[PHOTO] Eight photos from Room for Mystics, Art Gallery of Ontario (@agotoronto, #meigsago)

Room for Mystics, a collaboration by painter Sandra Meigs with composer Christopher Butterfield, certainly did create a sense, in this room in the contemporary art-filled fifth floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario, of a room with a special tinge to it.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the real possibility that extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua may have been ejected from the system of a dying star.


• Centauri Dreams notes new efforts to determine brown dwarf demographics.


• Crooked Timber shares some research on the rise and fall of Keynesianism after the financial crisis.


• Hornet Stories shares a decidedly NSFW article about gay sex in Berlin.


• JSTOR Daily notes the surprisingly high frequency of interspecies sex in the wild.


• Language Hat notes new efforts to promote the status of the Luxembourgish language in the grand duchy.


• The LRB Blog notes how a chess tournament hosted in Saudi Arabia has failed badly from the PR perspective.


• What role does the novelist have in a world where the television serial is moving in on the territory of literature? The NYR Daily considers.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw reflects on John Lyons' book Balcony over Jerusalem, the controversy over the book, and the Middle East generally.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes the ominous import of the decent drone attack in Syria against Russian forces.


• Drew Rowsome praises the 2016 play Mustard, currently playing again at the Tarragon, as a modern-day classic.


• Spacing features a review of a fantastic-sounding book about the architecture of Las Vegas.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers the impact of the very rapid rotation of pulsars about their very shape.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: #winterstations, Toronto Islands, King Street, 401 Richmond, coffee

• Muriel Draaisma talks at CBC about the art installations selected for this year's iteration of Winter Stations, including a "Pussy Hut".


• The City of Toronto has, unaccountably, decided not to allocate all the money needed to repair the Toronto Islands after last year's flooding. CBC reports.


• Mayor John Tory talks about the various plans--some new, some I think old--to bring more people to King Street during the transit experiment, over at the Toronto Star.


• This Toronto Star article about changes to taxation that will let downtown arts centres, like 401 Richmond, not get priced out of their homes is older but still quite important.


• blogTO notes local upset in Corso Italia that the local Starbucks, at Dufferin and St. Clair (not far from me!) is set to close. (I've never been there, which I suppose helps clear up any mystery around the closing.)

[NEWS] Five LGBTQ links: Leo Koury, cruising, Man's Country, Mike Balaban, instagays

• Hornet Stories tells of Leo Koury, a mobster who apparently kickstarted gay nigthclub life in the Virginia city of Richmond.


• VICE shares an article on an exhibit at a Berlin museum looking at the history and sociology of cruising in public washrooms.


• VICE features a tour of Man's Country, a long-established Chicago bathhouse now closing after four decades.


• Hornet Stories points to the Instagram account of Mike Balaban, "bammer47", whose account is full of LGBTQ-relevant photos of personal and general relevance.


• Khaleb El Khatib at VICE interviews some "instagays", gay (or bi, or queer) Instagram users whose photos (including selfies) attract huge followings. What do we get out of them? What do they get out of it?

[URBAN NOTE] Five cities links: Basel, Montréal, United Kingdom, black America, Duisburg

• CityLab looks at the streetcar system of the Swiss city of Basel, which extends over national frontiers into France (Alsace) and Germany (Baden-Württemburg).


• Global News suggests retail vacancies along rue Sainte-Catherine in Montréal reflects the impact of online shopping.


• CityMetric suggests that the secondary cities of Britain, i.e. cities that aren't the cosmopolis of London, are underperforming by the standards of their western European peers.


• Fast Company examines how and why black entrepreneurship is taking off in the Southern cities of Memphis, Atlanta, and Alabama's Montgomery.


• Politico Europe notes that the German city of Duisburg, painfully transitioned from its industrial Ruhr past, has become a major node in China's New Silk Road initiative.

[NEWS] Four culture links: Tim Horton's, Patuá in Macau, firebirds, humpback whales

• Edward Keenan points out that the reluctance of Tim Horton's franchises to accommodate the new Ontario minimum wage is really hurting their all-Canadian branding, writing at the Toronto Star.


• Matthew Keegan at The Guardian examines the imminent demise of Patua, the Portuguese-based creole now spoken by only a very few people in Macau.


• Of course multiple species of birds in Australia have developed the cultural trait of active helping wildfires expand in their own interest. It is Australia, right? The National Post reports.


• Live Science suggests that the humpback whale that saved a diver from a shark attack may not have been planning to do just that. I wonder ...