A curious case of dog-napping in B.C.

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 2:23 PM - 1 Comment

A string of 13 robberies in Surrey, B.C. last weekend had RCMP chasing their tails, both figuratively and literally. No case was more puzzling than the armed dog-napping of three Yorkshire Terrier puppies from a home in the Guildford area of the city.

Police say early Saturday two men and a woman went to a house on 107A Avenue where a litter of puppies was being advertised for sale at $625 each. One of the three pulled out a handgun, they forced their way in and made off with three puppies from the stunned owner, who has not been identified. “Definitely when we’re seeing home invasions with guns, we don’t expect to see them taking dogs,” says RCMP Sgt. Roger Morrow. Continue…

Round up the usual suspects: Liveblogging the post-QP scrums

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 2:18 PM - 6 Comments

This probably won’t become a regular ITQ feature, mind you, since it’s usually nothing more than a cacophony of competing talking points, but considering the events that transpired earlier today, it’s worth making the foray to the foyer this afternoon.

2:59:24 PM
Well, I’m here – although frankly, it was touch and go for a while there that I would recover sufficient mental faculties from the torpor of Question Period to haul myself out of the gallery and into the foyer. You would have thought that this would be an vitriolic, tension-laced highwire show of a Question Period, but you would be horribly, horribly wrong.

3:02:31 PM
Oh, the milling. So much of journalism relies on one’s milling skills. At least the security guards are friendly, although oddly reticent to comment on the political issues of the day. There are three clusters at the moment – two waiting, one involving Christian Paradis which is being conducted entirely in French, and a few MPs mingling with the horde as we eye the two respective doors intently.

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Yes we can! ..tell you when Obama will be in Canada.

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 2:11 PM - 27 Comments

February 19. A Thursday. Jack Layton is hoping President Obama will join him in a coalition, but if he doesn’t, Jack will be very angry.

Teddy Ballgame, by John Updike

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 2:07 PM - 1 Comment

This morning’s New York Times describes the late John Updike as “a literary decathlete” who was “almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.” Indeed. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, who died of lung cancer on Tuesday, left behind more than 50 books, countless short stories and a collection of poetry—including a memorable ballad about the bleacher seats at old Yankee Stadium.

But to many readers (me included) Updike will always be remembered as the guy who wrote that Ted Williams article. Correction: the Ted Williams article.

Published in The New Yorker 49 years ago, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” recounts the Splendid Splinter’s final home game at a “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark” known as Fenway. Unlike his fellow “maestros of the keyboard,” Updike did not watch the game from the comfort of the press box high above home plate. He sat in the third base stands, surrounded by 10,000 schizophrenic Red Sox fans who adored their aging hero almost as much as they despised him.

I read the article yet again last night. You should too. Continue…

What the budget does for the Alberta oil patch

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 1:36 PM - 1 Comment

The mood overall today in the west is strangely muted. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall bemoaned the coming years of deficit. “Here we have hard-wired into the budget, five years of it,” he told reporters yesterday. “In the long term, fiscal probity, balanced budgets, lower taxes (and) a competitive business environment is still our best hope for lasting growth.” The Regina Leader-Post’s Murray Mandryk began his column saying, “Finally, the
Conservatives have decided to get along with the Liberals by . . . er . . . doing exactly what Liberals like Stephane Dion would have done.” The budget prompted the Calgary Herald’s Deborah Yedlin, who is not a tree hugger, to
ask, “Where was the commitment to transportation infrastructure that would improve commuting within cities and between cities?” Eighty per cent of greenhouse has emissions, she notes, are generated by consumers, and the budget seeks to reduce none of that. And Don Braid, also of the Herald, outlined how the oil patch will benefit: “Ottawa will establish what’s essentially a $200-billion pool to provide ‘liquidity and financing’ to Canadian business,” he writes. “Energy firms consume more capital and credit than any other Canadian business. Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers vice-president Greg Stringham thinks the federal move will not only free domestic credit for the industry, but draw international money back into Canada.”

Calgary Herald

Commercials, Commercials, Commercials

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 1:11 PM - 7 Comments

Public TV in France, in a very un-CBC-like move, is going to eliminate all commercials by 2011 (so they won’t have anything interrupting those all-important Silver Spoons reruns). The idea that any channels in the world are actually going to show fewer commercials is a confusing and disorienting thing. But there are other signs, and not just from France, that we may finally have reached the point of commercial over-saturation and that the number of commercials may finally have to contract, rather than expand. Another sign is that Fox’s experiment with fewer commercials — and therefore, old-school running times — on Fringe may actually be working, by increasing the likelihood that viewers will actually watch the damn commercials:

About 13% of ads during Fringe are being skipped, per ratings that include DVR playback, while 16% to 20% of ads in other leading hour-long Fox shows are being skipped, according to Magna Global (via MediaPost).

