[PHOTO] The goats of Jewell's Country Market

Jewell's Country Market, located on the northeastern outskirts of Charlottetown where route 25 descends from the north to meet the St. Peter's Road, has been an active retail location for Jewell's seeds and sundry ephemera since the late 1990. As far as I know, goats have always lived here, ensconced in the fenced-off climbing structure between the market proper and the St. Peter's Road.













You can feed them for one dollar, giving them a palmful of dried corn to eat out of a plastic cup.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Antipope considers the question of who would win in a battle to the end, Cthulhu or Warhammer 40K's Emperor of Mankind?


• blogTO shares history and photos of Humber Bay Shores and the Scarborough Bluffs.


• Joe. My. God. notes Donald Trump's attack on the Japanese-American alliance.


• Language Hat reports on how speakers of the Aboriginal language of Murrinhpatha point out directions.


• Marginal Revolution starts a discussion on the Faroe Islands.


• George R.R. Martin announces that his Wild Cards universe is set to come to television.


• Window on Eurasia argues Americans are recognizing Putin's regime as negative, looks at pro-Russian Ukrainian journalists, and observes how Russia's invasion has not affected the identity of Ukraine's Russophones.


• Arnolz Zwicky celebrates (1, 2) British actor Ianto Jones.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• ABC reports on the Sudanese-Australian basketball players who are transforming the game in Australia.


• Bloomberg reports on the potentially transformative scope of China's New Silk Road project.


• Bloomberg View likes the new Star Trek movie's shift beyond speciesism.


• CBC reports on the strength of pro-Trump support among non-voting Amish in Pennsylvania, and looks at a VIA Rail proposal to set up a commuter run in Halifax.


• Gizmodo reports on Florida's disastrous coastal algal infestations.


• The Globe and Mail notes a proposal for Ontario-Michigan cooperation and recounts the story of the construction of the Rideau Canal.


• The Guardian reports on Catalonia's swift progress towards a declaration of independence.


• MacLean's describes Manitoba's falling crime rate.


• Open Democracy wonders about Italy's Five Star Movement and looks at the newest African-American hashtag movements.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Park Beneath New York City's Sidewalks"

CityLab's Jessica Leigh Hester last motnh described a fascinating proposal for an underground park in New York City.

Dan Barasch envisions verdant gardens below New York City’s concrete and asphalt. He pictures locals parading down flights of stairs to be confronted by stalagmites of ferns, bromeliads, and mosses in sunken spaces flooded with light.

It surely sounds fantastical, but New York City is one step closer to a year-round subterranean park now that the Lowline, a one-acre underground green space, has received a preliminary go-ahead from city officials.

On Wednesday, the city’s Economic Development Corporation designated the Lowline as the developer approved to work on plans for the decommissioned trolley terminal beneath the Williamsburg Bridge.

During the early 20th century, the site was a turnaround point for trolleys, but has been disused since 1948. In the interim, the space above ground has transformed into one of the densest pockets in a city already strapped for space. Barasch, the Lowline’s co-founder and executive director, wondered what might happen if developers built down, instead of up.

To prove the premise—an underground park sustained by light siphoned from the sidewalks—Barasch and his collaborators set up a prototype in a former warehouse space two blocks north of the park’s prospective future home. In the Lowline Lab, sunlight streams from a solar canopy mounted above 3,000 plants, including fruit that flourishes with no regard for the season. Inside, there were plump strawberries ready to be picked in March; a rambling mint patch was overgrown in the middle of December. The result, says Barasch, is a pleasantly puzzling sense of being completely immersed in a botanic garden in the midst of an urban area.

[URBAN NOTE] "We held a Pokémon Go meetup — who showed up?"

Oliver Sachgau's Toronto Star article appeared last month, before Pokémon Go's official release and while I was preparing for my Island trip. It's an interesting story, based around interviews with Pokémon players and the meaning they get from the game and its culture.

I was really worried no one was going to show up to my party.

Just before 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, I had set up a sort of invite in Pokémon Go, telling people to meet me at 1 Yonge St. With luck, people would arrive to chat about Pokémon with me. They would arrive, right?

