Mel Lastman

A bride without a head.

A wolf without a head.

That is how I feel as I feel like the song Dragon the River,

in the sense that if one thing worse than this happens to me, I may kill myself.

I'm also sick as well.

That's why I sound like this.

If you're listening to this, don't get mad at November.

Don't be snarky with her.

No, I mean, that's basically true all the time.

Ideally, that's a disclaimer we put out before every episode.

Yeah.

Doing the Tracy Jordan, don't make me show you the back of my hand, whereas written, please be nice to me.

Yeah, I mean, the problem is, like, this is most common.

I most commonly get the criticism of being like confidently wrong about stuff.

Only because, like, if you present stuff unconfidently, it's a bad podcast, right?

But like, I get that criticism a lot through, well, there's your problem.

And it's like, hmm, I wonder why this podcast with its engine with its

audience of like engineering fans might be a little bit pedantic, you know?

Yeah.

As opposed to our audience of what I can only assume are local politics freaks who are obsessive but pleasant.

Yeah, they're all wearing the big foam thing that says local government.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's the banner we put up at the live show.

Okay.

The live show is getting more and more just appealing to me as a concept every time we talk about it, From like the possibility of having a house band to a banner drop, to I'm not even going to say anything else.

To that, that one bit

wearing only sashes to applying the shell, of course.

Also, we probably have to sync up our recordings at some point.

Oh, yeah.

Hey, we won't have to do that at the live show.

I think we should do it anyway.

Do the clap.

Okay, well, let's

practice for the live show.

I'm going to say three, two, one.

Let's jam.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You might wonder, am I going to do that every time?

And the answer is yes, from now on, because I liked Cowboy Beep.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors.

That was a little bit of preamble.

That's like, hey,

it's a good show.

Look, I feel like the most infuriating opinion I could derive from Riley is like an earnest belief that he likes cowboy bebop, is not aware of the existence of the original, referring solely to the Netflix live action.

So, I spent a lot of money on eBay in the early 2000s buying Hong Kong rips of anime series that to have them delivered to my house.

That's why they call you Cowboy Ebop.

I had the most illegal copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion in Canada.

Okay, okay, you can't just keep saying okay, sorry, I'm just you can't keep it the most transactional

I've ever heard in my life

You had illegal Evas?

You fuck, you fuck, you fuck

I didn't know

I did know I didn't know that was a trance thing to do

No, you're not meant to yet, but now you are by By now you are.

Sorry, my wife is out of the house and she's going to be doing a lot of screaming on this episode.

Riley?

You motherfucker!

I'm so far away from my microphone right now.

And I'm so bad at you.

It's so funny that this elicited a much bigger reaction than when I told you both I lived in the lesbian party house.

Well,

this is the last straw.

This is the last.

straw.

That's a separate issue.

We will get to that.

Get to your one-quarter FFS that you got.

It says, I know multiple people who have, who have transitioned after knowingly or unknowingly, sometimes years-long campaigns of it's so funny, what a coincidence it is that I'm the only cis boy who's like this, right?

And I just want to say, at this point, if you actually do that, I will be mad.

Genuinely, I will be like angry.

I will not be supportive of your transition because I have tried.

You basically think, I now need to be the, let's call it the que cis Haderach

who is able to able to look in inwardly.

You need to be like imprisoned for your crimes in a kind of ironic fashion where you get stuck in the soft launch forever.

It's like, what, going around being like, hey, my hair's a little longer.

Ooh, I wonder why.

I'm sentencing you to once a day going into a Starbucks and trying out a different name.

Just trying it on for

you.

Hey, hey,

I'm going to segue into

the item mix-up.

The item mix-em-up, the item dance?

The municipal roundup.

Yes.

Because

I hear that if you go into a Starbucks and you ask them to say the name Municipal Roundup, they're not allowed to do it because of woke.

He wrote Loser on my cup, yeah.

Yeah,

Rudy Giuliani has now proudly proclaimed that if you say you must write Municipal Roundup on your Starbucks cup, they have to do it.

And also, if you write, ha ha sucker, you lost Lauren Bacall's Mercedes, then it's a legal kill.

They're allowed to kill you.

No, this is this is item.

This is the item rodeo, a municipal roundup.

Cirque des actualités.

This is a free episode.

We have to behave normal.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Okay, you're telling who just spent like several minutes yelling?

I believe that was you.

Oh, it's me?

As I did that?

Yeah, it was.

I just thought I was sipping on a little.

I think Maddie's going to know that she did that on account of she was, I think, arguably dissociating the whole time.

I mean, I don't doubt you.

It's just I thought that what I was doing was sipping on this really nice Pino Grigio or Graubergunder, excuse me.

The thing is that, Riley, you sometimes say things that are so infuriating to trans people or trans women specifically that we enter third person mode.

So it's like, yeah, I'm still performing all of the same actions, but my camera position is like now behind my own head.

Yeah, like my autonomous nervous system is still functioning correctly, but the rest of me is not here.

I'm gone.

I had no idea that illegal anime rips was a thing.

I'm sorry, it's not just illegal anime rips, Riley.

It's illegal evangelian.

Do you understand?

Do you understand?

I also show about becoming transgender.

Do you understand, Riley?

Do you

understand, Riley?

I also had Trigon.

Okay, that's fine.

That doesn't count.

That's fine.

That's fine.

That's fine.

It's just

Riley Quinn, the cisgender man who's Letterboxed top four are

like People's Joker,

the fucking the other one, there is still time.

I saw the TV creation movie part one and two.

Yeah, you remember it.

Yeah, of course.

Okay, well, I like the cinematography, okay?

There is still time to do municipal roundup.

Yeah, there's still time to do a municipal roundup because I was thinking, right?

I was thinking.

We've been doing a lot of episodes where we're like, the mayor is so big that we don't have time for municipal roundup.

Or we've been just doing like the New York Minute or London, Kentucky.

And I want to go back to a tradition of doing municipal roundups that we get in the blue sky inbox.

And I have one that's really fun.

This is

about a mayor named Vincent van Quickenborn.

I'll let that sink in.

Okay.

Is he running a kind of like barge syndicate?

Does he sell me tulips?

So, well, he is from the Low Countries.

Vincent van Quickenborn, that's that name again, is the mayor of Kortreich in Flemish Belgium.

And you almost said Flemish Belgium, which is very dune-coded, you know, like hearing the.

I mean, in that case, it's more like

it is, it is water power.

It's like polder power.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm putting on my Belgian still suit,

which is a joke that's TBD wanting about some stuff about Belgian.

I just want you to wear your clogs in Flemish fashion.

Seemed the natural natural way.

Yeah.

It's no, no.

Your 12% beer.

Your 12% beer is better stored in your body than your stillsuit.

So basically,

this guy, Vincent Van Quickenborn, he was actually in the news a few months ago.

He bounces back.

But he was there walking without rhythm.

Is what I saw.

He was there

just sloshing around sludgy farmland.

The heredity of that surname implies a kind of like historical Dutch child being fired out of its mother at like sufficient velocity to rename an entire family.

Oh, well,

that was quick.

The Quickenborns are only gestated for six months.

Yeah.

And you have to put the bassad across the room.

We're doing it real Swedish for our Belgian impression.

Look.

I don't have a Belgian impression.

Let me tell you about Vincent van Quickenborn, please.

I thought I was telling you about him, but okay.

Please.

So Vincent van Quickenborn, he's like elected mayor of Korthreich in like 2013, but he bounces back and forth between national and local positions because he's also like a bigwig in like the sort of liberal party of Belgium.

And he leaves Korthreich for good in 2022 to become justice minister.

As justice minister, Van Quickenborn was also the face of Belgium's fight against organized crime.

