Joel Plaskett
The latest edition of my Polaris People column is online over at the Polaris Music Prize website.
For this one we collect some of the latest Metric concert reviews, use a Joel Plaskett mention to justify talking about Clayton Park, and check in with Julie Doiron.
To read it, go here.
Filed under Music, The Misadventures Of
Rob Ford in his natural element – butter. I didn’t eat this.
Each year I go down to the Canadian National Exhibition and try out an assortment of the bizarre and gimmicky foods they have there. In 2010 it was stuff like Deep Fried Butter and Taco In A Bag, and in 2011 it was things like Deep Fried Pickle and a hamburger made using Krispy Kreme doughnuts as buns.
Once again, this year yielded some fascinating and gruesome taste sensations — including the worst thing I’ve encounter in the three years of tracking this stuff.
Scroll down to see what I consumed:
The first stop was to the Coke booth to purchase a refillable cup and then partake of the magic flavour fountain pop selector machine they have. Basically, it’s like when you’re a kid and you try mixing a million flavours of pop together all at once. First you pick your drink base (choices seen below), then you’re sent to another screen where you can add flavour shots like vanilla, cherry and peach, then the machine fills your cup with the chosen concoction.
The magic flavour spooger Coke product machine.
This would be our first concoction, Vanilla & Cherry Coke. I was a big fan of the now-disappeared Vanilla Coke so this was a happy return of sorts. Better than normal Coke, but still fountain pop. 6.6/10.
We were going to hit the crazy train early and start with Kimchi fries from Far East Taco, but because the Food Building was just opening they weren’t exactly on their game yet. The Mandoo Beef Dumplings were ready though, so we had those. Solid, simple dumplings, they didn’t suck — because dumplings rarely do — but they weren’t exactly a mouthsterpiece either. 7/10.
From here it was on to the big trendy food booth for this year — Bacon Nation — where everything they serve was wrapped in bacon. I decided to go big with one of the ridiculous signature sandwiches on the menu, the Nutella BBBLT. This sandwich is comprised of back bacon, the L&T, bacon, more bacon, and Nutella, all spread over toast. Or at least it was supposed to…
The Bacon Nation Nutella BBBLT. As a BLT it solidly does its job. 7.5/10.
Unfortunately, what I got was the Bacon Nation No-tella BBBLT. There was no Nutella. So I basically paid $12 for a novelty sandwich that didn’t have the key component of its novelty. This means this sandwich was actually a complete failure. 0/10.
Sarah then ordered a classic grilled cheese from the Mac ‘N’ Cheesery (sic?) with a fried egg in it. I think she liked it. I had some of her chips — Miss Vickie’s regular (5.5/10) and pickle chunk (5.6/10).
By this time we were had pretty much finished our first wave of the Food Building, which we topped off with another round of pop.
Pop round two was Barq’s Vanilla Root Beer. This was a totally acceptable choice, though the vanilla flavour was a little on the subtle side. 6.4./10.
Rasberry Coke. This was not a good idea. 3/10.
This here is the Greek Cheese Pie from one of those independent booths that only lasts one year. It was basically a baked pita with olive oil on it and wee chunks of cheese. Underwhelming, if that’s a word. 5/10
Sesame Zaatar With Cheese Pie. This was Sarah’s. She liked it, but there appeared to be none of the cheese we asked for. I tried it too. I thought it tasted like birdseed. 4.8/10.
Creature From The Black Lagoon, sculpted out of butter.
Vanilla Fudge. Vanilla totally gets a bad rap just because it’s associated with white people. This shiz is tasty. 8.1/10.
M&M Fudge. This is one of Sarah’s favourites. 7.8/10.
Oh My Gosh Fudge. I’m still trying to figure out what this is made of exactly, but I think it’s got marshmallows and caramel in it. Tasty, though. 8/10.
Red Velvet Fudge. I’m still not entirely sold on this whole red velvet food colouring trend, but this was just under the straight vanilla for tastiness. 7.9/10.
Another round of pop. Peach Sprite. This was like licking the bottom of a fruit stand clean. The worst. 2/10.
