Conversations

Driving with Brother through Midtown on a Hot Summer’s Day

BR: Glencairn
RR: The least popular subway station.
BR: Is it?
RR: Well, I saw that written on a sticker once. But that factoid is probably out of date now. That was before they built the purple line.
BR (distracted, driving): And now the purple line goes to Glencairn, does it?
RR: No! It goes to Bessarion, and now probably Bessarion is the least popular subway station.
BR: Oh. I see.
RR: I mean, I think. That sticker was without attribution, so I don’t know where they are getting their facts. I’m just basing the thing about Bessarion on the fact that it’s always empty when I go there, and Glencairn on an annonymous sticker I saw on a light-pole in 2003.
BR: So it’s not that it can’t be attributed. You could look into it.
RR: It’s right at the edge of being un-attributable.
BR: It seems like you’re just not working very hard.
RR: Oh, look, a giant inflatable Sonic the Hedgehog!
BR: Well, tis the season for it.

The above convo reminded me of another brother/transit one from a few weeks ago (I promise we do occasionally talk about non-TTC topics).

Taking the Subway with Brother at the End of a Long Evening

RR (stares at subway map): Isn’t it sad they got rid of the SRT?
BR: I…didn’t know they did.
RR (points at map): See? It isn’t there!
BR: Ah. So it isn’t.
RR: It derailed last fall and they never…re-railed it. Now it’s gone. I think they were planning to get rid of it anyway, but this was just earlier.
BR: This was in Scarborough? SRT?
RR: Yeah. Scarborough Rapid Transit. You never went on it?
BR: No, I think I did, once. To Scarborough—Square? A big mall?
RR: Close enough.
BR: It wasn’t good, right? It wasn’t a real subway.
RR: No, it was fine, it was just small and not in a tunnel. Like the monorail at Disneyworld.
BR: That’s very sweet. But more like the monorail on the Simpsons if it fell off.
RR: It was old. Everything falls off something once in a while. They didn’t have to just give up on it. They could have re-railed it.
BR: Isn’t this your stop?
RR: I’m going!
(sibling hug)
RR (too loud for TTC) RE-RAIL! RE-RAIL!

Mark and Rebecca Up before Dawn, Chatting

MS (repeats things twice, to be annoying) Let me know if this gets annoying.
RR: Ok. You sound like Jacob Two-Two, he always said everything twice. Do you remember Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang?
MS: Yes.
RR: That was a weird book.
MS: How so?
RR: Well, Mordecai Richler didn’t really write a lot of children’s literature.
MS: No, he did, he did. It was a whole series.
RR: Really? I just had the one.
MS: Let’s see (turns to computer)
RR: I hate googling things.
MS: I know, I’m just supposed to know everything.
RR: Yes.
MS: Ok, yes, in addition to Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, there was also Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur, and Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case.
RR: Huh, first. So there was supposed to be even more.
MS: Yeah, but he died…six years later, so that didn’t work out.
RR: I mean, I had the first one, my parents read it to me, I liked it. I just didn’t know we needed a whole series.
MS (reading, ignoring RR) Uh-huh.
RR: Did you have it too?
MS: No. It says here that Richler wrote a film adaptation of Death of a Salesman in the 1950s starring Peter Sellars.
RR: Oh wow.
MS: There’s a typo, though. Dearth of a Salesman.
RR: Maybe it’s a parody.
MS: This is going to bother me. Let’s look. (googles “dearth of a salesman”) Oh yeah, it was a comic short.
RR: I was right!
MS: “Thought lost, it was found in a skip outside Park Lane Films in 1996.”
RR: Is a skip like, the garbage?
MS: Yes. And shown to the public for the first time in 2014.
RR: Wow—found in 1996, shown in 2014—not a lot of urgency there. Do you want to see it?
MS: No.

I dunno, what do you do at 6:30am on a Wednesday?