Many of you have sat behind, beside, adjacent to, or perhaps even in front of (on a particularly unlucky day) that one doofus at the ball game who will not shut up, constantly exhorting his precious "team" to "win the game." He is only able to continue this abominable behaviour due to a combination of the celebrated Torontonian reserve and mild inebriation of his fellow fans. You've probably seen him at the Leafs or......

It's snowing again! This gives Torontoist yet another opportunity to bust out a pretty picture of streets clogged with snow, and it gives the rest of Canada the opportunity to go, "Hey, how come those Toronto folks can't deal with a little snow ha ha ha don't they have plows?" Then we say, "No, we don't have enough plows, fuckers, because it turns out everybody else is entirely happy to suck money off us......

Chris Bosh is at it again. Although his innovative video pitch to fans wasn't enough to push him past Kevin Garnett and Lebron James for a starting spot in the NBA All-Star Game, it has made him a media player. Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix details how the video's popularity has raised Bosh's profile to new heights and how it prompted CB4 to start his own Chris Bosh TV channel on YouTube. To ring in......

The Raptors have reached the halfway point of the season, and almost every news outlet in town has been engaged in the mid-season ritual of handing out report cards. Jose Calderon gets top marks across the board, and deservedly so. His name is even being mentioned as a potential reserve selection for the All-Star Team. Of course, on his own blog and in interviews, Jose has tried to remain humble about the whole thing. That's......

TSX plunges nearly five percent in one day. The stocks dropped as a result of a worldwide sell-off prompted by the probable American recession that, depending on who you talk to, is either here already, coming very soon, or never going to come ever. Of course, you'll only hear that last one when you talk to George W. Bush. Landlord of "the Dungeon" says it's not his fault. He only rents it out, he......

In the best campaign commercial since HuckChuckFacts, Chris Bosh has assumed the identity of a Texas used car salesman in order to try to drum up votes to make it to this year's NBA All-Star Game in New Orleans. Bosh has appeared in the All-Star game for the last two years. Last season he was voted into the starting lineup for the first time, but achieving that feat again became nearly impossible when Kevin Garnett......

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. Two years ago, the Toronto Raptors were the laughing stock of the NBA. Vince Carter and his mom had......

If you haven't been following the Raptors too closely this season, it's possible that you may have missed one of the greatest stories in professional sports at the moment. Jamario Moon is a 27-year-old rookie who had been kicking around just about every minor league on the continent until he finally got his shot with the Raptors this year. And he's tearing things up. Even though he's years older than a number of Raptor veterans,......

Dalton McGuinty's throne speech will focus on poverty and climate change. They were going to focus on Desperate Housewives, but the writer's strike got in the way. If you wanted to know more about the phony bomb scare last night at the ROM, Torontoist has the goods right here. Buy all our playsets and toys! Opposition rebels against Tory climate change proposals. Harper says that the Commonwealth's climate change plan would have meant a doubling......

Our national infrastructure needs $123 billion in investment to avoid collapse. If Canada's governments don't spend the money, we will end up looking like The Road Warrior. (Torontoist dibs being the Gyro Captain.) Internet "brownouts" could become common by 2010. Yes, you read that right: the horror of slow downloads could happen to you. The report, prepared by an organization funded by the American telecommunications industry, recommends massive investment in fibre optic cabling for......

Primate cloning a success. No, we don't have cloned monkeys yet, but we do have cloned monkey stem cells, which could in turn be used to generate human-compatible monkey organs. Man, it's fun just to type the word "monkey." Monkey. City to revamp Union Station. The plans involve teleporters, a spaceship landing port, monkeys, and geothermal power syst... What do you mean, "they're only going to build a mini-mall in the basement?" What the......

People queue up for a chance at a condo. The condos at One Bloor Street East range from $300K to $2 million, so remember, kids: lines aren't just for poor people and the Nintendo Wii any more! Loonie breaks a buck ten American. It's funny because last week when Torontoist mentioned the loonie-rising story, economists were all "well it'll probably hit a dollar-ten eventually" and it seems "eventually" was "less than a week." Speaking......

Now boarding at Platform 1: The Toronto Raptors Bandwagon. Please form a line to the right, and have your tickets ready. Prepare for a bumpy ride, this trip is standing room only. For the first time in five years, the Toronto Raptors are going to the NBA playoffs. And if making the playoffs wasn't enough for Chris Bosh, on Monday he was also named the Eastern Conference Player of the Week. Despite the loss......

Just a little under a month ago, Torontoist suggested that Stephen Colbert should end his long-standing grievance with the Toronto Raptors. Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, put the team "On Notice" during his first show on October 17, 2005. As we described then, the move came one day after the Raptors lost to Maccabi Tel Aviv, the Euroleague Champions; it is the only time that an international squad has ever beaten an NBA......

Howard Moscoe to jerks: "Hey, stop abusing disabled parking permits!" Bill Gates and Stephen Harper have pledged millions of moolah to the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative. Polls suggest the Conservatives have taken the lead in public popularity, but Harper claims he's in no rush for an election. Today in City Hall: a $6.2 million renovation is rejected and nobody wants to sit nicely for the class photo. Fiddler extraordinaire and Toronto resident Ashley MacIsaac......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur, the......