Beer break! (And frozen margarita break. That was some strong tequila.)
Frozen Margarita and Creemore beer. They’ve got booze in ’em, right? Right. 10/10.
This was a giant Veggie Loaded Potato from Baked ‘n’ Loaded, or Loaded and Baked, or Loaded Potatoface or whatever it was called. It was huge and featured broccoli, green beans, carrots and cheese jammed in the middle of a sea salt crusted baked potato. This was a welcome change from our non-stop sugar consumption and it was alright as far as vegetable slurry goes, too. 7.5/10.
Chocolate Dipped Ice Cream On A Stick With Sprinkles. In theory, this should have been a tasty treat, but the hot chocolate dip make the ice cream melt too quickly and the result was a drippy, deteriorating mess made worse by the chunks of chocolate sprinkle randomly falling to the ground. And being the cheapskate I am, each chunk that fell I was going “That’s 72 cents… That’s 12 cents… That’s 23 cents…” What should have been gold, wasn’t. 6/10.
The Maple Lodge Chocolate Eclair Hot Dog was one of the worst things I have ever eaten. Things did not get off to a good start when the group of college bros in line before me ordered one, got their order and proceeded to conduct an elaborate photo shoot before attempting to eat it — they were doing it as a dare. It didn’t get any better after I ordered and the first thing the server did was hand me a half-dozen napkins. So I got my Eclair and quickly rushed out of the Food Building to near BMO Field where there’d be less people to see me eat this…
Exactly like the title suggests, this is a chocolate eclair with a hot dog in the middle. On their own they’re both fine foodstuff, but the combination of chicken wiener and whipped cream was not a good one. Worse though, was the mess. Falling, dripping globs of cream landed at your feet, soaked through the napkins onto your hands and generally created the tactile sensation that you were being covered in sticky-sweet hot dog water. With Sarah’s help we wolfed this down (she was actually turning away from people walking in the nearby thoroughfare because she didn’t want anyone seeing her attempting to eat this). It was, truly, a heroically awful food experience. 1.1/10.
Additional reading:
Things I ate at the CNE in 2016. Bug Bistro’s Bug Dog and Fran’s Blueberry Milkshake with a slice of real blueberry pie.
Things I ate at the CNE in 2015. Including Frosted Flakes Chicken On A Stick and The S&M Burger.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2014. Including Cocoa Chicken and the Thanksgiving Turkey Waffle.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2013. Including Nutella Jalapeno Poppers and the S’more Dog.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2011. Including the Krispy Kreme Hamburger and Deep Fried Twix.
Things I ate at the C.N.E. in 2010. Including Deep Fried Butter and Taco In A Bag
Filed under Food, Recollections, The Misadventures Of
Over the years, I have managed to engage in at least three combat sports and pillow fight professionally with relatively little incident. The activity that finally did me in was crafting. Or, to be more precise, coming home from craft night after declaring that my craft for the evening would be drinking wine.
I did end up making this collage about drinking and driving, though. The gist of this piece is that if you drink and drive, you go to heaven. Which is filled with tiny Mustangs floating in the clouds.
It was a lovely craft night. I drank questionable wine with far less questionable people. I made wonderful art. A friend of mine gave me an absolutely brilliant old Niagara Falls tourism poster that she found at Goodwill. And so I went home just after midnight, tipsy and in love with the world because I had amazing friends who see cheesy Falls memorabilia and buy it for me because they know how much I love it and friends who agree to join me at craft night so that I can lend them Oz DVDs and friends who let me cut up their old issues of OMNI and make collages out of their car ads.
The Niagara Falls Poster, my trusty companion on this fateful journey.
The closer I got to home, though, the more my unbridled love for the universe was replaced by an unbearable longing for pizza. And when I finally got off at Eglinton Station, I went off in search of the exit that would take me closest to the Pizzaolo. This seemed like a perfectly logical course of action at the time. Going out one of my more common exits and then heading south for half a block seemed so utterly unnecessary.
