Can we get tickets?

I worked at a restaurant briefly where these would have been a god send. The architect apparently had designed everything - the building, the interior, the furniture, the decor, and the lighting. He won an award for it, and the deal with the restaurant mgmt was they couldn't change anything.

Lights were so low, people couldn't read the menus. We carried little flashlights with us.

Hamburger, fries, and a Coke... and change back from your dollar!

That was a pretty effective ad at the time.

I worked for a place that had the entire 26 volumes of the OED. There was nothing like sitting down at lunch, opening a volume at random, and just getting lost.

I constantly have problems with my crust not separating from the pan. I use springforms, and I've tried them buttered, oiled, and with parchment paper, and the crust always sticks. How did you avoid that?

Most up and down winter I've ever seen in Toronto, and I've lived here since 1960. Warm spells where I walk around with just a light sweater, and then boom, a foot of snow. Then the same thing happens two weeks later.

TBF, I live in downtown Toronto, and it was +10 on Monday.

So is diamond. They are both carbon.

If you're actually able to interpret this graph, you'll the US is a huge producer of plastics, but has one of the smallest absolute emissions, and among the very lowest emissions relative to production.

All of which makes the ban on plastic straws even more idiotic.

You ca leave a game midway through, and be re-admitted?

Not in North America.

> if you're a skier, surfer, slater, climber etc. You've definitely had moments where everything links up

I've heard from downhill racers that when they have a run where everything links up and there's no hairy moments, they know they've finished twelfth. It's only when they're right on the edge of complete wipeout that they're in contention. Not 'flow' as I understand it.

I read his book "Inner Game of Golf" before I'd heard of flow. It's a good book.

> but the tell is a feeling of dissociation

Thanks, that's a good way of putting it.

I used to do TM when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, years of bad choices have made it extremely difficult; I have so much stress I can't "go under". Gotta keep working on that..

Thanks for the tip about the book. I'll be sure to look that up!

As per your 3rd para, I agree that you need to be near that line to be eligible for flow. As you get better, the line just goes up. I'm sure Tiger Woods had his flow days; I'm equally sure they were a lot better than mine!

This is not my understanding of 'flow' at all. Flow occurs when, e.g., an athlete or a musician (the two most obvious examples) is performing at a top level, but is not explicitly trying to do things; they just let the music or game 'flow' out of them.

It is characterized by a lack of blood flow to the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), which is why it's also known as "transient hypofrontality". That lack of blood flow is indicative of the body shifting resources to other parts of the brain. In this case, by shutting down executive and higher order functions in the cortex, the body is able to do things it knows how to do without interference from the judging, over-thinking PFC.

Every golfer knows this problem. You stand over the ball, and there are a million thoughts in your head. "Don't shank it, don't slice it, keep your arm straight, keep your head down, make a full turn, don't come over the top, I wonder what's for dinner tonight, shift your weight, keep your heel down, don't hit it in the bunker,....". Then you proceed to top it into to the bunker.

But you have made this shot a hundred times before, so why are you worrying? You don't worry about picking up a fork from a table, or walking two steps to the front door - you trust your body to do that. But in some tasks, we don't have enough trust to 'let go'.

As OP notes, one can't reach flow unless you have already mastered the basics of a task. That's why piano students spend hours on scales, and golfers hours on the range. You need to build up the synapses and autonomous skills so that you don't need the higher order brain functions to complete the task.

Once you've reached some level of expertise, flow is possible. It is not easy to 'trigger' it, though, because it's not easy to consciously make your conscious brain (CB) take a break. CB is always there, judging each action, assessing the situation, making predictions, and deciding what to do next. However, CB is too slow to play a complicated arpeggio, react to a 100-mph baseball, or make a 20-ft jump shot. We depend on our autonomous systems to do those things for us.

Another issue with flow is it's unsettling to an extent. After, you feel that it wasn't 'you' that did it - it was some other guy in your body, as 'you' weren't present, in that the CB wasn't doing its usual job of collecting, collating, and judging every act you do. Pro athletes have described it as 'being in the zone' - you're completely aware (of the game), and completely unaware (of your ego) at the same time. When they are finished, they don't have much memory of how they played, only that they played really well.

My 30th birthday, I got hammered, and I was playing in a golf tournament the next day. I woke up in the morning, probably still half-drunk, and went out to play. I'm normally a very chatty golfer, but this day, I was very quiet. Instead of the usual thousands of thoughts in my head, there was only "hit it in the fairway" and "hit it on the green".

Which I did. I shot 76, four over par, about ten shots better than I normally do, and I won the tourney. I only remember three shots from the round: two holes had giant oak trees in the centre of the fairway, and you were supposed to play to one side of them. I just decided to aim for tree - "I'll never hit it" - and proceeded to hit both trees on one bounce. I had no shot, so had to chip out sideways, costing me a stroke on each hole. The very last hole, I guess I was beginning to 'wake up', because I hit it over the green, and had to make a nice chip shot to get it close. That shot won the tournament for me.

Afterwards, I barely remember anything except those three shots. Everything else is a bit of blank. Without the CB's constant presence, I was able to perform at my optimum skill level, but none of it registered either.

There used to be a few in Toronto, but I'm not sure if any are left.

EDIT: So I looked it up; there are 12 in Ontario, all of them in Southern Ontario but none in Toronto proper.

There are no Dairy Queens in Vermont.

I went to a restaurant in Toronto half a dozen years ago that specialized in frou-frou tasting menus. One of the dishes was presented on "dirt". My GF asked me "Is that real dirt?", and I said "No, it can't be. It's probably bread crumbs or something. "

How wrong I was. It was real honest-to-god scraped from the ground dirt. The chef foraged personally for it in Ontario forests, looking from dirt near maples, and avoiding it from near pines (which has a turpentine taste, according to him).

Now I see a description like "soil", and I have to check!

The dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971. The anchor that kept prices in check was cut loose, and here we are.

You only fuck Canadians?

Three stages in a man's sex life:

Tri-weekly
Try weekly
Try weakly

I turned it on and the score was 10-7, and I thought 'all right, a football game!'.

I turned it off at the half.

> ''i know this is 'bad' but i do not care, everything is 'bad' after all'

Or, as we call it in AA, "the f*ck-its". As in "my wife hates me, f'it, let's drink", or "Or I've been sober for six months but I've had two drinks. F'it, let's drink". Certainly got the best of me for nearly ten years.

Once again, Bills get screwed by the league.