CNE 3: EVERYTHING ELSE

This is going to be the last post, with video and pics, from our two days at the Canadian National Exhibition at the end of August. Day one of the Ex was primarily taken up with the Air Show and the Jump Jet performance by Cirque Orange.

Those two events pretty much took up an entire day and there were still a lot of Ex activities to indulge in, like hunting for stuffies and stuffing our faces ... hmm, a stuff theme. Oh yeh, and there was beer. I know ... Collette and I attending an event that featured beer. Shocking, I know.

Unfortunately, we were not the only people with that idea. The weekend we went to the Ex happened to be, weather wise, the best weekend of the summer; unfortunately, it was the LAST weekend of the summer. So we went to the Ex. And every person in Toronto went to the Ex. And all their relatives went, and all their barbers went, and everyone who had ever heard of the Ex went ... there were a lot of freaking people at the Ex.

So off we go on our stuffie hunt ... stuffies would be stuffed animal, bagged and displayed in Collette's classroom. We basically have two methods of obtaining stuffies. One is the Birthday Game, where you put money down on a month of the year, toss a ball and whatever date comes up, there's your winner. So this is a case of blind luck, though in Collette's hands it becomes a game of deliberate skill. Hence this lovely terrapin that we carried around the Ex all day and hauled home on the bus.



Our other game is the water gun game, where you shoot a stream of water into a clown's mouth and the first one to pop a balloon wins. The main skill here is my ability to intimidate a bunch of 10 year olds in order to win a stuffed Nemo or something.



Besides stalking stuffies and seeing how many pogo's and tiny donuts and beer we could shove down our throats, there were a couple of other shows we wanted to see. One was a rodeo, apparently the first time a rodeo has been at the CNE in something like 50 years. These were participants from the Ontario area, competing for standings that they would carry to the big rodeo that happens at the Royal Winter Fair.

I haven't seen a live rodeo since I lived in Calgary (it had to be live because television was yet to be invented) and Collette had never been to one. It was pretty entertaining; barrel racing, team and individual calf roping, a bullwhip expert, bronc riding and .. my favorite .. bull riding.

They had a "rodeo clown" who was supposed to be funny and was .. kind of .. and the bullfighters who were there to protect the cowboys. I will give the clown credit though, during the bull riding, he popped himself into a barrel out where these thousand bulls were blasting around and that is a risk that, in my opinion, is best viewed from the cheap seats.

Now let's talk about the guy with the bullwhip. He performed stunts with an eight foot long bullwhip, including slicing up a newspaper held up by his wife .. in front of her face. This is when you want to make sure that the relationship is secure.

So this dude was tough. Not because he could pluck out your eye with his whip from ten feet away, but because of those white boots. Brother, you hang around rodeo cowboys while wearing boots, you are double tough.

Another married act we saw was this husband and wife escape artist team. Well, she was the escape artist, he was a magician of sorts. The main feature of the show was the water torture escape, one of many that Houdini made famous. You know, chain somebody up, toss em in a tube of water, and watch them escape.

The duo claims that this lady is one of the few women in the world who does this stunt and the only person of any gender, who performs the entire escape in full view of the audience. They brought an audience member up and she cuffed the performer around her ankles, her wrists and her waist ..... in Vegas you'd pay a lot to do that to a girl. Besides the shackles, there were something like four locks on the lid.

While she was submerged you could see her working with her straight lock picks; there was no illusion how she was escaping, it was more her skill, and the fact that there was no external oxygen source, she held her breath for the whole time. While she was underwater she was working pretty hard, picking the locks, putting her feet up on the glass to get at her ankles, reaching up to the lid .. she was in the water for almost two minutes and forty seconds. Pretty impressive.

So that was our visits to the Ex. Video is here. Shot with the Samsung palmcorder, a sort of highlight from the rodeo and Krissy's entire escape, unedited.

CNE: Rodeo & Escape from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

BUSKERFEST 4: TORONTO AERIAL BALLET

So I am continuing the coverage of Collette and mine's summer. Hmm, it was a busy one. This post is going back to Buskerfest. A very busy day indeed as you can see by the videos I've already posted. I could easily cull another video out of the day and perhaps I will, perhaps I won't, these things are left up to the Fates, the tides of the ocean, the will of the transcendental spirits ... and when I roll my ass out of bed.

This video features a performance by the Toronto Aerial Ballet. This is your basic cirque de soleil style troupe with its own spin on things. This group combined canned music, backscreen video projection, live music, dance and an aerial performance. Apparently there is some kind of story/commentary behind it, I'll let you be the judge.

