Torontoist is ahead of the game for previewing some of the best music choices this week (Queen West fire benefit, Forest City Lovers' CD release) but Musicologist will give you one more recommendation—just for kicks. When UK’s Field Music announced a (begrudged) break last year, who knew David Brewis would be in Toronto playing a show under a different name and clean ethos so quickly? School of Language and their debut LP Sea From Shore......

Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman has caused a furor with his comment that he'd be willing to test-drive an adult diaper to see if being left in soiled diapers for hours on end is really all that bad. Critics say he isn't taking the issue of sub-standard care in nursing homes seriously, which seems a bit harsh, since there can't be too many politicians who'd be willing to spend a day crouched in their own......

Your reaction to snow depends on the circumstances. The frequency of dumps the city has received so far this year has caused grumbling about blocked streets, dirty mounds higher than the average citizen and many a wish for spring to speed up its arrival. Conversely, as long as the roads outside the city are passable, lovebirds, families and outdoor enthusiasts looking for an escape from the city have headed up to Muskoka resorts like......

There are tons of great shows for all you concertgoers this week, including a particularly time-sensitive one tonight. Apparently a sold-out Wrong Bar for Crystal Castles last Thursday was not enough for the electro-punk duo. A last-minute show has been booked at the Wrong Bar tonight (alongside LA’s Health) before they continue on with their extensive North American tour. With no tickets to be purchased in advance, you better drop what you’re doing and immediately......

Photo by Darryl Scott. Danger! The Mothership descends onto the Phoenix this Monday, bringing George Clinton and his ace group of funkateers, Parliament Funkadelic, into town to tear the roof off the mutha sucka. Meer mortals are powerless to Dr. Funkenstein and his bop gun. All attempts to fake the funk are punishable with potential exile to the Zone of Zero Funkativity. Accept that it's one nation under a groove. (Note: resistance to groove......

A brief stint of Radiohead concert rumours spread like wildfires last week. Ticketmaster had announced that the band would play two shows on May 26 and 27 at the Air Canada Centre, but mentioned neither the date for the tickets to go on sale nor the price of the tickets themselves—the announcement was quickly removed from the site. This is not the first time Ticketmaster has announced a Radiohead show that did not exist, and......

If you're like most snow-hating Torontonians, your weekend plans are changing with the weather. Suddenly, the thought of spending Friday night in high heels and club lineups has all the appeal of an ice bath. Forget new outfits or dinner spots, you're looking for new releases instead. Should you also be looking for a way to broaden your horizons, impress your intimidatingly smart date, or celebrate the Chinese New Year and Canadian cinema, look......

Most should be very excited by the wide gamut of shows announced this week; Musicologist is excited, but distracted by the concept of a $30.75 Hedley ticket. But yes, excitement: Rick White and The Luyas (one third Jessie Stein of Miracle Fortress and SS Cardiacs, two thirds Bell Orchestre’s Pietro Amato and Stefan Schneider) play the Music Gallery on February 9. Gogol Bordello returns on March 2, shortly after their over-the-top performance last October. New......

Photo by ethervision from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. We wanted to start off this challenge with a proclamation, in Japanese, of our deep love of sushi. Unfortunately, all the online translators we tried just came up with a bunch of squares. We're pretty sure the Japanese language has evolved past this, so we're going to have to blame it on our inferior translator-finding skills and move on. Invented as an early form of fast......

A longtime staple of the holiday season is a special visit from jolly old St. Nick to the nearest shopping mall or department store. Kids relish the opportunity to tell Santa that they want the latest hot toy, peace on Earth or an official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model air rifle, while retailers hope these gift lists translate into sales. If the establishment has hired their Santa carefully, kids will not need to......

Transformation AGO will soon be entering the final stages of its expansion project, estimated to finish sometime in mid-2008. But before the AGO closes its doors in order to begin reinstalling over 5,000 pieces of art into 110 galleries, they will be offering free admission to the public for its closing weekend this October 6 and 7. This will be your final opportunity to view the four exhibitions that have been on display since......

David Hughes, a senior geoscientist at Natural Resources Canada, is to energy security as David Suzuki is to the environment or Al Gore is to Global Warming. The fact that he has yet to receive the same level of attention is an unfortunate oversight, since our energy security (or lack thereof) is an increasingly urgent issue that we must learn more about and begin to address. Mr. Hughes' message regarding dwindling energy supplies is......

Beginning this Thursday, the fifteenth annual Junction Arts Festival will be swarming the streets with an entourage of innovative musicians, performers, and visual artists hailing from Canada, Denmark, Brussels, and the United States. Taking place on the one kilometre stretch between Quebec Avenue and Keele Street on Dundas Street West, the festival will present the works of over fifty visual artists as selected by the 2007 Juried Art Exhibition—and for the first time, will......

The CNE adds "you are here" stickers to its guide maps. No, really. Apparently this is a news story. And you thought journalism was hard and required a degree or something. Missisauga sci-fi author Robert. J. Sawyer wins a Galaxy award at the China International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival. The author of such excellent books as Far-Seer and Hominids said how science fiction is wonderful because it transcends language and culture and tyrannical......

Out of respect for the funeral of Richard Bradshaw, the Toronto International Film Festival Group chose not to hold their traditional big final press conference in Nathan Phillips Square yesterday, and so with slightly less fanfare than usual we received a massive lump of press releases from the Festival announcing that they’ve announced absolutely everything about the festival there is to announce, pretty much. So what does that entail? Well, in the 32nd Toronto International......

