crazed monkey

I mentioned yesterday how my weblog ranks high on searches for John Nunziata and John Tory. As it turns out, I received an offer earlier today promising six figures and a cushy job at City Hall in return for turning those high-ranking pages into ads for a certain mayoral candidate. Naturally, I turned the offer down as I refuse to act as a shill for a political figure, let alone six monetary ones.

I am turning the matter over to the Toronto Police for further investigation. Goodness knows why, as no doubt they have better things to do with their time. Those who made the offer know who they are. As such, I will not be revealing the guilty parties at this time. Instead, I leave it to my readers to make wild speculations and, in so doing, drag the political process into the mire where everyone is sure to be sullied.

Oh yeah, the candidate whose team made the offer; that person will be mayor.

Posted on October 28th, 2003 in ontario, politics - No Comments »

Over a month ago I mentioned that Barbara Hall was still a contender for mayor, as far as I was concerned. Well, not anymore.

Barbara Hall has been in danger of dropping from my list of eligible candidates for quite some time now. Frankly, she’s not a leader. Yes, she may be conciliatory and an effective manager, but I feel that Toronto needs someone who can really push the city forward. Hall has experience on her side, but that was as mayor of Toronto before amalgamation. A larger city needs stronger leadership who will take a stand, not backroom negotiation with peoples unseen.

Secondly, Barbara Hall continues to waffle on the future of the island airport and still looks to be leaning in favour of expansion. I dislike the idea of expanding the island airport, but I also dislike how Hall has not been clear on the issue.

David Miller will most certainly get my vote, and for reasons opposite to why I will not vote for Barbara Hall. Miller is a leader who has stood up for what he believes in. He fought for the MFP leasing inquiry, despite opposition from other councillors and from Mayor Mel Lastman. Miller comes across as ethical, which is exactly what Toronto needs after years of corruption. A mega-city leaves ample room for sleaze to go unnoticed, but I get the feeling, based on his past record, that Miller will keep watch.

John Tory also comes across as a strong leader, and I’m sure that Toronto would fare well with him as mayor. However, I do not agree with him on several key issues, namely his promise to ban panhandling, his proposal to introduce garbage incinerators, and his negative ad campaign against David Miller.

On a related note, my weblog is getting lots of hits from people searching for information on John Tory and John Nunziata. (Search on Google for both these mayoral candidates to see why.) The accesses continue to mount and threaten to replace “monkey” with “john” (203 vs. 196 at current count) as the highest ranking search keyword for my weblog. There’s a joke in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Posted on October 27th, 2003 in ontario, politics - No Comments »

The Toronto mayoral election is generating quite a buzz this year, and thank goodness for that! However, selecting a mayor is but one choice to consider come November 10th. The other equally important decision involves selecting your city councillor.

Your city councillor is to your municipal government as your MPP and MP are to your provincial and federal governments. That is, they represent the interests of the area in which you live while they are at council. As the province and country are divided into ridings, Toronto is divided into 44 wards for the 2003 municipal election. To find out which ward you live in, consult the City of Toronto Election 2003 website.

Ontario cities and municipalities have what is called a “weak mayor” system, in that the mayor’s vote in council is equal to that of a councillor’s. The mayor cannot rule by decree, but instead has to galvanise support from the councillors. A mayor with a strong vision and the ability to successfully communicate that vision can persuade councillors to vote for his ideas. By contrast, a mayor who cannot defend his vision for the city, or one who has no definite plans, cannot hope to draw support from council.

In selecting your councillor and your mayor, there are a number of strategies you could possibly employ. If you feel strongly about a mayoral candidate’s platform, it would be wise to select a councillor in your ward who shares the same ideas and who would consistently vote with your mayor. Similarly, if you feel strongly about most of a mayoral candidate’s ideas but oppose others, you might want to vote for a councillor who shares your views and who would vote with your mayor most of, but not all of, the time.

Unfortunately, many wards offer few choices as to candidates for city councillor. It is also not as easy to determine what your candidates stand for. Once you know who is running for councillor in your ward, try a search on Google. If environmental issues are your concern, the North Toronto Green Community has compiled some statements from candidates for city council from selected wards. For existing councillors, you might want to browse through the council and committee minutes to get a feel for how good a job your councillor is doing. The city of Toronto has been rife with scandals these past few years, so it would be wise to avoid re-electing a tainted councillor.

If selecting a mayor and a city councillor wasn’t enough, there’s also the question of choosing a school board trustee, but I’ll leave that one for someone else to tackle.

Update: Andrew Spicer has posted a review of Toronto Star columnist Royson James’ column in which Royson rates city councillors running for re-election. Andrew helpfully extracted Royson’s rating for Michael Walker, my city councillor, saving me valuable minutes.

On a related note, Erika Marquardt, the only person running against Michael Walker for city councillor in Ward 22, seems to be something of a political unknown. As such, I feel compelled to vote for Walker. Honestly, if you are running for public office and cannot be bothered to set up even a small web presence for your campaign, I cannot be bothered to vote for you. Marquardt didn’t even supply Toronto Elections with contact information, as evidenced by the candidates list for Ward 22, although I’m sure there’s a good reason.

