We don’t know whether he did it or not, but we do know this much: three reporters say they have seen a cell-phone video that appears to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

After the news broke on Gawker Thursday evening, the Twitter reaction was immediate and explosive. The silence in local media, meanwhile, was deafening. No Toronto outlet other than the Star had seen—or, at any rate, would admit to having seen—the video in question, which was recorded, supposedly, by a man believed to have provided Ford with the crack he allegedly smoked.

After the Star‘s article went up, around midnight, it took until morning for much of the rest of the city—and the world—to catch up. And boy, have they.

Here’s what’s being said about Ford’s latest scandal.

Locally, various city councillors have begun to weigh in. Ford’s deputy mayor, Doug Holyday (Ward 3, Etobicoke Centre), had this to say, according to the Globe:

“I have not seen any indication of him using any substances like this, or anything else for that matter.”

Meanwhile, John Parker (Ward 26, Don Valley West), Ford’s deputy speaker, called on the mayor to address the allegations head on:

“We all hope that the inferences that are floating around are untrue and the only one who can set us straight on that is the Mayor.”

And the police are also aware of the situation. The same Globe article quotes TPS spokesperson Mark Pugash saying the following:

“…we are monitoring the situation closely.”

Whatever that means.

Ford isn’t the first big-city mayor to find himself in this position. In 1990, Marion Barry, who was then the mayor of Washington D.C., was videotaped smoking crack by the FBI. He was later convicted of drug possession.

In an interview with Washington Citypaper, Barry had this to say about the Ford case:

“Unless he was entrapped by the government, it’s not similar.”

It’s worth noting that although Barry lost the mayoral election following his arrest, he did win a city council seat after being released from prison. Then, in 1993, he was elected mayor again.

And that’s not the only international press the story has attracted. Spurred on by Gawker, lots of out-of-town outlets are starting to discover Mayor Ford.

The BBC has picked up the story on its website.

New York Magazine has something on one of its blogs.

NBC is running a wire story from Reuters, meaning Mayor Ford’s name could start appearing in lots of other places fairly soon.

And, naturally, there’s a Taiwanese animation of the story now making the rounds on YouTube:

Another thing to come out of this whole affair was a Twitterfight between a Gawker editor and a reporter at the Toronto Star. The main bone of contention was the fact that the Star is referring to its story on the crack video as an “exclusive,” despite the fact that Gawker had reported on the video hours earlier.

Granted, it was a pretty one-sided fight. Let’s take a look, shall we?

And finally, let’s not forget the several Indiegogo campaigns that have sprung up in an attempt to pay for the crack video’s release. The owners are reportedly asking for six figures. There’s one semi-legit one that was set up by the Vancouver Province, and then at least one other whose legitimacy we can’t vouch for.

And, in the past hour, Gawker has launched its own Indiegogo campaign. It probably stands the best chance of succeeding, but that’s not an endorsement of spending your money on this. We all want to see the video, but do we really want to pay off the guys who took it?

UPDATE: May 17, 2013, 10:50 AM Earthquakes Canada is now reporting that the quake was 5.2 magnitude and occurred near Shawville, Quebec. There was a 4.1-magnitude aftershock.

• Someone is making YouTube videos that (affectionately) parody Chris Hadfield’s famous dispatches from the International Space Station. One of them is embedded above.
• Meanwhile, the real Hadfield readjusts to life on Earth after landing in Kazakhstan on Monday night. “I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking,” he told reporters. “I didn’t realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue.”
• The Grid has a neat visual breakdown of the relative heights of all of Toronto’s tallest skyscrapers—including those that haven’t been built yet.
• Psy, the “Gangnam Style” guy, is going to be co-hosting the MuchMusic Video Awards this year. This is, what, the third time he’s been to Toronto since his song blew up on YouTube? He does so many paid appearances. We suspect the reason he never seems to remove his sunglasses is that he doesn’t want us seeing the deadness in his eyes.

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WHERE: First Canadian Place

WHEN: Earlier today

WHAT: The main lobby of Canada’s tallest skyscraper looks like an arcade in a 1980s shopping mall today, thanks to 100 pinball machines carted in by the Stratford Festival as a promotion for its new production of Tommy—which, of course, is a rock opera, written by members of The Who, about a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” who “sure plays a mean pinball.” The machines will remain until 6 p.m. today, so there’s still time to go claim your turn at the flippers. No quarters are required; the games are free.

Lucius the cat, in happier days.

A blurry, Xeroxed “Lost Cat” poster isn’t always a particularly effective means of bringing little Kittykins home. But what else can a worried owner do, other than check in with local animal shelters every now and then?

One Toronto cat person wasn’t satisfied with those options. And that’s how Lucius—a black cat with a white spot on his chest who went missing in the College Street and Dovercourt Road area on April 22—became the city’s most-wanted feline.

