Wheels, pedals and casters - snap

Leaving the house on Thursday morning and I notice some people walking with a stroller.  The stroller gets caught on a crack in the sidewalk and the right front wheel bends and breaks - snap.  Lots of head scratching and I leave them to tackle their morning mishap.

As I was driving home after a meeting in Scarborough I was coming down Yonge Street off the 401 and was carefully overtaking a cyclist squeezed between the parked cars and my inside lane.  Snap - he breaks his left pedal off the crankarm.

The next day I'm at a customer's office and grab a chair in one of the cubes and one of its casters is snapped off.

Snap.

Morteza

I had a business lunch with a customer and my colleague made reference to a senior executive at one of our other customers.  The name was Morteza, I've heard the name before, but I've never been sure whether it's a first name or last name or whether it is a man or a woman.

In the evening I was at The Hangar for my ultimate game and walked in the washroom and there was a large soccer player at the urinal and the name on the back of his shirt was Morteza.

I'm pretty sure they're not the same person.

Phở

It was another cold, wet and windy day in Toronto and I thought some hearty phở soup would fit the bill for lunch.  I didn't actually know what exactly what pho was, but I'd seen it on lots of menus and knew it was a form of Asian noodle soup.  I did a little research looking for local best bets, and also found out that this Vietnamese dish is pronounced more like "fuh" than "fo".

I didn't find one of the top restaurant choices nearby, so I hoped in the elevator and planning to walk East along Dundas Street toward Chinatown until I found a spot that looked good and I could read the menu.

There are a few other people behind me in the elevator and I overheard one the ladies say she knows a great pho place and she heard from someone its wasn't pronounced "fuh" but "fo".  I didn't get in a debate about the pronunciation, but I did ask her the name of the restaurant - Asian Bowl on Yonge opposite the Eaton Centre Roots store.  I ordered the beef pho and a veggie spring roll - lovely stuff; very rich soup broth and tender beef and all for a decent price.

Whistler

Dreamed about skiing in Whistler last night.  Familiar dream about trying to get a few more runs in before the vacation ends.

First commercial I saw on TV this morning (sports station) was one for Whistler.  I miss my yearly Whistler trips !

Shoot to Thrill

Heading out for my evening dog walk and slip on my iPod.  I'd been napping on the couch, so I selected my upbeat tracks for the walk, hoping the cold air and music would wake me up a little for my late ultimate game.  My mind wanders to movies and remembers that I need to rent Ironman 2.  I believe AC/DC features pretty prominently on the soundtrack and I'm pretty sure one of my favourite AC/DC tracks, Shoot to Thrill is used on the trailer.  I've often thought the lyrics were a little too risqué so I was a little surprised the used it for the soundtrack.  I don't recall if I have any AC/DC on my iPod at the moment.  The first track of the playlist is over, I'm not in the mood for the second randomly selected upbeat track, so I skip to the next track - Shoot to Thrill.  Rock on.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I just got a nice comment on Flickr regarding a shot I took at my local park a few days ago in the fog. The comment from Jimbographer was "Like the colors, reminds me of Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind." And guess what, just before bed last night, I browsed the program guide a little in case there was a movie I wanted to record and found one of my favourites - Close Encounters of the Third Kind was plying on HDNet. Really looking forward to watching it now !

Canada Malting Co

I dropped off a few colleagues at Toronto's Island Airport (now called the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport) and we passed by the old Canada Malting Co. structure on Toronto's waterfront.  We wondered what they malted ?  Turns out malt is actually a processed grain product and could be used in a number of different end products.

When I got home I caught up on a few blogs and personal items and was pleased to see today's photo on one of my favourite photo blogs - Daily Dose of Imagery.

Carcassonne

I played a few games of Carcassonne with the family on the weekend.  I was in the Apple store at lunch today and picked up the new iPhone4.  I paged over a few pages and accidentally touched an app without noticing what app icon my finger was on and Carcassonne opened up. What a surprise, I didn't even know there was a Carcassonne Apple app.  Of course, I had to play for a few minutes.  Love the game and now available as an app for you iPhone and iTouch, with iPad to come (which we'll be really nice with the larger screen).

