You, Sir, are nothing but a banker

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 1 Comment

Forget the black hats; these days the bad guys wear pinstriped suits. At soccer games in Ireland, crowds are reacting to bad calls by labelling the ref “a banker,” instead of the rhyming w-word. The nefarious King Rat was a foreclosing moneylender in the British pantomimes this past Christmas. In the recent thriller The International—tag line “Everybody Pays”—Clive Owen’s cop was on the trail of murderous, arms-dealing financiers. And a sequel to Wall Street, with a recently paroled Gordon Gekko still manipulating markets through a protege, is being rushed into production.

But absolute proof that the global economic meltdown has defined the villains of our age will be available next fall, when an unnamed ABC sitcom, featuring Kelsey Grammer as a fiscal titan whose shrinking circumstances force him to become a househusband, makes its debut. After all, no one plays a pompous ass quite like the former Dr. Frasier Crane.

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UPDATED: Canada Border Services Agency: Keeping our streets safe from … George Galloway? Really?

By kadyomalley - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 7:26 AM - 51 Comments

From today’s Sun (UK):

ANTI-WAR MP George Galloway is to be banned from Canada.

Border security chiefs have declared the Respect MP “inadmissable” because of his views on Afghanistan and the presence of Canadian troops there.

Mr Galloway is due to make a speech in Toronto on March 30, following a US lecture tour, but will be turned away if he tries to enter Canada.

The Canadian High Commission in London was last night contacting the MP’s office to inform him of the decision.

Canadian rules say he will be allowed in only if he has a special permit from immigration minister Jason Kenney.

But Mr Kenney’s spokesman said: “George Galloway is not getting a permit — end of story.

He defends the very terrorists trying to kill Canadian forces in Afghanistan.”

UPDATE: More from the Daily Mail, which reports that Galloway is prepared to fight the ban:

Mr Galloway was due to give a speech in Toronto on March 30 but has been deemed ‘inadmissible’ to Canada under section 34(1) of the country’s immigration act.

Mr Kenney’s spokesman Alykhan Velshi said the act was designed to protect Canadians from people who fund, support or engage in terrorism.

The minister has the right to issue special exemption permits but will not do so in Mr Galloway’s case.

Mr Velshi said: ‘We’re going to uphold the law, not give special treatment to this infandous street-corner Cromwell who actually brags about giving ‘financial support’ to Hamas, a terrorist organisation banned in Canada.

‘I’m sure Galloway has a large Rolodex of friends in regimes elsewhere in the world willing to roll out the red carpet for him. Canada, however, won’t be one of them.’

“Regime”? Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a very friendly way to describe the government currently in power in the country to our immediate south, which doesn’t seem to have a problem allowing Galloway to cross the border. 

Some broadcasters are more equal than others

By Jonathon Gatehouse and Philippe Gohier - Friday, March 20, 2009 at 12:38 AM - 32 Comments

Good things come to those who wait. At least that’s Canwest Global Communications’ perspective on Ottawa’s new-found willingness to consider assistance for Canada’s beleaguered private television networks.

On Wednesday, Heritage Minister James Moore confirmed that the Harper government is looking at loosening broadcast regulations and changing tax rules to help the media giant stave off bankruptcy. But the spin from the company’s Winnipeg HQ is that this is less a bailout than a righting of historic wrongs.

“It’s a sign that the government is hearing the growing chorus of voices—consumer groups, organized labour, the Opposition, special interest groups—who are all saying that the way consumer dollars are collected for viewing cable are not being adequately and fairly sent around to everybody,” says John Douglas, Canwest’s vice-president public affairs. “Our position on this is the same as it has been since 1971.”

Canwest, along with CTV and Quebecor, owners of the private French TVA network, have long been asking the CRTC to treat their conventional channels more like specialty networks, which receive a share of cable subscribers’ monthly bills known as carriage fees. Cable providers like Rogers, which owns Maclean’s, are opposed to the idea, claiming the system could inflate customers’ bills by as much as $10 a month. The conventional broadcasters say the estimated $300 million a year fee-for-carriage would generate is essential to their survival. The CRTC categorically rejected that argument last fall, saying the networks failed to prove they really needed the higher revenues. But as the global economic meltdown has taken its toll on advertising, broadcasters are finding that Ottawa is a lot more receptive to being—rather than crying—poor. “We have the CRTC admitting now that the model is broken,” says Douglas. “And anything that would be contemplated by the federal government, I’m assuming, would be in recognition that the state of the industry is what we said it was two years ago.”

