[PHOTO] Six photos of Avonlea Village, Cavendish

I don't think Avonlea Village is quite authentic, as a recreation of a late 19th century Island village. Perhaps its buildings are too densely packed? You don't go to Avonlea Village for authenticity, though: You go for a taste of the imagined Island. At that, the complex is quite good, with plenty of products for sale. Restaurants, chocolates and candy packed, souvenirs--everything is available in a compact and well-tended setting. The Island maps at the local branch of Samuel's Coffee House were a nice final touch for me, as in fact was the coffee there.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes that Suspect Video is liquidating its stock.


• James Bow likes a portable USB adaptor.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to an analysis of the spectrum of a Luhman 16 brown dwarf.


• Language Log notes Sino-Western characters.


• The Map Room Blog reports on a Twitter bot that randomly generates maps of fantasy settings.


• Maximos62 notes the terrible pollution produced by the Indonesian forest burning.


• Otto Pohl reports from Kurdistan.


• Torontoist shares a photo of a graffiti alley near Trinity Bellwoods.


• Window on Eurasia reports on current trends in Russian migration from Kazakhstan.


• Arnold Zwicky describes the female gaze of the paintings of men done by Sylvia Sleigh.

[URBAN NOTE] "Gay Caribbean man granted refugee status after three year fight"

Daily Xtra's Arshy Mann notes the happy news that a GLBT refugee claimant from the Caribbean has secured refugee status.

It took Rolston Ryan, who now lives in Toronto, six legal proceedings, include two trips to the Federal Court, to finally be acknowledged as a refugee.

“He suffered harassment, discrimination and violence in St Kitts amounting to persecution,” wrote Michele Pettinella, the member of the Immigration and Refugee Board who decided his case. “He did not receive adequate protection from the state when he reported a violent attack.”

Ryan, who was stabbed and beaten in St Kitts because of his sexual orientation, escaped to Canada in 2013 after he was threatened with a gun.

Unlike some LGBT asylum seekers, Ryan’s sexual orientation was never in doubt. Instead, immigration officials argued that there wasn’t any evidence that St Kitts and Nevis was unable to protects its queer citizens.

This is despite the fact that gay sex remains illegal in the island federation and can be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

[URBAN NOTE] "Man lay low for five decades believing he was illegal"

The Toronto Star's Nicholas Keung tells the sad story of a man who hid from the Canadian government for five decades in the belief he lacked legal immigrant status, only to find out otherwise. I'm not sure if this story can be used to indicate anything, policy-wise; it sounds almost too extreme.

For more than half a century, Steven Dugalin believed he didn’t have legal status in Canada and could be deported at any moment.

Decade after decade, the now 77-year-old Mississauga man tried to stay under the radar, working in construction jobs, even living in a motel, fearing if he was picked up by immigration he’d get the boot.

[. . .]

“If it wasn’t for the government’s mistake, saying I was here illegally, I wouldn’t have had to endure the hardship,” says Dugalin, who came to Canada as a government-sponsored refugee from Hungary in 1957. “This has ruined my life.”

Dugalin said he’d been told by immigration officials that he’d lost his permanent resident status after being convicted of breaking into houses in British Columbia in 1959. He says he was hungry and was only stealing food.

“There was a group of us. We didn’t speak English. Nobody had jobs. We were homeless, hungry and desperate,” said Dugalin, who was among 37,000 Hungarians admitted to Canada after the 1956 Soviet invasion.

The truth about Dugalin’s actual immigration status wasn’t uncovered until 2012, when Toronto lawyer Barbara Jackman picked up his case and found the government records that proved he had maintained his permanent resident status all along.

[URBAN NOTE] "Would Germany Be Wealthier if Berlin Didn't Exist?"

Feargus O'Sullivan at CityLab noted a recent study observing that Berlin, unique among major European capitals, is poorer than the national average. This does highlight Berlin's particular problems, he suggests, but also notes the extent to which Germany outside of its capital is prosperous.

