This week’s Eye Weekly featured a photo of Toronto city councillor Rob Ford on the cover, and followed up the cover with a scathing story about the Ward 2 councillor inside. It’s no surprise that a lot of people in Toronto, particularly the other city councillors, don’t like Mr. Ford. After all, he does have a tendency to put his foot in his mouth, and his one of the most vehemently right-wing councillors on a left-leaning city council. That being said, there is a reason that Rob Ford continues to get elected (and by a huge margin) in Ward 2, and why he will keep winning: he gets things done.

Now, as a resident of Rob Ford’s ward, I will admit that I do not agree with many — in fact most — of his viewpoints on city issues, and I was particularly appalled by his recent remarks about AIDS, so this post is in no way a defense of Ford’s actions and political stance. Instead, it is perhaps a look at why a man like Rob Ford works for Ward 2, and why Ward 2 needs a councillor like Rob Ford.

A few personal stories: a friend of mine who lives in the ward recently had a tiff with her landlord over a malfunctioning toilet. Frustrated, she wrote to the Ford’s office, asking that the renters’ rights get enforced. Three days after she dropped her letter off in the mailbox, Rob Ford — not one of his office workers or anyone from housing — knocked on her door and acted as a mediator between her and her landlord, eventually getting the plumbing fixed and keeping everyone happy.

Vince Carter built a basketball court in the park near my building during his short stint in Toronto, which he then left in the care of the city. Last summer, for some odd reason, the lights on the court would shut off by 8pm, causing a lot of neighborhood youth to be really upset. One afternoon, Rob Ford came down to the park, heard the concerns of the local youth, the area residents and businesses, and a few days later, the problem was fixed.

Those are only two examples where I know that Rob Ford has personally helped fix situations in the ward. To be honest, most people in Ward 2 don’t care too much about the Island Airport or the Gardiner Expressway or the waterfront expansion; instead, they worry about absentee landlords, misplaced immigration papers, late TTC buses, and keeping neighborhood kids out of trouble. Those are the kinds of things that Rob Ford does well — not his office workers or representatives, but Ford himself. That, and the fact that he spends his own money rather than the city budget he is given, makes him quite the popular person in our ward.

So sure, it’s easy to criticize the man for being a bit of a nutcase, but this nutcase makes things happen for the people he represents, which is much more than most politicians can claim.

I know Jason already posted this yesterday, but for those of you who missed it, here’s the front page of The Independent print edition for July 21, 2006, courtesy of the Newseum.

The message in that infographic is clear and powerful, and much more obvious than any 600 word article ever could be. The excellent integration of the infographic will guarantee that not only will The Independent capture the attention of its readers, but will also appeal to people passing by the newsboxes.

It makes me happy to see good design and great content coming together like this.

“This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is a flash of lightning in the sky. Rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.”
- Buddha

Sakura Handa passed away one year ago, but she still lives on in my heart.

There’s something about throwing some charcoal on the old-fashioned grill, dousing it with lighter fluid, and then burning the hair off your hand as you throw the match in, that makes me feel good about summer. I mean, summer isn’t my favorite of seasons — scratch that, it’s my least favorite season — but there are a few key things that you can do during the summer that have more of an impact in the hot sun than in the cold snow; barbecuing is one of them.

That being said, everyone these days has one of those fancy gas barbecues where all you have to do is press a button and throw on the meat, which is great when you’ve got company over and all you need the grill for is to make some quick burgers, but when the focal point of your gathering is a barbecue, nothing really beats slapping some meat on an old rusty grill with the charcoal slowly ashing up as the smoke fills the air. Barbecuing at its best.

So for those of you in the southern hemisphere, I apologize, but for us up here in Toronto, it’s not summer. It’s barbecue season.

On a very awesomely related note, Greg Story of Airbag just wrote an amazing weblog post on the charcoal barbecue. Check it out. Also, there’s no real better thing to have after a barbecue than ice cream. For those of you who have trouble scooping it, here are some tips, via Lifehacker.

So I’ve been getting a few emails about the article that appeared in the National Post about “seeding” and marketing and blogs. The first thing I need to say is that I apologize for the really appalling sentence structure I used in my small quotation. In my defence, I had just come home from work when Emily Mathieu called, and I was a bit tired. Please forgive my grammar and word choice.

Language aside, a few people have been asking about my thoughts on the whole free phone gig, and how I can reconcile my code of ethics with blogging about products I receive for free. I’m a little puzzled by this, because I just can’t seem to see the ethical quandary here: I’m not being forced to say good things about a product, or anything at all. In the case of the Nokia promotion, all I’ve been asked to do is to use their product to create content for my site.

After all, this isn’t the first time that this is happening. I continually receive free movie tickets and free CDs, so most of the film and music reviews you read on this site have been the result of promotional give-aways. Do I feel like I need to disclose, on every review, who gave me the free tickets or free disc? No. Simply because I was given the free item without restrictions as to what I’m going to say, or without a clause to say anything at all.

Bloggers do have the potential to sway public opinion (which is why I think Matchstick is working in a particularly genius manner for the Nokia promotion), so I do believe that they should disclose anything that may be mislead their readers: conflicts of interest, forced commentary, or unoriginal thought. In the case of the Matchstick/Nokia promotion, I am in no way misleading the few readers I have; instead, I am offering full disclosure as to how I received the product, and what I will be doing with it — I wouldn’t have been in the National Post article otherwise. If the phone would have come with the clause that I needed to offer a favorable review of the product, I wouldn’t have accepted it: if anything was to break an ethical code on my blog, it would be to create content that didn’t truly reflect my thoughts. In that sense, accepting the new Nokia 6682 is not an ethical quandary at all. It is instead a reflection of a very smart strategy by Matchstick in order to show that any discussion about a product leads to exposure and brand recognition. And I have no problem with being a part of that, on my own terms.

Other thoughts on the issue: Rannie, Irina, Jeremy, Kelly