Tomorrow sees the debut adventure of a new Doctor Who played by Peter Capaldi, heavily promoted by Space as an unmissable TV event owing to its street cred with geek chic culture, a worldwide cult following who will no doubt to cast a long shadow over next weekend's Fan Expo at the Metro Toronto convention centre. Not bad for a 51 year-old TV series.
However not all that long ago, Doctor Who was in the inter-dimensional dumps. After being created in 1963 by Toronto born CBC brain trust Sydney Newman, the series ran for 26 years on the BBC before losing its mojo and becoming a creaky pantomime joke. It was cancelled in 1989, and faded into the limbo of cult television hell kept alive only by nerdcore books and comics, mostly written by fans.
During those "wilderness years", rumours appeared frequently about Doctor Who's imminent return. Everything from Steven Spielberg producing an Americanized version with a rapping Tardis to a big screen version starring David Hasselhoff were mooted and booted. Few knew the truth was about to (de)materialize in Toronto.
With Toronto’s condo market still running on a full boil, it was only a matter of time before some unlucky buyers got burned.
CityNews reported Friday that Centrust, the developer behind a proposed hotel and condo project north of Toronto’s busy Highway 401, has allegedly skipped town with roughly $12 million in buyers’ cash. The story is still unravelling, but it appears the units first went up for sale in 2010, and Centrust later filed for bankruptcy without telling any of the purchasers. Now the company’s principals can’t be located, with some speculating they’ve left for Korea. All that remains is an empty lot and a bunch of angry people.
While real estate deposits are typically held in a trust account, at least one of the developer’s lawyers has also filed for bankruptcy. Police are investigating, although it’s unlikely the buyers will get their money back—at least not all of it. Buyers put down anywhere from $20,000 for condo units (the maximum covered by Ontario’s new home warranty corporation, Tarion) to $600,000 for commercial space.
The debacle should be a red flag for anyone eager to jump into the frothy condo market in cities like Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto, where gleaming new projects with tantalizing amenities—juice bars, splash pools—seem to pop up every week. All that money sloshing around is bound to attract inexperienced and, possibly, unscrupulous operators, with many experts saying the industry largely remains a “wild west” in Ontario when it comes to regulation.
Ivory Coast has closed its land borders with Ebola-affected West African neighbours Guinea and Liberia in an attempt to prevent the world's deadliest outbreak of the virus from spreading onto its territory, the government announced.
A number of African nations have defied advice from the World Health Organization (WHO) and put in place restrictions on travel to and from the countries where Ebola has appeared, which also include Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
The Philippines on Saturday ordered 115 troops to return home from peacekeeping operations in Liberia due to the outbreak there.
Meanwhile, Sierra Leone's parliament has passed a law that means a two-year prison sentence for anyone harbouring Ebola victims, the justice minister said on Saturday.
"The amendment is needed at this time taking into account the fact that when the 1960 ordinance was drafted and passed into law, a disease such as Ebola did not exist," Justice Minister Frank Kargbo told Reuters.
It may no longer be good enough to hang your food in a tree to keep it away from bears when you go camping, according to a first-of-its-kind study at the Washington State University Bear Research Education and Conservation Center.
Some — but not all — grizzlies can use primitive tools to thwart your efforts, veterinary student Alex Waroff found this summer in an experiment assisted by Charlie Robbins, WSU bear centre director, and O. Lynne Nelson, assistant director and professor of cardiology at WSU's Veterinary Teaching Hospital.
Nelson said the idea for the study came from a report in a peer-reviewed journal of "first tool use" by a brown bear in Alaska.
"The bear was observed to pick up a rock or shell and use it to scratch his face," Nelson said. "Those of us who work with bears read the report and essentially said, 'Really? Is that the best you have?' "Nelson said the idea for the study came from a report in a peer-reviewed journal of "first tool use" by a brown bear in Alaska.
Nelson said she, and others who work with bears, see evidence of bears manipulating objects for a specific goal all the time — the definition of tool use.
"Of course, all of these observations are anecdote," she said. "So we decided to put this problem-solving skill to standardized research protocol."
It’s dry season in San Andreas, where California’s ongoing drought and prolonged excessively hot weather make a fire hose at the Performing Animal Welfare Society Wildlife Sanctuary a welcome escape for three African elephants as familiar with frigid winters as drawn-out summers.
Iringa buries her head in the ground and kicks her foot up in the air as she bathes in the steady stream. Toka wiggles down in the mud, throwing dirt with her trunk, basking in the oozing slime.
This is probably the first year the ground these two elephants call home hasn’t frozen, said sanctuary co-founder Ed Stewart. Iringa and Toka, along with a third elephant, Thika, moved from the Toronto Zoo to their warm, sprawling habitat last fall.
[. . .]
Despite protests from zoo staff, the elephants’ relocation was finally pushed through in late 2012, when city council reaffirmed its decision to move the mammals to the sanctuary, which takes in retired zoo and circus elephants. Barker funded the October 2013 transport.
In the nine months since their hotly-contested move, Iringa, 45, Toka, 44, and Thika, 33, have started acting like elephants in the wild rather than captive creatures, Stewart said.
“Natural behaviour is exhibited a lot, like every single day,” Stewart said. “Every day they resemble elephants in Africa.”
In 1902 Lu Xun translated Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon into Chinese from the Japanese edition. Science fiction, he wrote in the preface, was ‘as rare as unicorn horns, which shows in a way the intellectual poverty of our time’. Not any more. The Three-Body Trilogy by Liu Cixin has sold 500,000 copies in China since the first volume was published in 2006 (it will come out in English in the autumn). Liu, an engineer, is one of the so-called ‘three generals’ of contemporary Chinese science fiction, along with Wang Jinkang and Han Song.
‘Sci fi,’ Han says, ‘can express a lot that can’t be expressed in other literature.’ His most recent collection of stories, High Speed Rail, begins with a train crash that recalls the politically sensitive rail collision in Wenzhou in July 2011. In an earlier novella, Taiwan Drifts, Taiwan has broken free from its moorings and is on a literal collision course with the mainland. Unsurprisingly, much of Han’s work isn’t published in the People’s Republic.
or is The Fat Years (2009) by Chan Koonchung. Set in 2013, it depicts an ‘age of Chinese ascendancy’ following a massive global financial crash. But the month-long crackdown that launched the golden era is missing from the population’s collective memory, and the water supply is probably spiked with a drug to keep everyone mildly euphoric. ‘The people fear chaos more than they fear dictatorship,’ a high-ranking Party official says.
But not being published in China doesn’t mean not being read. A lot of ‘unpublished’ sci fi is freely available online, and censors are engaged in a permanent game of cat-and-mouse with allusive writers and readers alert to disguised meanings. ‘For a long time,’ Chan told me, ‘Chinese intellectuals used history as a fable to talk about the present. Now, the newer generation is using science fiction to write about the present.’ (There are a few venerable precedents: Cat Country by Lao She was published in 1932; an English translation came out last year. It’s set in a Martian civilisation of cat-like people addicted to ‘reverie leaves’, oppressed by both physically stronger foreigners and the architects of ‘Everybody Shareskyism’.)
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