johnrobe

I ride the subway every day.

(At least in the winter).

And every day, sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 I transfer from the Bloor/Danforth line to the Yonge/University/Spadina line at the Bloor/Yonge subway station.

For those who have never taken the subway at this hour, I will give you the general sense of what the southbound platform is like that time of day. There are at least 2000 people waiting for the next train, all standing there in a more or less orderly fashion. When the train comes in, they shuffle around a little bit, queueing up so that there is room for people to get out the doors, while at the same time getting ready to calmly make their way into the train. Most of the time, we won’t all make it onto the next train. Usually, you need to wait for at least one train to fill up before you get to the front.

The doors open, with their trademark chime, and people start filing out. And then the loudspeaker begins.

“PLEASE ALLOW ALL PASSENGERS OFF THE TRAIN BEFORE BOARDING PLEASE!”

“PLEASE ALLOW ALL PASSENGERS OFF THE TRAIN BEFORE BOARDING!”

Now … I don’t like people shouting at me, but I’ll allow this much, because once in a while, you get a yahoo who tries to barge his or her way on board before everyone is off. It doesn’t really hurt anything too much, but it upsets our quiet, orderly, Canadian shuffling.

But then the other shouting begins.

“PLEASE USE ALL AVAILABLE DOORS WHEN BOARDING THE TRAIN!”

“PLEASE USE ALL AVAILABLE DOORS WHEN BOARDING!”

“USE ALL AVAILABLE DOORS! ALL AVAILABLE DOORS PLEASE!”

I know you think I’m repeating for emphasis here, but I’m not… they shout this non stop until the doors close.

What drives me insane is… THERE ARE NO AVAILABLE DOORS! GAH! After the train closes its doors, there will still be dozens of people standing on the platform, patiently waiting the next train, because the one that just boarded filled up before everyone got on. It’s not like they somehow MISSED the magic set of doors to the fantasy car that wasn’t full.

Who are they shouting this message for? What available doors ARE there? The ones on the other side of the train? Do you want us to run upstairs, across to the northbound platform, downstairs, to dive across the tracks, climb up the outside of the train, pry THOSE doors open and wriggle inside? Are those the frickin’ available doors???

Please, god, someone explain this to me, because I’m getting closer and closer to the snapping point. All I can say is that whoever that guy is doing the announcements, he’s lucky that I have no idea where he actually is.

John Rants

I'm still sad about the police horse story, so I'm offering a kitten chaser (in the tradition of Boing Boing's unicorn chasers) from Cute Overload.

I give you Peeky McPeekerson Jr.

John General

I think this is the first sad thing I've posted on the blog.

On Friday, Brigadier, a horse with Toronto's Mounted Unit was killed by someone evading the mounted officers. Brigadier's rider was also severely injured, though he seems to have survived, mostly because of his horse, Brigadier.

This is not a greater loss than if a police officer were killed in the line of duty, but it's very very sad. The horses in the mounted unit do this city a great service, and unlike the officers, they do not volunteer to serve, nor are they paid, yet they serve loyally and well. Read about it at The Star here.

John General

… or you don’t get Homestar Runner.net (it’s DOT COM!!!!).

But if you do love The Cheat, you need to see 500 Cheats.

For those of you who read this blog but don’t like Homestar Runner … I promise someday I’ll do a post called “Why I love Homestar Runner” and try and ease you into it. I know some people just don’t know where to start.

John The Weeb

I am a grown man.

Yet I cannot stop myself from being amused by things that amused me as a child. To give an example …. I offer the Oversized Sac. But that's not funny enough on its own, oh no. Check out the photos on the site. This is a company with a clearly goofy marketing style.

John General, Shameless Consumerism

So, it’s Saturday morning … I haven’t posted anything in a couple of days, so it’s important that I put something up for both of my readers out there.

So I started browsing around, and I discovered Cribcandy, which was really cool, which led me to discover Wists, which was also cool, and after that subsided, I ended up just looking around at cool things… and then I found the Hammacher Schlemmer Marshmallow Rotisserie.

It's official, we've become too distanced from nature when something like this exists.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time camping. I was a boy scout, I went camping with my friends, and our family went camping every summer for weeks. Eventually, we ended up with a trailer parked on the Bruce Penninsula where I spent almost my whole summer every year.

As a kid, and then as a teen, I ate a lot of roasted marshmallows. When I was young, it was done “old school” by finding a long branch, and sticking the marshmallow on it. Later, when we had a more permanent place in the woods…. we had forks for pretty much the sole purpose of roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, and I remmber thinking that was pretty swanky.

