This week: #RIDE, Layton, and year-long photos

Here:

• The night before New Year’s Eve, I wrote something asking people who tweet to take the #RIDE hashtag back from the jerks who were using it to share the locations of police RIDE stops. I was hoping it would take off, but didn’t expect it would take off the way it did: there were at least 2,500 unique #RIDE tweets between noon on December 31, 2011 and 3 a.m. on January 1, 2012, by my estimate—that’s almost three per minute, for fifteen hours. Some people were tweeting real RIDE locations that night, but they were next to impossible to find, because they were drowned out with jokes and earnest messages against drunk driving and helpful tips on how to get home safe and bait-and-switches. Good work, everyone.

In The Grid:

• How do you take a year-long photo of Toronto, anyway? Michael Chrisman’s spectacular shot of the skyline from the Port Lands made it to the cover of the Toronto Star, and I interviewed him about how he does it.
• The Grid’s person of the year, as determined by our readers’ votes: Jack Layton, by a nose.*
• When the Canon Theatre became the Ed Mirvish Theatre last month, there was one thing they couldn’t change right away: the big “CANON” sign hanging over Yonge Street, which is currently covered up. This is what the sign looks like now, and what the new one will look like come spring.

(* means an article or a version of it appeared in The Grid in print; otherwise, it was online-exclusive.)