[PHOTO] Some more anti-Rob Ford graffiti in Toronto

I found this graffiti on the northeastern corner of Yonge and Alexander (below Wellesley), the very corner where a condo complex is scheduled to spring up, on the morning of the 7th after I picked up my dry cleaning and before I dropped off my cat.

It's not that difficult to find anti-Ford graffiti in Toronto if you know where to look, and the number of productions certainly isn't going to fall. (Over the weekend we learned that Ford was speculating about breaking with the family tradition of spending the Canada Day weekend at the cottage, instead going to Toronto to attend a parade--the Canada Day parade. The unspoken subtext is of his homophobia, since Toronto's Pride parade is on the same day.)

What will I find next, I wonder?

[URBAN NOTE] "Gardiner Expressway concrete falls on Mercedes at Yonge St. and Lake Shore Blvd."

The gradual decay of Toronto's transportation infrastructure, as signalled by the fall of concrete chunks off of the Gardiner Expressway--Toronto's main expressway, girding the waterfront from west to east--is worrisome. This isn't the first time there's been concrete fall this year, actually, but it is the first time a vehicle has been hit.

A section of Lake Shore Blvd. is closed at Yonge St. after a piece of concrete fell onto a car this morning from the Gardiner Expressway.

“It was like a bullet, an explosion. I felt scared.” said John Pandell, the car’s driver. “It really startled me, so I just pulled over.”

Pandell had just driven down the ramp from the Gardiner to Lake Shore at Yonge St. when the concrete hit the top of his black two-door Mercedes around 10:30 a.m.

He was not injured.

The Mercedes sustained a small dent to the windshield on the driver’s side and another near the trunk.

Pandell, a lawyer, said he is concerned for drivers in convertibles and people crossing Lake Shore.

Three lanes of the roadway are closed to traffic as workers drill and chip away at other parts of the Gardiner from which more concrete could fall.

“The area has been blocked off and now it’s up to the city,” said Toronto police Const. Tony Vella.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ford a no-show at Pride flag raiser"

I'm linking to the Toronto Sun's coverage of Rob Ford's Pride issues (written by Don Peat) since it strikes me as significant that even the dominant right-wing tabloid newspaper isn't very supportive of Ford's sustained non-participation in one of the biggest civic events of the year. (I really do like the fact that GLBT issues are this mainstreamed in the metropolis that I live in, you know.)

Ford didn’t join almost 30 city councillors, provincial and federal politicians and hundreds of residents on City Hall’s green roof to raise the rainbow flag and kickoff this week’s Pride Toronto festivities.

Councillor Janet Davis said Ford should have been there.

“He should be in the parade on July 1, he should be here today,” Davis told reporters. “The residents of Toronto and the LGBT community should have answers for why he’s not here. It’s his job.”

Davis said there was nothing more important than being on the roof of City Hall Monday for the Pride flag raising.

“It’s a very important event and I want to know why he’s not here. I think that’s a reasonable question we should be asking,” she said. “He’s the mayor of this city, this is one of the largest public events this city has, raising the flag says clearly Toronto is a city that values diversity.”

The mayor said Friday he wasn’t attending the flag raising due to another commitment. But both Ford and his staff have been tight-lipped about what that other commitment was.

Councillor Shelley Carroll read the Pride week proclamation signed by Ford.

The crowd laughed at and then booed when Carroll read out Ford’s name but cheered when she mentioned city council.

Virgin Radio brought a cardboard cutout of the mayor to the event.

[. . .]

Kevin Beaulieu, executive director of Pride Toronto, said the most important thing for organizers was the community turnout.

“On a day like today I can’t complain about anything because the community was here, we raised the flag, many of elected representatives were here and I think that’s a wonderful kickoff to Pride,” Beaulieu said.

[LINK] "Scrap of European iron unearths 500-year-old Canadian mystery"

Randy Boswell's Postmedia News article examining the excavation of a very early European trade good in an early 16th century Huron settlement (the Mantle Site in the Greater Toronto Area bedroom community of Whitchurch-Stouffville, north of Toronto proper), highlights the First Nations past of Toronto.

