In the most important news story of the day, two people have been arrested in the mysterious case of Huckleberry, the dog who vanished from outside a Yonge Street bakery and was returned after his owner offered a $15,000 reward. Police haven't said whether they believe Huckleberry was in on the caper. Oil prices closed yesterday at over US$100 a barrel yesterday, spooking financial markets. And my mom said I was crazy for keeping......

The amount of events this week are bursting at the seams. Keep Toronto Reading is kicking it into full gear this month with various readings across library branches, Lit Lunches, and various One Book events. There are just too many to list here. Visit the KTR calendar to see all event details and plan out your literary excursions. And if you have any kids, you can join Gisèle from TVOKids for various library tours, as......

TTC subways twice as costly to build as Madrid's. And they got tapas while they were building it. Rogers increases their fake "system access" fee. Torontoist has learned that this is only the first in a proposed system of additional fees, including an "energy cost of making your phone ring louder" fee, a "remembering that you're paying for additional services" fee, and the obviously necessary "keeping track of all the fees you owe us"......

While we're on the subject of TTC maps (as we often are), we might as well include the most wildly ambitious one of all. Reader Ryan Felix sent us his subway map, which he describes as a "fantasy map of the TTC" in 2050. Felix says it was "created in hope to influence people to become pro-transit, and to give a vision that Toronto can have a world-class transit system." The lines depicted on......

Left to right: TTC market research director Mike Anders, TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, irate civil engineering Engineering Science student Ryan Campbell, and Giambrone executive assistant Kevin Beaulieu. "Isn't this just a quasi-communistic redistribution of wealth?" asked a student at the microphone, receiving hearty applause from a good chunk of the audience. He was inquiring about the new U-Pass being proposed by the TTC, which Mayor David Miller, TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, and Vice-Chair Joe......

Just in case this is something you like to be reminded of, you're going to die someday. The good news is that day is likely to be further off than ever, because average life expectancy in Canada has risen, with a baby born in 2005 likely to live to 80.4 years of age. On the other hand, who wants to be an 80-year-old baby? CIBC has announced that they will be selling $2.75 billion......

Waves eroding the tip of the Toronto Islands. A project to keep it from eroding will cost around $14 million, thus reminding us all once again that attempting to combat the effects of Mother Nature is a horribly costly experience, as anybody who has ever bought a jar of Oil of Olay knows full well. Golden Globes without writers turn out to be massively boring. Number of people surprised by this: zero. In revenge......

Who knew there was a connection between the TTC and the Titanic, and not just that both are often associated with the words "transportation" and "disaster" (ba-dum-bum)? An exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre features four Toronto streetcar tickets salvaged from the world's most famous shipwreck by a 1987 expedition. The tickets are believed to have been the property of Major Arthur Godfrey Peuchen, a wealthy Toronto socialite who was sailing home from England when......

It might be time to cut back on the brews. Fox News is reporting that old beer fridges, which one in three Canadians keep in their houses, are remarkably inefficient and "contribute significantly" to global warming. The report was commissioned by the federal government, which says something about how much the government cares about your beer-related habits. Denise Young, the researcher who put together the study, suggests that the government provide financial incentives and......

Self-control is difficult. If you've ever been on a diet, then you know how hard it is to stay on track. You try to be good but at some point the voice saying "no" gives up. That's when eating just one cookie becomes the whole bag and a bucket of fried chicken. It's disheartening to try not doing something, but then end up doing it anyway. New research from the University of Toronto suggests the......

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......

We love the television advertising campaigns the WWF comes up with, and their latest is no exception. The ad does provoke some important questions, however, about the ability (or lack thereof) of individual action to create adequate change without government intervention. The first panel at yesterday's GreenTOpia launch dealt with this extensively. Keith Stewart (coincidentally, a campaigner with WWF) explained that even though he's taken extensive personal action (he has solar panels on his house,......

Meghan Provost at Queen's University has conducted a study testing correlations between women's fertility and the sexual signals that they give off by their walks. Surprisingly, women who were at the most fertile periods of their menstrual cycles had the least "sexy" walks (according to the male volunteers who rated them), with smaller hip movements and knees closer together. This would seem to contradict recent research that suggests men are more attracted to ovulating......

Microsoft has agreed to buy 1.6% of Facebook for $240,000,000, giving the social networking site a valuation of around $15 billion. The deal is good for both parties, with Bill Gates finally hanging out with the cool kids, and 23-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg getting to throw an awesome kegger. John Tory has officially backed away from the faith-based schools funding issue that may have cost him the provincial election. Seems kind of silly......

The After Dark Film Festival! Happening all week! The only film festival where Uwe bloody Boll could have his film accepted! We talked about it here! Check it out! Another crowded week for festivals, though, and sometimes we have to wonder how even Toronto can support this many in a week. We’ve got the ImagiNATIVE Film Festival and Toronto Latin Film Festivals finishing up, the Student Shorts Film Festival and the Estonian Documentary Film......

