Thanks to Ivor Shapiro for sending this:

Search for Rob Ford on the Globe and Mail‘s web site and you get this link to a column printed in the Saturday Oct 15 Focus section:

Rob Ford’s not popular despite being fat. He’s popular because of …
Oct 15, 2010
“Toronto municipal contender leads with his gut – where post-industrial angst is writ very, very large.”

Click on the link, however, and you get:

404: File not found
Oops! We can’t find the page you’re looking for.

Some readers (see Monday’s letters page) found offence in the column’s references to the Toronto mayoral candidate’s girth. Surely that wouldn’t be enough for the Globe to pull the story from the Web — unexplained? And yet, the link has been missing all day.
Here’s the column’s start (they haven’t pulled it from Factiva, yet)….

Headline:

Rob Ford’s not popular despite being fat. He’s popular because of it
Toronto municipal contender leads with his gut — where post-industrial angst is writ very, very large
BY Stephen Marche WC 871 words
PD 16 October 2010 SN The Globe and Mail
“The mounds of fat that encircle Rob Ford’s body like great deflated tires of defeat are truly unprecedented in Canadian politics.

We have had chunky political candidates before, but the front-runner in Toronto’s current contest to be mayor is so fat that his belly is invariably the first thing you notice about him.

Yet far from harming his political image, his bulk is the key to his appeal. Neither intelligent nor sympathetic, Mr. Ford offers voters fat. And we want fat. In fat, we see ourselves.

Let no one confuse Rob Ford’s obesity with jollity. Every extra pound on Mr. Ford’s frame is an extra pound of rage. His angry fat is perfectly of our time.

Fat is the physical manifestation of postindustrial life. It is no coincidence that the obesity crisis in North America has occurred simultaneously with the decline of manufacturing in our cities. The foods that we love to eat originated in a time when the lives of men and women were devoted to manual labour.”