Must Try Harder

Two months and one day of radio silence. Not good enough, eh? But plans are afoot to get the brain in gear again and report on the day-to-day adventure that is life in Toronto. For example: this weekend was Doors Open, so we took the opportunity to visit Fort York for free. The interpretive panels explained how the War of 1812 was a glorious victory for outnumbered American forces, whose unique spirit emerged as a guiding light for nations seeking democratic bliss. On closer inspection, said panels appeared to have been donated by the US Navy... It would appear that history is written by the victors, but redrafted by the losers.

Afterwards we took in Doors Open events at the excellent Steam Whistle Brewery, which included free samples (as usual) and a hall full of model railway sets. Like a lazy-yet-intrepid photojournalist, I instagrammed a few shots of the day (exciting, dynamic feed shortly to appear on this page, allowing further lazy updates):

The weekend also saw the hapless Toronto FC pick up their first points of the season after nine consecutive defeats in MLS and become Canadian champions (doesn't take much, seemingly). The Guardian's account follows, as will - hopefully - more frequent updates from me over the course of the summer, starting with Friday night's trip to the Royal Ontario Museum's club night (booze + live music + dinosaur exhibits = ???).

The "worst team in the world" wins a game

The comments on last week's five things were kicked off by a link from one limeyfletch who posted a heartbreaking clip of Danny Koevermans being interviewed in the wake of Toronto FC's 9th consecutive defeat - looking near tears as he described the phenomenon of playing for the "worst team in the world."

This week, the "worst team in the world" not only avoided a record-equalling 10th consecutive defeat, but actually won, courtesy of a goal by one Danny Koevermans, as the game entered its final minutes and Toronto fans were daring to dream heady dreams of their first point. Instead, as Canadian nerves frayed in the 88th minute, Koevermans bundled home an awkward, point-blank goal that was treated with the ticker-tape enthusiasm of a 40 yard cup-winning golazo, by the success-starved Toronto fans, who suddenly found themselves wishing away a few minutes of injury time to take all 3 points.

Actually success-starved is not strictly accurate - Toronto won the Canadian Cup this week, against a stunned Vancouver side who must have looked at the teams' relative fortunes beforehand and thought they were a shoe-in for the cup and the Champions League spot that comes with it.

Toronto's decent cup form has been something of a mystery this season (they made an unlikely run to the CCL semi-finals as well), though those last ten minutes against Philadelphia gave something of a clue. It had been a dire game that most sides would have been happy to consign to the archives - but as it drifted towards its conclusion the feeling was that Toronto were feeling the pressure of the 9 games that preceded this one in league play and half-expecting disaster to strike. Paradoxically, even with more nominally at stake, the one-off nature of cup games has been liberating for them, without the weight of cumulative negative expectation dogging them. Making Koevermans' goal all the sweeter for their fans.

Their opponents yesterday earned the unwanted record of giving Toronto their first league points this season, to put the pressure back on Peter Nowak - this year's All Star Game coach, who now manages a side where he has shipped most of his stars out. On that note, I caught up with his former captain Danny Califf on Wednesday night, playing for his new team Chivas USA. Speaking to a couple of journalists he at first laughed and said he was going nowhere near the question of what had gone wrong with the Union this season, before pointing out that the turnover of players from season to season wasn't helping team chemistry or camaraderie. Asked if in his case this had anything to do with his relationship with the abrasive Nowak, Califf laughed again, before saying wryly "C'mon...We were regular homies..." (before discreetly opting to "leave it right there"). Behind the smiles Califf was clearly hurt by the sudden end of his tenure with a club he felt a deep affinity for. Without him (and LeToux; and Mondragon...) the side Peter Nowak has retained are looking worryingly anonymous. Though for one day at least they are unwilling stars in the game no-one in the league wanted to be part of - the game where Toronto got their first points...GP

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.

PICTURE SPECIAL: Toronto Motor Show

Anybody who knows me knows that I'm mad keen on cars. Really into carburetors and gaskets and whatnot. I'm what Jeremy Clarkson would call a "proper petrolhead... on acid". So it was only fitting that I was present at the 2012 Toronto Motor Show, where ladies look at Minis and men decide which pick-up got the best mileage: the 31mpg Ford F150 or the 49.89kpg Buick Somethingorother.

I must have sat in at least eight different cars, my particular favourites being the most economic and realistic: the Fiat 500, the Mazda3 and the Nissan Leaf. I also happened to notice Toyota launching the IQ under their budget Scion brand, whereupon some weirdo filmed me getting in and out of the back just to "see how it was done". I should have made the bugger delete the footage: there wasn't a release form in sight... All pictures enlarge with a click!

