[PHOTO] Global Guest House, for sale

The for sale sign on the front of the Global Guest House on lower Spadina Road, just north of Bloor, fit with the grey ambiance of Sunday.

[URBAN NOTE] "How Christmas Markets Have Gone Global"

Torontoist's Emily Macrae looks at the globalization of the Christmas Market.

In a city known for snow, skiing, and hearty cuisine, wooden stalls fill a downtown park to create an annual Christmas market. The scene is Sapporo, Japan, which has hosted a German Christmas Market since 2002.

Japan’s fourth-largest city might seem like an unlikely place to find Bavarian specialties, like pretzels, each December, but the event is a result of Sapporo’s relationship with its sister city, Munich.

Christmas markets have a long history in Germany, dating back to the Middle Ages, with the first written records of the winter festivals appearing in the mid-1600s. Today, there are some 2,500 markets in Germany, and similar practices are found in neighbouring countries.

As anyone who’s wandered through the Distillery District’s Christmas Market can attest, vendors typically sell crafts and other gifts alongside warming food and drink. From glogg (mulled wine) in Denmark to grzane piwo (mulled beer) in Poland, there is no shortage of festive beverages, and Canadian gamay may soon join the ranks of holiday icons.

Sapporo shows that Christmas markets have expanded beyond their origins in Central Europe to become a global phenomenon. So if countless cities across multiple continents boast markets, do these seasonal events contribute to the unique identity of a community or simply entrench each place as an interchangeable site of shopping and off-key songs?

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO reports on the Union Station Holiday Market.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about how she has fled toxic environments.


• Centauri Dreams considers the next generation of observational astronomy with Alpha Centauri in mind.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at how foreseeeable advances may mean that Proxima Centauri b's atmosphere could soon by studied for indirect signs of life.


• Far Outliers notes how, in the dying ways of the War of American Independence, British forces were setting slaves free.


• Language Log shares Chinese science fiction writer Ken Liu's thoughts about the Chinese language and Chinese literature.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money warns about the potential threat posed to indigenous peoples in the United States by the Trump Administration.


• The LRB Blog considers the likely fates of Italy after Renzi.


• The Planetary Society Blog describes the impending launch of a solar sail craft into orbit.


• Savage Minds considers ways in which the different subfields of anthropology can more profitably interact, looking at scholarship and politics both.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the American left should make the Trump Administration cause to advocate for a renewed federalism.


• Arnold Zwicky writes about the art of being camp and its selective deployments.

[ISL] On the shortages of Canadian lobster

The Globe and Mail's Corey Mintz looks at how lobster has been priced out of the budgets of many Canadians. Islanders and other Atlantic Canadians, can you tell me of your experiences?

The lobster salad at Toronto’s Nota Bene has been on the menu since George Bush’s son was U.S. president (that is, 2008). So when the dish of steamed Nova Scotia lobster, maple-smoked bacon, preserved dill, avocado and buttermilk ranch dressing disappeared in early fall, regulars noticed.

Servers told querying patrons that the quality of lobster was not up to par. The harder truth was that the crustacean had gotten too rich for our blood. In the past five years, co-owner David Lee watched per-pound cost rise from around $9 to $12. Even if Nota Bene charged $29 for the appetizer, the dish would be unprofitable.

“The price is just crazy,” Lee says. “And there’s only so much the guest will pay for lobster.” When it reached $16 a pound in September, he took the salad off the menu.

People love to tell you, with the fanfare of revealing that Michael Caine’s real name is Maurice Micklewhite, that lobster was once so inexpensive and undesirable that it was fed to servants and prisoners.

However, this is not back in the day. And to anyone fewer than 100 years old and not living on the Atlantic, lobster is a delicacy.

North Atlantic lobsters (a.k.a. Homarus americanus, American lobster, Boston lobster or Canadian lobster), which are indigenous to our eastern shores, average one to one and a half pounds. Cooked, they contain between 20 per cent to 30 per cent meat. If the cost at the fishmonger is $15 a pound, that makes a pound of meat worth about $60.

[LINK] "British Villagers Are Baffled by Flocking Chinese Tourists"

In The New York Times, Dan Bilefsky describes why so many Chinese tourists are paying attention to the otherwise unremarkable British village of Kidlington.

One explanation holds that guides started using Kidlington as a drop-off point for tourists who declined to pay $68 for a Chinese language tour of the palace. Credit Elizabeth Dalziel for The New York Times

Sun Jianfeng, a 48-year-old tour guide with Beijing Hua Yuan International Travel, said guides were routinely depositing in Kidlington tourists who did not want to pay an extra $68 for an optional Chinese language tour of nearby Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s majestic ancestral home.

