Description 37 - The Drive Home

You've heard Toronto, you've heard Ohio - now hear what's in between as I take the Subaru on its zillionth trip across the border. Featuring music from The Ambers, mashups, service roads, mysterious medians and the anti-Tim's.

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And if you want pictures, there's the enhanced version!

Associated links:
Country Style
680 News
The QEW on list of Ontario Provincial Highways
(about as geeky as it sounds)
Thorold Tunnel
Jordan Village
Anna Olson's bakery
(okay, so she's in Port Dalhousie now. Close. She was here.)
Anna and Sugar on Food Network Canada
The Ambers on myspace
(the only other place you can hear "Endless Summer"!)
The Peace Bridge
Consulate General Buffalo
WGR SportsRadio (was listening to the Sabres/Senators game)
New York State Thruway Authority
Angola Travel Plaza
102ZOO

Yes, on part of the trip, I was playing mashups from my nano. Let's see if I can keep track of them... Air 52's by ToToM, Electro Punk (Iggy vs. Bloc Party) by Electrosound, Last Minute Man (Missy vs. NIN) by Hidden Signal, Crazy Logic by Arty Fufkin (who I met on SL a while back), and Highway to Hell & Back (AC/DC vs. Kelly Clarkson vs. John Cougar vs. Green Day vs. some other things) as well as the absolute classic Juke Box Hero Project (Foreigner vs. Seger vs. others) by DJ John. Mashuptown and the BootieSF site are excellent places to get brilliant mashups, and I know they would appreciate your support. My two-year love affair with mashups was fostered by Adam Curry, so I'm very happy to hear he's back to playing them on the Daily Source Code, having ceased giving a crap.

I've tried a few times to record my visits with US customs on the other side of the Peace Bridge. The sound was always too bad (and coming from me, that's saying something) because I'd be there in the car and the officer would be in his/her little booth - the distance was too much. I got lucky this time with a cop who got off his ass to check around. Also, I keep trying to have the iRiver going in case one of them gets smart-assy, which sometimes happens but hasn't happened lately. I get asked the usual citizenship question and I answer as usual "dual - US and Canada", and once the guy asked "which one do you want to be now?" Hmmm. Sometimes they just want to know what set of questions to ask ("how long have you been in Canada" or "how long will you be in the US").

A few months before the 2002 US election, a customs officer said, "but you come from America, right?" Right.

"Okay, so you're American." Well, partially.

"No, if you're a dual citizen, but you're from America, that's the only thing we care about. You're a US citizen. The other one doesn't matter." Hmph.

Technically, this is pretty much true. But I kinda wanted to ask, "would it matter if my other citizenship was...say...Syrian? Or Iranian? Maybe Pakistani? Or maybe if I wasn't a blonde white girl fluent in English with no suspicious accent? Then would my other citizenship matter?"

But of course, that is not the time to ask questions like that, unless you want to pull over to that nice building over to the right and hang out for a little while. I just nodded with understanding, answered the rest of my questions and went on my way. And I decided that since I was such a US citizen, I'd vote in that damn election and the one after that. For all the good it did. Oh, well.

Description 37a - The Enhanced Drive Home

When a podcaster gets a hold of GarageBand and a digital camera, an enhanced podcast seem inevitable. So while recording for Description 37, I took pictures of stuff along the way, as you will hear by the annoying pauses and programmed camera noises. So while there isn't anything useful like, oh, say, chapters and compression in there (I just found compression in GB near the end of editing this! Genius again.), there are nice photos that kinda sync up to what I'm describing. As this .m4a will make evident, I'm really an audio person at heart, and too many photos/video sort of defeat my purpose of podcasting, but this was a fun experiment that I may mess with from time-to-time.

The regular, photo-less, compressed .mp3 version is on the way, but for now, if you have iTunes or something that will read this kind of thing (seriously, otherwise this is gonna screw you up), enjoy!

Monte-freakin'-forte video!

