DWT

The first time I did one of these it was a review of 2015 and was geared at reminding me that I do actually do things other than just work and futz around on my home computer. I like the comparison here that what's stuck around from that one to this is the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, local dive bar karaoke (thwarted for 2026 by the fact it moved again at the end of the summer to be less local), visits from my aunt and uncle, and doing Shakespeare in the Park type things, oh, and also heading to Hamilton sporadically for Supercrawl or the Bach Elgar Choir. I've also gotten a heck of a lot of use out of that bike I picked up in July of that year ( (the July of last year was full of trail rides and I also biked to a couple of evening events, like the Lathe of Heaven gig) )

So the thing I really noticed about doing the 2022 is that I'm not so sure how much of all of what was there was truly nice. There were a couple of months that hardly seemed to have anything 'nice' at all and somehow I started drifting these from 'nice life-y' to just 'things I do outside of work'. I'm going to keep that pattern up for the for the next 3 of these (i.e. until I'm actually caught up) for ease of comparison ( and then re-evaluate what I want to actually capture )
Alright, that was absolutely Not As Bad as 2022 -- much better balance of the 'remote' not-work-work and actual Nice Things To Do.

Ending the night with the Macallan 12 (even if it turns out I like the Auchentoshan best and still have a touch of it in the beaker left to go... and more than twice that left of the Ardbeg when I wish it was the other way around!).

Meaning of this last post is that these little beakers are all tagged 'Whisky 1-4' but I'm clearly missing Whisky 3. I do actually remember polishing off Whisky 3 but don't remember what it was and what the heck I did with the beaker. I am 100% sure I kept the beaker as I know how I work but where can I find it now? Have not the foggiest!

And, yet, and yet, just like in Post 1 where I had a Surprise Brainwave about what I was originally planning to write about I had a Surprise Brainwave it may be in the baking cupboard and so it was. The 'Whisky 3' I don't get to drink tonight was the Aberlour 12.

Alright, but enough about whiskey -- back to the burning of monuments!

The problem with remembering what you wanted to talk about not too long before your usual bedtime is that you won't then have had the prep time you really need to do such a thing well. In this case the prep time I could have done with would have been The Pulling of the Relevant Quotes from This Damn Book. I've now got This Damn Book in front of me and we'll see how I get along with finding even Thing One to quote from it at this point given that I've not marked the thing up at all.

Luckily one of the Adam Smith quotes I remember well enough to pull it with a bit of Googling rather than through digging:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

Unfortunately for me I didn't remember the specific 'so far as it is instituted' bit and so had to go digging for it anyway where I find O'Rourke had irritatingly elided it out. To side note a bit from burning monuments, this is exactly the problem with reading this style of book: you're trying to get a quick sense of it and yet you can hardly get any solid sense at all as it's been cut to ribbons to make 'witty' [pointless] points.

Alright, so since he's not very useful for Smith at all let's just pivot and see if he's any use in and of himself:

"After 230-odd years of experience we still don't know much about democracy. We have discovered that it works. If you compare the countries that have the greatest degree of democracy with the countries that have the greatest degree of other things we prize, they are the same countries. But an examination of any democratically elected government leads to deep puzzlement about why democracy works. And every democratic election produces a dismal display of how democracy works. Maybe we the people, with all our idiocies, cancel each other out. Maybe politically empowered people are different from other pests and predators--the only thing worse than a lot of them is a few."

Does his country have the greatest supply of monuments you should make sure to save from burning over Some Person?

The thing that most struck me when I read that quote is that it feels like democracy works is because, at its best, it is the system that most wants people to be the most people-ly they can be on the biggest scale. This is why I think there's a common experience of first learning that 'we the people' or 'all people are created equal' (or 'demos' means 'people' but not actually all of them, hardly any at all, really at its emergence) when the legal definition of who those people was quite restrictive caused a severe bristling of 'how/why did they say people when they didn't actually mean all people??' I'd say the more people who have become eligible to become people the better things have generally gotten and produced 'the greatest degree of other things we prize'. And yet there are others who'd track along with how Adam Smith is represented in this book and say that actually more people have gotten to become people the better the economy goes as now we can afford for more people to be people, so hooray for Economic Success.

