On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I've been digging around and am hearing from at least one reliable acquaintance that there IS a star that was named "Cincinnati" by some astronomer somewhere. Can anyone help me nail down its other, better-known names and/or catalogue reference numbers?

The building to come, meant to host both the Main Branch of the Ottawa Public Library and the geneology resources of Library and Archives Canada in years to come, now has a name: Ādisōke.

Details in this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/opl_bpo/status/1423307279139549189

A continuing peril for many writers, yes?

https://twitter.com/melisscaru/status/1402277518057607188

In Ottawa, we've had a neighbourhood with street names of a New York-ish theme called Central Park. One of the street names was, I'm sorry to say, Trump Avenue:



There's a renewed push on to change this street name too, per this morning's report from CBC News Ottawa:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/trump-avenue-ottawa-name-change-1.5886702

Well, this was a quiet day too. The House reruns keep playing on CTV Drama upstairs, and for all the trouble I went to over the years to accumulate the DVD collection I currently have, I can't be bothered to watch a one of them yet.

No, for me it's Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap on Radio One right now.

I may be about to sell another book from my personal library. More on that tomorrow, maybe.

Rereading dduane's Star Trek: TNG novel "Intellivore" and geeking out a bit - again - over the star name-dropping. Looking up "B Hydri" via SIMBAD is bringing up nothing. Should I go to AAVSO?

GoDaddy is "squatting" the *.ca version of their domain name. That IS a problem, right?

I found myself inspired to go digging for one book yesterday, and in the process of finding it, rediscovered another.

1. I was looking for A Stó:lō-Coast Salish Historical Atlas yesterday, inspired by the news that a guest starship on Star Trek: Lower Decks would be named USS Vancouver. I half-remembered that this book would have that Indigenous nation's name for the larger region including Vancouver, the one I was taught to call the "Fraser River Valley": S'ólh Téméxw.

(Which I dearly want to learn how to pronounce properly!)

It occurs to me that, before I die, I'd like to see that name, S'ólh Téméxw - accents and all - on the hull of a Starfleet ship, preferably one more prominent than a DS9-style runabout. They can name a runabout "Fraser" if need be. With the people running Star Trek as a while these days, I'm thinking that it might happen, provided the Trek people reach out properly to the Stó:lō. There seems to be at least one Trek fan amongst that nation living in the metro Vancouver region going by anecdotal evidence on Twitter.

(Note: Titmouse Animation, the company handling the actual animation work on Lower Decks, has a branch studio in Vancouver, BC. This might be at the heart of the shout-out to the city.)

2. In the process of trying to find the first book, I accidentally rediscovered my copy of the second one, Ikonica: A Field Guide to Canada's Brandscape by Jeannette Hanna and Alan Middleton. Which contains a number of historical overviews of some two dozen Canadian brands of note and longstanding in our memories. I don't know if it's still in print. My copy became mine thanks to an airplane ride out to PEI back in 2008. It was a family trip, and my mother and I were travelling together by plane for the occasion, everyone else taking their families' respective cars. I think I posted some of the pix from that trip on my Flickr account...?

Okay, first: go look at John Lorinc's opinion and history primer on a street in Toronto about to be renamed because the namesake was a 19th Century pro-slavery fool.

(I'm writing here on my own blog. I'll call pro-slavery people - dead or alive - fools as it suits me. Because it suits me. As for the Spacing Ottawa wordmark, I want to promote Spacing's published work here along with my other motives.)

So...why do I care about the street-name debate?

For one thing, I've done those street name essays for Spacing's Ottawa blog off and on.

For another, there's a side street in Ottawa's Vanier district - formerly the town of Eastview and before that, the villages of Clandeboye, Janeville and Clarkstown. That side street is also named for Henry Dundas. It's a single-block connector running between Selkirk Street (formerly "John Street") to the north and McArthur Street to the south, just south of the old Eastview Mall now undergoing severe renovations.

It is interesting to note from the fire insurance maps of 1902, later updated in 1912, that "Dundas Street" was not its original name.

In fact, that name was "Napoleon".



There's another street in the northern reaches of Lowertown that used to share that name, also renamed, twice. First to Church, and then to Guigues as an extension of another street named after the first bishop of Bytown (now Ottawa). I smell a bit of Orange Lodge-related history-purging in that first renaming, but right now I don't have the time to go digging. The public library and city archives are difficult to access at the moment, too.



(Going to try to add maps to this later on, I promise! Both excerpted from those aforementioned fire insurance maps, themselves sourced from Library and Archives Canada.)

I'm guessing - uncertain for now - that Napoleon Street in the former Janeville section of what's now Vanier was renamed once Eastview was created out of the three former villages mentioned a moment ago.

Napoleon did make his way back onto street name signage in Ottawa as presently constituted. No worries about that. But, yet again, it was as the name of a side street. That side street feeds from St. Joseph Boulevard into the upper level of the southern parking spaces of Place d'Orléans Mall.

He only reshaped the maps of continental Europe over the course of half a century, and this is the respect he gets in a city his nation accidentally helped found on Algonquin lands? Maybe that obscurity is the justice he deserves. Many will argue that point, I'm sure.

As for the Dundas Street of Vanier? This isn't the first name it's had. It doesn't have to be the one it's stuck with for all time.

The first planets humans found orbiting any other star at all couldn't be ordinary. Nope. The first two that humans found back in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan, just as I was winding up my animation studies at Algonquin College, were found orbiting a pulsar.

To oversimplify, a pulsar - or neutron star - is a corpse of a star. It's dead, Jim. But what's left of it still has an energy output or we wouldn't have been able to notice it at all.

Small wonder, then, that when the International Astronomical Union started up a program or contest - I'm trying to remember which at the moment - to give as many stars as possible proper names in addition to the various catalogue numbers that they've all accumulated across the last couple of centuries, that...to quote the Wikipedia entry of the moment:

In July 2014, the International Astronomical Union launched a process for giving proper names to certain exoplanets and their host stars. The process involved public nomination and voting for the new names. In December 2015, the IAU announced the winning names, submitted by the Planetarium Südtirol Alto Adige in Karneid, Italy, were Lich for the pulsar and Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor for planets A, B and C, respectively...

A "lich" is a kind of undead being, usually depicted as a sorceror who's managed to keep their remains active and controlled by their intellect or soul or whatever after death. And the names of the associated planets were kept in related themes as well...

One example of the more amusing names we've given our O-Train cars: