Regina, Saskatchewan
Hi: Bitter Mango. This is a small place, I suspect we know each other.
Canadians
by Defender 62 Replies latest jw friends
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68storm
You have love Americans!
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,(no... my keyboard didn't skip and I didn't have a siezure, it was intentional) fellow Canadians. I would be willing to bet that a lot of our American freinds are wondering why people from Regina are not willing to meet with us in Toronto. After all, we are all in Canada.
I have travelled in the US quite extensively and I always get a kick out of the natives whenever they ask me things like:"How far north in Canada do you live?" No matter where you are, they picture a narrow strip of land straight north of where they live, "I guess you can't grow produce in the Tundra?", "Do you always eat the fish raw, or do you have a means of cooking it?", "I have been planning to visit Toronto in the near future, would a parka be good enough? (then you find out that they plan to come middle of July during their vacation)
I will give you a small example. A few years ago, I joined a classic car club that is based in Chicago.(sorry Tina) The president of the club asked me to start a regional branch in Ontario. Once it got started, he sent me someone in Vancouver, BC. The idea is for us to get together more often than the customary once a year. He was surprised to find out that this particular member happen to be approx. 3000 miles away from here.
Just thought that this would be a bit of a change of flavour on the board.
68storm
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Moxy
got email from you peter but id like to maybe work out a location as a group so its convenient. im coming from king and spadina so anywhere in the west downtown is easy for me. i can recommend places around here, if you like. the oldest bar in toronto, the wheat sheaf, is at king & bathurst. dont know if u had something more elaborate in mind.
mox
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bitter mango
running man: we may, although i have never been part of the cong. you can email me at [email protected] if you wouls like to find out. :)
peace
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peterstride
Hey Moxy,
The reason I wanted to send an e-mail as to the exact location was because a couple of people preferred it that way, in case the boards are monitored by fanatic JWs....so....I'll e-mail you and everyone else on the weekend.
I also work down at Kind & Spadina (surprise surprise!), so we should meet for lunch soon. I've been out of town for a couple of days now, and I return to Toronto Friday night.
Talk to you soon, :-)
Peter Stride
Toronto, Canada -
peterstride
King & Spadina...
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Simon
Good luck on getting the Olympics btw... I fancy going if it's in Torronto but I don't fancy a trip to Bejing
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Kismet
Well it is now 2:50 AM and I just walked in the door from the pre-announcement party re the Olympics...
there are many with very strong feelings that Toronto will be given the nod...time will tell.
but just in case there are any IOC members lurking... GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Toronto!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kismet
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Flip
Should have been posted on July 1st and/or the 4th, just to rub it in, but now is as good a time as any...:
We are Canadian !!!!!
So, what do Canadians have to be proud of?
1. Smarties
2. Crispy Crunch & Coffee Crisp
3. The size of our football fields and one less down.
4. Baseball is Canadian
5. Lacrosse is Canadian
6. Hockey is Canadian
7. Basketball is Canadian
8. Apple pie is Canadian
9. Mr. Dress-up kicks Mr. Rogers ass
10. Tim Horton's kicks Dunkin' Donuts ass
11. In the war of 1812, which was started by Americans, Canadians pushed the Americans WAY back... past their beloved 'White House' ...then we burned it...and most of Washington. All of this was done under the command of William Lyon McKenzie who was insane and hammered all the time.
We got bored because they ran away, so we came home and
partied....go figure!12. Canada has the largest French population that never surrendered to Germany.
13. We have the largest English population that never ever surrendered or withdrew during any war to anyone, anywhere.
14. Our civil war was only a bar fight that lasted a little over an
hour.15. The only person who was arrested in our civil war was an American
mercenary, who slept-in and missed the whole thing ...but showed up just in time to get caught.16. We knew plaid was cool far before Seattle caught on.
17. The Hudsons Bay Company once owned over 10% of the earth's surface and is still around as the worlds oldest company
18. The average dog sled team can kill and devour a full grown American in under 3 minutes.
19. We still know what to do with all the parts of a buffalo.
20. We don't marry our kin-folk.
21. Kentucky Fried Chicken founder, Colonel Harland Saunders abandoned the USA and came North to retire in Canada (Mississauga, Ontario).
22. We may say "eh" a lot but we know how to pronounce ROOF!!!
23. We invented ski-doos, jet-skis, velcro, zippers, insulin,
penicillin, zambonis, the telephone and short wave radios that save
countless lives each year.24. We ALL have frozen our tongues to something metal and lived to tell about it.
25. BUT MOST IMPORTANT! ...the handles on our beer cases are big enough to fit your hands with mitts on.
OhOOOOoohhhhh Yeah!!! We ARE Canadian!!!
anon.
