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Newsstand: December 27, 2010
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
The holiday food babies have been birthed, the gentiles’ incessant Chinese food and movie jokes have petered out, and the news goes on. Today: Don Cherry gets his hands on a great big gun, gutsy people go Boxing Day shopping, and court denies refugee claim based on homophobic threats.
Someone gave Don Cherry a gun for Christmas, a really big gun. Grapes, admirably, spent Christmas visiting Canadian troops in Afghanistan, and the troops let him fire a training round. Cherry joked “Taliban, here I come” after getting approval to fire the thing, and Peter McKay made a much less funny joke playing on “He shoots, he scores.” And score Cherry did, as the Taliban apparently responded to the heavy artillery fire by rocketing nearby Kandahar Airfield forcing soldiers there to take shelter.
Those not lucky enough to get to shoot big crazy army guns for Christmas tried to fill the void left in their hearts on Christmas Day by the typical thoughtless gifts of gloves or body butter by jamming into malls and electronics stores for Boxing Day sales. Behold the madness from the comfort of your computer.
And maybe you had to buy your own gifts because the socializing part of your brain is too small, leaving you with too few friends. Scientists think that the bigger the amygdala volume, the bigger your social network. And having lots of friends not only ensures more presents, but they’re also handy from an evolutionary standpoint.
A Toronto high school student is facing deportation after he and his sister were denied refugee status on the basis of homophobic persecution in Mexico. Seventeen-year-old Daniel Garcia and his thirty-year-old sister, Brenda, fled Mexico City after Brenda’s partner was shot and killed. Supporters rallied for the pair on Sunday, asking for more time to file an appeal. The process was stalled when their immigration lawyer died and an attempt to file the forms themselves with some help from the local library was unsuccessful. The court deemed the pair’s fear of persecution invalid because, according to them, Mexico City has a gay community with “sufficient tolerance.” The siblings have already been threatened since news of their return reached home. Brenda’s deportation flight is set to take off early Monday morning. Daniel hasn’t been given a departure date yet.
A trust fund has been set up for the children of a woman killed in a freak accident in a hospital parking lot on Christmas morning. The thirty-seven-year-old woman died of apparent asphyxiation after she was pinned between the door and frame of her car as she leaned out to scan her parking ticket. The woman was at the hospital visiting her grandmother who had suffered a heart attack the night before. Donation instructions will be released soon.
