[PHOTO] Rising from the westbound platform at Dupont subway station

The characteristic orange tiles of Dupont station stretch out.

[URBAN NOTE] "R.A. Dickey's knuckleball sharp against Blue Jays batters"

CBC Sports' Canadian Press article about new Toronto Blue Jays pitcher R.A. Dickey is starting to get me interested in the major-league sport that Toronto is actually good in. (Might this be the year I get into sports? I wonder.)

Blue Jays knuckleballer R.A. Dickey likes feedback and he got plenty of it from the batting cage Sunday as Toronto hitters faced live pitching for the first time this spring.

There were sighs, laughs, gasps and some wild swings as last year's National League Cy Young Award winner worked his magic on a chilly, windy 10-degree day during a live batting practice session.

"After you throw a good one, it does some funny things so you get some good reactions," said the 38-year-old Dickey.

Spring training has just started, but the former New York Mets ace is already befuddling batters.

"I think most of the hitters will tell you, they were in there and halfway through their swing I think they were laughing," said pitching coach Pete Walker. "Because they just realized they had no chance today.

[. . .]

Dickey had Brett Lawrie talking to himself at the plate as he tried to make sense of the knuckleball, not to mention Dickey's other pitches.

After working him over repeatedly with his 75 miles-per-hour knuckleball, Dickey threw a fastball past the Canadian.

"If a guy has tracked 10 or 11 knuckleballs in a row and then you throw a fastball in there, it's a whole different animal," Dickey said. "It looks a lot harder than it really is so you can kind of play with the optical illusion from time to time."

The good news for Blue Jays fans is that there is more to come.

[LINK] "Duffy claims to live in Charlottetown too"

The Guardian of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, is a small-town paper. Its faults would lie in the direction of being too kind to locals, not hard-hitting enough. Perhaps that's how Guardian journalist Shane Ross was able to get published a very funny article about his efforts to question embattled Prince Edward Island Senator Mike Duffy about, well, his claim to be a Prince Edward Islander. None of Duffy's neighbours in his claimed primary residence of Cavendish have seen him. Apparently he rents a second home in Charlottetown in winter. (Apparently.)

“In the winter, I live in town because the road in Cavendish is blocked,” Duffy said yesterday — Islander Day — at the airport, moments after landing on the 5:34 flight from Ottawa.

I had gone to the airport to meet Senator Duffy, hoping to solve this mystery once and for all. He has taken a pounding by the national and local media and in letters to the editor over whether it is appropriate that he claim more than $33,000 in out-of-town living expenses when his primary residence, it would appear, is in Kanata, down the road from where the NHL’s Ottawa Senators also play.

But Mike — he told me to call him Mike — has not liked to talk about it. At an event in Halifax on Feb. 5, he cleverly dodged reporters by slipping through a hotel kitchen.

Luckily for me, his flight Monday night was delayed a half-hour, and that gave me time to scout out the airport for possible escape routes. Given Mike’s MO, the first place I checked out was Budley’s, the airport restaurant, where the daily special was a pulled pork sandwich and fries for $9.49. There appeared no easy route through the kitchen. He would have to hop the counter. That was out.

Next, I checked the conveyor belt. I always wondered where it led to. Your luggage goes through the black curtains and back around the other side. Was this a possible escape? I think I’ve even seen Shaggy and Scooby pull it off, but a senator surely wouldn’t go unnoticed.

Then I asked a cab driver if — just sayin’ — a really important person wanted to get off the plane and avoid walking through the departure area with the rest of the passengers, could it be done? The cab driver assured me no, unless there was a car waiting for him on the tarmac.

But there was no car. Mike arrived with the rest of them.

“Senator Duffy?”

[URBAN NOTE] "Shark fin ban back on Toronto council's plate"

I'd mentioned in June 2011 Toronto's proposed ban on shark fin sales in connection to skepticism among Chinese businesses in Toronto which sold shark fins that the ban was a good idea, or that it would just displace purchases of shark fins to areas outside of the City of Toronto.

