[PHOTO] Christmas beads at Dollarama, red gold and green

Christmas decorations are already for sale; Dollaramas like the one at Yonge and Wellesley have aisles full of seasonal memorabilia.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the frequency with which young red dwarf stars flare, massively, with negative implications for potential life on these stars' planets.


• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal for probe expeditions to Pluto and Charon, and to the wider Kuiper belt beyond.


• D-Brief explains just how elephants manage to eat with their trunks.


• JSTOR Daily answers the question of just why so many American states--other subnational polities too, I bet--have straight-line borders.


• Language Hat links to a recent blog post examining the very specific forms of language used by the Roman emperor Justinian.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos looks at where the whole concept of "political correctness" came from, and why. (Hint: It was not anti-racists who did this.)


• Geoffrey K. Pullum at Lingua Franca describes the circumstances behind his new book, _Linguistics: Why It Matters.


• At the LRB Blog, Caroline Eden writes about the shipwrecks of the Black Sea, preserved for centuries or even millennia by the sea's oxygen-poor waters.


• Gabrielle Bellot writes at the NYR Daily about how she refuses to be made into an invisible trans woman.


• At the Speed River Journal, Van Waffle describes--with photos!--how he was lucky enough to find a wild growth of chicken of the woods, an edible bracket mushroom of the Ontario forests.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the loss of Ukraine by the Russian Orthodox Church will contribute to that church being increasingly seen as a national one, limited by borders.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Stackd, Parkdale, paradise Theatre, Bloor/Symington, Hadrian

• Urban Toronto notes that Stackd, a container-based community market, is taking form near Fort York.


• A Parkdale community group is seeking assurances of affordable housing from local developers. The Toronto Star reports.
The restoration of the Paradise Theatre on Bloor, in Bloorcourt, is proceeding apace. blogTO reports.

• The intersection of Bloor and Symington is getting better. (I imagine that the growth of Sterling Road is one trigger.) blogTO reports.


• This NOW Toronto review of the Rufus Wainwright opera Hadrian suggests promise. Perhaps a remount?

[PHOTO] Ten photos of Type Books in The Junction (@typebooks, #typebooksjunction)

Toronto independent bookstore chain Type Books opened its third location earlier this month in The Junction, at 2887 Dundas Street West, just west of Keele. Yesterday I made my first visit to this location, and was enthralled. This feels like a bright and dynamic community space already--I look forward to making this one of the hubs of my extended neighbourhood, down in the west end.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Queens, Atlanta, Winnipeg, Buenos Aires

• La Presse quotes mayor Valérie Plante's arguments that, while Montréal is enjoying something of a boom, it should takje care to prepare for a slowdown, too.


• Karim Doumar at CityLab takes a look at Queens' new storm-resilient park, Hunters Point South Park.


• Guardian Cities takes a look at #weloveatl, the Atlanta Instagram hashtag that has gone hugely viral.


• VICE takes the city of Winnipeg to task for its sadly dispiriting election, where major issues are not being dealt with (among other things). In this, Winnipeg reminds me of Toronto.


• The Inter Press Service takes a look at how plans to rehouse the inhabitants of the shantytowns of Buenos Aires are progressing.

[ISL] Five islands notes: Caribbean, Anticosti, Greece, Hawai'i, Micronesia

• The Inter Press Service notes that the vulnerable islands of the Caribbean can survive only a modest increase in temperatures.


• La Presse reports that the new premier of Québec, François Legault, says he has no plans to open up Anticosti island, in the Guilf of St. Lawrence, to exploration for oil.


• VICE interviews some workers on a Greek party island to see what their lives are like. (Rarely does it feel like a vacation.)


• The recent Hurricane Walaka has done terrible damage to some of the most remote islands of Hawai'i, destroying low-lying East Island entirely. Global News reports.


• CNN notes that although the more remote islands of the Federated States of Micronesia might seem idyllic to tourists, local populations are emigrating from these isolated locations in large numbers.

[NEWS] Five language links: Armenian, Icelandic, Irish, Ladino, Scots

• This r/unresolvedmysteries thread asks the question of where the Armenian language, a unique Indo-European language, came from.


• This Ragnar Jónasson article in The Guardian asks the question of how long the Icelandic language, with relatively few speakers and facing a tidal wave of influence from English, can outlast this competition.


• The Irish Times notes that the Irish language was heard in the British House of Commons for the first time in a century, spoken by a Plaid Cymru MP asking why this language has so little institutional support in Northern Ireland.


• Over at the BBC, Susanna Zaraysky takes a look at the Ladino language--a Spanish variant--traditionally used by the Sephardic Jews of Bosnia, and how this language is declining here as elsewhere among the Sephardim.


• Atlas Obscura takes a look at the Scots language, a distinctive Germanic language that was never quite broken away from English, and how this language persists despite everything.