The fifth and final ALL CAPS! festival on Toronto Island is going down this weekend at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Wavelength has once again put together a line-up filled with great bands including Hooded Fang, The Blow, Rich Aucoin, CATL and a whole lot more. Want to go? You've come to the right place.
Check out our contest page for full details on how to enter.
The best oysters in Toronto celebrate the refreshing energy of the sea and all its tastes and scents. We might not have a coastline of our own, but luckily we have a bounty of oyster-obsessed proprietors dedicated to sourcing (and sometimes even farming) the sweetest, plumpest and briniest varieties from near and far.
Here are the best oysters in Toronto.
See also:
The Best Seafood Restaurants in Toronto
The Best Lobster Roll in Toronto
The Best Fish Stores in Toronto
Hopgood Foodliner photo from Matt Reeder in the blogTO flickr pool.
Toronto events on Thursday, August 8, 2013
PERFORMANCE | SummerWorks Performance Festival 2013
SummerWorks is the largest juried performance festival in Canada and it returns for its 22nd year with over 30 performances taking place at theatres, concert and event venues around Toronto. Theatrical and musical performances will take place over the course of 8 days along with workshops with artists-in-residence Sook-Yin and Ben Kamino. Not sure what to see? Check out our top picks for this year's festival.
Various locations and times
ART | Two Astronauts
Psychonauts Neal Armstrong and Devon Marinac are young artists in Toronto who have explored space in the physical not aeronautical sense. At the opening of their exhibit, Two Astronauts, the artists present works in paint, photography and collage at #Hashtag Gallery. Exploring "space" in maps and artifacts, the experience is more psychadelic than astronomical. Swing by tonight to check out the exhibit and enjoy DJ sets by guilt_ and Ian Schober and, of course, a few drinks.
#Hashtag Gallery (801 Dundas Street West) 8PM Free
MUSIC | Music in St. James Park: The Boxcar Boys
Looking to spend a summer night lying in the grass, relaxing to music? St. James Park music series is winding down with the end of summer looming but the music men will continue to play tonight. The Boxcar Boys are setting up their acoustic set in the park for 7PM and all are welcome to stop by for a song or a whole set. Just bring your own seat/blanket and snacks and come out to enjoy a sweet night in the park.
St. James Park (105 King Street East) 7PM Free
POETRY | Poetry Salon: P.P.S. Do You Copy?
Five Toronto writers read selections from their work as part of The Power Plant's Postscript, an exhibit that explores the artistic possibilities of language. P.P.S. Do You Copy? will see Margaret Chritsakos moderate as Gary Barwin, Sonja Greckol, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jenny Sampirisi and Adam Seelig read pieces that springboard off works in the exhibit and individually reroute meaning. An audience discussion will follow and a cash bar will open at 7PM. For more poetry readings, check out our round up of the best spoken word events this month.
The Power Plant (231 Queens Quay West) 7PM Free
FOOD | Hands-On Cooking Workshop: Going Wild with Wild Blueberries
The Evergreen Brick Works, where summer feels just like it did when you were a kid, offers cooking classes that honour their month-long dedication to the blueberry. Tonight, baking classes will teach participants how to make wild blueberry tarts, red fife-blueberry quick bread, heirloom cornmeal cake with blueberry compote, and rye buckwheat bread with dried wild blueberries. This delicious class taught in the Brick Works kitchens is about as country as you can get in the city so if you're craving that summer farm feeling, sign up and head up to this stunning site for the evening--just don't turn into a Violet Beauregarde.
Evergreen Brick Works (550 Bayview Avenue) 6PM $85
ALSO OF NOTE:
Have an event you'd like to plug? Submit your own listing to the blogTO Toronto events calendar or contact us directly.
Photo from Summerworks 2013
The man who (allegedly) tried to shop video of Rob Ford (allegedly) smoking crack cocaine briefly appeared in court yesterday via video link. Sporting a beard that the Toronto Star says is new, Mohamed Siad confirmed his name for a justice of the peace. Daniel Brown, Siad's former lawyer, is now officially off the case and his replacement Nyron Dwyer confirmed he's received seven DVDs of "information" related to the case.
