Culture: October 2009 Archives

Well, look who's offering candy to babies now. Stephen Harper ditches the friendly blue sweater in favour of something a little spookier in this politically themed Halloween montage in Little India. On Woodfield Road, the resident artist's lawn arrangement is placed perfectly for tonight's festivities—the city will be closing down a portion of the road tonight from 6–9 p.m., where a fire eater will be taking the place of cars. And while the performer is busy chomping on flames and captivating the eyes of kids, well, here's hoping the politicians don't pop out and try to eat the children.

Halloween has long provided an excuse for Torontonians to relax and cut loose their stiffer qualities for at least one day. Whether it’s infants dressed as garden vegetables and insects or downtown revellers dressed in outfits that can’t be mentioned in family publications, Toronto has long loved assuming disguises and participating in all of the accompanying rituals that go along with today. A flip through old local newspapers shows that pranks played a large role in past Halloweens, from harmless showoffs to destructive blazes. For better or worse, tricks were as equally important as the treats.

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Blackface: probably still not the best idea for a Halloween costume.

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

The Pleasant View neighbourhood in the northeast corner of North York looks placid enough—comfortable middle class demographics, a community centre to take a relaxing skate or swim, and so on. On the surface, the only thing that appears askew is an inability to determine if the neighbourhood’s name should be spelled as one word (the recreational complex) or two (city documents and the local library branch). But one look at the intersection in front of the swimming pool hints that darker forces lurk in the background.

Unbeknownst to many, Toronto is full of landmarks, private homes, and even university buildings that supposedly shelter real live ghosts. From the McLaughlin Planetarium at the ROM to the Queen's Park vaults, these are the places that keep ghostbusters in business. Here are a few options if you're looking for a proper scare this Halloween.

You know the old saying: laughter is the best philanthropy. Earlier this month, the Stephen Lewis Foundation, in an effort to further fund its community-driven education and action programs in AIDS-ravaged Africa, launched the A Dare to Remember program—individuals take on dares (no wiener truths) and get cash sponsorship for seeing it through. Local actor and comedian Pat Thornton was recently challenged to participate, and came up with an idea that was, in hindsight, possibly on the overachiever's side of dares. "I was walking by a canvasser on the street and he recognized me because he was an editor on a show I was on. He said I would be great for their Dare to Remember program, so I talked to some friends and came up with the idea of doing stand-up comedy for twenty-four hours. I don't know why I said twenty-four hours...I think people would have been impressed if I said six."

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Over a year ago, Gary Rideout, Jr. of the Sketchersons bought a former Eritrean restaurant and pool hall at Bloor and Ossington and transformed it into the Comedy Bar. And his timing couldn't have been better. With venues like the Diesel Playhouse shuttering and big standup chains acting cool to so-called "alternative" comedy, Rideout's spot provided a haven for purveyors of standup, sketch, improv ,and acts that don't fit neatly into a category.

The success of and interest in Toronto breweries has taken off as the push to eat and buy local food has branched into the beverage industry. With big names like Steam Whistle and Mill St. battling it out with emerging brands like Great Lakes, the industry is seriously booming in this city.

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For the second year in a row, readers of the alt-weekly that we have never written anything critical about, not even once, have voted Torontoist Toronto's Best Blog. Aw shucks, NOW readers, thanks. We accept.

Here's my question—since the rush-hour crowding at St. George is verging on the very dangerous, why not put the moving sidewalks back in at Spadina and promote the use of Spadina as a transfer station?

Wanted: a good home for a down-on-its-luck newspaper box for a defunct newspaper. It's been living on the streets for five months and deserves to reside inside a warm house with a loving family during the coming winter.

It's sick season again, but in the wake of scary-sounding names like swine flu and H1N1, there is increased skepticism around the subject of vaccination. Anti-vaccination activists claim that the materials used in vaccines may cause autism, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and even—in the case of the HPV vaccine—cervical cancer, and that their widespread promotion is motivated by corporate profiteering. Vaccination proponents say that the fear-mongering anti-vaccination campaigns are rooted in bad science and misinformation, and that the increasing hysteria is leaving schools and workplaces alarmingly vulnerable to serious, often life-threatening diseases. In some facilities, like hospitals, seasonal vaccination is mandatory, and while the vast majority of medical and science professionals say that the safety of vaccination is not even worth debating, there are still people who are convinced that vaccines are nothing but trouble.

