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Followers of my Flickr and Instagram feeds will note that the above is my second Shakespeare picture for Caturday. In my defense, I had just woken up; my vision was as poorly focused as my camera.
Though summer is officially over as of Thursday, Toronto’s lingering warmth weather likely isn’t.
Environment Canada senior climatologist Dave Phillips says southern Ontario can expect temperatures in the 20s through November.
“We shouldn’t write the obituary on summer-like weather yet,” he said.
But even if those temperatures don’t materialize, Phillips said the extreme heat of this summer will probably be enough to make 2016 Toronto’s hottest year ever.
“We’ve seen that globally, but my gosh, not always in Toronto,” Phillips said.
Conservative leadership hopeful Brad Trost raised some eyebrows Wednesday when he compared Ontario’s new sex-education curriculum to residential schools.
Trost joined a couple hundred parents gathered outside the provincial legislature to protest Liberal changes to the way sex education is taught in the province.
[. . .]
“You have a responsibility, a responsibility that you take very seriously, a sacred responsibility to do what is right for your children,” the Saskatchewan MP told the crowd.
“We in Canada, when we have taken away those rights from parents we have had a disaster each and every time. The most tragic incident in our history was the residential schools and that was the underlying problem: parental rights were not respected.”
About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families and forced to attend government schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard graphic testimony from survivors who detailed physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the schools.
Trost said after his speech that the Ontario sex-ed curriculum is “not nearly” the same level of seriousness as residential schools, but “the underlying principle is the same.”
Starting next week, WestJet will no longer be offering direct service between Brandon, Man., and Toronto.
The airline says as of Sept. 26, it will remove the run from its schedule because demand for seats has not met expectations.
The four-times-a-week flights began at the end of June to test response to the route.
WestJet then announced in July that it would offer the service on a year-round basis starting late next month.
People who have booked flights on the route will be contacted by WestJet directly to make alternate travel arrangements or to offer refunds.
A couple of blocks can make a $41,000 difference on the price of a condo in Toronto.
That’s how much more it cost on average to buy a condo near Bay St., compared to the Yonge St. corridor in the last year, according to number-crunching by online brokerage TheRedPin.
It looked at 24 major downtown intersections and found the Yorkville area owned the high end of highrise in Toronto between Aug. 2015 and Aug. 2016.
The average price of a two-bedroom unit within about a five-minute walk of Bloor St. and Avenue Rd. was about $1.4 million — the highest among the 24 intersections in the analysis.
It was followed by an average $1 million for condos near the intersections of Bay and Bloor streets and Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave.
It was only a shopping mall, but when the Parkway Plaza opened at Ellesmere Road and Victoria Park Avenue in 1958, it signalled the arrival of space age in the Toronto’s eastern suburbs.
Just five years earlier the site was in the middle of Maryvale, a swathe farms and fields on the borderlands of the Toronto urban area named for the nearby country estate of Senator Frank O’Connor.
A short distance south, over the Canadian Pacific tracks near Lawrence Avenue, the first suburban culs-de-sac and commercial developments were rising from the cornfields.
Modernity arrived quickly in Maryvale. Highway 401 opened just to the north in 1956, and housing subdivisions sprouted from the agricultural landscape with astonishing speed.
To service these new homes, the Cadillac Development Corporation purchased the lots at the southeast corner of Ellesmere and Victoria Park for a shopping centre and hired Bregman and Hamann architects to draw up the blueprints.
Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi rejected the city’s bid for the 2024 Olympics on Wednesday, effectively dooming the capital’s candidacy for the second time in four years.
If approved by Rome’s city assembly, Raggi’s motion to withdraw the bid would leave only Los Angeles, Paris and Budapest, Hungary, in the running for the 2024 Games. The International Olympic Committee will decide on the host city in September 2017.
At a news conference in city hall, Raggi said it would be financially “irresponsible” to pursue the bid any further given the city is barely able to get its trash picked up. She highlighted the debts that previous Olympic host cities have incurred and the unfinished infrastructure already dotting Rome from previous sporting bids as reasons to justify the withdrawal.
