After seven years of running avoidinglife.com I think the time has come to call it quits. Since returning from Japan, getting married, buying a house and getting a proper job I can't hardly say that I'm still avoiding life, can I? Over the years this site has steadily devolved from a popular and innovative video blog about life in Japan into just another random pile of links to stuff. I think from now on I'll save the link posts for Facebook and Twitter and leave this site as a reminder of the amazing times I had for three unbelievable years in Aomori prefecture. Anyway, if you're thinking that avoiding life might be just want you need then I highly recommend signing up for JET Programme. It was certainly one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. I would even go one step further and recommend that you request Aomori prefecture and maybe even Noheji Town where I lived as your #1 desired location. Just make sure to get a really good dehumidifier if they stick you in my moldy old apartment.

The End.

Six years after its release, Macho Man Randy Savage's debut rap album has become quite the hot comodity. It's priced NEW on Amazon.ca starting at $72.95 and USED from $101.06. Why is the used version more valuable than new? Why you ask? Perhaps these reviews might shed some light on the subject. It seems like those few who get a chance to listen to an original copy of the album have been forever changed by the experience. Perhaps owning a used copy of 'Be a Man' is a little like owning a piece of history. While not owning an original copy myself, I have heard MP3s of the tracks, and it is no exaggeration to say that 'Be a Man' is unquestionably the single greatest piece of music ever created by anyone throughout the history of mankind. I mean, just look at what the title track inspired these dudes to create! The only other artist to even come close to reaching Macho's heights is of course none other than Macho's life-long nemesis Hulk Hogan, who's song Hulkster in Heaven inspired a fan-made video of its own.

From Amazon.ca:

5.0 out of 5 stars The First Of Many Inspiring Albums, Jan 12 2005
By Dark Ninja (Canada) - See all my reviews

There is no way you will ever get closer to the utopia you experience when you listen to this outstanding album. I hope for the sake of every being in the universe that we will see many, many more Macho Man albums in the future. When I first caught a glance of this CD at Walmart, I turned and fell to my knees while time literally stopped. Once I regained consciousness I quickly filled a crate with the album and handed the cashier a flying elbow drop! When I placed the CD onto the tray of my stereo system, I knew at once that my life had culminated to that point, my purpose was to witness the sick, wicked, and nasty beats that were about to pulsate through the earth itself and energize my very life force. When the tray recalled itself back into the stereo console, it was as though the final puzzle piece of human existence had been put into place. Rainbows began to pour inexplicably out of the speakers and onto my terrace. The windows flew open and The Macho Man himself floated in on a winged platinum unicorn. He gave me a $5 gift certificate at Radio Shack and told me that I was the chosen one. He said that He and I would lead mankind out of poverty and strife forever. He said we must hurry, unimaginable evils were gathering and following him and there was not much time before he would have to face them. As we prepared to embark a low rumble could be heard in the distance. Hardly decipherable at first, but it began to grow louder, and apparently closer. The sky darkened rapidly and took on a red-orange tint. The rumble grew exponentially louder and more fierce, and the ground began to shake. Without warning an enormous crack in the planet's surface appeared and a great mountain of rock and molten lava shot up from the center of the earth with the force of ten trillion mighty buffalo. Satan himself stood before us, in all of his evil majesty. Despite this apocalyptic series of events, Randy was not at all intimidated. He stood fast, and with a mighty cry of 'OOOOOOHHH YEAHHHHHH!' he was suddenly 250 feet tall and was made entirely of gold. Satan lunged towards Savage with blinding speed, but The Macho Man was suddenly gone. Satan spun back around just in time for a vicious Macho Man drop kick to the throat. Again, Savage disappeared, leaving Satan dazed and confused. As Satan tried to recover Randy leapt at him from out of nowhere with a punishing sunset flip, sending The Dark Lord directly into a black hole on the other side of the universe. Savage explained to me how his musical talents inspired the Greek God Zeus, and so Zeus gave him super powers and ultrasonic vocal cords. I told him he's the illest, the true chief warrior. The bottom line is I used to steal cars and buses all the time, but ever since I heard this album I only smash fire hydrants. I no longer sleep or eat or talk, I just absorb the lyrical extremes that this album surpasses time and again and train to fight The Hulkster. Everything that you've ever done, are doing now, or will ever do is a complete waste of time unless it directly involves Randy 'Macho Man' Savage. If you don't own this album, I sincerely hope that this review has helped you realize what a clueless and wretched piece of waste you really are. And seriously Hogan, be a man for once in your life. If you just take the beating maybe Savage won't banish you from the universe....OOOOOOOHHH YEEEAAAHHHHH!!! I just crapped on myself.

