[PHOTO] Massey Hall, 178 Victoria Street

Massey Hall, 178 Victoria Street
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

I snapped this picture of Massey Hall, the venerable concert venue of 178 Victoria Street just east of Yonge from the Eaton Centre, during my New Year's Eve Wanderjahre with Andrew after we left the Victoria Street Fran's Restaurant. It's venerable, it's hosted any number of music acts I love, yet I've not been--I've not done live music at all, actually. This'll change.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

Anthropology.net announces the discovery of a remaining community of Pontic Greek speakers in the northeastern Anatolian homeland, who stayed and preserved their unique language because they were Muslim and weren't forced to depart with their Christian co-linguals.

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton, visiting Toronto from Vancouver, makes the point that one thing distinguishing Vancouver from Toronto is
  the latter's desperate pretensions to be a world-class city. Toronto should relax, embrace its low-slung informality. Honest Ed's defines Toronto.

Watch on YouTube

• blogTO notes the controversy surrounding a map ad by supporters of the Transit City concept that uses the wrong baseline, comparing Ford's subway plan with an unrealistic version of Transit City.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster considers the potential use of solar sails for near Earth asteroid mining and communications satellites.


• Marginal Revolution notes the life of a young Bombay rat catcher, a profitable career in Bombay's slums.


• NewAPPSblog quotes one Gary Olson, who suggests that the foreign service of Cuban doctors and soldiers demonstrates Cuba's capacity for empathy, superior to that of the fragmented capitalist world. The question of whether these are press-ganged workers who are taken from a Cuban health system in need of their services, and used as sources of foreign exchange and ideological prestige while suffering poor working conditions and in fact defecting in large numbers, doesn't seem to occur.


• Tim Gueguen shares the good news that the criminally neglected mid-1990s animated series Undergrads is being aired now on Teletoon. I'm glad.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little writes about how the wonderful historian Theodore Zeldin explained France and the French "personality" through comparing the different ordinary people of society, almost an ethnographic effort.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker makes claims about hypocrisy over criticisms of American and European border fences aimed at keeping out illegal migrants by different European Union officials in different bureaucracies. The situations are alike, actually, save in the many many ways in which they are completely different. (Thanks to nwhyte for indicating the flaws in my original wording of the link.)

[LINK] "Is the phrase the "war on the car" a Toronto thing?"

blogTO's Derek Flack linked to some research which found that the phrase of the title--used to criticize urban planning principles which are said to favour other vehicles, bicycles in particular, over cars--is very nearly a Torontoism. Except for its apparently widespread use in Seattle, of all places.

[H]ere's an interesting theory, offered by Eric De Place of the Sightline Daily. According to his review of Google's news archive, use of the phrase "the war on the car" is highly concentrated in Toronto and Seattle.

"In the spring of 2009, a few months after officials in Toronto rolled out 'The Big Move' -- a 25-year, multi-billion dollar transportation plan that aimed at reducing per capita driving, reducing congestion, and increasing transit use -- the meme rocketed into prominence. On May 17, 2009, the Toronto Sun, a populist conservative tabloid-style paper, fired what appears to have been the opening salvo with a lengthy article called "Toronto's War On Cars." Five days later, the staid Toronto Star, Canada's highest-circulation daily newspaper, ran an editorial by Denzil Minnan-Wong, a city councilor with a decidedly pro-car perspective, who wrote: 'The city's undeclared but very active war on cars is really a war on people...'"

De Pace goes on to argue that an mini-explosion of the expression followed in Seattle later that fall. "It was about this time that the "war on cars" meme began to percolate in earnest in Seattle (though it had been used used occasionally before). In June 2009, however, Seattle's pro-road activist Elizabeth Campbell was quoted in the online Seattle PostGlobe saying, 'I think there's a war on cars and I don't support it' in reference to a mayoral candidate forum."

Now I'm well aware that a little bit of digging in Google's news archives is not exactly air-tight research, but at a very minimum it's intriguing to think that such phraseology would be mostly confined to two major cities (at least in terms of news headlines). I don't really know Seattle at all, but perhaps there's a connection between the planning/layout of our cities that leads to such heated argument over the issue. Or perhaps it's political? A longer look would be required to test and make any sense of this theory.

Thoughts? Seattleite opinions would be quite welcome.

[URBAN NOTE] "An Empress Hotel Mystery"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn features an article describing a mysterious death in th Empress Hotel, a hotel that once existed on 335 Yonge Street.

On the evening of October 17, 1896, a room was booked by a man who signed the register under the name George Hall. The next morning, Hall discovered he was paralyzed on the right side of his body, which left him unable to leave his room. A physician was called in, but when he inquired as to details regarding the patient's family, Hall refused to answer any personal questions. Hall was soon transported to Toronto General Hospital, where he continued to rebuff anyone who pried into his background or questioned his activities prior to his sudden incapacitation. By October 20, the mysterious patient piqued the curiosity of city newspapers, who guessed that Hall may have been a lawyer from Sundridge. As for what might have caused Hall’s paralysis, the World cited a Dr. Rennie, who felt it may have been an apoplectic fit.

