Carolyn Parrish lives!

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 1:13 PM - 6 Comments

…Only she’s come to inhabit the body of a left-wing, fringe party leader in Quebec’s National Assembly.

In case you missed it—and no one would blame you—Québec solidaire’s Amir Khadir is in a bit of hot water after tossing a shoe at a picture of George Bush at a rally in Montreal last week. Gilbert Gagnon, a teacher at the Cégep de Sainte-Foy, filed a complaint with the National Assembly, claiming the gesture “encourages violence” and that it came at the expense of the “dignity and responsibilities of a MNA.” Khadir has countered by saying his voters knew what they were getting when they elected him.

It seems unlikely that Khadir’s party or his colleagues in the National Assembly will send him off into the wilderness the way the federal Liberals did with Parrish (or hang him out to dry the way the PQ did to Yves Michaud eight years ago), if only because it’s a little hard to make the case hating Bush still matters. Besides, you can hardly blame Khadir for doing what he was essentially elected to do—add a bit of colour to an otherwise sleepy crop of politicians in Quebec. But it’s funny how little time it’s taken for Khadir to be reminded he’s supposed to be bland.

For the record, I’ve been getting my shoe-tossing kicks here all morning.

[Photo by Bernard Brault, La Presse]

Honour Amongst the Parliamentarians

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 12:55 PM - 9 Comments

Here are the best two sentences I read this week:

“But even if better practices can be instituted to guide the parliamentary head of state (be it a monarchical or republican model) in determining whether all the possibilities of forming an effective government have been exhausted and that a hung parliament must be dissolved, some element of discretion will remain, and the system’s smooth functioning will depend on the good judgment and honourable behaviour of the key actors. That is the fundamental lesson of the King-Byng affair.”

Emphasis is mine. That’s from Peter Russell’s very timely and very excellent new book, Two Cheers for Parliamentary Government. More than anything else I have read on the subject, this book has helped shape and shift my thoughts on minority government — I’m now inclined to give it one and half cheers, thanks to Prof Russell’s arguments. But more than anything, the book is indispensable background reading for understanding The Madness. I’ll have a proper review up after the weekend.

Anyone can whistle; only Zune owners have to

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 11:06 AM - 20 Comments

Apparently every 30-gig Zune mp3 player in the world is freezing up.  I asked Peter Van Loan and he said it’s Dalton McGuinty’s fault.

2008: What A Year!

By John Parisella - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 11:01 AM - 2 Comments

How else can you describe it? Thanks to Maclean’s for giving me the opportunity to share with readers in the blogosphere my impressions about the US presidential race from the perspective of a challenger who was 22 percent behind in the national polls at this stage last year. Thanks, too, to the readers and responders along the way. Many disagreed with me but were not disagreeable. While it may not always show, the more conservative, pro-Republican responders made me think and I am grateful. I still believe conservatism is a vital and essential part of American political thought. Just like liberalism needed to rethink its basic tenets from the 70′s on, I believe 2008 is the beginning of the next conservative revolution. This is just the way America works—checks and balances on its institutions and, more importantly, on its political thinking.

Continue…

NATO: Action on the Eastern front

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 10:35 AM - 2 Comments

The Economist sets a cat among pigeons by touting Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, as secretary-general of NATO. He’s a good choice to lead a military alliance between Europe and the United States, because he’s a former defence minister whose government wants to reinforce its commitment to the European Union, and he has impeccable contacts in Washington (here’s his wife). He’s a former journalist, although that was long ago and perhaps it should no longer be held against him. And as far as I can gather, Sikorski is less eager on the question of extending NATO membership to poorly-governed war zones than is Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, and at least one of my colleagues here at Maclean’s. The idea is warmly greeted in Warsaw; no word yet how it’s viewed in Berlin and Paris, although with a Chancellor who grew up under communism and a President of the Republic who’s also trying to mend fences between Old and New Europe — when he is not simply trying to run everything himself — anything is possible.

None of the speculation about a new secretary-general for the alliance names any Canadians. Surprise.

"AUTOPSY REPORT CONFIRMS EXORCIST TORTURED WOMEN"

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 9:57 AM - 5 Comments

Steve Coll reads a newspaper in Pakistan.

