Tag Archives: Nachos

Angry Torontonian Rant #1 (In A Minor)

Posted on by
Reply

(In a bid to be seen as less partisan and as fair and balanced as the next guy, we here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke are handing over today’s space to Angry Torontonian #1. He/she is fed up with the way things have been going down at City Hall in recent years and believes we are just enablers and downtown core sissies who think we know better than everyone else. Or something like that. No one is listening to him/her and he/she are demanding to have his/her voice heard. Since we imbibed heavily last night at some birthday celebrations, we say, hey, knock yourself out, Angry Torontonian #1. Have at it.)

… Am I on yet? Is this thing working? Testing, testing… ?

OK, yeah so, anyway. I was out last night, whooping it as I usually do every Saturday night, having some drinks, nachos and stuff. And as usually happens, right, I fall asleep on the streetcar heading home. I’m pretty sure it was a streetcar although I did wake up on the subway or should I say I was rudely woken up by one of those TTC union thugs, telling me to get up and go home as if it was that easy, right? I’m like, where? Finch Station and it’s like in the middle of the night. Yeah, I know. There’s the bus but I’m just saying it’s not as easy as Mr. Lazy Ass Union Guy makes it to be, OK. He’s probably got like a chauffeur or something to get home at this time of night and he can’t even offer me a ride? Typical union guy.

Anyway, I fall asleep again on my way to the bus stop because it’s not all that obvious where exactly the stop is. You’d think I’d know by now too because this isn’t the first time this exact same thing has happened to me. Shit happens, right?

Long story short, I wake up again early but light out. Too early for the Sunday subway, so it’s again with the bus ride down Yonge. Except that I don’t have enough money on me. No tokens, tickets. I’m busted, is what I’m admitting to and do you think a bus driver, Mr. Compassionate Union guy would let me on? Clearly I’m not just some drunken bum trying to scam a ride for free. Like hey Mr. Bus Driver. I read that you make like 100 Gs a year, just driving your bus. And you can’t front me a little cash-ish?

This is why I hate the unions. They don’t understand the regular people that depend on them to get back and forth to work and back and forth to home again. They’ve lost the common touch with their cushy jobs. I am a hard working citizen who just had a little too much fun the night before and spent a little too much money and now just needed a little understanding. Good luck with that, right? From a union guy?! I don’t think so.

So there I am left to my own devices, on foot, walking home. One foot in front of the next and so on and so on.

I don’t know how long this goes on for but it seems like hours. Finch. Sheppard. Man, there’s a lot of terrain to cover up in those parts, let me tell you. It goes on forever. No wonder all those people have two, three cars. You do not want to be trapped up there if one of them breaks down and you have to depend on the TTC. That would be a nightmare.

So I finally get to somewhere near Eglinton when it dawns on me that I could just stop at an ATM and draw out a little money to get home with. How dense is that? Walking for fucking miles thinking I’m penniless and I got my bank card burning a hole in my back pocket! Give me a break, huh. I’m like seriously hungover.

As I start looking around for a bank machine, a crowd of people catches my attention. What’s going on, I wonder. Maybe a car crash or something. A murder even! So I rush over to see what’s up only to find a bunch of idiots, dressed in shorts and tshirts with million dollar running shoes. Runners. Thinking they’re going to escape old man death by running. What a waste of time if you ask me. Not to mention waste of space either. There’s like thousands of them and they’re taking up all of Yonge Street all the way downtown and beyond. So a bus isn’t even going to get me down there without some major detour and nobody here seems all that interested in letting me know where the nearest bus stop is. They’re all too busy stretching and huffing and puffing.

Here’s what drives me nuts. Why are we letting runners and bikers and rollerbladers etc.,etc. always take over streets that were clearly made for cars? Roads are for traffic, OK. And traffic means cars. End o’ story. And trucks. Traffic means cars and trucks. End o’ story. If you want to run or ride, go run or ride somewhere else like a gym or a track.

This is the problem with the city these days. It spends too much time trying to keep people happy. I mean, people like runners and bikers and the like. Not people like business people and everyday Joes like me. People who do real work for a living and contribute to the city. Traffic means business even on a Sunday. Traffic means cars. And trucks. Not bikes and jogistas (ha, ha. I just made that one up.)

If a normally hard working guy like myself can’t easily get home after a Saturday night of partying, then this city just isn’t working. Instead it is going to hell in a handbasket. Something’s got to change.

— angrily submitted by Angry Torontonian #1

Don’t Bug Us. It’s Super Bowl Sunday.

Posted on by
1

No real posting today as we are already deep into the Super Bowl pre-game festivities. I believe Acaphlegmic may have spiked his homemade nacho cheese concoction with something unsavory that he purchased from a chemistry colleague at the unlicensed place of higher education at which he teaches. The mind wanders. Focus is hard to maintain. How long have we been at this? It seems like hours. Maybe days.