With Xmas just around the corner, I thought I'd just add this little link to my Amazon.ca Wish List... just in case.

Farewell Captain Lou.

A new McDonald's advertising there campaign centers on one Mr. James, a bespectacled idiot who tortures the Japanese language and is quite literally crazed for McDonald's burgers

link

I spent three years in Japan teaching people about North American culture, and until now I wasn't really sure if I had left a lasting impression on anyone. All I can say now is that I've never been prouder. I only wish they had asked me, the real Mr. James, to do these ads instead of hiring this imposter.

Thanks Kate for the link. Here's another link for more info, and here's Debito's predictable response.

Note to Debito... Mr. James is not a stereotype.. he's real! I'm living proof. If you have a problem with Mr. James, then you have a problem with me buddy boy!

Macleans takes a look at why there still is no high-speed rail in Canada... and why there may never be any... while BlogTO still holds out hope.

Could someone explain to me what this is about? Could it trully be a donut burger from my two favourite Japanese food chains? I must be dreaming.

"Mouth of the South" Jimmy Hart is pitching a new Ladies Wrestling show that I have to say actually looks pretty darn awesome, even if its name 'Wrestlicious' is a little corny. Perhaps though corny is exactly the point, as I'm sure the similaries to the 80's Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) are no accident. Instead of the WWE's trashy cookie-cutter "Divas" Wrestlicious has Malibu McKenzie the surfer babe, Draculetta the lady vampire and drill sergeant Boot Camp Baily. Will this show ever get picked up by a major TV network? If it does, will it last more than a few episodes? Sadly, I kind of doubt it, but I sincerely hope that I am wrong. Surely there's some space on dial weekend afternoons or late at night between informercials for Mr. T's Flavor Wave and The Snuggie. Let's hope Jimmy Hart and his bevy of wrestling beauties succeed in returning ladies pro-wrestling to its former glory.

Update: I've replaced the original video with a longer version, containing an extended version of the rap number, and a weird gameshow segment featuring some 80's wrestling legends. Also, it appears that a number of the characters the video introduced have since been re-cast. From Rajah.com...

As seen in the Wrestlicious video, there is a vampire character by the name of Draculeta. In a correction from an earlier report, the girl portraying the character in the rap video is not former Ohio Valley Wrestling women's wrestler Roni Jonah. Rather, it is actually one of a few actresses cast in the character roles before the female wrestlers were hired for the initial Wrestlicious taping. Some of characters shown in the rap video were later "re-cast" when it came time to shoot the wrestling portions of the show, such as Draculeta. The Draculeta character was actually portrayed by Daffney (a.k.a. "The Governor") at the wrestling taping. You can see the TNA performer sitting in a coffin at the 1:27 minute mark in the video.

In another casting note, the voodoo character White Magic was portrayed by former Ring of Honor performer Lacey at the taping. The person in the rap video was an actress.

Kate pointed out to me this blog post about a nifty little program called Key Hole TV that you can use to watch several TV channels from Japan online. The video quality isn't great, but the program works fairly well and streams several of the major Japanese TV networks. Key Hole TV also provides broadcasting software that lets anyone stream video through the service if they like. At the time I looked at it there was a clearly illegal feed from CNBC running, as well as a Spanish sports channel, a music video channel from Switzerland and a bunch of random radio stations. Key Hole TV is not nearly as sophisticated as new streaming video players like Boxee, but it's probably the only place online you're going to find many of these Japanese TV channels.

Get Key Hole TV here

Adam West vs. Jerry 'The King' Lawler

CTV icon, Dave Devall announced his retirement last week after 48 years of reporting the weather. I was charged with the task of making a tribute micro-site for Dave. Check it out at and send Dave your well wishes if you like! Not sure if Dave will ever actually read it though as he's already received over a thousand messages, and there's still 7 weeks before he retires.

After years of fighting, it looks like the express train from Union Station to the airport is finally going to get built. From CTV Toronto...

Construction is set to begin on a rail link that will connect Toronto commuters to Pearson International Airport before the end of the year, the provincial government announced Wednesday.