He added that some wily tourists had figured out that buying tickets at the palace would cost only about $25, and were secretly sneaking there on foot, irking other tourists, who had already paid full price. As a result, he said, those who opted out of the Blenheim tour were being dropped in Kidlington, which is not within walking distance.

Mr. Sun said Kidlington was also a convenient stop on the way to Bicester Village, a must-go discount luxury retail destination for Chinese shoppers. The Chinese are big spenders, and European countries compete hard for their business.

Mr. Sun stressed that the Kidlington phenomenon was also an outgrowth of modern China and globalization. Many tourists are a part of China’s rapidly growing middle class, many of whom live in anonymous concrete tower blocks in huge cities, he said. They are enchanted by the village’s tranquillity and intrigued by daily life in the English countryside.

“The environment in the countryside in China isn’t so great,” he said, noting that it could be run-down and gritty compared with England’s typically bucolic atmosphere. “In Kidlington, the environment is great. You see farm fields and ranches here. Also, many newly built houses here have brick or brick-and-wood structures, which you no longer see very often in urban China.”

[URBAN NOTE] "How a homophobic 20th-century book conjured up the ghosts of Paris’ queer past"

At Daily Xtra, Michael Lyons describes how his discovery of a vintage book from the 1920s at Trinity College's used book sale opened him up to new discoveries about LGBT history, despite its homophobia.

Probing the depths of Trinity College’s rare books sale can yield some queer finds —in every meaning of the word. When I browsed through hundreds of dusty tomes last month, I ended up selecting a modern English translation of a turn-of-the-century French book, Le Troisième Sexe. It’s an odd book, in turns amusing and awful, conjuring up the ghosts of homosexuality past haunting the streets of Montmartre, Paris.

Le Troisième Sexe, published in 1927, is something between a personal essay, literary criticism, a treatise on “homosexuality’s scabrous banners” and a voyeuristic travelers guide for heterosexuals fascinated by the underworld of “pederasts,” “inverts,” “uranists,” “men-women” and “ephebes” of early 20th-century Paris and beyond (the author uses the terms almost interchangeably, so he’s generally not calling all homosexuals pedophiles).

The book is published under the name Willy, the nom-de-plume of Henry Gauthier-Villars, a cultural critic and author, who co-signed his name on “collaborations” with at least 50 known writers. Like previous collaborations, the translator notes that Le Troisième Sexe was written by an unknown author, with Willy interspersing the text with his own (terrible) witticisms.

The tract starts with an overview of homosexual bastions in the world, like Italy and America. Willy also refers to the particularly militant organizing homosexuals of Germany — he seems astounded that queer people could like hiking — and the foundational works of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin.

[. . .]

This sort of dualism of informational writing with a sneering, titillated, judgmental reflex is the essence of Le Troisième Sexe. Looking through the eyes of the author, one would think all Parisian homosexuals were excessively rouged, simpering, mincing effetes who writhed for heterosexual spectators, plying sugar daddies with cocaine and caresses.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Toronto’s Urban Forest is a Critical Infrastructure Asset"

In a sponsored post, Torontoist's Catherine McIntyre looks at the importance of Toronto's urban forest as a source of financial and other benefits.

When a resident from Kleinburg, a heritage district in York Region, proposed a plan to build an underground garage on his property, the City signed off with little dispute. The car park, complete with a hydraulic lift, would be close to the property line, but would offer just enough clearance from the neighbour’s mature trees to avoid causing any damage. Soon after the resident started excavating, however, the City was inundated with calls from a frantic neighbour. Major roots that stretched from their property into the excavation area were severed, cutting off a significant means of water and nutrient uptake, and the neighbour feared, correctly, that their trees would die.

It turns out the resident building the garage had mislead the City by submitting plans for the above-ground area of the project—a fraction of what was being excavated below the surface.

But according to Philip Van Wassenaer, a seasoned arborist and tree consultant for municipalities, knowing the construction would have damaged the roots wouldn’t have mattered anyway. “What’s below ground—40 to 50 per cent of the tree’s biomass—is the most important part,” says Van Wassenaer, “But if my tree is growing a metre away from the property line and you get permission to excavate to that point, then you’re going to be doing significant damage to a portion of the roots in my tree, and I have no recourse.”


Indeed, while municipalities have the mandate to protect the trunks, branches, and leaves of mature trees, the vital root systems remain largely ignored by policy, leaving them vulnerable to development.

It’s just one of the many limitations in the efforts to protect the GTA’s urban forest—a critical asset for healthy cities, and one that is increasingly under threat, from climate change, disease, and the built environment.

[LINK] "Nicaraguan Women Push for Access to Land, Not Just on Paper"

At the Inter Press Service, José Adam Silva writes about the efforts of some Nicaraguan women who farm to get better land tenure rights for their land.

A group of women farmers who organised to fight a centuries-old monopoly over land ownership by men are seeking plots of land to farm in order to contribute to the food security of their families and of the population at large.

