BTW did you know Canada is currently No. 1 in the standings? Savour the moment our Canadian women’s soccer team gave us while you can.

Without further ado, here is a copy of the Facebook message, with Chris’s blessing:

HELLO EVERYONE!

The first of eight Buffalo Bills games in Toronto is to be played 1 week from today.

Ticket sales for the Bills in Toronto are selling, by comparison, as poorly as the Toronto Phantoms of the Arena Football League did in Toronto.

With the sky high ticket prices for the Bills in Toronto it’s hard to say if they can sell the last 20,000 seats and if they do…GREAT…but that’s only because of the change in regulations to purchase these tickets. If the game doesn’t sell out, Rogers will give away the rest of the tickets to fill the stadium and then claim a sell out.

The Toronto Argonauts are the oldest professional football team in North America and part of the most exiting football league in the WORLD. Why would anyone want to replace the Argos with either the Bills or a Toronto NFL franchise? These NFL games in Toronto are guaranteed to be boring just the same as 90% of NFL games.

As Canadians, not only football fans but all Canadians need to be patriotic at this time and realize the CFL is just about the only All Canadian institution left in this wonderful country.

With the threat of losing the CFL to the NFL or the Argos and Ti-Cats to the Bills is like losing Much Music to MTV or CBC to CNN, I’m sure we can all agree we don’t want to turn on channel 6 or 26 and see CNN. We need to stand together to protect the CFL, one of the few institutions in Canada we can call our own and still be proud of. The Canadian football league has such a strong and lengthy history (Football in Canada is as old as Canada itself) that we can not lose to the power of the dollar, the Rogers dollar. Losing the CFL will go down in the most regretted Canadian decisions right next to the cancellation of the AVRO ARROW.

I am calling on all CFL fans, Argo fans, Canadians, Patriotic Canadians, NFL fans or not CFL fans or not, No to the Bills in Toronto supporters, absolutely EVERYONE to help Protest the Buffalo Bills in Toronto next Thursday at 6:00pm (meeting time)

If you do not already have a shirt please contact me and provide me with how many people you are coming with and I will supply the shirts for the protest.

PLEASE REPLY: e-mail me at chris-fischer [at] live [dot] com if you are interested in attending this historic Protest. Please leave me the number of people you wish to bring and if you are willing to car pool.

The meeting place will be sent to you after you have e-mailed me.

LET’S GO CANADA!
SUPPORT YOUR LEAGUE!
LET’S KEEP THE CFL ALIVE!
THIS IS OUR LEAGUE!

If you need further inspiration or convincing please watch this video, if this video makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up…it means you should be protesting with us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS1jCfg7Qxc

BE A PART OF SOMETHING!

Signed,
Chris Fischer

-If you think what you did yesterday is still great, then you haven’t done much today-
Michael “Pinball” Clemons

Simcoe Day holiday begins tonight with Caribana Festival’s Pan Alive at Lamport Stadium. Listen and dance to steelpan bands as they compete for best band. That’ll be your dancing feet warm up for tomorrow, for tomorrow is the all-day-long Caribana Parade where even police officers smile and chat and maybe even do a move or two — or they did in the years I went. Television news was singularly unhelpful in showing the parade route, and even the Caribana site isn’t very specific. So here it is: It starts at the west end of Exhibition Place, fairly close to the Dufferin street gates, and it ends at Sunnyside at approximately 6:00 pm. The old route down University Avenue was better as it was equidistant for those from both the east and the west, but I guess Lakeshore is bigger and less disruptive to downtown traffic. Oh well. Caribana festivities continue on Sunday on Olympic Island. For all the details, visit the CBC site.

Now if all that dancing has you hot and breathing hard, and you just want some peace for a bit, check out the Chinese Lantern Festival at Ontario Place. It runs nightly from 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm; it features acts, food, stuff, and movies; and of course it’s the largest lantern presentation in North America.

Then on Simcoe Day — the holiday Monday — as you’re chilling down, learn why we call it Simcoe Day at Fort York. Watch musketry, men and women drilling in period military costume, and the 1:00 pm parade. Fort York is an under-rated jewel of Toronto history, a haven from modern Toronto — if you can just ignore the Gardiner looming over to the south, which actually once you’re fully into what’s going on isn’t too hard to do.

So there you have it, a full weekend of being entertained and joining in the entertainment. Or you could just turn on the barbie, kick back, and put your feet up. This is the best of Toronto! Happy Simcoe Day!

