Photo: Meta-Sightseeing

There isn't a major city in North America, I think, that doesn't have them--sightseeing buses, that is. They differ from place to place, of course, from the amphibious Ducks in Seattle to the open-topped double-deckers and repurposed London Routemasters of Toronto and Vancouver, but go down a main street on any given day and you'll be as likely as not to find one of them rambling along, creaking with tourists snapping photos of the city as it goes by.

Personally, I've never been interested in "tourist experiences" like these--when I'm off in another city, I prefer to do things that don't scream "hey everyone, I am a stranger to these here parts." I do, however, make it a point to take photos of these tour buses as they go by. I mean, I'd probably show up in a bunch of their pictures anyway. I'm only returning the favor.

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Photo: Eglinton and the Ripples

It's easy to forget about the effect that air has on photography. When you look out at the horizon, you don't see anything more than small, partially-distinct objects in the distance because the human eye isn't that good at resolving close detail at very long ranges. With a camera's zoom lens, though, it all becomes clear. I took this photo looking east along Eglinton just past Victoria Park, with my camera's maximum zoom--while the foreground looks essentially ordinary, bu the time you get to the intersection, the air's interference makes it look more like a painting.

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Photo: Autos, Autos Everywhere

The best way to get to the Air Canada Centre, if for some reason you're heading down there, is rather straightforward: the train. The place is literally next door to Union Station, with Lakeshore GO trains now rumbling in and out of there every thirty minutes, and Union subway station only steps north of it. Nevertheless, whenever there's a big event, automobiles always try their luck in their hundreds, turning the bit of Bremner past York into little more than a parking lot decorated with maple leaves. I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, when One Direction was having a concert at the ACC; tonight and tomorrow that stage is going to be occupied by Justin Bieber, so I imagine it will look like this, except more so.

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Photo: Free Stress Relief

I came across this taped-up bill offering free stress relief on a glass-walled enclosure next to Union Station a little while back. For those who don't recognize, the face at the bottom appears to be a caricatured version of hizzoner Rob Ford, and a good deal of them have already been ripped off... though I'm not sure how it's supposed to be particularly relieving of stress. I mean, I suppose you could tear it into little shreds or wad it up into a ball, but... that doesn't seem particularly cathartic to me.

I guess we all have our methods of stress relief.

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Photo: I Don't Think They're Coming Back for It

There are a lot of bicycles in Kensington Market. Unsurprising, really--that's just how Kensington Market is, the same way there are a lot of cars in Scarborough. I have to wonder, though, if some of them aren't left as statements running parallel to displays like the Community Vehicular Restoration Project. Some of the bikes I found locked up against fences and signposts have been there long enough for the local vegetation to grow around and through them, the leafy answer to a tree growing around a chain-link fence. So either someone's been planting kudzu along Augusta Avenue, or whoever belongs to that bike isn't getting much use out of it, the way it seems to me.

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Photo: Where the Lowest Price Was the Law

When Target swept into Canada like a big, red wave made of bullseyes, it didn't enter an unoccupied niche. It swept up here because it was able to displace Zellers, a similar department store which was a fixture of my younger days but wasn't able to keep up with the modern world. Most Zellers locations were replaced with Targets, and the replacement has been so thorough that in most places you wouldn't even know that it had ever been otherwise.

Not everywhere, though. The West End Mall in Pembroke, Ontario was anchored by a Zellers--until March of this year, at least, after which it became anchored by an empty box with a vague impression of its name left behind. With the slow but implacable march north of chains like Target, Bed, Bath & Beyond and Marshalls, there's not nearly as much room left for something that called itself "truly Canadian," I suppose.

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Photo: East York Sunset

I took this shot of the setting sun from my apartment last month, looking northwest across East York, when conditions were such that opening a window wasn't like opening a furnace. I like the way it worked out here, not only with the clouds and the buildings half in shadow, but from the silhouettes of the plane and helicopter that just happened to be passing by. I didn't even notice them at the time.

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What Lies Beneath Pacific Rim

So: Pacific Rim. If you haven't seen it--see it. It is a movie that promises giant robots punching giant monsters, and by God it delivers giant robots punching giant monsters. I can't remember the last time I walked into a film that was so cathartic, so full of in-your-face spectacle. It makes me pine, in fact, for a world in which our most pressing problems can be solved by punching things. Well, I suppose we do live in such a world, but there is always the problem of being charged with assault immediately thereafter. So it's not a particularly practicable method of problem solving.

