According to CBC’s Chris Boyce, the goal of this weekend’s CBCMusic.ca Festival is twofold. First and foremost, the CBC wants to celebrate Canadian music. Second, it wants to celebrate CBC Music, the broadcaster’s online music service, which launched a little over a year ago.

In 1996, Theatre Columbus premiered playwright Michael O’Brien’s “freely adapted” take on the famous Beaumarchais play The Barber of Seville, which was written in 1775. O’Brien’s version mixed in music from the 1816 opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini, as well as original tunes by composer John Millard. The adaptation also propelled the story forward a couple centuries, with pop culture references galore. With Theatre Columbus co-founder Leah Cherniak at the helm, the musical ended the season with six Dora Award nominations (it won three) and plenty of critical acclaim.

Seventeen years later, Soulpepper Theatre is remounting this zany reimagination of The Barber of Seville, updated once again by O’Brien, Millard, and Cherniak. But, for some reason—the change in decade, or company, or sense of humour—whatever had made the original so magical, has faded, save for a few key performances.

Have you ever considered a career in candle huggery?

No need for a meltdown, eh? Okay, there are a million puns we could have made about this one, but we’re still wondering what exactly candle hugging is and how one gets references for it (and steady work, for that matter). Also, nice sass.

Do any of the age-old techniques of being a bro stand the test of time? Ask the Time Traveler’s Wife how she feels about it.

I think we’re all taking a lot of creative liberties by referring to this as a “Blackberry.” Yeah, it’s pretty shitty.

This is weird and creepy, but it still has nothing on that pottery scene from “Ghost.” Gross. Ugh.

A lot of people do a lot of weird stuff on the internet, and ground zero for commercial e-weirdness is Craigslist. In Declassified, Torontoist combs over our city’s listings to find the best (and worst) of the bunch. Find listings we should include in our next edition? Email them to declassified@torontoist.com.

The world will never tire of this monkey.

We are thoroughly disappointed by how the author of this post missed every opportunity to include some blatantly obvious puns. That said, ladies, here is a super creepy chance to make $80 (and get lung cancer) lickety-split.

Can you imagine what would happen if every ad’s author was kind enough to add a disclaimer that their offer might involve illegal activity? We’d have nothing to write about.

Yeah, yeah, we’re all bananas over the Ikea monkey.

We have a strong suspicion that in this season of gift-giving, this guy has a package for you.

A lot of people do a lot of weird stuff on the internet, and ground zero for commercial e-weirdness is Craigslist. In Declassified, Torontoist combs over our city’s listings to find the best (and worst) of the bunch. Find listings we should include in our next edition? Email them to declassified@torontoist.com.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

To recap the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2011 season, we wrote that “the continuing maturation” of shortstop Yunel Escobar was a storyline to follow as the Jays progressed toward becoming a legitimate MLB competitor. Instead, this year what we saw was a startlingly immature display from Escobar that reverberated throughout Toronto’s sports-loving, multicultural, and LGBT communities.

Just as the Jays were finishing off a monumentally disappointing 73–89 season, during a game against the Boston Red Sox on Saturday, September 15, Havana-born-and-raised Escobar decided to write the words “Tu ere maricon” on his eye black ten minutes before stepping onto the field. Spanish-speaking viewers quickly noticed—the phrase roughly translates to “You are a faggot”—and many fans soon stopped paying attention to the game as the real battle began.

“Because of his actions, athletes everywhere—amateur and professional—will continue to remain in the closet, will continue to avoid sports, and will continue to have their sense of self demeaned,” read a press release from OUTSPORT, a Toronto organization to support LGBT involvement in sports. Despite the efforts of institutions like OUTSPORT and Brian Burke’s You Can Play Project, sports culture is still at a point where three words invoked by one professional athlete carry real weight, and can be felt as damaging attacks on both peers and generations of younger players.

It didn’t help much when Escobar tried to explain his side of the story, after receiving a three-game suspension. Besides his problematic attempt to demonstrate his acceptance of gay and lesbian lifestyles by mentioning that he’d hired an interior decorator and a hairstylist who are both homosexual, he raised divisive cultural tensions as well.

“I didn’t mean to say anything. It was not for anyone, and it was not meant to offend,” the then-29-year-old Escobar said through a translator at a press conference on September 18. “It’s just been said around amongst the Latinos. For us, it didn’t have the significance in the way that’s being interpreted. It’s a word without meaning.”

In some Spanish-speaking countries, perhaps. Cuba, where Escobar is from, is not one of them.

