When we first got a tip from Andrew Hunter that "someone has installed a new type of bike post along Yonge north of Lawrence," we were concerned that it might be the vanguard of the Coordinated Street Furniture onslaught of mass-produced uniformity. When we went down (yes, down) to visit the area, however, we were quite relieved to discover not Kramer-designed brontosaurus ribs but elegant, artfully crafted flourishes of metallic whimsy. Inspired by a......

On April 3rd, Trevor Norris successfully defended his dissertation "Consuming, Schooling and the End of Politics" and was awarded a PhD in Philosophy of Education by the Ontatio Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). On April 4th, a party was held at the Bedford Academy in his honour. Little did Trevor know that into this party would explode his friends in the shape of a uniformed marching band, banging......

Is anyone else disappointed that the dystopian future promised in 1980s films isn’t here? If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Torontoist, is that en masse, humans are terrible at predicting our future. It’s always so much more mundane than we expect it to be. The perfect example being The Running Man. Instead of audiences being unsatisfied unless they’re watching the most ridiculously violent reality TV shows possible, here people are absolutely satisfied......

It's Canadian Music Week and that means there's an unusually large number of hip hop shows going on. KRS-One will be teachin' at The Opera House on Saturday as he continues his Stop the Violence movement. RZA dons his Bobby Digital mask on Sunday at the Phoenix. There's also grimy New York hip-hop (M.O.P. on Friday), French rap (DJ Orgasmic and Cuizinier on Thursday), and a strong showcase of local talent (Friday's Exclaim! event). Also......

A demonstration at City Hall yesterday by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty forced the Speaker to halt proceedings after the protest spilled onto the chamber floor. The action by OCAP was called after the discovery of a homeless man frozen to death in a downtown stairwell February 27. A statement by OCAP called the death a "preventable tragedy." Members of the activist group handed out statements to councilors as others rebuked them for their......

Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. In the 1996 Canadian movie Kissed, a young female mortician discovers the joys of necrophilia. That same year, David Cronenberg made Crash, wherein a group of omnisexual urbanites eroticize car accidents. In Léolo, a 12-year-old boy masturbates with a chunk of liver, later served to his family for dinner. This spring's Young People Fucking is, well, called Young People Fucking. Canadians have traditionally been somewhat blasé......

The coolest movie opening this week is Be Kind Rewind, which is a treasure trove of Things White People Like, as it stars Jack Black and his black friend played by Mos Def, and is directed by Michel Gondry, and has lots of irony, seeing as how it is about a couple of people who erase all the videotapes in their video store and then make their own mocking versions of the movies they......

Snow globes, ice sculptures, and an ice bar...sound like an arctic paradise? Even if you're sick of slipping on the white (and sometimes yellow) stuff, you're still invited to Bloor-Yorkville's IceFest Festival this weekend—and you don't even have to get your feet wet! IceFest ent-ice-s with enough of the cold stuff to carve out a ship—and that's 25,000 pounds! By donating five bucks to the Heart & Stroke Foundation, you buy yourself a pose......

If only keeping thieves at bay could be that easy. Remember the '80s and '90s, when car radio theft was all the rage? People etched parts with identifying marks and put "no radio" stickers on their car windows to warn thieves away from a fruitless exercise. Attempting to curb increasingly bold metal thieves, Hydro One started following the lead of frustrated car owners last year, putting up these signs at some of their substations.......

On Friday night at 10:30, the Toronto Public Space Committee's Art Attack will "descend on the streets to re-imagine bus shelters as sensational structures of snow," converting the two ad-adorned boxes at Queen and Jones into something a little more whimsical. Transit shelters, like garbage bins, are giant heaps of private property littered throughout the sidewalks and roads of our city. And, most of the time, they serve a purpose. But every now and......

What kind of people don't like riding their bikes in a Toronto winter? People who have never tried it, that's who. Even as more and more people choose not to get off their bikes when November comes around, many non-cyclists still view winter cycling as unwise, dangerous, or impossible. So as part of its first Bike Winter campaign to raise awareness of cycling as year-round transportation, the City of Toronto is hosting the Coldest......

Barack Obama lays down the smack in South Carolina's presidential primary. Obama won by an enormous 28-point margin, prompting Bill Clinton to afterwards comment that this was no big deal because Jesse Jackson, who is a black man, like Barack Obama, won South Carolina when he ran for President, and did he mention that Barack Obama is black just like Jesse Jackson? (Also black: Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and that R&B star that had......

Sarah Polley is having a kickass month as her debut directorial feature, Away From Her, racks up the accolades. On Sunday, the Los Angeles film critics gave Polley a New Generation Award for up-and-coming directors. Then, on Monday, the New York film critics felt Away From Her was 2007's Best First Film. In addition, earlier this month Polley was named one of the "50 Smartest People in Hollywood" by Entertainment Weekly. She's the youngest......

The Toronto International Film Festival Group announced their top ten Canadian features for 2007 last night, along with (for the first time) their top ten list of Canadian short films. The top ten Canadian features were: L’âge Des Ténèbres (Denys Arcand), Amal (Richie Mehta), Continental, Un Film Sans Fusil (Stéphane Lafleur), Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg), Fugitive Pieces (Jeremy Podeswa) , My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin), A Promise To The Dead: The Exile Journey Of Ariel......

