[PHOTO] Riding the rails of the Union-Pearson Express in Toronto

I had the chance to take many photos through the window of the swift-moving train. I quite liked the photos I shared yesterday, of Toronto Pearson and the dense infrastructure surrounding it. I was particularly fond of the unexpected vantage points on the city of Toronto itself, seeing areas in new ways starting with the Union Station/Harbourfront point of departure.







The train quickly gathered speed, heading past the neighbourhood of Fort York and its namesake fort, past railside condo construction, and past a spot of graffiti.







Eventually we proceeded north, to the little-used Bloor GO Station, and through the suburban Weston neighbourhood and the Weston GO Station.







The return south was anti-climactic. (Also, I was quickly running out of power on my second phone.)

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes the impending end of Parkdale's Skyline Diner.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the efforts to track the origins of the 2013 Chelyabinsk impactor.


• D-Brief notes the development of ultra-durable, high-capacity glass memory chips.


• Dangerous Minds directs readers to a walking tour of punk London.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the magnetospheres of hot Jupiters.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on Russia's war in Syria.


• Far Outliers notes Koestler's description of the small railway towns of Soviet Central Asia.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how the influence of Africans has been underestimated in the United States, looking at food.

The Planetary Society Blog notes the reactivation of an old space probe's cameras.

• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes oddities in figures about public spending in Mexico.

[META] Another blogroll update

Two bloggers, three blogs.

• Ottawa-based writer 'Nathan Smith's Apostrophen examined the life of a gay fiction writer in the nation's capital. His recent post looking at how much he earns, from the perspective of what he could afford to eat with it, speaks about the economics of fiction writing.


• New York City-based writer Philip Turner has two blogs, Honourary Canadian describing his life as an expat and The Great Grey Bridge looking at his take on New York City. His recent photo post from the shores of the Hudson River is beautiful.

[LINK] "China museum offers reward to decode historic coins"

Via Language Log, I came across this BBC report.

A museum in eastern China is offering a reward to anyone who can decipher the inscriptions written on six gold coins in its collection.

The centuries-old coins were first unearthed on a farm in the southern Hunan province in the 1960s, where they had been kept inside a small glazed pot. They arrived at Jinshi City's museum in the 1980s, and archaeologists have been puzzling over their markings ever since, the Xinhua news agency reports. Now the museum says it'll hand out 10,000 yuan ($1,500; £1,100) to anyone who can help to shed light on the meaning of the coins' etchings.

The director of the city's Cultural Relics Bureau says they were manufactured in the Delhi Sultanate, the main Muslim sultanate in northern India, around the late 13th Century during China's Yuan dynasty. The front of the coins bears the name of a king, written in a rare form of Arabic, Peng Jia tells the China News Service. "But the information on the back is difficult to decode. I have consulted Chinese and foreign experts, but to no avail."

The coins have been designated as "first-grade national cultural relics", meaning they are officially considered national treasures in China.

[LINK] "Want insurance to cover your PrEP? Good luck"

Daily Xtra's Niko Bell reports about the difficulties of many British Columbians in getting access to PrEP.

Last fall, Dan wanted to get on PrEP in time for Pride in Palm Springs.

A young gay man from Vancouver, whose name Daily Xtra shortened to protect his identity, he had heard all about the pre-exposure prophylaxis drug from previous trips to the United States.

He knew it was effective and relatively safe. He figured a month would be enough to talk to his doctor, get insurance coverage, and pick up the pills. By the time he was partying in California, he thought, he would have a drug flowing through his veins that has been shown to prevent HIV infection as effectively as condoms.

It was not to be.

It took two rejections and over two months of wrangling with his insurance company before Dan was finally covered. In the end, the experience left him so frustrated he has never filled his prescription, choosing to simply buy unprescribed Truvada through an acquaintance.

In British Columbia, Dan’s experience is sadly typical. While many insurance companies will theoretically cover Truvada in some cases, gay men face repeated rejections, confusion, contradictory directions and misinformation before finally getting covered, if they are at all. Since Truvada costs about $900 a month, insurance is usually the only option.