Toronto's undead community is set to rise up for the second time in less than seven days.

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Toronto’s finest gathered at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on Monday to see and hear 250 teenagers from Venezuela. The world-renowned Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel (the Mick Jagger of orchestral music), awed the packed house for more than two and a half hours.

The buzz around local dreamy folk group the Wilderness of Manitoba continues to build in some pretty likely places, and it's easy to see why: their debut EP, Hymns of Love and Spirits, is an ethereal, reverb-soaked finger-picking slumber party with lush harmonies and sad overtones. It sounds exactly like the name suggests, playing almost like a paint-by-numbers indie folk guide, and its overly precious repetition is actually easier to roll your eyes at than it is to love. But there's an unnerving quality to it too—it's more than just starkness (calculated) or nature noises (really?), and if you do a little digging, the hidden loss and hurt give it a raw edge that the campfire quality never could.

We’d like to offer a toast to the unheralded service industry workers who served up fine fountain drinks back in the 1960s. Whether it was a bow-tied bartender who knew the perfect mixed drink to suit his or her customer's needs or a bow-tied teenager asking if you'd like a Coke with your burger and fries, these professionals required the finest of beverage-dispensing equipment to quench the thirst of bowlers, brides, and boozers.

Only four sleeps left 'til Halloween! Have you decided what you're going to be yet? Zombie Michael Jackson? Balloon Boy? Racist? What about Hitler?

Today's Events

Contrary to what Google Street View indicates, Browns Line doesn’t have a huge gap in it. Although Google has mapped most of the city in 3D, Street View still has a few dark spots, including almost all of the neighbourhoods of Alderwood and Long Branch, an area east of the Greenwood Subway Yards, and a residential neighbourhood southwest of Finch Avenue East and Warden Avenue. We smell conspiracy, and based on the omitted areas, we can only conclude that Google is covering up some sort of secret government plot involving City Councillor Mark Grimes, outdated factories, subways, and 1960s-style bungalows. God help us all.

Twelve thousand dollars. That’s the budget the organizers of the first edition of the International Festival of Authors (or Harbourfront International Authors' Festival, as it was called then) had to work with in 1980 to showcase twenty-two writers of varying infamy. Capacity crowds throughout the six-day event proved to organizers and potential sponsors that Toronto could support a literary festival.

                                   

It's a bit early for the dead to rise this month. Toronto's annual zombie walk—the seventh, can you believe—happened a full week before Halloween. But considering that the cruising speed of the average zombie is slightly faster than the Gardiner Expressway on Friday night, one week is probably about enough time to allow them to complete the course.

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Today's Events

University College has long been one of Toronto's most admired buildings. Its Gothic Revival style, inspired in part by the Romantic poets, impressed such distinguished nineteenth-century visitors as Anthony Trollope, Governor General Lord Dufferin, and Oscar Wilde. In Landmarks of Toronto (1893), John Ross Robertson called the University of Toronto building "the crowning architectural glory of Toronto." Perhaps befitting its moody architecture, University College is also home to one of the city's best-known ghost stories. Versions of the story differ, but each follows the same basic plot.

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the Toronto Maple Leafs' start to the 2009/10 hockey season. It's not just the lack of wins that's puzzling: it's how bad the team's looked in compiling its 0-6-1 record. Right now, the Leafs seem bereft of talent, ideas, leadership, and desire. Surely they won't be like this all year?

Today's Events

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

                                   

Despite extensive coverage by both online and print media, Monday's splitting of the 24-kilometre Queen streetcar route came as a bit of a surprise to many, necessitating lengthy explanations at the new turnpoints (Parliament, Shaw), as well as the odd enraged passenger (a particularly vocal, slightly off-kilter, middle-aged man waiting at Shaw screamed, "Where is the Long Branch and all those f**king c**ksuckers at?!"). In the name of research, Torontoist travelled the entire length of the route, beginning at Yonge and Queen, continuing all the way east to Neville Park, and then traversing the entire 24 kilometres to Long Branch, getting off and on as required. To see how we fared, see the photo gallery above.

Melanie Doane wants to teach us all a lesson in ambidexterity. And she's not the only one.

