News: August 2009 Archives

Do blue balls reek of Vulcan desire? This is just one of the myriad obscure questions you could have had answered for you had you gone to Fan Expo this weekend but, if you didn't, allow us to enlighten you. Three new fragrances were being hawked at this year's convention, one of which is named after Pon Farr, that magical time in every logical being's life when a lack of sex can result in death (we've all heard that one before, haven't we, ladies?). Not quite feeling like smelling like you're in alien heat? Try Tiberius if you want to give off that Shatner vibe or, if you feel like signing up for the ultimate sacrifice, there's always Red Shirt, "a daring men's fragrance for those brave enough to place no trust in tomorrow."

Vernon Wells is struggling. Everyone knows it, not least of all Wells himself. His body language is practically crying out, “Yeah, I know I’ve been sucking all year; I really am trying, though!” His face is screwed into an almost permanent grimace of frustration. Predictably, he’s begun squeezing at the plate—yet by trying so hard to bust out of his season-long slump he’s actually made it worse.

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...

       

Torontoist stopped by the Gladstone Hotel last Tuesday for the launch party of two exciting new documentaries airing on the CBC starting this Thursday night. This Beat Goes On and Rise Up chronicle Canadian music's growth in the '70s and '80s, respectively. The films were made by the two key players responsible for 2006's Shakin' All Over, which dealt with the '60s: director Gary McGroarty and writer/researcher Nicholas Jennings. Jian Ghomeshi narrates. Viewers are treated to an impressive collection of clips: concert footage, television appearances, and music videos, as well as interviews with classic and contemporary Canadian pop stars (think rock royalty like Burton Cummings sandwiched between Hot Hot Heat and k-os).

Dario Saleki isn’t happy. In late May, he applied for a Boulevard Café Licence (the city’s fancy term for a patio permit) for his new Italian restaurant, La Veranda Osteria, which is located on the northwest corner of Bloor Street West and Royal York Road. It's August now, and he’s still waiting for his permit. In the meantime, his empty patio is costing him business. Saleki blames the strike (which has created some licensing problems for restaurateurs) and the city’s bureaucracy for his woes, and in a pseudo–grass roots effort has put up several colourful signs in his windows urging Torontonians to complain to the city on his behalf.

The Green Bin program is getting a reputation as a huge (but organic) waste of time, but those laying the blame on the city might want to look closer to home. According to a lawyer representing Toronto's Director of Solid Waste Planning Geoff Rathbone, Toronto households toss only half of their Green-Binable waste into the right disposal container. Rathbone is currently suing the Star over the paper’s series of articles on the shortcomings—real and alleged—of Toronto’s citywide composting program. Taxpayers are likely to foot the first twenty-five thousand dollars of legal bills from Rathbone’s case, which could cost as much as $150,000 in total.

The province appointed a new supervisor for the Toronto Catholic District School Board after everyone took their toys and went home instead of playing nicely (read: resigned instead of attending a rogue meeting) yesterday. In response to the recent change, new RC Board Supervisor Richard Alway says, "A lot of the heavy lifting has been done." That had better not have been a fat joke, Rick—apparently the board is not known for their maturity.

To start off with news from over the weekend: Toronto officially has a new song stuck in its municipal head! Votes were tallied up on Friday night, and the best song in the sensibly named Toronto Song Contest is “Love to Live in Toronto,” [MP3], by George Axon and Aidan Mason. Out of five hundred entrants and ten finalists, Axon and Mason were crowned the Toronto-est (no relation) of all on Friday evening at the CNE, earning themselves a five thousand dollar award and an NXNE prize package, as well as civic kudos as the writers of the centrepiece tune of Toronto’s 175th birthday. The public’s vote counted for 20% of the finalists’ score, with five “celebrity judges” (like Mayor David Miller) making up the remaining 80%. That being so, in case you were interested in what we thought of the finalists, Torontoist published our own professional opinion of all ten (and, not to brag, picked the winner) back in June.

Pearl Jam returns to Toronto tonight for the first time since 2006, and to say it's a hot ticket would be severely understating things: the show was sold out as soon as it went on sale, and this morning StubHub is fetching as much as $280 for lawn tickets. Toronto loves its Pearl Jam—and the feeling, one suspects, is mutual. The band used the city as base camp for a third of its 2005 trek across Canada and launched its 2006 world tour with back-to-back nights at Air Canada Centre. Eddie Vedder, meanwhile, played a pair of white-hot solo shows at Massey Hall last summer. It's no surprise, then, that Pearl Jam picked Toronto as one of its few 2009 destinations.

