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The farmland of Dufferin County looks exactly the way you'd imagine: softly rolling hillsides, the landscape dotted with old clapboard barns and quaint country houses, wooden fences neatly marking off the lots. Nestled in this terrain, about an hour and half northwest of Toronto, is the township of Melancthon (population 2,895), a small community that has been an agricultural centre for many generations' worth of farmers. The soil in this region—Honeywood silt loam—is said by local farmers to be unique in southern Ontario, and is, particularly, ideally well-suited for growing potatoes.

When will the TTC open subway doors earlier than its current wake-up call of approximately 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings?

Do you remember when you were seventeen and you thought about being young, and urban, and an artist? Maybe you imagined whitewashed loft spaces with a low-key reek of depravity and beautiful people with their improbable haircuts. And maybe there were poetry readings, and everything was a little bit of a performance, and everything was deeply, self-consciously cool.

Since its official launch in August 2008, Google Suggest has been fuelling a new auto-complete meme that has taken off on social sites like Digg and Reddit and even encouraged news sites like Slate to take a pseudo-sociolinguistic look at Google's most popular searches. What we search can tell us a lot about who we are, so we thought it would be funny illuminating to use Google Canada's version of Suggest to find and dissect common queries about Toronto.

As of January 3, 2010, TTC fares will rise across the board. Well, almost. Here's what the Commission approved at their meeting this afternoon, all effective on the first Sunday of the new year:

The image above is a montage of eighty-six separate thirty-second exposures taken on Woodbine Beach in the early hours of Tuesday morning during the Leonid meteor shower. (Each image was loaded into Photoshop and blended with the images below it to build up the star trails and reveal the meteors.) Over the three-quarters of an hour it took to accumulate the photographs, the camera caught five meteors, enough to show how they radiate out from the constellation Leo—from which the shower gets its name. Away from the pollution of city lights, more meteors would have been visible.

Who doesn't wish they knew Natalie Portman?

You'd probably think you were on the wrong site if you pulled up today's Newsstand and didn't see anything about yesterday's TTC...um...what rhymes with "blusterduck"? Perhaps the Toronto Star delivered the most effective hat trick of coverage of yesterday's debacle: After Tuesday's Trudeau Poll results named transportation Toronto's biggest source of emo woe, the Star then regaled the reader with tales of how super pissed people are about the fare hike, culminating in last night's complete shutdown of subway service between Bloor and Eglinton. Despite all that has happened, is it terrible to be concerned about what all this worry is doing to poor Adam's pretty face? Then again, grey hair is rather sexy...

In September 2010, the Ontario Ministry of Education will introduce a new course titled Gender Studies, designed to help teenagers get a better grasp of all these perplexing issues. The course will be available as an elective for grade eleven students province-wide, creating a safe place where gender in our society, and in others, can be discussed.

Amidst the brouhaha about fare increases at this month's TTC meeting, one thing that was overlooked was the approval of the design for a Highway 407 station [PDF] on the new Spadina subway extension. Except—they haven't really decided on the finer points of the design. Did we say "finer points"? We meant "all of it."

Yesterday, Torontoist packed into the charming wood-panelled ballroom of the Gladstone Hotel along with throngs of passionate food lovers for the launch of The Edible City: Toronto's Food from Farm to Fork, hosted by This Is Not a Reading Series. The latest in Coach House Books' ambitious uTOpia series, which selects one broad aspect of Toronto each year and corrals some of the city's most influential writers to tackle it—past publications addressed the city's future (uTOpia), the environment (GreenTOpia), and arts and culture (The State of the Arts)—The Edible City delves into all things food.

For the past eight years, the Ontario College of Art and Design has been asking potential art buyers to put pretense aside and trust their gut in support of the school. “Whodunit?,” OCAD’s signature annual fundraiser, is a mystery art sale in which the name of the artist remains a secret until after you purchase the piece. It’s a refreshing concept in a creative marketplace so often dogged by an atmosphere of manufactured buzz and the dreaded art star.

If snacks and unlimited arcade freeplay are relevant to your interests, you might want to read on.

The usual way for a driver to avoid eggnog-fuelled destruction during the holidays is for them to travel with a designated driver. This is a tried-and-true method of avoiding being the only perp at the station who smells alluringly of nutmeg. If, for whatever reason, it's not a viable option for you (maybe all your friends like the 'nog as much as you do?) Toronto-area entrepreneur John Long has a solution. It involves tow trucks.