Man of the year: It was easy to make this priority

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 9:54 AM - 25 Comments

Dan Arnold over at Calgary Grit comes up with his Person of the Year and, following his self-imposed rule-of-thumb that it’s best to avoid the incumbent Prime Minister because that’s always too obvious a choice, comes up with Stéphane Dion. This sounds right. Maxime Bernier was another fellow who looked bewildered while things happened to him, but not for as long nor with stakes as high. Few provincial premiers had a sustained national profile. Jack Layton never changes. Justin Trudeau’s role is to be forever nominated, to get the hopes of Trudeauphiliacs alive and to boil the blood of Trudeauphobes. For the moment Michael Ignatieff looks like Buster Keaton in the old movie when the house collapses around him, wondering wha hoppened.

But it was Dion who spent the greatest amount of time executing swan dives into empty pools this year. Fun question: what on Earth would Stephen Harper have found to run against, if Dion hadn’t come up with the Green Shift? Then there was the whole coalition micro-mania, which from its inception to its dénouement (note to coalition bloggers: there was a dénouement. You can go home now) was inextricably bound up in competing interpretations of the Liberal leader’s legitimacy.

I won’t belabour any of this much further. I admire Stéphane Dion’s decade of public service. I thought making him Liberal leader would be high-risk but with a potential for high reward, so on balance he was my candidate in 2006. The reward never showed up, and from what I have been able to gather Dion still doesn’t begin to understand that it could have worked better if he had, at any early moment, given his head a shake. It’s a sad story. It’s over now. Its arc defined 2008, much more than anything Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper actually did.

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 9:06 AM - 1 Comment

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of December 30th, 2008)

Fiction
1 THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE by Joseph Boyden  1 (16)
2 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES by Nino Ricci  2 (6)
3 A MOST WANTED MAN by John Le Carré   3 (12)
4 COVENTRY by Helen Humphreys  6 (16)
5 THE PRIVATE PATIENT by P.D. James   4 (11)
6 THE FLYING TROUTMANS by Miriam Toews  5 (16)
7 THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson  7 (13)
8 2666 by Roberto Bolano 8 (2)
9 COCKROACH by Rawi Hage 10 (8)
10 A MERCY by Toni Morrison 9 (2)

Non-fiction
1 THE ASCENT OF MONEY by Niall Ferguson   2 (6)
2 OUTLIERS by Malcolm Gladwell   1 (5)
3 CHAMPLAIN’S DREAM by David Hackett Fischer  3 (9)
4 IZZY by Peter C. Newman  5 (5)
5 A FAIR COUNTRY by John Ralston Saul  6 (13)
6 ANNIE LEIBOVITZ AT WORK by Annie Leibovitz   (1)
7 THE AMERICAN FUTURE by Simon Schama   (1)
8 PANIC by Michael Lewis  8 (2)
9 CLIMATE WARS by Gwynne Dyer  4 (3)
10 THE GIFT OF THANKS by Margaret Visser  10 (16)

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Obama's First Test

By John Parisella - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 5:52 PM - 60 Comments

Even during the holiday break, one cannot completely disconnect from news events. In recent years, the holiday season has been marked by tragic events: the tsunami in Southeast Asia four years ago and Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last year both captured the world’s attention. This year, it is the Israeli air strikes in Gaza that are drawing attention. The U.S. reaction has been supportive of Israel and Canada has asked for a ceasefire while supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. Demonstrations are being held across the globe and the Arab world is up in arms with calls for a third intifada led by Hamas and Hezbollah. No doubt, Iran is following events and will once again be convinced there is a need to pursue its nuclear enrichment program.

Elections are coming in Israel this February and, so far, opposition leader and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu has been setting the pace. The governing party (Kadema) in Israel stood little chance of staying in power unless it took a strong stance against Hamas’ shelling of southern Israel. During the campaign, the two-state solution endorsed by Bush and Olmert (and defended by foreign minister Livni) will face off against the more hawkish vision of the Likud and Netanyahu. By then, Barack Obama will have inherited the problems he campaigned so hard for the opportunity to resolve.

At the top of Obama’s agenda will be the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, and a host of domestic issues like health care and independence from foreign oil. However, just like Bush, Obama will inherit an explosive situation in the Mideast. The ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be at the heart of his administration’s foreign policy issues. Will Obama continue down the path tread by Bush and push for a two-state solution? Or will he bring a new approach more in line with his “change” agenda? Does he intend to be a broker like Nixon, Carter, Bush 41 and Clinton? Or be more of an advocate, like George W. was?

