[PHOTO] Plush home on Queen Street East

The dog house for plush animals in the front yard of this Queen Street East home caught my attention yesterday.

[URBAN NOTE] "Church of Scientology owes city over $100,000 as Yonge-Bloor site languishes"

The Church of Scientology's downtown Toronto location on Yonge just south of Bloor, where I had some readings performed on me on the streetSeptember 2004 and where I witnessed Anonymous protests in February 2008, has today come up in the news for back taxes. The Toronto Star's Stephen Spencer Davis reports.

The Church of Scientology of Toronto, which owns 696 Yonge St., owes more than $61,000 in property taxes and penalties for 2014, out of a total of just under $112,000. The organization made only partial payments of its 2014 property taxes, according to Supervisor of Collections Stephen Franceschini.

It also owes $57,348.15 in taxes and penalties on the interim 2015 property tax bill, according to Franceschini.

Property owners receive an interim tax bill near the beginning of each year, and typically a final bill in May. Payments on the 2015 interim bill were due March 2, April 1 and May 1, according to the city’s website.

“We have contacted the local Church in Toronto and they intend to get this paid forthwith,” Scientology spokesperson Linda Wieland said in an email.

The news comes as the organization says it still plans to convert the Yonge St. building into one of Scientology’s “Ideal Orgs,” which it first announced in early 2013. Scientology describes these facilities as “cathedrals” in desirable locations, “intended to meet increasing demand worldwide for Scientology services and initiatives.”

[LINK] "Welcome, Talibanistan?"

Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs considers if the survival of the Taliban, and the collapse of state authority in much of Pakistan and Afghanistan, means a new country is set to form.

In 2001, a U.S.-led coalition threw the Taliban out of Kabul, their removal from power the price they paid for the sanctuary they had provided to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But in the decade and a half since, the military might of the West has been unable to eradicate the Islamist movement from the land it had supposedly liberated.

Now the ISAF task force has wound down, and the Taliban are still around, their estimated 60,000 fighters largely in control of the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan — the government of which they also fight.

Although it is unlikely that they will defeat either government (at least any time soon), their presence on both sides of the so-called Durand Line that is the official Af-Pak border, has in places rendered it as meaningless as the Syrian-Iraqi border straddled by Islamic State.

However, most cartographers still obligingly trace the Durand Line across any new map of the area. So it is a bit of a shock to see this map, which overlays the official map with the actual situation on the ground.

But maybe this is what the official cartography for the region will look like, some years hence. Assuming the state structures currently holding sway from Kabul and Islamabad don't disintegrate, nor manage to regain control over the border area, a logical accommodation could be to recognize the writ of the Taliban over the area where they rule the roost. Et voila, Talibanistan, nestled between a reduced Afghanistan and Pakistan. Born out of a bloody revolution, just like France. Although its slogan is unlikely to be liberté, égalité, fraternité.

[LINK] "Navajo Nation president sworn in after contentious race"

I've been keeping an eye on the politics of the Navajo Nation, thanks to Al Jazeera's coverage.

The new president of the Navajo Nation was sworn in on Tuesday after an election delayed for five months by a dispute over a rival's language ability, and he vowed to uphold the nation's culture and sovereignty while putting forth a pro-business agenda.

Businessman and former Navajo Nation Council member Russell Begaye won the leadership of the largest U.S. Native American tribe after a contentious race last month that was dominated by controversy over a rule that presidential candidates be fluent in Navajo.

In his inaugural address, Begaye spoke of his desire to protect a language steeped in tradition and value.

“Let's not ever be ashamed of speaking Navajo again as we move forward on this awakening of a new dawn,” said Begaye, who drew repeatedly on his campaign slogan, “Awakening of a New Dawn,” when speaking after he took the oath of office in Fort Defiance, Arizona.

He signed an agreement that includes moving forward with a tram — the controversial Grand Canyon Escalade project — that would shuttle tourists from cliff tops to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and other projects he agreed with his predecessor Ben Shelly to push forward. On the list is a rail port that would export crops and coal from the reservation and the pursuit of clean coal technology.

[LINK] "Here's a Bargain: Federico Fellini's $4.6 Million Home in Recessionary Rome"

The weakness of the Italian real estate market is the subject of Flavia Krause-Jackson and Giovanni Salzano's Bloomberg article. That property is so important in Italy is a sad irony.

What does $4.6 million buy you in Manhattan? A two-bedroom apartment in the Flatiron District with views of the Empire State Building. In Rome, the same amount in euros can get you something twice the size: Federico Fellini's home no less, a fifth-floor attic in a historic palazzo where the filmmaker lived while making "La Dolce Vita," according to Coldwell Banker, the real estate brokers in charge of the sale.

Even if you're not a film buff, a bargain is a bargain: three bedrooms, three bathrooms, terraces overlooking lush gardens of an aristocratic villa. Similarly-sized pads in the area go for about 2 million euros, according to data provided by Italy's Ministry of Finance. But the fame of its ex-resident doubles the asking price for 141 Via Archimede.

[. . .]

