[#PHOTOS] Looking for the streetcar, St. Clair TTC station, #Toronto

Looking for the streetcar, St. Clair TTC station, a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

On the uppermost level of the St., Clair TTC station, just east of Yonge Street, the 512 St. Clair streetcar comes arcing in, past the front entrance and its McDonald's and curving around the non-TTC tower to the passenger loading area.

[LINK] "Why doesn't our solar system have any gas giants close to the sun?"

An article summary by io9's Alasdair Wilkins purports to recount a possible solution to the existence of "hot Jupiters" and "hot Neptunes", gas giants orbiting close to their suns. The first non-pulsar extrasolar planets discovered in the 1990s were very close-orbiting gas giants, worlds that--it was believed before their discovery--simply couldn't exist.

Hot Neptunes- and their even bigger counterparts, known as hot Jupiters - are gas giant planets that orbit very close to their star, often much closer than even Mercury does in our own solar system. Their names are simply ones of convenience - the biggest are the size of Jupiter or even larger, while the mid-sized ones are roughly the size of Neptune, and so their names reflect that.

That, in and of itself, wouldn't necessarily be that weird. After all, there's no reason why our solar system has to be typical. But the problem is that most models of solar system formation say that the gas giants in other solar systems would have to form far away from their star - just like those in our solar system - and only then migrate inwards - which is very unlike what happened here.

So why didn't Jupiter and Neptune come cruising past our planet billions of years ago en route to the Sun? Researchers at UCLA and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics might have found the answer. They created a new model where the disc of gas and dust around a new star was unusually massive. This super thick disc was enough for gas giants to form in close proximity to their star, which is a big change from previous simulations that suggested the star's intense gravity would rip these embryonic gas giants apart.

Of course, the key phrase here is "unusually massive." The disc certainly is far more massive than our own was - that's why the four gas giants formed so far out - but it's entirely possible that these thick discs are the norm elsewhere, and that's why hot Neptunes and hot Jupiters are so common elsewhere in the galaxy.

[LINK] "Back before Gaga and Beyoncé, there was Kate Bush"

Now that her son is growing up, it looks like iconic songstress Kate Bush is becoming active again. Partial proof can be found in her interview with the Times' Will Hodgkinson, an interview I posted last night gaffa on account of its thoroughness.

An interview with Kate Bush, whatever form it takes, is exciting enough to cause heart problems in otherwise healthy music journalists. She is a genius: Every album she has released has been something of a reinvention. She is elusive: She has toured only once and she last came into view six years ago for the release of her album Aerial, even then doing only one interview. She is hugely influential: Everyone from Lady Gaga to Beyoncé owes a debt to the woman who invented the idea of the female pop star as performance artist.

“She was the first female singer that wasn’t a songstress,” says Lindsay Kemp, the legendary dancer, actor and mime artist who taught David Bowie and Bush, and who was a key influence on her. “Much as I adored Dusty [Springfield], Kate was something else; a chameleon, really, and very cultured, with a great imagination.”

It is 33 years since Bush, with her debut single Wuthering Heights, became the first woman to have a U.K. No. 1 hit with a self-written song. Now she is emerging ever so slightly from her castle of domesticity in Berkshire co-habited by her guitarist husband, Danny McIntosh, and her 12-year-old son Bertie, for the first time in six years with a reworking of two of her albums. And she has agreed to talk about it.

Director’s Cut revisits The Sensual World from 1989 and The Red Shoes from 1993, either rerecording the songs entirely or tweaking them into new forms. She won’t do an interview in person, and she will talk only about the new album; any questions straying toward the personal will be ignored. But with Bush you take whatever you are given. So the first question is: why would someone so forward thinking and original want to go over old ground? “I’d wanted to revisit some of the songs from these two albums for a while now,” she replies. “I think there were some quite interesting songs on there, and I wanted to see how I could make them sound at this point in time. I’ve tried to allow the songs to breathe more by stripping a lot of the production out and lengthening some sections, but keeping the best performances from the original tracks.”

