Image of DEXTRE courtesy of NASA. Several months ago, a group of young NASA employees set out to redefine what space exploration means for their generation, Generation Y. Unlike the Baby Boomers' mission to the Moon, our generation's experience of space has been shaped by things like the International Space Station and the horrific Columbia disaster. It is no wonder, then, that Gen Y'ers are not all that interested in space. To get them......

Fire at Queen and Bathurst. Adios to Duke's, the Suspect Video outlet, and a bunch of other cool places. Check out Torontoist's coverage of the fire here and here and here––Queen West will be closed until next week. Home sales in Toronto drop significantly after land tax kicks in. Of course, one has to account for the fact that home sales in January, before the land tax was initiated, were significantly higher because people were......

At first we assumed it was Scientology. After all, who else has the money to produce and purchase space for such glossy anti-pharmaceutical ads, which have been popping up all over transit shelters and buses in Ontario and Montreal? Google wasn't much help, and their Blog Search just pointed us to other people as perplexed as we were. And poor spellers with domination fantasies. Searches of domain registrations weren't particularly fruitful, especially after the......

Last February, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released the NYC Condom, with packaging echoing the city's iconic subway signage and distributed for free by street teams in heavily-trafficked areas. In time for Valentine's Day this year, the rebranded LifeStyles condoms have been redesigned, accompanied by a multimedia campaign under the slogan "Get Some." But one of the campaign's new banner ads will look strangely familiar to Torontonians—it features a......

Frequent northbound travellers on the Bayview Extension have probably noticed the "Pottery Road" street sign pointing to a glorified supermarket driveway at the top of the hill, just south of Moore Avenue. Some may even have wondered how it relates to the more familiar street of the same name almost 1.5 kilometers to the south, winding up the valley wall to Broadview Avenue. The answer to this puzzle is that the two Pottery Roads......

Oh yes. There Will Be Blood is the latest film from P.T. Anderson (he of Magnolia and Boogie Nights). Set across turn-of-the-century America, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a miner-turned-oil tycoon, and scored by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, the film is making pretty much everyone who loves movies lose their mind: Gaze upon its 95% on Rotten Tomatoes! Its 9.3 on IMDb! Its 382 Google results for "'there will be blood' 'best film ever'"! And it's......

Google has always been known for its clean, lightweight, ad-free search page, but Canada's largest provider of broadband internet is under fire today for messing with it. Toronto-based Rogers has begun testing a controversial technique that allows the media empire to insert its own content into another entity's web page, angering net neutrality proponents. According to a tip passed to L.A.-based technology expert Lauren Weinstein, the system being employed is manufactured by the "in-browser......

A large part of the downtown core from College to Queens Quay and York to Bayview, was blacked-out for about 2 ½ hours yesterday. In response, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said that Toronto has the ability to generate all the power it needs and certainly wasn't getting any more from the Province, while Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty agreed, adding that Torontonians should stop whining and being all dependent on electricity. Web search giant......

While events like Luminato and Nuit Blanche are fantastic, Toronto is sorely lacking in quality, long-term public art. Last April, Henk Hofstra created an "urban river" in Drachten, Holland. The Blue Road installation is an example of what mind-blowing urban public art can be. Featuring 1000 metres of road painted blue and the phrase "Water is Life" written in eight-metre-high letters across it, the Blue Road is reminiscent of the waterway that used to be......

Google Street View will comply with Canadian privacy laws. Don't worry—you can continue to masturbate on the roof of your home in relative peace. Dalton McGuinty says he would accept a minority government. Gosh, Dalton. That's awfully big of you. Speaking of minority governments, Stephen Harper admits that a minority government is possible if he calls another election. Considering that the Tories haven't bettered their fortunes in Ontario recently, this earns Torontoist's "well, duh"......

First the OPP, and now the Toronto Public Health department—everyone's getting Facebook! A few weeks ago, a woman went to the Toronto Wildlife Centre to drop off a bat that (unbeknownst to her) was infested with rabies. The health department wanted to warn her, so they tried all their top-secret official government methods of tracking people down (apparently consisting of the "telephone book" and "Google") but nothing panned out. So they did what any reasonable......

The idea of another Toronto restaurant guide may not seem original, but Urbanspoon, a newly launched website, sets itself apart by combining the best elements of other guides with some ideas of its own. And it presents them all in a clean and user-friendly design. Like many guides, it lets you browse by type of cuisine or by neighbourhood (including the suburbs), with the results listed alphabetically or ranked according to ratings. What distinguishes......

Whilst performing our pre-read ritual of tearing out Toronto Life's 8,000 annoying snot-glued ad inserts and heavy stock subscription cards, we suddenly came across Torontoist's name in the mag's "Roundup" feature. The chart compares Toronto's four major city blogs: Torontoist, Spacing Wire (now Spacing Toronto), BlogTO, and the newish Torontopedia. Torontoist's raison d'être is listed as "news, arts, culture, snark"—and we won't argue with that—while BlogTO is like "your geeky friend who's always in......

A few weeks ago, Torontoist discussed a number of emerging collaborative gatherings, including Talk20 and Dorkbot, and a considerable omission was made when Drupal Toronto was left off that list. Toronto is quite renowned for having a very active and vital community contributing to the development of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). What is Drupal and why should you care? Put quite simply, Drupal is an open source system for building websites. It......

When the TTC started mapping out its new future under Adam Giambrone, this probably wasn't what it had in mind. A few hours ago, Ian Trider left a comment on Jonathan Goldsbie's post about the TTC's survey, with a link to a TTC map that reflects the potential cutbacks. We've seen a fair share of TTC maps, from a superb Google Maps mashup to a glorious anagrammed subway line. Trider's map is simple, effective,......

