news
Newsstand: April 8, 2010
lllustration by Clayton Hanmer/Torontoist.
Good morning! So the Post‘s urban affairs flaneur, Peter Kuitenbrouwer, got lost in the PATH’s Vatican library of boutiques, and now has a notion to post maps of the underground walkway network in TTC stations. And it sounds like the TTC thinks that’s worth mulling over. Well, mull this: if PATH invites too many unwashed ratepayers down, rents are sure to drop, and soon it’ll be impossible to find a decent shoeshine stall or any C6-sized Gmund & Rössler envelopes in the downtown core.
Bad news, beauty fans. The Beautiful City plan lost out in yesterday’s vote on how to allocate revenue from the new billboard tax. The tax itself wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Beautiful City’s mammoth campaign to fund the arts through a tax on third-party outdoor signs, so getting cut out of the revenue is a bit of a kick in the teeth. The bright side, from their perspective, is that the decision only applies to this year’s revenue, and they have some strong supporters inside city hall. To quote mayoral candidate and councillor Joe Pantalone (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina): “I’m 100 per cent committed to it happening, definitely next year when I’m around.” Wink, wink.
It almost looked like mainstream media would pass unnoticing over Eric Tunney’s death on March 28. Fortunately, the Globe caught up and published an extensive and poignant tribute to the stand-up comic whose greatest claim to fame was how often he almost became a star.
NOW Magazine just ran a eulogy for Reg Hartt’s Cineforum, which has closed its doors after years of basement screenings and photocopied flyer excellence—although it’s those black-and-white posters that may have landed him in trouble. Hartt explains that someone annoyed by his “spam” posters reported them to City Council, which shut him down for running a movie theatre out of his residence. Hartt has options for getting official approval or moving his screenings to a new locale, but the former would take a while and, as for the latter, Hartt doesn’t seem too fond of the idea.
We are sad, now. You know what might cheer us up? Maybe if someone gave us the only dog still up for adoption at the Humane Society. Oh no! No one likes being picked last…but scrappy Mary Sue looks like she’ll tough it out. We imagine she spends her days hanging around the office, cracking jokes with the cat who may have feline leukemia (“otherwise healthy”).
Toronto Police Services have backed down from punishing a cop for writing a crime novel. Constable Brent Pilkey, aka Dirty Brent, was told by the pencil-pushing desk jockeys in HR that his novel, Lethal Rage, could be viewed as “disparaging,” “disrespectful,” and against the “law.” Well, then the law is crazy. Maybe the book will be good, maybe not, but he’s already signed a deal with ECW Press to write two sequels.
And, finally, funding cuts could force the CBC to kill programming equivalent to “three half-hour comedy series, 1.5 one-hour drama series, or 36 one-hour documentaries.” Last year, a budget shortfall forced the broadcaster to lay off eight hundred employees. They are already getting one billion dollars this year—can’t they just rent out George Stroumboulopoulos to make up the difference? Or does he count as a billboard, for tax purposes?