[PHOTO] My garden pots, August 2015

This is the second summer running that I have been trying to grow crops of vegetables in pots on my laneway, and I am having considerably more success. Timelier planting is key.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes that this year, the Canadian National Exhibition will host more high-calorie culinary atrocities.


• Centauri Dreams considers the final pass of Cassini around Saturn's Dione.


• Crooked Timber considers the opportunity costs of war.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the war in Donbas.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes the Chinese-led revival of the Silk Road as a trans-Eurasian rail route from Poland.


• Spacing describes the funiculars of Portugal.


• Torontoist celebrates Summerworks.


• Towleroad reports on Zachary Quinto's arguments about safer sex techniques.


• The Volokh Conspiracy advances an argument against immigration restrictions.


• Why I Love Toronto shares more local Toronto craftsmakers.

[ISL] "Why Aren't Young Guys Going to the Gay Paradise of Key West?"

Matthew Leifheit had an interesting photo essay at Vice exploring reasons why young gays may not be vacationing in famously gay-friendly Key West. Economic issues may be key, perhaps also a lack of knowledge?

Beyond breathtaking sunsets and sour, gelatinous pie, Key West, Florida, has historically been famous for its gay culture. Queer icons from Divine to Leonard Bernstein used to slut it up at the many gay bars and men-only guesthouses the island was known for in the 1970s and 80s. Tennessee Williams, the ultimate daddy, lived for years in a small house on Duncan Street with his "secretary" Frank Merlo .

"Now please don't hurry down here: the island has finally run out of coral rock extensions into the sea," Williams once wrote of Key West. "Almost no one plays bridge, and there is almost nothing to do but drink or swim or —."

But many are claiming this historical gay paradise is no longer the hot hangout for homos it used to be. In 2005 the New York Times accused Key West of "going straight," and in 2012 The Advocate dropped Key West from its list of America's top 25 gayest cities. So I went down to the island's Tropical Heat festival, a weekend of nude pool parties and fetish balls engineered to draw a big gay crowd, to see for myself just how hetero Key West has gotten.

That question was easy to answer—Key West is so fucking gay. The sky there literally shits out a rainbow every time it drizzles. As soon as I arrived at the airport, which was decorated like the set of Golden Girls, I turned on Grindr and started asking questions. Immediately, a VGL local bear told me I needed to talk to Gary "Sushi" Marion, the grand dame of Key West's thriving drag scene who descends from the sky in a giant red shoe each New Year's Eve. Her authority was confirmed by many others throughout my time in Key West, where Sushi is revered for her sharp wit and fishy realness.

[LINK] "Even Tom Cruise Can’t Buy Ireland Success With Heritage Sales"

Bloomberg's Donal Griffen reports on the failure of Ireland to mobilize its diaspora to save its economy, at least as much as it wanted.

For Ireland, a drive to tap into the pockets of its diaspora turned out to be mission impossible.

The government said in Dublin this week that it’s scrapping a certificate of heritage, the state’s imprimatur on the recipient’s Irish roots, amid slow sales. Not even awarding certificates to actor Tom Cruise and President Barack Obama inspired much business.

“It’s a very good concept,” Jimmy Deenihan, an Irish junior minister with responsibility for “diaspora affairs,” said in an interview on RTE Radio on Tuesday. “But certainly the take-up was lower than expected.”

The government has sold about 3,000 of the certificates, which was “considerably less than anticipated,” the Foreign Affairs ministry said. The project’s scrapping is a rare reversal for a nation that has long traded on the emotions of Americans in search of their heritage. Tourism accounts for more than 4 percent of the Irish economy, with about one in six trips coming from North America, and proved a bright spot as the country emerged from its worst recession on record.

[LINK] "More Evidence That Comets May Have Brought Life to Earth"

Universe Today's Nancy Atkinson presents evidence comets may have contributed to life on Earth, not by importing it but rather by making the precursor chemical compounds to life.

The idea of panspermia — that life on Earth originated from comets or asteroids bombarding our planet — is not new. But new research may have given the theory a boost. Scientists from Japan say their experiments show that early comet impacts could have caused amino acids to change into peptides, becoming the first building blocks of life. Not only would this help explain the genesis of life on Earth, but it could also have implications for life on other worlds.

Dr. Haruna Sugahara, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokahama, and Dr. Koichi Mimura, from Nagoya University said they conducted “shock experiments on frozen mixtures of amino acid, water ice and silicate (forsterite) at cryogenic condition (77 K),” according to their paper. “In the experiments, the frozen amino acid mixture was sealed into a capsule … a vertical propellant gun was used to [simulate] impact shock.”

They analyzed the post-impact mixture with gas chromatography, and found that some of the amino acids had joined into short peptides of up to 3 units long (tripeptides).

Based on the experimental data, the researchers were able to estimate that the amount of peptides produced would be around the same as had been thought to be produced by normal terrestrial processes (such as lighting storms or hydration and dehydration cycles).

[LINK] "Canadian accent is shifting, changing how we pronounce words"

The Toronto Star's Tara Deschamps reports on the slow mutation of Canadian English in pace with California's dialect.

People living in Toronto and California might live on opposite ends of the continent, but they have at least one thing in common.

They both like to get down … with their vowels.

New research says the Canadian accent is going through a subtle shift, making “laugh” sound like “loff,” “red dress” sound like “rad drass” and “milk” sound like “melk.”

It’s all part of a change quietly seeping into our language to make us pronounce vowels lower than usual, say sociolinguists from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

A similar shift, at times borrowing some qualities from the Valley Girl cadence, is simultaneously happening to Californians, but researcher Paul De Decker says, “It is not making us sound more like them. We are just both on the same path at the same time.”