Today's Events

In the latest in our series of live online discussions co-hosted with our partners at the Globe and Mail, at 5 p.m. today, Thursday, Torontoist will be joined by the Toronto District School Board's new Education Director, Chris Spence—and he'll be taking your questions. Though Spence is proposing a whole host of changes ("more parental engagement in education, 'full-service schools' with facilities to support students' families, better digital technology in classrooms, green-energy initiatives, and a renewed effort to stem losses of 4,000 students a year by hiring a marketing director," as the Globe sums it up) he's most in the news for proposing an all-male elementary school.

       

Despite all the drama Bridgepoint Health (and the Don Jail) went through between Doors Open and now, they broke ground right on schedule just this past Monday and put the wheels in motion to build the new Bridgepoint Hospital with the adjacent old Don Jail being repurposed as a research and administration facility.

If something looks a little amiss about the model in the advertisement above—if her head looks a bit too big for her body, her torso a bit too compact to be natural, her arms, dear God her arms, doing things arms don't do—all can be explained: Bikini Bay on Queen Street West apparently offers its models, like its swimsuits, in "mix & match."

Today's Events

One month ago, we reported on Toronto Life Square's quiet transformation into 10 Dundas East, the result of the magazine's struggle to get their name removed from the flailing project that dominates the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas. Digital signage around the building was being changed (to a much worse design), though "Toronto Life Square" signs still lingered—as the name did on the building's website.

Effective Monday, October 26, it will be illegal to operate any handheld device while operating a vehicle in Ontario. Following years of studies demonstrating that holding a phone to your ear while driving shows a similar level of impairment as driving drunk [PDF], the province has banned any handheld electronic device that takes a driver's attention away from the road: no dialling, no talking, and—we can't believe we have to say this—no texting or emailing. And this should be obvious, but if you're behind the wheel and need to call 911, call 911. Tickets won't be issued during a three-month education period (though police can still lay charges if talking on your beloved BlackBerry leads to other violations), but after that, it's handsfree or hands off. Recent evidence seems to show that even taking a call on a Bluetooth headset might pose a similar risk to holding a device, so expect to be entirely incommunicado on wheels some day.

Today's Events

If you've spent today warding off swarms of insects that don't look quite like regular ladybugs, don't be alarmed: they're just Asian ladybird beetles, and they're trying to make the most of an atypically warm fall day.

Like a ray of pop-nostalgia sunshine, the new self-released, self-titled EP from Everything All The Time finds its way into our sad-bastard acoustic hearts this week. It's a committed pop record that is technically pretty removed from a lot of the easy indie rock cop-outs that get thrown at the messy-haired, bespectacled sextet, but don't be afraid—they keep the conventions and the company (oh, and live drums), so no one will ever know.

And what are your kids doing tonight, besides hanging out in a dimly lit club?

A few nerdy dudes, two couches in an otherwise barren basement, and a video camera. With MuchMusic turned over to Leah Miller's minions and whomever wins the all-pervasive VJ Search 2.0, this simple format stands as a striking alternative to the glamorous folk with the obnoxiously loud in-studio audience on Queen West. But with the launch of AUXtv, with an impressive 285,000 viewers in its first week, the channel's new late-night spot—Talk Show Night at Juicebox Manor—may look more like the future of cool music programming for the coveted 18–34 set.

We have to admit we kind of like Fever Pitch. Sure, it's a formulaic rom-com, but it's a lot better than what we typically have to sit through. More to the point, it makes such great use of its Boston locations (particularly the stuff in and around Fenway Park) that you would hardly know how much of it was shot here.

The Mill is definitely one of the most exciting things happening right now in Toronto theatre. It's a series of four plays written by four of the best young playwrights around these parts (Hannah Moscovitch, Matthew MacFadzean, Damien Atkins, and Tara Beagan), each centred on an historic Ontario mill. And while that might sound at first like typical Canadian theatre fodder, there is more than one twist: MacFadzean's play (Now We Are Brody), the first in the cycle, is set in 1854; Moscovitch's (The Huron Bride) is set twenty years prior; Beagan's (The Woods), another three hundred years prior; and Atkins's (Ash) is actually set in our own future. Plus, there's lots of ghosts and gore.

