[PHOTO] East-end flowers, Toronto

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On this grey January day, this photo of someone's front yard of flowers in east-end Toronto should provide some reminder of brightness and colour.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Anthropology.net notes the study of ice man Otzi's gut flora.


• blogTO shares photos of different Toronto intersections a century ago.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly considers the virtues of rest.


• Centauri Dreams considers how we date stars.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers the fates of exoplanets in untable circumbinary orbits.


• The Dragon's Tales notes China's construction of a second, indigenous, aircraft carrier.


• Geocurrents maps real estate prices in California.


• Kieran Healy notes an odd checkerboard of land ownership in Nevada.


• Languages of the World notes a study suggesting that one never truly completely forgets one's first language.


• Language Log notes the snark directed at the Oregon militiamen.


• The Map Room maps thawing in the global Arctic.


• Marginal Revolution suggests one way in which religion is good for the poor.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes an exciting proposal for a Europa lander.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer does not think the 2016 American presidential election will necessarily change much, not compared to 2012.


• Peter Rukavina shares the results of his family's use of a water metre.


• The Russian Demographics Blog maps the distribution of Germans in Soviet Ukraine circa 1926.


• Towleroad looks at syphilis in the male gay/bi community.


• Window on Eurasia notes the alienation of Donbas, looks at the decline of Russia-linked churches in Ukraine and a proposal to shift the date of Christmas, and wonders about Tatarstan.

[LINK] "Grindr, the Gay Dating App, Hooks Up With Fashion"

Matthew Schneierjan's article in The New York Times amused me.

When the monthlong marathon of men’s fashion shows kicks off this week, so will the scrimmage to cover it: the race by newspapers, magazines, television networks, social media platforms and blogs to get a piece of the action for themselves and their viewers.

Joining the melee for the first time will be Grindr, the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) social-networking app primarily for gay men. On Sunday, the app will live-stream the fall 2016 men’s wear show of J. W. Anderson as it hits the runway at London Collections: Men, the city’s biannual men’s fashion week.

Grindr’s purview has admittedly been narrow. The app introduces users to others in the surrounding area who are looking to make a connection — as often as not, a sexual one. Its buffet of thumbnail-size photos is, by design, bare-bones (and, not infrequently, bare-chested).

Joel Simkhai, the founder of Grindr, takes it easy at home in Los Angeles. The app was born of an idea made possible by technology and a $2,000 grubstake.

“Grindr is a very, very visual experience,” the app’s founder and chief executive, Joel Simkhai, said in an interview in 2014.

So, of course, is fashion — even if Grindr is more traditionally thought of as being for those dispensing with clothing than acquiring it.

[ISL] "Absinthe now available at P.E.I. distillery for adventurous drinkers"

The next time I'm on the Island, I'm going to try the local absinthe. From CBC:

A small distillery in Warren Grove is the first in the province to produce absinthe, a potent green alcohol swirling with history and mystery.

It took Deep Roots Distillery, a family-run company, nine months to create the triple-distilled alcohol, which sells for $48 a bottle.

"So it took a lot of research, a lot of reading up on it, coming up with our own unique recipe," said Mike Beamish, who runs the distillery with help from his five children.

Initial sales of the spirit have been surprisingly good, he said. Deep Roots has sold 50 bottles in less than a month, both from the company's booth at the Charlottetown Farmer's Market and at the distillery.

"I thought sales were going to be quite slow, to be honest, especially at the price point," said son David Beamish.

[LINK] "Ebola-Free Sierra Leone Bets on Cocoa to Spark Recovery"

Bloomberg's Silas Gbandia and Isis Almeida report on the struggles of Sierra Leone's nascent cocoa agribusinesses to survive Ebola and its aftermath.

In July 2014, Adrian Simpson was on a night out in Sierra Leone’s third city of Kenema to celebrate his biggest deal yet: a contract to supply a new business partner with cocoa beans from his company’s plantation.

But as he and the business partners sat drinking beer, an unexpected visitor brought some distressing news.

“We were having a great evening,” said Simpson, managing director of the cocoa unit of London-listed Agriterra Ltd., by phone from London. “Then, an American girl who was studying Ebola wandered over to our table, sat down and said, ‘I think Ebola has arrived.”’

