A while back I wrote (with a leaning toward espionage) about a couple of books I’d been reading that highlighted the porous and permissive nature of Canada. I’d hoped to make this a preamble to other stories I was aware of but, at the time, didn’t feel that I’d sufficiently plumbed their depths for proper discussion. In other words, I knew of them but not enough about them.

Having now completed “The Soviet Spies” by Richard Hirsch I can say that I’ve done at least a little work to correct this oversight.

Long story short, it’s the 1940s and a GRU cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko working in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa goes rogue, making off with a bunch of files exposing the breadth and width of Soviet infiltration within North American politics, military, academia, research, industry, etc. His family is endangered, a bunch of roadblocks and nail-biting encounters follow, and eventually scandalous exposés and international drama ensue — standard spy pulp fiction fodder, except it happens to be true.

While I understand that there may be some disputes surrounding the accuracy of the following statement, the Gouzenko Affair is considered by many historians to be the unofficial start of the Cold War. This is where people like McCarthy got their (not entirely incorrect) ideas about a Red invasion and where movies like Russell Rouse’s wordless classic “The Thief” got their (sometimes literal) inspiration.

Naturally much of the Gouzenko backstory happened in Toronto and enough thorough detail is included in “The Soviet Spies” that I’m considering taking a tour of some of the conspirators’ homes and places of work. This attention to detail can get a bit tedious but the book manages to weave together detailed facts and timelines in a way that reads like a modern day (albeit wordy), spy thriller. Combining this with the history of places like Camp X adds even more intrigue to Canada’s post-war narrative.

This may all seem like a bit of nostalgia but with the current Canada-India diplomatic row, Canada-Russia diplomatic row, Canada-China diplomatic row, and undoubtedly a few others, the same sensational stories that were making headlines nearly seventy years ago are no less apropos today. In fact, the cloak-and-dagger nature of international diplomacy along with a resurgence of human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) and other old-school techniques seem to be more relevant in the modern era than ever.

In any event, if you get a whiff of similar themes in /sectionb then at least you’ll know where I ripped ’em off from.

… continued from part 1

If you don’t understand the nostalgia that Ontario Place generates in geriatrics like me I invite you to take a wistful gander at the video below. But before you start kvetching about how, by today’s standards, the place sucks, I’d remind that this was the olden days and us kids were just happy as fuck not to have to walk 15 barefoot kilometers in the snow to school.

This video might leave you with the impression that Ontario Place could be the upswing but the reality is that its fate was sealed and loaded onto the S.S. Therme which sailed some time ago.

One the one hand, a spa-and-water-based attraction on the grounds is not that out of place. On the other, the promo material makes it look a little exclusive and pricey. The current admission price of FREE makes it hard to compete.

I suppose there’s always Trillium Park but with half of the unique and scenic path through Ontario Place now off limits, it just gives the small trail a melancholy feel.

Just in time for summer.

I’m happy with the result but much of the process is manual so I may have to spend some time slapping together some automation for the next installment.

From: https://www.torontocitylife.com/sectionb/2022/03/25/2-brush-pass/

I’ve been thinking about producing a more immersive rendition of /sectionb. I’ve also been thinking that producing a “Parapsychological Spy Thriller” via conventional means is not be the correct approach. It needs to be a little more artsy, interpretive, associative. Unfortunately, illustration and animation aren’t really my thing.

Although I can draw some basic proportions and I try to pay attention to composition and colour, I can’t produce the type of visual output that modern artificial intelligence can. But as it happens I also dabble in code so it wasn’t long before I was fucking around with Stable Diffusion and similar software. Unfortunately, if I wanted to use the AI to produce short films the still images it spat out would need to be animated using something like morphing — doable but laborious.

By one propitious circumstance a fairly recent upgrade to Stable Diffusion by Deforum popped up in my search results one day and as soon as I saw a few samples I got giddy. Not only is the animated output of DSD dream-like and trippy, which is very apropos for /sectionb, it also improvises around the periphery of supplied prompts/themes in surprising ways, which is also quite apropos.

