A while back, KH showed me pictures he took at some Chinese cultural festival. I've wanted to take a crack at shooting under similar settings. On Saturday, I finally got the opportunity, as I went to Market for another Toronto First Radio event. This event was entitled "金腰面之決戰前夕" (The Duel) starring the two DJ's from the 男人咀對咀 show. 腰面派兩大掌門決裂 - 武林勢必哄動!
金腰面 is a game they've been playing on their radio show for many years. I don't fully understand the rules, but normally, the two DJ's each pick a song. Callers will then select one of the two songs (Song A or Song B), whichever they like more. After some complicated voting system, the winning DJ will say to the losing DJ : "你金腰面!!" Not fully sure what it means, but one theory is that it sounds like "你'禁'要面!" (You really want to 'save face').
In this night, it was the ultimate showdown between the two host DJ's. Ten of the stations DJ's were split into two teams. One DJ from both teams battle 1-on-1 in each round by both singing a song. Audience would then vote for Song A or Song B. Five rounds - Best of three. The losing side in each round will have to suffer one of "滿清四大酷刑!" (Qing Dynasty's four major forms of torture!) While the singing was very good overall, the most memorable parts were, of course, the punishment! Kind of wish I had a P&S to record some videos, but pictures are worth a thousand words.
Round 1 Punishment: 辣辣壽司 (HOT HOT SUSHI)
Two plates of sushi, one hot, one not.
Ah Lau picked the normal one. He's home free.
Hold on.... Punishment requires eating BOTH dishes.
>_<;;;
Round 2 Punishment: Balls
One of the more severe and hilarious punishments of the night. Golf ball - up one, down other. Pictures tell all.
Round 3 Punishment: Pie in Face
Pretty self-explanatory...
Round 4 Punishment: Shoe in Face
Rather disgusting.... Sniff three times.
Round 5 Punishment: ULTIMATE punishment
Dress up and take five pictures with the audience and collect five quarters. LOL.
Final Results
Overall, a fun night. Learned a lot about photography and the limitations of my camera and lens under low light conditions. The faces in the pictures were redder than normal, but I suspect that was due to the uneven lighting on the stage. Try to account for that next time.
Saturday night marked the official architectural opening of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). An astounding bold structure in the heart of the city, this $270 million jagged outcrop took four years to complete. There were big holes in the ground in years one and two and a really ugly steel structure in year three. So it was very nice to see the building finally completed.
Some people love it, some people hate it, but this crystal has everyone talking about it. I really love the fact that it is daring and so different. Walking down Bloor Street, it's hard not to slow down and take notice. In broad daylight, the structure does not look as magnificent, as the planked facade gives it a dull weathered looked. Maybe it would look better if it was all glass - I dunno. At night though... Wow.
The opening of the Crystal was launched to coincide with the opening ceremonies of Luminato, Toronto's Festival of Arts and Creativity. Luminato is a week long celebration of film, literature, dance, music and imagery. A LOT of activities going on this week, so definitely check some of them out if in town.
Following the opening speeches by the many distinguished guests of honour was the night's free concert dubed"A World of Possibilities". My group came out from dinner late, and by the time we got back to the ROM, it was PACKED. A little unfortunate that we couldn't get close enough to the stage, but we were close to a big screen that was projecting all the action.
The theme of the concert evolved around humanity and time, fitting for a museum setting. In short, evil "Dr. Time" has had enough of humans' mistakes over the past centuries and want to end the world at 11:02pm on June 2nd, 2007. The rest of the concert was to convince Dr. Time to give humanity another chance (more time), by showcasing aspects of the cultures that make humans so different and unique. A bit cheesy, but a good way to tie all the performances together, and suitable for the family.
The concert was a collection of assorted performances, ranging from pop, classical, rock, jazz, opera, folk and gospel, aboriginal and David Suzuki. Some of the more memorable performances: Eva Avila, winner of the Canadian Idol. I don't follow any idols, but her song was great (especially after the subpar tap-dancers). Then, there was the Trinidadian-born comedian Jean Paul, who gave us a load-down on Trinidad and Zulu, including their nice accents and how to use "I own five cows" as pickup lines. One of the most impressive performance of the night featured The Canadian Tenors. I've never heard of them before, so I was thinking since they bear the "Canadian" title in their name, they better not be a disgrace. Man, their voices sounded so awesome, and was the first and one of the few performances of the night that brought the "crowd to its feet". Isabel Bayrakdarian, some opera soprano, was pretty cool. I've never really paid any attention to opera before, so it was a good first experience. The best part of the show was definitely the finale, an original musical that David Foster composed and orchestrated for the event. Started off with Alexandria Maillot, who was joined by Cody Karey, followed by a children's choir and Jann Arden! It was such a passionate inspirational piece - totally captures the energy, emotions, and really, the human spirit of the evening. "Imagine what we could do!"
