Shopping Carts in Ravines

It’s really creepy how the sarcastic cynicism that became hip for our generation (scripted by Generation “Heroin Chic” X and very much fostered by how outrageously jaded most baby boomers are these days) has left so many people open to anti-life right wing BS.

Harper can issue a press release and the next day its coming out of all these random people’s mouths as if they thought it up themselves, even though the ideas are loaded with logical fallacies and clearly haven’t even been doublechecked between their ears and vocal chords… (Here’s a tip kids, when you don’t bother to reword the sentence, it’s obvious that it’s plagiarism!)

And then with the current strike at York U, almost every single undergrad is going on about how unions should shut up and just accept that no one has job security.

Well thank god the original labour movement didnt buy that kind of crap. What ever happened to optimism? What, is our high-tech 21st century life really that bad? Or are we numbed to the core by a total lack of the suffering that inspired people to actually stand up for themselves and each other at the start of the 20th century?

I’m not sure CUPE 3903 is accomplishing much with this strike, but it’s really grossing me out how people are just like LIFE IZ BAD DEAL WID IT FOOL LOLOLOL.

Like, okay, you know what, if you wanna believe that, I’ve got a job cleaning my house in exchange for whippings you can apply for.

Many openings available!
One-day weekends allowed off every other week!
Only a $50 fee per job application submitted!
Non-submission punishable by police brutality and water cannon, so get ‘em in before the deadline.
I’m an equal-opportunity enslaver - women and people of colour especially encouraged to get in line and shut their mouths!
(Preference will be giving to those parents also willing to commit their children and grandchildren to lives of bondage and servitude.)

from bonfire of the brands

Does anybody remember meadows anymore? Cloudwatching?

Update: and on the braindead horde side of the issue… Long Island Wal-Mart worker trampled to death by bargain-hunters.

Nutrition consultant & educator Karen Hanrahan has kept a plain McDonald’s hamburger from 1996 without doing anything in particular to preserve it and it is in nearly the exact same shape as when it was sold 12 years ago:

That’s 1996 on the left, 2008 on the right.

She writes, “Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike - this is a chemical food. There is absolutely no nutrition here. Not one ounce of food value… McDonalds fills an empty space in your belly. It does nothing to nourish the cell, it is not a nutritious food.”

When I reference Urban Hiking, what I’m thinking of in my mind is occasions where I’ve walked long distances through unfamiliar areas to reach a far-off destination (say, across a city) without ever having felt a sense of being lost but instead retaining a sense of exploration and enough focus to be charting the previously unfamiliar territory between my position and my desired destination. Part of my ability to do this is a keen sense for cardinal points, but honestly they sell that in stores and it fits in your pocket.

Here is an example from Aug 2, 2006 when I decided to walk home after a windy thunderstorm from Bloor downtown to Northern Etobicoke just using continuous course correction based on an awareness of directions and always choosing the path less familiar when presented with a choice.

Urban Hiking is fun, educational and exploration-based but has some more practical direct applications than the modern sport of Urban Exploration in places like warehouses (which is wicked) and storm drains (which seems to me like an unpleasant place to spend your time).

Urban Hiking is about assessing the often unfamiliar immediate environment for information (paths/potential paths) while remaining anchored in the broader geography.

With cardinal points, a sense of adventure and the ability to evaluate your surroundings for opportunities on the fly, it becomes irrelevant if you are unacquainted with your immediate location. You can avoid ever being lost yet still be constantly getting acquainted and discovering areas and experiences.

By retaining a conscious and lucid mind about your surroundings you can master their layout and choose routes through areas that avoid pollution (proximity to busy roadways), potential crime or physical obstacles. This allows you to choose your experiences-en-route as being as scenic or shortcut-quick as you desire.

For me, one of the definite highlights of the trip to NYC was visiting The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, an animatronics-based non-graffiti exhibit by infamous street and guerilla artist Banksy, who also happens to be my favourite contemporary artist. (Although for the record, Tom Green did the hang-your-own-painting-in-a-big-gallery trick in Ottawa first!)

