This past week­end, while I was vis­it­ing my par­ents in St. Catharines, I watched tele­vised scenes of po­lice cars on fire, thugs in black smash­ing store­front win­dows and cops in riot gear beat­ing and ar­rest­ing pro­test­ers. After I re­al­ized it wasn’t a movie (what? I had just woken up), that it was hap­pen­ing in my beloved Toronto, my stom­ach knot­ted up in […]

It’s the lit­tle things that put the spring in your step (and the ego into over­drive)…
This email was sent to me last week:
We are very pleased to re­port that you are in the top half of OkCupid’s most at­trac­tive users. The scales re­cently tipped in your fa­vor, and we thought you’d like to know.
How can we say […]

Up un­til last night, I was a LOST junkie. I prob­a­bly will be for a few more days. Then my ad­dic­tion will sub­side un­til they is­sue the com­plete DVD col­lec­tion. Anyways, I would ven­ture to say that there are some who are dis­ap­pointed by the se­ries fi­nale. And those who never watched the show (or aban­doned it early on) will […]

I love vin­tage ads. They cer­tainly didn’t beat around the bush back then. They told you, in very frank and ex­plicit terms, why you needed to buy this prod­uct — you were too fat, you were too ugly, you were sin­gle!
In these times of sub­lim­i­nal mes­sag­ing, where the misog­yny be­hind an ad is hid­den in sub­text and “art”, […]

Last week­end, I went to a club to cel­e­brate a friend’s birth­day. The mu­sic wasn’t par­tic­u­larly mov­ing me (my friend, Catherine, kept scowl­ing over a house remix of Oasis’ “Wonderwall”), so I started to people-watch.
The key to people-watching is sub­tlety – you don’t want to be too ob­vi­ous about it, and you don’t want to leer, stare or ogle. But even the […]