Winter finally arrived in Southern Ontario halfway through January, so of course the streetcars stopped working, sensitive beasts that they are. I alligator-clipped my wayfinding research papers together (surprise: The New York subway has had its signage critiqued twice), cued up the BBC Welsh podcast, and nonchalantly walked to the Lesliebucks, thereby fulfilling my promise that it would be used as a fill-in on days too icy to ride.
Who should walk in but the kind of person who passes for a star in Canada, Zaib Shaikh from Metropia (what?) and some other show you may have heard about. Z.S., who looks better clean-shaven but is a reasonable, if short, specimen, apparently believes fashionable trainers function well in the slush. (Unlike Toronto’s inveterate climate deniers, I have two pair of waterproof footwear.) He read the Star and hung up on one shoephone call to answer another on a second shoephone. (Call waiting?) A nearby dirty old man who runs a limo business, a really classy line of work, took time out from annoyingly tapping his foot to the Voice of Music at Starbucks™ to chat up an actress attempting to learn her sides. For some reason, she let him.
After having a discussion with the manageress, who definitely knows me, that if they’re going to close one door after dark for security reasons it can’t be the one that’s barrier-free, I checked the Jones Library for graphic-design books claimed to be en route. I read the latest self-aggrandizing bullshit about bloggers helping the TTC with its Web site. (The fact that they don’t know their semantics from a hole in the ground – where, presumably, a gentrifying condo tower could be built – never seems to warrant a mention. Indeed, the writer of the piece was one of the actual bloggers-cum-gatekeepers-cum-tastemakers. Fox taking the Sheppard subway to the henhouse?) I returned and did actual work funded by micropatrons, pausing to make a coconut-milk rice pudding.
You think all this would really fare better on Twitter? I don’t.