Toronto

Scarborough Bluffs escarpment above Lake Ontario in Toronto.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

The original building, designed by Toronto architects Frank Darling and John A. Pearson, opened in 1933. The new wing, by American architect Daniel Libeskind, who also designed buildings for the Denver Art Museum and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, opened in 2007 and is referred to as the Crystal.

Believe it or not, yesterday was Go Skateboard Day in Toronto, where this fella was truckin on down College Street.

This windowful of April is in Toronto. Let the May begin.....

This is Adelaide Street in downtown Toronto, Ontario.

Sam Javanrouh's caption for his nighttime skyline shot was indeed a reference to election results--but not to the mid-term elections at the center of the media universe here in the U.S.

Javanrouh was unhappy about last week's mayoral election in Canada's largest city, Toronto, where a "right-wing intolerant redneck" named Rob Ford trounced former deputy premier of Ontario George Smitherman. Ford ran openly homophobic ads against Smitherman, who is openly gay. He also promised to cut taxes and stop spending and etc.

The CN tower is dark in this photo, not its usually well-lit self, but that's just a coincidence, not an example of early budget-slashing. Must be Obama's fault.

Back alley in downtown Toronto, Ontario.

California sculptor Michael Christian wrought this man--bogeyman?--from rusting steel. The creature first appeared last summer at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, but he has recently been transplanted to a brick courtyard in Toronto's Distillery District.

He is named Koilos, which is a place of caves in a fantasy-card game. He's fourteen feet high and weighs about a ton. And he is perfectly typical of Christian's monumental-scale work, which is well known on the West Coast: vaguely human, clearly alien, all kitschy with that ineffable low-budget horror-movie something. Many Torontans have quickly grown fond of Koilos; as of last night, at least 339 photos of Koilos in Toronto have been posted on the web.

A shaft of sunlight has slipped between a couple of skyscrapers to illuminate this woman's walk across King Street in Toronto.

The poor bicycle, chained to a pole, had no chance to escape. But at least nobody was riding it at the time.

Photo by Sam Javanrouh in Toronto.