Shopping Carts in Ravines

Now that the Christmas consumer frenzy has died down, perhaps it is time to reflect… on how to keep the fabulous new digital device you’ve got.

iPod muggings are in the news again, and even though those on the upper half of the middle class may laugh (”What, thugs just heard of iPods now?”) those of us who live in, frequent or even simply travel through less wealthy areas of the city have genuine cause for concern.

This photo was taken in front of the Tim Horton’s in Weston, a spot where I know for a fact people have been robbed for their MP3 players. The craving-inducing advert was in pretty poor taste and could just as well have had blood drips instead of paint, but at least it only hung for a couple weeks.

I witnessed such a mugging (attempt) at Lawrence West station (Protip: Avoid) when disembarking a 52 Lawrence West bus and transferring to the subway. As an aside, I should note that I’ve noticed almost all of the buses running the 52/58 routes are numbered 66**, often including 666 and including 6666. Juuust sayin’.

Anyway, I was walking down the stairs when 3 youths pushed past me, bumping two young kids aside. It became apparent that they were in pursuit of another young teen who was walking ahead wearing black around-the-ear earbuds. All guys, but I’ll leave their specific ethnicities out of this except to say that, of the 4, one was Asian, one Caucasian, two Afro-Canadian. (I’ll let your innate racial biases assign the roles.)

I myself was wearing earbuds and couldn’t actually hear anything, but I watched the trio hurry to catch up to the the individual. One threw an arm over his shoulder and walked closely beside him, but he pulled to the other side and doubled back out of the grasp. His body language suggested that his mouth was saying “F* off” and he walked back to the start of the platform.

A train arrived and he (and I) boarded the last car, while the three boarded the second-to-last. That seemed to resolve the situation temporarily, until they came through the car doors and began more forcefully demanding things from him. He resisted and they shoved him around and threw some punches that I think were intended more to scare than injure. A woman intervened, a man hit the alarm strip, and the subway pulled into Glencairn station. The trio left, hitting the emergency stop button on the downward escalator so they could run up it to street level.

While the actual assaulting was taking place, I thought of snapping a picture with my iPhone camera - but any iPhone user knows that “snapping” is a euphemism for the brutally sluggish process that is loading and stabilizing the camera app. Technical logistics aside, I wasn’t sure the situation really called for me to start pulling the most expensive things I could find out of my pockets and demonstrating their functionality.

If I’d had Cycorder at the time, I would have made a video and could have provided it to the police. I hadn’t yet jailbroken my phone, and the fact that jailbreaking it was a prerequisite to being able to capture video is both a strong argument for jailbreaking and a strong argument for Apple loosening their stranglehold on the platform.

So, what exactly can you do to mitigate the likelihood of being targeted for such an attack?

This is definitely an open question and I don’t have a real killer answer.
The common suggestion of swapping white earbuds for black ones obviously wouldn’t have helped our friend in this case. If anything, his style of earbuds made me assume that he had kind of a crappy MP3 player in his pocket, and he very well might’ve - I never saw it.

Most likely, however, his assailants did see the device itself and picked him for it. “Flashing” the device - that is, exposing and handling it at all - is the most likely way to call the wrong person’s attention to it. If they were picking people for earbud colour, they would’ve picked me instead… although, granted, I know how to slip into screwface in the ghetto to project a combination of leave-me-alone and not-worth-it-anyway to thugs. I found that I’d look out the bus windows and if the residences in view were more expensive than my own, then I would openly use my iPhone.

I also tend to keep my iPhone buried deep inside my clothing, whereas they had been trying to reach right into the pocket he was carrying his in and grab it without having to negotiate any threats. And when I say deep, I mean deep - I wear a double-layered snowboarding coat and generally keep my iPhone zipped inside an inner chest pocket that is located behind the zipper that attaches the lining to the external layer. There’s no way a quick pocket pick would bring it into the open, but of course that’s only a deterrent against those who won’t actually apply violence.

So then what? Kung fu, tasers and handguns are “solutions” with all sorts of obvious problems attached to them. The TTC’s new subway cars, supposedly coming this year, will have CCTV cameras on them as many of the buses already do. The effectiveness of that is yet to be determined.

GPS capabilities also offer the promise of tracking a stolen device after the fact based on pre-installed software, but all the iPhone and laptop tracking apps I’ve tried out have been a bundle of hype over do-nothing code.

Personally, my only available solution (screwface aside) has been to move out of Weston. Someone once told me, “It doesn’t matter where you live, just as long as you don’t roll there.” That’s true enough, but it kind of falls apart in the 21st century when your $300 phone rings in some crack district of the city. A more applicable quote may be from Dizzee Rascal: “Stay ghetto if you must, but remember to get out.”

