[PHOTO] Sandy Carruthers, Lobster!, 2013

I saw Island cartoonist Sandy Carruthers' sketch of a giant lobster ravaging a coastal community in the basement of Charlottetown's Art Guild and loved it. There is something decidedly and uncomfortably non-vertebrate about these uncuddly things; were they larger, or if they tasted less good ...

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams reacts to yesterday's announcement that Kepler had found another 715 planets. What an embarrassment of riches!


• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram mourns the freer blogging culture of old, before things because set and professionalized.


• A Fistful of Euros' Edward Hugh argues that, with a shrinking population and stagnant incomes, Japan-style deflation is inevitable in Spain.


• At Geocurrents, Claire Negiar summarizes the simmering separatism of the southern Senegalese region of Casamance.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen starts a discussion about the impact of bringing extinct species like the passenger pigeon back to life.


• The New APPS Blog's Mohan Matthen argues that an independent Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom should maintain a currency union. (I've made arguments against.)


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer maps the declining power of Chavista politics at the polls in Venezuela.


• Savage Minds has a neat interview with an ethnographer who is also a designer.


• The Speed River Journal's Van Waffle celebrates the avocado, with photos and recipes.


• Torontoist links to a cool video showing the exploration of some hidden nooks of the Toronto transit system.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, at least in terms of declared ethnic identity, Ukraine is as Ukrainian as Russia is Russians.


• Wonkman points out that mores in cities take a while to get used to, just like the mores of non-urban areas.

[NEWS] Some Friday links

• The Toronto Star notes that Mississauga is celebrating its 40th anniversary with--among other things--a new logo.


• The Atlantic Cities shares photos of a Soviet Second World War memorial that keeps getting repainted as a form of political graffiti and notes that banks of offshore windfarms could conceivably cut down the strength of hurricanes.


• The Guardian notes the slave-like conditions that less privileged foreign workers suffer in Qatar.


• The CBC notes that the roommates of Loretta Saunders--the Inuk student found murdered in New Brunswick--have both been charged with first-degree murder.


• National Geographic examines the consequences of a storm in Wales that uncovered a storied forest.


• BusinessWeek shows how many prominent Ukrainians have been living in luxury, with extensive property holdings throughout Europe.

[URBAN NOTE] "So the WBB is closing."

Livejournal's James Burbidge has a post reflecting on his experience of the World's Biggest Bookstore. In his experience, it wasn't all that much.

I remember when it opened. At the time, the Coles chain, which it was a part of, was the very bottom of the barrel as bookstores went. Even in Peterborough, where I lived at the time, it was the last stop if you were looking for something. In Toronto, the top of the pecking order was occupied by Britnell's and the U of T bookstore, and there was a vibrant collection of good second hand bookstores as well as various other chain and independent bookstores. (This was before W.H. Smith[1] and Coles merged into the monster which would later become Chapters.)

Coles was good only for mass-market paperbacks and for Coles' Notes. The staff rarely knew much about books. Quality always lost out to price: if you were looking for Shakespeare, for example, you could find Signet Classic editions but never New Arden ones.

The WBB was a bit of a step up -- its section mangers, by and large, were relatively knowledgeable, and its larger size meant that, just by brute force, it was more likely to have something you were looking for. But it was, and remained, basically a bigger Coles. If you had been exposed to Foyles in London or FNAC in Paris, its rather grandiose claims to size were a little wearing.

It was a good place to shop for genre paperbacks -- it retained an independent ordering policy for a long time, perhaps up to the end -- and would frequently have midlist books absent from other stores. It was still worse for SF than Bakka, or for mysteries than Sleuth of Baker Street, but if you worked downtown it was closer. But it would never have the interesting books reviewed in the TLS, for example.

There is fuss, he argues, simply because there has been so much change--specifically, so many stores closing down or being consolidated--in the book retail landscape.

Ignoring the online world, Britnell's has gone; Nicholas Hoare has gone; Lichtmans has gone. (Ben McNally on Bay street is the last independent bookstore downtown, AFAICT.) W.H. Smith and Coles were swallowed into Chapters which was itself devoured by Indigo and the branches which aren't Indigo superstores are now IndigoSpirit stores which are (unbelievably) worse than the old Coles stores were (less selection). In the downtown Toronto PATH area two surviving Coles bookstores (in BCE Place and Commerce Court) have closed within the last year.

Go, read.

[URBAN NOTE] "More public transit riders, paying far more to ride"

MacLean's writer Vidya Kauri notes (more data at the site) that while transit use is rising quickly across Canada, so too are user fees. More money to subsidize mass transit--better fundraising generally--would be helpful.

