Month: March 2018

A pleasant Good Friday has dawned with most service businesses closed as usual. Summerhill Market at 446 Summerhill Ave. will be open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday.

Some restaurants on Bayview Ave and Mt. Pleasant will be open as will attractions like the Art Gallery of Ontario, Ripley’s Aquarium, Casa Loma, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario Science Centre, the Toronto Zoo, the CN Tower and the Aga Khan Museum. The Eaton Centre will be open all weekend with shorter hours of 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. The Easter Parade on Sunday runs along Queen Street East, from Munro Park Avenue to Woodbine Avenue. The 501 Queen streetcar route will turn back at Kingston Road, starting at 1 p.m. Regular service will resume after the parade ends, around 5 p.m. TTC will operate on holiday service on Good Friday.

Michio Kaku

Technicolour Toasty

Smokey Tusker

So Michio Kaku has an IQ that’s over the moon and maybe that’s where the unidentified objects that keeping startling airline pilots are originating. Michio’s head is quite well screwed on but he says that ten percent of reports leave him baffled. Then, at Selfridges in London you will certainly be wanting more than a simple grilled cheese sandwich with your lunchtime champers. The luxury department store is serving up “Technicolour Toasties” made from goat’s cheese, beetroot, rocket and caramelised onions. Finally, call this dandy curiosity Smokey Tusker. He’s an Indian elephant who likes sucking up ashes from the fire and blowing them out. Go figure.

Clean-Up Day April 21/Bulldog

Team Blue/Wildcats

Airbnb rental in Leaside/Toronto Life

Emmy Duff/Family

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Sun Stars/Bulldog photo

The photo upper left from 2016 showing old friend Simon Hanlon, Councillor Burnside and others sweeping up asks the question: “How About You?” Make a note on your calendar to help out on the Bayview Leaside BIA Clean-Up Day Saturday, April 21. Below that, congratulations to a jubilant Team Blue in the Wildcats Senior House League. They are champions of the Non-slapshot competition. Go you Blues. On the right, Toronto Life tells of a Leaside couple who are said to be making $60,000 a year renting via Airbnb. It may not be for everyone. Centre left, please remember to honour the memory of Leaside’s Emmy Duff and give blood this coming Wednesday at the semi-annual clinic held at Northlea Public School. That’s where Emmy was a pupil when word came that she had been struck by leukemia. Please think about this and do the right thing. Then, there are some April events on posters. The first is Easter in the Village on Mt. Pleasant. Take the kids to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Regent on Saturday. Those orange cuties at lower right are rain-drenched Sun Stars outside Passion Fruit.

Robertson shows front end damage caused when he was hit fron rear/CP24 capture

Vehicle hit the left rear corner/CP24 capture

Lloyd Robertson was unhurt Thursday morning when his SUV was hit from behind in a multi-vehicle collision on the Don Valley Parkway. In an interview with CTV, Mr. Robertson showed where a truck hit the rear-left corner of his VW SUV. It caused him to skid into a vehicle ahead and sustain the damage at the front. Toronto Star

It has long baffled those with bank accounts why anyone would advance money to Starbucks just so they could buy a cup of coffee someday. A 2016 study revealed consumers have handed Starbucks as much as $1.6 billion US for which they get the right to buy a coffee with their own money. The same is true in Canada. But now, as seen in this NBC report, there is stunning snooping going on too. Starbucks wants to know your friends, your contacts, your interests and your computer history. And why not? They’re getting your money for free.

The University of Toronto student’s union voted at a referendum on Wednesday to reject a measure that would have given students deeply discounted passes for the TTC, funded in part by additional student fees. Opposing votes ran to 65.6 per cent of those casting a ballot. CBC  TTC “U Pass” part of tuition for students at local universities

Opposum mom with joeys/Teri McGurk

Davisville and Pailton/Google

Bulldog reader Teri McGurk has tweeted an extraordinary picture she took late last year of this opossum mom and her joeys all aboard. We count seven. How about you? Teri snapped the shot on Annesley Ave. in darkest North Leaside. Upper right, parkettes are for building apartments on it seems. The space seen from above is at Davisville Ave and Pailton Cres. where the CAPREIT partnership has applied to build a 16 storey tower. Ugh. Below that, some posters you should check. Kids will want to get the Easter Bunny Colouring entries in at Tuft’s ValuMart by Saturday. In April, we have the Leaside Rotary Recycling Day and the Blue Radish evening over at Manor Road United Church. Parents who plan ahead will want to take a look at details of the Bamboo Bay Art and Lego Summer Camp.

Social spending promised in Kathleen Wynne’s pre-election budget will be paid for by nearly $20 billion in new borrowing over the next three years and a quietly introduced personal income tax increase affecting those earning $92,000 or more. That’s about two million people.  The 2018 budget indicates the deficit is projected to be $6.7 billion, and combined deficits for the next three years amount to $19.8 billion. The provincial debt is already about 312 billions dollars, the highest debt of any non-sovereign jurisdiction in the world.

• Wynne Liberals to run deficits for next six years
• Ontario Liberals bet big on seniors’ care, drug and dental coverage in 2018 pre-election budget

Andrea Giesbrecht, the Winnipeg woman convicted of concealing the remains of six dead infants is expected to ask to be released on bail while she awaits an appeal. Giesbrecht was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison last July for concealing the remains in a U-Haul storage locker.

• Andrea Giesbrecht, 42, guilty of trying to conceal six births

Founder of Barrick Gold

Peter and Melanie Munk

Funded cardiac centre

Canadian businessman and philanthropist Peter Munk has died at age 90. Munk was a 20-year-old Hungarian immigrant when he arrived in Canada in 1947. He went on to create Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold-mining company, and to donate millions of dollars to worthy causes. “Munk passed away peacefully in Toronto today, surrounded by his family,” the mining company said in a release Wednesday. In his later years, his focus turned to philanthropy, donating $300 million to numerous causes, most notably in a $100 million gift to found the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at the Toronto General Hospital in 1997. It was the largest single gift ever donated to a Canadian hospital. He also funded the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto with $51 million over the years, something the school’s former director Steven Toope says was born of Munk’s belief that Canadians embodied values like openness and integrity, two things the world needed more  Peter Munk is survived by Melanie, his wife of forty-five years, by his five children, Anthony, Nina, Marc-David, Natalie, and Cheyne, and by his fourteen grandchildren.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un pledged his commitment to “denuclearization” and to meet U.S. officials, China said Wednesday. This after Kim’s meeting with President Xi Jinping. China has promised to uphold its friendship with the hermit nation, an odious leftover of one-man rule from the worst days of the Comintern. It appears that China has briefed the US on this meeting and that there may be plans for Kim to meet Donald Trump and others as early as May. Events have spun along quickly since the first inkling of Kim’s trip to Beijing leaked Monday. Now China is talking about it.

HISTORIC MOMENT

Media are putting quotes around the word denuclearization, perhaps because no one can be sure just what the Chinese and North Koreans have agreed to. The devil will be in the details. Look at the videos below, especially the one on the right. It is astonishing to hear Kim talk politely about peaceful change on the Korean Peninsula. Mere days ago he was blowing off about incinerating American cities. Truly a moment in time.