On the campaign trail, Obama had to wrestle against perceptions he may not be friendly enough to Israel. The marginal yet significant controversy surrounding his name and possible Muslim heritage contributed to the doubts about his views on Israel. Obama addressed his critics by visiting Israel and endorsing its right to defend itself. (He also courted controversy by supporting Israeli rule over an undivided Jerusalem.) Since winning office, he has made reassuring moves to Israel boosters, like keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates in place, and appointing Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state and Raihm Emmnuel as his chief of staff. Few can doubt that Obama will bring a drastic change in policy in the short term with these nominations.

The conflict in Gaza will be the first test of the Obama presidency. The short term challenge will be to secure a ceasefire, although this will most likely happen in the next few days under Bush. The long term challenge is to forge an enduring peace that guarantees Israel ‘s right to exist and the Palestinians’ right to a state so it too can grow and prosper in peace. This will require diplomacy at the highest level, given the Iranian nuclear threat, the continuing threat of terrorism, and the need to find a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israel and its neighbours.

Hamas has no scruples when it comes to provocation and is known to set up its headquarters in civilian-populated areas. But Israel’s deadly response is hardly measured or justified by most humanitarian accounts. The international community must intervene with more than a press communiqué. Leaders such as Obama and Sarkozy are expected to do more than continuing decade-old policies. The world is more volatile now than it was during the Cold War: now, we must deal with rogue nations and the possibility of nuclear terrorism, a global recession, two inconclusive wars that have overextended the American military, and a serious gap in the credibility of the moral leadership of the U.S. (largely a product of the Bush years).

Obama must change the discourse in the Middle East and become more a broker of peace than an advocate of one side. Israel must never doubt America’s and the free world’s resolve to defend its right to exist. But it is time for greater audacity in the search for peace. The old formulas no longer will do. A new generation of Americans wants change and so do a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians. They prefer peace to war. This is Obama’s first real test—and failure cannot be an option this time around.

How to fix the leaking Alberta oil sands

By Alex Shimo - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 5:23 PM - 6 Comments

Earlier this month, a report came out on how much contaminated water was leaking from the Alberta tar sands. The Green Room reported on the study, as did pretty much every other Canadian media outlet. This was likely because the volumes of the leaks were so big – 11 million litres every day – and the contaminated water was filled with lots of substances that one really shouldn’t drink, such as known carcinogens and toxins like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and copper, zinc and iron.

Anyway, the Green Room was curious about what could be done about this, so we contacted one of Canada’s leading researchers on water pollution, Leslie Warren at McMaster University. Warren has been studying a specific solution – using bacteria to neutralize the tailings ponds. Here are my questions and her answers:-  Continue…

MUSIC: One of another kind

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 3:32 PM - 4 Comments

Nobody ever played more trumpet than Freddie Hubbard, in the sense of a guy picking the horn up the way a very angry bulldog would pick up a side of beef and shaking the notes out of it. With Hubbard, playing the coldest and toughest of the brass instruments was an irreducibly carnal experience. He put his whole body into it and all of his soul, which is why one of his great early albums was called The Body and The Soul even though it was built around the old article-free standard “Body and Soul.”

The way the big man from Indianapolis played the horn was tied up in a very old-fashioned conception of masculinity: he was not sure how to play in any other way except as a demonstration that he had something physical to prove. He had a rich, opulent tone that Stanley Crouch liked to compare to ripe fruit. He could be genuinely affecting on ballads. His own compositions, which he stopped writing early in his career, were fiercely complex things that never lost sight of basic melodic virtues. So there was a lot to like about the guy besides the physicality of his playing, but sooner or later, usually sooner, it always came back to that physicality. He sometimes grew almost comically excited when another very good trumpeter was on the bandstand or even somewhere else in the room. Very soon he would be pushing toward even higher registers and even denser flurries of notes, sometimes with an oblique, dissonant relationship to the home key. It was typically in the presence of his most formidable peers that Hubbard would either play something memorably virtuosic — or face-plant lamentably in the attempt. You didn’t get a lot of mediocrity from this guy.

Continue…

Is Hamas in over its head?