But deep cuts to local news coverage by all the private networks, moves by Canwest to sell its five E! channels and threats by both CTV and CanWest to walk away from unprofitable smaller markets, are also clearly forcing government’s hand. And the message that immediate help is needed has been taken directly to 24 Sussex Drive. Both CanWest CEO Leonard Asper and Quebecor’s Pierre-Karl Péladeau, have personally met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of their companies in recent weeks. The federal lobbyist database also shows meetings with Minister Moore, senior CRTC executives, and former industry minister Jim Prentice. Douglas would not comment on specific meetings, or reports that Canwest has engaged the lobbying services of Ken Boessenkool, a former senior Harper adviser, but said the company has always kept Ottawa in the loop about its concerns: “The amount of dialogue we’ve had is no different that what we’ve had over the previous years.”

If the government’s aim in saving Canwest is to preserve local programming, easing content restrictions is a curious way to go about it, argues Canada’s largest media union. In a statement released Thursday, the Communnications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada says the federal government should be wary of bailing out from under the weight of its “bad business decisions.” In fact, if the CRTC does eventually allow the broadcasters’ to collect carriage fees, the government agency should use the opportunity to tie the extra funds to “new, original news and information programming,” says Peter Murdoch, the union’s vice-president, media. “Local programming is not the cause of Canwest’s debt problems, nor should it be made its victim.”

The prospect of doling out government aid to Canwest also raises the question of just what the government should be doing to help other types of media struggling in these uncertain economic times. Canwest, for example, also owns 39 daily and community newspapers in Canada. And while they don’t appear to be lobbying Ottawa for assistance on that front (the lobbying database lists “broadcasting” as the subject of all recent meetings), given the industry’s current difficulties south of the border, it is not inconceivable that Canada’s papers will also soon find themselves at a crossroads.

David Black, president and CEO of Black Press, which operates more than 150 community and daily papers in Canada and the U.S., declined to comment on any possible assistance for his competitor (“You don’t want to go there”) but said there is a case to be made for Ottawa helping print too. “I don’t believe that government will work very well without daily newspapers,” he says. “If the opposition raises its voice in the House and no one is there to report it, what good does that do?” Given the current crisis, journalistic ethics may have to take a back seat to economic realities, says Black. “You want to be able to run editorially without fear or favour, but on the other hand we’ve got a problem.”

The one place where the Harper government is emphatically drawing the line, however, is public broadcasting. Moore has already said Ottawa will not provide more money to the CBC after the network disclosed that it is facing an estimated $100 million hole in its budget due to shrinking ad revenue. Ditto to requests for an advance on next year’s funding or a bridge loan. “The only way we’ll get the financial flexibility we had asked for,” says CBC spokesperson Marco Dubé, “is to sell some of our assets.” For his part, the Heritage minister suggested earlier this week that the CBC would have to cut between 600 and 1,200 jobs to balance its books.

Whether the public and private broadcasters—long bitter enemies—will find common cause in these troubled times, remains to be seen. One of the issues that Leonard Asper is registered to lobby on is the future mandate of the CBC. But at this point, CanWest has no position of whether its rival deserves some assistance too. “That’s not for us to comment on,” says Douglas. “We’re in a position to comment on our situation and the realities of our network.”

It's…it's….as though David Dodge predicted it!…

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:43 PM - 17 Comments

Quebec budget announces a one-point hike in the provincial sales tax for 2011. That’ll raise almost enough money to make up for the $700 million tax cut Jean Charest favoured Quebecers with after the federal government “fixed” the “fiscal imbalance.”

Other budget highlights: new arts spending that doesn’t quite replace the amount of the cuts that got Charest so exercised last autumn. A freeze on social-science research grants. Not a dime of new core university funding. Not a syllable about increasing tuition fees so universities can get more of the money they need from students. No links; it’s all too depressing.

UPDATE: Okay, one link. The finance minister used economic projections that assume half the economic contraction most private-sector forecasters are predicting. So the real world will probably be a lot worse than this budget! This clinches it: Charest wants to replace Harper, and he’s demonstrating that there would be perfect continuity in budgeting.

