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Newsstand: November 4, 2010
Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.
Thursday’s the day: G20 officers get wrist-slapped for not wearing badges, Scarborough gets a whiff of the fears of fiction, Toronto likes its intersections scrambled, the Science Centre gets some whales, and, on an unrelated note, the National Post calls off the Rob Ford fat jokes.
Everyone’s favourite local fascist Toronto Chief of Police Bill Blair was in front of the House of Commons public safety committee yesterday to explain actions taken by his force during the G20 protests in June. Blair revealed that disciplinary action is being taken against about ninety officers who removed their badges or name tags over the weekend. The process involved reviewing thousands of hours of video from closed circuit cameras. No disciplinary action has yet moved forward, but Blair says that the punishment for officers who attempted to conceal their identity will likely be the docking of a day’s pay. Funny, we seem to remember protesters who concealed their identities being treated just a little bit differently. The committee also heard from Kevin Gagnon, a student from Quebec, who was swept up in the raid on U of T campus and kept in appalling detention conditions. Blair defended those actions.
Residents of Scarborough experienced their very own airborne toxic event, and here’s hoping they haven’t been reading any Don DeLillo lately. A chemical plant in the city’s east end began leaking a cloud of “white sulphuric acid mist” (sure, no biggie) around 11 a.m. yesterday, leading to a cloud covering a one-hundred-metre radius around the building. Residents were instructed to stay indoors and turn off their air circulation until the leak was fixed. Now everything is fine. Say it with us again: everything is fine. The directive to stay indoors may be off, but the ban on reading postmodern fiction is expected to stay in effect for at least a week.
How would you like your intersection? Scrambled? Yesterday, Toronto got its third scramble intersection in as many years. The new site of the (organized) pedestrian free-for-all is Bay and Bloor, joining its scrambly friends at Yonge and Bloor and Yonge and Dundas. The city is considering a fourth intersection of its kind—also known, by the way, as a Barnes Dance—at Harbord and St. George, just outside U of T’s Robarts Library, but the intersection has its limitations due to students being too spaced out and generally inclined towards idiocy the long diagonal crossing of the awkwardly shaped intersection. While Toronto loves itself some scramble, the statistics haven’t proved that the intersections improve pedestrian safety. They do, however, increase traffic wait times. But for now, we say scramble’s just fine. Oh, and we’ll have our toast buttered, please, and our coffee black.
The case of David Chen, the Toronto shopkeeper who was tried and ultimately acquitted for tying up a shoplifter, has prompted Stephen Harper to say that his government will look into revising the law around citizen’s arrests. NDP MP Olivia Chow raised a private members bill in the House of Commons on the issue which Harper turned down, saying that he’ll take justice into his own hands and tackle the issue himself.
We’re not totally sure why the National Post felt the need to turn this event into a breaking news–style timeline, but damn if we don’t think whale skeletons are cool. The sperm whale skeletons are on loan to the Ontario Science Centre from New Zealand. Dudes, whales are sooooo big! While you’re thinking about whales, you should read this article from The Walrus about how to get a gazillion tonnes of fat off a set of bones. And we are totally NOT going to use that reference as a segue to this.
Toronto artist Kristan Horton has won the 2010 Grange Prize, an honour that comes along with fifty thousand dollars. Horton’s innovative work with photography involves layering and manipulating pictures in a way that we don’t totally understand because it involves the word “torque” and torque is a word from science. The AGO exhibit of work from the Grange Prize nominees will be up until January 2, 2011.