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 3:02 PM - 5 Comments

Writing in the New York Times, Ben-Gurion University’s Benny Morris suggests Israelis aren’t simply scared; they’re deathly afraid—and not just for themselves, but for the future of Israel. Morris argues Israel is struggling to adapt to a new reality that includes dwindling sympathy for the Jewish state in the West and an energized Islamic opposition to Israel’s very existence: Continue…

Just Respond To The Question, TV Characters

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 12:09 PM - 17 Comments

We all can name certain types of scenes that we don’t like, or are usually hard for us to sit through. I was reminded of one of them when I was watching an episode of, of all things, Aftermash. I’ll save the background of this short-lived spinoff for a “weekend flops” post in 2009, but in this scene, Klinger is on trial for something or other and Colonel Potter is called as a witness. The prosecutor is trying to introduce damaging information about the defendant, so he asks Potter about Klinger’s habit of wearing dresses when he was in Korea. And in the ensuing scene, Potter talks about the issue without ever saying outright that Klinger only wore dresses because he was pretending to be crazy. It’s necessary for the plot that he not get too specific about that, because the plot requires the judge to think Klinger is actually insane and commit him to the mental ward for examination. But it bothered me, because it was all too clear that the character was not saying something that he should, and logically would, say.

This kind of thing happens a lot, in both comedy and drama, though for some reason I’m having trouble thinking of specific recent examples. (I know I’ve seen some recently; they just don’t come to mind right at this moment.) It occurs, usually, when the plot would not work if someone revealed a piece of information, but the story has not set up a specific reason why the character can’t reveal that information. So he or she just doesn’t say it, and we’re left wondering why. Another example I can think of, though still not recent, is an early episode of The Simpsons where Homer is photographed dancing on a table with a stripper, and Marge gets mad at him. We know that he was at a bachelor party, got up on the table to dance, and nothing else happened. There is no plot-related reason why Homer can’t say “I was at a bachelor party, I got up on the table to dance, and nothing else happened.” But he doesn’t. So we’re pissed at both characters: at Homer for not imparting the information, and at Marge for being too idiotic to ask him what happened.

You can also frequently see it on soapy shows like Grey’s Anatomy, where characters will argue about something without one of them mentioning a key fact that would change the tone of the conversation — remember Derek and Meredith yelling at each other about her first date with Finn, but Derek never bothers to ask, or Meredith to mention, what the date entailed. (Because it’s necessary for the scene that Derek Continue…

Up Next: The Future

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 10:34 AM - 5 Comments

The monthly news magazine published by UBC has a neat little feature this month: they asked a handful of researchers to talk about interesting and futuristic-y developments in their field.

A nuclear weapon-free world would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m also extremely wary of psychology prof Elizabeth Dunn’s proposal to make enhancing subjective reported happiness “the explicit goal”of public policy. “I’m from the government and I’m here to make you happy” does not strike me a fruitful direction for public policy.

If we must have centralized control, how about systems that eliminate the need to drive:

We have now reached a stage, thanks in part to work on guided missiles, where camera systems can do a better job than the human eye and brain. Couple this with communication of precise positions and headings of vehicles in the vicinity and you have the possibility of safe, driverless vehicles operating over existing roads. There would be no need for traffic lights or signs and vehicles would hardly ever need to stop. A central control would normally manage all vehicle movements.

Finally, if there is one advancement on this list that I think will do most to enhance human welfare, it is professor Frank Ko’s work on tissue scaffolds:

Like the scaffolding we see on construction sites, the nano scaffolds are being created by Ko to reconstruct damaged tissue within the human body. Burn victims would benefit from scaffolds used to regenerate new skin. Those with failing heart valves or damaged nerves could count on scaffolds to regenerate these parts from within the patient’s own body. As healing progresses, the scaffold, being constructed from a biodegradable material, is absorbed and metabolized by the body while slowly releasing drugs to aid in the healing process.

Dear Liberal Party: That's not actually an answer.

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 9:45 AM - 241 Comments

… At least, not to the (relatively straightforward) question that was asked: 

A spokeswoman for Mr. Ignatieff refused to say whether the new Liberal Leader will allow any of his members to continue to advocate openly for reduced access to publicly funded abortions.

“I don’t think we are in a position to answer those questions today. I think they are speculative at this point,” said Jill Fairbrother, adding that it is impossible to know if the committee mentioned by Mr. Bruinooge even exists and, if so, whether there are members from parties other than the Conservatives.

