news
Newsstand: July 12, 2011
Tuesday is the day and news is on display, so come on down to the Tuesday Newsstand. In the news: almost every City employee is being shown the door in a massive buyout offer, art takes a beating and a Group of Seven stealing, and you’re free to wade.
Picture this: the City of Toronto is a gravy boat, traversing the tumultuous seas of spending and service levels. Up ahead, the guys in the crow’s nest spot a giant budget hold that threatens to swallow the entire ship, leaving not a trace of the nation’s largest city. The skipper needs all hands on deck, and he needs them doing way less fancy extra stuff for all the hoity-toity passengers like pillow-fluffing or snow removal, violin-playing or water fluoridation. So when you see 50,000 City employees offered buyouts, it’ll look a lot like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Almost every person in the City’s employ has until September to decide if they want to take six months salary and hit the road, which could prompt a mass exodus from the S.S. City Hall as early as October.
Group of Seven? Try Group of Stolen! A group of 11 Canadian-made paintings were discovered stolen from a gallery on Mount Pleasant early Monday morning. The hoard is worth about $400,000 all together, including an A.Y. Jackson piece called Les Éboulements valued at $135,000, but experts are skeptical the pieces could fetch that much because everyone who’s anyone in art will know they’re hot. We already know the art world is incestuous and self-congratulatory, so it’s kind of nice when that most detestable trait is used to punish the bad guys.
And from an uptown gallery filled with pricey paintings, we go to a downtown student gallery, marked by an orange bicycle. Though at first the bike was targeted for removal, after a little bit of backpedalling, the City decided to let the once-abandoned, now beautified bike stay on its post outside the OCAD gallery, and even launched a program to place more pretty bikes around town. But there’s not much funding for the “Good Bike” project, and now vandals have forced the bike that started it all indoors. The bike will be on display in the gallery’s window until it feels safe to go out again.
The City’s wading pools will not be closing early due to a popular uprising. So everyone just chill out and let your small children splash around in the standing water all you want.
And after some backlash and hilarious jokes about Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) videotaping the Dyke March, he has made an official statement assuring everyone he is “not creepy.” Well that settles it.