Next season, Escobar will play for the Tampa Bay Rays and will only be back in Toronto when the season schedule dictates. But now, he won’t be remembered for the promising shortstop we knew; he’ll always be the guy with egg, and homophobic slurs, on his face.

Sue-Ann Levy Using her position to deride instead of reason.

Michael Bryant An astonishingly tone-deaf response to a tragic death.

Frances Nunziata Treating her colleagues like wayward schoolchildren.

Unsubstantiated “Safety Concerns” Using race as an indicator of crime.

James Pasternak and QuAIA Alarmism Undermining Pride Toronto, and Toronto’s commitment to diversity.

Doug Holyday   Trying to turn an already divided house even more against itself.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

During city council’s first meeting of 2012, Councillor Josh Colle (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence) did something unexpected: he moved a motion to reverse tens of millions of dollars in proposed budget cuts by Mayor Rob Ford’s administration. Councillors began to rise and question Colle. As Paula Fletcher (Ward 30, Toronto-Danforth) stood for her turn, council’s speaker, Frances Nunziata (Ward 11, York South Weston)—whose job is to preside over meetings objectively and ensure that debate is fair—acknowledged her by name before adding, “stick to the script.” When Fletcher replied that she didn’t have a script, the speaker insisted, “I’m sure everybody has a script. Just follow your script.”

Cynical sniping of this sort is an unfortunately common occurrence on the floor of council, particularly from veteran councillors. What a shame that Nunziata, the person charged to lead council meetings and maintain order, can’t resist such mean-spirited, partisan behaviour while sitting in the speaker’s chair.

Nunziata exhibits few of the qualities you might expect from someone in her role. For one thing, she often seems confused about or unconcerned with procedure; Nunziata recently ruled a motion by none other than Councillor Fletcher out of order after councillors had been debating it for nearly an hour. At the time, the speaker claimed she knew all along the motion was no good, but got distracted by the number of councillors who wanted to debate it. Nunziata often seems convinced that if she needs to interrupt a colleague mid-speech, the remainder of that person’s speaking time is forfeit and she may simply move on.

Nunziata’s indifference to rules and inability to maintain order carried serious consequences this year. During a wild debate on the civic appointments process, the speaker asked Giorgio Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) to retract potentially intimidating and impugning statements towards city ombudsman Fiona Crean. When Mammoliti refused, Nunziata suggested that he leave the chamber, as council rules require, but didn’t actually enforce her decision. Mammoliti’s ability to remain despite his behaviour was a message that Nunziata either didn’t know how to enforce the rules, or didn’t care to do so. (He later chose to leave of his own accord.)

Nearly anyone who took in even a quarter-hour of council proceedings this year knows that Nunziata’s hallmark as speaker is her apparent burning contempt for many fellow elected officials. It’s particularly evident during a term where 14 rookie councillors, nearly a third of councillors, are usually polite, diplomatic, and unconcerned with lobbing insults and dismissals at their peers. Perhaps they haven’t been made cynical yet. And to returning Councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), Nunziata said recently: “You don’t know how to tell the truth.” She seems to thrive on her endless verbal assault of perceived political foes, as if moralizing, editorializing, and comebacks are part of the job description.

Mere notions of respect, civility, and fairness are mocked by this speaker at almost every opportunity. This summer, in the wake of mass shootings downtown and in Scarborough, council was debating possible responses to the violence. As is sometimes the case, the discussion became unruly when councillors got confused about an item to be voted on. Nunziata’s response? “I guess some people don’t care about the shootings.”

Sue-Ann Levy   Using her position to deride instead of reason.

Michael Bryant   An astonishingly tone-deaf response to a tragic death.

James Pasternak and QuAIA Alarmism Undermining Pride Toronto, and Toronto’s commitment to diversity.

Unsubstantiated “Safety Concerns” Using race as an indicator of crime.

Yunel Escobar   Homophobic slurs and frustrating non-apologies.

Doug Holyday   Trying to turn an already divided house even more against itself.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Every day in our city, we are made aware of potential threats to public safety. Most of the time, these threats are spelled out so we can respond accordingly: pedestrian fatalities are spiking, so walk and drive with caution; an assault has taken place, so keep your eyes out for a suspect. But every now and again, we hear about an apparent danger for which no further details are available. It is as if those warning us would rather appeal to our imaginations than to a specific, identifiable hazard. Unsubstantiated safety concerns had a big year in 2012, and they were most likely to pop up wherever a group of black Torontonians were planning to get together.

