[CAT] Shakespeare in bed

[URBAN NOTE] "Queen Street and New Streetcars: Less Service, Fewer Stops, Wider Gaps?"

Toronto transit blogger Steve Munro has serious concerns about the likely development of the 501 Queen streetcar route. There may be more streetcars, but that doesn't translate into better service.

The TTC has been inconsistent in statements about how the new cars would affect service. Initially, the idea was that larger cars would provide more capacity, badly needed on many routes including Queen. A few years later, thanks to the penny-pinching budgets of Mayor Ford and TTC Chair Stintz, the idea of actually improving service capacity vanished. Indeed, the TTC has already relaxed its off-peak loading standards for streetcars to allow more standees in a bid to save on operations.

Add to this the highly irregular headways on Queen and other routes, any proposal to run fewer streetcars can only mean one thing: service, which declined substantially when headways were widened for the 75-foot long articulated light rail vehicles (ALRVs), will get even worse with the new larger low floor cars (LFLRVs).

The TTC likes to talk about how running fewer cars will improve service by reducing the bunching inherent when cars are scheduled more frequently than traffic signal cycles. This does not, and has not, applied to Queen Street for many decades. Indeed, the TTC tries to make virtue out of wider headways by generalizing an hypothesis originally developed for a simulation of operations on the busy King streetcar downtown during peak periods. There is no comparison to the Queen car in The Beach.

As for stop spacing, there have been many comments on this site about the excessive number of stops on Queen and other routes. Among the most likely to vanish are the Sunday stops especially if any special sidewalk treatment or fare machine installations would be required. (All of the Sunday stops on Roncesvalles came out as part of that street’s redesign.) Some other stops are simply too close together, and these are often leftovers of historical traffic patterns dating back to the 50s and beyond.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.


• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into text, diacritical marks are endangered in the Polish language. A campaign has been launched.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis links to an essay by feminist and historian Ruth Rosen wherein she states--basically--that early feminists didn't think about campaigning against violence against women in the 1970s because violence against women was taken for granted as inevitable.


• British journalist Mark Simpson unearths a vintage article about Napster and the Internet and free culture from 2001 that's still relevant today.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen links approvingly to a book, Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, that examines "Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times". It does look interesting.


• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the ways in which the sex industry of New York City's Times Square was an integral part of the neighbourhood, in photos and posters.


• Torontoist notes that City Council has just declared Toronto a sanctuary city, guaranteeing undocumented residents access to municipal services. More on this later.


• Eugene Volokh in a couple of posts (1, 2) starts speculating whether or not indigenous peoples in the New World would have seen European migrants as illegal immigrants and starts to head in problematic directions. Again, more later.


• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his love of libraries.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes, via various sources, that Chechen refugees in the European Union are facing forced returns to their ever-problematic homeland.

[LINK] "Western Poland more expensive than eastern Germany"

I'd blogged in 2008 about how traditional migration patterns in central Europe from east to west were starting to reverse themselves with, among other nationalities, newly well-off Poles taking advantage of low real estate prices and good infrastructure in eastern Germany. With stories like this, the imminence of some sort of limited convergence, at least, is impending (East Germany is much the poorest region in a Germany perhaps two-thirds richer than Poland, even western Poland is poorer than East Germany, and the sheer number of Poles means that some number will be able to make foreign purchases of whatever).

Though Eurostat data indicates that Germany is a more expensive country than Poland, it still pays for Poles to go grocery shopping in eastern Germany. According to the Wrocław branch of the Central Statistical Office, shoppers in Wrocław pay 17 percent more for beer, 25 percent more for butter and 70 percent more for bottled water than they would in stores in Germany.

The list of products that are more expensive in the west of Poland than in eastern Germany also includes: cottage cheese, condensed milk, cream, juice, honey and soap, with the biggest price gaps on alcohol.

The price differences are attributed to a gamut of factors, some of them being: higher commissions on alcohol sales in Poland, higher VAT in Poland on products like bottled water, and a more concentrated German market with fewer intermediaries.

[LINK] "Pastoral Uruguay Yields a Crop of Digital Yetis and Adventures"

Noel, do you have any insights on the situation described in this New York Times article?

For a start-up that has a hit video game for the iPhone, the new loft-style offices of Ironhide Game Studio are exactly what one would expect — a newly hired staff labors feverishly on software updates not far from a pinball machine and custom-built monster arcade cabinet intended for letting off steam.

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

[. . .]

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

[LINK] "How a D.C. Hockey Fan Site Got the Russian Meteorite Story Before the AP"

Garance Franke-Ruta's post at The Atlantic is fantastic. Wasn't it a generation ago under the Soviets that the whole area around Chelyabinsk was closed off as a high-security area?

If you were on Twitter last night your first English-language news of the Russian meteor hit -- the largest to come to Earth since the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia -- likely came from a website with a passel of the most amazing Russian dashboard cam videos and a name guaranteed to raise suspicions about its veracity. That is, of course, unless you are a Caps fan, in which case you know that Russian Machine Never Breaks is a great source of news and information about some of the Washington region's most outsized sports figures on one of its best teams -- and not a site given to elaborately staged pranks and hoaxes.

