It is sometimes worth paying QP some attention

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 12:13 AM - 5 Comments

There is apparently some lament—from no less than the Prime Minister even— that the Liberals didn’t use Question Period this afternoon to follow up Michael Ignatieff’s announcement this morning. Funny thing is, they did.

Indeed, between Michael Ignatieff, John McCallum and Michael Savage they managed to broach the isotope shortage, wonder about the latest deficit projections, claim confusion over government spending on infrastructure and ask if the government might be interested in fixing employment insurance. They moved on then to other concerns.

Funnier thing, they’ve been asking the same sorts of things for awhile now. Months, even. Continue…

TV Guide's "100 Episodes We've Heard Of" List

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 12:04 AM - 12 Comments

TV Guide has published its “Top 100 [U.S.] episodes of all time” list (you can see it reproduced here among other places; the official episode-by-episode countdown is going on at the official site). It’s kind of a depressing list, because most of it was clearly arrived at merely by taking the name of a very famous or popular show and picking the episode that the writers, and/or readers, were most likely to have heard of.

Maybe I’m being unfair, but what are the odds that the most famous episode of a show can be the best episode, over and over again? Not so terrific; in fact, some of these episodes not only have no business on a top 100 of all time list, but are poor episodes by the standards of the shows they come from. I mean, they picked “Fonzie Loves Pinky” from Happy Days, which was closer to the worst episode that show had produced up to that point (worse was yet to come). And in many other cases I think — and this is personal opinion, obviously – they picked fairly unexceptional episodes that had some kind of hook to make them famous: the early Angel episode where Buffy dies yet again, the Scientology episode from South Park, the Dan Quayle episode of Murphy Brown, that not-terribly-funny Gone With the Wind sketch from Carol Burnett. My opinion of those episodes is purely personal; what’s objectively true is that most of the episodes on this list have some kind of external significance – increasing the likelihood that a casual reader will have heard of them – that goes beyond their qualities as television episodes. 

So the impression you would get from that list is that the best episodes are the ones that happen to be remembered for some kind of issue/guest-star/gimmick. As opposed to episodes that are not big, spectacular or attention-grabbing, but happen to be great examples of the art of making a unique/moving/funny/thought-provoking episode of television. It’s like they’re not working with any actual standards for what makes a TV episode good, let alone great.

The last time TV Guide did a list like this, about a decade ago, they were a better publication and assumed a more TV-knowledgeable viewer, so they actually had some episodes on the list that were not the “obvious” choices. “The Contest,” which is now the # 1 episode of all time and shouldn’t be, wasn’t even on that list, because their Seinfeld episode of choice back then was “The Boyfriend” (the Keith Hernandez/JFK) episode — a better episode in my opinion, but certainly not the reflexive choice.

Have a look at their 1997 list. Even adjusting for the fact that the new list needs to drop some of those episodes to make room for the many excellent shows in the last 12 years, that list has many more interesting or un-hackneyed choices of episodes.

Balsillie's bid to buy the Coyotes is rejected

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 11:19 PM - 0 Comments

Jim Balsillie’s US$212.5 million bid to buy the Phoenix Coyotes was rejected by a bankruptcy judge in Arizona. The billionaire’s plan to relocate the team, which has lost a reported $300 million since it moved from Winnipeg to Phoenix in 1996, was a major issue for the court. So was who owned the team—Jerry Moyes, who filed for Chapter 11 in May, or the NHL—and therefore, who had the legal right to sell it.

CTV

Twitter Beats Truncheons

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 10:15 PM - 9 Comments

These are frightening, astonishing, remarkable events going on in Iran, and Andrew Sullivan has been hammering the point home: The protests are being fueled, at least in part, by slippery new technologies that allow people to evade the censors, share information, and organize themselves in a way that would have been impossible even a couple of years ago. This is all impressionistic of course, and all I’m doing is sitting at home “jacking in” as the cyberpunks used to say, i.e. reading blogs and twitterfeeds.

