The Candidate who is Brilliant at Stating the Obvious?
"We need a City Hall that values services and recognizes they must be improved in so many parts of the megacity."
The Lonely Candidate? "Amalgamation created a new city called Toronto, but someone forgot to include the citizens."
The Hungry Candidate?
"If I am elected mayor, I will always be happy to sit down and discuss public issues. And I'll even let you buy me a coffee and a doughnut, "
The Sensitive Candidate? "We need more family housing particularly for abused women. As mayor I will request our housing authority to pursue a new goal of 250 units per year specifically for those you represent."
The Partay Candidate?
"As Mayor, I will brand and market Toronto to the world as the "City of Festivals" and create a Festivals Office to provide assistance and infrastructure to the dozens of magnificent festivals staged every year. The Toronto International Film Festival, Taste of the Danforth, Caribana, the CHIN Picnic, the Jazz Festival, the Hispanic Festival, Festa Italia, the Ukrainian Festival, Afrofest, Beerfest, Buskerfest and the many other annual events which bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to Toronto and bring us all out onto the streets of our city in celebration." (hey you forgot Pride Day)
So can you spot which candidate is which?? Maybe this could be a contest?
The Green River killer case can finally be put to bed if Gary Ridgway's confession is legit. Ridgway has admitted to killing 48 women in the Green River area and dumping their bodies in "clusters".
However he says he didn't know their names and can't even remember their faces. This to me lends some doubt and opens the door to other theories and maybe even appeals.
The case was solved using DNA (take that Socialist Worker) but as far as I know the DNA evidence only links him to 1-6 bodies.
Interestingly enough back in the 80's Ridgway was a prime suspect to the point where police raided his home and arrested him. But they couldn't muster enough evidence from him and couldn't get him to confess. This bears out a theory of mine that in most serial killer cases the police have a good idea who it is but can't ge enough evidence to catch the perp.
There still isn't an explanation for why the killings stopped suddenly. "Experts" theorized that the suspect had died or moved or was incarcerated. I don't think any of these happened in this case.
My crack research staff found this one for me. Try making it female, light, nervous, and happy. Funny as hell. And I think I got it before the Flea or Rocket Jones.
But then again they don't have crack research staffs roaming the net like some sort of net roaming research staff.
Leave it to the Flea to uncover a quintessential Canadian memory
"Take Robert Clothier, for example. I grew up being half-terrified/half-in awe of his cranky character, Relic. It turns out he was a sculptor. Quite dapper too."
I liked Bruno Gerussi's cooking show - I saw a re-run of it on the cooking channel a few years ago and he had a very young David Letterman before he had his show on. He was very funny and hasn't changed a bit.
Plenty of talk in the business press recently about the trend to outsource many "back-office" functions to far away locales such as India and Indonesia.
However as the Economist reports the trend is not always one-way.
The article is only available to subscribers (and I encourage you to subscribe it is truly one of the best magazines in the world) but I have pasted the gist of it below.
".... It's a lot cheaper to hire someone in Bangalore than in Boston, and the state of the markets has meant that banks have been desperate to screw down costs. This has been especially true of their information-technology departments... Now the investment-banking arm of Citigroup has hit on a novel way of reversing the trend: hiring American college undergraduates instead and sitting them at unused desks.
Such seats are in plentiful supply....because regulators force investment banks to maintain “continuity of business” arrangements, in which certain desks and whole areas must be set aside in case there is a power cut on the trading floor, or a building is blown up.
So why not fill them with techy college students? For a start, they are cheap. Citigroup pays them $17 an hour, which works out at about half what the bank would have to pay programmers in India. It makes use of expensive space that it has to have anyway. Moreover, the bank avoids having to shovel off jobs to India. It gets first crack at talented students when they leave college. And it develops better relationships with some of America's top universities.
So far the bank has hired about 100 college students, many from MIT, and wants to take more. “It's a win-win,” says one insider."
Wait a minute they are paying Indian programmers 34.00 an hour?? I know Canadian programmers they can get for cheaper than that!!
Tory and Miller will go down to the wire if the The latest polls are to be believed. 20% of those polled still haven't made up there mind so it could go either way. The Globe also mentions Barbara Hall's collapse as "stunning". This was obviously written by someone who hasn't heard her speak.
One of the big issues that always gets a disproportionate amount of coverage in Toronto Municipal politics is the Toronto Island and the airport that it houses. For years people have resisted any attempts to establish a fixed link to the island or to allow increased air traffic there.
One thing that most people are unaware of is that Toronto Island isn't really an island. It's a peninsula. In the late 1800s a storm washed out the narrowest part of the peninsula that connected it to the rest of the mainland. The "island" was thus born. Establishing a fixed link would be only recreating what existed in nature long before man arrived on the scene.
John Nunziata says that David Millers camp has been sending a brochure to local unions that says "For David Miller every day is Labour Day" according to the Bolshevik Rag .
Miller's union connections are becoming more scrutinized as the polling date nears and other candidates hone their attacks on him. Interestingly Barbara Hall seems to be dropping like a stone and doesn't warrant a mention among the "front runners" any more. The tone of the media seems to be that it is a close race between Miller and John Tory. Hall didn't even show up to a debate yesterday - hardly the best move for someone who needs to get her campaign back on track.
Tory was a distant third mere weeks ago but polls at the time showed about 50% of the people hadn't made up their minds yet. I guess Hall's support was only a core of dedicated supporters. I don't see how any sane person could look objectively at all the candidates and say she was the best. Unless you are Sonia Smits.
My crack research staff points me to this column by the Toronto Sun's Peter Worthington who skewers our state sponsored media.
"Taylor argues for the CBC to provide "accurate information and independent analyses" of international crises. Her example is 9/11: "We needed to see this ... tragedy through Canadian eyes, analyzed by Canadian experts, commented on by Canadian politicians ... (with) the luxury and responsibility of pre-empting its schedule for breaking news ... in a way private networks cannot."
Oh, Carole! I don't know about Vancouver, but on that Sept. 11 CBC Radio in Toronto didn't interrupt its regular programming to cover the attack. Even the sports station (the Fan 590) and Mojo Radio (640) scrapped regular programming to go to Ground Zero and the Pentagon.
When it finally tapped in, the CBC was more concerned about a possible backlash against Muslims than to the U.S. ordeal.
How about the CBC's "independent" and "Canadian voice" in the Iraq war? The CBC removed its reporters from Baghdad before the bombs hit. It had no journalists "embedded" with U.S. and British troops, ostensibly because it didn't want them subjected to army spin and propaganda.
Baloney. Often, CBC "independence" was to acquire video feeds from the U.S. networks, then use them with its own "spin" in the commentary.
The CBC covered much of the Iraq war from the safety of Kuwait - and subsequently gave its hired hands celebrity hero treatment. Pathetic. "