For a summer movie built around giant robots punching things, though, Pacific Rim has surprising thematic depth. The main themes running through the film are family, unity, and coming together--witness the nature of the jaeger pilot teams, the manner in which the jaegers' mission is fulfilled, and the things that are necessary in order to do that. Behind those, though, there's a pretty strong environmental message--really, the kaiju are a pretty blunt metaphor for climate change.

Consider it: powerful forces erupt from out of sight, emerge onto land and devastate cities. The countries of the world cooperate at first and take active measures--the jaegers--to beat back the threat, but as the tide begins to turn, the sense of unified resolve splinters and the leaders choose instead to build giant walls to protect the land from the threat of the ocean; walls that may or may not be finished in time, and which may or may not actually protect the millions of ordinary people on the coasts immediately behind them, while the rich and powerful flee to "safe zones" inland. Remind you of any projections? The kaiju themselves are almost as forces of nature within the movie itself; consider that a powerful kaiju is a Category 4, the same way we categorize a devastating hurricane, and the opening narration explicitly draws that comparison ("in a jaeger, you can fight the hurricane").

That's why I have such a problem with part of the film's climax. If you've seen it, you may already know what I mean. If you haven't, wait until you've seen it to read the rest of this, unless you don't care about knowing what's to come.

Here's a good spoiler break--created by the Jaeger Designer.

So, it's the end of the movie, and Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka are marching across the bottom of the ocean to deliver a nuclear weapon to the Breach, the dimensional portal through which the kaiju are invading Earth, and thereby seal it. Things go wrong, because of course they do, this is a movie for hell's sake. The weapon is unusable, and the hero pilot of Gipsy Danger must seal the Breach by self-destructing the jaeger's own nuclear reactor.

Oyyy. To put it simply: NUCLEAR REACTORS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. You can't turn a nuclear reactor into a nuclear bomb any more than you can turn a 1989 Geo Metro into a fuel-air explosive.

This is a regrettably widespread misapprehension, because some goddamn writers don't make an effort to actually understand how things work--but, hey, I get you. You might be saying, "in a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters, you're getting angry over something like this?" Yes, I am. Things like kaiju and jaegers are impossible; you're not going to have 300-foot monsters in reality, and the idea of building 300-foot battle robots with modern technology is purely ridiculous. I can, however, suspend my disbelief on that point--jaegers and kaiju are the very core of the movie. Since they do not, and cannot, really exist I can forgive a lot of spectacle about their capabilities.

Nuclear reactors, however, do exist, and it is not very hard to treat them accurately. Pacific Rim is already asking a hell of a lot from me to suspend disbelief over jaegers, kaiju, a giant wall built around the entire Pacific Ocean... asking enough, really. It does not get a free pass on mischaracterizing something that actually exists.

There's more to it than that, though--a rather pernicious "more," the way I see it. It's the illusion-of-truth effect; people are more willing to believe something they've encountered before. Now, Pacific Rim isn't making any kind of statement here--the reason the whole "nuclear meltdown self-destruct" thing was used was because it's a simple kludge for the writer and it's direct. The problem, however, is that it generates another little data point fluttering around and waiting to attach to something. It's another piece of "something that I heard somewhere" that nuclear reactors explode.

The kicker is that the way I see it, this runs at cross-purposes with Pacific Rim's environmental themes. What was true in the 1970s is true in the 2010s; when it comes to electrical generation, for most of the world there are only three choices: nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Not everyone has geothermal vents of dammable waterfalls, after all, and while renewables are admirable targets to shoot for, they're still far away from being able to support the brunt of demand themselves. While natural gas has a comparatively low CO2 emission rate, the fracking necessary to get it is causing earthquakes hither and yon, and the pollution from coal-burning plants kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year when everything is working normally.

But you don't see Greenpeace standing in front of the bulldozers that the Germans are using to build those dozen new coal plants that are replacing all of its nuclear plants, because it doesn't fit with the common environmental ideology that nuclear is the worst of all things. No, you just see well-meaning movies that unintentionally shore up the foundation that makes that kind of ideology possible.

Nevertheless: Pacific Rim is fucking awesome. Go see it.