And yet, one way or the other: whether caused by an expanded intrinsic understanding that all people should get to be people or caused by A Successful Economy the fact is that if at any point we're shrinking our definition of who people are it is the lead indicator that we are failing.

Last year I did Nice Tea Writing Night as I was a guest in a house for cat sitting but tonight I'm back at home with the quit-gift scotch glasses first referenced in 2023 but instead of the quit-gift Cragganmore I've got the last of my Covid Birthday Scotch (that being the scotch that was shipped to me in the mail for a 2021 Virtual Scotch Tasting since IRL Scotch Tastings were not A Thing in January 2021). Starting with a 10 year old Ardbeg, which is either my favourite or my least favourite as there's more of it left than anything else.

Can confirm by first sip it ain't 'cause it's my favourite but it also ain't bad, so off we go.

To my profound frustration there was something I was planning to write about tonight that I can't for the life of me remember. It was something that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I now wish I'd made an Actual Note on instead of a Mental Note. To be fair, my Mental Notes for things like this usually don't fail me so new note made that this is now A Thing.

Since it's the day after Halloween the local Pumpkin Parade is on so I popped by it taking the long way 'round to the grocery store as they were missing 3 key things I wanted last time I was in (thankfully all 3 were there this time). For those not in the know a Pumpkin Parade is way to squeeze one more day of value out of your carving by bringing it to hang out on display in one place (in this case, the local park) so folks can conveniently pop by and check 'em all out without wandering the whole 'hood. There's always a bunch of classics and usually one standout pop culture offering (closest to that this year was a death star). This year really seemed to be the year of The Interesting Scary Face more than anything else.

I'd hoped the extra long walk would shake whatever the idea was loose but I think in that sort of slippery way where you're trying to get at a tip-of-the-tongue-word the more attention you give it the more it slips away.

Happily, even as I was writing that paragraph about mental notes I finally got a little flicker of remembrance and am now pretty sure that what I wanted to write had its roots in this: ""You must understand the weird logic of the left. To them life is priceless and should always be prioritised over property. They would literally let the statue of Liberty burn to save one person."

I was almost certainly thinking of this 2019 Post of Questionable Linage a couple of weeks ago as I have the ongoing misfortune, at present, of reading PJ O'Rourke on the Wealth of Nations.

How does anyone misfortunately read such a book? Well, first you pluck it off the street outside a bookstore with a heap of other books that look interesting and are clearly destined for the trash and then you take it home, forget about it for years on end, and only years later take it down to read it on your daily commute and think to yourself before you get started, "wait... isn't this guy a well known fuckhead?"

Before we get to anything about burning copper-clad statues and fuckheads, let's first do a bit more meandering in NaDruWriNi Post #2.

Won't be doing The Classic catch-up lifey thing DruWriNi post tonight. I've tired of that shtick for this night (even though I still have plans to do them some other night). Nope, tonight as I drink my quit-gift cragganmore from my quit-gift crystal glasses, I'm going to talk about bygone television, as you can still get at it today.

The primary way I get at my bygone television is through the remarkable good fortune of living within the 5km or so rabbit ear broadcast radius of one of Canada's perhaps only known remaining pirate television station, Star Ray TV. Star Ray is an excellent source of student films, NFB pieces, streetcar documentaries, and b-movies (last night they aired Bela Lugosi's last full film, The Black Sleep and tonight it's When Worlds Collide). The night before that they showed McLuhan's Wake.

