• Would letting stores stay open for Christmas help ease overcrowding on days immediately before and afterward and avoid scenes like this 2010 Boxing Day madness at the Eaton Centre? The City of Toronto wants to know if you’d like to spend your holidays shopping, and it’s conducting a retail holiday shopping consultation to get feedback on whether Toronto’s Holiday Shopping Bylaw, which requires most retailers to close on nine holidays each year, should change. Take the online survey here.
• Aiming to encourage winter cycling in the city, one of our heroes, Bixi Toronto, is launching its Winter Warrior Contest. Bixi Toronto’s most active members between January 1 and March 31 will win prizes, and the person who racks up the most kilometres will be crowned the Winter Warrior King or Queen.
• Knowledge is power, the saying goes, so when it comes to municipal government, the more a city’s citizens know the better. In recognition of cities that made their data public in useful ways this year, Atlantic Cities put together a list of the best metro data releases of 2011. Alongside Vancouver, Edmonton, London, and a few U.S. cities, Toronto made the list for a data set about our one-way streets, which is available here.

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• The last Saturday before Christmas is often the busiest shopping day of the year, and spending time in overcrowded, sauna-hot stores is likely to put a frown on many faces. So Improv in Toronto‘s Gift for Strangers mission, in which volunteers handed out presents to unsuspecting passersby near the Eaton Centre on Saturday, was both well timed and well placed. Look at those smiles.
• Will you still be around when the Port Lands development project is finished? According to John Lorinc, writing for Spacing, the way things are going now, it will take a century to build out the area, and Waterfront Toronto needs to start borrowing money to speed things up.
• Those suffering from Bieber Fever who don’t have tickets to his December 21 concert at Massey Hall had better be ready to shake every last penny from their piggy banks. Toronto Life reports that tickets for the sold-out concert are going for as much as two grand on eBay. People know he cut his hair, right?
• ‘Tis the season when some people bring conifers into their homes to set them up as tinsel-covered shrines. So what better time to worship the trees in our city, from sunrise redwoods in the east end to a 24-metre red oak in Kipling Heights? From the Globe this weekend, a list of Toronto’s top 10 trees, as selected by local landscape architects, urban designers, ecologists, and business leaders.
• Craig Silverman posted his annual roundup of media errors today on Poynter.org, and two Toronto publications were lucky enough to make the list. The Toronto Sun and a Toronto Star website both earned recognition, one for calling Bob Kinnear, president of Local 113 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, a “union mob boss” and the other for receiving a request for an unnecessary correction from a reader. We’ll let you guess which is which.

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• We’ve all passed them on our way to jump on a train, and dropped a coin or two in their hats, but how often do we get to hear musicians who perform in TTC subway stations talk about what they do? Ryerson film student Jackson Fishauf directed and edited Subway Tracks, a nine-minute documentary about those musicians, for a film production class. We think it’s pretty pro.
• Canadian Architect magazine announced the winners of its 2011 Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence, and some local firms and projects got a nod. Recognized for their “architectural design excellence” are: Patkau Architects Inc., in joint venture with Kearns Mancini Architects Inc., for the Fort York National Historic Site Visitor Centre; gh3 Architects and Landscape Architects and R.V. Anderson Associates Limited for the Storm Water Quality Facility at Lake Shore Boulevard East and Cherry Street; and Zeidler Partnership Architects, in joint venture with SNØHETTA, for the Ryerson University Student Learning Centre.
• We called them and their fellow GSA-involved peers heroes, and now 30 students at St. Joseph Catholic Secondary School in Mississauga have been named Xtra‘s Toronto newsmakers of the year for founding the first gay-straight alliance in an Ontario Catholic school (though they’re not allowed to call it a GSA). Andrea Houston discusses the group’s achievements here.
• Global News map-master Patrick Cain took a look at Ontario’s drunk-driving statistics and shared the results earlier this week. Notably, he discovered that some of the lowest rates are right here in Toronto: “Every Toronto subway or LRT station is in a postal code with drunk driving rates below the provincial average.” Reason number 8,375,896 to expand our transit system and try to keep it affordable. [via OpenFile]
• Rob Granatstein, writing for Toronto Life, has some advice for our mayor: start running Toronto with an “an eBay expert’s mentality.” That is, rather than selling off City-owned assets now, fix up and sell what we don’t need to pay for what we do (which, in Granatstein’s opinion, is the TTC, Toronto Water, and City Hall). Read the full story here.

