Here is a fun and easy music questionnaire for you:

1)     Are you tired of waking up tired?

2)     Have you ever been accused of wearing your sunglasses at night?

3)     Would you say that we are here for a good time as opposed to a long time?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above, you’re going to want to tune in to the CBC for four Thursdays in a row, beginning on August 27th to check out This Beat Goes On and Rise Up—two new documentaries that celebrate Canadian pop music in the ‘70s and ‘80s, respectively.

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Shawn McPherson / Ian Brown

If laughter is the best medicine, then Josh Holliday and Andrew Johnston are neurosurgeons. Basically.

Both are Toronto-based comics in the running for the Canadian Comedy Awards. And although you may have not have heard of either of them, you will soon. Other nominees in the running for a CCA include such comedy hotshots as Rick Mercer, Russell Peters, Jeremy Hotz, Debra DiGiovanni, Brett Butt and Seth Rogen.

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The Vancouver Courier

Patrick Maliha has been in comedy since 1995 and he's been a key player in keeping Vancouver comedy community alive and kicking.

A few years ago he created the People's Champ of Comedy competition which takes place every summer at Darby's Pub in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. "I put up $1,000 of my own cash in Grand Prize money and hope that someone who truly deserves it, wins. It's a great competition because both judges and the audience judge the stand-up comics." He added that it began simply as a way to keep the public excited about comedy in the slow summer months but has since grown into a 9-week event in which amateurs and pros compete.

According to Maliha, a large part of the community's success in town is the availability of performance venues. "There are rooms that are great for pros to try out new stuff and rooms for first timers to get their feet wet. It gives people who normally wouldn't be able to get stage time, more of an opportunity to improve their craft."

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Ingram Barss

Members of the Canadian music industry and media gathered at The Drake Hotel’s Sky Yard in Toronto yesterday to learn the ten finalists of the Polaris Music Prize.

Polaris Founder and Executive Director Steve Jordan called the picks “an ambitious crop” and dedicated the proceedings to Toronto radio DJ Martin Streek, the deep-voiced and opinionated rock radio stalwart who took his own life on Monday.

Keep reading for the nominees:

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Sonia Mansillo

Over the last few years the City of Surrey, just East of Vancouver, has been home to Western Canada's largest Canada Day celebration and with 100,000 in attendance last year, it became one of BC's largest outdoor shows ever staged.

They're returning to the Cloverdale Amphitheatre on July 1st for this year's round of festivities, activities, music and rides in this free event for the entire family.

Headliners on the main stage include legendary Canadian rockers 54-40 and Bif Naked, who recently released her fifth studio album, The Promise.

"After 3 years of being off the road, getting married, and a year and a half of battling breast cancer, Bif Naked has been given the green light to tour," states her official Facebook page. "Bif is determined to get back on the road and do what she does best – put on a killer live show for her devoted fans." The City of Surrey is calling her Canada Day performance the comeback show of the year.

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Sonia Mansillo / E!

It's kind of like Christmas for Canadian musicians. The Polaris Music Prize Long List was announced this morning, and includes such ace contenders as the legendary Leonard Cohen, singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright (sister to Rufus) and socially conscious purveyor-of-hip-hop K'NAAN.

Modeled after the UK's Mercury Music Prize, the Polaris Music Prize was established in 2006 and awards $20,000 (that's twenty freakin' grand, people!) to the album judged by a jury of music journalists and broadcasters to be the best Canadian release of the year.

This ain't the Junos, kids. The Polaris Music Prize cares not for album sales or mainstream success. It only aspires to award bona-fide artistic brilliance. We can totally get behind that!

Previous winners have included Final Fantasy and Caribou.

Keep reading for the complete Polaris Music Prize 2009 Long List:

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Sonia Mansillo

At the tender age of 22, LIGHTS has accomplished more than most Canadian singer-songwriters will during their lifetime. She's made respectable headway on the charts, her music has been featured in commercials and she was recently awarded the 2009 New Artist of the Year Juno—an honour previously bestowed upon hotshots like Feist, Michael Buble and Avril Lavigne.

"(I'm) being recognized a little bit more," says the bright-eyed and energetic young entertainer who was born Valerie Poxleitner. "The day after the Junos, I was on the front page of Metro...it was such a big shock. The general feeling is that it's a big acknowledgment of the hard work I've been doing for the past few years and it merits me as an official Canadian musician."

LIGHTS has just finished mastering her full-length debut, The Listening (due out in August), and is currently working on a new music video. She is tight-lipped where the concept is concerned, but she teases that it has "taken me at least a month of preparation." Despite her down-to-earth nature, her videos all have a similarly space-y theme, looking the way people in the '60s thought the future might be like.

"Growing up, I was always blown away by Star Trek and Barbarella and Logan's Run. The retro sci-fi thing. It was sort of obvious that it wasn't real and that gave you the right to do crazy things...(like) build a rocket with an etch-a-sketch machine! It opened the door to possibilities and kept the budget relatively low," she laughs.

