Friday, May 29, 2009

Joy division art show.

This kinda irks me.

Unless you have pictures of Ian Curtis or something couldn't you find another name?

In other news I'm starting a clothing company called "How soon is now"

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Reality check

Just when I think this city might be kind of a cool place I see a local magazine with a cover like this and realize I might live in the most uncool city known to man.

Seriously sometimes this city makes me want to smoke cigarettes and get drunk in the middle of the day.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

I just went there

This city has decided to flick it’s fun switch. Like the rest of Canada, Vancouver is a completely different place when the weather gets nice. Another cool thing is, well, the wicked nature, which I’m admittedly a bit of a dork about.

With all that being said people here can still be a bit weird. I think I’ve revealed enough on here about how great the place is to gripe a bit now. For one, no matter what people say about the west coast this city is not full of relaxed, happy-go-lucky people. Far from it. Because everyone here is so athletic and beautiful they take themselves a little too seriously. There’s a reason you never see handsome comedians. If only they spent half as much time working on their fart jokes as they do on their beach bodies. I get it dude, you got a sweet six pack, but could you please stop recycling jokes from “How I met your mother”?

As an extension of that a lot of dudes here take the city too seriously. Say anything bad about Vancouver and it’s like you just took a dump on their first born.

This city is like one giant teenager, and in a way the metaphor makes sense:

1. Until recently it wasn’t really a big city. It’s almost like it’s going through it’s puberty from town to big city.
2. It takes itself too seriously, which is exactly like every teenager.
3. It really cares about being seen as cool, not as much about actually being cool. Which is basically what high school was all about. Seriously you see 40 year olds here dressed like teenage skaters, but at the same time it’s really hard to find a bar open late with cheap pints and a decent jukebox. Priorities people, priorities.

Hopefully this cities awkward, self-conscious phase ends soon and we can move on to the party animal university phase, the indy hipster phase and eventually the quarter life crisis phase.

Okay, now back to the fun, photo stuff.

Recently I’ve been trying to get out, hang out, do outdoors stuff like most of the world except for maybe Goths. Been a few places lately, thought I’d show off and include some photos and quick descriptions.

The Capilano river is right on the North Shore of Vancouver. It’s a super rugged river but super close to the city, what makes it so wicked is that since it’s still a super mountainy, cliffy river it can feel quite remote despite just being 10 minutes from down town. Lately I’ve been up there quite a bit scaling down the cliffs to the river to find nice quiet fishing spots. Was up there on Friday where me and my buddy Joel found a spot with smaller minnow sized salmon jumping all over the place, we had a feeling there were bigger ones forcing them to try and get away. Despite having fish following our spoon all the way to the surface, staring back at us, we couldn’t convince any of them to bite. Next time we’re bringing worms.

Recently went to Whistler with Christy and my buddy John. The funny thing about Whistler is how fake of a town it is. It gives Disneyland a run for it’s money. The whole place is so polished it feels like your visiting a theme park called “extreme town” or something. I guess the super rich chubby kids need to have a place to call there own where they can get decked out in mountain biking gear without being beat up by the kids who actually do mountain bike.

One other weird thing we saw was a mountain unicycler. In hindsight I can't believe i didn't take a picture but seriously the kid was like 16, old enough to know better. Seriously if my son came home one day and was like "Dad I think I'm a transexual martian" I'd be like, cool, we'll figure it out. but if my son came home with a unicycle I don't think I could ever forgive him.

We grabbed a few beers and nachos on a patio right near the base of one of the mountains. What was cool was that there were tons of people mountain biking down the mountain. They’d take the ski lifts up and bike down. We sat beside a couple of trophy wives doing a good job of neglecting their fighting kids while drinking wine and talking about plastic surgery. I wish I was making that last sentence up. Welcome to Whistler I guess.

After Whistler we headed up to near Pemberton to the Green River and a cool waterfall. Once you drive past Whistler the drive has a real intimidating feel to it, in kind of a cool exciting way. It’s like the Mordor of BC. The mountains start to look more intimidating, the road starts to snake more and it just generally looks a lot more untouched. You also see the odd orc or dragon too. The river had a pretty rad camping spot attached and was generally just a cool place to hang out and check out nature.

Me and Christy also did a day trip up to Squamish and a few surrounding waterfalls and lakes. Once again cool stuff to check out. I forgot to bring my rod this time but I went one spot where people were catching Rainbow trout. Blah blah blah nature nature nature.

So there we go. Blog entry done. One less thing to feel anxious about all week. Hope everyone isn’t still coping with the fear from drinking too much this weekend. Peace out.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Where my dawgs at? Daniel Bruyn edition

Continuing with the "Where my dawgs at?" interviews I've moved on to another Toronto resident. The interviews will become more regionally diverse soon, but in the meantime enjoy this one.

Dan Bruyn is my bro, I've known him since I was almost 2 years old. One of my first memories of him was when I was 4 and he was 2 and he beat me in a race on our big wheels, it's a harsh reality when your bro half your age proves he has more balls than you. Regardless I don't think there's another dude like him in the entire world.



1.Who are you?


I’m Daniel Anthony Bruyn – your brother.


2. Where you live? (city/neighborhood)


Toronto, ON. Little Poland – Roncesvalles. just down the road from High park.


