[PHOTO] "Cardboard Only" elevator on Spadina Avenue

Seen while touring last month's Contact photography exhibition on Spadina Avenue, ironically enough.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO shares the story of the first LCBOs opened in Toronto after Prohibition. The procedures involved were rather bureaucratic.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper that tries to answer the question of whether Titan's different seas and lakes are connected by subsurface aquifers.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig recounts the history of Russians in the San Francisco area.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money engages with David Graeber's left-wing critique of Thomas Piketty.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen doesn't like Scottish separatism.


• James Nicoll of More Words, Deeper Hole finds Donald Moffitt's late 1970s novel The Jupiter Theft somewhat better than he feared.


• Personal Reflection's Jim Belshaw explores (1, 2) the consequences of changes to funding in Australian higher education.


• Peter Rukavina shares an excerpt from a typeset edition of Milton Acorn's "Poem for the Astronauts".


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russian moves against Belarus or Kazakhstan are still possible if either country disappoints, and wonders if the Eurasian Economic Union will encourage Armenia to promote Karabakh independence rather than to seek to annex it.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell criticizes economists who work without reference to facts.

[URBAN NOTE] "Someone paid $2.9 million for the Metro Theatre"

I first posted the above picture of the Metro Theatre, a grungy porn theatre on Bloor Street West in Little Korea, two years ago when it seemed there was a chance it could become an art theatre. Toronto Life's Informer says that, instead, the place sold to people who want to transform it into a gym and retail space.

The Metro Theatre, near Bloor and Christie, closed late last year, ending its 35-year run as Toronto’s most prominent (and eventually, last remaining) porno theatre. Its co-owner, Karim Hirji, had been trying to sell it for years, and had listed the building for $3.59 million as recently as 2011. Now we know it ultimately didn’t fetch quite that price.

Property records show that the building sold quietly in August 2013, a few months before the theatre officially shut down for good. The buyer was a numbered company directed by a woman named Saroj Jain, who couldn’t be reached for comment. The sale price? $2.9 million—which, while not quite equal to the original asking price, is still a nice sum for a 75-year-old building in need of major fixing up. And, as a matter of fact, the new owner already has some fixes in the works.

On May 21, Jain’s company applied to the city for a minor zoning variance that would allow it to gut the interior of the theatre, creating two commercial spaces: a large rec-hall area where the theatre used to be, and a smaller retail storefront facing Bloor Street. The plans call for the building’s facade to be left essentially as-is, although minus the 1970s-era porn posters that have goggled the eyes of neighbourhood youngsters for a generation. The street-level frontage would be replaced with plate glass.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mississauga’s last family farm hangs on"

Wendy Gillis' Toronto Star article describing the last family farm operating in the city of Mississauga caught my attention. I wasn't surprised to learn that the economics are dire, the younger Hustler men having to work off the farm as well to keep to farm going as a viable business. Will it be much longer until it's sold off at a hefty price for real estate development?

As if he knew the house would one day sit on the edge of one of North America’s busiest highways, British settler Jacob Scott laid the red brick walls of his farm house 14 inches thick, then slapped on a layer of horse-hair plaster for good measure. For that, the Hustler family is forever grateful — their home, built by Scott in 1828, is uncannily quiet.

Outside on the farm, it’s a bizarre cacophony of urban and rural noise. Massive Hereford cattle bellow. Three dozen sheep swap nasally baas. Titan and Bailey, the Hustler farm dogs, bark replies.

The animal chorus competes against the roar of cars speeding down the 401 and the on-ramp to the 407, which together form the Hustler farm’s northern boundary. To the immediate east, the cars swerve in and out of the bustling big-box shopping centre, a maze of chain stores and restaurants.

“The cows used to summer pasture across the road,” says 34-year-old Jason, a fifth-generation Hustler, trudging through soggy grounds on a recent spring day.

“Basically, where the Rona is, the Buffalo Wild Wings, the Michael’s.”

Once just another farm in a predominantly agrarian region, the Hustlers today operate the last working farm in Mississauga, a 52-acre lot tucked in the very northwest corner of a city better known for cosmopolitan condos and sprawling subdivisions.

[LINK] "This Is How You Stream Netflix to the Moon"

Wired's Klint Finley describes the advent of a new high-speed communications system that would let people on Earth connect to computers on the Moon at a very high speed.

Traditionally, NASA has used radio frequencies to communicate with spaceships, satellites, and rovers, but that’s rather slow. Plus, the further a contraption gets from earth, the more power–and the bigger the dish–it needs to send a signal. That’s why NASA’s most distant probe, Voyager 1, requires a 70-meter antenna to be heard. Optical connections are much faster, but they’ve been limited by things like varying lighting conditions, cloudy skies, and atmospheric interference.