But it all reminds me of a piece by Bruce Sterling, from the early days of the internet, written a half-decade after the Velvet Revolution.  Sterling was in Prague, hanging out with some Czech literary types, and the conversation turned to technology and its influence on events. Back in ’89, students were coordinating the uprising using BBSes and a handful of beat up 300-baud modems. Still, it was hard getting the word out:

And then, without any warning or fanfare, some quiet Japanese guy arrived at the university with a valise full of brand-new and unmarked 2400-baud Taiwanese modems. The astounded Czech physics and engineering students never did quite get this gentleman’s name. He just deposited the modems with them free of charge, smiled cryptically, and walked off diagonally into the winter smog of Prague, presumably in the direction of the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. They never saw him again.

There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that this Japanese guy existed. I’ve talked to four different sources who claim to have seen him in the flesh. The students immediately used these red-hot 2400-baud scorcher modems to circulate manifestos, declarations of solidarity, rumors, and riot news. Unrest grew steadily. By late November, Václav Havel and the older-generation dissident intelligentsia were playing a big role in the demonstrations. Then the general populace took to the streets, and without Red Army backing, the puppet regime collapsed like a rotten marshmallow. By mid-December, the Civic Forum was in power.

Read the whole thing.

Peace in our time

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 9:46 PM - 3 Comments

Tim Powers predicts as much, though perhaps merely in an attempt to seem more conciliatory than Mr. Silver. On a side note, we should stop describing our version of democracy in terms that imply some sort of painful burden. Iranian readers may find that unseemly.

Tehran today

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 9:29 PM - 14 Comments

“Longing on a large scale is what makes history” — Don DeLillo

Damn, Adam, that's cold

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 8:47 PM - 62 Comments

Adam Radwanski writes the cruellest paragraph I’ve read about Michael Ignatieff from a writer who could, reasonably, be expected to like the guy:

Dion’s problem was that he had a vision; he just couldn’t find the right words to sell it. Ignatieff has managed to flip things around; time after time, he articulately ties himself into knots trying to get around the fact that he has very little to say.

It is cruel, of course, in a way that inaccurate criticism could never be.

Twitter hits the big leagues

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 8:26 PM - 0 Comments

Ok, now I’m impressed:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

MUSIC: The new kid

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 8:24 PM - 0 Comments

I knew this wouldn’t take long. Youtube has video of Branford Marsalis with his new drummer, Justin Faulkner (who is one of five young drummers profiled by the estimable Ben Ratliff this weekend in the New York Times). (Here’s a review of the gig in the Youtube video.) The whole band sounds really good here — Branford with that cute Sonny Rollins thing at 0:20-0:22 and a good-natured, tremendously lyrical solo in general, Joey Calderazzo showing how much taste and depth he’s (*cough* finally *cough*) acquired.

Eric Revis’ bass solo is interesting: he watches Faulkner so closely and walks so prosaically this must be part of the young man’s schooling. In 1999 when I saw Branford’s quartet at the Village Vanguard, Revis was the new guy in the band; he would lean into a solo so hard, trying to nail the band’s concept, and Branford, who can be a hard guy to please, would just smile and shake his head at the end: That’s not it. Eventually Revis made his way through the hazing. Faulkner sounds like he’ll be OK too. The song, of course, is “It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” Bands that play it almost never swing. This one does.

It's a date

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 7:53 PM - 8 Comments

Messrs. Ignatieff and Harper are now scheduled to meet on Tuesday. If Mr. Ignatieff’s estimation earlier today was correct, it’ll be the first time the two have enjoyed each other’s company since January.

About Mary Magdalene, I should have been more careful

By John Geddes - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 7:43 PM - 4 Comments

I fear this post might expose me to a world of passionate argument that I am neither equipped nor inclined to enter. But here goes. I apologize to any readers of this week’s issue of Maclean’s who were offended by my use of the phrase “New Testament prostitute” to describe the subject of Titian’s painting “St. Mary Magdalene in Penitence.”
Continue…

The Commons: A stare down

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 7:07 PM - 19 Comments

The Scene. Michael Ignatieff, in dark suit and white shirt, his tie red with white stripes, strode into the National Press Theatre and placed his notes on the wooden podium in front of him. He attempted first to make himself clear.