The Canadian National Exhibition opens this week, bringing with it nearly 130 years of tradition, from its beginnings as an industrial showcase to its current role as a signal that summer is drawing to a close. Today's pair of ads provide a glimpse of what the Ex was like on the cusp of World War II, before it was closed for wartime activities. The "new amusement area" touted in 1937 proved significant, as it......

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......

Toronto legend Edwin "Honest Ed" Mirvish has died. He was 92. The philanthropic businessman was a crucial part of Toronto's reputation as a world-renowned theatre centre, and had been mostly out of the public eye after contracting a severe case of pneumonia in 2003 and experiencing deteriorating health ever since. Mirvish died at St. Michael's Hospital at 1:30 a.m. Mirvish was born in Virginia on July 25, 1914 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His introduction to......

Pandas is an odd name for anything, and more than a little disconcerting if you're a fan of large, bamboo-eating quadripeds who don't like to breed. Luckily for pandas and those who love them, the No Pandas gallery isn't a radical anti-panda group dedicated to the final destruction of that most endangered of species. It's an art show at Xpace, dedicated to exposing North Americans to China's up-and-coming young artists. Curator Siya Chen, who......

Every weekday, we pick an image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve! Sewer? Don't even know 'er! Whenever Torontoist sees an open utility hole, we have to peek down inside because there's a whole other fascinating world down there! The colours and lighting in this subterranean shot by Flickr pool contributor inventor_77 beautifully......

We've previously written about renowned architects designing furniture, but those creative design types also like to get their fingers dirty with paint on canvas. What could be more appropriate than an art exhibit from the guy who designed the OCAD tabletop building? Starting tomorrow, modernist British architect Will Alsop will be premiering Cultural Fog in Toronto—his first North American art exhibit. Alsop says he's been inspired by city neighbourhoods, which include Riverdale, Roncesvalles and......

It's the last day of Inside Out, and this afternoon, the gay and lesbian film fest presented a pretty exciting Q&A session with director Laurie Lynd. Lynd directed, among other things, gay-friendly fare like the film version of Torontoist-fave Daniel MacIvor's House as well as episodes of Queer As Folk, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Noah's Arc. But it was his latest project that brought him to the immediate attention of Inside Out. Lynd......

The Canada Goose Branta Canadensis is a native North American species of waterfowl. There are up to 11 subspecies of the Canada Goose, but they all have handsome markings—black head, white cheek patches, and long black neck—and fly together in a "V" formation when migrating. That is, if they migrate: Another characteristic of the Canada Goose is that it has no problem living near humans. In fact, they find urban areas like Toronto an......

The Tories unveiled their plan to fight climate change, which broadly speaking involves polluters paying, although not very soon or very much. Cue predictable environmentalist outrage, and Environment Minister John Baird pointing out that the Liberals didn’t even have a fake plan. Buzz Hargrove is pleased, though. An unlicensed daycare in Riverdale was closed down after a child was injured there. An anonymous parent said that the kids in the centre were “healthy, well-stimulated,......

With Toronto FC's home opener drawing near, today's trip in the wayback machine stops at an earlier point in the city's professional soccer history, offering "super summer nights" for a pair of twenties. The Metros joined the North American Soccer League in 1971. This was the city's second go-round with the league – the Toronto Falcons had been a charter member in 1968, but folded after one season. When this ad appeared, the Metros......

Supporting their recently-released second album Yours Truly, Angry Mob, England’s Kaiser Chiefs played a storming, triumphant set at the Kool Haus on Wednesday night. Their story isn’t new: having sold millions of albums in the UK and Europe, British band attempts to crack North America. For every Coldplay, there’s countless Pulps. But as so-called difficult second albums go, Yours Truly, Angry Mob seems to fare much better than average. Writing short-but-catchy pop-punk songs is never......

It was one of the wildest final weekends in NHL history. The Toronto Maple Leafs delivered a knockout blow to the Montreal Canadiens in one of the most electric matches in recent memory, only to have the New York Islanders break our hearts and take the final playoff spot in a shootout against the New Jersey Devils the following day. The Stanley Cup Playoffs begin tonight, but for the second consecutive year, the Leafs won't......

While North American documentaries are becoming increasingly political and divisive, Souvenirs, Iraeli filmmaker Shahar Cohen’s directorial debut doc, is the very human story of a father and son trying to understand where they came from so they might to understand who they are. Souvenirs follows Shahar, an unemployed filmmaker, and his 82-year-old father, Sleiman, as they drive through Europe. Sleiman, a former WWII truck driver in the Jewish Brigade, believes they are retracing his experiences......

If you're a red-blooded Toronto sports fan you probably already have your Toronto FC season tickets in hand, waiting for the big kick-off against the Kansas City Wizards and the day Beckham arrives. In the meantime, the most exciting news on the local football front is the unveiling of our Major League Soccer club's uniforms; especially if you're a BMO customer. The FC have decided to go all "continental" which basically means that they're putting......

Ontario to raise minimum wage to $10.25 by 2010 in new budget. NDP critic predictably says "no, we want it NOW," but Torontoist feels this is one instance where Dalton McGuinty's tendency to take as middling a road as possible has produced just about the best possible result. A twenty-five percent raise in the minimum wage over three years (and what will be a sixty-six percent raise since the Liberals took office in 2003)......