Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Advertisement for CBLT's first night on the air. The Toronto Star, September 8, 1952 Once upon a time, Toronto television viewers had to rely on transmissions from south of the border to watch regular programming. While there had been homegrown demonstrations of the technology at venues like the Canadian National Exhibition from......

CBC's How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? concludes tonight at 8 p.m. when either Elicia Mackenzie of Vancouver or Janna Polzin of Woodstock will be chosen by the public—over 650,000 Canadians—to spend October as the star of The Sound of Music, yodelling in the Princess of Wales theatre. The show, imported from Britain where a Maria was similarly found, is a hit for the CBC, which must be a relief since the network......

Users of modern web browsers are getting used to not having to type in an entire URL to get to the page they want—most new browsers fill in the shorthand, so you can type in "Torontoist," for example, and don't have to worry about the .com suffix. Unless you're on Rogers, that is. Beginning yesterday (for us), Rogers users started getting a browser hijack for any failed DNS requests, which are usually due to......

With summer now officially upon us, some of our fair city's citizens face an age-old dilemma: stay in the city for the weekend or flee to the cottage. Families who choose the latter are then faced with the prospect of entertaining themselves in the midst of gridlock and curveballs tossed by the weather deities. Enter CBC's network of repeater stations to keep family members safe from each other's throats and help them avoid the......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. So I've been casual friends with this guy, let's call him Smith, for about seven years. We went to the same high school, and went to University together, and now, lo and behold, we work together. Thing is, I notice now that he's acting... different at work. The cocky womanizer I know is suddenly talking a lot about fashion,......

A characteristic of spending any good length of time on the internet is desensitization—one's tolerance levels for graphic horror are escalated with repeated exposure to lemon parties, tubgirls, a certain .cx domain, and the indelicate contents of 1 cup. Nothing, however, prepared us for this eyeball-searing, nightmare-inducing, yet totally brilliant commercial created by local ad agency Zig, Toronto. It should be safe for work, but fair warning to those at overzealous nanny workplaces: you......

With Rogers' plan to move Citytv, OMNI Television, and the Fan 590 to the southeast corner of Dundas Square, those familiar with the current streetfront studios on Queen Street have wondered if the former Olympic Spirit building will be opened up in a similar way. Though merely an preliminary concept rendering, Rogers and Quadrangle Architects seem to have grand designs for the space, currently dubbed Rogers Television City, as evident in this image supplementing......

Many years ago, the TTC launched the smart "Ride The Rocket" ad campaign, of which only the slogan and typewriter-like font still exist. The fast-paced and effective television commercials featured a quirky spokesperson chattering rapidly into a wide-angle lens about the pros of public transit, and the slick spots made the Commission look modern, exciting, and cool. To a tourist or GTA resident, the subway looked like the backbone of any big city experience.......

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......

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. Is there anything as satisfying as waking up to that little dancing alarm clock every morning on Breakfast Television?......

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. Getting furious at advertising may seem so early 2000's, but commercials this year have not only annoyed, but shown......

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......

Well, it's about time. Two years after launching downloadable television shows south of the border, Apple has finally flipped the switch here, albeit with a dearth of content. Single television episodes are available via iTunes for $1.99, and full seasons range from about $10–$30. Most of the shows currently available are for domestic productions, like CTV's Degrassi: The Next Generation and the CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie, but non-Canadian shows, like South......

Are you getting geared up for the season finale of The Hills on Monday? If so, continue reading. If not, we don't need another lecture about how the show is quasi-scripted—tell it to your boring friends. The last few weeks have surprised loyal viewers with some major plot twists: Audrina finally dumped Justin Bobby, Lauren wants to make a boyfriend out of notorious man-whore Brody Jenner, Spencer's sister has turned cat-fighting into the official......

A couple weeks back, Spacing Wire posted this brilliant old TTC ad that made us hungry for more forgotten gems of Toronto advertising. The video in question was uploaded by a user calling themselves WNED 17, and their entire archive is made up of similar videos. In fact, their profile page provides a mission statement: "Youtube user WNED17 is proud to present repeat portions of broadcast captured in the 1980s and early 1990s via......

The good folks at TiVo have decided that now would be the optimum time to unleash their initially-much-talked-about-but-not-so-much-talked-about-anymore product on Canadians, a mere eight years after its release to the U.S. and U.K. markets. (Way to capitalize on a phenomenon, fellas!) TiVo can be credited––at least according to Canada.com––with "making TV watching less of a laborious task," which is a relative understatement considering how exhausting sitting through commercials can be to the average viewer. Don't......

