Oscar Wilde, Vatican favourite

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 1:22 PM - 1 Comment

Only a few days after making peace with Harry Potter, the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano ran a glowing review of a new book about the Victorian era’s most famous open homosexual. Wilde was “one of the personalities of the 19th century who most lucidly analyzed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects,” wrote author Andrea Monda in a piece about Italian writer Paolo Gulisano’s The Portrait of Oscar Wilde. Wilde was baptized into the Catholic Church shortly before he died, and L’Osservatore Romano was happy to cite one of his quips on his conversion: Catholicism, Wilde claimed, was “for saints and sinners alone—for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”

The Guardian

Police may have found Tori Stafford’s remains

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 7 Comments

Police Commissioner Julian Fantino said this morning that human remains found northeast of Woodstock, Ont., may be those of Tori Stafford. The eight-year-old girl has been missing since April 8. Since then, police have been searching for her body in the Guelph and Fergus, Ont., areas, south of where the remains of a “young child” were discovered at about noon on Sunday. “We have some very strong leads that cause us to believe that we have in fact located the human remains of Tori Stafford,” Fantino said. Two Woodstock residents – Michael Rafferty and Terri-Lynne McClintic, have been charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder, in connection with Tori’s disappearance. McClintic has been assisting investigators’ search for the child’s body. The remains will be taken to Toronto for forensic investigation.

The Canadian Press

Should the U.S. use Canada as a model for its health-care reforms?

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 12:28 PM - 35 Comments

'The cultural collapse of television in Britain'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 12:08 PM - 4 Comments

Former Late Show co-host Sarah Dunant considers her former colleague and what they might do next.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all to find Michael now involved in politics. He is a substantial man, a man of sublime intelligence and taste,” says Dunant, 59. ”But I’m sure that Michael has found that the journey from being one thing to another takes time. It’s a bit like turning around an oil tanker. In my case, it has taken 10 years to change the perception from `Sarah is a television host who sometimes writes novels’ to `Sarah is a novelist who in the past did some television.’

… ”The Late Show was an extraordinary show, which you would not now see on British television, such has been the cultural collapse of television in Britain,” she says. “Now the only show that would want Michael or I back is Celebrity Big Brother and I’m not sure that he nor I would wish to be in that house.”

Refreshing candour

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:59 AM - 12 Comments

The Prime Minister’s press secretary concedes that the last person you can trust right now is an economist.

“This is all highly hypothetical. This question is tied directly to the global economic recovery and when you think that will be – and what speed you think that will be, which is hypothetical by its very nature,” Prime Minister’s Office spokesman Kory Teneycke said. “One thing you can count on over the last number of months since the economy started to slow down is that predictions from economic analysts have been consistently off.”

Just visiting

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:54 AM - 2 Comments

Back now from a week in New York, arriving there just in time to see Tim Hortons take up residence in the urban, cosmopolitan mecca of North America. Sad to see a Canadian political analogy so swiftly undermined, but such is the cost of progress.

Parliamentary penny pinching

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

“Find a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck” — unless, of course, that penny happens to be at the bottom of the Centennial Flame fountain on Parliament Hill, in which case you may end up with the Mounties in hot pursuit. According to Canwest, an internal RCMP document on Hill security orders officers on the Peace Tower beat to take a zero tolerance approach to parliamentary penny pinching, noting that “the public perception of police inaction or tolerance of this behaviour is unacceptable.” Although the document acknowledges that laying charges would likely be “inappropriate” except under extreme circumstances, it nevertheless instructs officers to intervene “to ensure the activity is stopped”. According to the RCMP, that means patting down the pilferers, and putting any purloined pennies back in the pool.

Canwest News Service

"Shock, grief, shame and outrage"

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

The wife and daughters of Earl Jones have spoken out about the controversy surrounding the Montreal investment broker, expressing “shock, grief, shame and outrage” over reports Jones may have bilked investors out of as much as $100 million. Jones’s wife, Maxine, and daughters, Kimberly and Kristine, released a statement Sunday saying they will “co-operate fully” with the investigation into the alleged Ponzi scheme, with one daughter revealing that even she and her husband have been left “financially exposed” by the scandal. “The Earl Jones who has been revealed in recent days is a man we can scarcely believe exists,” the statement read. Maxine, Kimberly and Kristine also apologized to Jones’s clients and said they hoped Jones, whose whereabouts remain unknown, would “come forward and provide an explanation.”

The Gazette

Space station toilet "out of service"

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:31 AM - 0 Comments

Mission Control has instructed astronauts to hang an “out of service” sign on the toilet at the International Space Station (ISS), currently home to a record 13 astronauts, until it can be fixed. In the meantime, Endeavour’s crew is using the toilet on board their space shuttle; other ISS residents are using a backup toilet in the Russian part of the station, the BBC reports. If worse comes to worst, NASA reports that “Apollo-era urine collection bags” are available. The toilet, which is Russian-made and cost millions of dollars, was launched into space and attached to the US side of the ISS last year. It has broken down once before, prompting space shuttle Discovery to rush up a replacement part in 2008. And this isn’t the only time the ISS toilet has caused friction among astronauts: last year, a Russian crew member complained of being blocked from using the U.S. toilet due to billing and cost concerns.

