Stephen Humphrey RSS
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A throng of protesters, most of them visibly young, faced a grim line of armoured peace officers from Toronto, York and Peel regions.
Many held signs with the usual cocktail of social messages. Just as many held video cameras, point-and-shoot cameras, SLRs, you name it.
One of the group’s chants was “the world is watching.”
There were a couple of, “Fuck you fuckin’ pigs” characters in the bunch, but no-one moving violently. Others simply taunted officers for standing in the flowers and so on.
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Well, school is out, protests, one minor earthquake and the G20 have rocked the city and season finales are recently all wrapped for prime-time shows.
24 did its breathless, unmerciful final wrap and Lost’s big finish left everybody wondering once and forever what that stupid island was all about anyway.
Those shows were the lucky ones, closing shop at will with full honours and high ratings. Not all shows get to choose their death. As with any battleground for hearts, minds and dollars, some return victorious and others don’t.
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Suddenly…!!
During a Q&A session with the cast and creators of Pure Pwnage, the gamer nerd web show four episodes into its first-season run on Showcase, the fire alarm begins pulsing.
“It’s like someone is using foul language at regular intervals,” says Jarett Cale, who plays the socially maladapted gamer Jeremy.
After five valiant minutes of ignoring and/or ridiculing the alarm, everyone is finally asked by building staff to vacate the room. (In all fairness, it turns out to be a false alarm.)
Suddenly the front steps of the Direct Energy Centre is milling with superheroes, sci fi villains, x-wing pilots and dressed-down comic fans.
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In his post-apocalyptic (and/or pre-apocalyptic) novel Maelstrom, biologist and sci fi writer Peter Watts describes a near-future customs office where thuggish guards brutalize civilians at will.
“Technically, of course, it was not an assault,” he writes. “Both aggressors wore uniforms and badges conferring the legal right to beat whomever they chose.”
That book of dystopian science fiction, published in 2001, was meant to describe social conditions five decades from now. Ironically, a piece of that sad future came true for Watts last December when he was pummelled and pepper-sprayed by customs officers in the border town of Port Huron, Michigan.
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“We rattled through an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets…”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
What does the eminently rational Sherlock Holmes do when faced irrefutably with the supernatural?
Does he dismiss the possibility of spirits, demons and hellhounds to their faces or does he acknowledge the darkly extraordinary, however improbable, as truth?
He might go either way in a pinch according to 13 authors who entangle fiction’s great consulting detective with a host of otherworldly suspects in Gaslight Grotesque, a collection of Holmes-related horror from Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.
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OMG! Did you hear? Adam Giambrone cheated on his girlfriend and the other woman called the press because she totally thought he was married, which he wasn’t but then she read it in the paper and, like, totally went public.
OMG! That’s, like, so Tiger Woods!
You bet. Toronto city councillors are finally giving the city a show. I mean, the garbage strike was all kinds of thrills and spills, but it was messy and called for audience participation.
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What scares Canadian writers?
According to horror writer and critic Robert Knowlton, it’s wide-open spaces.
“Searching for Canadian dark fantasy is akin to peering into a dark wood,” he writes. “The foreground is densely foliated, but the background recedes into darkness.”
Knowlton’s essay, titled “Out of the Barrens: Two Centuries of Canadian Dark Fantasy and Horror” follows 23 “chilling tales from the great white north” which comprise Tesseracts 13. Calgary publisher Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing chose a darker direction this time for the influential sci fi anthology’s latest installment, in homage to the number 13’s sinister reputation.
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With the cloud of recession hanging over it, Toronto endured a smelly six-week garbage stike and saw one of its most beloved bookstores close.
Torontonians heard announcements that the city’s approach to transit was being re-imagined for the coming decade, but also that the mayor wouldn’t stick around past the next election. One colourful political figure announced he was leaving provinicial politics to make a bid for mayor, while an Etobicoke MP began his audition for the role of prime minster.
Cancer took the lives of a talented local singer and an admired shaper of cultural events.
Toronto couldn’t get through the year without its share of bad behaviour, as demonstrated by the convication of a pipe-swinging serial bike thief and an altercation between a cyclist and a politician’s convertible which left a bike-rider dead and a political career in ruins.
Experts now claim the economy is rebounding. Here’s hoping some of that good news trickles down during the coming year.
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Strings of bright lights, glowing nativity scenes and kitschy items such as Homer Simpson Santa Claus statues adorn the fronts of houses to bring festive feelings to Toronto neighbourhoods.
Celebratory lighting first dates back to pagan Winter Solstice celebrations. In early Christian times a lighted candle signalled where worshippers could gather to avoid Roman persecution. The lighted Christmas tree became an established tradition under Queen Victoria in the 19th Century.
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There was room for plenty of pre-holiday acrimony in the final session of Ontario’s legislative assembly before it reconvenes in February.
Opposition MPPs managed to get in some final moments of shouted invective about the less-than-popular harmonized sale tax, which finance minister Dwight Duncan was left to defend in the premier’s absence.
Meanwhile George Smitherman, outgoing minister of energy and infrastructure, found energy enough for a passive-aggressive comment about Toronto’s incumbent mayor as he bid farewell to provincial politics to begin his own bid for Toronto mayor.
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Global leaders will soon discuss how to handle the dire state of earth’s climate, but the climate of corporate Canada may have already shifted. Or so it seemed as top environmentalists complemented and appealed to them Tuesday night at Exhibition Place.
David Suzuki looked across a banquet hall in Exhibition Place’s Allstream Centre, where a mostly corporate audience applauded from 150 full tables.
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Robots resembling runaway factory hoppers roll around the Ontario Science Centre’s grand hall, tossing bright-coloured balls that look to be made of silly string.
The bewildering game takes place under a banner proclaiming, “Robots Rule Weekend.” The flag presides over two simultaneous events where robots and their makers play games.
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Their thoughts keep returning to the impression of a human body in a hotel bed.
Not unusual, perhaps, in a frequently slept-in hotel suite. Unless the hotel has been boarded up for the past seven years.
For decades the Guild Inn was a jewel of Toronto-area hospitality. It was dormant since 2001, however, when the city of Toronto, the inn’s current owners, closed its doors. The once-grand hotel gradually became an eyesore among the statues and greenery of Guildwood.
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In his blog, CityNews meteorologist Michael Kuss suggested Torontonians not be too shocked to see a few unhealthy trees down.
Indeed.
Residents of the condo community at the foot of Livingston Rd. got to see the venerable old willow at its gate drop one mighty bough during last week’s storminess.
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An older man leaving a Bank of Montreal answers he’s not going to the farmer’s market just steps away from his branch.
“Too expensive,” he says. “They say it’s because it’s fresh,” he adds sceptically.
A stretch of grass next facing Scarborough’s Guildwood Parkway, is populated with white tent-tops and tables spread with vegetables, fish, free-range chickens and home-made wing sauces.
