news
Newsstand: September 10, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Thank goodness it’s Newsstand Friday! Rossi gets cheaper, candidate list gets bigger, and watch that butt!
The race to out-Ford Ford continues, with the Globe reporting that Rocco Rossi is now endorsing the idea of reducing the size of city council by half. That idea, of course, was originally raised by Rob Ford, and roundly panned as impractical by the media and the other candidates. Rossi (who is not in fact the dancing guy from the Six Flags ads) also pledged further budgetary slashing and burning, including canning the controversial eighty-eight-million-dollar multi-level skating rink on the waterfront.
Colourful! Just twenty-four hours before the last day to register in the mayoral race, a new candidate has jumped into the fray. Weizhen Tang, who calls himself the “Chinese Warren Buffett,” says that he combines the “political wisdom, insight, and experience, with the financial expertise which Toronto and Canada need.” These attributes are not best demonstrated by the charges he’s currently facing, which allege that he defrauded investors of millions in a Ponzi scheme. Fortunately, Tang isn’t due back in court until October 27, two days after the election, so he’s available for campaigning.
An Oshawa mother is displeased after Bell gave her sixteen-year-old daughter a loaner phone that came preloaded with pornographic videos, and now isn’t responding to her enquiries as to how it happened. Five bucks says they call it a feature and try to charge extra for it.
Put down that breakfast poutine—a study out of Ottawa says that half of adults in Ontario are overweight, and a further quarter have earned the scientific label “obese.” What’s more, those of us who are members of the chubby majority have a higher incidence of hypertension, and besides being more likely to die, will eventually be a huge and expensive burden on the healthcare system.
And as long as we’re scolding you, you should be aware that tossing that cigarette butt onto the street, all cool like a portly James Dean, could eventually cost you some real coin. Liberal MPP Dave Levac is introducing Bill 28, the Cigarette and Cigar Butt Litter Prevention Act, which would see the maximum fine for chucking your used tobacco rise to three-thousand dollars. Fun fact: there’s already a bylaw in the City of Toronto that mandates a $365 fine for littering, including cigarette butts. Has that ever been enforced?
Maybe bedbugs aren’t all that bad—a family recently arrived in Toronto from Mexico came across a seven-centimetre scorpion in their home. It’s assumed that the arachnid (not insect; they hate it when you make that mistake) flew up from the sunny south with the family after stowing away in their luggage. We are so sick of these m’f’ing scorpions on planes!