electric relaxation

I’m still pondering the whole Desi difference thing, and I’m not ready to write about that yet. But in the meantime I got some new jewels.

• Bar scene. Shockingly, I think San Francisco wins here. So far, I’ve seen a bunch of shitty sports bars, and a whole lot of frou-frou, loud and crowded places that look like they charge cover and have bouncers and shit. Moreover, the pompous places are also dressy of course (actually on reflection I guess only San Francisco has places that manage to be insanely pompous without an actual dress code).I think this explains why my friends here don’t seem to go out to bars a whole lot (other than sports bars to watch the Raptors games). Anyway, if you are looking for some eye candy and willing to stand in line for the privilege, then cool, but I actually like that in San Francisco you get the choice: if you wanna overpay for drinks and let out your inner douche you can hit up any number of bars in SOMA or FiDi, and if you wanna show off your tattoo sleeves you can hit up the 500 Club or Delirium. If you just want to actually chill for a minute you can go anywhere from Casa Nova to Home to Dock’s Clock or you can just bump some ATCQ on the jukebox at the Mission Bar.

  And then of course there’s a whole bunch of weirdly unique places like Bourbon and Branch or that house bar in Solano. I guess I gotta give the nod to San Francisco for this one, while reluctantly acknowledging that someone reading this is going to mock me for compromising my principles of uniformly dropping venom on the Bay.

  Although Toronto does gain points for the fact that they apparently really do last call at 2:00 AM rather than 1:30 or 1:15 or whatever like in SF.

• Beer selection. Almost a side note but it has been annoying me so WTF, this gets its own bullet. So, the beer selection at these places in Toronto is mostly wack – there don’t seem to be a whole lot of brew pubs around and your best bet is one of the Irish pub places (but then you’re at nothing but Irish pubs all the time which gets old).

Just a brief one today. I’m too lazy to write up my thoughts on those other promised topics and I want to exercise a little more caution given that a lot of people seem to be reading these without necessarily parsing them completely, and I don’t want to inadvertently offend anyone. Actually that’s a lie, I love inadvertently offending people, but only if I don’t like them, and if you’re reading this I probably like you.

Also only my tech friends will care about many of today’s items so be forewarned.

• Toronto seems to be quieter – at least there aren’t so many goddamn motorcycles.
  This is pretty topical given the recent South Park episode. I hate Harley riders. I realize it’s completely hypocritical of me, since the old Z used to set off car alarms when I started it up and the subwoofer definitely wasn’t neighbor-friendly, but hey, that’s why it got stolen right? Justice was served – I did the time for my crime. The point is, these fricking d-bags are so pervasive in San Francisco that I didn’t even realize how much more pleasant a city could sound until I got out of there. Of course for an apples-to-apples comparison I’d need to live on a lower floor right off of Queen St. So this is really only useful as a justification in favor of moving out of the Mission.
• Music and media streaming services don’t work or cost money in Canada.
  No Hulu, no Pandora, no Last.fm. Fortunately, piracy still works just fine, or so I’ve heard. I guess I should toss Google Voice into this list too, though that’s really more of a fundamental problem with GV (what the hell is it good for if it can’t ring international phones), and anyway I suspect that it will get fixed sooner than the media stuff.
• Cell phone data plans suck.
  Apparently my crazy SpeakOut wireless EDGE data hack – blackra1n plus blacksn0w plus SpeakOut $7 browsing addon plus iPhone connection profile (thanks again Eric B) – is even more of a deal than I originally realized, because it’s pretty much the only way to get unlimited data in Toronto. Unclear if this will ever get fixed. I suppose I should also figure out how much data I really use on my iPhone in SF though, since maybe 5GB really is enough?
• Online shopping is not nearly as cheap or prevalent.
  Apparently Amazon Canada is not nearly as well stocked as the mothership. Also, nobody’s ever heard of Zappo’s, you sometimes have to pay import duties on stuff (?!), and people actually buy computers and TVs in stores here because online prices aren’t much better.

Got a few quick ones today. I decided that food is way to complicated of a topic to tackle in a single post so I’ll be breaking things down on the granular tip.

• Falafel and shawerma are way the fuck better in Toronto. First, there are Lebanese, Turkish and Palestinian (I assume?) falafel places all over the place. In my random sampling of three places so far (including the place right outside my house that is open until 3AM, see #2), they were all better than Truly Mediterranean.
• Graffiti is no contest. Inspiring murals aside, Toronto’s graffiti kicks the crap out of San Francisco’s. See here or here (or many other places) for what I’m saying.

Stay tuned for posts on ABCDs versus CBCDs and relative whitenicity (hint: Toronto wins on both).

These are going to start adding up quickly. Maybe I should come up with better titles. Also, it makes more sense to just track both advantages and disadvantages in the same series so that’s what I’m doing.

• 24-hour/late-night stuff
  I just bought a ton of groceries at 11:45PM. I know I can do that in San Francisco if I live right next to a Safeway, but that’s like three places in the entire city, and they all kind of suck. Pizza-pizza, which I’m sure I’ll get sick of quick fast but for now is plain delicious, stays open until at least 1 or 2AM from what I can tell, and they are everywhere. This isn’t so much of a win for Toronto as it is a horrible, horrible fail for San Francisco, but it should still count.