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Rebecca Bollwitt

The festival concert scene has always been important to Vancouver, rain or shine, and with such a culmination of punk/ska, independent and alternative talent the Vans Warped Tour is highly anticipated each year.

The festival rolls into Vancouver August 14th with performances from dozens of bands including NOFX, Alexisonfire, and Bad Religion. Fans can already ramp up their excitement on the tour's website, which has been turned into a social network. The online community features a Google map/tour date mashup, concert-goer profiles, comments, mobile content, and band pages.

When the lineup was initially announced, the tour instantly became a trending topic on Twitter—the microblogging service used by millions globally. In Vancouver we'll see acts like Less Than Jake whom I spoke to last summer at the Commodore about life on their own label and the impact of social media throughout their careers.

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Disney/Pixar

This week is Vancouver Digital Week, and is filled with workshops, forums, and conferences discussing new media as well as the digital gaming industry. Next year, however, they'll have to add a whole new category of events for animation as it was recently announced that Disney's Pixar studio is setting up shop in town this fall.

"The operation will be small in size and dedicated to producing short-form quality computer animation for theme parks, DVDs, television and theatrical exhibition," said Disney/Pixar president Ed Catmull.

Regardless of size, the opening of an studio such as this is good news for the Vancouver digital space which has been seeing giants like locally-based Electronic Arts Inc. trimming some fat over the last year.

Warren Franklin, Chief Executive Officer of Vancouver's Rainmaker Entertainment Inc. told the Globe & Mail of this move's importance, "It's going to go a long way to putting Vancouver on the map as a world centre for animation."

Vancouver's always had appeal to Hollywood, with its ability to look like anywhere from the Bronx to Smallville but along with scenery and using some great local talent it's also the tax credit that are so enticing. As of this past February, the province of BC renewed its tax credit for digital animation and visual effects, and it seems like it was perfect timing.

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Epitome Pictures

Canada’s most beloved low-budget drama is about to meet Hollywood. 

Epitome Pictures announced a new movie that transplants Degrassi: The Next Generation characters Manny, Paige, Marko, Craig and Ellie in California. The extended trailer was posted on YouTube this week. 

E! Online first learned about the project in March in an interview with Degrassi: TNG star Adamo Ruggiero.  

“It’s going to be a two-hour special that will premiere in August,” he revealed. “The classic kids take on Hollywood. It’s very big and glamourous and exciting.” 

Will aspiring journalist Ellie finally win Craig’s heart? Will Manny and Paige make it big as A-list Hollywood actresses? Will Marko find love again? Or at least make out with a bunch of hot dudes with frosted tips? Your guess is as good as ours. But we here at E! Online are gleefully torching hundreds of pages of collective fanfic in the hopes that this next chapter of Degrassi will be tastier than anything we’ve yet to imagine.

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Ferdaus Shamim / Getty Images

John Cusack's new movie, Hot Tub Time Machine, is making a splash in the Vancouver film industry. At first, it was simply a working title, however, fans around the internet are praising it for its quirky and nerdy science-comedy value.

Having finished a stay at the Fernie Alpine Lodge in Eastern British Columbia, Hot Tub Time Machine picked up filming on one of Vancouver's local mountains, Mount Seymour in April.

According to Variety, the story involves a group of friends who return to a ski lodge where they enjoyed partying as teens who then get frustrated about their current lives. When they get into a hot tub—that just also happens to be a time machine—they are transported back to 1987.

The location on Mount Seymour is so popular that they have a Twitter account setup on behalf of the lodge, which has been posting updates throughout the production (@movie_cabin).

Tweets over the past month included: "Still filming up here around the base of mystery ski lift, many of the extras have been here for 12 hrs +, many of them wearing heat packs," and "Several folks have noted that John Cusack is well liked by the mountain staff and a pleasant lad to chat with."

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ITV

The Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver is enjoying a phenominal spike in interest in their spring production of Les Miserables thanks to Susan Boyle of Scotland who took the world by storm this month with her passionate performance of I Dreamed a Dream.

Boyle was a contestant on the TV show Britain's Got Talent, described herself as, "nearly 38, currently unemployed but still looking," and lives alone with her cat, Pebbles. She's never been married, never been kissed, and certainly didn't look like a contender for the competition when she walked out on stage—yet she blew everyone away.

With roughly 100 million views of various videos of her audition that have been posted to YouTube so far, she's an international sensation and interest in Les Miserables has been re-kindled.

"I'm excited that, with her spirit and incredible voice, Susan Boyle has connected people to the beauty and power of this song," said Sara-Jeanne Hosie who will sing I Dreamed a Dream as Fantine in the Arts Club production. "But mostly it's a relief that if I get hit by a bus, the Arts Club knows exactly who to ask to replace me!"

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