Wake
Wake
Wake

It is painful (not in the style of this IMDB reviewer) to watch McLuhan talk about the media environment from today's vantage. It's almost worse to see the discussion at the end of the film about UofT chucking out all his work (though Wikipedia does say something about eventual protests about closing his 'Centre') a year or so into the stroke that killed off his speech and, eventually, him. This ouch is enhanced by knowing that the President who hired him (Bissel) would eventually give his name to the building that housed the Faculty of Information (AKA the home of archives) I graduated from. (There's a small ouch reduction in knowing that there was still a place for McLuhan there when I was around, even in a library -- at a library school -- they were actively slicing to ribbons as I was there).

His work / that doc uses Poe's Descent into the Maelström and this stuck out extra heavily for me this week, as reading Poe is what I've been doing since Monday as my seasonally appropriate activity (no time for carving or costumes this year -- too tired from a work project that even ended up haunting my Halloween night for 40 minutes and, in part, screwing up my sleep the rest of the week). This night, of course, is also a seasonally appropriate activity.

Here I'm using 'seasonal' in its rhythmical sense (turn, turn, turn) and not so much its weather one (though I'm only having this scotch now as it's sufficiently cold outside -- the last time there was An Occasion for it I didn't want to crack it open as the weather was wrong for it). Another rhythm that matters here for bygone television is the weekly one and that I was reminded of by TVO showing a hour long doc yesterday about Elwy Yost and Magic Shadows / Saturday Night at the Movies. (They were very unfortunately showing this as key rhythm of theirs -- 8pm/11pm -- is currently fully broken by the ongoing strike).

Magic Shadows I missed entirely (not in the country for it) but Saturday Night at the Movies mattered a fair bit to me as a teen.

On the one hand I'm sorry these things are gone but on the other they aren't fully (and this is very much what I meant by 'as you can still get at it today' in the opening paragraph) because I'm calling this 'bygone' and yet each of these elements I was able to access in the past 24hrs (and as I write about them here, barring geo-fencing, I'm able to pass viable links to some of these things on in this very post).

Realistically you can say I'm still more connected to all of this 'past' (and even watch it on a cathode ray tube) than I am to the new world of casting / streaming. I have the occasional second-hand exposure to Netflix accounts and when I visit my family in Pickering I can see that cable remains near on the exact same cesspit it's been since I moved here in the early 90s when I could not stop marvelling that in going from 4 channels to 200 that there was so much less you'd actually want to watch!

The closest I get to that is Hoopla/Kanopy and YouTube docs (where I'm very happy things like Trash Theory exist, even if it always feels like the more I know of a subject the more I gently errrr at them). :)

In the past decade much of what used to be TV time wound up supplanted by Casual Video Game Time and I'll end this by marking the final death of http://www.die2nite.com/ on November 2nd, though even it remains undead through the community who loved it trying recreating it as a labour of love at https://myhordes.eu/. And, in the end, that's how these things all still go on: in community, in communication.

For sure going to have split this one for format ( for pre-(January/February/start of March) )
( ...and post-Pandemic announcement: )

It's that day I actually write stuff here! I think I've solved the problem of the last two years of only writing one post by writing an extremely short one (instead of just a pretty short one) to start. Ha. I bet it helps to start at 7 rather than 11 as well.

Drinking: G&T.

Listening: Agent Side Grinder - Last Rites.

So clearly still doing a fantastically poor job at writing here more frequently buuuuut tonight is NaDruWriNi so you're gonna get This One Post fueled by lazy gin sours (a lazy gin sour is just gin and lemon simple syrup. If I was feeling ambitious I'd have tried something like this but I spent hours out of the house today, for the for the 1st time since March, enjoying the world so I'm so very not feeling ambitious!).

I'd said in a comment in a previous post that I was going to write in my next post about the social trick of writing here more but I suspect I will not have the brain for that on multiple gin sours and so am going to pivot a bit into the semi-related topic of my Very Nice Day Today (spoiler: I'm not going to get to the bit where I explain why it's related today).

Before there was Covid I used to do all sorts of things in the world. You can tell this from my (2015, 2016, 2017 & 2018) Nice Life-y Things posts. Now there is Covid mostly what I do is sit at my kitchen table next to my fridge. If you've had cause to join a video call with me you will Most Certainly have seen my fridge (fun fact: before Covid I never sat at this spot of the kitchen table. I sit here now as I dumped all the stuff I need to work at this end of the table so I could still have the bit I used to sit at every so often still available to me).

