John Murtha, a U.S. Congressman and 73-year-old former marine colonel who fought in Vietnam, wants the bulk of U.S. forces out of Iraq toute de suite.

John Lorinc, contributor to the forthcoming book uTOpia, praises 1950s-era shopping plazas that have come into the gunsights of urban planners.

I hope Conrad had a nice night out at the Maclean's bash on Tuesday. It must have been fun, considering he had libel papers served on Peter Newman as his old friend and author of the offending tome There Be Dragons entered the shindig.

But life is about to get a lot less fun: Conrad has been charged with criminal fraud by the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago for some jiggery-pokery involving the finances of Hollinger International.

The amount in question is $51.8 million US (Note: updated versions put that figure at more than $80 million US).

Here's the CTV.ca story. The Toronto Star story provides links to the text of the indictment and a U.S. Dept. of Justice statement.

His lawyer Edward Greenspan says his client asserts his innocence.

(Blog statistical trivia: My 2,000th post in this forum!)

If you're squeezing a container of frozen orange juice to see if it's defrosted enough to convert into actual juice, don't have an open can of beans or some other substance nearby on a counter.

If you do, there's a chance the frosty container will shoot out from between your fingers like a cannonball, hit the can, and send beans (or whatever) flying everywhere.

Wednesday night, I'm riding westbound on the College Street car. As I cross Spadina, I'm looking northward  towards the Waverly Hotel/Silver Dollar Room.

A "woman," with long, straight hair that falls to mid-back, is crossing the street moving towards the hotel. What makes this odd is the "woman" is wearing a micro-miniskirt on a very cool, blustery night.

The "woman" was also wearing thong underwear -- a fact that became evident when the mini somehow became hiked above her asscheeks when she stumbled on her heels.

Now, to make this strange scene even stranger, as the streetcar passed her, I noticed the "woman" had a Fu Manchu mustache!

Plenty of people on the streetcar noticed this tableau, but no one giggled or commented. What good Torontonians! :)

This is a terrific article from Salon that's partly memoir about living hip in San Francisco in the 1980s and a review of a book by sociologist Richard Lloyd on the role of "neo-Bohemia" in modern capitalism, focusing on the Wicker Park nabe in Chicago.