New Rogers "channel" is all chicken, all day

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2:54 pm

We’re pretty sure that April hasn’t arrived, so we were surprised to find what seemed to be a prank making its rounds on the webosphere today: a story about Rogers Cable’s new “Rotisserie Channel,” starting Feb. 28. Well, it’s not a prank, and the channel features (you guessed it) chickens roasting on a spit over the fire, 24/7 (for ambience, of course).

The link is making its way around Twitter, and much of the response has been something along the lines of, “What the…?” The channel, only available to digital subscribers in Ontario, is a product placement deal with Swiss Chalet. It’s kind of like Rogers’ other ambient channels, like the fireplace channel or the sunset channel, but weirder. And less vegan-friendly.

This is the dawn of a new type of programming that puts the Magic Bullet infomercial to shame. Oh Rogers, what will you think of next? A hand-washing channel for flu prevention, perhaps? Or, how about a sleek car driving along an endless autobahn?

[Globe and Mail]

HMV Canada: going the way of Sam?

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11:52 am

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Could one of Canada’s biggest music retailers be going the way of Sam the Record Man? After slumping sales over the holiday season, the UK-based HMV Group is considering “a full or partial exit from the Canadian market,” Sky News reports.

Earlier this year, HMV announced plans to shutter around 60 of its UK locations over 12 months, and now, apparently, it’s examining the future of its 125 stores in Canada.

The HMV Group cited “challenging entertainment markets” as a contributing factor to its poor performance over Christmas, normally the company’s peak period.

No doubt, the ubiquity of free (and often illegal) music and movie downloads continues to erode CD and DVD sales across the industry.

A spokesperson for HMV Canada provided a short emailed statement about the future of the company in Canada: “The majority of HMV stores across Canada will not be affected. Those that may no longer be viable due to increasingly high property costs, proximity to other locations and/or other associated running expenses will be evaluated,” it said.

The statement went on to say that HMV Canada will maintain its roots in the retail entertainment business as it branches out into the digital world.

In other news, Apple is in talks to improve the quality of its iTunes music downloads.

[Sky News]

How to wallop Watson, the Jeopardy! machine

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10:37 am

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Clobbering the two best Jeopardy! contestants out there is no small feat. But last week, during one final Jeopardy! round, Watson — the artificial intelligence IBM computer that won a three-day tournament against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — answered incorrectly. The machine answered "Toronto" for a clue under the heading "U.S. Cities." So was this some sort of snide remark? Was Watson intentionally trying to knock our nationally sensitive identity? Or is the machine’s gaffe a sign that with the right practice — and a good dose of Canadian trivia — this superhuman, high-tech machine can be beat?

Who better to give us a real competitive edge than Stephen Baker, a former BusinessWeek senior writer and author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Baker has been following the development of Watson since its early days as the apple of IBM’s eye.

How did you get the idea to write a book about Watson?
I had been looking for my next book project and was eager to find a real story to tell. Ideally, this gripping story would introduce readers to some technology poised to change the world (if that wasn’t asking too much). So one day in late 2009 I was having lunch at IBM, and people started talking about Watson, the Jeopardy! machine. This was my book! It even featured a do-or-die championship match. My only fear was that someone else had already claimed it. Luckily, no one had.

What is the machine’s most endearing quality?
Its happy confidence as it botches clues in ways that no person could dream up. It is then, when Watson errs, that you realize just how foreign our knowledge and language remain to this machine, and how surprising it is that gaffes don’t happen even more often.

What is the best way to trump it?
That’s easy. Just step out of the Jeopardy! format and ask it a question most people would consider simple, perhaps, "What’s today?" or "Where are we?" Watson will launch an exhaustive search through millions of documents with references to time and place, never comprehending that the question requires something it utterly lacks: awareness. Tripping up Watson in Jeopardy! is much more difficult. But it does have troubles with clues involving multiple levels of analysis. This type of arithmetic clue, for example, ties it into knots: ____ Wonders of the World x ____ commandments =? (What is 70?)

