[PHOTO] Daylilies of Wychwood Park, by Davenport

I walked part of the way home, exhausted, through Wychwood Park. At the southern gate of this planned Neighbourhood adjoining Davenport Road were clumps of bright orange Daylilies, the flowers still fresh. They enliven me even now.

[LINK] "Panama and Nicaragua – Two Canals, One Shared Dream"

Iralís Fragiel of the Inter Press Service writes about how, between Panama's modernization of its interoceanic canal and Nicaragua's plans to build one, the dream of the canal as a trigger for growth seems widespread throughout Central America.

Nicholas Suchecki Guillén is blind. His dream was to visit the Panama Canal expansion works, touch the cement structures, and feel part of this new period of history in his country.

The 11-year-old stood on the third set of locks in Cocolí, near the Pacific Ocean. He had the privilege of forming part of the last group allowed to visit the complex before the flooding started – a long process that on this side began on Jun. 22.

Like Nicholas, many Panamanians visited the new locks free of charge on tours promoted by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), the agency that has run the canal since it was handed back to this country by the United States in 1999.

“I feel proud to see what we have done,” engineer Luis Ferreira, spokesman for the ACP, told IPS. “When the first locks were built, 222 Panamanians participated. On this occasion, 36,276 Panamanians took part.”

The expansion also represents a promise of economic growth. “The canal’s contributions to the state coffers amounted to more than nine billion dollars between 2000 and 2014. With the new locks, they could climb to three billion dollars a year,” Ferreira said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Bangkok is Sinking Into the Earth"

Via Towleroad I came across Patrick Winn's Global Post article looking at the hard fate facing Bangkok, either relocation further inland or an expensive seawall to avoid being flooded out.

Thailand’s capital is both glitzy and gritty, a city of glass towers and cement hovels teeming with nearly 10 million people.

All that steel and concrete and humanity sits on what was once marshland. The ground beneath is spongy and moist. Imagine a brick resting on top of a birthday cake. That’s Bangkok — and it’s sinking into the Earth at an alarming rate.

Thailand’s disaster specialists have been warning of this coming calamity for years. One expert has said he’s “worried about Bangkok resembling Atlantis.” Another previously told GlobalPost that the city will be under five feet of water by 2030.

Previous estimates showed that Bangkok is sinking more than three inches per year. But newer data suggests the rate is closer to four inches per year.

The predictions for 2100 are even more dire. By then, Bangkok will be fully submerged and unlivable.

[LINK] "Teens' attack on Chinese girl draws comparison to 'Lord of the Flies' from judge"

At the Los Angeles Times, Cindy Chang and Frank Shyong use a recent attack on a Chinese student in Los Angeles by her peers to look at the phenomenon of the "parachute kids".

The March 30 attack has prompted soul-searching not just in Rowland Heights but also in China — the victim and her alleged attackers were "parachute kids," part of a new wave of Chinese youngsters who live in Southern California and attend local schools while their parents remain back home.

Parachute kids typically stay in private homes in the San Gabriel Valley, paying for room, board, transportation and substitute parenting from their hosts. Most are in high school, though some are younger, studying here to get a jump start on admission to an American college.

In the attack on [Yiran "Camellia" Liu], who is 18, three teenagers have been charged as adults and pleaded not guilty to torture, kidnapping and assault. Attorneys for Yunyao "Helen" Zhai, 19, and Yuhan "Coco" Yang, 18, acknowledge that their clients participated in the attack and said they hope to reach plea agreements that dismiss the most serious charges. Torture carries a life prison sentence with the possibility of parole. A lawyer for the third defendant, Xinlei "John" Zhang, 18, argued in court that his client was only a bystander.

[. . .]

For parachute kids, living in the U.S. is a chance to learn a new language and culture and to escape China's ultra-competitive college entrance exams. Some thrive in their new environment and go on to colleges such as UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. For others, struggles with dating, friendships or school can spiral out of control without the steadying influence of parents and other family members.

The court testimony of Liu and the second victim offers a glimpse into a world devoid of adults, centered on the Chinese teahouses and karaoke parlors of the east San Gabriel Valley, where some of these teenagers drive Mercedes cars and stay out past 2 a.m. on school nights.

[LINK] "The foodie traveller … on the revival of Native American cuisine in Minneapolis"

This Johanna Derry article in The Guardian on a Native American-themed food truck in Minneapolis made my hungry, among other things.

Travel across the US and the cuisine doesn’t change much from state to state. It has a reputation for being sodium-filled, sweetened and glutenous (though, arguably, delicious) food. But chef Sean Sherman, known as the Sioux Chef, is hoping to redefine what we think of as “American” food.

At his newly launched Minneapolis food truck Tatanka, named after the American bison, dishes are made with ingredients that could be found living or growing locally before the arrival of European settlers. So you can forget processed sugars, wheat flour, beef, chicken and pork, Sherman serves wild rice and taco-style cornflour cakes with bison, turkey or rabbit, topped with wild greens and washed down with maple water. As well as being truly American, the food is super-healthy, organic – and local.

“We’ve worked with a couple of native-run farms to grow back some heirloom varieties of beans, squash, melon and corn,” says Sherman.

[LINK] "Not Exactly Friends of Greece"

At Transitions Online, Martin Ehl writes about how post-Communist countries in the Eurozone have angrily given up on Greece--a one-time model for transition--as a lost cause.

The anger and fatigue were visible in the face of Slovak Finance Minister Peter Kazimir 27 June when he spoke to reporters in Brussels about another urgent eurozone meeting on Greece.

