NoCBCVille
I was forced to climb into the cigar tube again last week.
This time it was headed to Toronto.
Which, all things considered, is not a bad place to go to in September. Still warm, not humid, and hockey season has not yet started in earnest.
Thought maybe it might have, however, as the taxi swooped off the Gardiner Expressway into the downtown core late Tuesday evening and ran smack into the throngs milling around the Air Canada Center.
But then the driver and I both realized that it couldn't possibly be a sports crowd because there were too many women and too many overdressed men.
Turned out it was the Elton John 'Go Large or Don't Go At All' Tour (or some such thing).
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Stayed at the Delta Chelsea just off Yonge near Carleton, which I've always thought of as the Empire Hotel in that Joni Mitchell Song about the couple in bar with 'a little money riding on the Maple Leafs', if only because the place is a little old, a little tired, and only a stone's throw away from what used to the Gardens.
Which, of course, is dumb because it's probably really a dive out in Scarborough, or even Saskatoon, for that matter, but I told my wife enigmatically that I'd be calling her from the Empire Hotel Bar that night anyway when I left that morning.
She didn't get it, but my oldest kid did.
And here's something weird that happened the next morning.
I awoke early to polish my Science geek wares for the show-and-tell session that had brung me East in the first place and stumbled upon the entire CBC One Toronto Morning show team on the UofT College Radio Station.
And it was rip-roaring fantastic....Andy Barrie, Kevin Sylvester and Erika Ritter completely unshackelled, having a go at everything from politics to culture to current events and back again with style and elan completely unsquelched by dictorial edicts from management.
Turns out there is a bushel full of this stuff that can be downloaded for podcasting from Todd Maffin's 'CBC Unplugged' site.
Which is also fantastic.
Except for one thing, which came to me as I climbed back into the cigar tube with a half a dozen shows loaded onto my machine for the trip home.....what if they're so good at this thing that it actually takes the edge off the demand and allows the Braindead Braintrust to lock them out even longer?
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Update: In case you were wondering, there has been some stuff uploaded from CBC Vancouver and most of it is not half bad. Even better, I have only found one that is dragged down by significant Cluffie time.
And I needed those shows, because Mr. Milton's folks loaded us into the plane and then made us sit there for two hours while they fixed a cargo door, a door that was sitting on the tarmac, in plain view, before they forced us into the tube.
What was worse, the movie was Mr. & Mrs Smith which, as far as I can tell, is some kind of ultraviolent, totally banal, collagen-enhanced metaphor of a Superpower gone wrong teetering on the brink of fascism (rated PG, of course).
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