Read more

Seems like they still plan on refurbishing a bunch of mothballed 50 year old diesel passenger trains for this route. Tickets are looking to be $20-25 each trip, which is quite a bit more than the $2.75 you can pay to make the same trip using the TTC. I suspect that downtown relief train/subway line along the same corridor would probably have been more useful than this project, but I guess we shall see...

...and if you have the time, here's the entire training video:

Part 1

Part 2

Finally the Toronto Star posted an article worthy of my attention. It's about a guy who started a successful model train business in Ontario called Rapido Trains. He's recently become the first person to manufacture and sell a working model of Canada's long lost Turbo Trains. You can read his nice story here, and then buy his trains here. Since my model train collection is N-Scale only, I guess I'll have to wait until he can find a Chinese injection molding company that can make really, really tiny plastic parts. Here's a video of his beloved model Turbo Train in action:

I stumbled across this interesting blog belonging to a couple of JET Programme ALT's that have taken over my old job and home in Noheji, Japan. If any of my faithful readers from back in the day are still reading this, you may notice a number of similarities between my old blog posts and theirs, such as posts about climbing mount Eboshi (mine here) or the battle of man vs. mold. From the looks of this post, mold has completely taken over my old apartment! As anyone who visited the place while I was there can attest, the mold smell was really quite bad despite my best efforts to eradicate it. The school even half-offered to move me into another building because of it, but my supervisor suggested that I turn down the offer as they were just being nice offering it to me and didn't actually want to give it to me. So there I stayed for three years, and while I miss Noheji and might have stayed longer if I could, I'm kind of glad I got out of there before the mold completely took over!

Going shopping to Goodwill isn't really one of my favourite ways to spend a Sunday afternoon, but sometimes it can pay off. This weekend I discovered these neat TTC glasses from 1978. One shows a subway and PPC streetcar, and the other a deisel bus and an electric trolley bus. Kind of makes me wonder what other neat merchandise the TTC has put out over the years. These glasses certain beat anything sold at that crappy "Transit Stuff" store at Union station.

I love white vinegar, but it's so hard to find in restaurants outside Canada. Here's a nice gallery of vinegar packets from the few places that offer it.

Thanks to the TTC strike, I didn't get very far from home this weekend. With High Park being situated just across the street, Kate and I used this break from our usual weekend shopping sprees to take in a little hanami. We weren't expecting to see much as the cherry trees didn't bloom until May 6th last year. Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to find them in full bloom as you can see in this photo:

Of course under the trees were lots of people sitting on tarps having picnics. Perhaps some of them were even having Sushi Picnics!

Ceder Fair, owner of roller coaster Mecca Cedar Point, bought my town's local theme park (and my former employer) Canada's Wonderland from the notoriously stingy Paramount Parks a couple of years ago. Ever since, roller coaster fans have been waiting with bated breath to see what big new rides the company would put in. The park has always had a nice assortment of rides and roller coasters, however the penny-pinchers at Paramount never would drop the kind of dough it takes to build a really big, marque ride. Well the wait is almost over now as Wonderland has just completed construction and testing of the park's first hypercoaster, the awkwardly named "Behemoth". The press were invited to the park the other day for the big unveiling.

Videos:
Tom Brown Takes a Ride - CTVToronto.ca
A Blazing Roller Coaster - Toronto Star

Wonderland is pretty much the only place you can go in Toronto to ride roller coasters these days. The C.N.E. used to have The Flyer and Doppel Looping (or Double Looper as most people mistakenly called it) however they've been gone now for years. Since Wonderland is actually in the suburb of Maple, technically speaking Toronto no longer has any roller coasters today. As my dad likes to point out to me, there was a time when the Toronto lake shore was a lot more interesting than it is now. Before the Gardiner Expressway was built in the 50's, Sunnyside Beach Park sat just two blocks from the house I'm now living in. All that is left today is Sunnyside Pool and the Palais Royale. Thanks to the highway, roads, trains and streetcars, the spot the park once stood now has the distinction of being "The noisiest location in Ontario" according to Wikipedia.

In researching this story, I can't seem to find a definitive answer as to what the roller coaster at the Sunnyside amusement park was called, or what happened to it. Some articles indicate that it was called "The Flyer" and was moved to the C.N.E. after the park was closed down. The Toronto Star seems to think that it was called "The Rocket" and was simply torn down. They also claim that the C.N.E.'s Flyer was "built at the CNE for $200,000 in 1953 by Patty Conklin", which seems to imply it was not related to the Sunnyside Flyer in any way. This article provides the most detailed explanation of the history of Sunnyside's coaster, however it still left me confused as to how many "Flyer" coasters there were exactly. I get the impression that there may have in fact been three completely different Flyers built in the first half of the last century in Toronto. It seems like amusement park operators had just as hard a time coming up with decent names for their roller coasters back then as they do today.

