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Weekend Newsstand: July 31, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Happy Caribana weekend, folks! Today in the news: mayoral digs, transit showdown, Toronto’s top Twitterers, Black is back, and opium makes an incredibly limited comeback.
To all would-be mayoral candidate stalkers: jackpot! The Star has published a juicy rundown on the private residences of Toronto’s five leading mayoral candidates, replete with descriptions of telling features like a “shimmering salt water pool,” “shag carpeting,” and “a shrine to the Virgin Mary” (guess who!). George Smitherman is the down-to-earth urbanite with his modestly priced Carlton Street condo ($395,000), while Sarah Thomson’s six-bedroom “Rosedale manse” may raise a few but-is-she-one-of-us eyebrows ($1,696,000). Coming out adorable is Joe Pantalone, who lives in the Little Italy duplex ($588,000) where he grew up, long before he knew that sharing a childhood bathroom with eight family members would one day earn him major campaign street cred.
When it comes to public transit, it seems the province and the city cannot get along—or even pretend to get along. Or even acknowledge when the other one is standing in the room, like, right next to them. At a news conference held yesterday at Lovat Inc.’s Downsview plant, mayor David Miller and TTC chair Adam Giambrone announced that Lovat Inc. will build eight burrowing machines to be used for work on the Spadina subway extension and the Eglinton LRT projects. What they glossed over was that the machines will actually belong to the provincially run Metrolinx. Miller and Giambrone have been miffed at the province ever since the deferral in last spring’s budget of $4 billion for Transit City. Metrolinx head Rob Prichard was at the news conference, but, in what was judged by some to be a slight, was not on the speakers list. Prichard got his chance to shine, though, as only an hour prior to the TTC event, Metrolinx came out with an announcement of their own: they will be building Toronto’s air-rail link, connecting Union Station to Pearson Airport. It’s hard to say who came out on top in this announcement-off, but one thing is for sure: it was petty.
For those of you who have already happily embraced Twitter, pat on back, and to the rest of you still stubbornly planted in the “it’s not enough space to really express myself” camp, this little nugget may be just the bait you need. Yesterday the Globe reported that Toronto is the third most twittering city in the world (after New York and Los Angeles) and named some of our city’s top tweeters, among them ex-Torontoist writer Jonathan Goldsbie, female wrestler Taylor Wilde, and Flare editor-in-chief Lisa Tant. Put the three together and you get a witty, power-suited, muscle-bound techno-whiz that speaks only in 140-character sentences. Terrifying.
Conrad Black is a free man (for now), and he’s celebrating said freedom as any verbose, recently pardoned media baron should: with a glass of vino and a torrent of prose in the National Post. Of his first days back at his Palm Beach estate with his belle Barbara, Black writes: “I enjoyed pristine quiet, free of loudspeakers, screamed argument, and the snoring of a hundred men.” Black was recently released from a Florida prison and is awaiting further news as an appeals court reviews his criminal convictions.
And last but not least, what could bump this long weekend from pretty alright, to disturbingly mindblowing? Why, opium, of course! It’s just so darn tricky to get, what with that pesky war in Afghanistan disrupting the flow of black gold from east to west. As luck would have it, it seems at least twenty-eight grams have made the trip. The small but unusual stash was found Thursday night on a man in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, and police are describing the discovery as “odd,” as opium is very rarely seen on the streets in Toronto, or anywhere in Canada for that matter. So I guess that six-pack of Carib will have to do. Sigh.