The National Post has cornered the market on transportation-related stories this morning: whilst Buttonville Airport is poised to close after Ottawa withdrew funding and Ontario is balking at a one-and-a-half-million-dollar bailout, the TTC is looking into the feasibility of a relief subway line downtown and earmarking more than six million dollars to make their washrooms less incredibly disgusting. "It seems to me you can renovate ten washrooms for a lot less," opined Councillor Karen Stintz. Someone's obviously never been to the ladies' at Bloor Station during rush hour.

                     

The lightning is gone, the tornadoes have dissipated, and the skies are awe-inspiring. Here are some of the best photos of tonight's turbulent heavens from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Auntie Em! It's a twister! A whole series of them! Toronto has always enjoyed geographic coordinates virtually immune to natural disasters, but the storms this summer aren't making us feel so safe anymore. Like something from a Roland Emmerich disaster flick, southwestern Ontario is actually being besieged by some pretty serious Tornados. According to rapidly updating media reports (with video!), funnels have been seen in Collingwood, Vaughan, Markdale, and following what police are calling a "major incident," at least one person is dead in Durham, just south of Owen Sound.

For the average consumer, things might get a little pricier in Ontario. The provincial government has just finalized its plan to merge the GST and PST into a single Harmonized Sales Tax. Businesses will benefit from the proposed HST plan, which eliminates some of the provincial taxes they pay, but many consumer goods and services—like gasoline, phone bills, and airfare—will rise in price.

Molson Coors Canada is busy apologizing after promising to take down billboards displaying a slogan that had some Hogtown residents in a lather. Adam Moffat, brand marketing manager for Coors Light, said that, after receiving thirty to forty complaints yesterday, his company decided to remove the offending signage (with the tagline "Colder than most people from Toronto") that was originally scheduled to be up until September. According to some other sources, however, many residents seem to be taking it in stride—after all, Torontonians may be cold, but they're not humourless. We're not talking about people from Whitby or anything.*

Toronto city councillors impatiently awaiting federal money from Canada's stimulus package have been politely told that they'll finally get the funds this week. The stimulus money—which the City plans to spend on about five hundred infrastructure projects—was promised in January, but with Toronto's construction season running out, we have yet to see a dime so far.

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.

Aha! we thought, when news of the TTC's long-anticipated project to put art on our beloved Metropasses landed in our inbox: they get it! By issuing a public call for submissions of interest, the TTC was demonstrating not only a sensitivity to the small aesthetic details that can brighten our day, but giving Torontonians the opportunity to actively engage with the transit system on which they are most often merely passive riders. Maybe, we even dared think, Valentine Makhouleen's nifty designs might actually be put to use.

As Toronto continues to recover from its really, really gross thirty-nine-day strike, some city councillors want to hold a formal review of how well the city dealt with picket lines, dump placement, and odour. Sandra Bussin, whose Beaches-East York ward includes Ted Reeve arena, named Toronto’s most disgusting-smelling temporary dump during the municipal workers’ strike, wants the hockey rink, surrounded by houses, taken off the list of potential dump sites.

Now that the strike is over, the legacy remains: the folks over at the Globe and Mail are not only kvetching about the resulting fruit flies (as are AM640 and CityNews, briefly) , but the publication also suggests a few remedies to the scourge. The cheapest and most environmentally friendly way? A drop of dish soap in a shot glass one-third full of cider vinegar. Tested and confirmed! Disgusting but true!

Toronto District School Board Chair John Campbell is in favour of shutting down "twenty-five to thirty" schools with low enrolment. That number is in scare quotes because no actual proposal is on the table yet, but mothballing half-full schools could save the TDSB as much as fifteen million dollars per year. It's still a bitter pill to swallow while the province is still shelling out thirty-two million dollars annually to sustain the controversial EQAO "literacy tests" set in place by the Harris government.

It must have been a hard day for David Morelli.

IKEA fans, prepare to become (more) disillusioned: Kerri Molinaros, president of IKEA, did not Make Every Space Beautiful. After a transparent guerrilla/astroturfing/look-at-us-being-edgy-like-skateboarders campaign was smacked down by resident smacker-downer Councillor Howard Moscoe as soon as it descended on our fair city, Molinaros offered "100% assurance…[that they have] removed all the chalk applications promoting the campaign." Wanna see what a good job they did? Click here!

