Toronto needs a mayor who doesn’t do heroin
ROB FORD DOES HEROIN.
That would’ve been my headline. Call me crazy, and many do, but it seems to me that that is news.
Irene David Cleary
My Aunt Irene passed away on the weekend, another family member felled by cancer.
Her funeral is today in Knowlton, in the Eastern Townships, and I couldn’t get there on time. My Mom is there, however.
What can I tell you about her? To me – as a kid, as now – she was what Montreal was when it was at its hippest: Expo ’67, Trudeau (the elder), Habitat, all of that. She was cosmopolitan and multilingual and lived on two continents, and I thought she was from another world, back then. She was cool.
Anyway, say a little prayer for her, if you will. She was a good one. Thanks.
14,000+
I have some small distance to go before catching up to a Future Prime Minister and Our New Twitter Overlord, but not much.
So, do I get an award or something?
Lame, lame, lame
Jim Watson calls Gord Brown “Gordie.” Good God! The horror!
Oh, wait. I call Gordie “Gordie,” too, because he’s one of my oldest friends. I’m friends with Michael McSweeney, as well. I wish to assure the Citizen’s crack investigative team that I do not, however, call Michael “Mike.”
So, let’s see: no law was broken. No rule was broken. In fact, all that did happen here is this: this guy duly registered, as the law requires. He followed the rules, right out in the open. So the Citizen decides to do a drive-by on him.
Lame, lame, lame.
Chong, preach
I’m no PMO shill, obviously, but I think this Chong bill is a trap. It is dangerous.
Among other things, it would render this sort of nightmare – which I lived through, day after day, from 2000 to 2006 – an ongoing reality, and give rise to myriad constitutional crises.
Well-intentioned, but a bad idea. Cure is worse than the disease, etc.
Junior Murvin, rest inna peace
Junior Murvin, a giant of my teenage punk years, died yesterday in Port Antonio. He was in his sixties. No one knows yet what was the cause, apparently.
The Clash famously covered Police and Thieves, of course, but Murvin should be remembered for more than that one amazing tune. He was a genius – and I will keep forever the note Murvin sent to me, via my Jamaican friend Karl Hale, a few years back. Here’s the song for which he was best known.
You can come if you haven’t smoked crack, bought illegal drugs, drove drunk, or hung with organized crime
In Tuesday’s Sun: Paris Ford
Rob Ford went to see a football game on Sunday night. The rest of us got to see what people really, truly feel about him.
They flocked to him. They swarmed him. They surrounded him as they tried to get a photograph of themselves with Toronto’s mayor, as he took in an NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the Atlanta Falcons at Toronto’s Rogers Centre.
Photographers who had been sent to take pictures of the game turned to take pictures of Ford and the football fans in the stands.
A Toronto man who had purchased the seat on which Ford was sprawled, eating a bucket of chicken wings, wondered on Twitter how he would get what he paid for (don’t we all).
My pal Steve Ladurantaye, who works for the Globe and Mail, was also there. His report was both dry and insightful, and he called the scene in Section 133 “bizarre.” Dozens of football fans appeared determined to try to get their picture taken alongside Toronto’s mayor, he observed.
I was also at the game, with Son Two, in a less-pricey section. I kept one eye on the field, where the Bills would go on to lose to the Falcons in overtime. And I kept one eye on social media, where the circus surrounding Ford was unfolding.
“Why are people trying to get their picture taken with Rob Ford, Dad?” my boy asked me.
“That’s a really good question, buddy,” I said.
Ford’s supporters would say that it is evidence the downtown socialist elites are all wrong, and the common folk — the ones at the NFL game — still love him. After all, they would say, why would anybody scramble to get their picture taken with Rob Ford were it not so?
Ford’s detractors, meanwhile, would be upset and bewildered by it all. Why, they’d ask themselves, would anyone in their right mind want to get their picture taken with Toronto’s crack-smoking, drinking-and-driving, gang-associating, eating-at-home, disgraced and disgraceful mayor? Have they no shame?
Or do the picture-seekers — and this is what the so-called elites fear most — truly support Ford and approve of him?
To answer that question, I refer you to an NFL Super Bowl I attended some years ago in Houston. I went with my university buddy James Villeneuve. Before game day, James and I were at a party and Paris Hilton walked by.
You know, Paris Hilton: Sex tape, reality TV star, drunk driving, cocaine, celebutante.
James hailed her: “Hey, Paris! We’re from Canada! Can me and my friend get a picture with you?”
“Sure,” she drawled. We took the picture. In it, she looks bored and we look amused. Afterwards, James and I would laugh uproariously about that picture.
“What an airhead,” I’d say. “What a ridiculous person. Famous for doing nothing.”
You know where this is going, don’t you, Ford Nation? Sure you do. People flock to get their picture taken with famous people and infamous people. Even (in)famous people who do drugs, drink and drive, and are trailer park trash.
Afterwards, they show the pictures to their friends, like we did with poor old Paris Hilton, and they laugh.
And, Rob? We’re not laughing with you.
We’re laughing at you.
The greatest early Canadian punk rock singles
Conservatives: deleting emails is “the usual protocol”
Remember how Kooky Kavoukian and the Ontario PCs shrieked and brayed about how the routine deletion of emails was a “crime”? How democracy itself was at risk? Remember all that?
Well, take a look at this morning’s papers, and the stories about the metastasizing Senate scandal. Read this bit:
The “usual protocol.” And you know what? It is. That’s why every government office you have ever set foot in – whether it be the OPP, the RCMP, the PCO, or even Kooky Cavoukian’s office – has (a) shredding machines and (b) computer keyboards with the “delete” button still intact in the upper right corner.
The investigation by the OPP into the routine deletion of emails – in a situation where there is no legal penalty for doing so, because it isn’t a crime, for Chrissakes – is a frigging joke. (So, too, the force’s routine leaking of details about their bogus “investigation” to Liberal-hating media outlets.)
But, if Kooky Kavoukian, the Ontario PCs, the OPP and assorted others want something to do, I encourage them to focus their attention on Ottawa. There, the federal Conservatives have said deleting emails is “the usual protocol.”
So why aren’t they all in jail?