[PHOTO] Six photos of the cherry blossoms of High Park, Toronto

As promised, the cherry blossoms of Toronto's High Park were in full bloom this Sunday. While the manicured slopes of the park were not as dense with people as I remembered them to be last year, there were still plenty of people. Fortunately, there were also plenty of blossoms.

blogTO links to a selection of photos from its feed. What I think are my six best are below.

[LINK] "What Was Gay?"

J. Bryan Lowder's long article in Slate, grounded in his biography and historically informed, is a fascinating exploration of the distinctions between sexual orientation and the cultural elements associated with said. What happened? What might happen yet? Strongly recommended, all of it.

[A]nyone who’s even eavesdropped on the long-running debate over “gay identity” among homosexuals will know that this position—that gayness might be located in sensibility or style as well as sex—is currently anathema. We live in the era dominated by a born-this-way, “it’s-a-small-part-of-me” ethos that minimizes gay difference to sexual attraction. The current dogma among mainstream LGBTQ advocacy organizations and the majority of gay writers and public figures sees gayness as little more than a hazy accident of biology that shouldn’t be legally or socially disadvantaging. Any notion of some inherent cultural affiliation (“gays love Gaga”) or unique sensibility (“fags get fashion”) has been pretty much disavowed within the community—imagine the uproar if some naive network executive tried rebooting a minstrelsy-driven show like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2015—and many straights have gotten the memo as well.

This move away from broad-brush gay stereotypes is wise to a point. Ascribing an obligatory cultural component to homosexuality has caused a range of problems, from the merely annoying Oh you’re gay? Let’s go shopping!–variety to the more pernicious example of admission to safer, queer-only housing in prison being determined based on tests of “gay insider” knowledge or behaviors that not all queer people necessarily possess. Clearly, a person’s homosexuality should not be taken as evidence of any special affiliation, just as heterosexuals, united only by their sexual connection and propensity for procreation, are never assumed to share anything else. This has been one of the key arguments in the “we are normal” case for equality—and it’s been largely successful. Though the job is not totally complete, it feels like we are working as fast as we can to build what gay academic and activist Dennis Altman imagines in his provocatively titled The End of the Homosexual?: a world in which we no longer see “homosexuality as a primary marker of identity, so that sexual preference comes to be regarded as largely irrelevant, and thus not the basis for either community or identity.”

However, any serious “post-gay” triumphalism would seem a touch premature. For one thing, folks on the ground are not as uninterested in gay cultural practice as the “gay culture is dying” headlines suggest. Enthusiastic audiences tune in to RuPaul’s Drag Race for lessons in a certain school of gay “herstory” on a weekly basis, and homos of a less glittery make clamored to HBO’s Looking in a desperate search for images of “real gay life”—implying that it must indeed be distinct from the straight life portrayed on other programs. And politically, there’s a sense in which minimizing gay difference now, right at the moment when the majority of Americans are actively grappling with it, amounts to a cop-out: “Americans are uniquely hasty to assert a ‘post-’ right before we approach the finish line,” Suzanna Walters notes in The Tolerance Trap, “effectively shutting off the real and substantive public debate needed for that final push.”

Instead of “post,” a more accurate diagnosis of our moment might be schismatic. History shows that the divide between gays who reject any cultural embroidery on their sexual orientation and those who spend evenings hand-stitching it has been around since homosexuality, as a human category, was invented. But the ascendancy of the former position, tied as it has been to the civil rights achievements of the past 20 years, has left us culture queens so embattled that a conscious uncoupling is starting to sound like a good idea. A “gaybro” doesn’t want to camp it up with a “stereotype” like me? Fine—it was never fair to assume that he should (or could) anyway. Nate Silver wants to identify as “sexually gay but ethnically straight”? Great. Let’s make that split an option for everyone.

To Silver’s credit, the notion of gayness as an “ethnicity” that one might choose to invest in or not is actually very useful if schism is your goal. On a post about super-gay Internet sensation Brendan Jordan, the wonderfully flamboyant young queen who rose to fame last year for voguing in the background of a local news report, a Slate commenter offered a similar sentiment: “One of the reasons I so dislike identifying myself as a gay man,” he wrote, “is that I don’t want people to hear that word, gay, and link me in their mind to someone with a personality and manner like this kid or, say, a Jack McFarland. Homosexual actually feels more comfortable to me than gay.”

[LINK] "Syria's last bookstores"

Al Monitor's Samer Mohammad Ismail describes the sad decline of the bookstore in Syria. Even before the civil war, it seems that literature was on the decline.

It was not the catastrophe alone that led to the disappearance of the most important bookstores in Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia and other cities. In fact, several bookstores had vanished long before the outbreak of the war.

This time, a more realistic version of the words Gabriel García Márquez wrote in “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” was experienced by Said al-Barghouthi, owner and manager of Kanaan Publishing and Distribution House.

Remembering the capital’s bookstores, he wrote, “My memory takes me back to the early 1950s. My school was close to the flea market — the only place in Damascus that sold stationery and some used school books at the time.”