Fox’s initiative, dubbed Remote Free TV, includes just 10 minutes of national ads per hour, compared to 16 minutes of other hour-long shows. The second show in the initiative, Dollhouse, premieres Feb. 13.

And while I’m on the topic of commercials, this is a quote from a December 1955 Associated Press article, about the success of The Mickey Mouse Club (and therefore the newfound popularity of washed-up cartoon star Mickey). The writer talks about the good stuff, but then comes the bad part: the shocking number of commercials. Which, of course, is a smaller number of commercials than we routinely accept on prime-time television today.

But the commercials! They’re enough to drive you nuts. Not only are there three in every 15 minutes. The station also sneaks in three more every 15 minutes at the station break.

The Disney people are just as upset as the public. Walt apparently didn’t foresee the excesses of the network; he vows that next year he’ll have some control over such matters.

Finally, more on The Snuggie and its amazing global pop-cultural reach. Most amazing of all: four million people have ordered the thing.

It’s come to this: You want a job? You pay us

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 3 Comments

In a traditional economy, you get paid to work. But with millions of graduating students desperate for work experience, that model is being turned on its head. Now, desperate parents in the U.S. are forking out big bucks to buy the perfect internship for their kids. In other words, they’re paying potential employers to let their kids work for them. Thousands of high-profile internships are being auctioned off to the highest bidder on web sites such as CharityFolks.com, reports the Wall Street Journal, and parents are paying as much as $12,000 for the right work experience opportunity. Some employers admit they’re even creating additional internship opportunities as a way to raise cash. Just another reminder that, in good times or bad, if your parents have cash, you’ve got yourself a head start.

The Wall Street Journal

Wow

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 12:24 PM - 120 Comments

Michael Ignatieff, for whom this corner has not historically carried a torch, has had a very good hour. First he put Stephen Harper on a leash. Then, all by himself, Jack Layton went out on a limb and energetically sawed the branch off behind himself.

Jack Layton’s best five months in Ottawa began on the night in 2005 when he announced, alone among opposition leaders, that he wanted to “make this Parliament work.” He extorted concrete policy concessions from the Liberals, avoided a hasty election, made Stephen Harper look like a cranky obstructionist, demonstrated the utility of a vote for the NDP. Today he decided to do none of that. Layton demonstrated there is no conceivable action by this government  that he will support. He can’t afford an election. He has lost his coalition partner. And after running the 2006 election against the Liberals and the 2008 election as a putative prime minister, he has marginalized his party well away from real decisions about power.

Meanwhile, in the House foyer…

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 12:23 PM - 10 Comments

Jack Layton sounds a bit like a 16-year-old who just got dumped by his girlfriend.

Further adventures in photo-ops

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 12:12 PM - 18 Comments

From the pool report of the Prime Minister’s visit to a construction site this morning.

PM’s handed a nail gun, which he uses to nail in a window frame.

He says: “I’m not an expert on this,” as he grabs the gun.

He struggles with it at first, getting an initial shot into the wall but coming up empty on his next four attempts.

PM: “Oh. Misfire.”

He hands someone the gun, and that person tinkers with it and hands it back to Harper. The PM then succesfully fires three shots into the wall.

PM: “There we go. It’s all done. I have a second job.”

'We are putting this government on probation'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 8 Comments

Michael Ignatieff is a bewildering, but entertaining performer. His preferred hand motions this morning were the clenched fist and the back-handed swipe. He walks and talks like a man who considers himself to be walking and talking from an advantageous position. Which is particularly disorienting because for the past two years one could only say as much of Stephen Harper.

He deviated only marginally from his script, so the prepared text after the jump. Continue…

In search of hope

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

A beard and a stovepipe hat could hardly have made it plainer. Barack Obama now occupies a unique place in American history, but his ascension to the presidency was carefully modelled on a giant from its past, Abraham Lincoln. The 44th U.S. President retraced the 16th’s train journey from Philadelphia to Washington, stopping in the same communities to make speeches. He made the official theme of his inauguration “A New Birth of Freedom,” borrowing a line from the Gettysburg address. At six minutes after noon on Jan. 20, he took the oath of office on a Bible belonging to the Great Emancipator. And the celebratory lunch served in the Capitol afterwards consisted of that other Illinois president’s favourite foods, served on replicas of Mary Todd Lincoln’s china.

