[PHOTO] Civil defense siren, Dundas and Shaw

This civil defense siren, slightly relocated east to its current location at Dundas and Shaw, just across Dundas from the northwestern corner of Trinity Bellwoods Park, is one of the last sirens remaining and a noteworthy artifact of the Cold War. In 2007, the Toronto Star published an article by Leslie Scrivener about it and the few others left.

"It's a neat thing to look at," says Claire Bryden, referring to the air raid siren near the corner of Dundas St. W. and Shaw St., a remnant of Toronto's age of atomic anxiety. The sturdy, horn-shaped siren rests on a rusting column on the property of Bellwoods Centres for Community Living.

Few of these Cold War relics, which would alert the population to an imminent nuclear attack, remain in Toronto. One siren resides atop the York Quay Centre at Harbourfront. Others, like the one on Ward's Island, disappear when buildings get new roofs.

Today, no one claims ownership of the surviving sirens. Call the City of Toronto and they refer you to the province. Call the province and they refer you to the Department of National Defence. Call the Department of National Defence and they refer you to ... the city.

But Claire Bryden is happy to take possession of the one at Dundas and Shaw. Bryden is executive-director of the Bellwoods Centres, which provide homes for people with physical disabilities. The air raid siren, overlooked for decades, suddenly became of interest during construction of a new building. Because it was in the middle of the Bellwoods Park House property, which straddles old Garrison Creek (now flowing through an underground culvert), the siren had to be moved or removed altogether. A new public path, part of a Discovery Walk daytime urban trail from Fort York to Christie Pits, will go through the property right where the siren was.

What to do with the towering artifact? "Rather than throw it away, we decided it's a piece of historical memorabilia," says Bryden, who recalls air-raid-siren practice in her childhood. "It gives character, and we don't see too many around."

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton photographs the Gibraltar Point lighthouse and wonders about the Toronto Islands.


• Bag News Notes visits Iraqi Kurdistan and the survivors of Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurdish city of Halabja.


• At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather notes that the projected size of the American population in decades hence has decreased owing to the recession-related fall in the birth rate.


• Eastern Approaches notes the church-sponsored attack on a gay pride protestin Georgia, its implications for law and order in Georgia, and the impact on Georgia's reputation abroad.


• Geocurrents' Asya Perelstvaig goes over the fluctuating Russo-Finnish border regions.


• GNXP's Razib Khan argues that devoting ten thousand hours to practising a particular skill, as described by Gladwell, won't do anything if one doesn't have the requisite talent.


• Language Hat notes an article on the life of Alice Kober, one of the linguists who helped decrypy the Minoan script Linear B.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio wonders how astronomers would recognize artifacts of a supercivilization--Dyson spheres, FTL warp bubbles, et cetera--as artifacts.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes that many Russian nationalists are opposed to integrating with post-Soviet countries, particularly in Central Asia, that are currently de-Russifying.

[LINK] Two notes on Yahoo's work with Tumblr and Flickr

Yahoo, as any number of news media (like the Financial Post, has bought Tumblr.

Yahoo! Inc. is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date.

Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs. Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Mayer, CEO of the biggest U.S. Web portal since July, is betting that Tumblr will help transform Yahoo into a hip destination in the era of social networking as she challenges Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the US$17.7-billion display ad market. The price she’s paying — about a fifth of Yahoo’s US$5.4-billion in cash — underscores the deal’s importance to Mayer’s turnaround effort, according to Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

“It’s an aggressive move,” Reiss-Davis said in an interview. “They are saying, ‘where is our next group of people who are going to spend many hours per week on Yahoo properties?’ It’s big bet that the answer is going to be Tumblr users.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2013, Yahoo said in the statement.

Founded by Karp in 2007, Tumblr grew to log more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site offers a free service for publishing blogs on the Web and mobile devices, and tools for sharing photos and other content across social networks.

Yahoo has also radically upgraded Flickr.