SIMULTANEOUS REBUTTAL-DATE: Stephen Gordon rather likes the thing, because of the one thing that runs counter to perfect Harper-Charest budget continuity: that PST hike.

Coyne v. Wells on Gary Goodyear

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 6:15 PM - 61 Comments

Are Winnipeg’s car thieves on March break, too?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 5:45 PM - 2 Comments

On March 3, Winnipeg celebrated a theft-free day, according to the Manitoba Public Insurance Corporation. Indeed, Winnipeg has recorded declining rates of auto thefts over the past year, according to Mayor Sam Katz, thanks to the expanded use of “auto immobilizers,” and an intensive supervision program targeted at prolific offenders.

Winnipeg Free Press

New Policing Strategy Announced in Vancouver

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 5:43 PM - 1 Comment

The Vancouver Police Department is proposing a change to its drug strategy in the city’s Downtown Eastside. The new plan, announced yesterday, calls for seizing drugs, but not prosecuting low-level offenders in the city’s notorious core-area neighbourhood. By avoiding mountains of paperwork, police say they’ll keep more cops on the beat, tackling street disorder.

Vancouver Sun

Complete PEANUTS Now Available Online

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 5:32 PM - 2 Comments

As a follow-up to a Peanuts post the other week, I should note that the syndicate has made all the Peanuts strips available online, though they haven’t really publicized it much. There’s no search engine, really (there is a search feature but it only allows you to get all the strips from a particular time period displayed on one page) or tags, so to find a strip, you have to know what day and what year it was published, or just keep clicking on the arrow buttons until you find the strip you’re looking for. The format is:

http://www.comics.com/peanuts/yyyy-mm-dd

So if you type in http://comics.com/peanuts/1976-08-09 , you get the strip from August 9, 1976, where Snoopy writes a book about religion.

The strips aren’t all in the best of condition; as you see from the TV-related strip at the top, they have some missing lines. But they still have the logo in the upper left-hand corner, which the books have eliminated but which I kind of like. (Without the logo, you wonder why the word balloons in the first panel are usually scrunched over to the right.) Anyway, I think it’s great that 50 years of this strip are now available for free, and hope against hope that this might finally hasten the departure of Peanuts reruns from newspapers. Because, as Charlie Brown himself said on June 30, 1962, aka http://comics.com/peanuts/1962-06-30 :

Coyne v. Wells on Gary Goodyear

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 5:11 PM - 44 Comments

HQ Version

CBC Ya Later

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 5:09 PM - 0 Comments

The latest on the CBC’s budget problems can be found here. Hubert Lacroix, the head of the CBC, said yesterday that they’re abandoning (for now) the idea of adding more U.S. TV programming or radio commercials, and trying to make up the shortfall by cutting salaries/bonuses and selling assets.

The big question about the CBC’s current plight is what the Harper government sees as the endgame — where it wants the network to end up. (Shutting it down is not really an option; the Republicans couldn’t de-fund NPR, either.) There have been suggestions that, in addition to not wanting to bail the network out, Harper “couldn’t be happier” about the current situation, since it creates the crisitunity to “starve the television and radio network, which receive more than $1-billion per year from the public purse, into a reinvention revolution.” Which, if true, might explain why the CBC is trying to avoid changes in its format at the moment. Adding commercials on the radio or even more U.S. programming might not be a disastrous thing in and of itself, but in tough times, the network has an interest in keeping its format as intact as possible; any changes will open the door for demands that they re-orient themselves even more.

Protecting polar bears

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Five nations—Canada, the United States, Norway, Denmark and Russia—issued a statement that climate change is the number one long-term threat to polar bears.  This follows a controversial move last year by the United States to list the polar bear as a threatened species (despite opposition from Inuit groups that hunt the bears). Not all bear experts agree that climate change is, at present, a serious danger—bear populations are much healthier now than they’ve been in decades and have been growing in some regions. But if the Arctic ice that the bears use to hunt seals does disappear, the fate of the bears would be very much at risk.

The New York Times

How is Obama doing?

