Link: Canadian Heritage Minutes

If you lived in Canada in the 1990s and owned a television set, chances are you remember the educational minute-long history commercials produced for Canada Post. Hell, if you're anything like me, you  remember them better than most of the Canadian history you actually learned in school. And now, thanks to the superkickassing awesomeness of the internet, you can spend hours bathed in the warm glow of nostalgia, national pride and occasionally passable acting. There's an online archive of the commercials here and it has all your old favourites: James Naismith and his crazy old peach baskets, the woman who smells burning toast whenever Wilder Penfield pokes her in the brain, Jacques Plant getting hit in the face with a puck...

I could go on listing them forever so, here, I'll just give you a bunch of links to some of my favourites and embed a few of the more Toronto-related ones below:

James Naismith invents basketball here.
Wilder Penfield performs brain surgery here.
Jacques Plant wears a hockey mask here.
The Avro Arrow is developed here.
Winnie-the-Pooh is here.
Pierce Brosnan is Grey Owl here.
Baldwin and LaFontaine help invent Canadian democracy here.

Joseph Tyrrell finds dinosaur bones here.
Frontier College (where my father used to work, thank you very much) teaches people to read here.
Nat Taylor helps invent the multiplex here.

Meet The Little Red Umbrella

Sorry, things have been quiet around these parts for the last couple of weeks, but with good reason, I promise. I've been spending some of my time working on an especially epic and time-consuming post about the duel Samuel Jarvis fought at Yonge and College in 1817—and the rest of my waking hours on a brand new project I'm pretty excited about. Some friends and I have just launched a new online magazine, The Little Red Umbrella, which the curious among you can find here. I'm going to be posting highlights from The Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog there, along with posts about pretty much anything else I find interesting or cool. And that will include historical stories and ephemera from places other than Toronto. (Yesterday, for instance, I published a bunch of gorgeous, colour photos from the First World War. You can check 'em out here.) We'll also write about music, film, tv, lit, style, politics and everything else we think is neat. Things may be a little slow over the holidays; we'll really kick things into gear in the New Year.

Meanwhile, you can follow us on Twitter here. Or like us on Facebook here.

And I'll be back shortly with that Samuel Jarvis post. I swear!

Link: Old CNE Posters

The poster for the Ex in 1937

Tonight I'm heading down to the Ex for the first time in like a bazillion years, so it seems like a perfect time to direct your attention to a small online archive of old CNE posters collected by a geography professor at York University. You can check them out over here. They range from 1884 to 1939. I'm especially struck by the Communistic worker imagery in a couple of the designs from the '20s and '30s. And the way the kid in the last one looks like an enraged mini-King Kong, ready to swat a plane out of the air.

There are some other cool ones here and here and here.