The Real Toronto's hook is relatively simple. Filmed in the summer of 2005 by a now-24-year-old Russian immigrant nicknamed Madd Russian, it aims to show that "Toronto, known to most as a world class city has another side to it. This movie shows the reality of living in housing projects and some of the most run down areas in the city. This footage includes interviews with gang members, drug dealers and some of the......

Do you wistfully dream of having a little corner of the city to call your own, but balk at the "Homes" section of the classifieds with its hyperbole-strewn ads and dead-eyed realtors? A new Google Maps-based website, housing123.com, tries to make things a little easier for potential home buyers across the GTA. The Canadian Real Estate Agency (CREA) operates a database known as the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), which allows realtors to view virtually......

With over one million attendees in previous years, there was no chance that Torontoist would have forgotten about Taste of the Danforth. One of the most popular cultural events in Toronto begins tonight at 6 p.m. on Danforth Avenue between Chester and Jones Avenue and continues throughout the weekend to make sure you get your fill of souvlaki. To help you plan out your trip, Taste of the Danforth has put together a handy......

There are few things more irksome to a cyclist than a needlessly blocked bike lane. So while some people are making their own, others have created a service to help defend the far-too-few bike lanes we have already. This is precisely the idea behind MyBikeLane Toronto. A North American network of blogs launched in 2006, MyBikeLane is dedicated to outing the road hogs and other boobs blocking the way. All cyclists who have experienced......

For people of a certain age, memories of the Toronto Zoo begin with riding the old monorail. Only it wasn't the old monorail back then—it was the super-futuristic monorail. After a 1994 accident that injured about 30 people, the train's track was pulled up and some of the guideway removed. But if you know where to look, most of the route remains visible as it snakes through the grounds of the zoo. The abandoned......

It's not entirely clear how or when R. Kelly's hip-hop opera "Trapped in the Closet" became a Zeitgeist. Part music video, part soap opera, it—while verging on self-parody throughout—has spawned parodies by everyone from South Park (which used it to make fun of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, among others) to Weird Al (who used it to make fun of fast food. Oh Weird Al!). What is clear is why it's been embraced by seemingly......

A big congratulations goes out to Toronto-based press House of Anansi for publishing this year’s ReLit short story winner, Bill Gaston’s Gargoyles. The ReLit award is set up to give well deserved attention to books produced by the independent presses throughout Canada. House of Anansi’s winning entry is joined a number of its other publications on the poetry and novel short list. (Also nominated for the long list was Torontoist’s very own Sharon Harris for......

Every two weeks, Torontoist looks to fill up all the square feet in your abode. Eschewing the IKEA catalogue, delve into the unique design shops, interesting sales, and easy do-it-yourself projects that can be found scattered throughout Toronto. The green bin program has been met with little resistance as one of the better initiatives the city has taken on to divert a greater percentage of waste from landfills. Since many of the residents of Toronto......

Torontoist has seen its fair share of Google Maps mashups. For geography nerds like us, maps are always fun to play around with, but most of the mashups we've seen so far have not been particularly useful. That is, unless you're dying to know where they keep all the Timmy's or bust all the grow-ops. Enter Taxiwiz. The site is far from slick, but the idea behind it is great. Taxiwiz takes Google's driving......

OpenCities was a weekend-long unconference that took place on the 23rd and 24th of June. Many excellent conversations came out of the weekend, and this is one of them. You can read notes from the rest at OpenCities.ca. The late Jane Jacobs asserted that a great public space should attract different people for different reasons at different times of day. Why, then, have we forgotten the last part in our planning—and our thinking? Torontoist......

CityNews and the Toronto Star are reporting that Canada's Wonderland has closed its free-fall ride, the Drop Zone (named after the Wesley Snipes skydiving movie) due to a grisly accident on a similar ride in the States. On Thursday, a cable snapped on the Superman Tower of Power at Louisville's Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom and severed both feet of a 13-year-old girl above her ankles. The Six Flags and Cedar Fair chains (the latter......

Ever since the creation of the Greater Toronto Transit Authority (GTTA) last year we have been eagerly awaiting some information about what it is they actually do and/or when/where they will actually do that thing. So, last week when Dalton McGuinty announced that (if re-elected) he would invest $17.5 billion in transit programs to be administered by the GTTA we decided it was time to do some serious research (i.e. Google them). Alas, we......

In our ongoing quest to highlight the city's most heart-warming graffiti, we draw your attention to Erin Pryde’s Love photoset on Flickr. Pryde first spotted the "I Love You" series of tags in early 2006. At that time, she "was in a whirlwind of major life changes." Although Pryde moved to Toronto in 1995, she had a love/hate relationship with the city for over a decade, but thanks to a move and the graffiti,......

After what was Toronto's first school shooting this week, the issue of youth violence is again on the lips of Torontonians. The first reaction in events like this is to establish blame—and blame comes quick. Fingers are pointed at a predictable checklist of reasons, most laced with classist and racist undertones that sully entire communities in our city, and the Star publishes a Google death map which points out exactly where you might not......

By now, you've likely heard about some marketing brainiac's bright idea for an ad campaign, illegally erecting giant logos for a car company in our city's ad-free public parks. There has been some discussion about whether or not to give this story further dissemination lest it draw even more attention to the manufacturer and confirm the adage that any publicity is good publicity, even if it's negative. But let's mention them: it's Audi. Audi......