Monday June 11, 10:16 p.m.
Had one more lesson with that morning class that I'd been teaching all last week. Didn't quite come off as well as expected, part of the reason being that I had a student suddenly show up in the last week of the session. As the regular teacher put it when I met her during lunch break today, the school is also a business. Students shouldn't be allowed to audit during the final week, but if they insist, the administration's hands are tied. But as it was, there was enough goodwill from last week so that I was able to get out of it with my skin intact. As far as I know, I'm done for the rest of the week.
It was 3H weather in the GTA today: hot, hazy and humid. Plus, there was a smog alert to scare the asthmatics and allergy-prone commuters. Still, I decided to walk down over to the St. Lawrence Market to see if I could pick up some Montreal bagels for the parents. But I found out the hard way that the place is closed on Sundays and Mondays. Well, there's always Wednesday. On the walk back to Union Station, I went through the basement of Brookfield (formerly BCE) Place; saw a lot of folks in the upscale food court there watching multiple monitors of the France-England game in Euro 2012. Yup, Toronto may be a full continent away from the soccer pitches of Europe, but there's plenty of passion for football.
Got a couple of calls from old friends today. First I spoke with The Wild Guy; it's been a few weeks since I met him and The Egg for lunch. I'd thought that I would have one chance to have lunch with him this week but he turned me down since he has to take care of a lot of business before he and his family take off for Osaka for a short vacation. Then, The Egg himself called up tonight. Not surprisingly, he's been having a really busy time of it since he manages the 2nd-largest theatre complex in the country. Great money for him, but oh, the hours. In any case, I'm gonna see him and his wife for dinner in the Yonge-Eglinton area on Wednesday night.
The big news in Japan has been that psycho killer in Osaka who had gone on a killing spree a few days ago. He killed two with a knife and stabbed several others....sounds ominously like the Eaton Centre attacks. And the motive behind his massacre is not new, but it is pathetic. He couldn't come to kill himself so he decided to kill others so that he could get capital punishment and have someone else do it for him. And I know he's probably a nutjob just for the fact that he stared right at the camera lens as he was being driven into police headquarters; most people have some sense of shame and remorse and hide their faces. Not this guy....looked like a deer in headlights.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Zen Restaurant
Sunday June 10, 11:23 p.m.
Getting hot out there. Looking at a 35-degree Humidex today. Nice to stay at home in relatively cooler surroundings.
Looks like Canada is feeling pretty sad sportswise. Our hope for a Canadian Triple Crown winner was dashed rather suddenly when the horse I'll Have Another was retired to stud due to tendonitis, thus destroying any chance of getting into The Belmont Stakes after winning The Kentucky Derby and The Preakness. And of course The Blue Jays managed to lose again in Atlanta...rather makes those commercials of them look pretty ridiculous. At this point, I'd say that the team shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a playoff spot. Finally, our only potential saviour for team sports in this city, The Toronto Marlies got swept in the American Hockey League's Calder Cup; just seems like the team had the plug pulled on them after they had gotten through the semi-finals. If there were a god looking over our city, her name would be Lucy Van Pelt and she would have a very big football.
Anyways, our family went out last night to Zen, that Japanese restaurant in the heart of Scarberia. Not too cool with its location in the middle of a dingy strip mall but since we were in and out of there before the sun went down, we were OK. Just read their blurb on their website taking a potshot at ersatz Japanese eateries which just go for profit instead of any Japanese authenticity; they make a good point but they also put a big target on themselves by stating that at least Zen knows about the basics of Japanese culture.
Well, an arrow got shot and hit a bulls-ear last night when the waitress had forgotten to bring the o-shibori (hot towels) for us, which would be something akin to a capital crime in Japan. When they were finally brought over, they were indeed toasty hot but in the words of my niece, they smelled "yucky"....time to change the detergent? Still, the food was good and plentiful. I certainly got a lot of tempura on my plate: four shrimp and a good heaping of deep-fried veggies. Wouldn't get quite that much in an equivalent tempura place in Tokyo.
www.zenjapaneserestaurant.com
Getting hot out there. Looking at a 35-degree Humidex today. Nice to stay at home in relatively cooler surroundings.