“The Liberal party is not seeking an election,” he said. “We want parliament to work. We want to replace confrontation with cooperation.”

There was a caveat. There is always a caveat. “But,” Mr. Ignatieff continued, “we need the Prime Minister to deliver the accountability Canadians expect from their government.”

He began then to tell the woeful tale: of the fall economic update that nearly ate Canada, of political crisis and untended recession, not to mention those allegations of sedition.

“There is no coalition,” he assured.

The nation let slip a heavy sigh of relief.

He traced his party’s previous demands that the government report regularly to Parliament on its progress. He dismissed the Bloc and NDP as parties of perpetual opposition. He asserted his intent to one day win the right to govern. And then he arrived at the central concern of this warm Monday morning in June.

“We listened to the Prime Minister. We studied the report carefully and we consulted with Canadians,” he assured. “And we have serious questions about this report and the government’s performance.”

This was now assuredly not going to end well, serious questions not particularly tolerated in this Ottawa.
Continue…

The day in video

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 6:57 PM - 4 Comments

Michael Ignatieff’s press conference is (in three parts) here, here and here.

Stephen Harper’s press conference is here.

Michael Ignatieff talks to CTV here.

Jack Layton talks to CTV here.

Gilles Duceppe talks to CTV here.

Video of a cat playing with a cardboard box, after the jump. Continue…

British Vogue retouching photos to make models fatter

By John Intini - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 6:53 PM - 0 Comments

Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, is being hailed for criticizing the fashion industry’s “size-zero” obsession. In a “strongly worded” letter that was leaked to the media, Shulman blasts prominent fashion houses for forcing magazines to hire models with “jutting bones and no breasts or hips” by supplying “minuscule” garments for photo shoots. So dire is the situation, Shulman writes, that Vogue is now frequently “retouching” photographs to make models look larger. The influential editor’s intervention has been hailed as a turning point in debate over model size in Britain since the death of three models from complications relating to malnutrition, and the decision by prominent fashion shows to ban size-zero models.

London Times

Iran: A nation in chaos

By John Intini - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 6:23 PM - 0 Comments

On Monday, a pro-government militia fired into a crowd protesting the results of Iran’s election, killing one man and wounding several others. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad descended on Tehran’s Freedom Square to denounce Ahmadinejad’s victory in Friday’s election over reformist leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. Earlier in the day, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered a review of the disputed election results. U.S. officials have said they are “deeply troubled” by the appearance of voting irregularities, as well as the government’s reaction to the protests. Meanwhile, Mousavi isn’t holding out hope the review of the elections will bear fruit. “I have appealed to the Guardian Council but I’m not very optimistic about their judgment,” he reportedly told supporters at a rally in Tehran. “Many of its members during the election were not impartial and supported the government candidate.”

The London Times — in pictures
AP
AFP
Reuters
BBC Video

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom (er)

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 6:13 PM - 3 Comments

Did you hear about the re-emergence of Moses Znaimer in Canadian television? His company, ZoomerMedia, has purchased VisionTV, the longtime “multi-faith, multicultural” religion channel, from the not-for-profit company that used to own it.

While I haven’t watched much of the channel lately, it is — or used to be — kind of a “mainline” religion channel, one that had a few of the evangelical shows but tended to veer more toward serious, questioning discussions of religion. (In the ’90s, they were the channel where I first encountered Ingmar Bergman movies; they showed a weekly festival of Bergman crisis-of-faith movies like The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly.) According to the Wikipedia entry, evangelical viewers have tended to abandon Vision in favour of the more conservative, evangelically-oriented CTS (which has been slowly inching toward semi-national status for two years), and that’s probably the case.

Like I said, I haven’t seen much Vision lately, but in its early years it was a rather good place to see some documentaries, TV plays and movies you wouldn’t see in many other places, often dealing with the issues about faith, the universe, and so on — not programs that demanded you be religious, but just that you be interested in these questions. But a religious channel that caters to mainline liberal religion is probably a lost cause these days, where the most-rapidly growing denominations in North America are conservative evangelicals and non-religious people.