A Canadian archeologist who excavated the remains of a 500-year-old First Nations settlement near Toronto has revealed a stunning discovery: a carefully buried, European-made metal object that somehow reached the 16th-century Huron village nearly 100 years before the documented arrival of any white man in the Lake Ontario region.

The unearthing of what appears to be part of a wrought-iron axe head at the so-called "Mantle" archeological site in present-day Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ont. — a fast-growing suburb about 40 kilometres east of Toronto — is showcased in a new documentary film, titled Curse of the Axe, to be screened for the first time Monday at the Royal Ontario Museum and broadcast nationwide July 9 on History Television.

The documentary details the quest by Toronto-based archeologist Ron Williamson and his colleagues to identify the composition and origin of the metal artifact and determine how it might have wound up so far inland — at least 1,500 kilometres west of any 16th-century European whaling or fishing station on the Atlantic coast — at such an early time in Canadian history.

The Mantle site is described by Williamson as "the most complex village ever in northeastern North America." Researchers have recovered tens of thousands of artifacts indicating it was a sprawling settlement with dozens of longhouses and a fort-like palisade, all surrounded by cornfields used to feed as many as 2,000 Huron inhabitants for several decades beginning around 1500 A.D.

Historians believe the first contact between Europeans and the Huron tribes of the Great Lakes didn't occur until around 1615, when French explorer Etienne Brule — an important scout and liaison with First Nations for Quebec City founder Samuel de Champlain — reached Lake Ontario.

The film chronicles the researchers' high-tech testing of the metal object, which confirms it came from Europe. A telltale mark on the iron artifact points even more precisely to the Basque Country of modern-day Spain as its place of origin — a logical link, given the well-documented presence of Basque whaling operations at Red Bay, Labrador, in the early 1500s.

Williamson's team hypothesizes that the iron piece might have been traded by Basque whalers to members of a native group on the East Coast of Canada, who subsequently traded the metal westward until it was acquired by the Hurons of the Mantle village.

[BRIEF NOTE] Is it too early to ask where are the extraterrestrials are?

An io9 post puts the question simply.

If there's one thing the Kepler mission has taught us, it's that planets are everywhere. Lately, it seems like if we're not discovering new exoplanets, we're finding evidence that there are hundreds of billions of them out there (many of them probably even Earthlike), and we just haven't found them yet.

On one hand, being up to our necks in planets is incredibly exciting business. It's entirely possible, for example, that we've already discovered Earth 2.0 and just don't know it yet. At the same time, this overabundance of exoplanets has raised some unsettling questions, and at the root of many of those questions is one big, glaring conundum: where the hell is the alien life?

I've made multiple posts referring to Keith Wiley's paper on technological societies, highlighting his prediction that--with even conservative estimates on the prevalence of life--that could well be hundreds of vehicles created by different extraterrestrial civilizations in the solar system, vehicles that--at present--we are completely unable to detect owing to the primitive state of our astronomy. There could well be a high-tech civilization operating in the outer solar system and, unless it tried to contact us or we somehow knew exactly where the civilization was operating, we would have no way of finding out.

The situation is grimmer when it comes to the detection of possibly life-bearing planets. Only now in 2012 are we actually starting to detect planets in large numbers, and even though their detection is one of the signal achievements of our technology our samples are partial and the information we have gathered so far are bare. We know the environmental conditions--atmosphere, temperature, and the like--of only a few exoplanets, these exoplanets we know in only the broadest detail, and our exoplanet sample is patchy: we've a possible exoplanet detection in the Andromeda Galaxy but know about the Alpha Centauri system next door what can't be found (we'd have detected gas giants by now, but know nothing about putative Earth-sized worlds).

Is the galaxy filled with life, even tool-using life, even--maybe--a galactic civilization? At present, I don't know if we have the technology that would be needed to detect such a civilization if it wasn't actively trying to signal to us with technologies that we're familiar with. james_nicoll?