[LINK] "Fish Farming Becomes Bigger Business Than the Open Sea"

Bloomberg Business' Iris Almeida reports on the ascent of fish farming.

For the first time, the world is eating more fish from farms than from the open sea, spurring billions of dollars of takeovers as one of the largest food companies seeks to capitalize on rising demand.

The latest buyer to enter the fray is Cargill Inc., the world’s biggest grain trader and a meat supplier, which said Monday it agreed to acquire Norwegian salmon-feed business EWOS Holding AS for $1.5 billion.

Fish consumption is growing at a faster pace than beef, pork and poultry, driven by an expanding, increasingly prosperous global population that recognizes the health benefits of eating seafood. Demand is forecast by the United Nations to outstrip supply in coming years. Wild fish aren’t going to fill the gap, and that leaves farming in lakes and coastal waters -- also known as aquaculture -- to make up the shortfall.

“We can expect that large companies active in commodities, animal proteins and life sciences will be considering this industry and how they can play a role in the growth of what some call the Blue Revolution, the growth of marine farming of food and feed,” Gorjan Nikolik, a Rabobank International seafood-industry analyst, said by phone from Utrecht, the Netherlands.

[ISL] "Mike Duffy emails show he wanted 'P.E.I.-isms' added to statement"

The Charlottetown Guardian's Teresa Wright reports on the almost pathetic attempts of Mike Duffy to cloak himself in Prince Edward Island culture on the eve of his disgrace.

Calling himself the ‘Old Duff,’ who would “never knowingly fiddle anything,” suspended Senator Mike Duffy purposely inserted “P.E.I.-isms” in his February 2013 statements when he made the bogus announcement he would repay his housing expenses, court documents show.

But emails entered into evidence in the ongoing criminal trial of the Island’s embattled senator now reveal Duffy’s statements that day were anything but spontaneous.

They were carefully scripted, with each detail anxiously negotiated between Duffy’s lawyer and numerous high-ranking officials in the prime minister’s office.

[. . .]

One email indicates Duffy asked for revisions of a statement drafted by PMO staffer Chris Woodcock, asking for more colloquial language for his P.E.I. audience.

[URBAN NOTE] "The two worlds of my Etobicoke"

Spacing Toronto features an excellent autobiographical essay by Prajakta Dhopade looking at the remarkable internal divisions within Etobicoke, the former west-end Toronto municipality internationally famous as home of Rob Ford.

My childhood was spent surrounded by the Humber River and grocery stores.

I live in Rexdale, where there’s not much to do and every reason to leave. For the first decade of my life, north Etobicoke was my world. My family were immigrants who arrived in Toronto in 1997. We settled in west Rexdale, in an apartment complex nestled beside the Humber River Valley, which was a five-minute bus ride away from a nearby school that my sister and I attended. Years later, we moved further east, still in Rexdale, but closer to older developments near Kipling Avenue. The only way to get around was by car.

When I entered high school is when my world expanded. I had two public transportation options — either a 30-minute TTC bus ride east to the Yonge-University line or a 25-minute bus ride south to the Bloor-Danforth line. The 45 Kipling bus that runs north and south on the busy west-end avenue became my way out of the barren, plaza- and parking lot-laden landscape I had grown up in.

Many of the friends I made in Etobicoke exclaimed “Me too!” when I told them I live in the borough but I would quickly have to clarify with a “but way up north…in Rexdale,” to which I’d receive a confused “oh…” I might as well have said I live in Narnia. The result of this disconnect was a jarring feeling of misplaced identity within this city. I envied friends who lived in the south and could walk to Tom’s Dairy Freeze — a community staple on the Queensway — or could access streetcars and subway stations a relatively short distance away from their homes. It wasn’t downtown, by any means, but it was more of a bustling and central area than I had ever previously experienced.

The reason for this is because south Etobicoke’s lakefront was home to several communities, supported by industrial enterprises. The townships of Mimico, Long Branch, and New Toronto are the oldest parts of Etobicoke, formed around 1890. The neighbourhoods were created on a rigid street grid, where everything was plotted close together, serving the working class residents. The industrial boom is now over, and the area’s number-named streets offer residents walkability in an era where it is now desirable.

[URBAN NOTE] "Galleria Mall, recently sold, harks back to a neighbourly era"

Edward Keenan in the Toronto Star salutes the Galleria Mall.

Walking into Galleria Mall feels a bit like stepping into a time capsule that was filled but not quite sealed in the 1970s.

There’s the pebbled finish on the exterior, of the type you don’t really see anymore, the polished floor that’s a shade of beige you might have seen on a Howard Cosell Wide World of Sports blazer, the arched stucco ceilings, the letters above the computer store written in that old-fashioned font that was used for futuristic tech stuff at the dawn of the personal computer era (the one that looks like the numbers printed on the bottom of cheques).

The building, at Dufferin and Dupont Sts., doesn’t appear to have seen many updates since it was opened on Aug. 15, 1972, but it’s still going, for now, and has some eccentric charms.

In the middle of the large, empty central court, old Portuguese men gather on four haphazardly placed benches to chat the morning away. In lieu of a food court, people get coffee and corned beef subs from the El Amigo Restaurant stand. At the Pagers & Cellular Plus kiosk, in addition to picking up a cordless phone and wiring money by Western Union, you could buy a “fully detailed hand crafted” model of the Titanic.

The big display window labelled “Galleria Smokers Choice” sits empty save for a purple cellophane backdrop. Once, presumably, it contained a display of tobacco products. Now it seems emblematic of its place — a reminder of a different time when people still smoked, urban malls were still trendy, and independently owned stores outnumbered the chains. Something not quite gone, not quite forgotten, but no longer being maintained or updated.

More at the newspaper site.