Results tagged “middleeast”

Toronto principal in controversial controversy over explicit poems he wrote and posted to his website. This is of course the first recorded case ever of somebody getting in trouble for something they wrote on the Internet, and the scandal has sent shock waves through the online community. "Wait, somebody actually this shit?" said Patrick Metzger. "Dammit, I better re-emphasize that my erotic snuff story about Geri Halliwell is purely a work of fiction!"

Toronto-based Naked News (NSFW, duh), which already broadcasts both an English and Japanese version, will soon also be available in Spanish, Italian and Korean. That's right. While other newsrooms are cutting back, laying off correspondents, and eliminating foreign bureaus, Naked News is (insert your pun of choice here).

It's Boxing Day! Go spend money! If you don't, Canada's economy will suffer and it will all be your fault! You probably don't even own all the seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD yet, do you? You slacker.

So, things are rapidly going to hell in Pakistan. Somewhere between one and two thousand people have been "detained" (i.e., dragged away) since Saturday and all private television stations shut down and the country is about ninety percent of the way to pure chaos, which, given that they have nuclear weapons, is bad. Of course, the White House managed to find the good in the situation, namely that Iraq could be as bad as Pakistan.

Today’s Interview: Suroosh Alvi, co-director of Heavy Metal In Baghdad

Brampton's mayor and police chief are looking to dispel a local urban myth that the municipality is paying Toronto gang members between $5,000 and $10,000 to move to Brampton. Officials deny the payouts, but admit they may have distributed a pamphlet suggesting that in Brampton "the streets are paved with 9 mm shells and the malt liquor flows like water."

Billed as being about "Film & Culture About People from Israel & Palestine," the Voices Forward Film Festival is particularly intriguing because the area is going through a cultural renaissance right now, with writers and directors rejecting the nationalism of the previous generations to tell their own stories. The fest not only unites filmmakers from that troubled region, but it also shows Toronto audiences that, hey, it's not all bombing and hatred in the Middle East.

Garth Turner joins the Grits. Green Party leader Elizabeth May takes all her pictures of Turner out of their heart-shaped frames, burns the mash notes and holds press conference to say that Garth Turner is, quote, "dead to her." Turner, for his part, promises that in future he will address the feelings of any dissatisfied constituents by offering them the opportunity to participate in a referendum as to what color his new leathers should be: traditional black, or Liberal red-tinted.

Apple unveils the iPhone. Entire bunches of interwebs go nuts over possibilities created by what is, when you get right down to it, just another fancy cellphone. Seriously, this isn't the iPod. This isn't a new class of product. This is at best a slight improvement on existing things to which we already had access. The iPhone will not do your hair, manage your diet or make you generally sexier. (Okay, it might make you sexier to technology fetishists.)

Hungry Torontonians are no stranger to shawarma. Simply a rotating column of chicken, beef or lamb, it is arguably the best food import from the Middle East since domesticated wheat (and that's a good 5000 years!).

CTV will be airing an in-depth report on each story on their 11 PM national news, starting December 23. There's bound to be some debate among people who care about this sort of thing as to the order of the stories, as well as about some glaring omissions. But should Stephen Harper lose a federal election in 2007, he can take solace in the fact that in at least one poll, he totally kicked Stephane Dion's ass!

This afternoon's pro-Lebanon rally outside the Israeli consulate at Queen's Park & Bloor was, like so many other recent partisan efforts, riddled with contradictions.