Damascus did not have stores selling large numbers of books. Barghouthi added, “The city’s population at the time did not exceed 300,000 people, and the bookstore was more like a kiosk ... [selling] magazines, newspapers, books, cheese, sandwiches. Bookstores did not have the same significance as today and were not specialized in selling books.”

In the 1960s and 1970s — which means during the era of big dreams, as described by Barghouthi — bookstore frequenters would go together to find books. Bookstores flourished and filled the streets of Damascus. The Palestinian Semaan Haddad established the Atlas bookstore in al-Salihiyah Street, Mohammad Hussein al-Nouri established Al-Nouri bookstore in Al-Hijaz square and Mohammad Ziad Tanbakji established the Damascus bookstore; the oldest was Yaqadha bookstore.

[LINK] "For Chinese Tourists Behaving Badly, A Government Blacklist"

At NPR's Parallels, Anthony Kuhn notes how the Chinese government is clamping down on badly-behaving tourists. The worst may not be allowed to leave the country.

Not only are the Chinese bemoaning their rudeness at home and abroad, the government has responded with new rules that took effect this week, aimed at keeping loutish travelers in check.

And in a major innovation, the government has named four tourists to a new blacklist, which could affect their credit ratings and freedom to travel for years.

There was considerable competition in the airborne category.

Travelers Wang Sheng and Zhang Yan earned special recognition for their performance on a Bangkok-to-China flight last December. When they did not immediately get the seats they wanted, they threw hot instant noodles at a flight attendant and threatened to blow up the plane. The pilot then made a U-turn and headed back to Bangkok, where police detained the pair.

Another traveler was blacklisted for opening a door on his flight as it was about to take off. Another was photographed climbing on statues of Chinese civil war-era soldiers.

Last year, Chinese tourists took 109 million trips overseas, 20 percent more than in 2013. Many host nations may be inclined to overlook misbehaving Chinese tourists because China now contributes more money to the global tourism industry than any other nation.

[LINK] "Putin's Tanks Draw Cheers in Russian City Jammed Between NATO Nations"

Bloomberg's Leonid Ragozin visits Kaliningrad during the celebrations of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany to find a population that is cautiously accepting official mythology.

Tanks and ballistic missiles lumbered past thousands of spectators gathered in Kaliningrad on Saturday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe, an historic triumph for Russia that the Kremlin has used to whip up a new nationalist fervor.

“We need to show our enemies, who deem us guilty just because we exist, that Russia is a very peculiar woman—she can knock you down without a second thought,” said Aleksandr Sapenko, a 64-year-old history teacher, citing the U.S. and European Union as Russia’s main enemies. “Soviet soldiers saved them from the Nazi gas chambers, but they are barking at Russia like a pack of stray dogs.”

This Russian enclave was once the German province of East Prussia; the city’s Victory Square was known for centuries as Hansa Platz and briefly as Adolf Hitler Platz. On Saturday, when Russia and the former Soviet republics marked the anniversary of Hitler’s defeat in World War II, the square was awash in Russian and Soviet flags. Many people brought their children, whom soldiers encouraged to climb tanks and pose for photographs while wearing garrison caps and clutching tank-shaped balloons. Similar parades were held all over Russia, notably in Moscow, the capital, where more than 16,500 troops marched in Red Square.

In the postwar settlement, East Prussia was incorporated into the Russian republic of the USSR, its entire population deported to Germany and the province repopulated with Soviet citizens, primarily ethnic Russians. Nearly flattened by British bombers and Soviet artillery, the East Prussian capital, Koenigsberg, was rebuilt as a drab Soviet city and renamed Kaliningrad, after Mikhail Kalinin, a Stalin functionary who held the largely ceremonial post of Soviet president during the war.

[. . .]

At the rally, Nikita, a 21-year-old student sporting a red Soviet flag on his bicycle, complained about the hardware. “Why couldn’t they show the new T-90 tanks instead of the old T-72s?” he said, more satisfied with the state-of-the-art Platforma-M robot tanks. Nikita said such parades were necessary so that no one forgets Russia’s war sacrifice. “It is also important to show our military might, but it’s not to scare the neighbors,” he said. “They are not our enemies, and we should all be united.”

[LINK] "Brazil’s urban Indians confront city life head on, with headdress off"

Al Jazeera America's James Young notes how Brazil's increasingly urbanized indigenous peoples are facing serious problems in their new environments. This story is sadly familiar to this Canadian.

The bow and arrow, recipes for plant-based medicines and traditional headdress hanging on the walls contrast sharply with the jumble of office blocks visible through an open window and the industrial clank of a nearby train transporting iron ore from a mine outside the city. The Center for Urban Indians, a resource center and meeting space, is housed in a cramped room in a drab two-story building on one of the busiest streets of this sprawling city in the southeast of Brazil.

“Everything changed when we arrived in the city,” said Paulinho Aranã, 54, who along with 14 family members moved to Belo Horizonte from the Jequitinhonha Valley in the north of the state of Minas Gerais in 1979. “We had grown up in the forest. The only thing we knew was animals, not cars or planes.”

