[PHOTO] Closing time at Zellers

I went to visit the Zellers in the Galleria Shopping Centre at Dupont and Dufferin last night, ostensibly to look for a suitcase but mainly out of curiosity to see what that anchor store looks like now that it is in the process of going through a liquidation sale.

The Galleria Mall has often been criticized for its downbeat aesthetics, although as these photos I'd taken this February illustrate the problems of the Galleria have more to do with its empty spaces--overly-wide concourses, missing shops--than anything else. Will it survive? Well, Dollarama is taking the spot of departed sports bar P.M. Toronto ...

Zellers? As I blogged in January 2011, it's a retail chain of long Canadian vintage (not recent Canadian ownership) that failed to compete with Walmart and thus is currently being taken over, suitable locations being given over to Target and the remainder being closed down. The Galleria location doesn't seem to be slated to be a Target.

Going inside was sad. There were plenty of bright red-and-yellow signs advertising discounts of between 30 to 50% were everywhere, but the atmosphere of the store was sad: poor maintenance, a disspiriting atmosphere, the works.

[META] Blogroll Additions

Two new blogs are on the blogroll!

First is The Signal, the Library of Congress' digital preservation blog concerned with the archiving of digital information. There's plenty of activity on this group blog and interesting stuff to read, like Mike Ashenfelder's post describing the efforts of American public libraries to help ordinary Americans archive their lives.

Supernova Condensate is a great science blog owned by Livejournal's now-deported invaderxan. All sorts of fascinating space- and physics-related items are described at length, with photos, at this blog. The most recent post, describing the formation process of a remarkably symmetrical ice crystal in space, is as good a place to begin as any.

Go, read!

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling reposts some post-modernist revolutionary rhetoric from Québec's ongoing student protests.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster writes about planet HD 189733b, a gas giant that orbits its star 63 light years away so closely that it's literally evaporating.


• Geocurrents notes that recent rioting in Zanzibar, connected to the constitutional status of that autonomous island within Tanzania, may harm the island's lucrative tourism trade.


• Language Hat starts a discussion on the language environment of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which despite its origins among the Baltic-speakers of the modern republic was increasingly dominated by Polish-speaking Slavs of one denomination or another.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Eric Loomis blogs about the collapse of Appalachia's coal industry, undermined by cheaper competition and the exhaustion of local resources, making things much for the poor locals.


• The Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín examines sex work from a Marxist perspective.


• Registan's Joshua Foust is quite right to note that Pakistan's prosecution fo Dr. Shakil Afridi for aiding the CIA's location of Osama bin Laden augurs a breakdown in Pakistan's relations with the West once NATO withdraws from Afghanistan.


• Savage Minds' Levi Jacobs posts a summary of a recent ethnographic investigation of Occupy Denver, and what futures are possible for the Occupy mvoement and its successors.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little is skeptical about the consequences of a recent conference concerned with triggering rebirth in Michgian.