The Scarborough LRT is official on ice, for now, sort of. As decades of false starts and back tracks tell us, no transit project is ever really dead in Toronto, but Metrolinx says it's officially stopped planning work on the line pending the city's ability to drum up funds for subway extension. There's still a chance the line could revert to light rail if the additional money isn't available. Predictions?
Cllr. Gary Crawford is getting ready for his artistic masterpiece - an acrylic portrait of Rob Ford. The executive committee member and part-time painter plans to use the summer break from council to make good on the promise he made to the mayor's mother more than a year ago to paint her son. He's also considering one of Doug Ford and a "Last Supper" scene featuring members of city council.
The Toronto streetcar involved in the Sammy Yatim shooting will return to active service some time this week without a change to its serial number. TTC CEO Andy Byford spoke with the Yatim family before the decision was made public. There will be no further announcement regarding the return of the streetcar or the route it will be assigned to out of respect for the family, Metro reports.
Cllr. Shelley Carroll has agreed to step in and attend the naming of Morton Shulman Ave. after Cllr. Denzil Minnan-Wong backed out over Shulman's abortion rights legacy. In June, Minnan-Wong left the council chamber before a minute's silence to honour Dr. Henry Morgentaler because his work clashed with his Catholic beliefs. As Ontario's chief coroner, Shulman pushed to relax the province's strict anti-abortion laws.
Google Street View has invaded the Ontario Science Centre. Now you can explore the inside of the building as if you were a really tall person unable to touch any of the exhibits. It's a bit of a tease, really, but we well worth a few minutes of your time.
Finally, we'll find out today whether the Sun News Network will become a basic channel on cable and satellite TV. The network has been seeking mandatory carriage from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. If the CRTC says yes, the right-wing news network will become a standard feature of all television packages.
IN BRIEF:
Chris Bateman is a staff writer at blogTO. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisbateman.
Image: Jonathan Castellino/blogTO Flickr pool.
This Week in Film rounds up noteworthy new releases in theatres, rep cinema and avant-garde screenings, festivals, and other special cinema-related events happening in Toronto.
NEW RELEASES
Drug War (TIFF Bell Lightbox)
For a genre director, Johnnie To seems to be remarkably invincible from a critical standpoint. Releasing roughly a film a year, To can't seem to make an ostensible action/thriller entry without it getting hailed as his latest and greatest masterpiece. Always entertained, I tend to be a detractor in thinking his movies are merely just that: entertaining. Drug War is different, though. When it comes to double-crossing cop movies (to be super reductive), there probably hasn't been one as invigorating, smart, and deceptive as this one since Infernal Affairs, and even then this one is way more tonally interesting and reliant on the audience's full, undivided perception skills. Crescendoing to a nihilistic climax in the blink of an eye, this is truly the work of a master at the height of his craft.
Elysium (Varsity, Scotiabank)
Amazing how some guys just have a knack for getting gajillions of dollars thrown their way to make movies. On the strength of some innovative short films, Neill Blomkamp, maker of that neat Adicolor Yellow video, got a cool $30 million to make his feature debut - the shaky cam realist sci-fi monster movie District 9. Now comes his sophomore effort, and it cost roughly quadruple the price, and it shows both in the high gloss of the production and in the themes of the film. Set in the semi-distant future, Elysium is the name of a space station where the upper classes live, while the lower classes are stuck on a ruined Earth. There is, naturally, a bunch of thrilling genre stuff that takes place in response to the humanist premise, and Matt Damon and Jodie Foster are the leads who navigate us through it all. The summer blockbuster season: it's winding down.