So, in order to quickly send signals across the approximately 250,000 miles between earth and NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory, Stevens and his team built a completely new optical communication system, with new transmitters as well as receivers, drawing on techniques used in past projects. “People in the space business have long known that laser communications has a lot of potential benefits including higher data rates and smaller space terminals,” Stevens says. “NASA has been pursuing parts of the technology for several decades.”

On the transmission side, the team used four telescopes to beam information coded as pulses of infrared light into space. Each of the four signals travels separately, and though each will encounter interference, this four-pronged approach improves the odds that at least one signal will make it to the receiver.

When a signal arrives, it’s focused into an optical fiber similar to what’s used in high-speed internet connections such as Google Fiber. Then it’s amplified and is converted into electrical pulses that carry the data transmission. Less than one billionth of a watt will be received of the original 40-watt signal, but that’s still about 10 times the signal strength required for error-free communication.

The satellite had its own transmitter, which was able to send the data signal back to earth at an even faster speed: 622 megabits per second. That’s faster than most home internet connections, though not quite as speedy as the one-gigabit speeds you get with something like Google Fiber.

[LINK] "Translating “Frozen” Into Arabic"

Writing in the New Yorker, Lebanese linguist and writer Elias Muhanna takes issue with Disney's version of the hit musical Frozen for the Arabic-speaking market. His argument, that the Modern Standard Arabic chosen for the translation doesn't connect with the different forms of the Arabic language spoken by different peoples, makes a certain amount of sense. There's also the non-trivial question of identity: having a version of Frozen in an Arabic theoretically common to everyone might well have ranked highly in Disney's prospective market.

There has never been a Disney musical so widely translated (or “localized,” in industry-speak) as “Frozen.” There has also never been a Disney musical so loaded with American vernacular speech. Princess Anna may have spent her childhood in a remote Scandinavian citadel, but she talks like a teen-ager from suburban New Jersey. Singing about her sister’s impending coronation ceremony, she says, “Don’t know if I’m elated or gassy, but I’m somewhere in that zone,” and confesses to a need to “stuff some chocolate in my face” at the prospect of meeting a handsome stranger at the party. Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine were more demure in their longings, and sang in a register of English more readily amenable to translation.

One of the forty-one languages in which you can watch “Frozen” is Modern Standard Arabic. This is a departure from precedent. Earlier Disney films (from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to “Pocahontas” to “Tangled”) were dubbed into Egyptian Arabic, the dialect with the largest number of speakers in the region, based in a country with a venerable history of film production. Generations of Arabs grew up watching Egyptian movies, and the Disney musicals capitalized on their familiarity with this particular dialect.

Modern Standard Arabic is very similar to Classical Arabic, the centuries-old lingua franca of the medieval Islamic world. Today, it is the language of officialdom, high culture, books, newscasts, and political sermonizing. Most television shows, films, and advertisements are in colloquial Arabic, and the past several years have seen further incursions of the dialects into areas traditionally reserved for the literary language.

Ironically, though, children’s literature has remained deeply resistant to the trend toward vernacularization. “If we read to them in dialect, when are they supposed to learn real Arabic?” is the answer I usually get when I ask other parents about this state of affairs. As a scholar of Classical Arabic and a native speaker of Lebanese Arabic, I have always felt this to be a false choice. Setting aside the fraught question of what constitutes real Arabic, there is surely something to be said for introducing children to literature that speaks to them.

It’s tricky to describe the quality of a literary text in a formal language to a speaker of American English or any other language that does not contain the same range of linguistic variety as diglossic language families like Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. One way to put it is that Modern Standard Arabic is even less similar to regional Arabic dialects than the English of the King James Bible is to the patter of an ESPN sportscaster.

The Arabic lyrics to “Let It Go” are as forbidding as Elsa’s ice palace. The Egyptian singer Nesma Mahgoub, in the song’s chorus, sings, “Discharge thy secret! I shall not bear the torment!” and “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” From one song to the next, there isn’t a declensional ending dropped or an antique expression avoided, whether it is sung by a dancing snowman or a choir of forest trolls. The Arabic of “Frozen” is frozen in time, as “localized” to contemporary Middle Eastern youth culture as Latin quatrains in French rap.

[LINK] "Trial begins for lone junior Tory charged in robocall election scandal"

So it begins. From the Canadian Press, via MacLean's. What will come of all this, I wonder?

After a three-year investigation into almost 2,500 complaints in 261 ridings across Canada, the robocall scandal comes down to a solitary trial of one junior Conservative campaign staffer in a single southwestern Ontario riding.

Michael Sona’s trial is scheduled to begin Monday.