Why doesn't the City use electric trolley buses instead of streetcars? These at least have the advantage of being able to change lanes (so as to not block two lanes when dropping off passengers).

In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."

Though the smell is more grilled sausage than ham and some of the lettuce may be shipped in from faraway destinations, the atmosphere evoked by this description of St. Lawrence Market from a 1976 Toronto Star profile still rings true. At the time those words were written, the market neared the end of a decade of rehabilitation that reflected changes in attitude towards historic properties in the city. The north side saw the old knock-it-down attitude at play, while the south was spared a date with a wrecking ball in favour of renovation. Otherwise, you might have enjoyed this morning’s mustard sample or peameal bacon sandwich in a building that lacked more than 150 years of history.

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

In an ad for a recycling campaign, it seems appropriate, clever even, to recycle elements of an old image. But when the ad is for Belgian beer, and the logo belongs to someone else, it doesn't make much sense—particularly when the designer fails to ask permission for its use.

"It basically started as a way to hopefully get free CDs." In what seems like a dream to those of us yet to turn our internet noise into an escape from day jobs and a licence to sleep in, Dan Wolovick has, in a few short years, turned his reviews-based music blog Two Way Monologues into a full-time job. "I became inspired [to put on live shows] by a friend from a band who challenged me for never doing anything [besides] criticizing bands in reviews, and I've never looked back."

Book season is well and firmly upon us. Like the changing colours of the leaves and the rediscovery of the scarves in the back of your closet, the sudden surge of literary prizes and the annual return of the International Festival of Authors signal that autumn is decidedly here. And it makes sense, really: what better way to combat the chill than with a pile of books that keep you safely indoors?

It was only a matter of time before someone did a clown show about the financial crisis. We always had the feeling the recession was actually the set-up for a really good joke, and SPENT, the new play created through the joint efforts of TheatreRUN, Why Not Theatre, and Theatre Smith-Gilmour, promises to deliver the punchline. It sounds like a good idea: the show is created and performed by Ravi Jain and Adam Paolozza, two of our favourite young theatre artists, with the assistance of Michele Smith and Dean Gilmour, two accomplished old hands at physical theatre. Yet somehow, even though this is a subject we would all surely love to be able to laugh about, SPENT doesn't quite give us the giggles we were looking for.

The internet, many people like to remark offhand, is killing print. With a twenty-four-hour news cycle better served by the instant response times of broadcast and online outlets (including the online arms of print publications who will run those same stories in the next morning's paper), e-books finally taking off, and shortening attention spans that prize bells and whistles over the sedate pleasures of slow perusal, the old-fashioned printed word is facing hard times. Or so this line of thought goes.

With the closure of Pages Books a couple of months ago, Toronto lost one of its great literary institutions. As we reported at the time, however, the news wasn't entirely grim: "There is, fortunately," we said, "the silveriest of silver linings, which is that Pages' much-loved programming, run under the banner This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS), will continue."

It turns out that technology once only dreamed about in the back of comic books is now a reality: T-ray scanners may soon be deployed at an airport near you, and they know what you look like naked. Transport Canada is now reviewing a six-month trial of the security scanners, which are currently only voluntary and are used only when someone has set off the metal detector. The subject's body is scattered with terahertz radiation, which—unlike X-rays—are believed to be harmless to human tissue. A technician reviews the scanner results in a windowless room, and the resulting images are anonymous, incredibly unflattering, and decidedly unerotic. Images can't be stored, faces are obscured, and cameras aren't allowed in the viewing room. Still, opponents say that peering at nude bodies is even too extreme for already-excessive security theatre, and may even run afoul of child porn laws. According to a spokesperson from the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, however, 95% of travellers in the Kelowna, B.C., trial preferred it. If approved by Transport Canada and the Canadian privacy commissioner, the high-tech peepshow could be coming to Toronto airports soon.

David Miller's announcement on September 25 that he would not seek re-election took many by surprise—including, no doubt, those at Toronto Life. With the big expanse of time between the time articles for the magazine are finalized and the time the completed publication is actually distributed (a delay typical of monthly magazines), the November issue is only now beginning to land in the mailboxes of subscribers. Somewhat awkwardly, it features a full-page look at how Miller stacks up against six possible competitors in the mayoralty race he took himself out of three weeks ago, complete with each one's odds of winning against Miller. And we quote: "A lot of people think David Miller stinks, and not just because of the 39-day garbage strike. But do any of the other likely candidates have what it takes to knock out Toronto's top dog?" The answer: yes, all of them. But only because he knocked himself out first.

