[PHOTO] Tiles of the ground floor of Sears at the Eaton Centre

Sears Canada's flagship store in the Toronto Eaton Centre--"the world's largest Sears location in terms of floor area", Wikipedia claims--is set to close in February. Perhaps the highest-profile component of the retail chain's program of shrinkage and hoped-for reconsolidation, the irony of this location closing down is that, once upon a time, it hosted the Canadian flagship store of the Eaton's chain now departed for two decades. (Rod McQueen's The Eatons remains the classic tale of that chain's decline.)

I visited the store last month with my parents, looking for bargains. Everyone was looking for bargains, across the entire store. The entire location had started to take on the look of a declining discount store, with clothes strewn about the racks and tables and pieces of sets gone mysteriously missing. (My mother just managed to find a right glove to go with the left.)

I spent some my time looking at the floor's geometric patterns, and enjoyed the abstraction. I wonder if the next store to take the location over will keep them?

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Dragon's Tales notes that Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan are planning their customs union for 2015. Elsewhere in the cosmos, Will links to an astronomy paper summarizing the mysterious existence of three massive planets distant from their star.


• Clay Aiken for Congress? Joe. My. God. notes it could happen.


• Johnny Pez summarizes his successful year past creating a Wiki for Sobel's alternate history book For Want of a Nail (and later fan fiction project For All Nails).


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money is unimpressed by David Brooks' anti-marijuana column.


• Mark Simpson shares a Gay Liberation Front poster from 1975 purporting to trace heterosexuality's origins to any number of traumas.


• Marginal Revolution notes that a fifth of children in China do not live with their parents; they've migrated.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer describes energy reform in Mexico and is very skeptical about the claims of New York City's Stuyvesant High School to be truly elite and worthwhile.


• Steve Munro describes the planning for the Eglinton light rail route.


• Torontoist notes that a candidate for my riding of Ward 18 in Toronto is Alex Mazer, an acquaintance of mine from PEI.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Belarusians want European Union membership, wonders about Ukrainian Orthodox defecting from Moscow, and notes the below-replacement fertility in most of the North Caucasus.