vic.gedris.org Never mind the blogs, here's the website.

Here at the ALLDERBLOB, that blob of blobs, we rarely show our hand. Oh, them as can read between the lines know we take pride in that part of the city of Toronto known by locals as “the Pocket,” and may even figure out we hold a stake in the neighbourhood. After all, what else could it mean when we describe “chez ALLDERBLOB” as Seymour Jones?

Sadly our days in the Pocket are numbered.

Actually, the number is exactly 30.

We’ve sold our place, and are moving on to greener pastures.

Will the move affect the blob of blobs? Does a raccoon defecate under the back porch? Things will change. But we leave you with two abiding images: one is our kitchen, with the stove we rescued 13 years ago from the scrap metal collector down the street, and restored with a new manifold and all new valves;

The famous stove

the other is the fabled shed, the true castle of chez ALLDERBLOB, which resides in all its glory at the back of the back yard, hard by the subway yard and from whose second floor windows one could espy all kind and manner of goings-on.

Shed ALLDERBLOB

Here in Canada (where we are currently running an election for Vice-President of the U.S.) [um, check that, would you? --ed.], there’s a minor kerfuffle over the fact that in 2003, when the current Prime Minister was leader of the Opposition, he gave a speech calling on Canada to send its forces into battle alongside those of the U.S. in Iraq. The speech, as widely reported in the News and Car Advertisers today, was plagiarized word-for-word from a speech given two days earlier by the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard.

A minor strategist, Owen Lippert, fell on his sword as the news became public. It wasn’t Stephen Harper, apparently, who was to blame–although it was Steve who happily took credit back then, when the speech was reportedly “noted as one of the best of his career” [consider the source --ed.].

Plagiarism is one thing. It doesn’t surprise us that Steve would copy John Howard, but what we’d like to know is who was Howard copying? We rather suspect there was more at play than some speechwriter in a hurry, handing his boss a shopping list to read. The fact is, as reader David Welwood points out to the Toronto Star and Car Advertiser today, Steve is the product of the same education system that gave rise to the most rabid among the U.S. rabid set–i.e. them as what hold the reins of power down there at present.

With the turmoil on Wall Street thanks to years of fun with laissez-faire, hands-off economics, and 19 people dead from a disease outbreak in the context of an inspection system that has been forfeited to the food industry itself due to purely ideological, experimental grounds, and a faith that somehow the “market” can solve our climate crisis, it is truly remarkable that poll numbers in both the United States and Canada show that over 40 per cent of the electorate (enough to form a majority government in Canada) in both countries supports more of the same.

News flash: free-market economics does not work, there is no way to run an economy without the hand of government, it is self defeating. Each time it has been attempted, the stock markets face one crisis after the next.

When this policy was exported through Washington ideologues and right-wing think tanks associated with the University of Chicago’s economics department in the 1970s, to countries in other continents, disaster became the word of the day. In stable countries such as Chile and Argentina, democratic governments that were working for the vast majority of their citizens, were overthrown by right-wing dictators funded by the CIA for a variety of reasons, including sometimes raising taxes on American companies doing business in those countries.

Gone were their democracies, in place were new “free” countries where industrialists could do whatever the hell they wanted at the expense of the democratic rights of the people on the ground. This was all sold and coated in the language of freedom and liberty, despite the fact that anyone who voiced their disagreement to such policies were in many cases shot, killed, or “disappeared.”

In Canada, we have a government whose leader studied at the University of Calgary school of economics, taught by professors who had studied at Chicago, under the likes of Milton Friedman, the professor whose idea it was to export “freedom” to Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and elsewhere. The results of failed attempts to rid the economy of government interference in Canada can be seen in the deaths of the 19 people from listeriosis

.

Word has it Canada is to elect a new government. The writ, as they say, was dropped a couple days ago when the Prime Minister, Stephen “Steve” Harper, formally requested Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament.

To do this, he left his own house early last Sunday morning in a four-car motorcade and drove to Parliament, where Jean had been told to expect him.

At 20 minutes after 8 a.m., Harper drove in a four-car prime ministerial motorcade across the street from his 24 Sussex Drive residence to Rideau Hall and told Governor-General Michaelle Jean he needed a new mandate.

Four cars. To drive literally across the street.

View Larger Map

And Steve wants us to believe he cares about the environment?

Thanks to Vic for the tip.

Our colleague Chris Carlsson, meanwhile, stopped by Toronto during the weekend past to promote his new book Nowtopia and get to know the city.

