I got really upset last night looking at images of the G20 ‘riots’ but of course taking stock today it doesn’t seem so bad. Four cop cars torched, smashed windows, some police brutality perhaps… that ridiculous arrest law, and too many arrests. Yet no bombs, deaths, and not too much tear gas (?). I’m out of town in Windsor, but if the vibe of this writeup is to be believed, it sure could have been worse. Pictures of masked people smashing shit, burning cars, and rows of menacing riot cops are always disturbing, but when the backdrop is the city you live in and love – or even the building you work in, in my case – it can be horrifying. And you assume the pictures are representational of widespread similar activity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I was happy to hear that street crews were busy cleaning up Queen St. by late last night. Back to business, kids.

I also loved this image:

(photo by Martin Reis, courtesy Torontoist)

Good to know.

In other news, I went to Detroit yesterday for the first time. I’ll have more about that later.

Yesterday the province decided not to prosecute Michael Bryant. According to the Star, here’s what happened the night Darcy Allan Sheppard died.

This is the part that gets me:

He succeeds at restarting the engine and the Saab accelerates into Sheppard, who lands on the hood. Bryant hits the brakes when he sees Sheppard. Sheppard falls off the hood. (2.5 seconds elapses between the car starting and stopping. It travels two car lengths before Bryant stops.) Sheppard stands up within two seconds, not seriously injured. Bryant reverses and drives forward, trying to get around the bike.

I’m not saying that Bryant purposefully murdered Sheppard, as I agree that it sounds like sheer panic. Nor am I saying that Sheppard is remotely close to being a good cycling role model. However, it bothers me that this car “lurching” forward two car lengths, striking a human being, is not a bigger deal. It certainly explains why Sheppard grabs onto the car (not that it’s a good idea). I don’t see why the charges don’t involve vehicular manslaughter, careless driving, and leaving the scene of a crime no matter how angry and drunk the victim was.

That said, IANAL and perhaps lesser charges will now be forthcoming. But it would be a shame if Bryant escapes all blame, as it sends the message that it’s okay to kill cyclists if they seem angry or drunk.

Juice and some other friends do this clothing sale once a month, and it’s on tomorrow. Thanks to this sale, I have a killer wardrobe – you may have to sift through some junk, but there are great finds every time, including brand new stuff from stores. If you live in Toronto you should totally check it out.

Ooo, my robot heart just throbbed a little at this: “Showcasing the talents of some of our favourite artists from Toronto (and one from Sweden), over 20 illustrators, painters, sculptors, graphic designers, photographers and a blacksmith have produced a stunning array of work with LONELY ROBOTS as the theme.”

Lonely Robots – group art show

It opens at Magic Pony sat. the 16th of july.

A number of divisive transit issues have been in front of the council here in Toronto. The latest is the Jarvis redesign, in which the fifth lane is sacrificed in order to widen the sidewalks and install bike lanes. It passed after much controversy.

From my point of view, any new bike lanes are good, and I’ll take a walkable street ahead of a highway for Rosedale fatcats any day. However, I have some concerns here. There is already a bike lane the next major street east, on Sherbourne. That’s a big deal when you consider the downtown has only two(!) north-south bike lanes, Sherbourne and Beverly-St. George. (No, I’m not considering the Death By Cab shared lane on Bay a viable route.) The Jarvis lane doesn’t make much sense in the context of the city’s own bikeway network plan. We must then wonder if the Jarvis lane is an easy bone to throw to cyclists, in preparation for disappointments elsewhere. Indeed, word comes that the proposed Bloor-Danforth bike lane has been shunted off to an as-yet unspecified consultant, and “Mr. Heaps said … that if the study showed the lanes would hurt local businesses, he would not support them.”

The downtown portion of the bikeway network; dotted means not yet built. I’ve put in the Jarvis route in yellow.

That same article mentions a possible protected lane on University, which would be nice – but again, not part of the city’s own bikeway network plan. The bike plan is good, and it should be implemented. Lanes outside the network are great, but not if they take away political will to actually implement it, and especially not if they are in areas already reasonably well served by the network. I fear Jarvis may hit both these negatives.

I rarely talk about biking here, for some reason. Well, that’s about to change!

Here’s an interesting interview in the Star with bizarro Clive Owen, a bike safety expert since being run over by a truck while in a bike lane. Notable (I quote):

• Research shows the average duration of time spent in a car has gone up by over 200 per cent over the last 20 years. The distance people are driving has also increased.
• drivers were largely culpable in 74 per cent of all of accidents and partially culpable in another 16 per cent.
• 97 per cent of the drivers in cases of fatal accidents involving cyclists were male. It is highly unlikely to get that kind of statistic by random chance.
• The Netherlands has the lowest cycling fatality rate in the world per kilometre cycled or per cyclist, and their rate of helmet use is less than 1 per cent.

So we decided to check out Toronto’s new dedicated poutine restaurant, Smoke’s Poutinerie.

First off, this joint is popular. This is my second time going, or rather trying to go – the first time I went with a couple friends, we turned away empty handed due to the lack of seating and wheelchair accessibility. It’s got seats, it’s just that they were all full, and they were this time, too. But it was a lunch expedition, and we just took our gut-busting lard-based treats back to work and ate them there.