For all of you who have made Description 05 one of most popular episodes here, and even for those who have no clue what I'm talking about, I bring you the first video I ever shot with my new digital camera: Monteforte at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern last Friday.
I dig your rock.

Description 36 - Janes and Jane's

We walk through The Annex again, but this time we're led by someone who knows what the hell he's talking about - like why's it called The Annex? And what's that lady doing across the street? May include chalk drawings, but no tv shoes.

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Associated links
Doors Open Toronto 2007
Jane's Walk
Angus Skene's Architours
Structures on Rogers Television
Our first stop at the Medical Arts Building
Our second stop at the York Club
Madison Manor Boutique Hotel (part of our third stop)
The Jane's Walk gallery
Spacing Wire blogs about it.
The book Angus recommended about Robert Moses
Jane Jacobs @ Project for Public Spaces
Good ol' Description 17
the TTC's moment of silence

I gotta get a handle on how to read levels in GarageBand. If the start of this episode doesn't blow your ears out like the last episode, you can thank my Australian friend in Second Life. We were in-world together when he got to this blog from my SL profile and started playing Description 35, then said "ouch".

When you look through some of those photos of the walk and you see this person looking kind of uncomfortable in a long black coat accented by a white cable strung across her, that would be me. Move along...

The post in Spacing Wire estimates that a couple thousand people participated in Jane's Walk. Again, the people's interest in their own city without a ton of promotion never ceases to amaze me. If it didn't amaze me, I guess I wouldn't be a proper Torontonian. :-)

Description 35 - Kraft Dinner

In the kitchen, I contemplate the significance of elbow macaroni with frighteningly orange powder; and in a Canadian grocery store, contemplate the significance of tomato soup with cheese portobello mushroom ravioli. With music by The Pursuit of Happiness, Danny Michel in the background, and a certified parking lot freak-out.

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Associated links:
The Official Kraft Dinner site
CBC Midday does Kraft Dinner! (with Brent Bambury!)
Danny Michel: official, MySpace and the fansite.
Buy Danny's new DVD/CD combo! Or get that new album on vinyl or digital download!
Oh, and this was the album I was playing.
Time to plug my TPOH site again.
The Daily Bread Food Bank
Loblaws
SModcast, via Quick Stop Entertainment

Okay, I admit: no one will give their right arm for wild mushroom risotto.

Note that my freak-out was not about losing a huge amount of food, but that I was going to have to talk to someone about it. That should give you an idea about my social nature.

Listening back, I wondered if I was inferring that a lot of immigrants use food banks. Coming from Ohio, I can tell you that folks born and raised are every bit as likely to need them. Anyone can fall on hard times. I guess the points I was trying to make in that wrong inference start with Toronto being such a multicultural place, and that's reflected in the grocery stores. People could be second or third generation Canadians, and carry on the culinary traditions their family taught them, and this isn't easy with peanut butter and no name mac'n'cheese. But beyond that, it isn't even a matter of ethnic food or culture or whatever. It's a matter of quality - of food, of life. Everyone deserves that.

And what are my culinary traditions? Er...Swanson Fried Chicken and Hostess Ho-ho's?

Don't laugh, Yanks. You can't get Hostess Ho-ho's here. Seriously. And Canadians who think they're no different from Swiss Rolls? Just as well you keep thinking that...

Save Sons of Butcher

While I'm thinking up the new episode...I've learned that our cartoon network, Teletoon, is not renewing one of my favourite shows I've worked on in the day job, Sons of Butcher. This sucks because it's funny, has the rock, and is a fine representation of Hamilton, Ontario (since they're ditching CHCH after a zillion years and replacing it with the fricking E! channel, it may be the only way that town gets represented!). So to give a little bit back, here's part of the last regular episode (from youtube, because to use what I got from work might be illegal or something...). As Doug might say, maybe y'all can get viral on they ass. To check out the rest of that episode, go here, and to see more wigged stuff and find out how you can sign a petition to save the show, go to the SOB myspace page.