The Hidden Cameras are back home, and we are all better off for it. As we mentioned in this week's music listings, the Cameras––they of the Mississauga-bred now world-famous exuberant gay pop fame––are playing an AIDS benefit concert this Thursday night at the Great Hall in Hart House (7 Hart House Circle), with proceeds going to Toronto People With AIDS Foundation and AVERT International. The show, with Montreal's Sister Suvi and Toronto's Allie Hughes, will......

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......

This just in: Conrad Black has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his role in "misappropriating" (which is Rich People for "stealing") millions of dollars from the Hollinger newspaper empire, and for obstructing justice by allowing certain documents, which would have determined whether or not he was guilty of the nine charges he managed to evade (including racketeering), to "disappear." Now, of course the National Post is all over this......

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,......

Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson has, as he put it to Torontoist in a phone interview earlier today, "seen better days." The Integrated Media OCAD student and his final project for his advanced video class are the direct cause––intended or not––for yesterday's bomb scare at the Royal Ontario Museum, and, a day later, Jonsson is now suspended from OCAD and is wanted for questioning by police. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades pieces (the most famous of......

As the 20th Century dawned, Danforth Avenue was a muddy road that served as the northern boundary for the eastern portions of the city of Toronto. Between 1909, when the city made its first major annexation on the north side of Danforth, and the appearance of today's ads in 1921, the area we now know as "The Danforth" rapidly changed from a semi-isolated mix of farmland, villages and church reserves to a series of......

Remember when you were like fifteen and it was a TOTAL BUMMER that you couldn't buy alcohol, because, you know, you weren't of age yet? And now that you've been legal for what seems like an eternity, and you're older and wiser, with many formative life experiences behind you, you realize that not being able to buy booze at the age of fifteen was probably a good thing, and likely prevented more than a few......

Following the release this year of Neil Young's 1971 Massey Hall concert and a third tribute album comes Chrome Dreams II. Featuring ten new songs and covering a range of musical styles, there is something for all of his fans on this recording. "Where Living With War and Everybody’s Rockin' were albums focused on one subject or style, Chrome Dreams II is more like After The Goldrush or Freedom, with different types of songs......

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......

During TIFF we said, "if you’re as big a fan of Joy Division as Torontoist is, you’ll quickly come to terms with the fact that Control is simply one man’s interpretation of Deborah Curtis’s book Touching from a Distance, and your overall feelings will (probably) lie on how you feel about that interpretation," and we stand by that even now—despite the gorgeous cinematography, which remains the film’s strongest point, we still like 24 Hour......

To no one's surprise, yesterday's Ontario election (read our liveblog of the results here) was a big victory for the status quo, with voters giving the Liberals another majority and soundly rejecting Mixed Member Proportional voting. Dalton McGuinty was pleased, having given his acceptance speech the day before the election, while John Tory, having lost bids to become mayor of Toronto and Premier of Ontario, needs only an unsuccessful run at the PM-ship to......

More than a week of protests in Toronto against the violence in Burma culminated last night with the Global March for the People of Burma. The demonstration began at 6:00 p.m. in front of the Chinese consulate on St. George Street before making its way to Queen's Park, where a vigil was led by monks from the city's Buddhist temples. According to the Toronto Star, hundreds heeded the call from Amnesty International and other......

If you can imagine, for a moment, that Queen West has been designated a streetcars-and-pedestrians-only zone, it would not be that much different from the traffic flow in 1907, or this weekend. Join Streets Are For People this Saturday for World Carfree Day. Celebrated in over 1,500 cities around the globe, Toronto's version is custom-tailored to our homegrown oil addiction. This Saturday, there are two related happenings to be aware of. The first is......

It begins! Tonight the Toronto International Film Festival opens officially with Jeremy Podeswa’s Fugitive Pieces, so if you want to start soaking up the atmosphere of the festival head down to Roy Thompson Hall before 8 p.m. It’s easy to write off the festival before it’s even begun: maybe you’re already sick of all the coverage, annoyed about how scarce tickets can be (despite some high ticket prices—this year we’re perplexed as to why......

If you missed it, yesterday our Toronto International Film Festival preview began with a look at the Gala and Contemporary World Cinema programmes, and if you didn’t know, tickets go on sale tomorrow morning online, at 416-968-FILM or 1-877-968-FILM and at the TIFFG Box Office at the Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor Street—so after you’ve read this, you might want to start queuing. Today we have our preview of the Special Presentations, Real To Reel......

Sin And Sun recently interviewed Rebekah, a Torontonian who has gone from living on the streets to being an erotic Internet entrepreneur. Her client niche? People who are turned on by smoke and smoking. No sex, no nudity; just a woman with a Cuban cigar and a pack of Gitanes. Rebekah, who describes herself as "a punk rock gothic power smoker who adores cigars and unfiltered cigarettes," maintains a Flickr account with over a......