Toronto seems to get its annual dose of legendary outsider filmmaker John Waters around this time. A couple of years back he was hosting the TIFF gala of his latest film, A Dirty Shame, then in late 2006, he could be found gallivanting around Roncesvalles overseeing the transformation—for good or ill—of his 1988 comedy, Hairspray, into this year's hit family-friendly musical starring John Travolta (based more on the 2002 Broadway remake than on its original......

With Citytv moving out of 299 Queen West as part of the Rogers-CTVglobemedia deal, some alarm was raised over the fate of the CityPulse truck—long a fixture of Queen and John. Too complicated to dismantle and acknowledged as a downtown tourist landmark, it was announced that the famous artwork (or eyesore, depending on who you're talking to) would stay put. Now that the two entities are to be officially severed and City News is......

Wireless number portability (WNP), the ability to keep your cellular phone number when you change service providers, came to Canada in March of this year. The masses of consumers looking to free themselves from their frustrating cell companies cheered. Those cheers turned to grumbles with the realization that the spiffy new phones received for “free” came attached to lengthy service contracts. Breaking a contract can make switching to (or from) the company with the......

Photo by Sylvain Dumais from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Old people, prepare to get pissed off. SoundProof Magazine asked a whole bunch of Toronto bloggers—Torontoist's staff included—and asked them to make a list of their favourite Toronto albums ever. The results are in, and though 158 albums got votes (!!), the list is very recent-album heavy: Broken Social Scene's You Forgot it in People shoves some old dude named Neil Young out of the......

So you wake up, make a cup of coffee, go outside to grab the newspaper in your PJs and suddenly notice that your regular copy of The Globe and Mail has been replaced with a more different copy of The Globe and Mail. One with ugly black divider bars scattered across the front page and at least a couple inches lost from the broadsheet. You notice an alarming increase of sans serif fonts. Is......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

Carolee Schneemann is an artist whose work refuses a tepid response: in a career that has addressed contentious topics such as American imperialism and the implications of living in a sex-phobic society, Schneemann has solidified her position as a pioneer in what is now known as multi-media/disciplinary art. Schneemann began her career as a painter in the late 1950’s and later applied the medium's physical properties to installation, performance, filmmaking, the written word, and assemblage.......

Photo by avp17 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. There's a more interesting way to keep those "this year I will get in shape, no, really" New Year's resolutions than a membership to some stuffy gym that you'll stop using in a month and a half anyway-- a way that can even help you show off your new buffness and make you appear cooler on the dance floor next New Year's Eve, in the last......

Toronto isn't New York, anyone can tell you that. But like New York and other big cities, Toronto has an addiction to the automobile. The city has avoided major disasters like the Spadina Expressway and downtown ghettoes, but slow-burning issues like smog and congestion means that the city has to find a way to wean itself off its dependence on cars. Contested Streets: Breaking New York City's Gridlock is a film that premiered earlier......

This year the Toronto International Film Festival features a mind-melting 352 films and over 500 guests from across the world. It’s no wonder, then, that not only is the press conference in which they announce the majority of these almost impossible to keep up with but that we’ve spent the last couple of hours just trying to think of a way to approach this post to give you the maximum amount of information without......

Breaking the law, breaking the law. We -ist folks love us some crime, and no misdemeanor is too petty for a post on any of our sites. This week, join us for a rogues' gallery of miscreants major, minor, and alleged. Gothamist gets us started with "Law & Order", muppet style. Oh, you know what isn't a crime? Taking pictures on the MTA. So, why are cops stopping photographers? In other Gotham crime, a......

Let’s open with an image. By far our favourite image of film in the past...Ooh, ages, Date Movie’s unique take on Napoleon Dynamite. I can almost hear the two (count ‘em) writers from Scary Movie in the pitching office. “Okay, get this, right. We’ve got a version of Napoleon Dynamite. Now, you know how all the kids are wearing those ‘Vote for Pedro’ t-shirts, right?” (The movie exec nods with recognition, a feign he’s......

Sorry, since there's such urgency to this post, we weren't able to throw out one of our always hilarious Bloc Party/Bloc Quebecois jokes in here. But feel free to think up one as you read and Torontoist will happily ammend the post. Here goes: Bloc Party are punching out a DJ set and possibly hooking up a live performance tonight at the Drake Hotel. This secret (shhhh!) information comes via a rumour via a......

Breaking! Actually, this news is not breaking at all. TOist just wanted to know what it felt like to be Matt Drudge for a minute. And we do believe this item of government-sponsored gossip is hot, perhaps even hott. Why is Kiefer not playing the role of a lifetime, the role of his granddad's lifetime in the biopic of the latter? And who is the respected actor taking his place in the Saskatchewan-shot screen gem?......

Torontoist doesn't partake of enough wacky pastimes. This picture, of a Clusterballooner, makes our complete lack of an adventure gene painfully clear. Yesterday was one of the clearest days we'd seen in a while, a day so crisp you could even see the ugly bank logos gleaming atop their respective towers. In short, a perfect day for clusterballooning. Speaking of clusterballooning, the first balloon artist to come up with the idea of tying four decorative......