My arm hurts, or, City Chase Toronto #1 2009

Sporadic entry time!

After three years or so of playing out in my head how much fun it would be, I have now officially completed a City Chase! My friend and fellow atmospheric chemist Avila suggested it about a month ago, and I immediately got very excited. And so, after $150, two trips to pre-registration, and a restless night akin to most 8-year-olds before Christmas, yesterday was the big day.

For those of you who don’t know, City Chase is a Canadian invention. It’s somewhat akin to Amazing Race, but over the course of 6 hours in an urban setting. There is no preset course; you have to complete 10 chasepoints and make your way back to the finish line, only proceeding on foot or by public transportation. The website specifies no cars, bikes, hang gliders or rickshaws (except under certain circumstances… I’ll get to that), and no breaking of laws or inhibiting other teams.

Before the start

I awoke to a day that was, not surprisingly, grey and wet. I was thankful that the rain was mercifully light as I walked from home to High Park Station, only to arrive at Spadina to see it was pissing rain outside. I put on my optimist shoes (?) and decided that this would just mean that water hazards during the course wouldn’t be important. I grabbed a coffee, picked up Avila, and we hopped on the 510 down to Metro Hall where our day would begin.

Having not actually been to the square at Metro Hall before, we followed the herd of white t-shirt wearing participants. We arrived just during the “Goodlife Fitness Warm-up”, which looked like a combination of callisthenics and jazzercise (side note: Apple’s dictionary does NOT recognise “jazzercise” as a word. Pity). We listened to the speech to kick off the race, which congratulated a guy turning 50 and two women wearing miniature foam versions of the CN Tower and SkyDome as hats, along with some inspirational words courtesy of… Chad Kroeger?… and some hints. And then…

The start

…a scavenger hunt! We needed to pair up with another team and managed to get: a page from a 2-day old newspaper, two people dressed with completely backwards clothing, the next Air Canada flight to Québec, a memorised recital of the first verse from inspriational-Nickelback-song (still not sure of the name…), a Mitsubishi logo on someone’s body (the red pen from the team we paired up with was very helpful to many), and the bible verse quoted during the clues. Our reward was a clue sheet with where we could find all the chasepoints. Without much thought, I saw that one mandatory station was nearby at the Rees Street Slip. I knew it would probably involve a kayak, and that I knew where Rees Street was from biking down to the waterfront trail, so we booked it there before people (a) figured out were Rees Street is, and (b) the lines got long.

Rees Street Slip – Chasepoint #1/#2

We arrived at Rees Street Slip. The task: paddle two kayaks, tethered together side-by-side, through a small slalom course. The lineup was relatively short, maybe 5 or 6 teams in front of us, and got long quickly. Added bonus: as it turns out, the pre-race chasepoint (raising $50 for Right to Play) was awarded here as well! Serendipitous, considering neither of us took the time to find this out before hand. With minor difficulty (neither Avila nor myself had ever been in a kayak before), we finished the course and quickly had our first two chasepoints. Huzzah!

King and Spadina – Chasepoint #3/#3.5

Our next plan was to head to another mandatory chasepoint out in Liberty Village. We caught the 510 at Lower Spadina/Queen’s Quay to head up to King Street. Another friendly team, clearly more prepared than us, kindly told us that the Toronto School of Art on Adelaide was right there, and would be easy to stop off at before heading to Liberty Village. This is where, in the past, where you sketch naked people (or, for bonus, a naked team member). This year, however, was urban design-based, and needed three recyclable items. We grabbed three plastic bottles off the street while running to Adelaide and headed in. The task was to recreate a famous landmark. We, rather fortunately, drew the Parthenon. Lots of pillar-type material was available. After some upgrading to our initial (read: crappy) design, we finished the task and moved on.

Also at the School of Art, we received a list of questions for another chasepoint, which involved looking for landmarks along the Spadina streetcar route, such as the colour of the door at 1 Spadina Crescent (green), the type of store at 429 Spadina (everyone’s favourite tattoo and barber shop), and the park south of King on Spadina (Clarence Square). We missed the requisite 12 items on the way up, and headed down the line again to get the rest… only to realise that we needed to hand in the info back up at Bloor. We held onto the answers until later.

Liberty Village – Chasepoint #4.5/5.5

We headed out to Liberty Village on the King streetcar to find the Metro parking lot (stupid me was looking for a Green P, forgetting that Metro is in fact a store now. How quickly I blocked out of my mind the horrible Metro at Bloor and Spadina). On the way, we happened across a dance studio with a chasepoint. Wheeeee! Avila and I learned the Merengue and had a good time hip-shaking for our unplanned chasepoint. We were doing remarkable well at this point… barely an hour gone by and we were almost halfway done!

