JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

The local media has gone gung-ho about tales of parking ticket quotas and increased driver rage against the parking cops. None of this surprises me, given several sketchy tickets I've received for parking on my street. A permit doesn't make you immune from zealous officials. I've learned not to park in certain spots, regardless of how they are marked. The weirdest ticket happened five years ago. In front of my house, there are two legal spots. Between our driveway and a short alleyway behind Mt. Pleasant, there's an illegal spot, marked as a "no standing" zone by a pole in front of my house. One night, the front of the car was sitting about 5 cm in front of the pole. 5 cm too far for a parking cop early one May morning. Here's an entry on the ticket from my journal - I used to number each installment, giving up after one volume disappeared along with the backpack it was in. 948: 25 May 00 Wha' The Fuh? It was not a good way to start off the day...

A few shots snapped while walking downtown Sunday afternoon... What's wrong with this picture, shot on a mid-walk trip to Manhattan? Note that famous NYC attraction, the Bata Shoe Museum. Yes, Bloor and Madison has suddenly slipped into a parallel dimension where it is now located south of Columbia University. Question: will this really fool anyone into believing it's the Big Apple? (Or maybe I've got a time machine kicking around...) You may have read in the Globe this weekend about city plans for handling graffiti. Here's a highly visibile example on College near Croft - note the message to our departed police chief. Creative interpretation of the Val Kilmer faces slowly fading from buildings around the core. This one mourns his career while paying tribute to one of his roles. At least it ain't The Island of Dr. Moreau they're saluting... (Augusta and Nassau, Kensington Market) The Four Seasons Centre (aka the new opera house) is well on its w...

We continue with the third of six vintage Gulf ads discovered in the Warehouse. Commentary by J. Percival Wexford-Snoopington, Ph. D. Tire inflation was an important part of the service attendant's daily itinerary. No more allowing customers who no prior knowledge of operating an air pump to handle these delicate pieces of machinery. Service attendant fatalities from standing too close to customers who overinflated their tires which promptly exploded declined by 57% after new procedures were introduced in 1927. However, some station owners came up with their own interpretation of "save you from 20 to 40% on mileage". Long before 70s television journalists uncovered rotten service station practises in Georgia, some operators instructed their pump jockey to overinflate customers' tires just enough so that they'd have a blowout a mile or two down the road, then be forced to return to the station for "repairs", driving up a station's profits by an ...

This month's Chowhound meetup resto: Hanoi 3 Seasons (588 Gerrard St. East), which was reviewed by Now in February This is part of a mural in the parking lot on Gerrard just west of Broadview, featuring interpretations of the seasons. Here's the outside of the restaurant, located steps east of Broadview on the north side of Gerrard. It's a cozy place, which filled quickly after our arrival. Probably a good thing we were a smaller group than usual (only four were able to make it). In front, #4 Hen (sauteed baby clams served with crispy rice cakes, which were cracker-like scoops flecked with black sesame seeds). Behind, #5 So Hap Gung Xa Ot (steamed mussels, which came in a tasty broth). Note the empty glass on the right, a quickly-downed jackfruit shake. Two of us were going to go for soursop, but that was the only fruit out of the half-dozen specialty shakes on the menu that they were out of. Reminded me of the shakes at The Mini in Windsor (yes sis, one of thes...

Looking for fun old photos to throw on the site, I dug back in the archive to my university daze. The wayback machine has been set to the fall of '95, with Mr. Buchanan (our dancing king from a few months back) proudly displaying two items. The red pepper came from a clown show we went to at either Tarragon or Passe Muraille as part of a script analysis class. The box in background still pops up in discussion among the gang - if you ever hear any ex-Arts Hausians refer to the Rent-a-Monkey Fund, this was the collection box. JD and Brad had the brilliant idea that if they could collect enough money, we could rent a monkey for a day. Who doesn't like monkeys? They pitched the fund at several house meetings, but alas, the fund never made much headway. It was a terrific idea, but its time hadn't arrived. Hmm, maybe I should start the 10th anniversary monkey fund... - JB

Another month, another freebie newspaper. Today's entry into the newsbox sweepstakes is Dose , CanWest Global's attempt to hook twentysomethings. I fell out of my chair looking at the paper's " About Us " page, which neatly sums up everything wrong with it. Tell me this doesn't sound like a cry against the man written by somebody funded by him: There is a lot of crap out there and we realiuzed there was nothing that was relevant so we said screw it, we are going to create a new source of information for our peers. Or at least severely dumbed-down information for their peers. Forced hipness is a rare beast to pull off well - we'll see if CanWest can do it. (I should fess up that I've spent most of the weekend listening to the CD version of Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them , so my media crap-detector is running higher than usual). Design-wise, it resembles a messy headline-news channel, down to the "ticker" (in ...