JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Back in the spring at the ever-wonderful Elora Festival book sale , I purchased a stack of 1950s Gourmet magazines. The December 1958 issue featured a lengthy "Garden of Eating" gift section devoted to specialty food producers. Over the next few weeks, you will tempted by tasty treats from half-a-century that may inspire you to bestow a 5-1/2 lb drum of roux on your loved ones—it would be quirkier than a run-of-the-mill Hickory Farms sampler!

Over the lunch hour yesterday, I popped into the neighbourhood used record store and picked up a pair of soundtracks: The Producers (original film version from the 60s) and North By Northwest . I usually test out additions to my CD collection on the road, so when I needed to head out to the east end to snap photos for a future article, I brought along the disc pictured at left, Bernard Herrmann's score to one of my favourite Hitchcock flicks. Driving home along Danforth, I noticed a police car with all lights flashing race up behind me...just as the soundtrack reached the scene where Cary Grant suddenly finds himself holding a knife lodged in the back of a diplomat at the United Nations. My heart jumped out of my body and performed acrobatic stunts I haven't been able to do since grade two. I pulled over to the side to allow the police to race to their emergency and to chuckle at how the music and traffic had coincided so perfectly. Not the right scene, but the pho...

Then: Source: Monthly Detroit , July 1978 Now: Check out Spacing Toronto for a recent tour of the complex, now home to GM's world headquarters. - JB

For its recent reopening and public introduction to its Frank Gehry-designed additions, the Art Gallery of Ontario offered free admission for the inaugural weekend. Due to other commitments, I wasn't able to check it out until the Sunday. I arrived around 2:30 to find a line running down McCaul Street that curved onto Grange Road. Feeling hungry, I decided to eat a late lunch then return to assess the state of the line. The top picture was what I returned to at 3:15 - the line had curved back onto McCaul and now stretched about a block further south. Since the AGO is maintaining a free admission night (unlike the Royal Ontario Museum, which I've only been to once since its star-architect addition opened), I figured it would be more relaxing to wait a few weeks to take in the changes. Photos taken November 16, 2008 - JB

We all agree that Bowling Green, Kentucky was one of the low points of the trip. Perhaps we should have taken a derelict motor court on the outskirts of the city as a sign. The Everly Brothers may have thought Bowling Green had the prettiest girls they ever saw , but nothing went right for us inside the city limits. We were looking for a place to grab a quick lunch, but every road I took led into residential neighbourhoods or out to the middle of nowhere. Downtown was a dusty construction zone, the university a haven for monster speed bumps. Nary a pretty girl wandered by. On our way back to the freeway, we came upon a Waffle House . Never having been to one before (the closest locations to Detroit are in Toledo), we figured it was worth a shot. We stepped in the doorway and Mom's jaw dropped to the floor. Imagine the messiest diner you have ever been in and multiply the dirty dish factor by five. The Toronto Board of Health would have had a field day with the state of the ki...

Like DVDs of motion pictures, sometimes posts I write for other web sites merit bonus features. Before browsing this entry, read "A Wartime Letter" , posted on Torontoist on Remembrance Day. The material I used for the story comes from a box sitting in Mom's basement. It appears to be material my paternal grandmother collected, mostly photos and newspaper clippings. The earliest photos are probably from the 1920s, while the newest content consists of my first regular media gig, writing the monthly highlight column for my elementary school in The Amherstburg Echo while I was in grade 8. Much of the material is World War II vintage and revolves around my great-uncle Morrey. This is the notice that appeared in The Toronto Star on August 11, 1941, when Morrey was reported missing. A similar story appeared the same day in The Evening Telegram. The loss was devastating to the family. His name lived on among several nephews, including my father, who was given Douglas a...

1,440: CATCHING UP: A FALL HIKE AND TWO DINNERS Longtime readers may have noticed that I'm not quite as speedy as I once was in posting about things going on in this corner of the world. Writing for other sites, fatigue from increasingly busy times at my day job and a hectic everyday life in general have dented some of the grandiose schemes I've had for this blog and its offshoots (examples: brief election coverage, tales of the family summer roadtrip that will stretch into 2016, a Backstreets of Toronto sitting in "draft" for nearly two years). So, in an attempt to play catch-up, here are a trio of recent events, all of which are fully fleshed out in their respective Flickr photo sets (hit the link on each event name): *** Mono Cliffs : Growing out of a suggestion at a party, a group heading out near Orangeville in September to go for a hike in Mono Cliffs Provincial Park . Fueled by burgers and Blizzards from the Dairy Queen we met up at, we spe...

1,439: VINTAGE TORONTO SUN AD OF THE DAY Budget stretcher? Sure. Nutrition? Debatable. Growing up, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the only national fast food chain to set up shop in Amherstburg for years. Colonel Sanders stared at us from the orange-and-white boxes occasionally, or from buckets during large family gatherings. My fingers were crossed that the box arrived with a breast or wing (tasty) instead of a thigh (disgusting). While I haven't eaten a piece of KFC in over a decade, one of my guilty pleasures is an annual splurge on medium tubs of their macaroni salad and glowing green coleslaw. The Amherstburg location was later converted into a credit union with one element the KFC lacked - a drive-thru! Source: The Toronto Sun , September 26, 1978

Source: The Witching Hour #46, September 1974 Pick a card, any card... The "Wizard Collusion Trick" sounds intriguing, though I wonder if it is merely the secret of how to get other budding Blackstones to purchase six decks of trick cards. For me, the term "collusion" usually conjures images of baseball owners agreeing not to sign free agents . *** As for the floating head with the giant bowtie, Marshall Brodien was a Chicago-based magician whose fame came from promoting these cards on television and a long stint as Wizzo the Wizard on WGN's edition of Bozo the Clown . *** The Witching Hour was the third title introduced during DC's late 1960s resurrection of horror/suspense anthologies, following House of Mystery and The Unexpected . Debuting on newsstands in late 1968, witches Cynthia (the alluring one), Mildred (the fat one) and Mordred (the crone) presented spooky stories for 85 issues until they rode their brooms into The Unexpected i...

TORONTO - United States President-Elect Barack Obama took little time in making his first foreign visit after he was declared the victor in Tuesday night's election. Shortly before speaking before an excited crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, Obama made a lightning-fast stop in Toronto's Dundas Square to greet enthusiastic local supporters. Mr. Obama did not utter a word during his visit. Secret service officials allowed the crowd to rushed up to Mr. Obama to have their picture taken with him. After several hundred snapshots were taken, the President-Elect rushed back to Chicago. The gathering, dubbed "Welcome Back America" , was organized via Spacing magazine and a Facebook thread. Several hundred showed up, nearly all excited about the turfing of the Republicans from the Oval Office. One exception was a derelict who walked up to several people in the crowd to dampen their enthusiasm. Identifying himself as a Communist, he proceed to launch a spiel on the m...

Logical response, wouldn't you say? Little Britain Road, west of Lindsay, November 2, 2008