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Newsstand: January 17, 2011
Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.
More bang for your Monday buck: Toronto’s mourning Sergeant Ryan Russell, suburbanites get the shovelling treatment, your rotting refuse will go to use in 2011, that crazy beer’s still not here, and when we say Blue Monday, this time we mean it.
This weekend, hundreds of people, many in uniform, attended the visitation for Sergeant Ryan Russell, the thirty-five-year-old police officer struck and killed by a snowplow last Wednesday. The well-populated show of support offers a preview for Sergeant Ryan Russell’s funeral tomorrow at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, which is expected to draw thousands and shut down parts of downtown.
If you’re looking for other ways to wave your engaged citizen flag this week, you could attend one of the meetings this week where the City’s budget committee plans to listen to the people speak. Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. the Budgeteers will be at the East York and North York Civic Centres, and Thursday at the same hour they’ll be hitting the Scarborough and York Civic Centres. We’re telling you now because if you want to be on the speaker’s list, you have to email [email protected] by Tuesday at noon, and you’re supposed to include your relationship status, astrological sign, and interests in the message. Just kidding, you’re supposed to make your deputation sound relevant and unique. (Besides, everyone knows that no one wants to know your astrological sign ever since we found out that the zodiac’s all out of whack.)
Did you notice that all the locations for these budget consultations are in the not-downtown? Well, proximity to forthcoming civil consultations isn’t the only perk of living in the burbs: as a product of amalgamation negotiations in 1998, Toronto’s suburbanites enjoy the luxury of having their sidewalks plowed on the city’s dime, while the downtown elite have to give it a little elbow grease. This strikes us as an inconsistent display of customer service. Who’s conducting this gravy plow, anyway? We should all just shovel our own damn sidewalks. Oh, and Toronto, for “shovel” please do not read “douse with enough salt to rival a KFC Double Down.” Seriously, people, ease up on the salt. It’s a little much.
The compost that you put out for collection on your snow-free sidewalk could get kind of useful kind of soon: a pilot project being launched at the Dufferin Organics Processing Facility will have the stinky gas from your compost powering the city’s garbage trucks as soon as a few months from now. The plant’s biomethane, currently being burned off, will be redirected and stripped of ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and water vapour and converted into something similar to natural gas. The city has ordered one truck that can burn this rotting-vegetable byproduct gas (that’s the scientific term) and has plans to order more. The biomethane that can be recovered from the Dufferin plant in a year is enough to power seventy-eight garbage trucks. Science is cool!
Remember how last week we were going on about those unreasonably large beer vats that were being caravanned ever so slowly from Hamilton and were set to reach Toronto a couple of days hence? Yeah, well they’re still not here. Apparently the beer and its entourage have been running into all kinds of cold-weather driving situations that are dangerous for a 119,754 kilogram convoy. What, haven’t they ever done this before? We think this caravan o’ beer is some mythical harbinger of spring: when it arrives, that’s only six more weeks until patio season as long as the beer sees its thirty-metre-long shadow. [: After it’s long trek, the beer has finally arrived.]
Speaking of recanting stuff we said last week, some of you more diligent Newsstand readers may recall that we greeted you last week with “Hello Blue Monday!” It was all a lie. The real Blue Monday is today, turns out, and the Toronto Star advocates chocolate and sex for coping with the blues. (Ok, they say some other stuff, too, but most of it was useless. “Talk to your boss”? I hardly think that’s going to help anyone feel less depressed. Plus, some of us don’t have jobs.) It’s True-Blue Monday today, so have a Kit Kat and get laid, Toronto.