The Procrastination Station

That Air and Space Museum at Downsview Park got served an eviction notice. Apparently the museum hasn’t been generating much income and are about $120,000 behind in their rent. The park wants to replace the museum with a 4-rink skating facility. Some people are calling this a Downsview Park cash grab, stating that the park is destroying a piece of history.

I was actually planning to check out the Air and Space Museum this summer because there was a Groupon deal for it back in June. (BTW, the groupon and wagjag coupons are still valid, but you have to call 416.638.6078 first to book your visit.) I remember hearing about the Canadarm and Avro Arrow in history class, but don’t know much about them. This was my chance to find out.

How a museum can close down is beyond me. It’s not like we are running out of land…Downsview Park is like a huge useless piece of land with weeds growing as far as the eye can see. Not sure why they couldn’t just build the skating rinks on another piece of the land. And it must be nice to collect $100,000 in rent from one little building on it too.

Has anyone noticed the new newspaper at subway stations? They were out of Metro papers today, so I grabbed the one next to it, which was “The Onion” newspaper. To my surprise, the OccupyWallStreet riots have won over the country and also, the end of the world is coming.

The Toronto Star partnered up with The Onion website to produce this advertisement filled, fake news piece of crap. Since no one watches TV, listens to the radio, or pays for a newspaper anymore, I think a lot of people will be getting false news as their primary source of news. I’d bet that more than half of TTC riders won’t even realize it is fake news!

Luckily, I’m kind of a computer nerd and have heard of the Onion before. It is a funny news website where they make fun of real news. I totally didn’t fall for it and tell all my friends the protests are over…

Toronto city councillors voted 38 to 4 in favor of banning the sale of shark fin. The rule will come into effect in September 2012. So fill up on that shark fin soup (a Chinese delicacy) before it is too late!

Toronto Star Shark Fin Article
CBC Shark Fin Article

Shark Fin soup is served at pretty much every Chinese wedding, as well as Chinese New Years and larger birthday banquets. It tastes kind of like chewy, clear vermicelli noodles (aka…it’s tasteless) in a mildly salted soup. For all I know, I might have actually been eating vermicelli noodles and I’d be none the wiser.

I don’t think that it is the city’s job to ban shark fin, in the name of animal preservation. It should either be a Canada-wide entire shark ban or not at all. I feel a bit sorry for the restaurants downtown, because I’d bet that the majority of the consumption wasn’t even done in Toronto. I mean, no self-respecting Chinese person would eat at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. All the fine cuisine is in Markham and Richmond Hill, and the wedding halls are also North of Toronto’s borders.

If they tried to put that shark fin ban in Richmond Hill and Markham, all hell would break loose. Actually, let’s just say that the bootleg DVDs and sharkfin soup won’t be on the English menu anymore.

p.s. I’m not a shark fin soup lover or anything and “Megashark Versus Giant Octopus” is a great movie.

I went to the Eaton Center for dinner today. The Queen Street food court is where I usually go, but to my amazement, it was totally boarded up. I followed the arrows on the boards and found my way to the new and improved food court, also known as an “urban eatery”:

There were some new food places as well as some old places. Actually even the old places look new because their design matches the food court colors. Check out that hardcore Subway with their LCD menus:

Well, I like the new eatery. It looks very sleek and modern with their black and stainless steel colors. Everything also seemed pricier than usual too. I usually get a chicken shawarma from Villa Madina, but since I’m going broke, there’s only one thing to do:

The black and stainless steel McDonald’s! The only thing yellow in this picture is the “Wet Floor” sign!

Yesterday I was bored and decided to hit up Yorkdale mall. I walked down to the subway station, ran past the ticket booth guy and hopped onto the subway train. Still out of breath from my short sprint, I noticed something different. The floor was clean!

Yep, I was on a brand new TTC train. Clean floors, clean seats, clean windows. All the carts connect so you can walk from the front to the back of the train. There were blinking LEDs on the map to show you which stop you are at, as well as a display with the name of the stop. A nice voice tells you to “please stand clear of doors” before they squish you, and the air conditioning seemed to be working better too.

When I busted out my phone to take the videos, some 12 year old kid saw me and gave me the stare down. I thought he thought I was an idiot, but then he took out a camera and started taking videos too! His YouTube channel probably has better videos than mine. Anywho, I arrived at Yorkdale and said goodbye to the new chariot of the Gods (aka. new TTC)

Yesterday, I must have been extremely bored at the North York library…because I went downstairs to check out the TTC Meeting on proposed route changes. “Route changes” could be more accurately described as “route reductions”. Basically, they are just stopping service at 10pm instead of 1am on about 40 of the bus routes.

