[PHOTO] Bilbo, with statues

When I saw this pair of statues adorning the front lane of a home on Russell Hill Road one evening this week, I knew what I had to do.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers what it takes to be a credible journalist.


• Centauri Dreams considers the study of planets orbiting brown dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper considering if Sedna was captured from another star.


• The Dragon's Tales wonders if orbital probes can detect volcanism on Venus.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell points out that the wealthier Africa becomes the larger a source of migrants it will be.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money uses Magic Mike to study the repression of female desire.


• Marginal Revolution reports a study of Scandinavia.


• pollotenchegg maps economic growth over 2004-2014. The east did worse--the Donbas much worse--than the west.


• Spacing Toronto looks at abandoned rail lines and hidden streets in Toronto.


• Window on Eurasia looks at problems in Dagestan, suggests Russian fondness for Soviet symbols without beign aware of Soviet ideology will be a problem, and suggests that the Krajina will be a model for the Donbas republics.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto library to roll out book-lending machine at Union Station"

The Toronto Star's Tara Deschamps reports on the Toronto library service's interesting experiment.

The Toronto Public Library hopes to roll out a book-lending machine at Union Station by the end of the year. If it’s successful, more could be on their way.

The move is a novel idea aimed at making the library more accessible to Torontonians and broadening the number of users, which sits around 18.5 million annually.

“You aren’t expecting a library presence in Union Station, so it will be a convenient way for commuters to access library content,” said Ana-Maria Critchley, the library’s manager of stakeholder relations.

Because the organization is still seeking vendors to take on the project and working with stakeholders at Union Station to choose a spot for it, she said the machine’s exact functions have yet to be determined.

However, a library report earlier this year said initial planning for the kiosk “focussed on access to high demand books and DVDs,” but “may be adjusted to incorporate downloading e-books.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Francophone bookstore aims to fill ‘void' in Toronto’s literary landscape"

Jillian Kestler-D’Amours at the Toronto Star shares the exciting news that a Québec chain hopes to open up a French-language bookstore in collaboration with the Alliance Française.

Christophe Gagnon-Lavoie, co-owner of La Librairie du Quartier in Quebec City, told the Star that Toronto is an ideal place to open the shop, which would be the only exclusively French-language bookstore in the city.

The GTA, he said, is home to a sizeable francophone community (numbering almost 125,000 in 2011) and many Francophiles and French-language students.

“There is certainly a place, we think, for a small bookstore of French books in Toronto,” he said.

The project is being facilitated by the Alliance Française de Toronto, executive director Thierry Lasserre told the Star, and the future library will be housed at the group’s downtown building at 24 Spadina Rd.

“The francophone bookstore project at the Alliance is a project that I’ve been working on for the past six or eight months,” Lasserre said.

[ISL] "The Island Fringe Festival"

At his blog, Peter Rukavina wrote about the Island Fringe Festival and its import, opening today.

When I moved to Prince Edward Island, in the early 1990s, I was 27 years old.

And as near as I could tell, every other person on the Island was older than 50 or younger than 15. It was as if a reverse-Logan’s Run-like event had occurred, sucking all the cool young rockers out of the city.

If there’s any demographic change that’s happened in the intervening 20 years, it’s that the young, creative minds are, more and more, choosing to stay here at home. And you can see the result in the art, the food, the film, the music, the theatre, the coffee, the fashion. It’s a change that makes the city, and the Island, ever-more-liveable.

One of the events that’s an obvious expression of this demographic retention is The Island Fringe Festival, which runs next week here in Charlottetown, from August 6 to 9, 2015.

[URBAN NOTE] "Creative young Brits are quitting London for affordable Berlin"

The Guardian's Johanna Kamradt reports about a new trend in intra-European migration.

The building that houses Agora, tucked away in a small side-street in residential Neukölln, in an old lock-making factory, is easy to ignore.

Outside a handful of people in their late twenties and early thirties are milling about, smoking, working on their MacBook Airs, chatting. On the short walk from the front gate to the front door snippets of three different conversations in English can be heard. Inside is a sea of laptops on desks, with workers fuelled by cortados, flat whites and a daily changing menu, written in English; a woman with a strong German accent orders a coffee in English, because the woman behind the counter doesn’t speak German.

Dani Berg manages Agora’s “food platform” (which includes pop-ups and “performance series”), as well as the cafe. She moved to Berlin just over a year ago, after spending a decade in London.

“The first time I visited Berlin was eight years ago. People told us not to come to the district I now work and live in, Neukölln, as it was considered to be dangerous, and it wasn’t even in the guidebooks or anything. Now it’s filled with tourists and expats.”

Her decision to leave London was mainly a financial one. “I was working seven days a week and paying £800 for a shared flat in Lewisham. We kept moving further and further into south-east London, until I felt I needed to leave entirely. I’m part of a big exodus; I know many people who have moved from east London to south-east London and then to Berlin. The New Cross to Neukölln Express.”

[. . .]

