By Lori Dance

This image of one of High Park Zoo’s denizens should tide you over until the third paragraph of this post. Photo by swilton from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner—oh, Alanis, how overused and lame(r) will your lyric seem by the time the headlines are through?—but the CRTC slapped fines on three violators of the Do Not Call list yesterday. Two of the accused companies, oddly enough, share the same name; both tried to argue that fax spamming doesn’t qualify as telemarketing and, when that didn’t work, they tried to claim that the offending advertisements weren’t coming from them. Oh, really. Facsimile machines are breathing a collective sigh of relief, though the paper industry will likely resort to massive layoffs. Now, if only they’d go after those bastards who call our cell phones and claim that our car warranty is expiring…
Apparently, KISS is why we can’t have nice things: In response to the public outcry that ensued after Oshawa was not included in an upcoming tour by the painted foursome despite having won an online contest (though the attention paid by certain blogs was most certainly a catalyst), the ‘Shwa has been added to the band’s schedule and frontman Gene Simmons is not only “pissed off at the media” for spoiling whatever surprise he claimed to have had in store, but he’s also not terribly surprised that his obtuse followers (we are talking about Oshawa, after all*) didn’t get that he had been planning it all along. “Respectfully, the fans aren’t qualified to understand how things are done,” he pouted, foot firmly stamped in petulant rage. “[They] don’t know how things work.” This supposedly super-special wicked-awesome surprise that everyone totally ruined will take place on October 7 in the form of a “two-and-a-half hour sweat-filled show.” And that, my friends, is something you can’t unread.
Need some mental palate cleansing? Okay, okay…let’s all sit back, take a sip of the warm beverage of our choice, and watch this raw footage of llamas nonchalantly strolling around whilst cops and volunteers wildly scramble about in an attempt to lure them back to their pens (you could watch the finalized news story, but all the talking almost kills the buzz—though CityNews has some video commentary from a zoo patron regarding large bowel movements that is kind of random…). A half-dozen animals were freed by unknown persons Tuesday night from the High Park Zoo but, as of this hour, they are safe and sound and, according to Parks Manager Kevin Bowser, “show[ing] no signs of their little adventure.” If “four llamas, a wallaby, and a yak” sounds like the beginning of a cute joke (as opposed to a Toronto Police Service news release), here’s the punchline: “There was evidence of a yak being out in the parking lot,” said Staff Sergeant Bruce Morrison. “There was a pile of evidence.’’
And now, the lightning round: Toronto District School Board trustees are saving pools and closing schools whilst Ontario kids struggle with the three Rs at sub-par levels; a panel of experts recommended that Ontario pay for in-vitro treatments in order to cull medically induced multiple births; bureaucratic red tape is claiming victims in the food-cart business; the city is officially funding a civil servant’s libel suit against the Toronto Star for bad-mouthing the Green Bin program; and the TTC has greenlighted nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars to make Union Station prettier. Oh, and the Jays won last night (wait, what?).
*The author of today’s Newsstand spent her adolescence in Oshawa and holds the thriving metropolis once known as “the city that ‘moto’vates Canada” in the highest regard.