Ray Gork and family

True Value now closed

Re-shingling at Bayview and Millwood

In your face at Mt. Pleasant/Merton Esso

Team Galusha practice at Leaside Curling

Ray Gork, the congenial hardware and later paint consultant, has retired after nearly three decades at 1525 Bayview Ave. Ray is seen here with his large family in 2015 on the 10th anniversary of his Benjamin Moore Paint franchise. Before that, Ray and his wife oversaw the double store location of Allen’s Home Hardware. Upper right, the  True Value Hardware at 1613 Bayview is closed for good. The owners are said to have leased it to a Mediterranean style restaurant. Below that, roofers were busy re-shingling the cone atop epi Bread Thursday. At the bottom left, anyone filling up at the Esso/Circle K station at Mt. Pleasant and Merton gets a close-up sell of the Vype ePen 3, just in case you want to start this doubtful habit. This in-your-face ad is attached to the gasoline hose. And the Leaside Curling Club was host to the pride of Yellowknife, NWT, this week as Kerry Galusha’s Team Galusha practiced for a bonspiel in Oakville Saturday. That’s local curling champ John Epping with the northern ladies.

Penelope/Toronto Zoo

The public has chosen the name Penelope for a six-week-old pygmy hippopotamus from a selected ballots of names provided by the Toronto Zoo. The other names were  Alika, Zola and Zawadi. About 10,000 votes were cast over the course of the campaign. The baby hippo has been predictably popular with zoo goers and the public in general.

Crushed bicycle on Dundas St./City News Mehrdad Nazarahan

A woman cyclist has been badly hurt after a collision with an SUV on Dundas St. E. near Logan Ave. early Thursday. Paramedics took the woman to hospital with life-threatening injuries.

Auston Matthews had the magic touch tonight as his second sealed the victory for the Leafs. #LeafsForever @EASPORTSNHL https://t.co/PyoQ3EaFI5

— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) October 4, 2018

The Leafs could hardly badmouth their performance enough after Wednesday’s opening game at Scotiabank Arena even though they won it 3-2. The most frequent word was ugly. Expectations were high, to say the least. The home team seemed to lose the initiative after the first period and then just hang on by the thinnest of good luck through two more. Auston Matthews scored his second goal in overtime to get the win. He took a feed from Patrick Marleau and beat Carey Price with an airborne shot 61 seconds into the extra period. John Tavares, with his first for Toronto, also scored, while Frederik Andersen stopped 34 shots. Nazem Kadri added two assists.

Calgary buses flounder in estimated 20 cm of snow

A record-breaking 15 to 25 centimetres of snow fell in Calgary Tuesday, snarling the City. Help was sent from other municipalities, notably Edmonton, to assist. CBC meteorologist Christy Climenhaga said the previous record for October 2 was set in 1954 with only about five centimetres. Calgary normally has snow clearing equipment in readiness by October 15, which was thought to be lots of time for a real snowfall. But no.

Ugh! Edmonton Journal

Awww! Calgary Zoo

Yecch! Edmonton Journal

Large turnout for candidates meeting at William Lea Room

Councillors Jon Burnside and Jaye Robinson slugged it out on the issues as identified by those who attended the candidates debate at Leaside Arena Tuesday night. The two incumbents are thrown into competition with each other by the reduction in the number of wards which was legislated by the Ford government. Mr. Burnside represents the old Ward 26, Ms Robinson the old Ward 25. Now they are contesting the new Ward 15, Don Valley West. Questions from the audience were read by moderator Brian Athey, past president of the Leaside Property Owners Association, which sponsored the debate. They asked how the candidates would deal with the increased number of constituents in the larger ward, what would be their priorities, did they favour a hand gun ban in Toronto, privatized garbage collection east of Yonge St. and cycling issues. Candidate Tanweer Khan joined the panel although two other candidates Minh Le and Nicola Streker were absent

PRIORITIES

Jaye Robinson said her local priorities would be traffic infiltration of Leaside, development (which she called aggressive over-development) and the threatened over-capacity of Leaside schools. Jon Burnside also cited traffic and referenced the referendum he sponsored in North Leaside where, as he said, “the people spoke.” He emphasized road safety and the need for photo radar and more police. He named development and what he called the ongoing relationship between Leaside and Thorncliffe Park to avoid the  “regionalization of poverty.”

City News is reporting that tenants of a Flemingdon Park apartment owned by the Minto Group have been ordered by the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) to pay back withheld rent immediately. Many ternants have been on a so-called rent strike since August 1. At that time they had also receive notice of an increase. The striking tenants had applied for an adjournment so they could make their arguments against Minto, but the LTB denied the request. At the hearing on Monday, the board ordered the tenants to pay their outstanding rent in 11 days on average, barring extenuating circumstances of face eviction.

Donna Strickland

Nobel panel makes announcement

Professor Donna Stickland, of Waterloo University, will share in the 2018 Nobel Prize for physics. Strickland will split half the $1,000,000 award with Gerard Mourou of France with whom she collaborated in an article on the development of ultra-short optical pulses used in eye surgery. The other half will be given to Arthur Ashkin of the US. The Guelph-born Strickland, who is an associate professor at Waterloo, told the academy she was left in disbelief when she got the call from Stockholm notifying her of the win, saying she thought it was “crazy.”

Hilarious video here of a runaway horse galloping into a bar in Chantilly, France. Then it gallops back out. Punch line? None, except the wallop in those hooves. No one was hurt and later they were telling horse jokes. You know, a guy comes into a bar and moans that he can’t tell his horses apart. The bartender says he should measure their height to see if one is taller than the other. The excited guy comes back next day and says it worked. “The white one is taller than the black.”

The Coalition Avenir Québec (or Coalition for Quebec’s Future) has won the Quebec general election Monday. CAQ won 74 seats out of 125 with the Liberals (31) and the two separatist parties (total 19) being laid low. There is much astonishment among writers at the outcome, citing the measure of change after a 15 year Liberal reign. The CAQ has the word coalition in its name but seems less like a coalition than a fresh mainstream movement, centre right and focussed on the economy. It was founded by former Parti Québécois (PQ) cabinet minister François Legault and businessman Charles Sirois; Legault serves as party leader. The party membership includes both Quebec nationalists and federalists. Legault has said it will never endorse a referendum on sovereignty, but more autonomy if necessary — with Wikipedia