Chris, the man, is not the same person as Chris, the legend. The legend invented Critical Mass bike rides, a global phenomenon celebrated each month in some 300 cities. The man acknowledges he contributed to the discussion, and coined the name (the movement started out in San Francisco, Carlsson’s home town, under the name “Commuter Clot,” but Carlsson, who had visited China and seen the way cyclists there could literally stop the movement of motorized traffic when they built up in sufficient numbers or resolve, conceived of the name critical mass to describe the phenomenon). For “inventing” Critical Mass in 1992, Carlsson was awarded the Golden Wheel Award by the San Francisco Bike Coalition. His book Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration would be on any cycling advocate’s wish list.

Chris Carlsson, the legend, founded Processed World in 1981, a magazine (now a website) devoted to chronicling the emerging class of workers whose skills as typists eclipsed any creative abilities or gifts they might have had, when it came to finding employment.

The magazine’s creators found themselves using their only marketable skill after years of university education: “handling information.” In spite of being employed in offices as “temps,” few really thought of themselves as “office workers.” More common was the hopeful assertion that they were photographers, writers, artists, dancers, historians or philosophers.

Chris’s new book, Nowtopia, is a starchly written analysis of labour relations in the post-modern era, and as such ties in nicely with the Prime Minister of Canada deciding to quit his day job during Carlsson’s Canadian visit.

As Carlsson describes it,

Nowtopia is a book about a new politics of work. It profiles tinkerers, inventors, and improvisational spirits who bring an artistic approach to important tasks that are ignored or undervalued by market society. Rooted in practices that have been emerging over the past few decades, Nowtopia’s exploration of work locates an important thread of self-emancipatory class politics beyond the traditional arena of wage-labor.

When we have the Prime Minister of Canada acknowledging he is at best a “temp,” in other words, we are close to living the “Nowtopia” Carlsson describes. In this emerging world, we are not defined by our jobs but by what we do in our spare time. Is Prime Minister Stephen Harper the boss? Or is he just a hopeless drone, pushing paper in a windowless cubical while he itches to make some xerox art while the real boss goes to lunch?

For Carlsson, “Steve” Harper would be only a tool in the spectacle of power, no more or less than some of the tools he’s had to fire in the past week as his reelection campaign veered into weird territory.

In a sickening turn of events, David Frum, who can best be described as “Sarah Palin without lipstick,”

Down, I tells ya

has found a new home at the Daily Week.

Frum is well known as the fellow who wrote The Song that Made the Young Men Die, but he will be better known by readers of the ALLDERBLOB as the man whose recent bicycle repair here in Southern Ontario included an unexpected “Homeland Security fee” of $1,000.

And The Week, as our readers will know, is an upstart British publication with a focus on U.S. news and events, set to challenge the hegemony of car advertisers Time, Newsweek and Scholastic Upfront all at once. It publishes both a weekly print edition and a daily online edition, and strives for a balanced mix of opinion from the far right and (at least what passes for it in the U.S.) the far left. We like reading the Week. For the past month or so, a link to it has appeared on our pages under the heading “Research Dept” (for the time being it gives the lie to the notion that car advertising is necessary to keep an online magazine afloat).

But citing the far right is one thing. Allowing further air-time for that would-be American patriot (he’s Canajun, eh?) David Frum is truly a sickening turn of events.

Why? Perhaps a digression is in order.

The executive editor of the Week is our colleague [a-heem! --ed.] Francis Wilkinson, a writer whose career we have followed with interest since his days as a busboy at the Golden Inn in Avalon, N.J. His internship in the 1980s with Alexander Cockburn at the Nation was an inevitable next step. Wilkinson resurfaced (for us) in the early 1990s when we started seeing his name on the masthead at Rolling Stone magazine, where he was National Affairs Editor. He subsequently worked as a consultant for Democratic political candidates at the firm Doak, Carrier, O’Donnell, Wilkinson (famous for its lost battle to preserve California Governor Gray Davis against the Arnold Schwarzenegger juggarnaut in 2003, and its winning fight to elect Antonio Villaraigosa mayor of Los Angeles in 2005). Then, even as ALLDERBLOB day was proclaimed here in Toronto, Wilkinson parlayed his strengths and experiences into a new position. He was proclaimed “blob editur” [please fix spelling before publication --ed.] at that little-known ALLDERBLOB competitor, the Huffington Post. In short order he was writing opinion pieces at the Guardian Online as well as chronicling the U.S. presidential race on the pages of the New York Times and Car Advertiser. Around July 2008 however all this opinion writing came to a jarring halt.