When Dan first approached his insurer, Pacific Blue Cross, about the medication, they told him they could not cover it because it was supposed to be covered by the province; he would have to get a letter from his doctor saying it was for a different purpose, and fill out an application for a special exception.

[LINK] "The Downfall of a Russian Soccer Team"

The New Yorker's Sean Williams reports about the potentially existential problems facing Dynamo Moscow, problems possibly part of Russian soccer generally. The teams' economic bases are too narrow, it seems.

The Russian soccer team Dynamo Moscow has its roots in a factory club that was founded in 1887, at the Morozov mill, on the city’s outskirts. In the spring of 1923, the club was co-opted by Vladimir Lenin’s feared secret police, the Cheka, and given its current name. (The playwright Maxim Gorky is credited with coining the club motto, “Sila v Dvizhenii,” or “Strength in Motion.”)* By the mid-thirties, Moscow was home to five major teams, four of which represented different arms of the Soviet state: CDKA, now CSKA, was the team of the Red Army; Dynamo, the secret police; Lokomotiv, the state railways; and Torpedo was the club of the city’s sprawling Torpedo-ZiL automobile factory. The exception was Spartak Moscow, founded by the Young Communist League and the local soccer hero Nikolai Starostin, who named his club after the gladiator who revolted against Roman rule. Spartak forged an identity as “the people’s club,” which is why, even today, it has more fans at its games than any of its rivals can boast.

Dynamo, led by Lavrenti Beria, a vicious sexual predator and head of the N.K.V.D.—the police force that succeeded the Cheka, and was succeeded in turn by the K.G.B.—won the first Soviet championship, in 1936. A bitter rivalry between Beria’s Dynamo and Spartak—support for whom represented a small act of everyday protest against the politburo—ensued. The enmity reached its peak in 1939, when Beria ordered a cup semifinal that Spartak had won to be replayed, one month later. Spartak won the replay, 1–0, and went on to win that year’s trophy. In 1942, Beria wreaked his revenge, sending Starostin to the gulag for ten years for “praising bourgeois sports.” (Upon Stalin’s death, Beria was arrested by Nikita Khrushchev, and, in 1953, at the age of fifty-four, he was executed.) Dynamo dominated in the nineteen-forties, but it has not won the domestic league since 1976.

In October, I visited Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, to watch the latest installment of Dynamo versus Spartak, known as Russia’s oldest derby. The prestige of the contest has dimmed as Dynamo has been eclipsed by crosstown rivals CSKA and by Zenit St. Petersburg, a team founded in 1925 and bought, in 2005, by the state-owned gas company, Gazprom. Zenit is now littered with stars and competing well at Europe’s top table, the Champions League. Meanwhile, both Dynamo and CSKA are playing their matches at Arena Khimki, an eighteen-thousand-six-hundred-and-thirty-six-seat stadium built to house a club from the surrounding suburb, and awaiting new arenas of their own. As I watched Spartak come back from a 2–1 deficit to win, 3–2, on what was practically the final kick of the match, a local writer turned to me. “It’s the curse,” he said, referencing Beria, for whose sins Dynamo, many say, has yet to atone. But the club’s predicament owes more to the topsy-turviness of Russian soccer than to some historic hoodoo.

Russian soccer has rarely been run in parallel with its European neighbors. The Russian Premier League took shape during the Soviet era, and it is studded with clubs run not as businesses but as the playthings of oligarchs, despots, and, chiefly, the Russian state. However, a landmark ruling last year by the sport’s European governing body, UEFA, may, eventually, change that. Under the organization’s Financial Fair Play (F.F.P.) rules, Dynamo, which is funded by a state bank and by Boris Rotenberg, Russia’s hundredth-wealthiest person and Vladimir Putin’s former judo partner, was found to have grossly manipulated its finances and, consequently, was expelled from European competition.

Now its biggest international stars have left for teams in other countries, and the once-powerful side is languishing at the bottom end of the Premier League table. What’s more, people have begun to speculate that the fall of Dynamo could precipitate trouble for the country’s other major teams. For Russia, the timing of the case could hardly be more awkward: in just a few years, it will host the World Cup, and the Kremlin is keen to project global power and prestige. With Dynamo shamed, and more teams potentially to follow, the standing of Russian soccer could be in tatters before a single ball of the tournament is kicked.

