A blog by Keith Soltys. Things that interest me: science and technology, music, technical communication, computers and software, science fiction, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Death of an exurb
Here's a rather depressing article (that may depend on where you live) about the death of the North American suburb. Acres of emptiness.
The scale of the devastation caused by this type of land use is immense. In addition to building over farmland with bloated single-family houses, residents must rely on automobiles for all transportation needs, as there are no sidewalks on the main road that leads to the freeway.
In looking at these photos, it is important to question why this type of development existed in the first place. It is absurd that people were paying nearly half a million dollars to live 70 miles on a heavily congested freeway from the nearest major cities (Oakland or San Jose). Living more centrally, but in a smaller house or an apartment, seems like not only a better choice for the future of the planet but eminently preferable to spending four hours in traffic every day.
Dubai has to be one of the more SFnal places on Earth, and this video by Philip Bloom (who also did incredible videos of Prague and Skywalker Ranch) proves it. You have to wonder if the rulers of Dubai are Bladerunner fans. It was shot on a Canon DSLR too, which is even more amazing.
For many years, Torontonians were proud to point out that Toronto was home to the world's tallest structure - the CN Tower. Now that title has passed to Dubai, home of the Burj Khalifa, which surpasses the CN Tower by about 900 feet. Planetizen has a gallery of pictures showing the Burj Khalifa and its surroundings in Dubai, surely one of the more science-fictional places on the planet.
Although the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) hasn't managed to get a route planner on its site yet, some enterprising developers have managed to do it on MyTTC.ca. I tried it out on a trip to my mother-in-law's house in Scarborough, and it gave me the exact route I needed, with estimated times (which are probably science fictiion, sadly, but that's not their fault). Definitely one to bookmark if you use the TTC.
Here's a drop-dead gorgeous video of a winter's night in Prague, shot with a pre-production Canon 1D SLR. It's shot in black and white, and it's hard to believe that it wasn't shot with a full-scale professional movie camera. It's also a very nice piece of film making and will definitely put you in the mood for Christmas.
Torontonians (and most Canadians, I suspect) will know Yonge Street as Toronto's main north/south street, with a claim to being the longest street in the world. I'm not sure about that part, but I've walked enough of it over the years to know it's pretty damn long. A couple of Toronto film makers have taken it all the way and made a stop-motion movie of a 40 km. journey down Yonge. It's neat, and if I had a couple of days (and was 30 years younger), I might try it myself.
Folksinger and member of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Stephen Fearing, will be playing down the street from me next Thursday night, September 26th, at the Waterfront Bistro. I picked up tickets for Nancy and me tonight.
The Waterfront Bistro is a small venu, seating about 100, and just about a perfect place to see an act like Stephen Fearing or Colin Linden, who I saw there in September (along with the late Taylor Mitchell). If you're looking for an excellent and fairly inexpensive night out, you could do a lot worse. Music by the Bay Live has a great series of shows coming up, and I hope they do well, as I've been starved for live music for years living out in the boonies, and I can walk to these shows.
Chinese photographer won this year's ugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.” The pictures are stunning, both for their photographic and artistic quality, which is very high, but also for the subject matter, which shows just how far Chinese industry (and presumably the government, in collusion) will go in raping the environment in the name of the economy. Think of these, and the poor affected people many of them show, the next time you shop at Wal-Mart or your local big-box retailer, and by something with a "Made in China" label because it's cheap.
Rose and I went into Toronto yesterday evening to check out the much hyped Nuit Blanche art event. We weren't terribly impressed. I mean, hanging a 30-foot-high silver bunny balloon in the Eaton Centre is cool, but I didn't quite get the point, if there was one.
City Hall had giant letters spelling FATE hung between the two towers with eerie ambient music playing below. The Old City Hall courtyard (impressive in itself, and not something you normally see unless you're in the back of a cruiser), had an ambient sound/image installation as did Union Station's Great Hall. That one was truly impressive and made excellent use of the space. I wanted to see the event at Massey Hall in which they turned the hall into a giant musical instrument, but the lineup was too long. Bay Street had a small midway set up, staffed by laid off financial district workers. I can see the symbolism in that, but I've seen better midways in Pickering.