Silence from the charmed pen of F. Wilkinson.

What next, the world asked.

The answer was not long in coming: as announced at the Wall Street Journal and Car Advertiser in August, Wilkinson had the new job as executive editor at the Week.

Here at the ALLDERBLOB, we have in the past made sporadic and obscure reference to Mr. Wilkinson and his work. Most recently, we pointedly compared David Frum and Mr. Wilkinson on the fame-o-meter, and found Wilkinson wanting.

But now, likely in direct response to our provocative comparison, Wilkinson has hitched his wagon to Frum’s star. Suddenly the words DAVID FRUM (and no, sadly, the capitals are not our invention) have appeared on the Week’s online content. We can only warn Mr. Wilkinson of his folly. We cannot take responsibility for the imminent fall from grace the appointment of Sr. Frum portends for our old pal Frank.

Frank, drop Frum. Drop him now; drop him without hesitation. Frum’s rancid ink will not only soil your pages. It will darken your soul. Stay with Frum and you will one day soon be writing alone, in the darkness of your living room, with your loved ones quiet and asleep and unaware. Stay with Frum and at best a future blobbing will be your fate.

Last night we participated in the Toronto Cyclist Union’s coming out party, where the new Magazine Dandyhorse was launched. This was the party we were waiting for, the one Mez promised us over a year ago. It was worth the wait. Everyone was there. Even Sally’s mom.

Well, not everyone. Some were home by the hearth, mesmerized by the flickering image of Barack Obama
igniting the 75,000 85,000 spectators who swarmed the Denver Bronco’s football stadium. They all hoped, perhaps, to hear as memorable a speech as the famous “I have a Dream” of Martin Luther King, Jr., given on the same day on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 45 years previous. Obama would have been two years old. He’s younger than that now.

And then there were the folks in New Orleans, on another anniversary–the one where Hurricane Katrina delivered devastation and forced a rather more sordid gathering at a different NFL football stadium. Yesterday they were eyeing the horizon for signs of Tropical Storm Gustav, which threatens to gather force and crash as a hurricane just west of where Katrina made landfall three years back.

Meanwhile, here at the blob of blobs, we’ve grown introspective of late. Googling ourselves, we’ve been. Turns out the majority of our readership is in Kurdistan.

Eh? Guess they liked our post linking Nochiya with the Toronto pedestrian who hexed the face and neck of a driver who came too close to him… Or was it something else?

Regardless, greetings to our Kurdistani fans. Welcome. If we may, allow us a turn of phrase: “Greusome, wa?” and “Djagedennyonya?”

Stay with us as these stories and more bear fruit in the coming days. Dandyhorse gets a rubdown, Obama gets examined, and Gustav does exactly what it wants, regardless of our paltry pecking and scratching down here on the face of the planet.

You gotta love the optimists of the old school who people the business of issuing “official reports” intended to explain away the weird stuff that everyone knows demonstrates corruption or crookedness at the heart of everything. The latest example of this is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report on the collapse of WTC7 (Building Seven of the World Trade Centre in New York). The collapse happened at around 5:20 pm on Sept. 11, 2001, so the report comes after some seven years of relative silence on the topic.

We’re not sure why they bothered.

But in an AP story authored by Devlin Barrett on the report release, The Toronto Star and Car Advertiser quotes one Dr. Shyam Sunder, the lead NIST investigator: “The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery.”

Relax, people, they say. It was just a prolonged fire, coupled with a failed sprinkler system, that dropped the 47-storey steel-framed building and all its secret offices into the ground. There was no explosion or controlled demolition, as some have claimed.

Yet questions remain: what was the meaning of the building owner’s claim that “We decided to pull it” in describing the moments leading up to the collapse? Why was the building reported to have collapsed on BBC television some 20 minutes before the event happened? How is it possible that any building could fall so neatly into its own footprint

The real world, in real time

unless there was an engineered failure? How could the building have collapsed at “freefall” speed unless the structure was compromised at multiple points simultaneously? What explains the molten steel found in the ruins of the building (six weeks later)?

The Star and Car Advertiser article concludes,

Sunder acknowledged some may still be skeptical, but said, “The science is really behind what we have said,” adding: “The obvious stares you in the face.”