[LINK] "Detroit’s Comeback Has an Arabic Accent"

Jeff Green's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article looks at how immigration from the Middle East, particularly from Syria and Iraq, has played a major role in the revitalization of Michigan generally and Detroit in particular.

Renan Sadak, who has a degree in computer science from his native Iraq, could land only an $11-an-hour job managing a liquor store when he arrived in Detroit seven years ago as a refugee. “I got married, and I wanted to make more money,” Sadak says, but the city was in the throes of recession.

Last year the resurgent auto industry began to change the prospects for work. Sadak was hired in June to drive a truck shuttling auto parts for Midwest Freight Systems in Warren, Mich., at double his original pay at the liquor shop. “Now I’m making a decent wage,” he says. “I’m covering all the bills.”

At a time when Europe and many parts of the U.S. are divided about integrating refugees from the Middle East, Michigan is providing opportunities for immigrants from the war-torn region. The state and the city of Detroit have the U.S.’s highest concentration of residents with roots in that part of the world. The Detroit area’s Arabic community goes back a century.

As the auto industry recovers, companies in Michigan ranging from small operations such as Midwest Freight to bigger ones like Denso, a Japanese auto parts maker, are tapping immigrant workers to fill a labor shortage. Newcomers from the Arabic-speaking world are benefiting, as are refugees from Myanmar (formerly Burma). “Three years ago, maybe 20 to 30 percent of the refugees could get work in the auto industry,” says Jasmine Ward, a manufacturing recruiter at Allegiance Staffing in Fraser, Mich. The automakers and their suppliers just weren’t hiring. Now, she says, “if they want to work, they can pretty much find a job. They work really hard, and that’s what companies are looking for.”

The auto industry is hiring long-established residents, too. African Americans last year made up about 15 percent of the U.S. auto workforce, from a low of 11 percent in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Black unemployment in Michigan fell to 11.6 percent in 2015, down from 23.9 percent in 2010, says the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. White unemployment in 2015 was 4.5 percent, vs. 10.6 percent in 2010.

Last year, Michigan accepted 1,162 Iraqi refugees and 246 Syrians, according to U.S. Department of State data. That’s more than any other state except Texas and California, which each accepted about 200 more refugees than Michigan. They’ll integrate them into populations at least twice the size of Michigan’s. The state has drawn a total of 13,800 people from those two countries, mostly from Iraq, in the past five years.

[LINK] "From ‘Vegas girl’ to MP, Ruth Ellen Brosseau had to prove her legitimacy"

Jane Taber's article in The Globe and Mail looking at the success of Ruth Ellen Brosseau, a NDP star who started from seemingly unauspicious beginnings.

With the nickname “Vegas girl,” Ruth Ellen Brosseau was something of a joke on Parliament Hill in the days after the 2011 general election, and it seemed her prospects for success were few.

She was the NDP candidate who famously went to Las Vegas to celebrate her 27th birthday in the midst of the election campaign – and then became part of the May vote’s so-called “orange wave,” in which the NDP increased its seat count from one to 59 in Quebec.

The single mother, who at the time was the assistant manager of a Carleton University bar, had never stepped foot in Berthier-Maskinongé, the Quebec riding for which she was suddenly the MP. Her French was rusty, she had no political experience, and had visited the Parliament buildings only on a school trip.

Overnight, Ms. Brosseau became the subject of intense media scrutiny. She was mocked – the attractive single mother was an easy target – and portrayed as someone not fit to be an MP. She was so much of a distraction that some people in the party wanted to cut her loose.

Today, Ms. Brosseau is the NDP agriculture critic – her riding has dairy and chicken farms – and vice-chair of caucus. She is bilingual, and a sought-after speaker on political organization.

Ms. Brosseau says she learned how to be an MP from Thomas Mulcair, who also represents a Quebec riding. She met with Mr. Mulcair, then the deputy leader, immediately after the 2011 election and he introduced her to mayors and other officials in her riding. She also studied French, and her first question in the Commons was in French.

