[PHOTO] Eight photos of Toronto from the CN Tower

I have made two other visits to the CN Tower, but last Monday's visit felt different. The first time I was in the CN Tower was in 2002, the next in 2003. Both times, I was very new to Toronto and did not know what streets or what buildings I was seeing from high above. This time I did know what I was seeing.

I knew that the below was Billy Bishop Airport, on the western end of the Toronto Islands.



I could follow the rail corridor as it stretched west, past the new condo districts to the south and under the bridges of Spadina Avenue, Bathurst Street, and Dufferin Street.





I could look north to the leafy west-end neighbourhoods I know well.



I could appreciate the safety cage used by the workers who, in cleaning the windows of the CN Tower, made these views possible.



I could pick out the line of towers stretching north along Yonge.



Going outside, I could pick out the Financial District through thick mesh.



Looking down over the lip of the CN Tower, on its eastern edge, from the east, I could see that corner of Toronto as if in miniature.



The view is fantastic. If you're in Toronto, you really should go.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes the warning of the Royal Bank of Canada that the city has too many condos.


• D-Brief notes how patterns of glucose consumption in the brain can distinguish between people capable of consciousness and those otherwise.


• Dangerous Minds notes the Victorian tradition of post-mortem photographs.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that, apparently, our knowledge of nearby brown dwarfs is limited.


• The Dragon's Tales considers the impact of close encounters with massive passing bodies on the crusts of ice moons.


• Joe. My. God. notes the criticism of Peter Thiel, funder of attacks against Gawker, by Gawker's founder as a comic book villain.


• Language Log notes early efforts to promote a single standard for the Russian language in the Soviet era.


• The Map Room Blog shares the new map of the London subway system.


• The Russian Demographics Blog charts the sources of different countries' immigrant populations.


• Window on Eurasia notes the popularity of imperialism in Russia.

[NEWS] Some Saturday links

• Bloomberg notes Chinese interest in Australian housing is starting to drop, observes that Miami's condo boom is likewise slowing down, observes rising migration to the United Kingdom, notes a stated European Union refusal to compromise the deal with Turkey, and reports about Russia's search for export markets for its chicken.


• Bloomberg View notes China's problems with launching itself as a pop culture exporter, and looks at the fragmentation of the European Union's digital markets.


• CBC notes that apparently Mars is emerging from an ice age, and reports from the Conservative party's national polic convention.


• The National Post notes that, after photos of Chinese students in a mountain village climbing almost a kilometre on a ladder to get to school, this village might get stairs.


• Open Democracy hosts an unconvincing argument that universal basic income will make recipients lonelier.


• Urban Ghosts Media shares photos of abandoned radar stations in North America along the Arctic.


• Universe Today wonders if there could be life on Kepler-62f.

[URBAN NOTE] Two links on the escaped capybara of High Park

CBC interviewed a local expert in capybara on the ability of individuals of this species to hide.

Catching the pair of capybaras currently on the lam in Toronto's High Park won't be an easy feat, according to an expert with experience wrangling the giant rodents in his native Brazil.

"They have this survival instinct. It's like running after a cheetah," said Diogo Beltran, who worked with the Tropical Sustainability Institute in Brazil, a country where capybaras are a major nuisance, not unlike rats or raccoons.

"In Brazil it's a hobby. We don't go out hunting turkeys — we capture capybaras in our spare time," he said in an interview on CBC Radio's Metro Morning.

[. . . B]eltran said that in Brazil, capybaras aren't always a laughing matter. Now a computer engineer, he once worked to clear large groups of capybaras from construction sites and rivers. He and his colleagues used traps to humanely capture the animals for release in the wild. But it wasn't easy.

One reason is that capybaras are semi-acquatic. They can hide in water and remain below the surface for up to five minutes at a time. It's for this reason Beltran says they can't be captured using tranquillizer darts because they'll just run into the water and drown once the sedative takes effect.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s red-hot market sends property values soaring"

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski describes booming property prices in Toronto. If this is not a bubble--if this is the new normal--then I worry.

Toronto's blistering housing market has prompted a 30 per cent jump in residential property values over the last four years, according to the company that assesses real estate in the province.

City homeowners will receive assessment notices — their first since 2012 — from the Municipal Property Assessment Corp. (MPAC) beginning next week showing a 7.5 per cent annual increase in their property values.

That's well above the 4.5 per cent provincial average, but lower than the double-digit increases in some 905-area communities such as Richmond Hill and Markham.

The average assessed value for a single-family detached home in Toronto is $770,000, up about $200,000 on average from the last assessment in 2012. Toronto condo values increased 2.9 per cent on average to $363,000, about $35,000 higher than four years ago.

Although assessments are linked to property taxes, homeowners should not panic about a steep rise in taxes, says MPAC.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Police try to convince us marijuana dispensaries are dangerous"

Michelle da Silva and Kate Robertson of NOW Toronto report on the unconvincing arguments of Toronto police that the marijuana dispensaries were dangerous.

No one is coming from this looking good, not the dispensaries that opened while their key product was illegal, not the police that mounted the raids.

Reason #1: Because they’re not licenced to sell what they sell.

“We have to have environments where it is regulated, properly by the government so that there is a standard, not just an ad hoc, ‘I think i’ll just open a shop and go by my own rules,’” Saunders said today. “You can’t do that.”

But isn’t that why so many medpot activists and dispensary owners were eager to speak to the issue at the May 19 Licensing and Standards Committee meeting that was deferred to be held on June 27? Should the City not take some responsibility for their snail-paced approach to regulating the industry?

Reason #2: Because there are serious health and safety concerns.