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Image courtesy of the Rob Ford Book Club.

• Aiming to give a boost to the Toronto Public Library’s holiday donation drive, an anonymous group has created the Rob Ford Book Club, to which library fans can donate $10 or more in the name of whoever they choose, and the club will send that person a gift card (the organizers suggest making a donation in Rob Ford’s name). Click here to find out how to donate.
• Do you know what your neighbours are hiding? It might be feathered. Toronto Life talked to nine closeted hen-havers in the city, and discovered that backyard chickens are becoming Toronto’s favourite pets-with-benefits.
• The Toronto Zoo has issued an update on the progress of its African Penguin Breeding program, and it includes news on everyone’s favourite bonded-penguin duo, Buddy and Pedro. As it turns out, Buddy and his buddy enjoy the company of female penguins as well as each other. After having been introduced to their female partners, Buddy, who met his lady friend on November 19, has been observed participating in breeding activity, while Pedro, who was introduced to a group of females on December 1, has been courting a special someone but has yet to go “all the way.”
• If you missed the chance to don a Santa hat and strip down to your skivvies to support the Hospital for Sick Children, maybe pick up A History of Healing, a book on the hospital’s 135-year history, that just came out. See a selection of the photos here.

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• This morning, the City’s parks department removed dozens of love locks from Humber Bridge, leaving just three behind. City parks manager Kevin Bowser told the Star that the department would consider holding onto them for a short period of time so that couples who installed the locks as a symbol of their everlasting love can reclaim them. Aww.
• The Globe has posted its own version of Awkward Santa Photos after readers sent them shots of their kids’ traumatic encounters with mall Santas. Sometimes, all a kid wants for Christmas is to jump off of a red-suited stranger’s lap.
• An update on the Mimico 20/20 Revitalization Action Plan, care of The Grid: waterfront revitalization west of downtown is moving at a slow pace. Like it is in the city’s core, Lake Shore Boulevard in Mimico is cut off from the lake, and, as has happened in other evolving Toronto neighbourhoods, the area’s current residents are worried about intensification and big, bad condos.
• The TTC took a step forward with the proof-of-payment fare system on its new streetcars, but Toronto transit still has some catching up to do. What’s in our future? Chicago and Philadelphia are both pursuing “open payment” fare systems, where riders can simply tap their debit or credit cards to pay. John Lorinc, writing for Atlantic Cities, has all the details here.

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• During one of their get-togethers last month at No One Writes to the Colonel, Choir!Choir!Choir!, Toronto’s come-one-come-all singing group, took on Wham’s “Last Christmas.” Videographer Amanda Lowe was there to record it and last night she posted the video. On a gloomy, soggy Monday, we figured your hearts could use some warming.
• People in Toronto line up and camp out overnight for all sorts of reasons: concert tickets, movie premieres, Apple product launches, and so on. This weekend, though, they lined up for free turkeys. Sunday was the 24th edition of the Honest Ed’s turkey giveaway, and City News reports that “hundreds” lined up outside the Annex store, some arriving as early as Friday night. The annual tradition has become so big that Rob Ford declared yesterday Turkey Day. [Insert gravy joke here.]
• It’s gift-giving season, and the clever people at Spacing are launching new products for the left-leaning, civically engaged person on your list. The Rob F#*king Ford line of buttons and magnets are based on notable Ford brothers’ shenanigans this year, including plans for a Port Lands Ferris wheel and Doug Ford’s dustup with Margaret Atwood. Read more about them here.
• Keeping tabs on the goings-on at city hall, with its many committees and councils and panels, is a lot of work. So we’re happy to share word of a new feature on the City of Toronto website that lets you subscribe to council and committee updates by email. Updates will include links to and notices about meeting agendas, decisions and minutes, supplementary materials, and meeting-schedule changes.

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Yonge and Dundas, with its billboards and expanses of concrete, may be the spot in Toronto that seems most removed from nature. But this video is a good reminder to look up every once in a while.

Karen Whaley (a former Torontoist contributor) was waiting for a streetcar at the intersection around 5 p.m. Saturday evening when a flock of birds caught her eye. “Suddenly I looked up and there was a massive formation of birds swooping around the billboards on the north side of the street,” she told us via email. “It was totally enthralling.” Whaley says only a few people noticed at first, but as the flock got bigger, everyone at the stop was looking up. “For the next few minutes until the streetcar arrived (for once, a bit too soon) it was like we had our own mini airshow.”

