Mid-week Treats

August 31, 2012


We stay in Downtown Toronto, and it's summer. It seems almost sacrilegous to take a metro pass when everything is within walking distance (walking distance being 6km given the lovely weather... and the fact that I feel guilty about not hitting the gym as often as I could. Read: ever).

But. When you travel the metro pass way, you suddenly see all these ads about fun events you may otherwise never have heard of. Like the Old Town Toronto re-enactment of the 1812 Battle of York. History fascinates me, and I've been trying to read/watch more about Canada's, so I was really looking forward to this.


Unfortunately, when I got to Berzy park at noon yesterday, all I saw was this:

Not a soldier in sight! I was extremely disappointed, especially having double-checked their Twitter account for updates on the 1812 show before I left the house.

Serious decadence

The husband kindly improved my mood though, by whisking me off for a surprise lunch. Everyone keeps saying summer's over, (though it's still 25 degrees out) so to make the most of the remaining sunshine, we ate a giant fudge brownie sundae on the park-benches lining Yonge Street as part of the Celebrate Yonge summer event (and, because my mum's reading this, I should clarify that's not all we ate for lunch =))

Social Media & The Global Poverty Project

August 28, 2012

Despite all my best intentions, I never seem to write about the panel discussions and informational meetups I go to. Maybe it's because it's hard to condense one hours' worth of debate on digital media into one blog post... especially when there are no hard and fast conclusions that come out of it. Still, meetups with the Social Media Ref were thought provoking, and I really enjoyed the Non-Profit Technology Network's latest workshop on using social media for social justice (details over here)

d'Arcy Lunn, the Canadian Campaign manager for The Global Poverty Project's Polio campaign, led the group, with a quick overview of global poverty and the things that the Global Poverty Group had been doing in the digital space to get the word out etc. 

One of the biggest problems with digital campaigns is that they're short-lived and superficial - peoples' interest shifts to the next thing that comes along etc. So I was hooked by the fact that for an upcoming concert in New York, tickets are free, but people earn their way in by reading articles, sharing them, signing online petitions etc - and these people are kept  on a database which ensures they get follow-ups about other projects which need similar action. It'll be interesting to see how that works.

Another aspect that had me hooked was d'Arcy's emphasis on Google+ being a great medium for projects like this - the GPG's making better use of G+ than most for-profit organizations I've seen, and it's definitely working fantastically for them. I've worked with Google.org to build out search & display campaigns for non-profits, and also used Google Pages to build simple sites for some projects, but I think adding social to the mix definitely broadens any project's scope.

... There are so many ideas that came up while I was talking to the group, but like I said at the beginning, it's hard to figure out which ones to put down, and they rarely make sense out of context. That said, I thought this particular meetup was worth writing about, just to get the word out about GPG (their website's here). 

The Expendables: Completely Expendable Experience

August 27, 2012

Remember last week, when my Meetup group had free tickets to The Expendables 2 premiere (like that movie needed a sequel!)? The theater had solidly overbooked and so we were asked to come back later. We should have listened to all the reviews we heard over the week, and just skipped the movie altogether. But it's hard to say no to free tickets, and so we found ourselves at the Scotiabank Theater, even vaguely excited about finally getting to watch the movie.

You can Photoshop movie posters, but you can't ease away the wrinkles from the cast in every single frame - Bruce Willis' face was the only one still capable of movement. Personally, I found it painful watching yester-year greats try to rehash their signature moves for a forced script that tried to massage everyone's egos... give me their individual classic movies any day. 

Storyline: When Nepal, China, Albania, and Russia are all part of a single story, you stop looking for lines weaving them together. Quick summary: everyone tried to kill everyone else just because they could, and I would have liked it if more people had succeeded. 

Constant gunfire with the occasional explosion made for a pretty consistent soundtrack, occasionally interrupted by man-grunts, which made up the majority of the dialogue. The rest of the dialogue consisted of cliches so trite that Bollywood would turn its back on them. 

As you can see, the movie annoyed me on several levels. If it were a rom-com, I may have been able to dismiss it as mindless entertainment. Yesterday though, when I was watching all the pointless violence and the throw-away references to justified wars, all I could think of was this:

Busker Fest 2012

25 August 2012

When I landed in Toronto, I was all touristy-eyed about attending the city's most talked-about festivals... in most cases (as with Luminato which I wrote about here) I had no clue what the festival was actually about, but I thought the name sounded promising. Similarly so with the Busker Fest (I started wildly thinking about snow sleds and dogs, which, actually, isn't too far fetched, if all that people tell me about Canadian winters is true).

Turns out what actually happens at busker fests is almost as awesome - buskers are essentially street performers - everyone from jesters, to jugglers, to magicians, tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, what have you. Entertainment medieval style. Nothing I say is going to do it justice anyway, so I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking.

 

 

I pretty much wandered through with my mouth agape and eyes wide open for the most part, so all the pictures above aren't mine, they're from Busker Fest Toronto's Facebook page. The full collection's here.

Now here's what I found truly amazing: all of this stuff was available for free. The audience didn't have to pay to watch, the performers weren't paid to perform. Some of them came from other countries, just for the joy of performing. Any money they made was from tips. And not one person who watched any show walked away without leaving a tip. I think that's what made the whole thing completely phenomenal for me. 

All proceeds from the theater in the area, as well as donations made from those attending the event, went towards supporting Epilepsy Toronto. I'm definitely going to volunteer as well as attend next year, it's a great event that ensures people who attend willingly donate what they can.

The Week that Was

August 19, 2012

Expendables premiere, which got overbooked, and we were told to come back next week. So really, this was a Jack Astors social instead. I learned that JA makes the most amazingly cheesy bruschetta, so I can't say it was a wasted evening in any way.

TEDx salon on where our food's coming from. A ton of very passionate views, including my husband's, which is that he really doesn't care. (The scandal that caused in his small group discussion must have been great fun.)

First time I made pizza from scratch.... for 20 people. With vegan flour, at that. Worked out amazingly well, although I must confess I got annoyed with the dough not rolling out evenly, and just tore it up and pieced it together like Play-dough on the plate. Who can tell the difference once the toppings hide the Frakensteinness? Exactly.

Very brief visit to Scarborough - it definitely felt like a little piece of India. And where else can you get your face done for $5? While listening to some random Bollywood music so outdated you can barely even place it? Epic win.

Bling swap at Uniiverse. I'm great at sharing, but that generosity flags a bit when it comes to giving away my precious earrings (it had to be earrings, there's no way I'm giving away my shoes). Though I have six pairs of hoop earrings that are essentially identical, and I wear exactly two of those, I still had the hardest time picking which one I'd give away. It was all worth it in the end though because I picked up two very cute cloth belts.

Chinatown kitchen accessories hunt (finally, finally found a rolling pin  - and proceeded to make rotis. My forearms feel more toned already).

Putting together the last piece of Ikea furniture ourselves. Splinters galore flew about in every direction, but the couch is finally in the color I want it to be.

Several library visits. Several rounds of phone calls and suchlike.

And those are just the highlights. It was a bizarrely full week. Here's hoping this one gives me slightly more time to chill at home.