“This is a matter that was settled by the Supreme Court more than 20 years ago and that’s our view on it today,” Ms. Fairbrother said.

First of all, of course the “committee” exists – although to be fair to Ms. Fairbrother, it’s not an official House committee, per se, but an informal, ad hoc group of parliamentarians who have been meeting periodically in relative obscurity for years.  

Continue…

An Obvious But Entertaining Riff On A Famous Showbiz Moment

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

Okay, I know jokes about Shatner’s “Rocket Man” have kinda jumped the shark (now that you’ve got dozens of commenters on YouTube insisting “Stewie’s version was better,” we’ve officially reached the point where the parodies are more ubiquitous than the original), but this one is so obvious and yet effective. The caption indicates that it was made in 1991, back when the “Rocket Man” video was still an underground thing, an in-joke for those in the know — and this was the ideal in-joke about an in-joke.

Lebanon redux

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 4:10 PM - 6 Comments

If there’s a theme emerging in the analysis of Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign in (and looming invasion of?) Gaza, it’s that Israel is anxious to show that the failed invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was an aberration. Writing in The Globe and Mail, Patrick Martin argues that, far from being humbled after the Lebanese exercise, Israel has instead adapted by lowering its threshold for success while leaving its basic, heavy-handed military strategy intact: Continue…

Michael Ignatieff Eyebrow Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 3:26 PM - 14 Comments

Distressing news. As reported elsewhere, the Liberal leader, Mr. Ignatieff, has apparently resolved to spend more time trimming his formidable eyebrows in the new year. For shame. Once more, politics is forcing compromise on this man.

Surely the great philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he of great influence on Mr. Ignatieff, never put scissors to his eyebrows. (Just as Mr. Ignatieff should never have put clippers to his once-flowing locks.) As evidence, consider this archival footage of the two in conversation, presented via YouTube in six parts.

Berlin v. Ignatieff  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI.

USA Stat of the Day

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 3:20 PM - 5 Comments

In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

link.

How busting Madoff cost the U.S. government billions

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 2:42 PM - 6 Comments

Over at the American Interest editorial blog, economist Peter Heller looks at where the money from Bernard Madoff’s $50-billion ponzi scheme might have gone:

First, one must assume that some of the capital simply went to support Mr. Madoff and his life style of an apartment in Manhattan, fancy houses in Montauk and Palm Beach, and if I recollect from the news, a house or apartment in Europe. I also seem to recall yachts with the name of “Bull,” as well as country club memberships in Palm Beach and the Hamptons. All of this does not come cheap, and one may assume that Mr. Madoff pocketed and spent, after tax, at least $25 million a year—or $35 million pretax– (my ignorance of this standard of living may mean that I have underestimated what such a life style costs by a factor of two or three even). But there is also significant overhead to the production of Ponzi income of this magnitude. Add three floors of rent in the so-called Lipstick building of Manhattan, as well as the overhead costs of the employees and other running costs of his legitimate securities transactions business (presumably including at least two well-paid sons and other relatives), and we can potentially account for another $40 million in expenses (again, my numbers are completely arbitrary). So this would imply that Madoff would have had to have annual inflows of capital to his operation of at least $75 million to cover these costs.

Continue…

Rod Bruinooge Maverick Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 1:05 PM - 18 Comments

Merry  Christmas, Prime Minister. (And a belated happy Hanukkah too.)

Whatever the merits of Mr. Bruinooge’s particular cause, the diminutive and quiet Internet gaming maven and film festival founder would appear to be freely and publicly expressing a personal opinion—a personal opinion that directly contradicts the stated position of the government of which he is a member. Indeed, with a couple interviews and a little op-ed appearing all on the same day, he seems to be making quite the show of it.

The cynical among you might assume the expression of this personal opinion was planned and blessed from above. The even more cynical might imagine that even if it was, Mr. Bruinooge will soon enough be scolded in public and quickly disappeared.

But in the spirit of the holiday season, let us believe that an MP has found it in himself to act like something other than a well-paid parliamentary pawn. Small victory, that. But one must applaud what one can.