The Star recently redesigned their website. Not only does the new site serve up breaking news with style, but, as we discovered, it even makes the CN Tower into a cloud pooing machine. Developers at the Globe and Mail have likewise been very busy on the bizarre web idiosyncrasies front. Their site is now offering readers thirty lives.

The Diableros have always had the unusual ability to both show and grow; their jumpy beats and awkward vocals are way too in-your-face before you have the chance to actually hear what's going on, let alone absorb it, but eventually the structures unravel. The band's new EP on Outside Records, Old Story, Fresh Road, sticks close to this mandate, but a fresh lineup and streamlined recording process have also added a new focus and a clear direction.

Continuing the merry trend of importing whatever's been a hit on Broadway or the West End from the past several years, CanStage kicked off its current season with Tom Stoppard's latest effort: Rock'n'Roll. In this show, a decades-spanning epic, Stoppard tells the story of a Cambridge University family who become involved with a visiting scholar from the former Czechoslovakia. It opens shortly after the Prague Spring of 1968 and finishes up at a Rolling Stones concert just after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The history of communism in Czechoslovakia is interwoven with the history of rock'n'roll music, as well as Czech scholar Jan's interest in civil disobedience (and Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe), Marxist Cambridge professor Max's family life, and the mental decline of Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett. If you think that sounds like rather a lot of things to be jammed into a single play, you are absolutely right. In fact, it's far too many.

Based on these ad campaigns for two of Labatt's top-selling brews in 1960, we surmise that 50 was targeted to men who indulged in a healthy round of log rolling/jumping or other potentially fatal tomfoolery while downing a few stubbies, while IPA was intended for the alpha male who wanted no distractions, apart from watching his favourite sport, while indulging in his favourite beverage.

It's hard to deny that Robin Williams can be a funny fellow, and he even earned an Oscar for Good Will Hunting, which, of course, was shot here.

In the name of reform, nineteenth-century politician Robert Baldwin was a thorn in the side of more than one governor of Upper Canada. As a result, he has been called a lot of names. One governor, Lord Sydenham, dubbed him "the most crotchety impracticable enthusiast I have ever had to deal with." Another called him "such an ass." Neither seems especially fitting given that Baldwin always carried himself with an impeccable, gentlemanly demeanour in his dogged efforts to undercut the governor's power to govern without need to consult with the local parliament.

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

At 10:01 a.m. this morning, one of the five green-jacketed police officers standing on the corners of Yonge and Bloor walked confidently but carefully into the middle of the road. The traffic lights at the intersection had just been deactivated, and were now blank, and, after stopping cars in all directions, he waved one direction of cars through, then stopped it, then waved through the other. It was a brief moment of forced acclimatization for the drivers and reassurance for the pedestrians waiting on the tips of the corners: another officer a few minutes earlier had joked to pedestrians that "you don't want to be the first one to be hit by a car." A second later, the traffic lights were all back on, a solid red for all drivers in all directions, and the little stickmen beamed white from every pedestrian signal box. Inside a stopped van, one male driver gestured to his female passenger back and forth across the intersection in front of him, explaining what this all was, and the pedestrians followed his lead.

                     

Do you want to spend an intimate afternoon in a dark room with some strangers? How intimate do you want to get? Try deep under somebody's skin. Literally.

Unintended side-effect of the Star's website redesign: when it's overcast, as it was last night, our esteemed CN Tower looks very much like a magical cloud-farting machine. The world's tallest magical cloud-farting machine, thank you very much.

While most people cheered the announcement of Brendan Healy as new artistic director of Buddies, NOW pointed out (albeit a tad awkwardly) that this meant seminal queer Canadian writer/director Brad Fraser didn't get the job. These days, he seems to be more popular with Factory Theatre, where his newish play, True Love Lies, has just received its Canadian premiere and opened their fortieth anniversary season. And Fraser isn't the only one returning to Factory: he's bringing David, a regular character in his work often considered the author's own alter ego, along for the ride. In this show, David returns to Toronto and to the life of erstwhile lover, Kane, who has since switched back to hetero and now lives with his interior-design partner/wife Carolyn, and their two teenage children, Madison and Royce. When Madison tries to get a job at David's restaurant, it sets into motion a string of events that leads to old family secrets being unearthed, new ones being buried, and a big, sexy mess where a family used to be.