Also opening in theatres this week:
REP CINEMA
Modern Love: The Films of Leos Carax (August 9-13; TIFF Bell Lightbox)
Ask pretty much any film critic or cinephile about her favourite films of 2012, and chances are you'll hear mention of Holy Motors. For many of those people, that film will have been their first encounter with a film made by Leos Carax. While some blame for this could be laid on the fact that he'd only made four films prior, with none of those being at all well-represented on DVD in North America, the primary reason is that it was his first film in 13 years, and only his second since 1991's The Lovers on the Bridge. Which is all to say that, look, all five of his films are among the best that have been made in the past three decades, so don't let a lack of familiarity turn you away from seeing these films on 35mm - perhaps the very last time you'll even have that opportunity.
Inspired by poetic realists such as Jean Vigo and Jean Cocteau, Carax's cinema has been both extremely eclectic and consistent from the beginning. For one, all save for Pola X star Denis Lavant as a surrogate for Carax; the two look vaguely similar, and the flexible actor's romantic escapades are meant to emotionally represent Carax's interior anxieties about love and death. At the same time, his films are prone to erratic tonal shifts from one to the next; from the punch-drunk whimsy of Bridge to the graphic polemics of Pola X to the funereal absurdism of Holy Motors, his cinema is as alive, mutable, and well-realized as it gets. And to briefly touch on his first two pictures, Boy Meets Girl and Bad Blood, they're both masterpieces and too difficult to pin down in a measly capsule overview but must be seen, too. Oh, and Leos Carax will be present to do Q&A's after the Bad Blood, Holy Motors, and The Lovers on the Bridge screenings.
Screening in Modern Love:
More rep cinema this week:
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
Sharknado (Friday, August 9 at Midnight; Carlton)
The Roland Emmerich and/or Samuel L. Jackson film that even they couldn't stoop low enough to make, Sharknado has taken cult cinephiles the world over by storm ever since teaser posters from Cannes hit the net last May and went viral. The film is about the havoc wreaked when a bunch of tornadoes filled with live, hungry sharks are...actually yeah that's pretty much all that needs to be said. It's dumb, it's awful, it's too bad to be true, and it's so much more popular right now than any other movie that it's getting midnight screenings in most of the major cities in North America. The Toronto one is this Friday, but if it's anywhere near as wretched as The Room, this'll only be the first of many opportunities to see some sharknadoes projected up to life size on a cinema screen. "Enjoy."
Lead still from Drug War.
This popular Long Branch bakery recently relocated and expanded its offerings to also serve as a cafe and local foods market. The delicious treats and locally sourced grocery items are reason enough to pop in, but it's the homey atmosphere that will make you want to stay for a second slice of pie.
Read my profile of More than Pies in the bakery section.
Toronto Restaurant Openings highlights the latest restaurant openings and closings in Toronto and also gives a preview of what's coming soon. Find us here every Thursday morning.
OPEN
OPENING SOON
CLOSING
OTHER NEWS
Have you seen restaurants opening or closing in your neighbourhood? Email tips to liora@blogto.com
Many of Toronto's most detailed historical maps, the documents that record the city's evolution from a muddy hamlet to a wandering metropolis, are stored in pieces - both physical and digital - in the city archives, sometimes in forms that make them inaccessible to people without special software or the time to visit the facility in person at Spadina and Dupont.
Enter Nathan Ng, Toronto's map hero. His latest project - following on from three comprehensive archives of Toronto maps that collect the earliest sketches by the area's first visitors, plans of Fort York, and detailed insurance plans - brings the separate pieces of a 155-year-old street plan in to the 21st century with the help of some much-needed navigation tools.
"If you had said 'show me Yonge and College,' I'd have no idea which of the plates it is. It's a real pain in the neck," says Ng. "In the modern world, with interfaces like Google Maps and Bing Maps or whatever, you can just scroll and zoom in. So in the back of my mind I thought it would be cool to paste together the 30 plates and put up a little map."
By meticulously stitching together the separate files, sometimes with difficulty, Ng and friend Carrie Martin created a single, giant image with enough detail for virtual aerial exploration of the Toronto of 1858, a drastic step forward for the map's accessibility.
"It actually turned out to be a little more difficult than we thought because a lot of the plates weren't quite oriented the same ... when you actually try and stitch the exact parts together it doesn't match or the angle is slightly different."