(I'm for the ban, by the way. Even before seeing the compelling documentary Sharkwater, the idea of the shark fisheries upset me as profoundly wasteful. Cutting off the apparently tasteless fins and leaving the rest of the animal to slowly drown, on top of the ecological disruption caused by mass fishing, seems wrong.)

The ban passed, and was struck down in court. As presented by the Toronto Sun's Don Peat, the question of whether to revisit it is a simple right versus left dispute.

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday argued councillors should swallow their pride and drop the ban.

“Let’s not get ourselves into a big legal fight over this matter,” Holyday said. “It’s not really our responsibility as the courts have already decided. I guess the municipal interest hasn’t been shown and I think it would be very difficult to show the municipal interest.”

Holyday added it will be too expensive to continue fighting for a prohibition.

“Heaven knows how far into the court system it would eventually go,” he said. “We don’t have the money to get into this kind of fight and I don’t think it is our business to do it.”

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, an advocate of the ban, said he wants the city to try and craft a bylaw that will withstand a court challenge.

Kristen Wong-Tam also supports the ban.

Perhaps as interestingly, the municipal ban also tests the powers of the municipality in the Canadian political system, which allots cities only the powers that provinces choose to give it. This has come up in the recent affair of Mayor Ford's donations, as well.

[LINK] "Lab chimps successfully treated with anti-depressants"

Via io9 I came across Pallab Ghosh's BBC report suggesting that anti-depressants could be quite useful for chimps freed from research colonies. With the obvious provisos that this has to be done carefully, under controlled conditions, if this report is accurate I'm pleased. Especially after reading Andrew Westoll's award-winning book The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery, describing how chimps at a rehab facility in Québec suffered terribly and in ways recognizable to humans from their long captivity, and in light of things like the National Institutes of Health's retirement of its chimp colonies, doing something to help these intelligent animals seems morally imperative.

Dr Godelieve Kranendonk, a behavioural biologist leading the study at AAP, a rescue centre for animals in the Netherlands, told BBC News that the results had been astonishing.

"Suddenly, [the chimps] woke up. It was as if they were zombies in their enclosures and now they are happy, playing with each other. They are chimps again - that was really nice to see," she told me.

[. . .]

Staff at the AAP sanctuary care for the animals until they die. They try to rehabilitate them so that they can live out their remaining years happily.

The chimps are fed a good diet of vegetables, have toys and plenty of space in which to play. But Dr Kranendonk found that the abnormal behaviour actually increased. It was as if the animals did not know how to cope with their new found freedom.

Dr Kranendonk decided to consult Martin Bruene, a professor of human psychiatric disorders at the University of Bochum, Germany. He prescribed a course of anti-depressants for five of the chimps.

All the animals had been used in medical experiments and were infected with Hepatitis C. "Willy" showed the least abnormal behaviour. "Tomas" and "Zorro", on the other hand, would spend a third of their waking hours eating their own vomit.

"Iris" had lost so much weight from vomiting when she first came to the sanctuary that the staff thought she would die.

The most troubled though was "Kenny", a small chimp who was constantly anxious that the others would attack him and spent much of his time screaming in terror.

The chimps were given SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors), which is a class of anti-depressant similar to Prozac and is used to treat human patients for depression, anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

After six to eight weeks, the animals behaviour started improving. The abnormal behaviour declined and the chimps began to play together. After seven months, there was a vast difference.

[. . .]

The big question though is whether the effect lasts when the chimps are taken off the medication. The early indications are promising. The medication has been steadily reduced and there has been no adverse effect on the chimps' behaviour.

Kenny himself decided that he did not want to take the anti-depressants anymore. His clownish behaviour has continued.

"It seems that while on the medication, the chimps learn to be chimps again," said Dr Kranendonk. "And once they have learned that, they don't need the medication any more."