[PHOTO] Looking south, at Charlottetown Harbour

The vantage point offered by Charlottetown's Victoria Park for seeing the broader geography of the Charlottetown Harbour is unmatched. Standing at a point on Victoria Park and looking south. To the left (east) is the suburban community of Stratford; to the right (west) is the peninsula that is home to, among other things, the Port-la-Joie-Fort Amherst national historic site; in between is the access to Northumberland Strait.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes the stormy weather on brown dwarfs and takes a look at the ongoing debate on the origins of hypervelocity stars (stars travelling so quickly that they will escape the galaxy).


• Crooked Timber's John Holbo is rightly incredulous that Bill Kristol hopes the centenary of the beginning of the First World War will mark a rebirth of militarism.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a study claiming that Y-class brown dwarfs--very small and dim brown dwarfs--might be a bridge between brown dwarfs and planets.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money talks about sexism, starting from columnist James Taranto's statement that female achievement in families is responsible for male underachievement.


• New APPS Blog's Jon Cogburn writes about our generation's "inconsistent mix of ironic detachment and fear of being uncool", perhaps exemplified by the rapid 1991 transition from hair metal to grunge.


• J. Otto Pohl links to a friend's paper that talks about the failure of one effort for deported Soviet Germans living in Kazakhstan to gain an autonomous region.


• Torontoist has some good essays, one on property taxes, another on the availability of 3-D printers in the Toronto public library system soon, and another about York University's explanation as to why it was willing to accomodate a student who didn't want to interact with women.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Google will be adding support for Kazakh soon, and for other Turkic languages somewhat later.

[URBAN NOTE] "The changing face of Bloordale"

Iain Marlow's article in The Globe and Mail takes a look at Bloordale, a neighbourhood just a subway stop to the rest of mine that, like mine, is also on the upswing.

[N]ext door to the Coffee Time nearby, there is a trendy restaurant called the Whippoorwill, with a line-up-worthy brunch and cocktails named after local businesses (such as “the Caribbean Queen”). There is a Nordic smokehouse café and a store called Zeebu that sells blankets made by former Brazilian prisoners. There is also a retro vintage store selling used clothing and other items quite ironically: One item for sale is a small piece of old looking wood that has two hand written labels on it; one, which reads “Early telephone ?!?”, offers a vague sense of a narrative, while the other simply says “Sexy block of wood. $15.”

“In this neighbourhood, people like stuff with a story behind it,” said Craig Williamson, co-owner of Zebuu.

Mr. Williamson, whose store also sells Gandhian blankets from India made from home-spun cotton, is referring to the new people coming by, the people who stroll by after brunch at the Whippoorwill, or after dinner or lunch at the Emerson or Keralia or Brock Sandwich. He is not referring to the people who gave the neighbourhood its previous reputation for addiction and crime, or the folks who swing by the House of Lancaster strip club.

The 2011 census lists the area’s main non-English, non-French mother tongues as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Cantonese. The census of 2006 lists the area’s median income at just $22,582, but even though there is no comparable data for 2011, anecdotally, people who work in the area say that the makeup of the neighbourhood has changed markedly.

“You see more family people around,” says Georgia Hamilton, the chef, owner and “everything else” of a Bloordale roti shop, as she serves up some cashew brittle. “No hustling. No hustlers. No drug dealers. No more hustlers coming in. More shops. More bakeries.”

But not more factories. Todd Gariepy has worked for 25 years in a plant just north of Bloor Street near Lansdowne Avenue. He has watched the neighbourhood change: the women working the corner slowly move on, the syringes on the ground and the drug dealers disappear. But even though he can still eat at Pepper’s, a restaurant nearby that has survived all the changes, he has also watched as multiple factories close up and then be transformed into lofts or replaced by townhouses. Mr. Gariepy was almost forced out of the neighbourhood himself, when the Canada Packers factory he worked in shut down in 1990. His job was saved when the factory was quickly bought up by a Japanese firm, Nitta Gelatin NA Inc.

[MUSIC] Three links on popular music.

Wired's Douglas Wouk defended Beyoncé's controversial use of a sample from NASA's reaction to the Challenger disaster in 1986 in her song "XO", on the grounds that others have done it before and that her sample works.

“XO” is a love song, but it’s a love song with the threat of mortality hovering over it; if you didn’t know the title, you might well guess from the song’s lyrical refrain that it was called “Lights Out.” In that context, the six-second clip of Nesbitt that begins it isn’t a non-sequitur or a trivialization. It’s a memento mori: a swift, understated and brutal reminder that everything can go horribly wrong before anyone understands what’s happening, and that the light could be extinguished at any moment.

Why is Sweden so good at pop music, The Atlantic's Nolan Feeney asks? A variety of reasons are responsible, from universal education in music to an efficient and effective media industry to the fluency in English.

Sweden’s knack for high-quality pop songs isn’t a genetic trait that gets passed along from generation to generation alongside like blond hair and blue eyes. [Swedish academic Ola] Johansson argues that it’s the result of the fact that no other small country has the right combination of language skills, cultural values, tight-knit industry, and supportive public policy to transform itself into the music-exporting phenomenon that Sweden has become. So the next time you find yourself humming along to “The Sign,” don’t write it off as simple, reggae-lite relic of decades past. Get into the light and accept the song for what it really is: a triumph of some complex geopolitical systems.

NPR's Chris Molanphy argues, meanwhile, that in the age of memes popular music is very erratic and doesn't necessarily produce enduring acts.

Here's a list of a dozen chart-topping songs from across the 55-year history of Billboard's Hot 100. Each wound up as Billboard's No. 1 song of the year. Which song, arguably, has the strongest legacy?

1958: Domenico Modugno, "Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu)"
1961: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"
1967: Lulu, "To Sir with Love"
1979: The Knack, "My Sharona"
1981: Kim Carnes, "Bette Davis Eyes"
1986: Dionne Warwick (& Friends), "That's What Friends Are For"
1994: Ace of Base, "The Sign"
1997: Elton John, "Candle in the Wind 1997"
1999: Cher, "Believe"
2006: Daniel Powter, "Bad Day"
2012: Gotye (featuring Kimbra), "Somebody That I Used to Know"
2013: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (featuring Wanz), "Thrift Shop"

Depending on your age, you can probably sing half or more of the songs on this list. At least a couple, including Lulu's '67 smash, Warwick's '80s AIDS-charity single and Sir Elton's '97 elegy for Princess Diana, are considered pop standards.

But for this thought experiment, the correct answer is 2013's No. 1 single, "Thrift Shop." Why? Because it wasn't Macklemore & Ryan Lewis's final No. 1 hit.

I'm not seriously arguing that the Seattle rap-pop duo, less than two years into their career as stars, have a stronger legacy than Elton John. But if there's one thing the Billboard charts reinforce over and over again, it's that — to borrow a term from Wall Street — past performance is definitely no guarantee of future results. In the age of YouTube, iTunes and Spotify, the machinery that allows acts to rocket out of nowhere and top the charts has expanded and accelerated; it's never been easier to become a flash in the pan.

Go, read.