And there was a plot to kidnap him in 2022 where a bunch of guys like just were arrested outside of his house with a truck full of like AKs and zip ties and Molotov cocktails and stuff.

Cool.

Now, I mean, listen, I don't like to kink shame.

Also, I really like the idea of like

these hoods have met their match in quick and born.

We got to take out Quickenborn.

He's going to, he's, it's like, it's like you're watching Gamora, but instead of like terrifying Gamora guys, it's just a bunch of bouncy Belgians.

So, as justice minister, basically, that's what he was doing.

And the thing is, that's not the focus of this story because he didn't get kidnapped

and the guys were arrested, but then there actually wasn't enough evidence.

Doesn't matter.

He's been fine about that since.

However, as a result of that, he's had increased police protections.

That's a minor biographical detail.

It's like, yeah, you'd like fucking, you almost got kidnapped.

I've been almost kidnapped.

Who cares?

Right?

Exactly.

So, the only thing we need to know about that is, as a result, he had increased police protections for like the the foreseeable future okay this resulted in a scandal in Belgium that was called pee-pee gate

they're putting you on the quickenborn detail

all right uh quick quicken I'm afraid quickenborn has succumbed to pee-pee gate

or at his 50th birthday three of his friends went left his house and peed on an empty police van And then he came out and then he was like dancing beside them and laughing and miming peeing also.

This is just to me, this is European culture.

Spit with your friends.

Yeah.

This is, this is European culture to me.

I don't, this is what I assume they are doing.

Like I've seen the, in Amsterdam, they got those urinals on the side of the canals that guys are just pissing on the street.

And I just assume that this is just sort of a natural thing to be doing in the low countries is you just you're just peeing on stuff with the very kind of piss focused set of countries by all means.

Oh, yeah.

Look, look, when you have that much like flowing water, like everyone's got a piss all the time.

So, Belgian media reports citing inverse Dune.

Yeah, this is what I mean.

This is why I need the still suit to recycle my piss.

This is what Caledan would have been like.

No, that's not Caladan is the Belgium of the Dune fictive universe.

Oh, that's cursed.

So, some Belgian media reports citing other funnels.

Paul, move your waffles across the room.

Make me give them to you.

This is the voice.

It's that.

Put on the Swedish accent, Paul.

Mother, give me the water.

None of us have a Belgian accent.

Or a Dutch one.

Hold on.

Let me lock in.

Let me lock in.

Mother, give me the water.

She's going to do the voice.

That's the voice.

I just did the voice.

You both have to give me the water.

Okay, the water.

Well, I'm giving you the water of life, which is piss.

I've been killed.

Anyway.

All right.

So basically, they're like, hey, these guys pissed in a police van and you went out and like did a little like mimed peeing beside them.

And then he was like, no, I wasn't miming peeing beside them.

And then there's a video of him that gets released miming peeing beside them.

And then he said, I wasn't doing that.

I was playing unrelated air guitar.

This quick and boom guy, I'm coming to like him.

I've got to be honest.

This is like, if your country's Elliott-Ness got embroiled in a kind of like piss scandal.

Not even a bad piss scandal.

Not like a kind of like trussed up and leather, like a Tory MP piss scandal.

Like, no, just like a public urination scandal.

He wasn't even doing it.

Yeah, he was just having fun with his, well, his boys were doing it.

So.

As for whether he was mimicking someone urinating, Mr.

Van Quickenborn, widely known as Quickie in Belgium, said he was in fact performing an unrelated air guitar solo.

Come on.

I hate to admit it.

He is quoted in the Flemish newspaper Het Neusblad as tell, it's a fake language, as telling the justice committee of the Belgian parliament on Thursday, I specialize in air guitar.

I am a metalhead.

That checks out.

Dudes, rock.

This is great.

I love him.

I specialize in air guitar is maybe one of my favorite sentences.

That's a beautiful verb to use with that activity.

I'm not just an air guitar guy.

I'm a specialist.

Yeah.

It's like, no, it's like

that's the rank that you enlist in if you're going to be an air guitar instead of front-facing combat.

Yeah,

the thing about air guitar is that it's kind of run by like an E4 mafia, you know?

So, okay.

Anyway, so basically.

So on Monday, the 4th of September, 2023, the Flemish public broadcaster

VRT cast a lot more pissing at Er Guitar Sandhurst, weirdly, cast doubt on his version.

The next day, the minister decided to show another channel for his own footage, where he can be seen visibly tipsy as he walks to his last guest to the door at four in the morning.

In the footage, the minister is seen leaning back as if to mimic the gesture of someone urinating next to his friend who finds it hilarious.

He also addressed the seriousness of the issue, telling Parliament, quote, I am ashamed that people I invited to my house peed on a police van.

It is disgusting, especially considering why the van is there for my protection.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Crew was at the birthday party, but says he didn't see anything.

Is it illegal to be a good hang and have a fun time with your friends, Your Honor?

Yeah.

Is it illegal to pee in the same way that Ferris Bueller would have if he were in that situation?

I asked.

Ferris Bueller was a, was a, was a Belgian mayor.

You're assigned to stop this guy from getting like

cut to pieces in a shipping container, right?

And you're better and and you are then trapped in a kind of prank, pranky relationship, like an animal house.

You're in a national lampoon style relationship with your protectee.

It's beautiful.

So the result was that Van Quickenborn was not faced prosecution because, just like having a little dance next to someone peeing on something is not a crime.

And the two men involved, they need to each pay 1200.

Yeah, 1,250 euros.

It actually is true.

1250 euros and a moral compensation of one euro each to the affected police officers in addition to paying to have the van cleaned.

That's literally spending a penny.

Well, with inflation, how it is.

Oh, my.

I have to go out and spend a Euro to go out and spend a Euro on more.

I keep getting Swedish with it.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to put it on a public call.

If you are a listener to this podcast, can you please give us all low countries voice training?

Thank you.

Yeah, if you're, if you're, you're really a person.

I had a girl try to teach me Dutch once.

Yeah.

That was memorable.

So yeah, maybe.

I grew up, a friend of mine growing up lived down the street from me.

His mother was from Belgium and she was a lovely woman and she made chocolates in the basement.

And I'm not joking.

And she had a very thick Belgian accent.

And I cannot, for the life of me right now, remember how she sounded.

So I'm sorry.

It just

close enough to English that it just slips out of your brain.

Dark.

Yeah.

Look, Dutch is easy because hello is just hello.

It's the same in German, really.

But it's time to leave municipal roundup.

I miss municipal roundups like this, but it's just a nice, self-contained story of one funny guy.

Hya indeed.

A monster of the wind.

Let's end this with our best, our best Belgian-accented Hya.

Okay.

Okay.

On three.

One.

One, two,

three.

Hyua.

So basically, November's hya in Belgian is like she's got a terrible stomach virus.

It's a very Eeyoreish.

They're an Eeyoreish people, the Belgians.

Make me sound like a kind of horse.

Yeah.

Okay.

I panicked in the moment.

I was overwhelmed.

Do you two want to hear about Mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman?

Oh, Lastman.

Yes.

Someone I have been excited to talk to both of you about now for, I would say, two weeks.

Please tell me about why the last melman thank you you've been enjoying that uh i have so you should see the story of mel lastman who was mayor from 19 of toronto from 1998 to 2003 but mayor of north york for a very long time before that as a kind of prequel to rob ford a bit of rob ford's phantom menace uh for a lot of personal color by the way i will be quoting from his obituary throughout the episode so mel lastman melvin lastman was born into a family of polish-Jewish immigrants in Toronto in 1933.

His parents were like sort of well-to-do, but lost all of their savings in the Great Depression.

His father

sold newspapers.

He worked in a hat-making factory.

He was a Trotskyist.