BBC News

MUSIC: Drum solo of the day

By Paul Wells - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:27 AM - 4 Comments

From a New York band called Mostly Other People Do The Killing. A satire on jazz, played by reasonably good jazz musicians. Things reach their logical conclusion at about 2:20. I like how, once he’s blown into his cymbal stand, he keeps on blowing into his cymbal stand, as though it was a concept. Comic genius, ladies and gentlemen.

Speed kills

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 10:53 AM - 0 Comments

Speed kills, especially since 1995. That’s when the federal law mandating a 55 mph speed limit in every State was revoked. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago have found that ever since each State has been allowed to set its own speed limits there has been a dramatic increase in deaths. About 12,500 people died between 1995 and 2005 in car crashes, proving that policy makers need to rethink speed and road safety in the U.S. Besides lowering speed limits, the researchers suggest setting up speed camera networks, which exist in England, France and Australia and have drastically reduced the number of auto accident deaths. The findings are published in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Science Daily

No progress in Honduras

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 10:43 AM - 3 Comments

Crisis talks in Honduras have broken down after two days. The interim government will not agree to “the legitimate restitution” of ousted President Manual Zelaya. And representatives of Mr. Zelaya say they’re done talking with the opposing regime. The week’s mediations were led by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who met with both parties to present a seven-point proposal. That proposal mandated Zelaya’s return to the presidency, but also provided safeguards for interim government supporters – including amnesty for all political crimes committed before and after the June 28 coup. Zelaya was forced into exile on June 28 after the military overthrew his government. “The Zelaya delegation fully accepted my proposal, but not that of the [interim President] Don Roberto Micheletti,” Arias explained. He urged for both sides to resume talks in three days, or risk “a civil war and bloodshed that the Honduran people do not deserve.”

BBC News

Kids, turn in your wine glasses

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

A third of 11-year-olds in Milan have alcohol-related problems, authorities say. Now, the parents of those thirsty tweens will have to pay. In an effort to curb binge drinking among teenagers, Milan has banned the consumption and sale of alcohol to children under the age of 16. Officials have also slapped a new 500 Euro fine on parents of under-age kids caught drinking wine and spirits. But not everyone is happy with the new regulations. Italian families are used to giving young children wine as a treat at parties. And bar owners resent being made to act as alcohol police. Currently, a national law bans the sale of alcohol to under-16s, but it is only loosely enforced.

BBC News

Baby surprise

By Cathy Gulli - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 7 Comments

It was early in the morning when Kimberlie Bunch woke up with excruciating stomach cramps and nausea. As the aching in her right side got worse, she worried that her appendix might burst. When Bunch’s boyfriend came home from work, he found her writhing in agony, surrounded by unexplained blood splatters. They rushed to the ER, where the nurse asked if Bunch was pregnant. The answer was an unequivocal no: Bunch was using birth control, had irregular periods, and hadn’t gained weight.

But within minutes, a doctor told Bunch that she was in labour. “At that point I thought I was dreaming,” recalled Bunch on an episode of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, a paranoia-inducing TV show documenting women who experience a condition called “denial of pregnancy.” Unlike concealment of pregnancy, which occurs when a woman hides the fact that she’s expecting, denial of pregnancy happens when she is unaware of being pregnant. After Bunch gave birth, she was dumbfounded. “You’re taught all these things that you should expect when you’re pregnant, like morning sickness and weird cravings,” she said, “but I never had any of that.” Continue…

PBOWatch: There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

By kadyomalley - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 9:36 AM - 18 Comments

So, remember that unanimous committee report on the Parliamentary Budget Office? Turns out that the in camera negotiations played out pretty much exactly as ITQ suspected, right down to the part where it was, indeed, the Liberals — or, at least, the Liberals on that particular committee  – that ultimately came down on the same side as the government on the question of whether the PBO should be liberated from the Library of Parliament.

.From today’s Hill Times:

The NDP and Bloc Québécois agreed to set aside the independence issue of Canada’s first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office for another two years when the office is reviewed again in exchange for the PBO’s $1-million budget increase, says Bloc Québécois MP Louis Plamondon.

Mr. Plamondon (Bas Richelieu-Nicolet-Bécancour, Que), a member of the Joint Library of Parliament Committee that reined in Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page last month in a report on the office, said he spoke with Liberal MP Mauril Bélanger (Ottawa-Vanier, Ont.) and told him he was ready to put the issue of the independence of the PBO aside to get the much-needed boost.