3. What you up to?


I’m in sales. I sell software and hardware. Good environment – mostly smart, young people I work with – pretty high tech office too.
Were like a little gang , we drink beers after work a lot, then fight rival gangs. I think I have to stop after-work beers now that the suns coming out because I might want to take my shirt off.


4. What's something cool about where you live?


I spent an afternoon wandering roncesvalles, here's a few.

I’m pretty happy to be in such a mellow neighborhood that hasn’t been invaded by money or hipsters. Just an old fashioned kind of area. Kids play hockey on my street, people smile and sometime make dumb-cute jokes like ‘don’t go having a heart attack on me’ when your shoveling your sidewalk. There’s fresh fruit and veggies every corner for a fraction of Sobeys or metro (and far fresher) . I’m down with the polish – the food options are great:

I wanted kielbasa, so where better than ‘super kolbasa’? success. I wanted weird candy that I wouldn’t know how to eat – done.
I want baked goods fit for the pope. So I went where the pope got his baked goods when he came to town. Seriously – when Pope John Paul came to town in 2002 Granowska’s had the honor of making his bread. Look how pumped they were, the one girl is just adoring it. Kinda creepy, but I was sold. Twice.

There’s a good sushi place too but the chef is weird.


5. What is something you're excited about right now?


Summer: soccer league starting. Learning how to skate again. BBQing on my balcony. Making money and paying off debt. Drinking patio beer and getting fatter.


6. Anything else?


I’m going to start a blog soon.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Where my dawgs at? Matt Unsworth edition.

Okay so given I probably know everyone by name who reads this thing and it's basically a way for me to stay in touch with people I thought I'd extend it to my friends as well. Basically this will be a reoccuring article that'll be a quick interview with one of my friends so I don't have to have those lame conversations the next time I see them. Also, because everyone lives in different places right now I gave it a bit of a geographical slant. So yeah, if you read this, there's a good chance I'll probably email you soon asking you to answer some questions. Without further ado, here's the first one.

I've known Matt Unsworth since I was about 11. When we first met I made fun of him for wearing a crash test dummies button to school thinking it was cool. Basically since that point our friendship has essentially been based on making fun of the other one whenever they think they're doing something remotely cool. He also runs a pretty hilarious blog which you can check out here

Also note he is literally the worst speller I know. I've left all his grammatical errors as is in the interview. enjoy!


This is what Matt looks like eating breakfast.









This is what Matt looks like the rest of the time.





1. Who are you?


Matthew Alexander Unsworth


2. Where you live?

Toronto


3. What you up to?


A lot of TV shows on Itunes, did you know you can buy a show for 2 bucks? That combined with microwaved triscut nachos, I couldn't imagine a better way to spend ones time. I do work, but a lot of that time is spent in hotels of weird places that I don't know anybody, nor are they the types of places you'd see on WIld On, like Abu Dhabi. So that's why I spend a lot of time in hotel beds watching laptop tv and eating junk food.


When I am at home I spend most of the time putting my life back together after longs trips, that's almost a part time job, laundry, cleaning the apartment, email catch ups. It usually takes about three days for things to get back to normal, by the time its all done I'm usually off again. All the other time I spend writing (I have a blog and just started working for Toronto Life Magazine), hosting a film review podcast, and making movies that no one on the internet seems to want to watch but me. But I'm cool with that.


4. What's something cool about where you live?


Babe Diversity/babeversity, its the best city because there is probably about 4 girls to every guy, and 3 of those 4 are about an 8? You folllow me? It's kind of a shittier version of New York, only two types of people can survive in cities like NYC and TO, good looking people and smart people, which usually makes for a good scene. Like that guy from my wood shop class, Clint, he doesn't live in Toronto.


Getting back to Babeversity, it's great, if you want an Artsy girl, Queen west, Turbo hot/semi retarded girl club district, fun/college girls Humber bars, hippy keningsington, Girls that want to get married after the first date, little italy, desperate girls, sneaky dees 2:00 am


That's what's cool about toronto, the night life and the social scene, outside of that, this place is a steaming pile of dog shit.


5. What is something you're excited about right now?


I installed a HD projector at the end of my bed so it projects movies on to my ceiling so I can them while lying down. I found a way to be even lazier than a couch potato.


That and getting some projects done that have been on the burner forever.


6. Anything else?


I have an Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo ds, and a sitdown pacman machine with every arcade, Nintendo and Sega game on it, and I never play any of them, ever. I don't really like video games, just the idea of them.



Matts ceiling projector:




Matts neglected Ms. Pacman machine:

Monday, May 11, 2009

I have been sadly not updating this thing as much as I probably should. But here's a quick update without pictures for the time being.

The weather lately has been pretty fantastic. Work has also been quite busy. As a result when I'm not working I'm generally outdoors doing stuff, especially hiking and fishing lately. In fact, it's quarter to 6 right now and Christy is coming to pick me up to go to the Capilano river to go fishing tonight. So yeah, get ready for a lot of posts about me fishing again I guess.

Truthfully the purpose of this blog is to keep people up to date with what I'm up to, so if what I'm up to isn't that interesting send me an email or something and I'll talk to you more personally or tell you a fart joke or something. Or you could always come out here. I got some people coming out here for the summer so it should be pretty sweet. Mom is out here in less than a month. Matt and Dan are out here in two.

Still think if you're interested in catching fish, you might want to consider coming out for the pink run. They're expecting 17.5 million returning fish!!!!

more updates, pictures and rants to come. Sorry for the lack of action.