Why Networks Prefer To Own The Shows They Produce

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 12:33 PM - 1 Comment

I mentioned a while back that CBS’s success with comedy has been achieved entirely with shows that are produced by outside companies. But networks still generally prefer to order shows from their own parent companies, and a recent lawsuit, filed just before Christmas (ho, ho, ho) reminds us of one of the reasons why: your own company is less likely to sue you (though it still can happen).

An ongoing dispute between Warner Bros. TV and CBS over “Two and a Half Men” has reached the courts.

Warner Bros. filed a $49 million suit against the Eye in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, arguing that the network has refused to pay sums it had agreed to hand over to the studio if “Two and a Half Men” turned into a hit.

Almost every show operates at a deficit early on, since the money that the network pays to license the show never covers the full cost of producing episodes. (That’s why syndication is the holy grail, the shankara stone, the ark of the covenant: that’s where you make money after losing money for four or five years.) Warner Brothers is basically claiming that CBS promised that if Men became hit, they’d pay back all the money WB lost in the early years, as well as increasing the license fee.

I have no idea who wins the suit (if it even goes to trial, which these things usually don’t) since the reports are very confusing about what CBS is supposed to have promised or what specific ratings feats Men had to accomplish to fulfil its part of the agreement. But that’s not the point; the point is that this is the kind of thing that’s more likely to happen when networks order their product from outside companies. (Even if this is an outside company that actually is partners with CBS/Viacom in the CW “network.” But they’re at least technically an outisde company.) Even though it’s just in-fighting and bookkeeping between big companies who spend most of their time trying to figure out ways to claim that they don’t owe their writers and actors any money, I kind of enjoy that kind of fight and find it, in a strange way, a sign of health, a reminder that hit TV shows are still valuable enough to be squabbled over by competing corporations.

Best in Books — 2008 Edition

By Brian Bethune - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Longest gestation, best baby:
Now 69, Patrick Lane had been an iconic poet for decades and, more recently, the author of an exquisite memoir, before writing his first novel, the brilliant, scarifying Red Dog, Red Dog. A grim story—dead infant narrators will do that—about proud, bitter and surprisingly loyal characters in the B.C. interior in the 1950’s, the beautifully written story was inexplicably left off all the national prize lists.

Best rewrite of modern history (actual):
How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Columbia university historian Mark Mazower not only shows in greater detail than ever before the casual as well as systematic murderousness of Nazi rule, but it’s equally brutal incompetence: while half the Third Reich clamoured for more and more (slave) workers, the other half was killing them by the millions. More remarkable than that well-known story, though, is Mazower’s persuasive case that the Nazis were depressingly less anomalous than anyone would wish. Much of what they did in Eastern Europe—from vast population transfers to mass hostage executions—was not revolutionarily evil but more an escalation of past wars there. Continue…

Best on TV — 2008 Edition

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 29, 2008 at 12:23 PM - 2 Comments

Best non-romantic relationship
Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Penny (Kaley Cuoco) on The Big Bang Theory. He’s an asexual scientific genius, she’s a waitress who walks into her neighbour’s apartment in her underwear, and together they have become the funniest odd couple since, well, The Odd Couple. Their interactions are a highlight of every episode: Penny gets frustrated by Sheldon’s lack of familiarity with normal human concepts, and Sheldon is constantly surprised that she thinks he’s weird. Their relationship reached a sort of apex in a Christmas episode when Penny gave Sheldon a napkin that was used by Leonard Nimoy (”I possess the DNA of Leonard Nimoy”) and in gratitude, Sheldon made the supreme sacrifice and gave Penny a hug. Who needs romance when you can have hilariously awkward platonic friendship?

Best appearance by a ghost
Harry Morgan (James Remar), the adoptive father of the title character on Dexter, died long before the series began. But this season, that didn’t stop him from popping up to talk to Dexter, his sociopathic pride and joy, about the ethics of murder and anything else that was on his spectral mind. Some fans felt that Dexter seeing dead people was just another sign of his sad decline from a fascinating monster to a lovable weirdo with a wacky habit of killing people. But it sure is better than the other high-profile ghost sighting this year, Izzie’s visions of Dead Denny on Grey’s Anatomy. At least the ghost on Dexter isn’t sleeping with anybody.

Best use of a TV show for political purposes
This scene from the 1967 Batman episode “Dizzonner The Penguin,” where the Penguin (Burgess Meredith) debates Batman during a mayoral election and accuses the Caped Crusader of “concealing his past” Continue…