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Newsstand: August 11, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Do people still call it “Humpday”? Newswise, Rob Ford is being mean again, mayors don’t want to get paid, and a missing G20 charge has finally turned up.
The Fab Five mayoral candidates—Ford, Pantalone, Rossi, Smitherman, and Thomson—spoke with a single voice on Monday night to say that they’d have no part of the sixteen-thousand-dollar raise recommended for the incoming mayor by city staff. This would leave the future mayor making less than leaders of surrounding municipalities, and leads to a likely scenario where he or she will band together with other poor mayors and kick the rich mayors’ butts in a dance competition at the local country club.
As we told you yesterday, a Toronto man attempting to be funny has brought the wrath of Ford down upon himself. Oliver Ogilvie (a pseudonym) ceased and desisted from publishing his satirical website RobFordMayor.com after he got a humourless letter from Councillor Ford’s lawyers recommending said course of action. While the site is down, a cached copy can be found here. Warning: it’s not very funny.
Also on the Fordwatch, the notoriously thrifty councillor wants to dig into the city coffers for half a million bucks to keep municipally run ski hills open. Ford, who has built his brand on berating everyone within earshot about overspending, calls the hills in Etobicoke and North York “smart spending” and says they are “essential.” Just don’t try to bike there.
Good news for the literati—the cover of Canadian music icon Justin Bieber’s memoir has finally been revealed! The biographical tome, slated to be released in October, is reportedly a dark, melancholy reflection on teen angst and the brevity of life, tentatively titled “The Grim Bieber.” Kidding, it’ll be a bunch of tedious tweener trivia made all the more infuriating because he’s wasting his fame on being a good kid instead of the drunken lecherous brat you’d have been if you were a teen idol. Or maybe that’s just us.
Police say that the reason that the charge against G20 fence-approacher Dave Vasey couldn’t be located last month was that it was lost in the mail. Vasey was the only person charged with getting too close to the world leader fence during Carnivale G20, but when he turned up in court on July 28 to face the consequences of his rash actions, he was told there was no record of the charge. Now he’s being told it got held up in interagency mail on the way from the police to the prosecutor’s office. Seriously, that’s how they do it. A spokespoliceperson said, “We don’t believe it’s in the public’s interest to move forward with this case at this time” which can be loosely translated as, “This would be embarrassing and we’ll almost certainly lose.”
First fast, now furious. A Vaughan man is taking the bus after going online to brag about his bad driving. Nineteen-year-old Vladimir Rigenco has been convicted of careless driving after logging onto a website for BMW fans to boast about his speeding. Rigenco is banned from driving for six months, and also scored a year’s probation and a thousand-dollar fine for his heavy foot and big mouth.