It Happened

It happened: David got a job. Cue face-melting scenes a la the doddering Nazis at the end of Indiana Jones & The Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Not just got a job, indeed, but started it too! So while last week was all lie-ins (8am), leisurely coffee breaks and half-a-dozen hours of streamed Premier League, this week is all early starts (6am), hastened green tea breaks and half-a-dozen projects on the boil (read: one project, currently).

It is a role, of course, in which trade secrets are par for the course, and I couldn't possibly begin to divulge any of the sensitive information with which I have so far been entrusted. What I can tell you is my job title (Digital Copywriter), place of employment (DAC Group) and current dress code (smart quasi-casual).

So what? Is that it? Is that all I can reveal? At this stage, yes: it's almost 9pm - my new bedtime - and time is of the essence.

But let me tell you something about Canadian commuting: it's no joke. According to the ever-reliable Google Maps, I live a 20-minute highway drive from my office. While I can drive and do have access to a car (a Chevy... Malibu? Does that sound right?), public transport is my only real option; not much of an option, but my only option nonetheless.

• Option A) Walk 20 minutes to the GO Train station; take the 35-minute GO Train journey to Toronto Union Station; take the subway 27 minutes north and then 10 minutes east; walk the remaining five minutes. TOTAL: something like 90 minutes, best case.
• Option 2] Walk 15 minutes to the nearest TTC bus stop; ride the bus a mere 47 minutes and umpteen dozen stops; switch buses and take another bus for something like 20 minutes. TOTAL: probably more than 90 minutes.

Neither arrangement is satisfactory, but I had resigned myself to either one or the other with a projected purchase of a Kindle e-reader, leaving sufficient time for me to read every book ever written within a month or two of beginning my tortuous travails. I was even learning towards the TTC bus, despite assurances from literally everybody I've met that a journey on one is punishment worse than death:

What Torontonians describe when talking TTC buses

Luckily for me, Tony happens to work on the same street, and so had long ago figured out the best way to get to our almost-shared destination: bat your lashes nicely at the man or woman of the house, get a lift to the nearest GO Bus stop (there's a GO Bus?!), ride said bus for half-an-hour and then you're a mere two trains and four stops from your office. Easy as pie, and the GO Bus sounded a dream...

Not pictured: complimentary massage and pep-talk

And so I've started to clock the miles on the glorious GO Bus (it's more of a coach, actually) and have shelved plans to acquire an e-reader (temporarily, I suspect, as our morning chatter is already grinding to a half - especially when, as happened this morning, we have to sit at opposite ends of the bus). It's a commute that's poor on paper but not so soul-destroying in practice: we can pick over the finer points of the Metro newspaper, eavesdrop on combative passengers (you're expected to use a pre-purchased pass, not pay cash) and silently judge passing motorists who are texting, dozing, applying makeup or otherwise being criminally inattentive. The swanky show-offs.

Tracks Of 2012 So Far

As cribbed from the ever-readable (if I don't say so myself) musicOMH Tracks column, a selection of my personal highlights of 2012 to date; a year in which I've scribbled a load of nonsense about music singles but little, as yet, in terms of full albums. To echo the vast majority of my school reports, "Must try harder!"

Of the seven embedded here, Friends and Beach House are particular favourites; their respective LPs for 2012 should be something special when they finally arrive.

WWE: Poetry In Motion

I've a long and chequered past with professional wrestling; a history marked with irregular bouts of obsession, an embarrassing one-off attempt at backyard wrestling (clue: I was the ref) and all too few live events.

I can date my interest back to those heady days in the early 90s when ITV screened both British wrestling and WCW; the former on weekend afternoons, the latter late at night. While Big Daddy passed an agreeable hour or so between A-Team and Air Wolf, I most looked forward to catching up with WCW's meatheads during occasional visit's to my Uncle Les, who would very kindly tape their late-night antics "for the kids" (though I suspect it was as much a treat for him as it was for us). As such, my very earliest pro wrestling memory is of Sting (not the Wallsend warbler) cutting a promo about something or other, and I duly adopted his hairstyle shortly thereafter. Check this guy out!

But such delights were fleeting. I made do through primary school with the odd WWF (as it was then) annual, a pile of trading cards ("The Model" Rick Martel's quote: "Honesty is the best policy!") and tag-team piggy-back fights on lunch breaks. Slim pickings, you might say, but it was enough to stay up to speed; I was the same boy, after all, who had wept for E.T. after reading his story on the back of a Weetabix box. Another year or two would pass before I'd see the actual movie.

So when WWF progressed from redneck mulletry to storylines with genuine edge, I was back in. Want to hear about an octogenarian by the name of Mae West giving birth to a prosthetic hand? You got it. Interested in Stone Cold Steve Austin being sacrificed on a cross, a la Jesus Christ? Right here. Get a kick out of the boss's son being thrown through glass plates by an Olympian? Sorted.

A good friend of mine taped RAW each week (thanks again, James!), conversations in GCSE Maths were littered with spoiler alerts and I even went to a live event when the show rolled into Newcastle's Telewest Arena. Better was to follow: Rebellion 2000 in Sheffield, where we sat a few rows from the front on the TV side for a rare British PPV. In the 11 years that passed between the event and the DVD, we were convinced that we had prominent screen time for the extravaganza's three-hour running time. As it turned out, only one of us got his mug on TV for a blink-and-you-missed-it gurn.