I'd probably enjoyed it more if they'd done it in the summer, one nice warm summer night, with more street events like buskers and live music. Or if I'd had the stamina to stay up all night and check out some of the events outside of the downtown core.
Earlier this month I blogged about the appalling situation in Philadelphia, where the library system was facing closure due to lack of funds. Now, it looks like they've had a reprieve.
Just minutes ago, the Pennsylvania State senate passed bill 1828 by a vote of 32 to 17. For all of you who have been following the saga over the city's budget crisis, this is indeed the legislation that was needed for the City of Philadelphia to avoid the "Doomsday" Plan C budget scenario, which would have resulted in the layoff of 3,000 city employees and forced the closing of all libraries.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, the Toronto Public Library just celebrated the 100th anniversary of one of its branches, is about to open too more, and continues to evolve into what the Toronto Star says is the world's largest public library system.
Contrary to what you might have heard, libraries are not in a terminal state of decline, "they're not even sick," says Wendy Newman, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto's faculty of information, formerly library sciences, now known as the "I School."
"Libraries are back big-time, they're having a renaissance."
Circulation was up 27 per cent this summer across Ontario's 330 systems and 1,000 branches. Toronto, already the largest system in the world with 99 branches, is expanding with two more.
Photos from Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica
Alek O. Komarnitsky was fortunate to be able to take an Antarctic cruise that included Terra del Fuego, South Georgia, and the Falkland Islands. He took 2 Canon digital SLRs and shot about 10,000 pictures, many of which he's posted to the web.
I've spent about half an hour browsing through these, and I'm seriously impressed. There are some gorgeous pictures here of a part of the world few of us will ever see. Highly recommended.
Pickering has never been known as a hotbed of fine dining, but over the last few years several new restaurants have opened here, many of them featuring ethnic cuisine. Up the street we have a Japanese sushi place, a Jamaican bar, and a Vietnamese/Thai place. Down by the waterfront, there's a high-end restaurant and an excellent dessert cafe. Now joining the little cluster of establishments across the street from us (Massey's, the Big M drive-in, and Liverpool Arms), we have Zeera by the Bay, an Indian restaurant, which just opened in the plaza across the street.
I'm not particularly familiar with Indian cuisine, and they haven't got an online menu, so I can't tell you exactly what we had, other than the samosa appetizers (which were good). I had lamb in a spinach-based sauce and Nancy and Rose had shrimp in a tomato-based (I think) sauce. Both were excellent. Price wise, they're comparable to Massey's, but the food is considerably better. We will definitely be going back.
I posted the other day about the photographs of Detroit by James D. Griffioen. Here's another collection of photographs of Detroit by seven photographers. The third world is just around the corner, maybe a few years away.
Detroit is one of the most visually interesting cities in the world however it is also one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented cities. This group of photographs illustrates what contemporary Detroit artists have been doing in regards to developing an understanding and appreciation for this complex and diverse city from street portraits of the “survivors” to the landscapes of wild new growth to the industrial leftovers.
These seven artists have been working in the city as explorers, adventurers and pioneers for years to capture the city as it changes, evolves, devolves and transforms into something unbelievable, profound and heartbreaking. In the end they hope as a group to show Detroit as it is, not what it should be or what it was, but how it is. This in itself a provocative gesture as there are not many who feel content with the Detroit of today.
I went to university and Windsor, and Detroit was something of a magic wonderland to a kid who'd grown up in small-town northern Ontario. It looked quite beautiful at night, the lights of downtown glittering on the water of the Detroit river, and it wasn't too hard to ignore the sound of sirens and the occasional gunshot. The reality of the city, once you got up close and personal, was something quite different, and I was never really comfortable visiting there, especially at night. There was always a sense of menace just around the corner, but to go with that there was a lot of life and vibrancy, at least in the late 1960s and early 70s. Detroit was still a city that mattered.
