American Idol: Adam Lambert and some other guy

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 9:13 PM - 9 Comments

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And so then there were two. Which is to say then there was one. Just one undeserving contestant with a chance to beat Adam Lambert. Just one undeserving contestant standing between us and a heated debate over America’s willingness to accept a possibly gay American Idol.

It’s Adam Lambert. It’s some other guy. We’re either getting the most compelling Idol in the show’s history or we’re reigniting the culture wars. We can’t lose.

Herein a running diary of this season’s penultimate episode of American Idol. It’ll be like a live blog. Only with the benefit of me having more time to work out the jokes.

8:00pm. Ryan Seacrest opens the show in an expensive-looking suit. Is there anyone in pop culture whose success is more disproportionate to his identifiable talents? He’s a sort of genius.

8:05pm. Our first commercial break and our first Conservative attack ad.

8:09pm. Adam’s up first. In an interview with his parents we learn that he was a troublesome child who screamed a lot. Which is remarkable and telling because that only describes approximately 64% of all infants.

8:10pm. Adam reprises his Gary Jules-inspired version of the Tears for Fears’ classic Mad World. Dry ice and spooky lights. Lambert looks like a cross between David Bowie and the Undertaker.

8:13pm. Randy Jackson gives him an A for Adam. Randy Jackson is basically a Seasame Street character brought to life.

8:15pm. Next up it’s Kris Allen. Apparently he convinced his parents to pay him to sing when he was a child. Which is altogether rather impressive.

8:17pm. Ain’t No Sunshine on the piano. There are a dozen hotel bars in the southeastern United States that regularly feature more interesting performers.

8:18pm. Judges commence over-enthusing about Allen’s performance so as to justify the next 45 minutes and guard themselves against an upset tomorrow night. “You awaken the spirit in all of us,” says Paula. You get the feeling Paula would say the same thing to her Starbucks barista in the morning.

8:23pm. Adam puts on a silver suit to perform A Change is Gonna Come. Oh the potential subtext. Oh the potential awkwardness. Strangely, it’s pretty decent.

8:28pm. Paula Abdul orgasms.

8:29pm. After giving round one to Kris, Simon tries to claim this puts Adam “back in the game.”

8:30pm. Cut to shot of Katie Holmes in the crowd covering Suri’s ears. Scientology jokes are way too easy to make at this point.

8:35pm. Back from commercial, Kris performs an acoustic version of What’s Going On? These two songs were apparently selections of the show’s producer, Simon Fuller. Is Fuller feeling a bit down about the world these days? Barack Obama got elected, dude. Everything’s cool now.

8:38pm. Simon and Randy agree it wasn’t enough. Kara DioGuardi tries to explain Kris’ vast potential to initiate social change. Or something. Paula Abdul orders a venti, no-foam, extra-hot, soy latte.

8:39pm. “Lot of symbolism tonight,” says Ryan. Er. Okay.

8:43pm. Now the two finalists perform what would be their first, instantly forgettable, single if they win, this one written by DioGuardi. Shockingly it’s about reaching for your dreams and climbing mountains and facing hurricanes and not giving up and there being no boundaries. It’s actually an interesting test. Give a singer a terrible song and see if they can salvage anything.

8:46pm. Adam gets through it. Kara claps for her own song.

8:47pm. Simon laughs at the mountains and hurricanes, declines to judge the song directly and instead just praises Lambert in general. As he’s laughing about the lyrics, you can hear Kara saying, “I know, I know.” Which is an interesting way of conceding the awfulness of your work.

8:53pm. After another commercial, Kris gives it a try. He keeps tapping his chest. Possibly in attempt to suppress the vomit.

8:55pm. “You should be very proud of what you’ve done in this competition,” Randy says. So, that sucked.

8:56pm. “I don’t want you to be judged on that song,” Kara says. So, yeah, that really sucked.

8:56pm. “I wish you the best of luck,” Paula says. So, er, good luck then.

8:57pm. Simon says Kris has made his parents proud. Ha.

9:00pm. And now Carrie Underwood is singing to a montage review of the season. There’s the blind guy. And the girl in the bikini. And the guy in the bunny suit. And a bunch of other contestants you’ve already forgotten and will never hear from again. Ah, memories.

9:03pm. And that’s it. Back tomorrow for the results. Bring your blunt objects and best window-smashing gloves. We’ll be proceeding directly to the riot if Adam doesn’t win.

