Jill Murray

March 22, 2006

Greetings, visitors from WestSideLofts.ca!

So you want to buy a condo, eh? Too bad these mysterious condo-selling web sites don’t offer much in the way of concrete information, hunh? You’d think if they wanted you to hand over a minimum $179,990 of your hard-earned dollars, plus interest, taxes and condo fees that may well be in excess of my rent, they’d at least pay you the respect of giving you some decent details.

Personally, I’d like to see them divulge the real address of their business, not just demand your email address and ask you to go stand on the sidewalk across the street from the Drake Hotel, hoping beyond hope that construction will end soon on their sales centre.

But that’s OK. If they’re more interested in flash & Flash than practical details, I can help fill in some of the informative parts. I’ll be updating this page periodically with tidbits I find amusing and you might find helpful.

For now, please have a look around the site. Make yourself at home. Mi blog es u blog. My original post about the lofts from December 18, 2005 is below. I’ve also discussed these lofts here.

Cheers!

Jill

And here’s my original post from December 18, 2005:

Bad Condo Sales Centre! Bad! Down! Get off Queen West. Off!

Can anyone tell me why it only takes about four days to build a whole row of stacked townhouses, but six months to build one condo sales centre? They’ve been building this thing since summer, and we all watched in horror as they laid the foundations for what we expected to be a temporary building, then built the first story not out of prefab trailer pieces, but cement, then turned what we thought was a roof into a second and then third story.

Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, they brought in these weird blobby-splotch plywood panels and proceeded to wrap the whole thing in a shell of ugliness.

When they were about half way through that step, the building suddenly became so ugly, it laid an egg, which was promptly painted white with black stripes, along with the inner-outer walls of the “building.”

This building isn’t just in the penalty box for bad ads. It is the penalty box. Somehow, over the summer of 2005, the volume of bad sales materials in the world became so massive that the entire collective consciousness of humanity was no longer sufficent to contain their effects. Thus, this building was erected, nominally to aid in the selling of stacked townhouses, but more realistically as a monument to the horrors of capitalism.

The web site for these condos is every bit as delectably awful as this building itself, yet strangely incongruous in its overall style. It reflects an entirely “other” badness, leaving me to wonder if this whole scheme wasn’t masterminded by an infinite number of monkeys.