[PHOTO] A basket of corner store vegetables, Dovercourt and Hallam

This basket of peppers and eggplants caught my eye yesterday.

[URBAN NOTE] "Bidding Farewell to the 2015 Blue Jays"

Torontoist's Stacey May Fowles reflects, in the aftermath of the Blue Jays' Game 6 defeat, on her fandom.

There was a moment in last night’s Game Six, during the seventh inning, when Blue Jays centerfielder Kevin Pillar offered his sleeve to teammate Ben Revere to wipe the blood from his arm. Revere, or “Benny” as Jays manager John Gibbons adorably called him during an in-game interview, had just miraculously launched himself into the air against the wall in left field, robbing Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez of what would have been game-changing double. Revere tore the skin on his arm in the process, and as Pillar casually gestured to offer to help the left fielder with his injury, I thought, “This is exactly why I love baseball.”

All of a sudden I realized that the real reason I love baseball is because it lets me see people be good to each other.

This is no small realization. I have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why exactly I care so much about this slow, silly, complicated game where men wear belts and literally run around in circles. I’ve tried to understand why it makes me feel all the intense feelings I do, why walking into a ballpark—any ballpark—has a unique capacity to clear out the buzzing in my head, to relieve me of anxiety, and to make me feel better about how truly terrible the world can be at times. I have thought about why I have so much affection for baseball because I feel like in some ways I owe it that consideration—this totally inexplicable thing that, at the risk of sounding extreme, came into my life and saved me. This thing that made so many things better when nothing else would.

And even though it felt devastating and unfair and not what Jays fans had all hoped for, I think last night’s eliminating loss to the Kansas City Royals finally gave me the very simple answer I needed. It finally made me understand. I really just want a place to see people be good to each other.

The 2015 Toronto Blue Jays were special. This is an undeniable fact, though trying to explain exactly why they’re special feels like an overwhelming task. Beyond their obvious athletic skills and achievements (I feel like I’ve seen Kevin Pillar fly a million times) there were dozens of tiny stories from these disparate men that filled our newsfeeds, that were passed around from fan to fan in the interest of attaching ourselves more and more to them with each passing day. There were surprising rookie ascents, solid veteran performances, and a trilingual journeyman first baseman who continually surprised. There were heart-warming sound bites of the appreciation they had for each other. There were even cute and colourful stories of popcorn in lockers, of team bathrobes and scooters, of affectionately assigned nicknames.

[URBAN NOTE] "The rise of Willowdale, Toronto’s hottest new neighbourhood"

The Toronto Star's Susan Pigg reports on the real estate boom in the North York neighbourhood of Willowdale.

Builders are always looking for bargains, so it caused quite a stir when a pleasant backsplit went on the market in North York’s Willowdale area earlier this month for what may have seemed like a crazy amount to anyone else — $1.1 million.

It didn’t matter that its four bedrooms featured a virtual rainbow of wall-to-wall carpeting, or that its panelled kitchen was far more dated than designer.

All that counted to the dozens of interested builders who filed through the front door the first two frantic days was the patch of grass and asphalt on which the house has stood since 1961 — all 40 by 131 feet of it.

By Day 3 some 17 offers had been registered. The best was for $1.551 million — more than $400,000 over the asking price.

“Seventeen isn’t so crazy. That’s happening a lot here now,” says long-time next-door neighbour Johnny Yoon, who is also a realtor in this booming Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave. area.

[LINK] "Justin Trudeau won't move in to 24 Sussex, says Margaret Trudeau"

CBC reports on how 24 Sussex, the official Ottawa residence of the Canadina prime minister, might be abandoned for a time and much-needed repairs neglected under Stephen Harper are carried out.

I wonder if this--catching up on past neglect--will be a common theme of the Liberal government?

Justin Trudeau won't immediately be moving his family into 24 Sussex Drive, his mother Margaret Trudeau said on Friday.

Margaret Trudeau was being interviewed by CBC Radio's Information Morning in Fredericton and was asked about her feelings about her son moving into the official residence of the prime minister.

"No, they're not," she said.

"Twenty-four Sussex is in need — has been in need since I was there 40 years ago — of major infrastructure repair, and it simply hasn't been done.

"They'll live somewhere else while — not decor, not fancy stuff — just plumbing and roofs and all the things that keep a house standing [are repaired]."

An auditor general's report in 2008 said urgent repairs were needed to 24 Sussex Drive, which was Justin Trudeau's childhood home when his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was prime minister.

[LINK] "Laser treatment could end pain for iconic ‘napalm girl’"

Jennifer Kay's Assoicated Press report about how Toronto-resident Kim Phuc, famous as a victim of American napalm in the Vietnam War, is undergoing new therapy to deal with lasting pain from her scars.

