Nearing the end of weekend trip to Montreal with some old friends, the three guys left were having a lazy Sunday at a pool (billiards) bar a few hours ahead of our 7:45pm flight. Just before 2pm we get simultaneous emails from Porter Airlines with this message: IMPORTANT – Flight Change Notification Porter Airlines […]
I walked into a Best Buy store in Toronto a few weeks ago, and asked a sales assistant: “How do I get all of the main US stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS) and the main Canadian ones for free, in HD?” He told me you couldn’t. The only way to view High Definition television […]
Welcome to 2011. The question some Highway 401 drivers ask when they see this sign: “Why does the Ontario government, given its strict and serious highway signage rules, allow Port Hope to welcome people to their town?” Only when one actually takes the exit (or looks at a map), does one understand how Port Hope […]
Lost in grass-is-greener thought, a month before moving back to Canada, I salivated reminiscing about burgers in Canada. In particular, I remembered the trademark flavours of Harvey’s and Licks. Both restaurants pride themselves on the taste, quality, and toppings of their hamburgers, purportedly better than McDonalds and Burger King. Both Harvey’s and Licks dress the […]
I like Weetabix. It was introduced to me in my youth, when my British-raised Cypriot-Dutch cousins would have it on the breakfast table in Cyprus. To a very young Canadian, it was a British cereal. Plain, unassuming, a bit mechanical, and texturally fascinating as the milk mutated the very fabric of the cereal within 10 […]
Things I am relearning about Canada #57: people love pumpkins. How do I know? Fruit stands around Toronto have been chock-full of small, medium and large pumpkins since late September. Mill Street Brewery is selling “Nightmare on Mill St” which by reports is spicy but not very pumpkinny. Finally, every coffee joint in town is […]
Commissioning my own font for my logo was too expensive. So here’s what I did. Do you like it? It’s a good thing established brands don’t use Helvetica when they rework their logo, right? Otherwise everyone’s logo would look like American Apparel’s. Whoops.
People ask me “What’s it like being back in Canada after 14 years away?”. I have a few observations: Suburbs have been commercialized, and their commercial buildings look like they’ve been designed by Tupperware. Big boxes made of ticky-tack and they all look just the same. People love hockey a little too much, but being […]
From the Guardian: “The trust concludes that, as things stand, the case has not been made for the closure of 6 Music,” the trust ruled. “The executive should draw up an overarching strategy for digital radio. If the director general wanted to propose a different shape for the BBC’s music radio stations as part of […]
I don’t know if it’s because I’m 40 now, but I suddenly like Old Spice deodorant. In Costa Rica I don’t need deodorant, because I’m constantly in and out of the water; it’s nice to detox from all the aluminum zirconium trichlorohydrex. But when in North America, the smell of a deodorant-less man can be […]