Hot off the heels of another summer hit movie and likely Oscar-worthy role in Julie & Julia, Meryl Streep visited Toronto for an informal conversation chat with Globe and Mail journalist Johanna Schneller in the Royal Ontario Museum at a special event entitled "An Evening with Meryl Streep." The evening is part of the series The Question of Celebrity, a lineup of public programming surrounding the museum’s newest exhibition, "Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008."

After street artist (and Torontoist contributor) Posterchild finished philosopher flâneur Mark Kingwell's recent book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, the Vandalist curator and street art advocate noticed that Kingwell's celebration of concrete and the cities built out of it missed one reverie in particular: graffiti.

                                   

Yesterday's launch of Google Street View created a new wave of digital tourism, with most of us starting with our home address and then scouring the mostly anonymous bodies nearby for flickers of recognition. As is par for the course with the service, the camera sometimes captures some unusual, quirky, and mysterious events. Here are some of our local favourites (so far).

If you're reading this, you've probably done some thinking about bicycle policy in Toronto. In the aftermath of this summer's struggles over shared roadways, culminating in last month's extremely ugly incident, many voices have joined the debate, some less successfully than others. There is, in the middle of all this, a group of cycling activists in Toronto that is resolutely ambivalent to all solutions. The organization is Bike Pirates, and it exists to address an issue that cuts through law and infrastructure, right to the heart of the daily cycling experience.

Now ranked as Amazon's best-selling product, the Kindle has been a remarkable success in the American marketplace, possibly signalling that e-book readers have reached a tipping point. The devices can download books wirelessly without being tethered to a computer, and text is displayed on a reflective electronic paper screen, which isn't backlit and uses very little power. The Kindle has been available south of the border for two years, and in a press release late yesterday, Amazon announced the rollout of their iconic e-book reader in more than a hundred countries. While consumers in places like Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are now able to order the thin white tablet, however, Canadians are—again—left twisting in the breeze.

At long last, Google Street View has gone live for Toronto as of this morning. We're gonna be perusing the sights today, but if you spot anything great, email it to tips@torontoist.com.

If you ever wanted to hear Har Mar Superstar try to pronounce "Degrassi Junior High," or listen to a techno remix of "O Canada," or reinforce your pre-existing feelings for Ellen Page, here's your chance: in the Crappy Holidays team video above, Justin Long, Har Mar Superstar, and Kathryn Aagesen (don't worry, we had to Google her too) prepare a Canadian Thanksgiving feast for—or is it with?—Ellen Page. And her eggo is preggo...with comedy!

Guess who's back! Toronto's favourite post-everything fuzz boys, Little Girls. Concepts is their first, proper full-length, and it's out on Paper Bag Records next Tuesday. If you hate reflective youthful whimsy fuelling no-wave nostalgia, you should probably reassess your life and then go come clean about your shortcomings to super-real baby-faced Little Girls mastermind Josh McIntyre. There is no way Torontoist is doing that for you. For shame.

While Blue Jays fans may bemoan the disappointments of the past season, at least this year’s squad didn’t stink as badly as their predecessors thirty years ago. The 1979 edition of the bluebirds was the worst in team history, with a record of fifty-three wins and one-hundred-and-nine losses. Chances were good that the shirt modelled by outfielder Rick Bosetti could have performed better on the field than most of that year's lineup.

At long last, the Star has a new layout for its website, and it's—large. The site's editorial team describes it as "giv[ing readers] more options for finding the news," and it does indeed do just that in a rather neat way, with three new styles for their home page in addition to Standard View (pictured above): Visual News, with a tile of photos; Timeline View, which shows the most recent stories added; and Grid View, which is a little like Visual News, but with more text than photos. There are slight tweaks throughout, too. Comments are now on separate pages from articles, thank God, and the paper's RSS feeds finally have small thumbnails in many articles.