At this year’s NXNE music festival, a major hip-hop show featuring artists from home and abroad was abruptly cancelled only hours before it was set to begin. Management at the Rivoli, the proposed venue, cited ambiguous “security concerns” as the reason for dumping the show, and added that the city’s Guns and Gangs task force had paid them a visit earlier in the day. Performers and fans were shocked, especially since they heard nothing more about the potential peril that had spooked organizers.

Similar circumstances wiped away an entire weekend of events at Irie Fest, a celebration of Caribbean and African music and dance. In this case, event promoter Phil Vassell took pains to describe the event’s “incident-free record over the last nine years” even as he announced the cancellation. Vassell said “the recent increase in violence in Toronto,” the mass shootings at Danzig and the Eaton Centre, had factored into his decision. He didn’t mention the overwhelming, prejudiced media scrutiny that he and other black event organizers faced in the wake of those shootings, but the pressure was likely too much for him to bear.

Without a doubt, the strangest instance of an unsubstantiated black threat occurred during the now infamous “gravy bus” incident, in which police inexplicably called in an emergency TTC shelter bus to ferry football players from Don Bosco, the team Mayor Rob Ford coaches, from a game. The players weren’t said to have done anything violent or dangerous—in fact, a TDSB official who attended the game called their behaviour “exemplary.” And although 23 Division Superintendent Ron Taverner agreed, he repeatedly claimed that, out of an “abundance of caution,” it was necessary for police to call the shelter bus, which essentially served as a paddywagon for the mostly black students. Police did not bother to question or follow up with the only person reported to have actually acted out aggressively that afternoon, a coach of the Father Henry Carr team. We still don’t know his name.

This last example is instructive. It doesn’t seem to matter what a group of black people are doing or not doing—their mere presence seems to represent a latent safety concern in the eyes of our police and media. The most likely explanation for taking a TTC bus off the street to pick up Don Bosco’s players is that their coach, the mayor, wanted to pay them a kindness and take them out of the pouring rain after a game. Instead, again all evidence, the public was sold the familiar story that a group of black men were ready to blow, and that a police response was the only reasonable course of action. It didn’t help that Mayor Ford repeatedly congratulated himself for being on the scene to “control” his players as only he can.

If 2012 was any indication, we’ve got a long way to go before black Torontonians can assemble in their city without arousing undeserved paranoia and scrutiny.

Sue-Ann Levy Using her position to deride instead of reason.

Michael Bryant An astonishingly tone-deaf response to a tragic death.

Frances Nunziata Treating her colleagues like wayward schoolchildren.

James Pasternak and QuAIA Alarmism Undermining Pride Toronto, and Toronto’s commitment to diversity.

Yunel Escobar   Homophobic slurs and frustrating non-apologies.

Doug Holyday   Trying to turn an already divided house even more against itself.

Please show some respect for small people. They’re no better at dealing poker than the rest of us.

This is what life is like for the very short. Everyone wants them to dress up in costumes, and expects them to have fee schedules for different lengths of time spent dealing poker at parties. Good on this guy for keeping it politically correct in his demeaning want-ad, though.

This guy probably wishes he’d eaten the cereal in 1997, when it was still worth something.

Of course I’ll pay you, internet stranger, to let my kids hang out with your kids in some kind of unlicensed daycare situation. Just let me sprinkle some Valium on their mac and cheese first, so they don’t cry when I drop them off. Their well-being is literally meaningless to me! I only had them for tax purposes!

And of course, the teachers’ union’s rolling strike has also given rise to its share of no-strings-attached sex ads. Wouldn’t any mom, no matter how horny, have kids around in this situation? Is the idea just to tell them to play outside while mommy has alone time with the nice, creepy man?

“Makey outies?” No guy hoping to have sex would ever use that phrase. This ad was clearly written by a cartoon chipmunk.

A lot of people do a lot of weird stuff on the internet, and ground zero for commercial e-weirdness is Craigslist. In Declassified, Torontoist combs over our city’s listings to find the best (and worst) of the bunch. Find listings we should include in our next edition? Email them to declassified@torontoist.com.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

We invite them into our lives every day. They entertain us, they know where we come from, they tell us the truth even if it’s hard to hear, and we always feel as if they have our best interests in mind.

So when the journalists at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were hit with a devastating funding cut, it felt like an attack on some close friends.

The biggest blow, perhaps, was foreign current affairs program Dispatches, with host Rick MacInnes-Rae. It got the axe this April when Kristine Stewart, executive vice-president of English services, announced a list of changes to CBC Radio, CBC Television, and Radio-Canada as a result of the 2012 federal budget.