This was the last performance we saw that day and you can probably tell from the video. My angle was not the greatest. I should have found some high angle but I just had to sit. I had been on my feet all day including about 30 minutes perched on the edges of a wooden planter to get shots over the heads of the crowd. So we got to the aerial dance site early and plopped our butts down in front of the stage.

The angle I got put a stage light right in the lens most of the time but when I focused on the aerial performers, I think it looks pretty good. There was a fair amount of variety in the show with rings, ropes, ribbons and fabric used like an aerial cocoon.

Besides the aerial performers, there was dancing as well. You will see a bit of a female doing a solo dance but this has been edited; really, "modern" dance is something beyond my ken, I get the point of free movement but there is only so much rolling around on the stage I can take. Except . . .

... two women rolling around stage is something else all together. That's all we need to say about that, just watch the video.

So this video was shot with the XL1. It is longer than a lot of the videos I've posted, a simple performance vid cut down from around twenty minutes. Again, not the perfect angle but you get what you paid for don't you. If you haven't, check out the Jump Jet video from Cirque Orange in a previous post. Two drastically different "aerial" performances.

Toronto Aerial Dance from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

PETE TOWNSHEAD MADE ME WRITE THIS POST - REDUX

This is a slight edit on the orginial post, the new material is about ten paragraphs down, where I talk about Audie Murphy.

Who are you? OK, that gets the Pete Townshead reference out of the way. But it does touch on the topic of this post. Who are you? Why are you here? How did you get here? And no, none of these are philosophical questions of universal import, this blog is not that sophisticated. No, this is a much more insular post. Take those questions and apply them to this post: Who are you? Why are you here? How did you get here?

I have a couple of tools on this site that allows me to keep track of certain stats: How many people have visited in a day, what their locales are, even how they came to the site, how they were referred. Nobody panic: I have no way to find anybody's address, IP provider, personal e-mail etc. Well, even if I did, I would have no idea how to use such tools or any inclination to do so. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I respect other people's privacy to a fault; translation, I don't care to know you all that well. OK, so that is a bit disingenuous. I am very curious about who visits the site and why.

A lot of the people who read this blog are folks that Collette and I actually know, our friends and a lot of members of our two big crazy families. That is called a kind of captive audience and I am glad to have them. I also have regular readers from the online community that has developed around Screw Bronze . Collette and I are proud to be part of that particular community and I am happy when any of Elizabeth's readers visit here.

The Hairy Edge has been around long enough that the search engines are beginning to reference it. And that is very entertaining for me. I get a lot of people searching "hairy" Fair enough, that is right in the title of the blog. But some of the hairy things they search for ... well, this is the sexnet, I mean internet, after all. Hairy women. Apparently "Hairy Mary" is quite the popular young woman ... and no, I did not visit Hairy Mary, there are certain things I just do not need to see. I don't know why, but most of the "erotic" hairy searches are coming from the middle east. I have no idea why. It is just what Sitemeter shows me.

Then we have hairy searches you can lump into a sexual category from another perspective: Hairy men seeking other hairy men. Bears, specifically. This has nothing to do with the big furry critters that prowl along Springhaven Lodge .. ok, maybe it does, I don't ask what people's preferences may be.

"Old hairy mothers" was another search ... that I do not need to see either. There apparently is a band called The Hairy Edge .... really? I don't know what this phrase means to be honest, but I would not have associated music with it. There is a Hairy Edge Productions ... and it is not mine. There is an irony. I have a production company, my blog is called The Hairy Edge and my company is called something else.

Then there are the folks out there searching for answers about their hair growth. Fair enough. I have mentioned this in a few posts, I just hope no one was expecting answers cause really, let's face it, there are no answers on this site.

Dog parks are another big search; again, not surprising, I've written about dog parks several times. My post on dog park etiquette gets big responses. I wish I got more hits from the Toronto area because dog owners are still not picking up their dog poop and still walking away with Hayley's toys.

People out there are searching for Jeff Healy which pleases my heart because I will be a Jeff fan for life and although the man is gone, his music needs to be supported for a long time to come.

And Audie Murphy. My man Audie I have had serveral hits searching for Audie, one as recently as a full day after I originally filed this post. I have had several hits for Audie from the UK, which I find interesting. I think of Audie as an Amercian icon, mostly for his war exploits and today, to a far lesser degree, for his work in movies.

