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Weekend Newsstand: October 30, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Happy Halloween boys and ghouls! In the news: Team Ford’s fake Twitter ruse; despite the overwhelming power of the Halloween season, U of T rejects SLLUT-dom; the tale of a media mogul and a grocer; and hipsters are finally good for something.
For those of you still shaking your heads in disbelief over Rob Ford’s impending mayordom, Maclean’s and The Globe and Mail have undertaken expansive investigations into just how Ford managed to win the election. Both articles highlight the Ford Team’s innovative social media tactics—a pillar of success for any contemporary political campaign. But the Ford Team really took their internet game up a notch and when they created a fake Twitter account to promote and protect the candidate. @QueensQuayKaren is just your typical “downtown Toronto gal” who likes politics (read: educated elitist) and cats (read: liberal). The fake account of Karen Philby was set up by Ford deputy communications director Fraser Macdonald to intercept a potentially campaign-ending recording of candidate Ford offering to try and find OxyContin for an ill man. After securing the tape and preemptively leaking it to The Sun, Karen Philby kept on a-tweetin’ all summer long until just days before the election. Soon after we uncovered the ongoing ruse, all of @QueensQuayKaren’s tweets started disappearing and her account is no more. Luckily, we preserved them all before that happened. Internet FTW!
While fake Fordians made a lot of friends during the campaign, it seems some Facebook friendships took a hit after the election. Some users got tired of seeing rabid anti-Ford comments and sanctimonious proselytizing on their newsfeed and hit “unfriend.” Sorry guys! We’ll tone it down. Please be our friend.
After a midlife crisis, U of T has turned down SLLUT and done the honourable thing. The university is cancelling plans to abandon its long-running Centre for Comparative Literature. Torontoist first broke the story back in July of the university’s plan to shut down the school founded over forty years ago by literary theorist Northrop Frye. The plan called for several departments, including Comparative Literature, East Asian studies, and many language departments to be rolled into one school as a cost-cutting measure. But after fierce feedback from the U of T community and a chorus of international scholars, the university has rescinded its threats to close the centre. The revived departments and schools will work with the university to find alternate solutions to money woes, among other issues. And the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto is now taking applications for next year, according to director Neil ten Kortenaa. We guess they were just frontin’.
In legal land, Conrad Black had two of his fraud convictions overturned, and Chinatown grocer David Chen was found not guilty on all counts. Yep, just two honest guys tryin’ to make a livin’. That would make some buddy comedy, wouldn’t it? And judging by the Post’s account of yesterday’s sentencing in the Chen trial, Justice Ramez Khawly should play himself. His decision was littered with cultural references from Frank Capra to Emile Zola. And he illustrated the finer legal points of the dispute with the reference trifecta: Jimmy Cagney, George Orwell, and Donald Rumsfeld.
Just in time for trick-or-treating, the Globe reminds us what the city’s most notorious intersections are. But seriously, crime levels are dropping in these areas. The recent addition of a fresh market to Jane and Finch, a community-built mural to Birchmount and Glendower, and a bunch of hipsters to Bloor and Lansdowne are credited with some of the improvement.
And on this weekend of the spooky and the scary, why not take at look at the OPP’s catalogue of missing persons and unidentified bodies. There are 120 unclaimed bodies in the Toronto morgue as you read this. Just lying there. In those body drawers. With sheets over them. Waiting.