MuchMusic reports that VJ Sarah Taylor underwent emergency surgery on Thursday morning at a hospital in Las Vegas to relieve pressure on her brain. 25-year-old Taylor remains in an induced coma in the intensive care unit and is reported in stable condition. It is not yet known what caused the pressure on her brain. The VJ was shooting on assignment at the NBA All-Star weekend when she was rushed to hospital on Wednesday. She had......

Between fake terrorist alerts and scandals big and small, this just might be the Best Best of the -ists ever. We're exhausted just thinking about it. First up, SFist, who saw their little 'ole site be the center of what was a nice little scandal (even getting their editor on TV) only to find their scandal dwarfed by the even bigger scandal caused by their Mayor boffing one of his aides' wife. We're not just......

Raptors fans have had to suffer a lot of humiliation over the last few years: There was the Vince Carter trade debacle, there was the night that Kobe Bryant dropped 81 points, and there was the 1-15 start last season that had ESPN speculating that the Raptors might be one of the worst teams in NBA history. But, the absolute low-point for the franchise came on the afternoon of October 16, 2005 in a pre-season......

Ottawa reaches $10 million settlement with Maher Arar. Meanwhile, Arar is still on the American no-fly list, so the next time some American asks you why us Canadians are so smug and self-superior as regards them, just point them to this and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. One in four Canadians lists the environment as their chief issue of concern. Twenty percent say they are very likely or somewhat likely to vote Green......

George W. Bush made his State of the Union address last night. Among his policy initiatives introduced in the speech were a request to Americans to reduce their gasoline consumption by twenty percent in ten years (while simultaneously claiming American needed to increase domestic gasoline production), and a proposal to tax employer-based health plans to pay for HSAs (which don't actually solve the problems facing American healthcare). An annotated and rather niftily clickable rebuttal......

Yesterday, Jorge Garbajosa was named the Rookie of the Month for the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and he has been leading NBA.com’s unofficial Rookie of the Year Race for the past month. Garbajosa, however, is not a typical rookie; he doesn’t look like one and he doesn’t play like one. He just turned 29 years old, making him about seven years older than most of the league’s other leading rooks. Perhaps that is why he never......

It appears that most members of the Liberal caucus will support Stephen Harper’s resolution that Quebec be considered a “nation” within Canada. Toronto Police Services Board chairman Dr. Alok Mukherjee now wants to hold a public inquiry into possible cases of corruption, cover-ups and general nasty stuff by members of the Toronto police department. This should come as no surprise: The day after it was announced October was the deadliest month in the history of......

Since 2004, signs have hung on the southeast corner of Maple Leaf Gardens promising an historic Loblaws Real Canadian Superstore. "Soon you'll discover a store filled with fresh flavours, shops and services," the billboards cheerily stated, but the Gardens at Church and Carlton has loomed a decrepit shell since it went dark in 2001, despite some minor action hosting the filming of Cinderella Man. The last Leafs game was on February 13, 1999, where......

The AIDS conference started last night and while Bill and Melinda Gates were there Stephen Harper sent his health minister. We think Stephen owes Tony one. Clement had to face a crowd who repeatedly chanted "Where's Stephen Harper" and some who held up signs and placards protesting the Conservative government's poor record on fighting AIDS in Canada and abroad. Even the co-chair of the conference criticized the PM for not showing up. The Star......

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddy for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bids Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash. Yeah, we may have a few issues with our World Cup broadcasters here, but this guy......

This Torontoist is slowly becoming a sports fan (as if.) After watching 1.5 Stanley Cup games, (my first hockey games ever,) and with plans to go to a baseball game, I'm a changed man. The plans are to see at least one game of each sport... Yes, even the CFL. But now to the NBA. They had their draft on Wednesday and our cuddly Raptors had the number one pick! Who did they choose.........

Sampaist is on the scene in São Paulo beginning this week to become the only ist south of the Equator. Editor Leandro M. Pinto leads the paulistanos down there. You can protest someone at his office, sure, but when the whistle blows at the end of the day can you follow him home? D.C. has sports fans, apparently, and elephants aren't really cut out for zoos. There's this trick where you can read information from......

The weeks starts out right when a sucker punch on the field lands Chicagoist in the middle of a Sox/Cubs throwdown and the fists continue to fly in the comments. Despite suburban resident Ms. Pinney's best little try no books will be banned anytime soon and the El is really really gross. Houstonist is there to start compiling the punditry when when the guilty, guilty Enron verdict comes down. This guy seems to be able......

With Chris Bosh spraining his finger just six minutes into the first quarter of Sunday's game against the Milwaukee Bucks, it was Raptor rookie Charlie Villanueva who stepped in for the all-star forward. Villanueva scored an NBA rookie season-high 48 points on 20-for-32 shooting. Unfortunately the Raps came up short, losing 125-116 in overtime. Villanueva has been a welcomed addition for Toronto fans following all the turmoil the team has endured over the past couple......