Photo: No Parking, the Kaiju Says

You'd think it would be difficult to miss--a colorful mural splahsed over the side of a building on Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, centered around a hachimaki-rocking kaiju breathing not only fire but an admonition against parking. You'd think, but people are nothing if not oblivious, assuming they care at all. Whoever was driving that black Mini didn't, after all.

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Quaff Review #28: Shawinigan Handshake

I know it's been a while since I put up one of these, and I don't even have any excuse like "I was running for Mayor of Toronto again." I mean, it's not like I haven't been drinking. Hell, there was a time in the not-so-distant past where I needed to drink, regularly. But that's behind me, for now, and what's ahead is another smooth review. For the first shot in 2013, I present to you a beer that's only recently appeared on the Ontario scene, Shawinigan Handshake from Le Trou du Diable ("The Devil's Hole"), a microwbrewery in Shawinigan, Quebec.

Some may think that "Shawinigan Handshake" is a strange name for a beer, particularly if you're not well-versed in Canadian politics. For that, let me take you back to those grand old days of the 1990s--specifically February 15, 1996. On that day, Prime Minister Jean Chretien found himself confronted by a group of anti-poverty activists, and reacted as anyone would expect Jean Chretien to act. That is, he grabbed one of them, Bill Clennett, with a chokehold and broke one of his teeth. Perhaps not the sort of thing you'd expect just any politician to do--I mean, you'd think they would have people to choke protesters for them, so they don't have to get their hands dirty--but hardly out of character for Chretien. I mean, just look at the soapstone thing. Appropriately enough, the bottle's label depicts a highly-caricatured version of Chretien executing the famous chokehold on the Devil, and you can't say he doesn't deserve it, either.

Now, though, for the beer.

Shawinigan Handshake describes itself as a "pugnacious strong ale," but this didn't tell me much--hell, I bought it because of the name and the political undertones. What it means is that it's a rather hoppy pale ale, though not verging on the extreme bitterness of IPAs I've had in the past. I found bitter notes present, though not particularly strong, in the taste from the start, but as I progressed through the stein (which wasn't able to hold the entire bottle at once--a first) I found that there was a definite hoppy taste building up on my tongue, and the more I drank the stronger the bitter taste came to the forefront. This beer wastes no time in wrapping itself around your throat.

The beer itself is bright with a thick head, but I have to take issue with the label's description--the beer claims to have "notes of bread, banana, and spruce," but aside from a vague scent of spices just after I poured, I didn't detect any of this. Perhaps it's time to replace my tongue with some sort of super-capable bionic tongue, able to pick up and magnify the slightest tastes... but I can imagine how that could quickly go awry.

Nevertheless, Shawinigan Handshake is a firm hitter. At 6.5% alc./vol., and especially with me not having eaten very much at that point in the day, the one bottle left me spinning for a while afterward. Personally, I wouldn't recommend having it alone; particularly with the bitterness, this is a beer that's best paired with food. Considering its brewpub origins, that's hardly a surprise. Available in 600 mL bottles, you can find it at the LCBO for $6.05 per.

It sort of makes me wonder how Harper will be commemorated in beer form. Tar Sands Stout, perhaps?

ANDREW'S RATING: 4/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #27: Red Racer Pumpkin Ale
• #26: Betty Stogs
• #25: Polygamy Porter
• #24: Voodoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Ale
• #23: Secession Cascadian Dark Ale
• #22: Asahi Black
• #21: Howe Sound Rail Ale
• #20: Olympia
• #19: Eel River Açaí Berry Wheat Ale
• #18: Bah Humbug
• #17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer
• #16: Mana Energy Potion
• #15: HE'BREW Messiah Bold
• #14: Mackinac Pale Ale
• #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40
• #12: Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale
• #11: La Loubécoise
• #10: Summer Honey Seasonal Ale
• #9: Earthquake High Gravity Lager
• #8: Route des épices
• #7: Sparks Plus
• #6: Hurricane High Gravity Lager
• #5: L'Indépendante
• #4: Antigravity Light Ale
• #3: Nektar
• #2: Innis & Gunn Original
• #1: Abbey Belgian Spiced Ale

Photo: Through the Spokes

Hey, I'm the one who took this photograph, and even then I needed a moment to figure out just what the hell it is. What it is is a simple shot through the wheels of the many, many Bixi bikes parked at the station at Front and Yonge in front of the Dominion Public Building, just waiting for people to ride them away to wherever.

