[PHOTO] Corner store cat, Dovercourt and Hallam

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams looks at cometary breakups.


• Dangerous Minds notes that a legal suit brought by a member of Kraftwerk has legalized sampling in Germany.


• The Dragon's Tales notes one group claiming that Planet Nine is a captured exoplanet.


• Language Hat looks at a native speaker of Hindi who is learning Gaelic as an adult.


• The Map Room Blog maps the decline of dialects in England.


• Marginal Revolution notes an apparent collapse in Indian fertility.


• Window on Eurasia notes Putin's belief in the importance of spiritual bonds to hold Russia together.

[NEWS] Some Thursday links

• The BBC notes a study suggesting that the bombardment of the early Moon by comets gave it water.


• Bloomberg View criticizes red tape in Greece, and notes that the salts of Australia will be drawing solar cell manufacturers to that country.


• The Guardian notes Jeremy Corbyn's claims of BBC bias against him.


• The Inter Press Service examines the vulnerability of young women in Africa to HIV.


• MacLean's notes the struggles of a prominent Inuit family, the Tootoos, with alcohol.


• National Geographic notes an exciting archeological dig into the heart of Roman London and reports on signs of activity on Pluto.


• New Scientist notes that, among the orcas, evolution is driven by culture, with culturally distinctive groups also being genetically distinctive.


• The Toronto Star reports that Mossack-Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers, is shuttering offices.


• Wired notes Switzerland's Gotthard tunnel and warns that Flint is not the worst bit of American infrastructure in decay.

[URBAN NOTE] "Quebec-Vermont towns straddling border chafe under heightened security"

The Toronto Star shares William Marsden's Washington Post article noting how tight border controls are dividing a binational community on the Québec-Vermont border.

For some folks living in a cluster of small towns straddling the U.S.-Canadian border here, life could not feel more comfortably secure.

Six Canadian and U.S. checkpoints service the four-kilometre stretch of frontier that cuts through the villages of Derby Line and Beebe Plain, both in Vermont, and the town of Stanstead, in Quebec. Street cameras, satellite and sensor surveillance, vehicle patrols, and the occasional thumping helicopter overhead ensure that residents can’t budge without someone watching.

It’s no wonder that many don’t bother to lock their doors.

“We really feel safe,” said Laurie Dubois, 56, an American living on the Canadian side. With the cameras and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, she noted, “there’s not a whole lot of bad stuff going on.”

But the heightened security is a sign of the times that doesn’t sit well with all of the residents in these once close-knit cross-border communities tucked into the northern highlands of the Appalachian Mountains.

[URBAN NOTE] "Fish feed the plants, plants clean the water in waiter's fresh-food venture"

The Globe and Mail carries Andrew Seale's article looking at the potential of urban aquaponics.

Pablo Alvarez envisions a day when Torontonians will wander his Aqua Greens aquaponics farm in the city centre, choosing bunches of arugula, basil and chives as well as a couple of the tilapia swimming below the plants.

Customers will be able to buy fish and local, organic greens any time of year, says Mr. Alvarez, an entrepreneur and long-time waiter who wants to connect people with their food.

But for now his aquaponics farm – a self-contained ecosystem in which fish swimming in huge vats provide nutrients for plants floating above on foam pads, which in turn clean the water for the tilapia – is relegated to a 3,000-square-foot industrial park near Pearson International Airport.

Before they set up their current location in September of 2014, Mr. Alvarez and partner Craig Petten were denied permission to launch in Toronto proper, given that the city’s zoning bylaws don’t allow agricultural operations. It’s a pain point for the small business, which supplies produce – the tilapia aren’t for sale yet – to multiple restaurants in the downtown core.

The bootstrapped startup is at full capacity, producing about 12,000 plants a month with 5,000 tilapia. The guys behind Aqua Greens say the business will make its way into the black in the coming months, more than a year after the first harvest.

The founders haven’t paid themselves yet, but they say a more pressing challenge is finding a way to compensate the six or seven volunteers, mostly students of environmental science or zoology, who also pitch in. They help with the harvest, clean the systems and brainstorm how to make Aqua Greens more efficient.

[URBAN NOTE] "‘Buyer gridlock’: If Toronto and Vancouver homes were on a Monopoly board"

The Globe and Mail's Michael Babad reports on an eye-catching, if depressing, analogy for the Toronto and Vancouver real estate markets: The board game Monopoly.

