[PHOTO] Flowers by the window, Allan Gardens

If we are going to have an abbreviated winter and an extended spring, I at least want spring to come in full force with all the colour I could ever want.

[ISL] "Kansas town of Olathe has P.E.I.-themed subdivision — who knew?"

This is bizarre. The CBC's Sara Fraser reports.

From the strange-but-true file: a Kansas town has a P.E.I.-themed subdivision with old-fashioned street lamps, houses trimmed with wooden gingerbread and street names that include Prince Edward Island Street, Charlotte Town Road and Cavendish Trail.

The Brittany Yesteryear subdivision was built in the town of Olathe near Kansas City in the late 1980s by developers Don and Faith Bell. The Bells visited P.E.I. in the early 1980s, and one of Mrs. Bell's favourite books became — you guessed it — Anne of Green Gables.

"We just thought it would be interesting," recalls Faith Bell, now in her 80s, from her home in Olathe.

Other streets in the subdivision refer to P.E.I.'s most famous author: Lucy Maud Montgomery Way, Marilla Lane, Green Gables Street and Anne Shirley Drive.

"We saw those different names [on our trip to P.E.I.] and I got some books and I got a beautiful photograph — in fact, several."

[URBAN NOTE] "Guelph a preferred option over Toronto"

Kathy Flaxman's article in the Toronto Star makes for interesting reading, and believable reading. It's just that me, with my Island roots, see a city with almost the same population as my native province as not an especially small city at all.

A backyard was a must-have for Joanna Cobban when she went house-hunting.

Joanna Cobban loves her drive to work along country roads. She fills her half-hour commute singing along — loudly — with the likes of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off.” It’s a direct contrast to her days being stuck in city traffic or crowded into the subway. “My commute takes me through farmland, and it is beautiful,” she says.

Cobban, who turns 30 next weekend, last year traded her hectic urban life in The 6 for Guelph, still a city with 120,000 people but smaller. She longed to return after graduating from the University of Guelph. Then, last year, she did and purchased a two-bedroom home where she lives with her dog Casey, a yellow Labrador/golden retriever mix.

Add it all up and Cobban is living in her dream location, in her own home, with the dog she wanted and a good job in her field as a senior business analyst with a major insurance company nearby.

“As a student in Guelph I loved the green spaces and the relatively laid-back atmosphere,” she says. “It’s beautiful, with a lake and great outdoor areas. There are a bunch of farmers’ markets close by and places like St. Jacobs have excellent bakeries. I have a motorcycle and a bike, and there are a lot of trails and back roads that I plan to explore this summer.”

[. . .]

“I always had the idea that I wanted to return to Guelph,” she says. “I had previously thought I might like to buy a condo. But I knew with Casey I wanted a house with a fenced backyard.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Zoo forced to adapt to survive as attendance falls"

The Toronto Star's Jennifer Pagliaro writes about the Toronto Zoo's ever-going struggle for viability. I did not know that it faced so many issues.

(Perhaps I should go this year?)

When the gates of the Metro Toronto Zoo opened in Aug. 15, 1974, officials anticipated a first day crush of 50,000 visitors.

What they got was 8,000 as officials blamed an ongoing transit strike and fears of overcrowding for keeping visitors away. It wasn’t the only glitch.

The guests who did come complained of too-high barriers that prevented children from seeing some of the animals on display. Some of the animals were impossible to see at all: A group of aardvarks mysteriously disappeared, believed to have burrowed under their enclosure, far from view.

[. . .]

Throughout its more than 40 year history, officials charged with overseeing the 700-acre public zoo, have been exceedingly optimistic that putting a wide selection of the animal kingdom — especially newborns — on display would attract the kind of visitors needed to keep it running. But in all the time gates have been open, the Toronto Zoo, as it’s known now, has always operated at a loss, needing millions from the city each year to keep going.

Bad weather, declining spending on tourism and competing attractions have been the target of blame since Day One.

But with attendance rates falling — reaching an eight-year low last year even as zoos in Calgary, San Diego and New York have seen revenues climb — the Toronto Zoo is faced with an age-old problem: Adapt to survive. But how?

[URBAN NOTE] "Over-the-air TV opens up the world outside your door"

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with Shawn Micallef's argument in the Toronto Star. Whether over-the-air or streamed digitally, content is content, and can be as localized as you'd like.

Most television transmissions in Toronto originate from the CN Tower, the reason it was built, and if your place has a clear line of sight to it you’ll likely have a good signal. My apartment faces north, away from the tower, but condo buildings bounce the signal down to me. I was also surprised at how many Buffalo stations I was getting.

