[CAT] Shakespeare, on his side

[PHOTO] At McCardle's Berry Patch, Tracadie, Prince Edward Island

On my trip to the Island, I went with my parents to McCardle's Berry Patch, a U-Pick farm specializing in mixed berries in the farming community of Tracadie.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait evaluates the doability of Elon Musk's proposal for colonizing Mars.


• blogTO notes that Casa Loma will be transformed into a haunted house for the month of October.


• The Dragon's Tales notes NASA's belief that Europa almost certainly has watery plumes.


• False Steps shares an early American proposal for a lunar base.


• Far Outliers notes the location of multiple massacres in Chinese military history.


• Joe. My. God. notes that a far-right group is unhappy Alabama judge Roy Moore has been suspended.


• The Map Room Blog notes the acquisition of a British-era map of Detroit.


• Marginal Revolution speculates as to whether a country's VAT promotes exports.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the end of the Rosetta space probe.


• The Russian Demographics Blog charts increases in maximum life expectancy over time.


• Seriously Science notes a paper arguing that small talk diminishes happiness.


• Towleroad reports on a gay Cameroonian asylum seeker in the United Kingdom at risk of deportation.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes Instapundit's departure from Twitter without noting why Reynolds is leaving.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the complexities surrounding the possibility of another Finno-Ugric festival.

[ISL] On the visit of William and Kate to Haida Gwaii

The National Post carries the article "Tradition and politics mix as William and Kate paddle to Haida Gwaii by war canoe", from the Canadian Press' Dirk Meissner.

Prince William and Kate arrived at a small village off the coast of B.C. on Friday in a replica 15-metre Haida war canoe, taken to the remote island by paddlers wearing T-shirts opposing liquefied natural gas development.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were welcomed to the Haida heritage hall by more than a dozen chiefs and elders.

Young dancers in brightly coloured and beaded costumes performed a dance to honour the survivors of Canada’s residential schools and their personal journeys.

They also did a dance that highlighted the many animals that provide spiritual, cultural and life-sustaining sustenance to the Haida. One dancer wore a full bear costume and rose up and roared like a bear during the dance.

“We are survivors,” Haida Nation spokesman Peter Lantin told William and Kate. “We owe our existence to these islands and these waters. We know that good will come from your visit to Haida Gwaii because you bring hope.”

Inside the hall, William spoke in the Haida language and remarked on the long relationship between the Crown and the Haida.

[ISL] "Old Farmer's Almanac at 225: 'It doesn't look that much different' "

CBC News interviewed Peter Rukavina, Island blogger, on the subject of the Old Farmer's Almanac. I did not know he contributed to it.

Not too many publications last 25 years, let alone 225, but that's the birthday being celebrated this year by the Old Farmer's Almanac.

There are still many that swear by it for its annual insights into the coming seasons and weather patterns.

And there's even an Islander involved, Peter Rukavina, who turned what he thought would be a short-term job into two decades of work.

As he told Island Morning's Matt Rainnie, he was asked to help with the publication's then-new digital companion, almanac.com.

"I had some experience with webby stuff, so I said yes, fully expecting this to be a month-long project, and 20 years later I'm still here," said Rukavina.

He's part of a great tradition which still sees some 4,000,000 copies distributed annually.

[ISL] "Devon Island: The Last Stop Before Mars"

At D-Brief, Carl Engelking reports on how experiences on an island in the Canadian Arctic could aid in the colonization of Mars.

Talk of sending humans to Mars hit a fever pitch this week following SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s big announcement Tuesday.

He outlined an ambitious plan to begin sending cargo missions to Mars by 2018, with the first manned missions leaving by 2022 or 2023. Along the way, he hopes to improve the cost of trips by “5 million percent”, and establish a colony of 1 million souls there within 40 to 100 years. Let’s just say people had questions — The Verge’s Loren Grush outlined a few of them.

How will humans survive? What about radiation? How will they get around? What happens to the waste colonists flush down the toilet? We didn’t get a clear answer form Musk, but these are the kinds of questions that NASA scientists have been working to answer for two decades in one of the most remote, empty places on earth: Devon Island.

Devon Island is the largest uninhabited island on the planet, and it’s about as Mars-like as it gets. It’s home to the 14 mile-wide Haughton Crater, which is cold, dry, rocky and extremely isolated. Since 1997, Pascal Lee, planetary scientist at the Mars Institute and the SETI Institute, and director of the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center, has led missions every summer from a small research station there to prepare people and design technologies for a trip to the Red Planet.

On the island, researchers have tested robots, spacesuits, drills and other tools that would aid future Mars explorers. It’s also a proving ground for would-be Mars colonists. Devon Island is isolated, the environment is brutal and the area is poorly mapped, which makes it the perfect place to get a taste of what might go wrong out there.

