[VIDEO] Crossing the Bloor Viaduct,15 December 2012 at 7 pm

A quick cellphone video filmed the evening of the 15th of December from an eastbound TTC subway car on the Bloor Viaduct, this clip is dominated by the snaking traffic of the Don Valley Parkway dozens of metres below.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster writes about Titan, first noting an apparent river valley flowing into the north-polar Ligeia Mare, the second reflecting on the possible subsurface oceans of that Saturnian moon.


• At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell reflects on the ignoble record of the Economist in relation to the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird notes research suggesting that trees in the Amazonian rain forest have survived temperature peaks akin to those likely to be produced by global warming.


• GNXP's Razib Khan links to a 1930 article projecting a total American population of 180 million by 1980, noting that long-range demographic projections are problematic.


• Language Log's Victor Mair notes the problems with maintaining character fluency in Sinitic cultures like China and Japan.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer observes that Ghana has been forced by a UN tribunal to return to Argentina a naval ship held at the request of Argentian's debtors.


• A Registan guest poster, Anvar Malikov, observes that the questions of Afghanistan will dominate policy-making in Uzbekistan.


• Via Peter Rukavina, I've learned that peak electricity usage on Prince Edward Island amounts to 230 megawatts.


• Understanding Society's Paul Little notes the imprecision of the social sciences relative to the physical sciences. Is this really an enduring difference, though, or will the social sciences catch up?


• Window on Eurasia takes note of growing regionalism in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic.

[URBAN NOTE] "Manhattan's Only LGBT Bookstore Fighting for Permanent LES Space"

Since the 2009 closure of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City, not only has Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop been the oldest extant GLBT bookstore in North America, but New York City has been lacking in such. I was alerted by Towleroad to news that a pop-up GLBT-themed bookstore in Manhattan is crowdsourcing to raise funds for a permanent location in the Lower East Side.

(The Bureau of General Services Queer Division is a nice name.)

The owner-operators do seem to have caught onto the idea that, to survive, an independent bookstore has to offer more than books, with Glad Day's combination of book space and community space seeming relatively viable. I hope that they succeed.

The Bureau of General Services Queer Division, or BGSQD, has been operating out of 27 Orchard St. since Nov. 15, creating a community through art and literature events aimed at the gay community.

But with the temporary store set to shut down next month, its owners are hoping a fundraising campaign will give the bookstore the initial boost it needs to make the Lower East Side its longtime home.

"This is a space that is open for everyone," said BGSQD co-owner Greg Newton, 42. "But it is a space dedicated to supporting queers and exploring issues of gender and sexuality."

BGSQD is working with local crowd-funding site Lucky Ant to raise $15,000 — the equivalent of three months rent for the store — by Dec. 20, while offering donors a range of gifts and perks for their generosity.

[. . .]

Newton and Jochum's gallery-like space on Orchard Street is stocked with titles such as "Bi-Curious George," a parody of the classic children's series, and Sarah Schulman's "Israel, Palestine and the International Queer," about how the LGBT community works together from the two sides.

"You stumble across things, you talk to people in the store," Newton said of the experience at of shopping at BGSQD. "You find things that might not be introduced to you by the algorithms of Amazon."

The store's events calendar of poetry and book readings, live music and gallery nights is another important aspect of the business.

"The social spaces for a lot of LBGT people happen to be bars, especially for men," said Newton, "but they are often loud, not conducive to conversation… they serve a different purpose."

While Newton was researching the plight of independent bookstores in the city, he found that creating a community space with events was crucial to success in selling books. He pointed to Word in Greenpoint and Greenlight in Fort Greene as community bookstores BGSQD is looking at as a model.

[URBAN NOTE] "New York, a graveyard for languages"

The BBC has an interesting article by Mark Turin describing how the cosmopolis of New York City is a refuge for many dying languages, thanks to its status as a destination for migrants from around the world.

(Gottscheerish, the German dialect spoken in the former language island of Gottschee in southern Slovenia; the background to that is described in Michael Manske's 2004 post at The Glory of Carniola.)

Home to around 800 different languages, New York is a delight for linguists, but also provides a rich hunting ground for those trying to document languages threatened with extinction.

[. . .] New York is not just a city where many languages live, it is also a place where languages go to die, the final destination for the last speakers of some of the planet's most critically endangered speech forms.

[. . .]

A recent Census Bureau report notes that in the United States, the number of people speaking a language other than English at home increased by 140% over the last 30 years, with at least 303 languages recorded in this category.

