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Blogs, Books and Beyond
It’s old news now, but just in case you didn’t hear, Boing Boing editor and former Torontonian Cory Doctorow is one of three judges for the 2006 Blooker prize. The Lulu Blooker prize is awarded to the best non-fiction, fiction and comic books inspired by a blog (or blog turned into books). The most impressive title on the short list, in Torontoist’s humble opinion is Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, the New York secretary that cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But we also have a soft spot for Toronto artist Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics. (pictured above)
But let’s face it, books take way too long. Scratch a blogger though and you get a wannabe magazine writer. With this in mind Torontoist points you to this handy guide on turning your blog posts into magazine articles from Lowculture.
Torontoist is wondering when blogs will be turned into movies. Hey, if they turned Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into a decent film why not Boing Boing or Gawker or even Torontoist? For now though we’re content to watch things like this series of Lego montages inspired by the film that should’ve won the Best Picture Oscar. Torontoist jokes because he loves.
In more relevant news, we want to point you to Transit Toronto’s excellent summary of last week’s flurry of Transit news. In case you’re too lazy to read it, The Battle of St. Clair is over, The invasion of York university might be starting soon with the help of the province, and the anagram mapper gets some back-up. Also, GO users might get dinged an extra quarter. And Rick Mercer isn’t the only one with a ridiculous auction on E-Bay.
We also want to draw your attention to the Star’s article on Dollarama and the Bad Bands Revolution, which the Star is describing as a Broken Social Backlash. After reading the article we think the Star’s copy-editors (who probably wrote the headline) were just trying to stir up controversy. BBR and their philosophy of radical openness, encouraging experimentation and embracing “failure” isn’t a backlash to Broken Social Scene’s much touted collectivism but a more avant-garde variant. A healthy music scene definitely has space for both.