Archive for the ‘Breaking News Dept.’ Category

Case Ootes: the scandal grows

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Breaking News Dept.

The veteran Toronto Star and Car Advertiser reporter, Royson “Miller Killer” James, writes in Tuesday’s paper about the profligate spending of our esteemed councillor for Ward 29, Case Ootes [rhymes with “odious” –ed.].

letter to the \"ad\" itor? typical Case Ootes advertisement in the East York Mirror and Car Advertiser: Give the man a razor!

Mr. Ootes spent the most of any Toronto councillor in 2006, an election year, for advertising, all on the taxpayer’s tab. At $15,184 for advertising, plus $20,927 for “postage and couriers,” it could be argued that the 20-vote margin that gave Mr. Ootes victory over his challenger last year amounted to an outrageous pay-out of $1,800 per winning vote.

Talk about yer “sponsorship scandal.”

As Case Ootes told the Star’s James, who asked him if having a “huge account to promote his name in an election year” was important: “Arr. And if I’d had another $36,000 to spend, I would’ve won by 40 votes. Now get lost.” [To be precise, his exact words quoted in the Star are “Of course you benefit from that; I’d be the first to agree.” –ed.]

It falls to the ALLDERBLOB to remind Mr. Ootes that for all his spending, he actually earned 3,562 fewer votes in 2006 than in 2003. At that rate, just $200 more spent on “advertising” would have lost even those pathetic 20 votes that gave him his bunion cushion at city hall until 2010.

We urge Mr. Ootes to take charge of advertising at GM or Ford as a post-retirement career. If anyone can put them out of their misery, it’s the advertising genius Case Ootes.

Case Ootes vote total, 2003: 9,352 (62% of all votes cast)
Case Ootes vote total, 2006: 5,790 (46% of all votes cast)

Warnings on Car Ads: As goes California, so goes the European Union?

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Breaking News Dept.

In our hourly pimple analysis [that is, “what brings readers to our blob” –ed.] we occasionally come across quirky facts (see “Do You Feel Lucky” at right). Strangely, for example, a search for “Jack Lakey” and “smasher of dreams” yields all of three hits. Who’d a thunk? But more than that, a search on Google.ca yields different hits than one on Google.com. Try it with the phrase “car advertisements.”

Now that’s a laugh riot.

Interestingly, it’s on Google.ca that the “car advertisement” search turned up a link to a story in the New York Times and Car Advertiser from a month ago, that we’d missed. Darn. Fact is, we’ve been lax in our hegemony factor lately.

Bad Torontonian! Bad! New York Times and Car Advertiser important! Riverdale/East York Mirror and Car Advertiser unimportant!

We didn’t miss the story in the San Francisco Chronicle and Car Advertiser from 2006, the one that called for a ban on TV car commercials but neglected to consider the car ads that paid the writer that day.

And we didn’t miss the one from the Globe and Mail and Car Advertiser that told how Norway’s parliament had outlawed the depiction of any car as “green” or “ecologically friendly” in advertising.

But somehow the Times piece slipped through our sticky fingers.

Dateline: October 28. London: Eric Pfanner reports:

The European Parliament proposed last Wednesday that car advertisements in the European Union carry tobacco-style labels, warning of the environmental impact they cause.

Under the plan, 20 percent of the space or time of any auto ad would have to be set aside for information on a car’s fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, cited as a contributor to global climate change.

greenpeace car warning label click for warning

Now, as Pfanner’s story makes clear, this is not a guarantee that car ads will soon carry the warning labels. It’s not the EU Parliament, by some freakish quirk, that makes law in the EU. That duty is left to sommat called the “European Commission.”

But it’s a step closer to the inevitable, as we see it: a time when the right to freely promote a machine in whose tailwind the global crisis blows (and grows) is questioned, and eventually seriously curtailed.

Stealing our fire, if not our moral bar

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

We came across the following in Toronto’s entertainment weekly Eye and Car Advertiser today.

Interesting coincidence. We used to know a Jacob Allderdice. We’ve been wondering what he’s gotten himself up to lately.

Advertising morality
Christopher Hutsul speaks of a “lofty moral bar” supposedly set by the advertising department of the Toronto Star and Car Advertiser (“Turn off the red light?” Letters, Nov. 15). What, exactly are those morals? The Star spreads its pages willingly to any automobile advertiser that flashes enough dough. Meanwhile on its editorial pages we read nothing but the usual bumph about diabetes epidemics caused by automobile dependency, deaths caused by automobile pollution, loss of farmland caused by automobile-induced sprawl, and financial ruin coming to Toronto “driven” by automobile-based suburban tax–base drainage (or something like that).

On the other hand, this is also true of EYE WEEKLY.

The good news is, in your rebuttal to Hutsul, you admit that advertising policy and editorial stance are linked. Now how about a policy banning car ads in EYE WEEKLY? JACOB ALLDERDICE

Good luck, Mr. Allderdice. We sure aren’t holding our breath for this one.

[editor’s note: after an extensive search in our archives, we found the original Hutsul letter that provoked Sr. Allderdice’s wrath, and print it in all its glory below. Note Mr. Hutsul, a former cartooner at Eye Weekly and Car Advertiser, has his own website, located here. –ed.]