TD’s chief economist, Beata Caranci, has done a unique study of what observers believe are the frothiest markets, and how things might look on a Monopoly board.

And they sure look different than when we were playing the game as kids.

“Baltic Avenue, once considered one of the most affordable, is now fetching the price of St. James Place,” Ms. Caranci said in her recent report. “Ultimately, Toronto and Vancouver are moving the way of many international cities, where land constraints and population growth forces residents out and up. Out into suburbs and up into condominiums, be it ownership or rental.”

[. . .]

Ms. Caranci noted that Monopoly players might normally buy something cheap like Connecticut Avenue on “the first time around the board,” but they’ll still have enough to buy, say, Marvin Gardens, which is a goal.

“If the game changes such that Connecticut Avenue fetches the price of Marvin Gardens, would this alter the selection of your first purchase?”

[URBAN NOTE] "'On the Waterfront': Transit 'reset' options"

Robert Mackenzie's extended Transit Toronto post looks at transit futures for the Toronto waterfront.

Rapid growth in several neighbourhoods at or near the water’s edge — including Mimico, Humber Bay Shores, Liberty Village, Fort York, King/Spadina, City Place, South Core and King / Parliament — is significantly transforming the waterfront. The City is already planning to expand several more waterfront areas, including Lower Yonge, North Keating, the Port Lands, South of Eastern, the East Bayfront and West Don Lands.

Throughout the years, transit planning along the waterfront has been inconsistent, incomplete or non-existent. For example:
•Waterfront Light Rail Transit Line environmental assessment, 1995;
•Central Waterfront Secondary Plan, 2003;
•Lake Shore Boulevard West light rail transit study, 2008 - 2009: incomplete;
•“Closing the Gap” environmental assessment (reviewing transit options to connect Dufferin Street with Park Lawn Road), 2008: incomplete;
•Extending streetcar service to Dufferin Street environmental assessment modification, 2008: approved (but never implemented);
•Bremner / Fort York alternative alignment environmental assessment, 2008: incomplete.
•Waterfront East light rail transit line environmental assessment, 2010: approved (but never implemented);
•East Bayfront Transit Implementation Study, 2013;
•Various plans to improve transit along the waterfront east of Yonge Street, including the North Keating, Port Lands, South of Eastern, the East Bayfront and West Don Lands communities.

(Note how many of these studies ground to a halt during the regime of late mayor Rob Ford who disdained any form of rapid transit other than underground subway trains and had only slight interest in improving the central area.)

This hodgepodge of plans and proposals has resulted in a lack of any comprehensive plan for a transit network to handle transit for a growing residential population on the waterfront and travel from beyond the area to and from recreational destinations and post-secondary institutions. That’s why City Council directed the three agencies to study ways to “reset” plans for waterfront transit services during its meeting of November 3 and 4, 2015. (The City’s Planning division took the lead in the study.)

Despite the lack of co-ordination in planning, better transit is essential as the City projects both population and employment in the area to continue to grow. The current transit service is totally inadequate to handle to expected number of commuters into and out of what may be the fastest growing areas of Toronto over the next 25 years.

[URBAN NOTE] Two Toronto Star links on the possibly misjudged Scarborough one-stop subway expansion

First is Jennifer Pagliaro and Ben Spurr's "First detailed plans revealed for one-stop Scarborough subway".

As the city unveils the first detailed plans for the one-stop Scarborough subway, residents whose homes are threatened by tunnelling are questioning why the city is spending more than $2 billion for transit they worry is not justified.

At private meetings Tuesday, the city and TTC officials revealed the recommended alignment and station location for the subway extension to Scarborough’s city centre. That recommendation is to tunnel east from Kennedy Station along Eglinton Ave., north on Danforth Rd. to McCowan Rd., ending north of Ellesmere Rd. with a new station to be located in the middle of the parking lot now at the southwest corner of the Scarborough Town Centre.

But plans to cut just west of McCowan Rd. before Ellesmere Rd., tunnelling under a section of detached family bungalows that may need to be expropriated, has left some residents asking bigger questions. That was the case at a meeting of just under a dozen concerned neighbours who convened with city and TTC staff.

