First off, some local news:
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| The Rob Ford stencil from an alley on Queen West. |
The Globe and Mail: Almost all snow-clearing to be contracted out, as city hires three people to fight graffiti
"As well as the job cuts, talk of three new jobs gained attention during Tuesday's budget talks, as news surfaced that the city was hiring three people as part of its plans to fight graffiti - a campaign pledge of the mayor and a key policy since he took office.
The three positions, two project leaders and one manager, come with salaries of between $70,000 and $100,000 and were posted in late October."
Do I smell gravy? Next up, from Grand Forks, B.C.:
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| Photo by CBC News |
CBC News: RCMP admit to monitoring B.C. graffiti artist
"Dion Nordick found two surveillance cameras hidden in trees near his trailer home in June. He took them down and found pictures of himself and friends coming and going from his home.
Nordick also found hundreds of pictures of drug busts, suicides and assaults that hadn't been erased from the internal memory card."
And finally, a fun general interest piece from south of the 49th parallel (may require login?):
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| Photo by Jens Mortensen / New York Times |
The New York Times: Who Made That? The Origin of Spray Paint
"Early nonradiator-painting devotees tended to split into two camps: protestors and vandals. While it is impossible to determine the first student or activist to aim an aerosol paint can at cardboard or buildings, forefathers of the latter include Cornbread and Julio 204, the Philadelphia- and New York-based artist-defacers, who took advantage of the technology to make their tags (né names) well known in the '60s and '70s. Spray paint, after all, was the ideal medium for this form of branding."