In the endless haze I seem to remember something about Etobicoke councilor Rob Ford mulling over a run for mayor. A nebulous poll placing him 3rd among possible contenders. Can’t be. Rob Ford for mayor? Hee, hee, hee. That’s too.. too.. ridiculous to even contemplate. Hee, hee. Maybe Rocco Rossi’s people put him up to it in order to make their candidate seem less crazy? Hee, hee, hee. Ha, ha, ha.

Ooops. I think I may have peed a little nacho cheese. What’s in that stuff?

Prediction: once more the Super Bowl will not be as exciting as the Grey Cup game and it’ll be 33-21, Colts over the Saints 31-17, Saints over the Colts. Pardon the typo.

And Rob Ford for mayor. Hee, hee, hee. Hee, hee.

— freakily submitted by Cityslikr

Politics Straight Up

Posted on by
4

In the political trenches, the battle of ideas is almost always won by those who are best able to explain their position(s) clearly, succinctly and without the slightest hint of subtlety. “Keeping it simple keeps it real, yo,” I am told by a local political strategist and overnight/weekend infomercial host who asked to be quoted anonymously pending the outcome of legal proceedings. “That way, voters don’t have to think too much about it.” He goes on to say that ideally politicians should try to get their point across in one breath. “So Joe Q. Public will remember it easily and regurgitate it without having to forgo a mouthful of nachos.”

It is a strategy that conservatives — both big and little ‘C’s – have mastered. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ back in 1980, the political left has been, well, left stammering, hopelessly yammering on with awkward, tongue-tying slogans that have seldom resonated with voters. For every one “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” or “Change We Can Believe In!” there’s been countless numbers of clunkers that ultimately fell on deaf ears. Who can remember the rallying cry “Climate Change Is A Complex Dynamic of Inter-related, Multilevel Systems Susceptible To Even The Slightest Variation But Overall The Science Is Solid.”? Or how about even this pithy but obscure proto-Keynesian economic challenge, “Countercyclical Fiscal Policies Now!!”? Me neither, which has been the progressives problems for decades now.

Yes, governing is not simple. It demands complicated and multifaceted approaches that don’t always operate on easy-to-understand, intuitive gut levels. But that doesn’t mean explaining how you’re going to do it has to get bogged down with detail heavy insights, thoughtful deliberations or big, multi-syllabic words. If you want a crack at power, it’s all about “The Axis of Evil”, being “The Decider” and “You’re Either With Us Or You’re Against Us”.

Here at the local level, we can see this discipline already at work in the early days of this year’s municipal election. Toronto Sun columnist and Hater-Of-Everything-To-Do-With-David-Miller, Sue-Ann Levy, came hard out of the gate last week after Councilor Joe Pantalone announced his intention to run for the mayor’s office. Not even waiting until the first sentence, Levy brings the pain right there in the title: Mayor Pantalooney? No Way!

Ha Ha! Joe Pantalone? Joe Pantalooney!! He can’t be mayor. He’s crazy! Crazy as a loon, that Joe Pantalooney!!!

How will the man ever dig himself out from the hole Levy’s tossed him in? His twenty-nine years of civic duty which Levy dismisses as merely a “career” only serves to prove that Pantalone is categorically unfit to be mayor because he’s crazy. Who’d dedicated nearly 30 years of his life to public service? You’d have to be crazy. Probably couldn’t get a “real” job, that Joe Pantalooney.

Since Sue-Ann Levy doesn’t agree with anything Joe Pantalone stands for, ipso facto, the councilor must be crazy because certainly Sue-Ann Levy isn’t crazy. Would such an august operation like the Toronto Sun hire crazy people to fill its pages?

It’s a hardball approach that Levy seems to relish and that must save her heaps of time to not do reporterly stuff like investigative researching. Why, just a few days ago, she turned her sights on those “whining airport wingnuts” who were stamping their little feet over the possible expansion of flight numbers by the good folks at Porter Air. How dare a gaggle of “self-centred, ridiculous bunch of whiners” (Sue-Ann does love her quotation marks) treat the waterfront as their very own “fiefdom on the lake”! Haven’t these people cottoned on to the fact that the “fiefdom on the lake” is the personal playground for the likes of federal political patronage appointees, Robert Deluca and downtown business bigwigs who have neither the time nor the inclination to make their way out to Pearson when duty calls? The airport is here to stay, dammit, and anybody who continues to fight the inevitable is simply crazy. And probably a hippie.

So, to all you left wingers out there and island airport opponents who see its continued presence and Porter’s possible expansion as the ongoing extension of a politically underhanded and democratically dubious land and money grab of the Toronto Harbor Commission by the federal Liberal party over a decade ago… you see, there you go again, talk, talk, talking, like you’re being heard by rational, relatively sentient beings. Just blurt it out. From the gut to the tongue, bypassing the brain entirely. It’s worked for the right wing for decades now. It might even get you a job writing for the Toronto Sun.

— insanely submitted by Urban Sophisticat