Extra, Extra: Ambushes, New Revenue Streams, and Old, Actual Streams

By Steve Kupferman

Every weekday’s end, Extra, Extra collects just about everything you ought to care about or ought not miss.

• The above video of councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale-High Park) ambushing former Ontario Premier David Peterson at a 1990 press conference with a tape recorder in a suitcase that is handcuffed to his arm, uploaded to YouTube over the weekend, makes us wonder what the former environmental campaigner will get up to at council over the next four years. The lefty Perks clearly knows how to fight from a position of weakness. [via Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler and John McGrath]
• Hazel McCallion can’t survive without walnuts and the song “Danny Boy,” apparently.
• Last summer, some construction workers excavating the foundation of a new east-end condo building discovered a long-lost tributary of the Don River. They know it was buried by human hands because it was full of awesome antique garbage.
• Spacing Magazine announced today that they’ve sold ten thousand of their “pinko” buttons and magnets, produced in the aftermath of Don Cherry’s disastrous speech at Rob Ford’s investiture earlier this month. We’re not sure how they’re splitting the proceeds with the stores that are selling the items, or how much of the profits they’re planning on donating, as promised, to the Darling Home for Kids, but at $3 per button and $5 per magnet, that’s a considerable amount of revenue, certainly in the five figures by even the most conservative estimate. Maybe this is how money is made in online journalism? Someone alert the press!
• Eye Weekly, with whom we’ve had some disagreements in the past, has been killing it lately, thanks in part to an editorial shakeup. Yesterday’s defence of offence, with respect to the Maclean’s “too Asian?” controversy, by Edward Keenan, is but more proof of the newsweekly’s commitment to its new direction. Keenan’s observations from the last city council session are also not to be missed.

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