Julia Moulden, a former speechwriter, and host of Toronto's New Radicals Salon, wants to show you how to save the world. Carol Goar's column in this morning's Star profiles the Torontonian author, activist, and aspiring leader of the baby-boom generation in light of her new book, We Are The New Radicals: A Manifesto for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World.

Published by McGraw Hill earlier this year, Moulden's book tells the story of 20 successful people, who after doing well for themselves, have decided to focus their energies on doing good for the world. Moulden believes that the stories contained in the book, and their message of mid-life empowerment, can have a serious impact on everything from the environment, to food, to relationships.

In a recent blog on The Huffington Post, Moulden describes the moment the idea was born, as she looked back at her idealistic younger self, with grand ideas for transforming the world. "I realized," she writes, "that this was something profoundly different: we weren't just talking about changing the world now. We were in a position to actually do it."

It is a remarkably timely idea, and one, Moulden Hopes, that will catch on.

Read the first chapter of We Are the New Radicals here.

While reading about the slow, steady death of Toronto's video game arcades today on CityNews, I couldn't help thinking of the hours I spent in my own childhood pumping coins into those sleek machines, my eyes transfixed by glorious destruction in that flickering gloom. I never frequented arcades myself, but remember vividly going to birthday parties at some of the cleaner ones, and having to be literally dragged away from games like Terminator 2 and The Simpsons. The joys of all that candy-coloured, marvelously addictive fantasy still linger.

Yes, arcades are on the way out. Why go to Yonge Street to a dingy place that smells like BO and ramen noodles when you can stay home and play Halo in the privacy of your own room while your mom makes you sandwiches?

I wonder, though, if CityNews' Michael Talbot has been to Pacific Mall's Playscape recently, or any of the other, newer arcades that dot the outer suburbs. On a recent trip there I was amazed at the popularity of games like DanceDance Revolution, GuitarFreaks, and DrumMania. While the shooting things games and driving around games were mostly empty, there was a steady parade of Asian teenagers dropping tokens into these music and dance-type machines, and pulling out the most insane moves you've ever seen.

According to Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, Toronto is going to hell in a handbasket, or, more accurately, to Jane-Finch in a roti wrapper.

Simpson's scattered editorial in this morning's edition points the blamefinger at new immigrants, who sap our tax dollars, suburbanites, who don't consider themselves "Torontonian" enough, and a conservative federal government, who doesn't care about any of it.

Simpson looks backward to the glorious days of Toronto in the '70s, a place Peter Ustinov called something along the lines of "New York run by the Swiss." Now, he says, our downtown is beset by condo towers and Rolls Royce dealerships, and our suburbs are dangerous and dysfunctional hotbeds of crime.

Perhaps it's obvious by now, but I take issue with all of it.

While this morning's Canada-heavy Oscar nominations were cause for a certain amount of national pride, buried beneath the big six top categories is a solid shout-out to our fair city, in the form of a five minute animated short called I Met The Walrus.

In 1969, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were holed up at the King Edward doing one of their famous "bed-in" things, a 14 year old North York kid named Jerry Levitan snuck into the hotel with a tape recorder, and taped a forty-minute interview with Lennon. The product of Levitan's now-infamous bedside tête-à-tête was recently turned into a film by Toronto filmmaker Josh Raskin, and this morning it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short.

According to this morning's Globe and Mail, much of the museum's extensive Chinese collection was smuggled out of China in the 1930s by an Anglican bishop for whom one of the galleries is now named. As several claims suggest, William Charles White, the ROM's first Far East Collection curator, knew he was breaking Chinese law when he sent pieces out of the country, often hidden in the luggage of visiting missionaries to avoid detection by authorities.

At the center of the article is a new book from the University of Toronto Press, which Globe journalist Geoffrey York appears to have forgotten to name. He also doesn't say what the book is actually about, or indicate who wrote it. Such insignificant details aside, it makes for a nice segue into a discussion of the future of our city's impressive collection of Chinese antiquities.

As those lovely white rings on our pant cuffs and shoes remind us, Toronto uses huge amounts of salt on its roads and sidewalks each year, salt that runs off into our waterways, rusts our cars, and ruins our footwear. While this week's near-tropical temperatures have rid our fair city of most of its wintery precipitation, colder days are on the way, and with them will return the age-old debate of salt vs. sand.

After Environment Canada's 2001 report on the dangers of road salts to our local ecosystems, the Ontario government claims to have reduced its salt use by 20%. But is this enough?

Laurie Varga, a Toronto communications consultant and community activist, doesn't think so. "I'd never encountered [road salt] until I moved here eight years ago," says Varga, a Calgary native who was surprised by the Tdot's salt-happy ways. Her hometown uses mostly sand and gravel to combat slippery roads, an alternative she feels is much more sound. With that in mind, Varga has posted an online petition asking for a ban on road salts, which she plans to present to Mayor Miller and other city officials.

Sand and gravel pose their own problems, ("Everyone in Alberta has chipped windshields from the pea gravel," she says) but compared to the longterm effects of salt pollution, it seems like a small price to pay.

Photo: drp