Candelight vigil for Toronto's 2005 gun victims



Dundas Square, December 30
10:08 p.m.

Happy New Year!

Find me there.

So my friend Videsh always harps on about how this gun violence will affect you somehow...

He gets righter and righter, in a sense, I suppose... I feel terrible for the family of the girl shot dead on Yonge Street Monday afternoon, and while I only heard the shots, I guess Videsh was right... she went to Riverdale, the school I graduated from in 1998, and ran cross country, much like I did... the ripple of gun violence circles ever so closer, doesn't it Vee?

Or can it get closer? Time will tell I suppose, although I still say it's a flawed argument because it's one of those theses that you can never disprove...

The Great Shark Hunt, by Hunter S. Thompson


"It’s teddible, teddible."

These are the last words I would use to describe Hunter S Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt, but are probably the ones I will remember the most from this fascinating book. They were uttered by his friend Ralph Steadman in the second essay, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," which established Thompson's "Gonzo Journalism" style of making the writer an essential part of the story.

Thompson, who killed himself back in February, is such a good read. His essays are so layered and complex that they should be read with at least two strong cups of coffee in your system, and they are worth it. He talks about wearing pantyhose for Muhammad Ali, offering Ted Kennedy heroin on an airplane, and zooming around the city of sin with Oscar Zeta Acosta in a passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was made into a 1998 Johnny Depp movie.

The best passage, I found, was the one for which the book was named, one that Thompson wrote for Playboy. He is sent to write about a fishing derby run by a bunch of rich, red-necked anglers, one of whom is distracted during an interview because “all he seemed to have any real interest in at the moment was the ‘Argentine maid’ he was grappling with in the cockpit of his boat. She was about 15 years old, had dark-blonde hair and red eyes, but it was hard to get a good look at her, because ‘Cap’n Tom’ - as he introduced himself - was bending her over a Styrofoam bait box full of dolphin heads and trying to suck on her collarbone while he talked to me.”

Later, a stoned Thompson sucks up sand through his nostrils thinking it was coke, and about the funniest thing I’ve ever read is of how he and his friend Yail Bloor (who is actually his Aspen friend Michael Solheim) made it through a Texas airport with orange amphetamine pills spilling out of his shoes.

But that’s not to say he was all about drugs and stoner trips through exotic places. The back cover carries an endorsement from the New York Times, saying “He smells injustice,” and he does. He’s got a very clear sense of what is right and wrong, writing about race, politics, and the bullshit from Richard Milhous Nixon, to whom the book is dedicated, “who never let me down.”

This was a great read, and timely, considering the number of "Fear and Loathing" references I've read the last couple weeks with the national election a month away, and looking to reading more from him. In fact, I might begin digging through downtown used bookstores for old copies of his articles in Rolling Stone.

Self-portrait reflected in a GO train window somewhere in Scarborough on a rainy Saturday night.

Where my head at?

Saw this beautiful fluff of feather outside the eighth-floor patio over the noon-hour Wednesday. After much discussion my co-workers and I decided - tentatively - that this foot-tall bird is a falcon.

What do you think?

Gotta stop drinking...

This would've been such a cool picture of the fireworks at Ontario Place if I hadn't been so inebriated.



At least I wasn't the only one who was a bit tipsy. *burp* And that's NOT my contribution to the bottom of the snowman.



Liberty Village
8 p.m. to 10 p.m.

I had to chuckle while looking out my eight-floor window this afternoon ahead of the big storm. Look at these suckers, I thought, just another karmic reason why I failed my road test -- twice.


         3:03 p.m.                  4:35 p.m.                  5:03 p.m.

But karma is a bitch. I stepped out from a cozy office building just after 5 p.m. and into a Ricola commercial, with the snow blowing so hard it hurt my eyes underneath my foggy glasses.

I got to the stop and had nothing to do but stare at this seat for 10... 15... 30... 50 minutes, before the bus that's supposed to come every 16 minutes finally came.









All pictures taken at Eglinton and Renforth

Fireball lights up Alta sky following unexpected gas buildup at oil well

I've gained a huge appreciation for the environmental concerns in Alberta ever since reading Andrew Nikiforuk's book Saboteurs, detailing Weibo Ludwig's fight against big oil and the unsolved murder of 16-year-old Karman Willis, and stories like this one piss me off big time.

Out here in the central Canada we hear so little about what's going on out west... if I lived in Alberta I'd be wondering if any of the 157 nations at the Montreal Climate Change conference this week knows that Albertans put up with dead livestock and miscarried children while big oil (and big money) continue to insist that sour gas is safe.

Flying V

As if the first extreme cold weather alert of the year Monday wasn't enough indication that winter weather is here, I saw this while shivering it out at a bus shelter in Mississauga.

Photog log

So I've been upset most of the past month thinking that my Pentax Optio S51 was busted, the victim of a violent three-foot drop.



I had gotten barely a half year's worth out of a camera that even at a mega Hong Kong discount cost $500 along with a 512MB memory card. But just as I went to bid it a fond goodbye... Cazart! It's working! Sometimes! (I'm sure it really is busted and just capturing its last pics, but it'll do.)

So I breathed a huge sigh of relief, but not before deciding upon and buying the superly expensive (for me) Canon Rebel XT.



Now I will resume my periodical entries here with snappy pics of my city and anything else that interests me.

One more thing...

After figuring that my Optio still had life I found this on the memory card. It was the only pic there.



I don't remember taking it...