Berliners are noticing how rapidly the city is growing and changing, and how much rents are increasing (despite a recent price cap). Berlin is now the third most visited city in Europe, having surpassed Rome, with only London and Paris ahead of it; many of these visitors are deciding to stay for good. With 45,000 new inhabitants in 2014, Berlin’s population is now more than 3.5 million, marking the 10th year in a row that the city has grown by a similar amount. In 2013 an estimated 10,000 Brits were living in Berlin – this number increased by 35% within a year, rising to just under 13,500 as of November 2014.

[LINK] "Humanitarian Crisis Looming Over Venezuela, Says ICG"

The Inter Press Service's Jaya Ramachandran writes about fears Venezuela might become a failed state.

A Brussels-based think-tank has warned Venezuela of an impending humanitarian calamity in tandem with growing political instability.

While the accelerating deterioration of the South American country’s political crisis is cause for growing concern, says the International Crisis Group, there is a less widely appreciated side of the dramatic situation: “A sharp fall in real incomes, major shortages of essential foods, medicines and other basic goods and breakdown of the health service are elements of a looming social crisis.”

In a recent briefing, the Crisis Group says: “If not tackled decisively and soon, it will become a humanitarian disaster with a seismic impact on domestic politics and society, and on Venezuela’s neighbours. This situation results from poor policy choices, incompetence and corruption.”

The Group points to another aspect of the impending humanitarian crisis: “Those with ailments such as cancer, HIV-AIDS or cardiovascular disease can go months without medicines they require to survive. Hospitals and even private clinics cannot maintain stocks of medicines and other basic supplies, including spare parts to repair equipment.”

The think-tank headed by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, a former French diplomat, refers to “some economists” who predict a sudden collapse in food consumption and widespread hunger. It adds: “Public health specialists already say that some surveys are showing chronic malnutrition, although the country is not yet on the verge of famine.

The collapse of the health service, however, can have pernicious short-term effects, including uncontrolled spread of communicable diseases and thousands of preventable deaths, warns the Crisis Group.

However, it adds, the severest consequences can be avoided by ending the political deadlock since 2014 between the government and opposition, which in turn would require “strong engagement of foreign governments and multilateral bodies”.

[LINK] "China’s Film Industry Is Gaining on Hollywood"

Bilge Ebiri's Bloomberg Businessweek article testifies to the potential for Chinese soft power to grow markedly.

Since mid-July, the biggest movie outside the U.S. hasn’t featured a Marvel superhero or dinosaurs from a revamped franchise or even an American action star. It hasn’t been an American film at all, but a Chinese animation/live-action fantasy, Monster Hunt, about a baby monster smuggled through ancient China. Directed by Raman Hui, a director of DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, Monster Hunt opened in China on July 16 and immediately broke records: Its Saturday, July 18, tally of $29.8 million stands as the biggest single-day gross for a Chinese film and tops the opening day take of many Western hits, including 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, which grossed $27 million on its first day. Ticket sales have reached $211 million, making Monster Hunt the highest-grossing Chinese movie ever and, with a $40 million budget, profitable, too.

Monster Hunt, produced by Hong Kong studio Edko Films, isn’t the only domestic hit lighting up Chinese box offices. Superhero parody Pancake Man, directed by and starring popular online comedian Da Peng, has brought in $132 million since opening on July 17—its budget was $13 million. The movie was released by privately owned Wanda Media, the film and TV production arm of Wanda Group, one of the country’s biggest conglomerates. The two movies’ success reflects both the growth of Chinese audiences and the maturing of the nation’s film industry. On July 18 the Chinese box office hit $70.2 million in one day, almost all from local films. “You’re seeing Chinese filmmakers getting better at their craft,” says Rance Pow, head of the film industry consulting firm Artisan Gateway.

With its mix of government-controlled enterprises and independent companies, the Chinese system looks very little like Hollywood. Longtime Hong Kong producers such as Edko regularly collaborate and compete with mainland giants Wanda, Huayi Brothers Media, and Bona Film Group, as well as the powerful state-owned entities such as China Film Group, which controls the importing and distribution of foreign films and produces its own. Internet companies Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and others are getting in on the action as producers and distributors.

All this investment and integration has led to improved scripts and greater diversity in an industry known for martial arts films and period spectacles. Today, feel-good fantasies such as Monster Hunt, which one Hollywood Reporter critic dubbed “a sentimental dollop of easily digestible moral storytelling,” succeed alongside comedies like Pancake Man, with Jean-Claude Van Damme as a villain. “There’s a growing commercial value and slickness to the Chinese films,” Pow says.

[URBAN NOTE] On dogwalkers and psychogeography

With 14 likes so far on Instagram, this photo vies with this morning's photo as the most popular photo of Bilbo I took this past week. He's a good dog.

One thing I learned this week is the extent to which dogs are social and engender sociality. Not only does the typical dog want more and closer relationships that the typical cat--when the dog presents its belly to a human, it wants to be scratched--but they invite humans to explore with them. Perhaps I should have trained Shakespeare to go on walks on a leash after all. The act of shared exploration can be quite enjoyable, not a burden but a gift.