[T]he big news is the free space — "we want all of your images," said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in "full quality." Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space "other" companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.

Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful," said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you'll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.

As a long-time Flickr user, I'm excited by the upgrade. As a novice Tumblr user, I only hope Yahoo doesn't screw it up (the fact that Marissa Mayer has had to promise not to do that worries me). I do find it worth noting that, between Flickr and Tumblr and my Yahoo Mail account, I make more use of my Yahoo account than I do my Google account, and that with the impending demise of Google Reader my usage of Google will diminish accordingly. I just use Google to search; I do my business on Yahoo.

Is this common, I wonder?

[LINK] "The 'Zuckerberg of Russia' Faces Trouble"

Russia's VKontakte is one of the few native social networking systems to have outlasted Facebook in its home territory. That's one reason why news that it and its founder are facing any number of troubles, as described by Ilya Krennikov at Bloomberg News, is of interest to me.

Pavel Durov is Russia's Mark Zuckerberg. Just five months younger than the Facebook founder, the programmer formed VKontakte in 2006, giving the Russian-language social network two years to build a following before Facebook arrived. Today, VKontakte has 43 million users in its home country, dwarfing Facebook's Russian presence.

Durov's defiance defined him as much as Zuckerberg's geekiness. He's fought music labels claiming VKontakte breaches copyright laws, and when KGB-successor Federal Security Service pushed him to shut down pages by anti-Putin groups last year, he tweeted a hoodie-wearing German shepherd with its tongue sticking out.

When billionaire Alisher Usmanov's Mail.ru tried to take control, Durov took to Twitter again, flipping the bird and dubbing it "an official answer to trash holding Mail.ru."

But Durov's self-assurance may be slipping. He founded the site with money from two rich schoolmates, who got a combined 48 percent stake. They backed him when he wouldn't sell shares to Usmanov, but last week, money won out. They sold to United Capital Partners, a fund known for doing deals for state-run energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft.

Durov's 12 percent stake means Mail.ru (40 percent) and UCP (48 percent) need his backing to control VKontakte, though he doesn't seem to be feeling like the belle of the ball. After prosecutors suspected him of being involved in an April 5 incident in St. Petersburg, when a policeman was struck down by a Mercedes-Benz, TV Rain says he's fled the country.

[URBAN NOTE] "Rob Ford fired as Don Bosco Eagles head coach"

Apparently as a consequence of ill-judged statements suggesting that his football players would be criminals if not for him, and not because of the ongoing question over an alleged crack video, the Toronto Catholic School Board has fired mayor Rob Ford from his position as coach of the Don Bosco Eagles senior football team.

The TCDSB did not give a clear reason for its decision in a statement released on its website other than to say it is "pursuing a different direction" and thanked Ford for his commitment to the team.

A spokesman later told CBC News the decision is "in no way related to the current allegations. It is due to the review of his March 1 Sun News Network interview."

John Yan said Ford painted the Don Bosco community negatively when he referred to it as "crime ridden," and the youth as "gang bangers."

[. . .]

The mayor's commitment as volunteer head coach of the north Etobicoke high school football team has not been without controversy.

In November, a TTC bus was diverted off-route to go pick up Don Bosco players at a game after reports that a near brawl was about to break out on the field.

Ford had faced criticism for missing an important council vote to attend the semi-final game that would eventually land the Eagles in the GTA Metro Bowl championship.

"It's the playoffs, we're undefeated, we're No. 2 in the city. We're in the championship game," Ford said later, denying any involvement in requesting the bus.

It's worth noting that even at at the Toronto Sun, comments are not very supportive of Ford.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Highly Effective Idiot"

Toronto journalist Philip Preville writes in Slate about Ford's record. As Preville notes, the litany of scandals that have gradually paralyzed the Ford administration have taken Ford to a point where he's no longer effective. Might he have effected some change first?

