CELEBRATION: St. Lawrence Market has been a culinary hub of our city since even before we were a city (talk about putting the cart before the horse). This year, while the City of Toronto is celebrating its 175th anniversary, St. Lawrence Market is celebrating 205 years of food and freshness. It won’t be your usual Saturday at the market with live music, buskers, cooking demonstrations, children’s activities, and guided tours of the building. In honour of the city’s birthday, many farmers, merchants, and artisans will be featuring products for the special prices of $1.75 and $11.75. St. Lawrence Market (93 Front Street East), Saturday 9 a.m.–4 p.m., FREE.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort, the product of a team of reporters, photographers and editors working in concert to produce the kind of activist agenda that has served Star readers and our community so well for so long...To remove a critical element of that work is to shortchange everyone who depends on it."

Last week, Live Green Toronto, the City of Toronto’s website for eco-friendly living, launched a new transit shelter advertising campaign with a unique twist: passersby can flip a giant switch that turns the ad on or off. The ad’s text encourages readers to "switch this poster off," and to switch on Live Green’s website for information about saving energy and living green. The ad was designed by Agency59, a Toronto-based advertising agency, and installed by Astral Media, the company behind Toronto's street furniture. While it’s undeniably clever, the execution is a little flawed.

Kensington Market will soon be designated a BIA (that is, a business improvement area), pending near-certain approval by City Council this winter, according to a city staff report, released on Monday. A few area business owners have mixed feelings about the impending designation, but many see it as the best way of ensuring the future of the chaotic little neighbourhood in the heart of Toronto.

Enduring bouts of rain and hail, about a thousand students, workers, and community members marched through downtown Toronto yesterday as part of the Drop Fees for a Poverty Free Ontario campaign. At 4 p.m., they arrived at Queen’s Park to demand that the provincial government start "investing in the people, 'cause we are the solution," as the chant went.

"I probably don't even need this microphone, to be honest!" Frontman Odario Williams and the rest of his genre-bending hip-hop group Grand Analog launched the Toronto Public Library's current Make Some Noise series straight from the kids' section of the College/Shaw branch last night, and the alternative venue proved a somehow very fitting setting for an affair that's typically relegated to dark clubs at late hours that no adorable two-year-old would ever be able to attend.

Our pets are catching the swine flu! And not just our pet swine! Confirmed cases of housepets gettin' sick with H1N1 are giving us some kibble for thought today. Maybe it's time to make some new flu-naming rules, though, because this is pretty complicated. While humans can't get equine flu from a horse, apparently we might be able to catch swine flu from a parrot and then give it to our cat. Dogs are virtually people-flu proof, but humans deliberately infect ferrets with our influenza germs. Rabbits are just a total wild card. And don't even get us started on the iguanas. People are being cautioned to take steps to protect their pets from the Pig, but the vaccine is still for humans only—felix no can haz.

FILM: Filmmaker and scholar Jean-Pierre Gorin, companion of Nouvelle–Vague visionary Jean-Luc Godard throughout his Dziga Vertov period, is in Toronto for his self-curated series "The Way of the Termite: The Essay Film." Gorin will introduce Chris Marker's Sans Soleil tonight to launch the series, which runs until December 3 and will also feature a couple of Gorin's collaborations with Godard (Ici et ailleurs and Letter to Jane), as well as the Canadian premiere of La Rabbia di Pasolini. The films screened over the next month explore the balance between history and anecdote, fact and fiction. Each work speaks as clearly about the filmmaker as their world views, resulting in the perfect meeting of art and politics. The series invites audiences to reflect on how we think about history and how we process current events through images, which is particularly poignant in an age of media saturation. TIFF Cinematheque (2 Carlton Street), 7 p.m., check online for ticket prices.