Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Cory Doctorow: “May smelled great in Kensington Market. The fossilized dog shit had melted and washed away in the April rains, and the smells were all springy ones, loam and blossoms and spilled tetrapak fruit punch left behind by the pan-ethnic street-hockey league that formed up spontaneously in front of his house. When the winds blew from the east, he smelled the fish stalls on Spadina, salty and redolent of Chinese barbecue spices. When it blew from the north, he smelled baking bread in the kosher bakeries and sometimes a rare whiff of roasting garlic from the pizzas in the steaming ovens at Massimo's all the way up on College. The western winds smelled of hospital incinerator, acrid and smoky.”

You know the feeling you get when you don't expect the step to be there, or you think there's one more step to climb but there isn't? At least 3 times now since Saturday here in Toronto, while walking out of an eating establishment, I assumed that said eating establishment was at the same level as the sidewalk. Instead, I get thrown for a loop (and look slightly disoriented) when learning the hard way, without ever looking down to notice it, that it's one more step, my foot expecting the sidewalk to be about 20 centimeters above where it actually drops. There are no "watch your step" signs here, since maybe everybody here is used to it. Either that or they at least pay attention to what's in front of them.

Another vignette, as already written on my Flickr weblog: a street performer (or, in the parlance of the times, a busker) whom I call "Yonge Angel", just had some dickhead try to steal the money in her hat. He sat down next to her, waited for her to stop paying attention, then made a lunge towards the hat and baggie (from a previous haul) filled with change. I dropped her a toonie and she gave me a fortune, which reads “If you think a fortune will give you clarity, think again.” I made some lame joke that it indeed was giving me clarity. She either thought it wasn't funny—most likely—or she kept her game face on.