*miserychick is actually happy

Take an Albert Hein’s stroopwafle, spread on some maple-walnut cream cheese and topped with fresh berries. ZOMG.

After Spain won the World Cup with that one magical goal, the Spaniard fans on the streets of Toronto went just a little happy:

photo from BlogTO

This intersection is two major city blocks away from my apartment. According to BlogTO, people were on top of the streetcars for more than an hour.

Notice closely in the photo, that’s TWO streetcars abandoned by the drivers for people to climb up and celebrate their Canadian, I meant, Spanish won. It was a happy day with perfectly happy weather, so I don’t actually have any complaints about the celebration, but it’s amazing how different Toronto streets were just two weeks prior.

I was actually down the street from where the major gathering was, but all along College St. in my neighborhood, all you could see was yellow and red and all you could hear was honking, cheering, oleoleoleole, and of course, the vuvuz. From as soon as the game ended (around 5pm or so?) until at least midnight, because that’s when I went to bed, people cheered on as if they were the players themselves.

Last World Cup in 2006, I was living in Italy and watching the game in my living room from an Internet stream which had a significant lag time (did the same thing this year, but the stream was a bit faster), so by the time I saw that Italy won, Treviso’s streets were already filled with the national flags, horns, cars, people partying and all the rest.  This year, I didn’t expect to witness such celebration, but now I’ve learned that Toronto can totally hold their own in World Cup street celebration – no matter which nation was gonna win.

Having followed the World Cup this year from beginning to end, right in the Toronto neighbourhood where soccer runs deep in the blood of my fellow inhabitants, it was an amazingly fun event.  Not because I’m a big soccer fan nor because I was rooting for any particular team, but there was this collective sense of excitement in the air and it was something that everyone agreed was important – not for work or for money – but just for pure sake of being happy about the game.   And it’s pretty awesome.

photo from Flickr

That intersection in the photo above is my block. Not where we live, but just around the corner from there is our office.

Yesterday (Saturday) a peaceful protest to welcome the world leaders of the G20 summit to Toronto was supposedly hi-jacked by an anarchist group dressed in black who started smashing store windows. And then they proceeded to burn a couple of police cars. For a couple of hours, these “hooligans” using “Black Bloc” (media jargons that’s been hammered into my head) tactics went buck wild in downtown Toronto. Which makes you wonder: where were the police? And why would they let their vehicles unattended? In other areas where there were relatively no violence, the police were busy beating their batons on their shields, trying to control the crowds. Eventually made some random arrests including several journalists on the scene.

Today (Sunday), as the world leaders leave town, the police seem to be kicking into to high gear, arresting people here and there, and the picture above is probably their ultimate show of force.

These websites have a lot of coverage: Torontoist, BlogTO, Spacing… and of course, #G20 on Twitter

They say it was Prime Minister Stephen Harper who wanted to host the G20 summit in downtown Toronto. He wanted to put Toronto on the ‘world stage’ (whatever that means). The city of Toronto then spent $1 billion in taxpayer money to host this one-day meeting of the leaders, mostly to beef up security around the convention centre. One. Billion. Dollars.

Couldn’t you have flown them all to some far islands where the poor protesters can’t get to? It’s not like any of these world leaders and their entourage got to see the city of Toronto. It’s not like they would care where it’s hosted, right?

Anyway, this account from a photo journalist who was held in the make-shift detention centre was a walk down memory lane for me. It seems that there is a standard, inhumane tactic for dealing with protesters, carefully designed to break down any dissent mentality. Then I learned though this link that it’s called the Miami Model.

A popular police tactic is called “kettling.” Officers on bike or horses herd protesters into an enclosed space, so they can’t leave without trying to break through the police line. Take the bait; you provoke a beating or arrest.

Makes my blood boil.

But then again, if this is true, then it appears that the police in Bangkok didn’t know about this Miami Model or kettling tactic. Thai police never made any mass arrests-hell, they still haven’t made any arrests for the arsons or shootings-for all that two month long nasty riot in Bangkok. Had they any idea of how to control a riot (and have the balls to actually do it like their Western counterpart), it might not have gone out of control.

However, there should be no reason for any cop of any country, really, to do this:

Now that I’m back home in Toronto, work gets a little too busy and and life is too familiar to blog about, but today was a special day.

We were sitting in our office: Mark at his desk, me at my desk, David at his and Adam, our new intern member of team Aesthetec, also at his desk. As usual, we all stared at our monitors with fingers clicking away, typing or browsing or whatever. When all the sudden I felt the floor move. Kind of like when you’re in a boat where everything sways, or a trampoline where someone else is jumping and you’re riding along.

I looked up to Mark, who was looking up at me, both of us were getting ready to say “hey, stop that” to each other, but realizing that we weren’t doing it. We turned to look at Adam, he looked at both of us and with hands raised, said, “hey, it’s not me!” We all continued looking at each other, not knowing what to do. Is it the neighbour’s loud music? (but there’s no music!) Is it a big truck going by? (but we don’t hear no truck!) And then after a bit, it stopped.

“What the heck was THAT?!”

Bewildered, we all turned back to our computers and resumed the tasks at hand. Mark wondered if it was an earthquake. And I wondered if this part of the world actually gets earthquake. Then we shrugged.

I finished an email I was writing, then checked my twitter feed five minutes after we’d dismissed it.

Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the Internet soon confirmed that there actually was, an earthquake, being felt all over from Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and even some parts of the U.S. Earthquake is not known to happen around here, but I suppose mother nature always has a couple tricks up her sleeves (or we humans just have short memory).

For archival sake, here’s my Tweetie screen shot from when it happened (taken retroactively):

Might have been a freak of nature, a once in a blue moon occurance kind of thing, but I’m proud to say that I FELT IT.

Finally, I’ve upgraded to the grown-up computer. W00t!

@ Peter’s drive-in, a Calgary landmark. $4.50 milkshake, choose 3
flavors to make your own combo.

I was hungry… Not sure if I am this hungry tho…

having a ‘husband is working on a contract job in Calgary and I’m just
here shopping" kind of day.