Betty Davis Eyes

My wife and I went to see Brandon Flowers (of The Killers) play a solo gig last week and one of the tracks he played was the classic Kim Carnes' hit Betty Davis Eyes.  I hadn't herd that great song in a very long time, and then I heard it again on the car radio this morning.  I just went out to run another errand and heard the same original version being played at St. Louis Wings on their outdoor patio speakers.  I ran my errand, and as I'm returning back to my car, the same restaurant is now paying The Killers' big it Sombody Told me.

Shad and Champion

We went to Shad's concert at The Opera House last night.  I haven't been to many hip-hop or rap shows and I wasn't sure what the crowd was like.  I decided to wear my Champion t-shirt for the occasion thinking it gave me a little street cred, although electronica is still a musical departure away from Shad's hip-hop style.

Today, I was having some trouble trying to find the setlist from last night (so I can fill in some of gaps in myShad downloads), when I came across a CBC Radio 3 podcast - Shad and Champion playing last year's Transmission Festival in Victoria !  Never suspected they'd played on the same bill before.

Ryan

Ryan - coincidence, originally uploaded by PJMixer.

I was downtown checking out some of the exhibits for the Contact Photography festival when a noticed this striking bright red truck on Ossington Avenue. I took a few shots, one of which included a brightly dressed passerby. After taking the shots, I continued my walk up Ossington and noticed some beautiful and colourful art work at AWOL Gallery. Upon closer examination, I noticed the piece was made up of mousetraps. I went into the gallery and met Agata Ostrowska who told me all about Ryan Barrett and his latest project, Fire Trap. Ryan returned from getting a coffee and we spent almost an hour talking about the project and art in general.

When I checked my photographs when I got home, I noticed Ryan was the stranger I captured in this earlier photo.

Click here for the full story and more photos from my visit to AWOL Gallery.

Centaurs

I asked my son to describe Lady Gaga's set on American Idol tonight.  He came up with the creative "centaury" which kind of surprised my wife who wasn't in tune with his new fantasy fiction vocabulary.

Later in the show, Harry Connick Jr. (one of my all time favourite singers), said he would prefer being a centaur rather than a mentor.  Maybe he saw Lady Gaga's rehearsal, but that's a unusual descriptive coincidence regardless.

Junos

I recently heard  that my daughter's music teacher was nominated for a Juno award for Reggae Recording of the Year.  He was the instrumentalist for Carl Henry III.  He unfortunately lost the award to Dubmatix ft. Prince Blanco.  I immediately recognized the name Prince Blanco as I met him a few years ago as he was singing with a local reggae band called the Liquidaires with a ultimate [frisbee] friend of mine on bass.    I went to the gig with another ultimate friend and had a great night.  On a related note, I was really pleased to see that a couple of other friends I met playing ultimate, Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen won a Juno for DVD of the year.

Duke

I came home from my ultimate game tonight just in time to see the last 13 seconds of the NCAA Final Four Championship game.  Duke won by a couple of points.  Before bed, I then sit down to ice my ankle and I pick up What the Dog Saw to continue with a chapter I was reading a few days before.  After a few pages I read that one of people Gladwell is talking about went to law school at Duke.

U2

I had my Flickr slideshow set (698 items, 16 of which are U2) displaying on our TV in the kitchen earlier this evening and of course at the same time I glance a shot of U2, U2 starts playing from our main iTunes playlist (1179 tracks, 21 of which are U2).  Just a little coincidence, but I thought it was wroth recording since I was talking about concert DVD's with my brother-in-law earlier in the day and said U2's DVD's are excellent.

Exeter

My son has an opportunity to do a two week school exchange next spring to Toulouse, France.  We had a meeting with the organizing teacher and the travel agent this week.  The travel agent was from Ellison Travel, based in Exeter, Ontario.  I hadn't heard of Exeter here in Ontario before, although I was pretty familiar with Exeter in England as they had a good speedway team back in the 70's (and I supported The Coventry Bees).