Like, he was a union steward in the hat-making factory selling newspapers.

Well, shit, so he might have been.

Yeah, goddamn, maybe.

Dad, stop trying to sell me copies of the Morning Star.

I don't care.

Also, I live with you.

Stop telling me about the

permanent brim.

I don't want to hear about it.

So,

basically,

Mel was...

Fuck off.

Mel was a salesman from the beginning.

He used to sit in the sidewalk and sell, quote, pickles for a nickel, which was fun.

So

it's only fun because it rhymes.

Otherwise, you're just buying a pickle from a small child.

Yeah.

If it was a pickle for a dice,

a loose single pickle as well.

Yeah,

I'm selling pickles for a nickel, but that's because I have low self-esteem, and that's what I'm calling myself.

The only thing you should be selling like loose individually like that is like, I don't know, like hot dogs or cigarettes.

Like, don't sell me a pickle.

This is embarrassing.

Lucy's

Lucy pickle.

So he went to high school nearby in Toronto's Kensington Market, which is like central Toronto.

It's now Chinatown.

It used to be a sort of more Jewish area.

And he met his girlfriend, a woman called Marilyn Bronstein.

later Lassman, who was basically in charge of his career sort of the whole time.

We love this.

We love a guy being piloted by his wife.

Yes.

So basically, she got a job in an appliance store in Toronto and said, hey, can you hire my boyfriend for the back room?

And the owner said, okay, we'll hire couples.

She was like, okay, well, I'll quit.

And then Lasman, my beautiful boyfriend, Melvin, he can work in the back room.

Please hire my beautiful Melvin.

I will quit so you can hire my beautiful Melvin.

I will make space so Melvin may thrive.

And the thing is, that was kind of a good move because Mel was amazing at furniture sales.

He like took the place of a salesman.

It's really important to like hold space for the Melvins in your life.

He's doing progressive stack.

Melvin's first.

Melvin's to the front.

So they married when she was 18, he was 20.

And he very soon after created a furniture shop of his own that would become a store called Bad Boy.

That if you're from Ontario, I've just triggered.

there's a

furniture store called Bad Boy, but why?

I'm looking at a photo of a storefront and I would love to describe what it looks like to people.

Can I get us to the bad boy?

There is a bad boy segment.

I'm going to get us

back.

I can

round up the bad boy segment, but go off.

So I thought the bad boy segment was when I said, yeah, I used to buy pirated Evangelion DVDs when I was 13.

It's a bad girl segment.

Bad girl segment.

Oh, okay.

Bad girl segment.

So anyway, he sets this furniture shop up.

It goes through a few names.

It becomes like the bad boy appliance empire.

I will explain bad boy.

Yeah, it's actually a merger of

the bad furniture store, which weirdly did not go well, and the boy furniture store, which had a much stranger clientele.

And he merged those two failing chains to create something that was greater than the sum of its parts.

So this is Marilyn.

Marilyn said in 1988 Toronto Life profile, Mel fails miserably at marriage, but I like him.

He tries.

I'm number two, but I try harder.

The couple had two children, Dale, who became a lawyer, who we'll never hear from again, and Blaine, a businessman who would go on to take Bad Boy over from Mel.

Sorry, Blaine with a why.

Yeah, Blaine with a why.

Blaine with a why.

Yeah, Blaine with a why.

I think that's so important.

I feel like Massey and I are kind of like, I'm not sure how it is with the lag, but I keep saying things more or less simultaneously with her.

We're in the drift.

Yeah, we are.

We absolutely are.

So basically, he's got this huge penchant for publicity stunts for promoting his furniture store, which he basically sticks to for his whole career.

Well, it's not called good boy furniture, right?

So, like, of course, they're going to try and get your attention.

So, it's like, yeah, he's just acting out to get attention.

Basically, my favorite type of commercial, or one of my favorite types of commercials, is where the proprietor of a store or shop is like committed to a mental health institution because he's priced the products too low.

In this case,

the conceit is that Mel and later his son Blaine have been arrested and put in jail.

They're dressed up in striped jail outfits because the prices are quote, a steal.

And they love to do ads.

you know, around that.

I love the like, I've priced the products too low.

There must be something wrong with me.

Yeah, like as a as a proponent of crazy eddies here in New York.

Yeah.

The classic of the genre.

But so it does, okay.

So this doesn't make any sense to me.

So the prices are a steal.

Yeah.

So the owner's in jail?

Yeah, that's collapsing instantly.

He should be dressed up like a cop.

Yeah, that's true.

Look, it's like, there should be a police officer at the door of Bad Boy, where if you walk in, they're like, another one.

Take him away, boys.

This is making a fuss out of the Canadian justice system.

So

in 1963, Mel Lassman dresses in a jailhouse uniform for the first time, offering people at Queen and Young Streets a $2 bill in exchange for a $1 bill.

Hey,

they're selling $2 for a dollar.

Yeah, promotionally.

Yeah, he sold $2 for a dollar.

We used to have $2 bills in Canada.

They got phased out when I was like nine.

For the famous Toonie?

For the famous Toonie, a bimetallic coin.

I remember.

It was a big deal.

So the Toronto.

You used to have $2 bills in America, too.

Yeah.

You didn't get a toonie, though.

I know.

I used to collect them because I thought they were fun.

You collected up for $12.

That's the kind of child I was.

The corner where Lassman was giving away $2 for $1 got so busy that the police shut it down in like 15 minutes.

In 54, Mel Lassman also

follows an ice truck around, noting their delivery stops before he pitches them on buying a refrigerator.

He was also arrested during a publicity stunt in Times Square, where he, again, would sell two Canadian dollars for one American dollar, but he was actually arrested, not just moved on.

That's actually a deal in his favor.

That's that's that's not like

his publicity stunts, the probably the most racist one.

Oh, Lastman flew.

Yeah, sorry.

Uh, Lastman flew to Nunavut to quote, and I'm quoting the exact quote that he says here.

Oh, no, I know what he's gonna do.

No, yep, no, yep,

yep, I'm sorry.

He is, and I quote that, I'm quoting him here.

Sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo.

Put him in the actual jail.

Well, he's dead.

Do you want to dig up his bones?

Justified NYPD arrest, I'm afraid.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the coffin is the,

some call it the last jail.

You always end up in prison.

The coffin prison.

Take him to coffin.

Like

some wisdom you would hear from like the aged con in the yards.

Like, what the fuck is this?

Yeah.

I tell you what, kid.

There's one jail waiting for all of us.

There was getting a little bit Trump there.

It was getting a little bit like, and that's where I hope Trump ends his days is like being the like old convict dispensing wisdom.

You know, a lot of people call it the last jail.

They're saying there's one last jail waiting for all of us, kiddo.

Very difficult to break out of.

I think that my experience of the last jail is going to be like good fellas.

I'm an Amic Basta with Ray Liotta, and it's going to be pretty good.

All right.

I have two YouTube videos for you both to watch now.

If you scroll to the notes.

Sure.

Did you just watch the first one?

I would certainly kill my internet, but I will do my best.

Well, I'm watching an ad now.

Oh, I have premium.

I'm watching an ad for something horrible.

I mean, I have premium, but it hasn't loaded yet because I have bad internet.

Okay, well, I'll just describe that.

Also, I got it's a fake Bill and Hillary.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Oh, no.

I really, the flags around the border

are something else.

Yeah, pretty good, right?

This is.

They're like, sort of like, there's like a sh-

Oh.

I'm, I'm so distracted by these.

Is that him?

No, that's his son, Blaine, who took over Bad Boy because Mel sold it in the 70s.

It went bankrupt.

Blaine with a why.

And then Blaine with a Y bought it again in 1991.

But then Mel would always come on to say the catchphrase of Bad Boy, which is nobody.