By John Parisella - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 4:39 PM - 10 Comments

It’s a fair question to ask as he begins the last third of the first 100 days. Polls indicate strong support for Obama, with figures around the 60% level. His policies , however, do not curry as much favour. Already, there are cracks within the Democratic congressional caucus as Blue Dog Democrats (conservatives and centrists) are coalescing to oppose what they see as excessive spending in the budget, specifically the $3.4 trillion dollar deficit and the massive bailout packages for the financial sector and the car manufacturers (the so-called Big Three).

The deficit represents a whopping 12.3% of GDP compared to deficits of 8.8% in the UK, 5.6% in France and 2.2 % in Canada. Job losses have grown significantly in recent months, with approximately two million job losses in the past three months. Unemployment is at 7.2% and growing. The stock market indices have steadily resisted making any significant gains since the stimulus package passed Congress. The performance of the markets may have improved in recent days, but not enough to hail a “turning of the corner.” Add to this the well-placed fury of the American public against AIG’s payment of retention bonuses to executives, and we can assume that the Obama administration is on a short leash. (It’s worth noting AIG may only be the tip of the iceberg regarding bonuses paid to executives of bailed out companies.) Meanwhile, the president is out in California and elsewhere doing town halls, television interviews (including the one scheduled to appear on CBS’s 60 Minutes next Sunday), and will appear on Jay Leno this week. There is rarely a news day without Obama announcing a new policy or explaining his actions to date. Clearly, this president intends to run a proactive presidency.

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Shooting for a cure

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 4:30 PM - 0 Comments

A new vaccine may prevent people from developing colon cancer. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have already administered the shot to a dozen patients, and plan on inoculating another 50 study participants with the vaccine, which is still considered experimental. It seems to work by stimulating an immune response that fights the MUC1 protein found in precancerous growths, known as adenomas. That, in effect, would help the body attack abnormal cells, which would otherwise lead to colon cancer. If the vaccine works, it will also mean that at-risk patients won¹t have to rely on as many frequent and uncomfortable colonscopy tests.

ScienceDaily

Pay up or get out

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 2:50 PM - 53 Comments

What surprises Marcus Leech the most is how fast it all fell to pieces. Six months ago he was working as a computer security expert at Nortel Networks in Ottawa, earning about $127,000 a year. He knew the telecom giant was on shaky ground. But with three decades of experience, Leech was sure he could land another good job if need be. So when his wife, who had stayed home to raise and educate their three children, went to school to become a pharmacist last August, Leech thought nothing of tapping his line of credit for the $9,000 tuition. Nor did he fret much when he took out a mortgage of around $280,000 for a new home in Smiths Falls, Ont., or when he borrowed thousands to replace the family’s two aging vehicles. In all, the family piled on more than $400,000 in debt in the last few years. “When I was young if you got heavily into debt it was a very serious issue, but now it’s just seen as normal,” he says. “If you’re an average middle-income family with two or three kids and only a single income, debt is the only way to keep the family going.”

Then, last November, the hammer fell. Nortel told Leech, 46, that his last day would be Jan. 11. At first he took solace in the fact that after 20 years at the company he was due a generous payout of around $100,000. But three days after clearing out his desk, Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection, killing any prospect of a severance cheque. All Leech got was $11,000 in vacation pay, which is all the family has had to live on since. With his hopes for quickly finding a new job shattered, the family has radically scaled back. But the bills continue to roll in, forcing Leech to sometimes resort to credit cards to make ends meet, sinking the family even deeper into debt. With their finances spiralling down, he knows everything is at stake, including the roof over their heads. “I have no idea how we’re going to eventually crawl our way out of this situation,” he says.

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Skepticism about that new Shakespeare portrait

By John Geddes - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 11:11 AM - 2 Comments

"To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune..."

An authoritative voice is casting the inevitable doubt on the latest purported “life portrait” of William Shakespeare. If you’re at all intrigued, this detailed, skeptical article by Katherine Duncan-Jones, co-editor of a recent edition of Shakespeare’s poems and a biographer of the Bard, is well worth reading.

I was receptive to her cogent analysis for two reasons. First, the new picture, from the family collection of Alec Cobbe, is of a guy turned out in expensive lace; he looked far too aristocratic to fit my notion of Shakespeare, working man of the theatre. Second, I live in Ottawa, and so I root for the so-called Sanders portrait, another that claims to have been painted of Shakespeare in his lifetime, which is owned by Ottawa’s own Lloyd Sullivan.