Germany would actually be better off without Berlin. That, at least, might be the skim-read conclusion to be drawn from a challenging new report from Cologne’s Institute of German Economy. The report, released Tuesday, notes that Germany’s per capita GDP would actually be higher if Berlin and its population were removed from national economic figures.

[. . .]

Before we look at why Germany’s figures skew differently, it’s worth looking more fully at the figures the report provides. They don’t, for instance, actually suggest any inherent relation between the size of a capital’s contribution to national GDP and the overall prosperity of a country. Of all capitals surveyed, it’s actually Athens that shows the greatest national dominance. If that city and its habitants were removed from national figures, then Greece’s GDP per capita would drop by 19.9 percent. The Paris region shows similar levels of national contribution: its absence would slash French per capita GDP by 15 percent. In the U.K., no London would mean a drop of 11.2 percent in per capita GDP. A Madrid-free Spain’s per capita GDP would drop by 6 percent, while even Rome—known for playing second fiddle to the economic powerhouse of the North Italian Plain—would cause Italy’s per capita GDP to drop 2.1 percent if it were removed from the country’s economy.

It’s only in Berlin that these figures appear to suggest Germany would actually be better off without it. Removing Berlin and its residents from German economic tallies would, according to the report, actually boost the country’s per capita GDP, albeit by a meager 0.2 percent.

The reasons for this are as distinctive as Berlin’s standalone negative performance. Certainly, a rather sluggish economy doesn’t help. Without its capital status, Berlin might be just another rustbelt city, an ex-industrial metropolis whose swing towards an economy based on the service, technology, tourism and creative sectors has (as so often is the case) failed to fully compensate for the decline of the city’s industrial base. It’s not for nothing that Berlin had until recently a reputation as a cheap place to live. Prices long remained low because jobs were often scarce and wages relatively meager. As of this July, Berlin’s unemployment rate of 9.5 percent was the second highest (after Bremen) of any German federal state. If there is a loser hidden behind Berlin’s relatively poor performance, it’s unemployed, underpaid Berliners who are struggling despite living cheek-by-jowl with the government of Europe’s most powerful country.

Berlin’s unusual performance is still arguably as much an example of the strength of Germany’s regions at the weaknesses of the city itself. While in other countries, capitals suck in all the wealth, talent and investment, Germany remains a mosaic of prosperous cities scattered throughout its territory. Its largest metropolitan area (as opposed to its largest city) is not Berlin but the huge Rhine-Ruhr region, an industrial conurbation that’s home to over 11 million residents. Munich and Hamburg are both major economic and cultural centers with higher median wealth than the capital, while the heart of continental Europe’s finance industry is in Frankfurt. The Federal Constitutional Court is in the modest city of Karlsruhe, while the city with the highest per capita GDP is actually Wolfsburg, home to Volkswagen.

[URBAN NOTE] On the struggle of North Preston to rebrand

Douglas Quan's National Post article "North Preston, N.S., is synonymous with a notorious pimping gang. Now residents want to reclaim its name" looks at how the largely African-Canadian Nova Scotia community of North Preston is trying to recover from the terrible PR associated with a violent human-trafficking gang.

One of the first things you notice when you enter this community northeast of Halifax is a large billboard that tells you you’re in “Canada’s Largest Black Community.” It’s followed by a slogan: “We’ve Come This Far by Faith!”

The second thing you notice is that just about every driver here acknowledges oncoming drivers — even strangers — with a wave of the hand.

It’s not the welcome you expect in a place that has repeatedly been described as the birthplace of North Preston’s Finest, a violent gang that specializes in trafficking young women and girls as young as 14 in the sex trade.

The community came under scrutiny last month when Edward Delton Downey, the prime suspect in the slayings of Calgary mother Sara Baillie and her five-year-old daughter, Taliyah Marsman, was linked in several media reports to North Preston’s Finest.

Talk to residents, even local police, and they insist the claims about a criminal gang originating in North Preston are exaggerated, misleading or manufactured by outsiders who don’t know their community.

