Those pesky right-wing NDP radicals

The Sidney Smith Building on St. George Street is often the site of a whole lot of the crazy on the U of T campus, particularly as each new school year starts. Here, for example, we have a guy shilling a paper for something called the Spartacus Youth Club:



The Spartacus Youth Club seems to be your typical Marxist-Leninist outfit, as is evident from this website. It's not that I can't respect the Marxist point of view, but you have to wonder about groups like this who don't seem to recognize that it's not the 1930s anymore. Check out the opening paragraph about the club from the website I linked to above:

The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter.

Note to the SYC -- the Leninist vanguard party is lone gone, and it isn't coming back.

Of course the most amusing part of this whole scene is the sign attached to the guy's table:



This sign is self-evidently funny, but it's worthwhile to think about why it's so funny.

The idea behind the message is rather clear -- the NDP are a component of the same big political/capitalist machine that comprises Canada's other major political parties, so they're not going to enact the kind of change a good Marxist-Leninist is after. That's fine. But are they really the "frontmen" for "Canadian imperialism". I mean, maybe they're somewhere in the cheap seats. But the front men? I don't think so.

Anyway, if you're going to make such a strongly-worded sign, shouldn't you go after a bigger target like, I don't know, capitalism? Or maybe one of the major institutions that symbolizes capitalism and/or imperialism? The IMF, maybe? Or the World Bank? Wall Street? NATO? Something like that?

Here you get the impression that this guy's NDP-supporting girlfriend dumped him, and this is his way of getting back at her. Funny stuff any way you look at it.

The TTC's broken staircase

On any given day, roughly 1000 of the TTC's subway station escalators are broken and/or under repair (this is a rough estimate, but I don't think I'm too far off). Yet this regular old staircase of the eastern platform of the St. Clair West station has the distinction of being the only non-mechanical stairway I know of in the system that is "broken":



This staircase has been cordoned off for months. They haven't even bothered to put up a sign telling us the date when it will be "fixed" (which would inevitably be pushed back four or five times before the job was finished).

Having said all this, there is a good reason that I can attest to for why this staircase is closed. One day, while passing by, I noticed that is was soaking wet. I didn't think much of it, until I noticed that it was wet for several days in a row after that. And this wasn't because of a leaking pipe dripping onto it overhead or anything like that -- the staircase seemed to simply be oozing wetness.

The stairs are quite dry now, in case you can't tell from the photograph. Yet it remains closed. Perhaps the source of the wetness has yet to be bested. In any event, the escalators are only a short walk further down the platform.

Korea Town, now with less Korea

The area of Bloor Street east of Christie Street and west of Bathurst (actually west of Honest Ed's) was known colloquially by Torontonians as Korea Town. Except the thing is that the street signs in this area never used to label this district as such. Rather, it was dubbed the "Korean Business Area":


Photo courtesy of JB's Warehouse and Curio Emporium

The reason for this was quite sensible -- while there are many Korean businesses along this strip, few Koreans actually live the area. The surrounding neighbourhood is actually more of a (slightly) downscale version of The Annex, with similar demographics.

With the new street signage going up all over town, however, it would appear that the unofficial name has now become official:



I suppose it's catchier, but the ironic thing is that this strip of Bloor has become increasingly less Korean over the past couple of years. There has been a sprinkling of Indian restaurants in the area for a while, and of course there is that KFC/Taco Bell on Euclid. But the pace of the invasion of the non-Koreans has quickened considerably over the past year or so.

Some of these new places have a rather disturbing Annex-esque feel to them, such as this self-described "eco shopping oasis":



Right beside this place is a hair salon that had a decidedly non-Korean umlaut in its name:



Mobile phone companies seem to be creeping into the area, perhaps because the real estate here is cheaper than it is further east:





That last one is a Fido store that is rather hard to photograph, by the way.

Everyone's favourite new hipster joint, Snakes and Lattes, is smack in the middle of Korea Town:



Don't pull out your laptop if you decide to go -- you'll embarrass yourself in front of grad students playing Carcassonne (who presumably keep their MacBooks safely tucked away in their messenger bags when they visit).

On the other side of the coin, we have this place that's only a little further west:



The only thing I know about Eggsmart is that there's one in a grimy old building near the bus station that used to be a Coffee Time. It doesn't look much less grimy than the Coffee Time, however. Perhaps it is merely a placeholder until a Tim Hortons moves in.

Oh yes, we also have this distinctly non-Korean clothing store in the area. I enjoy how I managed to position my reflection right in between the headless mannequins in the display window:



We can add more irony to what's going on in Korea Town. The venerable store named Yankee Stuff - one of the few Korean-owned places in the area that sold non-Korean goods - closed a while back. The quaint old sign remains, but the place seems to sell mostly Korean DVDs and handbags now -- that is to say, most definitely non-Yankee stuff:



Yet all is not lost for the Koreans in the area -- they have managed to score one notable victory. On the northwest corner of Bloor and Markham is a building that apparently used to be a McDonald's. That was before my time. When I lived in the area, the building housed a strange Mexican restaurant/nightclub combination called Labios. Well, Labios is gone, replaced by a Koren BBQ:



Score one for the Korean businesspeople of the area. They may be losing the war, but they won this battle.