TEDxTO, the independently organized TED conference focussed on "What's Next," which we previewed in July, has spent the better part of today periodically announcing their thirteen speakers and those speakers' topics for their September 10 event via—like you couldn't guess—Twitter. And while it's far too early and the topics far too broad to make anything better than make an educated guess as to how good it'll be, it's, well, looking rather good.

Yesterday's two thunderstorms toppled trees, grounded planes at Pearson, and dotted the city with power outages. Torontoist readers would have been wise to hunker down somewhere dry and warm, but those who ventured out thinking the worst was over after a morning deluge shouldn't feel too bad—Environment Canada declared the threat over at 1 p.m. Only seven hours later, the weather was uglier than ever. (The proof is in our photo gallery of storm photos from last night.) Winds of up to 100 km/h were recorded, and the city was flooded with roughly five centimetres of water in under an hour. Environment Canada, if they still have any credibility left, are playing it safe and warning you to expect the nasty weather to continue today, though (maybe) not quite as bad as before.

                   

This summer's been something of a bummer, weather-wise, but that doesn't mean that there haven't been plenty of moments that have left us completely in awe—like last night's colossal long-lasting lightning storm, which covered the city for several hours, and which might be duplicated again today. Above are a selection of photos from photographers in Torontoist's Flickr pool, who braved the storms by holding small metal, electric objects pointed up at it, many of them focusing on the lightning conduit that is the CN Tower.

Whatever you may call it, football/soccer fever has hit Toronto as Real Madrid almost filled the twenty thousand seats of BMO Field at their first open practice last night; however, their arrival was not without controversy. Toronto FC flashed a quarter of a million dollars' worth of green to install a temporary grass field for the weekend because the Spanish team refused to play on the existing faux-liage, leaving its home team feeling like chopped liver (they had been complaining about the fake turf for months). Oh, well—where else outside of Parkdale can you scream "KAKA!" at the top of your lungs without being looked at askance?

Ah, IKEA. Bastion of the comfortably quirky; originator of accessible (read: cheap) design; first stop for first apartment decorators everywhere.

We Torontonians like to complain how the Blue Jays and other Canuck franchises never seem to get their due from the Americans, so it’s nice to know that The Onion, the continent's most venerable fake news source, is paying attention.

Last Friday at Bloor and Lansdowne, Torontoist reader Caitlin Jane spotted one of Google's Street View cars, caught precariously in the middle of an intersection, as the cars are wont to do. Jane writes: "it was trying to turn right onto Bloor (heading west) and had to wait for the light, then waited for pedestrians, which was how I was able to take such a great picture. Then I waved, haha."

Livent duo free on bail awaiting appeal (CBC): "Former Livent theatre impresarios Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb, who presided over a company whose culture "was one of dishonesty," have been sentenced in Toronto to stiff jail terms for defrauding investors." [More coverage in the Star.]

We've been following Metrolinx's Georgetown South Service Expansion and Union Pearson Rail Link project (GSSE/UPRL) since the beginning of the summer. For those unfamiliar, GSSE/UPRL is a major transit initiative that will result in the addition of several new sets of tracks to the rail corridor between Union Station and Malton for freight and commuter use. That's the GSSE part. The other part of the project, the UPRL, is exactly what it sounds like: a new rail link between Union Station and Pearson Airport (to be operated for profit by a private carrier). The reason we've been paying so much attention to this project is that it has been fraught with controversy for months—controversy that is now poised to come to a head.

Plan to revamp Union Station tops agenda (National Post): "A $640-million plan to revitalize Union Station will top the agenda when Toronto council gets down to business today for its first regular session since a crippling strike brought the city's business to a halt."

David Miller: Hanging by a thread (Globe and Mail): "Abandoned by the left, hated by the right, it's hard not to wonder at the loneliness of Mayor David Miller."

On the second full day of the city workers' strike—June 23—Torontoist photographer Christopher Drost set up a camera rig in a window at the corner of Runnymede and Annette streets. Set to shoot one photo every ten minutes (and one every two minutes once the deals to end the strike were in place), the camera looked out towards the street and over two waste bins, one on the south and one on the north side of the street, snapping shots all day and all night for the whole rest of the strike.