Finally, I’d like to state that for maximum authenticity this entire entry was written on my iPhone while in transit.
Living life on the Edge, eh?

More amazingness courtesy of the Flickr ‘wtf’ tag:

Some dude in San Francisco who set himself up with a laptop, keyboard and mini soundsystem that was running off municipal electricity. Two photos by caffeina.

I got on a 41 Keele bus from York late the other night - I think it may have been the last Keele bus of the night - and suddenly found myself transported to a futuristic pleasure realm. I was by myself, so was only talking about what I saw in my head, but both of the small groups who also boarded the bus with me were suddenly having the same conversation as I was. That conversation was, essentially, “holy shit, check out these seats!”

The bus followed the same layout as the past few new designs have, with the raised section at the back, but unlike the previous two designs (the one with and the one without the ‘king seat,’ respectively) the seats were not backed by thick black hard plastic. Instead, the backs were made of thin sculpted metal. This meant that people over 5 feet tall could actually sit in them without being forced to cram in tightly, hurting their back and crushing their knees against the seat in front. As well, it meant that the seats themselves were ergonomically designed and pleasantly shaped on the front end, too.

On top of this, the velvety seat covers seemed particularly thick and plush, but this might have simply been due to the fact that they were clearly brand new and hadn’t been subject to any wear yet.

This was bus #1133, incidentally. When I got off, I noticed two further things that I thought were worth noting. One was that they were hybrid electric vehicles, and two was that the back left corner of the roof was sporting a thick metal exhaust pipe. I’ve seen the hybrids before, but I’ve never seen an exhaust pipe (doesn’t mean they haven’t already had them, though).

I’ve had a pretty wild day today, spent mostly (thus far) at the Science Centre with Sasha and Sid. I’ve only been there with school in the past, either in public school or more recently last year with a Bio/Kine trip through York to see the Body Worlds exhibit. The Marvel superheroes exhibit was pretty awesome, though I did notice that in their history-of-the-comics hallway they only barely touched on the Marvel comics civil war in which Captain America takes his patriotism out of the realm of propaganda and into the realm of morality by directly challenging the American government and it’s anti-constitutional policies. The more pro-9/11-heroes stuff was detailed, but the only reason I knew what they were talking about with regards to Captain America’s resistance (quietly tucked into the final sentence of the display) was because I was previously aware of it and specifically looking for the inclusion.

I also really liked the Weston family innovation centre, had all types of fun with the completely interactive exhibit/workstations there, and I was also very impressed by a whole section examining the issues of bias and prejudice in science and how they shape our scientific notions and knowledge base. I’m not sure how new that last one was, but I don’t ever recall having been through it before, and I found that I otherwise had the place pretty much memorized.

I can’t recall ever having anything but a 100% positive experience there, and today certainly did nothing but exceed that, but I was particularly struck by something that I hadn’t ever really noticed before on the school trips. Now that I had to deal with the ticket entrance and everything myself, I realized how young and cool all the staff working there are. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to apply for a job there before, but I realized that it fits my interests, knowledge, schooling, extracurricular experience and personality pretty much to a T. So I’m definitely going to be doing that, not sure whether they do regular hiring or do things seasonally, but hopefully I’ll be able to put on one of those lab coats and help expand some young minds.

I mentioned anti-constitutional policies above, and while I was referring to the United States government there, I was really happy to hear about the supreme court decision regarding security certificates today:

“In a unanimous [ 9-0 ] decision on security certificates, judges call it unconstitutional to detain people based on secret evidence”

It’s one thing that the supreme court decided to rule on the side of our constitutionally-protected rights rather than the government’s American-style secret evidence-based detentions, though I’d like to say that I’d expect that type of a response from the courts in Canada (until the Tories succeed in stacking things against the public)… but a unanimous decision sends a very strong message about what direction Canada is going in this so-called post-9/11 world.

(More detailed analysis of the decision is available here.)

Speaking of the post-9/11 world, I had my first down-to-Earth taste of what that really means and could mean. At 6:00 pm we were on the westbound train at Broadview station, on the third car back from the front. While the train was stopped at the station and people were getting on/off, a woman suddenly rushed along the platform from the front of our car, yelling “There’s gas!” A number of people from that end of the car all started coughing together, and most everyone got off the train. Sasha said she smelled something faintly, I wasn’t sure if I had or not. Most people left immediately, and we got off the train and away from that part of the platform, but once I felt we were (hopefully) far enough away from whatever it was, we stopped to see what was going on. A transit constable showed up right away and started trying to find out who had sprayed it and what it was, and he was soon joined by 6 or 7 more constables and a TTC staff member. They were unable to find the person who had done it, but after a minute two guys approached the constables and told them that they’d seen what happened and that it was a can of that “Fart Spray” stuff sold in novelty gift stores. Satisfied with that, they sent the train on its way.