Coyne v. Wells on those Tory attack ads

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 7:50 PM - 0 Comments

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Coyne v. Wells on those Tory attack ads

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 7:47 PM - 118 Comments

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'Don’t call him Steve'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 7:41 PM - 10 Comments

Stephen Harper crashes a wedding.

About those attack ads

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 6:33 PM - 42 Comments

I happen to like attack ads. The anti-Dion gambit, for example, was as effective as it was cruel, and it certainly beat the hell out of that sweater-vest campaign. So I won’t be joining the chorus of people who think these (or any other) ads will be the downfall of Canadian democracy. I think electing poo-tossing monkeys to do a circus routine every day in the House of Commons has pushed that along much further than any attack ad ever could.

That doesn’t mean I like these ads—the French ones, especially. If anything, they seem to show just how out of touch the Conservatives are with Quebec and Francophones in general.

Michael Ignatieff was out of the country for a long while, doing academic-y stuff: Continue…

Israel at 61, quality food, students join senator in elevator

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 5:31 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Friends of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Canada-Israel Committee held a special reception on the Hill in honour of Israel’s 61^st year of independence.

Toronto-area Tory MP Peter Kent and Merle Goldman, Associate National Director of the Canadian Friends of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Conservative B.C. MP James Lunney, Chair of the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group.

Continue…

Woody Allen’s image not free for the taking

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:47 PM - 0 Comments

Director Woody Allen’s case against American Apparel Inc. won’t be going to court after all. The clothier has agreed to pay Allen US$5 million for using his image on billboards in New York and Los Angeles without his permission. Allen was initially seeking more than $10 million over the appearance of ads featuring images from “Annie Hall,” which show the director dressed up as a rabbi. According to Allen, the settlement is the “largest reported amount ever paid under the New York right to privacy law,” but American Apparel founder Dov Charney remains unremorseful. “I am not sorry for expressing myself,” he said.

The New York Times 

Nobel winner back in Turkish court

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:46 PM - 1 Comment

Novelist Orhan Pamuk can’t shake remarks he made to a Swiss magazine in 2005, that “30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” That caused him to be charged and tried for “public denigration of Turkish identity” under Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code later that year, but the case was subsequently dropped in the wake of international outrage. Now he’s facing compensation claims from six individuals—including nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, who has filed cases in the past against Pamuk—who have been given leave to demand $30,000 in personal damages arising from the “insult” to Turkishness. Their claim has been rejected twice previously, but was yesterday upheld by the country’s highest appeals court. The case will now be reassessed. The legal assault, perhaps not coincidentally, comes at a time when a new novel from Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, has become a bestseller in Turkey, raising Pamuk’s popularity in his homeland.The Museum of Innocence is the story of one man’s lifelong unrequited love. “It’s about virginity, about the policing of women who don’t follow the rules,” said his British translator Maureen Freely. “It’s very controversial in its way, putting down things that have never been admitted to before by a male writer.”
The Guardian

Grim weekend mars start of summer in B.C.

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:44 PM - 1 Comment

A treacherous Victoria Day long weekend in British Columbia has left an alarming nine dead, including a six-year-old boy who fell into the icy Lynn Creek in North Vancouver. There were three drownings, three people were killed in car crashes, two more died in hiking or camping incidents and one was killed after falling from a cliff in an ATV quad. RCMP spokesperson, Cpl. Chris Newel was at a loss to explain the number of deaths. “I think it’s one of the first long weekends of the spring. People tend to go out and they start to do things and I think judgment is sometimes impaired,” said Newel.
The Province

A tale of two Iraq wars

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:43 PM - 1 Comment

Along with Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Robert Gates, Richard Haass is one of only a handful of people to have been at the highest rungs of the U.S. government for both Iraq wars. Haass was a special advisor to George H. W. Bush when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, and served as the director of policy planning in the State Department when the younger Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. In his new book, War of Necessity, War of Choice, Haass argues that, despite their similarities, the two wars are marked by one crucial difference: whereas the first military operation in Iraq was borne of obligation, the second war was elective. Haass left the State Department in 2003 to become the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Q: Is there a moral distinction to be made between wars of necessity and wars of choice?

A: No. Wars of choice can be moral. For example, many people would argue that what the West did in Bosnia and Kosovo was truly moral even though it was a war of choice. And I expect there would be those who would go so far as to say that when the world chose not to intervene in Rwanda was immoral.

Wars of choice are just that—they’re choices. Usually, the interests involved are less than vital and there are other policy options. To me, though, it’s not a question of morality. When I call something a “war of choice,” it’s simply a description. It’s not a value judgment.