The proposed tunnel would run under a gas station and 11 Stanwell Dr. homes which back onto McCowan. The TTC has also notified those residents that their homes may need to be expropriated in order to create a 10,000-square-metre staging area for tunnel construction.

Officials are still considering whether to use the northwest or southwest corner of McCowan and Ellesmere for construction purposes. The northwest corner is the forested Civic Centre Park.

The two authors also have this article, "Mayor Tory defends Scarborough subway extension despite new ridership data". Briefly, there's barely enough projected traffic to justify a light rail route. Why spend so much and disrupt so much for so little?

Mayor John Tory is defending plans to build a one-stop subway extension to Scarborough for more than $2 billion despite new numbers that show ridership for the six-kilometre stretch would see trains that are 80 per cent empty at rush hour.

At a public consultation meeting at the Scarborough Civic Centre on Tuesday night, city planning staff unveiled new projections that said by 2031, at its busiest hour in its busiest direction, 7,300 people are expected to ride the new subway.

That ridership number is half of the upper range of figures presented to councillors in 2013 when they approved the extension. At the time, city planning staff said that between 9,500 and 14,000 would ride the subway, but since then the projections have been revised downward to accommodate the effect of the planned SmartTrack line and design changes that reduced the number of stops from three to one.

“I can’t speak to the numbers that were bandied around before I was here, but I can say that the numbers we’re looking at today make this a project that we should do and we must do, and I continue to be very committed to it,” Tory said at a transit announcement at the TTC’s Greenwood yard Wednesday afternoon.

The mayor said he believes recent reports on the shrinking numbers have been “misleading,” arguing other terminal subway stations have similar ridership — an argument also championed by senior city planning staff.

[URBAN NOTE] "Honest Ed’s memories to become part of new development"

Sarah-Joyce Battersby writes in the Toronto Star about an urban historian gathering stories of Honest Ed's, for later incorporation into its successor residential complex.

For Jay Pitter, it’s the barrels not the light bulbs, that make Honest Ed’s a special place.

Sitting on a Markham St. stoop, Pitter taps into a collective heritage when she says her mother once loaded little barrels with canned fish and toothpaste from the discount shop.

“And send it back home!” chimes in Akia Munga, who lives nearby in newly opened Sprott House, a home for LGBTQ youth.

Munga and a group of his friends were visiting Pitter on Sunday afternoon as part of her Honest Ed’s Project, which aims to capture memories of the place amid plans for redevelopment of the 1.8 hectare parcel of land.

“Most people would be willing to lose a building more readily than they would be willing to lose the fabric of their community,” Pitter said.

[MUSIC] Kahimi Karie, "Good Morning World"

Some weeks ago, the indispensable pop culture blog Dangerous Minds featured a post on Kahimi Karie, J-Pop chanteuse who was relatively big in the 1990s but never quite managed to cross over.

Influenced by the French yé-yé singers of the 1960s and finding her own Serge Gainsbourg(s) in the persons of then boyfriend Keigo Oyamada (aka the brilliant Cornelius) and quirky Scottish performer Momus, Karie’s whispery, half-spoken Claudine Longet-esque vocals were the perfect gloss on a pop confection that looked backwards and forwards equally.

Her best-known single “Good Morning World” was commissioned for use in a Japanese cosmetics company’s TV commercial. The song’s playful, nearly nonsensical dada lyrics named-checked a Fall song (“How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’”) and it utilized a particularly effective sample lifted from the Soft Machine’s “Why Am I So Short?” Talk about two insanely cool dog whistles to smuggle into a corporate advertising jingle. Bravo!

There was much to like in the Kahimi Karie package, but for whatever reason, other than the small hipster J-Pop audience, few outside of Japan took notice.

"Good Morning World" happens to be on YouTube.

"GOOD MORNING WORLD(M.V.) / カヒミ・カリィ" (Watch on YouTube)

I like it. I can imagine picking this song, and its album, at a CD shop. It would be an import, but I could see it gaining some traction in the crowd of people fond of the shiny Britpop of the 1990s. I can imagine Jarvis Cocker covering this song, or Elastica giving it a harder sheen, or Karie herself crossing over.

She didn't. It strikes me that Karie's story is that of Japanese pop culture internationally generally, or at least in the West. In the 1990s, it was poised for a crossover that never happened. Or was it? What happened?