I went out what I thought was the right door. It was, as it turns out, not the right door at all. It was, in fact, a door that probably shouldn’t have been unlocked at all, seeing as how it led to a chunk of the abandoned post-industrial wasteland that used to be Eglinton’s bus terminal. I walked toward what looked like an exit at one end of my post-apocalyptic prison, but it was fenced off. I tried the other end, but it, too, was fenced off. So I doubled back towards the demon door that had started the whole mess, and that was when I discovered that it had no handles. I was alone and trapped in an semi-abandoned TTC back alley.
I felt like this.
Now, those of you have never had the pleasure of riding with the Toronto Transmit Commission might be asking yourselves “Why on earth would they leave a one-way door to a completely caged-in trap of nothingness and pain and terror unlocked? That’s absurd!” But those of you who have spent any quality time with the world’s most underfunded transit system, a public entity so entirely unloved and ignored by every level of government that it’s practically gone feral are probably saying “Well, that sounds about right.”
Evaluating my surroundings, I quickly constructed a foolproof plan. I called Aaron, told him that I was trapped just south of Eglinton, that I was probably going to have to jump a fence, and that he should come meet me and help me extract my gym bag full of art and my framed Niagara Falls poster from the premises.
With Aaron on his way, I hung up and began to inspect the fence in question. Then, out of nowhere, some dude showed up and told me some cockamamie story about his duty to guard the fence and make sure everything was OK with it.
“I have to take a picture of this fence to prove that it’s fine,” he told me.
“Take your picture,” I said.
“Is everything fine with the fence?” he asked.
“The fence is fine. I just have to climb over it because I’m locked in here. Just take your damn picture and leave me alone,” I replied.
He said OK, and then left without ever having produced a camera of any sort. Weirded out, I decided that I couldn’t possibly wait for Aaron any longer. I would jump the fence and meet him on the other side, triumphant. I had visions of Sherlock elegantly scaling the gate in The Reichenbach Fall dancing through my head.
What was supposed to happen: 1. I am trapped. 2. I successfully scale the fence. 3. I execute a perfectly graceful landing and await Aaron with the pride of a grade A fence jumper.
That’s not what happened.
What actually happened: 1. I was trapped. 2. I scaled the fence with some success. 3. I leapt like a tool and landed entirely on my right ankle. 4. I flopped around like I was dying.
The actual scaling of the fence went off without a hitch, but getting down is always the hard part. Instead of descending slowly, I caught my cardigan on the top of the fence, and then I flung myself off of the damned thing, landing entirely on my right ankle.
What I realized I should have done, as I was flopping around on the floor: Crawl through the giant, Sarah-sized gap between the fence and the pavement.
My right ankle was not impressed. It responded to the latest development in my misadventure by throbbing in immediate and overwhelming pain. I responded by curling up into the fetal position and rolling around on Yonge Street in tears.
I called Aaron and told him that I had probably broken my ankle. Then I went back to rolling around.
We quickly decided that I needed a cab home. But procuring one isn’t particularly easy when you’re rolling around on a sidewalk.
“You need to stand up,” Aaron told me. “If you keep doing that, they’ll think you’re drunk and that you’re going to throw up in their cab.”
Figure One: How Aaron wanted me to wait for the cab.
Figure Two: How I wanted to wait for the cab.
But every time I tried to stand up, everything turned blue and my already strong desire to vomit increased exponentially. So I went back to rolling around on the sidewalk.
Eventually, we managed to hail a cab and I hobbled home. I called my mother, because that’s how grown-ups deal with things. She agreed to drive up and take me to the emergency at Sunnybrook.
By the time she arrived in town, I’d moved past hysterical sobs and reached some sort of delirious brand of bemused giddiness.
“When you decided to have a baby 31 years ago, did you ever imagine that you’d be doing this?” I asked her. “I mean, when you were my age, you had a three year-old. I got drunk at craft night and fell off a fence.”
She assured me that it was fine, and tried to placate me with some story about the time she stepped on a twig when I was three, but somehow that didn’t really work. I moved on to other concerns.