“In light of the data we have, these Olympics are not sustainable. They will bring only debt,” she said. “We don’t want sports to become another pretext for more cement foundations in the city. We won’t allow it.”
Raggi drew up a motion to withdraw the bid Wednesday and put it before the city assembly, which has the final say. There was no immediate word if and when the council would take it up.
People living in neighborhoods affected by the expansion of urban construction suffer a “double displacement”, with changes in their habitat and the driving up of prices in the area, in a process in which “we are not taken into account,” said Natalia Lara, a member of an assembly of local residents in the south of Mexico City.
Lara, who is pursuing a master’s degree in public policies at the Latin American School of Social Sciences (Flacso), told IPS that in her neighborhood people are outraged because of the irrational way the construction has been carried out there.
The member of the assembly of local residents of Santa Úrsula Coapa, a lower middle-class neighborhood, complains that urban decision-makers build more houses and buildings but “don’t think about how to provide services. They make arbitrary land-use changes.”
Lara lives near the Mexico City asphalt plant owned by the city’s Ministry of Public Works, which has been operating since 1956 and has become asource of conflict between the residents of the southern neighbourhoods and the administration of leftist Mayor Miguel Mancera of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has governed the capital since 1997.
In mid-2014, Mancera’s government announced its intention to donate the asphalt plant’s land to Mexico City’s Investment Promotion Agency, which would build the Coyoacán Economic and Social Development Area there.
In an international context, however, the objectifying gaze of the ruin photographer can be revealing. Although the rhetorics of Cold Wars past and present would emphasise their difference, the gaze of the photographer helps to demonstrate the inherent kinship between the ruins of the US and those of the former USSR. In both countries, at around the same time, giant factory cities emerged, with the same purpose and with similar architectures and philosophies (Taylorism, Fordism, technological positivism); in both countries, industrial progress went hand-in-hand with extravagant defence spending, scattering expendable outposts of a vast military-industrial complex around a continent. In the ruin, subtleties of dogma are forgotten: when we look at the snapped pillars of a Greek temple, we don’t care whether it was dedicated to Apollo or Dionysus.
In the Russian context, this sense of serendipity is redoubled because the established western stereotype of communist Russia for so long excluded this personal aspect. In fact, ruin photography can be seen as a factor in a general shift in the perception of Russia and the Soviet Union: the superpower has not lost its reputation for strictness and inhuman grandeur, but now this — for better and for worse — is combined with a sense that the Soviet world is, from an aesthetic point of view, ready to be mined for content by the contemporary culture industry.
Soviet communism always had, in contemporary branding speak, “a great corporate aesthetic”: strong use of colour, an accessible visual grammar and eye-catching, easily reproducible logos. This branding recurs again and again in books like Soviet Ghosts (it is, to be fair, hard to avoid). This can be seen as part of a broader reassessment of the iconography of communism, one begun long ago. Once the symbols of the Soviet Union have been shifted into the world of ruins they becomes reusable as purely aesthetic objects. This is not unprecedented: the Renaissance world could “discover” and exploit the art and design of pagan antiquity precisely because its connection with ruination neutered the potential danger posed by its non-Christian origins. Once Venus de Milo has stumps for arms, she can be a symbol of secular beauty rather than, as she once was, a revered devotional figure. Likewise, a faded red star on a rusting missile is no longer a threat, but a mood board waiting to happen.
As many have observed, the nostalgic aspect of ruin photography is connected to a certain post-modern alienation: the ruins of the 20th century seem to conjure a lost, longed-for time of ideological self-confidence and practical purpose. The physicality evoked by these photos contrasts with the way they are consumed in the virtual world of the internet. Moreover, one of the reasons, I suggest, that ghost-city, ruin-porn photography is so popular is that its engagement with the physical offers the promise of serendipity. Photographers often juxtapose images of hulking buildings with quiet human moments — a girl’s doll, a faded poster, a family photo. The implicit message of the genre is “look what you can discover if you go through the locked door”. This makes it perfect for an information marketplace dominated by the peepshow principles of clickbait headlines: ruins offer a valuable online commodity — the possibility of a chance encounter with a sense of our own humanity.
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