Get Up

Perhaps you live downtown and fancy yourself cultured. You eat ethnic food and are the epitome of multiculturalism*. You're quite world-wise, giving money to NGO's, scorn America, are above religion, have an ear for the underdog (in your own cliched definition) and never, ever drive. You hate what 905ers are doing to the city and talk about this long and hard while eating shitty Chinese food.

Yes, shitty chinese food. That's pretty much what you're guarranteed to eat downtown Toronto, shitty Chinese food. You're a step up from small-town Ontario or New York City that way, with your Chinaman's gwailo offerings.

And here it is, sweet vindication in the pages of Toronto Life: The Burbs or Bust.

Forget downtown, Chinatown wears the played out crown.

*Eating food from some other country doesn't count as culture, it counts as eating, period.

Porn and Pussy Nerdery

Re: Porn's philosopher king

"Pressing the play button is an admission of sexual failure: I can't sleep with an attractive woman, so I guess I'll watch some other guy do it."

For all his thoughtfulness National Post columnist Jon Kay seems to agree with Ron Jeremy's assertion "Let's be honest - people get bored." Following Kay's line of logic we can see one ought to seek out and procure pus-pardon, partners, in full neanderthal conquering mode.

Sure, porn is depressing. There's a moral and pragmatic arguement for that. Moralists like the acclaimed Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family approve of masturbation for its inherent safety-valve qualities. Grumpy novelists like Norman Mailer abhor onanism for its wasting of seed while Kay chafes due to its admission of defeat. Kay's stance, essentially, is a modified intellectualism born of 80s movies such as Porky's, where man is not man unless he's well, gotten laid. Which really isn't much of a position at all, Kay's missionary for 80s moralism.

Not to split hairs, but failure would be the inability to rise to even a solitary occasion. What Kay terms failure is other people's training.