Anyway. Since last night was the Great Woods Music Festival opening night (with a frothing explosion of nature's fury immediately afterwards), and this weekend is the two-day summer tournament amongst the local fighting game scene (and do feel free to come out, if only to say hello), I'll have to figure out when to squeeze in my previously promised Islendingadagurinn post.
(Wait, the Bombers game is on tonight? Son of a--)
But all that can be put aside, temporarily, because I have information of immediate interest to pass along.
Walking to the bus stop from work a few hours ago, to begin my journey home for the day, I heard tell from word on the street -- quite literally, in this case -- that the owner of the local Gourmet Cup coffee shops is a predatory pedophile.
Wait, what?
You can't see it, but I'm pantomiming a doubletake right now.
As you can read for yourself, I'm not making any of this up:
(sic):
"WARNING -- The Owner of the Gourmet Coffee Cup is a Pedophile and is stalking our young girls of our Community of Brokenhead Ojibway Nation Since June / 2007. He Lure's them with Drugs and Money."
Ho-lee. Well. Huh. That's not something I was expecting to read in passing today.
Now, this is a particularly harsh accusation to be levelling at somebody -- especially when the extent of the evidence offered is a series of mostly identical placards. Mall security had a few representatives standing in, but they clearly had no inclination to move these women from their position:
Mind you, this probably falls outside their jurisdiction. The demonstration was outside the building, nothing was being shoplifted, and no laws were being broken (assuming for the moment that the message isn't defamation); what were they going to do about it? I would have assumed, were this condemnation a baseless claim, that the people specifically hired to protect mall business would have done something about the situation by this point -- but one of my roommates worked security for a while, back in the day, and he later assured me that security does not actually have to do much about these sorts of things.
You can draw your own conclusions from all of this, of course; heck, for all we know so far, the owner of the Gourmet Cup might be out there next week holding a sign that says "Those aboriginal women last week were actually guerilla Starbucks employees out to undermine our proud local businesses." (That's not going to happen, of course -- but I would pay good money to see him try that, now that I've thought of it.)
We'll see what if anything develops from this opening salvo of nastiness, or if it even gets reported in the papers tomorrow; I'm just passing along what I saw, particularly because it was not something I thought I would be seeing.
I swear, if I find out tomorrow that the Fyxx runs an underground drug cartel or something, I'm just going to give up and switch to tea. Multinational corporations are immoral scumsucking world-destroyers, local businesses are allegedly run by sexual predators -- could somebody please just sell me a big cup of black coffee without being all evil about it? Really, now?
4 comments:
Wait a minute......is that the same coffee shop where I get bubble tea whenever I'm downtown? I hope not. I talk to the owner there whenever I go........
Dear.....I want to stay tuned to this ongoing story.
Toi Kong the owner of the Gourmet Cup is indeed a gutless phedophile. I stood and talked to these women for a period of 45 minutes and as i stood there one young lady commented on how she see's him hitting on young girls all the time as he is working in gourmet cup, another young lady also said she felt discusted when she was approched bye this man to go smoke pot!! these women are doing justice for themselves and protecting their young girls from this phedophile, because the law would not as you see in the papers all the time sexual predator released high risk to re-offend. So why let the creep out to begin with? because women are worthless and can take a raping? so come on justice like this should be supported, at least Toe Kong is not in a foreign contry where the family would be allowed to kill him in whatever way they choose suitable for the phedophile. I commend these women for caring so much for their girls to have the currage to do this for them as should you!
If Goumet Cup has pedophiles and The Fyxx has Drug Cartels..
Then that must mean Tim Hortons must be linked to the Al Qaeda!
For some reason, absolutely nobody else anywhere -- either in the blog world or in the actual media -- has made mention of this yet. (I'm still holding out hope for Uptown on Thursday. Don't let me down, alternative press!)
I am distinctly uneasy with the idea that somehow I've accidentally become a primary outlet of citizen journalism. How the hell did that happen? Didn't we used to have a bunch of other blogs in this city?
Anyway. Let's see what I can make of this.
I hadn't known previously that the owner's name is Toi (or Toe?) Kong; for reasons I won't speculate on he doesn't list his contact information online, and for reasons I won't speculate on the demonstrators hadn't written his name anywhere on their placards.
Manitoba Justice's online Sex Offender Notification site has no listing for a Toi (or Toe) Kong; this doesn't necessarily mean that he isn't a convicted offender, only that he isn't considered or registered as a high-risk offender by the Manitoba government. Beyond that, and beyond the name and information of his chain's parent company, I'm not sure what more there is I can offer yet about this story.
I keep thinking it would be proper procedure to try and get the other side of this story for the sake of perspective, but I suspect I wouldn't get very far in questioning the owner directly. Call it a hunch.
If he's ever been to court about it, nobody (not even the initial protest) has made mention of it; nobody else has seemed willing to go near this, and the demonstrators seem to have found no outlet outside of Friday's showing.
(If there is fire behind this initial smoke -- and so far I have no reason to rule it out -- my initial suggestion to these women would be for them to try and contact Colleen Simard; given her track record, this seems like it would be right up her alley. And certainly she'd be able to do more with the story than I could, because she is a prominent Aboriginal columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and I am a very-slightly-Aboriginal-but-mostly-white unknown blogger who writes about rainbows and geese.)
Still, though. I remain terribly interested in the whole situation, and I eagerly await the next salvo from either side of the story.
Also: no way is Tim Hortons involved with Al Qaida. Their proud Canadian reputation (despite being owned by Americans) forces them to invest in some good old-fashioned local evil, which is why any minute now they'll probably pump some money into the Spirited Energy coffers just to completely infuriate me.
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