Fast forward to November 2015, and Sierra Leone was declared free from the disease that ultimately claimed almost 3,600 lives in the country, making it one of the hardest-hit by the worst Ebola epidemic yet. The double blow of Ebola and a slump in iron-ore prices devastated the West African nation. While growth is forecast at 0.1 percent this year, the economy contracted 0.25 percent in 2015. Before Ebola began to spread, the government expected growth to reach 14 percent in 2014. Instead, it grew 4.6 percent.

[LINK] "Shock, Laughter Greet Plan for Saudi Arabia's Record Oil IPO"

Bloomberg notes the remarkable news from Saudi Arabia.

When one financial adviser heard about Saudi Arabia’s plans to list a company larger than the economies of most nations, he had to pull over his car because he was laughing so hard.

Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, said Friday it’s considering an initial public offering. It confirmed an interview with Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman published in the Economist Thursday. The news was greeted with incredulity in the financial industry, according to interviews with a half dozen bankers who do business in the Middle East. They asked not to be identified to protect their business interests.

For one thing, Aramco’s inner workings are opaque, making its true value a mystery. Then there’s the timing. The price of crude oil is near its lowest level in more than a decade. Discussions with Aramco about selling assets in the past had been about much smaller parts of the business, five of the people said. An initial public offering of the entire enterprise had only ever been discussed as a joke, one of the people said.

The company could be worth anything from $1 trillion to upwards of $10 trillion, which would make it the most valuable company in the world, according to a note from Jason Tuvey at research firm Capital Economics. The last mega IPO from the oil industry was a decade ago, when Russia’s OAO Rosneft raised more than $10 billion.

[LINK] "China to pay a steep price in Saudi-Iran conflict"

Al Jazeera's Richard Javad Heydarian reports on China's distinct lack of interest in choosing between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

With respect to Iran, Beijing viewed the Middle Eastern power as both a reliable bulwark against Western hegemony in the Middle East as well as a steady and affordable source of hydrocarbon resources.

Over the years, amid deepening tensions between Tehran and the West, particularly over the former's nuclear programme, China replaced Europe as Iran's top source of technology and capital.

But this didn't prevent China from cultivating deeper economic engagement with Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which gradually anticipated a post-US order in the Middle East.

Over the past decade, China's trade with the Middle East expanded by 600 percent, reaching $230bn. Despite its growing economic preponderance, Beijing's policy approach to the region, however, was marked by commercial pragmatism and low-key diplomacy.

The deepening sectarian conflagration in the Middle East, however, is threatening China's expanding interests in the Middle East. Though Saudi-Iranian tensions have so far had a minimal impact on oil prices, any major regional conflict will adversely impact China’s energy security.

It was precisely the concern over regional stability that encouraged Chinato play a key role in facilitating the implementation of the Iranian nuclear agreement, even if this allows a post-sanctions Tehran to reduce its economic dependence on Beijing. Saudi-Iranian cooperation is also key to resolving the ongoing civil wars in places such as Yemen and Syria, which have gradually become a haven for extremist groups.

[LINK] "Searching for the ‘Armenian Lobby’"

At Open Democracy, Arzu Geybulla notes how all opposition in Azerbaijan, and to Azerbaijan, is being traced to the "Armenian lobby". In this environment, no dissent is possible.

Conspiracy theories are no stranger to resourceful leaders. They can consolidate political power, cultivate the image of an external enemy and reduce their responsibility for the nation's ills. And in the ex-Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, conspiracy theories help keep incumbent president Ilham Aliyev in power.

According to these conspiracies, Azerbaijan has two main enemies: the Armenian lobby and the jealous west. As the former is often said to finance the latter, these two enemies become one: an omnipresent and all-powerful ‘Armenian lobby’. This powerful structure has become a commonly used weapon in the hands of the authoritarian leadership of Azerbaijan to crack down on dissent. By referring to all of its critics both at home and abroad as Armenian, pro-Armenian, and representing Armenian interests, the authorities have created a quick conspiracy formula for muzzling independent voices by labelling them as traitors.

In Azerbaijan, Armenia wasn’t always used as a political tool—at least, not as much as today. Between 1988 and 1994, the two countries fought a bitter war over the mountainous area of Nagorno Karabakh. The ceasefire that ended the conflict in 1994 failed to maintain a buffer zone.

