City
Morning Brew: Igor Kenk Update, VIA Rail Strike Threat, Lottery Winner Arrested, Black Widow Sightings
Photo: "I Took A Stroll" by sniderscion, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
It's been more than a year since Toronto the world watched in awe as police raided the garages and found 2,865 stolen bicycles and arrested and charged Igor Kenk. But he's yet to see trial and a date still hasn't been determined. The problem? So many charges, so much evidence, and a lot of it circumstantial. Also (presumably) delayed? His book.
Another day, another union threatening strike action. Engineers at VIA Rail Canada have agreed to set Friday at noon as the deadline, and will walk out if contract talks don't work out. If they strike, all Via Rail passenger train trips will be halted immediately. If you have plans already, you may want to look at flying or car rental options.
They "don't want it to be a scare story," but we should probably (OMFGWTFBBQ!) be scared - the northern black widow has been found living in garages in the GTA, and it has enough strength in its venom that it could kill your small children and really ruin your morning.
Brampton's Barry Shell has quite the story to tell the grandchildren. He won $4.4million in the lottery and was arrested on his way out of prize claim office. Two very different mug shots on the same day!
A number of requests for building permits that were issued prior to the June 22nd walkout by unionized city workers are now being processed, and some 500 are expected to be processed by the end of the month. Slowly but surely the city continues to sort of ways to keep things moving along despite 30,000 people being off the job.
And the Toronto Blue Jays have set a July 28th deadline to trade ace pitcher Roy Halladay. If the team doesn't see a deal worth jumping on by then, he'll likely ride out the rest of the year in Toronto.
Discussion
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There's an article in the Post today that talks about this issue -
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/07/21/rudyard-griffiths-cupe-makes-a-good-case-for-eliminating-cupe.aspx
I live on the ground level of a very old building with windows literally at ground level and an already decent population of spiders living in all the little cracks and crevices. The area outside of the windows are very nicely shaded on 2 of the 3 sides of the apartment.
So this 'good news' does not bode well for me. :P
Anyways, Black Widows in Ontario isn't anything new. Some had been spotted at my great uncle's old farm an hour west of Ottawa (one in the outhouse...shudder...to this day I drive 20 minutes into town to use the bathroom)
We really should never create single point of failure services. It's very bad planning and just serves to allow special interest groups to extort rents from the community. Stop the extortion, stop the unions!
Ryan L. is right; we've had black widows in Ontario for a while now. On top of this, it's not a huge thing to stress about-yes, they have venom however, the likelihood of running into one, much less pissing it off enough for it to bite, is pretty low. I've worked with these spiders, as well as others, and you're pretty safe. The population is definitely not overwhelming and you're still more likely to get hit by a car in downtown than run into one of these spiders. Also keep in mind that there are many countries that live with multiple venomous creatures and many people never see a single on in their lifetime. Most of these creatures are just as scared of us as we are of them and have the same initial reaction-get out of the way!
p.s. liz: getting hit by a car downtown...not a great comparison. many people dodge a near miss by a car downtown every day. so it would seem then that seeing a black widow is not that unlikely.