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Travel writer Pico Iyer’s

March 31, 2001 by Michael Boyle

love letter to Toronto. Of course, published in a Toronto-based publication. Canadians love to publish articles telling us how much Americans love our country. Montreal is all that Iyer loves as well, only turned on its side, and far weirder – and to me, better – for the turning. [via Aaron]

Tags: Montreal, Toronto, Travel

It’s pretty boring of me

March 13, 2001 by Michael Boyle

to link to a Feed article – I do it all the time – but that’s only because, to me, it is the most interesting magazine going, in any medium. Anyhow, tonight’s object of my attention is the excellent, refreshing article, This Is Planet Earth. Mitchell Stephens has begun a long journey to report on the state of globalization around the world.

His first stop was to meet with the inestimable Clifford Geertz and his second, Wichita KS, where he found Laotion food among other things.

It’s personally interesting to me to read that because it mirrors my own experience in a way. In the early 90s I had this insane job in which I travelled to every city in Canada (pretty much). In my travels I was shocked, quite literally, to find a completely legitimate Thai restaurant in Prince Albert SK, to meet Indian (i.e., from India) businessmen (they were invariably men) in all sorts of cities, no matter how small and remote, and generally put the lie to the standard Canadian dogma: immigrants live in the big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc.) and the rest is still very white and protestant. In my experience 10 years ago, that is simply not true.

I grew up at University in an environment in which very different issues were at the front of everyone’s mind – a very similar world as was described by Naomi Klein in No Logo (in fact if I’m not mistaken we overlapped at McGill). But I studied political theory, so even then the idea of globalization was kicking around – but at that time the whole edifice relied (at least casually) on the bedrock principle that cities=diversity, towns=whitebread. In Canada that’s an even deeper idea that permeates our entire canon of literature until 1990 or so. And it was, and is, wrong.

All this by way of saying that this sort of fresh, novel approach to the question of globalization is long overdue.

Tags: Business, Canada, Environment, Food, Montreal, Personal, Protest, Test, Toronto, Travel

Not only are

November 2, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the Rheostatics one of the closest things to a genius literate pop band you’re going to find, but group member Dave Bidini is a fine writer of books, not just songs. His latest is Tropic of Hockey and you can read an unedited sort-of excerpt called Gretzky Eats Shit. Bidini has also posted another story called Joan. Interesting maybe-fact – the “Gordie” in the story is probably Gordon Downie of the Tragically Hip. I’m not certain, but I’ve been hearing stories for years about the rock-band house-league hockey team in Toronto. So it makes sense.

Tags: Books, Hockey, Test, Toronto

I’m in a nice neighbourhood

June 7, 2000 by Michael Boyle

now. My Webloggers ring neighbour to the right is none other than Mr. Joe Utsler, aka Crazy Uncle Joe and the venerable host of Metacubed, the meta weblog for meta webloggers. To the right is a very green Prattle, from Toronto as near as I can tell.

Tags: Blogger, Blogging, Meta, Toronto, Web

It seems like

June 3, 2000 by Michael Boyle

a joke, but it looks like they might be doing something interesting, similar to InfraSearch. They’re wrapping it up with killah funny marketing, that’s for sure. OpenCOLA the software, OpenCOLA the softdrink. Both are open-source. Both from Steelbridge in Toronto.

Tags: Funny, Marketing, Search, Software, Toronto, War

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