Friday night, I went to my first newmindspace event. These things are always so cool, and I’ve been meaning to goto one for so long. But it was always something stupid like the fact that the events start at 11PM downtown, or I’m not a cool enough blogger to attend. Anyways, I dragged my ass down to the corner of Queen & Spadina at 11:11PM on a cold and windy winter Toronto night to participate in Radical Illumination (This is why it is so inconvenient).

Actually my excuse for not looking retarded was that I was meeting up with parts of the climbing gang: Aaron, Horace, Janet, & Ben. Victor and Richard went home because of pending work (exam?? lame) pfft. The theme of this event were these cheap LED throwies that are surprisingly cheap to make and fun fun fun!

We arrived slightly late and by then there was already a huge crowd spilling onto the street. The meeting place was the north/east corner, which if you are familiar with the area is the corner where CIBC has the extra wide sidewalk. I’d guesstimate there were about 200-300 people there including a Global News crew. It was tough to actually fight through the crowd to get the throwies, so I didn’t bother. Only Horace and Ben were brave enough to do so.

After the throwies were all distributed, the plan was to assault a passing streetcar. This involved everyone crossing the road, into the streetcar right of way and waiting at the streetcar stop. Well the stop can’t fit that many people, nor can that many cross the road at once. So we blocked traffic for awhile. Meanwhile, a cop car had pulled up across the street and started watching us.

Shortly, a streetcar arrived, and it got pelted with LEDs! It sounds a lot cooler in theory because, as Horace pointed out, the force of throwing was greater than the magnet so they kind of bounced off without sticking. This seemed like a good time for the cops to step in, which they did with sirens blazing, and effectively blocked the streetcar lane. So everyone milled around and waited. There was a streetcar across the street, but it was I guess terrified of the crowd or the cop car in its way and didn’t cross the street.

Eventually several more cops pulled up. The smart ones (i.e. us) stayed on the other side of the street, but seeing as no one was getting arrested, we jaywalked to join the crowd. Conveniently, several streetcars started arriving from the other direction. The mob grew smarter this time, and instead of throwing the err throwies, they ran up to the streetcar and placed them. We also saw a lot of goofs that ran into the middle of the road amidst cars to pick up LEDs that people had previously thrown too far. A trailing streetcar asked us what was going on which was kind of funny. That’s why the TTC should read blogs I guess.

Afterwards, we went to Swanton (sp?) in Chinatown. It was funny because our waiter was bizarre. First, we (a group of all asians in a restaurant filled with a lot of white people) were sitting around a big bowl of noodles, when eventually the waiter had to show up to distribute the dish into servings. Then, Aaron had to ask for (just) one chopstick, and eventually got dissed because: 1) he should go to school, 2) was Korean from HK, and 3) wasn’t given a box for his doggy bag.

Also another review on BlogTO

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, newmindspace, toronto