Watson mistook Toronto for an American city. Is this a matter of semantics, or should we be worried that America is trying to assimilate us?
Poor IBM. Before the match, the team building Watson was weighing the potential damage to IBM’s brand from a silly gaffe on the part of the machine. If Watson had low confidence in a response, mightn’t it be better simply to raise the white flag and say, "I don’t know?" Humans, you see, are blessed with common sense and can make reasonable guesses. But when Watson starts guessing, it comes up with the most outrageous responses. In the end, instead of quieting Watson in these cases, they had it add question marks, as if to announce that it was only a guess. In any case, Watson was stumped by a clue about U.S. cities. Yet compared to some of the dumb answers I’ve seen (It once confused Oliver Twist with the Pet Shop Boys), Toronto wasn’t so far off. It is a city, after all, a North American city, even if it’s on the other side of a border.

Who do you think would win at a round of pure Canadiana trivia? Margaret Atwood or Watson?
That’s a tough one. I would suspect that in depth of Canadian knowledge, Margaret Atwood would clobber the computer (a dilettante if there ever was one). But I’m not so sure about her range. Is she up on the ski lingo at Whistler, seasonal festivals in Nunatsiavut, hurricanes that have battered the Maritimes? If so, she’d probably fare well against Watson — assuming she’s fast on the buzzer.

Where to buy London Fashion Week's Canadian designs

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8:37 am

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Following New York Fashion Week comes London Fashion Week, one of the big four catwalk fixtures alongside Paris, New York and Milan. London is best known for showcasing cutting edge talent and avant-garde trends, as well as blending up-and-coming designers with established names. Participating this year are three emerging and exciting Canadian designers: Erdem, Mark Fast and Toronto’s own Todd Lynn. And luckily, their gorgeous garments are available to purchase right here in Toronto.

Erdem
Birthplace: Montreal
Who wears his clothes: “A clever person who probably cares little about seasons. She has a lot of conviction and marches to her own drum.”
Where you can buy: The Room, Hudson’s Bay Company, 176 Yonge Street

Mark Fast
Birthplace: Winnipeg
Who wears his clothes: “[Women who are] strong and enthusiastic with great legs.”
Where you can buy: Carte Blanche, 758 Queen Street; The Room, Hudson’s Bay Company, 176 Yonge Street

Todd Lynn
Birthplace: Toronto
Who wears his clothes: “Fearless [women] with a heart full of rock ‘n roll.”
Where you can buy: Holt Renfrew, 50 Bloor Street

Toronto gets serious about mocktails

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2:53 pm

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Pregnant women, alcohol abstainers and under-aged diners rejoice! No longer shall you be slated into the same, lackluster beverage categories when you go out to eat: fresh, tasty non-alcoholic options that don’t contain alarmingly high levels of sugar or aspartame are sprouting up citywide in the form of mocktails, The Globe reports.

Recent studies show that Canadians are already guzzling wine like there’s no tomorrow, so what better time to introduce particularly enticing non-boozy blends to cocktail lists? High-profile institutions like the financial district’s Ki and the Ritz-Carlton’s long-awaited TOCA offer mocktails crafted with the same passionate consideration as their spirituous creations.

Apparently, the popularity gap between cocktails and mocktails is narrowing. Ki’s General Manager Kelly Higginson has observed a spike in non-alcoholic cocktails at lunchtime, and a steady decline in the liquid lunches of yore. “Times have changed a lot. [The demand for] productivity being what it is, it’s more reasonable to have a fresh, non-alcoholic cocktail at lunch, or even at dinner,” Higginson told The Globe.

Ki features thirst-quenching, booze-free options like the Ginger Peach ($6), a blend of fresh peach and ginger juice amped up with aromatic sage syrup, and the Winter Citrus ($6), a medley of popular Japanese soft drink Calpico and stunning yuzu citrus. Over at TOCA, a selection of “temperance cocktails” includes the Tandoori Tangerine ($8), made with Tandoori-spiced orange, lime leaf, Elderflower water and green tea syrup.

With increasingly lavish concoctions flaring up behind bars citywide and an intensified attention on gastronomical endeavours in general, it makes perfect sense for mixology to enter non-alcoholic terrain. Now all that’s needed is a new excuse for raucous late night behaviour.

[The Globe and Mail]

Is American Apparel losing its foothold in Toronto?

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11:27 am

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When Little Italy’s American Apparel shut its doors a few weeks ago, it became Toronto’s second AA store to close (four years ago, the Church Street location packed up due to high rent prices and less-than-satisfactory business). So could this mean AA stores in Toronto are disappearing faster than the clothes on its ad models? Well, yes and no.