Matilde Rocha, vice president of the Federation of Nicaraguan Women Farmers Cooperatives (Femuprocan), told IPS that since the late 1980s, when women trained in the Sandinista revolution organised to form cooperatives, access to land has been one of the movement’s main demands.

According to Rocha, as of 1997, the organisation has worked in a coordinated manner to fight for recognition of the rights of women farmers not only with regard to agriculture, but also to economic, political and social rights.

Femuprocan, together with 14 other associations, successfully pushed for the 2010 approval of the Fund for the Purchase of Land with Gender Equity for Rural Women Law, known as Law 717.

They also contributed to the incorporation of a gender equity focus in the General Law on Cooperatives and to the participation of women in the Municipal Commissions on Food Security and Sovereignty.

For Rocha, this advocacy has allowed rural women to update the mapping of actors in the main productive areas in the country, strengthen the skills of women farmers and train them in social communication and as promoters of women’s human rights, to tap into resources and take decisions without the pressure of their male partners.

[URBAN NOTE] "Subway Will Modernise – and Further Gentrify – Historic Centre of Quito"

The story told by the Inter Press Service's Mario Osava, describing how the Ecuadorian capital of Quito will be transformed through gentrification following subway construction, sounds sadly familiar.

Success can kill, when it comes to cities. Spain’s Barcelona is facing problems due to the number of tourists that it attracts. And the historic centre of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, a specially preserved architectural jewel, is losing its local residents as it gentrifies.

This paradox was pointed out by Fernando Carrión, president of the Latin American and Caribbean Organisation of Historic Centres (OLACCHI) and a professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Ecuador.

“Quito’s historic centre lost 42 per cent of its population over the last 15 years, a period in which it gained better monuments and lighting, and became cleaner,” he said. According to official census figures, the population of the old city dropped from 58,300 in 1990 to 50,982 in 2001 and 40,587 in 2010.

The effort to revitalise the historic centre was based on a “monumentalist policy,” on the restoration of churches and large buildings, which led to a process of gentrification, driving up housing prices and the conversion of residential into commercial property and pushing out low-income residents, he told IPS.

“I fear that the subway will drive away more people,” exacerbating the tendency, he added.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Monorails Are the Future (Really This Time)"

At Bloomberg View, Adam Minter suggests that the monorail might yet have its moment, flourishing in cities of the developing world as inexpensive mass transit systems.

Monorails may not have worked in sprawling, 20th-century Los Angeles. But for the dense, traffic-choked cities of the modern developing world -- where populations are growing, pollution is worsening and public funds are limited -- they're ideal. If they catch on, they could change urban landscapes around the world for the better.

In China, they're already starting to. Although China has built some of the world's biggest and best metro systems, and plans to build more, subways come with plenty of problems. They're geographically constrained, disruptive to build and expensive to maintain, especially for the smaller cities driving much of China's local debt problem. Buses and cars are cheaper and more flexible, but contribute to air pollution and traffic jams.

Monorails could help on all counts. They run solely on electricity, and so are usually better for the environment. They're built above ground, on relatively thin pylons that can be installed in road medians, and thus avoid the heavy costs of excavation and underground maintenance. BYD, a Chinese manufacturer backed by Warren Buffett, says its SkyTrain monorail costs one-sixth what a traditional metro would, and requires only one-third the time to install. For cash-strapped Chinese cities such as Shantou -- home to 5.5 million people and (soon) a 155-mile monorail -- that's an attractive proposition.

More interestingly, monorails can navigate steep grades and sharp curves. This makes them ideally suited to downtowns, where they can easily be aligned with existing roads and landscapes. And it opens up new possibilities. The world's busiest monorail -- with nearly a million daily passengers -- is located in the hilly metropolis of Chongqing in Southwest China, where it negotiates curves and hills that would've required tunnels for heavier rail. Though few cities are as geographically challenging as Chongqing, there's plenty of demand for transit systems that can take people exactly where they want to go.

[LINK] "Food in North often expired — even at high prices and with subsidy, good food is hard to fin

The National Post carries Bob Weber's article in The Canadian Press describing how a Canadian government program intended to make healthy food more affordable in the North has not worked at all.

A researcher has found that a federal subsidy intended to reduce astronomical food prices for northern families has resulted in stale-dated, unreliable food on store shelves without making grocery bills more affordable.

Tracey Galloway of the University of Toronto, whose findings are to be published in a scientific journal later this month, says the Nutrition North program should be reformed with mandatory price caps on essential food.

“Without price caps and regulatory framework for pricing, the retailers have arbitrary control on how they set prices,” she said from Iqaluit, where she was presenting her results. “We have not seen prices come down over the course of this subsidy.”

