Two good bits of news from Spacing today: the City of Toronto finally plans to go ahead with the Bloor Street revitalization they’ve been talking about for years (while we’ll have moved downtown by the time it’s completed, I still work up here), and they’re also (finally) going ahead with the Union Station overhaul. Hopefully this means no more being crushed when you take the escalator down to the platform at rush hour. Actually, being 6’2″ / 220 I’m less concerned with being crushed than I am with crushing some tiny Korean lady.

Regarding the Bloor Street sidewalk work, I echo what Torontoist is saying: hopefully the lack of a bike lane is just an oversight. Take Make The Tooker.

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And now, two bits of news from the Toronto Star: the (c)Raptors lucked out and won the #1 pick in the NBA draft lottery last night (though there’s no clear #1 this year), and Alexa Ray Joel lucked out and got her mother’s looks. Actually, on second look, she does kind of look like her father…but I guess there’s enough Christie Brinkley in there to make it work. Thank god. Not a big fan of the music, but at least it doesn’t sound like the usual American Idol excretions.

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I’d love to see the Freakonomics guys take a run at bullshit claims like this:

“Smokers’ rights advocates say 1,000 businesses will go bankrupt and thousands of people will lose their jobs as a result of Ontario’s new anti-smoking legislation, set to take effect in a week. ‘At least 4,000 businesses will be impacted,’ Edgar Mitchell, of the Pub and Bar Coalition of Canada, said at a news conference in Toronto Wednesday. ‘Possibly 2,000 will have severe difficulties and as many as 1,000 will be forced out of business. Yes, some pubs and bars can adapt, but it’s a damned hard road.'” [via CTV]

Setting aside for a second that — on the very day that Heather Crowe died of lung cancer from the second-hand smoke she inhaled working in a bar — this asshat wants us to put the business interests of 1,000 bars (a venture with a high failure rate under any circumstances) ahead of the health of the tens of thousands of citizens who’d pass through them…where the hell did he get that nice, round number? What’s he basing the figures on? What research shows this? Has he found another market that underwent these changes and matches Ontario’s? Has he extrapolated it from the earlier municipal bans and restrictions imposed in Ontario? And if so, I’d love to see his numbers; there’ve been considerable research findings to the contrary.

Paging Steven Levitt…

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I find this little doodad fascinating, addictive and frustrating all at once. Blame boing boing.

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I got a 90% on my marketing assignment. I was convinced that an entire paper of bullshit didn’t merit anything better than a C-, but I guess this mark makes sense. Talking out of one’s ass never get anyone fired from a marketing job.

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I worked through some of my music “inbox” today, checking off the new Concretes (yech…except for “You Can’t Hurry Love”), the new Magneta Lane (killer, as expected) and the new Final Fantasy (only two good songs: “This Lamb Sells Condos”, which is a Toronto in-joke, and “Many Lives -> 49mp”, which he played last year the Arcade Fire concert and freaked us all out, what with the shouting into the violin and all). I started into the new Pilate disc, which seems ok, if a little bland.

[tags]bloor street, union station, tooker, raptors, alexa ray joel, american idol, freakonomics, ontario smoking ban, marketing, concretes, magneta lane, final fantasy, pilate[/tags]