Newsstand: October 11, 2010

By Suzannah Showler

Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.

Welcome to the holiday edition of newsstand, little poults (that’s a baby turkey, FYI): a Chinatown plant thief is jailed, Rocco Rossi won’t back down, teenagers get dumped while numerologists get hitched, and keep your eyes peeled for bad-news spiders.

Anthony Bennett, the Crown’s star witness in the case against Chinatown grocer David Chen, is back in jail for stealing flowers from a shop up the street from Chen’s. The delay in charging Bennett is not related to his role in Chen’s trial, police say, but is due to the bureaucratic challenge of collating the many complaints against him. Bennett, who has forty-three prior convictions, is described as a well-known plant thief.
It’s kind of like a break-up email: journalist Peter C. Newman, an early Rocco Rossi supporter, sent him a message encouraging him to do the right thing and drop out of the mayoral race. Rossi’s all: “no dice” and “shan’t.” Well, alright then.
Two teenagers were shot and killed leaving a party in Regent Park this weekend. The highrise’s surveillance camera, which could have provided police with images of the shooting, was not working.
For the fourth time in the last few months, a black widow spider has been spotted in the GTA. Mississauga winemaker Toni Nicoletti spotted the deadly arachnid (isn’t everything scarier in science-talk?) in his garage, where he believes it rode in on a crate of Californian grapes. The spider is currently dwelling in a glass jar, darkly.
The Toronto Star has taken a moment to remind us of the fate of many first-year university students who will return home this weekend to participate in the illustrious tradition of getting the kiss-off from their high school sweetheart. Turkey dump, they call it, which frankly sounds disgusting. We think there should be an expression for first-year students who go home with newfound sexual prowess and try to mack on all the friends they never made it with in high school. We’re thinking “gravy star,” but we’re open to suggestions.
While the teenagers were dumping one another, the grown-ups (and grown-up numerologists) were tying the knot. Yesterday’s date—October 10, 2010, or 10/10/10—happens but once a millennium, and couples came out in droves to put their faith in the numbers. Toronto’s city hall was overwhelmed and had to move the stream of weddings to a downtown hotel. Couples pledged their ’til-death-do-us-parts every half hour from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

CORRECTION: OCTOBER 11, 2010 This article originally said that the date 10/10/10 “happens but once a millennium”; it actually happens once a century. If it makes it any better, the CBC made the same mistake.