Highlights include the scattered lost creeks of old Toronto, the still-disconnected streets that would later be linked to form present day Dundas, University Avenue as "College Park" (giving us the curious lost intersection of College and College,) and a sparse Queen West.
"I like Toronto," continues Ng. "I'm enthusiastic about maps, and this is just one way I like to share the history of Toronto with other people - I hope they find it interesting."
Zoom around and see what you can find. For more background on the project, read here.
Chris Bateman is a staff writer at blogTO. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisbateman.
Image: Toronto Public Library
Gourmet ice pops in Toronto provide a welcome departure from the typical sugar and calorie-laden Popsicle and ice cream cones of the world. They can, perhaps surprisingly, be found in neighbourhoods across the city, and they can even be delivered on a bike, if you like. Here are five lovely companies that make gourmet ice pops in Toronto:
The Pop Stand
Ice pops from The Pop Stand are made from fresh ingredients sources from farmers markets around the city. Flavours include the lush-sounding Kentucky Bourbon -Apple Cider and Ginger-Thyme-Basil. The Pop Stand can be found at the Nathan Phillips Square Farmers Market each Wednesday from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.
Augie's Ice Pops
Augie's ice pops are made from freshly-squeezed juices, and their flavours are to die for, like Pineapple Coconut Lime and Strawberry Basil Lemonade. Their flavours are switched up all the time, depending on what's in season. You can find Augie's pops at retailers across the city, like Tealish and The Candy Bar.
Philip's Ice Pops
Philip's Ice Pops can be found at several shops across the city, from Easy Tiger on Dundas West to Red Fish Blue Fish in the Annex. They also, however, deliver the pops on a vintage bike, if that suits you better. They have refreshing flavours like salted watermelon and lemon ginger rosemary, but they mix it up depending on the season.
OMG Baked Goodness
OMG Baked Goodness on Dundas West switches up their ice pop flavours depending on the season. Right now, it's watermelon-jalapeno, and they've had flavours like strawberry daqueri and pina colada in the past. All ice pops ($4) are made in the shop from their own recipe, and they use fresh, local ingredients whenever they can.
Wild Child's Kitchen
New to the CNE this year, Wild Child's Kitchen will be a health nut's dream come true. The company is vegan, vegetarian and mostly gluten free, and they avoid using refined sugars. Their ice lollies are hand-pressed, and they feature ingredients like coconut, mango, agave and coconut. Wild Child's ice lollies can be hunted down later this summer in the CNE Food Building.
Photo by Emily Baille.
Breakout Toronto Bands features local artists that we think you should give a listen to.
You probably never thought about it, but R&B and folk music go together like ice cream and apple pie (yeah, I just went there) — and this artist proves it. An R&B vocal master with the soul of a folk singer, Isla Craig brings a stunningly hollow and haunting sound to her most recent a cappella creations.
Who is she?
As she grew up at church with her mother, who is a talented organist, vocalist, and pianist, it's no surprise that Craig developed a strong love for choral music. But, as a child of the 90s, even at seven years old she had a collection of R&B tapes — Aaliyah and Whitney Houston, among others — that formed an even larger part of her musical development. "I'm an urbanite," she tells me. "I live with the feeling of live energy."
Living in Toronto for the last decade, she's been involved in many projects over the years, none more important than The Deeep, a synthwave/electro band whose album, "Life Light," was released on tastemaking label Not Not Fun back in 2011 (was it really all that long ago?). Currently flying solo to pursue her own sounds and goals, Craig seems to be going with the flow. "I like to see albums as a process. I don't really think of it as a definitive endpoint or an object and it represents you. I'm interested in a life of becoming an artist, not in a stagnant spot of being an artist."
She sounds like...
A droplet of soul into a bucket of heartfelt sound that pulses and springs like the ocean breaking on rocks. Maybe I'm getting a bit hyperbolic, but it's hard not to after chatting with Craig for a while. When asked to talk about her sound, she'll say, very matter-of-factly: "Contemporary folk R&B." But when push comes to shove and her mind starts to wander, she describes it quite differently: "When I sing it's a feeling and a release. It's the best health tonic for my body."
