You may remember Ford’s spat with the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale a little while ago. It started with Dale poking around behind the Mayor’s house, investigating the veracity of an application to extend his Rotundness’ property  in order to add another fence.

Another fence, on top of an already solid six-footer because, to quote the big man directly:

“Our primary concern is the safety of Douglas and Stephanie, our two young children, having a secure area to play. The addition of this parcel of land to our property would allow us to install a better security fence that will help to enhance the safety of our children.”

…

“We have a number of safety concerns, as we have encountered youth encroaching on our property late at night on a number of occasions.”

The entire thing, in other words, is based on Rob’s concern for his children’s safety. All those pesky teens are making him jittery.

And now, in light of this past weekend’s shooting at the Eaton Centre by a man not too long out of his teens (in which a young teen was killed), here’s what Fordo had to say:

“Let’s just continue living our lives like we do every day — go out and have fun and take it from there,” Ford said at police headquarters. “It’s been a terrible couple of days but this is definitely, like I said before, the safest city in the world.”

So apparently when it comes to Ford’s part of town, those no-good teens giving him the stink-eye pose a clear and present danger, so much so that he applied to put up double fences on public land, but when it comes to a public murder in a busy downtown shopping centre, it’s suddenly the safest city in the world.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the very definition of self-serving hypocrisy. It’s yet another example of Rob Ford looking out for Rob Ford, lying and deceiving Torontonians the whole way.

…the wide open boulevards of our fair city this pleasant afternoon with my girl.

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I like a good protest as much as the next guy, and I’m definitely not above showing my support for the demonstrators when I think they have a point to make, but sometimes I have to question what they’re trying to achieve. Or if they bothered to give any thought to what they’re doing.

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Nothing like a whack of indoor flakes to take your mind of the stuff outside, eh?

Haha!

Ah, but I kid. This is actually a serious problem for Toronto retailers. Last year we lost 12 people in an avalanche at the lower-level Starbucks…

I like Christmas, I really do.

I’m always a little surprised to hear someone say that they don’t. To me, the dislike inevitably always boils down to poor management, doesn’t matter the back story.

What do you see when you look at the following picture?

Do you see a brightly decorated foyer with a festively blue wreath above the door, or is that a translucently hot sun about to go supernova and tear you and your family limb from limb? I’m going to suggest that both are possible depending on how you look at it. This can either be the prelude to an idyllic Christmas, or it can the foreshadowing of utter bloody terror. What’s the difference? I believe the answer is expectations.

In the first scenario, the only expectation is that you’ll be home, happy with your family, and hopefully you’ll get to enjoy some relaxing time off and a couple of good meals. Pretty simple, easy to fulfill. In the next scenario, well, I don’t have enough space here for the lists, recipes, schedules, budgets, planning, planning, and more planning that needs to takes place. And that show really needs to hit the road ASAP if it’s going to get some traction by December.

The first scenario has fairly low expectations. The second’s are in the stratosphere. So the trick is to simply bring those expectations down. Manage them.

Part of that is letting everyone know you want to keep it as simple as possible this year:

Take a page from the people in the business district, they didn’t dick around. “Throw a string of shit on that tree and let’s get the fuck outta here, we’ve got money to make”, is most probably how it went down. The essence of pragmatism.

But the idea is to take a page and not the whole book, because otherwise you start getting stuff like this:

Okay, it’s certainly better than barf on the windows, but it seems a little cold. Guess I’m more of a traditional Christmas kinda guy; gimme a fireplace, a mug full of booze, and a comely lass on the knee. Trees are also nice. I probably wouldn’t choose to put giant, blood-red impalement pyramids in the entrance to my place. I think it gives off the wrong message.

Bay Street sure likes it’s Christmas angular and abstract. But that’s okay, I don’t expect any more than that.

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This is starting to look bad, isn’t it? Second Friday post that didn’t make it out until the weekend. But this time, dear reader, I want to assure you it was an absolute necessity. You see, an event took place this weekend that marks TCL’s first technical anniversary and I didn’t want to waste a post on something more mundane.

I say technical because if you look at the archives, TCL only goes back to January. But it’s really been online since November of last year.

Luckily the WayBack Machine has, as yet, no record of it.

At that time TCL had a mostly-black theme with content that induced hemorrhaging from the eyeballs and projectile vomiting. Pretty awful stuff. Back then I didn’t have the experience or the sphincteric relaxation to do anything interesting, really. Had anyone suggested I run a shocking exposé on what really happens at the annual Santa Claus Parade, I would’ve balked!

But in mid-November I attended Illuminite, the annual Christmas lighting of Yonge-Dundas Square. It was a cold and rainy November night, but the show went on anyway. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to muscle my way up to the front of the crowd, and it was in that soggy moment of inspiration that I remembered it was Toronto City Life. Most of these people were alive, so they qualified. I was getting all bent out of shape for nothing!

That epiphany, and the attitudinal adjustment that came with it, carried me through all the way around to this year’s event. Good thing too because there were a lot more people this time around:

Most of the show, consisting of fire, sparks, trampolines, and dancing, took place at the far end of the square. There was a lot of loud music that, more often than not, descended into a raucous noise that in no way said season’s greetings to me. Eventually, the same spooky music I remember from last year came on as the fire dancers wound their way across the square toward the stage I’d plunked myself behind:

The dancers paraded around on stage in wintry white and silver, twirling fiery objects and having pyrotechnics go off behind them as if to say, “here’s the last blast of warmth you’re getting for the next six months”:

The audience were close enough that one slip and the girl in the red hood got a face full of fire. Now if that’s not a reason to go see something live, I don’t know what is. The fireworks were pretty scary too:

Behind the dancers was the reason for the whole display, the tree.

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Ah, fall. A time when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of … wait, I’ve done that already. I guess I’m still in shock at how quickly the temperature’s fallen. I’m walking around with pointy nipples for God’s sake!

It’s also been an unusually traumatic week, what with Bill Carroll switching time slots and all. You can smell change in the air. And musty autumn leaves. And urine. Why’s it always urine?

But no matter. The proper urban rat knows all the warmest holes in the ground. In Toronto it happens to be a long-ish path known as, umm, PATH. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be an acronym or what; not that it would jazz it up any.

Today, instead of writing a long post describing what’s there and blah blah blah, I thought I’d just invite you along for the walk. I am so thoughtful!

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