Food in the North costs between two and three times what it does in the south. Grapes were recently selling in Nunavut for more than $28 a kilogram.

[. . .]

Nutrition North is a $77-million program that, since it replaced the Food Mail initiative in 2011, has sought to reduce costs by subsidizing shipping to 121 communities in the three territories and the northern regions of the provinces. The federal government is reviewing the program and has held public meetings across the North.

[LINK] "Why Saturn’s moon Titan is the best spot for an off-world colony"

MacLean's' Mike Doherty has an interview with two authors, Amanda R. Hendrix and Charles Wohlforth, who argue that if humankind is ever to embark in on an expensive program of colonization in space (something much more expensive than fixing our world, they argue), Titan not Mars should be the target.

Q: Why is humanity so fixated on travelling to Mars?

AH: It’s always been fascinating because back in the earliest observations, it looked like there were canals on Mars and some sort of greenery, [as if] there could be aliens. It remains a good option for looking for past life, and more accessible than some of the places in the outer solar system that might have current life. So it’s interesting as a target scientifically, but for long-term human settlement, it’s not the place to go.

CW: We’re a very long way from being able to put humans safely on Mars. The issues with [brain damage from] galactic cosmic rays, or GCRs, are serious, and in the past year, NASA has really come to recognize them: an internal document says you only have 150 days of safe travel unprotected—which won’t get you anywhere near a Mars-and-back mission with current technology. It’s probably time to level with the American people, and setting a farther-out human habitation goal is a better way to start solving those problems, rather than thinking about a short-term trip to Mars that’s probably not going to happen.

[. . .]

Q: Why specifically is Titan the place to go, and can we realistically get people as excited about Titan as we have been about Mars?

AH: Titan is a much more interesting place just visually; in terms of the landscape and the opportunities there, Titan offers so much more. It’s really Earth-like: it’s the only other place in the solar system that has any liquid on the surface. It’s not water, but it’s ethane and methane, and there’s a nice atmosphere. It’s one-and-a-half* the [atmospheric] pressure that we feel here on Earth, so it’s not too much and not too little. The main benefit, of course, is that people will be shielded from a lot of the the GCRs that are so damaging. It takes a long time to get there, and it’s cold, but there are ways around that.

[OBSCURA] On the photographic art of Justin Main, Instagram's photified

I was startled to see the above image in my RSS feed, contained within Emily Landau's Toronto Life feature "This Toronto photographer reimagines the skyline as a post-apocalyptic dystopia". This image, and many others, is the product of Instagram user Justin Main, known as photified on that platform. His surreal alternate histories are amazing.

Over the past few years, the iconic Toronto skyline has become a creative blank slate for Toronto artists, who are taking familiar elements—the CN Tower, Rogers Centre, waterfront skyscrapers—and transforming them into fantastical cityscapes. One of the most inventive Instagrammers on the scene is Justin Main, a prolific photographer who goes by the handle @photified on Instagram. Main’s shots make the city seem like the world of a video game: he shows the skyline sprouting out of an iPhone screen, envisions giants stomping on the city and reimagines Toronto as a miniature city in a turtle tank. The photos are cheeky, striking and sometimes a bit scary.

The 30-year-old Main grew up in Barrie. When he was 14, he fell in love with Photoshop, spending all his spare time manipulating images. He studied photography at Georgian College, but after he graduated, he found himself weighed down by OSAP loans and decided to give up his photographic aspirations for something more stable. He got a gig at the Honda factory in Alliston, Ontario, and spent the next three years assembling car engines.

About five years ago, Main decided to quit his job, move to Toronto and pursue photography full time. “I was discouraged by most of my family and friends, but I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it,” he says. For the first couple of years, he worked in the music industry, creating album covers for hip-hop mixtapes. His ultimate goal was to get into advertising, so in 2013 he embarked on a Project 365, which involves posting one image every day. He never missed a day—even during the 2013 ice storm, when he lost power and had to camp out in Tim Hortons to work on his laptop. Three years later, he’s amassed tens of thousands of Instagram followers, and when he’s not posting on Instagram, he’s creating images for brands like Google, Club Med, Crayola and Timberland.

Main’s shots are complex photo collages: he often spends up to 12 hours a day cropping, lighting and tinting on Photoshop, splicing together anywhere from two to 15 individual images. Many of his images are magical twists on classic Toronto sights, like the Island, the DVP and Brookfield Place.

[. . .]

This vaguely apocalyptic landscape combines the Toronto waterfront with a rocky cliffside, making the city resemble an isolated medieval fortress. “I dreamed this up after a discussion with a friend about lunar tides,” Main explains. “I wanted to exaggerate Toronto, so it kind of looked like the Bay of Fundy.”

I normally don't follow Instagram photo art accounts, but I followed this one. You may want to do the same.