Games without gravity

Whenever the International Parabolic Sports League fires up its first season of gravity-free competition featuring eight teams, Toronto won’t be denied a franchise – even though the playing field will be initially confined to an airport in Las Vegas. Down the line, the Zero Gravity Corporation plans to bring its modified Boeing 727-200 G-Force One aircraft to the individual markets craving to watch local heroes play a game called Paraball, even though they fail to explain where spectators are going to sit. Currently, a weightless flight involving a total of 15 parabolas – lasting about 30 seconds each – can be obtained for $3,750 per person. Weightless dodge ball and tag have been played on the aircraft, and Zero Gravity claims to have been approached about zero-g gymnastics and a zero-g fashion show.  The newfangled sport will be covered in a show called Space Champions, produced by local company IPX Entertainment – not coincidentally a Zero Gravity sales agency – as part of an online television network allegedly launching in March. Slashdot commenters are dutifully dubious of the entire enterprise: Beyond the cracks about how this is the first sport where a plane crash would take out both teams, the officials and staff, one wonders how actual athletes who can’t transition from grass to astroturf would be capable of moving from earth to simulated space. But at least the filthy rich now have access to a recreational outlet that requires fewer coordination skills than fox hunting or croquet.

Space Sports Closer to Reality [SPACE.com]

m&m’s&$&¢’s

The plummeting M&M’s balloon at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was most prominently caught on tape by Alar Allas, a spectator from Toronto whose recording of the 515-pound dirigible toppling a 30-pound light fixture in Times Square thankfully hasn’t turned him into the Abraham Zapruder of character mascots. Moreover, the father of the two lightly injured by the falling debris declared he has no intention to sue the City of New York or anyone else, instead accepting the invitation to sit in the VIP section with his daughters next year. By contrast, a column in the New York Daily News points out NYC doles out some $500 million a year in settlements – $50 million alone to folks who slip and fall on the sidewalk – goaded by adverts from personal injury lawyers. The accident wasn’t necessarily a surprise to Macy’s officials aware of the crosswinds gusting around the Broadway intersection where past mishaps occurred with Sonic the Hedgehog and The Cat in the Hat. Most criticism related to the accident is being leveled at the NBC network, who failed to report on it during the parade coverage, instead switching to a clip of last year’s M&M’s – Al Roker wondering, "Will these classic candymen get out of this delicious dilemma?" (The accident as captured by Allas – who evidently works in video production locally – can be viewed here.)

Spent force

Buy Nothing Day is supposedly being observed in 65 countries today – coinciding with America’s biggest shopping fiesta of the year – although its novelty is waning, even for the fella who started it all. Locally, a zombie walk through the Eaton Centre was beaten to the punch by a similar event with less diabolical intentions before Halloween. BND founder Kalle Lasn is now expressing contempt for the kind of sedition nurtured by the internet: "There are a number of people who think they are activists if they start a blog and talk sustainability," he tells Wired. The publisher of Vancouver-based Adbusters now wants to encourage the younger generation to step away from their computers. Well, the Canadian malls will only be more crowded according to this week’s survey from the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft, conveniently crowing that 40 per cent of people in this country are too paranoid about identity theft to shop online – compared to just 24 per cent stateside. This clashes with a study from the Retail Council of Canada, who claim "a meaningful number of Canadians are showing interest in online shopping during the holiday season". But less interest in meaningless statistics from companies helping news outlets whip people into a holiday shopping frenzy, given how the political pollsters will be taking precedence this year. As for the founder of Buy Nothing Day, tells Wired he’s ready for a brand new beat: "We are definitely going to try and launch social-marketing campaigns that encourage people to just unplug, just to pull out of the virtual electronic environment and try to live more than half their lives in the real world." Sounds like he’s run out of half-witted media-baiting gimmicks like the Blackspot sneaker and TV-B-Gone.