Q: Along with Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda, you’ve also said Vietnam was a war of choice. Do modern wars tend to be wars of choice?

A: There’s nothing particularly modern about discretionary wars. I haven’t done a thorough study, but I would bet that most wars in history are wars of choice.

But after 9/11, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was a war of necessity. If North Korea attacked South Korea tomorrow, that would obviously be a war of necessity.

Continue…

'One step ahead of the chimps'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:43 PM - 2 Comments

Amy Langstaff writes to defend the honour of honourable heckling.

It is not an excess of heckling that is undermining parliamentary debate, but the fact that the environment is so devoid of real attention that a first-rate heckle – crisp, witty, penetrating – is impossible. When a good heckle hits its mark, it’s like the heckler has thrown a match into a tinder pile of inarticulate dissent, which ignites into laughter. A heckle can be a shining moment of intelligence and humanity in an otherwise dull, pompous, or unfocused gathering. Where there is good heckling there is substance and shared attention; heckling is a delicate verbal act that reminds the speaker that the audience, though silent, is dangerously alert. The challenge to our system is not to suppress the conflict that is a normal part of politics. It is to make discussions in the House substantive enough that they are worth listening to – at the very least for MPs, and at best for all Canadians.

Tamils, physicians and foie gras

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:11 PM - 6 Comments

Stockwell Day writes to his constituents.

Escaping the artificial climate of Ottawa and breathing in the fresh air of home is vital for one’s sanity.

No name travel

By Nina Slawek, Takeoffeh.com - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 2:19 PM - 0 Comments

You know your favourite brands intimately, call them by name: “Has anyone seen my Levis? My Dockers? My Nikes?”

Most people would agree that a week-long holiday deserves a little more purchase consideration than a pair of jeans, yet, if you’re like most Canadians, you don’t have a clue which brand you ‘travel.’

The question is – should you? Recent events would indicate the answer to that is a resounding “yes!” But buying travel by brand is a little more complicated than finding your true boot-cut fit.

Continue…

Obama at Notre Dame

By John Parisella - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 1:24 PM - 15 Comments

With his landmark speech on race last year in Philadelphia, Obama showed Americans he does not avoid facing controversial issues head on. Obama was put in a similarly difficult position this weekend when he was awarded an honoris causis degree from the University of Notre Dame, a legendary Catholic institution known for its academic excellence and famed football teams. His presence was not without controversy, as some members of the Catholic community questioned the appropriateness of honouring someone whose views on abortion and stem cell research don’t mesh with those of the Church. And just like he did with his speech on race, Obama did not shy away from expressing his views.

His speech at Notre Dame emphasized the need for respect and the finding of common ground on working to reduce abortions. Obama did not budge on his views and showed much courage in accepting the invitation and discussing the issue before a Catholic audience. By all indications, the president was a hit.

The speech reminded me of one delivered at the same university by the then-governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, on the subject of abortion. Then as now, there was controversy. The Catholic Cuomo argued that a politician can be faithful to the teachings of his Church, but must govern in a pluralistic society where those teachings can be at odds with the views of others. Obama essentially made the same argument and in so doing showed once again his presidential leadership.

Shameless plugging in our time

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:58 PM - 0 Comments

One of the things I’m involved in these days – the other major things being operating a speechwriting business, writing a magazine column and nurturing an online poker addiction – is a relatively new venture called Public Voice. You can find it here at PublicVoice.tv.

Basically my role is to be the Interviewer who sits down and asks questions of various Thinkers, a differentiation I strive to preserve by going for hours at a time without having a thought of my own. Think of me as a cue card, but without the charisma.

Anyhoo, give it a look if you’re a) interested in probing the fundamental social and political policy questions of our time, or b) bored. It’s very much a project in its infancy. There are plans afoot to make it more timely, dynamic, interesting and other things that are good. That said, I’d be happy to pass along any feedback to the big brains and big wallets behind it.

'This reaction is almost entirely irrelevant'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:47 PM - 8 Comments

Adam Radwanski reminds us of his limited influence.

The Conservatives surely were not banking on positive reviews, because attack ads rarely if ever get them.  They’re no doubt prepared to take a short-term hit, maybe even  a couple of points in the polls, because these ads are about the long game – the idea being that the anger against them will have faded come election time, but the impressions they’ve helped set of Michael Ignatieff will linger.