They point to North Preston’s more famous sons and daughters: Olympic boxer Custio Clayton, basketball star Lindell Wigginton, young lawyer Shanisha Grant and singer/songwriter Reeny Smith.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Toronto loves nostalgia events right now"

I'm not sure that I agree with the argument in Amy Grief's blogTO article. Or is it that I don't want to agree? What does it say about us now that we seek to revisit our childhoods in adulthood?

It might be 2016, but it feels an awful like the 1990s in Toronto as local venues keep hosting throwback dance parties, themed nights and other retro events that aim to appeal to a millennial audience eager to relive their childhood.

And no one seems to do it better than the Gladstone. The West Queen West hotel used to host colouring book nights and it just launched a weekly event dubbed 90s Kid Tuesdays - an evolution of its Lego and Lagers night. This iteration not only has Lego, but also Pogs, giant Jenga and 90s music.

Tara McCallum, the Gladstone's director of marketing, thinks these themed nights give young people a chance to relax and bond over their childhood memories. "It was in our lives, a really carefree time. And a time of being tacky and a time of shitty music that was awesome," she says with a laugh.

Beyond 90s Kid Tuesdays, the Gladstone made headlines earlier this year with its annual Come Up To My Room art and design exhibition. Why? Because artists Sarah Keenlyside and Joseph Clement painstakingly recreated Ferris Bueller's bedroom and people went nuts for it.

[URBAN NOTE] Two links on the questionable prospects of the Arctic port of Churchill, Manitoba

Scott Gilmore of MacLean's wrote in the atmospheric Abandoned Churchill" about the distress of people in the northern Manitoba port of Churchill, a perpetually promising port on Hudson's Bay, that their port is being shut down.

I flew up to Churchill in a small private plane, with a map in my lap so I could trace our progress north.

This is a good way to appreciate how vast and empty this country is. Churchill is as far from Winnipeg as Toronto is from Nashville. From the cockpit, on a clear August day, the pilot and I could see for more than 100 km in every direction. It was simply forest, muskeg and hundreds of lakes, most left nameless on my map. But it did show the occasional mine, fishing camp or radio tower, and each of these was marked with the same bracketed annotation: (Abandoned).

We began our descent just as Hudson Bay appeared on the horizon. The town sits on a narrow point of land bounded by the sea to the north and the Churchill River to the south and west. The first visible landmarks were the grey stone walls of Fort Prince of Wales (abandoned 1782) and the white grain elevators of the Port of Churchill (abandoned 2016).

The massive superstructure of the port is visible from everywhere, and the main street ends right at its gates. When I pulled up in my rental pickup, these were open—the guard shack empty.

Other than the concrete elevators and the loading gantries there was not much to see. A rusting tugboat sits on blocks. There are no train cars waiting to be unloaded, and no ships to take on cargo. Other than seagulls and the wind, it was quiet.

At 4:30 p.m., though, a few people began to emerge and walk toward their cars. This was the last shift, leaving for the last time.

In the National Post, Brian Hutchinson's "Port in a storm" also looks at length at the dire situation for the town. Without the port--something that might well be useful in time of global warning--what point is there to keep Churchill, isolated in the far north, functioning as a community?

Bobby deMeulles sits at his usual perch, next to a window at the Reef coffee shop, keeping an eye on Churchill’s main drag, and beyond that, the town’s old train station and the tracks.

This time of year, railway cars filled with prairie wheat should be rolling past the station for the port of Churchill, 500 metres down the line on Hudson Bay. There are no grain cars today.

There haven’t been any all summer, because Canada’s only deep-water Arctic port — the only port of consequence along 162,000 kilometres of northern coastline — has suspended all grain shipments, a decision made by its Denver-based owner, OmniTRAX Inc.

DeMeulles figured something was up, long before the company announced last month it was halting port operations, save for the movement of local freight to small communities further along the Hudson Bay coastline, mostly in Nunavut.

