[PHOTO] Maple Leaf Gardens in Cake, Loblaws 60 Carlton, December 2012

During my December 2012 visit with my father to Loblaws 60 Carlton--the grocery store built in the former Maple Leaf Gardens--I saw this scale model of the building its current state advertising the store's cooking school.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• As mentioned previously, Charlie Stross asks what the big issues of 2013 will be.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait writes about a magnetar's blast fifty thousand years away that, eight years ago, swamped our solar system with radiation.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster links to and comments upon a Martin Beech paper examining the history of studies and speculation about Alpha Centauri.


• Daniel Drezner is unimpresed by the Republican Party's lack of learning about foreign policy.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's bloggers are unimpressed by Naomi Wolf's claims about FBI coordination of anti-Occupy campaigns and started a discussion about which countries give indigenous peoples the right to cross international frontiers at will.


• New APPS Blog gets the importance of the Idle No More movement.


• Eugene Volokh asks his commenters, drawing from a recent custody case involving a Singaporean family, whether Islamic family law should automatically invalid international custody claims.


• Whatever's John Scalzi celebrates the ten-year anniversary of the publication of his novel Old Man's War.


• Window on Eurasia comments upon a recent Russian study demonstrating that the numbers of guest workers in Russia are much smaller than often mooted in the public press.

[DM] A question to our readers

I've a post up at Demography Matters asking readers what they'd like to see covered. (Specific trends, specific regions, et cetera.)

Thoughts?

[FORUM] Might a globalized feminism take off in 2013?

A post at the Global Sociology Blog entitled "Let’s Make 2013 The Year We Tell The Patriarchy To GFI" points out numerous highly-publicized events related to patriarchy: the death of a woman in Ireland after she was denied a potentially life-saving abortion;, the terrible things said by too many politicians about rape in the run-up to the American election; the legitimation by a Kansas court of a woman's firing by a boss who sexually harassed her; the gang rape and murder of an anonymous Indian woman, the support lent by the Pope to oppressive and often violent homophobia.

One of the benefits of the sexual assaults and rapes that have happened in the past year and terrible things that said about rape--in Toronto, in the United States, in India--is that it's forcing people to confront rape and its associated enablers in our cultures. Most spectacularly in India, this seems to have given voice a very loud, angry, and coherent mass movement interested in improving the lot of women and criticizing patriarchal traditions. (I, and my own kind, obviously benefit from this too.)

What say you all?

(Happy New Year!)