The South Bayview Bulldog

The proclaimed takeover of the yet to be built LRT lines by the Ontario planning agency known as Metrolinx has lasted barely a week. Today at TTC headquarters Ontario Transportation Minister Bob Chiarelli and TTC chairman Karen Stintz met to  announce the reversal of the Metrolinx decision. TTC officials expressed outrage when it was announced that a private company would be hired to run the four light rail transit (LRT) lines. But under the plan unveiled today the TTC will operate all the lines and Metrolinx will find someone else to maintain them. So your Eginton LRT — love it or fear it — will be a TTC system just like the rest of the transit services in Toronto. It would be rich to know what kind of ambition, revenge or just plain pig-headed pride was driving all this. There is plenty of these qualities on both sides. Did the Premier have to make the decision to reverse Metrolinx in its tracks? We may never know.

Clarke Pulford

Northern Secondary School principal Ron Felsen will officiate at a ceremony on Saturday, October 6, 2012 at 11 am  to mark the completion of Clarke Pulford Field.  The school’s sports field has been re-made to include a turf surface and a professional running track in a $500,000 project. It is named after long-time coach and math teacher Clarke Pulford who served almost his entire career at Northern before retiring. The re-dedication ceremony will recognize the many people and organizations which made the new field possible. The ceremony will be followed by the traditional homecoming regular season NSS  Jr/Sr Football games. Coach Pulford and his wife Joan will be present.

Last week’s fire at the Canadian Tire Store in the RioCan Leaside Centre has left the normally busy store in a sad state. But the company is sparing no expense to get the location open again. The burned out Garden Centre has been removed and inventory that was damaged has been replaced. Today crews were busy using high-power hoses to clean the sidewalk outside the store’s front door. What does this mean? There are a lot of opinions. A well-placed security guard on the scene said he felt sure the company was trying to get open within days. Another person, a clerk in the store, said that it might be November. Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later. 

The short list has been published for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize for works of Canadian fiction. The first place winner will receive a prize of $50,000. Here are the four candidates: Will Ferguson’s novel 419 was praised as a global work that tells us the ways in which we are now bound together and reminds us of the things that will always keep us apart. Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside begins when a woman mistakes a man for a log. It was described by the jury as a novel about people “that jumps between decades, locations and characters with a precision that makes Ohlin’s hard work seem effortless. The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler revolves around the mystery of Lily Azerov. The novel “shifts through Lily’s past and her daughter, Ruth’s present, interwoven with the perceptions of her whole extended family, as they adjust to the comforts of Montreal” after the horrors of the Holocaust. Kim Thúy’s novel Ru, translated by Sheila Fischman, is the story of a journey from Viet Nam to Quebec. The jury said “Thúy is a born storyteller, but she rewrites the traditional immigrant narrative in a completely new way.” Whirl Away, a short story collection by Newfoundland author and journalist Russell Wangersky, was praised as a collection in which “each story stands starkly and wonderfully alone. The jurors were Irish author and screenwriter Roddy Doyle; Canadian publisher, writer, and essayist Anna Porter; and American author and satirist Gary Shteyngart. The prize was founded by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994 in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. The winner will be announced at a gala on October 30.