Initially I tried adding voice narration but it just didn’t fit so instead I converted the text to subtitles/closed captions, chucked in some original music, and after that the video basically just produced itself.

A month and a half between posts might seem excessive but hear me out! I could’ve just posted another static map image but I’m trying to push the envelope a little bit so I thought, “Why not a video?”

Unfortunately, adding a time component introduces a whole bunch of new complications. First I had to alter my code to produce output based on a temporal sequence rather than a single point in time. After that I had to figure out how to produce composite images so that I could add things like the time/date stamp. Then I had to figure out how to actually encode the video. Following that, the clunky user interface needed to be updated in order to accommodate the new features. Then I realized that the data didn’t include any duration information so I had to figure out how to extrapolate it. And then I had to run the extrapolation routine over the whole database which took weeks, no doubt owing to my weak SQL.

Anyways, I find the first product to be kinda soothing and hypnotic and leaves me thinking about what else I could do with it. So without further adieu here’s 24 hours of all C4S calls over Halloween, each call (red dot) growing larger in diameter the longer it remains active:

To nutshell the above video, yet another court challenge regarding Covid mandates that stripped millions of Canadians of their fundamental rights has been dismissed by a Canadian court as “moot”.

Slaves, after all, have no rights that aren’t benevolently granted and that cannot be arbitrarily taken away.

Another interesting tidbit to emerge from this interview is how the government overtly and directly lied about following the advice of their own health advisors while simultaneously crushing any and all questions about the necessity for mandates, masks, and vaccines. Shocking.

The sad part of this video is hearing lawyer Keith Wilson maintain hope that the government-owned-and-operated courts are not entirely corrupt — I guess he hasn’t read anything about how the government simply snubs its nose at, lies to, and defrauds its own courts like the Canada Revenue Agency has been doing for years (I recall complaining about exactly the same thing a while ago). So even if you do somehow get a favourable ruling in an overwhelmingly corrupt and ridiculously unfair system, the state will simply ignore it and tell you to go fuck yourself while threatening you to pay taxes (a euphemism for debt slavery), and remind you to put a little check in a little box every four years because it’s such a great, glorious, and sacred privilege (and just another “Right” that they can summarily strip you of).

Hearing the interviewer close with the supposition that Canada might by a dictatorship would be almost funny if I hadn’t been screaming the exact shame thing for years. In fact, pompous government fucks were openly bloviating about our “benign dictatorship” many years ago while simultaneous musing about what they would do when they became the dictator (which then happened).

Then this asshole took over:

I’ve given this a lot more thought since my earlier analyses but people still seem hell bent on replacing the problem with more of the same (i.e. government), so instead of wearing out my keyboard for another decade I’ll invite anyone who’s interested in discussing the topic seriously to contact me or to leave a comment.

Needing to replenish our stock of incense, Sarah and me recently dropped by Shanti Baba.

Aside from being a perennially cool store packed full of intriguing paraphernalia, rare objects, and numinous curios (a sort of spiritual head shop), the longtime owner is pretty knowledgeable about the Queen West area and offers interesting tidbits whenever we visit.

This time around he wrote the name “KENK” on a pink Post-It and handed it to us with instructions to look it up. When I did I realized why the name sounded familiar: up until about a decade ago Igor Kenk had been a fixture in the neighbourhood and was widely recognized as “the world’s most prolific bicycle thief”.

I don’t know how many of the nearly 3000 bikes strewn across his properties Kenk was personally responsible for stealing but I suspect that his reputation is well-earned. He’s so notorious that TVO even decided to produce an interactive graphic novel about him. The guy has lived an interesting life.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Igor Kenk no longer lives in Toronto but he definitely left his mark.

(this all sounds a little familiar…)

(so, about that…)