Results tagged “us”

Omar Khadr's lawyers recently released video footage of Khadr's interrogation by CSIS agents in hopes that the video would embarrass the Prime Minister and garner sympathy from Canadians. Unsurprisingly, the PM's office wasn't hearing that noise. Clearly these lawyers don't know how hard it is to embarrass Stephen Harper.

Plagued by complaints, the City of Toronto has finally gotten around to ticketing some homeowners who don't clear the snow in front of their property. A city spokesperson said they prefer not to send out inspectors in the winter because it's so difficult to get around.

Gas prices in Toronto are at $1.09 or more a litre today, reflecting all-time record oil prices of over US$108 per barrel. For all our driving readers, it might cheer you up to consider that it's still cheaper to fill up your car with gas than say, orange juice or Diet Pepsi. By the way, if you do decide to go with orange juice, remember that the pulp-free kind is less likely to gum up your engine.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has fired off a whiny letter to the PM complaining about Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's public criticism of Ontario and its tax laws. Flaherty, who apparently counts all time lost when he's not psychologically bitch-slapping his governmental inferiors, responded by calling McGuinty a "big stupid crybaby."

Today’s release on Xbox Live Arcade is Trigger Heart Exelica, an originally Japan-only Dreamcast "bullet hell" vertically scrolling shooter, and if that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you whatsoever, that’s totally fine.

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse.

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.

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 most knew the ticket-selling mongrels were wrong, as both Greenplastic and W.A.S.T.E. (the two most reliable Radiohead news sources) announced a small batch of US dates to come in May with the remainder of (unannounced) North American dates to follow Radiohead’s summer tour of the UK and Europe. With accurate Canadian dates sure to be released any day now, Musicologist recommends relying on both Greenplastic and W.A.S.T.E. for pre-sale opportunities.

Next Saturday, Toronto Poetry Slam brings you the last slam of the season, with some of the city’s brightest and wordiest battling it out for the last remaining place in the semi finals. Finalists will have a shot at the 2008 Toronto Poetry Slam Team, which competes at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and the US National Poetry Slam (this year to be held in Madison, Wisconsin).

Attention basement dwellers: on Wednesday, February 6, OCAD is hosting a free presentation by SWEAT, a collaboration of game designers, programmers, and artists dedicated to bringing socially aware video games to the general public. SWEAT has already produced games like Crosser, a Frogger-esque game about illegal crossing at the US/Mexico border, and is currently developing Juan & the Beanstalk, a game about the societal effects of illegal drug production in Colombia.

Palace of the End, Judith Thompson's most recent play, is not only her most political work, it is also her best. As most auditioning actors in this country have discovered, Thompson's greatest strength has always been her monologues, and in this piece, she uses that strength to its full advantage. In fact, she dispenses with character interaction altogether and breaks her show into three long monologues, each spoken by someone who has been greatly affected by the political situation in Iraq from Saddam's rise to power to the present. Interestingly, while Thompson has created the text for the show, she has not created fictional characters. Though they are not credited as such in the program, the following becomes clear: Maev Beaty's "American Soldier" is none other than Abu Ghraib's favourite dishonourable dischargee, Private Lynndie England; Julian Richings' "British Microbiologist and Weapons Inspector" is WMD whistle-blower and Thom Yorke muse David Kelly; Arsinée Khanjian's "Iraqi Mother" is the less notorious Nehrjas al-Saffarh, a woman who was tortured along with her children during Saddam's reign and died in the first Gulf War.

Gas prices are up three cents a litre as the price of oil crossed the psychological threshold of US$100 a barrel for the first time ever. Upon hearing the news, Stephen Harper flew to the Alberta oil sands and gave a stirring speech about how victory would soon be his, whereupon he was roundly cheered by all the hosts of Mordor.

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.

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.

">believe that, as dance music artists, "there's much better places for us to be," (this is said right at the 4:16 mark, of all times) Toronto's other homegrown house producers have taken the entire electro world by storm in the last few months. One needs only to point one's browser to the website Beatport, which has quickly become the DJ world's number one website for downloading high-bitrate dance music, and look on the "Top Downloads" panel on the lower right. In that period of time, there has been at least one track by a Toronto-based artist on the Top 10, and in the last five months, at least one Ontarian (if you include Windsor-raised Richie Hawtin, a.k.a. Plastikman.) Here is a brief look at three Toronto artists who have been conquering dancefloors around the world with their popular tracks on Beatport:

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...

, but the writer's strike got in the way.

This what a bioterrorist looks like, according to the FBI. Dr. Steven Kurtz (right) is a Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo and member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an art and theatre collective co-founded by Kurtz and his late wife, Hope. In May 2004, the Kurtzes were preparing a piece called Free Range Grains, which allowed participants to test food for the presence of genetically modified organisms, when Hope died of heart failure...

These days, everyone and their grandmother has a celebrity gossip blog. Perez Hilton became a millionaire by outing Lance Bass and defacing paparazzi photos, while TMZ.com (named for the Thirty Mile Zone surrounding Hollywood) came out of nowhere in 2005 and almost instantaneously became the top site to see celebrities behaving badly.

This weekend, Toronto will be a rockin' city, as the 2007 World Rock Paper Scissors Championships cut into town.

Photo by smlgphotos.

The price of oil scaled new heights yesterday, climbing up over $80 US for the first time ever. That's good news if you're an oil company, but bad news if you're a regular folk who likes to go places, or do things, or eat stuff.

Environment Canada reports that this has been the driest summer in fifty years for Toronto, with the city only receiving around half of its usual rainfall. Short-term predictions suggest that fall will be equally dry, with the the long-range forecast calling for global warming followed by drought, famine, plague and societal collapse. Sounds like great picnic weather!

The Ontario government will spend around $27 billion on nuclear power between now and 2025 in a bid to keep the lights on in the province. If history is any indicator, the nuke plans will be characterized by inefficiencies, unanticipated delays,and massive cost overruns, but will at least ensure that future generations have access to a secure supply of radioactive waste.

Stock market volatility continued yesterday, with the TSX index adding a 194 point drop to a loss of about 10% in the last month. A spokesman for the Global Society of Plutocrats said that in spite of the burgeoning financial crisis, everything remains fine for the super-rich.

NASA is embarrassed after a Toronto man found an error in their climate reporting. The new data mean that the warmest year on record in the US was 1934, not 1998, and skeptics have seized on the story as proof that the whole "global warming" thing is a hoax. Upon hearing the news, the newly navigable passage through the Arctic Ocean immediately refroze.

Civil engineers say that Ontario bridges are at risk. Short, short version: we're not in as bad shape as the Americans on this front, but we need more strenuous testing of existing bridges since most of ours were built in the 1960s and have expected design lives of about fifty years, so we're entering the beginnings of a replacement cycle.

Vancouver Central Public Library photo by lindn.