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Orthopod
n.
(ORTH-oh-pod)

The medical specialist the hardware store clerk (in the movie, would be played by Seymour Cassel) who is finding your vacuum cleaner bags has been unable to get an appointment with until three weeks from now, thus explaining why his GP is helping him to cope with his knee injury by looping him to the gills on codeine.


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So how bagged am I, as I sit in Pearson airport waiting for my flight, having had but a single recuperation day after the Finland trip? Astonishingly, not very. Fell into bed on my return on Monday night, slept for twelve hours, and last night got a better-than-usual pre-Gen Con sleep. Even my voice seems to be recovering. However, I'm sure an ( Read more... )

In the Bloor subway station I hear the keyboard stylings of an unseen busker. Whatever she's playing is familiar, but she's adding all these classical flourishes to it, like she's navigating her way through some Listzean etude. Finally I place the melody.

It's the Chicken Dance.

Scene: European Meats, a large butcher shop in Kensington Market, Toronto. A short, silver-haired man in a flat cap examines a tray of very smoked meats I am too far away to identify. The woman behind the counter prompts him to pick one ( Read more... )

Heading toward the eastbound platform at the Bathurst subway station, we bypass a confrontation in progress. A pugnacious, leather-jacketed guy wearing a doo-rag, his look borrowed from Mickey Rourke, berates a second man. “Does that make you tough? Does that make you a tough man?” The object of his baiting is an obese young man with straggly blond ( Read more... )

Walking to the library on a cold and quiet Saturday morning, I see baker’s half-dozen of grackles in the middle of what is ordinary street. They’re very excited by a couple of bread slices that have been squashed flat by traffic. The birds squawk and peck furiously at the pieces of bread, but mostly at each other. It is better, apparently, to keep ( Read more... )

Walking up through the main University of Toronto campus, I pass a young woman wearing an Islamic head covering - a buknuk, I think. It’s one step up, concealment-wise, from a simple headscarf. She’s wearing a dark cardigan, pushed back to the side, to fully display a bright red Che Guevara T-shirt.

Now that’s semiotic!