[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdpei]

• BlogTO's Ed Conroy rights about the golden age of video stores in Toronto. (Apparently Toronto was the first city to have a video store, the Video Station on Eglinton Avenue, in 1977.)
• Eastern Approaches describes how the European Union is building up a viable relationship with Moldova. Is the possibility of Moldova being tracked for EU membership that far off?
• Far Outliers' Joel quotes from J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain, noting how a devastating plague at the end of the 17th century not only created severe labour shortages but depressed the Spanish mood. The great dream of empire was falling apart.
• Geocurrents discusses the climate of Australia.
• GNXP's Razib Khan is among the many people who noted the genetic research tracing the ancestry of the Romani to northwestern India's lower castes and their arrival in Europe to a point a thousand years before present.
• Normblog's Norman Geras links to a review of a recent book on the devastating Great Leap Forward and its famine in early Communist China, making the point that although Mao may have driven the policies that created the catastrophe everyone around him collaborated in trying to minimize the disaster.
• Steve Munro describes a public meeting of GTA transit authority Metrolinx. He's unsatisfied with the extent to which policy changes were discussed, as opposed to past achievements.
• Supernova Condensate discusses, with pictures, the unusual wind patterns of Saturn.
• Torontoist noted the 1992 visit of Salman Rushdie to a PEN gathering in Toronto.
• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble discusses the disaffection of many Tatar Christians in Tatarstan in being classed as ethnically Tatar, and the ways in which this complicates state-center relationships.