Yes, NIST, questions remain. Some may still be skeptical. What is “obvious” is that the truth is still “out there.”

Everyone loved ol’ Albert, apparently. Over at Heritage Toronto he has a fan in one Rebecca Carson. She writes how she liked the view of Toronto Island from his library high over the Toronto harbour. And our colleague Sarah Hood expressed dismay on hearing of his demise: “[it's] a terrible loss to anyone interested in Island history, and I really liked him too.”

Here at the ALLDERBLOB we hesitate to cast aspersions on the dead. And now that Fulton has departed this mortal Daewoo Lanos, his body dragged from Toronto harbour at the foot of York Quay, we recall the words of our grandmother Eleanor, who, like Fulton, had an ancestor who came to Amerika on the Mayflower: “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all.”

Long Silence.

We liked old Albert for one thing, we’ll say that much. We liked his collection of Toronto Island archival materials that he made available to the public at his weekend house on Algonquin Island. We used to send our students to examine that collection and to talk to him about the zoning by-laws peculiar to the residential communities of the Toronto Islands. Fulton provided them with a hand-typed page that laid out the required setbacks, maximum heights, and other absolute measures which would forever guarantee that no one would build something “out of character” with that charming place. Fulton really had a thing for making sure no one stepped out of line, apparently.

We never visited his other house, the one he spent weekdays at. The one in lovely Wychwood Park.

But we heard about it, and we wondered. Do some people have too much of a good thing? How was it that this guy, who prided himself on protecting the character of his island community, managed to bend the rules that said

Under the Act, anyone who holds title to an Island home must use that house as his/her principal residence and declare it as such for Income Tax purposes. The homeowner’s land lease stipulates that you cannot use an Island house for a part-time or “summer” home, or as rental property. ?

But it appears Fulton had a streak of Yankee independence in him. It appears he felt rules were made for lesser folk, perhaps those not descended from Mayflower-variety immigrants. So he had a house in Wychwood park for the week, and a house on Algonquin Island for the weekend. And from Carson’s entry above, it appears he had a place in a harbourfront condo tower as well.

But it was Fulton’s alleged activities in Wychwood Park that brought him to York Quay in his fancy car. Distraught, he was. His good name had been sullied. The previous week, he had been charged by police with a variety of crimes including slashing the tires of automobiles parked on the picturesque winding roads of the residential enclave. The sad irony was that Fulton was a self-appointed protector of those winding roads. He was the co-founder of the enclave’s Neighbourhood Watch.

Of course: and on the Toronto Islands he had taken on the task of policing the zoning by-laws.

Boy, this city’s full of boy scouts, ain’t it.

And we mean that in the nicest way.

We read in Canada’s Other Newspaper and Car Advertiser of Record, The National Post, a front page story by Peter Kuitenbrouwer on the boy scout activities of one Igor Kenk. You know the saying, “Be Prepared?” Apparently Mr. Kenk, who is well known among Toronto cyclists and weary police as the “go-to guy” for stolen bikes, is not merely a pedlar of stolen pedals. He is a practicing boy scout.

Is anyone surprised? Consider for moment his known activities over the past 15 years or so. As owner of a Queen Street West pawn shop-slash-bike repair “clinic,” He purchases bikes from people (and other junkies) on an as-is basis, records the serial numbers “in case they might be registered with the police as stolen,” and at some point soon after puts the bikes in “storage.” Mr. Kenk, at latest count, had close to 3,000 bicycles in scattered storage rooms across the city. Sometimes he would sell a bike, sometimes he would repair someone’s bike if they brought it to him, but mostly he collected and hoarded bikes.

It is not the boy scout’s famed “one good deed a day” that brings Mr. Kenk into Sir Baden Powell’s fold, although we have no doubt his mother likes him. Instead, it is his planning and “preparation” for the dark future we at the ALLDERBLOB occasionally wonder about. The one James Howard Kunstler constantly warns of. The one where Peak Oil meets Climate Catastrophe meets Economic Meltdown. The Long Emergency.

Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s front page story is only one among many that have regaled front page readers and viewers and listeners of national media and car advertisers about the activities of Igor Kenk in the past few weeks. What makes the story newsworthy, of course, is the fact that the cops are finally seen to be doing something about a crime that nearly everyone in Canada experiences or will experience at least once in their life. Kenk was arrested, finally, when a police sting with a so-called “bait bike” left unlocked near his shop is said to have observed him directing a colleague, the lesser alleged scoundrel Jean Laveau, to cut the lock of a bike parked near the bait bike.