It was the Russian players who put the Washington Capitals on the map in the National Hockey League, and who've since made the team a surefire bet for D.C. residents who like to cheer for winners. And Caps fans are looking forward to more of them coming to the city, too -- players like Evgeny Kuznetsov, a forward who plays for Traktor Chelyabinsk and was drafted 26th overall by the Washington Capitals in 2010. His arrival in Washington has been much-anticipated and closely followed by the men at Russian Machine, a site that describes itself as "A cheerfully demented Washington Capitals site with a healthy fixation on Alex Ovechkin and his Russian bros."

It was the site's Moscow correspondent -- hey, you can't have a top Caps blog without one -- who broke the news to the D.C. crew.

"Fedor Fedin heard about the explosion (we didn't know the cause) through social media and radio around 11:00 PM ET. He relayed it to us," said Russian Machine editor Peter Hassett of Frederick, Md., in an email.

"I scoured Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube using the Cyrillic version of Chelyabinsk and its nickname 'Chelly'. Fedor translated tweets from the only reliable source we could find (@plushev, host of a news radio program in Moscow).

"I was skeptical at first, but once I saw multiple videos from multiple users showing the same contrails and sonic boom in addition to a Russian-language reporter repeating official news releases and a first-person tweet from a North American goalie known to be playing in the region, I bought the story."

Yes, you heard that right -- a Canadian former Atlanta Thrashers goalie now playing for Traktor Chelyabinsk helped break the news online on Twitter, because that's how media works today.

[URBAN NOTE] Jeremy Feist on letting Rob Ford get away with things

Xtra! blogger Jeremy Feist began his post "Long live our idiot mayor" by linking to the Toronto Star report that Mayor Rob Ford will not be prosecuted for overspending on his mayoral campaign.

Tuesday will be the first day in nearly two years that Mayor Rob Ford will not have to worry that he might be evicted from office by a judge.

The city’s compliance audit committee voted 2-1 on Monday against hiring a special prosecutor to pursue non-criminal charges against Ford for alleged election finance violations. Ford, whose mayoralty has been plagued by legal distractions, has now won both of the cases that threatened his political future.

An auditor concluded that Ford’s 2010 mayoral campaign committed numerous “apparent contraventions” of the Municipal Elections Act. But his lawyer, Tom Barlow, told the committee the breaches were insignificant and unintentional — and that, through the audit and the accompanying media scrutiny, Ford has learned his lesson and “answered for his conduct.”

[. . .]

The committee’s decision was a second major defeat in a month for Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Max Reed, the two citizens who filed the audit case and who quietly initiated the conflict of interest case Ford won on appeal in January.

Feist is unhappy with this.

While [Ford i]s constantly -- CONSTANTLY -- fucking up, it's never bad enough for people to go into full-blown outrage. A roll of the eyes, a week's worth of punchlines maybe, but one of the few thing Ford does right is that he screws up enough to get called out, but not enough for the city by and large to hold him accountable.

The result of this is that Ford's fanbase rallies behind him stronger. His poll numbers actually went up from 45% to 48% since the campaign spending trial. I get it, Ford seems like a humble man of the people, in that he's about as competent as any average Torontonian could be. It's relatable. And when the government cracks down on him, it just makes it look like big government is going after the common folk, despite the fact that Ford is rich as balls and oh yes, he's the mayor of Toronto. But people will still see it as elitists and intellectualists condescending to the average person.

If you're interested in Toronto affairs, you really should read his blog.

[LINK] "Canadian Chris Hadfield is quickly becoming the biggest name in space travel"

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, currently on board the International Space Station and set to take command shortly, is a celebrity. He's on Twitter; he has recorded a song with the Barenaked Ladies; his photographs of the Earth from space are being enthusiastically shared on Facebook. Hadfield is a celebrity astronaut, and the National Post's Joe O'Connor seems impressed by this.

“Chris is a rock star, there is no two ways about it,” says Stephen Quick, director of the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.

“We’ve seen it from the beginning with Chris. We’ve had him in here to do briefings on how to fly a CF-18, and on training for space, and he is as adept at talking to a six-year-old with stars in their eyes as he is talking to the governor-general or a head of state.

“He tunes into that person. He has this vibrant personality, this twinkle in his eye, and it is almost a mischievous twinkle.

“What other astronaut has had a Twitter tete-a-tete with William Shatner? To even do that, it goes beyond the boundaries.”

Commander Hadfield is a crossover spaceman. Space-nerd-kids love him. But so does everybody else, presumably for his everyman charisma, but also because he is accessible by design.

[. . .]

The Canadian astronaut had about 20,000 followers on Twitter in mid-December. He had 441,125 followers when I checked at 5 p.m. EST Monday, which was 600 more than he had a few hours before, and about 140,000 more than our Prime Minister and 430,000 more than Marc Garneau, Canada’s astronaut emeritus and candidate for the Liberal Party leadership.

[. . .]

The American rocket men of yore, such as Aldrin and Armstrong, were minted American heroes. They zoomed up, up and away, and they never really returned to Earth, settling instead on some pedestal reserved for priceless national treasures.

There they remained, mostly because of what they did but also because the wonder of space travel lost some of its wonder, as more and more rockets and space shuttles roared off. It became just another thing.

Now along comes this new phenomenon, Chris Hadfield, and suddenly the space celebrity machine is whirring again, only we don’t look up at our Chris — or read his Twitter feed with stars in our eyes — but with the winking suspicion that he’s the kind of astronaut who’d be great to grab a beer with.