Turn off the red light?
Looks like New York magazine has dropped its escort ad section. At some point, EYE WEEKLY should probably adopt this policy. At the very least, it would help align EYE WEEKLY with the lofty moral bar set by its older sibling, the Toronto Star. CHRISTOPHER HUTSUL

The Editors respond: Mr. Hutsul would have us turn our back on the women and men who work in a legal industry that is so marginalized that it makes basic workplace safety difficult to ensure. Doing so would further marginalize them and drive more of their commerce into the shadows of the black market. Perhaps in some parallel universe that constitutes raising the “moral bar.” Back in this universe, however, we’ll continue to recognize the legitimacy of sex work and continue supporting calls to have the courts and legislatures recognize the need of those who do it to be treated like workers and businesspeople entitled legal protection and basic human dignity.

Feist/Gonzales, Massey Hall Toronto 2007

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

This post has been moved to the “page” category–see sidebar or click here.

Questions raised by pollution study

Monday, November 5th, 2007

By now you will have heard about the study (pdf here) released today suggesting Toronto cars and trucks kill some 440 people per year. Authored by Toronto Medical Officer of Health David McKeown, the study got front page treatment in the Toronto Star and Car Advertiser on Saturday–well before its release–as well as coverage in Eye Daily Car Advertiser today.

What gives the story “legs” is the contention that the deaths are not from collisions but from illnesses stemming from air pollution. The solution, according to McKeown, is a 30 percent reduction in car traffic, coupled with improved public transit, cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Everyone is going on about what a radical shock this would be to the city: but note the study cites a 75% increase in the city’s car traffic since 1985.

Questions come to mind:

1. What car does McKeown drive?
2. What would a 30% reduction in car traffic take down first? The existing transit system? The police dept budget? City hall as we know and love it? (Thanks to Toronto Cranks)

Man bites dog; allen key sought

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

In a story that briefly displaced world events for readers on the city’s news and car advertiser websites–world events like the suspension of Pakistan’s constitution or the half-million people flooded from their homes in Mexico–it appears a person on a bicycle retaliated for being cut off by a motorist in Toronto. According to rumour, in Monday’s Globe and Mail and Car Advertiser you will read how he “stabbed” the motorist with an allen key. Alleged Allen Key (not exactly as illustrated) click for actual size

The previous version of the story (see link above) stated the motorist was in hospital with serious injuries. Stay tuned.

UPDATE Monday Nov. 5 2007 as reported in the Globe and Mail and Car Advertiser:

Bike rage ‘going to happen’

JAMES ADAMS

November 5, 2007

The stabbing of a motorist last week by a Toronto bicyclist was “a pretty severe action,” but bike rage is an unavoidable consequence of the crowded streets, cycling advocates say.

With “more cyclists and more cars on the roads, it’s going to happen,” Derek Chadbourne, a spokesman for Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC), said yesterday.

Last Friday morning, near the University of Toronto, an SUV driver was struck in the neck by a metal object wielded by a cyclist allegedly upset at being cut off by the driver as the driver attempted a left turn. The cyclist subsequently fled on foot, leaving his bike near the scene.

In September, a cyclist in Milwaukee, Wis., fired a gun three times at a motorist, wounding him in the shoulder, after the motorist caused him to fall.

“Cyclists, on an hourly basis, face people trying to aim their cars at them, swearing at them, swerving at them, taking them off the road,” fellow ARC spokesman Darren Stehr said.

Still, Mr. Stehr cautioned, cyclists’ responses are usually tame. “The most I hear cyclists do is spitting at the window or something … because the cyclist is starting from a David position since he’s so much smaller than the car.”

Original reports identified the weapon in Friday’s incident as a screwdriver, with one television station describing the wounds as “life-threatening.”

Yesterday, however, police said the unidentified 30-year-old victim, a male, was released from hospital on the weekend and is recovering at home.

“No major arteries were affected,” Sgt. Craig Lewers of Toronto’s 52 Division said. Also, contrary to one newspaper report, the victim was not struck six to seven times, but no more than three, and the weapon, he said, appears to have been “a bicycle tool, maybe an Allen
key” – a wrench sometimes known as a hex-head.

As of yesterday afternoon, no arrest had been made, nor had the cyclist – described as a white goateed male in his late 20s, wearing jeans, a baseball cap and carrying a black courier bag – turned himself in.

“We’re still looking at leads – and who doesn’t show up for work Monday, courier-wise,” Sgt. Lewers said.

Mr. Stehr said that the only other episode he could recall of a similar nature occurred a few years ago in Scarborough. “A cyclist got cut off, he pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and took out the rear-window of the car.”

Cycling advocates, however, have differing opinions on whether the fugitive cyclist should come clean.

Even if police don’t make an arrest “the [cyclist] should take responsibility … and maybe tell his side of the story,” Mr. Stehr said.

“I think it would just go really badly for him,” Mr. Chadbourne said, adding that the likelihood of the cyclist being caught is minimal. He noted that initial reports of the victim’s injuries appear to have been overblown. “It’s not like the guy’s dead.”