For a man who is expected to change so much, such backwards glances were a telling choice. A deliberate referencing of the darkest period in the country’s history. A reminder, not of triumphs and glories, but of struggle and sacrifice. And a stark acknowledgement that America’s incandescent dream has been largely forged from the ashes of its collective nightmares. “Obama is unlike many of our presidents, someone who has read history and who thinks he can learn from history,” says Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political historian. “And Lincoln has become the man whose spirit he most wants to summon.”

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A celebration for the ages

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

On the morning of Jan. 20, at 8:45 a.m., Barack Obama left the historic guest quarters at Blair House, across the street from the White House, and climbed into the back seat of a black Cadillac limousine—an armoured personnel carrier that the Secret Service have dubbed “the Beast.” He wore a black suit and red tie, and was accompanied by his wife Michelle, clad in a coat and dress of Swiss-wool lace in a cheerful, non-partisan yellow.

The Obamas headed for the traditional inaugural church service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where they were joined by family members and the soon-to-be vice-presidential couple, Joe and Jill Biden. The choir sang This Little Light of Mine. A guest pastor from Dallas, T.D. Jakes, preached that “God always sends the best men into the worst times.” Later, Jakes turned directly to Obama, and quoting his own 14-year-old son, he added, “May the force be with you.”

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And the saviour was taken over by PR hacks

By Allan Fotheringham - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 14 Comments

It was 2005 when the word started to circulate in the right Liberal circles. All their troubles would be soon over. A saviour was about to appear from abroad. It seemed so promising, almost so miraculous.

After nearly 30 years away from his native Canada, the storied Michael Ignatieff was to favour us with his presence. And what a presence. Father a renowned Canadian diplomat internationally. Grandfather a member of the cabinet of the last Russian czar.

More? Star graduate of Harvard, richest university in the world. Star graduate of Oxford. Author of 14 books. Winner of the Governor General’s Award for his family memoir. Owner of seven honorary doctoral degrees. And, even more intriguing, while at the University of Toronto the roommate and rumoured best friend of one Bob Rae, later, as we know, a five-year NDP premier of mighty Ontario. When Rae fell ill with depression as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ignatieff nursed him back to health.

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Someone who’ll watch over me

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Joshua Slocum, on his way to becoming the first man to sail around the world alone, encountered one in 1895, an inexplicable presence that steered Slocum’s ship through a 48-hour gale while the Nova Scotian lay prostrate with food poisoning. Reinhold Messner, the great Italian mountain climber, felt its comforting nearness in 1970, during the nightmarish descent from Kashmir’s Nanga Parbat mountain that killed his younger brother. And on 9/11 one called Ron DiFrancesco by name and convinced the broker that the route to safety in the stairwells of the World Trade Center’s south tower meant running though flames.

Once you start looking for accounts of a “third man,” a mysterious, saving—and literally impossible—presence who appears to people at times of extreme stress and danger, you can find them by the dozen, says John Geiger, who presents an array of them in The Third Man Factor (Penguin). They’re fascinating to read, but this deeply humane book is far more than the sum of its parts: Geiger elegantly demonstrates how these divergent and very personal experiences reveal our profoundly social nature.

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The era of federal-provincial bickering is over. It is now the era of federal-provincial open threats. Progress!

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 10:15 AM - 18 Comments

Kumbaya, my friends, KUM-Ba-YAAAA!!!!!

“If he’s throwing Quebec overboard, it’s really too bad for him too because he’s going to be in an election soon, and you will understand that he may need the ridings he still has in Quebec.”

— Quebec finance minister Monique Jérôme-Forget

Hold the sheep’s stomach lining

By Pamela Cuthbert - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 10:10 AM - 1 Comment

Now’s the time to toss prejudice aside and try haggis. Never mind that this humble pie is a steaming mound of ground organs, suet, assorted spices and oats, all boiled in the lining of a sheep’s stomach. Ever since Scotland’s bard, Robert Burns, immortalized haggis, it has become the dish that launched a million parties—and possibly about as many interpretations. This is the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth, so the annual celebration of Burns Night, on Jan. 25, is promising more invention and revelry than ever.