Things have changed, and not for the better. Parts of the city are now a vast urban wasteland and other parts aren't urban at all, as Nature is reclaiming the land. James D. Griffioen has been documenting the disappearance of Detroit in an incredible series of photographs. These are remarkable both for their subject and their artistic and technical merit. The pictures of vacant schools are particularly poignant.
We watched One Week this weekend, and I have to give this a five-star recommendation. It's a Canadian film about Ben, a high-school English teacher who finds out he has terminal cancer and takes off for a motorcyle ride across the country. But that brief plot summary doesn't really do the film justice - it's a funny, touching, and very human story. You'll have a lot of fun with the locations chosen for the movie - every big thing (for example, the Canada goose in Wawa, but they missed the pysanka in Vegreville) between Toronto and Tolino seems to be featured. The cast is excellent and features some well-known Canadian musicians in cameo roles.
If you've ever wondered just where you'd end up if you dug a hole straight through the Earth, wonder no more. Go here, centre the green arrow on your location and click it. In my case, I'd end up in the Indian ocean, a few hundred miles southwest of Australia.
Figure/Ground is the portfolio web site of Liao Yusheng, an architecture photographer based in New York.
Yusheng's photographs have appeared in books published by teNeues and Taschen, as well as periodicals and newspapers like Time Asia, The Guardian, International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
He's really, really good. I thought I'd taken some good pictures in Vancouver last year, until I looked at his ...
Dubai is sometimes held up as an example of how capitalism can raise a third-world country into glittering new heights, but as this article from The Independent shows, it has a dark, seamy underbelly, of indentured workers, political repression, and ecological abuse.
Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.
As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.
Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.
For some excellent photographs of Dubai (and other places) check out the photoblog Seeing Things, including this incredible shot of Dubai at night.
Update: For a somewhat different view, here's a post from Joi Ito, a part-time resident of Dubai.
I don't want to sound too defensive about Dubai or the Middle East in general, but one thing I've learned from my still brief time is that it's much more complicated than it appears. Just calling Muslim law and governance "medieval" and writing it off is ignorant. It's very different and isn't in sync with what many of us might think is "fair". They treat bounced checks and drug smuggling very seriously. Moving to the Middle East casually and assuming that everything should be just like home is dangerous and I wouldn't recommend it. However, I knew about the drug thing even before I visited and I learned about the "bounced checks land you in jail" thing on my first day.
In summary, I think that if you're looking for fast money or a "rags to riches" dream, I would recommend against going to Dubai. On the other hand, if you're looking for a safe place to park while you explore opportunities or culture in the Middle East, I think Dubai is fine, for now. The food is good, there are great people, the culture is diverse, most of the infrastructure works and the laws are, relatively speaking, friendly to foreigners compared to the rest of the region. That's why I moved there and so far I'm not regretting my decision.
The Boston Globe's Big Picture Blog has a photo essay on the Red River flooding currently happening in Manitoba and North Dakota. I hope the efforts of the people there are enough to hold back the flood - the scale of the flood and the relief effort are both impressive.
The Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is the world's largest model and it's truly mind-bogling. 800 trains, for example, all running under computer control. And they're even adding an airport. Watch the video - it's amazing. If I ever get to Hamburg, I am definitely going to visit this.
I love looking at the 3-D panoramas you can find on the Web, and 360cities.net has lots of them. The one of Monument Valley is really impressive.
If yoiu click on a region on the home page, you'll get a Google Map, with icons indicating the location of panoramas. Mousing over an icon gives you a list, if there's more than one at that location. Neat, I could spend hours browsing here.
If I won the 649 tonight, I know what I'd buy - the Fawcett house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I have always had a thing for Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings and find him a fascinating character. I can only imagine what it would be like to live in one of his houses.