Two things of note on the TTC front: first, the TTC's press release sent out to outlets last night was incorrect about the price of an Adult MDP Metropass and VIP Metropass; they were listed as costing $110 and $106, respectively, when they'll actually cost a dollar more each (sacrilege!) as of January 3, 2010. (We've updated our post on the fare increases accordingly.) Second, and most pertinent for today: tunnel damage "caused by a contractor doing work on a roadway/bridge south of St. Clair Station," as the TTC's press release puts it, has led to a shutdown in subway service on the yellow line between Bloor and Eglinton Stations, both north and southbound. The TTC expects the delay to last "the duration of the evening."

“Guys, we did it. He's actually here!" Toronto comedian Bob Kerr exclaimed in front of a sold-out, standing room–only crowd while he hosted the first of two shows at the Rivoli starring Paul F. Tompkins. Tompkins, if you didn't know already, is an enviably talented Los Angeles–based comic with a resume that includes decades of stand-up, TV (Mr. Show, Best Week Ever), and movies (There Will Be Blood, The Informant!), but before last month, he had never set foot in Hogtown. So, what brought him here? Twitter, Facebook, and Bob Kerr. Together, Kerr and Tompkins took advantage of all that is good in social media and started a trend that shows no signs of abating.

The annual Leonid meteor shower will peak in intensity tonight and tomorrow night. This year's show promises to be an exceptionally spectacular one, by recent standards—but only for those who know how to hide from Toronto's countless jiggawatts of light pollution. Do you know where in the GTA to go in order to ensure that your night of neck-craning is not spent in vain? Torontoist does.

Remember how Canadians were locked out from the worldwide Kindle launch last month? Well, whatever was happening behind the scenes conveniently got worked out in time for the holiday shopping season, so Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is now being shipped to that primitive backwater known as Canada. The thing about e-books is that they last for weeks between charging, can be read in direct sunlight, and product can be downloaded via 3G networks "over the air" without syncing with your computer. If you want a Kindle, be prepared to pony-up a cool US $259, plus import fees (what free trade?), which, in Canadian dollars, is a little over three hundred smackers. Don't discount Sony's similar e-book offerings, but Barnes & Noble's sexy little nook isn't on its way north any time soon.

It's not unfair to call it a "shoebox multiplex from the Reagan era," and we'd have to agree that the theatre itself is not exactly a cinema treasure—but dammit, they didn't have to go and shut down The Carlton!

The Edgewater Hotel sign is gone. City officials ordered that the Parkdale landmark be removed on November 3, after nearly three years of working to convince the owner of the building to which it was attached to make necessary repairs. According to a Municipal Licensing and Standards manager, the sign had finally become so derelict that city inspectors deemed it unsafe.

Egypt’s famed boy-king is gearing up to set off another bout of "Tut-mania" in Toronto.

There’s something about the quiet landscapes that line the walls of the Stephen Bulger Gallery that’s oddly disquieting. It’s easy to tell that they show vistas far from here—the vegetation and the topography carry those subtle but clear cues of an unfamiliar place—but it’s not that. The lighting seems suspended between an artificial dusk and the bleakest of mid-days, but that’s also not what’s out of place. It’s because there’s something intentionally absent from Canadian photographer Bertrand Carrière’s series “Lieux Mêmes.” They are photographs of something that is no longer there. The subject left the scene ninety years ago.

Everyone needs love, even people who aren't, in fact, people, but over-designed alien glassworks stuck to the sides of historic buildings. They need love, too. We are pretty sure of this. So we wonder whether calling the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal one of the ten ugliest buildings in the world is really necessary. For reference, here's last year's "winner." Sure, the crystalline ROMniplex may have a shoddy interior, but it's nice on the outside if you stand in the right place, plus it makes a sweet lightsaber-fight venue. Besides, obviously no one told the selection committee about Toronto's dirty little secret at the corner of Jarvis and Dundas. Go ahead and trash the crystal, but remember, we'd still love you—even if you'd been designed by Daniel Libeskind.

It's been a very exciting week for Toronto Fringe enthusiasts. First, there was the announcement of the festival's partnership with both Mirvish and the Randolph Centre for the Arts, which means the Fringe Club beer tent will move from the Tranzac to the parking lot behind Honest Ed's (which happens to be across the street from new Fringe location Randolph). The move makes a lot of sense in terms of giving the festival a central, highly visible hub that's pretty much exactly in the midpoint of the festival's various reaches to Tarragon in the north, UofT in the east, and Factory/Passe Muraille in the south. Those interested in participating in next year's festival had better get a move on it, though: the new, early application deadline this year is this Wednesday.