My trip through Canada has turned into more of a fact finding mission than anything else. Sure I'm doing the planned business and socializing but I'm also learning a ton about things I didn't know I didn't know about.

First of all, apparently due to drug advertising regulations a manufacturer can run ads with the name of the drug they are selling so long as they don't mention what it does. This makes for some extremely weird ads - like the one I saw before Superbad in a theater in Toronto. This particular ad was a solid 60 seconds of young girls jumping around and trying on clothes and the voice over saying something about "being your own person" or some crap. I couldn't figure out what it was for to save my life, turns out it was for birth control. There have got to be some insane advertising meetings specing these things out.

Also, if you have a mobile phone and want to use it for any kind of mobile Internet kind of things you are pretty much screwed. As far as I can tell there's no such thing as an all inclusive data plan in the whole of Canada and the providers are totally stoked on bending over the entire country. My US issued CDMA phone works here no problem - for voice, but won't connect to any kind of data network. This is possibly because data costs something like a hundred bucks a MB or so and therefore the networks have them super locked down. Sorry Canada.



Speaking of mobile phones, the folks over at Rogers have put in what might be the flat out stupidest feature I've ever seen. They offer the Sony Ericksson W810i Walkman Phone which, as you might guess from the name, is set up to play music. In fact it has tons of built in music playing software, which lets you play MP3s and things. Well, the smartalics over there at Rogers decided to hijack the "end call" button and make it connect, rather slowly I might add, to their own DRM filled music store instead. This is going to be especially interesting to follow, as Rogers is slotted to release the iPhone later this year.

Finally, not so much something I learned but a learning experience... I was walking down Queen West when I saw a store window display filled with a ton of books a good friend of mine had written. I instantly started smiling and pulled out my camera and started snapping photos of the window so I could show her later. This was all well and good until I noticed people inside looking at me rather oddly, and then processed that my friend Violet writes sex manuals, and the store was a sex book/toy shop, and the books in the window were giving/getting head, fetishes, and generally getting it on and I probably looked like a total creep. Luckily the staff was very understanding when I went inside to try and explain myself.

And yes, I just used the word "staff" in a paragraph about a sex shop.