Description 34 - Formerly Known as Hull

What is this town with two names? Why does everything look closed? And what the hell was I doing there? Features music by The Hundreds and Thousands, a contemplation of nigiri vs. galettes, two waterfalls and a very special cameo by Maurice Chevalier.

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Associated links:
Musimax!
Hull in Wikipedia (where we learn I was wrong about "Chaudières" meaning "rapids")
Cool stuff to do and see in Gatineau
Official site for the CRTC
The tv station we were proposing to the CRTC
Me in the application hearing the next day - yikes!
The Hundreds and Thousands
Hour Magazine reviews L'Argoät, and digs them too.

L'Argoät was the restaurant where I ended up, and it was really great. I had a savory galette (which is really a crepe) which had these roasted potatoes and camenbert inside; and the traditional drink with galettes in Brittany (I learned), "un bolle du cidre" or a bowl of this alcoholic apple cider. Then, once my server told me that I could pay by interac (whew!), I had a dessert galette just with chocolate sauce, but the best chocolate sauce EVER.

So you see, Gatineau - formerly known as Hull to everyone but the cab drivers - isn't as bad as I made it sound. Pretty close to the hotel was the vast Gatineau Park, across town is the Museum of Civilisation (like a Canadian natural history museum - its architecture is so cool, it totally sticks out like a sore thumb), and in the other direction is Casino Lac-Leamy, which I still call by its original and way-less-glamorous name, Casino d'Hull. That's right - casino dull. Genius.

It turns out the Quebec election that day was pretty damn interesting. Jean Charest and the Liberals held on to power, but only got a minority government. The Parti Québecois stunk up the joint, so the cute and gay André Boisclair is probably going to lose his job. The big shock winner was Action démocratique du Québec (see, told you there was a "democratic" in there), who've gone from not even being an official party to being The Opposition. So things in Quebec become as hard-to-predict as ever, just in a whole different way.

Something I didn't get to do while I was in the area was meet up with my friend Gavin, who I've known ever since we were smart-ass writers for our college paper at York University. He lives in Ottawa, but had business out of town most of the time I was there. We've had our ups and downs, and go in and out of touch, but I've always found him a remarkable, funny guy with my favourite voice in history. Late last year, an email came from him out of the blue about this thing he was doing: he was running a marathon and a half (literally) at Disney World to raise money toward building a school in Kathmandu, Nepal. Okey-doke. It was a great cause of Sean Egan, the man who led Gavin's first expedition up Mount Everest - an expedition that Egan did not survive. So Gavin ran what's left of his ass off (I think the last time I'd seen him, he was running the marathon in Ottawa) and raised thousands of dollars. These folks have just about made it to their goal of $150,000 to build the school, so why not help get them over the top by going to the Ad Astra (which means "aim high") site and coughing up some coin.

Description 33 - Voluptuous Panic

Still not in Canada, but in London (England) to walk across a bridge, sit on some rubber and go down a slide. Not exciting enough? How about a creaking door?

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Associated links:
Millennium Bridge
The new Globe Theatre
The Tate Modern
Watch the live webcam at the base of the slides, or watch video of the ride down each of them (I was on Slide 2).
Gilbert & George: in Wikipedia, their exhibition at the Tate Modern, and them discussing the exhibition

Originally, this episode was going to be called "Art For All," which is Gilbert & George's credo. In their manifesto What Our Art Means, they put it this way:

We want Our Art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood. The decadent artists stand for themselves and their chosen few, laughing and dismissing the normal outsider. We say that puzzling, obscure and form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel denial of the Life of People.

While the slides have no nudity, bodily fluids, or run-down house (though possibly the odd cute boy in a hoodie), I think they express this intention pretty well. I'm not a huge fan of modern art, because I can't always relate to it - which for some, is the point. But it is nice to have some art that can be quickly understood on a visceral level by anyone, which pretty much forces you to participate in its themes and prove them...and while having fun. Very skillful stuff.