Statistics Canada recently released data on urban transit ridership and revenues for the full year of 2013, and when looking back over the past decade a clear picture emerges: More people in cities are turning to transit to get around, but at the same time, it’s costing them a lot more to do so.

[. . . W]hile ridership is on the rise, passengers are increasingly feeling it in their wallets. Revenues for transit systems (excluding subsidies) have skyrocketed by comparison, a sign of how fast transit fares are rising. Yes, transit systems draw revenue from other sources, like advertising, but it’s minor. Just slightly more than two per cent of the Toronto Transit Commission’s operating revenue comes from ads. This shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise, when you consider Canadian cities have some of the highest transit fares in North America.

For those who like to grumble that people who take transit get a free ride, the data make it clear just how much deeper riders are having to dig. Yes, transit is heavily subsidized, but the cost to riders is rising incredibly fast. At the same time, it raises the question—at what point will soaring fares deter people from taking transit?

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Vince Li release and criminal responsiblity

The news that Vince Li, the Greyhound passenger responsible for the unusually gruesome July 2008 killing of Tim McLean on board a Greyhound bus, will be allowed unsupervised visits has gotten wide coverage. (The reporting by the CBC is typical.)

I'm not surprised that the victim's mother is upset. As I noted in 2009, though, Li committed the crime in question while in a schizophrenic episode, apparently believing he needed to kill McLean in order to prevent an alien invasion. Li was clearly not capable of forming criminal intent, and not criminally responsible. Keeping him detained even after Li's biochemical issues have been regulated and the man is capable of becoming a functioning and contributing individual is unjust.

Li's doctors should be held responsible for their patient's behaviour, and potential misbehaviours. I strongly suspect that they are in any case.

A man who beheaded a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba will soon be allowed to leave a mental hospital without an escort.

Thursday's ruling by the Criminal Code Review Board means Vince Li will be on his own in public for the first time since he stabbed Tim McLean and then ate parts of his body six years ago.

The board granted Li all the new freedoms his psychiatric team had requested at a hearing earlier this week. Lead psychiatrist Dr. Steven Kremer said Li, a schizophrenic, has stopped experiencing delusions and is a model, non-violent patient.

Instead of the supervised outings Li had been granted previously, he will be allowed unescorted trips from the Selkirk Mental Health Centre into the nearby city of Selkirk. The visits, to begin next Thursday, are to start at 30 minutes and increase to full days.

[. . .]

For McLean's mother, the changes were an outrage.

"We're not surprised. We're very disappointed, embarrassed, ashamed," Carol DeDelley said.

[. . .]

Crown attorney Susan Helenchilde did not oppose the changes proposed at this year's hearing. She noted that Li has co-operated with hospital staff at all times.

Li's doctors said he willingly takes his medication and understands the importance of doing so.

DeDelley is not convinced. She said there is no way to guarantee that Li will continue to take his drugs if he's unsupervised.

"He poses no threat in care. I propose they keep him in care so he's not a threat."

DeDelley has been running a website, www.timslaw.ca, where she highlights cases across the country in which people found not criminally responsible for crimes reoffend after being released.

[ISL] On the marketing of Prince Edward Island lobster

I came across, via an approving quoted friend(hi Christine!), Steve Sharratt's article in the Charlottetown Guardian describing a proposal for a marketing levy on Prince Edward Island lobster (Atlantic Canadian lobster more generally, I think.)

This kind of forward-thinking investment is essential, especially at a time when there are dropping prices for fishers' catches. Moving up the value-added chain is only a good thing.

The creation of a $3-million marketing campaign for the king of seafood will get the claws of the Canadian lobster industry into lucrative international markets and generate payback, says the executive director of the Lobster Council of Canada.

“Other marketing levies have generated as much as a 2-1, to a 9-1 (dollar) payback in sales and revenue,’’ said Geoff Irvine about the proposed penny a pound lobster levy from his office in Halifax.

Irvine said he was pleased to see a recent test vote on P.E.I. show 75 per cent of northside fishermen support a penny a pound marketing levy, which if matched by processors and buyers, would raise $500,000 on the Island alone.

“In Canada, we land about 150 million pounds of lobster . . . so if we had a marketing levy that collected a penny a pound from two sources (fishermen/processors), we would have a $3-million fund for marketing and promotion,” said Irvine.

The idea of a marketing levy for the tasty Atlantic crustacean has been bobbing in the waves for the past few years and the industry would love to see the lobster as popular as the Bluenose or Anne of Green Gables.

But only now, after two Maritime panels cited a lack of potent marketing, is the levy being discussed.

Many observers say the lobster fishery could become a hot tamale by taking a page from the P.E.I. potato industry.

The spud sultans have marketing down to a science with a smiling Olympic gold medal winner Heather Moyse doing the endorsing.