Looks like Canada is feeling pretty sad sportswise. Our hope for a Canadian Triple Crown winner was dashed rather suddenly when the horse I'll Have Another was retired to stud due to tendonitis, thus destroying any chance of getting into The Belmont Stakes after winning The Kentucky Derby and The Preakness. And of course The Blue Jays managed to lose again in Atlanta...rather makes those commercials of them look pretty ridiculous. At this point, I'd say that the team shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a playoff spot. Finally, our only potential saviour for team sports in this city, The Toronto Marlies got swept in the American Hockey League's Calder Cup; just seems like the team had the plug pulled on them after they had gotten through the semi-finals. If there were a god looking over our city, her name would be Lucy Van Pelt and she would have a very big football.
Anyways, our family went out last night to Zen, that Japanese restaurant in the heart of Scarberia. Not too cool with its location in the middle of a dingy strip mall but since we were in and out of there before the sun went down, we were OK. Just read their blurb on their website taking a potshot at ersatz Japanese eateries which just go for profit instead of any Japanese authenticity; they make a good point but they also put a big target on themselves by stating that at least Zen knows about the basics of Japanese culture.
Well, an arrow got shot and hit a bulls-ear last night when the waitress had forgotten to bring the o-shibori (hot towels) for us, which would be something akin to a capital crime in Japan. When they were finally brought over, they were indeed toasty hot but in the words of my niece, they smelled "yucky"....time to change the detergent? Still, the food was good and plentiful. I certainly got a lot of tempura on my plate: four shrimp and a good heaping of deep-fried veggies. Wouldn't get quite that much in an equivalent tempura place in Tokyo.
www.zenjapaneserestaurant.com
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Good to enjoy a weekend
Saturday June 9, 11:51 a.m.
It's getting pretty hot and humid out there...not surprising since we're going into Summer in another couple of weeks. After a week of straight teaching, I'm grateful for the next couple of days off. Not that I haven't enjoyed being back on the saddle again; my kids are a fine bunch, all three classes' worth of them. It's looking like it'll just be a stay-at-home weekend which I'm quite happy with. But my brother's family have called us out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant nearby. You might think that's a little strange considering my family background, but sushi isn't exactly an everyday dish for Japanese.
The Anime King called me up a few nights ago to say that he did get the "Yamato 2199"discs. Any Canadian fans of the ol' "Star Blazers"series will probably be slavering like Pavlovian dogs on reading this. He said that the animation is obviously a whole lot slicker than that for the original 1973 series but the old tropes are still there including the original sound effects on the vessel itself.
But there has been one important update. The Yamato now has quite more than one woman as crew. It's always been a source of some mirth that lone female crewmember Yuki Mori (aka Nova on "Star Blazers") managed to keep her chastity intact throughout the one-year voyage to and from Iscandar despite looking like Gwyneth Paltrow and being surrounded by a whole bunch of young men. I mean, did Earth Command chemically castrate these guys before setting off? The even stranger thing is that included within the sapphic increase is....an accountant. Yup, no matter how dire the situation is, that beancounter has to be there to count the number of missiles fired at Gamelan battleships.
Anyways, you can take a look at his blog: nutsaboutpackaging.com
It's getting pretty hot and humid out there...not surprising since we're going into Summer in another couple of weeks. After a week of straight teaching, I'm grateful for the next couple of days off. Not that I haven't enjoyed being back on the saddle again; my kids are a fine bunch, all three classes' worth of them. It's looking like it'll just be a stay-at-home weekend which I'm quite happy with. But my brother's family have called us out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant nearby. You might think that's a little strange considering my family background, but sushi isn't exactly an everyday dish for Japanese.