We arrived at the Metro parking lot (easy to find due to the long lineup of participants waiting). The task – pair up with another team, and run around the neighbourhood looking for coloured letters to spell a word. The catch? You had to do it with a rickshaw, two people riding and two people running. I want to thank our partners in crime, Mandy and Leslie, in part for helping to tow the rickshaw (this part was fun – I had always wanted to try running a rickshaw), but mostly for Leslie’s friend who had already completed the task so that we knew that “Laughter!” was the word we needed to spell. For good measure, we ran around the neighbourhood quickly to make it look to the other participants that we had done something, and then made it on our way.

West Queen West – Chasepoint #6.5/#7.5/#8.5

While in line at the rickshaw place, another team mentioned that the Knit Cafe on Queen Street west of Ossington had another chasepoint. Already planning to head to Trinity-Bellwoods Park and to Aradia fitness, we slotted this stop in. The task – one of us had to knit two rows. Avila volunteered her services to this one, and not only learned to knit, but managed to knit two rows much faster than I had anticipated. Her words (paraphrasing): “It looked like crap, but it’s done!”

Next stop was the “Nestea Plunge” at Trinity-Bellwoods. One team member had to don a velcro-covered suit, take a running jump off a small trampoline, and stick to a wall on the other side of pool of water. The ground, trampoline, and inflatable wall-thing were all quite wet, so it was acceptable to simple hit the wall with two limbs since it was hard to actually stick. I got my sexy suit on a made a run for it… success on the first try! Sort of. I did hit the wall with both arms… but I hit hard enough that my right arm is pretty sore today, and I got velcro burn on my bottom lip, and I got drenched. Nonetheless, it was worth it.

Next stop was Aradia fitness, Toronto’s favourite place for women to do erotic fitness. One team member got to don a feather boa and learn a pole dancing routine. Avila did an admirable job here, looking like an old pro with her slides and grinds. Slightly more difficult was the turn around the pole, and it required a little more practice, but it was overall a quick challenge. We got our chasepoint, I got a sweet action photo of Avila spinning on a pole, and Avila got some skills to supplement grad school income – the city’s first knitting pole dancer? I think there’s a market out there…

The Annex and Yorkville – Chasepoints #9/#10

After Aradia, we hopped on the Bathurst streetcar up to Bloor and ran to Bloor and Spadina to go to GAP Adventures to submit our answers for the streetcar chasepoint. This was much more successful than trying to submit them at the much more closed version of GAP Adventures off of King Street…

A short subway ride to Yonge brought us to our last chasepoint, a Rogers store in Yorkville. We had to take photos of 2D barcodes and submit them wirelessly off a supplied Blackberry. The software was not very intuitive, and required restarting the application for every station, but once we figured this out, our method of Avila scouting out the barcodes while I clumsily tried to type stuff worked quite well. Soon we were finished out last chasepoint, and a subway ride back to St. Andrew Station and a run to Metro Hall finished our race after 3 hours and 50 minutes… good for 90th place out of 550 teams. We were pretty happy with the top 20% finish given this was our first go at City Chase.

We learned a bit about strategy this time around… the move to head to Rees Street first was a good one, but an extra 5 minutes or so to plot out the rest of our spots would have been a smart move. We know to avoid equipment-heavy chasepoints next time… fun, but they slow you down waiting in line if you don’t manage a passing lane card. We had a blast though… and hope to improve for August! Hopefully we’ll have some environmental chemists willing to join in for some friendly competition within the division, too…

Also impressive was the amount of help and cooperation from not only competitors, but from complete strangers. Other teams were quick to give hints and assistance, even unsolicited at times. And people were remarkably nice when I repeatedly dodged between them, or ducked under their umbrellas, or shouted “excuse me!” when immediately behind them. Streetcar drivers were chatty and helpful. Overall, Toronto was remarkably friendly on Saturday, and for that, I say, thanks, Torontonians!

The trustworthy encyclopedia?

To celebrate the beautiful democracy that is the internet, I have decided to start a little project. Beginning today, I’m going to post one sentence into an article on everyone’s favourite right-wing user-edited wiki-based encyclopedia, affectionately known as Conservapedia. Edits will be made on a semi-regular basis, and I plan for the edits to be just plausible enough that they might slip below the radar. The goal is to see how long it takes for my edits to be removed and how long I can keep it up before being removed as a contributor. I will keep you updated as this highly unscientific experiment continues. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Now, despite my apparent support for censoring certain speech due to my inherent Liberal Bias, in the interest of freedom of expression I will not remove any passages from the encyclopedia.

Edit number one: As of April 27, 2008, 09:30 EDT, the entry for Feminist Style now includes a line that reads, “lack of a healthy fear of the word ‘vagina’.”

UPDATE: Edit removed as of April 27, 2008, 13:00 EDT. These guys are on the ball! Removed by this guy.