“Why do I always end up at Sunnybrook emergency for the weirdest reasons? The first time was because I fell off a stool at McDonald’s. Then Tara fell on my leg at jiu jitsu. Now I’ve fallen off a fence in the middle of the night.”
Two pleasant and only mildly long visits to Sunnybrook later, we’ve confirmed that nothing’s broken. The swelling, in all of its gargantuan proportions, should go down within the next four or five days. The psychological scars, however, will be around for much longer.
My cardigan
What bothers me most about the whole fiasco, somehow, is the discovery that I’m absolute rubbish at scaling fences. After years of ever so slightly ridiculous physical pursuits and physical training, I flopped off a fence like a drunk toddler attempting the world’s worst parkour demonstration. Far from my visions of flinging myself over the fence with the catlike grace of Sherlock Holmes, I now find myself at the opposite end of the Cumberbatchian physical acting spectrum, moving around like The Creature finding his footing at the beginning of Frankenstein.
My ankle
And Pizzaolo wasn’t even open when I had my great fall. Not that I could have stomached it in the aftermath, anyway.
My soul
Filed under Art, Recollections, The Misadventures Of
Step 1: Separate the Skittles
A while back, the Risky Fuel household hosted a bit of a party for Sarah’s birthday. Two of the centerpieces of said party were an endless supply of 30 Rock Cheesy Blasters (we dramatically improved on the recipe from our first attempt and will write about that at some other time) and the creation of the very exciting liquor combinations Skittles vodka and Skittles rum.
Here’s what went down:
First, we needed the ingredients and the tools, so we got:
* 2 big bags of Skittles
* 3 500ml bottles of water
* 1 bottle of 375ml Bacardi Superior rum
* 2 bottles of 375ml Absolut vodka
* a box of coffee filters
* a funnel
NOTE: You need to start all this a day before the day you intend to drink these fancy boozes.
Step #1: Separate The Skittles
This job was pretty simple. There are five flavours of Skittles — lime, lemon, strawberry, grape and orange — so we just separated the various candies into their appropriate bowls. What was harder, though, was figuring out which flavours of booze we were going to make. We had two vodka bottles and one rum, which meant two Skittle flavours wouldn’t make the cut.
We figured strawberry would got with the rum because, well, strawberry daiquiris. Lime sucks, so that was easy to cut. So it was down to grape, lemon and orange for the two vodka bottles. We decided to go with grape and lemon because orange just doesn’t go well with stuff. Like chocolate. Those chocolate orange thingees are only exciting to lowers on the evolutionary ladder.
Anyway, we now had our flavours:
* Lemon Skittles vodka
* Grape Skittles vodka
* Strawberry Skittles rum
Step #2: Skittle-fying The Alcohol
First, you drink the water from the water bottles. Then you take your Skittles and put all the lemon in one bottle, all the grape in the second, and all the strawberry in the third. Then you go have a pee break because you just drank three bottles of water. When you come back from peeing you grab your funnel (because it mess-proofs things) and funnel the corresponding booze into the appropriate water bottle.
Then you let your water bottles full of booze and Skittles sit for a day to allow the alcohol to dissolve the candies. They should look something like this if you arrange them neatly for photo taking purposes:
Lemon Skittle Vodka Bottled
Grape Skittle Vodka bottled
Strawberry Skittle Rum bottled
Step #3: Filtering The Skittle-fied Booze Back Into Original Bottles
So the next day while you’re casually cleaning the house for your party it’s time to set up the funnel, with a coffee filter in it, to pour the Skittle-infused from the water bottles back into the original bottles.
We were forewarned this was a snag area — the whole reason why you need to coffee filter things is because the candy doesn’t entirely dissolve — and sure enough, it was a problem. And the specific problem in our case was that the coffee filters made the actual filtering process go reaaaaallllly slowly.
Lemon Skittle vodka in the early filtering stages
As in agonizing drip, drip drip-type slow. Poking the funnel or tugging at the edges of the filter would temporarily increase flow, but ultimately continuing to do that would cause structural collapse of the filter and the entire contents just ended up pouring straight into the bottles.