Some of the searches surprised me as they were connecting things that I may have mentioned only briefly in the blog. Like the old Raquel Welch western Hannie Caulder. Take a look at this post I wrote comparing the movies The Brave One and Death wish, you have to look pretty hard to see the Hannie Caulder reference but it is in there. The fact that somebody was searching for the movie, however, did inspire me to buy the movie on eBay. No, I haven't watched it yet. Like a lot of movies/books/music I enjoyed in my youth, I have a nagging suspicion that the actual product may not live up to the memory.

My post on whether or not I am disabled got a huge response, most of it thanks to a reference Elizabeth made at Screw Bronze. I am still getting hits from this search parameter which should be not too surprising, people are still disabled, and people still need to know how and why the world is viewing them in this context.

Besides search hits, the other thing my online tools show me is who is visiting, at least in terms of regions. Again, I can often match locales to people I know; Kingston area is my family, Parry Sound is Collette's family, Victoria is Elizabeth, Regina is Neal and a certain UK location is going to be Gaina.

But I have some regular visitors who I can not easily identify. I have a very dedicated regular reader from Mountain View, California ... who are you? Where do I know you from? I love the fact you are a regular but as always, my question would be ... why?? I have some regular viewers from Los Angeles and a couple more from the UK who I cannot identify. And Quebec. I'm big in Quebec .... perhaps not the same as the Tom Waits song "I'm Big in Japan" but there you go.

Obviously, I like knowing that people are actually reading this thing. Not an absolute requirement for me, I almost exclusively write just to appease the voices in my head. But hey, I am glad you are all out there. If you would care to drop a comment or even an email every now and then, that would be awesome. If you comment I will almost always try to respond, if only to thank you for commenting. I have no problem with anonymous comments, it is just nice to know that you are actually out there.

Incidently: I have a new gadget at the bottom of the post, called Following. Not sure I totally understand it but I guess it is a kind of way for you to suscribe and for me to follow you ... wow, that sounds really creepy but it is nothing of the sort. So the gadge allowed me to title this feature and of course, I called it Edge Heads. Are you an Edge Head? Do you think that is the most annoying thing you've ever read? Well .... I will accept that comment too.

CNE 2: JUMP JET

Yes, this is a sort of flashback post, to our visit to the Canadian National Exhibition a couple of weeks ago. All the excitement about Collette's walk shifted my focus, of course, but there was at least one more video and pics from the Ex that I wanted to share.

An aerial outfit called Cirque Orange performed a closing show for the last weekend of the Ex. We saw the show twice. As far as I know, this is a local troupe, at least they have performed around town a few times this summer.

We've seen a few of these aerial shows, of course, and we enjoy them, but this one is a little different. Don't know if I've ever seen jumpsuited characters performing a dance with metal grinders before. Or trampoline artists tumbling while said jumpsuiters blast fire under their feet. Or twirl flaming bars of steel.

However, these characters were not the stars of the show. The stars were, in human, form, a remarkable female aerialist and her incredible "flying machine".

The plane was this amazing prop, hoisted up on a giant crane, capable of turning, of spitting fire out of its engines, of showering down sparks and of setting its own props "on fire"

At one point they hoisted the plane a good fifty feet up into the air. That is when our young lady came out to play.

She danced on the plane, she swung on her trapeze, and she flipped around on a pair of bungees ... she really was quite good.

The video below was shot with my Samsung palmcorder and I'm standing on a sign, so it is shaky and the quality is not the greatest, but it will give you an idea about the show. Right at the end, she launches off the plane on her bungies and does this tumbling run that seems to go on forever. You can hear me say "there is something wrong with that girl" So enjoy.

CNE: Jump Jet from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

COLLETTE'S WALK: PART TWO

She did it! Two days, 60 K, and she is back home in surprisingly good spirits. More rain today, sometimes coming down quite hard but Collette, Billie and Thelma all made it through. Collette got up before dawn this morning (and I mean before the dawn of time, it was that early) and went back up to Downsview Parc where Billie and Thelma had spent the night in tent city.

The setup in the Parc was pretty amazing, including full food setups, massages, stretching booths, and a huge party last night. The organization of the entire race was pretty impressive, with lots of stations along the way providing food and drink, the girls really didn't need to take anything with them.

I was only able to go to one Cheering Station today but I decided to completely cheese out and get Miss Hayley involved.

The above picture is how you humiliate a border collie in one easy lesson. But she was quite the hit at the cheering station. As the walkers went by I would say "Hayley, cheer" or "Hayley, say thank you" and she would bark. The secret was this little hand signal we have for barking that I can disguise pretty well so people don't even notice it.

