1. Seven Steps to Picking up Hot Foreign Guys in Coffee Shops
“When this conversation has come to its natural end, tell hot foreign guy that the real reason you were inquiring about his sexual orientation and relationship status is because you'd really like to go out with him sometime.”


2. The Herd of Independent Music
“There’s just not enough good reason to go against the grain these days and so much more good reason for this wide assortment of “critics” to line up with it.”


3. An End to Villainy
“Maybe it's been too many novels about vengeful ex-wives cutting the power supply and crazy employers extending work hours, but these villainous type characters often seem like a shortcut to manufacturing tension in a plot where none really exists.”


4. Why Industry Bigwigs Love the Reset Button
“The idea that we have the power to ignore history or (even better) to reset it and do it all over is a childish fantasy—unless you work in the entertainment industry, that is.”


5. Mile End in 1840
Montreal ruralia: “We moved out to the Mile End and lived for a time in a great big old stone house on Mr. Jacob Wurtele’s farm.”

6. Horse v. Dirtbike: Why Avatar’s Problems are Besides the Point
“How can a film celebrate the technologically-unsullied spirit when it is itself a zillion dollar exercise in techie showboating?”
 

7. A Hasidic Exodus
“If the Hasidim left Outremont, who would make up for the constant foot traffic generated by a community of people that almost never leave the neighbourhood?”

8. Games to play on the TTC
“In order to not simply start hating everyone on the bus, I have been imagining the interior monologues of these people, trying to empathize with how they must somehow feel wronged by my desire to sit beside them.”


9. A Place to Piss
“An absence of public toilets assumes that nobody will spend enough time in the public realm to actually need to pee; everything that matters, it suggests, happens indoors.”

10. Pop Montreal: Abbreviated Roundup
“There is nothing like watching a happy pair play music together to make you feel inadequate about your own personal life.”


11. Don Draper vs. Anaïs Nin: Which Blogger are You?
“I subscribe more to the Anaïs Nin school of writing everything and choosing the veils through which things are presented than the Don Draper method of building mysteries from the ground up.”


12. Christ-Off
“I learned that Christianity didn't necessarily mean putting on elaborate displays of piety and belting out insincere, crappy music and marching up and down aisles to the tune of emotional devastation and feeling like a number in the spinning bingo ball of God. You could be casual about it.”