Later, the same evening, I started to watch Angels and Demons (which I'd PVR'd a few days prior).  In one early shot, Hank's character is seen standing in front of a large Exeter pennant in his Harvard office.

The Cars

My brother in-law is a massive music fan and loves vinyl (and he just bought a very old Dual turntable).  He told me about a second-hand vinyl show scheduled at a neighbourhood community centre tomorrow.  I'm thinking of joining him and on the drive home tonight I was thinking about some of the albums I have (to sell perhaps or to buy for nostalgic reasons).  I was recalling that The Cars' Candy-O was one of the first albums I bought when I frist came to Canada.

As usual, we were flicking around various radio stations on the drive home and as I'm thinking about The Cars, I switch to Q107 and they are playing You're All I've Got Tonight from The Cars' debut album.

More Champion

I heard a great Haiti charity song just this week on my friend's blog - it was a very gritty version of the classic, I Put a Spell On You.  As you may be aware, I'm a big of a band called Champion and I have all their albums.  As I was looking on iTunes for the track, on the first page of hits of I Put a Spell On You, I noticed Champion had a version of the song as a single.  Nice surprise coincidence.

Philth(y)

A friend of mine in university once gave me the nickname Philthy.  For the record, she was a rather sloppy character herself.  I named a soccer team The Philthy Kickers and my first ultimate team I put together was called The Philthy Flyers.  My CKMS radio show was called The Philthy Show.  The name morphed into just Philth and some people still call me that moniker. My mom was never a fan of the name and today the name is perhaps a little like a poorly chosen tattoo you got when you were drunk once.  It's cool sometimes, but not really appropriate for someone who works in an office and has two children.  PJMixer seems much more my style these days.  Although I see the name quite often in my neighbourhood because there's a bar called Philthy McNastys, I was quite surprised to see that there are lots of references to Philth and Philthy on the internet.


I was at the Champion concert last night and DJ Champion (Max) was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with Club Filth on it.

TMZ

My wife was talking about music sensation Justin Bieber this morning.  I'd never heard of him before, it seems this young kid is just massive these days.  I guess my wife was doing a little research to find out what all the fuss was about, so she tells me about some stuff about him on a web site called TMZ.  Again, I've never heard of TMZ.


On the walk to the subway, I'm listening to Hedley's song Cha-ching (I saw their performance at the Olympics closing ceremony) on my iPod and he sings "watch TMZ".

100's and 1000's of strangers

I've been doing a photo project called 100 Strangers for about 9 months now and I'm up to over 40 strangers.  I  met Pam, #43 on Monday night before my ultimate game.  He talked about a lot of different things, including 100 Strangers and she told about her friend, Hilary Leung and his 1000 Stranger project.  Hilary takes photos of people in public spaces, then draws an illustration of that person.  He is exhibiting his work at a gallery starting this week on Queen West in Toronto - see his blog and website for details.  What a cool coincidence.

Heart of Glass

I have a playlist on my iPod that contains recently downloaded tracks.  Along with some new releases from Phoenix and The Courteeners (both great albums), I also just downloaded my 2 favourite hit tracks from Blondie's classic Parallel Lines album.  So as I'm listening to shuffled tracks from this playlist this morning on the way to work, I hear the line " all the girls singing Blondie with heart of glass"" from The Courteeners' Good Time are Calling.  Blondie had come to mind recently because of a few new bands that had some of that Blondie early new-wave sound.  So I had downloaded Heart of Glass and One Way or Another and those tracks were in the 41 song playlist.  Next track that my iPod automatically selected in the shuffle, Heart of Glass.  Beautiful.

Spartacus

I was channel surfing the other night and paused briefly on The Rat Pack on HBO Canada.  I wasn't that interested, so I was ready to flick to another another station.  Instead if going through the on-screen guide, I was using the Info button so I could just scroll up and down to other channels.  Just as I heard one of the characters say something about "Spartacus", I hit Info and went to the next station and is showed Spartacus: Blood and Sand on The Movie Network.  Nice one Spartacus.

