[PHOTO] Pool on rock, Montclair Avenue Parkette

This rust-stained pool in the top of some kind of metamorphic rock in the Montclair Avenue Parkette, on Spadina Road just above St. Clair, caught my attention as I passed by. It looks almost primeval, don't you think?

[LINK] "NDP lead widens slightly over Conservatives"

CBC's Éric Grenier reports on the latest on polling for the upcoming federal election. The NDP is doing qutie nicely.

As battle lines are drawn now that the campaign is underway, the New Democrats' slim lead over the Conservatives has widened slightly. And as leaders begin to jet across the country, regional contests are taking shape as well.

The latest numbers from CBC's Poll Tracker give the NDP 33.2 per cent support, for a lead of just more than two points over the Conservatives, who trail in second with 30.9 per cent. The Liberals follow in third with 25.9 per cent, while the Bloc Québécois and Greens each have 4.7 per cent support nationally.

The polls are painting a relatively clear picture of where things stand. Though a few individual polls have shown some striking results, including the first survey conducted after the writs were issued that put the NDP as high as 39 per cent, five of the last six polls have pegged the New Democrats to between 30 and 34 per cent support. The Conservatives have scored between 28 and 33 per cent over the last six polls, while the Liberals have registered between 25 and 26 per cent in five of the last seven.

[. . .]

The most recent standout poll giving the NDP a crushing 11-point lead, by Forum Research for the Toronto Star, could be a sign that Tom Mulcair's party is poised to make some major gains — or it could be an indication of how difficult it can be to gather a representative sample of Canadians on a Sunday that also happens to fall on a holiday weekend in much of the country.

But translating the average support levels into seats, the NDP would likely win between 116 and 143 seats if an election were held today. That puts them in a near tie with the Conservatives, who would take between 112 and 148 seats. The average projection from the Poll Tracker shows how close things really are, with both parties pegged at 127 seats.

[LINK] "Syrian refugees in Armenia 'stumble from one crisis to another'"

Writing for Al-Monitor, Peter Schwartzstein notes the plight of ethnic Armenian refugees from Syria now living in their titular homeland. Separated from their nominal co-ethnics by culture and Armenia's poverty, many seems to see Armenia as an interim place of residnce.

Were it not for the snow-capped summit of Mount Ararat shimmering in the distance, or the closer rumble of spluttering Lada cars, casual visitors to the downtown Lahmajun restaurant might be forgiven for thinking they’d strayed into Aleppo’s teeming old city.

Flour-covered bakers busily prep dough with minced meat toppings while peppering their speech with Arabic swear words. They greet regular diners with effusive Middle Eastern courtesy and break stride only to catch flashes of news from their TV.

Ever since he fled Syria’s commercial capital in mid-2012, when the country’s civil war took a serious turn for the worse, Gaidzas Jabakjunian has done his utmost to recreate the eatery he once operated in the heart of his beloved hometown.

“It reminds us of Aleppo,” he said, casting a quick, wistful glance at a photo of the city’s now mostly destroyed citadel. “It was the good life there, and we want things to be good here too.” In his absence, the city and its ancient monuments have crumbled amid government barrel bombs and rebel shelling.

But like many of the other 16,000 or so Syrians of Armenian origin who have descended on this small, landlocked state perched high in the Caucasus mountains, he’s found an imperfect sanctuary.

[LINK] "Syria’s opposition plans to replace Syrian pound with Turkish lira"

Al-Monitor's Mohammed al-Khatieb reports how the Syrian opposition is switching currencies, from the Syrian pound to the much stronger Turkish lira. This may well make economic sense, but it may also signal an expansion of the Turkish sphere of influence.

The Syrian opposition forces and institutions in the north are investigating whether the Turkish lira could substitute the Syrian pound, which has been drastically dropping in value since the start of the war in early 2011. The Syrian pound is still the main currency in the opposition-controlled areas, despite it having been three years since the Bashar al-Assad regime lost control of these areas.