Description 32 - Rue Mouffetard

There is a nice town called Paris in Ontario, but it is not the Paris where this show was recorded. It includes me buying toothpaste while listening to Boney M - do I really have to say any more?

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Associated links:
Rue Mouffetard featured in the Project For Public Spaces
Mon ami Xavier: his publishers and a gallery of some of his work. (please allow pop-ups and click on "book")
The Tabacaria blog gives love to Xavier's comic Les Indégivrables
Musée Marmottan
That Monet painting I remembered from childhood.
Fondation Le Corbusier
OChef makes duck confit!
Petite Anglaise blogs about Paris driving

I've since determined that the cheese-and-potato thing I ate that night was not cassoulet, since that is a way to use white-or-other beans, and no way were they involved in that dish. It was more like a gratin, but I know that's not what they called it on the menu - I could have sworn the word was "cassoulet" or "cassoulette", but I guess I was wrong. I'll have to ask Xavier...

You'll notice the link that talks about Rue Mouffetard is from a site about public spaces. This is something I didn't discuss while blathering this episode: that there are many, many places in Paris for people to gather. Because it has this ersatz network of odd corners and roundabouts and streets that emit from a centre, there are dozens of spots like where I stood at Place de la Contrescape, with a fountain in the middle and a little area around it, then the small roundabout surrounded by cafés and shops where people sit out front. And I wasn't even around for what is the best-known thing about the area: the open-air market at the other end of the street at Square St. Medard, nearer to my hotel. I was always either too early or late to check out the vendors there. And as the name suggests, it starts in a sort of square, which is yet another area where people walk around or hang out. And most of these areas are very focused on pedestrians - which may have something to do with the fact that when all this got started hundreds of years ago, you had your feet and maybe a horse or a cart. Still, I think that's part of what makes it such a "vibrant" city, to use the parlance of purple travel prose. I think it's really hard to plan for something like that, but those carrying the Jane Jacobs torch will do what they can.

Oh, and the toothpaste I bought? Would you believe...it was made in Canada!

Biggest Day Job Plug Ever

Hi. No, I don't have a new episode, but I'm editing...occasionally. I was on vacation, so here's a flickr set (yay! my first flickr set!) to give you some idea where I was and perhaps provide a preview of the next two shows - if of course I ever get them done.

Now, on to the business at hand.

You know that my day job is producing audio description for movies and tv shows so the vision-impaired know what the hell is going on. Description 27 is about that, and if you heard it, you'll recall I explained that it isn't easy to access our stuff on tv - I demonstrated turning on the SAP (Secondary Audio Program) by navigating a mess of buttons and menus and crap on my particular tv and vcr. You can imagine how fun that process is for someone who can't see.

When I've posted day job plugs on this blog, they've usually been for CBC stuff we've described, because we have a deal with them where first-run CBC shows of an hour or more that air prime-time can be simulcast on our sister station VoicePrint, which you can get in an online stream. Still, that's not many shows, and the vision-impaired should be able to hear all the described programming available (even stuff we didn't do - gasp!) as easily as possible.

So the company where I work has applied to the CRTC (big-shot regulators) to get a tv station with nothing but shows with open description, meaning without all of that SAP nonsense. The description is just there. Frickin' cool, huh? The vision-impaired can enjoy or hate tv just like the rest of us without all that dumb technical hassle.

Part of the process of applying to the CRTC for this station is that the public can submit their opinions on this idea, whether they think it's great or stupid and why. And it does make a lot of difference. That part of the fun is going on now until March 8.

So if you have a minute, head over to this page:
http://www.nbrscanada.com/accessiblechannel.htm
...which tells you how to submit your letter of support (or non-support, but you wouldn't do that, right? right?), and even provides some more info on the station if you want it. You can submit by snail mail, fax, email, filling out an online form and even by phone.

Thanks in advance for helping out, and really for just bothering to read this. Now, back to that day job of mine...and eventually editing that next podcast.