Yeah.

Ooh, the second one here seems to be Macho Man.

Blaine is a husky lad.

He's a hearty boy.

That's a large man.

He's a

large son, a large adult son.

Yeah.

He says, I love when I crush prices, there is no competition.

One of my favorite types of like huckster local ad.

I love it.

Yeah, this is really beautiful.

The WWF at Maple Leaf Gardens with Macho Man Randy Savage.

Okay, also, just can I can I talk about the stripey uniform he's wearing?

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

That's a hoodie.

It's like a hoodie with no hood.

It's it looks like a hoodie.

It's got strings.

He's wearing a red t-shirt.

under it.

Uh-huh.

It's not a prison uniform.

He looks like he's going to a Fallout Bolly Show in 2005

has a very emo aesthetic

instead it's a maximum security in emo ontario instead of getting your hair cut when you get to prison they just give you like a flat iron fringe

giving you the emo hair at the prison instead of getting a prison tattoo i get prison snake bites yeah

i'm getting a i'm getting a prison tattoo but it's like the like the the the nautical star seeing a guy wearing like skinny jeans that are ripped at the knees and just crossing the street because you're like i'm pretty certain that guy's been in prison

no it's um if you have skinny jeans ripped at the knees that's like a russian gangster with stars on his knees in canada it's considered to be very intimidating

so

anyway after they did the bill and hillary commercial the white house actually sent a cease and desist letter to blain and mel lastman and he responded just by making more bill hillary commercials I mean, they don't have any that like, I'm pretty certain there's some like international treaty obligations that would have to to change before any Canadian gave a shit about that.

And this is why Mark Carney is justified in driving a technical up to the border, you know,

just shooting wildly into the air.

So, yeah, it's like the American president doesn't like your fucking bad boy furniture commercial.

I don't give a shit.

Different country.

Yeah, you'd, you're, your, your authority does not extend into the great southern erg of Canada rackets.

So they're also, they're also very flamboyant as a family.

Mrs.

Lastman, so Marilyn, used to quip, quote, there's no room in my closet for skeletons regarding her fashion and jewelry collection.

The bar mitzvah throne for their elder son Dale had 650 guests at the Royal York Hotel, which is kind of like the New York Palace, that Garnard mentioned the next day in the papers for its extravagance.

The theme of the night was simply, my son the king.

This is the second mayoral bar mitzvah we've spoken about on this show, and it has considerably stranger vibes than the first one, which was the mob lawyer bar mitzvah from Oscar Goodman.

How come you guys keep covering Jews and I haven't covered one yet?

It's fucked up.

Chance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's unclear what Blaine's bar mitzvah theme was.

That's not known.

However, that's brutal.

That makes me feel so sad, actually, to be like, here's my one son.

He's a lawyer.

My bar mitzvah theme for him is like he's on a throne, he's got a little crown.

Here's my other son, he gets to be in my commercials, and he's going to manage my furniture stores.

And let's not worry about his bar mitzvah theme, you know?

Justice for Blaine at this point.

It's like Blaine, they just get the Kiddish lunch after services on Shabbat morning.

And it's like Broadway, and there's like one table with a playbill on it, and that's all they gave him.

Oh, it's the thing is, Blaine,

it actually is quite like your son the king in the sense that it is quite aristocratic.

It is quite feudal in the sense that you're like, all right, here's my first son who will, uh, you know, like rule, and here's my second son who will, uh, like rule the trivial stuff and be the kind of big idiot and is a spare in case the first one dies in like a crossbow accident or something.

Yeah, I sending your son to run bad boy furniture is the 20th century equivalent of sending him to the monastery.

Yeah, or like being like, okay, you can be a count in Umbria, I guess.

Yeah.

I guess.

Be the Count of Umbria.

It doesn't mean anything.

So this is also from his obituary.

Though he was often called a flamboyant showman, was his pasha for obvious hair plugs, Rolls-Royces, and diamond jewelry.

He was actually a shy man who was uncomfortable in large public gatherings.

He was overshadowed by his glamorous wife, Marilyn, who was fond of large jewels and glitzy parties, as she was of the husband she publicly called that little schnook.

I think these two are kind of admitted.

It's so awesome to be married to a mean lady.

Oh, yeah.

I like that.

Absolutely.

Terrifying woman and a like pretty normal man.

Oh, okay.

Let me disabuse you of that notion.

Just a moment.

So now we're going to talk a little bit about Lastman the mayor.

So Toronto is not always been the greater Toronto area.

It was a bunch of cities that included Old Toronto, North York, East York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, and so on and so on.

York also.

So Mel Lassman is elected to the North York Board of Control in 1969.

When elected, he famously said to the press, what does a controller do?

Which is, I mean,

classic.

But the thing is, he was really beloved.

He would serve 10 straight terms, 25 years, as the mayor of North York before it became part of Toronto.

This is from the North York Historical Society.

He was easily accessible to North Yorkers, unlike his predecessors.

He was reported to have instructed that anyone calling City Hall should always be greeted by a real voice, not voicemail.

Voicemail is an evil invention because it encouraged employees to pick and choose what calls they return, and he always kept his phone number listed.

What is it with Toronto mayors and giving out their personal phone numbers?

They love it.

It's just, yeah, it's just like, I need to talk to people on the phone because I feel very lonely.

I do like actually that there's a bit that because my wife just bullies me.

He does specify real voice.

in office hours.

So he's not a monster, right?

You're not having the phones kind of like staffed 24-7, which I appreciate yeah so uh he's also he was an absolute booster of north york he was like do business in north york come to north york and so on and so on he said it was it can't oh it's canada's like fourth largest municipality he got ontario to charter a city in 1979 because even though it was like a sort of metro area not a city he called north york the city with heart and he had a public celebration of north york on valentine's day every valentine's day including giving up marriage licenses for free and serving a giant heart-shaped cake to the citizens Hey, this guy's giving out licenses.

He's like very winning.

They're like Zadian marriage licenses.

Yeah, look, they're worth half a U.S.

marriage license.

Well, they actually changed that out to be like a bimetallic marriage license now.

So he did a number of real things.

He campaigned quite tirelessly for a subway line to connect off of a street intersection called Young and Shepherd in North York.

And if you imagine the Toronto subway system, right?

It's a very thin U with a big line through it.

Well, I'll do this easily, yeah.

Yeah.

It's not much of a subway system.

And then there, but

the U with the line through it, on the top right of the U, there's like a little, beep, there's like a little hyphen, which is called the Shepherd, the Shepherd line.

It's a four-stop nubbin off the top of the Young line.

It has only five stations, and it's one of the least used transit lines in North America.

I have a question.

Did you just describe it as simultaneously a four-stop nubbin that has five stations uh excuse yeah sorry i which is it quinn

there's the station it starts no there's the station that it starts at this is the classic uh fence problem in math yeah

yeah okay so sorry it has five it's a five-stop nubbin um it's one of the least used transit lines in north america it could be expanded upon to become more useful and there are like plans to expand it But like 50,000 people use it on an average weekday in total.

In total.

That's not very much.

We keep covering mares that get transit built but none of it is useful it's like the fucking uh the tram in london that borrows built or the monorail uh that we talked about in portugal that goes like two stops one stop actually one mall

right

it's the mall express so uh anybody oversaw like lots of development and investment will peeping time

discovering like not to do the fence post thing right but like am i seriously discovering riley that you have a like ground floor first floor thing where if a line has two stops, you say that it has one because it's got a start somewhere and that doesn't count as a stop.

No, unfortunately, I simply misspoke.

I'm sorry.

I wish I could say there was something funny with my brain, but no, I just simply misspoke.

So I also oversaw lots of development and investment, keeping taxes low, which basically the only way you can do that is by being completely in bed with the real estate industry, right?

