[PHOTO] The Tower at 315 Bloor Street West

The Tower at 315 Bloor Street West
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is a side view of the circular tower attached to 315 Bloor Street West, current location of the University of Toronto's Admissions and Awards office but in the 19th century a centre for meteorological research.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton speculates on the constellations seen by someone living on a world orbiting the young but broadly Sol-like star of Iota Horologii.


• blogTO's David Marciniak doesn't think that the city of Toronto's decision to pay an additional $C 417 million for new streetcars after the federal government bailed out is a good one, especially since it takes money away from other, arguably more useful, projects.


• Broadsides' Antonia Zerbisias <ahref="http://thestar.blogs.com/broadsides/2009/07/impotence.html">blogs about how a generally impotent Hamas makes itself feel powerful by bullying women who don't accept subordination.


• Aslak at Demography Matters points out that, contrary to social conservatives' beliefs, it's actually the most liberal societies which evidence the highest birth rates, and that it's the societies with more traditional gender roles that see impressive fertility declines.


• Far Outliers blogs about the 11th century trade boom in northeast Asia.


• Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros examines the implications for Kosovo if the International Court of Justice rules against the legality of its creation.
  
• At his Halfway Down the Danube, Douglas also takes a look at Ugandans fears of trouble in 2011.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen examines how Alan Turing's hidden sexuality and possible autism influenced the design of the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.


• Slap Upside the Head makes the point that a celibate gay man who was employed by an Ontario Catholic church as an altar server really should be surprised that he was fired. What could he have expected?


• Strange Maps has a somewhat gruesome map showing where people jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge, and also shows a remarkable map of the world as seen from late Tokugawa Japan.


• The Dragon's Tales blogs about plans for NASA-ESA cooperation on future Mars missions.

[LINK] "Someone will have to pay for a two-tier job system"

Unlike last year's TTC messiness, the current Toronto city workers strike hasn't left me very unhappy. Perhaps it's because I did my big apartment cleaning the week before the strike; perhaps it's the lack of a garbage depot in a nearby park; perhaps it's because I like the slightly straggly grass. Toronto has held up reasonably well, I think, the occasional unmanaged spot of garbage on the sidewalk aside. Torontonians can be proud that they're managing reasonably well.

But. Reasonably well does not mean happily. Margaret Wente makes the point that a lot of Torontonians are unhappy with the extra income and other privileges enjoyed by city workers compared to their private-sector peers.

Toronto's garbage strike is about as popular as a skunk at a picnic. As the streets get messier and smellier, public support for the union seems to be hovering at zero. Why? Because the garbage workers are striking to hang on to benefits unknown to the rest of us, including a cushy deal that allows them to pile up sick days and cash them in when they retire.

The sick days have caused public outrage. But they're the tip of the entitlement iceberg. Across the country, the compensation gap between public- and private-sector jobs has grown increasingly wide.

The garbage workers are typical. Their hourly wage is about 20 per cent higher than in the private sector. They have a gold-plated benefits plan, to which they contribute not a cent. After 10 years service, their jobs are guaranteed. Workers with top seniority get seven weeks vacation. Then there's the pension - a generous defined benefits plan, guaranteed by you and me.

A stunning piece of research by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has chronicled the public/private wage gap. It found that public-sector workers across Canada earn 8 per cent to 17 per cent more than people with similar jobs in the private sector. The public-sector wage advantage is now 11.9 per cent for municipal workers, 7.9 per cent for provincial workers and 17.3 per cent for federal workers.

That's just half the story. They also get better benefits and pensions. Their work weeks are shorter (typically 33.5 hours, versus 37.3 in the private sector), and they get more vacation and sick leave. Once you calculate the value of the benefits and shorter work time, the total compensation advantage adds up to 35.9 per cent for municipal workers, 24.9 per cent for provincial workers and 41.7 per cent for federal workers.

There used to be a deal that everyone understood: Public-sector work didn't pay a lot, but there were good benefits and job security. Now, people are forking over tax dollars so government workers doing essentially the same jobs can make a lot more than they do.

Yes, there is a lot of sentiment being voiced for breaking unions and turning things over to private contractors. Why do you ask?

[LINK] "Why free trade with the EU goes nowhere"

Iceland and Croatia might be close to getting into the European Union, but is Canada even close? Paul Wells of MacLean's is profoundly skeptical.

If this negotiation is to succeed, each side will have to give up what it hasn’t been prepared to give up before. [European Commission trade director Mauriccio] Petriccione portrayed the Europeans as late but zealous converts. He always enters trade talks with a detailed mandate from European trade ministers. In 20 years, no trade negotiator has been given such a mandate more rapidly than he was for this Canada round.

“We are committed to this negotiation,” he said. “We are prepared to go into all the classic no-go areas. There can’t be any if we want to make progress.”

But with a veteran diplomat’s polished grace, Petriccione asked whether Canada is as committed. Can a complex federation sing from one song sheet? “I must confess we are watching with extreme interest . . . I think this is a huge test for Canada.” Some Canadians are certainly trying. Quebec’s Jean Charest has named one of his predecessors, Pierre Marc Johnson, as the province’s lead negotiator for the EU trade file as a demonstration of his seriousness.

But up to now the provinces have been so eager to keep one another out that they are reluctant to let European investors in on the same terms as locals. “I could take the easy way out and say it’s Canada’s problem to solve. But what I can add is that we have had region-to-region negotiations [between the EU and other international partners] that we have suspended because our partners would not offer us the benefits of an integrated market, equal to those that we were offering.”

