[PHOTO] East on Dupont Street, between Dufferin and Bartlett, past 1:30 am Saturday

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares stunning photos taken by Hubble of distant galaxy cluster RXC J0142.9+4438, three billion light-years away.


• The Buzz celebrates the Hugo victory of N.K. Jemisin, and points readers to her various works.


• Centauri Dreams links to a paper considering if gravitational wave-producing events might be used as ersatz beacons by hypothetical civilizations hoping to transmit to distant observers of the event.


• The Crux considers how we can get the four billion people alive currently without Internet access online.


• D-Brief notes that a class of violet aurora known as STEVE is actually not an aurora at all, but a "skyglow" product of a different sort of process.


• Far Outliers takes a look at the history of slavery in Mauritius and the nearby and associated Seychelles.


• Kieran Healy shares a funny cartoon, "A Field Guide to Social Scientists."


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the story of the stolen children of Argentina, abducted by the military dictatorship, and the fight to find them again.


• Language Hat links to an article considering the task faced by some in bringing the novel to Africans, not only creating readerships but creating new readerships in indigenous languages displaced by English and French.


• Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money criticizes John McCain in particular connection with the mythology surrounding the POWs and MIA of the United States in the Vietnam War.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel goes through the evidence supporting the idea that our universe must be embedded in a vaster multiverse.


• Window on Eurasia notes how Russians have come to recognize Belarusians as a nation separate from their own, if less distinctly separate than Ukrainians.


• Arnold Zwicky considers a visual pun inspired by Route 66: Is the image a cartoon?

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: gay Toronto, reverse commuters, TTC, Presto, Bentway

• I find quite accurate this Hornet Stories guide to gay Toronto.


• This May Warren article in the Toronto Star looking at so-called "reverse commuters" in the GTA, people who live in the city an commute outwards, is fascinating.


• It goes without saying that an uploading of the TTC from the City of Toronto to the provincial government would threaten municipal-level transit planning. The Toronto Star reports.


• The two-hour transfer program being created for Presto users is a good sign of the push to get that card up and running. (Me, I still use the Metropass; I trust it.) CBC reports.


• The block party held Saturday at the Bentway to celebrate the conversion of that patch under the Gardiner Expressway by Fort York into a public space would have been fun, I think. The Toronto Star reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Beechwood, Saint John, Moncton, Niagara Falls, Baltimore

• The Nova Scotia community of Beechwood has been recognized as being of historical significant for its African-Canadian links. Global News reports.


• This Sunday saw the final Masses delivered at three churches in Saint John, new Brunswick, closed down due to rising costs and falling attendance. CBC reports.


• The leaders of New Brunswick's major political parties appeared in Moncton for that city's bilingual Pride festivities. Ici Radio-Canada reports.


• An Ontario NDP MPP has been the latest to complain about the sewage being injected by Niagara Falls, NY, into the Niagara River. CBC reports.


• Guardian Cities reports on how what can only be interpreted as paranoid, even racist, hysteria against outsiders in greater Baltimore's Anne Arundel county is driving a push to reduce service on its light rail system.

[NEWS] Five science links: BC fires, urban animal intelligence, Oort clouds, stars, dark energy

• The fires of British Columbia are so vast that their smoke is reaching the west of France. Ici Radio-Canada reports.


• Are the unique challenges posed by modern cities making the animals who live in them smarter? The Atlantic examines the issue.


• Universe Today notes that the Oort clouds of other stars may well be visible on microwave frequencies.


• Universe Today reports on the very recent finding that star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy shut down for billions of years, that we are in the middle of a second wave of star formation.


• Do not fear: There is at least one hypothetical strategy that an arbitrarily advanced future civilization could adopt to minimize the effect of dark energy on its exploration of the universe. Universe Today reports.

[NEWS] Five First Nations links: John A MacDonald in Scotland, Onondaga, Québec Innu, stat holiday

• The legacy of John A. MacDonald is also coming into question in his native Scotland, as Scots reckon with their country's role in the business of the British empire. CBC reports.


• The Vintage News reports on the rent, in money and apparently in salt, that the Onondaga of New York receive for their lost lands.


• CBC talks about the quiet revolution brewing among the Innu of the Lower North Shore of Québec.


• This account, by Hélène Clément in Le Devoir, of a train trip through Innu country tells of a fascinating experience.


• A Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq leader thinks that the federal government's move to create a new statutory holiday commemorating the residential school system a good idea, a much-needed public recovery of memory. Global News reports.

[PHOTO] Noontime pink rose after rain, Dovercourt Road

[REVIEW] Box 4901, Summerworks

I learned of the existence, at this year's incarnation of the SummerWorks theatre festival, of the play Box 4901 through a post at critic Drew Rowsome's blog. The mention in the first paragraph that the playwright was Brian Francis sold me entirely on the show. Francis, for me, stands out particularly for his second novel the 2011 Natural Order, in the course of which he first created a character undeserving of sympathy and then managed to persuade me into shedding tears of sympathy for her. (It still does that.) At that point, I was ready to go down to the Theatre Centre on 1115 Queen Street West to catch a performance, even taking a visiting friend down with me to take in the show last Sunday.

Box 4901 is an autobiographical play. In 1992, while still in the process of coming out in the southwestern Ontario city of London as a student at the University of Western Ontario, Francis placed a personal ad in the local paper looking for contacts. He received dozens of replies to his ad, but left 13 unanswered. Box 4901 is structured as Francis' systematic, belated, responses to this answers, each answer getting portrayed by a different actor on the stage, Francis himself delivering his response behind a lectern on that same stage.

One thing that I found fascinating about this storyline was the amount of distance. The distance in time was not so significant--the language of the ad and of many of the answers could well appear on any of the online social networking platforms that I use today--as the distance in mentality imposed by speed. (My only encounter with said was via a Sunday school teacher of mine who briefly tried to persuade her students to protest against the local paper sharing ads for same-sex couples; my cohort, happily, responded with confusion to this.) The call-and-response nature of the personal ad may be eternal, but the era of the personal ad stands out from my experiences for its slowness and disconnection. Replies would necessarily have to take days, even weeks, to be dispatched; meetings would need be arranged meticulously in detail, in an environment rather more hostile than now. Box 4901 did a great job of communicating the tenuous nature of the community being knit together; it let me, a theatre-goer, get a vidi sense of the mindsets of the time.

I rather liked the performances. The different actors, interviewed by Rowsome at his blog, all did great jobs with their material, presenting different sorts of characters delivering their lines in ways alternatively silly or sensuous or sincere (and, in at least one memorable case, all at the same time). Francis began his performance by noting that he was not an actor by training, and while that may be true that self-evaluation undersells his performance. Francis was a perfect straight man for his actors, someone more than capable of sharing his memories of the past, of delivering self-aware and wise commentary on his own past and his own community in a way that connected with the audience. All the performers, Francis included, did a great job of bringing together a vivid depiction of a past just outside of easy recall.

If Box 4901 has a flaw, it lies in its tight focus, on its drawing from the particular experiences of a single man looking back for the first time in his adult life at a particular moment in his life. What would future productions of Box 4901 look like? Will they be altered by the process of reflection? How reproducible is this play? I can only say that I was very lucky to have been able to catch Box 4901. I hope others will be able to be able to share in this particular theatrical experience.

(If you are curious to see others' take on Box 4901, see the reviews of Glenn Sumi at NOW Toronto, Sam Mooney at Mooney on Theatre, Martha Schabas at The Globe and Mail.)