But as far as I could tell the millions promised for the Spadina extension to York was exactly what the McGuinty government set aside before the last election, so all they’re doing is reminding us that they still have it banked for whenever it happens. I’m sorry to be such a jaded Torontonian, but ever since Lastman-Harris-Chretien stood on the banks of Lake Ontario promising us billions to revitalize the waterfront, we’ve endured many more such announcements by the Mayor-Premier-Prime Minister of the day, or parts thereof, promising millions or billions for TTC, waterfront, or take-your-pick-of-desperate-Toronto need, followed by nothing. I don’t know why optimists even try to get together a bid for big games like the Pan Am games because (a) the federal government hates Toronto and won’t lift a finger for it and (b) no senior government is going to invest in infrastructure in this city. All those billions China spent on Beijing, making it a games jewel, would never happen here under similar circumstances because the country doesn’t see Toronto as representing it to the world, even though it does, even during an ordinary tourist season.

Anyway, it’s not like the plans for Spadina, Eglinton, or even Queen Street subway expansion are new. They’ve been studied and planned to death. Yet today’s leaders are loathe to use the technology proven to move masses of people swiftly, without being hindered or slowed down by car traffic, because it’s the most expensive to build. It’s a good thing our city planners back in the 1940s and ’50s had more guts, else we’d have an LRT down Yonge Street and along Bloor-Danforth instead of what are today overloaded subways. Now, OK, I know that we haven’t yet reached the massive crowds of London in rush hour — where getting on a train means committing to not being able to move even a mm, anywhere in the car — however, during the day and on Sundays Toronto trains are fuller than they should be from a user’s point of view. I attribute this directly to the fact that our leaders, starting in the rich 1980s (remember, the era when people flaunted their wealth), stopped building subways here in Toronto, while they continued in Montreal, and that voters rejected a leader who put subway planning in her platform in favour of a do-nothing so that, in the words of one editor, we could give him a second chance (to do nothing). And so instead of having a line parallel to Bloor-Danforth, we have none, neither along Queen — which planners say is the one place a subway would pay for itself — nor along Eglinton. And so people take buses, subways, streetcars down to Bloor-Danforth or up to it, thus causing needless overcrowding on that line, while the Yonge-Bloor interchange has become a nightmare.

While debate continues about whether Eglinton should have a subway or an LRT, and the federal government waves around money already committed to one subway and makes no announcement about any other subways, England is set to spend 32 fuckin’ BILLION bucks on a crosstown subway line in London, this in a city that has never stopped building subway lines, even getting them built by badgering developers into funding them if they want to build towers. It’s not like the British like London any more than Canadians like Toronto; it’s that they understand that they must move people as quickly as possible there, as efficiently as possible if that city is to continue to generate wealth for the country. It’s too bad Ontarians and Canadians forget that piece of wisdom.

I first knew something had gone awry when I was one moment listening to a song, then suddenly static, buzzing, and then nothing. Google is useless for finding out about breaking news like this; unfortunately, so were CTV and Citytv online news, at the time I searched anyway. I eventually got through to the source, and as I learnt when speaking to DJ John Woodlock, that “nothing” is because CHUM’s backup transmitter did kick in, but for some reason is not receiving the signal to broadcast out to the world. Their engineers are working on it feverishly. Meanwhile Woodlock is broadcasting to an audience of, um, one, cause he did get a winner in the contest. Lucky person — they obviously can listen online. Me, not even the online player works! There’s probably a heavy demand for the online player, and so some of us are going to get the “busy” signal. Stay tuned!

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Update: CHUM FM back on the air, seemingly for good, just before 13:04.

[Play in high quality if you can. It's MUCH better.]

When I started my personal blog back in 2005, I was falling down the rabbit hole of frustration and turmoil. I had to find an outlet and I had to both practice my writing and discover if I could even write regularly again; but my lawyer was troubled by my idea. We agreed that I could blog if I kept it anonymous and if I didn’t blog on a whole bunch of topics he listed for me. As the movies say, anything you write will be used against you in a court of law. Well, that’s a bit of a twist on the old line, but it’s certainly true.

I thought at the time that this would be a temporary thing, that my made-up user name would soon be supplanted by my real name.

Ha!

As I blogged and practiced writing and joined Toronto Metblogs, the insurance companies dragged their heels, counter-sued my ex-spouse, and sent me to more medicals. As I returned to photography and an angel came into my life to help me finish my book interrupted, I waited for the mediation to happen, the mediation that was booked almost a year away. I think I also went for a repeat medical. As I published my book and created a website for it under my real name, we went to mediation. What a total waste of time. Time wastage continued as I watched the months crawl by towards my pre-trial in June. My lawyer had informed me nothing was going to happen between mediation and pre-trial as the insurance companies would just wait as is their wont. Finally the day came. The day went. No change. And then at last, the companies started negotiating in earnest with my lawyer, we struck a deal, I recovered from the shock of how the state, insurers, and judges shaft car crash claimants with the legal system’s blessing, and then I waited some more.