Love Land gets dumped

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:41 PM - 0 Comments

The large female mannequin legs that marked the entrance to the sex theme park Love Land were pulled down over the weekend after officials in the Chinese city of Chongqing closed the park. Love Land’s manager said the aim of the park was to educate the public about sex (it was to include sex technique workshops and giant models of genitals, among other things). But even though prostitution is openly practiced in China, it is a country where sex is usually not so openly discussed. Many complained about Love Land after stories appeared in the local media. The controversial park was shut down even before construction was finished.

New York Times

Chuck Saves the World, Subway Saves Chuck

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:38 PM - 0 Comments

NBC’s cult favourite Chuck, about a geeky twentysomething who moonlights as a super-spy, will be coming back for a third season despite low ratings. The reason the network is bringing it back is that they were able to get some extra money by tying the show in even further with its sponsor, Subway restaurants: the title character might be moving from his job at the generic “Buy More” chain to the real-life Subway chain—or it might be his female lead, played by Yvonne Strahovski, “selling Subway sandwiches.” When the show returns after the Olympics, every episode will prominently feature Subway and its sandwiches. Subway gets a chance to sell its products to the young viewers who fast-forward through the commercials.

TV Decoder

Kill your mother and go to Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:37 PM - 3 Comments

Anne Dorval and Xavier Dolan "I Killed My Mother"

While masters as old as Alain Resnais (who’s 86) climb the red stairs to the high altar of the main competition, no one gets more excited in Cannes than young filmmakers premiering their first films to triumphant acclaim. Yesterday, in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar program I saw a remarkable feature debut by Xavier Dolan, a Quebec actor/writer/director who just turned 20. Despite the title, J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) is semi-autobiographical. And although no one dies, it’s about the murderous hatred between an cocky, gay 17-year-old kid living alone with a single mother, whose behavour irritates the hell out of him. Dolan first dashed off the script’s first draft at the age of 17, then went on to direct and star in the film, which he financed largely with his own savings from working as a child actor. Continue…

Cocaine’s Rewards

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

The high derived from cocaine use is interpreted by the brain as a reward, according to new research by scientists at McGill University in Montreal. They studied 10 non-addicted drug users who alternated between sniffing cocaine and a placebo powder and found their brains secreted dopamine, a chemical that is like a reward-response. The more coke that a participant had taken in the past, the more his brain secreted dopamine. The researchers say that this information may help in developing treatment against drug addiction.

McGill University

Ethiopia to head back into Somalia

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:34 PM - 0 Comments

In a sign that Somalia’s long-running insurgency could once again draw in neighbouring countries, Ethiopian troops have reportedly entered Somali territory and dug in around a strategic town. Ethiopian soldiers invaded Somalia in 2006 to oust Islamist militias that had taken over much of the country and to restore a United Nations-backed government. They officially pulled out earlier this year. The Islamist militias have meanwhile continued to expand their reach—a development that Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country, views with alarm.

Washington Post

The Internet used for good

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:31 PM - 0 Comments

The first step in treating addiction is always admitting you have a problem. But only 10 to 20 per cent of alcohol abusers actually seek help, which often involves group meetings like AA. Now, a promising web-based intervention that can be done at home on the computer is making it easier for drinkers quit. The Drinking Less program was developed in the Netherlands, and combines motivational and cognitive-behavioural therapy plus self-control and goal-setting. Of the 378 study participants, 18.8 per cent reduced their alcohol consumption within six months to a low-risk range. The researchers say this program is an important first step in helping alcoholics recognize and treat their addiction.

Science Daily

When are North American cars not really North American?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:21 PM - 3 Comments

According to Canadian Auto Workers president Ken Lewenza, in order for the federal and provincial governments to “maximize their return from GM and Chrysler and possibly Ford,” limits should be imposed on the number of cars the automakers can import into Canada. GM recently revealed to the U.S. Congress that it plans to start importing small cars from China beginning in 2011 as part of its plan to become profitable again. The union representing its workers has long complained that manufacturers in countries like South Korea and China are protected by national trade barriers that prevent Canadian-made cars from being sold there. But GM’s plan to import small cars threatens to derail critical negotiations aimed at reducing production costs between the union and the automaker. GM must reach a deal with its workers by June 1 to qualify for billions in government aid from governments on both sides of the border.

Toronto Star

'If he chooses to mislead the public, he can expect strenuous, factual resistance'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 12:03 PM - 25 Comments

The Toronto Star checks the Prime Minister’s statements in the House last week.

Stephen Harper is welcome to tell the 350,000 workers who have lost their jobs since October that Canada has a “very generous employment insurance system.” He is free to claim, “the system we have in place meets the needs of the market.”

But when the Prime Minister resorts to fabrication to deflect demands for EI reform, he crosses the line.