By Lori Dance

Toronto bylaw enforcement officers are gearing up to crack down on motorists who leave their cars idling for more than three minutes every hour—and by cracking down, hopefully they mean that they’ll give out more than the paltry fifty tickets (and 250 warnings? Really?) issued last year. Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, chairman of the city’s public works and infrastructure committee, is hoping that the $125 fine (which, by the way, is five bucks more than the yearly average one would save by not indulging in such wasteful behaviour) will mitigate the resulting health risk. “All of us collectively create so much smog we’re literally sending people to hospital,” he explains. So for all of you d-bags who park your Hummers outside the Food Depot at Dupont and Davenport and block the right-turn lane, be a doll and turn off the engine, would you?
CityTV is hinting that “Toronto Police will make a major announcement [today] concerning their ongoing struggle to get guns off the streets of Toronto.” Well, it can’t be that they have successfully eliminated guns forever, so what could it be? Ooh! Check under your pillows, kids—I think the firearms fairy left us a surprise last night…
Feathers are all a-ruffled over TTC maps containing glaring typos and lacking mention of major landmarks. While Adam Giambrone has apologized with the added admission that there is nobody in charge of map creation (so who made the maps? Oh, firearms fairy, you are so busy sometimes), Mitchell Kosny, director of the school of urban and regional planning at Ryerson University, finds such errors “unacceptable.” “I wouldn’t even accept work from my students—I wouldn’t even look at it—if it had those types of errors,” he clucked disapprovingly. Though his sentiment is more than admirable, he may be throwing out more and more assignments in the coming years, what with the winners our schools seem to be cranking out.
Finally, it appears as though Toronto has decided to do away with the electoral process and instead choose its new leader in a test of physical stamina. Three mayoral contenders will be competing in celebration of Scotiabank’s 20th annual Toronto Waterfront Marathon. As each candidate will be running in separate races of varying lengths, the finalists must seal their victory with a spectacular synth-fuelled musical performance extolling the virtues of his or her fraternity in the climactic talent show. No, wait—that was Revenge of the Nerds.