Gerald Ford Passes, Shopping For the Masses, and Hey! Less Violence!

Former U.S. President Gerald Ford dead at 93. Not really much to say here: he was by all accounts an extremely decent man who served honorably. (Unless you are of the belief that all politicians are by their very nature forked-tongue devils, which is not the most uncommon belief out there.) I suppose Chevy Chase has one less go-to joke in his arsenal, though, which makes this an extremely sad day for Chevy Chase.

Ontario energy officials are wary of Ottawa's nuclear energy plans for Ontario. The Ontario provincial government at odds with the feds? That's un-possible!

An estimated six million Canadians (half of them Ontarians) hit the Boxing Day sales yesterday. Of those six million, approximately six came out of the Future Shop/Best Buy sales thinking "wow, that was really worthy of the hype." (No, no, I kid. Forty bucks off an iPod that'll be sixty bucks cheaper inside of six months is a huge deal.)

Gun crime, murder and and shootings declined in Toronto in 2006, down from 2005. I think we can all agree that that is pretty good! (No, no, I'm kidding. Come on, there's going to be someone who can tell us why this is bad. Come on! Somebody hit me with some sociology here!)

And the Leafs beat the Wild last night, protecting their precarious tied-for-eighth-place-in-the-East slot.

Image from - unsurprisingly - the Time online archive.