She believes she has finally shaken off that demeaning nickname. “The girl from Vegas; the bartender; the anglophone in a francophone riding – but [now] she does speak really good French and she knows her issues. I think we are past that.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Fort McMurray and the Canadian boom-to-bust experience"

CBC's Don Pittis reports about how Fort McMurray's vulnerability to the boom-and-bust economy is an ancient Canadian pattern.

Hark Savinsky remembers the boom days when every kid out of high school could walk right into a good job. And the first thing each youngster did after getting that job — with a little help from the bank — was buy a shiny new truck.

Those days are gone. In fact, they're long gone.

Because Savinsky, who now works at Scotiabank's corporate headquarters in Toronto, grew up not in Fort McMurray, Alta., but in Atikokan, Ont. He watched the northern Ontario community boom, and when the mines closed one after the other, he witnessed its pain as the boom turned to bust.

Fort McMurray is going through the same difficult process experienced by communities dotted across Canada as the single industry they depended upon sinks following an exhilarating rise.

The wealth and sophistication of Fort McMurray is hard to compare with smaller boom towns, but one common feature is that the decline is often gradual, as enormous reservoirs of wealth seep out of the community. After many years of prosperity, residents cannot accept that the party is over.

"There was a lot of hope," Savinsky says of Atikokan, which saw its population shrink from about 7,000 to just over 2,000. "And this is part of the denial, I suppose."

[URBAN NOTE] "Don Valley gondola could lift Toronto tourism"

The proposal for a gondola to connect east-end Toronto with the Evergreen Brick Works, as described by the Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski, is certainly ambitious. As someone who went to the Brick Works recently, I have to wonder what the point would be. Could this ever make money?

Imagine soaring high above the riotous autumn colours of the Don Valley aboard a comfortable cable car that would connect the bustle of Danforth Ave. with the natural surroundings of Evergreen Brick Works on Bayview Ave.

That is the $20- to $25-million proposal for Toronto’s first gondola being floated by a private company called Bullwheel International Cable Car Corp.

Envisioned as a major tourist attraction, the Don Valley cable car could be up and running in three or four years, although that is an aggressive timeline, admits the company’s CEO. It would be built and operated without public money.

“(Gondolas) are proven technology. Our technical director is a third generation ropeway technician who’s built systems all over the world. He commissioned 10 of the lifts for the Sochi Olympics,” said CEO Steven Dale.

The gondola still needs to meet rigorous public and civic approvals, but Mayor John Tory said it could fit with his agenda “to move people any way we can.” He called the concept “exciting” and “novel.”

[URBAN NOTE] Two links on the opening of Saks Fifth Avenue in Toronto

MacLean's hosts Chris Sorensen's interview with the company's president.

Saks Fifth Avenue is preparing to open its first two Canadian stores in Toronto this month, making it the latest in a long line of big U.S. retailers to expand northward. But much has changed since Hudson’s Bay Co. purchased the U.S. luxury retailer for $2.9 billion back in 2013 and announced plans to bring the storied Saks brand to Canada—namely, the cratering of the price of oil, which has taken the Canadian economy down with it. Meanwhile, U.S rival Nordstrom is continuing its Canadian rollout while local luxury stalwart Holt Renfrew has upped its game in a bid to protect market share. So can Saks still realize its goal of opening as many as seven stores in in Canada over the next several years? Or did it arrive at the exact moment when Canadian consumers ran out of money to spend on Manolo Blahnik shoes and Valentino handbags? Senior writer Chris Sorensen caught up with Saks President Marc Metrick in the (almost-finished) flagship store in downtown Toronto to find out.

Q: Tell me a bit about your background.

A: I was born and raised in New York. Worked at Saks for 15 years. Left Saks. Worked for HBC for a few years. And they recently made me president of Saks. So I’ve spent a lot of time up here [in Canada]. I know the customer and how Canada works. I have experience with both brands, but I was really born and raised with Saks.

When HBC first announced its Saks plans in Canada, the economy looked a lot brighter than it does today. Is there still enough demand here to support a U.S. luxury retailer like Saks?

