[PHOTO] Looking north as the southbound train comes in, Rosedale station

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Apostrophen's 'Nathan Smith points to his blog post about the strengths of the chosen families of queer people, in life and in his fiction.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling revisits the politics behind France's Minitel network, archaic yet pioneering.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly blogs about meeting her online friends in real life. Frankly, it would never occur to me not to do that.
  
• Centauri Dreams looks at how Kepler's exoplanets fall neatly into separate classes, super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.
  
• The LRB Blog has a terrible report from Grenfell Tower, surrounded by betrayed survivors and apocalypse.
  
• The Map Room Blog notes the inclusion of Canada's First Nations communities on Google Maps.


• The NYRB Daily's Robert Cottrell explores the banalities revealed by Oliver Stone's interviews of Putin.
  
• The Planetary Society Blog's Jason Davis considers the likely gains and challenges associated with missions to the ice giants of Uranus and Neptune.
  
• Towleroad notes the new Alan Cumming film After Louie, dealing with a romance between an ACT-UP survivor and a younger man
  
• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin does not find much good coming from Trump's announced Cuba policy.
  
• Window on Eurasia warns about the threat posed by Orthodox Christian fundamentalists in Russia.

[LINK] Three notes on refugees, from Toronto to Vietnam to Ethiopia

• Craig S. Smith notes the profound cynicism of Kellie Leitch in using one Syrian refugee's abuse of his wife to criticize the entire program.


• CBC's Carolyn Dunn notes that the story of the Trinh family, boat people from Vietnam who came to Canada, will be made into a Heritage Minute.
  
• James Jeffrey describes for the Inter Press Service how refugees from Eritrea generally receive warm welcome in rival Ethiopia.

[URBAN NOTE] Three notes about Muslims, their haters and my neighbourhood and cats, in Toronto

• Daily Xtra's Arshy Mann and Evan Balgord report on how the Jewish Defense League plans on marching in Toronto Pride. Grand.


• Spacing's Shazlin Rahman reports on the Jane's Walk she organized around sites of significance to Muslims around Bloor and Dufferin.


• The Toronto Star's Nicholas Keung and Raju Mudhar reported earlier this month on the happy reunification of a Syrian couple with their cat.

[NEWS] Five links about science, from libraries to smartphone sociology to spaceflight

• The Guardian's Ian Sample reports a claim that the older a father when a son is conceived, the geekier the son is likely to be.


• Pew Research Group's Abigail Geiger reports a study's claim American millennials are likelier than other generations to use libraries.
  
• This Longreads essay by Adam Greenfield examining the significance of the smartphone in human life is enthralling.


• Universe Today's Fraser Cain considers whether suspended animation, hibernation, is possible. (Note that this is not cryonics.)


• This Elon Musk sketch at New Space of the case for colonizing Mars and how Mars is to be reached is ambitious, at least.

[MUSIC] Pet Shop Boys, "Single-Bilingual"

Watch on YouTube

The Pet Shop Boys' 1996 song "Single-Bilingual" was not as big a hit as their iconic global singles of the 1980s. Perhaps it was because this song, like the rest of their album Bilingual, was a shift from their previous European-styled electronica, incorporating Latin rhythms. This is a shame, because this song and others are among the group's slyest.

The songs of the Pet Shop Boys, like those of all great songwriters, can say many things. See "Single-Bilingual". Listening to the peppy song, Neil Tennant singing in the voice of a self-styled cosmopolitan businessman who claims to be the master of his world, there is humour. As Wayne Studer points out, this man is not all he thinks he is. He's just a cog in the machine.

They call this a community
I like to think of it as home
Arriving at the airport
I am going it alone
Ordering a boarding pass
Travelling in business class
This is the name of the game
I'm single, bilingual
Single, bilingual

I find myself wondering, too, if this song fits on the soundtrack for Brexit. From a pretended cosmopolitanism down to an actual solitude?