Results tagged “viacom”

Photo by gbalogh from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. The Star's Jack Lakey, aka The Fixer, is invaluable. There is no better way to elicit a favourable response from the City bureaucracy than by sicking him on a case of civic neglect. It really is the most consistent way to get things done in Toronto. (The TPSC got Viacom to fulfill their contractual obligation to put street names on transit shelters simply by getting him...

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 about something from the Indecision 2000 campaign trail, which as you might recall ended up going into overtime (“Electile Dysfunction”)? It almost sounded too good to be true…and it was, at least for Canada.

Each weekday for the next two weeks, Torontoist is facing off local memes and blog drama in a tournament-style ladder and you, the reader, decide the outcome. View the full ladder here. Some highlights from yesterday's matches: Taste of the Danforth grills street meat (103 - 100). In an amazing and dramatic last-minute turnaround, Toronto showed that it salivates more thinking about one day of tasty meat to a whole year of drunk food vendor patronage. Spanakopita, anyone? Today's matches, Region IV, 1st Round:

Road Tolls vs. Congestion Charge
Stephen Harper vs. The Environment
Dufferin Grove Park vs. The Parks Department
IllegalSigns.ca vs. Viacom Outdoor
Lower Bay vs. The Brickworks
IKEA North York vs. The Sheppard Line
Spadina North vs. Lowther Station
Hipsters vs. The Queen Streetcar

Statistics Canada reports a national population increase of 5.4% since 2001, yet downtown Toronto only experienced an increase of 0.9%. The boom is being attributed to immigration, which experts predict will be our only means of population growth by 2030. It seems everyone is happy to settle in the suburbs as towns like Brampton (33.3%) and Vaughan (31.2%) are growing as fast as houses can be built. Milton has grown an astounding 71.4%. I nearly spat out my coffee when described Mississauga as "a little slice of heaven." (Read more...)

A Torontoist reader passed this photo of Mao on a Queen Street West transit shelter on to us. He writes on his flickr site:

We own the TTC. We paid for it with tax dollars and at the farebox. But this month the city had to PAY Viacom Outdoor Ltd for permission to promote the "Live with Culture" campaign on the TTC because Viacom has exclusive rights to all advertising on the transit system. Essentially, tax dollars were spent to buy back space we already own.

Special thanks to the folks at the Toronto Public Space Committee, and their eight-month fight against video ads in our subway cars. Yesterday, TTC commissioners voted 4-3 against allowing Viacom Outdoor to proceed with what would have been a new level of intrusiveness to our journeys around the city.