If you check her out on Bandcamp, Craig has released two sides to an album titled "Both the one & the Other" that focuses almost entirely on vocal production and the harmonies of either Craig with with four of her close and talented friends, Ivy Mairi, Daniela Gesundheit (of Snowblink), Tamara Lindeman (of Weather Station), and Felicity Williams, on the one side ("Both the One...") or with just herself on the other ("...& the Other"). Says Craig, "This tape was really about showing the process of collaborating. I wrote them by myself, then brought them to the ladies and developed them, and then went back and recorded them solo after we had worked on them altogether. It's kind of a backwards process."
But maybe this describes her sound best: "The creative process for me is really about doing a lot of different things and collaborating across genres and styles, being influenced and introduced to new things and new ideas. It percolates down into my own work. I'm a compound experience."
Given that she's also a member of OG Melody, a 90s R&B throwback duo with Thom Gill, Craig is a "compound experience" indeed.
Hear her / see her
If this appeals to you, you might want to find yourself at the Gerrard Art Space during Feast in the East on Friday night. Craig and Ivy Mairi will be performing a selection of folk tunes, both traditional and new.
Are you an amateur Interior Designer or someone who wants to put their years of playing the Sims to good use? Got a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket? Well this just might be the place you've been looking for. The Townlofts on Strachan Ave. at the foot of Trinity Bellwoods Park offers the ability to almost entirely design one's dream loft space from the ground up.
Besides the exteriors, these three storey lofts will be just about empty at the point of sale. Minus some basic concrete floors, these units will sit ready and waiting for everything from plumbing to your indoor pool (available on any level mind you) or your private elevator (you lazy bugger). Although the interiors may be your domain, the exteriors will be relatively uniform. Considering the renderings, when complete, these lofts may at worst end up looking like some of the dated buildings in Alexandra Park and at best be a nice modern addition to the area.
Unless you're willing to spend a great deal of time and money renovating an existing downtown home, the kind of flexibility available with these empty shells is mostly unheard of. Here, the developers have gone to great lengths to make it so you can customize just about every inch of these massive 7,500 square foot units to suit your most unusual whims. Ever wanted to host your own rave or learn to play the drums? Well the Townlofts also features state of the art sound insulation to ensure you never have to listen to your neighbour's sub-woofer all night. These lofts also come with a two spot carport, as well as a two car garage. The need for both downtown is really unclear, but if you're an automobile aficionado or want to start your own repair shop, the option is there.
The only finished part of these units will be the apartment sized 1,300 square foot rooftop terrace, which will feature relatively panoramic views of the downtown skyline, and with a beefed up floor load capacity enough stability to hold everything from a hot tub to perhaps a grand piano.
SPECS
Storeys: 3
Number of Units: 4
Ceiling Heights in Feet: 12, 14
Total Square Feet: 7,500
Terrace Sizes in Square Feet: 1,300, 200
Cost of Pool: $50,000
Cost of Private Elevator: $30,000-$40,000
Maintenance Fees: $200-300 per month
Notable Customization Options: Private Elevator, Pool on any Level 19 ft. long, 8 ft. wide and 4 ft. deep or 45 ft long on the second floor, Front Terrace can be sunken 4 feet with mezzanine above, Parking can accommodate either storage racks or parking stacks, Optional staggered glass walls, Indented Terraces, or a fireplace in a glass wall.
THE GOOD
The ability to design your dream home from the ground up is simply staggering. Also if you love Trinity Bellwoods and are discouraged about the recent crackdown on dinking in the park, your new pad is just steps away, where you can consume your drink of choice on your massive terrace ticket-free! The building aside, this is really one of downtown's coolest neighborhoods, whether it be the excellent restaurants and cafés, the non imposing human scale of its buildings or the mix of families and mild mannered young urbanites, this area is always fun.
THE BAD
There's going to be a lot of work heading your way, whether it be hiring construction crews or working out just how you are going to fit that floor-to-ceiling shark tank in your new place. If you don't have time to be playing architect, developer and accountant, you should look elsewhere.
