There are certain topics that one just does not address in polite society, but Friday sure as hell ain’t one of them. In the news: a $70,537 parking ticket; hyping typing; a Scarborough resident and his dog go bluffing; Yorkers fake it until they break it; and Ford gets out of the hospital.

By Casey Irvin • Illustration by Brett Lamb

An apparently malfunctioning parking meter has wound up costing a Toronto doctor $70,537 after she lost her fight to have a class-action lawsuit against the City certified. In November of 2007, Dr. Anna Marie Arenson parked her car, put money into a parking meter, and waited for a printed receipt that never came. She then repeated the process at another meter, again without any luck. Dr. Arenson (represented by her ex-husband) contends that there is a systematic problem with the parking meters during inclement weather and had hoped to lead the class-action lawsuit for the public good, but instead wound up with a bill for the municipality’s legal costs. Oops.

Quick, ask Zoe, what’s the most boring (but probably also the most useful) thing a kid could go to summer camp for? No, it’s not sports, rock ‘n’ roll, or wilderness survival skills—the hottest summer camp this year is typing camp. A bunch of lucky kids are spending a week of their precious summer at Ruth Rumack’s Learning Centre acquiring better computer input skills. Oh, to be young again. Peanuts!

A man and his dog went over the Scarborough bluffs yesterday. After John Kitsco’s dog, 14-year-old Lou, fell from the back of Kitsco’s property, Kitsco followed on a rope to rescue the poor pup. However, once he was down with the dog, he was unable to ascend. Luckily, Kitsco is a firefighter, so he knew the correct three digits to dial for emergency services.

More than 60 people have been charged in connection with a set of apparently staged automobile collisions in York Region. Project Sideswipe, which has an awesome name, was launched after the Insurance Bureau of Canada alerted police to nine collisions that seemed to have been faked. All the collisions took place within a three-kilometre radius of each other and the losses are estimated at around $5 million. Finally, with these arrests, balance has been returned to the universe. Insurance companies can now go back to screwing people, not the other way around.

Rob Ford has been released from hospital. The mayor was treated for a throat infection that had interacted poorly with his asthma. No word on how many residents phone calls he returned from his hospital bed, but according to a photo posted to Twitter by the mayor’s press secretary, George Christopoulos, Ford was ostensibly able to get lots of really, really important mayoral work done while under medical care. Brother Doug reminds us that Rob outworks “probably 99 per cent of the population out there.” Okay Doug, does that mean that maybe it is time to outsource the role of mayor to one of the 26,150.6 Torontonians that works harder than he does?