Casualties on the front line continue to this day, and the failure to reach an agreement between the two states to this day leaves the territory administered as an unrecognised state under Armenian protection. Thousands of civilians have been displaced. Warlike rhetoric has significantly increased over the years and, these days, it is the rubber stamped government policy in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

[LINK] "Why Quebecois cinema finds itself trapped within its provincial borders"

The Globe and Mail's Barry Hertz writes about how Québec's films do not find an audience in English Canada, and vice versa. (Québec, though, produces more films.)

“To be seen outside Quebec is a great honour,” says Philippe Lesage, director of the festival selection Les démons, an intense coming-of-age drama. “But I think somehow it’s a little sad. From what I heard from my distributor, it seems hard to sell French-Canadian films to the rest of Canada. Very few [Quebecois] films make it into theatres outside the province.”

Lesage would know: Despite earning raves from the likes of Variety after its debut on the festival circuit, Les démons only saw a release in Quebec this past October (it will finally enjoy a run at Toronto’s The Royal rep cinema this Friday). Although the film is set to open in France and a British deal is also in the works, Lesage’s work will likely go unnoticed by the rest of his countrymen. “We’re making these films because we want them to be seen, but it’s tough for Quebec cinema. It’s a shame it’s not being shown elsewhere,” Lesage says.

The obvious obstacle is, of course, language. It can be a difficult enough sell to get moviegoers to take in homegrown English cinema, let alone films with subtitles. Yet at the same time, Quebec is inarguably producing the best films this country has to offer. Say what you will about the likes of Hyena Road, Beeba Boys or Maps to the Stars, but few English-language features from the past few years can match the emotional power of Laurence Anyways, Café de Flore, Tu dors Nicole or Monsieur Lazhar – Top Ten selections all.

“We still struggle to find our audience here in Canada. Maybe there’s work to do in terms of labelling these films, marketing them so the audience doesn’t care too much about where it comes from, just that they want to see a good film,” says Philippe Falardeau, director of My Internship in Canada. His comedy received a rare wide release this past fall, playing not only in Quebec, but across the country – a fact the director attributes partly to the film’s easy comedy trappings, its political focus in an election year and the recognizability of its star, Bon Cop Bad Cop’s Patrick Huard.

“But the question could also work in reverse: How can we promote English-language films in Quebec? It’s the same problem,” Falardeau adds, joking that Canadian films are like Canadian beers: There are great products all over the country, they just don’t cross provincial borders. (The fact that he admits he first made this quip when accepting a prize at the 2007 Genie Awards only makes the allegory more depressing.)

[LINK] "The rise and fall of Detroit as the driving force in the car world"

The Globe and Mail's Peter Cheney describes the collapse of Detroit as the symbolic heart of the global automotive industry, or even the North American one.

[D]oes Detroit still matter?

There was a time when no one could imagine that this question would ever be asked. In the 1960s, Detroit bestrode the car world like a colossus. This was the town that invented mass production, then fine-tuned the marketing systems that endlessly stoked the fires of consumer demand – Detroit turned the car into a status symbol, up-sold buyers with ever-expanding option lists and instituted the annual model change.

Today, Detroit is producing the best cars it has ever made. And yet, the city is a fallen empire and the gravitational centre of the auto industry it spawned has moved elsewhere. Gone are the days of Henry Ford’s famous, vertically integrated River Rouge complex, where ships and trains unloaded millions of tons of steel ore and timber at one end, and finished cars rolled out the other. Today’s manufacturing is defined by a decentralized supply system in which components flow in from around the world for final assembly in plants dominated by robots.

And when those new assembly plants are built, it’s not in Detroit – it’s in Mexico, China or right-to-work states in the Southern United States. Even more damaging to Detroit than the shift in physical operations is the relocation of the auto industry’s intellectual axis. When the next great shifts in automotive transportation are discussed, the conversation no longer centres on Detroit – instead, the cutting-edge is in Silicon Valley, Calif., where Google and Apple are focusing on a world where cars drive themselves and sales are no longer driven by social status and consumer aspiration.

For decades, Detroit shrugged off small, non-traditional competitors as irrelevant, and assumed its own massive scale and deep well of manufacturing and engineering talent would keep it on top of the automotive hill.