You can’t imagine Bush looking back much. “I don’t listen to my old stuff very often at all,” she confirms. “But when I’ve heard bits and pieces from these albums I felt some of it sounded a bit dated, some of it a bit cluttered. I approached them as if they were newly written songs. To me it sounds like a new album.”

It's a wonderfully long and complete article. Go, read.

[LINK] "Can Turkey Unify the Arabs?"

I'd like to thank Facebook's Scott for linking to this New York Times article by Anthony Shadid. The idea of a Turkey having a substantial influence on the Arab world--more specifically, it seems, but the area of the Fertile Crescent stretching from Lebanon through to Iraq--now that it has become dynamic in any number of areas (economically, culturally, politically) does make a certain amount of sense. Might it be accurate to describe the former Ottoman domains as constituting as cohesive a bloc as the former Austro-Hungarian domains in central Europe?

As the Arab world beyond the border struggles with the inspirations and traumas of its revolution — a new notion of citizenship colliding with the smaller claims of piety, sect and clan — something else is percolating along the old routes of that empire, which spanned three continents and lasted six centuries before Ataturk brought it to an end in 1923 with self-conscious revolutionary zeal.

It is probably too early to define identities emerging in those locales. But something bigger than its parts is at work along imperial connections that were bent but never broken by decades of colonialism and the cold war. The links are the stuff of land, culture, history, architecture, memory and imagination that remains the realm of scholarship and daily lives but often eludes the notice of a journalism marching to the cadence of conflict.

Even amid the din of the upheaval in the Arab world, that new sense of belonging represents a more pacific and perhaps more powerful undertow pulling in directions that call into question more parochial notions. The undertow intersects with the Arab revolution’s search for a new sense of self; it also builds on economic forces now reconnecting an older imperium, as well as on Turkey’s new dynamism and on efforts to bring reality to what has long been nostalgia.

Its echoes are heard in the borderlands like Gaziantep, near Mr. Said’s shop, where businessman can haggle in a patois of English, Turkish, Arabic and even Kurdish. It is seen in the blurring of arbitrary lines where the Semitic script of Arabic and Kurdish tangles with the Latin script of Turkish across the borders with Syria and Iraq. It is noticed along the frontiers where Arab and Turkish nationalism, pan-Islamism and a host of secular ideologies never seemed to quite capture the ambitions or demarcate the environments of the diverse peoples who live there.

“The normalization of history,” proclaims the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, whose government has tried to reintegrate the region by lifting visa requirements and promoting a Middle Eastern trade zone, as it deploys its businessmen along the old routes and exports Turkey’s pop culture to an eager audience.

“None of the borders of Turkey are natural,” he went on. “Almost all of them are artificial. Of course we have to respect them as nation-states, but at the same time we have to understand that there are natural continuities. That’s the way it’s been for centuries.”

There is admittedly a hint of romanticism in it all. The Arab world may in fact be bracing for years of sectarian and internecine strife in places like Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria. And in seeking to be a more prominent, and steadying, influence, Turkey’s ambitions may well be greater than its means. Still, economic realities are already restoring old trajectories that joined the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, tied Batumi in Georgia to Trabzon in Turkey, and knit Aleppo into an axis of cities — Mosul, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep and Iskenderun — in which Damascus, the leading but distant Arab metropole, was an afterthought.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Dose of Fiscal Reality"

At his blog, James Bow makes the obvious point that Toronto mayor Rob Ford's plan to build entirely new subway lines is simply impossible, and that there will either be significant increases in city taxes and tolls or massive cutbacks.

[. . .] I’m not surprised that Ford currently enjoys a 70% approval rating. I, for one, didn’t buy the doom and gloom of the anti-Ford naysayers that Ford’s election would ruin the city on December 1, 2010. Toronto is just too resilient for that. Besides, there’s the small matter of the $300 million surplus that David Miller left behind. That money has helped fund Ford’s many fiscally irresponsible acts in 2011, including canning the Vehicle Registration Tax, blocking the TTC’s fare increase, and granting the police union a higher-than-inflation wage increase. Put simply, Ford has coasted through his first year in office thanks to David Miller’s gift. The real impact of Ford’s mayoralty hasn’t been felt by most Torontonians, and it won’t until 2012, when Rob Ford will be called upon to close the $750 million operating shortfall that’s currently on the city’s books.

