1 POLARIS SHORTLIST It’s here! Someone else talk about this please because all I can think about is 1) there is some serious déjà vu going on here with some of these nominees, 2) what are Handsome Furs (who are broken up now!) going to do with the money if they win?, and 3) aw man Cannon Bros. didn’t make it.
2 DANZIG SHOOTING A young man and a teenage girl were shot dead at a block party last night in Toronto. The pontificating is already rolling in, but nobody in editorial pages has yet weighed in on how Twitter has managed to give us an incredibly complete picture of the night already, thanks to the work of one Redditor. (I’m not suggesting, by the way, that this is one of those stories where “the real story is Social Media.” There’s something vaguely mortifying about clicking the links in that Reddit post, as more often than not the people he’s linking to are dealing with having witnessed death twelve hours ago. There’s a humanity and a vulnerability to it that you don’t often get from a big-picture news story.)
3 MORE STADIUM BUSINESS At dinner last night, fellow prairie dog blogger James Brotheridge and I talked about having seen mayoral candidate Marian Donnelly’s in-depth post about this weekend’s stadium announcement. We’d both had the idea of looking at other mayoral candidates’ web pages to see if they’d posted similar reactions and come up with bupkis. Thankfully, Global was willing to do a bit of legwork and ask mayoral candidates what they think. (And even though he’s not running for mayor, there’s also a pretty good Murray Mandryk column today about taxpayers footing the bill.) (Although his argument that it’s better to build a new one now than spend a third of the cost of a new stadium on renovations makes me wonder if this entire city needs to be sat down and given a stern lecture on the importance of renovations, upkeep, and general care of your goddamn property, because it’s apparently a deeply-rooted attitude problem now.)
3 CUTS ON THE BIAS I actually don’t like linking to Huffington Post – not a fan of their business model, not a fan of their founder, not a fan of their layout or design or anything. But sometimes their reporters do good work. Example: their current mega-feature on life under austerity. Today’s piece, on the long-term impact of cuts to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, is a must-read.