Which he was.

Of course.

Of course.

In a bed that he sold for such a low price.

In fact, he went to jail, actually,

He must have stolen real estate developers.

Yeah, but he was even like even his critics were like, look, we don't like how he's doing it, but he has made North York not really such a backwater.

So there are six regions, Old Toronto, York, East York, North York, Starborough, Etobicoke,

that are then by the province in the 1990s, they're going to get amalgamated into a megacity.

And fucking nobody wanted it at all.

No one in Old Toronto, no one in the metro areas.

76% of voters rejected it,

including in North York.

But the conservative provincial government was like, fuck you.

You're going to be amalgamated.

Canadian Shenzhen.

Yeah, so yeah, we were going to be Canadian Shenzhen.

At a recent anti-amalgamation rally, he waved around the province's map of the new municipal boundaries and said, you don't find North York anywhere on this map.

North York will be gone.

They're carving us up like a turkey and it isn't even Thanksgiving.

Lastman then chanted as he announced the results, no, like crossing his fingers, like, no, big money, big money, no whammies.

He was like, no megacity, no megacity.

Wait, you're carving us up like a turkey by combining us into one big thing?

Yeah, like how you combine a turkey.

You're amalgamating us like a chicken nugget.

Yeah, that's the real, that's the analogy.

You've turned to North York into.

So Lastman becomes mayor of Amalgamated Toronto because basically there's like, okay, well, there's no one who's mayor of Amalgamated Toronto.

They should keep calling it Amalgamated Toronto the whole time like you should that should be the name of the city and you have to say the whole thing like a tribe called quest yeah it's amalgamated toronto is like the setting for my the worst cyberpunk novel ever written

the corpos are onto us neo tokyo and amalgamated toronto only two cities are left to the post-nuclear wasteland Amalgamated Toronto is about to e-x-p-l-o-d-e.

Yeah, I

oh, God.

God.

Good for health, bad for education.

So he ran this really flashy, gaff-prone campaign.

Only the sun, which is owned by the same people that owned the British Sun or the New York Post, supported him.

But he was constantly getting media attention in the news.

And he was running against a woman called Barbara Hall, by all accounts, a sort of left-leaning technocrat liberal, who was just very serious about being the mayor, who had, it was not fun.

Like, she wasn't wacky at all.

She was the opposite of Mel Lassman completely.

All she wanted to do was like work with other mayors.

Oh, no.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm so sorry.

Which message will resonate with voters?

And the two messages are like quite an elaborate and technical program to improve people's lives in a reasonable way.

And I must be crazy to sell a sofa for this list.

And that's why they put me in here.

It's like genuinely.

I get the sense that Barbara Hall is the kind of politician that Keir Starmer imagines himself to be.

Oh, absolutely.

Wait, I have a question because I feel like like I can intuit it from the kind of guy that he is but Mel Laspin's like actual politics uh-huh he's like is he I mean he's a conservative yeah he's a conservative he's a tax slashing

he's a tax slashing conservative but he's not like

social conservative quite as much like he's he's more like a median voter he's just has a bunch of random stuff yeah well he well he's he's not a social conservative because his life was changed when he went to prison for selling a chair for too little yeah he's a prison abolitionist

I should be able to price my chairs how I want without being criminalized.

Full D-Crim now.

It turns out that those commercials are actually like pretty, pretty like emotionally searing depictions of the like violence and trauma that prison causes.

Yeah,

I'm for the Nordic model, which is when they build an IKEA.

Can I get a clip of a really clean clip of Maddie saying, I'm for the Nordic model?

No, I don't.

Okay.

I want, so here's the thing is, I'm for the Nordic model, comma, it's when they build an Ikea is a really funny joke that's very good.

Unfortunately, I don't believe it.

Yeah, it's good.

It's a good bit.

We should keep it in.

That's fine to keep in.

To be clear,

I'm not for the Nordic model in real life.

I'm making, I'm presupposing

a thing for a setup for a joke on my comedy podcast.

About further.

So you're saying to me that is comedy illegal?

I'll never do that because that's how you get in real trouble.

Yodo.

Is comedy illegal now?

Yeah.

Hey, hey.

I mean, besides the answer being yes.

Like, let's stick to the facts, huh?

Let's stick to the facts on the show.

So,

yeah, he runs.

Basically, it's like the kind of wacky salesman, like the human, wild, wacky, inflatable, arm-flailing tube man versus Barbara Hall, the quite serious technocrat.

Okay, and I'm assuming this is the end of the episode and she won.

Yep, yep.

Bye, Mel.

No.

So the Patreon is no gods, no mayors.com.

Thank you for listening.

So the thing is still going.

Mel cannot stop saying crazy shit during the campaign.

So, for example, he's like, look, if I'm faced between shoveling every driveway or helping feed hungry children, I won't have to think very long about my decision, said Hall during a debate with Lastman, meaning I'm going to feed hungry children.

Mayor Hall, there's a big difference between us.

You can't wait to spend taxpayers' money, and I can't wait to save it.

You know, so it's like,

God, he talks in furniture.

He talks in ads.

Another thing Hall said on Hall about a writer writer and commentator at the time, she's not especially gifted in the art of twisting arms.

She's proven herself to be an effective promoter, a reasonable consensus builder, and a politician with a substantial understanding of the relationship between cities and local governments.

Oh, God.

I know in my heart this is going to be like bath party margins.

Yeah.

So Hall says, I'd like to lead a city where more, because she was the mayor of old Toronto, which is very liberal.

Right.

It's like, it's,

I'll go on though.

She says, I'd like to lead a city where more people take the time to pick up a piece of garbage and fewer people run red lights.

A city where we see our neighbors as reflections of ourselves, as false, hopes, and virtues not unlike our own.

I'd like to lead a city that shines out to the world, not as a glittering neon sign, but as a beacon of compassion, tolerance, and hope that the world can look to with respect.

Meanwhile, Mel Lashman.

That's Lisa Simpson.

That's Lisa Simpson running for office in a city that has just been amalgamated with every Hitlerite suburb that surrounds it.

Yeah, it's a city that elected Rob Ford, basically.

So he used to say

he companed like on the promise of freezing property taxes, despite Toronto, quote, downloading a lot of new costs in the amalgamation.

When asked how he would do it, he simply said, look, if I try to prove it, everyone's just going to start poking holes in it and they're going to find a million different ways of proving me wrong.

So I'm not going to prove it.

It checks out.

It's an uncosted manifesto because if I costed it, people would yell at me.

Yeah.

He also like denied homelessness was a problem on the same day that a homeless woman like died of cold exposure in North York.

He also said, I want heavy penalties for young people.

I don't care if they're age 10.

I want to see young offenders penalized.

I don't want to see them walking the streets.

I'm not talking about stealing an apple.

I'm just talking about something a serious crime and should be punished.

So he's basically like, yeah, jail for 10-year-olds.

Well, because the thing is, they're selling that furniture way too cheaply.

Look, they're selling pickles for three cents.

If you don't intervene on the pickle sellers now, by the time they grow up, they'll be selling like sofas and beds and stuff.

Yeah, I know because of my lived experience.

experience no i i like when he's like i'm gonna feed hungry children the well some of them the other ones i'm going to put in prison oh no sorry susan hall said she wanted to feed hungry children oh i'm so sorry no mel lastman said he wanted to shovel the driveways that makes more sense yeah a child in every driveways also feeding children by putting them in prison in that they have food in prison but he then said uh he admitted that his pro his policy of jailing 10-year-olds was a mistake saying quote i was thrown a 10-year-old is a little young but a 12-year-old knows a little better and maybe maybe something should be done about them.

When I was 12, I knew the price of a chair.