Went to some sketchy Korean joint on Bloor afterwards. To get to the place, you had to go through some nondescript entrance and up some narrow stairwell. However, the place was a nice bar, with really fancy cushions as seats in their booths. Tried some cocktail So-ju for the first time and played rounds of Big 2 for the rest of the night.
Oh yeah, one thing I should mention. On the way back to ROM after dinner, we saw this topless woman walking ahead of us. Apparently, she had patches covering the essential areas. The gals accused us guys of showing too much reaction! In my defense, we only saw the back of the woman, so it was natural that we were curious, when there's so much left to imagination. hahah.
With three finds under my belt, I am now pretty much an official geocacher. Geocaching, in a simple fashion, is a treasure hunt, whereby one is given the GPS coordinates of the treasure. There are many flavours and twists to this concept, but general premise is the same. Steal the treasure and log it.
Kung introduced me to this sport by telling me about the adventures of his geocaching pal in Nevada. I read up on it a while back and didn't give it too much thought. A few weeks back, I mentioned geocaching to some wannabe detective. All of a sudden, after spending agonizing hours coming up with the alias "MrMonk", the dude went crazy and starting hunting from the wee hours of the morning to past the dusk hours of the night. Not wanting to fall too far behind, I signed on-board too.
Things didn't start too rosy for me. For some reason, I decided to pick a rather difficult cache. It was a multi-cache (MC), where the first cache will provide clues or coordinates to a second one, and so forth, until you get to the final cache. This particular MC hunt was in German Mills Park. I've driven by it so many times, and was always curious at what laid at the end of Leslie St.
In terms of gear, the basic tool of the trade is a GPS. I don't have one. So really, I was totally screwed for this MC hunt. I had the coords for the first cache, but would need to go back to a computer to look up any new coords I picked up. But what the heck. Armed with a gMap printout of the first location, I headed to the park after work. The first hint was a Christmas tree. The cache is suppose to be an ammo box. I spotted the LONE evergreen in that area (matched perfectly with the printout) and searched literally everywhere around it for 20 minutes. The cache wasn't freaking there!
Came back home rather disappointed, I was scolded for not reading the log entries left by fellow geocachers on the cache's website for hints. I thought it was really cheating to read all that, but apparently, not having a GPS was a good enough "excuse". LOL.
One of the entries read: "We found the first stage quickly, but it was nestled right against a birds nest, and the bird flew out as we reached in to retrieve the coords." OMG. I looked everywhere around and under the tree, but didn't look in or up the TREE! I didn't even notice a bird's nest earlier. big SIGH.
I went back the following day feeling rather confident. Got back to the tree, and easily spotted the bird's nest! There were younglings in the nest, barely able to open their eyes! One of their parent got scared as I approached the nest, flew off and was observing me from this post.
Back to the cache, I looked everywhere in the tree, and everywhere around the tree again. NO CACHE! WTF. Someone must have stolen the cache or something. It was bad too, as I wasn't as careful this time - accidentally brushed my naked skin against some stinging nettles. My arm and hand were itching like crazy for the rest of the night.
I was more pissed than disappointed. I spent two days looking for one cache and failed, while my arch-rival MrMonk had found FIVE caches in two days.
Anyway, since I had to head down to Ithaca over the weekend, I decided to read up on the caches around my alma mater. Found a couple "ideal" candidates that might be simple enough to find. Ended up discovering my first ever cache by Uris Library and the clock tower. It was a little key holder box, and nicely hidden in a pretty obvious location. There were a lot of muggle families around taking photos with all the graduate candidates, so I had to be rather careful and discrete when retreiving and restoring the cache.