The southern edge of Los Banos (Merced County), where only dusty roads and distant silos interrupt the endless landscape of tilled Central Valley soil, seems an unlikely place to happen upon the work of America's architectural icon. But past the cattle feedlot and leaning hay barn, deep in a field where winter wheat and cantaloupe mark the seasons, sits a ranch house designed by an aging Frank Lloyd Wright.
It is the third-to-last California residence drawn by the master of suburban homes, and one of only two currently on the market.
Obscured from the road by a cluster of walnut trees, the cinderblock structure forms an angular, shallow U. The living room at the base looks onto the garden through a wall of windows and French doors. Twin wings swing open to 120 degrees, a row of bedrooms radiating outward on the north side, the kitchen and play room on the south, before giving way to a palm-shaded swimming pool.
Living in Pickering, almost within sight of Canada's largest nuclear reactor complex, I'm somewhat conscious of the fact that my life could be turned upside down in an instant by an accident at the station. I consider it a pretty low probability, obviously, or I wouldn't be living where I do. However, I suspect the workers in the town of Pripyat, Ukraine probably felt that way too, at least until the roof blew off Reactor 4 at Chernobyl.
Abandoned now for almost 25 years, the town of Pripyat is slowly decaying into piles of rust and dust. Here's an evocative and sometimes eerily beautiful set of photographs from Pripyat taken earlier this year.
The term "failed state" has come into currency in the last few years to describe places like Somalia and Zimbawe, where the government and the economy are essentially moribund, and chaos reigns. But on a smaller scale, you can also have a failed city, and Detroit would be a good candidate.
Things were bad enough there when I was in university years ago. I remember taking a cab to the Grandee Ballroom to see the Jefferson Airplane, and driving through block after block of burnt out buildings, remnants of the infamous riots. Downtown was safe enough by day, if you didn't get hassled by the cops who walked in pairs or trios, with pearl handled revolvers conspicuous on their belts. By night, you went there at your own peril.
Now, it's far worse. The Financial Times has a good article on Detroit, looking at what the city is like now. It's not all hopeless, but it's certainly bleak enough. If the recession gets worse, and turns into a full-blown depression, you have to wonder if Detroit is a model for what other North American cities might become.
High culture aside, charities and institutions such as the Mosaic Youth Theatre, a beacon for poor, inner-city teens, are also worried about their budgets. The city’s two newspapers, The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, are clinging together for survival under a joint operating agreement that allows them to skirt antitrust law and pool costs on areas such as printing and back-office functions. From this month, they are cutting home delivery – standard for newspapers in the US – to just three days a week.
Detroiters also speak of a fraying of the city’s social fabric. For much of the 20th century, the car industry was a ticket to the middle class for poor whites from Appalachia and blacks from the deep south, lured north by Henry Ford’s famous $5-a-day jobs. Public sector unions, in turn, negotiated benefits modelled on the UAW’s – which are now straining city and state budgets. For some, social mobility is now in reverse. In Detroit’s predominantly black North End, there are blocks of ramshackle houses, many up for auction after being abandoned by owners no longer able to meet higher payments on their adjustable-rate mortgages. Again, this is the stuff of Detroit dispatches of past; the difference is that this neighbourhood always had middle-class residents alongside its poor majority. All are now bearing the brunt of the sub-prime crisis and its ripple effect on jobs, the economy and confidence.
From the Big Picture blog, some pictures that will make you forget that it's snowing and cold outside, assuming of course, that you live anywhere near the 49th parallel.
SF writer visited New York city recently and wrote about it on his blog. The post includes many photographs. I enjoyed seeing his perspective on the city, which I regret to say I've never visited.
The Geograph British Isles project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland, and they've just hit a million pictures. If you're a Britphile, you are positively going to love this site. Just click on a map of the British Isles, drill down and see a grid of thumbnail pictures of that area. Click on a thumbnail to view a larger picture. You can search and browse the site in various ways and quite a bit of information is provided for each photo. Images are freely available under a Creative Commons license.
I would love to see something like this for Canada.