Over the next two days, Hall’s past slowly emerged. He was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer who had last practiced in the north, but in Parry Sound, not Sundridge. And his name wasn’t Hall but Wall—Guret S. Wall—whose legal career included stints with two Toronto firms (including one whose partners once included Sir John A. Macdonald) and a junior partnership in the practice of Parks and Wall. His mother had passed away in Smiths Falls two years earlier and left him with some property. What happened to Wall after her death was left vague in the newspaper accounts; a front page story in the Star indicated that his life was "rather eventful" and that he "first adopted the name George Hall to prevent his friends from knowing of his whereabouts."

But any old friends had little time to visit Wall. The night his identity was published, he passed away due to what the Telegram termed as an "acute congestion of both kidneys." No further follow-ups on Wall appeared in the papers, which leaves many unanswered questions. Why was his life so "eventful" that he decided to take on a new identity? What would have caused him to remain so tight-lipped about his past? Debauchery? Debts? Fraud? Murder? Social deviancy? Was his sudden paralysis a bad stroke of luck, the result of hard living, or caused by nefarious means?

Myself, I suspect it was suicide through some sort of long-enduring poison, and perhaps that he checked himself in under a false name so as to (mercifully?) leave people thinking he was still alive while he relieved himself of his life. This surmise leaves entirely untouched the question of why he did it.

[LINK] "The Lost Canadians"

Over at the excellent Walrus Magazine, Grant Stoddard's "The Lost Canadians" takes a look at the people of the Northwest Angle, a territory accidentally attached to the United States despite a geography that should have placed it in Canada. Interestingly enough, the people of this quasi-insular possession have been willing to take advantage of their geography.

[The] Northwest Angle and Islands [is] a 302-square-kilometre US exclave unwittingly created by the comically unwieldy Article II of the 1818 treaty. Some years later, when a survey team led by English Canadian explorer David Thompson eventually located Franklin’s northwesternmost point of the lake and surveyed the fix specified in the new document, it was found to intersect other bays of the lake, cutting off a Malta-sized chunk of US territory. The anomaly is easily found on a map: simply follow the forty-ninth parallel from west to east, and you’ll see a small upward jut, “the chimney of Minnesota,” just before the border begins to wobble off its 2,300-kilometre perpendicular course.

With Ontario to the north, Manitoba to the west, and open water to the south and east, the Angle enjoys the distinction of being the northernmost point of the contiguous forty-eight states, the only part of the continental US north of the forty-ninth parallel, and one of only four non-island locations in the lower forty-eight not directly connected by land within the country. But the Angle’s superb walleye fishing, rather than its curious location, is what sustains the local economy. It was an enduring threat to this livelihood from Ontario that spurred Dietzler and a small handful of others to explore the idea of seceding from the Union and joining Canada. The notion quickly grew beyond fanciful bar talk, and within a few months it was introduced as a bill in the US House of Representatives, supposedly prompting a miffed Bill Clinton to place an urgent call to Jean Chrétien.

Let’s ruminate upon this milieu for a moment. What could be more panic inducing to the American psyche than a group of rugged, tenacious, individualistic US citizens opting out of the dream in favour of Canada? In 1997, it might have seemed too ludicrous a proposition for many Americans to ponder, but what about now? Not only is the United States a more bilious, ailing, and fractious place than it was thirteen years ago; but in 2010, Canada consistently bests its neighbour on almost every metric pertaining to quality of life. The American wont, of course, is to compare our two countries with a more fiscal eye, but even there Canada has largely cast off its hard-won image as the habitual underperformer.

You’ll excuse me for unabashedly singing Canada’s praises. I do realize it’s considered unspeakably gauche around here, but I’m a recent émigré, and as such possess a bullish, patriotic zeal that has lingered on beyond the hoopla of the Winter Olympics. I also feel that in some way I’m a physical embodiment of the mother country and her North American offspring: Born and raised in England, I’m the grandson of a World War II vet from rural Nova Scotia who saw bloody action across Europe. After graduating from a London university, I lived in the United States for a decade before following a woman to British Columbia and marrying her. Now, sitting at my desk in Vancouver, I can clearly see the snowy peak of Mount Baker in Washington state, and am compelled to think about life on either side of this blatantly synthetic line. Visiting the Northwest Angle, then, seemed like an opportunity to meet with an entire community mulling over the very same thing. Is there a point, after all, where pragmatism trumps patriotism? My aim was to gain a better sense of where that point might lie by pitching Canada as the better place.

The advocacy of secession was much more a media strategy than anything else, but Stoddard argues persuasively that the outside world wouldn't do badly to see what makes the locals tick.

Go, read.