“Signals travel really well over the lake,” says May. “It’s like how you can hear people partying far across water.” In my layperson’s imagination, the condos catch the Buffalo signals and throw them down to me. Thanks condos.

Watching, and listening, to terrestrial broadcasts is a connection to place that “on-demand” services can’t provide, and watching OTA TV has been a sort of rediscovery of the region. Terrestrial radio is similar, providing a local connection that satellite services and podcasts often don’t. The best thing to do on a road trip is find local radio stations and soak up the local commercials, news and traffic reports, all a way to understand that place a bit more.

Watching Buffalo commercials, I now have intimate knowledge of their local attorney scene should I ever wish to file a medical malpractice or slip-and-fall lawsuit in western New York, but all of it has me wanting to visit Buffalo more. Toronto and Buffalo used to have a stronger relationship when they were the bigger city, but Buffalo’s PBS station, WNED, still appreciates the relationship because it brings in fundraising dollars, albeit depressed Canadian ones, branding themselves as a “Buffalo-Toronto” station.

[URBAN NOTE] "When Mississauga Was “Toronto”"

insauga.com explores how Mississauga stopped being Toronto. Literally.

Were it not for the population growth in what's now Mississauga, this website might have been named something else. Why? From 1806 to 1968, the majority of Mississauga was known as "Toronto Township".

Rewind to Samuel de Champlain's explorations of this area in 1615, and you'll find maps using "tkaronto", a Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) word, to mark a waterway up at Lake Simcoe, past Barrie.

Over the next years, variants of "Toronto" were used for a wetland on Lake Simcoe, Lake Simcoe itself, a canoe route along the Humber River, and even the Humber River itself (Riviere Taronto). Eventually, a fort named Toronto was established on what are now the grounds of Exhibition Place. Also known as Fort Rouille, it was the earliest permanent non-Aboriginal settlement in the area.

[. . .]

According to an account of the story by Peel warden and Toronto Township reeve Mary Fix, Simcoe was partial to the name Toronto for the new capital of Upper Canada. His associates, though, were cold to the option, preferring to use British names as aspirational goals for the new colony. When the community was finally laid, a ceremony was held on August 27, 1793, to announce the name of "York" for this "temporary" capital of Upper Canada. (Similarly, the settlement of Niagara was renamed Newark, and Cataraqui became Kingston.) In the words of an Irish map-maker working in Canada, "It is to be lamented that the Indian names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others."

A little west, what became Toronto Township was being drawn out. Following the "Mississauga purchase" of land from the local Aboriginals, the name Toronto was given "legally and officially" to the area in 1805. (Alexander Grant, a member of the Executive and Legislative Council of Upper Canada wanted to call two other Townships "Alexander" and "Grant", but was overruled.) It's thought that Grant would have been familiar with the name from Fort Toronto, and perhaps even Simcoe's preferences, when he named the township. Surveying of the land, which would allow settlement, began in 1806, the year Simcoe died/>b;pclqipte?

[LINK] "Under the Crushing Weight of the Tuscan Sun"

At The New Yorker, travel writer Jason Wilson confesses his issues with Under The Tuscan Sun. I do think I get his point that travelogues without narratives of setbacks or shocks of some kind are ultimately boring, leaving aside the whole fetishization of a region.

I have sat on Tuscan-brown sofas surrounded by Tuscan-yellow walls, lounged on Tuscan patios made with Tuscan pavers, surrounded by Tuscan landscaping. I have stood barefoot on Tuscan bathroom tiles, washing my hands under Tuscan faucets after having used Tuscan toilets. I have eaten, sometimes on Tuscan dinnerware, a Tuscan Chicken on Ciabatta from Wendy’s, a Tuscan Chicken Melt from Subway, the $6.99 Tuscan Duo at Olive Garden, and Tuscan Hummus from California Pizza Kitchen. Recently, I watched my friend fill his dog’s bowl with Beneful Tuscan Style Medley dog food. This barely merited a raised eyebrow; I’d already been guilty of feeding my cat Fancy Feast’s White Meat Chicken Tuscany. Why deprive our pets of the pleasures of Tuscan living?