Posted on October 24th, 2003 in ontario, politics - No Comments »

This past Tuesday was probably my last day riding into work until spring. I might try to get a ride in this weekend if I have the time, but Tuesday was it as far as commuting by bicycle is concerned.

This summer hasn’t been bad as my first for frequent riding. May was a fairly wet month and not much suitable for riding, but I can’t much complain about the rest of the summer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete my goal of 3000km. However, I managed to fit in some 2500km of riding, which isn’t all that bad. No doubt next year will be better.

It is not the cold that is stopping me from continuing my riding as I have been quite happy to ride wearing a thin jersey, bike shorts and fingerless gloves. As long as I ride fast enough to keep the blood flowing and my legs warm, I’m fine. Nor is it because of the biting 30-50kph winds which magically change direction in order to conspire against me in both the morning and the evening. The fact that I have to carry a larger burden of clothes for the day hasn’t stopped me yet this month, so that isn’t it.

It is the dark, not the cold, which stops me from riding to work well into the winter months. With the daylight savings time change-over this coming weekend, I would have to leave work much earlier in order to avoid riding home in the dark.

Yes, I know they make headlights for bicycles these days. However, I cross two busy roads on the way from work, and not at the lights either. Front and rear lights are not all that visible from the side, especially by the crazed drivers one sees on the roads these days.

In addition, much of my riding is done on trails, both paved and unpaved, where it’s often difficult to spot people and their dogs, although mostly their dogs. I have often come within inches of rendering into trail mix the shihtzu-rat hybrids the Rosedale set seem to enjoy, and during the daylight hours at that. I can only imagine the havoc I would wreak in the twilight hours if I were to continue riding.

Lastly, those in my Forest Hill neighborhood with too much money and too little sense (meaning most of them) have a tendency to rake their fallen leaves into the sides of the street. When dry, these leafy mounds are large enough to hide all manners of treasures suitable for puncturing tires. When wet and mashed, they are a slimy, slippery mess, and invisible in the dark.

Yeah, yeah, I could suck it up and ride on the main roads instead of the trails. That would at least eliminate many of my issues with riding in the dark. Unfortunately, it would also eliminate much of the fun I have riding almost non-stop from home to work. Not much can beat the feeling of riding in excess of 30kph for long stretches, knowing there are few obstacles, no red lights, no stop signs and, most importantly, no cars to slow you down. It’s an exhilarating experience to be sure, especially in the crisp morning air.

I refuse to go half-assed and use my bike purely for mundane transport, weaving around cars and waiting for green lights. I have loved the time spent racing the trails this summer. Relegating my bicycle to the stop-and-go traffic of the road would just kill that love.

In the interest of keeping the love alive and giving me something to which to look forward next spring, I am hanging up my bicycle until some sunny morning in March or April. Until then I ride the subway.

Posted on October 23rd, 2003 in meta, person - No Comments »

I wasn’t going to comment on Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad’s speech at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, but when I read Smuggy’s take on it, I knew I just had to.

The CBC is going halfway and manages to fit in with the whitewashers while pretending to be unbiased. […] Our media could at least give people the option of deciding for themselves whether this guy is a nut or not - why do they need to put the squirrel-yelling guy through two hours of hair and makeup before they roll the camera?

I’m not sure which CBC article Smuggy was reading, but the one I read earlier today had a headline of “Malaysian PM urges Muslims to unite against what he calls Jewish domination” and an opening paragraph which read (emphasis mine):

In a blistering attack on Israel and hectoring criticism of the Islamic world, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a summit of Muslim leaders Thursday that Jews ruled the world and recruited others “to fight and die for them.”

And in case you misread that paragraph, or thought it a misprint, the next one quotes Mahathir (again, emphasis mine):

“The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy,” Mahathir, a widely respected statesman in Asia and the developing world, said in a speech as he became chairman of the 57-country Organization of the Islamic Conference.

You would have to be illiterate to come away from the CBC headline, let alone the text of the article, without the impression that Mahathir is a raving lunatic. The CBC, and many Canadian papers, the Globe And Mail included, do not, by any stretch of the imagination, leave it up to the reader to decide whether Mahathir is out of touch; they spell it out in the article headline and its opening paragraph. A journalist could have easily opened with any number of Mahathir’s statements, many of them strongly critical of modern Islam. Instead, they focussed on the strongly anti-Semitic portion of the speech, and rightly so, as that is a far larger story.

Certainly, a news article could be more critical of Mahathir’s beliefs, but that job is for the opinion pages. If someone living in the 21st century can’t read the facts, or even simply the text of Mahathir’s speech, and come away with the impression that Mahathir is a nut-case, at least as far as his beliefs of a Zionist conspiracy against Islam are concerned, then that person is as backwards as Mahathir and no comment editorial can spell it out for them.

Posted on October 16th, 2003 in politics, world - No Comments »