UPDATE: Thanks to Donna Douglas for the following info about the CNE's Flyer:

The "Flyer", was designed by Joe McKee of New York and built, maintained and operated by Bill Davis of Conklin's Canada Shows. Constructed at a cost of $200,000

See more details in the comments.

So for several months now I've been hard at work building new local news websites for CTV affiliates across Canada. Our small team at CTV.ca has released in quick succession CTVBC.ca, CTVEdmonton.ca, CTVOttawa.ca and CTVWinnipeg.ca. To promote its new site, CTV BC is running a crazy ad campaign which you can see here, here and here. Today, finally, we re-launched CTV Toronto's website at CTVToronto.ca (formerly toronto.ctv.ca) using the new design. Please come by and check it out! I don't think CTV Toronto has any plans to make ads like the ones for BC, but they'll probably at least mention the new site on the news tomorrow night.

There's an article on Spacing about TTC plans for renovating subway stations on the Bloor-Danforth line, and how a local font-obsessed citizen, Joe Clark, is up-in-arms about it. I'm more inclined to support preserving the heritage of local McDonald's restaurants over subway stations, so I can't really get on board with Joe's crusade against "fake helvetica" signage on the TTC.

Joe points out an interesting aspect of the station design along the Bloor-Danforth line that, despite my near daily trips from one end of it to the other, I had never noticed before. Station tile colors for stations east and west of downtown match up with each other starting from the center of the line (St. George and Bay stations) all the way to Kennedy and Kipling stations respectively. You can check out this handy chart for an explanation of what stations match one another. I guess it would be kind of a shame to break-up the uniformity of this design, but then again the stations are still pretty ugly on this line and in need of work. I guess either way is fine with me. What would be neat though would be if they added chimes to stations like they do in Tokyo.

I just read on Spacing that my favorite McDonald's in Toronto is being torn down to build a condo! The McDonald's in question is the big one opposite the ROM at Bloor and Avenue rd. It is also well known around the world as the McDonald's where a drunk Ashlee Simpson went nuts a few months ago. The building is really cool and unique looking, and even though the condo they are building will have a new McDonald's you can pretty much guarantee that it won't be anywhere close to as nice as this one.

Never before has anything ever gotten me this angry and fired-up! Help stop this terrible injustice and save this historic McDonald's while there is still time!! Join my new Facebook Group and help the cause!!! Fight the power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This could be interesting. The Hulkster is apparently planning to start his own wrestling promotion to compete with the increasingly irrelevant WWE. The intriguing part is that he seems to want to move wrestling back to its glory days of larger-than-life caricatures and colorful costumes. I pretty much stopped watching WWE shows right around the time it lost its WWF name in 2002. Around that time they also lost most of their best starts including The Rock, Steve Austin and Mick Foley. All that's left now is a roster of indistinguishable 'roided-up muscle-heads in black tights lacking any discernable gimmicks or personality, and equally dull bimbos called "Divas" that do nothing but stand around in their underwear.

Still, even during these dark days, you can always count on occasional short moments of greatness. Now with the passing of the Fabulous Moulah, these moments are becoming few and far between. There is however a bizarre story line going on right now that only Vince McMahon himself could have crafted. It involves a magical leprechaun named Hornswaggle who also happens to be Vince's illegitimate child. You can read all about it at Wrestlecrap.com. For me, Hornswaggle illustrates well the biggest hurdle Hulk Hogan has to overcome with his new wrestling show. Even in the WWE's darkest hour, you can still count on Vince McMahon to come up with something crazy and unpredictable. While I welcome the Hulkster's call for a return to gimmicks and colorful characters, I fear that Hogan just doesn't have what it takes to think-up the kind of strange and irreverent stuff that Vince loves to do. Anyway, I look forward to finding out just what Hulk has in store.

I never got a chance to attend one of these shows while I was in Japan. It looks so awesome that I just might have to go back to Japan just to see a show live.

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This one apears to be some sort of low-budget music video featuring Aomori train station. I think it's called "Many Lover Aomori Station"

There's also lots of fun techno music videos about the trains of Aomori. Here's some of my favorites...

Seikan Tunnel Trains

My personal favorite Aomori train, the Heat 789.