Bonne Fête du Canada à tous! I thought I would celebrate this holiday by nominating last week’s Little Shits™.
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Matt Blackett, the graceless, peevish, grudge-holding, increasingly clannish Spacer, who published a self-congratulatory post on the elimination of megabins. That wasn’t the problem, or not much of one. The first commenter on that post, Fen, wrote “Anyone who helped kill these things deserves a pat on the back.” My comment was the next one – “You’re welcome” – and it lasted less than five hours before Blackett, or some other churlish Spacer, deleted it. Public space is fine; public dialogue apparently isn’t.
I requested, put together, and published the city’s megabin data, I judged a workshop to design a replacement, and I asked David Miller at the New Year’s Levee to kill the damned things. Hence I did help, even if the Spacers want the official version of the story to hold that only they worked on the topic and are uniquely responsible for victory.
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Self-avowed snuff-film viewer Bert Archer, whose snideness in television interviews actually surpasses the repellency of his writing, dismissed my esteemed colleague Marc Weisblott’s work on his Weblog, Paved, as follows:
The city’s least relevant blog (present company excepted, of course) is now over. I’ve got to say, I never liked the idea of Marc Weisblott being brought under the Star’s aegis… His used to be one of the blogs one heard mentioned….. Ever since he started at the Star, I’ve heard no one even mention it…. [I]t didn’t work.
Weisblott did not “start… at the Star”; he never worked there. However, “Bert Archer is an editor at the Toronto Star,” hence is in a position of conflict of interest. His admission does, however, shed light on the typically feudal Star newsroom, and this isn’t the only case in which the Star didn’t look out for its own writer.
Also, memo to a fellow baldie: Having no hair provides that much less of a cushion for the skull in the event of an accident. Hence, on those highly conspicuous midnight bike rides along the Danforth (complete with U-lock dangling from handleber), do wear a helmet. A mind as supercilious as yours is a terrible thing to waste.