You don't see a lot of pictures from North Korea, so this series from the Big Picture blog is definitely worth a look. As always from this site, the quality of the photography is outstanding and the subject matter makes it especially remarkable. The degree of regimentation in people's lives must be mind numbing.
As well as it's current issue devoted to China, National Geographic recently ran a feature on China's "instant cities", the coastal manufacturing towns that are such a major part of China's surging economy.
National Geographic's latest issue is devoted to China. I don't buy National Geographic very often (in fact, I'm not sure I've ever bought a copy), but I bought this one, both because the subject is important and interesting, and because the photography is stunning. It's available on the web, but I'd recommend browsing through a copy a the library or news stand to see the photos in their full glory.
An Australian department government has labelled Canada with the "exercise caution" label, meaning that they rate Canada as less safe than Chile, South Korea, and Romania.
"We advise you to exercise caution and monitor developments that might affect your safety in Canada because of the risk of terrorist attack," the website reads.
"Pay close attention to your personal security and monitor the media for information about possible new safety or security risks."
While the crime rate in Canada is acknowledged to be "similar to that of Australia," tourists are warned to remain vigilant as "pick pocketing and street theft occurs at tourist destinations, hotels and on public transit."
They also have concerns about our climate:
Heavy snowfalls and ice in the winter can make driving dangerous. The wind-chill factor can also create dangerously cold outdoor conditions. ... The province of British Columbia in western Canada is in an active earthquake zone. Alberta and British Columbia are also subject to avalanches. ... Tornadoes can occur in some areas of Canada between May and September. Bush and forest fires can occur any time in Canada.
I'd certainly be interested in hearing the results when an Australia tourist phones the Ministry of Natural Resources in the Sault to get the forest fire risk next week.
During his voyage, Becquer Casaballe lived eternal days, trespassed ice seas, was at 14º below 0 temperature and 35º below 0 thermal sensation (inside the icebreaker, of course), passed through a scary 'whale factory' that functioned between 1911 and 1934 at the Deception Island (talk about a proper name), saw white crosses cemeteries that remembered the fallen in the area, and managed to manipulate his camera with huge gloves.
Earlier this year, SF novelist Charlie Stross visited Japan to attend the World Science Fiction Convention. Here's a link to his essay about the trip.
They've got our future, damn it.
It's not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills — oh no, that's not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they've got it and they're living in it, damn them. They've got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They've got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze — a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they're building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.
In the future we will all have shaved cats. And six story high pornography boutiques that sell Hello Kitty! novelty toys on the ground floor. And 200mph super-express trains blasting between arcologies through a landscape scorched by the waste heat of a hundred million air conditioning units. And beer vending machines on street corners. And skyscrapers cheek-by-jowl with temples that are modern reconstructions of buildings dating back to the eighth century (said reconstructions only slightly older than the Christopher Wren iteration of St Paul's Cathedral).
I've always been fascinated by the urban understructure - the maze of sewers, water mains, power conduits, and passageways that lie under our cities. Michael Cook is a Toronto-based photographer who explores that realm. His site, the Vanishing Point, is amazing - a treasure trove of articles, maps, and pictures about his explorations. He writes:
The built environment of the city has always been incomplete, by omission and necessity, and will remain so. Despite the visions of futurists, the work of our planners and cement-layers thankfully remains a fractured and discontinuous whole, an urban field riven with internal margins, pockmarked by decay, underlaid with secret waterways. Stepping outside our prearranged traffic patterns and established destinations, we find a city laced with liminality, with borderlands cutting across its heart and reaching into its sky. We find a thousand vanishing points, each unique, each alive, each pregnant with riches and wonders and time.
This is a website about exploring some of those spaces, about immersing oneself in stormwater sewers and utility tunnels and abandoned industry, about tapping into the worlds that are embedded in our urban environment yet are decidedly removed from the collective experience of civilized life. This is a website about spaces that exist at the boundaries of modern control, as concessions to the landscape, as the debris left by economic transition, as evidence of the transient nature of our place upon this earth.