Despite the company’s financial woes (apparently, it barely escaped bankruptcy in 2009 when Lion Capital lent it $80-million to help meet the deadline on another $51-million loan), the College Street store was a huge risk for the company. “The area didn’t develop into a retail neighbourhood. The gamble didn’t pay off," American Apparel’s Los Angeles headquarters outlet operations manager, Luke Michalowski, told Humber College’s The Daily Planet.

And according to him, the Yonge and Dundas location is “one of the best stores in North America. We’re still going strong." Our calls to American Apparel’s Canadian offices for further comment were not returned.

However, it should be noted that when news of the near-bankruptcy first hit, Canada store sales were down 15 per cent compared to sales in the U.S., which were down three per cent. If that’s any indication of where AA might cut its losses, we could expect to see less of those semi-pornographic ads around here. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

[The Daily Planet, New York Magazine]

Sardine connoisseurs to vastly increase by 2050

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5:45 am

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Get ready to start eating lots of sardines. According to an American Association for the Advancement of Science panel meeting, predatory fish like tuna and grouper will be virtually non-existent by 2050, while smaller fish like sardines and anchovies will be in abundance. The news isn’t all bad: at least something’s going to survive the apocalypse of 2012.

The reason for the dramatic decline in predatory fish is – surprise, surprise – overfishing by humans, The Washington Post reports. Apparently, humans have consumed two-thirds of the large predatory fish in the ocean over the past 100 years, most of that over the past 40 years. Still, it’s good to know there will be fish at all in the future: the panel’s discussion question was “2050: Will there be fish in the ocean?”

Some experts say that if the number of fishing boats and the days they fish are restricted immediately, then fish stocks could start inching back. For anyone in Toronto with less than full faith in humanity’s capacity for self-control, we hear that Bar Salumi has a mean cured sardine.

[Washington Post]

How to rock a Canadian Tuxedo this spring

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1:18 pm

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Now that the weather is getting milder, it’s time to think about spring fashion. One of the biggest trends found on New York runways for spring 2011 hits pretty close to home: the Canadian Tuxedo. Don’t worry, this isn’t the one we’ve seen John Mellencamp sporting back in the early 90s.

Thanks to top designers like Stella McCartney and Derek Lam, the new denim-on-denim look is lightweight, making for a very fresh and fashion-forward look. We found the items to help you put together your own Canadian Tux.

Jeans: With this look, you’re going to need an awesome pair of jeans, and with over 10,000 pairs of both premium and brand name denim, Hill Street Blue Jeans is totally worth the drive to Richmond Hill.

Chambray shirt for her: This too-cute chambray shirt at Jonathan and Olivia by Surface to Air is on sale for $125.

Chambray shirt for him: Yes, this look is unisex and your man can look chic, instead of cheesy, with the black chambray shirt at Klaxon Howl.

Denim jacket for her: Over the Rainbow has a wicked 1970s Levi’s trucker jacket that would perfectly top off your tux.

Denim jacket for him: Style Exchange has this hot, distressed, No Excess jacket on sale for $45.

Marshalls to hit the GTA next month

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11:58 am

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Torontonians will soon understand what the big deal is about U.S. discount department store Marshalls — and apparently there are a lot of them. Deals, that is. The first three Canadian stores are set to open in the GTA on March 17. The stores are coming to Leaside, Scarborough and Woodbridge, and will feature brand name clothing at discount prices, kind of like our good Canadian friend, Winners.

Don’t expect discount wars any time soon, though. Marshalls’ U.S. parent company, The TJX Cos. Inc., is likely to want Marshalls to complement rather than compete with Winners, Frances Gunn, an assistant professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, told The Star.

Still, we’re betting Sears and The Bay won’t be too happy with the new kid on the block since the chain carries many of the same designer labels, like Kenneth Cole and Ralph Lauren, for cheaper prices. Marshalls has plans for a downtown location, too, at the site of defunct Circa nightclub in the Entertainment District. That store won’t open until later this year, so in the meantime, the drive to Woodbridge might actually be worth it for once.

