Photo: "_MB_4037" by blogTO Flickr pooler 9ineteen.

Your afternoon news roundup for Wednesday February 13th, 2008:

Pop quiz. A parabola with vertex (2,0) and axis of symmetry parallel to the y-axis, passes through (3,1) and (-3,t). Find the value of t. Find this difficult? A lot of Ontario high-school graduates do too (and without looking it up, I don't think I could answer this with any degree of confidence if my life depended on it).

It isn't easy being one of nearly 10,000 taxi drivers in Toronto. A collaborative report by Toronto academics points to worsening problems with work hours, pay, and abuse by customers. They work hard, folks. Be nice.

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Former Toronto Blue Jay pitcher Roger "The Rocket" Clemens is on the stand, and throwing fastballs at the congressional hearing investigating the use of steroids and human growth hormone in Major League Baseball. Clemens insists that he's never used them, and his trainer claims he stuck him with juice many times and that he has needles with DNA to prove it. Why the US congress is wasting their time and resources to investigate doping in sport is beyond me. Shouldn't this be in baseball court or something?

Some wiseguy stole a backhoe, drove it to a coin-op car wash, and used the shovel to rip the coin bank out of the wall. He was spotted by a snowplow driver who engaged him in a low-speed chase before the wiseguy gave up and ran off only to have his footprints in the snow tracked by police, who arrested him. All allegedly, of course.

The TTC has figured out what caused the derailment of a subway car last week, and has given the media a lovely schematic to refer to while scratching their heads trying to understand it. A questionable part of the undercarriage will be replaced on all cars in the H6 fleet, as a precautionary measure.

And police have confirmed that it was in fact a student carrying a microphone tripod from Sheridan College's Media Arts program that triggered the 3h emergency lockdown. Whoooopsies.