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Newsstand: September 27, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
It’s a marvellous Monday morning: fire-displaced residents still can’t go home, people puked in Loblaws but now everything’s fine, and Kenyans are better marathoners than everyone else everywhere all the time. And we’re not writing a word about the mayoral candidates—Newsstand is an election-free zone today.
Remember that six-alarm fire Friday night? Well, that happened, and it’s still a really big deal. Firefighters don’t know what caused the blaze, and the units affected are so structurally damaged that they’ve not yet been able to go in to find out. With 1,200 tenants displaced from Canada’s largest social housing building, the city is maxed out trying to cope with the influx of vulnerable citizens. You can do stuff, though, so don’t feel helpless when you could be feeling helpful. If the thirty-storey, 711-unit building at 200 Wellesley Street were built today, it wouldn’t pass fire code muster.
Keep your eyes peeled for this dude, because after a 3 a.m. shooting Sunday morning near Shaw and Bloor, he is considered armed and dangerous, and wanted by police. Because this is serious business, we’re not even going to poke fun at the CBC headline and ask whether they want someone with hands, or just arms. (Grammar police, feel free to correct us, but doesn’t it sound like they’re just after some guy with limbs?)
Half-time Toronto artist and Ryerson grad Jonathan Hobin (he splits his time between here and Ottawa) is making headlines with an exhibition about headlines. He’s photographed kids re-enacting dramatic moments in recent news history, such as 9/11, Abu Ghraib, and Hurricane Katrina, in playroom settings. For some reason, the photographs have garnered criticism. Apparently some people don’t like it when kids pretend to do the shitty stuff that adults to do one another.
People got puke-y at a Loblaws at Broadview and Danforth this weekend, but the chemical leak that is believed to have made four customers and seven employees sick is nowhere to be found, and the store will re-open this morning. Grocery shopping has never sounded so appealing.
The Scotiabank Waterfront Marathon happened in Toronto this weekend, and the top-place runners broke the records for fastest marathons run on Canadian soil. Clocking in at 2:07:58 and 2:22:43—which is about how long it takes us to conjure up Newsstand—the first place male and female runners are both from Kenya.
(And since we promised that we wouldn’t write about the mayoral race this morning, we definitely won’t tell you that Rob Ford thinks that marathons should be run in parks so that cars won’t have to deal with those pesky runners clogging up the city’s traffic arteries. We also won’t speculate that Rob Ford has never come within ten feet of a marathon.)