Speculation has been swirling in Toronto's literary community over the authorship of The Calling, a new recent crime fiction novel, penned by a prominent and highly-regarded writer under the alter-ego of Inger Ash Wolfe. First, Maclean's guessed the author was Jane Urquhart, who denied the rumour. Then, citing as evidence a handful of anonymous leaflets distributed to publishers, The Star pointed the finger at Michael Redhill, one of Torontoist's favourite authors. He coyly side-stepped the......

Phase Two of the much-blogged Obay campaign is hitting the streets, having been "unveiled" in a press conference at Centennial College this morning. Linda Franklin, President & CEO of Colleges Ontario—the advocate for the province's 24 colleges of applied arts and technology—was there to divulge details of the "top secret" campaign. Shocker: it has to do with parental mind control.......

Says Charles DH Crosbie, who submitted the photo at right to our Flickr pool:Yes, this is how the slice came: a used and soiled "Convenience Size" bottle of Vaseline moisturizer, as found in a Pizza Pizza, bagged slice of pizza; purchased in-store at 8:30PM (EST) 23 February 2008, Yonge St near Bloor St (Toronto, Canada). If you want to see more (and why wouldn't you?), there are several more photos of the mess. (There's even......

Since fake pharmaceutical ads for a drug called "Obay" starting appearing across Ontario (and elsewhere) last week, everyone from street artist Frank Shepard Fairey (aka OBEY) to Scientologists to comedian Maggie Cassella has been fingered as the culprit behind them. Last Friday, three days after the ads seem to have launched, we traced them, with no small amount of confidence, to a substantially less dramatic source––Colleges Ontario, an advocacy organization representing twenty-four colleges across......

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......

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......

Most of the bronze plaques bolted to the city's historically designated sites and monuments commemorate some virtually forgotten piece of minor Toronto history—but take a stroll along Queen Street West and some familiar round medallions might particularly pique your interest. The strange plaques were part of the grand Gestures installation by the 640 480 Video Collective, which aimed to memorialize inconsequential events captured on video at ten spots around the city. Each marker was......

Starting your art collection? Start small. At OCAD's sixth annual Whodunit? Mystery Art Sale on Saturday, you'll have over 800 pieces to choose from—all 5½" x 7½", all $75.00. Buy your favourite, then turn it over to reveal the name of artist. Depending on your luck and sleuthing skill, you could end up with a big-name bargain: in addition to the usual Canadian artists and OCAD alumni, faculty and students, this year's special contributors......

Dr. David Evans is an Associate Curator in the ROM's Vertebrate Paleontology department. Upon assuming the job in May, he was assigned the task of finding a flagship sauropod specimen to display in the museum's upcoming exhibit (opening December 15) within the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Little did Evans know that he didn't have far to look. While on a scouting trip to Wyoming, the bone buff came across an article by noted sauropod expert......

A few weeks ago, we wondered about the presence of electricity meters placed randomly around the city, measuring power consumption for, well, something or other. We'd grown so perplexed by these meters that we felt compelled to ask Toronto Hydro for more information. The utility went beyond the call of duty by actually sending a supervisor out to examine one of the mystery locations we'd identified. He reported back that the meter on Overlea......

Torontoist firmly believes in the old adage that one can never have too many photographs of pumpkins. Whether they are ornately carved, falling from a 32nd floor window or baked into a luscious pie, we are always on the prowl at this time of the year for interesting shots of glorious gourds. Unfortunately, many of the city's pumpkins come to a tragic end. Take the smashed specimen above, found sitting atop a phone at......

We were amused to find these veneers on the website of a Toronto cosmetic dentistry practice. Can you guess which celebrity these Chiclets belong to? Hint: it ain't Hilary Duff.......

Our modern urban infrastructure is so pervasive that most of it goes virtually unnoticed. But every once in a while, something appears just out of place enough to make you stop and wonder what it's doing there. For example, an electricity meter strapped to a light pole directly above a pedestrian "push to cross" button, its familiar flat disk spinning slowly and recording usage of, um, what exactly? Since first puzzling over that meter......

At their crudest, graffiti tags are generally used for the artist’s personal aggrandizement. While it is not uncommon for graffitists to tag the names legendary celebrities (Tupac anyone?) much more rare is the tagger who promotes the work of classical composers posthumously. Recently, tags of the name of the Bohemian-Austrian composer Gustav Mahler mysteriously appeared on the Queen Street Bridge and along Lake Shore Boulevard East. Who is this culturally aplomb tagger and why......

We’ve heard of skeletons in the closet before, but skeletons at Toronto’s Old Don Jail? Recent excavations uncovered three skeletons, likely former prisoners buried in the prison cemetery. Before the 1976 abolition of the death penalty in Canada, seventy executions by hanging took place at the jail. Please remind us not to go trick or treating at the Don Jail this Halloween, as we have an acute case of phasmophobia. Illustration by Kevin McBride.......

Photo by Qehven from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. If "free contemporary art things" happen to be your thing, then chances are you were one of the 425,000 people wandering around at last year's inaugural Nuit Blanche. And unless you've been living under a rock, you know that this year, it's back this Saturday night—with a vengeance. Boasting 123 museums and over 150 projects, teamed with all night subway on certain routes and txtArt allowing......

