I realize this is like, two months late. I’M BUSY.

Like a lot of other Torontonians, I was pretty pissed off about the G20 — pissed off at the indignity of having to march next to Black Bloc at the main march on the Saturday; pissed off at the Black Bloc during the trouble; about how the police handled it; about how the media looped footage of that cop car burning at King and Bay, over and over, for the entire day; about how protest and our right to it was usurped by idiot mall anarchists and idiot cops.

It all started when I saw @mondoville retweet this boneheaded, pollyannish remark from Vella on Friday, July 30:

Depending on who you ask, TAVIS and the TPS’ other preventative policing initiatives are clusterfucks that have further fractured citizen support for the police, and alienated young black men in Toronto. Or, it’s great work that is responsible for keeping hundreds of vulnerable kids off the street. With that and my G20 experience in mind, I made this tweet:

I didn’t think he’d respond. The Toronto Police Twitter strategy seemed to me to be one of shameless retweeting of praise — during the G20, @TorontoPolice exclusively retweeted comments from Torontonians supportive of the “police action” that weekend (i.e. trampling peaceful protestors with horses, but not apprehending vandals on foot). I was wrong — he did respond, but with the same insincere attitude that had characterized the ISU that entire weekend:

Like, ugh! So I was all like:

I guess that’s when he clued in and re-read what I’d actually said. Context: @delbius works on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team (ostensibly dealing with fraud, identity theft, user verification, etc.), @lawscomm is in fact not a lawyer but a “Social media strategist for Law Enforcement,” and @trafficservices and @graffitibmxcop are his fellow officers on the TPS.

Now, I’m no “social media guru” but I know what works on Twitter and what doesn’t. Again, retweeting only complimentary tweets doesn’t work. Neither does the 2010 equivalent of “telling on the principal.” Plus, I have more followers than @OfficerVella, and I’m not afraid to use them. So I said this:

Sure enough, fellow Torontwonians (see what I did there?) came to my defence. Some even made some funnies!

Flustered, Vella made various overtures about fostering “communication” and “dialogue” throughout the afternoon:

Of course, all of this is defensive hot air — throughout the entire debacle, the only direct conversation we had was when he thanked me for my “retweet.” I’ve never received an apology or acknowledgement that what I said about police relations had merit. If the Toronto Police knew how to use Twitter (or knew how to police), he would have said something like, “Thanks for your feedback. We’re trying harder to reach out to folks who were upset with how the weekend went down. Follow up with complaints, etc., at email@torontopolice.ca.”

There are many ways to read into this whole experience:

Cops can and do treat the Internet the way they do the street: They think they can bully, intimidate, threaten and corral people into doing whatever they want. But online, everything remains on the record (and still remains online — have to give Officer Vella credit for not deleting his asinine tweets).
Relations between Torontonians and their police force have irreparably changed after the G20. They can’t stuff it in the corner and pretend that progressive, middle-of-the-road folks aren’t mad too.
This PR flack doesn’t know shit about Twitter. Let this be an instructive experience for PR folks, in any field. Know the difference between a reply and a retweet. Vella’s original charge was that I had altered his words and rebroadcast them as his own; I did no such thing. If you understand the mechanics of these two functions, you’ll know the only people who would’ve seen the original tweet were him, @mondoville, and whoever’s following both of us; which, I’m guessing, is not very many people.

Don’t take that to mean I think cops should get off the Internet. Cops have every reason to be on Twitter — in Toronto, many active, engaged citizens, journalists and community organizers talk about the city’s many issues, and those are the people you want to reach if the force wants to improve policing and relations. But not like this.

The measure of a society’s civil rights protections is not in times of peace, when no one ever gives a thought to their civil liberties, but rather how they are upheld when legislation, agencies, bodies or groups threaten them, blah blah blah. I will spare you all the platitudes about civic engagement, democracy, etc.

Hat tip to Justin Stashyn for his handy write-up on #twettle, and to my wonderful co-star, Media Relations Officer Constable Tonyo Vella.

I have no doubt this spat has put me on their radar for as long as we both shall live, because two weeks later, another cop has started following me on Twitter. Oh, and TPS asked me to advise Halifax Police on my experience being #twettled.

Now, who wants to buy me a twettle mug from Urban Dictionary?

This is the retard cousin to my dog.

John Barber is my favourite columnist evar. I don’t know what documentary this is from, but I want to watch it.

1. McClungs – Because of flakey photographers, and because we’re going to print next Monday, I’ve been shooting approximately 50% of the visual content. I guess that’s what small productions are like, completely dominated by the masthead.
2. Internships – It’s hard enough putting yourself out there and applying for internships at major Canadian magazines, it’s another thing to do it when you KNOW you’re outshined by older, better, smarter, faster, wiser, savvier journalism graduates who are more desperate and poorer than you. So basically it’s a lost cause applying in the first place, but I convince myself it’s “for the experience.” Exception: Spacing magazine, see point 3.
3. Spacing – I have an interview for a photo internship with them next week. Crossing my fingers, since it’s the only place I’ve gotten a response from (nary even a rejection letter, I mean srsly). Good lookin’ out to a certain friend for the heads-up.
4. The Eyeopener – Photo editor Jamie has taken over my life. Every week it’s a new assignment
5. Procrastination – You know I’ve tried to keep this in check the last few months, but I’m also writing this instead of my 1500-word feature, which I only started today, which is due tomorrow at 1 p.m., which is worth 40% of my Critical Issues in Journalism mark. I am le suck.
6. Former Transformer – With arguably the two best band photographers in Toronto, David Waldman aka Kid With Camera and Jess Baumung, we’ve started a new band photography collective called Former Transformer. I’m really excited about this, enough that I’m ending my hiatus/hibernation from shows just for this project. Wow, how inadequate do I feel right now?
7. Mike – He left last week. I was despondent for a few days, and now I realize I can actually get work done. Just kidding, I miss ya beb.

