[PHOTO] A Woody's rhino

The patron animal of Toronto gay bar Woody's is a rhinoceros--the bar's sponsored flag football team is named after the animal. Here, a mounted rhino head is looking past one of the bar's many video monitors, which display live stage performances or prerecorded videos.

[META] Feedback time!

It's time for me to ask my readers what they want to see more of at A Bit more Detail this year. Photos? Links, annotated and otherwise? Extended format content?

Discuss.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

To start, over at Demography Matters co-blogger Scott Peterson notes that, faced with a growing number of retirements, Oregon's public workers pension fund is starting to come under stress as it tries to finance everything. Is dis-saving beginning?

• Bag News Notes' Karen Anderson examines gender segregation on Israeli buses and streets as representing a particularly thorny misogyny--one reproduced in the United States too, in New York City's Williamsburg Park district.


• At Centauri Dreams, mention is made of the plan to use the Kepler space telescope's data on extrasolar planets to look for their moons, too.


• Daniel Drezner seems to think that sanctions are the least bad option in dealing with Iran's nuclear program, that at the very least it will make things more difficult for the Islamic Republic at a difficult time.


• Geocurrents notes a paradox in the science fiction of Frank Herbert's planet Dune and J.R.R. Tolkien continent of Middle Earth, that despite going into such detail about their realms the two authors actually don't create very plausible worlds.


• At GNXP, Razib Khan points to devastating epidemics among immunologically naive isolated populations--in Amazonia, in the Andaman Islands--and wonders if these people are closer to the original human stock, and current disease resistance is very recent.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Scott Lemieux points to evidence from Morocco to suggest that the only thing anti-abortion legislation does is harm women, not actually limit the number of abortions.


• Marginal Revolution links to a distressing article discussing the extent to which state neglect has let Italy's Pompeii ruins literally get carted away by tourists.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell describes a trend among certain Muslim scientists to claim that everything--even the theory of relativity--can be found sufficiently hidden, in the text of the Quran.

[URBAN NOTE] Cracks in the Ford administration?

A post in the toronto livejournal community pointed me towards the possibility that Mayor Rob Ford's alliances on city council might be cracking.

For more than two decades, Eglinton Avenue has suffered from ever-worsening traffic congestion while political bickering killed plan after plan to build better transit on the busy corridor.

The current plan, negotiated by Mayor Rob Ford’s administration to avoid running rapid transit in the middle of the road, would see a light rail line built in an 18-kilometre tunnel. Critics have objected that it lacks the advantages of a full subway, which can carry more people, while having the drawback of being far more expensive than a surface LRT.

Now, the woman Mr. Ford appointed to head the Toronto Transit Commission has added her voice to that growing chorus. Karen Stintz argues it makes more sense to put the LRT underground only along the most congested part of the route, in midtown, while building it on the surface in the spacious suburbs.

“If the decision is to go with an LRT, it should be at-grade,” she said. “If there’s a decision to put it underground, it should be a subway.”

A judgment that Ford's alliances are cracking is quite premature. As the sole commenter at the toronto post noted, Stintz could be as easily quietly steering Ford's transit policies along a line more quietly to his liking as publicly challenging him.

Other Ford supporters have come out against burying the full length of the Eglinton LRT, new environmental assessmnets have not been completed (started?) for the parts Ford wanted buried, there's no real schedule for the work yet, and, as far as I know, there's still no solution on how to bury it at the Don. So my guess is actually that she's the talking head signalling a shift in Ford's own policy -- he won't back down publicly, so she'll do it for him (note that she says the money remaining should go to Ford's Sheppard subway project).

It's either that, or she's motivated by her personal political ambitions beyond Ford's mayoralty.

Still. Edward Keenan, writing in eye weekly, has made the point that Ford's aggressive managerial style doesn't lend itself well to keeping strong political alliances with a city council that's generally pragmatic. Could this be--might this be, I hope--the beginning of something better? At least Toronto has a weak mayor.