But this thing … good lord. Was turning the marshmallow that hard? I don’t remember it being so… in fact, that was one of the things you were your proudest of.

The bit I love, though, is the way the site extolls the virtues of this thing … and how it proudly states it can be used indoors or out.

And now if you will excuse me, I must go see if we have any marshmallows.

John Rants, Shameless Consumerism

Mike Schuster, Redsox Fan, may have outdone the Oxford County Marijuana Party in the outstanding website design department. It’s a little unfair, because the broken links add a certain, as the French say, I don’t know what.

As I mention in a previous entry, the Oxford County Marijuana Party / Lady Godiva’s headshop does an amazing job of using black backgrounds, scrolling text, red and yellow foreground text and more to create a fabulous web experience. Mike has kicked it up several notches though … with fantastic frames, background images and tables, tables everywhere!

John Design

One Saturday afternoon, the TV found** a show on Sun TV called Street Eats.

I enjoy the occasional cooking show, and I enjoy restaurant reviews, and I thought initially that this show was one or the other. My interest level rose when I realized they were walking around the streets of Toronto. Even though Toronto is the biggest city in Canada and a world-class city, anything that focuses ONLY on Toronto often comes across as sort of small time and, well, lame.

Things got even more interesting when I realized they weren’t so much interested in any particular restaurant, it was more that they were doing a cross-section of a type of ethnic cuisine, in this case, Thai. As they went from place to place, I quickly realized that this show wasn’t a restaurant review show, or a cooking show, it was a show about a style of food and how typical restaurants of that style made the cuisine’s signature dishes.

The icing on the cake (although not literally, which does happen occasionally on this show) was when they walked into Salad King. I was already digging the show after watching the owner of a restaurant in Etobicoke make a tasty looking glass noodle dish. Salad King, though, is one of my favourite restaurants, and I’ve been going for years. As I watched PJ chatting with Linda I was overcome with fanboy feelings of “I’ve been there!” and fond memories of her shouting “Numbah *static*eight! Num*static* twenty*static*!” In a matter of a few minutes’ discussion, I learned interesting little tidbits about the restaurant, Thai cuisine, and little tidbits of trivia that made it all seem so real. Did you know that in Thailand green curry is green because of hot peppers, but at Salad King they use ordinary green peppers for the colour because that many hot peppers might kill their Canadian customers?

food + education + places I know and love = for Johnno.

I can’t overstate how much I love that the places they go to on this show are regular, real places that I have either been to and loved (Salad King, Pho Hung, Mexitaco for example), or I could actually see myself going to and loving (like Izakaya, for example, which I went to and loved as a direct result of this show).

So far they’ve done:

Vietnam
Jamaica
South India
East Africa / Ethiopia
Korea
Trinidad / Guyana
South China
Mexico
Japan
North India / Pakistan
Thailand
North China
Lebanon

The potentially sad thing is that they haven’t added any new episodes in a while … I fear the season might be complete, and in some cases (Clone High and Firefly) 13 is an unlucky number, from which no new seasons escape. On the bright side, for any of you who haven’t seen it, it’s all new to you!

Saturdays, at 12:30 and 8:00, on Sun TV.

** - “the TV found” means that for whatever reason I ended up watching this show, I didn’t actually choose to watch it. To be honest, I’m not actually sure how this happens in the day of the TiFaux (PVR), but it does once in a while.

John Food, Television

I am now finally caught up on Lost, you may now speak to me of anything Lost-related without spoiling me.

I’m still really on the fence as to whether the show is great or whether it’s just really interesting. I do admit though, it was a lot of fun catching up. It was like the time when Timmi and I went through all the episodes of Firefly before going to see Serenity.

On the subject of Firefly, I’d like to take a moment to officially apologize to Mike. You were right way back when, the show was good, very good. I still say if they hadn’t advertised it as a wisecracking space western it would still be on today.

John Television

Today I read a news story in the elvator that could have been from the Onion. Apparently, Iran has renamed danishes to “Roses of the Prophet Mohammad”. Actually, it was the Iranian confectioner’s union, but close enough.

In a move echoing “Freedom fries” and … wait a minute… confectioner’s union?????

So yeah … they renamed all the danish style pastries no matter where they came from (pretty much all from Iran) in retaliation for the Danish cartoons that have much of the muslim world in an uproar.

When will the world stop overreacting to things? Until it does, I am punishing Iran by renaming the Flock of Seagulls classic “I Ran” to “That Diet Pepsi commercial song”.

John Food, Politics