[LINK] "Northern exposure: Manitoba's northern economy facing serious challenges"

CBC News' Cameron MacIntosh reports on the continuing economic decline of northern Manitoba. How can Canada call itself a northern nation with issues like these?

It's a long drive, twisting through seemingly endless forest, past lakes, down a long two-lane highway that alternates between patches of broken pavement and gravel.

Eventually Manitoba's Provincial Road 391 comes to an end.

A nearly 1,100 kilometre drive north of Winnipeg, Lynn Lake is just about as far north as you can drive in Manitoba on an all-weather road.

It's also long been at the end of the road economically.

On the final stretch of 391 — Sherritt Avenue, Lynn Lake's main drag — is the Northern Store, one of the few active businesses in town. A group of residents, including Tommy Caribou, is just sitting around outside.

Caribou's red cap would be familiar to anyone that's been paying even minimal attention to American politics. The slogan, written in white, is slightly modified: "Make Lynn Lake Great Again."

[URBAN NOTE] On Rogers' axing of Canadian mass media

Bloomberg carried the startling news in a brief article.

Rogers Communications Inc. is pulling back from its magazine business, shuttering some titles, selling others and reducing the frequency of its most-popular magazines, dealing a major blow to Canada’s already-struggling publishing industry.

“Maclean’s,” Canada’s best-known public affairs magazine, will shift from weekly publication to monthly while “Chatelaine” and “Today’s Parent” will move to six times a year. The print editions of “Sportsnet,” “MoneySense” and “Canadian Business” will be cut completely and become online-only. French-language titles will be sold, though a buyer has not yet been found, Rogers said in a statement Friday.

Shares in the Toronto-based telecommunications and media company were little changed at C$55.96 at 11:49 a.m. and have gained 17 percent this year.

Rogers has been struggling to maintain media revenue as advertisers continue their flight to the internet from traditional TV and print ads. It cut 200 media jobs earlier this year in a bid to save costs. The company isn’t alone. Newspaper and magazine owners including Postmedia Network Canada Corp. and Torstar Corp. have all made deep cuts in the last year.

The Toronto Star's Michael Lewis had more.

“We are going where our audiences are and doubling down on digital to grow our consumer magazine brands,” said Rick Brace, president of Rogers Media.

“We have already made significant investments in creating content and making it available on digital platforms, including Texture, Sportsnet Now and Rogers NHL GameCentre Live.”

Janice Neil, chair of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, called the moves another sign of the “end of the Guttenberg era,” referring to the German publisher who is credited with introducing the printing press to Europe in the 1400s.

Although she said the digital shift is inevitable given the online reading habits of younger generations, she called it a shame for older people who are not as tech savvy.

Neil also noted that Maclean’s, a venerable publication with a loyal print readership, is being scaled back in frequency while glossy showbiz magazine Hello! Canada will remain in weekly print.

This is huge news for Canadian mass media. MacLean's a monthly?

[URBAN NOTE] "The difficult task of reviving Toronto’s Ontario Place"

The Globe and Mail's Alex Bozikovic writes about the issues involved with reviving Ontario Place. Why, for starters?

The couple looked as confused as we were: He in a navy-blue two-piece and she in a red skirt suit, while our crowd donned skinny jeans, canvas totes and New Balance. As we all arrived at Ontario Place, it became clear we were here for different purposes: us for the In/Future festival of arts and music, and them for a wedding.

In the modernist fantasy land on Toronto’s waterfront, which opened in 1971, the wedding guests seemed a bit out of place. Ontario Place was designed as a gleaming showpiece for the province’s culture, but that vision collapsed; today the site, which ended up as a theme park, is largely closed. The wedding venue, meanwhile, is doing good business.

Ontario Place was the product of grand modernist dream, built on a futurist ambition of social progress.

It was a powerful lesson about what makes public space work: You have to give people a reason to come. And In/Future, which wrapped up last weekend after a highly successful 10-day run, did just that: a set of art installations and music performances that brought one of Ontario Place’s two artificial islands to life.

And that is a difficult task: How do you take a big and slightly isolated place, the product of a grand modernist dream, and make it live again?

The curators of In/Future, Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton, asked artists to engage with the landscape – designed by Michael Hough as a rolling park stocked with native trees and shrubs – and with the architecture, envisioned by Eberhard Zeidler, with its spherical cinema and series of high-tech white steel structures. “What do we learn about ourselves in the present,” Hinton asks, “when we look at the past, to see how we imagined the future?”

[FORUM] Have you done Nuit Blanche before? Will you be doing it? (#nuitblanche)

Tonight, I will be doing at least some of Nuit Blanche Toronto. Why not? I've done it consistently for the past few years, I've generally enjoyed the artworks, I like walking around the city, and, this night, I brought a sweater.

What about you? Have you done Nuit Blanche, or a similar all-night or late-night art festival, before? Would you do it again? Why, or why not?

Please, discuss.