Let’s see then if he’ll manage to live up to his campaign promise to cut taxes “without any service cuts” (to be fair, he later amended this with the weasel words, “without any major service cuts”). It’s easy to like Ford when he cuts a $62 million tax, but doesn’t close community library branches, pools, hockey rinks, or rush hour buses. When real service cuts come to hit the TTC, when community centres close, ice time vanishes, and pools sit empty during the hot summer months, how will people react to a city that has just become leaner and meaner, in ways that affect them personally?

It’s at this point that people will start pointing out that Ford promised that stopping the gravy train would enable the city to lower taxes while maintaining services, but the math isn’t adding up in Ford’s favour. Privatizing garbage collection for half the city will only save $8 million. Going through department budgets line by line, and going after the overspending of previous councillors, like Adam Giambrone’s $3000, will barely net more than a million. It’s all well and good to go after these efficiencies, but at the end of the day, the Ford administration is only going to have saved around $50 million. Congratulations guys; that is time well spent. But you still have $700 million to cut. You are now going to have to go after things that you previously did not label “frills”.

Signs of the coming unravelling can already be seen as Ford pushes forward his fiscally irresponsible plan to complete the Sheppard subway. Never mind that Ford is spending $4 billion to build a major piece of infrastructure that far exceeds the demand of the route it serves when an LRT line costing a quarter of that value was already funded, and would have served more of Sheppard Avenue. So dogmatic was Ford’s antipathy towards surface transit that, if reports are to be believed, he turned down a provincial offer of $2 billion towards his beloved subway, on the condition that the provincially funded Eglinton LRT be allowed to operate on the surface between Laird Drive and Kennedy station.

I can’t help but shake my head at this. That’s $2 billion turned aside because Ford wasn’t willing to widen Sheppard Avenue to put LRT vehicles in the middle. Instead, we’re left with infrastructure that’s way overbuilt, and which will be of use to far fewer people. Where’s the respect to taxpayers?

And by turning aside the $2 billion, Ford now has a $4 billion subway proposal that’s almost completely unfunded. And yet, his campaign promised that the line would open in time for the Pan-Am Games. Does that sound sensible to you? He might get money from the federal government, but the related government infrastructure program he’d access only has a budget of $1.25 billion, to be earmarked for the whole country. He’s talked about development charges, but the funds raised by these measures are woefully insufficient. Now, I’m told we’re looking at rerouting development charges around the Eglinton LRT, and possibly a fire sale of City property to try and close the gap. Not only is this fiscally irresponsible — selling the refrigerator to pay for a new mansion — it won’t close the gap.

Go, read the whole thing, and hope that Bow is wrong.

[LINK] "Divide and Bind"

Bulgarian television journalist Boyko Vassilev an article up at Transitions Online examining the decidedly tumultuous Bulgarian-Turkish relationship.

Yes, Bulgaria and Turkey have a long history. Its central fact is a number: 500, the years of – how to call it? Ottoman or Turkish? Presence? Domination? Rule? Or was it a yoke, as the 19th-century writer Ivan Vazov saw the period in his classic novel, Under the Yoke. “This is a Bulgarian issue,” Pamuk told a press conference before our interview, seeming genuinely surprised by the question from a reporter.

But it’s not only “the yoke” that sticks between Bulgarians and Turks. Contemporary history also matters. In the mid-1980s Bulgaria’s communist leadership changed the names of the Muslim population, including ethnic Turks, Roma, and Bulgarian Muslims (Pomaks). The shameful campaign, called the “revival process” was supposedly meant to encourage them to “rediscover” their Bulgarian roots. Instead, resistance broke out, blood was shed, and around 300,000 Turks left Bulgaria. The common life was poisoned, and the country’s international reputation was ruined. Even Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union did not back its Bulgarian comrades.