In the photograph that made Kim Phuc a living symbol of the Vietnam War, her burns aren’t visible — only her agony as she runs wailing toward the camera, her arms flung away from her body, naked because she has ripped off her burning clothes.

More than 40 years later she can hide the scars beneath long sleeves, but a single tear down her otherwise radiant face betrays the pain she has endured since that errant napalm strike in 1972.

Now she has a new chance to heal — a prospect she once thought possible only in a life after death.

“So many years I thought that I have no more scars, no more pain when I’m in heaven. But now — heaven on earth for me!” said Phuc upon her arrival in Miami to see a dermatologist who specializes in laser treatments for burn patients.

Late last month, Phuc, 52, began a series of laser treatments that her doctor, Jill Waibel of the Miami Dermatology and Laser Institute, said will smooth and soften the pale, thick scar tissue that ripples from her left hand up her arm, up her neck to her hairline and down almost all of her back.

[LINK] "Ex-MP wants ‘new’ dropped from NDP name"

And so, as described by Kristy Kirkup's Canadian Press article featured in the Toronto Star, does the NDP start to reinvent itself.

The New Democratic Party should drop the world “new,” says former MP Peter Stoffer.

The 18-year veteran politician, who lost his East Coast riding last week, suggests the New Democrats should consider becoming the Democratic party.

“It is a simple change, it’s superficial . . . but if you just call yourselves the Democrats . . . people can digest that very easily,” he said.

Stoffer, who was among those who pushed for structural party reform in 2001, also favours separating the federal and provincial wings of the NDP.

“If you join, for example, the Ontario NDP, you’re an automatic member of the federal NDP,” he said. “That has to change.

“We need to break that sort of string that ties us both together . . . We’re the only party that does that. I’ve been asking for many, many years now to change it and I think it’s time we did that.”

[LINK] "For Irish Illegally In U.S., A Life Locked In Place, Hoping For Change"

NPR's John Burnett notes the plight of illegal Irish migrants in the United States, unable to regularize their status and hoping for change.

Among presidential candidates, a crucial point of contention centers on what to do with the estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. About three-quarters of these immigrants are from Latin America — but there are plenty of others who come from around the globe, including Europe.

Gerry is one of them. A 40-year-old Irish bricklayer who lives in a Chicago suburb, he sneaked into the country 21 years ago, crossing at the Canadian border with a fake driver's license. For that reason, he doesn't want his last name used for this story.

Now he's married, with a 5-year-old son and a small masonry business with six employees. One is a Mexican man who is also in Chicago illegally.

Gerry says he feels a kinship with the undocumented Mexican worker on his crew.

"He's got family, and he's worried about his family," Gerry says. "He's traveling from into the city to the job. He's probably worse off than me, because he probably doesn't have a license."

[LINK] "Radicalisation in Georgia: a self-fulfilling prophecy?"

Inga Popovaite writes at Open Democracy about Georgia's Pankisi Gorge, a mountain valley adjacent to Chechnya and with a largely Chechen population that has gained some fame as a source of radicals.

A narrow valley in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, Pankisi Gorge is back on the local and international media radar. In fact, Pankisi has been the centre of attention for the past year after it was discovered in June 2014 that Abu Omar Al-Shishani, a leading commander in Islamic State, was born and raised here.

The focus on Al-Shishani has done Pankisi, and coverage of the region, few favours. Beka Bajelidze, Caucasus director at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), stresses that both local and international media reports lack context and deeper analysis. 'Foreign media was concerned only with the personality of Tarkhan Baritashvili [birth name of Abu Omar Al-Shishani] when they came to report from Pankisi.' Bajelidze tells me. 'They were not interested in the bigger picture - why mainly young people are joining insurgents in Syria.'

Bajelidze believes that, at a time when a lot of journalists solely rely on desktop research and online sources, they get disconnected from the reality on the ground, producing unverified and often biased material.

According to Bajelidze, Georgian news outlets also lack in-depth knowledge of Pankisi. Their reports are affected by prevalent attitudes towards ethno-religious minorities: 'For some journalists, it is enough to know that [Pankisi's inhabitants] are Muslim. Religion becomes the main cause of radicalisation. They often do not take into consideration factors such as the lack of inclusion in local governance, institutional support and social and economic alienation.'

Local and international media reports strengthen Pankisi's already infamous reputation as a cradle of radicals, criminals and terrorists in Georgia. This reputation emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the gorge became a haven not only for thousands of Chechen refugees fleeing the war with Russia, but also a base from which Arab and Chechen militants, allegedly with ties to al-Qaeda, could launch strikes into Russia. By 2004, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had cleared the gorge of paramilitary fighters – with US support – and dispersed the majority of the area's well-established criminal gangs.