Kuitenbrouwer reports “Arresting officer Consable [sic] James Rowe, who arrested Mr. Kenk on July 16, says the man is cogent and focused.” However, Kenk told Toronto Police Detective Constable Aaron Dennis, “The apocalypse is coming.”

The apocalypse?

While this suggested to the good detective that Mr Kenk needs psychological attention (”I want to get him looked at,” Kuitenbrouwer reports him saying) we see in Sr. Kenk’s words a resonance with certain fundamental tenets we hold true. “Be prepared.” In a world where we take for granted the slave labour of many thousands of man-hours per year provided by the oil economy, but one in which oil is creeping into the mystery zone of post-peak costs, how will we smelt the iron to make new bicycles? Or as Kuitenbrouwer puts it, “In the future when we have run out of oil, we will all need bikes to get around, …and Mr. Kenk will have a few in storage to offer us.”

Be prepared. With his deep wells of bikes to draw upon, Igor Kenk was poised to be the Rockefeller of the post-peak era. What a boy scout. What an entrepreneur.

You will all know Mike Strobel, columnist and former editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun and Car Advertiser. Elsewhere, he has been called “among the five best reasons” for reading that newspaper. We still vaguely remember the column he wrote about Critical Mass, the monthly celebration of all things “bicycle.” It was the summer of 2004 or so. Back then, he was on his first CM ride and he loved it. He wasn’t pleased about getting a traffic ticket though (don’t ask; he was missing a reflector or something).

Today he wrote another column on bicycles, called “Start lining up for a lane.” In it he complains about the new bikelanes on Eastern Avenue. Apparently since the Dundas bikelanes were painted (back in 2003) he’s been a regular driver along Eastern. But Eastern’s no good for him anymore and he’s wondering where he’s welcome in his mobile global warmer. He’s feeling vexed, boxed in, discriminated against because he needs four fat wheels, not two skinny ones.

We feel for the guy, we really do. He had some good points in his piece, although he did not search very far for the true reason for the installation of bikelanes along Eastern. He thinks it has something to do with making life easier for cyclists. In fact, it will only make life more difficult, at least in the short run. It will turn more west-bound cars onto Leslie to get onto Lakeshore blvd. We imagine a car-count there (on Leslie) done post-Eastern Ave. bikelanes will negate any chance Leslie once had for a bikelane. And that’s a pity. It will turn more east-bound cars up Broadview to get to Dundas. Riding Dundas of late has been heavy with bad air as the rear ends of Strobel-mobiles fart into the evening breezes.

But back to Strobel’s column. The remarkable thing about it was he really nailed the connection between car advertising and car dependence. In a few sweet sentences he stated the ALLDERBLOB’s raison d’ettre:

3. Ban Car Ads. Worked on smokers, eh? Especially with all those PSAs showing blackened lungs.

Car advertising makes us lust for Cadillacs and Volvos as we once lusted for Craven A’s and Viscounts.

Tear down those billboards that make us lustful all along the Gardiner Expressway.

Put up big pictures of pollution-blackened lungs instead.

Sadly, as Vic of the International Bicycle Conspiracy has observed, it’s likely he was being sarcastic.

From time to time we examine the Saturday Globe and Mail and Car Advertiser for signs of bad taste and a lack of geometry. Inevitably, we find it.

Yesterday it was large and protruberant within the confines of Margaret Wente’s column, which examined in some detail the circumstances of why her butt hurts so badly these days. As many of you may suspect, a horse was involved. Sadly, the column is neither amusing nor interesting, nor even mildly salacious.

At present, a google search for the phrases “Margaret Wente” and “my butt” is “lucky” for the ALLDERBLOB. We rather suspect that Ms. Wente feels some chagrin at this fact, and is attempting to catch up. And indeed, her column is now no. 2.

“Try harder,” Ms. Wente. And we truly hope your butt grows less uncomfortable over time.

Our silence speaks volumes. Meanwhile the Allder-blobdingnagian bile has been building up in pus-filled pouches all over the body politic, building up and building up, ready finally to burst and ooze and spread the vile stench and diseased thought and repressed anger wherever the hooded and blobbish gaze wanders.

It wanders toward Eastern Avenue in Toronto.

