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......

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......

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......

A Torontoist reader passed this photo of Mao on a Queen Street West transit shelter on to us. He writes on his flickr site: On first glance, I thought this was an ad. But on closer inspection, realized someone had removed the Viacom ad, painted this Mao on the back of it, and carefully inserted it back into the transit shelter. Interesting subversive commentary on the commodification of the Queen West West area. The......

Recently I had a chance to pass through the Melinda Street exit at King subway station. I meant to do this several months ago, because there was transfer art exhibit by Michael Brown on display. Michael spent an entire day in the TTC system, collecting a transfer at each station, and then drawing a picture of a rider on each transfer. I thought maybe I’d luck out and the exhibit would still be up.......

Things have heated up over at the St. Clair Pro-ROW site, as the anti-transit group SOS (which is an acronym for Destroy Our City) have caught wind of it. Transit guru James Bow, editor of Transit Toronto, is pushing for calm heads and civil debate. What could be the future of Toronto's streetcars will be on display at the Toronto Hummingbird Centre, 1 Front Street East this Monday, October 24th from noon until 5 p.m.......

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. Artists! The Toronto Public Space Committee currently has a call for submissions for The Better Way: Redesigning the TTC: Replacing Ads With Your Imagination art show......