Turned out to be nothing, but all the same I feel like in another sense I came potentially very close to becoming seriously sick or dying for being on that train, going about an extremely positive and enriching day of my life. I’m a little too existentialist-disconnected to have the experience really ’sink in’ - or I’m still in the shock I was struck with at the time - but it was extremely powerful nonetheless.

I think that, though I’m obviously one to have something to say about everything, I have to leave you to you to draw your own significance from that.

I can say that this has been a bit of a bridging experience in terms of being able to relate to New York and London. I’ve been well aware for some time that there is some amount of potential terror risk now associated with downtown Toronto and the transit system, but at the same time I’ve been disconnected in a more visceral sense from any such thing being a part of my actual personal reality - whether real or imagined.

That changed today - luckily, only halfway.

Finally, after that we got a chance to see the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious graffiti (from the train between Broadview and Castle Frank) and then took a quick trip through Lower Bay station.

Well, I’d mentioned it before but only the other day did I manage to get a taste of the new TTC surveillance cameras myself. These photos are from a Yonge night bus.

Four per bus! I wasn’t expecting that.

They’re pretty spooky, though I can understand the reasons behind them. Once I spotted these, though, I became hyperaware of the fact that these little surveillance domes were actually everywhere I went… in stores, in elevators, in apartment building lobbies and hallways. If the Dundas Square ones go back up, that’s pretty much got everything covered. Very little of what a person does downtown would go unrecorded, although it is important to point out the difference between a centralized totalitarian (1984ish) regime monitoring a billion little cameras, and a bunch of independent private closed-circuit ones. Still, I’m left feeling a tad claustrophobic, like we’re losing space.

On a happier note, I found a wonderful little TTC prize while on the subway. I’ve already pointed out the TTC happy face stickers, which I continue to see regularly while riding the subway. This time, though, in addition to the stickers someone had also placed this little doll’s head:

(I included the train car number in case any trainspotters feel like going headhunting.)

You may want to know that the TTC has just installed 100 high-resolution cameras on buses around the city. They aren’t monitored live, only used for footage in investigations. I have yet to see any, but according to that article, they ought to already be on the streets. I assume that buses with cameras will have to make it clear to riders that they are under surveillance, as taxis do.

For Halloween proper (i.e. the 31st) Newmindspace organized a last-minute subway party. Me and my friend Sasha went, myself dressed as a king and Sasha dressed as a Hullabaloo candy kid, complete with an authentic Robin Frolic.

My two primary impressions of the event are that, one, the TTC seems to get increasingly friendly with each party, and two, the dynamic of this party was different from any others that I’ve been to. I’m not sure dynamic is the right word, I’m just talking about how everyone was crammed together to the point of not being able to move an inch in the centre of the car, while there was so much room at the far end that it could be considered a “chill space.”

There were two soundsystems playing music ranging from drum and bass to Aqua and Prozac (accompanied by singalongs). The advertisement in the background of that photo, like the advertisement behind Jesus here, are for the Toronto Heart Health Partnership’s GetInToIt.ca, which funny enough includes a big honkin’ Newmindspace link under its Games section.

This subway party was a little earlier in the night than usual, allowing it to catch a variety of unsuspecting Halloweeners, plus a handful of random middle-aged / business people. It went off largely without any problems, starting from Downsview and looping all the way around to Finch. At first, I was a little concerned when the driver came on the PA system and told us to “keep it down back there” and that the maximum number of people allowed on the car was 225 and that they’d have to shut the party down if we exceeded that. No such thing happened, though, and when everyone was dismantling all the decorations and cleaning up the candy wrappers so we could switch to a different train at Finch, he came on the PA again and told us that to wish everyone a happy Halloween, it was alright if we stayed on the same train and went back, so we just rushed to the other end and started the party back up.

The rest of my photos are up on my Flickr here, everyone else’s on Flickr should be listed here, and if you happen to be the two girls who got on the train not knowing what was going on, you can find out more at newmindspace.com.

There’ve been a number of skids of mysterious boxes sitting on the subway platform at Lawrence station. The TTC ought to know better than anyone that you can’t just leave things sitting around on the subway and expect them to be okay. Weeks later, they look like this, and are still just sitting around.

That black and blue thing inside does not really give me any hint as to what’s in the boxes.

Down at Coxwell and Gerrard, I found this bus shelter. As you can see in the background, my bus had just arrived and so I only had time to snap this shot and none to investigate. I don’t know where the plants were growing from, but good for them.