Another contributor, can you believe it, dear reader?

Joining TCL as a Syndicated Contributor is Amber Dawn Pullin who does her own bit of dabbling in urban Toronto life over at amber dawn’s non-paper journal.

As a Syndicated Contributor Amber doesn’t write directly for TCL. Rather, I occassionally scour her blog for posts that I think you might like and, with her permission, re-publish them here. And feel free to comment on the posts — I’ll try to nudge Amber to take a look, possibly even answer.

Of course, dear reader, you’re welcome to let me know if I’m making editorial errors. In other words, if you’re clamorin’ for more Amber, gimme a holler. And there’s always the option of visiting her blog too, right?

So welcome to the Legion of Downtown Super Villains, Amber! (Sorry if I didn’t mention that last bit in my emails. Membership is mandatory.)

It’s been years since anything like this was attempted and, let’s be honest, this is a survey that all of Toronto has been waiting far too long for. I understand that you, dear reader, may not know the first thing about most, if not all, of these people and that’s perfectly okay. I might suggest that not knowing some of these folks’ backgrounds may make them sexier. The idea here is to be entirely superficial. :)

I think it’ll be fun to leave the poll open until the fall election when all of these faces may change. Perhaps we can correlate the sexiness factor with incumbency.

In the meantime, pick the three sexiest guys and gals (feel free to vote as much as the system will allow), and I’ll try my best to deliver the good news to the winning two offices — one lady, one gent — when the numbers are all in. “Hottest Toronto Councillor 2010” — that’d look nice on a plaque.

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Every now and again, when people learn about what I do (did), they ask me earnestly why I’d choose to stay in Toronto.

Easy to answer: it’s an awesome city. As soon as the right people are at the helm at City Hall, it’ll be truly world-class. In some ways the city is already busting at the seams in this regard, it’s simply the government that keeps reining it in.

Election day is coming and, regardless of this, the city is blooming with construction, flowers, and lovely ladies. And as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen a good selection of cities; enough to know that I haven’t seen nearly enough. Toronto isn’t the cheapest, or the cleanest, or the busiest, or the biggest, but it’s also not the dirtiest, most boring, barren, or small by any means. Any tourists that complain about deficiencies in these areas are, well, tourists. The city’s way bigger than that (have you see how little I’ve covered in TCLand?), and growing by leaps and bounds. Frickin’ jackhammer outside my window right now, in fact.

With so much growth it’s extremely important to keep a steady vision otherwise it could get real messy. Here’s a great example: the new designs recently unveiled for the new north hall of St. Lawrence Market. The market has been around since basically Toronto’s been here but the north hall, which to me resembles a stripped-down school gymnasium, is much newer. On Saturdays local growers truck in their produce and on Sundays it’s an antique market.

I know I’ve probably mentioned this before but I know that many people don’t get a chance to visit that area, so to help you out I’ve taken photos from approximately the same locations as in the literature. That way you can see the before and proposed-after shots.

The design teams for the north hall project are split up into five colours but obviously the orange team is the best. A rooftop garden? Hells yeah!

Anyhow, here they are, winner to be decided by committee. :(

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This week the pre-election ritual of reviewing councillors’ salaries began in earnest. Prior to this election the issue, like the trillium, blossomed every three years but now with a four- year term this ugly plant has morphed into a weed that always bears bitter fruit. Councillors will predictably fall all over themselves to prove to the electorate how frugal they are. They will disparage the expectations of their colleagues and publicly slash their wrists in an effort to out humble each other.

Oh my gosh. :D Then at the end of this Toronto City Council motion it ends by saying that the Toronto Star’s Editorial Board bears great wisdom when it comes to giving people raises and why not use them since they’re “are always eager to give advice about this weighty subject”? Yours truly, Councillor Howard Moscoe.

Gotta thank Newstalk 1010 for this one.

Here’s something else I found stuck to the wall this afternoon (Church, south of Dundas). Could it be?

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Been a lot of buzz about British street artist Banksy on the Toronto wires lately. When I had a gander at the art I thought I’d remembered hastily snapping something like it last month — but that was last month. What do you think, Banksy or not?

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For some strange reason people continue to submit photos to the TCL Flickr group despite the fact that it’s been mothballed for months now. I drop by every couple of weeks and there are ten to thirteen new photos awaiting approval — for only who knows how long. Weeping inconsolably, usually.

I feel like such a jerk.

Well, why not at least show off a few good ones, huh? It’s what the photographers were expecting when they joined my neglectful outfit.

So here’s the first of whatever (and whenever) I dig out the group pool. I believe this is that roller derby league I’ve seen plastered on every light pole around town.

E-ville Dead by –nikon–

Regional transit and brooding days seem to go hand in hand for me. Here’s another example from yesterday: me going to meet family to celebrate a birthday out west. Way out west. The flipbook movie is about 13 minutes long (out of a 40 minute trip to Oakville), so give it some time to load. Maybe this is a good time to call your mum?

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Zach’s post about the G20 kinda freaked me out a bit. Not about the clampdown on the city or anything, I think that’ll be a riot. My main concern is the volume of simultaneous stuff that’ll be happening, and the lack of bodies to attend. Last year I got a request to cover Caribana so I spent the whole day wriggling through a million people in the blistering heat. I had to miss about three other things that day, three things within my highly limited scope of “what’s happening”.

This year the city’s shipping in Euro-crazies for the summer, doing a mayoral throw-down, plus all the other usual seasonal stuff that’s supposed to happen. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

One day at a time.

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Have you noticed any changes around here lately, dear reader? I’ve slowly been sneaking stuff onto the site…that TwitPic flip book at the top of the front page, TCLand (current to August 2009, but now there’s Caribana :( ), TCL by Month, the Tumblr site for picture junkies (occasionally with exclusive stuff), various shuffles, re/moves, and additions.

And I’ve added paid advertising. For realsies this time. It’s high time I try to do this thing fulltime because, if I may be honest, a year and a half in I love this blogging thing more than my first day. I entirely agree with most ad networks’ policies that I shouldn’t be asking you to click on any ads. It’s crass, a justifiable reason to get booted off the ad network, and you being the intelligent person you are make the sole and conscious decision to interact with any advertising that appears on this site. I wouldn’t insult you like that.

In order to be entirely transparent about my reasoning behind this effort, you should understand that any revenue that TCL generates goes directly toward helping me pay rent, eat, pay for hosting fees, and all that other stuff that requires money.

Generally speaking, revenue on sites and blogs is generated through the sale of ads, many of which pay when they’re occasionally clicked on. In effect, a a simple click on an ad ends up, via various channels, supporting the site on which it appears. In a very indirect way, the site that loads when a viewer clicks is providing financial assistance to the site carrying the ad. I like to think of this as the credits at the end of a PBS program. Hope you find this information useful.

So yes, I’m selling ad space and I’m getting something together where folks can actually invest in the blog — the idea is for these investments to accrue in value over time (if you believe TCL will accrue value over time, that is), and I’m going to try to get prices down to as low as a buck a pop — $1 – so it might be affordable for you too. I’ll explain how it works later, hopefully it’ll make so much sense that it’ll make your head explode.

But wait, there’s more!

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