[PHOTO] Me, suspicious, with Owl and Fox at Harbourfront

Pursuant to my previous post, suffice it to say that the above--thanks Stephen!--is now my new Facebook profile picture.

I had fun.

[PHOTO] Departure of the Union-Pearson Express

The blurriness of this photo is not my fault. This train, one of the many of the Union-Pearson Express, was simply accelerating away from its Union Station berth below, already reaching a substantial speed by the time it was about to pass underneath me.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Centauri Dreams considers agriculture in space.


• Crooked Timber examines the tribalisms which benefit Donald Trump.


• Dangerous Minds notes an angry New York City television editorial criticizing the Sex Pistols.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the cycles of Mars' north polar gap.


• Language Log talks about Chinese script, starting with Ted Chiang's criticisms.


• The LRB Blog speculates about the future of a Labour Party that has lost its working-class support.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen likes the Chinese city of Qingdao.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the dispatch of the OSIRIS-REx probe to the launch pad.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders what solution Bernie Sanders is proposing for Puerto Rico.


• Understanding Society describes sociological frameworks for writing biographies.


• Window on Eurasia speculates the doping scandal may cost Russia not only the Olympics but FIFA in 2018, and is unsurprised by Gorbachev's support of the annexation of Crimea.

[NEWS] Some Tuesday links

• The Atlantic notes the import of the assassination of the head of the Taliban.


• The BBC observes Spotify has more revenues, but is still not making money.


• Bloomberg suggests Brexit would embolden central European populists and slow down growth, and looks at Coca Cola's end of production in Venezuela.


• Bloomberg View suggests a new class of educated Chinese professionals will hurt middle-class wages.


• The CBC notes the lifting of the mandatory evacuation order for northern Alberta oil sands camps.


• Daily Xtra looks at the importance of Facebook in spreading knowledge to PrEP.


• Gizmodo notes the proliferation of cephalopods in the world's oceans.


• The Miami Herald describes how desperate Venezuelans are turning to urban gardening.


• The National Post looks at Kevin O'Leary's interest in Canadian politics.


• The Toronto Star reports on the lifting of the American arms sales embargo against Vietnam.


• Wired notes Grindr can still be hacked to identify users' locations.

[URBAN NOTE] DiManno on the life and death of Rodney Whitefish

The Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno tells the story of a man recently murdered in Toronto, a First Nations man battling homelessness and poverty for decades.

It was the misfortune of Ramsey Whitefish to become Toronto’s 30th homicide a mere three days after the murder of a five-month pregnant woman whose premature baby was saved by emergency caesarean section.

How does a victim compete with that kind of shocking narrative? Because it apparently requires exceptional circumstances for a city to sit up and take notice as the bodies pile up this year at a record pace. It feels numbingly like the new normal, a reprise of the Year of the Gun in 2005.

Candace Rochelle Bobb was homicide No. 29, slain as she sat in the back seat of a vehicle that was fired upon repeatedly alongside the Jamestown public housing complex. Her murder was front-page news, avidly followed by an appalled public.

Whitefish’s life wasn’t extinguished by gunfire, so he doesn’t even fall within the arc of bang-bang melodrama; what lies not beneath but very much in the open, brazen. The 42-year-old aboriginal man died of blunt force trauma to the head, possibly inflicted by a rock found near his body where it was discovered in a pool of blood on Gloucester St., just before midnight Wednesday. The Star ran an online story, first reporting his death, then later an update saying an arrest had been made within hours.

Yet the murder of Whitefish is just as much a vital tale of this city, of how people live in our midst and how they die in our midst.

For some two decades, since arriving in Toronto from a reserve in the Turtle Island area — Whitefish was part Sioux, part Ojibway — he had been among the chronically homeless, with its drastic over-representation of aboriginals: 16 per cent of the homeless, despite accounting for only one per cent of the local population, according to the 2013 Street Needs Assessment survey; one-third of those found to be sleeping rough, that is outside, in parks, on benches, inside doorways.

[URBAN NOTE] NOW Toronto on the last video stores of the city

In NOW Toronto, Aidan Johnston looks at how the last video rental stores are doing.

In stark contrast to the superfluous openings of weed dispensaries in Toronto, when a video store disappears from the streetscape, it’s deeply mourned. Of course, as sad as we sometimes get, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Despite overcoming the big-box boom of the 2000s, independent video stores now face history’s largest shift in the home movie market, and the most-embraced home entertainment feature since the television: on-demand streaming.

“There were at one time 75,000 video stores in North America; we’re down to about 1200 left,” Howard Levman informs me, just three weeks after his flagship location of Queen Video at Spadina closed. “Queen reached that threshold where there’s just not enough business.”