There are two things you need to know in order to understand why the search for Lucius has become unusually intense. One is that Lucius’ part-owner, Jef Bradshaw, feels a kinship with his cat that goes way beyond the ordinary. The pair have matching tattoos. (Lucius had the characters “HY35″ tattooed inside his left ear by a previous owner. Bradshaw now has the same on his own left ear.)

The other thing to know is that Bradshaw does research and logistics for Greenpeace, and so a lot of his friends are activists with plenty of experience attracting attention to various causes. The search for Lucius has taken on some of the characteristics of a well-organized political campaign.

Bradshaw adopted the cat from Toronto Animal Services with a housemate about seven years ago. Like every pet, Lucius is very special. “He’s handsome,” said Bradshaw. “He’s more like a dog, temperament-wise. He comes when you call him. He’s really relaxed, and just an awesome guy.”

After he’d put up posters in the College and Dovercourt area, Bradshaw had one of his friends help him set up a Tumblr and buy it a domain name: whereislucius.com. The site is a repository of pictures of Lucius for people to share on Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

Lucius also has his own direct-mail campaign, and some of Bradshaw’s friends have begun spray-painting a stencil of the cat’s website’s URL in different places around the Dovercourt area, making it ubiquitous in the neighbourhood. Lately, Bradshaw’s focus has been on getting others to help sweeten the pot for whoever finds the cat. The current list of rewards for Lucius’ safe return includes a hand-delivered extra-large pizza, a $50 gift certificate to an Etsy store, a bike tune-up, a custom-written piece of short fiction, and a variety of cat-themed books donated by Nicole Winstanley, president and publisher at Penguin Canada.

The campaign has grown to the point where it almost seems like a publicity stunt, but Bradshaw maintains that it isn’t.

Lucius was an outdoor cat, and so his owners are still holding out hope that he’ll turn up. “He’s probably not dead,” said Bradshaw. “It might be that it’s spring and he’s gone a little too far.”

If Lucius isn’t found in the next week, Bradshaw and a crew of about five volunteers will start going door-to-door, using campaign canvassing techniques to ensure that they cover as much ground as possible. The campaign’s Twitter account has even started reaching out to celebrities.

“We’d love to be on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, or some crap like that,” said Bradshaw.

If you think you’ve seen Lucius, you can send your tips here.

Images from whereislucius.com.

• Google Glass has tech people all excited. In the video above, a local digital marketing agency imagines some ways the smartphone-like eyewear might be used in the future, on the streets of Toronto.
• Did the Toronto Sun, for one brief moment, become Toronto’s most progressive media outlet? According to Xtra, last Friday the paper did something it has apparently never done before: it made a transexual woman that day’s “Sunshine Girl.” Granted, the editors didn’t know she was a transsexual until afterward.
• Disappointed that you missed out on Mayor Rob Ford’s latest bout of strange behaviour, during which he, in the Star’s words, “bolted” from a community meeting to hang out in the parking lot and put “Rob Ford Mayor” magnets on cars? You can now buy two of those magnets on Kijiji—or, the seller says, trade “one iota of progress on the City’s transit file” for them. [Via @jessiecatherine]
• The most amazing catch at Tuesday’s Blue Jays game against the San Francisco Giants wasn’t made by a baseball player.

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The monster in pieces. Photo by Beth Kates.

If you’ve ever been to the Distillery District, you remember it: the faceless, 14-foot-tall Lovecraftian horror that crouched near the intersection of Gristmill Lane and Parliament Street. The steel sculpture, Koilos, by artist Michael Christian, had only been in the spot since 2009, but had already become a neighbourhood fixture. Now, it’s gone.

Reader Beth Kates, a Distillery resident, spotted Koilos being disassembled and loaded onto a flatbed truck on Monday. Despite its terrifying appearance, the sculpture had an eerie beauty that made it popular with photographers. Because it was so large, it was also inviting as a makeshift jungle gym. Damage done by climbers may have contributed to its removal.

Koilos in happier days. Photo by tonalmotion, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

During a phone call on Tuesday, Distillery District spokesperson Mathew Rosenblatt said Koilos was removed at Christian’s request.

“The artist didn’t think it was doing well in the climate,” Rosenblatt said. “As well as just the wear and tear on it over the last few years.” The work was first installed at Burning Man, an annual festival that takes place in the arid Black Rock Desert, in Nevada.

Koilos was on loan to the development companies that own the Distillery District. They had the option of buying the sculpture, but, according to Rosenblatt, they opted not to. “If we were to keep it here, it would end up being destroyed,” he said. It wasn’t immediately clear where Koilos is headed now.

There are two other works by Christian in the Distillery District, both of which will remain. Rosenblatt said the Distillery is on the hunt for something to replace Koilos, but hasn’t settled on anything yet.

UPDATE: May 16, 2013, 2:40 PM Rosenblatt now tells us that Koilos has been sold to a new private owner. It will be moved to a location somewhere in Muskoka, where the artist believes it will be spared further damage.

The National Post‘s website, as it appeared earlier today.

