[CAT] Shakespeare, upside-down

[PHOTO] Equilibrium and streetcar, Carlton at Jarvis

The Okuda San Miguel mural Equilibrium, painted on the east side of the Parkside Student Residences at Carlton and Jarvis, looks quite fine in the morning. The TTC streetcar passing east made this a scene I had to capture.

[PHOTO] Thirty-one photos of the Junction, along Dundas Street West (#thejunction)

I had a nice walk through The Junction Thursday, walking west on Dundas Street West towards the Humber. I spent my time enjoying the streetscape, dipping into places like independent book and music store Pandemonium and button-maker People Power Press and passing by the other businesses home on this old neighbourhood's streetscape.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the hope of the controllers of Hayabusa2 to collect samples from asteroid Ryugu.


• D-Brief takes a look at how ecologists in Hawaii are using bird song to encourage invasive species of birds to eat local plants.


• Bruce Dorminey notes preliminary findings of astronomers suggesting that stars with relatively low amounts of metals might be more likely to produce potentially habitable Earth-size worlds.


• The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas considers what, exactly, it means for a technology to be considered "neutral".


• At JSTOR Daily, Hope Reese interviews historian Jill Lepore about the crisis facing American institutions in the 21st century. Is there a way forward?


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the ongoing catastrophe in Yemen, aggravated terribly by Saudi intervention and supported by the West.


• Andrew Brownie at the LRB Blog notes how soccer in Brazil, producing stars against dictatorship like Sócrates in the early 1980s, now produces pro-Bolsonario figures.


• The NYR Daily notes the resistance of the Bedouin of al-Khan al-Ahmar to resist their displacement by Israeli bulldozers.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how, among other things, extreme temperature swings make the Moon an unsuitable host for most observatories apart from radio telescopes.


• Window on Eurasia notes the sheer scale of Russian immigration to Crimea after 2014, the number of migrants amounting to a fifth of the peninsula's population.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Eglinton Avenue, Raptors, Selim Esin, video stores, clock tower

• blogTO shares photos of what Eglinton Avenue used to look like, transitioning from a rural route in the 1930s to a burgeoning suburban stretch in the 1960s.


• CBC reports on Jorge Giuria, a man who became famous when, in 1995, his job as a model made him one of the first people to wear the jersey of the Toronto Raptors.


• Wendy Gillis at the Toronto Star reports on the memorial service held earlier this month for Selim Esin, one of the victims of the Church and Wellesley serial killer, at St. Stephen's-in-the-Fields.


• CBC reports that some of the venerable video stores of Toronto have not just survived streaming video but are thriving.


• Urban Toronto notes that the famous 1871 clock tower on Yonge north of College has been successfully moved, the better to integrate into a new condo façade.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Markham, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Bay View, Ushuaia

• blogTO reports on the efforts of York University to try to salvage the Markham campus cancelled by the Ontario provincial government.


• CTV News reports on the Bear Clan Patrol, a First Nations group that has taken to patrolling the streets of Winnipeg to watch out for the ongoing meth crisis.


• The Discourse wonders whether the new city council of Vancouver will be as committed to reconciliation with First Nations as the old one.


• Vice reports on the latest from the Michigan town of Bay View, where there is an almost incomprehensible reluctance among many in that Christian-founded town to allow non-Christians to own property there.


• Matthew Teller at Adventure writes about Ushuaia, the Argentine community that is the southernmost town in the world, and looks at this isolated community's difficulties.

{NEWS] Five links on the future: water wars, cities of Africa, Japan, EU borders, Pakistan

• Earther shares a world map produced by a group predicting where political conflicts over water scarcity will be likely to develop.


• Ozy notes that the fastest-growing cities in the world will be in Africa.


• This Project Syndicate essay suggests that the economy of Japan is actually doing a better job than some metrics suggest, at least on per capita measures. Is Japan pointing a way towards a better future in the high-income world?


• The Irish Times visits the Poland-Ukraine borders to see how well, or not, traffic there flows. Of special note to the Irish readers is the fact that, despite everything else, Ukraine is trying to get closer to the EU, not further away as with the Brexit UK.


• This essay at The Atlantic looks at how the Pakistan of Imran Khan is negotiating multiple spheres of influence, the West and China and the Middle East, all at once.