Uninhabited Spaces

We stayed in Toronto for the Easter weekend, to relax and recharge. I just did not want to do any of Ontario's highways on the first long weekend of the season. That said, we were certainly not idle, and we had our own little adventures travelling around the city, looking for food and drink. We certainly popped into tons of lovely shops but it seems to me that we really spent most of the weekend eating and drinking. Thursday Our adventures actually began on Thursday night, right after work. We headed directly to Gusto 101 in the King Street West neighbourhood. The 2-storey location is a former auto body shop and the resultant look and feel is somehow industrial yet rustic. This place would easily fit in on the main strip of The Junction. We started off with a Frank Costello (Bulleit Bourbon, Amaro Montenegro, Cardamom Honey, Lime Juice, Angostura Bitter) cocktail. Very nice. Mark had char-grilled octopus for starters while I had carpaccio. For his main, Mark had braised lam...

My goodness! Not sure if I have any readers left after such a long absence. My apologies to all...I had no idea it has been that long since I have posted to my blog.  [...] I was looking at my personal library recently and one of the books, Future Shock (1970) by futurist Alvin Toffler, was yelling at me to have another look. In a 2007 blog post on that book I noted that his premise was that "there are limits to the amount of change that humans can absorb without being overwhelmed, both physiologically and psychologically. The state such an over-stimulation creates what is Toffler coined 'future shock'. The future, Toffler wrote, will present the super-industrial citizen with a paralyzing dilemma: overchoice".  One of the primary coping solutions Tofflers suggested we would adopt is to identify with subcults reflecting our lifestyle (or rather the lifestyle we desire to reflect) and we would consume the products and the values of that preferred lifestyl...