[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Acts of Minor Treason and Steve Munro are both very unhappy with the tendency to automatically equate streetcars with light rails. This is just not so.


• Derek Flack's photoessay, hosted at blogTO, showing the CPR tracks behind Dupont Street--i.e. my street of residence--was nice to see indeed. The photos provide nice, unexpected angles on the neighbourhoods I spend my time in.


• The Burgh Diaspora notes that a major problem for troubled American cities lies in the inability of many of their residents, tied down by real estate, to move to more promising environs. Some kind of process that could encourage people who left to return with their skills (and perhaps investments) might work.


• Eastern Approaches comments on the apparent end, but continuing tensions, in the name-spelling row between Poland and Lithuania.


• Far Outliers records a Japanese-trained Dutch bankers impressions of 1960s America as a place marked by open hospitality and a troubling guilelessness.


• Alex Harrowell, at A Fistful of Euros, thinks that the European Union has proven its worth by keeping Berlusconi from running Italy completely into the ground.


• The Global Sociology Blog traces the global migration of soccer players, finding that while their movements trace historic pathways and reflect established connections, their movement is actually the product of at least five sorts of micromovements.


• Passing Strangeness' pauldyre shows how the accidental release of mustard gas off the southern Italian coast in the Second World War, causing hundreds of dead, actually helped save millions of live through cancer treatments.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that things look fairly bright for Portugal, with plausible projections suggesting renewed growth and the stabilization of the debt-to-GDP ratio, and impressive and potentially quite productive investments in infrastructure and new technologies, too.


• The Search's Douglas Todd writes about self-righteous greens. Ethics aside, that's just bad politics.


• Slap Upside the Head suggests that, with a resolution of the Québec segment of the New Democratic Party, Canadians are well on their way towards stripping organizations offering cures for homosexuality of charitable status, on the New Zealand model.


• Spacing Toronto applauds the well-designed, multi-use parking lots of Portland OR.