“The first time I had an electric shower, I was terrified that the water would be electrified,” remembered Juliana Pataxó, 35. “So I’d fill a bucket with water and take it into the bathroom and use that instead. When my cousins asked me what I was doing, I’d lie and say it was to clean the bathroom afterward.”

Araña and Pataxó — both leaders at the center — are two of more than 315,000 of Brazil’s approximately 817,900 indigenous people who live in urban areas.

“Many come for work or for health care,” said Pablo Camargo, a historian and representative of the Minas Gerais branch of FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation of the Brazilian Government. “Also, life on Indian territories can be difficult. Many are small, and old ways of life such as hunting and fishing are no longer practical. Social problems such as alcoholism and unemployment are common. And today younger indigenous people have access to technology and so are becoming more and more interested in what the cities have to offer.”

The profile of urban Indian populations can vary greatly from city to city, with indigenous culture enjoying greater visibility in the more remote north and west of Brazil. In the vast cities of the prosperous south and southeast of the country, such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, however, urban Indians often struggle to be seen and heard.

[LINK] "Rogers axes OMNI news programs, cancels Breakfast Television in Edmonton"

CBC News notes the decline of some prominent non-English television programs in Canada. Is this a marker of the decline of television generally, and the shift to online sources?

Rogers Media has cancelled multicultural news programs in Ontario and B.C. and will replace them with new current affairs programming targeting the same audience.

On Thursday, Rogers Media said in a release that it will air three new half-hour current affairs programs that will air in multiple languages in the 8:30 to 10 p.m. timeslot. The new shows will be hosted by "veteran OMNI Television on-air personalities," Rogers said.

Those shows will replace 30-minute newscasts that used to air weeknights on OMNI's local channels. Unifor, one of the largest media unions in the country, said Rogers is also cancelling V-Mix and Bollywood Boulevard, two English-language programs for South Asian audiences.

[LINK] "More than 2 million people still pay for AOL dial-up"

Chris Matyszczyk's CNET report notes that a surprisingly large number of people are still paid subscribers of AOL's dialup services. Who are they? Why? He considers the issue.

AOL's quarterly earnings report, published Friday, revealed discreetly that 2.1 million people are still dialing up and paying AOL around $20 a month for the privilege of accessing the Internet.

Dial-up is infernally slow. It's about as narrowband as a contemporary connected mortal could imagine and far beyond anything they could tolerate. Just to compare, in January the FCC redefined broadband as 25 megabits per second, though the average speed in the US is 10 Mbps. Dial-up is 56 kilobits per second. (As a quick refresher: kilo- anything is much smaller, or in this case slower, than mega- anything.) About 70 percent of Americans have broadband at home, as of a September 2013 survey, the latest figures from the Pew Internet Research project.

So who might these people be? I have contacted AOL to ask whether it could offer a breakdown and will update, should I hear.

One is left, therefore, to speculate. An obvious view would be that many of these people are senior citizens. For them, perhaps, the price is comfortable. Even more comfortable is the security of knowing how something works because they've been doing it for a long time.

Another group might be those for whom $20 a month is simply all they can afford. They might not be able to stretch to bundled cable packages or fancy computers. AOL offers, in their minds, a good deal.

Of course, it might be that some are neither grouped by age nor income bracket. They're simply people who are too ingrained in habits. They either don't notice what is going on around them, or they just don't care.

[LINK] "Go north, not west: Yukon lures businesses with new company rules"

CBC's Paul Haavardsrud wrote at the beginning of the month how Canada's northern Yukon Territory wants to make its autonomous government a potent selling factor for business, by making Yukon a preferred place to incorporate businessses. Leveraging its sovereign jurisdiction in this way could work: Look at Delaware.

What do a Chilean mining company, an Illinois-based pharmaceutical firm that just sold for $12.8 billion, and a gold producer from Colorado operating in Turkey have in common?

They're all registered in Yukon.

That Alacer Gold, Catamaran, or Orosur Mining don't do any work in the territory is a quirk of Canadian regulatory history that Yukon wants to make less of an oddity. So today, Yukon is changing its Business Corporations Act in a bid to convince even more far-flung companies that part of the answer to tapping Canada's capital markets can be found north of 60.

"If you want to send a message to the business community that this is a good place to come, what better way to say it than you've got really good business legislation," says Paul Lackowicz, a partner at Lackowicz & Hoffman, a Whitehorse law firm.

[. . .]

How much of a difference can some esoteric changes to business legislation really make? For a province like Ontario or Alberta, not much at all. But for a remote locale with a population of only 36,500, even a little economic activity can move the needle.

In that regard, Yukon is in the same boat as Delaware, a tiny state that's so amenable to business that nearly half of the public companies in the United States are incorporated there. Yukon's regulatory changes don't include tax benefits, so no one should expect it to become Delaware North.

Registering for a business licence in a jurisdiction is also different than incorporating there as a legal entity. Still, in a sparsely populated territory that raised its employment rate 2.1 percentage points in 2013 by adding an extra 400 jobs, even changes at the margin can matter.