Levman first opened his venerable store 35 years ago, with two more locations following suit. A College location closed in 2014, but the Bloor location in the Annex remains just a few blocks away from the equally beloved Suspect Video (which will sadly shutter at the end of this year). So what’s still working at the remaining store?

“Well, the Bloor store was busier,” he says. “It had a lower break-even point, so it was able to last longer in a shrinking industry. Our customers that are left, most of them aren't internet savvy and they don't download anything.”

But at a time when you can rent new releases on your iPad or start an entire series of television with one indifferent click, aren't people drawn to the back catalogue of classics on offer at local video stores that services like Netflix and Shomi are sorely lacking? The answer is no.

[URBAN NOTE] NOW Toronto on niche real estate agents

This is fascinating. From NOW Toronto's Miles Kenyon:

The Toronto Real Estate Board estimates there are roughly 42,000 realtors working in the GTA. This means competition between rival agents is fierce. But with market trends and finances beyond the control of your housing representative, how are they able to set themselves apart?

Some have taken to moving beyond the noise of numbers and appealing instead to their clients’ sexual orientations, specialized needs and even spiritual beliefs.

For instance:

The Christian

What would Jesus do? Given today’s economy, he might sell condos. Scott Benson isn’t really sure but he does think he’s trying his best to blend his religious beliefs with Toronto’s housing market.

“I have the willingness to try and do real estate in a way that is true to the Christian principles,” the 35-year-old agent says. He thinks that clients seek him out because they’re looking for someone who will handle the biggest purchase of their lives while adhering to particular values. However, sometimes these guiding principles clash with traditional businesses practices.

Benson offers this recent example: in one transaction, he represented both the buyer and seller of a property. Appliances were supposed to be included in the sale, but when the buyer went to move in, they discovered the washer and dryer were missing. After double-checking the paperwork and finding that the seller was in the wrong, he attempted to mediate the situation instead of getting lawyers involved. But an agreement couldn’t be met, so he simply purchased new appliances to settle the disagreement himself.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Trip Advisor for rental apartments?"

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc describes the push for a landlord registry and licensing system.

When the members of the Municipal Licensing and Standards committee meet tomorrow at City Hall, they’ll be considering the latest attempt to license the apartment sector, with a motion to create a public consultation process around how such a system might function, and how the city should rate multi-unit buildings, which provide homes for hundreds of thousands of Torontonians.

For those with long memories, the lobbying and caterwauling that will begin to escape from the powerful landlord industry in the wake of this meeting will likely rival the complaints from Toronto’s restaurant sector circa 2000, when Mel Lastman’s famous “rat shit” quote ushered in a new era of public health ratings for eateries (now known as DineSafe).

Times have changed, and the licensing debate that begins after Thursday’s session will be informed and shaped by the open-data movement.

Firing the first volley, ACORN Canada, a tenants group, and a New York civic tech firm, RentLogic, have teamed up to create something called Toronto Landlord Watchlist, which is modeled on New York City’s Landlord Watchlist, a project of the NYC’s Public Advocate (currently, Letita James). The site, which went live this morning, contains information drawn from inspections triggered by tenant complaints. That data has been used to compile a list of what the organizers call Toronto’s 100 worst apartment buildings. (The data sets are available here.) Let the searching begin…

In New York, RentLogic has set up a beta site for a Big Apple apartment rankings service, which draws on all sorts of granular information from open-data releases, including reports on rodents, electrical problems and hot water interruptions.

[URBAN NOTE] "New plan would add 525 km of bike routes to create a true Toronto network"

The Toronto Star's Ben Spurr reports. All I can say is that this is a great plan. Will it be enacted? This remains to be seen.

Bike lanes could be coming to eight of Toronto’s busiest streets if the city’s new 10-year cycling plan pans out.

The plan, released in a city report Monday, identifies 525 km of new bike lanes, cycle tracks, trails and other routes that, if built, would create the kind of connected network Toronto’s bike advocates have long pushed for.

The majority of that infrastructure, some 280 km, would be in the form of painted or physically separated bike lanes on busy streets, while 190 km of it would be cycling routes on quieter roads. The remaining 55 km would be “sidewalk-level boulevard trails” running alongside major thoroughfares. The plan would cost an estimated $153.5 million over the next decade.

“Over a 10-year period we would roughly look at doubling the amount of cycling routes in the city,” said Stephen Buckley, the city’s general manager of transportation services. He said that to date the city’s planning of its bike network has been disjointed, and his goal was to “develop a full network that we could get behind.”

The guiding principles are connecting existing cycling routes, expanding the network, and improving infrastructure already in place, Buckley said.

Perhaps the most striking feature is a proposal to study bike infrastructure on eight major corridors, including Bloor St./Dupont St. from Dundas St. to Sherbourne St.; Danforth Ave. from Broadview Ave. to Kingston Rd.; and Yonge St. all the way from Steeles to Front St., almost the full length of the city.