“For four months we’ve been solving the electoral promises of Syriza,” Kazimir said to Czech and Slovak TV reporters. “If somebody has promised heaven on earth and isn’t able to deliver that, he shouldn’t blame others. Truth is truth, a lie is a lie.”

And that was the polite version. Behind closed doors, reporters were told, the post-communist eurozone member ministers used even stronger language.

These small countries de facto didn’t have much say in the solution to the Greek crisis, since decision-making was down to big member states, and the biggest contributors to the rescue funds. But having fresh memories of painful economic and political transformation, those governments – even the leftist ones, as in Slovakia – don’t have much patience with or understanding of Greek problems.

“We’re prepared to save Greece but not at any price,” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said a week earlier at a conference in Bratislava.

[WRITING] Andrew Wheeler at Comics Alliance on gay characters in fiction

At Comics Alliance, Andrew Wheeler writes about how it is never accidental if a particular writer in a particular medium does not feature LGBT characters, that choices are always made at some level.

Organic, meaningful and natural. That’s the familiar language of the writer looking for an excuse not to introduce diversity to his (or her; usually his) work. It’s the magical view of storytelling as a gift from the muses, except these muses are a vegetable delivery service, and if they didn’t bring any gay characters in the delivery box, you can’t use any gay characters in your recipe. If the gods of literature did not inspire you with gay characters, you cannot offend the gods and add some anyway.

In this way the writer can present his cowardice, laziness, and lack of imagination, as artistic integrity. “I couldn’t write gay characters; I didn’t have any.” Hand-to-forehead; the tortured auteur.

Yet writing is a sequence of decisions, and you can be sure that’s at least as true in Hollywood, or at a publisher like Marvel Comics, as it is anywhere else in storytelling. Writers build worlds, sometimes in advance and sometimes as they go, and if the writer decides that their world should have robots or dragons, you can be sure they’ll contrive ways to put the robots or dragons into key scenes in the story.

Gay characters aren’t like robots or dragons, because the world the writer is building already has same-sex relationships. I’m sorry if that seems prescriptive, but it’s true; people in same-sex relationships exist in all fictional worlds, because they are a natural, meaningful, and organic part of the real world. They are already there. Maybe they’re hiding behind the dragons, but they’re there.

Unless, that is, you choose to exclude them.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Big Picture shares photos from post-referendum Greece.


• blogTO looks at a recent live-tweeting of a bad date.


• Centauri Dreams notes the recovery of New Horizons.


• The Dragons' Gaze notes a new estimate for terrestrial exoplanets suggesting that every Sun-like star should at least have one.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that salt in the waters of Uranus and Neptune plays a critical role in determining their internal structure.


• Geocurrents looks at Dhofar.


• Language Hat notes that Stalin was quite multilingual.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the way the language used by women is policed.


• The Map Room's Jonathan Crowe links to an interview with fantasy map designer Robert Lazzaretti.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reflects on Australia's experience in the Great Depression, noting that it was a time when states were powerful.


• pollotenchegg notes post-Second World War fertility in Ukraine.


• Savage Minds has a roundup of links to various anthropology and social sciences blogs.


• Speed River Journal's Van Waffle shares photos from St. Jacob's Farmers market.


• Torontoist looks at a BDSM sex dungeon.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that Iceland has repealed its blasphemy law in direct reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Russia's historical singularity and recent evolution.

[AH] Peterson, Iroquoia Under Britain, 1783-1815

I've decided to go back to an old Tuesday night habit of posting DBWI reviews of books from alternate histories. Reactions, please.

***

I picked up this book, an Iroquoia State University book listed as required reading on some syllabuses I read online, in Cataraqui just before I finished my visit to Ontario and New York. I was familiar with the story of British Ontario from the Canadian perspective. What, I wondered, was the American perspective? It turns out that it was not very different from the Canadian perspective at all.

The textbooks I remember from Canadian history emphasize the extent to which the Loyalist settlement in what was then Upper Canada was transitory, the extent to which many of the settlers brought over under Britain were not Loyalists as such but rather Americans interested in settling a new frontier. That so few of the Loyalists accepted resettlement to Nova Scotia or the Ottawa Valley after 1815 has been seen as proof that the British identity proclaimed by so many locals on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars actually was not durable at all. Canadians are taught that redrawing the frontier between British North America and the United States of America, west of New England, to run along the 45th parallel established a durable frontier with little chance of spillage from one side over to the other.

This, it turns out, is almost exactly what Iroquoia Under Britain says. It's somewhat more generous, placing Ontario alongside rest of the Midwest as a space of mixed and debatable loyalties that could have gone either way. I suspect that this might be history written from the comfortable victor's perspective. Certainly visiting Toronto and Cataraqui I saw little enough sign of any British heritage, downtown street gridworks aside. The locals even talk with their own, non-Canadian, accent. Iroquoia is where its majority population wants it, and I cannot imagine any Canadian who would want to change this.

There are certainly uchronical possibilities here. United, American Iroquoia and Canadian Ontario have a combined population of nearly 13 million. It's unlikely that an *Upper Canada would approach this population, if traditional Canadian immigration restrictionism has anything to do with it, but even so an Upper Canada could be a force indeed inside Canada. It could plausibly challenge Laurentia for dominance in Canada, even, and undermine the whole French-dominant bilingualism of the country. In the United States, meanwhile, the changes could be more subtle. Iroquoia likely would not have become American if the Napoleonic Wars hadn't been taken over here so early, and if the Union had not needed compensation for the split of New England. Would the Civil War have been postponed?