[Now on my 2nd lazy gin sour]

So. A few days ago I learned from my local Councillor in an local FB group that the somewhat famous Water Treatment Plant (yes, really) at the foot of my street was going to have a Dia de los Muertos light display projected on the side of it after dark. Having done Sweet Fuck All enjoyable around the city since the WHO declared the pandemic March 11th some outdoor art in a week with a 20°C streak seemed like Just The Ticket.

I originally thought I'd do this yesterday after work, but, due especially to the whole Dumped Into Darkness aspect of the time change, I wasn't feeling super inspired to barrel down a hill ('cause the Water Treatment Plant at the foot of my street is actually at the bottom of a Big Ass Hill of varying grades that, like most of Toronto, tips toward Lake Ontario) on my bike in the darkness (particularly since with the whole 'have barely done anything since March' thing I'm pretty dang out of practice with being on my bike as well).

This meant The Better Plan was to go today while it was still light out so off I set around 4:20 knowing sunset would hit around 5. Since the display wouldn't start until 6:30 I also decided to go The Long Way 'Round and start at one end of the beach and meander my way back to the appropriate side. So in order to do that I used the new Danforth bike lanes for the 2nd time this pandemic (1st time was to go the bank) to get to the Woodbine bike lanes and wind up at the beach.

I knew I wouldn't be thrilled from a global pandemic perspective about what I'd find there as there have been multiple stories of social distancing fail centered specifically on Woodbine Beach but I wore my mask in the crowded bits and leaned into outdoor is better than indoor and minded myself as best I could. First I locked up my bike and beelined to the water while there was still light. Then I split my time between a log on the sand where I could best see the sunset over the city and a rock on the shore where I could most enjoy the water. To my surprise, while on the log, I got a phone call from evening_tsar. I think this is the first time I've gotten a phone call while Out And About In The World, which is kind of amazing in this cellphone age of ours. I answered and would say we mostly talked about what had just happened in the US, which I think bar none was the most popular topic of conversation in the western world today.

[3rd and final gin sour. Not actually remotely drunk -- not even tipsy! -- should have gone with the vodka creamsicles as the speed with which I can suck those back should have assured drunkenness]

As darkness really started to set in some cops pulled their dune buggy uncomfortably close to my rock and I started to wonder if there was a post-sunset ban on being on the beach and so I decided to move on before they actively directed me to. I made it back up to the boardwalk and sat on a bench until you couldn't tell any more if the reddish orange in the sky was still the sunset or an effect of the street lights. I retrieved my bike from lock-up and started the walk with along the wooden boardwalk in the darkness. I could have rode on the adjacent trail but I'd wanted to walk to better listen to the waves (I love that sound) and look at the stars.

It took about 40 minutes to make it to the other end which meant I'd be between 15 and 25 minutes "late" to the 6:30 start but since I was pretty confident it would either be a repeating or static show I was OK with that. Once I made it to Queen Street I locked the bike again and headed up the steps to the plant. Somewhat to my surprise it was a repeating show but it was only repeating on one small corner of the building. With something as large as the edifice of the R.C. Harris is I liked the idea of the projections being spread out across the whole faces of it (especially in our current circumstance to trying to avoid crowding) but can certainly appreciate the extra challenge logistically that would be.

The displays were beautiful and in my luck I happened to walk up right as they were starting one of their rounds such that I wasn't even sure if it was the case that something had gone wrong and they were starting late overall. I stayed for 3 rounds of the showing, which in the end, only ran about 10 minutes: once to properly watch it, once to capture some favourite images (I think most of you are most likely to be able to access a small selection of these on FB) and one last due to a bit of capture fail in the 2nd 'round.