Originally home to the indigenous Lenape people, then settled by the Dutch, conquered by the English and populated by waves of migrants from every country ever since, the five boroughs that make up the Big Apple - The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island - are home to every major world language, but also countless vanishing voices, many of which have just a few remaining speakers.

No longer do aspiring field linguists have to trek halfway across the world to collect data on Zaghawa or Livonian, they can just take the Number 7 train a few stops where they will find speakers of some of the 800 languages that experts believe are spoken in New York.

[. . .]

Recognising what a unique opportunity New York provided, two linguists and a performance poet - Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins and Bob Holman - set up the Endangered Language Alliance, an urban initiative for endangered language research and conservation.

"This is the city with the highest linguistic density in the world and that is mostly because the city draws large numbers of immigrants in almost equal parts from all over the globe - that is unique to New York," says Kaufman.

Several languages have been uttered for the very last time in New York, he says.

"There are these communities that are completely gone in their homeland. One of them, the Gottscheers, is a community of Germanic people who were living in Slovenia, and they were isolated from the rest of the Germanic populations.

"They were surrounded by Slavic speakers for several hundreds of years so they really have their own variety [of language] which is now unintelligible to other German speakers."

The last speakers of this language have ended up in Queens, he says, and this has happened to many other communities.

[URBAN NOTE] "Breaking point"

The midtown Toronto neighbourhood of Yonge and Eglinton is the subject of Richard Poplak's eye weekly article. The cover page article of the most recent editon of that weekly, "Breaking point" describes the rapid condo-driven growth that's causing the expected growing pains.

Yonge and Eglinton is bursting. If you need help forming a mental picture, think of it like this—enormous robotic creatures ascend screaming from the earth’s core, bringing with them a concrete and steel mini-city from the depths. In the coming decade we’ll see up to 30 new towers, about 23,000 new people, and few new amenities other than an under-construction LRT system that will add insanity to the traffic chaos, at least in the short term. In raucous, brain-shredding 3-D, an entire neighbourhood is transformed, seemingly overnight.

As far flung and foreign to some downtowners as Myanmar or Bahrain, Yonge and Eglinton is a ’hood that puts the Eglinton subway station in a three-square-kilometre bear hug—a transition zone that bridges downtown with uptown. In other words: Midtown. The recent census indicates that 39,171 people live here, a demographic pole vault representing a 14.5 per cent increase over the past five years, compared to a city-wide population rise of just 4.5 per cent during the same time. At rush hour, the subway platform resembles a chemical weapons strike evacuation, while the side streets, with their leafy single-family dwellings, are parking lots for late-model SUVs.

This is postmodern Toronto in miniature—a building boom so nonsensical that it seems there are more cranes than cars, more workmen than residents. Keeping count of the condo developments is a forensic endeavour. There’s the emblematic Neon, a 20-storey project rising at Duplex Avenue and Orchard View Boulevard, all set to engulf the nearby homes and the Northern District Public Library in apocalyptic shadow. Within spitting distance, there’s the soon-to-be 17-storey Berwick. And a couple of blocks east of Yonge, just off Eglinton, The Madison is coming—two towers with 703 units and a “Zen garden retreat with water feature.”

The jewel in the crown, and the project that, according to developer Bazis International’s market-speak, spurred interested calls “from all over the world,” is the E Condos proposal. This will flatten the northeast corner of the Yonge and Eglinton intersection and replace it with 64- and 38-storey towers, a pair of drag queen’s stilettos gussied up with essential mod-cons like a boxing ring and a cantilevered pool deck. Across the road, on the northwest corner, the grim Yonge-Eglinton Centre square will become a glass-encased shopping mall.

Part of the building mania can be explained by the coming Light Rapid Transit line, a.k.a. the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown. The LRT will join Black Creek in the west with Kennedy Road in the east, and will run partially underground—a costly logistical nightmare. When it’s completed in 2020, Yonge and Eglinton will have become a dense constellation of mixed-use urban space, zipping people hither and yon via its subway hub.

City Hall and developers insist that this is both manageable and desirable, and that the future will reveal a glittering ersatz downtown as vibrant and buzzy as, say, downtown. But where, locals wonder, are the plans for all this growth? Where are the amenities that will integrate the newcomers—the parks and schools and bike rings and shrinks’ offices needed to absorb so much development? Yonge and Eglinton, which was the site of Toronto’s only recorded armed rebellion in 1837, is at its breaking point—its furious residents on the verge of taking up arms once more.