UPDATE TWO: Apparently I was also banned from editing for 5 years for that sentence. Now THAT is a healthy fear of the word “vagina.” This occured at 12:59 EDT, meaning I lasted a whopping 3 hours and 29 minutes. A stand-up demonstration of the wiki model.

Give me that funky beat!

Well, this is going to be another stopgap. I was worse at keeping up on this than I thought I would be.

Anyway, I made up a modest little nerd rap remix, mostly just using the stock loops, and some cutting and pasting of the mp3 files. I tried to include a bit of all my favourites, although because I’m lazy, some didn’t make the cut. I also selfishly included my own rap, and my sister’s as well. So there.

Nerd Rap Battle – Funky Beat Remix

Stopgap post!

Well, it’s been busy my friends. I’ll have more stuff to write about in due time, especially once my quantum project is done and I climb the CN Tower tomorrow!

So, in the meantime, I will post my submissions to the youngme/nowme challenge for colour wars, where I attempted to recreate a childhood photo with my current self. Let me know how it went!

Reviews you wish had been written…

Hands up: who here knows that Gary Coleman used to be on a TV show called “Diff’rent Strokes”? That’s right; Coleman, now better known as a highly respected music historian, used to be known for appearing in the long running sitcom and uttering the popular catch-phrase “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” Since publishing the wildly influential beEThoven: Classicism and the Search for Alien Life ten years ago, his current influence in the musical sphere has eclipsed his former child-star fame. The book quickly established Coleman as one of today’s leading experts on classical composers and has been followed by three more bestselling books on musical history. Coleman is now poised to enter the realm of popular music and society by cowriting a new book with Kelis entitled Lactose Intolerance: Milkshake’s Subversion of Race and Gender Discrimination, set to be released May 5.

Kelis, famous in her own right for the critically acclaimed song Milkshake, originally contacted Coleman with the idea for the book. “Milkshake has received a lot of positive attention, first from the critics and fans, but eventually human rights activists took notice,” says Kelis, speaking from her New York home. “Sweeping the Grammys that year was another great accomplishment, but once we were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, I really had accomplished what I set out to do with this song.” Despite losing the Nobel to the United Nations and the successful Oil-For-Food programme, publishers were still in pursuit of the 28-year-old R&B singer to bring the story to print. “After all this, I really wanted to spread the word about the positive aspects of the single, and a book was a great way to keep the legacy going. Gary was just a perfect choice to work with. I don’t think I would have followed through without his support.”

Coleman says he was excited to work on the project from day one. “I’ve been looking for the right way to start writing about current music and society, and the story of Milkshake was a fantastic way to start,” said the 40-year-old writer after an advance reading in London. “So few artists have managed to so vastly change the social fabric of the industrialised world like Kelis, and Milkshake is really the classical music of its day.”

From its release, critics were quick to praise the single for its intelligent commentary on both race and gender. Most writers were unanimous in the complex beat and hooky structure which instantly drew in listeners. “There was some great production and writing involved in the song,” says Kelis, “but most people were quick to pick up that it wasn’t Milkshake quality that brought all those boys to the yard. It was the different flavours rising up against the dominance of vanilla. I feel most minorities found it quite empowering to see the lesser flavours winning over Caucasian dominance. There was an inspirational message to this song that really helped to break down racial barriers.”

Coleman agrees. “This song did more to eliminate inequalities than any government program could hope to do. Because not only did the song inspire, it showed the establishment how ridiculous it was to still have racial inequalities.” He is quick to point out that the song was empowering to women as well. “Emphasising that milk, a traditionally feminine product, could to bring all the boys to the yard, really gave the stagnating feminist movement the shot in the arm it needed.”

The song inspired massive social change in the west. Hundreds of thousands began to gather in peaceful protest demanding the end of racial and gender inequality. The result was a successful grassroots campaign, where the people of the Western world banded together for true change that couldn’t be accomplished by legislation. While incredible progress has been made (Coleman believes the song created the necessary social climate for the co-operative Democratic campaign in the United States between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), small inequalities still remain. Kelis remains optimistic, however. “If we nearly eliminated these inequities in all of four years, with the momentum still on our side it could be within a year that, at least statistically, all races and both genders in America are the same. Maybe in ten years, it will be the world.”

The book is Coleman’s best to date, containing a great deal of insight and his trademark wit, and should introduce him to an even wider audience with its greater focus on pop culture. Where does he expect to go from here? “I’m interested into moving into other forms of media. Kelis and I plan to collaborate on a new single called ‘Gonna Get Your Bling’. It will focus more on socioeconomics and the income gap, and we hope that it will be as successful as Milkshake in evoking change.” Is it just pipe dream? “Well, maybe it will only benefit my socioecomic status,” Coleman laughs, “but one thing I have learned in this project is that change truly can be accomplished in just one song. I’m optimistic.”