We never figured out a better filtering solution so our Skittle booze was filled with candy floaties.
Step #4: Drink It
We were a little bummed about the filtering, but people eat tequila worms and drink Goldschlager, right? So it was, like, whatever and we had our party.
As it turns out, people were actually a little bit scared of rum and vodka infused with Skittles. We managed to finish off the grape vodka by doing shots, but the strawberry rum and lemon vodka are still kicking around our place. As shots the various flavours came across a little harsh — like an angry variety of cough syrup that won’t make you appreciate Houston hip-hop if you drink it. And we’ve yet to experiment with the remaining boozes in mixed drinks.
Booze-periment end result
Conclusion: Unless we come up with a eureka mixed drink combo for our remaining booze and a brainwave on how to filter out the candy pieces more quickly and easily it’s probably going to be a long time until we combine Skittles with alcohol again.
Filed under Food, Recollections, The Misadventures Of
As a teenager, I was completely consumed by the equally twisted and touching love story between inmates Tobias Beecher and Chris Keller on HBO’s groundbreaking prison drama, Oz. Romeo and Juliet were just stupid teenagers. Antony and Cleopatra, comparatively, lacked drama and sacrifice. Lancelot and Guinevere weren’t nearly star-crossed enough.
But Beecher and Keller? They had everything. Love, jealousy, passion, agony, angst, beauty, terror, and arm bars. They were complex and almost as perfect for each other as they were toxic for each other.
Since the end of Oz in 2003, there’s been something missing in my life. As Augustus Hill, the de facto narrator of the show once said, “The worst stab wound is the one to the heart. Sure, most people survive it, but the heart is never quite the same.” I survived the end of the show and the end of Beecher and Keller’s story, but my heart has never been the same. There’s been an emptiness there that no other pairing can fill.
At least, there was an emptiness until my friend and slash-pusher, S, convinced me to watch Sherlock. Now, many people have been trying to get me to watch the BBC’s modern day take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic character since the show debuted in the summer of 2010, and I had every intention of getting around to it eventually. But everyone else who was telling me to watch it was using words like “clever,” “brilliant,” and “fun.” S said used a word that magically transformed Sherlock from potential future viewing to immediate, must-see TV: homoerotic.
That was all it took. Within the next week and change, I had watched all six of the show’s 90 minute episodes. It’s every bit as wonderful and brilliantly written and expertly acted as everyone told me. And yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch (who is, in fact, a real human being and not one of Salad Finger’s puppets) is as oddly dreamy as Sherlock some suggested. But, most importantly to my stunted and scarred heart, it offered a story that could potentially fill my void.
Dr. Watson and Sherlock just might be the new Beecher and Keller. Don’t believe me? I have assembled the following proof with my Sherlockian pop culture skills:
It all starts with a tortured blond man who has been through a traumatic experience.
Dr. John Watson served in Afghanistan.
Beecher was Schillinger's prag.
Their trauma has left them visibly altered.
Watson has a psychosomatic limp.
Beecher has a swastika tattooed on his ass.
Then a tall, dark sociopath walks into their lives.
Sherlock Holmes, the dreamy and brilliant crime solver.
Chris Keller, dreamy and cunning crime-causer.
The troubled blonds start to overcome their issues.
Watson loses his limp and runs around with Sherlock.
Beecher shits on Schillinger's face.
The blonds and sociopaths fall in love.
According to subtext and fandom, at least.
According to cannon. And a healthy fandom that continues to this day. Not that I'd know anything about that.
The tall, dark sociopaths engage in varying degrees of nakedness.
On the BBC, fangirls got to see Benedict Cumberbatch in a sheet.
Meanwhile on HBO, Meloni's wang got so much screentime that it deserved separate billing.
In times of trouble, the pairs find themselves on different sides iron bars.
While they were handcuffed together!
Well, sometimes you don't need handcuffs.
And, finally… (SPOILER ALERT for Oz season six and The Reichenbach Fall) Continue reading
Filed under Relationships, Television, The Misadventures Of
I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder: A Memoir
Risky Fuel 