But now it finds itself in a world where technological disruption and social shift have altered the rules. The Big Three are regarded as legacy firms. When the talk turns to automotive cool and industrial innovation, the company on everyone’s lips is Tesla Motors, an upstart California firm that has played David to Detroit’s Goliath, designing and building the world’s finest electric car while its chief executive simultaneously crafts cutting-edge space ships.

[LINK] "London, Ont. defends Saudi arms deal as integral to region’s economy"

Saudi Arabia might have a horrific human rights record and Canada's arms deals with that country are being criticized, but as Richard Blackwell notes in The Globe and Mail Saudi human rights are irrelevant in the southwestern Ontario city of London. There, in that partly deindustrialized region, the Saudi deal offers hope.

Political and business leaders in London, Ont., are standing by the company that makes the combat vehicles Canada is selling to Saudi Arabia, describing it as a pivotal component of the region’s effort to become a major hub for defence-industry manufacturing.

General Dynamics Land Systems Canada (GDLS) builds the light armoured vehicles (LAVs) at a plant in London that employs 2,100 people, including 650 engineers, and that makes it an “anchor to the defence-industry cluster in Southwestern Ontario,” Mayor Matt Brown said.

Like other members of the business community, Mayor Brown did not want to weigh in on the politics of the contract, which is now under close scrutiny following Saudi Arabia’s mass executions on Jan. 2 that included a prominent Shia Muslim cleric. The focus instead is on the benefits for a region that, until recently, had suffered from years of a weak economy and severe job losses.

For Southwestern Ontario, the success of companies such as GDLS is seen as key to continuing the economic momentum recently gained as a result of the low dollar and stronger exports to the United States.

But the economic gains go beyond Southwestern Ontario, because GDLS buys components across the county, said Kapil Lakhotia, president of London Economic Development Corp., which is responsible for drawing investment to the region.

“GDLS is critical to the London regional economy, it is certainly an important part of our growing defence sector, and [its work] has a variety of positive economic impacts throughout Canada,” he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "An Artist Sues to Save Her Landmark Detroit Mural"

CityLab's Kriston Capps had an article about how artist Katie Craig is suing to protect her work, the 2009 The Illuminated Mural, from being destroyed by the renovation of the Detroit building it's painted on.



Katherine Craig, The Illuminated Mural, 2009. (BB and HH/Flickr)

For Katherine Craig, the mural is more than a marker of North End’s rising status. The so-called “bleeding rainbow” mural is a cornerstone of her career. And now, since the building’s owner aims to sell or redevelop the property, the artist is taking legal action to protect her work.

Craig filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit against Princeton Enterprises, the owner of the building at 2937 East Grand Boulevard. The federal suit seeks an injunction that would bar the developer from destroying or otherwise altering The Illuminated Mural—something that the developer intends to do in order to convert the building into lofts or apartments.

Converting the 9-story building into a condo tower would ruin The Illuminated Mural, a 100-by-125-foot painting that covers virtually an entire side of the building. The artist, who studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, received a Community + Public Arts: Detroit grant from the College for Creative Studies to execute the mural. (Her piece is in fact the banner for the program’s homepage.) Craig poured and splattered more than 100 gallons of paint on the Albert Kahn–designed building to create her work.

Seeing how often The Illuminated Mural winds up mentioned in the same breath as Detroit works by Charles McGee or Shepard Fairey, it stands to reason that she’d want to ensure its future. “Craig’s mural challenged the limits of experimental and traditional approaches to street art,” write Julie Pincus and Nichole Christian in Canvas Detroit.

The Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) protects artworks of “recognized stature”— including murals—from destruction, whether “intentional or grossly negligent.” If the federal court grants an injunction in Craig’s case, it would prohibit the building’s owner from knocking down the building or punching holes through the mural for windows. The injunction would further require Princeton Enterprises to notify potential buyers upfront about the mural’s protected status.

This is definitely an interesting legal approach. I just wonder whether or not this overlooks the extent to which this work, and perhaps the others like it, might represent only a stage in the neighbourhood's transformation. When there are vacant buildings, there is space for public art; when the buildings are full, some of this may well be displaced by a neighbourhood with new life. Undeniable beauty like this might be only a stopgap, might even need to be transitory.