Just turning the big dial back and forth.

Yeah.

Again, he like also came up with this idea to freeze property taxes for 10 years, improvising, talking at a senior citizen's home in Etobicoke.

He just made it up.

He's like, I don't know, 10 years.

Why not?

Anyway, Lastman wins the election and he carries Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough with Hall winning East York, Toronto, and York.

This is the exact Rob Ford divide.

I was going to say, wasn't this whole thing with Rob Ford only one because of all those suburbs that had been added?

Yep.

Yeah.

That's one of the main reasons the conservatives wanted to amalgamate Toronto is they wanted to eliminate this quite like progressive city.

And they, hey, guess what?

They did.

They succeeded.

Good job.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, so one more, one more video now.

The vibe of Blasphemy Mayoralty is just open up that little video right there.

Oh, yeah.

Hold on one second.

There's a I'm having an issue with my, there's a cat on my desk.

And I, okay.

Oh, this is a Cronenberg worker.

Okay.

Oh, god i hate this guy already

yeah because he's a he's a huckster right yeah this is this is huckster stuff mel wants you yeah

hi i'm mayor mel and you're on the air

phone facts or email i want to hear what you have to say

questions comments kudos

whatever

So he and his deputy mayor, Case Oots, then basically run the city.

But the funny thing is, a lot of what they do, a lot of they spend their political capital on, is trying to screw with the mayor's lifelong enemy.

Well, let's fucking go.

Also, can we circle back to Case Oots?

Yep.

Case Oots.

Case Oots?

Or as you'd pronounce him in America, Case Outs.

Thank you.

Boo!

So.

There's all this.

This is the, like, literally these two guys, since they have known each other they have been in municipal government in North York and then Toronto for exactly the same amount of time and they have hated each other like they are each other's mortal enemies.

They hate each other.

This guy called Please tell me about his nemesis.

This is a guy called consular Howard Mosco.

So Howard Mosco, yeah, started hating him in North York and stayed hating him for the rest of both of their lives.

Lasman spends a huge amount of time as his first term as amalgamated Toronto mayor, trying and failing to get this guy fired as TTC commissioner, uh, Toronto Transit Commissioner.

Moscow is also the son of Jewish immigrants, but was often the only left-wing voice in North York Council.

He was an anti-apartheid activist, a teacher, a union firebrand, a fierce supporter of LGBTQ rights at a time when ridiculously conservative Toronto was banning even like mentioning homosexuality on subway advertising.

Well, I mean, that's the kids might find out that they're gay from subway advertising, which is maybe the funniest way to have it happen.

So he was also very gaff-prone.

He was like an exact reverse nega lastman, essentially.

He had a wario?

Yes.

Although I technically, I think Mel Lastman is Howard Moscoe's Wario.

One of you has to change your name to Firstman

to make this work.

The Globe and Mail,

Canada's New York Times, called him Mr.

Dress Up, which is our version of Mr.

Rogers is called Mr.

Dress Up.

In 2007.

Don't worry about it.

Fake country.

Fake first country.

That sounds like a new slur for trans men.

Mr.

Dress.

Oh, hey, Mr.

Dress Up over there.

Sorry.

I'm looking at what Mr.

Dress Up looks like because I'm really going to be surprised, I'm sure.

Uh-huh.

Okay, so

he's wearing, he looks like, what's that Marvel guy that's got like the four quadrants Morpho or whatever?

That's what he looks like.

I hate this.

I hate Mr.

Dressup.

You hate Mr.

Dress up.

No, Mr.

Dress Up's good.

No, sorry.

Sorry.

I won't stand for this Mr.

Dress Up slander.

Show me, computer, show me Mr.

Dress Up.

What the fuck?

Yeah, I don't like this.

He looks like he's in the fucking like 2CB marching band.

Why?

What?

Oh, I don't care for any of this at all.

This is clownish.

This looks like somebody making fun of Canada by being like, you know, Canada has their own Mr.

Rogers called Mr.

Dress Up?

And he's wearing big old.

This is the head of like a kind of...

like mid-ranking communist party official in the Soviet Union that has been grafted onto some kind kind of like children's entertainer.

Look, Mr.

Dressup was, he's good, all right?

Let's not start talking about Mr.

Dressup in any bad ways.

There's something Fed-related about Mr.

Dressup.

There's one here where he's got like a jacket with too many arms on it, but he looks uncannily like George Smiley in Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy.

Yeah.

And he just, but if George Smiley had like three or four more arms.

Yeah, guys, guys, I have bad news.

He also,

kind of haunted.

I was going to say, I have awful news.

The NKVD has killed Mr.

Dressup for advocating for reform.

Comrade Dressup.

It says, look, we.

Smiley, we knew that your weakness was your puppet wife, Anne.

You'd never be able to see me.

Well, it's about him learning to

lose that and eventually becoming the same as his nemesis, you know.

Mr.

Dress Up.

Maybe Mr.

Rogers is his Carla.

So it was his decision.

Basically, Mr.

So you have to wear costumes.

That's what they called him Mr.

Dressup.

Okay.

But it's to his decision to delegate the costume wearing that in part caused a city councilor to resign from the TTC Pizzazz Committee in 2006 that he formed because Mr.

Moscow requested that the counselor,

sorry?

The Pizazz Committee?

The Pizazz Committee?

Sorry,

your subway doesn't have the...

Does New York City subway not have a Pizazz committee?

I mean, we've got a Razzle Dazzle Committee, but a Pizazz committee sounds ridiculous to me.

No, that's, hey, what the fuck is the TTC Pizzazz Committee, please?

I mean, the Chief just has to show this

committee.

Yeah, they have a Pizzazz committee.

It's like out of making it fun, right?

Making the subway fun.

Anyway, Moscow had requested that a counselor wear a bunny costume and ride the subway.

The thing is,

country.

Oh, my God.

The thing is that, like, Mr.

Dress Up would be such a devastating fucking insult were it not referencing an extant thing that demonstrates how fucking stupid the country that you're in is.

There's a little more Canada slander than I expected on this episode, okay?

Okay, well, you can't bring up Mr.

Dress Up and Pizazz Committee in the same paragraph.

You can't just give me Mr.

Dress Up.

So Moscow once said of his relationship with Last.

World-weary Canadian politics insider being like, yep, looks like Mr.

Dress Up's fucking with the Pizazz Committee again.

What?

Okay, well, now when you say it like that.

We are a serious country, by the way.

We will not be responding to the president's cease and desist letter about our ad featuring them.

So if I said a blackboard was black, Mel would say it was green.

Philosophically, we're at the opposite ends of the political scale.

I didn't really dislike him, but I did love toying with him.

They dissolved the Pizazz Committee in 2006?

that's because moscow got removed from the ttc by lastman that year the pizzazz committee was moscow's thing it's like this this bunny suit is the last straw

and the thing is moscow no no i'm gonna tell the whole story so their their hatred of one another started as what as something of an accident because local reporters of like north york daily news would need some filler last minute and moscow would just like trade barbs to make headlines Moscow once said, I told Mel one day, you've made me famous.

When are you going to make me rich?

But Moscow also basically existed to try to fuck with Mel as much as possible all the time.

For example, last minute, because he was a North York councilor and last one was North York mayor.

Last minute was part of a drive to have a magazine called Now removed from North York City Hall because there were ads for sex workers in the back of the paper.

During one council meeting, Lastman would marvel at the various sex acts advertised in the paper.

He'd be like, Blow job?

and stuff like this.

Lastman then went on vacation, and Mosco was deputy

mayor for one week.

And at that time, he presented the now magazine co-founders, Michael Hollitt and Alice Klein, with an award formally recognizing the paper's contribution to journalism from the government of North York.

Batrolls.