The Anime King called me up a few nights ago to say that he did get the "Yamato 2199"discs. Any Canadian fans of the ol' "Star Blazers"series will probably be slavering like Pavlovian dogs on reading this. He said that the animation is obviously a whole lot slicker than that for the original 1973 series but the old tropes are still there including the original sound effects on the vessel itself.
But there has been one important update. The Yamato now has quite more than one woman as crew. It's always been a source of some mirth that lone female crewmember Yuki Mori (aka Nova on "Star Blazers") managed to keep her chastity intact throughout the one-year voyage to and from Iscandar despite looking like Gwyneth Paltrow and being surrounded by a whole bunch of young men. I mean, did Earth Command chemically castrate these guys before setting off? The even stranger thing is that included within the sapphic increase is....an accountant. Yup, no matter how dire the situation is, that beancounter has to be there to count the number of missiles fired at Gamelan battleships.
Anyways, you can take a look at his blog: nutsaboutpackaging.com
Friday, June 8, 2012
A Week of Work
Friday June 8, 7:25 p.m.
Hard to believe but I actually did my first week of sustained work since I got back home 6 months ago. A bit tough at first getting used to the new students but by today, I was starting to get some compliments and even requests for me to stay on from the kids themselves. Nice to be needed. As it turns out, I will be working Monday morning at least. Those 5:15 a.m. wake-up calls are not all that easy.
Obviously, the nice thing is that I'm getting paid again. I can actually approach an ATM nonchalantly without feeling like a terrified acolyte bowing in front of an angry god. Still, I'm not exactly doing any major shopping sprees. But I do appreciate a full weekend.
Hard to believe but I actually did my first week of sustained work since I got back home 6 months ago. A bit tough at first getting used to the new students but by today, I was starting to get some compliments and even requests for me to stay on from the kids themselves. Nice to be needed. As it turns out, I will be working Monday morning at least. Those 5:15 a.m. wake-up calls are not all that easy.
Obviously, the nice thing is that I'm getting paid again. I can actually approach an ATM nonchalantly without feeling like a terrified acolyte bowing in front of an angry god. Still, I'm not exactly doing any major shopping sprees. But I do appreciate a full weekend.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Got Their Men...and Woman
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| courtesy of Sublight Monster from Flickr |
After a week of horror, the cops finally caught the criminals:
Luka Magnotta, the Body Parts murderer
Christopher Husbands, the Eaton Centre shooter
Naoko Kikuchi
For those in Toronto and Canada, the first two names should be fairly familiar by this time. But who is this Naoko Kikuchi? Well, she was one of the three at-large Aum Shinrikyo members who helped perpetrate the 1995 sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway system. After 17 years on the run, she was finally caught in an apartment in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture last night. Some months earlier, one of her other compatriots, Makoto Hirata, had also been arrested, which now leaves just 54-year-old Katsuya Takahashi as the sole Aum member left on the lam. For years and years, I'd been seeing that poster with all three on subway station malls to such an extent that they looked like permanent decorations. Now it looks like the chapter may be coming to a close. As for the big guy himself, the self-proclaimed guru Shoko Asahara, he's still lingering on Death Row, years after being convicted of masterminding some of the most heinous crimes on Japanese soil.
As for Magnotta and Husbands, I'm hoping for eventual justice.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Public Enemy No. 1
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| courtesy of clumsy time from Flickr |
Probably every blog or tweet about Toronto in the last 12 hours has mentioned about what happened at The Eaton Centre last night at around 6:30 p.m. My family was just pulling out of the restaurant to head home when I turned on the radio and heard about this shooting. Apparently, it had happened just when we had left home for dinner.
Even when I was living in Japan, I'd heard about some of the ugliness that had occurred at Toronto's largest shopping mall: swarmings, the Kreba shooting in 2007, and the usual teenage idiocies. And so when I heard this breaking news on the radio, I figured that this must be pretty bad. And sure enough, it was. One dead, seven injured although the one kid hit by a bullet seems to be getting out of the woods. But Chief Bill Blair of the police and Mayor Rob Ford sounded shaken during their respective interviews which speak of the gravity of the situation.