Crossings bearing the familiar Pedestrians Obey Your Signals sign are usually a good indication that still nobody is obeying, but what to do when the signals themselves ignore each other? Discovered on Jared Alleyne's Flickr account and captured this week in Yorkville by his sister Caleigh, the photo also shows a smashed street lamp reflector at the base of the pole. Perhaps we'll stay away from this intersection for a while.......

Earlier this evening, The Star reported on what might somehow rank as one of the strangest videos on YouTube. Recorded on Monday afternoon at the protests in Montebello, the video shows the tail end of a confrontation between Dave Coles (president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada) and three masked men who seem hell-bent on rilling up him, his fellow protestors ("old guys, grandmothers, grandfathers"), and the line of riot-ready police.......

As mentioned in last week's ad, the Canadian National Exhibition took a break during World War II. Once the war was over, the existing buildings were modernized to prepare for the Ex's return. "From acting as a depot through which passed thousands of young Canadians to the theatres of war," noted a Toronto Telegram editorial, "it now reverts to its role as the window through which the world may glimpse the peacetime strength and......

"Oh my God, my blow-up doll has been brutally murdered!" shrieked the young woman from the southeast corner of John and Richmond as she clutched her fake-blood-soaked inflatable companion. "My only friend, and someone brutally shot her! The horror! Why hasn't the police security camera done anything about it?!" Early Saturday afternoon, the Toronto Public Space Committee's Cameras in Public Spaces campaign performed this bit of street theatre in the Entertainment District. It was......

Canadian music fans might have heard of Sherrie Lea Laird. She covered Sade's "No Ordinary Love." She has a band, Pandemonia, and they just released a classic rock CD called Left to Die...In the Wide Open. Oh, yeah—and she married Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, had an affair with JFK, and starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Laird is the subject of a book by a Dr. Adrian Finkelstein, "Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a......

If you're interested in learning more about what the future holds for you, but feel that clairvoyance is not something to be attempted on an empty stomach, Psychic Brunch may be just what you’ve been looking for. Psychic Brunch first took place in 2003. Since then, it's become a twice monthly event where what the Psychic Brunch MySpace calls "a small but seasoned, dedicated team of psychics and healers" gather to help clients "mold happier......

We're intrigued by this apparent statement discovered yesterday by Torontoist Flickr Pool contributor Eyeline-Imagery. The mystery art includes quarters glued to the sidewalk next to a Green P lot at Yonge and St. Clair, beside the message "Why scrounge? Park for free. Drive a bike." With most of the focus of cycling on the environmental and health benefits, it's a fresh idea to point out the high cost of parking instead, especially with such......

A mystery is afoot in Riverdale. The residents of Cambridge Avenue near Broadview & Danforth have grown familiar in recent years with the roaming gangs of monkeys—a dozen at last count—that dangle from the utility wires above the street. They move about only under cover of darkness, stealthily assuming new positions every few nights. By day, they prefer to remain motionless, silently watching passersby far below. Aping the inclusive character of their neighbourhood, the......

We don't normally post ridiculously open-ended questions on Torontoist, but the discussion about the Sam the Record Man sign and the excitement over a new column about Bad Buildings in the city got us thinking about that whole "Toronto aesthetic" thing that keeps coming up time and time again in our city. Not about defining that aesthetic, though (there isn't an over-arching one—if anything, the lack of an aesthetic is our aesthetic), and more......

Torontoist sure does after a visit to the Magic Building on Sumach Street, south of Queen. The pediment over the doorway is graced by what may be both the sexiest and creepiest cowboy hat-wearing gargoyle we've ever seen. Or is that a witch's hat? Either way, she's marginally less inviting than Father Time at the old Don Jail and one-of-a-kind in Toronto. Okay, we know that she's not technically a gargoyle, but it's the......

In a recent argument in favour of the heritage value of the Sam's sign, the billboards in Yonge-Dundas Square were compared to "banner ad slots on a Web page" due to their ephemeral nature. Well, the same could be said of our cultural institutions. The agenda of the June 25th meeting of City Council's Executive Committee [PDF] contains a report recommending that the naming rights of the Hummingbird Centre be resold [PDF]: The financial......

Artist Damien Hirst's diamond-studded skull reminded us that we used to live across the street from a lady who kept a magical Mayan crystal skull in her house. Which got us to thinking about other spooky things. So we've compiled a list of ten, supposedly haunted places in the city. Make your own ghost walk and if you do actually see a spirit, please let us know. 1. The Hockey Hall of Fame (pictured here)......

Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch? This weekend, Torontoist got sent the above poster. While we can't reveal much beyond what the poster does, we can tell you that 418 Spadina is Lucky Dragon Restaurant, which has over three hundred items on its menu. We have been assured by the person or people involved in facilitating the lunch (see? we really can't say anything) that the free food line is......

Our first entry to Touch Up Toronto comes from long-time listener, first-time caller Nick Mahon, who sent us this gently-altered pic of some unearthly sea-beast skimming the surface of Lake Ontario's waters. Back in her native Loch Ness, Nessie is back in the news after being caught on tape (kinda, maybe). Come to think of it, a good harmless Torontonian monster might be a good way to drum up some tourism. After all, nothing......