[PHOTO] Four unusual photos from a craft shop north of Port Hope

Driving on Highway 28 towards Peterborough from Port Hope on the early September daytrip of me and Jerry, we happened across a curious roadside craft centre selling unusual things in stone and wood, like Buddhas and Austronesian huts and odder sculptures still. I forget the name, frustratingly: Jerry, anyone, can you help? Regardless, below are four photos.

Buddhas 40% off
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Jerry in an East Timorese hut
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Gnarled tree stump
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Horned ungulate skull, carved
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] Some Friday links

• blogTO's Rick McGinnis blogs about the disappearance of the former Bohemian district of Gerrard Village thanks to rising real estate prices.
  
• James Bow comments on the Louisiana judge opposed to interracial marriage. Racist, that last guy.


• Far Outliers links to a source discussing how Fijians of Melanesian background, not just Indo-Fijians, are beginning to become sailors on the world stage in larger numbers. The blog also tackles the remnants of Thessaloniki's multiculturalism.


• Language Log reports on language conflict in Taiwan and Guangdong, as locals try to reassert their languages against Putongua. In a related post, the blog wonders what exactly constitutes an ethnic group.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley savages American conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer.


• Peter Rukavina links to a video tour of Toronto's Coach House Press.


• Slap Upside the Head notes that yet another group of "concerned citizens" want to forcibly exclude a GLBT-themed book from a public library.


• Towleroad reports that American gay writer Edmund White thinks that same-sex marriage is radical simply because it normalized same-sex couples.


• Window on Eurasia observes that an opening of the Turkish-Armenian frontier would transform the mental maps and national identities of Armenians and Turks alike, and also comments on Russia's emergence as a supplier of raw materials to China.

[LINK] "Giambrone mulling run for Toronto mayor"

I quite like this news.

Adam Giambrone, Toronto's youngest councillor and chairman of the TTC, says a mayoral run next year is a “very real possibility,” a move that would make him the first left-leaning candidate to throw his hat in the ring.

“I have not decided yet, but it looks like it is a very real possibility,” Mr. Giambrone told The Globe and Mail, saying he has spent the last two weeks mulling policy and making phone calls to potential supporters. It's the most explicit he's been yet on his political future at City Hall.

He's the first left-of-centre candidate to step forward since Mayor David Miller's bombshell announcement Sept. 25 that he will not seek a third term, fuelling an unofficial race that's been dominated so far by centre- and right-leaning names.

“I am enjoying the work of improving transit as the chair of the TTC and there is always lots to do in Ward 18, but it may be time to take the next step,” Mr. Giambrone said.

I'd quite like a mayor Adam Giambrone. He has a good record representing Ward 18, where I've lived since I've moved to Toronto, I like most of the TTC policies that he has proposed and enacted, and he's a very pleasant guy to have dinner with, too.

[LINK] "Queen and Grafton could get 'scramble' corner"

Guess what other community of personal note to me is considering a scramble intersection?

Changes could be coming to one of Charlottetown's busiest intersections. The city's police committee is planning to look at traffic flow issues and pedestrian safety at the corner of Grafton and Queen streets.

One of the options being presented is a pedestrian "scramble," which allows pedestrians to cross the street diagonally.

At a scramble crossing, vehicles are periodically stopped by red lights in all directions and people can walk across the intersection in any direction, including diagonally.

Toronto instituted the scramble at one of its busiest intersections the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets in August 2008.

Coun. Rob Lantz said that if it can work in Toronto, it can work in Charlottetown. "It's more efficient," Lantz said. "You don't have vehicles trying to turn right while pedestrians are crossing at the same time, which is not only unsafe for pedestrians, but it stacks up the cars that are trying to turn right."

The idea was put forward by a downtown Charlottetown business advisory committee. The committee also wants council to remove the no left turn law that exists at that same corner. Motorists driving along Grafton Street aren't allowed to turn left onto Queen Street.

You can see the intersection of Queen and Grafton Streets here. For pictures of the intersection in question, go to my photo post collecting September 2002 pictures of Charlottetown, or just look at the below picture.

The Confederation Centre of the Arts
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[BRIEF NOTE] "The Cascajal Block"

I wanted to devote an entry to a recent entry by pauldrye at Passing Strangeness, examining the Cascajal Block, a millennias-old stone tablet that may well be the oldest evidence of writing ever found in the Americas.

The first Mesoamerican civilization was the Olmec, and it’s far from clear that they knew how to write. On the other hand, the Zapotec flourished not long after the heyday of the Olmec, and they had a fairly developed script. This has troubled archaeologists for a while, for the reason that one would expect writing to start out crudely and develop over time. As it happens, this theory had been challenged by better understanding of Sumerian writing, which went from quite crude to quite complex in just a few hundred years. Even so, archaeologists specializing in Central America have kept a close eye out for Olmec artifacts that suggest that the Zapotec learned the trick from their predecessors.