• The National Post‘s paywall is now officially up (though we haven’t been able to trigger it yet). Users get 10 free articles, after which they have to pay $9.95 for thirty days’ access to the paper’s online content. Print subscribers get their online access at no additional cost.
• Good news for visitors to the Leslie Street spit: just in time for spring, the City has finished installing some new huts for people to cower inside during sudden rain storms. No more trekking multiple kilometres to safety.
• Is this Star article supposed to be satirical, or are there really people who need to be reminded not to slip into crippling personal crises because the Toronto Maple Leafs lost again?

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Photo by wyliepoon, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

What happens to old street signs when the City removes and replaces them? Perhaps, unsurprisingly, most of them get sold for scrap. But now city council has an opportunity to make sure some of them get set aside for members of the public to buy.

A proposal that goes before council’s public works and infrastructure committee on Wednesday calls for the City to set up a website where Torontoians can browse an inventory of decommissioned street signs and place orders for the ones they want. The proposed price for each sign is $30. True, it’s more expensive than tearing one off a pole, but it’s cheaper than the eight beers you’d probably need to drink before doing that seemed like a good idea.

The City currently has about 950 decommissioned signs in stock. Included among them are many victims of the City’s efforts to replace older styles of signs with the new, standard blue-and-white ones. This could be your big chance to get a nostalgic, acorn-topped street sign (like the one in the picture, above) of your very own.

If city council gives final approval to the idea at its meeting in June, we could all be buying signs as soon as late July or August, according to estimates from City staff. The notion was first formally proposed by Councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) over a year ago.

The City has been keeping a wait list of requests for different signs. Right now, according to Allen Pinkerton, manager of signs and markings, the line is about 2100 requests long and growing, recently, at an average 300 requests per day.

Which street signs are in the highest demand? And how can you get on the wait list yourself? Well…

The streets below are currently the ones that have been requested the most. These numbers, which come from Pinkerton, are running totals.

• Queen Street: 20 Requests
• Spadina Avenue: 12 Requests
• College Street: 10 Requests
• Roncesvalles Avenue: 9 Requests
• Danforth Avenue: 9 Requests
• Bathurst Street: 8 Requests
• Bloor Street: 8 Requests
• Dufferin Street: 7 Requests
• King Street: 7 Requests
• Ossington Avenue: 7 Requests
• Yonge Street: 7 Requests

Could it be that Queen Street has twice as much nostalgia value as the next-most-nostalgic street in Toronto? That’s what the stats seem to suggest, at least for now.

To get on the wait list, send an email to signsandmarkings@toronto.ca and include all the pertinent information: what signs you want, who you are, where you live, and how to get in touch with you.

Things could quickly get competitive at this rate, not least because the City probably won’t be selling every single sign it tears down. City staff say that 90 to 95 per cent of decommissioned signs are so badly damaged that they can’t safely be entrusted to members of the public. Some of them are unreadable. Some have “extremely sharp edges.”

UPDATE: May 16, 2013, 2:50 PM It looks like the wait for signs will be a little longer than anticipated. The public works and infrastructure committee sent the idea back for further consideration on Wednesday, partly so City staff can figure out how to handle unexpectedly strong demand from the public.

“If you are reading this, I am dead.”

—Worthington, a career newsman, wrote his own obituary before he died at age 86 on Monday, and today it’s in the pages of the newspaper he helped found: the Toronto Sun. It’s a little unorthodox for a newspaper to let someone compose his own postmortem—one could say it seriously compromises journalistic objectivity—but this is the Sun we’re talking about. (It was “never as good a newspaper as it could have been,” writes Worthington.) Anyhow, the piece is a pretty entertaining read.

WHERE: Maple Leaf Square

WHEN: Monday, May 13

WHAT: Thousands of fans gathered outside the Air Canada Centre Monday night to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs take on the Boston Bruins in game seven of Toronto’s first NHL playoff series in nearly a decade. The Leafs led for most of the game, only to watch a 4–1 advantage melt away in the final minutes of the third period. Not long afterward, an overtime goal by the Bruins put an end to hockey season in Toronto. Click through the image gallery for a look at how the die-hards handled the elation and the crash.

Photo by Todd Images Photography, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

• The Leafs are going to be playing game seven in a hard-fought playoff series against the Boston Bruins tonight. Whatever happens, Toronto’s often-derided home team has already exceeded most expectations. We think ex-GM Brian Burke deserves a lot of the credit.
• During the Mother’s Day edition of his weekly radio show, Rob Ford’s mom told him his birth was “an afterthought.” Here’s an audio clip of the mayor reacting to that revelation.
• This Vice article about all the weird and scary stuff that happens to Toronto cab drivers has given us a new appreciation for that little “if flashing, call 911″ light on the back of every taxi.
• And be sure to stop by the Sun to see how the paper is mourning one of its founders, Peter Worthington, who died today after a long and storied career in journalism. Also, check out our article on the Sun‘s early days.

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