Whaley notes that since then she found out the birds were starlings, which in a flock are called a murmuration. “Most of the starling murmuration sightings I’ve seen on YouTube are taken in natural settings rather than urban one, so I don’t know why the starlings were hanging out at Yonge and Dundas Square on Saturday,” she wrote.

If Absolut Vodka somehow trained the birds to flock around the billboard, we salute their clever viral-marketing strategy.

Hat tip to David Topping.

• Remember that time, earlier today, when it was like winter for a while? Once the sun emerged later in the afternoon and melted pretty much all the white stuff, it was like it had never happened. Still, we think this pile of seasonal objects, spotted in the Runnymede area, neatly sums up today’s not-so-subtle reminder that winter is approaching and you’d better start your holiday shopping soon—or at least remember to buy a snow shovel.
• The ghost bike that was installed at Dundas Street West and Sterling Road as a memorial to Jenna Morrison, who died there early this month, is gone. Morrison’s family requested the removal, and a volunteer for Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists carried it out, reports David Topping for The Grid. A friend of Morrison’s commented on Facebook that the family wanted to “return this gesture of solidarity [to ARC] in the hopes that they never need to use it as such again.”
• As we reported earlier today, Torontonians are amazing Movember participants. And, according to numbers released today about this year’s campaign, it seems that enthusiasm is country-wide. This year, Canada has surpassed Australia, where Movember began, as the country that raised the most cash for Movember. As of this morning, Canadians had raised $32,669,522, up from $22.3 million last year, according to CTV News.
• New approaches to urban development in Toronto always catch our eye, and a new idea proposed for the King-Spadina area did just that, writes Bert Archer for Yonge Street. Today a number of architecture firms—including David Pontarini, Les Klein, and Core Architects—gave area residents a presentation on their proposal to develop “land-locked properties,” pieces of land with no street-facing addresses. Councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) compared the developments, which would likely include pedestrian walkways, to Berlin’s hidden courtyards. Sounds nice, actually.

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If you’ve got a burning desire to depute at an upcoming Budget Committee meeting about the 2012 capital and operating budgets, take note. The meeting to hear public deputations, which was originally scheduled for December 8, has been moved to December 7 at 9:30 a.m. Budget Committee chair Mike Del Grande has told the City Clerk that he wants a few procedural motions in place, which means that participating in the meeting will take a bit more planning than usual. Here’s what you need to know:

• Deputants have to register by 4 p.m. on December 6 (usually registration is allowed up to when the meeting starts).
• No overnighter this time around.
• The meeting will end at 9:30 p.m. on December 7 and, if necessary, will resume at 9:30 a.m. on December 8 and must end by 9:30 p.m. that night. If you’re counting, that’s 24 hours of deputations.
• Del Grande noted during Monday’s budget launch that it may be that the committee runs out of time, over those two days, before all registered deputants have had time to speak. No extra time will be accorded, after December 8. Instead, any deputants who are registered but do not get to speak will be invited to submit their thoughts in writing.
• To make the most of those 24 hours, he’s leaving the door open for a motion that would reduce deputants’ and council members’ speaking and question times. Del Grande will make these motions at the start of the meeting, to be voted on by all the Budget Committee members present.

There are two ways to request to speak. You can call or email the Budget Committee secretarial contact, Merle MacDonald, at buc@toronto.ca or 416-392-7340, or, once the meeting’s agenda is posted, you can click the “Request to Speak” button that will appear at the top of the page for each specific agenda item, which will let you send a message to request to speak about that item.

• All eyes were on City Hall this morning as the 2012 Operating and Capital Budget Launch got underway. Considering what’s at stake and harmful rhetoric leading up to today, it’s not too surprising that things got heated, and by noon, Budget Committee chair Mike Del Grande was running out of patience. Toronto Sun reporter Don Peat tweeted: “Cllr Janet Davis asks city staff if they’ve quietly budgeted for savings from a labour disruption. Budget chief cuts off question.” And, as anyone familiar with Toronto’s City Hall watchers would expect, a Twitter meme was born.
• On account of all the waiting, TTC users have a lot of time to dream up improvements to their transit system (and, of course, those who use many of the TTC’s buses and streetcars will soon have more). Here’s some fodder for those stranded-on-a-platform fantasies: the National Post‘s Peter Kuitenbrouwer presents six dream improvements to the TTC that will likely never happen, including the Downtown Relief Line and linking the TTC’s and GO Transit’s fare systems.
• No doubt Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham gets a lot of confidence from his band’s many fans, but in an interview with Xtra, he reveals his self-image has been boosted by one particular group of fans: bears. Abraham shares the story of the first time he performed with his shirt off, boosted by encouragement from a member of queercore punk band Limp Wrist: “Scott says, ‘You look amazing with your shirt off,’ and no one had ever said that to me at all. It was incredibly liberating, in a physical and spiritual kind of way.”