Time Magazine has published a long article looking at the state of flood control in New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately for the city and people living there, it looks like the flood control efforts are turning into yet another Army Corps of Engineers fiasco.
The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.
They should. Two years after Katrina, the effort to protect coastal Louisiana from storms and restore its vanishing wetlands has become one of the biggest government extravaganzas since the moon mission—and the Army Corps is running the show, with more money and power than ever. Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the vulnerability of New Orleans long before Katrina are warning that the Army Corps is poised to repeat its mistakes—and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast. If you liked Katrina, they say, you'll love what's coming next.
Eye Magazine has run a couple of articles on the woeful state of the signage in Toronto's TTC system. Generally it's not very functional and almost never elegant. About the only exception is the St. George subway station, which was used as a pilot to improve the networks signage in 1992, but it was never expanded to the other stations. There are a couple of online supplements to the printed article: part one and part two.
This is not about aesthetics, Clark points out. “It's not centrally about selecting a font you like. It may not even be about selecting one font... a rational system might have many fonts. It might have at least two, you never know. Because it's not about, ‘I really don't like Helvetica.' No, no, no – it has nothing to do with that. It's all about rational choices based on performance, which an intelligent person can assess upfront, then you make prototypes, then you test the hell out of them. And it's all about function, right?”
Indeed, wayfinding signs are not decorations, as you'd realize in an emergency if you needed the sign directing you to the exit, or if you had poor vision and needed to figure out which train goes eastbound. Right now, signage is a responsibility of the marketing department. “That means that the sign you need to get out of Donlands station when it's on fire is equivalent to the station domination [advertising] campaign for Bud Light,” Clark says.
In 2011, Toronto's CN Tower will no longer be the tallest free-standing structure in the world. A 2001-foot tall tower being built in Tokyo will be a couple of hundred feet taller. It does look an awful lot like the CN Tower though.
Amazing photo of 1906 San Francisco earthquake damage
I was in San Francisco last year just before the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake, so there was quite a lot of press about it. But I didn't see this photograph, which is an aerial panorama taken from a blimp. It's a large, fairly high resolution photo and clearly shows the extent of the damage caused by the quake and subsequent fires. If I haven't got my geography too badly mixed up, the picture looks like it was taken almost directly over the Fisherman's Wharf area, where I stayed during my trip.
Update: Not quite - the picture was taken from a bit to the east of Fisherman's Wharf. There's more about the picture and a contemporary view here.
As part of the LuminaTO festival, the Globe and Mail has commissioned a series of articles, and William Gibson's is the first. In Pining for Toronto's 'Gone World', writes about the 'gone world' of Toronto - the part of the city remembered from his past that is no longer there. It's a wonderful essay.
When I return, there is no returning. Some crucial few square blocks are simply gone. Altered beyond recognition. Only the febrile tackiness of Yonge below Bloor preserves something of my past, and I invariably find myself walking there, considering how the cheap, flashy goods of the 21st century resemble the cheap flashy goods of the 20th. An immortality of battery-operated plastic crap, the business of its retail sheltering the actual texture of the gone world, these queer old buildings unnoticed above the lights and bright laminates and shining tat: weird Masonic dreams, blackened finials carved like chess pieces. Under a fresh fall of snow their former gaslight solidity can loom, breathtakingly peculiar, like Castle Gormenghast held overhead, at bay, by sex shops and knockoff sneakers. To the extent that I ever find the place my memory tries to take me to, in Toronto, I find it there.
This mirrors my own experience pretty much exactly. I used to visit Toronto quite a lot when I was in university, and the parts of the city that I visited the most, Yonge Street, Yorkville, Bathurst and St. Clair, have changed beyond recognition and not always for the better. The avenue of strip malls that is Kingston Road in Pickering and Ajax was a two-lane highway through a farming district in the 1970s. Sometimes progress isn't an improvement.
