[PHOTO] Dunes of Covehead, Prince Edward Island

The long horizons of the North Shore of Prince Edward Island will always have power for me.

[PHOTO] Start of Spadina, Queens Quay

Spadina begins here, where Lower Spadina runs down to meet Queens Quay by the harbour.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO describes how Parkdale's Harry's diner is going to be revamped.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes the joys of making friends through the blogosphere.


• Centauri Dreams looks at Kuiper Belt object Niku and its strange orbit.


• The Map Room Blog looks at the controversy over Google's map of Palestine.


• Marginal Revolution notes how Faroese women leave their home islands at a disproportionately high rate.


• Peter Rukavina describes time spent with his son kayaking Charlottetown harbour.


• Strange Maps depicts</> the shift of the global economic centre of the world.


• Window on Eurasia describes the decay of provincial Karelia.

[ISL] Quartz on the Hong Kong independence movement

Quartz' Vivienne Chow reports on the demographic dynamics behind the Hong Kong independence movement.

When Edward Leung and Chan Ho-tin, the de facto leaders of the nascent Hong Kong independence movement, led thousands of protesters in a rally outside the government headquarters last Friday night (Aug. 5), it was about more than just the government’s attempt to bar them from running in elections in September. It was a symbolic gesture of one generation’s determination to revolt against the society’s so-called “old seafood” establishment, a defining moment for a city that desperately needs to find a new cultural identity.

“Old seafood” refers to the Cantonese phrase “lo see fut.” “Lo” is the sound of the Cantonese word for old, while “see fut” resembles the sound of asshole. It is common Hong Kong slang, used to refer to the “old butts” occupying top positions in society and refusing to cede their privileges.

Sampson Wong, an artist and liberal arts lecturer at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing arts, said the old seafood class feel a sense of entitlement because “they turned Hong Kong into a wonderful metropolis within two decades and made the Hong Kong miracle possible.”

“They probably have the tendency to feel that they should be in charge of the city, and that they are more capable than the younger generations,” he said. Wong’s art project “Countdown Machine” was removed from the city’s tallest skyscraper after he and partner Jason Lam revealed the installation was a clock counting down to 2047—the expiry date of the “50 years unchanged” promise that Beijing made to Hong Kong after the 1997 handover.

Whether its members identify as being pro-democracy or pro-Beijing, being part of the old seafood class is more about mindset than political stance. They can be anyone, ranging from mid-level management to the top leaders of companies, organizations, or political parties. They have demographics on their side—Hong Kong’s low birth rates and large elderly population mean that nearly half the city’s residents will be over 65 by 2041. And they continue to monopolize the discourse of Hong Kong’s cultural identity and values almost 20 years after the handover to China.

[URBAN NOTE] "A city of two worlds, Yellowknife is an open book well worth reading"

Dave Bidini's ode in The Globe and Mail to Yellowknife is a lovely read.

Yellowknife is small and openhearted, but it’s also hard to find. You think you know what it is, but then it moves – from the darkness of a tavern teeming with North and South Slavey, Cape Bretoners, Métis, Saskatchewanians and old men from the Dehcho to the cool shadow of a Twin Otter cruising low enough above your dockside rock that you could poke it with a fork. Here’s a fun game: When visiting, try to describe Yellowknife to your friends on a postcard (hint: buy a lot of postcards).

Yellowknife has a main street, but no one calls it that. In fact, they call it two things: 50th Avenue and Franklin Avenue, depending on how you feel about the former British explorer and northern colonialism (spoiler alert: The Dene don’t feel good, while most non-indigenous shrug as if not quite understanding the question). The main street – or 50th or he-who-will-not-be-named – has its own naked charm, including the denizens outside the main Post Office, most of them undomiciled.

If you spend any time with them, it isn’t hard to walk into a story. One afternoon at the main post office, I met two men the size of compact cars – Bear and James Thrasher, both from Tuktoyaktuk – who, like many of the city’s homeless, had come to Yellowknife because of greater access to services, housing and alcohol (Tuktoyaktuk is a dry community on the shores of the Western Arctic, which I visited during my eight-week stay in the Northwest Territories).

When they found out I was going to their hamlet, Bear asked for my book so he could write down the Inuvialuktun word for “white person.” I handed it to him – the hardbound writing book looked like a church pamphlet in his great hands – and his tongue curved around his lip while engraving the word on the page: kabloonak. He told me in a voice like a hammer on a drum: “Now, listen, you might hear this word, but it’s not necessarily bad. It depends on how someone uses it. You got that?” I told him I did.

[URBAN NOTE] "Excessive film shoots at Riverdale home irks neighbours"

The Toronto Star's Holly Honderich notes controversy around film shoots at a Riverdale home.

Nightmare on Pape Ave.

That’s how one Riverdale resident describes the “excessive” number of film shoots that have taken place in the historic Toronto property next door.

The most recent one, the remake of Stephen King’s IT, has taken over the three-storey, nearly 130-year-old property right beside the home where Nick Shcherban lives with his family.

IT — based on a King novel of the same name — follows several children terrorized by an evil, shape-shifting monster that appears in the form of a demonic clown.

But according to Shcherban, a horror story is also playing out in real life.

“These (films) have been affecting the lives of the families in the neighbourhood,” Shcherban said.

