[CAT] Shakespeare, looking down

[PHOTO] Eight photos from a sandstone beach at Cavendish

My mother knows of a beach in Cavendish, just a few minutes' drive east of Cavendish Beach, where the red sandstone that underlies the entire Island is exposed directly to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. There is no sand here, only solid rock. The place feels primordial.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes that Green Day will be headlining a festival in the Distillery District.


• Centauri Dreams looks at research into an interstellar solar sail.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a study of brown dwarf populations.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at ancient Martian rivers and flood plains.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the protest of Colin Kaepernick.


• The Map Room Blog reports on a map exhibition at the Library of Congress.


• Marginal Revolution notes low murder rates among Haitian-Americans in Florida.


• The Planetary Society Blog examines the Dawn probe's low orbit scans of Ceres.


• Otto Pohl announces the beginning of his first semester in Kurdistan.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that it is a crime to talk about the Nazi-Soviet alliance versus Poland in Russia.


• Window on Eurasia looks at how North Caucasians in Moscow identify quickly as Muscovites.

[URBAN NOTE] "Is it time to rethink Toronto's air show?"

I wonder. From CBC's Metro Morning:

It's the sound of the city this weekend: the roar of planes overhead as the Canadian International Air Show features vintage and modern planes in aerial displays. It's been running since 1949, and draws thousands of people to the waterfront.

Some people love the spectacle; others hate the disruption, or object to the military display.

But for some in the city it can also have an unsettling, perhaps even traumatic, effect.

Maya Bastian is a writer and filmmaker with family roots in Sri Lanka. In 2009, as the war in that country was ending, she went there to work in conflict zones. "I had never seen anything like it," she told CBC Metro Morning's Matt Galloway.

Bastian returned at the end of the summer, shortly before that year's air show. Standing out on the street, "any time a plane flew over I was paralyzed, I couldn't move ... I was reliving a lot of the things that I saw and experienced and heard in that moment."

[URBAN NOTE] "TTC promises fewer A/C issues on Line 2 next summer"

CBC News' Tania Mehta reports.

The TTC is telling riders on Line 2, the Bloor-Danforth line, that next summer will be "monumentally different" in terms of battling those hot and stuffy subway cars.

TTC Spokesperson Brad Ross told CBC Metro Morning Friday that he can't guarantee riders won't step onto a hot subway car on Line 2 in the future but that the TTC is addressing many of the issues with the air conditioning on the trains.

"Around 83 per cent of all the cars on the Bloor-Danforth Line have functioning A/C," Ross said. But the problem will never be fully resolved, he warned, because "stepping onto a hot car is always a possibility."

Ross was responding after comments from a listener on Metro Morning's Vox Box were played on the show.

The listener said there's a clear double standard between Line 1 and Line 2.

"Line 1 is like business class and Line 2 is like third-class storage on a ship," he said. "Line 1 trains are airy, open, spacious, bright, with A/C and Line 2 are dark, dingy and boiling hot."

All of this is true.

[URBAN NOTE] "Canadian Farmer's Almanac predicts icy cold, snowy winter"

CBC News reports.

According to the Canadian Farmers' Almanac, this winter is going to be icy cold and snowy.

That's bad news for anyone who enjoyed last year's mild winter months, which stayed as mild as Canada gets thanks to the El Nino weather pattern.

That's all over, the Almanac's editor Pete Geiger told CBC Radio's Metro Morning.

"We think old man winter is going to return," he said.

"It's going to be downright cold."

[URBAN NOTE] On the transformation of Hickory Drive in Mississauga into a ghost town

Mahnoor Yawar and Leyland Cecco's long essay in The Globe and Mail, heavy on photos, reports on a district of Mississauga blighted by a wholly unexpected disaster, and the survivors who are apparently being abandoned by city government.

On the days that it doesn’t rain, Pietro Galea drives home to water his garden.

The 80-year-old Italian immigrant hobbles up to the house – now fenced-off – where he and his wife Maria have lived for nearly 40 years. Behind the bungalow where they raised six children, his tomato and zucchini plants thrive. He harvests some and carries the basket to his car, pausing a moment to stare at the cratered ground only two doors away.

“[The garden is] his happy place. I have a father, [and it’s] the same thing,” said Vito Picicci, an architect assessing the Galea properties. “That’s what they do in the summer. You take away their garden, they’re lost.”

Two months after a house explosion devastated the community, 37 houses remain empty after being deemed structurally unsound, and the displaced residents of Hickory Drive in Mississauga have no concrete time frame to provide hope or answers. What was once a well-knit community is now a virtual ghost town, save for a rhythmic hammering echoing from several houses. Potted plants are wilted and the grass is yellowed. The only cars that drive through the neighbourhood slow to a creep as they pass by the site where three houses once stood. The largely elderly immigrant community, overwhelmed by paperwork and bureaucracy, is bracing for a lengthy battle to return home – or what is left of it.