While professional wrestling's appeal has diminished since our last hurrah of a Wrestlemania party a few years back (shortly before Vince McMahon retreated from plotlines), I remain partial to a touch of WWE now and then - I could pick out The Miz in a line-up, describe Zack Ryder's gimmick and name the current US Champion (Italian comic relief Santino Marella) - and last Friday we took in the RAW Tour at Toronto's Ricoh Coliseum. Highlighting superstars included the aforementioned Santino and Miz, R Truth, Chris Jericho, John Cena and Kane. Sadly absent were the likes of Triple H, Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, Sheamus, Hornswoggle and Christian, as well as Big Boss Man, Eddy Guerrero, Chris Benoit, Earthquake, Yokozuna, Crash Holly, Brian Pillman, British Bulldog, Test, Macho Man Randy Savage and Andre The Giant.

Click pics for full size!

Jack Swagger vs. Santino in the opening bout

The Miz squatting; R Truth reeling

Jericho's LED jacket

Wow!

Cena slides into the ring

Kane, now with mask restored

Kane gently shoves Cena into a table

CM Punk extols his love for Toronto! Cheap pop.

VHS Cassettes I Have Known And Loved

When the kids of the Class of 2050 are downloading movies and music directly into their souls, will their parents feel a pang of regret that their offspring never experienced the traditional, tactile process of downloading to a USB stick first and then interfacing it with their frontal lobes? "In my day, we had to make do with a 15 terabyte cortex implant and a 15 gig-per-second access nodule built directly into our eyeballs. You kids don't know you were born." Except they probably would know they were born; it would be freely available to download from their parents' wi-fi enabled memory banks.

Yet we are the lucky ones. We are the ones who recall the simple and short-lived pleasures of the mini-disc; the stylish arrival and departure of the videodisc (thanks, Philips CD-i); the entertainment revolutions of a fuzzy Channel Five picture and, later on, a slightly clearer ITV Digital (née ONdigital) service.

But the king of techstalgia (my clever portmanteau of technology and nostalgia) is the VHS cassette. Whether store-bought or taped off the telly, the gratisfaction (The Strokes' clever portmanteau of gratified and satisfaction) of wielding a bible-sized block of moving plastic parts - a block you knew to contain an all-time great of Hollywood/Pinewood/ITV - can be little replicated in the age of the MP4.

Think about the great downloads of your life. It's not such a hot topic, is it? I can recall getting to grips with the very first incarnation of Napster - and then LimeWire - when all we had was a Pentium PC and a dial-up connection. Soon I would be enjoying the lush pop stylings of Barry White, Bloodhound Gang's Ballad Of Chasey Lain or Blink 182's All The Small Things, but first I would have to connect...



But we're scraping the barrel here: the download has little heritage next to the VHS. Still vivid in my mind are the VHS cassettes I have known and loved, and the more I thought on the subject ("David mused verily upon th' tapes..."), the more forgotten gems came to mind:

• First and foremost, our taped-off-the-telly Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. Remember the scene where Indy drinks the shaman's poison and becomes an unthinking acolyte? Well, I don't, because somebody (me, probably) inadvertently taped over that part with five minutes of Casualty. One second Harrison Ford is desperately trying to resist the bad guy's chanting - "Galimar, shuk-ti-day!" - the next there's a poor old sod crawling for the front door having somehow accidentally stabbed himself with a kitchen knife. As we return to the temple, Indy has Short Round dangling over a ledge. Class.
• Another taped-off-the-telly classic was our Who Framed Roger Rabbit?/Tremors double-bill. This was always the first tape I reached for when I was off school "sick".
• One of my older sisters got Far & Away for a birthday present. I soon snuck away with it to take in the glorious epic of one man's struggle against an unconvincing Irish accent and a sham celebrity marriage. It was as if the Cruiser had peered into the future, snaffled the very best elements of Australia and Gangs Of New York and shoehorned them into a slog of a movie not as good as either. But I loved it.
• Though we never asked for it, Hook was a VHS present from Santa Claus. It had a nifty illustrated cover and the side panels of the box were green. Outstanding.
• Another unrequested gem one Christmas was Home Alone, possibly the single greatest movie of all time.

Thanks to DVR, gone are the days when family members would scream upstairs, seeking permission - or, more accurately, objections - to record one thing over another. "Overboard is on in twenty minutes!! Can I record over... *glances at tape*... Field Of Dreams?!" "It's not Field Of Dreams, it's Romancing The Stone and Jewel Of The Nile... so no!!"

God bless the VCR and all who sailed in her. I pity those who in twenty years' time will have to dredge up trifling anecdotes of Netflix account errors, erroneously-labelled torrent downloads or "that time the Sky+ recorded Eastenders in Spanish" (though, in fairness, that last example does sound pretty hilarious). To approximate the guilty pleasure of taping off the telly, such poor souls can pause their Blu-Ray movies every 20 minutes to take in adverts like this. Timeless.