Fantastic Toronto is a guide to SF and fantasy, and horror that is set in or mentions Toronto. It's a pretty comprehensive list. Most of it is written by local authors and , and there are quite a few of them. The BoingBoing post also mentions another site, Imagining Toronto is a similar site and larger site that covers all genres of literature.
The CBC has been running a promotion for the seven wonders of Canada. You view the nominees and vote on the CBC web site. There are a few things I wouldn't pick (the canoe, really?), but it's a pretty representative list. I'd have put Old Woman Bay on the list too. But for the record my picks are:
- Bay of Fundy - Cathedral Gove - Drumheller - Manitoulin Island - Nahanni National Park - The Northern Lights - The Rockies
I've restricted myself to natural wonders, so the CN Tower is out.
A group of high-school students on an assignment to investigate the pros and cons of public cameras filmed an assult on a cyclist by a driver who was enraged that the cyclist stopped in front of him at a yellow light. The cyclist lost a tooth. The students are turning the tape over to the police so the driver can be apprehended. CityTV News has an article about it, including a link to view the video.
I work in downtown Toronto, and I'm surprised more pedestrians and cyclists aren't hurt or killed by some of the gonzo, idiot drivers. And it's just as bad in Pickering -- I've lost track of the number of times I've almost been hit walking to and from the GO station.
I guess if you have to put up with a Russian winter, a spot or two of colour might be a good thing. The sterility of these Russian apartment blocks is certainly relieved by the lurid colours and designs they're painted in. There are more than a few apartment blocks and condos in the Toronto area that could benefit from this treatment.
Here's a site that has links to a bunch of Google Maps mashups of the Toronto area. I like the public library finder - I didn't know there was a branch at Port Union and Lawrence, which makes it the closest TPL branch to me. (Yes, Pickering does have a library, and I use it quite a bit). The most useful one will probably be the Tim Horton's finder.
The Globe and Mail is reporting that geologists have put BC on alert because of the increased risk of a large earthquake during the next week or two. The Cascadia subduction fault, which could cause a huge quake similar to the one that hit Sumatra a couple of years ago, undergoes periodic slip events that increase the risk of a quake, and one is occurring now.
BC author Crawford Kilian discusses this in his blog and links to an article he wrote a after the Sumatra quake about what a similar quake would do to BC. It wouldn't be good.
Between ground shaking, liquefaction, and landslides, Vancouver and Victoria would be cut off from the rest of the world. Highways and railroads would be cut. Bridges would fall. Docks would be unusable, whether sunken into landfill or simply knocked down. B.C. Ferries terminals, the Roberts Bank coal terminal, and Vancouver harbour would all be crippled. Vancouver International Airport might be under water, or so broken up as to be usable only by helicopters. Even if it survived intact, the roads and bridges serving it might be wrecked.
There's been a lot of discussion in the news recently about the woes of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) and GO Transit, our commuter rail system, which is how I get to my job in downtown Toronto. GO has been having an especially bad winter; almost every second train is late, and now we face the threat of a strike by the conductors.
As for the TTC, here's a map (link to PDF) of an expanded TTC subway system -- the type of system that Toronto really should have by now, and could have if they'd kept building one or two stations per year after finishing the Bloor subway in the 70s. It sure would be nice to have a subway all the way to Rouge Hill, giving me an alternative to GO.
This has got to be one of the most spectacular city skyline photos I've ever seen - it's a "high dynamic range" night shot of the Tokyo skyline. Truly amazing - it looks like something out of Bladerunner. It's going into my wallpaper folder.
I'm going to have to find out more abut the high density colour process. There's a Flickr group for HDR images if you want to see more.
Here are some amazing photos showing the aftermath of the ice storm that hit Nebraska just before New Years. The ice is eerily beautiful, but it's going to take them quite a while to recover from the damage.
Placeblogger is a directory and search sites for local blogs -- blogs about places. It lists three for Toronto, only one of which I knew about. It'll be a site worth checking out if you travel a lot, or live in a large metropolitan area.