In “Tuscan Leather,” from 2013, Drake raps, “Just give it time, we’ll see who’s still around a decade from now.” Whoever among us is still here, it seems certain that we will still be living with the insidious and inescapable word “Tuscan,” used as marketing adjective, cultural signifier, life-style choice. And while we may never escape our Tuscan lust, we at least know who’s to blame: Frances Mayes, the author of the memoir “Under the Tuscan Sun,” which recounts her experience restoring an abandoned villa called Bramasole in the Tuscan countryside. The book, published in 1996, spent more than two and a half years on the Times best-seller list and, in 2003, inspired a hot mess of a film adaptation starring Diane Lane. In the intervening years, Mayes has continued to put out Tuscan-themed books at a remarkable rate—“Bella Tuscany,” “Bringing Tuscany Home,” “Every Day in Tuscany,” “The Tuscan Sun Cookbook”—as well as her own line of Tuscan wines, olive oils, and even furniture. In so doing, she has managed to turn a region of Italy into a shorthand for a certain kind of bourgeois luxury and good taste. A savvy M.B.A. student should do a case study.

I feel sheepish admitting this, but I have a longtime love-hate relationship with “Under the Tuscan Sun.” Since first reading the book, in the nineties, when I was in my twenties, its success has haunted me, teased me, and tortured me as I’ve forged a career as a food and travel writer who occasionally does stories about Italy. I could understand the appeal of Mayes’s memoir to, for instance, my mother, who loves nothing more than to plot the construction of a new dream house. “I come from a long line of women who open their handbags and take out swatches of upholstery,” Mayes writes, “colored squares of bathroom tile, seven shades of paint samples, and strips of flowered wallpaper.” She may as well be speaking directly to my mom and many of her friends. But I was more puzzled by the people my own age who suddenly turned Tuscan crazy—drizzling extra-virgin olive oil on everything, mispronouncing “bruschetta,” pretending to love white beans. In 2002, I was asked to officiate a wedding of family friends in Tuscany, where a few dozen American guests stayed in a fourteenth-century villa that had once been a convent. The villa’s owners were fussy yuppies from Milan who had a long, scolding list of house rules—yet, when we inquired why the electricity went out every day from 2 P.M. to 8 P.M., they shrugged and told us we were uptight Americans. This irritating mix of fussy, casual, and condescending reminded me of the self-satisfied tone of “Under the Tuscan Sun.” I began to despise the villa owners so much that when the brother-in-law of the bride and groom got drunk on Campari and vomited on a fourteenth-century fresco, causing more than a thousand euros in damage, I had a good, long private laugh.

[LINK] "The Arab World is at war with itself"

At Al Jazeera, Lamis Andoni describes from her perspective how the Arab world is splintering into fragments defined by sect, geography and the like, how it is disintegrating.

[A] sectarian anti-Shia language was not dominant in the Arab collective psyche which was more shaped by the legacy of the anti-colonialist struggle and commitment to the Palestinian cause.

Therefore, a majority of Arabs, unlike the pro-Western Arab governments, openly supported and celebrated the Iranian revolution in 1979 that overthrew Reza Pahlavi's regime, seen as the region's "gendarmerie" protecting US and Israeli interests.

It was the pro-Western Arab regimes, who feared and incited against post-revolution Iran, not on a sectarian basis, but out of fierce rivalry over influence and control.

It was not until more than a decade later that fear of exaggerated Iranian influence over Shia Muslims in the Gulf states became an overwhelming concern for these regimes - a claim that was also used as pretext to suppress domestic opposition.

The rallying against "the Shia threat" that started in full swing in 2004, was part of the US-backed formation of an axis of so-called "moderate" Arab states versus the Iranian-led Shia axis, aimed at undermining support for Hezbollah and Hamas, as resisters against Israel.

[LINK] "Explore idea of guaranteed minimum income, parliamentary committee says"

The Toronto Star shares Andy Blatchford's Canadian Press article noting the traction the idea of a guaranteed minimum income at the federal level in Canada.

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[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• Bad Astronomy notes Ceres' unusually large mountain, Ahuna Mons.


• Crooked Timber wonders if there are too many callbacks to history in the current American presidential campaign.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper comparing the makeup of T Tauri stars in Taurus and Orion.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money wishes Obama could run again.


• Marginal Revolution notes the unpopularity of Trump among Mormons.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explains why tactical voting is not much of a thing, looking to Kasich and Rubio.


• Torontoist again reports from spring training for the Toronto Blue Jays in Florida.


• Transit Toronto notes the spread of WiFi throughout the subway network, Dufferin remaining an anomaly.


• Arnold Zwicky notes the comics of the Maya, prized artifacts.

[DM] Some followups

At Demography Matters, I have a links post following up on old posts, everything from Georgia's continued population shrinkage to the plight of Haitian-background women in the Dominican Republic to stateless children of North Korean women in China.