March 24th @ Free Times Café

I was thinking recently about Spiderman. He obtained his superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider, which when you think about it is a lot better than what he would have got if he’d been bitten by a regular spider – big blister, rash, headaches, nausea – I mean he really lucked out.

The reason I was thinking about Spiderman was that I wondered where my superpower came from. And what is my superpower you ask? Why I can turn any type of cord into a jumbled impenetrable mass in a ridiculously short period of time. I mean it. You should see my phone cord at work. I always have to use the speaker phone because when I try to lift up the handset the cord is so twisted and knotted that I end up lifting the whole phone. Many people have tried but no one can entangle the phone card. It is a modern day Gordian Knot.

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February 17th @ Free Times Café

I remember the first time I saw the word ‘stomach’ in print. I was six or seven years old and I was reading a comic book – I can’t remember the comic but I think it was a western. Now I knew the word stomach, although I probably used the word tummy more often. Still, even though I know what the word stomach meant it was odd to see it in print. I mean stomach is just a weird looking word – look at it – really look at it – if you didn’t know that this is how stomach was spelled you wouldn’t think this was the word for stomach.

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Robbie Burns Night @ Free Times Café

Okay — This is it! The biggest shindig of the year and you’re invited! 

Date: Friday, 25th January   

Time: 8:00 pm start (Bagpipes join in at 9:30pm)                            

Place: The Free Times Café (320 College, near Spadina)

Please join us for another evening of ​friendly fun:

Some Burns. Some Scottish music. Some dance. 

… and… of course, the Haggis!

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January 13th @ Free Times Café

My first full time job after university was working for a public broadcaster in Toronto. I won’t name the broadcaster but it wasn’t the CBC and it just broadcasts on TV in Ontario. I wasn’t in the production end of things, I was in something called Learning Systems Design (yes – LSD). At one point I was asked to write a position paper on some type of restructuring for part of the organization (and you are quite correct to wonder what qualifications I had to embark on such a task because I had none).

I don’t remember anything about what I wrote but I do remember the meeting where it was discussed. There were a bunch of people in the room – not just from LSD but from other departments as well. It would have been cool if there were departments of Potential of Technology (POT) and Systems Produced Enabled Engineering Design (SPEED), etc., because it just would have been fun to play duelling drug acronyms – but the place didn’t really have a sense of humour so that didn’t happen.

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