I don’t know what Znaimer’s plans are for Vision, if he intends to use it for an entirely new programming block or make something that’s an outgrowth of Vision’s current orientation. Znaimer’s company is targeting aging baby boomers (hence “Zoomer”) and the purpose of the Vision purpose is to give him a channel whose audience is mostly in that age range. What he’s going to do with it, I don’t know, but if he’d bring back the old wacky, self-mocking announcements from CityTV, I’d be very happy.

The NAC at 40

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 5:08 PM - 11 Comments

The National Arts Centre celebrated its 40^th anniversary with a big bash.

Laureen Harper (right) and Aline Chrétien.

Laureen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

Continue…

Ignatieff's response to the response to the response

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 5:07 PM - 12 Comments

The Liberal leader’s on the television right now saying he’d like to meet with the Prime Minister tomorrow.

'I really can't call the odds'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:45 PM - 1 Comment

The transcript of Jack Layton’s scrum after QP today. Continue…

UPDATED: Iran: Obama's turn now

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:36 PM - 26 Comments

Yes, what is happening in Tehran is not about the U.S. president. And yes, if he jams his nose too far into Iran’s business he risks weakening the popular uprising by sapping its legitimacy. But George Packer points out the limits of “realism,” and the danger that it can turn into culpable legitimization of a regime whose legitimacy is dying. Money quote:

“With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, in a few reported cases, killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Iran’s cities, for the Obama Administration to continue parsing equivocal phrases serves no purpose other than to make it look feckless. Part of realism is showing that you have a clear grasp of reality—that you know the difference between decency and barbarism when both are on display for the whole world to see…

“…The tens of millions of Iranians who voted for change and are the long-term future of that country will always remember what America said and did when they put their lives on the line for their values.”

UPDATE: Obama speaks on events in Iran:

Ottawa's new fund to back "green" forest industry capital spending

By John Geddes - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:36 PM - 2 Comments

The federal government is preparing to announce a major fund to support capital spending by Canadians forest products companies—a measure designed to compete with a controversial multibillion-dollar U.S. subsidy scheme for pulp mills.

Government and industry officials familiar with the Canadian plan, which is being developed by Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt’s department, told Maclean’s they expect the plan to be announced by the middle of this week.
Continue…

The Obama effect on the Middle East

By John Parisella - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:14 PM - 5 Comments

When Lebanon’s elections went to a pro-West coalition last week, hopes were soon raised in the western media that Iranian voters would choose a similar patch and oust incumbent Mahmud Ahmadinejad from office. While still hotly contested, it would appear the election will instead leave Iran with the status quo. There was similar anticipation ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech that he might use the opportunity to respond to the initiative Obama launched in Cairo. His speech fell short of what Obama asked and it has been widely panned in both Gaza and the West Bank by the Palestinian leadership. The pessimists about peace in our lifetime are certainly reinforced by the events of the last 48 hours.

Already, Republican spokespersons like Representative Mike Pence are calling on Obama to move away from what he called “the olive branch and apology”-strategy to a more hardline stance. In other words, go back to the approach and policies of the Bush-Cheney years. Others are concluding that there is no Obama effect in the Middle East. This morning, the New York Times editorialized that Ahmadinejad may now have a stronger hand. Soon, opinion leaders will surmise that Obama may have to change course. I disagree.

Continue…

'Act like a grown-up'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:11 PM - 10 Comments

Rob Silver preemptively dismisses the Prime Minister’s just-delivered dismissal.

Michael Ignatieff has given Stephen Harper possibly the easiest opportunity to continue governing as Prime Minister a minority leader has ever faced. If, as I fully expect, Harper shows Michael Ignatieff the proverbial small flying animal, consider what it means … These aren’t conditions, it is an invitation to the PM to act like a grown-up. I fully expect the invitation to be rejected out of hand.

Sign language

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 4:09 PM - 10 Comments

Scrumming after QP, Denis Coderre, John McCallum and reporters debate the Prime Minister’s disposition. Continue…