Travel
GTA Tripping: Take Me Out to the Bike Polo Match
Like elephant polo, bike polo sounds like something exotic but impractical. To the uninitiated, like myself two weeks ago, it logically exists in our minds like one of the many other compound sports on the fringe: soccer-baseball, disc-golf, or hunting-dodgeball. If you've never seen a bike polo match, let's try to imagine it for a moment: hipsters, facial hair, fixed-gear bicycles... check. Beer, cigarettes, home-made polo mallets... right. But did your imagination imagine that in reality bike polo is full of epic crashes and awesome plays? Or how about style and swagger, the two magic ingredients in any indisputably watchable sport?
This was my world last week as I watched my first bike polo match at Bathurst and Dundas's Scadding court.
Travel
GTA Tripping: Horse Palace
This week I visited the Horse Palace at the Canadian Exhibition Grounds. There I met a Staff Sergeant with the Toronto Police's famous Mounted Division, stopped by the stables that carry on a 195-year equine tradition at the grounds, and gawked at a miniature pony living in sin with an African Pygmy goat... Travel
GTA Tripping: Pacific Mall
Tamagotchi. Dim Sum. Rain. Bukkake. Cowabunga. Hello Kitty. Ninja. Illegal DVD. These are all lend-words that we've recently taken into the English language from Asian languages (maybe). It is my contention that these sparkling morsels alone serve as proof that Asia is awesome, and that they are operating on a higher plane than us over there. Or, at least a more futuristic, delicious and/or cute plane, anyway.Pacific Mall is North America's "largest indoor Asian mall," and so I went there excited, hoping for a yummy, blinking, futuristic time. Unfortunately, what my GTA Tripping partner and I found this week was more Chinese Water Torture than Pikachu; a horror story of tight mall security and bad noodles.
Travel
GTA Tripping: Hanlan's Point Beach
If you're in the market for penis watching, there's no better place than Toronto Island's Hanlan's Point Beach. Given that I am a hetero-identifying (and sometimes -defending, owing to my neat appearance and pretentious parlance) male adult, the penises on my recent trip there were merely marvels, like picking up a rock in the forest and seeing something wacky crawling underneath.And boy, were they wacky (not that I was looking, really!). Long-ball Larrys, a few tubby micro-types (why is it always the overweight dudes doubly cursed with the micro penises?), and one or two stallion-like bros flaunting kielbasa numbers that shamed my pants back on. My friends, however, had no shame, as you can see from this week's lead photo. And that's really what Hanlan's is all about: no shame, freedom from society's conventions and perhaps freedom from your own.
Travel
GTA Tripping: Extreme Space Objects
I cannot do long division, and it feels great. In sixth grade we were finally allowed to use calculators in math class, and from then on long division and I have been happily estranged. I can long-divide a pitcher of beer, but that's about the extent of my usual relationship with math and science. But then I heard that on the first Thursday of every month the University of Toronto's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics offers a free talk and tour to the public, and so I paid a visit to my old enemy.
Travel
GTA Tripping: Upper Canada College
Given that my friends (and a new study released last week) have convinced me that using condoms as birth control makes me a sucker-idiot, I've started planning for my imminent pregnancy blessing/disaster. Imagining my future son (whom I will name, oh, let's say Alasdair Percival Reynolds), I can't help but envision the finest sort of man. Though the boy is still just a handsome, gifted mistake over the horizon, I'm the sort of dad who plans ahead, probably. So this week I headed to Upper Canada College, Canada's most storied and prestigious prep school - a turbo-Hogwarts pumping out CEOs and (soon-to-be?) Prime Ministers - to scout the place out for my probable future progeny.
