news
Newsstand: June 7, 2011
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.
Here’s an idea: instead of a tinny little beep coming out of your alarm clock, try waking up to the booming noise of clouds clapping. Ah, the glories of nature. In the news: zombie breeding ground in Ajax freaks out neighbours; badges and bosses come up at G20 hearing; another day, another request to audit the mayor’s campaign.
Rotting bodies make bad neighbours, Ajax homeowners say. That’s the headline of this Star article, and we don’t think there’s a darn thing wrong with that. There’s a man who owns a golf course there, and he wants to turn part of it into a “natural cemetery,” which is hippie code for a field full of dead bodies that aren’t in coffins and aren’t chemically treated to aid decomposition. In a totally hilarious play on the whole zombie as metaphor for societal fears and homosexual repression thing, one nearby resident wonders aloud, “What happens if someone has AIDS and that gets in the water?” Another fears coyotes running around with arms and legs in their mouths. And one farmer near the potential graveyard plays up the obligatory “urban versus rural” narrative and threatens us city folk by asking for reassurance that the crops “you buy and eat for dinner” won’t be affected by all that dead body juice in the ground water.
More G20 talk went down Monday night with the second of a three-part series entitled: We’re pissed. Only eight people spoke at the public hearing held at the Etobicoke Civic Centre, compared to lots more at the Metro Hall edition last week. Among the issues brought up by concerned citizens were the removal of name tags by some cops and calls for accountability at the top.
An audit request a day keeps the mayor’s integrity at bay, or something like that. Another citizen, David DePoe, has called for a forensic review of Mayor Ford’s election campaign, this time focusing on the campaign RV. The audit application was denied though, on account of those other audits already happening. But DePoe did seem to rattle Ford’s team, with his lawyer claiming the RV was provided to the campaign by a “supplier,” while the campaign CFO says it was provided by a “supporter.” “Supplier” means the campaign paid market rates (in accordance with the election law), “supporter” means they might be in trouble. Guess who said what.
Maybe it’s time for Toronto to quit comparing itself to America and embrace its Europeanness. More importantly, we should embrace all the tourist money Europeans bring in. Overseas tourists provided a boon to the city’s tourism numbers just as the number of American visitors was in decline.
And tourists aren’t the only thing coming over from Europe. A man in Peel region was diagnosed with E. coli after a trip to Germany. Ontario’s chief medical officer said the man has been released from hospital and is not likely to end up in a hippie cemetery anytime soon.