This is a quality poutine, no question. The fries are excellent, the gravy a nice, mild chickeny sort, and the curds authentic. The proportions – a crucial equation that has destroyed many a lesser poutine – are perfect. You can select from a number of variations, including the usual Italian and smoked meat varieties; I went with the meat-crazed “Hogtown” (bacon, sausage, onion and mushroom – while most everything in this life can be improved by adding bacon, just this once I do regret not going with a plain one to get a clearer taste of the essentials).

It’s $7 for a plain-vanilla poutine, and variations run to $8 or $9. Your cholesterol bomb comes nicely packaged in a brown cardboard box. I won’t say this is the greatest poutine I’ve had – this is it here – but it’s definitely good shit (as one would expect from a place that makes nothing but poutine).

Here’s the problem, though. Poutine is a terrible take-out food. Mere moments after the gravy hits the fries, it is waging a guerilla campaign against crispiness, and perhaps 15 minutes later, you are in a quagmire of mush. We had only a five minute walk before we could sit down and start destroying our arteries, and already the integrity of our poutines had been compromised by the inexorable pairing of time and gravy. The reasonable response to this is to get the gravy on the side, something Smoke and the gang should strongly consider. If you visit Smoke’s and it’s rammed to the gills and you cannot immediately pounce upon your Quebecois prey, ask for it that way.

During the gorging session, and before the gravy coma hit, it came up that the word on the street is that the best poutine in Toronto – nay, all of Canada! – is from one of the chip trucks out front of City Hall. Gentle readers, an expedition is assured, but it may wait until fairer weather enables on-the-spot feasting. And so until then, this poutine reporter must sign off.

So in honour of Video Games Live which is coming to Toronto this weekend I thought I’d remind us all of some good game music times…with a twist. This is the first, you might have heard it before…

Until reading this Ars article, I had never heard of Wireless Nomad, a Toronto Co-op ISP. I don’t think I can use them because it doesn’t sound like they can deal with dry ducks or whatever they call it when you have DSL but no landline, but I wish I could. They’re cheaper than Bell, with no bit caps. And every router they give out provides free WiFi access to people in range, in such a way that doesn’t hurt the subscriber’s speeds. If you live in Toronto, you should consider them ahead of Bell and Rogers.

Meatspace game Street Wars has been cancelled due to low turnout (only 60 registrations). “I have no idea why this happened,” says organizer Franz Aliquo. I have an idea:

In virtually every previous city where Street Wars has set up shop, police or city authorities have spoken out against the prospect of dozens of water gun-toting assassins running around shooting each other… In Toronto, the trend reversed: police indicated they didn’t see a problem with the shenanigans.

The Toronto police didn’t do free publicity for the game. That’s a little lesson in the economic benefits of controversy.

Here’s an article in the Globe about the Toronto edition of Street Wars, a big game in which participants must “assassinate” other registered players with a watergun, with the entire city as the playing field. It’s an interesting sort of game, and indicates the influence of video games beyond the “video” realm, where the fun of the virtual is injected back into the real. In the words of the game’s creator, Franz Aliquo:

I said: Dude, I’m watching people do interesting things on TV, I’m doing all this awesome stuff in fake worlds in video games, but it would be better for my life if I could get out and do the same types of things.

True dat. Interesting also that cops and mayors tend to object to the game, because of the violent ‘theme’.

Reading the Globe last week, I discovered that Toronto is the largest network on Facebook. Which is crazy since the cities of London and New York are obviously much larger in meatspace, but TO’s Facebook population dwarfs theirs. It’s crazy but it’s entirely believable to a Toronto resident: over the past couple months, Facebook has come up in conversation more often than even the weather. It’s spread quicker than a zombie plague. And in fact, to those who refuse to sign up (I’m on Facebook myself, but I know a few holdouts), it’s like your friends are one by one succumbing to the virus. Instead of asking for your brains, they ask if you’re on Facebook, and if not, why not?

That Torontonians would get all wrapped up in relentless, privacy-invading bulletins of friend-related minutiae flies in the face of our reputation as a quiet, withdrawn people. I suppose you could explain it by saying we are indeed withdrawn, and that Facebook appeals because it is the form of socializing that involves the least amount of actual socializing. Or, you could just call bullshit on the “quiet Toronto” myth. Either one works for me.

But then I remembered a past realization, that Toronto, city of SARS, filmic home of Resident Evil, Land of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead remake, is of course the capital of the zombie world. Which explains how infectious networking would especially catch hold here, but which also goes a little towards supporting another half-baked theory: that zombies in fiction symbolize P2P networked communications, and the fear of zombies reflects the fear that old, hierarchical, gatekeeper media have of a society that has no place for them.

That’s probably too cultural studies for a nice saturday afternoon, so let me clunkily segway into a mention of zombie-demon musical sensation Evil Dead: The Musical, which is back in Toronto. I saw it a couple of days ago for the first time, and it’s worth attending. It’s one of the only entertainment events that you can walk out of soaked in blood, and it contains some great writing such as one character’s dying words, “Death’s a bitch… a stupid bitch.”