Hey Kids! It's The Post Post

I dragged my self out to the crowded and noisy city of Toronto on Friday night for a night of rocking Mexican food and fantastic music.

More on that later, but two things about going to Toronto always get my attention. The first of which is that, although there about 5 major highways leading into Toronto, there seems to enough road in the city to handle only about 1/3 of this. I don't usually go there without having to be in the car for about 1.5 to 3 hours. The funny part about these times is that they are going to the same destinations. What should take 40 minutes of driving on a normal road becomes a marathon of gruelling endurance sitting. It's like watching the Academy Awards, except you can't get up to pee, or get a drink.

The second thing is all the visual pollution. There isn't a square foot of the city that doesn't have some sort of poster, billboard or advertisement on it. The street post at the top of this is the victim of years worth of handbills being stapled to it. The pole itself is now rusty from all the extra metal. The poor city has to pimp itself out to the world and I just feel bad for it.

But hey, when you've got a city that pretty much doesn't shut down, you have to take advantage of it. Ad, ads everywhere. What struck me about the post, was the lack of advertisement. Usually dripping in independent band posters and advertisements for phone in services, this pole was oddly naked, aside from the army of staples. These of course weren't higher than the bulk of us normal humans could reach (except for the staple layer at the top. Those were like 10 feet in the air, who the hell puts the posters up there? Mutated giraffes? Unemployed basketball players?

I didn't have the time to hang around, or the proper tools to test my theory that if I were to carefully remove the staples, layer by layer, I would reveal the evolution of the city. Like an archaeological dig, it would reveal secrets about the city that would amaze and astonish. Maybe I'll end up there one night with a pair of pliers and some test equipment. Carbon date some staples and recover some lost species (like polite cabbies) from the metallic prison in which they have become entrapped.

We'll let scientists stick to the science. I'll just bring a battery with me next time and see if I can magnetize the pole. It would be fun to watch cyclists and car drivers swerve towards it uncontrollably. I wish I'd paid more attention in science class now.