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• Torontonians think they live in the centre of the universe and see all things in relation to their city and yadda yadda yadda. You’ve heard it before. South of the border, New York City residents have a similar reputation, and ExtendNY, a Google Maps–based application that extends Manhattan’s street grid over the entire globe, is a deliciously quirky representation of it. Using it we find that Yonge-Dundas Square is at 2,174th Avenue and 1,126th Street, and Cairo’s Tahrir Square is at 32,040th Avenue and 84,479th Street. [via Atlantic Cities]
• Part of the debate over bike lanes is how effective they are at separating cyclists and motorists. To test the power of a line on the road, James Schwartz, of The Urban Country, and Dave Meslin, founder of the Toronto Cyclists Union, conducted a bike lane experiment on Sterling Road near Dundas, where Jenna Morrison was struck and killed on her bike earlier this month. According to the results posted by Schwartz and Meslin on their respective blogs, it turns out that, even if that line is made from bits of trash, drivers notice and steer clear.
• Sometimes you just have to ask. Determined to reduce bullying at his school, and having experienced it himself, Etobicoke School of the Arts student Jacques St. Pierre decided to organize an anti-bullying assembly, particularly to address harassment of LGBT students. In addition to asking students to sign pledges to tackle the problem, he contacted several celebrities and asked for their support. He got it, from both comedian Rick Mercer and Lady Gaga (maybe you’ve heard of her?), who sent a video message that was played at the assembly.
• Denise Balkissoon has been doing great work covering the Byron Sonne trial for OpenFile, and today she filed another update, which includes a video of police questioning Sonne. Balkissoon notes a comment in court from a police officer that, when they searched Sonne’s house three days before the G20 began, they found chemistry equipment. Mind you, it wasn’t assembled.

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CORRECTION: November 25, 2011 This post originally stated that another report by Denise Balkissoon on the Sonne trial, which was in fact published on November 11, was published today. We regret the error.

A rendering of what will either be named the Vaughan Centre or Vaughan Metropolitan Centre subway station. Image courtesy of the TTC.

• Based on public consultations via an online survey this fall, TTC staff have released a report recommending names for the stations on the Spadina Extension. The report recommends that the commission approve the names Downsview Park, Finch West, York University, Steeles West, and Highway 407, and rename what is now Downsview station to Sheppard West. It also disagrees with Vaughan City Council’s recommendation to name their new station Vaughan Municipal Centre and supports the name Vaughan Centre instead.
• Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes many people to make a high-profile album, and the majority of those people don’t get a chance to shine. With that in mind, AUX tracked down 10 Torontonians who contributed to Drake’s Take Care, including photographers Hyghly Alleyne and Lamar Taylor; musician and producer Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, who also did background vocals; Noah “40″ Shebib, who did a bit of everything on the album, it seems; and, yeah, Drake himself.
• The unveiling of new Blue Jays logo last week was met with mixed reviews, but what do the people who have to wear it think? Well, okay, this video of J.P. Arencibia and Brett Lawrie interviewing each other about the Jays’ new look is hosted on the official Blue Jays site, so it’s bound to be positive. But isn’t it nice to hear some optimism?
• This Magazine announced the winners of this year’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt today, and a couple of Torontonians are on the list: Andrew Shenkman won the Fiction category with his story “Salt Water” and Selena Wong‘s “Criss Cross” won the Graphic Narrative category. By the end of this week, all of the winning entries and second- and third-place finalists will be up on the site.
• Starting on March 23, 2012, the Power Plant is offering free admission for a year, thanks to the Hal Jackman Foundation. The gallery is celebrating its 25th anniversary next year. While the move makes it easier for everyone to visit the Power Plant, which is undoubtedly a good thing, Toronto visual arts watcher Leah Sandals wonders whether one year of free access will be enough to gain them a new, loyal legion of patrons.

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