• Tap water
  San Francisco is the clear winner. This one wasn’t a huge surprise. Toronto tap water isn’t disgusting like NYC, but it isn’t delicious and laced with LSD or whatever it is they put in the San Francisco stuff. Hey maybe that’s what my taxes are paying for – that’d be sweet. Anyway the Toronto tap water is bad enough that I suspect it’s why the coffee I made keeps tasting like shit. I bought some bottled water today to test this theory.
  
  
• The liquor situation
  This one is probably more complicated and will need to be revisited, since I think bars here maybe stay open later or something?Or at least 2AM last call means for real 2AM last call, not 1:30AM like in San Francisco? Anyway that’s not what I had in mind, I mean the whole LCBO thing. I’m not a big beer drinker but it’s annoying that I can’t just run downstairs and grab a six pack if friends are coming over to watch a basketball game for example. Also wine is more expensive for good stuff from what I can tell so far.
  
  
• Coffee and Coffee Shops
  There are surprisingly fewer coffee shops around compared to San Francisco – though Portland and Seattle are still playing in a whole different league.The ones that are around haven’t impressed so far; I’m going to go ahead and claim that Peet’s is decidedly better than Second Cup. I hate fucking Starbucks but I don’t seem to have a whole lot of options.

  Meanwhile, there are definitely a few frou-frou coffee houses with wifi kicking around but not like seven thousand billion of them like there are in the Mission. I couldn’t find a good one (i.e. not a Starbucks) in a three block radius of my house anyway. I know there’s one on Spadina but that’s far and it be cold.

Ok, I was going to do one about food since I had lunch with Ranjani at Nota Bene today, but I think I want to hold off on this one for a while. Anyway I’ll definitely split that one up (low, medium and hi-end) and it’s way too complicated and I’m starving so I’m gonna go eat some of my midnight groceries.

Seriously what is up with that shit?

I’m not going to count this as a flaw since that would be petty, but for real, I’m tempted to sign up for this stupid card just so that they won’t be wasting their time when they ask me at every checkout counter in Toronto.

Since a very explicit purpose behind my little adventure in Toronto is to figure out whether I would want to move back here permanently, it’s important for me to keep track of stuff that I dislike as well as the stuff I like. This will likely be the first in a series of posts.

I want to write these things down before they get purged from my memory during an all-dressed-chip binge or west-indian-food coma. They won’t be in any particular order (though perhaps I’ll go through and re-order them by importance once I’ve built up a comprehensive collection of complaints).

1. It’s fucking cold. No surprises there. Well actually, I forgot what it’s like to be so cold that you can’t just wear gloves, you have to wear the right kind of gloves or your fingers still freeze. And you can’t just where a warm wool hat, you need one that still fully wraps around the bottom of your ears when your hair has started to grow out. Also, it’s only December, and a relatively warm December at that.

2. Google Public Transit doesn’t work. Seriously, what the shit? In my mind’s little fantasy world, this city is supposed to be much better run than San Francisco. Unfortunately, the TTC is apparently pretty bureaucratic and heavy-handed (though this is just downright lazy).
   
3. Health Care. This one is actually suppoed to be better in Toronto obviously, but I’m putting it on here as a note to review and revise this one once I get around to having my follow-up appointment for last week’s fun Swine Flu adventure. But my recent experience with trying to pick a new PCP in San Francisco sucked balls. There’s no way it’s worse here. As I understand it, the surgery lines thing is mostly a stupid American myth. Actually, maybe it’s better in the US if you actually know doctors (and I know a few); if that’s true, I can always pull some elitist bullshit if I needed to at some point in the future – and go over to the States as necessary. After all, since our family already crossed that moral chasm back in 1995 with my mom’s health issues, so I figure I’m already tained.

Ok I need to go do some work. But that’s a start.

P.S. There are a few interesting tidbits in this forum discussion on San Francisco versus Toronto which I might mine for further inspiration.

P.P.S. I should get Brian Li to start tracking these things since he just made the reverse move (Toronto to San Francisc0 just a few weeks ago).

I walked around my neighborhood in Toronto for about an hour this morning; basically I did a loop, heading up on Church St., across on Charles and back down on Yonge.

Yonge to Jarvis north of Queen is basically the gayborhood.

Finally, a couple of pics that should hopefully prove educational for my American friends used to what passes for diversity in the bush leagues:

Online ordering (!), free delivery of kati rolls. This place is only a few blocks from my house too so it ought to be quick. Just ordered some food; if it’s good this might replace Minako as my favorite on grubhub.

p.s. Thanks again Lisa for telling me about this web site and helping reduce the amount of pesky human interaction in my life.

I played physician’s assistant this weekend while Dustin replaced the radiator in my car with a new one I’d had delivered to his house. We also swapped out the old battery for a new one, since I basically killed it by letting the car sit without starting for four months.

Fortunately, it turns out that the radiator swap was way easier than I had originally anticipated. It took only a couple hours to complete, and we didn’t even really need to consult the service manual. I still don’t really get why folks online claim this is a five-plus hour job. Hopefully we didn’t skip over anything crucial. At any rate, the Z rides again, so I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.

While we were at it, Dan replaced the brake pads in his car, aided by a modicum of encouragement and much heckling from the two of us. Photos here.

KRS-One’s “Sound of Da Police” over the DJ Unk “Walk It Out” instrumental.

iTunes had two versions of the instrumental, one’s got a few extra synthesized effects. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find the KRS accapella anywhere. Also, I need to speed up the Unk beat to +12% which means I have to use internal mode on the SL-1.