Map

A private transportation company with most of its holdings in American short-line railways, OmniTRAX Inc. claims none of its regular grain suppliers wanted to do business at Churchill this year. “The grain season for 2016 has passed the solutions stage,” it says. Townsfolk wonder if it ever really tried to salvage the season.

DeMeulles understands how things are done in Churchill. He spent 60 years working at the port, receiving grain, cleaning it, running the elevator. He retired just four years ago, when he turned 75. “I worked until I couldn’t work no more,” he says. “I was well looked after.”

But things looked bleak, well before OmniTRAX pulled the plug on the current shipping season.

“We’d always know how many ships were nominated (coming to the port) well ahead of summer,” deMeulles explains. “We’d first start to hear about the nominations in March. Grain would starting coming up in railcars around the June 15. If you don’t hear nothing, and you don’t see nothing, and there’s no grain coming, you know something’s wrong.”

He shakes his head. “It’s a terrible thing, for a small town.”

[BRIEF NOTE] On tonight's conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

From Space.com's Calla Cofield:

Just above the horizon, Venus and Jupiter will appear so close to each other that, from some locations, the two planets will almost seem to touch. The next time Venus and Jupiter will get this close will be in November 2065.

[. . .]

Viewers all over the globe should begin looking for the two planets shortly after sundown, just above the western horizon. Be sure to find a viewing location where the horizon is unobscured by buildings and trees.

For viewers in the northern U.S. and Canada, the planets will appear only about 5 degrees above the western horizon. A clenched fist held at arm's length is about 10 degrees wide, so look for the two bright spots of light about a half a fist above the horizon.

[. . .]

The best views of Venus and Jupiter will be from the East Coast of the United States and Canada. Unfortunately, the planets' closest approach will take place before sunset, at about 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT). But about 30 minutes after sundown, the light should fade enough to make the two planets (which will still be quite close together) visible to skywatchers. (The sight of these two bright planets apparently converging is so breathtaking that some people think it could explain the Star of Bethlehem story from the Bible.)

At their absolute minimum, the two planets will be separated by 4 arc minutes, where 60 arc minutes equals 1 degree. To get a better idea of how to measure celestial distances, use the Big Dipper for reference: The middle star in the handle of the Dipper is called Mizar, while the faint star just above it is called Alcor. These two stars are separated by 12 arc minutes.

On the East Coast, some viewers may be able to catch the planets separated by as little as 5 arc minutes. On the West Coast of the U.S., the planets will be separated by between 6 and 12 arc minutes. Viewers in North and South America will see the planets grow farther apart as the night progresses.

From Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait:

Closest approach (what astronomers call the appulse, but is more colloquially and commonly called a conjunction) will be on Saturday at 22:00 UTC (18:00 Eastern U.S. time), and at that time they’ll be an incredible four arcminutes apart. That’s only one-seventh the width of the full Moon on the sky!* In fact Jupiter appears half an arc minute across, so Venus will only be about eight times Jupiter’s diameter away!

[. . .]

The conjunction is cool not just because it’s pretty (and it is). It’s also rare. The planets orbit the Sun, moving at different speeds. They all stay in pretty much the same plane—it’s usually called the plane of the solar system—and we’re in it too, so the planets move more or less along the same path in the sky. But not exactly the same path, so they pass each other at various distances. A close pass is pretty rare and in fact this is the closest any two planets get all year.

It’s also cool because of the physical reality of what you’re seeing. Venus orbits the Sun closer than Earth, and it’s on the other side of the Sun right now. So you’re looking past the Sun (which is 150 million kilometers away from us) to Venus, which is about 230 million kilometers away. Jupiter is a staggering 950 million kilometers away!

What amazes me is that even though Jupiter is more than four times farther away, it still appears three times bigger than Venus. That’s because Jupiter is ridiculously huge, a dozen times the diameter of Venus.

My only question is whether, by 8:30 tonight, I should be down by the waterfront, or up Dufferin towards the escarpment.