Pedantry Digest

Today, I abandoned my rough-and-tumble little digital camera for something altogether more--what are the cool kids calling it these days?--"old school". (Let there be no confusion: I have never been nor will I ever be cool enough to refer to anything as "old school", which is why the quotation marks are an absolute necessity.) On my recent holiday to visit my family in Los Angeles, I rummaged through my bedroom there and found my four Polaroid cameras--an iZone, a Captiva, a JoyCam, and one of the older versions of the traditional One Step Flash Instant Camera. I went with the latter and had a good time, garnering lots of strange looks (more than usual) from people on the street.

If you have a Polaroid camera, go dust it off, buy a pack of 600 film, and play around--it's a good time.

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Bloor Street West and Queen's Park. The Royal Ontario Museum (old building on the left, yet-to-be-finished new building on the right). Polaroids are especially unkind to my shaky hands.




Saint George Street, looking down towards Harbord Street. You can't see it, but there's a piece of heavy construction machinery behind that pile of dirt, which stole the show, absorbing all the camera's flash.




Bloor Street West, slightly west of Queen's Park. This is the pedestrian walkway around the yet-to-be-finished new building. The writing on the left says, "BAN BEEPING TRUCKS!!! (shhh...)".




Inside the Alliance Atlantis Cumberland movie theatre. Two tables with a checkboard and pieces at each and four plain chairs around them are set up just outside the washrooms. Brilliant.




Bloor Street West and Avenue Road. Siao Li, beloved former housemate and my patient companion for the evening.




Yorkville Avenue, a bit east of Avenue Road. This is the back side of Williams Sonoma and those figures are either mannequins or cardboard cut-outs. Either way, it's my favourite image of the night.