THE VERDICT
Flexibility is everything here. If you are a flexible person willing to be patient with the hiccups of undertaking a project of this size, this is definitely a great place to live.
Read other posts in this series via our Toronto Condos and Lofts Pinterest board.
Writing by Dylan Giuliano
On Wednesday night Momofuku Daisho hosted the Remix Project to show off their new patio and raise funds for the City Life Film Project. Momofuku supplied the food and Ketel One, Tanqueray and Beau's All Natural Brewing served up the libations.
Check out all the looks in our Style section.
Opened in the space formerly occupied by Pavilion furniture shop, this new casual Italian eatery has a 70-seat sidewalk patio that's perfect for taking in the action on Queen Street while chowing down on well perpared pastas and pizzas.
Read my review of Destingo in the restaurants section.
Because the Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival is only in its second year, it might be a little early to call it the city's best beer festival, but if this year's event, held Saturday August 10 and Sunday August 11, is anything like last year's, it's a title that the event will certainly have rights to soon.
At first glance, the event doesn't seem all that different from any number of summer beer events in the city: craft beer, samples, food trucks, etc.; however, subtle differences have made this event a fast favourite for beer folks in the know.
First, there's the location. Held at Roundhouse Park just outside of — duh — the Roundhouse that houses Steam Whistle brewery, the Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival embraces one of the best parts about being at an outdoor beer festival, namely the fact that you're outside. For this event, picnic blankets are welcome and people are encouraged to sit around and relax, as opposed to queuing up in massive lines for a sample of beer or fighting for a lone picnic table — there's grass!
Then of course there's the beer.
Every beer poured at the Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival will be a member of the Ontario Craft Brewers. For me, it's an added bonus to attend an event that I know benefits and promotes local craft breweries as opposed to putting a little more money in the already full pockets of internationally owned, billion-dollar companies who just brew easy-to-drink-lagers. The Roundhouse Festival proudly boasts beer of "independent ownership, smaller batches, artisanal styles, and quality ingredients, [that's] all-natural and undiluted."
I'm not crying; it's just dusty in here.
Among the local brewers present will be Amsterdam Brewery, Beau's All Natural Brewing, Black Oak Brewing, Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery, Great Lakes Brewery, King Brewery, Lake of Bays Brewing, Left Field Brewery, Mill St. Brewery, Neustadt Springs Brewery, Nickel Brook Brewing, Steam Whistle, and Wellington Brewery.
And yes, the food trucks are here too. There will be eats from The Rome 'N Chariot, Dobro Jesti, Localista, Hogtown Smoke, Dirty South Truck, Canuck Pizza Truck, The Food Dudes, and Pizza Settecento
But it's not just about the beer (OK, it mostly is, but let's pretend). The Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival is also a fundraising event. In fact, proceeds go to support the Toronto Railway Heritage Museum, which serves to promote the history of train travel in the city. So they got that going for them, which is nice.
Also, the festival has a token system that seems less likely to promote drunkenness than some other festivals. Sample tokens are sold in batches of five so you won't feel compelled to get wasted and, even better, the event organizers will buy back any unused tokens at the end of the festival so no one will be chugging beer at the end of the day in an effort to get their money's worth.
(FYI, what you get for a token may vary. Brewers are allowed to determine for themselves how much they will charge for samples. Steam Whistle, for example, will charge one token for half a seven-ounce glass or two tokens for a full sample).
Lastly, and possibly most importantly, is the cost.
The Roundhouse Craft Beer festival costs a measly $10 to get in (provided you buy your tickets in advance online--it's $15 at the door) and drink samples tickets are just $1.
And that's not even the best part: the $10 entrance fee gets you your sampling glass and that glass acts as your ticket to the event. If you come back with your glass on Sunday, you don't need to pay again, meaning for $10 you can spend Saturday from noon-7pm AND Sunday from noon-7pm in the park drinking Ontario craft beer.
You see why I like this event?