The centre of Olmec civilization was Veracruz state, particularly San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán—unfortunately named because it’s not the Tenochtitlan, AKA pre-Columbian Mexico City (its Olmec name is unknown, so it’s named after two nearby towns, one of which was in turn named after the chief Aztec city by modern-day Mexicans). The centre is there because of the Coatzacoalcos River, which isn’t very long but was to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán what the Thames is to London or the Tiber was to Rome. About 25 kilometers downstream from San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán is the tiny village of Lomas de Tacamichapa, which contains a road-building quarry named El Cascajal. In 1999 two archaeologists, the husband-and-wife team María del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos, realized that the quarry was actually an Olmec site. In a pile of rubble left by a bulldozer they turned up many Olmec artifacts, the gem of which was an eleven kilogram block of serpentine stone. The block was incised with various symbols—62 in all, with 28 different ones—and, based on analysis of the other archaeological bits and pieces in the pile, it was anywhere from 2800 to 3000 years old: centuries older than any other writing found to date in the New World.

The news of the discovery, along with an in-depth study of it, was only formally announced in September of 2006; Rodríguez Martínez and Ortíz Ceballos spent six years trying to find any other similar artifacts and, when they found nothing else, they brought in several other notable experts on Mesoamerica. Altogether they came to the conclusion that the sigils weren’t just decoration, which seems a bit surprising given that no-one knows how to read it. Several techniques developed during the decipherment of other unknown texts were used instead and, while not definitive, produced clues that the signs have an underlying meaning.

This Joel Skidmore report (PDF format) goes into more detail. The problem, as Paul points out, is that there are some curious problems relating to the interpretation of the symbols on the stone, some even suggesting it might be a fake. Determining the meaning of the stone's symbols would be hugely complicated, given that no one has any idea what language they spoke, and it would also be next to impossible to reconstruct a language three thousand years before the present. Assuming, of course, that the stone does have writing. Regardless, as I wrote in my June review of Robinson's Lost Languages, I can't help but wish archeologists and linguists and anyone else who could help would have good luck: so much has been lost, in the world and in the disease-devastated post-Columbian Americas, that having some comprehensible text from so far in the past would be quite nice indeed.

[LINK] "No visa rule yet for Hungary, despite spike in refugee claims"

The Canadian Press' Terry Pedwell describes how, even though Roman in Hungary are migrating to Canada by claiming refugee status like their co-ethnics in the Czech Republic, Canada's not imposing visa restrictions on Hungary. (Yet?)

The number of refugee claims by asylum-seekers from Hungary has rocketed to nearly 1,400 so far this year - almost five times last year's total - making it the top source country for refugee claims at points of entry into Canada, figures obtained by The Canadian Press show.

The explosion in Hungarian refugee claimants, however, hasn't convinced the federal government to impose visa restrictions on Hungary as it did on the Czech Republic earlier this year.

[. . .]

The number of claims for refugee status from Hungarians rose to 1,353 to the end of September, compared with 285 for all of 2008 and just 24 the previous year.

And the number of claimants nearly doubled in the three-month period after Canada imposed visa restrictions on the Czech Republic and Mexico, compared with the first half of the year.

While Canada does not break down claimants by ethnicity, immigration authorities anecdotally say the vast majority of recent Hungarian refugee claims have been made by Roma.

[. . .]

Many in the Hungarian-Canadian community don't see the recent wave of claimants as legitimate refugees.

"I know what discrimination is, I went through it as a child," said George Telch of Toronto, who came to Canada as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia in 1949.

"Many of us (in Toronto's Hungarian community) think these people are coming to Canada for economic reasons," he said. "They're not genuine refugees.

"They have the old story in their heads that (Canada) is paradise, you don't have to work, you get rich, you get the car, the house, everything."

[LINK] "501 Queen streetcar line to be split in two"

As per the speculations on whatI reported back in July, the 501 Queen Streetcar route will be split in two.

Relief, maybe, is in sight for long-suffering transit riders on the 501 Queen streetcar line, which earns bragging rights internationally as a top-10 tram route but suffers locally for erratic service.

In a five-week experiment that starts on Monday, the Toronto Transit Commission will split the 24.8-kilometre Queen Street line into two sections: Long Branch (in the west end) to Parliament Street, and Shaw Street to Neville Park Boulevard (in the east end).

The two sections will overlap for a four-kilometre stretch between Shaw and Parliament, so commuters in the busy downtown area will not be forced to transfer between streetcars.

By splitting the line, TTC officials hope to reduce delays that begin at one end and inevitably reverberate to the other side.

“We hope this test will show whether splitting the route will provide [riders] with a more reliable service that has fewer waits and disruptions,” said John Chamberlain, TTC supervisor of the 501 Queen project. “If it doesn't, we will continue with the other strategies [introduced over the past two years] that have improved service.”

During the test period, which runs Monday to Friday until Nov. 20, rush-hour commuters on the western and eastern legs of the Queen line can expect to wait an extra two minutes compared to the current, albeit delay-filled, schedule. But with less bunching of streetcars, TTC officials expect waits to be more predictable, with less-crowded conditions.

As I noted back then, while it's an iconic route for me and much of the city, the 501 is also very, very erratic and frustrating, especially during the rush hours. Any improvement would be quite welcome. At least the western part of the route, the one I've used most extensively, will remain intact.