[LINK] "The Playmobil Conundrum"

The New Yorker's Jason Wilson describes the problems of Playmobil, a toy that--after his recounting--suffers from its lack of flexibility relative to Lego, and seems confined to a younger and smaller demographic. (I was a Lego kid, myself.)

n a late summer trip to Amsterdam, I visited the newly renovated Rijksmuseum. After a few hours spent looking at paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, I wandered down to the gift shop, wanting to buy something for my two sons back at home. There, underneath a huge plastic Playmobil figure with a familiar shiny smile and clip-on hair, I saw shelves stacked with exclusive, co-branded Playmobil souvenirs—one set depicting Rembrandt’s 1642 oil painting “The Night Watch,” and another Vermeer’s 1657–1658 painting “The Milkmaid.”

In the “Night Watch” package, the seventeenth-century burgemeester Frans Banninck Cocq and his lieutenant, Willem van Ruytenburch, are rendered in three-inch plastic form. Cocq wears a black hat that may have been borrowed from Playmobil’s cowboy set, while van Ruytenburch wears one that might have been swiped from the swashbuckling pirate set.

I found the Vermeer “Milkmaid” package even more striking, in part because the kitchenware and bread on the table seem repurposed from the bakery set that I’d bought my children almost a decade ago. I’ve always loved the tiny, specific details of that bakery scenario: Not just bread, but several specific varieties, including miniature rye, wheat, sourdough, and baguettes; Not just pastries, but a bundt cake, croissants, cinnamon buns, and a sheet of berry tarts; Not just a bakery, but a primary-colored, minimalist Bäckerei, with big sunny windows and workers with white coats and little white “paper” hats—a bakery that a Europhile American like myself might believe actually exists in Stuttgart or Linz or Utrecht.

As I examined the Playmobil version of Vermeer’s “Milkmaid,” I realized how Vermeer’s popularity as a painter rests on the same sort of generic, domestic scenarios as Playmobil, with all those charming, joyful, bourgeois little details, the depiction of the everyday things of our lives. That’s why I love Vermeer. I’ve always found myself equally charmed by the sweet details of the Playmobil worlds: A-frame vacation homes with “wood” beams, tiny vehicles that resemble Smart Cars, jungle adventurers with five-o’clock shadows, skateboarders with baggy cargo pants, polar explorers with puffy winter coats and furry hoods, beach lifeguards with orange Snooki-style tans, flight attendants serving blue coffee mugs, Euro camper vans with sunroofs, a construction crew that comes complete with a case of beer and a porta-potty, a timber Alpine lodge with a lederhosen-clad innkeeper playing an accordion and pulling draft beers from the tap.

I bought both the “Night Watch” and the “Milkmaid” sets, and when I returned home I excitedly gave them to my boys, aged thirteen and ten. Both sons enjoy the occasional art museum, and we had a chuckle about the sets, but a few days later, they remained unopened.

[LINK] "How Saudi Arabia helped Isis take over the north of [Iraq]"

Writing for The Independent, Patrick Cockburn describes too-plausibly how Saudi Arabia helped kick off ISIS to try to deter the Shi'a. What a terrible mess.

How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit.

In Mosul, Shia shrines and mosques have been blown up, and in the nearby Shia Turkoman city of Tal Afar 4,000 houses have been taken over by Isis fighters as "spoils of war". Simply to be identified as Shia or a related sect, such as the Alawites, in Sunni rebel-held parts of Iraq and Syria today, has become as dangerous as being a Jew was in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe in 1940.

There is no doubt about the accuracy of the quote by Prince Bandar, secretary-general of the Saudi National Security Council from 2005 and head of General Intelligence between 2012 and 2014, the crucial two years when al-Qa'ida-type jihadis took over the Sunni-armed opposition in Iraq and Syria. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute last week, Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasised the significance of Prince Bandar's words, saying that they constituted "a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed".

He does not doubt that substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: "Such things simply do not happen spontaneously." This sounds realistic since the tribal and communal leadership in Sunni majority provinces is much beholden to Saudi and Gulf paymasters, and would be unlikely to cooperate with Isis without their consent.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Crooked Timber wonders what Nietzche would have to say about immigration.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the atmospheres of different exoplanets orbiting different kinds of stars.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Pluto and Charon may have iron cores.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Martin Shkreli's newly-overpriced drug is being vastly underpriced by a new competitor.


• Language Hat notes a Yiddish translation of a Chinese song.


• Languages of the World argues that the Indo-Europeans are an identifiable people.


• Marginal Revolution considers the nature of Chinese economic growth.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the fiscal constraints of Brazil and notes the interactions of the vulture funds with Peru.


• Bruce Sterling on his tumblr shares a post looking at an American shantytown.


• Supernova Condensate enthuses about Enceladus.


• The Understanding Society Blog's Daniel Little considers how to model organizational recruitment.


• The Financial Times' The World blog wonders if the German economy will benefit from Merkel's open door.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes the menace of coordinated hype cycles.