We were roused to consider Eastern by the erstwhile “Kwazy Biker Chick,” Tanya, who poked us with a knitting needle over the installation this past week of Bikelanes on Eastern Avenue.

[Tanya: a bit of advice. Clean your knitting needle with something powerful. Do not get the bile on your woolen garments.--ed]

In the past we have commented on this foolhardy scheme. The fact is, except for the skateboard kids at the bottom end of Pape avenue (Pape dies at Eastern, where it’s super wide, and super dead, with a painted median like that on the much busier Danforth Avenue, but one which here provides only a hangout spot for kids on skateboards all night long), no one will use the Eastern Ave bikelanes. No one except for cars idling while they “run in” for a quick purchase at the soon-to-open Walmart down there.

(Please cars, do not forget to put on your “four-way-flashers.”)

Sorry, did we say Walmart? A possible Walmart, but a Walmart-style power centre indubitably, one with some 2,000 cars parked at its heart. Two thousand cars in and two thousand cars out in a typical 10 hour period means one car either coming or going every 9 seconds (you do the math: 10 hours = 10 x 60 minutes/hour x 60 seconds/minute = 36,000 seconds, divide by 4,000 cars (2,000 cars in plus 2,000 cars out) = 1 car every 9 seconds, on average).

The fact is, the Eastern Avenue Bikelane plan was a transparent ploy by our favourite Toronto Councillor, the former head of the Manitoba Communist party, Paula Fletcher (do Communists support bikelanes? Of course! The Proletarian Revolution needs free parking for its cars too after all–but we digress), to stay the course of Mitch Goldhar’s Smart Centre bid for a Walmart in Leslieville.

Of course, Mitch got ritch not by listening to the neighbours, most of whom will whine about the blight but will shop for cheap Chinese-made crap regardless. He knows that. So for Mitch, former Manitoba Capitalist Party Chairman, it’s off to the Ontario Municipal Board pronto, in a bid to defeat the community in its quest to keep Leslieville “free of big boxes.”

Problem: What is the Loblaws power centre at Leslie and Lakeshore? What is the PriceChopper across the street? What is the 700-parking spot Canadian Ire store on the southwest corner there?

Lawyers can spell P-R-E-C-E-D-E-N-T as well as the average 5th grader, and no that is not a typo for “president.” Fact is, South Leslieville is larded with “big box stores.”

In any case, the bikelane bid will fail to prevent Mr. Goldhar’s scheme. Indeed, as our friend at Toronto Cranks has noted, bikelanes can be sure of the support of car-owners across town, because they provide convenient temporary parking spots at all times, night and day. You don’t have to hunt for the parking lot driveway after all. And now, add those cruddy little cheap-ass electric motorbikes with their whiny helmet-headed drivers (or is that the engine), who somehow have gained the right to drive in the bikelane as if they were regular bicycles, all of whom will indubitably shop for their next bargoon at Mitch’s Phancy Emporium.

Mr. Goldhar’s been smart. He enlisted the help of clever Antarctic penguins, perhaps even the emperor variety, in his publick relations campaign. He’s coined a name, the “Phancy Emporium” [don't you mean the Foundry District,"? --ed.] which will have true blacksmiths grunting with disdain all across the city. He’s garnered the help of skilled advertisers and other “artists with nothing to say,” to paint a picture of bliss: never mind the five lanes of cars coming and going from the parking lot (forced to enter from Lakeshore Blvd. instead of Eastern, where they so easily blend with cyclists and strollers on the Martin Goodman bikepath).

Paula Fletcher, give up! Just like the Allderblob, which will no doubt soon be flying Porter air out of Toronto “because it’s just so much work to get to Pearson,” we know you are a secret Walmart shopper. We suspect you love them bargoons, just like the rest of the pitiful swine Mitch Goldhar looks down on all across Canada.

On the other hand, we are still in support of bikelanes on Leslie, From Queen to Lakeshore, where they will really make a difference. Where they are needed. Where cyclists will want to ride. Paula, if you get bikelanes on Leslie, we will stop calling you a former Communist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But we digress as usual.

For now we must be off, to bandage our oozing sores.

UPDATE: We apologize if it appears we think Mr. Goldhar thinks Toronto bargain hunters are “pitiful swine.” The fact is, we can’t remember his exact words.

UPDATE 2: Some Russian spy has posted what is suggested to be a photograph from Mitch Goldhar’s living room window in Caledon Ontario. We looked, but we could not see any Wal-Mart in sight. What’s up with that?