In June 2009, the Toronto Star performed an investigation of sanitary conditions at some of Toronto's soft-serve vendors and found that seasonal sellers (i.e. ice cream truck vendors) were among those with the highest concentrations of coliform bacteria in their product. Coliform is considered an index of overall cleanliness; high concentrations are bad. The Star's exposé was arguably in the public interest, but it seems to have given reporters a bad name among soft-serve professionals. Now, if you walk up to a downtown ice cream truck and introduce yourself as a writer, there's a fifty-fifty chance that the person behind the counter will tell you to get lost—sometimes nicely, and sometimes not.

Ice cream trucks sell ice cream, yes, but they're so much more than mobile soft-serve dispensers. In fact, they are at least two additional things.

During the summer, some suburban mall parking lots across Toronto become temporary, G-rated entertainment centres as circuses appear literally overnight. Foremost among these are Shrine circuses, which are similar in some ways to a caravan of quirky relatives who show up summer after summer, seemingly unannounced, in enormous camper trailers. For reasons purely nostalgic, they are always welcomed back—as long as they promise to sleep in the driveway.

Shortly after outdoor public pools close for the evening, the real action begins. On almost any given summer night in outdoor pools across the city, pool-hoppers start arriving no more than a half hour past midnight to get in on a very illegal, yet very appealing, late night pool party. A constant flow of people, of all ages and cultures, come and go throughout the night—more often than not until 4 a.m. or later, provided that the cops don't arrive to break up the festivities.

Yesterday's heat was not quite record-breaking, but it was one of the hottest days in recent memory, making it a perfect time for science. The local-news cliché is to try frying an egg on the sidewalk, but Google it and all you'll find are pages and pages of disappointed reporters watching uncooked albumen trickle into gutters. (Eggs don't even start to coagulate until they hit 60 degrees Celsius.) The Star cooked a roast inside a car yesterday, which was pretty original.

Starting tonight, the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival is unleashing 145 comedic, dramatic, solo, dance, musical, and kid's plays unto the city. And while actors, directors, and designers have 31 theatrical venues to use as their own peculiar performative playgrounds, this year it's not only theatre artists who get to have all the fun. The first ever Visual Fringe is bringing the fest's signature oddball eccentricity to the visual art scene too.

Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. In this photo of the Centre Island beach in about 1933, the man on the right is following the law, but the gentleman on the left is in danger of arrest. [...]

Popular Québécois cartoonist Michel Rabagliati will be making an appearance at the Lillian H. Smith Library (239 College Street) on March 15 at 5:00 p.m. to promote his latest book, Paul Goes Fishing. Rabagliati will participate in a Q&A session with The Beguiling’s Peter Birkemoe and sign books for loyal fans of the Paul series. [...]

Leave it to CanStage to somehow, in the midst of extreme internal upheaval what is maybe their darkest financial hour, be simultaneously running two of their strongest shows by far in recent memory. In fact, Palace of the End (which closes tomorrow night) and The Clean House (which runs until March aren’t just good shows [...]

Photos courtesy of Light in the Attic Records The landscape of soul music, more than any other genre, has been littered with talented artists with unfulfilled careers spent in obscurity, grinding out appearances in dingy bars in the search for the elusive radio hit. Such was the fate of Jay Douglas, The Mighty Pope and many other pioneers of Toronto’s soul and reggae scene in the 1960s and 1970s. These artists—who are reuniting for...