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Toronto(ist) vs. LA(ist)
It’s about time that Toronto started a feud with a major American city, and we think that Los Angeles, California has gotten off easy for far too long. The over-the-top Hollywood sign compared to our noble and restrained skyline; their smaller phallic symbol compared to our much, much bigger one; their cloud of smog compared to our green bins and green thumbs; their palm trees compared to our pine ones. So we were thinking, what easier way to begin a full-fledged attack on LA than to knock a few pegs off of one of our sister sites, LAist?
Torontoist will have a big exciting end of year “Best and Worst of Toronto 2006” collection of posts coming very soon, but until then, LAist’s collection of Best Of posts have been keeping us busy. The lists aren’t necessarily LA-centric; check out Colin Meloy of the Decemberists’ Top 10 CDs and PostSecret’s Frank Warren’s favourite websites.
In keeping with the Best Of theme, LAist Editor Tony Pierce (who made it to our Back to School party in September) issued a challenge to the rest of the sites in the Ist-A-Verse to come up with their own top ten list, and suggested a brilliant idea, one we’d be more than happy to take him up on: the top ten reasons why our city is better than his.
There are, obviously, far more than ten, and we doubt it’d be a challenge to name a quick list off the top of our heads (#1 – We’re Toronto; #2 – They’re LA), but we’d really like to exploit the wit of our readers instead. Post a reason why we’re better in the comments. We’ll compile the best ten together and send them over to LAist, and we’ll get the writers of our picks some snazzy Torontoist pins to boot.
After we’ve handily defeated LAist, we will move onto the city as a whole: the next step is stealing the “O”‘s from that godawful Hollywood sign to make our own makeshift Toronto sign (though, until we make n, the r, and the t’s, it’ll have to just say “ooo” for a while).
UPDATE: LAist took our suggestions and they’re made it official. Quoth the LAist: “Clearly they don’t realize that LA does have a downtown, it’s where the Raptors come twice a year to get their asses kicked.” Oh shit! I’m pretty sure that it’s on now. Those whose comments made it to our list, contact Torontoist for sweet, sweet buttons!