We never believed we would throw open the doors and people would just walk in. We have to take share to be successful. At the same time, our current Canadian business [cross-border and online] is among our better-performing ones. So as long as demand for luxury goods is here, which it will be, we want to be able to offer the Canadian consumer something in Canada so they don’t have travel to the U.S., where there’s going to be a foreign exchange headwind. We look at it as an opportunity to win and be successful.

So Toronto still looks like a pretty attractive launch market in 2016?

Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America. But you don’t have a Saks here. It never made sense to me and it was talked about before the company was bought by HBC. In fact, it was one of the key tenets of the deal’s acquisition thesis. Boston is a little over 4.5 million people with eight luxury store operators, including Nordstrom, Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, Saks and Neiman Marcus. By contrast, there are just three Holt Renfrews servicing the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), with six million. So the market is totally underserved. Even with the Canadian economy facing a little bit of a headwind, there’s an opportunity to come in and claim some share.

Meanwhile, NOW Toronto's Michelle da Silva questions the need for this store at all.

Acquired by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 2013, Saks opened in New York in 1867. Nearly 150 years later, it’s moving north at a time when the Canadian dollar is nervously low and consumer debt is on the rise. According to Stats Canada, at the end of 2015, the average Canadian household had nearly $1.64 in debt for every dollar of disposable income – a record high.

Saks is also opening less than a year after another major American retailer so spectacularly failed in Canada. Target, purveyor of the cheap and cheerful, shuttered over 100 Canadian stores shy of its two-year milestone last April. Why weren’t we spending our hard-earned cash at Target like so many people down south? It was a mix of poor location planning and Canadian up-pricing, according to retail analysts. But perhaps when shopping at a store no longer requires flashing a passport at customs, it feels less special, too.

Saks, however, is obviously targeting a different customer than Target shoppers. A press release sent out ahead of this morning’s ribbon-cutting ceremony with American fashion designer Phillip Lim described the store’s offerings as “an elegant edit of the best designer names,” including Dior, Valentino, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Givenchy and Saint Laurent.

This is a store where it’s not unusual to see a four-digit price tag attached to a sundress or key chains for $500 – where a fur salon selling chinchilla capes exists and Parisian sunscreen marketed to men retails upwards of $300.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the death of Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco is dead. I shared his Guardian obituary on Facebook.

The novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco has died, aged 84, according to reports. Eco, who was perhaps best known for his 1980 work the Name of the Rose, was one of the world’s most revered literary names.

The author, who had been suffering from cancer, passed away at 9.30pm (8.30pm GMT) on Friday, La Repubblica said on its website.

He was the 1992-3 Norton professor at Harvard and taught semiotics at Bologna University and once suggested that writing novels was a mere part-time occupation, saying: “I am a philosopher; I write novels only on the weekends.”

The Name of the Rose was Eco’s first novel but he had been publishing works for more than 20 years beforehand.

He discussed his approach to writing in an interview at a Guardian Live event in London last year. “I don’t know what the reader expects,” he said. “I think that Barbara Cartland writes what the readers expect. I think an author should write what the reader does not expect. The problem is not to ask what they need, but to change them … to produce the kind of reader you want for each story.”

My favourite of his novels was his Foucault's Pendulum, a superb satire of the conspiracy theory and the people who believe it. There's so much brilliance to be found in his œuvre.

[WRITING] Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis

Brain Pickings had a post ("Umberto Eco’s Advice to Writers") publicizing Umberto Eco's 1977 How to Write a Thesis. I'm actuallly quite interested in this book: he has some good tips.

Do not use ellipsis and exclamation points, and do not explain ironies. It is possible to use language that is referential or language that is figurative. By referential language, I mean a language that is recognized by all, in which all things are called by their most common name, and that does not lend itself to misunderstandings.

[…]

We either use rhetorical figures effectively, or we do not use them at all. If we use them it is because we presume our reader is capable of catching them, and because we believe that we will appear more incisive and convincing. In this case, we should not be ashamed of them, and we should not explain them. If we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but if we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling the reader an idiot. In turn, he will take revenge by calling the author an idiot.