[Marshalls Canada]

Coming Soon: Hot Beans, vegan comfort food in Kensington

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2:09 pm

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Make room for the latest munchies to hit downtown’s affordable food hub, because vegan takeout joint Hot Beans is opening in Kensington Market next week. The collective vision of chef Scott McCannell, Ross Corder and Madeleine Foote, the upcoming spot at 160 Baldwin will serve up a compact, approachable menu of Latin-inspired vegan delights.

After visiting Portland, Oregon last year, partners McCannell and Foote were inspired by the variety of fast, delicious vegan options available to them. That’s when the gears started grinding towards expanding the small – albeit solid – handful of vegan establishments in Toronto’s downtown core. McCannell, who has been cooking for 13 years, 10 of them as a vegan, earned his stripes under the city’s legendary vegan chef Stephen Gardner, in the kitchens of renowned veggie institutions Live, Fressen and Urban Herbivore (where he met Corder).

Together, McCannell, Corder and Foote decided that they had a niche to fill: “the vegan community in Toronto is mostly high end,” McCannell explains. Hot Beans plans to change that by perfecting what the chef describes as “simple, accessible vegan” fare. Their objective is to serve, essentially, vegan comfort food: fresh veggie options that are uncompromising in taste.

The enthusiastic Hot Beans crew plans to work tirelessly to satisfy growling stomachs with simple-yet-inventive veg-friendly vitals like the jackfruit “pulled pork” taco, smothered with in-house bbq sauce, and chewy seitan “chorizo” burrito with house-made peanut-miso sauce, garlic-annatto rice, pico de gallo, cashew sour cream, and cilantro-jalapeno salsa.

And Hot Beans will stay open late, until 2am on Fridays and Saturdays, providing veg-heads and night owls with nutritious post-bar options. Let the countdown to Friday, February 25 officially begin: vegan tacos, burritos, nachos and donuts! Oh my!

Hot Beans, 160 Baldwin Street, Kensington Market

Essential Fashion Week items from The Coveteur

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11:21 am

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New York Fashion Week is wrapping up soon, but if you weren’t lucky enough – or is it vogue enough? – to attend, don’t fret. Instead, covet. Torontonians Erin Kleinberg and Stephanie Mark have teamed up with Vogue to give budding fashionistas a peek at Fashion Week via their new website, thecoveteur.com. Last week, they compiled a list of essential Fashion Week survival items from key fashion players. Here are some must-have items that we loved.

1. Makeup: “Chanel bronzer and red lipstick. I never leave the home without them. A little bronzer and red-lip refresher do the trick to keep your look lasting.”
Sylvana Ward Durrett, Vogue director of special events

2. Literature: “Edie: An American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. It really is one of the best accounts of New York in the 1960s.”
Eddie Borgo, jewelery designer

3. Accessories: “Vintage Tom Ford sunglasses, and my cherished Ginette rose gold necklaces—I don’t go a day without them.”
Jessica Sailer, Vogue fashion market editor

4. Heels: “High heels are an absolute must—even in the snow! With tights, Christian Louboutin gladiator sandals in black velvet serve as the perfect winter shoe.”
Aslaug Magnusdottir, CEO and co-founder of Moda Operandi

5. Bag: “Prada bag: I’m still waiting for my Miss Wu bag from Jason Wu so until then, I’m carrying this amazing bag.”
Kate Young, Stylist

[Vogue]

Beer: helping athletes recover since 1862

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3:05 pm

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Toronto may soon forget Gatorade as a post-workout elixir if a non-alcoholic beer from Germany catches on here. Erdinger Brewery, best known in Ontario for its wheat beer, is marketing its Erdinger Alkoholfrei as a healthy athlete’s brew. Impossible as it may seem, it turns out that beer may be even more useful than we thought.

“It’s isotonic, vitamin-rich and all-natural, [and] over in Europe serious athletes will have an Alkoholfrei to replenish their nutrients after a race,” an Erdinger rep told Bangor Daily News, a newspaper from Maine. With that kind of talk, the beverage is liable to be considered a performance enhancing drug.

In all seriousness, its not surprising that a beer is being touted as a healthier alternative to sugar-laden sports drinks. Alkoholfrei is apparently all natural and organic – plus, it’s beer, which is a benefit unto itself.

Still, even if it does help replenish nutrients, we can’t see this beating Gatorade as a hangover recovery drink.

[Bangor Daily News via Zagat]