A trickle of complaints has turned into a flood of controversy for a Quebec-based water company. Eska Water, one of the official sponsors for this year's Pride Week, drew the ire of First Nations groups and some of our readers with their "Protecting the Purity" ad campaign. After attempts to quell the growing backlash, Eska announced today that they are pulling the campaign.

Perhaps there was something magnetic in the lighting used at the new Dominion supermarket at Bayview and Eglinton. As if possessed by an alien force, residents of Leaside and North Toronto suddenly put on their finest shopping clothes and walked toward the store, in a procession that resembled a zombie walk, minus the fake blood. Drivers who felt the call calmly turned into the freshly paved parking lot.

Twitter is a medium especially well-suited to self-indulgence. When it comes to the organizations that take up roost, though, the hands that supply the tweets are often hidden—and when it comes to media organizations, that invisibility offers a bit of anonymity that journalists don’t otherwise get a shot at. (Only a few Toronto media outlets’ [...]

Photo by saharsh from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. One of Torontoist’s favourite year-end lists has just rolled in—Regret the Error’s annual compilation of the finest in media errors and corrections. From the year’s trend of “calling bullshit” (where everyone with a computer terminal has become a fact checker and comedy sketches come under the microscope), [...]

Today’s Metro contains something of a cock-up. On page 10 of the Toronto edition—distributed in print city-wide and available online, too—there’s a large Canadian Press photo of several ecstatic young people, credited to one Clifford Skarstedt. (That’s the upper half of it, above.) What’s remarkable about this photo? The caption takes us halfway there: “St. [...]

Every Saturday morning Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Steinberg’s supermarket, Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue West, 1960s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 6543. Among the properties the city nominated for heritage designations last month, one that [...]

Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie/Torontoist. What happens when you’re a free daily newspaper and you ditch your few paid staff writers and try to fill their shoes with freelancers and unpaid interns? If you’re Metro, you get an amazing error like this one, in a review of Friday the 13th by Steve Gow in today’s paper: [...]

No, it’s not a printing error—all 815,000 copies of Metro across the country really are pink today. The stunt is in support of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, and the ad-supported free daily is donating 5% of today’s national advertising revenue to the CBCF (what that amount actually is remains undisclosed, but editions of Metro [...]

Many years ago, the TTC launched the smart “Ride The Rocket” ad campaign, of which only the slogan and typewriter-like font still exist. The fast-paced and effective television commercials featured a quirky spokesperson chattering rapidly into a wide-angle lens about the pros of public transit, and the slick spots made the Commission look modern, exciting, [...]

Hello, and welcome to another installment of everyone’s favourite film column in which the writer makes up their opinions on the weeks films largely based on what trailers they’ve seen on TV. This week we didn’t watch much (busy watching our IT Crowd Series 2 and Metalocalypse DVDs) so the only one which managed to [...]

It’s wild outside, huh? So wild that it allows us to segue into talking about Strange Wilderness first, for some reason. It surprises us that the last Happy Madison film that we saw was (the quite sweet, really) 50 First Dates. Strange Wilderness is only of interest to us because it has quite possibly the [...]

What kind of people don’t like riding their bikes in a Toronto winter? People who have never tried it, that’s who. Even as more and more people choose not to get off their bikes when November comes around, many non-cyclists still view winter cycling as unwise, dangerous, or impossible. So as part of its first [...]