Rich Man's Hill, Poor Man's Burden

I was just about to go to bed but I'm so angry that I'm writing this first.
Richmond Hill sucks. It was announced that it's building a Performing Arts Centre, and I was sort of happy about that until I stopped to think about it and then asked myself, "Ever since its incorporation in 1873 (compliments of Wikipedia), how come they waited this long to build an arts centre? With a population of 165 000, shouldn't they have built one long ago?"
I ride my bicycle through Yonge Street, the "downtown" portion of the town consisting of a narrow street and a very small space with a few shops, and the streets are deserted.
I hate to compare, but Oakville, Ontario has a similar population and...let's see...an established Performing Arts Centre, a vibrant downtown experience, an orchestra, a ballet company...
There are 4 libraries. The wiki didn't tell me the actual area of this God-forsaken place, but considering it is quite long length-wise I don't think 4 branches helps at all.
The more I researched into this place, hoping to find some sort of redemption, the more I wanted to pack my bags and leave immediately, dragging my family with me out of this suburban-soaked peepeehole.

It's not just the arts, either. In the 2006 Welcome Guide, the Town of Richmond Hill lists its attractions as follows: a wave pool, a couple of parks, and a community centre. I was laughing my head off after that.
RH is sucky because there's no sense of residential identity. Who cares what being a Canadian means--what does being a Richmond Hillian mean? The bigger towns nearby--Vaughan and Markham--soak up all the business opportunities that RH could ever have. It's a place that is the example that is all that is bad about suburbs. One can absolutely not get anywhere without a car, unless you're going next door (but since you have no sense of community who cares about that, right?). You need to drive for miles to go to work, school, play, shop, eat. In fact, it's not just miles. You must drive out of town to go to work, school, play, shop, eat. There's literally nothing here for you. "Hey! I've got an idea! Let's move to RH but not really live there!" Whoever came up with that is a prodigal moron who despises the thought of a comm-un-i-ty.
I told my mom this and she reasoned, "It's just been starting to develop very recently. Prior to that, it was more of a farming town. Maybe there's so many close things nearby that the municipality plans to make money on housing taxes alone."

Ugh. I don't have much more to say. I don't think I can really put this into words, and even pictures won't do--you have to actually be here and live the experience to see what I'm talking about.

"Hey, you wanna go to a movie?"

The suburbs has always occured to me to be such a cookie-cutter place. The houses, the food chains, the supermarkets, the cars, the whole lifestyle is so same. It hides under the facade of a wealth of choices when in fact it's just a repundant place over and over again.

I grew up in the epitome of Suburbia in Southwestern Ontario, aka the GTA and I still live in the suburbs. There is nothing but houses and car-park garages with little kiddy families for 15 minutes biking. After that, there's a plaza: rebundant with the likes of a Loblaws, a McDonald's, Roger's Video, Blockbuster, Country Style, Second Cup, William's Coffee Pub, Tim Horton's, Ho-Lee-Chow, Swiss Chalet. There's a (I hope) privately owned pizza shop and Chinese restaurant but that's about it. It's like living in the countryside without the scenery nor the serenity. But wait...what's that tucked into the corner? Empire Theatres!

Yes, the cookie cutting has not stopped at theatres! Yesterday I took an hour of my precious time out of my day to do some statistical analysis of the GTA's movie theatres. I saw a whole page of the newspaper dedicated to film/theatre listings so I just based it on those. Here are my results:

• GTA has 52 theatres owned by 5 companies (Cineplex, Rainbow Cinemas, Alliance Atlantis, AMC, Empire Theatres)
  
• Cineplex has the most theatres--37
• a small number of movies dominate a large number of theatres
• 12 movies are shown in ~40 of the theatres
• of those, 7 are of a series (Fantastic Four, Shrek 3, Ocean's 13, POTC 3, Live Free or Die Hard, Spiderman 3, Evan Almighty sort of)
  
• 38 other movies are shown in ~1-2 theatres
• for all of the GTA, 50 movies are screened
  

If these stats don't scare you, I hope this will:

• there are 537 screens in total
• that goes to say that a total of 50 movies are shown on 537 screens! Why isn't this number higher? Why in the world can't there be 537 movies showing across the GTA?
  

Conclusion: The movie-going experience has now boiled down to nothing but a monopoly of theatre brand names sucking up money for movie "sagas" in which the whole production company can just get more of your money's worth. These movies have, in my opinion, little to no artistic merit. They have loads of entertainment value but if we now base that value on explosions, comic-book characters (which should be stuck inside comic books except for Frank Miller adaptations), sequels, prequels, trequels, quadquels, stupid retellings of the Bible and fairy tales...

The facade of the suburban movie-going experience ridiculous and shameful. I know downtown has other screenings and has indie films and stuff, but then again I worship downtown and it has everything. I don't get why people today, myself included, are so brainwashed to vomit $10 to see this kind of crap. The box-office numbers are in the millions and budgets for Hollywood movies are in millions, billions.

Meanwhile, at the local library, I saw a great collection of foreign language movies.

Bloor St. Blues

I've always been in love with Bloor St...up until a few weeks ago. As always I was collecting business cards along the lanes when I came to Avenue Rd. and went into Whole Foods. I didn't realize there was a whole shopping place on the lower floor so I went into random stores asking for biz cards.
This guy kept on asking me what it was for before giving me one. Usually I just lie and say, "For contact info." but this time the guy knew I was lying because it was weird for a seemingly 8-year-old to want contact information for a kitchen supply store (although, of course, when you're really 19 and moving off campus next year it makes sense to go into a kitchen supply store). To avoid that for next time, I told myself I would tell the person the truth and see how well it goes.
So. I went into this isolated shoe store and I noticed things were quite weird when I accidentally stepped on this (faux?) tiger-skin rug. The woman behind the counter, presumably the shop owner and shoe designer or whatever, gave me a tight smile and I gathered up my courage and headed towards the counter.
The convo:
"Do you have a business card?"
"What is it for?"
"I, er...collect business cards."
"What is it really for?"
"I collect business cards as a hobby."
Just then the phone rang and as she answered it I saw that a pile of cards had been right in front of me in a shoe-shaped basket. I made a grab for one (or two, or three, four, five) when the Owner who Must've Been Having a Slow Day snatched the basket away from me as if I was intent on killing her child instead of taking a business card. She continued to glare at me as I slowly backed out of the store, coming to terms with Yorkville = Snobs.

Yes, I'm creating another blog

I haven't blogged in a few years, so why start now?
1. Because I'm bored.
2. Because I'm reading so many travel blogs and they inspired me.
3. Because I like talking to my computer.
4. Because this will push me this much closer to travelling around the world like so many others have.

I'm sure this will change over time, but five main themes of this blog are: hobbies, travel, foodstuffs, rants and exciting happenings.

I'm sure there will be pictures.