That budget shrank support for our public broadcaster by 10 per cent, or $115 million over three years. Other casualties from the cuts were Connect with Mark Kelley, radio dramas, news bureaus in Africa and South America, 175 hours of original TV programs, and 256 jobs (650 over three years). CBC Sports turned into a winter seasonal program and, for the first time since 1974, ads will start running on CBC Radio 2 and Espace musique.

These blows hit the mother corps especially hard since they came just over a year into the CBC’s ambitious five-year plan, emphasizing local programming, specialty channels, and more online services. At that time, Canada already spent far less than other developed nations on our public broadcaster. Even the conservatively inclined National Post protested, writing that the CBC is crucial in supporting “cultural nationalism, the creation and sustenance of a coast-to-coast identity, support for homegrown artists and intellectuals” and “good old-fashioned intellectual elitism.” With another cutback from the CRTC in October to the tune of $28.4 million, those noble goals will undoubtedly suffer.

While some see this as a chance for the CBC to reimagine its identity, Stewart herself told the Globe and Mail that a tighter budget means eliminating more experimental programs and continuing with whatever is safest (read: boring).

“It’s people that produce content, not machines,” said the president of the Canadian Media Guild CBC branch, Marc-Philippe Laurin. Job cuts, more ad space, and less risky programming means fewer people, fewer ideas, and fewer voices broadcasting to fewer eyes and ears across the country.

“Early on I asked our contributors to write like drunken poets. To experiment. Leave in the stuff conventional news leaves out. The personal stuff. The questions. Let the listener hear you thinking out loud,” MacInnes-Rae said in his final send-off. On Dispatches, it was the people that made it excellent storytelling. And it’s our friends on the air we’ll miss in 2013.

Margaret Wente Plagiarism, and laziness of epic proportions.

NHL Lockout Taking hockey away from us.

NFB Funding Cuts Forcing the Mediatheque closure.

John Farrell   Checking out even before he left the team.

Factory Theatre Board of Directors Losing their community’s trust.

Sedwick Hill   For the untimely death of the Toronto Underground Cinema.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

It was an up-and-down year for Toronto’s rep cinemas. For every success as heartening as Nadia Sandhu and Jonathan Hibhka’s improbable makeover of the seedy Metro Theatre into the arthouse refuge Projection Booth Metro, there was a glum story like the closing of the Toronto Underground Cinema thanks to ongoing landlord troubles.

With those mixed fortunes in mind, it’s been a rare treat to see the Bloor Cinema emerge from its own troubles into one of the city’s most promising and idiosyncratic rep houses. Closed in the summer of 2011 for what was then cryptically described as “an undetermined length of time,” the theatre returned in renovated form this March, and was rechristened the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, in honour of its new management—and just in time to serve as that festival’s flagship venue.

Despite the behemoth, 700-seat cinema’s long history of accommodating Hot Docs and popular screening series like Doc Soup, a nonfiction mandate initially seemed like an odd fit. This was the place that perennially packed the house with niche entertainments like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and Janus’ limited theatrical run of House. It didn’t help matters that there was little precedent, either within or outside of the rep community, for a first-run documentary cinema. (Hot Docs director Chris McDonald told the Globe and Mail that he could think of just one: a 14-seater in Zagreb, Croatia.)

But the newly reborn Bloor has proven itself a malleable venue, responsive to audience needs—and not just because it’s one of the only cinemas in town that happens to be fully licensed. Programmer Robin Smith has put together an enviable slate of film series, granting a measure of coherence to a genre that spans a virtually infinite number of subjects. We’ve been especially fond of Rock Docs, which has welcomed both new concert films like Shut Up and Play the Hits and old standbys like The Song Remains the Same.

In addition to high-profile new releases (Nishua Pahuja’s The World Before Her and Ken Burns’ upcoming Central Park Five), the revamped cinema has also stretched beyond its documentary focus. It’s made room for the sorts of films that made the Bloor a favourite of genre connoisseurs, resuming its mantel as the home of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. And what better way could there be to ring in the new year than the forthcoming screening of The Big Lebowski, complete with indoor bowling? The old Bloor Cinema will be missed, of course, but we’ll happily join the Dude in drinking a White Russian to its new incarnation.

Alex Anthopoulos   Building the Jays into a team to be reckoned with.

Academy of the Impossible Making education accessible, and breaking down barriers.

Sarah Polley   Staying true to an uncompromising path.

G 98.7 Making commercial radio worth listening to again.