By the time I got back to Canada, MrMonk was already up to TWELVE caches. WTF. I decided to tackle a simpler cache in the same German Mills Park. I picked up the coordinates and was pretty sure I was in the right area of the forest. I found the supposed tree stump with the cache, but could not spot the cache. I looked around for a while and came back to the stump, stepping on some logs around it. All of a sudden, one of the logs gave way slightly under my feet. I quicky jumped away and removed the log. The cache was sitting underneath in plain sight! I had almost crushed the cache by accident. haha.
Lots of goodies in this cache. Left a silver "Learning Science" pencil I had from teaching some grade 8 kids a while back. I didn't have any better toys, haha. I took a tiny bumble bee eraser from the cache.
Overall, GeoCaching has been pretty fun. There are a surprisingly large number of caches in the area. It is kind of amazing how so many "treasures" are hidden all around us. The best part is that these hunts often brings you to local areas that you have never realized existed.
My current stats: 3 caches FOUND in TWO countries.
I have this wooden shed in my backyard where I store miscellaneous garden tools, cardboard boxes and other junk. Over the weekend, I ventured into the shed and to my surprise, the place was in a big mess. Things were knocked over and debris laid everywhere. Obviously, some little rascal had spent a winter camping inside my shed, taking advantage of everything the shed had to offer without even asking.
As I began the labourious task of removing the junk and debris, this little squirrel ran into the shed! WTF. He was freaking me out and I was freaking him out. It ran all around the building, then eventually hid behind a bucket in the corner. I continued cleaning the place up. Every time I left the shed and peered back in, the squirrel came out to look around. When I entered, he resumed the cover position behind the bucket. Getting fed up after a while, I picked a few rocks and tossed them behind the bucket. I'd hope to scare the squirrel out and get him out of my shed!
The rocks locked on and homed in on the target. BOOM. nothing. no explosion. no reaction. Where did the rascal go?!? I pulled the bucket out and found the second entrance to the shed. The stupid thing ate a hole through my shed in the corner. That was where he was popping in and out. Now that I found the entrance to his secret lair, I took an interlock stone and blocked the entrance... BWHAHAHAHA. Later in the day, I went to Home Depot and got a bit of liquid concrete and patched the hole up. I didn't even know if concrete will work with wood, but the wood obviously wasn't enough to stop the squirrel. Let him taste a bit of concrete!
During the cleanup, I'd found a LOT of peanut shells littered all over the place. WHO is FEEDING peanuts to squirrels?!?!? Anyway, after many hours of work, I threw a lot of things out and my shed has never been cleaner. Curiously enough, there was this little squirrel that was looking over me from a tree. I can't be sure if he was the ONE, but I won't be surprised. He even stopped and posed for TochiCam. I didn't really feel bad that I took away the squirrel's home. It's still spring, so he has the entire summer to relocate.
Now we get to Tuesday. There was this dead squirrel beside the shed. He wasn't there yesterday. About the same size and look as above. He had his belly up. I didn't flip him over to confirm his identity nor did I bother to determine the cause of death. I felt kind of bad. Packed him up and gave it a proper burial in the green organic waste bin. Poor guy. Ruined my day.
Monday was Victoria Day in Canada, in celebration of the Queen's birthday. One can say V-Day is the sister holiday to Memorial Day (and not 4th of July! *cough*) in the States. As with all Victoria Day from years past, it's the first holiday of the year where people can enjoy setting off their own fireworks.
With great angst, I decided to delay my viewing of 24 and Heroes's season finale to go out and watch the fireworks display at Vandorf Community Park near Aurora. I really didn't expect much of a show, since this was a small community show. But it was a good opportunity to test TochiCam in a night setting. The next big fireworks display would be July 1st - too far away.
Overall, the show was rather subpar, but there was a really good community atmosphere. Seeing the little kids running and dancing around to the music. Everyone had sparkers and glow sticks. It was very nice to hang out on such a beautiful night. ;-)
I had a much harder time taking fireworks pictures with my dSLR than my old Nikon, mainly because I didn't know how to use the camera. Eventually, I figured out how to adjust the aperature and exposure time settings properly and made liberal use of the continuous shooting mode. I collected the best of the photos of the night and uploaded them to Flickr. Enjoy!
P.S. I got back just in time to catch Heroes, and then spent the next 2 hrs watching Doyle being dumb and Jack saving the world... again.