That’s the fate that awaits Canada if we try to bargain down to the same old tired routines. The urbane Italian visitor was daring Canadians to go big or go home. “We will want equivalent benefits to those we are prepared to offer.” He nodded at his fellow Canadian panellists. “All I can say is, I hope that Roy, Ross and many others were dead right when they convinced us.”

So, to sum up: It isn't so much the Netherlands or Portugal that some Canadians are afraid of so much as it is New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Oh Canada.

[URBAN NOTE] My psychogeography

Whenever I go for extended walks--like when, yesterday, I walked west from the Osgoode TTC station along Queen Street West and then up Roncesvalles Avenue--I always think of the walk as stictching together another bit of the city into my mental map, of penetrating into the dim grayness of the areas of town that even now I'm not familiar with ("Etobicoke"? what is Etobicoke"?).

Back in February, I created a [FORUM] asking where people saw their community's psychological boundaries lying. It's a fascinating subject, not least because of my above stated predisposition, but because I've recently come across the writings of British author Will Self on what he and others starting with Guy Debord call psychogeography. There's a Toronto Psychogeography Society, complete with a blog that seems sadly inactive, so I'll turn to a Self, first to a Self article about Toronto, then to an extended interview with him by the Toronto Star's Murray Whyte ("Slow down, you move too fast").

For centuries, geography has been disappearing. Slowly, at first: The wheel rendered modest, walkable distances passable in a fraction of the time. Then, it was quicker, much quicker, thousands of miles vanishing at once as carriages, galleons, ocean liners and cars, and finally air travel, made it almost irrelevant, reducing a once epic 5,700-kilometre transatlantic journey to a trifling six-hour stretch of boredom salved with filmic interludes from Will Farrell.

It's all awfully fast. Too fast, Will Self says. So he's trying to slow it down. Six hours, more or less, took him from London Heathrow to Pearson yesterday. Six more hours, give or take, of walking took him from Pearson to Swatow, a Chinatown icon (the grilled pork really makes it) on Spadina Ave. last night.

[. . .]

Self, the iconoclastic British author of such novels as My Idea of Fun and Great Apes, is here this week for the International Festival of Authors. He writes a column in the Independent called "Psychogeography," accompanied each time with an illustration by the artist Ralph Steadman. Four years' worth have been collected into a newly released book of the same name.

It's not as confrontational as it sounds. "Really, it's about being where you are, about trying to infuse human geography with physical geography," Self says.

Then again, maybe it is. Self's position runs counter to modern modes of living taken for granted long ago. Living in a city, for most of us, means a handful of significant nodes – home, work, shopping – connected by high-speed journeys – cars, cabs, trains. The space in between wings by barely visible, unexperienced, untouched.

Self comes by the fascination honestly. His father was an academic whose field was urban planning. Self was surrounded with urban theory his whole life. Then, in his 20s, he experienced "an odd epiphany – I had lived in London all my life, and I had never seen the mouth of the Thames, only 20 miles away."

Self's mother was American, and he was making trans-Atlantic flights as a matter of habit. Yet here he was, at home, yet somehow foreign-feeling, displaced. It occurred to him that modern travel "destroys that sense of where we are," and thus were the seeds of psychogeography planted: Knowing a place from a human perspective, not through the side window of a plane, train or car.

Psychogeography embraces those ignored liminal zones – the spaces in between – step by step, as actual, tangible and real. "The whole thrust of the mass transit folkway is to annihilate those places we seek to recover," he says.

Shawn Micallif at the Spacing blog covered a Self walk in New York City, if you're interested in his further exploits.

In his article, Self mentions the intruiging murmur project, where people can cell phones who find themselves next to a metal icon of a green ear can phone a number and get a snippet of someone's record memory about that place. It makes things additionally concrete, adds them a measure of psychological legitimacy that the walk might have lacked.

Might. Anna Bowness' "Literary History of the Flâneur" makes it clear that, just as Self argues, the mdoern trend is for walkers to create their own realities, their own legitimacies.

Benjamin’s image of the flaneur, wandering the streets idly and with a dandy’swardrobe, was the one that stuck in the popular imagination until later theorists ofwalking – also, notably, from Paris – tweaked the idea a little. Michel de Certeau and Guy DeBord politicized the pedestrian, and turned him from a passive observer to an activist of sorts. Without making him do anything in particular – Certeau’s and DeBord’s flaneur is just as directionless and whimsical as Benjamin’s – these latertheorists showed how the simple act of walking makes a statement as loud as words.Certeau argues that a city – its buildings, streets, and crowds – is a language initself, and that by taking a walk, the flaneur preserves this language and thuspreserves the space itself. Guy DeBord, co-founder of the Situationists, turnedwalking into art and activism. Spawning a whole movement – which endures today,in Paris and Toronto and elsewhere – Guy DeBord and the Situationists coined theterm “psychogeography” and gave a whole vocabulary to walking and the streets.After the Situationists, the flaneur had a purpose if not an itinerary.

Lately I've been finding my planned itineraries really boring. Why go the same old route when there are so many more--not infinite, but many more--possibilities? Spadina Avenue might be nice, but what about Spadina Road? Et cetera. Give me some new space for me to inscribe with my feet, or I'll just have to find some.