Make no doubt about it. Whether or not this was an act of a gang member getting revenge or just a nutjob enacting a fantasy, he/she is Public Enemy No. 1....problem is, there doesn't seem to be any good description of him/her, and with the ensuing panic, it's going to be tough to find this person. But he/she has to be found. Otherwise, Torontonians will go down into a further level of urban fear. Or worse, we'll fatalistically form another shell of cynicism about life in a North American city.
It's been a bad week for crime. Psychopathic porn star killer, psychotic face cannibals and indiscriminate spree shooter.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Take the TTC....please!
Friday June 1, 11:22 p.m.
We got piled on with torrents of rain and the high only got up to 13 degrees C in the GTA.. But that wasn't the disaster. First off, for some bizarro reason, my Vic Park bus suddenly got ordered NOT to enter the bus bay area at the station, so there were a few minutes of uncertainty, very loudly voiced by the commuters on board, as the driver ignored all questions (probably because even he couldn't answer them) and made a roundabout turn to get us to the main entrance. Then, when we got to the subway platform, the first subway completely bypassed us though it was in full operation. And by the time we did catch the next one, I saw TTC personnel and the cops having a discussion on the platform. I was wondering if that psychopath Luka Magnotta had ended up hiding out in the station somewhere.
And then of course, there was the flood. I got out of my training session at about 3:30 and dove into St. Patrick Station to hear the announcement that an entire swath of line ranging from Bloor to Osgoode Stations was now cut off due to a major flood down at Union Station. Unfortunately, some of the flood included raw sewage so the station ended up masquerading as the world's largest toilet. So there were tons of commuters waiting to go up north, although I was lucky to have walked further down the platform where there were not as many folks hogging the platform. Then I took the Bloor Line over two stations and got on the Yonge Line which was now turning back up from that station. The rest of the commute was pretty sweet. As I overheard one lady say back at St. Patrick at 3:30, "It's really bad now. Can you imagine what it will be like at 5 p.m.?"
And sure enough, when I turned on CP24 when I got home, I just saw one heck of a lineup on Bloor & Yonge waiting for shuttle buses. It was a major mess for rush hour.
But my title there is perhaps a tad harsh on the TTC. After all, last Thursday's kerfuffle was due to a suicidal student, and today's was a force of nature. If anything, current and past administrations at City Hall are really to blame for today's commuting horror. Years of deteriorating infrastructure downtown finally showed what can happen if not taken care of.
However, I now have to ask myself, considering that I will be teaching everyday next week, what the odds are of getting into another TTC tumult.
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| courtesy of magnetboy1 from Flickr |
And then of course, there was the flood. I got out of my training session at about 3:30 and dove into St. Patrick Station to hear the announcement that an entire swath of line ranging from Bloor to Osgoode Stations was now cut off due to a major flood down at Union Station. Unfortunately, some of the flood included raw sewage so the station ended up masquerading as the world's largest toilet. So there were tons of commuters waiting to go up north, although I was lucky to have walked further down the platform where there were not as many folks hogging the platform. Then I took the Bloor Line over two stations and got on the Yonge Line which was now turning back up from that station. The rest of the commute was pretty sweet. As I overheard one lady say back at St. Patrick at 3:30, "It's really bad now. Can you imagine what it will be like at 5 p.m.?"
And sure enough, when I turned on CP24 when I got home, I just saw one heck of a lineup on Bloor & Yonge waiting for shuttle buses. It was a major mess for rush hour.
But my title there is perhaps a tad harsh on the TTC. After all, last Thursday's kerfuffle was due to a suicidal student, and today's was a force of nature. If anything, current and past administrations at City Hall are really to blame for today's commuting horror. Years of deteriorating infrastructure downtown finally showed what can happen if not taken care of.
However, I now have to ask myself, considering that I will be teaching everyday next week, what the odds are of getting into another TTC tumult.
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