Sona, 25, is charged with “wilfully preventing or endeavouring to prevent an elector from voting,” having allegedly orchestrated an automated phone message scam to send non-Conservative voters in Guelph to the wrong polling stations during the 2011 election.

Sona, who was communications director for Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke, is the only person charged in the robocall affair.

He maintains he’s been scapegoated by his former party to protect those higher up the food chain who orchestrated what he believes was a conspiracy to suppress non-Tory votes that went well beyond Guelph.

“I had no involvement in this. At all,” Sona told Huffington Post Canada in a pre-trial interview last week.

[LINK] "The Online Life of Elliot Rodger"

Jay Caspian Kang writes at the New Yorker about how we can find out things about anyone--like, say, Elliot Rodgers, perpetrator of the recent Isla Vista killings--very quickly indeed. We can find out a lot.

Elliot Rodger was not mentioned in any of these reports. By now, we have watched his YouTube videos, read the posts he left on PUAHate, a forum dedicated to hating pickup artists, seen the screenshots of the comments he allegedly left on bodybuilding sites, and read his lengthy manifesto. Like James Holmes, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Adam Lanza before him, Rodger’s life has been reverse-engineered through the images and words that he posted online. This seems to be the preferred method of discussing mass killers these days. Once the videos, Facebook photos, and tweets have surfaced, the game of associations begins. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, every single thing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted online was scrutinized by the media. When it finally came time to put him on the cover of a magazine, Rolling Stone chose an Instagram selfie. Before his name was released to the public, a cursory Google search of Tamerlan Tsarnaev brought up only a YouTube page and an article about his boxing career. On April 19th, the day the public learned the names of the Tsarnaev brothers, CNN, CBS, NBC, and countless other news sources ran stories about Tamerlan, the boxer. After James Holmes went on his own shooting spree in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, the media, spurred on by amateur Internet sleuths, found Holmes’s scant online presence in the form of an online-dating profile and a video of a younger Holmes giving a lecture at a science camp in San Diego. That video became the subject of analysis, including a Salon piece titled “What does the James Holmes video tell us?” It examined everything from Holmes’s choice of clothes to his general affect to his habit of making eye contact, all to speculate on when Holmes might have turned into a killer.

It wasn’t always this easy to create a profile. Before Cho Seung-Hui went on his own shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, in 2007, he mailed a package containing video, photographs, and writings to NBC News, which broadcast excerpts of the horrific portfolio on its newscast. Rodger didn’t need to bother with the postage fee or with the editorial decisions of a news outlet to project himself onto the public consciousness. We found it all, and we shared it.

The Internet, in fact, not only found Elliot Rodger but almost managed to find him in time. A few days before the killings, a user on Reddit’s “cringe” forum submitted a video of Rodger expressing the deep misogyny that has disturbed the country. On Thursday, May 22nd, another user, named Dave Kawamoto, watched the video and wrote, “If this isn’t a troll, then I bet we find out this guy is a serial killer. I’m getting a strong Patrick Bateman vibe from him.” Since news of the shooting broke, Kawamoto’s comment has been “upvoted” (Reddit’s method of showing approval) more than three thousand times. Kawamoto told me over e-mail that when he first saw Rodger’s video he assumed that it was the work of an Internet troll who was trying to get an odd, dark laugh. But after looking through Rodger’s YouTube profile, Kawamoto saw other videos in which Rodger did nothing but drive around and listen to music. “One of the songs was Katrina and the Waves ‘Walking on Sunshine’ which, other than the general banality of Rodger’s gripes as well as his entitlement and materialism, was probably what prompted my comparison to American Psycho protagonist/antagonist Patrick Bateman,” Kawamoto wrote.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Al Jazeera notes anti-black racism in Morocco, attacks on Christians in border areas of Kenya, and the ways in which the crackdown on Somali crime in Nairobi is hitting Somali businesses.


• Bloomberg notes that Ethiopian migrants trying to enter Saudi Arabia are being persecuted on their trip by Yemeni criminal gangs, in much the same way that Eritreans trying to get into Israel are persecuted by Sinai gangs.


• BusinessWeek argues that tacky gifts at the 911 gift shop sell because people want them, notes that South Koreans like shopping online internationally to get bargains, notes the growing presence of the Taliban in Karachi, and observes the rise of Chinese fashions.


• MacLean's comments on the growing tendency of Italian young adults to stay at home, comments on the return of Sarah McLachlan, looks at the phenomenon of doctoral students who don't go into academia, and notes that Pakistan's independent Geo TV is nearing shutdown by state harassment and assassination attempts.


• Wired observes innovative ways to deal with online harassment and notes a new method for interplanetary communication--at least to the moon--that is as fast as a good home Internet connection.