[LINK] On the Dawn probe and its Vesta visit

Over at the Planetary Society's blog, Dawn space probe engineer Mark Rayman goes into wonderful detail about the ion-drive probe's July 2011 encounter with Vesta.

From [high altitude mapping orbit], at an altitude of about 660 kilometers (410 miles), Dawn will have an excellent view of Vesta, close enough to see plenty of fascinating details and yet far enough to allow its science camera to cover most of the surface of this uncharted world during the month of mapping. In addition to using the camera to develop the global maps, the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) will be trained on many regions, providing even better resolution on the minerals that compose the surface than it could achieve from the higher survey orbit. When its work in HAMO is complete, the craft will fly in for an even closer look.

[. . .]

Dawn's target after HAMO will be an altitude of around 180 kilometers (110 miles), closer to the surface beneath it than most satellites are that orbit Earth. It may take six to eight weeks to follow the winding path from HAMO to this low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) under the delicate push of the ion thrust. While that may seem like a long time, a mission to Vesta that relied on conventional chemical propulsion would be quite unaffordable within NASA's Discovery Program, and a mission to both Vesta and Ceres would essentially be impossible. In a real sense then, the time to travel from one orbit to another is about as fast as possible given humankind's present selection of tools for probing the cosmos.

Irregularities in Dawn's orbit will let the spacecraft map the world's mass distribution in fine detail.

As I noted in my previous Vesta post, this asteroid is important because in many ways it's quite like a terrestrial planet.

There is good reason to believe Vesta has a complex internal structure, as do the other large rocky residents of the inner solar system, one of which is immediately beneath your correspondent as he writes this and some of you as you read it. In addition to Earth and Vesta, Mercury, Venus, the moon, and Mars all are thought to have grown very hot as they were forming, and that caused the minerals within them to separate into layers of different composition. In this process, known to planetary geologists as differentiation, the denser materials tend to sink while the lighter materials rise to the top, and when the body cools, the layers are frozen in place. Other processes during the history of the planet may create pockets of higher or lower density rock as well.

Vesta may be the smallest relic from the solar system's formation to have experienced planetary differentiation, and the information scientists glean from studying the interior structure (in concert with all of Dawn's other measurements) will contribute to understanding the process by which planets formed. Even though it is Lilliputian compared to the planets, Vesta is Brobdingnagian compared to most asteroids. In the context of planetary formation mechanisms, its closer brethren are the rocky worlds named above.

I can't wait!

[H&F] "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes"

I've a post up at Demography Matters, thanks to centralasian, highlighting a video statistical presentation by Swede Hans Rosling showing how life expectancy and GDP per capita changed--i.e. improved hugely--over the past two centuries.

Watch on YouTube

Go, view, here or there.

[MUSIC] Scissor Sisters, "Invisible Light"

Jake Shears apparently wanted "Invisible Light," the final track of twelve off of the Scissor Sisters' most recent album Night Work, to be the album's first single instead of "Fire With Fire." I can see why he might have wanted that--"Invisible Light" is a fantastic song, a Stuart Price production, too, and a good end to the album's theme of sexual exploration--but I don't think it would have been a good single, or at least a single representative of the album. It's a much more focused and tense song than the band's typical hits, Jake Shears foregoing his falsetto for lower-pitched singing/speaking interpersed with Ana Matronic's chorus and an Ian McKellen guest vocal, lacking much by way of guitars and sounding almost completely synthesized, vaguely menacing in tone even.

The song's all about lust, the "invisible light" the gaze that binds one person to another.

At the doors of Babylon, You are my Zion,
Pacing Tiger, The keeper's cage,
Invisible light shoots from your eyes,
A sign I can see from my high rise,

Another castle crumbles, another monkey falls,
Just open up your joy and let the sailors climb the walls,
I thought I saw you laughing 10 feet in the air,
It doesn't matter if they touch you where because you can give me...

As McKellen confirms in his best theatrical/dramatic style, there's an edge of desperation and an air of energy to it all.

Babylon,
Where bricks of mortared diamonds tower,
Sailor's lust and swagger lazing in moon's beams,
Whose laser gaze penetrates this sparkling theater of excess and strobed lights,
Painted whores, sexual gladiators, fiercely old party children,
All wake from their slumber to debut the Bacchanal.
Come to the light! Into the light! The invisible light.

And then, complicating the song even more is the video Barcelona-based directing collective Canadaa. The safe version is here; the uncut version, featuring female nudity and more besides, is the one I'm including here.

Watch on YouTube

The Scissor Sisters are a queer band. This video is queer, too, though queer in the sense of a Shirley Jackson short styory or even something more restrained by Lovecraft, a nightmarish dream sequence filmed with the retro affect of a drama from the 1970s and taking the well-dressed protagonist past any number of threats: an over-perfect home, uncaged dogs, cultists, stigmata, her own funeral. Besides being very compelling and provocative viewing, the video brings out the song's theme of danger just that much more.

Bravo, gentlepeople! This song has good claim to be my favourite song of the year.