I found out about the exhibit (and that it was by Banksy, as it exists anonymously and is staffed by randoms) from Wooster Collective, whose RSS feed I really need to stay up on because I just missed them speaking in Toronto by a day. I’m really glad they were careful about spoilers and left out some of my favourite things, like the leopard. (The exhibit is closed now.)

Many people who lined up did so only because they were walking down the rather busy street it was on and saw a line of people waiting to get into what appeared to be a pet store with a leopard in the window. I heard a lot of “Uh, I think it’s an art thing?”
Some things you had to see online though, like the record of the view from the mother CCTV camera’s lens:

Unlike his first North American exhibit in LA where Banksy painted an elephant to match a magenta-and-gold wallpaper print, officially decreed illegally animal abuse, much of this exhibit had strong anti-animal-exploitation themes. Banksy not only said that this was a conscious flip, but that much of the money from the elephant exhibit went into funding this one.

A woman outside was handing out Go Veg For Thanksgiving pamphlets but I rejected them because I’m already vegan, I already have good Thanksgiving recipes, and our Thanksgiving had already passed anyway. I don’t think she was officially associated with the exhibit, just using the opportunity.

So, I recently took a trip to New York City, leaving from and returning to Toronto via Buffalo with Megabus, a company that seems to mostly rent Coach Canada / Coach USA’s buses out and drive them themselves.

Our first driver was very conscientious and genial, and counted heads to make sure everyone was present after a stop. When we got to Buffalo, the driver switched. Nothing much happened for most of the trip, and after the Buffalo Airport stop we were down to 5 passengers bound for NYC.

I was sleeping in the back through part of New York state and awoke to find a woman lying injured in the aisle of 5-passenger bus and moaning / calling out for help saying her shoulder hurt and she couldn’t get up. She had apparently fallen, and the driver wasn’t pulling over or doing anything to respond to the situation, he just kept speeding down the highway.

Even with all the passengers on the bus standing up and yelling at him variations of “Stop! Stop the bus! Someone’s hurt! Pull over! Someone is injured! Don’t you have policies to follow? What is wrong with you, why are you not stopping? Why are you still speeding down the highway when a woman is injured back here and needs a hospital?” and so on, he continued to speed and not respond.

The bus continued down the road for ten to twenty minutes (in traffic and at or above the speed limit) with the woman lying, moaning in pain, on the ground. One passenger called the bus company and the only thing that came of the conversation was him yelling “Don’t tell me he has it under control! He doesn’t have anything under control, he’s speeding down the road!“

The driver finally pulled over in Hackensack, New Jersey after some conversation in Spanish over his radio, and he asks for everyone’s information while the passengers use their own phones to call an ambulance and contact the woman’s local relative. He wrote down my name incorrectly even though I showed him my ID and explained which was my middle and which was my last name.

Volunteer college kid paramedics wearing track pants (one yellow with a robot bursting out of his rear) arrived to try to awkwardly lift the woman and load her into an ambulance. Apparently this is what happens in the States. The woman said that she had a checkered suitcase under the bus and “it” was loaded into the ambulance with her.

When we arrived in NYC, the only suitcase left was not our solid black one but a checkered (houndstooth) one with a pink ribbon tied around it. It then took the whole of the next 24 hours to deal with tracking down the hospital she went to, trying to explain to the staff there that they might need to remove it, trying to track down the relative the woman was going to visit, and trying to get the bus company to do anything at all to assist with this. What they did was misinform the woman’s relative, claiming that we had their bag with us.

We eventually had to make our way through an unfamiliar city at our own expense to locate the home of the injured woman’s relative and retrieve our bag that she had luckily taken on to NYC and not left in New Jersey. Luckily, they were some of the nicest people we interacted with in the States. We found out then that the woman had broken her shoulder.

Then, on the way back, we were given the wrong bus departure information on our itinerary and missed our bus. We ended up having to sleep for 11 hours on the floor of the subway level of the Port Authority bus terminal with random riders and homeless people and then as we waited for our Toronto-via-Buffalo bus at gate 309 as instructed, the driver called out “Buffalo” without mentioning Toronto at gate 310 and had I not gone and asked we would’ve been stuck there for another span of hours, playing Fuzzle and watching one-footed pigeons hobble around and fly laps inside.