He also

said,

but he also didn't just fuck with him in fun ways.

He also was like, hey, you're trying to publicly fund a performing arts center, but like that what's happening is this one guy is going to get really rich off of it and so on and so on.

on.

But my favorite one is that Howard Moscow's wife bought Mel Lastman's toupee at a charity auction and then Moscow would bring the hairpiece to North York Council with him and just pretend to dust stuff with it in front of Mel Lastman.

Full spectrum Canadian psychological warfare.

Just all your ventures, everything you have ever done, every breath that you take is going to be opposed by me in a way that is both theatrical and attempts to exemplify Pizazz.

Yeah.

This is, they remind me of like the last two Jewish guys in Kabul who were like, we built different synagogues because we hate each other.

We're just, we exist to squabble.

So anyway, he also, Moscow, weirdly, led the charge to rename a major square in North York as Mel Lastman Square when he was still alive and was still alive and was mayor.

However, it was then revealed.

Well, he was trying to land at I sure hope he is.

Well,

it was even more elaborate than that.

He was hoping that it would make Mel seem like an old hat who'd already been commemorated and pressure him into retiring.

That's a deep level of hatred.

I'm very here to that.

He also followed Lastman to the Amalgamated City Hall.

Why is Moscow trying to get it renamed to Mel Lastman Memorial Square?

Oh, he would have called it that if he thought he could get away with it, to be clear.

He hated this guy.

He also, when Lasman became mayor of Toronto, Moscow stayed as a counselor in Amalgamated Toronto, where he continued to hate him.

Like, Lasman did everything he could to try to get Moscow removed from that post as a TTC commissioner where he would like had the Pizzazz committee.

And Moscow never stopped in his taunting of Lastman for the council chamber.

But remember, I said.

Firing Moscow was a big focus of Mel's first term.

He finally did it, but he could only do it after the 2000 election election because Moscow was so well liked.

He replaced it with a guy called Brian Ashton, but Ashton wasn't as pliable as Mel would have wanted.

So he got rid of him and replaced him with a lady called Linda DeZero, who quit to become a garbage lobbyist.

And then Moscow was just next in line.

I'm sure she's a fine lobbyist.

Yeah.

Moscow was just next in line and then was spot welled into place the rest of last month's term as mayor.

So he like got rid of him for like six cunts back.

Yeah.

Moscow's boomerang.

So wait, wait,

going back to Mr.

Dress Up and George Smiley, it's Moscow rules.

So after Lastman's death, Moscow said, you know, I didn't actually dislike Mel as a person, but I didn't have a lot of sympathy for him either.

He was sort of a precursor to Rob Ford, Donald Trump.

He was the outrageous larger than life, but I think he did what he could within his limitations.

So the moment Mel Lastman dies, Howard Moscow is like, hey, it's fine, I guess.

Laying down my decades-old feud instantly and with a disconcerting amount of ease and just being like, Yeah, you know.

I don't know.

I did what he could.

Like, this, to me, this is my favorite part of the whole story: is that there are two mortal municipal enemies.

It's like, I hated him while he was alive.

And then when he was strict atheist nemesis, who doesn't like come to your funeral after you die is just like stops being your nemesis.

It's like, oh, yeah, doesn't exist anymore.

Not my problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

i i will waste no more energy on hating you from beyond the grave i'm just gonna go about my day advocating for like

like progressive policies in toronto moscow's still alive um so what were what were last

salutes to him you know oh a hearty salute to to howard moscow um so what were mel last minutes concerns he was a lot like rob ford really He was about to slash taxes, hire cops, jail 12-year-olds.

It was the standard stuff.

He didn't want to do anything particularly unusual except for devote all the power of the mayoral office to fucking with one man that he couldn't really do.

Listen, if you're going to take a guy like Mel, who does seem like he is maybe a little bit evil deep down, if you're going to get one guy to be sort of the sin eater for all of his evil to be focused on, it's not a bad way.

to get him to leave the city alone.

As you sort of deploy one member reincarnated as a lotus flower.

There were also a few funny gaffs.

There was some funny gaffs, some sort of quite, you know, again, this is a really racist guy gaffs.

One of the funny ones was there was like a blizzard into January 1999 in Toronto

that like just melted basically immediately.

But before it did, Mel Lassman called the army in and soldiers and tanks rolled into Toronto to rescue everyone from the snow banks, but the snow just melted.

And so they were like standing around thinking, what the fuck are we doing?

Yeah, they should have sent the Army Pizzazz Committee,

which I assume the Canadian forces have.

Yeah, the whole

costume.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he also, but gets it.

You're trying to, reaching for an unusually specific insult against the Canadian Grenadier guards and being like, oh, you mean the Canadian Forces Pizzazz Committee?

That's so specific.

This is going to lead to me getting in a fight on the Canada tour where like some like guards veteran like full force breaks my nose or something.

Yeah.

It says your ma'am on Twitter, you called the RCMP Mr.

Dressup?

Yeah, getting banned from Canada, but it's it's it's like I'm banned from all of North America for different reasons.

The Mexican Navy want to kill me because of a, well, there's your problem episode.

Donald Trump wants to send me to El Salvador, and the Canadian Border Force want to like deport me back to the UK because of my Mr.

Dress up bits.

You're allowed it.

You're allowed in like Saint-Pierre and Mikolo, and that's it.

In 2001, prior to leaving for kenya to gain support for toronto's olympics bid lastman said i don't want to go to a place like mombasa i just see myself in a pot of boiling water with natives dancing around me holding spears oh kill this guy yeah cool yeah oh boy yeah also uh he had an affair that produced uh several children uh in 1974 he cheated on the wife who like quit her job for him back in the day yeah and called him a little schnook yeah unfortunately and said he was a bad husband.

What a piece of shit.

Yeah, he fathered two sons with her, Todd and Kim, during a 14-year-long affair.

She worked at Bad Boy, but also his wife was.

There's another controversy on his wife.

His wife, very rich, very fabulous, very glitzy.

In 1999, she was apparently she loved shoplifting.

Like, she was addicted to shoplifting.

Go, boss.

Yeah.

Okay, go, yeah.

Shoplifting.

Shoplifting rocks, and I wish I could still do it.

If you, if you've, if you see an obscenely rich woman shoplifting, no, you didn't.

Yeah, she's dealing with ennui, okay?

She's just trying to feel something.

So this is from a 1999 edition of Toronto Life.

I'm quoting.

These same media outlets heard that millionaire Marilyn Lassman was caught stealing a $155 pair of designer pants at an Eaton store.

No charges were laid.

Guess who ran the story?

Nobody, to quote Lassman's well-known furniture chain advertisement.

Is there a double standard at work here?

You bet there is.

The story only came out because Mel Lassman threatened to kill and or have fired local CBC reporter Adam Vaughan when he accused of leaking an oblique story in the Shop Living Incident to Frank magazine.

That covers a lot of ground to be like, I'll get you fired or killed.

Whichever is more convenient.

I'm going to broadly change your personal circumstances and life.

Are you ready for a change between zero and 100%?

All right, you lucky.

You're going to have to change your Facebook status to dead or unemployed.

Either one.

Works at not being alive anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're going to be at City Hall filing a certificate of death for yourself or getting unemployment.

And I'm going to figure it out on your way down there.

But one of those, you have to go.

All right.

They call me Johnny Percentages.

I'm going to roll this hundred-sided dice and it's going to see how much your life changes based on my input.

All right, I roll the five.

Give me your shoe.

Hold on, let me look at my sheet that says each number.

You're lucky this wasn't a six because that's both shoes.

If I roll a one, you get a little kiss on the cheek.

It could be unnerving.

It's a lot of work making up those actuarial tables.

Well,

a good DM puts in the work ahead of time for Johnny percentages.

