I wonder whose bright idea this was?

It was announced last week that Kanye West is going to be the headliner at the closing ceremonies at the Pan Am games in Toronto.  Now I don't claim to be an expert of Kanye West, but what little I have seen of his music, most of it is bleeped out due to all the bad language he uses or I can't understand a word he says. Honestly I can't say I had heard of him, until he got together with Kim Kardashian.  

Also as the games are being held in Canada and we do have the odd high profile musician that is Canadian, Drake, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, or even at a push Justin Bieber, so why on earth couldn't they hire one of them?  Pitbull who is also American born is another star performing and also Serena Ryder who is actually Canadian.

Now as you probably know Canadians are a polite bunch, but this has got a lot of people angry and there are a lot of online petitions going around trying to get Kanye West replaced.  Obviously this isn't going to happen, as no doubt Kanye being the astute business man he is will have made sure there is a cancellation clause in his contract.

Then just to add to all the drama we have the Toronto Mayor John Tory announcing that it is great to have someone performing who has done so much for our (Canadian) music industry.......hello he's American....LOL

Now granted the poor man did go on and make a video basically making fun of himself over his gaffe, which I see can't be shown now due to copy-right laws.

Oh well on a brighter note all this makes for headlines which brings in more publicity for the games and Canada.........

2015 Pan Am Games....

They are being held in Toronto this time around and start on July 10th.  Suffice to say a silly amount of money has been spent making sure we look presentable to whomever is interested in this sort of stuff?  

Me personally, can't say I am awfully bothered but there were a couple of things about it worth mentioning I thought.  We are "lucky" to be in close proximity to a couple of event locations, one of them being this:

You see someone in their wisdom decided to designate letter abbreviations to the specific events locations.  Fortunately on the website it decipher's the codes for you and it turns out TTS stands for Pan AM Shooting Centre; why TTS who knows???  We are also close to CCE - Pan Am's Cross Country Centre and CEP - Caledon Pan Am Equestrian Park.  Close to where our daughter lives is PAC - CIBC Pan Am/Parapan Am Aquatic Centre.  You can read more about these locations here.  I feel sorry for most people as the local news asked local people what these abbreviations meant and no one had a clue!!  So goodness knows how the folk visiting from out of town can figure it out, if the locals can't?

Going through the top of Toronto is the 401 Highway.  It is one of the busiest highways in the country.  "They" whomever they are have decided to make one lane in various parts an "HOV" lane. 

"HOV," means a High Occupancy Vehicle Lane.  Normally it means you have to have two or more occupants in your vehicle but from now until the end of the games you have to have three people in your vehicle or accredited Games vehicles used to transport athletes, media and technical officials.

Now obviously the locals are not happy about this, as the ones close to our daughter's means it goes from three lanes in the express to only two lanes and believe me it makes a HUGE difference not having that third lane.  Yes there are the collector lanes, which is another three lanes, but the traffic back ups are bad.  Even on Sunday the road was slow and very busy.

We observed that also a lot of people was using this lane with under the three person occupancy as stated.  Other's were just using it as an over taking lane so all in all they were not taking a blind bit of notice of the rules.  

It explains here in more detail which roads are affected etc.  Locals have been told to take vacation or work from home if they can to avoid the extreme traffic congestion.  Son-in-law luckily doesn't work too far from home, so shouldn't be too inconvenienced.  Daughter though is going to work from home as she went to the office last week and it took forever to get there.

We can take a different route to our daughter's if we want to go down.  Was pleased to see some major roadworks have wrapped up, so that will ease the traffic a little.

I hope for everyone's sake the games are a success so at least we recoup some of the money that has been forked out to host this; as I am quite sure we the tax payers are paying for all of this!

I will be back to regular blog posts tomorrow, as this sort of subject is just not my thing!


Oh and just in case you are wondering, no we won't be attending any of these events, but may watch highlights on the tv.