Admittedly, part of the reason I like the Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival is also that last year's event was really laid back. It's conceivable that, as the event grows, so too will the amount of attendees and the laid-back vibe might vanish. I guess beer fans will just have to hope that no well-read Toronto-based websites preview the Roundhouse Craft Beer Festival so that it can remain under the radar for a while.
Oh, wait.
Ben Johnson also writes about beer over on Ben's Beer Blog.
Photo by Stephen Gardiner in the blogTO Flickr pool.
Ontario's ombudsman has launched an investigation into the ways police are trained to defuse violent situations, following the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim on a Toronto streetcar last month. André Marin said the pattern of incidents involving police was like "Groundhog Day" and his inquiries will focus on how police are trained rather than the Sammy Yatim case specifically.
Rob Ford has lost (possibly fired, it's not clear) another staffer. Carley McNeil, a special events co-ordinator, had worked with the mayor for the last 18 months before her departure was confirmed yesterday evening. Eight members of Ford's team have quit or been fired since the crack video story came to light.
The mayor says he's been approached by three Toronto high schools about coaching their football team, something he's "absolutely considering" doing. Ford wouldn't name the schools who were thinking of bringing him on board just months after he was removed by the Toronto Catholic District School Board as coach of the Don Bosco Eagles for the "distractions" he brought.
A byelection should decide who will replace outgoing councillor Doug Holyday, according to Rob Ford. A special meeting will likely be called to debate this issue some time this month. If council desires, a person can be appointed to represent Holyday's former Etobicoke ward for the duration of the current term. Ford says voters should decide who gets the nod, even if it is just for a few months.
Looks like Toronto's got a serial bank-robber on its hands. Cops say Corey Richardson is wanted for holding up 13 banks, many of them downtown and close to subway lines. The Canadian Bankers Association is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to Richardson's arrest. He's considered armed and dangerous, so best steer clear of this guy.
And finally, here's this: the official song for Taste of the Danforth. Happy weekend.
IN BRIEF:
Chris Bateman is a staff writer at blogTO. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisbateman.
Image: Grey van der Meer/blogTO Flickr pool.
The photos of the week collect each of the editor-selected photos of the day into one post for a contest to be decided by our readers. Sponsored by Posterjack, the photographer whose image receives the most votes will be awarded with a voucher code for a 24"x36" poster print of their work.
All the rules and fine-print can be found in the original announcement post on the blogTO Flickr page. One thing to add, however, is that the voting period ends at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, after which the winner will be contacted with the good news.
For those photographers whose images are featured below, please feel free to give us a little information about your shot — i.e. where and when it was taken — in the comments section. Who knows? Maybe your description will sway voters in your favour!
Lead photo by Michael Mitchener.
Getting "doored" is one of the most horrifying things that can happen to a cyclist, but it doesn't even classify as a collision in Toronto according to the definition police work with, which doesn't account for accidents involving stationary vehicles. Since these incidents aren't tracked, it's difficult to hatch effective strategies for reducing the incidence of "door prizes" in the city. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that accidents of this type are a common occurrence — it seems most active urban cyclists have suffered this uncomfortable experience at least once — but in the absence of data it's difficult to tackle the problem.
Enter a new open source website from Justin Bull called Doorprize. Given that the police don't track dooring cases, Bull is building a platform whereby cyclists can collect this data themselves. It's a simple idea, but should it take off, the statistics could help to identify areas or streets with a high rate of incidence, establish the breadth of the problem, and encourage police to change their definition of a collision such that dooring is included.
Bull is currently soliciting feedback as he builds the site, which he hopes will go live on August 21st. What do you think of the idea? Is it important to track these accidents? How can cyclists who've been doored be encouraged to report the collision?
Photo by Gary Baker in the blogTO Flickr pool.
This new sandwich shop joins a thriving restaurant scene in the Bloor and Lansdowne area. Although the menu is on the small side, the sandwiches are put together with some serious care, and you can bet this will quickly become a popular breakfast and lunch spot in the neighbourhood.
Read my review of Brock Sandwich in the restaurants section.