As always, there was a lot of community support and a dizzying display of walkers' self-expression.

Collette had no idea that was I going to be at this cheering station, let alone have Miss Hayley with me, let alone have her dressed up ... well, sort of. Miss Hayley is vocal, that is why it is easy to get her to "talk". But generally her bark is not the high pitched yelp of most border collies, it is a fairly deep, definite bark .. expect when a member of her pack is there to be greeted. Her pack consists of Collette and myself and some very special people who have been in her life like Billie, our nephew Jeff who lives in our basement, his parents Dennis and Kay, some of the regulars from our dog park. When Hayley saw Collette she did a little wiggle dance and put on a crying display that had all the female walkers saying "Awwwwwwwwww!!"


So the ladies continued on and the weather turned pretty bad, with some very cold rain coming down. Collette had packed some longer pants but Billie had only her shorts and t shirt. Luckily, Collette had also thought to bring some rain ponchos ... what a good aunt eh?



So the five thousand walkers wended their way through the rainy city down to Exhibition Place where the whole thing had started Saturday morning. Collette told me that the entrance to the hall was handled beautifully: First the walkers who were cancer survivors, then the event staff then all the walkers who had managed to finish the event. Collette told me she had, for a time, walked with a woman who was doing the walk for the second time ... she is 95. And she finished.

Here are the weekend warriors, still smiling after this amazing achievement, to say that I am proud of all them is a total understatement, especially my lovely wife, who set out to do something that she had never done before .. and did it well.

The final total of money raised by the 5,000 walkers is reported to be 13 million dollars.

So I cut a little video. All of the footage is from Day One.

Walk For The Cure from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

COLLETTE'S WALK: PART ONE

This was it, the first day of Collette's 60 K two day walk to raise money for breast cancer research at Princess Margaret Hospital. Collette is walking with our niece Billie-Marie and her friend Thelma. Billie stayed at the house with us last night and she and Collette were off very early this morning. Or someone claims it was morning. It was still dark out. Apparently I was awake. I think I took this picture .... is it in focus or were eyes just blurry?

The Weekend Warriors then made their way down to Exhibition Place to meet up with thousands of other walkers who would make their way some 35 Klicks up to Downsview Parc in North York.

Here are Billie and Thelma cued up at the Ex, way too perky for that time of day.

The girls started out walking in some fairly serious rain, but that soon gave way to sunny skies and pretty workable temp in the low 20's. The spirit of the event, considering its very serious nature, had a great atmosphere; as I stood at one of the "cheering stations" waiting for the girls to come by, I was treated to what you could only describe as a "variety" of walkers.

I really don't know what to say about this last photo ... I am just your intrepid reporter.

The walk .. tremendously well organized ... had set up cheering sites along the way. These were very well supported by the local neighbourhoods. Collette said that people came out to cheer them all along the route, often coming out with fruit and liquids. In the Weston area, a man brought out homemade zucchini bread. Someone was also handing out beer. I always knew I liked Weston.

Here are the Weekend Warriors at the second cheering station, roughly halfway through the walk .. they've just done over 15 klicks, why on earth are they smiling? Athletes .. they are just weird .. but there was free beer, maybe that was it.

At the Weston cheering station, I hooked up with Debbie. Debbie is Collette's co-worker and one of the people who helped us out so much with our two garage sales.

The support here was great. They had vans driving around that could pick up an exhausted walker and take them to the next "station" no questions asked. This is not a race. It is a fund raising effort. It is a community bonding to fight a common enemy. There were athletes on the walk of course (Billie and Thelma both run half marathons) but there were also just "average" people attempting something extraordinary to help prevent something evil.

Here are the Warriors with Debbie at the Weston cheering station ... you know the real reason I am never in these pictures? I've been up since 6 am. Don't believe for a second that I am smiling.

This was the last cheering station I went to before the girls made it to Downsview Parc. So, 35 klicks, 10 hours, Collette alone raising just over two thousand dollars to the cause. We can't thank enough all those who donated money, who donated items to sell at the garage sale, who gave us their support. That's what kept Collette going, I'm sure.

Billie-Marie decided to camp out at Downsview. Collette (wisely) chose to come back home before tackling another 25 K or so tomorrow. Of course I took video but I will wait till tomorrow is over before cutting it. I'll be going down to the Ex to see the girls bring it home, to cheer them on and, no doubt, capture some smiling images .... maybe even I will crack a grin.