Let me begin with a confession: I hate Mel Lastman, Toronto's Mayor. He started out as Mayor of North York, a suburb I grew up in, where he bulldozed a vital, 1950s-era strip (which included the only rep theatre in the city) in order to put up a largely fictitious "downtown" built out of nasty, modernist glass-and-steel towers, destroying the character of the old, pedestrian-friendly downtown. I moved away from North York when I was 17, and it was only another decade or so before I was living under the hairy fist of Mayor Mel — the Ontario premier Mike Harris amalgamated Toronto with its suburbs, and in the ensuing confusion, they elected Mel the mayor of the new "Megacity." He's done a frankly terrible job. He's a clown, someone whose personal life is as sordid as it is public, someone whose malapropisms and idiocies plumb the depths of ignorance daily. Now, on the other hand, Toronto's current Olympic bid would be a disaster for me, as the plans for the Olympic Village call for bulldozing my fabulous apartment to make way for a new roadway. Thus, I can hardly claim to be wholly enraged by Megamayor's latest "witticism," which promises to really piss off the IOC:
"Why the hell would I want to go to a place like Mombassa," Mayor Mel Lastman said to a freelance journalist before leaving for a trip to Kenya to pitch the Toronto Olympic bid. " I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me."
Link (Thanks, Amanda!) Discuss