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Vatican backtracks on Pope’s remarks

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 20 Comments

The concept of papal infallibility has always required a certain suspension of disbelief. But Pope Benedict XVI has pushed the principle to its breaking point with his claim during a trip to Africa that condom distribution is aggravating the scourge of AIDS. Yesterday, the Vatican backtracked on the remarks, and tried to soften their impact by publishing an edited text, in which His Holiness allegedly said condoms “risk” worsening the problem. Uh uh, say reporters and others who heard the statement. Factor in Benedict’s controversial remarks about Islam, his attempt to restore an ex-communicated bishop who doesn’t believe in the Holocaust and a variety of ill-advised remarks about gender roles and homosexuality and we have what may go down as the most gaffe-prone pontiffs of the modern era.

The Times

Divorce increases vasectomy reversals

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

In the UK, where 16 per cent of men under 70 have had a vasectomy, a growing number of men are seeking to get the procedure reversed in order to start fresh with a new partner, the BBC reports. Although remarriages now account for nearly 40 per cent of weddings there, vasectomy reversals are generally not publicly funded (the government put a ban on them in 2004 due to soaring demand, although they still pay in limited cases); they can be costly, and their success is not guaranteed. Critics are now arguing the procedure should be publicly funded. “If the [National Health Service] is going to offer vasectomies—and it should, as this is a cost effective and efficient way of preventing pregnancy—then there should be funding of reversals,” says retired NHS consultant Dr .Sam Nag. “People’s lives can change dramatically—we should accept that rather than adopting this ‘you made your bed now lie in it’ attitude.”

BBC News

IVF mix-up ignites ethical quandary

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

“Would you abort a fetus because it wasn’t yours?” This is the ethical quandary Slate writer William Saletan contemplates in this piece about a bizarre IVF mix-up that recently took place in a Japanese hospital, during which one woman ended up carrying an embryo belonging to another couple. In this case, the doctor got the dishes confused, and implanted three embryos, one of which belonged to someone else. The couple could not distinguish with any certainly whether the one that took hold was her own flesh and blood, and decided to abort the fetus. Now they are embroiled in a legal battle with the local government, claiming mental anguish. Meanwhile, the hospital maintains it only advised of the risks of postponing the abortion, but did not recommend that the woman terminate the pregnancy. To make matters more complicated, the other couple weren’t even told of the mishap until two months after the abortion.

Slate

I'm Not Actually Anti-Ambition

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:37 AM - 17 Comments

Just a quick meta-post: I’ve noticed a common thread in some of my recent posts and comments, and wanted to be the first one to point this out. I seem to be a little suspicious, much too suspicious, frankly, of shows with a lot of ambition.

In my previous post I praised Reaper for being unambitious fun, and then put down Kings, which as noted in comments is one of the most ambitious shows of the year. Then in comments, I put down the CBC for not having enough safe middlebrow entertainment. In another post this very week I said something mildly snide about David Milch, and last week I said that the networks should consider doing more light action shows about heroes helping the underdog. Other posts have put down Dollhouse for, among other things, taking itself too seriously; I’m not the only one who has made this point, since Joss Whedon has felt the need to address it (“it’s not the lighthearted romp that the other shows were”), but if you put everything together into a pattern one could reach some very unflattering conclusions about my tastes. It’s like I’m on a crusade to make television less ambitious and safer, until there is nothing left except middle-of-the-road sitcoms and stand-alone episodic dramas. That’s not what I believe, but I should be a little more willing to praise shows that take actual chances.

Now, a lot of it has less to do with my personal taste in shows (there aren’t many middlebrow CBS dramas that I watch regularly) than with my sense of what TV lacks today — there’s some great ambitious TV, and always plenty of bad stuff, but not quite as much in the middle. And since a lot of great, ambitious television is built on a middlebrow foundation, the lack of really great television has something to do with the lack of middlebrow television. That is, many great shows riff on the formulas and fantasies built up by the middle-of-the-road shows. And also, middle-of-the-road shows are, or were, where creators learned their craft. Shawn Ryan has talked about how much he learned from writing and producing Nash Bridges, and how creating The Shield was an application of the things he’d learned and also an attempt to tell stories that couldn’t be told on a middlebrow show like Nash Bridges (because middlebrow shows have heroes who can’t really do anything bad). So I do have this idea in the back of my mind that the middle is the place where TV is weakest nowadays, and the lack of a decent middle affects the quality of the high-aiming stuff as well.