“It looks like Universal Studios out there,” he added, referring to the trucks and crew members that have become a staple at the corner of Pape and Riverdale Aves, surrounding the property that was once used as a home for single mothers.

[URBAN NOTE] "How public transit affects home values in Toronto"

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski describes how public transit impacts home values in Toronto. The linkage is unsurprising, honestly.

Business student Karan Kundra doesn’t own a car, and doesn’t expect to buy one anytime soon. He has, however, purchased a condo at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, the terminus for the Spadina subway extension scheduled to open late next year.

Kundra won’t take possession of his one-bedroom-plus-den in the Cosmos tower until 2019. But whether he goes on to grad school at York University, where he is studying at the Schulich School of Business, or he gets a job downtown, his subway ride is only metres from his front door.

The Cosmos development is part of a residential building boom tied to Toronto’s new transit lines. These are the kinds of homes that planners and developers say will blur the line between urban and suburban living.

Public transit access boosts property values, and is increasingly a must-have for GTA homebuyers.

Kundra’s condo will be located deep in the suburbs, near Jane St. and Highway 7. But it will live like a city apartment, he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Exploring Toronto’s Hidden Waterfronts"

Torontoist's Mark Mann describes Toronto's several coasts, products of geology and humanity.

“Waterfront” is a relative term. Torontonians tend to think of the waterfront as the place where they can see water, as the term implies. But the city also keeps a few extra waterfronts in the back, where there’s no water in sight. Just because you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The oldest waterfront, by far, is the steep hill that runs east-west between Davenport and St. Clair, which marks the former banks of the large inland sea left behind from the last Ice Age. Today, it’s mainly an excuse for cyclists to avoid going north of the Annex.

Heading south on the old lakebed toward Lake Ontario, the next shoreline lies just south of Front Street—hence the name—about half a kilometre from Toronto’s present-day waterfront. That was the edge of the lake when the city was originally founded as the Town of York in 1850. Between then and now, all of the intervening land was unceremoniously dumped there to make space for the expanding city. But as Toronto grew out into the lake, the water never gave ground.

Gazing out toward the Gardiner Expressway from Front Street, this former waterfront doesn’t look that convincing. There are only roads and buildings in sight—no water. But the people who erected those buildings know better, because throwing dirt in a lake doesn’t actually make the water table get any lower. If you took a backhoe to the parking lot across from the Air Canada Centre, for example, the hole you dug would quickly become a pond. When developers excavate foundations for new buildings in that part of the city, they might as well be building directly in the lake.

[MUSIC] Two Toronto Star articles on Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip

Sports writer Brendan Kennedy remembered for readers a concert of the Tragically Hip he saw in 1996, when he was only 12.

The show was at Maple Leaf Gardens in December of ’96. (The Rheostatics, a band I would also come to love, opened.) Freshly graduated from their barroom beginnings, this was the Hip’s first arena tour. But Downie commanded the stage like a deranged general. His face contorted in some imagined anguish; body twisting and twirling in drunken pirouettes, he strutted up and down the stage, ranting maniacally.

I was mesmerized.

The band — drummer Johnny Fay, guitarists Paul Langlois and Rob Baker, and bassist Gord Sinclair, the same group of guys who have played together for more than 30 years now — seemed content to serve as Downie’s dependable foundation, the base from which he could safely leap.

He took full advantage of their support, undulating one minute — like a dolphin, he would later explain — and firing off rounds of an imaginary shotgun the next. He bobbed and weaved with the microphone stand — narrowly missing cracking himself in the skull on a few occasions — before mime-smoking a cigarette and glaring at the audience. He was fierce and beautiful and entirely unique.

I couldn’t look away. Who was this lunatic poet?

Pop music critic Ben Rayner really liked their concert here in Toronto.

“Thank you, Toronto. Thank you, Toronto. Thank you forever.”

Gord Downie didn’t say much to the crowd during the Tragically Hip’s Wednesday-night gig at the Air Canada Centre, but he didn’t have to. The elephant’s already loose in the room. We needed to forget about it for awhile. He and his bandmates of more than 30 years probably needed to forget about it for awhile.

So we forgot about it for awhile. This, the first of three sold-out Toronto dates on the Hip’s Man Machine Poem tour – the band is back at the ACC on Friday and Sunday – was no weepfest, despite the fact that after three more shows to come in Hamilton, Ottawa and hometown Kingston on Aug. 16, 18 and 20, respectively, the Tragically Hip looks very likely to be over for good. Downie, as most Canadians are by now well aware, is staring the most final of all final curtains in the face right now, valiantly fighting against terminal brain cancer by going out on the road with lifelong friends Paul Langlois, Johnny Fay, Gord Sinclair and Rob Baker for what could well be the last time. No doubt so everyone involved can forget about it for awhile.

So 20,000-plus Toronto fans tried not to think about that last night, and Downie and the Hip did their utmost in return to drive all the bad thoughts from our minds by delivering one of the most powerful and wholly uplifting sets they’ve played in this city for years for nearly two-and-a-half riveting hours.

True, the gnawing certainty amongst many attendees that this would indeed be the last time they’d ever get to see the Tragically Hip in action did lend an extra sense of urgency to a will-call lineup that still stretched across the width of the ACC lobby to the east doors half an hour after the show had started.