[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Anthropology.net's Kambiz Kamrani looks at the classical Mayan trade in pets, dogs and cats particularly.


• Dangerous Minds shares some vintage cheesecake ads for video and arcade games from 1980s Japan.


• Dead Things considers an examination of the thesis that the fabulous horns of some dinosaurs were used as sexual signals.


• Hornet Stories nominates some queer people to get stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.


• JSTOR Daily tells the story of Bobbi Gibb, the woman who in 1966 crashed the Boston Marathon.


• Language Hattells of Toty Samed, an Angolan musician who writes songs not in the now-dominant Portuguese but in his ancestral Kimbundu.


• Steven Attewell at Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the ways in which the metaphor of mutants has been used by Marvel Comics to explore themes of racism and marginalization.


• At the LRB Blog, Matthew Porges notes how European Union opposition to the annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco is counterbalanced by the need to keep Morocco as a partner.


• r/mapporn shared a beautiful map of the Great Lakes, Nayanno-Nibiimaang Gichigamiin or “The Five Freshwater Seas”, from the Ojibwe perspective.


• The Map Room Blog shares Christian Tate's transit-style map of Middle Earth.


• Marginal Revolution links to an essay arguing against the United States' dropping the penny and the nickel, on the grounds that these expensive coins are loss-leaders for currency generally.


• The NYR Daily takes a look at early 20th century Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyan, a man whose influence is visible in the Putin era.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the eye-catching male photography of Ekaterina Zakharova.


• David Post's analysis at the Volokh Conspiracy of the contract between Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump is a must-read.


• Window on Eurasia notes how the Russian government has failed to cultivate soft power, or wider influence, in the West.

[PHOTO] Sixteen photos of art from Toronto Revealed, at the TD Gallery (#tdgallery)

As I promised yesterday, here is some more of the art that I saw at the TD Gallery's Toronto Revealed exhibition. Although some of the works (paintings, today, mostly painted in oils) depicted scenes predating my arrival in Toronto or even my existence, like that showing the excavation of the Eaton Centre, most of the others were scenes that I recognized with delight from my daily life. One, of a nondescript gas station, was based on a location at most a lazy ten minutes' walk from my home.

More details on the individual works--their names, their painters, their dates--can be found by clicking through to my Flickr page.

[PHOTO] Three photos of Adolf de Meyer from the Met (#metmuseum, #quicksilverbrilliance)

From the 4th of December, 2017, to the 8th of April, 2018, Gallery 852 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be hosting Quicksilver Brilliance, an exhibition of the photos of early 20th century Adolf de Meyer. (Some sources use "Adolph" instead, but Adolf seems to be most commonly used.). The delicate black-and-white photos de Meyer took of some of the celebrities of the New York City of this time--Josephine Baker, Count Étienne de Beaumont, Rita de Acosta Lydig--speak of a skill in composition and eye for colour on de Meyer's part that I envy.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: #topoli, OldTO, Quayside, coffee shops, real estate

• Edward Keenan makes the point that, as the city prepares for elections, quotidian politics are starting to be neglected, over at the Toronto Star.


• blogTO highlights OldTO (#oldto), a open-source and open-data version of Google Maps that maps tens of thousands of old photos to different locations across the city.


• In a recent public meeting, Google tried to address the privacy and other concerns of others with the Sidewalk Labs involvement in the Quayside development. The Toronto Star reports.


• This Toronto Star take on how different coffee shops deal with customers who, after buying a single coffee, proceed to take up valuable seating for extended periods is interesting. (I try to be a good customer. When is there ever too much coffee, after all?)


• Over the year to the end of this February, real estate prices in Toronto have fallen by more than 12%. The Toronto Star reports.

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[URBAN NOTE] Five cities links: Mississauga, Hamilton, Detroit, Edmonton, Vancouver

• I only hope that Mississauga will do better with food trucks--will do better by food trucks--than Toronto. The Globe and Mail reports.


• Hamilton is now a risk area for Lyme disease, with black-legged ticks now present. Global News reports.


• If Ford really will buy the beautiful abandoned Michigan Central Station and rehabilitate this place into a functioning building, this will be a huge signal for Detroit. Detroit News a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2018/03/19/ford-talks-tenant-michigan-central-station/33088971/">reports.


• Is the new Edmonton Valley Line LRT route going to be able to handle near-future growth in traffic? Global News reports.


• Real estate prices are so high that well-paid tradespeople apparently have no plausible choice other than living in trailers beneath Skytrain tracks. MacLean's reports.