By Lori Dance

If you eschewed the papers this weekend in favour of more out-of-town pursuits, perhaps this pursuit passed you by, shall we say, under the radar: a Durham undercover officer was relieved of his licence (and his unmarked police car) after the OPP caught him driving more than 150 km/h on the 115 last week. This incident is the third in a series of driving-related offences: a paramedic/union chief stole an ambulance on June 22, and a fire chief was charged with street racing (a.k.a. “running late for a funeral”) on June 26, so it’s only the next logical scene in the script that the boys in blue should follow suit.
Not prime-time-drama-fresh enough for you? Well, check this out, then: traffic was briefly halted on the 427 last night as OPP officers dramatically took down a black Hummer SUV, thinking there were weapons inside. The awesome part? The men inside were a film crew! One witness described the scene as “like I’m watching something I’ve only seen on TV.” See? Life really does imitate art sometimes.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…a paper lantern! Nearly thirty OPP officers and three helicopters scoured a twenty-five-square-kilometre area in St. Thomas, Ont., searching for a downed ultralight aircraft, only to find the smoldering Chinese toy. Sure it was only a lantern. There’s no way it could have been, say, an alien spaceship (cue Mark Snow music)…
We’ll be right back after this important message: Microsoft is likely gearing up to find a technical workaround to get out of an injunction that will force them to stop selling Word (the patent on its custom-XML technology is held by a Toronto firm). Microsoft can sidestep court orders? That’s unpossible!
And now, back to everybody’s favourite subject: the strike! Many of Mayor Miller’s detractors say that a potential one billion dollar funding gap in the next few years could be mitigated by contracting out the city’s waste management services. Because, really, can’t someone else do it?
Et enfin, time ran out yesterday to vote on a resolution to change the name of the New Democratic Party after the hour-long window was monopolized by delegates with their pesky questions about other issues. The vote in question was to drop the word “New” from the party’s moniker; however, as one delegate pointed out, the resulting initials in Quebec would be “PD” which, in its French pronunciation, apparently sounds a little too much like a derogatory homosexual slur en français.