So some councillors and lobbyists are talking casino again, with Exhibition Place as the preferred site. Except that they’ve adopted the grand euphemism of “integrated resort“:
Alan Feldman, senior vice-president of public affairs with MGM, said it could potentially invest $3- to $5-billion on an “integrated resort” in Toronto, which could include about 200,000-square-feet of casino space, 1,000 to 2,000 hotel rooms, 100,000-square-feet of restaurant space, plus entertainment venues.
[emphasis mine]
Sounds grand, but you can scratch Exhibition Place off the list of possible sites; politicians should check on their existing obligations before they go around trying to make new ones. Did you know that there’s already a hotel starting construction soon at Exhibition Place? It was approved in 2009. You may remember the mini-scandal about the contract.
According to my reading of the Letter Agreement between the City and HKHotels back in 2009, HKHotels gets a 49-year lease (plus two 25-year extensions) that gives them:
[...]the exclusive right to operate a hotel:
(i)
during the period commencing from the execution of the Lease and ending on the date which is fifteen (15) years after the Rent Commencement Date, within the whole of Exhibition Place; and
(ii)
during the remainder of the Initial Term, within the portion of Exhibition Place which is located to the east of Ontario Drive.
["Exclusivity," page 9 of the PDF]
So no additional hotels (AKA “integrated resorts”) anywhere at Exhibition Place for 15 years, and no additional hotels east of Ontario Drive (between the Better Living Centre and BMO Field) for 34 years after that. An “integrated resort” built 15 years from now would have to destroy buildings or greenspace on the western half of Exhibition Place, and that would probably be even less popular than just tearing up a parking lot.
I’m not clear if this fish oil supplement is made from fish that don’t burp, contains no burps produced by fish, or cautions consumers against burping fish. Perplexing.
Have you checked our litter lately, honey?
I suppose I should thank Kirsten and Frank at PetSmart for verifying that the cat litter is in good working order every few days. I’m not sure I want to know exactly how they make that determination.
This TTC alert just popped into my inbox:
ALL CLEAR: All earlier delays on Yonge University Spadina line have cleared. Regular service has resumed. We apologize for any incontinence.
I’m not sure what caused the delays in the first place, but it must have been quite the mess.
(And this is a perfect example of why I read things twice before I hit the “send” button.)
There really wasn’t much of a winter this year but there were a few opportunities to get out and take pictures of scenes that weren’t relentlessly brown. Here’s a gallery containing a few of the things I saw this winter that didn’t quite make it into posts of their own for one reason or another.
Continue reading 'Winter wrap-up'»
The Eco Soirée (rhymes with Rico Suave) brings an environmentally friendly party to the sitting room and leaves attendees flush with excitement.
The MEC created a minor stir a few weeks ago when it announced that it would start selling Ghost bikes, a brand long-established in Germany but whose name means something else entirely here. It would have been difficult to find a bike name less suited to the North American market, but then I found the Ibis Tranny:
The Ibis Tranny has both a monocoque frame and a slot machine. Good to know.
It raises the inevitable question: would you rather be caught hammering a Ghost down the trail, or riding a Tranny? Either way, I’ll stick to my Trek, thanks.
Toronto may be home to the occasional good sign, but it also features a distressingly large concentration of bad signs. Their badness runs the gamut from enforcing bad rules to ignoring reality to being mistaken to just plain lying. I thought that a lifetime of studying Toronto’s dizzying array of bad signs had prepared me for anything, but I was flabbergasted when I saw this one on the path in the Charles Sauriol Conservation Reserve:
What makes this sign the worst in Toronto is not so much the meaningless legalese (I’m about to enter a “License Area”? I’d be happy to ask someone at CP what that means, but I’m just out for a stroll in the park.), nor its placement in a quiet park, and not even the fact that it’s the first sign I’ve seen after two hours of hiking up the Don Valley. No, what makes this the worst sign in Toronto is the context:
Okay CP, I get that we’re crossing your right of way at our own risk and all that. But seriously?
Only in Toronto could you have something called “The Avenue Road Avenue Study.”
(Stumbled upon while I was looking for something else entirely.)
Digging through old boxes of stuff occasionally turns up a real gem like this Ontario Medical Association fee schedule from 1950. It lists the standard fees that doctors should charge patients for various medical procedures, house calls, and lab tests. Read below the fold for a few scans from inside.
Continue reading 'Ontario Medical Association Schedule of Fees, 1950'»
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