Perhaps it would've been cooler if I hadn't explained it at all, though. I suppose I'll never know.

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Photo: Boat on a Stick

Forestry was a critically important industry in Canada's early days, and the situation in the Ottawa Valley was no exception. Ottawa itself started out as a lumber town, and today the trees stand thick and green along the river. In Pembroke, they've paid homage to this time by putting a boat on display at the town's waterfront--specifically a Cockburn pointer boat, the sort used by lumber crews along Canadian rivers from the mid-19th century all the way up into the 1960s.

This one, however, is made of steel. Because it's a replica, you see.

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The Air Canada Centre, the Power, and the Glory

Things are not yet all right in Toronto. Though recovery is proceeding apace, getting more rain in an hour than in a typical July brings down a strain on the systems that many of them just weren't built for. As I understand there are still spots in the west end that haven't had electricity since before the rain started falling, and while the policy of rolling blackouts that Toronto Hydro instituted yesterday may have spared the city from a further collapse of its electrical grid, the simple fact is that in parts it really is "hanging by a thread," as has been said. Mayor Ford was right when he asked the people of Toronto to cut back their power consumption--the less juice is being sucked up, after all, the less strain there is on the transmission system and the less chance that something new will break before the flooded transmission stations in Etobicoke get returned to service.

It seems that no one told this to the management of the Air Canada Centre... or, more realistically, they just didn't give a damn. Last night at 7 o'clock, when the rolling blackouts were flickering their way through west Toronto, the twelve-meter big-screen that overlooks Bremner Boulevard was lit up as if power was free. A big-screen that probably consumes more electricity than entire houses. A big-screen that shows nothing but an endless loop of commercials. God forbid the people milling around waiting for the One Direction concert be unable to learn about the price of pitchers at the Real Sports Bar & Grill or watch the same goddamn car commercials over and over.

Oh, thank god! If I couldn't watch silent car commercials on a television bigger than my apartment, I would just die.

I was here in Toronto for the 2003 blackout as well. I remember the entire city being dark, I remember the electricity coming back only gradually, the next day, with the TTC still shut down so as not to tax the grid, and I remember the pictures and video of City Hall with practically every light in both towers burning. As I recall, the municipal government took some flak for that. While yesterday's power situation was far less grave, that doesn't mean that the ACC should get off easy. Turning off their exterior screen is quite literally the least they could have done to help conserve power--but, hell, this is a screen that keeps flickering well after the sun has set, just on the off chance that anyone wandering around Maple Leaf Square may never have known there is a thing called Kraft Dinner which they could buy.

I know that this one screen is just a drop in the bucket--and while it's an exceptionally large drop, the bucket isn't too small itself. For hell's sake, though... the ACC didn't even bother to put up the appearance of power conservation, and for fundamentally worthless shit at that. What am I supposed to think here?

Glacial Lake Iroquois is Coming Home

Looking out from my windows, it seems as if the worst of it is over--but then, if nothing else, the past twenty-four hours have been instructive as to how quickly the situation can flip from "ordinary" to "the worst of it." I was out and about in downtown Toronto yesterday, taking advantage of a day off after flitting away to the Ottawa Valley, and though the typical July heat and humidity hung low in the air there wasn't anything unusual about it. Later on, not even the unusual darkness at 5 PM elicited much commentary from me aside from "man, it's dark," because I am a writer that is capable of noticing the subtlest of things.

When I finally noticed the rain coming down, well--I had to stand for a while and watch it. It's not the first time I've seen that sort of view from here, seen the skyscrapers of North York and Thorncliffe Park hidden from view behind a veil of precipitation... but those times were all in winter, during major blizzards. Yesterday the rain was coming down in sheets so fast and so thick that it practically hid my next-door neighbors behind raging walls of water.

Like this, but with water instead of smog, and turned up to eleven.

While it was coming down, I couldn't help but think back to those projections which suggest that come the 2040s, this sort of rain activity may well become de rigeur for Toronto. I'd hope that all this rain will be something of a wake-up call, something that will give our leaders the kicks they need to start preparing for future contingencies, the same way that Hurricane Hazel--which, incidentally, yesterday's storm defeated in terms of sheer rainfall--kicked the city into ending residential development in the ravines.

There were houses washed away in 1954, but not in 2013. We've shown that we can learn from the past, to some degree--now's the time to pay close attention to our latest lesson.