The Beguiling Supporting independent graphic arts for 25 years.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

CKFG-FM, better known as G 98.7, is the best thing to happen to Toronto’s radio airwaves in years. Canada’s first “urban adult contemporary” station went on the air late last year with a mandate to serve Toronto’s Caribbean and African communities. It wound up serving everyone who had burned out on what commercial radio had to offer.

For a city with such a productive hip-hop scene, Toronto has always had a rocky history when it comes to urban radio. Ten years ago, when Flow 93.5 launched, the station was hailed as a game-changer. It was expected to promote local talent and give a voice to the city’s hip-hop and R&B scene. At best, Flow was half-hearted in its attempt to fulfill those expectations. Local artists became progressively thinner on the ground, while more and more dance-pop artists found their way into the rotation. By the time Flow was sold to CHUM in 2011, it was a shadow of its former self.

G is the station Flow was meant to be. Sure, there’s some crossover between the two, but G’s playlist is also thick with reggae, dancehall, and soca—genres that are near and dear to members of the city’s Caribbean-Canadian community (and ones Flow played in the beginning, then progressively phased out). G’s list of local artists doesn’t just include Drake and The Weeknd, but also up-and-coming acts like 20 B-Lo and Big Black Lincoln. It mixes contemporary hitmakers in with old-school classics, making it the only spot on the dial where you can hear a mixture of Gyptian, Jay-Z, and The Four Tops in the middle of the afternoon.

In its first year of operation, G has already attracted some top-tier talent. Their list of mix-show DJs includes award winning club DJ Baba Kahn and former Flow talents like reggae jock Spex and soca DJ Dr. Jay, both of whom had their shows cancelled by Flow in spite of high ratings.

Commercial terrestrial radio gets a bad rap, and deservedly so. Much of what gets put out over the airwaves is pretty hard to defend: the same handful of songs on constant repeat, terrible ads, pointedly idiotic morning men, and inflammatory political rhetoric from elected officials. But G is a station unlike any other this city has ever seen. It mixes genres and eras freely, features club-quality DJ mixes, and serves the cultural communities it set out to represent, as well as hip-hop, reggae, and R&B enthusiasts of all backgrounds. G has made radio worth listening to again.

Bloor Hot Docs Cinema   A rare home for first-run documentaries.

Academy of the Impossible Making education accessible, and breaking down barriers.

Sarah Polley   Staying true to an uncompromising path.

Alex Anthopoulos Building the Jays into a team to be reckoned with.

The Beguiling Supporting independent graphic arts for 25 years.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains: the very best and very worst people, places, things, and ideas that have had an influence on the city over the past 12 months. From December 10 to 19, we’ll unveil the nominees, grouped by category. Vote for your favourites from each batch, every single day! On December 19 and 20 the winners from each category go head-to-head in the final round of voting, and on December 21, we will reveal your choices for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

If you think about it, this has all the makings of a classic Hollywood disaster movie. The initial reported incidents. The mayor assuring the city that everything is okay. A particularly dire independent analysis of the situation foreshadowing doom…. If things keep heading in this direction, we’ll soon be sending Bruce Willis and friends to help fix Toronto’s crumbling expressway.

Though many of our villains have in some way managed to harm or undermine Torontonians’ lives, the Gardiner is one of the few that is actually seeking to kill them. Its woes began back in 2011, when the first chunks started breaking off, but it wasn’t until this year’s half-dozen instances (some featuring baseball-sized chunks of concrete) that it really started getting people’s attention.

The story behind this fall from grace (if that’s an appropriate phrase to use) isn’t particularly compelling. The Gardiner is 60 years old and though water, salt, and oxygen have managed to expedite the corrosion process, it was well overdue for some attention. Our aging expressway has been an eyesore for much of its life, and now, with the added burden of safety concerns, it seems destined to becoming a useless world of concrete unless some serious action is taken.

The problem with the Gardiner is that nobody quite knows what to do with it. We can’t just turn it into a public space wonderland like New York did with the High Line. We either have to tear it down and start from scratch (which will be expensive and politically messy) or restore it (which is also expensive: about $500 million over the next 10 years). Though time will tell what will be done, there’s no question about the fact that something needs to happen. And for all of the Gardiner’s faults, it also represents a bigger problem: Toronto’s snail-like response time to issues that should have been dealt with long ago.

The Impossible Rental Market Vacancy rates that make renting hopeless.

Breaking Condo Glass   Causing injury, closing streets, and sparking lawsuits.

Donald Trump   Lending his name to an ugly, failing project.

Extreme NIMBYism Taking the fear of change to irrational heights.

Casino Pressure Making it hard to make a good decision.

Bike Lane Fiascos More angry, more congested, and less safe streets.