Canadians and Australians: equally crazy, apparently

Referring to this insanity as ‘northern’ when Toronto is one of the southernmost points in the country is rather misleading; it’s well below the 49th parallel. However, it’s still shockingly cold if you have virtually no clothes on and jump into a frigid lake in January. I was plenty clothed and I got goosebumps just taking their photos!

Madness? It certainly is, and today’s annual Polar Bear Swim around the country was not without a casualty (in BC). In Toronto the Polar Bear Club raises money for Habitat for Humanity by recruiting daredevils willing to send themselves into a state of frozen animation in front of friends and national television.

Perhaps in other places people do it for guts and glory, for the thrill of it, or because they got so hammered the night before they have a complete loss of sensation. Maybe all of the above! But imagine doing this in NUNAVUT — now THAT would be crazy!

More photos in the PictoBrowser below:

Yesterday, I went to see a film in the middle of the working day, something I’ve never done before. (If feature films were an hour, I’d do it more often!) It was another United Way fundraiser at work — this time about as far from a bake sale as one can get. As a bonus, the people who made the film (director/producer, CBC reporter, cameramen) were in attendance to answer questions from the audience afterwards.

To my surprise, I found the entire film on YouTube, which you can view here. The quality is quite low to meet YouTube’s file size limit, but it’s still watchable. I copied and pasted the synopsis from the YouTube page.

LOST IN THE STRUGGLE
The fifth estate wanted to know why young men in some neighbourhoods of Canadian cities are drawn to a culture of violence. A culture where drug sales are often a source of income, friendships are defended with weapons, and a deadly dispute can start with a disrespectful glance.

Rather than accessing this world through the police or social workers, producers wanted to document the lives of the young men in their own voices. To learn what options are available to a young person who grows up in a culture where loyalty is determined by whom you’re willing to protect. And to understand how they get left behind by the systems of education, social services and justice that are supposed to protect them.

more…

There are a few chess tables situated in the park on Queen Street East in front of Metropolitan United Church. One can often find old men congregated there, accusing each other of cheating at chess, banging on timer boxes, and at other times contemplating their next move, chin in hand. Tonight there was also a table of Filipinos playing cards.

There was a lot of cussing, but I think they toned down their language when I came around. They didn’t want me taking photographs, but I said I was only going to shoot the table and they calmed down.

the Howard tomb

Colborne Lodge in High Park is haunted! Go there at night in October, see the house and grounds by candlelight, hear some very creepy ghost stories while fog shrouds the moon, and be prepared for your imagination to run away…

the parlour, where a wreath of hair lies on display

In 1873 John George Howard and his wife Jemima deeded the park (which includes the house and the property) to the City of Toronto, and the city has been its steward ever since. Colborne Lodge is now a museum which is open year round, and in October they switch up the supernatural factor and give a haunted house tour.

Jemima Howard’s bedroom

It’s not all smoke and mirrors, though, the Howard stories are supported by the couple’s detailed journals and meticulous record-keeping; the legends that abound from the era are well-known to local historians.

I took the photo above in Jemima Howard’s bedroom, the room she died in… her husband, John, tried to get her committed to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum (he was the architect). He was unsuccessful, so he sequestered her to one end of the house and kept her locked up. Aren’t you glad this isn’t 1877? It turns out later that she was suffering from symptoms of breast cancer, one of the first women in Canada to receive such a diagnosis.

For more about “Haunted in High Park”, visit the Colborne Lodge page at the City of Toronto’s website.

Sorry about the bass overload, I was right up at the front and it was booming right into my digicam’s mic.

Hank Guzevich looks so much like Tim Allen (with darker hair) it’s eerie.

www.polkafamilyband.com

Based in Pennsylvania, the family has Mexican and Polish roots. They put on a lively, foot-stomper of a show.

Polish Festival 2007
Roncesvalles Avenue
Toronto

Technorati tags: The Polka Family, Polish Festival, Roncesvalles Avenue, videoclip, YouTube

Last night I had the good fortune of receiving an impromptu invitation to the National Yacht Club to join some people for dinner. The club has the best patio in Toronto in my opinion because of its vantage point — a tiny peninsula nestled between Toronto City Centre Airport and the city harbour. Very distracted by the scenery, I kept alternating between plane-spotting (mostly Porter Airlines traffic) and watching the sailboats cruise by.

Over Labour Day weekend is the Canadian International Air Show, and I’m looking forward to a spot right here on this patio with all my camera equipment to capture it for the first time (I was in Tofino a year ago). Last night I only had my Canon A520, which lives full-time in my bag, but it did a decent job at sunset.

Technorati tags: National Yacht Club, Toronto Harbour, sunset

Relax, it’s a film. A film that looks really funny, but only to a Canadian, I think.

Sunday, July 15, 2007
Hatred of Toronto examined in mockumentary at Montreal comedy festival

http://letsallhateto.com/

I found this part of the article particularly amusing:

Although Montreal would likely be the most fervant Toronto-hater in the country because of long-standing sports and cultural rivalries, Spence and Nerenberg found that’s not the case.

“The West only started hating Toronto in the way it does now in the last 20-30 years,” Nerenberg said. “This is a trend that Toronto isn’t really aware of. It’s news to them.”

Top honours go to Vancouver, Nerenberg said. “Vancouver is much more resentful.”

Another snort from Mr. Toronto.

“I think here’s what happens, is you have somebody who can’t cut it in Toronto. They like to lay around and smoke pot all day and maybe do the occasional kayak. So they move out to the ‘mountainlands’ where they can basically escape the responsibilities that we carry in Toronto to make the country work.”

But there is a bright spot to all the resentment. In a country threatened by political divisions and western alienation for years, hating Toronto is a great unifier.

“French, English, we can all hate Toronto,” Nerenberg said brightly. “What we discovered is that you could go to the most remote Inuit village in the Far North of Canada and you will find people who hate Toronto.

“You can go as far west as you want to go, you’ll find Toronto haters. You can go as far east. Rich, poor, short, tall, with mustaches, without mustaches, it doesn’t seem to matter. All these people can be unified by hating Toronto.”

I wonder how I can get a hold of this film now that it passed through Toronto already?

I live in the heart of Toronto’s Polish community. On Sunday was a Catholic processional and ceremony, the likes of which I’d be able to describe if I knew any Latin. Or Polish, for that matter. I’ll assume there was some blessing going on, which is always a good thing!

Some pics…

more…

It’s all been errands, errands, and more errands lately and I haven’t even had time to unpack yet (sleeping doesn’t lend itself to multitasking, unfortunately). Got my hair cut today, too, and I had quite a bit lopped off! It looked like there was more hair on the floor than on my head! No pics yet, though.

On my way home tonight I decided I’d had enough of errands and stopped to photograph the CNE main entrance. I tell you, I really love the Shake Reduction feature on this camera. I didn’t use a tripod for any of these photos:

Technorati tags: CNE, Canadian National Exhibition

It’s been a big weekend of photography, attending exhibits and visiting venues for two major annual events that ran both Saturday and Sunday — Wings & Wheels, Doors Open — and dipping into a third, Contact (which runs all of May). Aviation, architecture, and photography, what could be better?

After all this running around I’m in serious need of a nap, so I’ll post a few of my favourites over the past two days for now:

Technorati tags: Doors Open, Wings & Wheels, Toronto, architecture, aviation