It's 1999.

I had to do this on graph paper.

Yeah.

Look, you've seen the movie.

Look, you've seen the movie No Country for All Men.

I just think that there could be more than two outcomes to our interaction right here.

It's not really a coin flip for me.

I'm like Anton Shigeru.

I don't know if you're ever lost on a D20 roll.

Ah, yes.

But I don't know what skill check I'm making.

You don't know.

Don't write it down.

Don't write it down on your character sheet.

Then it just becomes another gold piece.

Oh, God.

D and D ant on sugar should really.

Oh.

Oh, God.

No.

Of all the podcasts I do, I expected to spin off into another D ⁇ D podcast.

It wasn't this one, but I'm ready for it.

I'm ready for that arc to happen.

I am so ready for a municipal D and D, and

one of the characters encountered by the party is Johnny Percentages.

Okay.

All right, we're back.

Oh, well, that's the trailer if I ever get back to cussing those.

So

the Toronto Star went with this angle reporting on the theft.

The mayor has been under personal strain since his wife Marilyn was apprehended in a Vaughan mall and arrested over stealing a pair of designer pants.

So it was very hard for the mayor when his wife stole the pants, which is why he threatened to kill that guy or have him fired.

Or have him

or take one of his shoes.

Give me a shoe.

So

also with crisis, it was also like.

When SARS was happening in Canada, he was like, what's the World Health Organization?

What's SARS?

I don't really care.

But he won re-election in 2000 by like 80%.

But then the proper scandals actually began.

And Toronto amalgamated.

It started leasing a lot of computers, including for a company called MFP.

A treasurer, by the way, at the time was a woman called Wanda Leitzik, who was a North York Lassman person.

Over the duration of this agreement, the city paid like double, like 85 rather than 40 million to this company, computer leasing company.

Hey, he's buying computers for two Canadian dollars instead of one.

Yeah, that's right.

It's all the publicity stunt.

And it's like he wasn't really involved in this, but like it was corruption that was in his city hall because it turned out that there was a whole like inquiry into it that one of the salespeople at MFP, a man called Dash Dome.

You can laugh at his name.

It's ridiculous.

Well, is he related to Ty Dome?

He is.

It's his brother.

It's his brother.

Good.

Ty Dome,

a famous hockey maniac.

Yeah, a goon.

Canada's best goon.

Like a true goon, like a guy that is who could not skate or do anything with a stick.

All he did was punch people in the head, including, am I inventing one time he did it to someone in the stands uh no you're not inventing that uh that happened yeah okay cool i think he also like he used to try to deniably hit the refs as much as he could

well critical school for that because refs are cops no gods no mayors no refs

so yeah he this yeah so dash doby is the older brother of ty domey hockey's foremost goon and he received like millions of dollars of kickbacks for securing this computer lease much of the testimony presented at the inquiry also alleged a pro improper financial relationship between Domi and a guy called Tom Jacob, who was the city's budget chief at the time of the contracts.

Basically, they found that MFP paid Jacob to attend like Leafs games in Philly and go flying private jets and all this stuff.

Hold on, hold.

Yeah.

Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.

So

I'm reading Ty Dome's Wikipedia page and

learning about the incident in

which he hit the fan.

Sitting in the penalty box, Domi used his water bottle to spray at a heckler, prompting another fan to begin yelling at him and climbing up the glass.

The glass panel gave way and the fan fell into the penalty box.

Domi then grabbed him and punched him several times.

After the game in an interview, Domi said to the media, it's nice to see the fans get involved.

Yeah, oh, he's he's a fucking maniac.

I think, I don't know if this is true, I think he still to this day holds the record for the most fights ever had in a hockey game.

Yeah.

That sounds right.

333 of them.

That's like across his career as well.

I think he holds both records, most fights in an individual game and most fights overall.

Like he's winning everything.

He's like one of these like runners that just like is perfect at 100, perfect at 200, perfect at 500, amazing at 800, wins the marathon, just sweeps it in terms of being a fucking goon.

Beautiful.

So basically, MFP, this MFP guy, Dash Dome, he withdraws $25,000 from his bank account and then phones Tom Jakobek.

And then both of them are seen going into the same city hall parking garage for 13 minutes.

And two days later, Jakobak pays $21,000 in a family vacation to Disneyland.

Dash and Ty Domey both testified that this was just a birthday, that the withdrawal that Dash made was not a bribe for Tom Jacobic, but a birthday gift for Ty.

And you know what?

I would believe that you would want to give a generous birthday gift to Ty Domey.

Otherwise, he might start punching you.

Now,

Jacob said, No, my, the payment on my credit card for the vacation came from my father-in-law, who is also a Toronto counselor called Ken Morris.

Anyway, also at the same time, in a separate affair, Wanda Lightsick, who I mentioned earlier, was like improperly awarded millions of dollars in contracts, different scandal, to an American software developer she was sleeping with.

Like, all of this stuff was all happening.

This woman's having a great time.

Like, and it all comes from going on the computer, you know?

Well, from his computer.

Uh, so this weirdly, weirdly, this led to the huge raft of ethics legislation getting passed in Toronto that is like in like in municipal Toronto, which is one of the reasons why like all of Rob Ford's abuses of power were so weirdly small time, like using a bus to move his hockey team around or like using city letterhead to solicit donations.

Like, ethics rules really tightened up after this, which is why it was so weird.

Um, anyway, uh, Lasman's health rapidly deteriorated due to hep C he contracted from tainted blood transfusion in the 80s, plus cancer.

He then resigned the mayoralty in the early 2003.

Still very popular, not as popular as he used to be because of the scandals.

He died in 2021.

He gave few interviews other than to reconfirm that he loved his wife, but he should have left politics sooner.

Bad Boy went bankrupt for the final time, having gone bankrupt several times in its existence.

In 2024, Howard Mossy.

Maybe they should have sold the furniture for more than they were selling it for.

Yeah, well, maybe.

Although, to be fair, they got like 70 years out of it.

yeah

he finally he finally the um the prophecy that he would become a memorial square uh finally happened

all right 70 years a bad boy that is my second hometown hero that is mel lastman what do you think i think he's cool as hell this has been beautiful yeah yeah i'm i gotta be honest i was one shot by johnny percentages and i will be thinking about johnny percentages for the rest of the day that is all i I can think about.

Well, hey, you out there, if you have a hundred-sided dice, roll it and then allow it to impact your life by that much.

Otherwise.

You've invented the Yi Ching.

Yeah, of course.

But in the form of a kind of

a mobster who I'm imagining is Johnny Tightlips, just so you know, when he's in my head, he's Johnny Tightlips.

The Italian-American Y-Ching.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think what I would say to you, Riley, is that you've been rolling it your whole life and you just didn't know it.

God damn it.

Anyway, I want to thank you.

I really thought it was going to be Mr.

Dress Up, but in fact, it's Johnny Percentages.

I want to thank my co-hosts in the municipality, my co-mayors, my alder women, for, as always, another wonderful episode of

this beautiful, odd, strange, kind of racist man.

And also, this is a free episode.

Yeah.

So there's going to be a bonus.

Who's mayor next?

I believe that's November.

Is that my decision?

My God.

It's your decision.

Well,

between two and three.

No, no, no.

Well, so what the Metaculus has guided me to is

between two and three relatively anonymous mayors of Denver in order to tell a story about another guy.

So

please subscribe to the Patreon for that because I promise it's worth it.

Trust me on this one.

Trust me with your $5 a month.

That's right.

No GodsNomares.com.

No GodsNomares.com.

Check it out.

Are saying.

And let me ask you something, listener.

If the rules of 5e brought you to this

of what use.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

Okay.

Love you all.

Bye, bye, bye.

Bye.