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Eusebius Hieronymus
What's with you people, eh? Especially in
T'ronto. Where's that hoser Percy Chapman when you need him?TORONTO JOURNAL
Shedding a Bit More Than Its Image
By ANTHONY DePALMA
John Hryniuk for The New York TimesTORONTO — When Carmen Russo goes to work, she routinely does something that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable in a city so conservative about so many things that it was known throughout Canada as Toronto the Good.
Ms. Russo is one of the principal anchors for an Internet newscast, reading national news and business briefs in steady, sober tones for a global audience. And she does so in the nude.
Ms. Russo's program, "Naked News," and a companion program from Toronto called "The Male Edition," in which Lucas Taylor and other young men deliver the news in the buff, have become two of the most popular sites on the Internet, getting almost as many viewers as The Wall Street Journal's site.
The success of "Naked News," and the city's sanguine response to its production, is seen by many here as the most revealing sign of how much this city has changed as it has become a metropolitan center and left behind an image of prudery and oh- so-proper English restraint.
It has been three years since Toronto merged with five suburbs to form a metropolis of more than 2.3 million people. As it grows in worldliness, the new city, Canada's largest, has been letting its hair down in many ways.
In April Toronto got what is called North America's first talk-radio station for guys, a bar-stool blend of sports, schlock and sex on Mojo Radio-AM (640). And a former paper plant and junkyard on the eastern waterfront has grown into an enormous party zone, an open-air meeting place with a pool, a foam-covered dance floor and Canada's newest drive-in movie theater.
And each June Toronto holds one of North America's largest gay pride parades, where bare breasts and buttocks seem to be no more unusual than pretzels and balloons.
"Something is changing out there," said Stewart J. Meyers, operations manager for Mojo Radio. He said he still considers Toronto a conservative city compared with its flashy French-accented big sister, Montreal, but he said much had changed.
"Societal standards are what we're talking about here," Mr. Meyers said. "Are they what they were 25 years ago? Hardly."
Some longtime Torontonians say it was the gay pride parade that set a new tone. Though the parade has been held since the 1970's, in recent years it has grown tremendously in numbers of participants as well as in acceptance.
One reason the parade has become more risqué, perhaps, is that a few years ago an Ontario court ruled that it was legal for women to appear in public without covering their breasts, as long as they did not do so for commercial gain.
Toronto has been developing a more European sensibility about nudity and sex, which is reflected on the Internet and on the radio. But there has also been a shift from its rigid Protestant past.
"This is a city that's having a lot more fun than before," said Robert Bothwell, a professor of history at the University of Toronto and a longtime resident. "At least it's having more fun publicly."
Whether discussing pick-up lines or the advantages of one sexual act or another, Mojo Radio caters to an aspect of culture that was held in check in a more reserved Toronto.
Mojo Radio's billboards — showing a barely clad woman reclining against drapery and holding a drill — are also a departure from the classic architecture of Toronto. "What this says is that it's okay to be a guy again," said Mr. Meyers.
On summer weekends, thousands of Toronto's men and women jam into the Docks patio on Lake Ontario to meet, drink and dance in a way that the old Toronto would never have abided.
"We might have had a lot of trouble getting this project approved in Toronto 10 years ago," said Jerry Sprackman, who developed the Docks, which describes itself as "limited only to your imagination."
"There was a very negative connotation about clubs in the city," Mr. Sprackman said. "They were considered places for sex, drugs and bad characters."
But to the greatest number of Torontonians, it is "Naked News," taped in their midst every day, that most clearly reflects the change of the city's attitudes.
Canadians boring? Hardly, said Ms. Russo, one of the four "Naked News" anchors. The 42-year-old former model and mother of a teenage daughter thinks it is about time that Toronto loosened up a bit. "Maybe the city should be called `Toronto the Daring,' " she said.
The show was created by two Toronto entrepreneurs with financial backing from eGalaxy, a company chartered in Barbados. (A similar concept is used for television newscasts in several European cities.)
Toronto's "Naked News" (www.nakednews.com) first appeared on the Internet in December 1999. Producers say it has six million individual viewers a month worldwide. An independent count performed by Jupiter Media Matrix indicated that the program had 1.2 million individual viewers in the United States in May. "Naked News" covers international and national news, business, movies and other topics covered by most Canadian newscasts. The anchors' accents sometimes reveal their Canadian origins, but nothing on the set identifies it as being in Toronto.
During most of the program the anchors stand completely nude while they read the news. The exception is the opening segment in which a clothed woman disrobes while she reads the foreign news.
"I don't know about you," said Ms. Russo, "but I think foreign news is kind of boring and needs a little something to make it exciting."
"Naked News" has become difficult for Canadians to ignore. Some of Canada's most prominent broadcast journalists confess to having watched it, of course to find out what it was about.
Dale Goldhawk, a reporter for CTV, a national television network, said the show's popularity was a response to an alarming trend. "Some newscasts I've seen are so bad," he said, "I think the people should take off their clothes to make it more interesting."