“Every year for everybody is a precious year. You don’t know what happens tomorrow,” said Carlo Galea, Pietro’s son. The younger Galea lives directly across the street from his family house. Both he and his parents have been forced to evacuate until their houses are deemed structurally viable.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mississauga First Nation celebrates 30 years of annual homecoming powwows"

The Toronto Star reports, with photos.

The Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Three Fires Homecoming Powwow, keeping the flame of tradition alive.

Quinton Sault could dance before he could walk. For the 19-year-old head youth dancer from the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, powwows have always been a fact of life.

“When I was younger my dad used to make all my regalia. It would take him all summer just to make one,” Sault says.

“To be up there dancing is a great honour,” Sault said, carefully securing twin eagle feathers to his headdress. On a Saturday morning, Sault was preparing to dance at his community’s 30th annual homecoming fire powwow. Eagle features are sacred, as is the powwow itself.

“You’re dancing not for yourself, but for everyone around you,” Sault said. “You’re showing everyone what it was like to be part of Mother Earth and one with everything around you.”

[URBAN NOTE] On the experience of Ralph Benmergui in Hamilton

"‘It's like I entered the twilight zone:’ Toronto couple thought they were being punked when they moved to Hamilton" is the title of Tess Kalinowski's Toronto Star article. Hamilton's moment, I think, is fast coming.

The day after they moved to Hamilton, a neighbour stopped by Ralph Benmergui and wife Cortney Pasternak's home with a gift of strawberry marshmallows from a local bakery.

Benmergui says he remembers looking around to see if he was being punked.

A little over a year later, the marshmallow woman's kids and his boys, 10 and 7, play at one another's houses. A retired couple bring over butter tarts for the children.

"It's like I entered the twilight zone. . . the way you think you should live your life," says the former broadcaster, now executive director of strategic initiatives and partnerships at Sheridan College in Oakville.

"With Hamilton a lot of people come up the east side and it looks like Blade Runner," said Benmergui.

But there are visually stunning neighbourhoods, natural areas and landmarks wrapped around a lot of heart in the city of 500,000.

"There's a combination of grit and kindness I really enjoy, a hard-earned work ethic that comes from being what it was, a good working town that also has a really good art gallery."

Buy real estate now.

[URBAN NOTE] "One hundred years after disappearing, Berlin (Ontario) shows signs of revival"

In last Saturday's The Globe and Mail, John Allemang wrote about the death of Canada's old German Berlin in the First World War, its replacement by Kitchener, and both the rebirth of Berlin and the story's meaning in a multicultural Canada.

One hundred years ago, a thriving Canadian city disappeared from the map.

As of Sept. 1, 1916, the southwestern Ontario community of Berlin ceased to be. On a grim day in the middle of a war fought to assert Canada’s best values, bullies and xenophobes won a battle for control of our national identity. A city of 19,000 people rooted in its century-old Germanic heritage was forced to deny its own existence, succumbing to the acts of intimidation and accusations of disloyalty perpetrated by small-minded patriots who resisted the truth that Canada could be other than anglo.

The historical reality of Berlin was wiped away from memory, and the city we call Kitchener came into being. This wasn’t just a simple, innocent adjustment of municipal nomenclature like York turning into Toronto or Bytown becoming Ottawa. It was a contrived and calculated switch that served the propaganda needs of Canada’s imperialist leaders: A subversive reference to the capital of the hated Hun could be annihilated from the pristine Ontario landscape and replaced with a tribute to Britain’s recently deceased Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener.

A century later, when it is not all that clear that Canadians have much appetite for remembering the finer details of the so-called Great War, a name-change on an Ontario map may seem like little more than a colonial-era fait accompli. Internecine hatred on the home front just doesn’t fit the well-meaning version of Canada’s war that history’s image-builders have manufactured – all those belated feel-good stories of a courageous young nation coming of age and forging its independence through the sweat and sacrifice of Vimy.

But in a country of immigrants and refugees where arguments about loyalty are noisier and more venomous than ever, it’s worth remembering that these fights over national identity have been fought before – and lost by those who wrongly believed their Canada to be an open and tolerant and welcoming place.

That’s certainly what Canada’s Berlin was meant to be in the beginning. Long before this country came into official existence, the Berlin area was a haven for immigrants escaping the ancient enmities and disruptive compulsions of narrow-minded nationalism. The earliest settlers in the late 1700s were German-speaking Swiss Mennonites, a pacifist and much-persecuted Christian group who moved north from Pennsylvania seeking cheaper farmland, religious tolerance under the generally hands-off British rulers and peaceful relief from the intrusive government control they’d experienced in the wake of the American Revolution.