Provincial and federal elections in Canada are largely determined by quirks of geography. That is, the number of seats each party receives in the legislature is rather independent of the popular vote and has more to do with the way people of particular political leanings are concentrated (or not) within arbitrarily-drawn districts. This makes pre-election polling an interesting exercise in extrapolation; a particular percentage of popular support could translate into quite a range of......

Last Monday was not just the start of the Ontario general election campaign—it was also the beginning of a campaign to change the way we elect our representatives to Queen's Park. On October 10th, Ontarians will vote on a proposal by the Citizens' Assembly (a randomly-selected group of 103 Ontarians) to switch to a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system, similar to that used in some other countries including Germany and New Zealand. A few......

John Tory says any religious schools must stick to the Ontario curriculum or lose their funding. Thus, creationism would not be allowed to be taught as science. That having been said, non-religious faith-based teaching (like "the invisible hand of the market can fix all economic problems" or "one day the working class will rise up and create a proletarian utopia") is fine! Luciano Pavarotti is dead at 71. The opera star finally succumbed to pancreatic......

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......

Nerds rejoice! It’s here! Well, it will be! Soon! Fan Expo Canada sets down at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre Friday, August 24, opening at 4 p.m. and running until 6 p.m. on Sunday (regrettably not straight). Hosted by the sometimes questionable Hobby Star Marketing, the three-day event is home to a series of mini-expos relating to comics, science fiction, horror, anime, and gaming, and features enough guest appearances to keep the World of......

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......

They’re trying to hypnotise us, people. They’re trying to brainwash us and subdue us by bombarding the television with adverts and by using the media to confuse us, and they’ll never stop… Until Superbad is the number one movie this weekend. Stupid movie executives. We were totally stoked for Superbad until they started a non-stop marketing frenzy that made us completely bored and, frankly, offended. John Harkness at Now is similarly unimpressed: “The weirdest......

It's been said that the geeks shall inherit the Earth, and a pair of Ontario high school students are doing it with zero emissions. Behold the Tango—a compact, electric motorcycle that could be the future of motorized solo transportation. Introduced at this year's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (IISEF) in Albuquerque, Oakville's Ben Gulak and Hamilton's Jason Morrow based their invention on the science behind the Segway. The bike features two wheels mounted......

This week Torontoist decided to work out for itself exactly when The Simpsons was good. Because it’s just been so long, so depressingly long, since we’ve seen a episode that didn’t make us want to open a vein. Seriously. Using the powers of science (well, Wikipedia) we’ve decided it was good between seasons three and ten, peaking in (roughly) season seven. So there, done and dusted. Turns out we’re actually quite forgiving here compared to......

You remember the Moose in the City, don't you? For six glorious months in 2000, more than three hundred fibreglass moose stood watch over Toronto, succesfully saving us from the shame of having hundreds of flying pigs instead. We greatly preferred the moose to any of the subsequent visitors to our fair city including aphids, SARS, and Chilean soccer players. Most of the moose had disappeared by the end of 2000, but a few......

If today’s column title gets Rachel Sweet’s Hairspray stuck in your head for the rest of the day, good! Because then we’ll have made our point that the version of Hairspray hitting this weekend isn’t as good as the John Waters original. Though the music not being as good is only part of it. There’s also the inherent irony about making a musical in which one of the central themes is integration through a......

Tonight, The Fifteenth Annual Scream Literary Festival launches its six-day festival with readings by Dennis Lee and Souvankham Thammavongsa at The Gladstone Ballroom. Performances by George Elliot Clarke, and robots belonging to Shapour Shahidi are also promised, and it sounds like audience members are invited to make art with weird, old science textbooks. This year's festival “considers the strange alchemy of poetry and science, through readings, panels, and performances.” On July 9th, the festival......

Lynsey Kissane, the project coordinator of Evergreen at the Brick Works, sent Torontoist the above photo, telling us "I have seen this truck-vertisement around a lot and don't think the blatant irony would be lost on anyone." Except, of course, the person responsible. From the advertised website: Vision-Adz Media is a Canadian mobile advertising company that is committed to being the dominant and most effective mobile advertising company in Canada. [...] Being a mobile-based......

Sam Sniderman (aka. The Record Man) wants the Sam's building to be sold to Ryerson University. Unfortunately, this does not comply with the conspiracy to turn every store on Yonge Street into a discount shoe outlet or nail salon. Sorry. Toronto couldn't handle a dirty bomb. According to a federal study, "the explosion of a small dirty bomb near the CN Tower would spew radioactivity over four square kilometres, resulting in mass anxiety, a......

Next in our series of Torontoist Poetry Contest poems of Honourable Mention is “In Transit” by Peter O’Donovan. Other poems that received Honourable Mention are “Velocity,” by Jenny Sampirisi and Matthew Tierney's "The Man who Knew from Cool"; Prathna Lor’s “((de)fragmentation.)” is coming soon. Our winning poem was "Eaton's Effluviad" by Gregory Betts. Peter O’Donovan grew up in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. He completed a Computer Science degree in 2005 at the University of Saskatchewan, and......