If you’re unfamiliar with Pokémon Go, it’s a mobile game that lets players catch virtual monsters by walking around in the real world and searching for them with their phones. People walk around in search for Pokémon — cartoon creatures that can look like anything from an electric mouse to a gigantic worm made of rock. (The game depicts the beasts against the backdrop of the player’s real-world environment, superimposing their image on pictures from the phone’s camera.)

Players battle them, catch them, train them, and collect items to help with the training from Pokestops — spots placed around the Pokémon Go map that correspond to real-world locations. the Toronto Star building, for example, has three Pokestops.

Technically, the game isn’t even available in Canada, but that hasn’t stopped people from finding ways to play it here, either by creating app store accounts in other countries or downloading unofficial versions of the app, all inspired by a game from 20 years ago.

“I was a Pokémon fan since I was a little kid . . . when I heard a new one was coming out I had to try it,” player Courtney Provan said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Hunting for Pokemon with my son in historic Lunenburg, my doubts lifted"

I really like Erin Anderssen's article in The Globe and Mail, also from mid-July, about time spending bonding with her son.

By the harbour, in front of the Bluenose Store, as a horse-drawn carriage carrying tourists clopped by, we captured a Jigglypuff. By the fire hydrant on Montague Street, a bouncing blue Nidoran was waiting. Not far away, a Pidgey was snagged, waiting dangerously in the middle of what was luckily a quiet thoroughfare. (Nothing like a digitally squashed Pidgey to take the fun out of things.) Coming around one corner, a Krabby – as in, a crab – surprised us. “There he is, there he is,” my son, Samson, whispered, forgetting, in the moment, that the Krabby couldn’t actually hear him. “I am sort of freaking out right now,” he confided to me.

It’s surreal playing Pokemon Go in the historic Nova Scotia town of Lunenburg, hunting virtual cartoon characters along the famous waterfront and brightly coloured, carefully preserved 18th-century houses. And yet, surprisingly fun. Two hours later, we had 27 Pokemon, and a level 5 ranking. This meant we could do battle in the nearest “gym,” which had been strategically placed by those clever game masters on the wharf, next to where the Bluenose would usually dock. On this Wednesday evening, the wharf was mostly empty, the famous schooner currently away from its home port. But every new visitor to Lunenburg eventually stops here; now every Pokemon Go player will, too. The founding families never imagined this.

It’s no understatement to say that Pokemon Go has become a worldwide obsession, sending Nintendo stock soaring. It’s already been downloaded more than the dating app Tinder, and is closing in on Twitter – even though it’s only, officially, available in the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Not that this has stopped any motivated gamer in Canada.

For a week, my son, who is 11, had been excitedly volunteering intel about the game, watching YouTube videos to learn how to play, and cleverly crafting the public relations case for why someone in the family should hack the system and get it on their phone. (He doesn’t have one of his own.) “It’s mother-son time,” he told me. “It’s really an app to go sightseeing with your kids.” “I can run around and burn off energy.” “We won’t get fat.” When he learned we were actually going to play, it was as if he’d chugged seven Red Bulls in one sitting.

[URBAN NOTE] "Water taxi driver charged after boat hits father and son in kayak"

Evelyn Kwong's Toronto Star article tells a worrisome tale.

It only took a second for Ben Leow to realize that he and his 8-year-old son were about to be mowed over by a water taxi on the Toronto harbour.

On July 19, Leow and his son Aidan had planned to enjoy their first kayak voyage on the Lake. The two paddled off just east of the Billy Bishop Airport near the buoys and were watching the planes take off when, Leow said, a boat came straight at them.

At around 12:30 p.m., a water taxi was travelling through Toronto’s Inner Harbour when it struck the kayak carrying the father and the son, said Const. Craig Brister, spokesperson for Toronto Police.

Luckily, the two got away with minor injuries — a few cuts and bruises — but are still confused as to how the boat, hit them in broad daylight.

“I have a flashback of the boat coming at my head. I had a second to turn around and I just saw the sun being enveloped and we were in darkness,” Leow said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vancouver rental market places people in a ‘lower class’"

Andrea Woo's article in The Globe and Mail tells a disturbing tale. Who will be left to live in Vancouver, at this rate?

In all, Sofia Pickstone put up about 40 posters in two days, stapling them to telephone posts in the Vancouver neighbourhoods she hopes to live in by the fall.