I also have a tendency to be a little hard on overtly ambitious shows because my own inclination is to be suspicious of popular art that wears its ambitions on its sleeve; I have a feeling that the film and television that endures is often “termite art”, described by Manny Farber as art that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Meaning that the future classics of movies and television are often the ones that don’t seem, at first glance, to be particularly ambitious. Which is fine as far as it goes, but when carried too far, it can seem like I’m chiding one show for trying something different while praising another show for trying nothing different. And that’s not taste, that’s philistinism. I’m not actually at that point yet (not in terms of my personal tastes, anyway), but I should try to watch out and avoid getting to that point.

This concludes my all-about-me post.

Osama bin Laden calls for overthrow of Somali president

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

In a sign that al-Qaeda may be increasingly shifting its gaze to the lawless east African state of Somalia, Osama bin Laden, in an audio recording released on the Internet, has called for the overthrow of the country’s president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Ahmed has promised to introduce sharia, or Islamic law, to Somalia, but Osama bin Laden accused him of partnering with “the infidel” in a national unity government. Islamist insurgents allied to al-Qaeda control much of Somalia.

BBC News

Obama’s a hippie?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:05 AM - 2 Comments

Forget the talk radio notion that Obama is a socialist. Now we have proof he’s a hippie. The Hawaiian-raised President of the United States has reversed yet another George W. Bush policy, ordering the Justice Department to stop prosecuting marijuana “compassion clubs.” California and a dozen other states have okayed the medical use of pot, but the Bush administration ignored state wishes and continued to bust sick users. No more, apparently.

Los Angeles Times

Desperate Afghan women are setting themselves on fire

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Feeling isolated and desperate due to domestic violence, illiteracy and poverty—one doctor in Kabul says he’s seen at least 80 young women set themselves on fire in the past year, while others beg doctors to kill them. One 20-year-old woman being treated at the burns centre of the provincial hospital in Herat after arguing with her husband said, “Don’t burn yourself. If you want a way out, use a gun: it’s less painful.” The post-Taliban constitution enshrines equal rights for men and women yet much of the country still treats women as second-class citizens.

BBC News

It takes a village

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 9:55 AM - 1 Comment

How much is an entire village in the English countryside worth on the open market? The charitable trust that owns Linkenholt in Hampshire, southern England, is about to find out. The Herbert and Peter Blagrave Charitable Trust has decided to invest its money elsewhere and has put the village up for sale with a starting price of $38-45 million. The price includes 22 houses, a cricket pitch, a village shop, a forge, 1,500 acres of farmland, and 450 acres of woodland. According to the real estate agent handling the sale, even in these turbulent economic times, buying Linkenholt is a “safe and sound investment.”

Reuters

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of March 17th, 2009)

Fiction

1THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows 1 (9)
2 THE KINDLY ONES  by Jonathan Littell 5 (3)
3 HANDLE WITH CARE by Jodi Picoult 3 (2)
4 OLD CITY HALL by Robert Rotenberg 6 (2)
5 THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE by Alan Bradley 2 (5)
6 THE ASSOCIATE by John Grisham 7 (7)
7 THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson 4 (24)
8 CUTTING FOR STONE by Abraham Verghese (1)
9 FALL by Colin McAdam (1)
10 THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE by Joseph Boyden 10 (27)

Non-fiction
1 OUTLIERS by Malcolm Gladwell 2 (16)
2 ANIMALS MAKE US HUMAN by Temple Grandin 4 (5)
3 THE INHERITANCE by David Sanger 7 (4)
4 THE YANKEE YEARS by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci 5 (6)
5 THE CELLO SUITES by Eric Siblin (1)
6 ANGELS AND AGES by Adam Gopnik 3 (6)
7 THE RETURN OF DEPRESSION ECONOMICS by Paul Krugman 8 (3)
8 THE ASCENT OF MONEY by Niall Ferguson 1 (17)
9 SEA SICK by Alanna Mitchell (1)
10 LORDS OF FINANCE by Liaquat Ahmed (1)

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)