Then it was back to unlock the bike in order the push it up the worst part of the hill (the steepest grade here is right before the lake) which happens to conveniently get me to the street I'd just noticed this past Thursday (as I biked to my local post office) has a burrito place so I also stopped in there to take one of those home for dinner. It was absolutely delicious and my only regret by the time I got home and ate it is that I ordered the 'regular' instead of the 'huge'. :)

As I nommed away on it I tuned back into the Light It Black event, which I'd been previously been listening to all day since I woke up at half 9 that morning. This was so enjoyable I was then more than an hour late to the Zoom chat going on in part in the service of NaDruWriNi (and at this point wholly in the service of NaDruWriNi as it's just the_siobhan and I left at this point.

And, good holy god, it's now quarter to 3 so I'm officially going to pack this in!

For those who know the Toronto scene, DJ Lazarus announced yesterday that DJ Phink has died. They used to work together on super popular club nights in the 2000s that I never attended called Darkrave. There's a cute picture of the two of them at one in this article.

While I never attended Darkrave I did go to Phink's nights at Area 51 as a tiny little pipsqueak and remember them with great affection. The comments about him on the announcement all lean into how he was a kind, sweet, down to earth person. On some level that's how I found the Area 51 nights. On rare occasions (mostly past now) when I'd have reason to think about the feel of an ideal club I'd think about that one which to me felt sort of charmingly mixed and chill. I'm sorry to hear the news but I'm glad to have had this experience that I still remember positively to this day.

Surprising no one I still haven't done a single one of the 1st 4 things. Mildly surprising me I still don't really care about this fact as I have a day off today *and* sensing that a number of us were in nervous breakdown territory the new ED of our org (whose announcement I worked 16.5 hours on the Monday previous followed by 12.5 on the Tuesday) announced that she was also giving us all the Monday too so now I feel like with that I'll actually make progress at some point this weekend (I'll be starting on some the chores / house stuff right after this post) and don't feel bad about writing here.

I also don't feel bad as a bunch of stuff I'm about to write is about streaming items coming up this weekend and that makes this post officially Time Sensitive (all times Eastern) so here we go:

Tonight

20-21:30, The Friday Night Parkdale Special, Ep2. Eclectic tunes from the other side of the city.
20-00, HYBRID // Haardcast. alt. metal, industrial metal, stomp-stomp music.

Tomorrow

07-18:45,  WSO Isolation Festival feat. Billy Bragg, Grace Petrie & more. Schedule here but you'll have to join a FB group to watch the pinned videos per the schedule.
16-22, Slimelight. Floor One for the modern crunchy beepy stuff and Floor Two for the goth / wave / old school ebm & industrial.
20-22:30, 'RomantiKa' join Ivan Palmer and a bunch of random goths dancing in their living rooms on Zoom.
21:30-02, Contempt! NYC Online. More living room dancing on Zoom but links announced later. The best goddamned modern goth on offer in one room and some other stuff in 'the main room'.
21-23, Tired of dancing? Watch a Twin Tribes live performance.

Sunday

TBD, Jesus Christ Superstar watch-party / sing-along
16-18, Gothicat  Festival 1. Unreleased streamed content from a crapload of goth bands. Again with the FB only, though.
19-22, Darkness Forever but if you'd prefer straight retro to modern goth then Saigon Sundays is weekly in the same slot.

Monday

20-02. Blue Mondays. Every Monday for a while (as long as the host feels like doing it on any given Monday) there's a Sci-Fi flick on 'Kosmi' then an Industrial / Dark Wave / Post Punk party on Zoom.

Wednesday

18-22, isolation transmissions two. Dave stands in the middle of his giant pile vinyl (new wave and minimal synth, some postpunk, ebm, acid house, new beat, electronic and maybe 2Tone ska) and streams it live on Twitch.

Anytime archive (and by using an incognito tab confirmed you don't need an account for the FB stuff):

Audra (their own stuff but also loads of Bowie, the Cure, James, Depeche Mode, etc.)
Siviyex
Wingtips

And in the And Now For Something Completely Different bucket I really like the 2nd sketch here.