Many Italians own more than one piece of property. To be precise, each homeowner has an average 1.3 properties, according to a Bloomberg News calculation of Finance Ministry data. Average housing wealth is estimated by the Bank of Italy to be at more than 200,000 euros per household.

Now, if you're anything like the typical Italian household, whose average disposable income is a mere $24,724, and your children are staring at youth unemployment of 40 percent in a country mired in a record-long recession, chances are you'll be eager to sell that second home you're paying much-hated taxes on.

Problem is, the housing glut is driving prices down. Even for something as priceless as Fellini's Roman abode. After Cyprus, Italy is the euro-area country where house prices fell most in the last two years.

[LINK] "Set to land in Cannes, The Little Prince reigns in Turkey"

CBC's Nil Köksal had a nice article about the popularity of The Little Prince in Turkey on the eve of the film release.

An international bestseller since 1943, the film version will likely introduce many young film fans to the story for the first time. It already has a huge following here in Turkey, which savvy publishers have rushed to take advantage of.

"There was great excitement among Turkish publishers" on Dec. 31, writer Kaya Genç tells me. That was the moment when the copyright on the book expired in many parts of the world.

[. . .]

One reason Turks love the tale is probably because of the Turkish character early in the story. In the fourth chapter, Saint-Exupéry writes of a Turkish astronomer wearing a fez, a traditional Ottoman hat.

Genç, though, thinks there's more to it. "My theory is that there are some parallels between Ottoman poetry…and The Little Prince. They use similar imagery — the rose, the nightingale, the garden … the lover and the beloved. We have these parallels in Ottoman poetry and I think it's in our genes in a way," he says.

[LINK] "Study undermines narrative of B.C. First Nations as simple hunter-gatherers"

Last week, the Vancouver Sun shared Geordon Omand's Canadian Press article examining the intensive nature of food production among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific coast of North America.

The discovery of an expansive system of historic clam gardens along the Pacific Northwest coast is contributing to a growing body of work that's busting long-held beliefs about First Nations as heedless hunter-gatherers.

A team of researchers at Simon Fraser University has revealed that First Nations from Alaska to Washington state were marine farmers using sophisticated cultivation techniques to intensify clam production.

In an article published recently in the journal American Antiquity, lead author Dana Lepofsky argued that the findings counter the perception of First Nations living passively as foragers in wild, untended environments.

"Once you start calling someone a hunter-gatherer there's something implied ... about not really being connected to the land or sea and not needing much from it," she said.

"Even if they aren't formal agricultural plots in the way that Europeans recognized, they were still cultivating the landscape."

[WRITING] "Why romance novelists are the rock stars of the literary world"

Emma Teitel of MacLean's had a fascinating study of romance novels and their writers. She makes the case that it's an astonishingly friendly, yet frequently overlooked, field of popular literature. Lessons, I'd suggest, could be taken from it.

When American filmmaker Laurie Kahn set out to make Love Between the Covers, a documentary about the women who read and write romance novels, she was struck by how often she heard the same story. It wasn’t a tale of beefy bodice rippers or love at first sight; it was a story about snobs. “I can’t tell you how many people I interviewed,” says Kahn, “who told me that people will walk up to them on a beach and say, ‘Why do you read that trash?’ ” Apparently, where lovers of romance novels go, contempt follows. Sometimes it’s subtle contempt—a raised eyebrow from a colleague, or a snarky comment from a friend (usually the kind of person who claims to read Harper’s on a beach vacation). Other times it’s more overt, even potentially damaging. When Mary Bly (pen name Eloisa James), an academic and New York Times bestselling author, began writing romance, she was advised to keep her fiction writing secret or risk not making tenure at the university where she worked.

For some reason, argues Kahn, perhaps because its subjects are female, romance novels are perceived as fundamentally silly, when other popular “genre fiction”—namely, fiction by and for men—is not. “Nobody,” she says, would walk up to “a man reading Stephen King, or a mystery or sci-fi novel” and scoff. And she’s right: Stephen King may write circles around romance novelist Nora Roberts, but mystery-thriller buffs James Patterson and Dean Koontz most certainly do not. Yet Roberts is the butt of jokes—a universal default example of “bad writing,” while her equally schlocky male contemporaries get a free pass.

A filmmaker whose previous work includes the Emmy-winning documentary A Midwife’s Tale, and Tupperware!, a film about American women of the 1950s who made small fortunes throwing Tupperware parties, Kahn wanted to explore not only the double standard faced by romance authors, but the wild success and collaborative nature of the romance community itself. Love Between the Covers, which premieres at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival at the end of the month, explores life from the perspective of the genre’s giants and veterans—the Nora Robertses and Beverly Jenkinses of the field (the latter a pioneer of African-American romance writing)—and its millions of readers and aspiring writers, some of whom work full-time jobs, yet write more than a thousand words every evening. (When Lenora Barot, pen name Radclyffe, began writing what would become groundbreaking lesbian romance fiction in the ’90s, she was a full-time plastic surgeon.) “It’s these untold stories of women that really appeal to me,” says Kahn. “Here is this community that is huge. It’s a multi-billion-dollar business and the women in it are writing a huge range of romantic fiction and no one gives them the time of day.”