“There is no quality control whatsoever on these products and, as you can see, they’re marketed in a way to disguise the unknown and unregulated amount of THC in the products,” Saunders said today. But at least some of the products on display were reportedly bought at Bulk Barn and intended to demonstrate that they are similar to edible cannabis products.

But many of the products shown at the press conference – like this Twisted Extracts’ Jelly Bomb (a fruit-flavoured edible in the shape of a Lego piece, with each dot representing one dose) – do clearly outline THC levels and recommended doses. In fact, many edible cannabis products do. To suggest that dispensaries are filled with unlabelled goods that look exactly like treats for kids is misleading.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why is Same-Sex Marriage Still Up for Debate Among Conservatives?"

That it has taken so long for the Conservative Party of Canada to accept same-sex marriage, as Erica Lenti wrote in Torontoist, is astounding.

According to the platform, which was last amended in November 2013, the Conservative Party “believe[s] that Parliament, through a free vote, and not the courts should determine the definition of marriage. We support legislation defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

Several MPs felt strongly about removing these clauses from the platform. Winnipeg MP Michelle Rempel broke down in tears during a scrum, noting to party members that her cousin is gay and that the Tory stance should be inclusive.

But the Tories are still split: about one-third of those at the convention voted against reviewing the heternormative references from the platform. In particular, Saskatoon MP Brad Trost said the issue is “divisive” and could tear the party apart.

[LINK] "How Literature Became Word Perfect": On the advent of word processing for writers

Josephine Livingstone's article at The New Republic describing how writers made the transition from typewriter to computer is a fascinating piece of history.

“As if being 1984 weren’t enough.” Thomas Pynchon, writing in The New York Times Book Review, marked the unnerving year with an honest question about seemingly dystopian technology: “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” The Association of American Publishers records that by 1984, between 40 and 50 percent of American authors were using word processors. It had been a quarter-century since novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture in which he saw intellectual life split into “literary” and “scientific” halves. Pynchon posited that the division no longer held true; it obscured the reality about the way things were going. “Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors,” he wrote. “Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead.”

The literary history of the early years of word processing—the late 1960s through the mid-’80s—forms the subject of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s new book, Track Changes. The year 1984 was a key moment for writers deciding whether to upgrade their writing tools. That year, the novelist Amy Tan founded a support group for Kaypro users called Bad Sector, named after her first computer—itself named for the error message it spat up so often; and Gore Vidal grumped that word processing was “erasing” literature. He grumped in vain. By 1984, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Chabon, Ralph Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice all used WordStar, a first-generation commercial piece of software that ran on a pre-DOS operating system called CP/M. (One notable author still using WordStar is George R.R. Martin.)

In the late 1970s and ’80s, brands of home computers proliferated: TRS-80 Model I, Commodore PET, Philips/Magnavox VideoWriter 250. All of these were stand-alone machines with price tags over $500. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh personal computer, which included MacWrite, a word processor that couldn’t deal with documents over eight pages. Very few writers liked it—with the notable exceptions of Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Mona Simpson, who used MacWrite to compose Anywhere but Here while interning at The Paris Review. Simpson had an excellent reason for enjoying the new Mac: Her biological brother, Steve Jobs, had invented it.

Genre writers were among the earliest adopters of new word processing technologies—experimenting with them as early as the 1970s—since they were often more adventurous and less precious than their hyper-literary colleagues. Many of the highest-browed in the literary world resisted word processing for decades. Indeed, some writers would conceal the fact that they used a word processor for fear of being tarnished by an association with automation or inauthenticity. In a 2011 New York Times article, Gish Jen recalled colleagues at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1980s doctoring their printouts, adding unnecessary pencil annotations in order to make their manuscripts seem more “real,” less perfect. Perfect copy, after all, was for the typist, not the genius.

[WRITING] "It’s a Writer’s Market": Bloomberg Businessweek on e-publishing

Karen Angel's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article is thought-provoking. Is this an accurate depiction of the situation facing writers? (Also: How do you become a midlist author in the first place?)

For Greg White, the last straw came when his publisher forgot to ship copies of his book to the launch party last October. It was just one in a series of lost marketing opportunities, says White, co-host of the Food Network show Unique Sweets. So he decided to take his book back. After getting his contract canceled, he turned to the editorial marketplace Reedsy to redesign The Pink Marine, his memoir about life as a gay serviceman. The author, who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., formed his own imprint, AboutFace Books, and cut a distribution deal with Ingram Content Group. “Five years ago, self-publishing was a scar,” White says. “Now it’s a tattoo.”

A new generation of online editorial services and self-publishing platforms is fueling that change in perception. The upstarts offer skills and services that used to be available only through traditional publishing, plus favorable royalty splits. They also allow authors to retain the copyright to their work. The array of offerings is spurring some writers to leave their publishing houses—particularly midlist authors whose books receive scant marketing support. Some are also using the new services to put out e-book versions of their out-of-print titles.

Janice Graham used Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform to release digital versions of her five novels, including 1998’s Firebird, a New York Times best-seller. For a novel in progress, she hired an editor through Reedsy and plans to self-publish unless a publisher offers her a good deal. “I’m not so interested in the prestige of being published by a traditional publisher at this point,” says Graham, who lives in Florence, Italy. “What I’m interested in is maximizing sales.”

Reedsy is a community of about 450 handpicked publishing professionals available for hire. The two-year-old London-based company offers software that allows authors to collaborate with editors without having to e-mail manuscripts back and forth. Reedsy co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Emmanuel Nataf says he had an epiphany when he got his first Amazon Kindle e-reader: “The barriers to publishing had been removed.”

[FORUM] What have you been reading?

Do you read fiction or non-fiction, books or shorter texts, printed material or online?

Discuss.