Avatar and the TTC

Quite a weird coincidence. This afternoon, I got my ticket to see Avatar tonight.  ON a completely unrelated online activity I'm looking for how to get a to a friend's house in Scarborough and I type in ttc.com (guessing on the URL for the Toronto Transit Commission).  It takes me to http://ttc.com/index.html which has an embedded image of Avatar and the company's tech connection to the movie.  Wow.

Psychedelic Friday

Driving home from my barber's, my son and I hear The Stones' Sympathy for the Devil (live version).  During pre-dinner music-mixing with my daughter, I request Trout (Nenah Cherry and Michael Stipe) to be added to the playlist.

I sit down to watch Tropic Thunder on-demand on TMN later in the evening - it gets funnier as the movie progresses.  The source track of Trout (Steppenwolf's The Pusher) is on the soundtrack along with Sympathy for the Devil.

Very psychedelic.

A wet dog and soccer parents

As I was leaving Sunnybrook dog park today I met up with a couple who were leaving at the same time.  I recognized their dog as he'd been playing with mine for a while in the park.  They asked if I was their son's soccer coach.  Sure enough, I recognized this nice couple who I hadn't seen for quite a years.

As we were getting our dogs to our cars, we talked about our dogs, and they said they had recall problems with their dog (like mine) and it had ran off a while back from this parking lot.  They only got it back after it had found another dog of interest.  I said I got a little worried about Kooper at regular parks (not officially off-leash, fenced parks) and said once he got bored of other dogs and we were in a regular park, it gets very difficult to get him back.

We said our goodbyes and I began the tricky process of taking the leash off Kooper and closing the (station wagon) trunk.  I noticed there was another dog in the parking lot and sure enough it was too big a temptation for Kooper.  He leapt out of the trunk and went to say hello.  As I approached, he ran off down the nature trail toward another dog.  From there he quickly noticed the stream and started exploring the soft ice along the bank of the stream.  I noticed the water was moving quickly and began to really worry.  He was oblivious to my calls and ran further upstream as I approached.  I couldn't get very close as the bank was steep and the ice, I'm guessing, too thin to hold me.  The game continued and sure enough he got too close to the edge and slipped into the stream.  I'm not certain how deep it was, but I was fearing the worst.  He was obviously very surprised when he fell in, but luckily it only took a couple of tries over about 10 seconds and he jumped out and ran up the bank to the trail and met up with another dog.  I grabbed him and walked back to the car.  He didn't seem cold at all and for him it appeared his adventure was just another walk in the park.  I hope he learnt a lesson.

He's Just Not That Into You

I came home from shinny (hockey) last night and my wife was watching He's Just Not That Into You on-demand on The Movie Network (TMN).  I watched a little and found some parts quite interesting and quite funny (although I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be funny), but then some other parts just didn't do it for me.  


A daily photo blog I follow is Daily Dose of Imagery.  Today's posting (yesterday's photo) is entitled not that into you with a well captured simple moment on the subway.

Jully Black

On my walk home today I stopped in at HMV to check out a few new releases (always released on Tuesdays theses days).  I noticed Jully Black's new album at one of the listening posts and put the headphones on to listen to track 1 - Running which is listed as her single.  Pretty decent track - as I remove the headphones, thh same song is playing on the storewide audio system.

Kensington

As you may know, I have a daily photo blog called 365inCamera.  


I was planning on visiting Kensington Market this afternoon for my daily shot (although I ended up finding something pretty interesting on the walk there and didn't make it all the way to Kensington).


I had a quick look at my Flickr comments in the morning and noticed one from a Sha_sha2008 (a Flickr member I didn't recognize).  I had a quick look at her photostream and noticed her shot of Kensington Market in her Photo Content Winners set on her home page.