I’ve seen the ads in the Metro Newspaper saying that there are public TTC meetings going on all week. I have never been to one, but I kind of imagined it to be a couple of TTC speakers at a table and a room full of reporters (and dedicated citizens) asking questions. In fact, I even thought that there would be refreshments!

To my disappointment, the meeting was pretty much just a room with about 40 posters showing what the route changes are. The info on the posters were pretty much identical to the info on their website.

Sample:
8 BROADVIEW – No service after 10:00 p.m., Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.
120 CALVINGTON – No service after 10:00 p.m., Monday to Saturday. No service on Sundays and holidays.
20 CLIFFSIDE – No service after 10:00 p.m., Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.
(times 37 other routes)

There were also some TTC workers standing in front of the posters answering questions and giving out comment forms. I wouldn’t call the event a meeting. It was just an info session for people that don’t have the internet or just want a human to relay the info to them.

I don’t think it’s worth it to attend these meetings. You tell the TTC surveyor that service ends at 10pm, but your shift ends at 11pm. Some will write stuff down on their notepad, while others will just “remember” to bring it up with the people in charge. As the TTC surveyor has no power, once the meeting is over, they can pretty much throw away their notepad and your comment cards. It’s a way to console the public after giving bad news.

I think the TTC is run in a really bad way, but as normal Toronto citizens, there’s not much we can do about it.

Entrance. Get a comment card from the nice lady:

Posters of the route changes aka reductions:

More posters, and a poser!?!:

So today, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was arrested in the UK. I think everyone who cares about this topic already get the up to date reports on news sites or Twitter. I was just reading through some sites and this article got me thinking.

It seems like the US government is trying to shut down WikiLeaks: Cutting off their funding (PayPal), Taking away their hosting (Amazon), Taking away their domain name (EveryDNS), and while we are at it, let’s arrest him for not using a condom.

Now, aren’t we doing the same censorship as China? Let’s put up the great firewall of China to monitor and delete all traces of unfavorable historical events and wipe the existence of certain religions from the face of the internet. Let’s just arrest people for writing information and while we are at it, let’s just censor anything on the internet about the jailbird winning any Nobel prizes.

We are all tricked into thinking we have freedom of speech. In fact, we believe in our own freedom so much so that we even condemn other countries for having less of it. How can we claim our media is unbiased when the government can step in at anytime and stop any publication they feel like?

So as I was reading articles on the news websites, I was thinking: “these articles about the government were all APPROVED by the government.” Do you think your local newspaper would risk being shut down by the government over an article? Making money is a newspaper’s number one priority. That is why they dilute the newspapers with as much advertising as they can possibly fit.

So, in conclusion…everything that WikiLeaks is publishing is already known by governments worldwide. Even WikiLeaks can get a hold of these secret documents, do you think that terrorist countries don’t already have this info? The only people that don’t know this information is the general public, and your government is trying to pull a China!

Rob Ford, the new mayor’s first order of business is to kill Transit City. Honestly, I’m not quite sure what was involved in the whole “Transit City” plan. Something about spending billions of dollars to build lightrail lines, repaint some streetcars, and in 10 years, we will have the best streetcars in the world!

The new plan is to just build subways (which are about 3-4x as expensive). I have no idea where Ford will get the money to do it, but hell ya, subways are key. Anyone who has ever played Sim City knows that subways are well worth the cost. If you build subways, people will start using it and the roads will clear up.

Anyway, I was reading some of the comments on the news sites and someone made a very good point.

Note that these subway maps are totally to scale. I looked at a Google map, used my fingers to measure their distances, then resized the Tokyo subway map to about the right size.

If you’ve seen the Tokyo subways at rush hour, just imagine if they didn’t have a subway! All those people would be driving on the 401!

The infamous octopus that correctly predicted the World Cup 2010 matches has died. Some Korean football fanatic decided to turn him into sushi to absorb his psychic powers for himself.

Ok, the official word is that Paul died of natural causes. He was two and a half years old, and they are thinking of burying him and giving him a shrine.

Rob Ford is Toronto’s next mayor.

The final voting results:
Rob Ford – 47% (380k votes)
George Smitherman – 36% (290k)
Joe Pantalone – 12% (95k)
Rocco Rossi – 0.6% (5k)

When I look at these numbers, it doesn’t seem like a lot of people vote. About 800,000 votes from a population of 3 million? I thought Rossi was a contender, but he only got 5,000 votes. If I told all my Facebook friends to vote for me, I wonder if I could beat that number. Hrm…maybe I should try out for the next one. lol

Anyway, the Torontonians have spoken. They want change and we will see if Ford can deliver it. It will be an interesting 4 years.