In the eastern part of the country that is under the control of the opposition in Aleppo, one rarely sees products priced in foreign currencies. Food items such as bread and vegetables as well as fuel and clothing are priced in Syrian pounds; electronic devices such as imported mobile phones and computers are priced in US dollars.

At the end of each day, traders convert their money from the Syrian pound to foreign currencies in order not to lose out. Alaa, a seller of fuel in Bab al-Nairab, told Al-Monitor, “I don’t keep large sums of Syrian pounds. [The Syrian pound] is volatile and unstable.”

The Syrian pound has been witnessing sudden price fluctuations against foreign currencies, in light of the rapidly changing political and military events. Before the protests in March 2011 that demanded the departure of Assad, $1 was worth 46 Syrian pounds. But according to the Central Bank of Syria, $1 was worth 240 Syrian pounds on July 9. The exchange rate of the dollar on the black market in Aleppo is currently around 298 Syrian pounds.

The Committee for Replacing the Currency is now working in opposition-controlled areas in the north — Aleppo, Idlib, Hama and Latakia — to realize the replacement of the Syrian pound with the Turkish lira in the daily dealings of the population.

[LINK] "Obama Charm Drive Targets Venezuela After Iran, Cuba"

Nicole Gaouette of Bloomberg suggests that Obama might be trying to reset relations with Venezuela, taking advantage of the improvement of US relations with Cuba and of Venezuela's own internal difficulties.

State Department officers have been meeting quietly with officials in the leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro since April to develop what Secretary of State John Kerry has called “a normal relationship.”

The outreach is another test of President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural pledge to “extend a hand” to repressive and corrupt regimes if they are “willing to unclench” their fists.

Falling oil prices, plummeting foreign reserves, a 68.5 percent inflation rate and growing political tensions are battering Venezuela. There’s enough at stake that even a Justice Department probe into the alleged drug ties of the lead Venezuelan in the talks hasn’t derailed the diplomacy.

“The U.S. has a broader goal here, no matter what they think about the Venezuelan government,” said Christopher Sabatini, a Latin American studies professor at Columbia University in New York. “The goal is to prevent a black hole that will suck in other Latin American economies.”

One frequent critic of the administration’s foreign policy has cautious praise for the effort. “I’m very glad the administration is trying to deal with them” on political repression and staging fair elections in December, said Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

[LINK] "Meet Vietnam’s Gay Power Couple: U.S. Ambassador and His Husband"

The power couple in question, described by Bloomberg's John Boudreau, is not Vietnamese. Even so, that they have such an apparently high-profile position says much.

Since their December arrival in Vietnam, U.S. Ambassador Ted Osius and his husband have become the most prominent gay couple in the Southeast Asian country.

Osius and Clayton Bond landed with their toddler son shortly before the government abolished its ban on same-sex marriage. Now the couple, who recently adopted an infant girl, find themselves ambassadors of the nascent LGBT rights movement spreading across the country.

“A lot of young people have reached out to me on Facebook, to say: ‘We are happy to see somebody who is gay and is happy in his personal life but also has had professional success’,” Osius said in an interview. “I don’t think of it as advocating as much as supporting Vietnamese civil society in doing what it is already doing.”

The Communist government’s revised marriage law, while not officially recognizing same-sex marriage, and its tolerance of pride events has made Vietnam a leader in gay rights in Southeast Asia, potentially opening up opportunities to attract the tourist “pink dollar” and business executives seeking a more tolerant environment.

Yet young gay Vietnamese say they can be ostracized in a patriarchal society in which heterosexual marriage and parenthood are seen as the path to happiness. The legal changes also sit oddly in a country that more broadly curbs political dissent, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mail.

[LINK] Aditya Mukerjee on the problems of Unicode on a multilingual Internet

At Model View Culture, Aditya Mukerjee has a post with the arresting title of "I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name". Mukerjee makes the convincing case that the underpresentation of non-Western languages in Unicode, especially South and East Asian ones, is a serious problem for the Internet. That undeciphered scripts like Linear A are fully included is, well, odd.

My family’s native language, which I grew up speaking, is far from a niche language. Bengali is the seventh most common native language in the world, sitting ahead of the eighth (Russian) by a wide margin, with as many native speakers as French, German, and Italian combined.