Mysterious noises

When I got home from my late night ultimate game last night (this morning), I went downstairs for a snack and to wind down.  I noticed a high pitched buzzing went I entered the family room and then tried to find the remote to watch a little TV.  Our universal remote was not in its usual spot and its screen was blank - the (rechargeable) batteries were run down.  So I fished around for various remotes and did a manual power on for a few components.  I grabbed the universal remote as I wanted to recharge its batteries, but the buzzing noise was getting very annoying so I started to walk around trying to isolate the mysterious sound.  The noise sounded a little like one of the pot lights ready to blow.  But no, that wasn't it.  I wandered over to the downstairs bathroom and the noise seemed to be a little louder.  I opened the utility closet door in the bathroom and thought the sound was coming from the natural gas pipe.  I walked back into the family room and also checked the gas fireplace, the noise was there too.  I checked in the furnace room and the noise was there too.  But I still couldn't isolate it.  I put the remote down and did another check, but the mystery continued.  A went back to the family room and went over to the TV and audio components and bent down a little to see if I could hear any better.  Sure enough, the noise was coming from the universal remote, the batteries were run down enough so they couldn't power the screen, but apparently not enough to cause the remote to emit an annoying high pitched buzzing sound.

So I get back to my TV show, last week's episode of Fringe.  The mystery involves some metamorphic, mutated humans and the agents track down a lead to a small town called Edina.  When the arrive in Edina, all the agents hear a weird humming sound.  I won't spoil the source of the humming, but I thought the coincidence was comical considering my earlier adventure and the look on Walter's face.

High Fidelity

In my coincidence last week, entitled An Education, I noted the work of Nick Hornby and have since started reading his latest book, Juliet, Naked.  One of Hornby's books that was turned into a movie and one I really liked was called High Fidelity.  I just saw in this week's NOW magazine that the stage version is opening tonight running through the end of month at the Hart House Theatre.

Delivery

We're waiting for our new washing machine to be delivered today.  Of course, they can only tell us it's going to be between 7am and 5pm.  So we just see a delivery van pull up outside and take out a boxed washing machine - but it's a Samsung, not a Frigidaire like we ordered.  Sure enough, the delivery is for one of our neighbours down the road.  We're heard that a few people had appliances break down over the holidays.  But a new washing machine delivery on the same block on the same day ?

Ultimate food court

I went down to the North end food court at The Eaton Centre today to load up on some wonton noodle soup and bumped into an old friend of mine.  Tom is a lawyer and works in one of the office towers so I've known he works in the 'hood for a long time, but I don't think I've ever seen him close to our offices (I'm in another of The Eaton Centre's 3 office towers) in over 5 years.  I know Tom from ultimate [frisbee], we played on a few teams together and went to the world championships back in 1995.  One small coincidence is that I sent him a quick email the other day wishing him happy birthday.  As I'm walking out of the foodcourt with my take-out soup I bump into another old friend from ultimate - Russell.  I've never seen him out of ultimate gear and here he was dressed like he'd just stepped out of GQ (he was on his way to a meeting).  Turns out that Russell's office is in the same tower as Tom's.

An Education

I was in the bookstore today and also doing some browsing online (Amazon always seems to have the best prices in Canada).  I recently finished The Lost Symbol and I was looking for some new fiction (as I already have a few Gladwell non-fiction books I'm currently reading).  I came across Nick Hornby, I'm not familiar with his books, however I've seen some of the movies adaptations, incl. High Fidelity and About a Boy.  I liked the premise of his new novel Juliet Naked and order it on Amazon.  But I did notice another title that sounded interesting, An Education, and also saw that it had been made into a movie.  I hadn't heard of the book or whether the movie was new or had already come and gone.  But the list of actors was pretty decent.  After work, I duck into 10 Dundas West where there happens to be an AMC movie theatre to make a quick call home.  While I'm talking to my wife, I notice a poster for An Education, now playing !

Unfortunate pricing coincidence

Coincidence - I've had my eyes on the Nikon 18-200mm lens for some time as a walk-around and travel lens and a replacement to our kit and telephoto lenses.  The current, best price of the older version is $729 at Blacks.

Our front-load washing machine broke over the holidays.  The breakage is severe enough that a repair doesn't make sense so we need to buy a new washer.  The dryer is mounted on top of the washer so choices for a replacement are limited because of the need for the correct attachment with the dryer.  I called The Bay for the latest price for the same model as our old washer - $729.  The sales person who we've bought from in the past will give us a 15% discount.  But still, those prices are unfortunately the same !