Today, it is done. Eight years, seven months, and three days after a couple of dickhead drivers smashed so hard into the back of the car in which I was a passenger that they pushed us into the car in front of us, causing me neck, shoulder, and closed head injuries, all the legal actions are over, and I can come out into the open.

Only thing is, it’s too weird. From finding it strange to write under a made-up name here  on Metblogs, to share my photographs under another made-up name, to getting used to being called Points or Pointsy (my Flickr handle), it is now utter strange to go back, to put my real identity on all my online activities, to amalgamate my blogs and websites under one moniker.

The next many days, I’ll be rejigging my Metblogs profile and making changes on my personal blog, as  I tie both into my website. And in the future, you can be pretty sure I’ll be writing about life as a car crash claimant, the hell of losing yourself through a closed head injury, the weirdness of growing a new personality and new hobby(ies?) out of that personality, and the legal system. I can now also talk about health care, insurance companies, and all sorts of interesting topics (Chinese curse: you lead an interesting life). But first I need to recover from this anti-climactic moment, anti-climactic because after the many times I thought we were finishing up only to find out not, that when it finally happened, I was too worn out to feel much excitement.

But I’m free! And to meditate on that is to touch excitement.

I didn’t hear if it was a spare-the-air day, but it really should be a stay-inside day. I dream of a time when all cars emit just water and the Ohio coal plants are shut down, of a time when smog is relegated to the history books instead of blanketing Toronto and the whole of southwestern Ontario. Until then, I ain’t going outside on days like this if I can help it!

But “while cities like San Francisco and Montreal can offer free rides on
smog days,” Adam Giambrone, Chair of the TTC, says that “the concept doesn’t work with the TTC’s 1.5 million daily riders.” (Nick Kyonka, The Toronto Star, 8 July 2008)

He’s right. Free equals more riders which requires sufficient capacity. I don’t know much about public transit in San Francisco, but I do know that Montréal has more subway lines than Toronto, servicing a much smaller population than we have.* In other words, they can accommodate an influx of riders, the kind of influx that requires large-capacity carrying transit for the kind of riders who won’t tolerate packed, overheated buses and streetcars but will take the subway in lieu of their preferred cars. Toronto cannot.

Not on our buses, not on our streetcars, not on our subways. This is what the Art Eggleton-school-of-apathy established in 1980, the Ontario-Canada-school-of-hate-Toronto, and the learned-helplessness-of-Torontonians have begotten us. The one thing that may save us is the green movement, whereby even the most apathetic and most-Toronto-hating politician may find it beneficial to start building subways again, especially downtown where it would pay for itself. (I don’t know what’s happened to the subway to York U, but it seems to have transferred itself onto the slow track.)

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* How much smaller is Montréal to Toronto: read this tourist post. For a person like me who remembers when the two cities were neck and neck in population, this is very funny. I’m glad she had a good time here! That’s what we like, happy tourists!!! Even if we natives have to put up with an inadequate TTC.

Having successfully used it with my own blog, I wanted to add Metblogs to it. Ha! Took me a few kicks at the can to figure out I had to manually configure the sucker and follow this format when inputting the posting URL: http://example.com/wordpress/xmlrpc.php. Phew! The login took at last and now I’m posting my first ScribeFire-powered post on Metblogs.

He will continue to anchor the Six O’Clock Global News show, but we will soon see him contributing to a new public affairs show a la 60 Minutes. Well, OK, there’s a little American inspiration instead of Canadian, but since I discovered how cleverly the Fifth Estate colours their stories and since CTV buried W5 in the schedule, I’m not surprised Global would look south of the border. Perhaps this new show is an outflow of Global Currents that Kevin Newman hosts? That would be neat. I hope too that with this change that Global will start to film all their original news productions in HD.

Anyway, congrats to Leslie Roberts on his big promotion and big raise, and now I know too what happened to Troy Reeb: he’s Leslie’s boss.

————–

Meantime, CFRB Operations Manager Steve Kowch has to find a new host for the 10:00 am to Noon slot. May I suggest a radical departure from the CFRB norm? A sole female host.

I realise a sole female hosting a regular, weekday talk show on CFRB may spark controversy, but I say you’re about a couple of decades behind the times. We’ve listened to capable and entertaining female hosts leave CFRB or be  relegated to weekends at the same time as we’ve heard newbie Ryan Doyle come on the air and assault our eardrums with stereotypical and uninformed spouting. He’s obviously a good producer, but he’s not nearly the same calibre as the female talk show hosts I’ve heard. Furthermore, there must be a lot of women chomping at the bit to have a shot as sole host of a good time slot. It’s about time CFRB provided that.

So Mr. Kowch, you’re not sure what to do with this time slot. Here’s my suggestion: Hire a woman. And for good measure put Doyle back on producing duties only and find another good woman to take over his current slot.