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is [Wired News]

Slumber party

Slum Tourism Toronto is the latest production by the Parkdale Tenants Association*, heightening their campaign to stamp out vermin with a slick parody website. Previous efforts to shame the politicians and landlords perpetuating squalid living conditions via the Golden Cockroach Award and Golden Weasel Award has led to the establishment of a City of Toronto disrepair disclosure website, with launches early next month. Not to be outdone, the PTA will counter the theatrical opening of Lord of the Rings on February 2 with their own Slums Unlimited bus tour through Parkdale, Flemingdon Park, Jane and Finch and elsewhere, and crowning a Lord of the Slums. The quest for more tenant protection measures, including the licensing of apartment buildings and allowing rooming houses citywide, is accompanied by a conditional vow to disrupt the forthcoming bid for the Toronto 2015 World Expo – itself a seemingly needless pursuit by those with delusions that such an event, held on this flattened earth, would have the cultural significance of Montreal’s fair of a half-century before.

Slum Tourism Toronto [the unofficial Toronto Tourism site]

Tiger beat

Nightlife entrepreneur Charles Khabouth earns a profile in the latest Toronto Life, providing insight into how the downtown club industry has transformed. Khabouth’s most familiar property is the Queens Quay E. complex called The Guvernment, "a Swiss army knife for event planners"; his Ultra Supper Club on Queen St. W. transformed the former Bamboo space into a haven for those sufficiently past having to get checked at the door for I.D.; he boasts a piece of the Pantages Hotel, the LOFT lounge on King St. W., an uncontentious condo in the vicinity of The ROM, and a forthcoming disco at the Fallsview Casino. After staring down wretchedly excessive rival Lucid, whose well-heeled backing resulted in bankruptcy, Khabouth entered into a grander ring of investment largesse allowing him to expand stateside. It’s typical Toronto Life fare, but with a more fervent work ethic: Not long after Khabouth’s family uprooted him from an upscale upbringing in Beirut, he took a job at McDonald’s even though he had to ask the manager how to mop the floor. The landlord at his maiden mid-’80s venture, Club Z, gave Khabouth a break because, writes Christopher Shuglan, "he saw him as a kind of Lebanese version of Duddy Kravitz"; success came after the giant tiger residing in the front window of 11A St. Joseph St. had a restless glass-smashing night. leading to a visit from the Humane Society, whose tranquilizer dart ironically supplied Khabouth’s career with the injection of front-page publicity it needed.

King of Clubs [Toronto Life]

Breakdown at Tiffany’s

A Sunday Star piece about Tiffany & Company depicted its 85 Bloor St. W. store as a throwback world where aspiring brides titter at the diamonds in display cases alongside anxious gents who dandily perspire when confronted with a selection of carats. Yet, for all the psychological baggage those powdery blue boxes end up holding, the frisson of old-fashioned courtship apparently overrules any price tag in Toronto. The darker side is provided by New York, where professional cheatbusters know what also happens behind Tiffany’s revolving door. Big spending fellas will invariably purchase gifts for wives and their mistresses at the same time –  unnoticed until after the holidays, when their spouse looks at the credit card statement. "Think of it like caveman days," explains private investigator Michael McKeever. "You suspect your husband is out banging some broad. Then he comes home from hunting with only half a yak. You got to wonder," he says, "Where’s the other half of that yak going?”

Breakup at Tiffany’s [New York]