Then 1989 came and Muslims got back their names. Some of the refugees returned. And a party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), was born. The philosopher and political prisoner Ahmed Dogan became, and remains, its leader. It was this party and this person who shaped the image of the relationship between Bulgarians and Turks in Bulgaria.

[. . .]

Could the famous Bulgarian ethnic model of tolerance and integration after 1990 crumble? No, but the ground is not entirely solid, either. Another coincidence proved that. On the last day of Pamuk’s visit, Ataka supporters clashed with Muslims in front of the Sofia mosque during Friday prayers. This act was immediately condemned by all parties and pundits – and exposed as part of Ataka’s preparations for October presidential and local elections. Yet the issue is inflammatory – and yes, it builds on historical memory.

The question is whether the Bulgarian public will be tempted to recall that memory right now. It would be premature to expect that Ataka will win the election points it is expecting. Christian citizens found each other on Facebook and brought flowers to the mosque; the Facebook group grew. Another group demanded that Ataka leader Volen Siderov be prosecuted for inciting ethnic and religious hatred.

Historians pointed out that Turkey is the neighboring country to enjoy the longest period of peace with Bulgaria. Commentators remind that the two countries are now NATO allies. Though there are open questions, like calls to compensate the descendants of Turkey’s 1913 expulsion of Bulgarians from Thrace, the bilateral itinerary is not one of conflict. Yes, Bulgarians have painful memories, but they also eagerly spend their holidays in Antalya, shop in Istanbul, and, most tellingly, watch Turkish soaps. Last year, the second-most watched show on Bulgarian TV, behind only the football World Cup final, was one of these serials. And Bulgarians read Pamuk, one of the best-selling writers here.

[LINK] "Talking trash at City Hall, left right and centre"

Edward Keenan at The Grid--successor to eye weekly--nails squarely the import of the privatization of garbage collection in Toronto, as an issue onto itself, as cause for the massive swing towards Ford (the 2009 garbage strike was unpleasant), and as representative of growing discord between ideological factions on city council.

CUPE Local 416, the union that represents the city’s waste disposal staff, is still suffering from damage caused by its summer 2009 strike. There is little point in going back to re-argue the merits of the union’s bargaining position. What appears relevant in retrospect is how self-destructive the event was, taken as a whole. The debate turned on a perk that allowed garbage collectors to bank unused sick days and then take them as cash—a quirky bit of largesse that offended the general public. So the union behaved as if it were at war with the city’s government and residents.

When the strike was settled, the union had all but ended the political career of David Miller, likely the most union-friendly mayor this city will have in my lifetime. When he announced he wouldn’t run again, most analysts attributed his decision to either the personal or political injuries he incurred during the garbage strike—at the very least, it appeared, to many of us, to have broken his spirit.

Moreover, the strike left a big segment of the general public viscerally angry at the public service and hungry for revenge. Which is where Rob Ford came in. His campaign for mayor tapped into the residual sense of rage that many people had with government employees. There was a gut feeling that getting paid for staying healthy, and $12,000 retirement parties on the public dime, were symptoms of a City Hall that had profoundly lost touch with reality, a government that left senior citizens rotting in a pile of their own garbage while it debated how best to spend tax money on perks. It’s too simple to say the strike made Rob Ford mayor, but it would also be simple-minded to deny it helped create the conditions for his victory. Notably, Ford’s campaign promised to contract out garbage collection.

Last week at City Hall, Ford moved a little closer to delivering on that promise. Still, if he’s capitalized on the union’s lack of diplomatic acumen, he doesn’t seem to have learned from it. Ever since he was elected, Ford has controlled council using a with-us-or-against-us mentality, bullying moderate councillors and aggressively trying to screw those who won’t defer to his will. The air between council’s left and right is toxic, but more importantly for Ford, the centrist councillors are showing signs of poisoning as well.

Go read the whole thing.

[DM] "More on the demographics of Canadian politics"

I've a post up looking at the analyses by Canadian political blogger Éric Grenier of the changing demographics of the three major Canadian political parties as they won or lost seats. While his analysis is remained problematic by the distinct between the people of the ridings and the people who actually voted, it's provocative.

Go, read.