“The meat in a haggis is brilliant,” says chef Craig Flinn of Chives Canadian Bistro in Halifax. “It’s like the meat in a tourtière pie.” He prepared the sausage-like food once, when he cooked in a hotel kitchen, but then forgot about it. This year, Flinn will serve a Burns Night appetizer: traditional haggis sausage with tattie ’n neep purée, caramelized onion balsamic jam and grainy Dijon veal jus that he calls “a bit cross-cultural.” He’ll use a mixture of lamb and pork trimmings with back fat and “more palatable” entrails such as lamb kidneys and pork tongue and cheek.

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Compensation denied

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

Two years ago, the federal government announced a $95.6-million compensation package for veterans and civilians who were unknowingly sprayed when the U.S. military tested Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown in the mid-1960s. To date, more than 3,000 people have applied for the one-time $20,000 “ex gratia” payment, providing Ottawa with medical proof that they contracted illnesses linked to the powerful herbicide, such Hodgkin’s disease, prostate cancer, lymphoma, respiratory cancers and Type 2 diabetes. But the Department of Veterans Affairs is being very picky about who deserves the cash. More than 800 people have been turned down, including a New Brunswick woman who has applied four times. “I’ll perservere,” says Barb Gill, who is recovering from her second battle with liposarcoma, a malignant tumour condition. “I can’t let it drain me emotionally, because if it does, that will affect my body.”

The Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Breathe easy, Yo-Yo Ma

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

For three decades, she and her husband “dined out” on the gag, but a British doctor who sits in the House of Lords has confessed to making up a condition called “cello scrotum.” The fictitious ailment, which for 34 years has worried male players of the large string instrument, was something Elaine Murphy and her husband John invented as a prank in 1974 after reading about a similar chafing condition called “guitar nipple.” The baroness came clean this week in a letter to the current issue of the British Medical Journal, noting that a researcher in a previous article had referenced the condition as if it were real.

BMJ

Times Online

Alexander the Great returns to Iraq

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Greece and Iraq have announced a joint plan to erect a statue of Alexander the Great in Mosul, northern Iraq, to mark the place where Alexander defeated the Persian emperor Darius III in 331 B.C. Get ready for a dustup involving Macedonia, which claims Alexander as its own, and Iran, which can¹t understand why anyone should celebrate the fall of the Persian Empire in the first place.

Al Arabiya News Channel

The woman behind Mad Men's killer fashion

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Janie Bryant designs the classic, tailored and sexy costumes on the critically acclaimed TV series Mad Men, and though she’s proud of the show’s recent success at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, she’s also celebrating her own nomination for a Costume Designers Guild Award that will be announced February 17. Bryant’s work plays a crucial part in establishing the tone of the show, which is set in the early 1960′s in an advertising firm in Manhattan. She was able to create the look through her experience studying fashion history, which gave her the opportunity to contribute a lot of her own ideas and work collaboratively with the show’s creator, Matt Weiner. Weiner is known for his obsession with detail, a quality he shares with Bryant – she often designs 200 costumes for a single episode.

Glamour

Family doctors unhappy

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 1 Comment

If they had known how hard their jobs would be, one-third of doctors would have chosen another career, according to an online survey. The survey of 180 doctors and health care administrators in British Columbia was conducted by Leger Marketing. Possible reasons for the discontent, says Dr. Bill Mackie, president of the B.C. Medical Association, include feeling undervalued, underpaid and unsupported. According to University of British Columbia professor Bob Smith, due to its small sample size, the survey should be used as a basis for a more comprehensive study.

The Vancouver Sun

Obama’s tough stance on Afghanistan

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Forget the velvet glove, America’s Afghanistan policy will be all iron fist from now on. President Obama intends to make a sharp break from his predecessor’s strategy-committing more troops and focusing exclusively on the war. That means the development and reconstruction programs that have been a staple of Canada’s involvement will be put on the backburner. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been put on notice that he will lose Western backing unless he cracks down on the rampant corruption in his government.

The New York Times

Beaten good Samaritan lied, say cops

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 1 Comment

A cut in the head so deep the skull is exposed tends to attract attention, at a gas station or anywhere else. So last January, when a bleeding Jason Brunelle started tanking up his car near Bassano, Alta., 140 km east of Calgary, an Esso attendant felt compelled to ask what might have happened. Brunelle, then 24 and from an RCMP family (his father is retired from the force), had a compelling story to tell. Too bad it may not have been true.

While driving along the Trans-Canada, Brunelle claimed, he had come across a car in trouble and stopped to help—only to receive a savage beating from three men armed with pipes and bottles. Brunelle said he fought off his assailants and fled before driving, bleeding and confused, into the Esso for gas.

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