What name would you give to this classic hotrod?
(Spotted in the Kennedy station area)

So one of my pet peeves is people abusing the apostrophe in every day grammar. Turns out there is an Apostrophe Protection Society, which claims to protect this much abused punctuation mark.

There’s a Flickr group, called Grocer’s Apostrophe which documents bad use of the punctuation mark at the grocery store, as well as several blogs like Apostrophe Catastrophe and Apostrophe Abuse.

Seems like last year, everyones favourite, evil, cable company, Rogers, made a mistake that cost them $2 Million due to bad grammar.

Now if only someone could fix the apostrophe on every goddamn Tim Hortons (save Quebec), I’d highly appreciate it. Seems like Tim’s started out its existence as Tim Horton’s. The apostrophe was lost to the language legislation in the Province of Quebec: unless a business name is simply a personal name, in Quebec the signage has to be translated into French: Tim Horton’s Donuts would have to become Les donuts de Tim Horton. Rather than producing entirely new signage for the Quebec market, Tim Horton’s became Tim Hortons from coast to coast to coast.

via Neatorama

J’ai regardé le fil “Bon cop, Bad cop” le weekend passé (avec mon épouse francophone ). Tout d’abord, c’étais très très fantastique de voir Tim Hortons, La tour CN…(I dont know how to say “posing as themselves”)

The film had it’s own Canadian styled plot (about hockey), a character named Harry Buttman (Gary Bettman) and even Rick Mercer staring as Tom Berry…a Don Cherry-like commentator. It’s a pretty funny movie to watch especially if you can see it with a bilingual crowd!

I didn’t intend to write this as so much a review as just a film that portrays Toronto, Montréal and in a sense then Canada in a unique light in today’s cinema. It also made me realize I need to work on my french…Pain Doré or Pain Perdu?

Please also visit the Montreal Metblogs posting for this movie, written when it came out.

Some of my “newly acquired” relatives were visiting Toronto for the first time, from South Africa and they stayed here for a month. (I just got married last month, and they just left last week) They made some observations on the differences between Cape Town and Toronto and on other things they saw.

One of these things leaped out at me though when seen from a visitors eye.

“Why do they call it the Sick Kids Hospital? Isn’t a hospital already for people who are sick or injured? Why not the Toronto Children’s Hospital or something?” Interesting. Does anyone have a theory on why we have to ensure we highlight the SICK portion? To be honest it hit me that you are more likely to donate money to the SICK KIDS hospital than a regular children’s one but maybe I am being too cynical…

Did anyone else know that we were one of the world’s least sexiest cities?

Well according to GridSkipper, that’s the claim.

World’s Least Sexiest City

(the anti Sex in the City city)

Liverpool
10.2% (72 votes)

Cairo
6.7% (47 votes)

Las Vegas
8.4% (59 votes)

Toronto
6.2% (44 votes)

Salt Lake City
68.1% (480 votes)

Go check out the rest of the site for more stats on who’s the sexiest and the sluttiest.

Thanks Omri!

Of course the Toronto Film Festival is in town. There are some interesting titles this year. Clearly Canadian, controversial, in tune with the times, or all of the above???

Adam and Dave are back again. Just got tickets to the screening of their latest Festival short film “TRUE LOVE” which screens this Friday night before “CITIZEN DUANE” at the Paramont (and again Sunday afternoon).

There are so many great films to see from the past and present. Great to see that there are even some classic NFB pics like Norman McLlaren’s Neighbours among others.

Don’t miss out. This may be the first and only place you will see some of these films from here and around the world!!!

Toronto, we here at Toronto Metblogs are glad to report that in 2010, the Toronto Ark will be completed. When the wrath and storms take out the very energy of our existence we will have a chance at safety and redemption!
(more…)

A power outage, public light show started at just after midnight last week when my area lost power.

When the power went off I was working at my computer, printing RSVP cards for my wedding. (A very easy thing to do yourself, and at least in Toronto you can save yourself some major cash doing it that way, too. Hint: Head over to Staples or something like it!) I grabbed my flash light and lit some candles and then walked out onto the balcony. I am on the top floor of my building and have never been in an apartment with a balcony for a black out. (I even missed the big power outage we had some years back since I was in Quebec.)

It seemed that there were many people awake and many brought out their flashlights right away!

- lights crossed each other like lightsaber battles from different buildings.
- anyone walking in the area got spotlighted
- someone decided to pull out their car keys and use their lights and horn for the show
- when cars would hesitate at darkened lights they would be lit up by 3 or 4 flashlights
(and every near miss resulted in many exclamations I could sort of make out)
- some kids started to run around in excitement and soon after the fire response teams were called out
- soon after that the police went around in a cruiser shining their bright heavy lights into parking lots and down streets.

All, in all people had fun. They seemed to revel in the darkness and love the effect they could have on the environment around us. It was very interesting to witness as was how the darkness of a few blocks almost made the stars visible… almost.

Feel free to add your own lines at the bottom.

Condos-R-Us