BMW Concept. Glass tube thing is a 3D HUD

A view of the afternoon

Woodpecker: what a refreshing change!

The Triumph side-exhibit: huzzah!

Minimalism: en vogue

Some kind of Acura, possibly?

Asked to take it for a spin but was told: "No professionals"

I said: "I'm not a professional"

Yes, it's an Acura. And these photos aren't in order.

The 2013 Passat CC. Possibly the worst car I've ever seen.

A Dodge Ram (aren't they two different manufacturers?)

Soft top Fiat + Japanese tourists = photo

Whatever this was, you weren't allowed near it

Low-slung Beetle

Just off the top of my head, this is a 2013 Nissan GT-R

And that was that; my vehicular interest taken care of for another year or so. The rest of the day involved a five-dollar footlong, a gormless hour or so in front of UFC and a hair-raising drive (i.e. me behind the wheel) to the closest bar with a pool table - the exotically-named and African-themed Safari! Sadly, there are no photographs. To tide you over, here's the ad for the aforementioned footlong: an ad that, thanks to its extraordinary key change, has been stuck in my head since I got here (it's a sort of half-step to a minor chord, you see, which is not what you expect of a jingle). Enjoy!

Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Twin towns and sister cities are two of many terms used to describe the cooperative agreements between towns, cities, and even counties in geographically and politically distinct areas to promote cultural and commercial ties. Obviously. Everybody know that.

Thanks to the gorgeous Coast Road sign next to the Wills Building railway bridge, I know off by heart that North Tyneside's twins include Halluin, Monchengladbach, some place in Denmark, another place in Senegal, and a few other places too. Newcastle's seven twins include Newcastle, Australia (imaginative) and Atlanta, Georgia, while Toronto's city siblings include Milan, Kiev, Frankfurt, Warsaw and Chicago.

The cities of Newcastle and Toronto, though not twinned officially, share a number of parallels. Both, for example, are world class metropolises shot through with rich heritage, breathtaking natural vistas (Wallsend Burn et al) and diverse, friendly, handsome populations. But more than this, Toronto and Newcastle share a curse: a giant, region-defining sports team that is at once its supporters' virtue and vice.

The Maple Leafs are the NHL's biggest and most valuable franchise, weighing in with a market value of more than $500m. They are one of the Original Six and, behind the Montreal Canadiens, one of the most successful teams in hockey history. Their fans are loyal to the point of blindness, games routinely selling out - despite steep ticket prices - while other franchises struggle. They are also utterly useless: they've haven't reached the playoffs since 2006, and their last Stanley Cup was brought home in 1967 (what Pierre Berton called "the last good year", and the last hockey season with just six competing teams).

Newcastle United, like it or not, are giants of the English game. Few teams have a history as illustrious, or a stadium as stunning. Like the Leafs, they haven't won a major trophy since the 60s (though the 2006 Intertoto Cup and the 2010 Championship title are technically silverware). Like the Leafs, they have their detractors; mardy regional neighbours and capital-based hacks alike, embittered by envy. Like the Leafs, they command the total devotion of their large, noisy and passionate fans. Like the Leafs, they are by far and away the greatest team the world has ever seen. Allegedly.

It is symmetry that came to a head yesterday as Newcastle crumbled to a 5-0 shellacking at Spurs and the Leafs went down 5-0 to the hated Canadiens on the same evening they honoured their all-time top scorer Mats Sundin. Cue shared, trans-Atlantic exasperations as the two sides forsook the momentum of surprisingly good seasons to date; the Leafs looking good for post-season, Newcastle still sitting as high as sixth despite comically-inept rivals Sunderland inviting Arsenal to town for a gentle run-around and three easy points (Sunderland recently signed Bridge, but what they'd really like is an airport. Or a cathedral).

And so the beat goes on: the Leafs flatter to deceive, and are more than likely to be on the wrong end of a playoff whitewash having cruelly raised the expectations of their long-suffering fans; Newcastle United, looking down the business end of the season, will ultimately run out of steam before owner Mike Ashley strips the team of its assets in a Summer Sale Spectacular. But in a funny way it wouldn't matter if they never lifted a trophy again: the Leafs and Newcastle United are the lovable losers that define their cities. After all, anybody can support glory, but it's not the winning that counts. Not really. Not if you think about it. To paraphrase Kipling: "If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same; then you are a Mag/Leaf, my son... Unlucky."