[PHOTO] Star Trek Beyond fighter pods @ $C 4, Cabbagetown

Last night, I came across these two toy sets, survivors of 2016's Star Trek Beyond, for sale at $C 4 each in the Dollarama at 425 Parliament Street in the heart of Cabbagetown. Should I have gotten them? Star Trek Beyond was a fun film, though it felt more like a 1990s Trek two-part episode than a fully-fledged feature film in its own right.

[PHOTO] U.V. Ceti by Andrew Posa, ten years later

I passed by the visited the Andrew Posa 1982 sculpture U.V. Ceti, poised in the middle of a temporarily quiet fountain, last night.



It had been ten years since I had last paid particular attention to that statue, attracted by its name the astronomical reference to nearby flare star Luyten 726-8 B.

Front view of UV Ceti, 30 Wellington Street East


Sculptor Andrew Posa chose the name UV Ceti, this Flickr photo and commentary suggests, because it was an obscure astronomical name. I'm a bit sad that I didn't photograph the message in garbled Hungarian that's apparently written inside the statue.

This statue was dedicated to one Edward Isaac Richmond, 1908-1982, "A kind man who shared his love of beauty." A quick googling turns up this 2007 article from The Globe and Mail, which reveals Edward Isaac Richmond to have been an architect of note.

Frank Richmond remembers the time his father, architect Edward Isaac Richmond, heard about a unique house party where guests were handed sledgehammers with their drinks and encouraged to take a few swipes at whatever struck their fancy. It was an old house, and the architect who'd purchased it was having it bulldozed the next day in order to build something new.

"My father was so upset by this because he viewed a home as almost a holy place," Mr. Richmond says. "When you demolish a building, there had to be a degree of respect."

[. . .]

The architect's own striking 1948 home, which he occupied until just before his death in 1982 at age 73 (and where son Frank lived until 1998), is right where he left it at 37 Burton Rd. And while it may have been a shocker to frill-obsessed, WASPy, postwar Toronto, his practice flourished. "That home got replicated in hundreds of different kinds of iterations [post-1948 and] for the next 15-odd years," his son confirms.

Perhaps that's because the 1931 University of Toronto graduate, one of the first Jewish architects in Toronto — if not the very first, his son suggests — had many Jewish clients eager to eliminate painful reminders of the old world, even architectural ones.

In a career that lasted a half-century, Ed Richmond worked on the old Mount Sinai hospital on Yorkville Avenue (a part of its façade is currently undergoing restoration and will be incorporated into a condo) during a short-lived partnership with Ben Kaminker in the early thirties. By the seventies, he was designing high-rise towers, including Palace Pier 1 on the Etobicoke waterfront.

The John Warkentin book Creating Memory: A Guide to Public Outdoor Sculpture in Toronto says this of this statue: "The sculpture reveals fundamental natural forces: within this maelstrom something new is occurring, possibly the beginning of a civilization. It is a much more substantial sculpture than is found in most late-twentieth century Toronto condominiums."

[PHOTO] Three photos of a Regent Park demolition

Regent Park is a neighbourhood in the middle of transition, shifting from a notoriously troubled public-housing district to something different via a controversial regeneration. On Parliament Street one block south of Gerrard, this one building remained, some windows missing but otherwise intact; on Gerrard Street east of Parliament, you could see inside into the ruins made by the demolition crews.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes that methane hydrates on the ocean floor will only pose a catastrophic risk of climate change if we do nothing about climate change generally.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the massive flare detected on L-dwarf ULAS J224940.13-011236.9.


• Crooked Timber considers a philosophical conundrum: What should individuals do to combat climate change? What are they responsible for?


• The Crux considers a few solar system locations that future generations of hikers might well want to explore on foot.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Pete Buttigieg is becoming a big star in his father's homeland of Malta.


• Language Log considers the idea of learning Cantonese as a second language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the policy innovations of Elizabeth Warren.


• The Map Room Blog looks at how the Russian government is apparently spoofing GPS signals.


• Marginal Revolution reports a claim by Peter Thiel that the institutionalization of science since the Manhattan Project is slowing down technological advances. Is this plausible?


• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes that the Mars InSight probe has detected marsquakes.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, finally, astronomers have found the first cold gas giants among the exoplanets, worlds in wide orbits like Jupiter and Saturn.


• Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy notes how some of the praise for Daenerys Targaryen by Elizabeth Warren reveals interesting and worrisome blind spots. (Myself, I fear a "Dark Dany" scenario.)


• Window on Eurasia suggests that Russia is not over the fact that Ukraine is moving on.


• Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative takes issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows.


• For Easter, Arnold Zwicky considered red and white flowers, bearing the colours of the season.

[URBAN NOTE] Six Toronto links: terra cotta, racism, Grand Gerrard, CityPlace, Vision Zero, coffee

• I should have gone to see that house in the Junction with the terra cotta tiles before it was no longer. blogTO reports.


• White nationalists are putting up posters around the city. blogTO reports.


• The Grand Gerrard Theatre is set to re-open, continuing a century-long tradition. blogTO reports.


• Urban Toronto notes how construction continues for Canoe Landing Centre, at CityPlace down on the waterfront.


• Can the Vision Zero plan help protect public spaces in Toronto from terrorist attacks? CBC Toronto considers.


• Why, exactly, did a Starbucks in Cabbagetown close down? blogTO reports on the local confusion.

[URBAN NOTE] Six city links: Montréal, New York City, Philadelphia, Istanbul, reserves, Wellington

• La Presse notes how Montréal is placing limits on new construction, and why.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how Basquiat interacted with his surroundings in New York City, using them for art.


• CityLab reports on a study of gentrification and displacement in Philadelphia.


• Guardian Cities reports on the remarkable speed with which Turkish Airlines shifted to a new airport in Istanbul.


• This article in The Conversation is entirely right about the importance of Indigenous urban reserves: Why cannot First Nations be as urbanized as other Canadians?


• Chris Fitch writes at CityLab about how, as part of a new policy, Maori placenames are being introduced (or reintroduced) into the New Zealand capital of Wellington.

[NEWS] Five science links: global warming, bees, Balsillie, backups, Neanderthals

• New estimates suggest the costs of global warming will be in the tens of trillions of dollars, with warmer countries taking a particularly big hit. Motherboard reports.


• Indigenous bumblebee populations in Canada are fast approaching extinction, with a certainty of major negative environmental effects. CBC reports.


• MacLean's reports on the return to prominence of Jim Balsillie, this time not so much as a tech mogul as a sort off tech skeptic.


• This Motherboard article makes a somewhat far-fetched argument that Game of Thrones demonstrates the need for human civilization to have backups.


• The Conversation reports on the recent discovery, in Serbia by a joint Serbian-Canadian team, of a Neanderthal tooth, and what this discovery means for our understanding of the deep past of humanity.