Dining With the Enemy: URS, Meat Paste, and the Dutch

Gathering together with family is often a momentous and healing experience, and joining in the giving of collective thanks creates moments of revelation and empathy.  Unless you're in my family, where your Mother forgets which holiday we're celebrating and festoons the house in preparation for Passover.

Though the remembering of the Spirit of the Lord culling the first born is always a fun-filled family event, I tried to gently and tactfully reorient the festivities toward the correct holiday.  I'd nearly succeeded when someone asked (as someone is wont to do every year in a desperate attempt to think outside a non-existent box), "Why don't we try something other than turkey this year?"

I was initially pleased to be spared an Homeric dual of with my arch-aminonemesis, but when my Mother decided to take cues from the Dutch in preparing the alternative mode of celebration and prepared hutspot and pea soup served in clogs, I took one look at what had been placed before me and fainted face-first into my dish.

Food?!

I'm beginning to fear the Dutch want me dead.  Their recipe for hutspot creates a goo with the perfect consistency to drown a man at a depth of 25.4mm.

The National Post captures the Dutch chanting, "Death to The Clog!"

For the time being, however, I am pleased to announce that I have survived all plots by the Dutch against my life ...and also against my palette.  To save the Thanksgiving feast, I fought fire with fire and, borrowing from both the Dutch technique of deep frying meat paste to create vaguely edible objects and Felt's advanced mold optimization strategies, I fashioned the hutspot into a turkey, deep-fried it to create the illusion of skin, and then baked it over a roaring clog-fueled fire.

The end result was an olfactory and gustatory obscenity ...but it was still better than hutspot.

Bidding goodbye to my family and returning to the other olfactory and gustatory obscenity, Toronto, I was affronted by headlines about Rob Ford dressing in drag to launch a tirade against cyclists eating the babies of poor harmless Scarborough drivers.  In search of more positive news, I turned to Herb Van Den Drool's blog and was enthralled to learn that the Urban Repair Squad has installed yet more infrastructure to guide and enable the cycling aspirants of Toronto for whom paying-attention-to-what-you're-doing is just too tedious.

Incapable of following basic traffic requirements?
That's OK.  Just go where you think is best.

Billed as another Toronto first, this unique piece of alternative infrastructure joins the pharrow as the second piece of Urban Repair Squad's program to provide alternatives geared to all riding skill levels ('incompetent boob' is a skill level in the Urban Repair Squad's manual) by alleviating Toronto cyclists of the responsibility to ride in any predictable direction.  Instead, the Urban Repair Squad encourages us, if we're incapable of riding sensibly, to go where ever we darn well feel like.

I'm pleased to see that the Urban Repair Squad is attending to the needs of all Toronto cyclists, and not just those of us with some sense and a will to remain alive.  The next time I'm riding downtown, I can look at the boob salmoning toward me in the bike lane and think "Thanks, Urban Repair Squad, for enabling this person to ride a bike."

When two imbecile cyclists collide head-on on this street, I hope I can be there to witness the coming together of misplaced entitlement and progressive infrastructure first hand.  If they're going fast enough, perhaps the world will be a better place afterwards.

Tail Winds: Charting New Courses in the GTA

Well ...no.  I guess not.  A bum squeeze would be a nice though.
Or at least a discreet glance at it.  That's why you're wearing sun glasses, isn't it?

Coiled on my floor in the fetal position and sobbing uncontrollably for four days and nights, I transcended unimaginable levels of consciousness and apprehended the manifold subtleties of Cycledom.  Ascending higher and higher, I achieved unity with Cycledom itself in a dharmic coalescence of Being, joining, then sublimating, then rejoining again in throbbing blissful ecstasy.

Then my phone rang with a recorded message soliciting my support for Rob Ford's mayoral campaign, recaptured below in an artist's rendering:

Braying Ass asks: "Can we count on your support on election day?"

Torn so savagely from Enlightenment, I lost all memory of my ascendant voyage.  In a desperate attempt to regain some sense of what I'd seen, I set out in my bicycle in search of touchstones that would resonate some lost fragment of illumination.  Though I saw manifold instances of abhorrent imbecility, I found no great illumination, until I accidentally happened upon the Kindly Sage with the Clean Shaven Legs.

I doff my dorky cycling cap to you, Kindly Sage with the Clean Shaven Legs, in full kit riding some sort of aerodynamic spaceship shod with Zipp wheels that I passed on the Queens Quay.  I took no pride in passing you because I knew I was only faster because I was the fresher and not delirious with exhaustion from a morning's worth of sprinting.  When waiting for the light, you shoaled not, but stayed behind.  When the light turned green, you politely waited for me to move left around the oblivious janitor sweeping garbage in the bike lane.  And lastly, when my cleat missed the clip down stroke and my foot slipped off the pedal, nearly face-planting me into my bars, you looked on with magnanimity like a young man pretending he can't smell his date's fart, even though the paint has begun to peel from the wall, all in the hope that he'll get laid later on.  Like the young man's date, you let it pass in silence.

You, sir, are a peerless gentleman.  You cycle with serenity, teach by example, and magnify my own errors without uttering a word of condemnation.

The Kindly Sage say, "A tail wind propels only the inferior man; the superior man notices it not."

Speaking of genteel farts, I'm a little surprised to see that Martino Reis hasn't already documented the Urban Repair Squad's latest bike infrastructure protest piece in The Grange:

Phallus sharrow: Pharrow?
(Note judicious appliqué of Celeste; clearly an infrastructure snob.)

Unlike their last piece, this installation requires no hermeneutical key.  It's clearly the next installment of U.R.S.'s attempt to install infrastructure appropriate to all levels of experience, including no experience at all.  The pharrow system is specifically targeted to Torontonians incapable of personal responsibility and awareness of their surroundings.  Rather than paying attention, blasé Toronto cyclists need only to follow U.R.S.'s  directional pharrow, which indicates the suggested route of travel if one wants to ride like a complete cock: haphazardly down the centre of the lane, as fast as possible, taking no responsibility for one's actions nor giving any respect to others on the route, and ideally, whenever possible, straight at any flock of pedestrians and small children also using the path.

Frankly, I'm surprised that the U.R.S. has left so many other areas thoroughly under-serviced by such equal-access infrastructure.  I'm currently recruiting a battery of kindly hobos to assist with the installation of my own protest campaign for equal access:

At the moment, I'm targeting the main cock blocks: pretty much all of the downtown core and every kilometre of recreational path in the GTA.