Toronto Sucks...Just Kidding.

[Said1]

Well, maybe not. Oops, is my regional prejudice showing?

A year caught with its pants way down

Dec. 31, 2005. 01:00 AM
ROSIE DIMANNO
STAR COLUMNIST

It was another year of living stupidly.

Foolishness and folly and all the frigging flapdoodle a city could possibly handle in 365 days.

Dark days too, but we won't dwell on those for the purposes of this review

Let us recall instead the events that made us hoot when we weren't wincing, shake our heads and our fists, left our jaws hanging.

There was scandal and mendacity at city hall, cops a-marching on the street, a locally raised Miss Universe who was rejected by anal retentive municipal bureaucrats and no hockey for nine months.

The crooks got dumber but the judges seemed no wiser, either. Teachers, doctors, elected officials all betrayed our trust. And everywhere you looked, somebody was getting caught with his pants down or her skirt up, which accounts for the disproportionate number of sexual transgressions cited below. Or maybe it's just me.

Collectively, though, we endured.

As the minutes run out on 2005, here's one last backward glance at life in Toronto, and hereabouts.

Bum steer: TTC chairman Howard Moscoe urges fellow commissioners to consider wider seats before finalizing purchase of 600 subway cars. "As a person who has long legs and a wide tuchas ... I have never felt quite at home in a TTC vehicle.''

Cockamamie defence: Despite conceding that he was "unusually large,'' a judge finds a Barrie man guilty of sexual assault, rejecting claims from the accused that he could not be guilty of the crime because his penis was too large to insert into the victim's vagina without consensual preparation.

Unguided missile: A trucker transporting rocket launchers is pulled over for going the wrong way on Highway 407.

Two-bit gangsta rap: Liberal MP Dan McTeague attempts to have American rapper 50 Cent — nine times a gunshot victim — banned from performing his Massacre Tour show in Toronto.

Coffee-beaned: An Ajax mom is found guilty of assault for hurling java in the face of a hockey player after he'd levelled her son on the ice during a game.

Hoser: Four years after renouncing his citizenship in order to become a member of Britain's House of Lords, Conrad Black — accused by the U.S. government of being involved in an $84 million (U.S.) fraud at his former publishing company — asks the federal government to give him back his Canadian status.

Band-aid solution: Oakville resident J.D. Fortune, one-time Elvis Presley impersonator, becomes lead singer of comeback-hopeful band INXS after winning a TV rock-reality series.

Once-upon-a-mattress: Bloodsucking bedbugs, largely eradicated in North America after World War II, make a comeback attack on Toronto.

Licence-ious behaviour: A Toronto psychiatrist who had a five-week affair with his patient, then dumped him, leaving the man suicidal, has his licence reinstated by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Beauty and the Beasties: The city's special events office bars Toronto's Natalie Glebova, the new Miss Universe, from appearing at a cultural festival at Nathan Phillips Square, citing municipal guidelines that ban activities degrading to women.

Beauty and the bust: A former Miss Guyana, now living in Scarborough, is sentenced to two years of house arrest for smuggling 7 kilos of cocaine into Canada.

Get off my back already: A Toronto couple takes first place in the wife-carrying competition at the Finn Grand Fest in upper Michigan.

Open wide and say aaarrrghhh: A 58-year-old dentist who Toronto police say had the largest private collection of child porn in Canada receives an 18-month conditional sentence but no jail time.

And the list goes on and on and on.

Continued

 

[Wolfe]

Toronto is on a downward spiral as all Canadians know. The largest city in Canada can no longer police itself with any effectiveness. The police have to be PC first rather than policemen first.