Douglas Coupland could have taken better stock of his surroundings before he spoke. The writer of Generation X and jPod was on stage in the Toronto Reference Library's new event space, the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon, for the space's inaugural event on September 23, the first of three planned installments of The Writer's Room, a series of author interviews hosted by the Globe's Ian Brown. The event was styled as a gala opening for the Salon, complete with a cash bar. The public had turned out in droves, drawn by Coupland's celebrity, and also by free admission. But there were career librarians in the room as well, basking in the Reference Library's beautiful new gathering space. And Coupland had to go and poke their collective sore spot.

On Saturday morning, David Dewees killed himself. On October 1, two days before, Toronto Police had charged the Jarvis Collegiate teacher with two counts of invitation to sexual touching and two counts of luring. The police allege that "between July 2008 and July 2009, [Dewees] befriended two boys while working at the Ontario Pioneer Camp in Port Sydney, Ontario," and that "he had inappropriate contact with them over the Internet." (The photo at right, and those charges, are from the police press release.) As is often the case, the accusation made the news, including the Star, which misreported that Dewees was charged with sexual assault of the two boys.

You gotta credit the Toronto Blue Jays: for once, they're actually treating their fans to a meaningful September.

For some, the works are underwhelming and too few and far between, yet for others, it's one of the few times when Toronto steps outside its dreary box—and that's reason enough to celebrate. You may think it makes modern art accessible to the masses, but perhaps you feel that the installations could be better. Cast a vote, and then head over to last year's poll to see how it compares.

Now that we have all recovered from our Nuits, it's time to step back and take stock. When we do we find, much like we did in previous years, that Nuit Blanche is still at the stage of working better as an idea than it does in execution.

For the duration of Nuit Blanche, Torontoist hosted Blanche Slate, a concurrent projection onto the south-facing wall of the Art Gallery of Ontario and a liveblog updated right here, below. For the whole entire night, we continually threw Nuit Blanche updates—photos and text, from both our contributors and our readers—to the wall, and into this article.

    

We just got sent these photos by the Dupont and Spadina Corner Collective, of the group's early-morning romp through the Annex, which saw them paint over and add flying birds to seventeen illegal billboards in the area—a "Flock Off," as they're calling it.

George McCullagh seemed to have it all: a rags-to-riches back story; a brash, cocky charm that appealed to financiers, politicians, and the public; a growing family; influence in the back rooms of government; and ownership of several Toronto daily newspapers. He even attempted to lead a crusade to change the nature of government that would enable him to fulfill his belief that he alone could improve the state of affairs for Canadians or at least the state of affairs for his friends in the mining industry. Ultimately all of this may have been too much for one body to handle.

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

Though they only last for three hundred metres so far, this is no small victory for cyclists. Bloor Street East, between just west of Yonge and just east of Church, has just gained freshly painted sharrows on both sides of the street. From what we saw today on the recently renovated roadway, they seem to be doing their jobs already: motorists are giving cyclists a bit more space than usual, and cyclists have moved a bit more into the road rather than towards the curb. That the painted-on sharrows literally impress cyclists' place on the road will, as they spread around the city and along Bloor, hopefully go a long way towards changing everyone's attitudes towards who our streets belong to—the correct answer being everyone.

Whatever you think of Nuit Blanche, in Toronto there's really no other nuit like it. The "free all-night contemporary art thing," this year happening from sunset on Saturday, October 3 to sunrise on Sunday, October 4, has earned its fair share of ambivalence over its previous three years—not because the idea itself is not a fantastic one, and not because the event itself isn't intermittently enthralling and exciting and cool, but because people are naturally critical of something that we all deservedly hold to very high standards. If you're willing to brave a disappointment or two, a lot of walking, and (this year) a bit of rain, though, Nuit Blanche remains one of the best ways to experience a different side of Toronto.

Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas, you perverts.

This year was Busking for Change's second: the event, which sees big-name (and other) musicians playing on city streets collecting donations for War Child ,started last year, and was born a little earlier, after Our Lady Peace's Raine Maida busked for War Child all around downtown for twelve hours back in 2007.

Richard Dawkins came to town this week, and boy were his fans excited. Dawkins, if you are unfamiliar with his work, is an evolutionary biologist and science writer by turns renowned and reviled for his sustained arguments against creationism and against the existence of God. His latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, takes on the task of explaining, in terms accessible to the layperson, just what makes evolution such a compelling explanation of biological diversity.