[PHOTO] Five photos from a progress home, Lansdowne to Dupont

Last night was a wonderful spring evening, with a perfect sky above a warming earth.

[PHOTO] Virgin Mary on Lansdowne

I had last taken a photo of this particular blue-and-white statue of the Virgin Mary back in July 2017, while I was walking on Lansdowne Avenue, on the western edge of the heavily Portuguese-Canadian (and even more heavily Roman Catholic) west-end neighbourhood of Wallace Emerson, caught my eye when I was walking down the street on the Saturday before a flight out. Yesterday evening, I walked by the same address with the same statue, this time without a luxurious front garden full of greenery, standing simply and unadorned on the corner of Lansdowne and Paton Road in bright spring sunshine.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes the many galaxies in the night sky caught mid-collision.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the plan of China to send a probe to explore near-Earth co-orbital asteroid 2016 HO3 and comet 133P.


• Gizmodo reports, with photos, on the progress of the Chang'e 4 and the Yutu 2 rover, on the far side of the Moon.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Bill de Blasio hopes to ban new steel-and-glass skyscrapers in New York City, part of his plan to make the metropolis carbon-neutral.


• JSTOR Daily notes a critique of the BBC documentary Planet Earth, arguing the series was less concerned with representing the environment and more with displaying HD television technology.


• Language Hat notes the oddities of the name of St. Marx Cemetery in Vienna. How did "Mark" get so amusingly changed?


• Language Log looks at how terms for horse-riding might be shared among Indo-European languages and in ancient Chinese.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the grounds for the workers of New York's Tenement Museum to unionize.


• The NYR Daily notes the efforts of Barnard College Ancient Drama, at Columbia University, to revive Greek drama in its full with music and dance, starting with a Euripedes performance.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shares some iconic images of the Earth from space for Earth Day.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Liberty Market Tower, Canada goose, raccoons, van attack, Minassian

• Urban Toronto looks at the excavation site of Liberty Market Tower in Liberty Village.


• blogTO notes that the Canada Goose has returned to Toronto, and that some geese have begun to defend their reclaimed territories.


• This Heather Mallick column at the Toronto Star about her accidental (and unsuccessful) impromptu stabbing of an errant raccoon is just bizarre.


• Many of the witnesses of the Yonge Street van attack last year are still struggling. Global News reports.


• The Katherine Laidlaw profileat Toronto Life of Alek Minassian, perpetrator of last year's van attack on Yonge Street, is timely. Still: How did he come to that point in his life where that atrocity made sense?

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: New York City, Pittsburgh, Montréal, Brande, Cork

• Bloomberg notes that, while New York City is gaining jobs, it is losing residents because of its housing crisis.


• CityLab takes a look at patterns of crime and race and violence in greater Pittsburgh.


• La Presse notes that Montréal, picking up from neighbouring Laval, has started a process of public consultations to try to come up with a common image of the metropolis' future.


• Guardian Cities notes that fashion giant Bestseller plans on building its skyscraper headquarters, 320 metres tall, in the rural Denmark town of Brande.


• This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland's second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential.

[NEWS] Five politics links: alt-right in Canada, Spain, South Korea, England

• NOW Toronto notes the growth of the far right and of anti-Muslim extremism in Canada.


• The Conversation notes how depriving online trolls of platforms is not going to stop their message from spreading.


• The Conversation notes how, particularly, the rise of Vox in Spain means that country's language on immigration is set to change.


• The SCMP calls on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.


• Alan Crawford at Bloomberg argues that Brexit can be traced to the lack of representation of England, specifically, in a federalizing United Kingdom. Who are the English? What do they want?

[AH] Five #alternatehistory maps from r/imaginarymaps: France, Austria, Slovenia, Japanese Empire

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an early medieval France that became not a notional kingdom but rather a decentralized empire, a Holy Roman Empire of the French Nation.


• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a greater Austria that includes Slovenia.


• A Greater Slovenia, encompassing lands from Austria, Italy, and even Hungary, is the subject of this r/imaginarymaps map.


• Could an Austria divided in the Cold War be divided like this r/imaginarymaps map?
  
• This r/imaginarymaps map shows a Japanese Empire that survived until 1956, encompassing much of the Russian Far East as well as Manchuria and Korea.