I’ll try and get some photos up after school winds down later this week. I’ve been snapping a lot of editorial photos, some of which I think are worth sharing.

This time, however, this little Korean-Asian-ambiguous man of mid-30s was a little more proactive, a little more eager. He decided the situation was so rife with opportunity to terrorize a 20-year-old unassuming girl that he had to stroke his peen, waiting for me to notice, leering, and breathing heavily. Even had the guff to ask as he rolled up to the bus shelter, “have you been waiting long?”

It’s led me to the conclusion – and there could be no other conclusion – that I must have tattooed on my forehead, in an ink that perverts can read but I cannot, the words “please show me your penis in public”. That, or I’m being stalked by a secret society of gross middle-aged dudes with serious sexual complexes.

I thought living in the downtown core was supposed to be the danger zone, but lightening isn’t supposed to strike twice. Two weeks til I move downtown. I’m safe!

It’s snowing. My shoes are salty and ruined. And my bike is in storage.

Complete contents of one (1) Supreme scatter-weave backpack in olive green, because I can:

• Nalgene bottle

• three copies of McClung’s
• wrinkled and torn A-section and crossword from the Toronto Star
• one battered reporter’s notebook
• one tattered RSU-issued agenda, with miscellaneous notes, paycheques, scribbled reminders and other assorted brain meltdowns
• Canon 5D body
• Canon 24-70 f/2.8 L lens
• Canon 550EX Speedlite
• non-descript lens cloth
• off-shoe cord for flash
• two spare camera batteries
• two memory cards, 512 MB each
• four spare NiMh AA batteries
• three pieces of protective high-density foam from camera bag liner
• grey Spruce scarf
• one pair of holey Descente biking gloves
• one black H&M toque
• two booklets of YRT bus tickets
• two Papermate pens
• one highlighter
• one tin of Burt’s Bees lip balm
• file folder with assorted research articles for upcoming Eyeopener feature
• one Hilroy notebook, teal green with notes from POL540: Third World Politics and SOC525, Media and Images of Inequality
• one essay handout for SOC525
• one Moleskine graph-lined notebook with Mike Giant sticker
• slim case of business cards
• one crumpled Tim Horton’s paper bag, remnants of a dutchie donut

 
I headed to the bus stop near my house just before 9 a.m. this morning so I could book it to work by 10. I miss the bus 8:49, natch (thanks, YRT… you could have spared me this whole episode). I’m sitting on the bench in the fishbowl shelter, waiting for the thing to roll up, minding my own business. Up walks this dude who looks relatively normal, but he’s got a queer little smile on his face and a phone glued to his ear. Don’t make much of it, but strangely, oddly… as I’m spacing out, in my periphery vision I notice the 501-looking jawns he was wearing, and I think Hmm, those are nice jeans. Wonder if they’re selvedge. I feel someone burning their eyes into my head.

And then. And then… my eyes drift upward from the patch of concrete I had been oogling – while he was oogling me.

But stop.

At.
His.
Crotch.

In full view – in all its wrinkly, erect glory…

Is his penis. Peeking out. Through his fly (by the way, they were zip, therefore removing the possibility that they were 501XXs. Glad I got that out of the way). To his face my eyes then turn, and I see the creepiest, slightest wondrous smile of a face. Like a kid in a candy store. Or like an old pervert looking at the kids in the candy store.

In a panic I pull out my phone to call someone, anyone. He figures I’m calling the po-po, so he zips up and heads back from whence he came. The police came over last night to take a statement, and now my mother thinks I shouldn’t take the bus ever again.

The end.

So on that note… After a brief conversation on Wikipedia last night over nachos at Sneak’s, in which my friend commented that everyone Wiki’s everything they need. And I started to think of all the time I save in journalism school when on assignment, starting my research on a story at Wikipedia (and often times ending it there, but let’s not get into my terribly poor research skills). So, I’m taking on a personal project to contribute to the site. For all the praise I extoll and lavish on democratic online media tools like Wikipedia, Youtube, GNN, and hell, even Myspace, I do very little to give back some real love for all they do for me. So, after setting up this blog last week, I started with expanding some of the grime and grime-related Wikipedia stub pages on a study break this afternoon. It’s kind of neat to think how many peeps might see what I did and check it out. Hopefully in the future I will expand my contributions to reflect my plethora of knowledge on such illuminated, world-changing topics like streetwear and sneakers. Haha.