Michael Frayn's play Democracy, currently playing at Tarragon, is not always easy to follow. For some reason, this doesn't particularly matter. The second political drama set in Berlin in Tarragon's current season chronicles the rise and fall of Willy Brandt, West Germany's charismatic leader from 1969 until 1974, and is crammed full of politicians, spies, treaties and references to the nuances of Cold War-era Germany that may occasionally go over your head. But it......

If you're one of those people who doesn't hit the snooze button until five minutes before you actually have to leave for work, you might have caught an interesting announcement this morning on that venerable Canadian news/pap institution known as Canada AM: CTV News has chosen its top ten news stories of 2006. Yes, an "esteemed panel of Canadian journalists," which apparently is CTV's euphemism for their own senior staff, chose ten stories from throughout......

Torontoist would never encourage you stay home glued to your couch when you could be out doing all manner of fun and edifying things. That last statement is a baldfaced lie. Torontoist has a really cushy couch and a backstock of microwave popcorn that would do any Cold War paranoiac proud and we are not above occasionally camping out on the couch with the popcorn from dinner until bedtime. Now, usually televsion programming is unable......

- We were asleep at the wheel when the Globe dropped the news that Ontario hired the Toronto Unlimited Firm to rebrand our fair province a few days ago. Our outrage had dissipated a bit. We're too young to become a nasty curmudgeon, we told ourselves. But then the Gehry ad ran again in the Northeast Edition of the Times we picked up in VT. Seems the brilliant brandsmiths have lopped off the most offensive......