Some Real News for a Change

My son stayed over at a classmate's last weekend for a birthday party. On the following Sunday morning they walked across the road to run around in a junior school playground to slide about on the ice and kick chunks of snow at each other. Some teenagers approached them there, pulled out a knife and robbed them of cash, cell phones and iPods!

Chris didn't lose anything and wasn't harmed, he actually seems pretty unaffected by it. He happily took the subway back from the Royal Ontario Museum that evening with a friend.

Toronto has historically been called, often disparagingly, "Toronto the Good". In the last ten years this has been displaced by media hysteria over violent crime, but Toronto is still one of Canada's safer cities and dramatically safer than most American cities. Still, crimes happen and sometimes very close to home...

I discovered a few days ago that the music video I was in has been released and the song, 21st Century Christmas, is on a country music Christmas compilation. It's probably getting airplay on country music stations and on country music video shows. Here's how you can see and/or hear it:

• Jaydee Bixby's single on iTunes.
  
• The country music Christmas compilation Christmas On The Open Road on iTunes.
  
• The video, "featuring" me, on YouTube.

A Boy and his Bike (redux)

Last year during the Toronto International Film Festival my street bike was stolen. A week ago the Toronto Police made a big bust, uncovering a stash of over 3,000 stolen bikes at a local "bike dealer". That's a mind-boggling number of bicycles. Seems more like a compulsion rather than a business, unless the goal was to help keep crack heads in ready money.

The police decided to set up a massive temporary "come and get your bike" depot, with fairly lenient proof requirements, so I headed down this afternoon to see if I could find my poor old Trek 800. No luck, but I did snap this iPhone photo of just a fraction of the bikes the police were trying to return.

Speaking of TIFF, I'll be on staff as a Box Office Line Supervisor again this year. I'll cut back the volunteer side this time though so I can actually see a few films...

And speaking of film, last night Sheryl and I took in the new version of Brideshead Revisited on the spur of the moment. There was an outstanding TV mini-series version back in the eighties. This much shorter film version stands up, although the homosexual subtext rises to the surface a bit too bluntly and plenty of other nuances are lost. Ben Whishaw as Sebastian Flyte and Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson as Lord and Lady Marchmain really stood out. Nothing like a tale of declining aristocrats and manipulative Catholic mothers!

Listening to: Precious (Michael Mayer Balearic Mix) by Depeche Mode from Precious (Remixes).

A Boy and his Bike

Over the last week or so I've been cycling downtown to the Toronto Film Festival box office at around 5:30 AM and putting in up to 20 hour days. It's been cool to cold and pitch dark, but mostly under clear skies with lots of stars in the heavens. Just yesterday morning I was savouring the pleasure of speeding through the night under my own power and thinking about how much pleasure I get from my mountain bike. Sure enough when I came out of the Varsity cinemas that evening my beloved Trek 800 had been stolen.

Now I just want to watch The Bicycle Thief over and over again. Everyone is very sympathetic, but Toronto is apparently the bike theft capital of North America.

Later that night I watched the Gala screening of The Walker, Paul Schrader's new political thriller, with Sheryl, her daughter and son in-law. I'm afraid that it was a bit of a disappointment. But the fun began when the director realised that the film was being screened with the reels out of order. It took almost an hour to correct the problem, but we were treated to a wide-ranging question and answer session by Paul and Lauren Bacall, who appeared in the film. That was way more interesting...

By the way, thanks for nothing Colin Farrell. Yesterday the Hollywood star took up the cause of a habitual Yorkville beggar. He bought him clothes, paid his rent for a year and gave him some money to live on. Now we've got panhandlers coming out our ears as they look for their own pot of gold. This afternoon we had to get the police to drag an unstable woman out of a theatre where Sidney Lumet was giving a talk.

Listening to: Weighty Ghost by Wintersleep from Welcome to the Night Sky.

Gun Control: It's a Good Thing

Four Dead in Argument Over Fence. This is what giving every idiot the right to own guns leads to. So pointless. By the way, we're all capable of being idiots.

Listening to: With A Gun by Steely Dan from Pretzel Logic.

Can you keep a secret?

I was recently pleased to read that mafia "godfather" Bernardo Provenzano, on the run since 1963, had been captured. Amongst the many murders he carried out or arranged were two prominent Italian judges. Of course it says something about the complicity of the Italian police that he was able to remain free for so long. He only communicated with his wife and underlings by coded messages on scraps of paper called "pizzini".

Today I was tickled to read that these trusted "pizzini" were encoded with a variation of the Caesar cipher (yes, that Caesar). The code boiled down to changing letters to numbers and adding 3. So "A" becomes 4, "B" becomes 5, etc. Profoundly simple... So simple that even I created an playful encryption program a few years ago that used the same technique. I called it Pretty Lousy Privacy (a nod to a popular method called Pretty Good Privacy). It's only purpose was to mildly annoy recipients.

Today the Caesar cypher it is worse than useless because it can be broken in minutes with nothing more than a pencil but ignorant people might trust it anyway. Provenzano trusted it enough to write down the names of his criminal associates. It's nice to see feared criminals revealed as bumbling idiots!

Listening to: Let's Get Retarded by Black Eyed Peas from Elephunk.

The Quiet Earth

It was a lovely spring day today and I had a 9:00 AM meeting about the Sprockets children's film festival. I decided to get there on my mountain bike so I could get a few kilometers of open road under me. I thought I'd take a fifteen minute bike up to the theatre, then scoot back home or join Sheryl for a bite before helping her with a business project she had to finish. The ride up was a bit cool, but sunny with very quiet streets.

I'm a slow starter on weekend mornings whenever possible, so the early morning lack of hustle and bustle can be a bit of a surprise to me. It reminded me a tiny bit of a 1985 New Zealand film call The Quiet Earth, in which everyone has instantly vanished, except those in the process of dying. A great psychological drama with lots of spooky scenes of silent, empty cities with the "sole survivor" wandering around trying to piece things together.

In the end my planning meeting was over faster than expected, Sheryl was delayed and the weather was even more enticing. I decided to take a serendipitous route home and ended up on the paths the follow the Don River. I just kept going until Sheryl called to say she was ready. I rode over 40 km! (So sayeth Google Earth's Measure tool.) Next time I'm not going to wear tight, stuffy blue jeans. And I'm going to get my rusty bike chain oiled.

In other news, Chris' team lost their hockey championship game 5 - 0 yesterday. As is always said in such situations, getting to the finals was a victory in itself. They were second last in the season standings but played their hearts out in the playoffs. They were just out-gunned on the day. Chris played as well as I've seen him though, so I was a proud Dad.

Also, last night while Sheryl and I watched a mediocre black comedy about a mob lawyer scamming his boss (The Ice Harvest) the news broke that eight Toronto-area 'Bandito' bike gang members had been murdered on a farm west of the city. Of course these guys are all just businessmen who share an interest in motorcycles...

Listening to: Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb from Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.