If you happen upon a group of tourists decked out in Chicago Bears regalia (with or without helmets) on your daily commute to work in the next few days, we think we may know the reason why. The Chicago Tribune recently informed its readers that a visit to Toronto would be well worth their while. The author of the article—who claims to have visited Toronto 137 times—recommends "10 Things To Love" about Toronto; let's......

Photo by Caesar Sebastian. Justice brings their gigantic glowing cross and their hot electro-house beats to the city on Monday. While the Sound Academy (ex-The Docks) is usually an awkward place to see music, it's well suited for this show. There will be plenty of space for people to "D.A.N.C.E." and the duo has a sound large enough to match the venue. They'll be joined by fellow Parisian Busy P and Fancy at the......

From downtown to Uxbridge, the Undercover Brother knows how to have fun in the GTA. Reel Toronto's crack team of detectives has figured something out. Aside from Chicago and Good Will Hunting, we don't get too many Oscar-quality productions up here in Hogtown. You would think with so many productions we could average better than, say, Cocktail, but we tend not to do so hot. Still, there's no shame in providing some laughs, and......

Photo by Kamillionaire (Chicago). A spokesperson for the Church of Scientology labelled Sunday's protest outside its office at Yonge & St Mary—part of a worldwide series of protests—a "religious hate crime" and said that the "hate crimes of Anonymous should be condemned," as reported in Torontoist, CTV and the Toronto Sun, among others. That got us thinking. Accusing someone of a "hate crime" is pretty damning. Are the protestors guilty of it? Our preliminary......

The rumour mill is swirling around the Maple Leafs this week, as a less-than-stellar season and mixed signals from club ownership lead to daily reports about the fate of the team's management and captain. With all signs pointing to a third straight early vacation at season's end, the team's followers are steamed. Fans 70 years ago may also have been frustrated with the club, though in their case the problem was a team that......

Photo from Monolith Festival. One of Chicago's finest, Kid Sister makes her return to Toronto at Wrongbar this Friday. Ever since landing the cover of Urb's Next 1000 issue, Kid Sister's career has been moving firmly in the fast lane. She landed a Kanye cameo for her debut video Pro Nails and she's already proven that she can rock a Toronto crowd. Kid Sister will be joined by Ottawa's Jokers of the Scene and......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse. A towering bench mysteriously appeared in Manhattan, and New York City officials are baffled. Chicago tragically lost one of its most recognizable neighborhood icons, the pigeon man of Lincoln Square.The Los Angeles Police Department left a body......

Photo by Jeremy Farmer from Flickr. It’s an end of an era as the popular indie night Easy Tiger shuts it down on Friday after a 14 month-run. A hipster haven, Easy Tiger is responsible for introducing hundreds of people to the booze can downstairs of College Street Diner that is Tiger Bar. Midland’s finest, Born Ruffians (pictured), will take the stage and the Easy Tiger DJs will spin the tunes. Expect plenty of......

Toronto's extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn't always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city. Mississauga scores a little slice of cinema history in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. From lame futuristic thrillers to Oscar-nominated period......

Photo by 826 Chicago Today, TINARS will present Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney's, to launch the paperback edition of his book, What Is the What. Here in Toronto for one day only, Eggers' book, written as a "novelized autobiography" about Sudanese war refugee Valentino Achak Deng, will be complemented with a multimedia presentation during the event. Also don't forget that Taddle Creek will be having their tenth anniversary party tomorrow. They'll be celebrating with the......

Ever marvel at the architecture of Casa Loma, Osgoode Hall and the Ontario Legislature in Queen's Park? Those lovely red-brick buildings, dear friends, are the legacy of Toronto's vernacular building material—sweet slabs formed from the banks of the Don herself. From 1889 to 1980, the Don Valley Brick Works made some of the highest quality brick in the land. Why, in 1893, the Don Valley brick was crowned Best Brick at the Chicago World's......

Some musicians are professional wallowers. Others are professional romantics. And still others are professional fun-havers. Both Toronto's Spiral Beach and Brighton's The Go! Team fall into that last category—performers who embrace the sheer joy of performing. But more than that, they are young, talented, and famous, they know they are young, talented, and famous, and they're grateful for being young, talented and famous. Although Beach's Maddy Wilde and the Team's Ninja may strike diva......

Reel Toronto is a look at Toronto's illustrious film history, during which our fair city has represented just about everywhere on earth. Yes, we're proud of our chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow––heck, Toronto even plays itself, every now and then. Even the legendary Elwood Blues cannot distract from the glaring sight of CBC Headquarters. There are a zillion reasons why Blues Brothers 2000 is not as good a......

Mid-1970s diners expected a certain level of ostentation when eating at finer Chinese cuisine establishments. Decor was touted as much, if not more, than what went into one's mouth. The atmosphere diners were promised at today's featured restaurant hints at a feast for the senses. Except that the foo dogs were not mere decoration... The history of 346 Spadina Avenue reflects the neighbourhood's ethnic shifts. During the mid-20th century it was home to the......

Police are investigating a mysterious purple liquid found seeping around the Don River. When asked for comment, the police stated that they have all their men rolling around in the goo in the hopes that it's radioactive and gives them all superpowers. A man is dead after a shooting near Broadview and Dundas. And an Etobicoke teen is dead after being hit by a car in a parking lot. Let's stop the hate, shall......

