The 5th annual iteration of Toronto's official WinterCity Festival commenced last Friday and is running through to next Monday, featuring the WOW! series of installations, music and performances around Nathan Phillips Square.

If you somehow missed the crowds and the fact that city hall was ablaze last week, or if like me you only managed to catch part of what was going on, the days to check it out are this Friday and Saturday from 2 to 10 p.m., plus the finale Sunday evening at 6.

This past Saturday, two of Kensington's eco-friendly retailers crossed their fingers, stuffed them into mittens and hoped the weather would hold up to allow for a successful first run of what they hoped would become an annual vegan chili cook-off for charity.

Veg- and eco-friendly shoe retailer Left Feet and clothing retailer Heart On Your Sleeve (previously profiled in our Green Toronto video series) set tables up in front of their conjoined stores and laid them out with crockpots, biodegradable spoons/bowls, and squares of vegan cornbread.

Last March, 2.2 million residents and 2100 businesses in Sydney, Australia turned off their lights for one hour, WWF's Earth Hour 2007, resulting in an energy consumption of 10.2% for that period of time and making a major statement about what collective effort can build out of seemingly minor individual actions.

Mayor Miller and WWF Canada recently announced Toronto's participation in this year's Earth Hour, teaming up with cities such as Chicago, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Manila and even Suva (Fiji) in joining an expanded set of Australian cities to make Earth Hour 2008 a global event.

The Toronto Star has positioned themselves as the primary local media outlet for the event and is making various attempts to use their reach to call attention to it - including the recent posting of a striking new video created by one of their photographers.

If you're like me, maybe you can only vaguely recall the last time you paid proper attention to the offerings of your local Toronto Public Library. It's easy to feel that, in this era of filesharing, torrents and eBooks, that the library's inherently finite selection and old-fashioned real-world cement is a tad obsolete.

Maybe the last time you did stop by, you too found yourself in the music collection flipping through a random selection of releases and having devious little pirate fantasies about borrowing them all out, firing up your CD burner and doubling your disc collection. Maybe you've even gone through with it and hung onto the copies long enough to realize that Navy Blues wasn't worth borrowing in the first place.

Well if you've been assuming the library into irrelevance too, there's a very good chance that you've missed out on the work they've done to get with the times and the fact that the library now offers eBooks, audio books, movies, music and other direct-download content through their website.

A new cigarette product called "Mirage" claims to leave less of a smoke smell when smoked in an enclosed area. As a non-smoker, I'll say I definitely don't want anyone masking their second-hand smoke because it's most certainly not doing me a favour... and that name just makes it sound so consciously sneaky on the smoker's part. (What's the target market exactly - smoking in bars and clubs, parents smoking in the car with kids, teenagers smoking in their bedrooms?)

But, also as a non-smoker, I typically wouldn't be hearing about new cigarette products at all. Except in this case, after a decade-long voluntary ban on advertising in mass-market publications, full-page ads for these cigarettes have been appearing across the country - including in a certain local entertainment weekly.

Over the past few years, I've been trying to slim my Christmas gift-exchange list down as much as possible, but there are some people that are permanent fixtures. There are also some non-people that are permanent fixtures.

My mother - invoking her talent for anthropomorphizing her dog Bennie - took an opportunity the other day to ask whether I'd be getting Bennie a Christmas present and informed me that he was expecting one.

He's usually pretty easy to please with a bone, squeaky toy or frozen curbside fast food leftovers, but this year I found out about another option. I'm not sure it's his style, but maybe your dog will dig it - a Toronto company's DVD series designed specifically for dogs.