Brilliant. Effing Brilliant short film!

9,000 year old beer recreated

9,000 year old beer recreated - thestar.com: "9,000 year old beer recreated

Only in British Columbia, pity.

Shooting Underwater

KP Underwater, originally uploaded by MMT1972.

Now that the weather is all nice and warm up here in Toronto, it's time to get back into the water!

I've had underwater gear for a while now, mostly purchased for shooting sharks and turtles and stuff down in the Caribbean back when I could afford to take decent vacations. :-)

Back here in Canada, while there are great wrecks to dive upon, and to shoot, I thought I would try and build a portfolio based on my adoration of Howard Schatz. His body of work is stunning; it helps that he has a heated, covered pool and can shoot year round. Yes, I'm jealous. :-D

It's always a struggle to find swimming pools to use for these type of shoots; the public ones are pretty much off limits for anything creative, and the private ones are usually out in the burbs.

The pool shoot on Saturday was more in the way of a gear / camera test, making sure that things still worked after a couple of years being dry. No floods! Yay!

Look for some more work in this vein over the summer; it's great to be back in the pool.

Regards,

Mark

Weekend Photoshoot

K.P., originally uploaded by MMT1972.

An image from the weekend's model portfolio photo-shoot.

The sun refused to come out. :-(

Shuttle Atlantis streaks into orbit on final planned flight | The Space Shot - CNET News

*happy / sad*

Soon there shall be no more pickup-truck fire in the sky.

Bring back the Saturns, damnit.

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Shuttle Atlantis streaks into orbit on final planned flight | The Space Shot - CNET News: "Atlantis blasted off on its 32nd and final planned mission Friday

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Is this the smartest job application ever? - thestar.com

Is this the smartest job application ever? - thestar.com: "Money well spent, apparently. Four of the five gave Brownstein job interviews. Two offered him jobs.

Bloor St. facelift $4.5M over budget - thestar.com

Sell it. Use the money for subway extensions.

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Bloor St. facelift $4.5M over budget - thestar.com: "half of the overrun – $2.5 million – is pinned on Toronto Hydro

Tree down on my street...

Tree down on Larchmount #leslieville #Toronto, originally uploaded by MMT1972.

Friday night / Saturday morning was a wild and windy time.

A series of thunderstorms roared through town, with the usual results. Thankfully, the tree didn't fall on MY car. :-) I was parked about five spots south of this.

Latest attempt at video... April Flickr Meetup

Toronto Flickr Meetup, 28 April 2010 from Mark Turuk on Vimeo.

You can never go wrong with waffles... mmmm waffles.

I seem to have a dueling-aromas thing going on with the downstairs neighbors; I don't know what he and his girlfriend were cooking for supper the other night, but I'm pretty sure 'food of the gods' was involved. That being said, I'm pretty sure I've got him beat on the morning shift as the buttery-vanilla goodness of these waffles is impossible to ignore.

About every two weeks or so, I make up a batch, most of which find their way into the freezer. These crisp up nicely in the toaster, so it's a great way to avoid the tastes-like-cardboard Eggo variety.

I use a recipe from BigOven, which involves mixing up most of the ingredients the night before, and letting yeast-ferment on your kitchen counter. The total prep-time is about 5-7 minutes.

If you own a cat, make sure you have cat-proofed your container. This is the most crucial step. Trust me. ;-)

For best results, use maple syrup; none of that flavoured corn-syrup stuff. *shudder*

BBQ & Other Friday Night Endeavours...

It was a busy weekend that started around noon on Friday.

I was about two years overdue to hold a serious BBQ, and so I sent out invitations earlier in the week to about 10 people, of whom 6 or so responded. I had asked for an RSVP, but as an earlier article in the NYT stated, RSVP seems to be a dying social convention.

The BBQ was to involve burgers and sausage; I had found a new coffee based dry rub recipe that I wanted to try out via the Epicurious app on my iPhone.

Given that I work from a home office, I didn't feel too bad with shutting it down at noon, and beginning the Epic Quest™ to pull together all the required ingredients.

I started at The Leslieville Cheese Market for some smoked Gouda, and provolone cheeses to crown my epic creations. Across the street, Rowe Farms provided me with four pounds of organic hamburger and fresh Brick Street Bakery buns.

The next stop was Meat on Queen, for some sausage... this Mom & Son operation have an entire deli case full of gourmet sausages that are made on site. Some of the recipes include Apple & Ginger, Veal & Sun-dried Tomato, as well as the usual suspects like garlic, honey, chorizo, greek, etc.

Last stop was Loblaws, to pick up the usual condiments; lettuce, tomato, onions, cold deli salads, etc.

I had purposefully asked people to NOT BRING ANYTHING. In fact, I was adamant as I wanted no kitchen / fridge leftovers. When you're single, and you host a party, your cold storage space can quickly become overrun if people bring stuff; you can never get through it all before it goes bad later on. And that's still exactly what happened, as peeps find it impossible to show up empty handed. Either that, or they never actually read anything I wrote in the invitation. Ah well.

One of the reasons that I had rarely if ever went down the road of home-made-burgers is that a) the frozen, store bought kind aren't too bad nowadays, and b) I was always embarrassed at my inability to make a round, evenly distributed patty. Enter the Starfrit Hamburger Stacker, the king of the infomercial circuit and (thankfully) carried by the local Canadian Tire. This thing is just awesome; I'm making fresh home made burgers all the time this summer. Or I say now. ;-)

With all the ingredients collected, I went about making the burgers, and placed the in the fridge to cool and retain that lovely red-hockey-puck shape. The house was clean, the beer was cold, and all that I needed was guests.