If you've ever fantasized about designing your own skateboard deck—and really, who hasn't—the best day of your life may rapidly be approaching. DIY skateboard company Roarockit is opening its first boardmaking program in Toronto. After almost four years as a web-based business selling make-your-own-board kits, Roarockit is opening a school where aspiring boardmakers can attend seminars on how to create their own decks, ranging from basic street decks all the way up to highly personalized......

Enormous DVD piracy bust in Missisauga. Investigators believe it was making over twenty million dollars a year. This is a huge blow to professional movie piracy in Canada. (Well, at least to that one piracy ring. Other movie pirates probably don't care. And in fact are kind of happy about the loss of competition.) Of course, this is not so much the case to people who just want to pirate movies for their own use,......

The last few years have seen a steady erosion of the stuffy formalities associated with sharing information. If you haven't already heard, the lecture is yesterday's news. Young artists and designers would rather share ideas in a more relaxed and less hierarchical environment. You can see evidence the world over with "open-source" collectives like Dorkbot, Share, Pecha Kucha and Le Placard, which allow artists and the curious public to come together to perform, present......

Apparently, we really really really wanna zig a zig, hah. The CBC reports today that the Spice Girls are coming to Toronto in January 2008. Toronto's Spice Girls fans (there are, apparently, some) "outvoted fans in Rio, Chicago, Paris, Baghdad and Alice Springs in an online contest to get the group to perform in the city." (This is why Baghdad is on that list, by the way.) 'Cause if there's anything this city is......

For those of us who grew up watching Buffalo television, the city seems like a nearby suburb or one of those neighbourhoods that you heard about but never visited. The phrase “Three alarm fire in Tonawanda” was as familiar as Bad Boy’s “Noooo-body.” Yet, cross border shopping aside, it's surprising how few Torontonians have really been to Buffalo. We went last week and we recommend the day trip. Here's a short list of things......

Chicago prosecutors expected to ask that the book be thrown at Conrad Black. HA HA HA ROT IN JAIL YOU UNKIND GENTLEMAN [Needless to say, the previous two words originally read...uh...differently. They were swears!—Ed.]. Sorry, that was not very objective. Please amend the previous sentence to read "hee hee hee rot in jail you freaking aardvark." In other news, he may also go bankrupt, making this officially the best news story of the year so......

White collar theft is relatively unexciting as news stories go, but yesterday's verdict from a Chicago courtroom fosters a special sort of antipathy toward the insufferable Lord and Lady Black of Crossharbour. It's not so much the US$60 million the dark Lord allegedly helped misappropriate, or how calling a CBC journalist a slut isn't particularly appropriate conduct for a Lady of faux nobility—it's that following years of jaw-dropping hubris which left a trail of......

Feeling nutty and proud of it? David Miller has proclaimed July 14 as Mad Pride Day in Toronto, which aims to recognize and empower a much marginalized group: those who have experienced oppression at the hands of the psychiatric system (psychiatric survivors and consumers) and those who generally have been stigmatized by their mental health issues. In the same way that the gay community has reclaimed the word "queer," psychiatric survivors and consumers have empowered......

You've only got a week and a half left to apply for the coolest job ever: a Torontoist contributor! The deadline is Tuesday, July 3. (If you applied and haven't received a response yet, hold tight—we're getting to everyone, but we've got like a thousand applications to go through.) In addition to the positions already listed in the hiring post, we're also looking for a copy editor—someone to look over every word of all......

This week, the already-awesome Dufferin Grove Park is absolutely ablaze with awesomeness, with tendrils of wicked cool billowing through its leafy canopies and filling the lungs and hearts of theatre aficionados everywhere. The Cooking Fire Theatre Festival, which runs from June 20-24, is a presentation of five short plays, accompanied by a spectacular organic meal and infused with a spirit of collaboration and comraderie from start to finish. This is not your ordinary trip......

Have you checked out the officially unveiled ROM Crystal yet? Some cool dudes like David Foster, Deborah Cox, Jann Arden, K'naan, Natalie McMaster, David Suzuki and Governor General Michaëlle Jean [AND CLAY AIKEN!!!—Ed.] were on scene for the dedication. A 18-month-old boy is dead after falling off of a 28th-floor balcony of an apartment building near Victoria Park and Danforth Avenue yesterday. Stephane Dion to One Cent Now: No. The Buffalo News on Toronto:......

The soldier killed Wednesday in Afghanistan has been confirmed as Master Cpl. Darrell Jason Priede. The 30-year-old grew up in Burlington, Ont. but lived in Grand Forks, B.C. until he left for Afghanistan a month ago. He was killed along with six others when a rocket flew into their Chinook helicopter. The Ipperwash Inquiry was released yesterday. Commissioner Sidney Linden says that he believes that both federal and provincial governments were responsible as well as......

Every weekday, we pick an image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve! There are a whole lot of photographic crowd pleasers in this shot by Flickr pool contributor End User: a fisheye lens, tall buildings, geometric lines, and the BCE Place atrium. What we (and the photographer) also like is how it captures......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

Say you work in government, and a famous environmentalist attacks the environmental plan you've put together, calling it a sham. Do you defend it on the merits? Well, if you're Environment Minister John Baird, no—instead you attack Al Gore with a "you weren't any better" retort. Because Al Gore was Vice President, seven years ago, of a different country! Also, he has a big house and is now kind of fat! It's official: Justin Trudeau......