This weekend, resist the urge to do the same old bar hop and try a more sophisticated means of indulging your party ADD: the art show hop. Okay, so we just invented that term, but the city does have three rad art happenings going on almost simultaneously this Friday, November 30. And we say, why choose? To start your adventure, knock back a whiskey for warmth and head down to the Harbourfront, where the......

Photo by Marc Lostracco. Deliberately confusing customers is big business in Canada, and fudging advertised prices with hidden fees is a hallmark of this particular circle of hell. Consumers can activate their cable television within a day, but can't cancel it without paying for the following month. Freestanding "independent" ATMs that are actually owned by big banks charge you an extra $1.50 "convenience" charge on top of what you'd pay at their regular ATM.......

First and foremost, we're going to warn you that the video above may not be safe for work, children, or the faint of heart. It's from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario's latest ad campaign. In the video, a young sweet sous-chef with her whole future ahead of her happens to slip on some grease, spilling a vat of boiling water all over herself and horribly scalding her face. While she's on......

At the Wellington Street entrance of the CBC Broadcast Centre, visitors of a certain age are met with some familiar sights from their childhoods: the treehouse from Mr. Dressup, a gang of puppets from Sesame Park, and the ratty but iconic Rusty and Jerome figures from The Friendly Giant. Now, the family of the Giant aren't feeling too friendly following a comedic skit shown during this year's Gemini Awards, and they are demanding the removal......

Bell is launching a preemptive strike before the much-drooled-over iPhone lands in Canada. The Star reports that Bell customers with the new HTC Touch phone (pictured right) could get unlimited wireless data for just $7 a month. (Data transferring is necessary to get music, games, television and the web onto your phone.) The Touch is similar to the iPhone in that both substitute a keypad for a touch screen and can run applications, but the......

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,......

For decades, Toronto has been one of Hollywood's most versatile back lots. Along the way, every specialized branch of the multi-headed film and television biz has sprouted up in the city. Camera, electrical, post production, locations and ... plane crash and natural disaster recreations? Yep, TV series like Discovery Channel's Mayday recreate the drama and the horror of famous plane crashes. Art director Adrian Greenlaw and his crew of disaster dressing specialists range across......

So, things are rapidly going to hell in Pakistan. Somewhere between one and two thousand people have been "detained" (i.e., dragged away) since Saturday and all private television stations shut down and the country is about ninety percent of the way to pure chaos, which, given that they have nuclear weapons, is bad. Of course, the White House managed to find the good in the situation, namely that Iraq could be as bad as Pakistan.......

Photo by ilkrender. The Toronto Reference Library will be celebrating the big 30 this Friday, and you're invited to its open house birthday party. Beginning at 10:30 a.m. with Breakfast Television host Kevin Frankish, Mayor David Miller, and architects Raymond and Ajon Moriyama, the event includes poetry readings, music, artist demonstrations, library tours, workshops, etc. The library will also launch Your Stories, a collection of personal narratives about the library's role in the lives......

A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Show upgraded their website, adding a free and fully-searchable video database of the past eight years of programs from the Jon Stewart era. For fans of the show, it was heaven. Imagine being able to instantly watch one of those old “Even Stevphen” segments with Carell and Colbert, before their bloated comic egos whisked them away to greener pastures and/or the studio down the block. Or how......

After decades of being situated as an icon of Queen Street West, it has been revealed that Citytv will be moving to a new high-profile location: Dundas Square. Since Rogers Communications announced plans to acquire Citytv, there has been much speculation about what would happen to the legendary Queen Street studios. The solution became the former Olympic Spirit complex at the south-east corner of Dundas Square. Built for $42 million in 2004, the building......

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.......

If you've watched Global at all recently, you've probably seen the promos for their new series Da Kink in My Hair, which premieres tomorrow night, October 14 at 7:30 p.m. The show is being billed as a sitcom, but that's not actually the most accurate description. It's a funny show set mainly inside a West Indian hair salon in Toronto called Letty's, which sounds like it could be a very sitcom-ish premise, but it's......

Monday morning, amidst a first-rate buffet of coffee, chocolate chip cookies, and fresh orange juice at the Four Seasons Hotel, a disheveled group of journalists and bankers gathered to hear the shortlist announced for the 14th annual Scotiabank Giller Prize. Only the second year that the final contenders were culled from an initial longlist of 15 books, this annum the task fell to the jury of staunch decipherers David Bergen, Camilla Gibb and Lorna......