Madonna in Totalitaria

Aside from being the most famous person to voluntarily travel to the Bathurst and Sheppard area during a July 2004 visit – her beloved Kabbalah Centre hadn’t opened its red string store in Yorkville yet – Madonna’s relationship with this city was forever defined amidst the excruciating narcissism of Truth or Dare, where she rebuked "the totalitarian state of Toronto". Fifteen years later, a piece in yesterday’s New York Times alluded to that May 1990 warning from police backstage at SkyDome, in response to parents aghast at the Blond Ambition tour’s display of onstage onanism, although any such warnings were ignored without consequence. Now she finds the entire display regrettable, an essential part of peddling Confessions on a Dance Floor to breeding women, although it’s been over a dozen years since every Madonna single was guaranteed airplay. Locally, those first hits were hardly even heard on the FM dial, although her visual impact was sufficient for dressalike fans to fill Maple Leaf Gardens on May 23, 1985. Now, a Madonna album release is accompanied by promotional spinning classes and memorabilia auctions – although the tunes have circulated enough online for anyone to have heard them while licking custard on the couch. Scarcer are copies of 1994’s Toronto-filmed biopic Madonna: Innocence Lost, telecast when she was furthest from public favour, where the NYC club at which she honed her rock chops was conveniently re-christened Lee’s Palace. The actress who won the lead role, Terumi Matthews, has evidently left acting to shield her kids from seeing that old lady in a leotard.

Origin of the specious

Fancy condo construction or not, a forthcoming attraction at the Royal Ontario Museum is previewed in today’s New York Times and USA Today. An exhibit on the life and discoveries of Charles Darwin opens November 19 at NYC’s American Museum of Natural History – Darwin will land at the ROM after stops in Boston and Chicago, then proceeding to London, England for the evolutionist’s bicentennial in 2009. The six-week "intelligent design" trial in Harrisburg, PA wrapped up on Friday, as parents and school board grapple over science’s part in making humankind. Museum management is keeping their distance from that debate as they outline the origins of The Origin of Species, with displays including live Galápagos tortoises and an iguana and horned frogs from South America – along with Darwin’s fossil specimens and the magnifying glass used to examine them. Much sooner than Darwin’s debut at the ROM is The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a book due out on Valentine’s Day, then into the top drawer of a hotel room near you.

Sex and the sleepy

Desperately seeking pre-Christmas credit card affection is Sex and the City: The Complete Series, a 20-disc box released today with a Canadian list price of $375. Meanwhile, actress Kim Cattrall – who worked local stages before catching a few big-screen breaks here – has spun her typecasting as Samantha into a role Estelle Getty wouldn’t have been as successful at: A soft-spoken advocate for her own multi-media ruminations on the fornication arts. Cattrall’s new HBO program, Sexual Intelligence, recently premiered in NYC with the Canadian consulate’s endorsement. New York magazine’s Adam Sternbergh, a fellow former Torontonian, meets up with her in public and concocts a cheap money quote: "I’m no SATC fanatic, but I exaggerate only slightly when I say that, as far as New York icons go, eating with Kim Cattrall at Soho House feels like going to Ellis Island to have lunch with the Statue of Liberty." Probably more accurate is his backhanded likening of Cattrall’s campaign to "discovering the benefits of flossing your teeth late in life and then wanting to shout it to the whole world". Not mentioned is Toronto sous-chef Alan Wyse, who Cattrall was flaunting as last year’s legover, despite him being over 20 years younger than she; a difference that was roughly half the span experienced by Cattrall when she was his age, dating Pierre Trudeau. Cattrall’s next project will be on sexpert advice directed at teenage girls – as if they’ll be needing the attention-starved to further feed into their own attention deficits.

Shrewd Awakening [New York]

Haunted louse

The public appearance of a three-year-old unsigned Snopes-worthy memo, Hallowe’en at Toronto District School Board Schools: Scarrrrrry Stuff!, indicating that Wiccan kids shouldn’t risk becoming traumatized by the festivities, is proof that the "holiday season" has finally nudged its way into October – just substitute "Samhain" with "Chanukah", and you’ve got two entire months of talk radio squawk about how "certain people" want to ruin traditions for the rest of us. Will educator fears of October 31’s "commercialization of death" in the classroom be followed by lessons decrying December 25’s commercialization of birth? Let the record show that the year’s first press release concerning Christmas shopping appeared yesterday at 19:27 ET – when Toys "R" Us Canada released their Hot Toy List for the Holiday Season, less than a week after Wal-Mart Canada issued their Halloween costume top 10. Possibly unpopular Star Wars merchandise factors conspicuously on both.