“Emily Carr student looking for a place to rent,” read the poster, in large illustrated letters. “Very tidy, quiet and responsible student in search of affordable accommodation in this neighbourhood. Thanks!”

The double Os in the word “looking” were made to look like binoculars, held by a cartoon version of Ms. Pickstone, 19. Tear-off tabs contained her contact information.

The postering effort came after a couple of months of scouring online advertisements daily for an affordable place to stay – a room under $700, ideally – and finding nothing, said the student. Most people didn’t even respond to her e-mails; when they did, it was usually to say the place had been taken.

[. . .]

In Metro Vancouver’s eye-watering real-estate market, many renters, too, are finding themselves in a desperate scramble for adequate housing. The region’s rental vacancy rate is just 0.8 per cent – a figure that is shaved down to just 0.6 per cent in the city of Vancouver, where the majority of residents are renters. Housing experts say a healthy vacancy rate is between 3 and 5 per cent.

[URBAN NOTE] "Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?"

Jeff Goodell's long article in Rolling Stone tells a worrisome tale about New York City's questionable future in an age of sea level rise.

It's a bright spring day in New York, with sunlight dancing on the East River and robins singing Broadway tunes. I'm walking along the sea wall on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Daniel Zarrilli, 41, the head of New York's Office of Resilience and Recovery – basically Mayor Bill de Blasio's point man for preparing the city for the coming decades of storms and sea-level rise. Zarrilli is dressed in his usual City Hall attire: white shirt and tie, polished black shoes. He has short-cropped gray hair, dark eyes and an edgy I've-got-a-job-to-do manner. Zarrilli may be the only person in the world who holds in his head the full catastrophe of what rising seas and increasingly violent storms mean to the greatest city in America. Not surprisingly, instead of musing about the beautiful weather, he points to the East River, where the water is innocently bouncing off the sea wall about six feet below us. "During Sandy," he says, darkly, "the storm surge was about nine feet above high tide. You and I would be standing in about four feet of water right now."

As Zarrilli knows better than anyone, Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in October 2012, flooding more than 88,000 buildings in the city and killing 44 people, was a transformative event. It did not just reveal how vulnerable New York is to a powerful storm, but it also gave a preview of what the city faces over the next century, when sea levels are projected to rise five, six, seven feet or more, causing Sandy-like flooding (or much worse) to occur with increasing frequency. "The problem for New York is, climate science is getting better and better, and storm intensity and sea-level-rise projections are getting more and more alarming," says Chris Ward, the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency in charge of airports, tunnels and other transportation infrastructure. "It fundamentally calls into question New York's existence. The water is coming, and the long-term implications are gigantic."

Zarrilli turns away from the river, and we walk toward the park that separates it from the Lower East Side. "One of our goals is not just to protect the city, but to improve it," Zarrilli explains. Next year, if all goes well, the city will break ground on what's called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, an undulating 10-foot-high steel-and-concrete-reinforced berm that will run about two miles along the riverfront. It's the first part of a bigger barrier system, known informally as "the Big U," that someday may loop around the entire bottom of Manhattan, from 42nd Street on the East Side to 57th Street on the West Side. Zarrilli likes to underscore that the barrier will be covered with grass and trees in many places, as well as benches and bike paths – it's the East Side equivalent of the High Line, the hugely popular elevated train track on the West Side that has been transformed into an urban park. There are plans in the works to build other walls and barriers in the Rockaways and on Staten Island, as well as in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River. But this project in Lower Manhattan is the headliner, not just because the city may spend $3 billion or more to construct it, but also because Lower Manhattan is some of the most valuable real estate on the planet – if it can't be protected, then New York is in deep trouble.

Zarrilli, who won't use the phrase "Big U" because it sounds like a plug for BIG, the Danish architectural firm that helped design the barrier around Lower Manhattan, is uneasy talking about walls, in part because it obscures other, more democratic measures the city is taking to become more resilient, such as requiring buildings to elevate critical infrastructure, but also because wall-building is politically fraught: You can't wall off the city's entire 520-mile coastline, so how do you decide who gets to live behind the wall and who doesn't? "You have to start somewhere," Zarrilli says, "so you begin in the places where you get the maximum benefit for the most people."