On the College St. streetcar tonight, the kindly female operator asked the big-eyed, befuddled rider (no, not me -- this time) where he wanted to get off.

BBR: "Let me know when we are on College Street."

KFO: "Sir, this is the College Street car. Where do you want to go?"

BBR: "College and Queen."

KFO: "Sir, College and Queen run parallel. Where would you like to go?"

BBR (Puts thinking cap on): "Queen and Oss-ink-tone."

That gave the KFO something she could work with! I cannot say if BBR got to his destination, or whether he told the Ossington bus driver that he wanted to go to Bathurst and Spadina.

Shades of Latka Gravas, I tell you.

Some nights, I feel for TTC operators. :)

Net guru Michael Geist has a good column on the "walled gardens" of social networking sites. You want to talk to your MySpace friend from your Facebook account? Sorry.

The Tyee cribbed a story first published at Alternet by filmmaker/journo Rory O'Connor: 'Citizen Journalism' grows up. O'Connor tripped over to South Korea for a conference sponsored by OhMyNews, a success story in the world of CJ.

O'Connor's personal blog is The Media is a Plural.

Here's some of the Tyee's favourite independent reads (they included Bourque; ewwww).

A five-step program from Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles:

Could it come to T.O.? Let us hope!

This 2004 Takashi Miike effort is well worth seeing. Here's the whole NYT capsule review:

A downtrodden schoolteacher, a disabled boy and a government agent suffering from an embarrassing itch: these are the unlikely heroes of “Zebraman,” Takashi Miike’s bizarre detour from ultraviolence into family fare.

It’s 2010, and all is not well in the Yachiyo ward of Yokohama. Rape and arson are on the increase, bearded seals are swimming upriver and a crustacean-headed serial killer is on the loose. When reports of more “nonhuman life forms” begin to circulate, Japan’s defense agency dispatches fabulously inept “Men in Black”-style agents (including the one with the itch) to investigate. Also on the case is Ichikawa (Sho Aikawa), a mild-mannered teacher who, along with his disabled student, is obsessed with a long-canceled television show about a superhero named Zebraman. Donning a homemade zebra suit and a new heroic identity, Ichikawa sets out to save his district.

Driven less by civic duty than by the need to escape his dreary life, Zebraman is a tragic, touching figure too often obscured by Kankurou Kudo’s hyperactive screenplay and a special-effects team drunk on alien slime. Mr. Miike fashions unexpectedly arresting images — the weird stillness of an ocean of emerald ooze, the surreal beauty of Zebraman’s lacerated costume — but the movie heaves with possessed schoolchildren, aggressive eggplant and a pea-green baby. “Japan doesn’t need nukes,” says a sign near the end of the movie. With all this going on, who would?

I wrote the following in a 2005 blog posting about the IFC movie house in New Yawk:

Two perfect midnight madness showings, for me, are Takashi Miike's Gozu and Zebraman (I saw both at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2003 and 2004 respectively).

Why? They're hilarious, totally irreverent and wildly imaginative, and that makes them the ultimate in cult moviegoing fun (of the two, Gozu is a bit more violent, but nothing like, say, Ichii the Killer or Audition). I love absurdist black humour, and nobody does it like Miike.

I watch Hollywood movies when I want a totally predictable movie experience. I watch Miike when I want a film that will be predictable only in its complete and utter unpredictability.

Speaking of Miike, he's back at TIFF this year! Observe:

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO Takashi Miike, Japan
Tighten your saddlebags, load your revolvers and pack your chopsticks for cult cinema bad boy Takashi Miike's audacious wagon ride mash-up into the wild, wild east. A familiar spaghetti western premise that involves a mysterious stranger arriving into the middle of two clans feuding over hidden loot gets sliced and diced into new Americana-Kabuki-baroque fare: Buddhist temples sit alongside saloons, samurai swords hang from gun belts and sake flows with blood. Blue-eyed samurai Quentin Tarantino makes his first Japanese film appearance in Miike's first English language film. Starring Hideaki Ito, Koichi Sato, Yusuke Iseya, Yoshino Kimura, and Masanobu Ando.

The Beeb has a good round-up of where Dubya's class of 2001 is these days.

From the BBC:

The two men are shown with their arms and legs tied

Russian officials are investigating a video which appears to show two men being murdered, execution-style, by far-right extremists.

The clip, which was posted on some websites, shows one man apparently being beheaded and the other shot.

One was from Russia's southern republic of Dagestan and the other from Tajikistan, captions on the video say.

A group calling itself the National Socialists of Rus says it carried out the attack.

Violence against people from the Caucasus and from central Asian and other foreign countries has been increasing in Russia in recent years.

It's always useful to remember that Islamist extremists aren't the only ones running death cults. :(

Update

The BBC reported that the guy suspected of posting the video has surrendered to police.

Mark MacKinnon, a Globe and Mail reporter formerly posted to Russia, has more in this Aug. 17 post on his blog.