And yet, on the Internet, Bengali is very much a second-class citizen – as are Arabic (#5), Hindi (#4), and Mandarin (#1) – any language which is not written with the Latin alphabet.

The very first version of the Unicode standard did include Bengali. However, it left out a number of important characters. Until 2005, Unicode did not have one of the characters in the Bengali word for “suddenly”. Instead, people who wanted to write this everyday word had to combine three separate, unrelated characters. For English-speaking teenagers, combining characters in unexpected ways, like writing ‘w’ as ‘\/\/’, used to be a way of asserting technical literacy through “l33tspeak” – a shibboleth for nerds that derives its name from the word “elite”. But Bengalis were forced to make similar orthographic contortions just to write a simple email: ত + ্ + ‍ = ‍ৎ (the third character is the invisible “zero width joiner”).

Even today, I am forced to do this when writing my own name. My name is not only a common Indian name, but one of the top 1,000 names in the United States as well. But the final letter has still not been given its own Unicode character, so I have to use a substitute.

A few other characters that were more common historically, though still used today, were also missing for the first decade of Bengali’s existence in Unicode. It’s tempting to argue that historical characters have no place in a character set intended for computers. On the contrary, this makes their inclusion even more vital: rendering historical texts accurately is key to ensuring their survival in the transition to the age of digital media.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Dragon's Gaze links to one paper suggerting that ocean worlds are likely to experience runaway glaciation and links to another looking at exoplanet WASP 14b.


• Will Baird of The Dragon's Tales is not fond of the new names for Pluto and Charon, and notes evidence that the Earth had a magnetic field from a very early point.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the import of Donald Trump for the Republican Party.


• Marginal Revolution notes the uniqueness of Singapore on its upcoming 50th anniversary of independence and approves of the novel The Mersault Investigation.


• Peter Watts at his blog reports on sundry things.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer speculates what might happen if Sanders get selected as Democratic candidate and black voters don't turn out.


• Towleroad notes how one homophobe in New York City made the mistake of attacking a married couple of West Point graduates.


• Understanding Society examines the social construction of technical knowledge.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the impact of Crimean Tatar activism in the diaspora.

[LINK] "Chris Hyndman’s death is a loss to the national family"

Anne Kingston's MacLean's article on the surprising death of Chris Hyndman, one half of the out couple behind the CBC afternoon show Steven & Chris, gets it. I would add that the couple of Steven and Chris was important simply because they were out, and themselves. It is a sad day.

This morning’s news that Chris Hyndman had died at age 49 met with a national gasp of shock followed by disbelief and sorrow. Social media tributes poured in for the Ottawa-born, Newfoundland-raised Hyndman, a household name as the irrepressible half of design/lifestyle duo everyone knew as “Steven and Chris.” He’d joked, mugged and charmed his way into the hearts of millions since the pair burst on the scene as the stylish-yet-friendly Designer Guys, which was also the name of their HGTV makeover show that debuted in 2001.

For the past eight years, the couple had brandished their signature style and chemistry as co-hosts of CBC-TV’s afternoon lifestyle show, Steven and Chris. Like all famous pop-culture couples, from Nick and Nora to Sonny and Cher, they knew their roles: Sabados was the focused, practical, hard-working one, Hyndman, the self-deprecating, avowed scatterbrain who emanated joy and delight with every breath he took.

Chuck Thompson, head of public affairs at CBC English services, announced Hyndman’s death this morning. Few details have been released. Toronto Police confirmed his body was found in a Toronto alley last night. No cause of death has been given; there is no ongoing criminal investigation.

Intensifying the sense of loss is the fact that Hyndman was half of a beloved professional-personal duo, a rare occurrence in Canadian popular culture. The two men had been together since meeting in a Toronto bar in 1988 when both worked for CityTV, Hyndman as a makeup artist. They moved in together three months later. Their design company, the Sabados Group, was founded in 1992. But TV, beginning with appearances on CityTV, was their calling. Designer Guys was followed by Design Rivals and So Chic with Steven and Chris.