Until last week the embarrassment that is Rob Ford was our little secret, but now the world has discovered our shame. Toronto is an ambitious city, eager to join the world’s top civic brand names alongside New York, Washington, Paris, and Beijing, instead of being forever relegated to the B-list with Helsinki and Lima, Peru. But it is a strangely contemporary kind of ambition. Torontonians love their city like a helicopter parent loves his kid: proudly but protectively and smothered with projected anxiety.

We want everyone to know Toronto is full of potential, home to stunning Libeskind architecture, gleaming condo towers, solvent banks, and Richard Florida. We did not want anyone to know about Rob Ford. We are embarrassed he was elected, we tell friends from afar who now inquire in droves. We’ve been saying it among ourselves for months, as though it was all someone else’s doing. But we did elect him—and not with entirely disastrous results.

In a city rife with cosmopolitan affectation, Rob Ford has proved to be a highly effective populist. During his 10 years as a suburban ward councilor, Ford built the base of his political support by answering all his calls personally, then showing up on voters’ doorsteps to solve their ensnarement with the civic bureaucracy. His speeches in the council chamber were remarkable only for their inanity. But on budget day, the anti-tax crusader would rail against waste and overspending to the delight of the press gallery.

[. . .]

Once Ford took up office in the Clamshell—local argot for Toronto’s spaceship-like Viljo Revell–designed 1960s city hall—he moved fast to act on his mandate. With the assistance of Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday, a staunch fiscal conservative and a veteran of many council battles, Ford started by slashing councilors’ office budgets. He then dissolved the board of Toronto’s public housing corporation, the largest in North America, whose buildings were rampant with criminal activity and bedbug infestations. He later fired the head of the Toronto Transit Commission, which had sunk into ineptitude, and replaced him with an Australian dedicated to customer service.

Ford has also managed to flatline city expenditures while revoking a much-loathed $60 annual vehicle registration fee. Then he aced his first round of labor negotiations: The city’s largest unions agreed to his terms with barely a whimper, even as he outsourced half the city’s residential waste collection to the private sector. He’s no Michael Bloomberg, but his list of accomplishments is nothing to sneer at, especially when you realize, as the world surely does by now, that he’s a fairly dim bulb.

[URBAN NOTE] "The legalistic arguments being made about Rob Ford"

The Grid's Edward Keenan dissects arguments made by some, notably the Toronto Sun's Joe Warmington, that Ford's personal life shouldn't be an issue of public scrutiny.

The people of Toronto—the voters—can legitimately ask a politician all kinds of things they have no legal right to know. For instance, what is his position on raising property taxes, or building subways? (He’s not under oath, he has no legal requirement to address these questions!) What sports team does he root for, and where did he go to school? (He is not obligated to discuss his personal life. His own time is his own business.) Is he fit to hold the job, especially since reports have arisen that seem to call that fitness into question? (Private property! Right to silence!)

Indeed, he has a legal right to remain as silent as he wants to be. And voters have the legal right to draw their own conclusions about what that silence says about him. Generally, the public wants to hear both sides of a story—freely offered, not compelled by subpoena—and then make up their mind. But when only one side of the story is offered, what are they to think?

Well, when that one side relies on HEARSAY evidence—I can hear the Law & Order fans who host talk-radio programs shouting—and there is no proof, then you can dismiss it, ’cause it’s hearsay. Jeff McArthur on AM640 loudly took a stab at this line of defence last Friday when the allegations first emerged.

Oy. A couple things. Certainly, in a court of law, second-hand information can be ruled out of order as hearsay.

But, first of all, in this case, what we are reading in the accounts on Gawker and in the Star are not second-hand accounts: It is eyewitness testimony from people who have seen the video. And they directly, in detail, describe what they saw in the video and the circumstances under which they viewed it. They talk about the conversations and negotiations they had with the people who showed them the video. That is not hearsay. That is direct evidence offered by eyewitnesses. And guess what? That is actually how a good deal of the reporting we rely on for most of our news is done!

Also, in the past Ford has actually said that the public has the right to know things.