Rodolfo the Jewish Brazilian Designer/Photographer was the first to arrive, bringing a couple bottles of wine. Ok, I can handle people bringing wine; it stores well and keeps me from having to hit up the LCBO.

Over the next hour, the rest of the guests trickled in; The Computer Engineer / Photographer / Historian, the Photographer/Music Journalist, the Engineer & Teacher from next door, the Wedding Photographer/Insurance Adjuster, the Television Programming Exec / Photographer... you can see that I should have gotten some decently varied, and maybe even awesomely indepth discussions on art and science... maybe even something on the future of our society, right? Nope. The girls talked DeGrassi memories, and guys talked computers. *sigh* So. Ashamed. And Sad.

The food was demolished in short order; I ended up running out actually and the people that showed up late thankfully brought their own kebabs that I just had to throw on the grill. By this point, the sun was down, the wine and beer were flowing even more copiously and it was time to hit the local bar to finish off the night.

Good times, good food, good peeps. :-)

Senior SEC staffers caught surfing porn during crisis - FP Posted

Senior SEC staffers caught surfing porn during crisis - FP Posted: "To be fair, at least now no one can accuse these particular employees of sitting on their hands while the financial crisis was going on.

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Nice.

Ex-immigration judge guilty in sex-for-status case - thestar.com

In most instances, I'm a very socially liberal kind of person. I may be more centrist / right on Political or Financial issues, but when it comes to Social Issues, I'm pretty much live-and-let-live.

However.

In cases where judges, police, or those in authority positions abuse those positions, I'm a rock.

As society must be, in order to protect itself from the rot from within.

Ex-immigration judge guilty in sex-for-status case - thestar.com:

"A former immigration judge has been found guilty of trying to coerce sex from a South Korean refugee claimant in return for a favourable ruling on her case.

First, I would like to welcome the young woman to Canada; I'm sorry that you had to deal with scum like this. Thankfully you've found justice, thanks to your boyfriend (now husband) at the time.

“He knew that what he was doing was wrong,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Thea Herman said Wednesday morning in finding Steve Ellis guilty of breach of trust and an Immigration and Refugee Protection Act charge of bribery.

“Mr. Ellis abused his position to his own advantage.”

Ellis, 50, who is also a former Toronto city councillor, showed little reaction to Herman’s ruling at first, but at one point raised his head and sighed.

I wish there was a special place where we could send Mr. Ellis. An island up in Nunavut or a work camp in northern Saskatchewan. You know, some place where we can send those special offenders. Those that prey on the system from within.

Some others that should probably be keeping him company are the four RCMP officers from Vancouver that tasered Robert Dziekanski to death.

One whom (was arguably drunk when he) later killed a guy on a motorbike in a separate incident.

Regards,

Mark

ginger / garlic veal in oyster sauce

ginger veal in oyster sauce on basmati
Originally uploaded by MMT1972

The last couple of years I've spent more and more time cooking food at home as opposed to buying take-away or eating at a restaurant.

On the downside, I've had to do a heck of a lot more dishes, and I'm one of only 22,348 people in N. America that doesn't own a dishwasher.

However on the upside, I've started to experiment with different ingredients that I didn't grow up with and would never have used. Ginger on the prairie was generally conceded to the softdrink aisle, after all.

Brown some veal scallopini or stir-fry beef, add some fresh ginger, sliced thin, sauteed in a little oil with some garlic, let simmer in oyster or teryaki sauce for 20 minutes or so.

Slather over a bed of rice or other carb of your personal preference.

It's like chinese food, but using better ingredients than I normally see when it's delivered, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Mmmm, and Regards,

Mark

Spring in Toronto

Well, at least, spring in High Park.

On the western edge of High Park, you can find a grove of cherry trees that blossom every year, if on a vastly smaller scale than their Japanese progenitors.

The trees were a gift from the Japanese embassy in 1959; more information can be found at the High Park website.

This past Saturday, I got up bright and early and headed over via transit. It was a good thing that I started as early as I did as the weather turned increasingly blustery, ending the excursion with rain, wind and sleet.

One of the projects that I have been playing with is making tilt-shift and tilt-shift / stop-motion images and videos. This sort of explains why I've not been posting a whole lot lately.

In effect, while I have been shooting a lot, it's mostly just 'stock' images, as I need themes and stories to work the videos and images into. It's been a great learning experience.

Which is the polite way of saying, it's been frustrating as all bloody hell. ;-) Most of the challenges have been technical in nature, and I've mostly got them ironed out, but I will state that still image editing and video editing are areas that have their own unique skills, applications and (most annoyingly) languages. If you started off speaking Photoshop and are learning Sony Vegas... frustration.

Anyhow, give me a week or so and I'll hopefully have something posted from the Cherry Blossom Shoot; until then you'll have to make do with the still capture from my iPhone. :-)

Regards,

Mark

Charest & Cheney

I had to do a double-take the other day when I saw this image of Quebec Premier Jean Charest on an article in the National Post.

Granted, he was having a bad week, and I feel for him. The whole Quebec/Judge/Donor thing is a bit on the off side of credibility, and it will be interesting to see what the outcome of the inquiry is. Granted, it's Quebec politics, but still, even the Liberal party wouldn't be that stupid... would they? *sound of crickets chirping*

All very interesting, but still and all, the reason for my post was that the image resonated with me for some reason... and then I remembered a picture of Dick Cheney.


'Nuff Said. ;-)

Regards,

Mark

Olympic Gold

The Other epicentre
Originally uploaded by MMT1972

Downtown Toronto on Sunday night! :-)