“There’s nothing more scary,” Mr. Chadbourne said, “than having your life threatened by a car.”

Lovelock: We must destroy Gaia before she destroys us!

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

Ooh, that wacky fun-loving magazine “Rolling Stone and Car Advertiser” is at it again.

Now they’ve gone too far though. In a revealing interview with James Lovelock (who knew he was a Quaker who spent WWII “shagging nurses” in English air raid shelters?), the man who named the Gaia hypothesis (the notion that our ecosystem is a living entity in which everything is interconnected) Rolling Stone has stepped on one too many toes.

Optimist? Pessimist? It doesn’t matter: most of us are going to die. It’s truly time to put an end to this Gaia creature
the scary face of Gaia–or is it her backside? click to check for pimples
before she destroys us all!

Bicycle Bump, a.k.a. The “Cyclists Union:” Dave Meslin’s work comes to fruition

Monday, October 15th, 2007

Breaking News Dept.

King Mez‘s been busy lately.

Today we saw his letter to the editor published in the Toronto Star and Car Advertiser.

Mez wrote about the vote for MMP, or Mixed member proportional representation, that was defeated in the Ontario provincial election the other day. The proposal would have seen the creation of a system to elect a legislature more closely aligned with the actual vote: in other words, when the Greens get 9% of the vote, it might work out that closer to 9% of parliament would be members of the Green Party. Instead, what we have today (and continuing since the defeat of the proposal) is a scheme where a party can be elected to majority status by a minority of voters, provided the opposition is spread thinly enough.

We like Mez. We happen to agree with him about MMP.

He’s sure been busy lately. What else has he been up to? Oh yeah, he impregnated Toronto with a Cyclist’s Union “Cyclists Union” [note: when referring to the cyclists union, do not say “cyclist’s union,” “cyclist union,” or any other variant, on order of king mez himself: it’s a brand thing. –ed.]

Bicycle Bump, aka The Cyclist’s Union click for close-up

We alluded to this here and Herb over at IBikeTO recently blobbed about it. Actually, the glorious event occured last month, on Sept. 30.

In case you missed it, Mez pulled together some 70 folks to present an idea for a new member-funded cycling group that would have as its central mandate the lobbying that TCAT does, and the advocacy and “fun” that ARC is known for, as well as a model of insurance/roadside assistance similar to what CAA does for motorists. It would include a new magazine, to be funded by advertising and provided free to all paid-up members.

He showed his research into similar organizations in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, SF, Chicago and NYC, with evidence that .07 % of the population as members (like in New York) would give Toronto 1,800 members, and .87 % (like in Vancouver/Seattle) would give Toronto 21,000 members.

Much oohing and ahing followed, along with a secret vote: 65 out of 67 votes cast said the people there that night would happily join and work toward the success of the group. Only one person said Mez is a nutbar and should “go away.”

The intention is to roll out the group in June 2008, with Mez to run it for the first year and for for a new board of governors to meet and elect/appoint a new director following that.

Surprisingly, less has been written about it on the web than we would’ve thought by now. What’s up with that? It may be that “King Mez” has the reins a little close to his chest with this one. We ran into him a couple days after the event and he gave instructions not to refer to the “Toronto Cyclists Union” as the “TCU.”

Suitably chastised, we walked away muttering. TCU sounds dopey, it’s true, but sometimes that’s life. Fact is, you don’t get to pick your nicknames. It may be that the “Cyclist’sCyclists Union” will stick, but if you feel the need to instruct and correct, chances are the thing will take a nickname you don’t like. Us, we prefer UBU (for “Urban Bicycle Union”).

You can email Mez (see below) for announcements about the group, and there is a facebook site (see also below) for folks to keep abreast.

October 1st, 2007

Toronto’s Cycling Community is Pregnant

On a beautiful evening in late September, under a full moon, the Toronto Cyclists Union was fertilised. Over seventy bicycle advocates and organisers from over twenty organisations came together under one roof and offered their overwhelming support for this new creature.

Nine months later, in June 2008, we are expecting the arrival of a vigorous young organisation: Toronto’s first membership-driven bicycle advocacy group.

The Toronto Cyclists Union will provide a loud voice for all bicycle riders. It’s time to stand up and demand the attention, respect, funding and facilities that we deserve.

The City of Toronto has a great Bike Plan, but implementation has been as slow as a bike with a flat tire…and no pedals. It is unacceptable the extent to which our roads give priority to cars at the expense of cyclists’ safety. Exclusive bike lanes are rare and are often filled with potholes and/or parked cars.

Working with other groups such as the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation (TCAT), Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC), IBikeTO, Toronto Bicycle Network and many others, the Cyclists Union will build our community into a strong, diverse, fun and effective network of thousands of bike riders fighting for change.

To get updates on the development of the Cyclists Union over these nine months and to find out how to get involved you can:

1) Subscribe to monthly updates by sending an e-mail to: “ultrasound at monkeycycle.org”
2) Join our facebook group

Dave Meslin: you will want to pay attention to this guy.