Mr. Bélanger discussed it with his Liberal and Conservative colleagues and Mr. Plamondon discussed it with NDP MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.).

Mr. Plamondon said he was pleased the parties agreed to seek consensus because a unanimous report is more likely to be implemented. Mr. Plamondon said the extra $1-million is necessary for Mr. Page to do his job properly, and a dissident report could have compromised its strength.

“I have a deal and I believe it’s the best deal, the unanimous [report] will have more power for having the money and I’m sure with the money in two years we’ll be able to do another fit if it’s necessary,” said Mr. Plamondon.

The committee was divided on the PBO’s independence issue. It fell into two groups. The Liberal and Conservative Members of Parliament wanted the PBO to remain under the Library of Parliament’s jurisdiction while the Bloc and NDP wanted the office to be removed from the Library of Parliament and made independent.

[...]

The controversial report released by the Joint Library of Parliament Committee had observers wondering why members of the four parties, in the House and the Senate, had decided to “shackle” the outspoken budget officer.

Academics, media and Parliamentarians criticized the report because it tied the increase in PBO’s budget to all its recommendations.

The committee said it’s up to the Parliamentarian or committee to decide if reports produced by the Parliamentary Budget Office will be publicly released and said the PBO can’t release reports during election campaigns.

Mr. Page told The Hill Times he was “very disappointed” by the report and admitted his message to strengthen the office’s transparency and accountability didn’t get across to Parliamentarians. Mr. Page also said his office would not be able to produce confidential costing reports. [...]

With the opposition parties divided, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois really didn’t have much choice; getting the rest of the committee to sign on to a recommendation to restore the PBO’s budget was likely the best deal they could get, under the circumstances.

We must close the absurdity gap

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 12 Comments

Where did we go wrong, Canada? France gets as a first lady a supermodel who used to pose naked. Italy gets a prime minister in the midst of yet another sex scandal—this one set off by the revelations of a woman who goes by the nickname Long Thighs. And what do we get? We get a summer’s worth of political debate about the mechanics of Employment Insurance administration. If we’re not careful, they’re going to kick us out of the G8 for this.

The tedium transcends the federal level. Ed Stelmach was grazed by a handful of pie near the beginning of his term as Alberta premier, and has yet to accomplish anything else quite as interesting. Brad Wall of Saskatchewan keeps talking about how everything in his province is going to be all great and awesome thanks to . . . potash!—the four-eyed nerd of the resource world. Meanwhile, reporters in Prince Edward Island got excited recently when rumours began to fly that one of Robert Ghiz’s hairs had been spotted moving. Continue…

Why "Che" tanked and other stories

By Andrew Potter - Monday, July 20, 2009 at 7:46 AM - 38 Comments

While Steven Soderbergh was making Che, the stories leaking out about the on-set goings on made it sound like the poor fellow had met his Don Quixote Apocalypse Now Medellin. In an interview with the Guardian, he more or less admits it was a disaster from the first day:

“You know, for a year after we finished shooting I would still wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Thank God I’m not shooting that film.’”

Does he wish he hadn’t done it?

“Yeah.”

The sad part is, that Soderbergh himself doesn’t really seem to know why he made the film in the first place – he appears to have been somewhat bullied into it by Benicio del Toro. And in an interview he gave with the Globe and Mail when the film was first released, he claimed that he was “agnostic” on Che’s politics, but that he was “just compelled by the fact that he twice gave up everything and put his ass on the line for someone else’s benefit.” Which is a strange reason to make a film about such a controversial figure, to say the least.

Anyway, the interview goes on and gets weirder. Soderbergh blames piracy for the film’s poor showing, and says that he only has a few films left in him, one of which is a biopic of Liberace starring…. Michael Douglas.

I’m not convinced the writer wasn’t being punk’d.

Anyway, did anyone here actually see Che? I tried to go three times, felt sort of obliged to see it. But ultimately, life is just too short.

The SALLY FORTH Dude Analyzes Television

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 11:11 PM - 3 Comments

Frank McCourt dies

By macleans.ca - Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 9:56 PM - 2 Comments

Frank McCourt, the Irish-American school teacher who became a best-selling author in his 60s with the book Angela’s Ashes, died at the age of 78. Angela’s Ashes, about his childhood in Ireland, won the Pulitzer Prize, sold widely, and was made into a film. Two more books followed about his own life, plus the children’s book Angela and the Baby Jesus. McCourt was often seen as the living embodiment of the American Dream, having risen from poverty to wealth, and from obscurity to fame. In 2000, he told Laura T. Ryan of the Syracuse Post-Standard that his post-retirement success was proof that anyone’s life can be good reading: “The only big difference between me and millions is that I wrote this best seller. And I think their lives are best sellers…which is a pretty good line. I just created that line: ‘My life is a best seller.’ ” McCourt was admitted to a New York hospice to be treated for melanoma, and according to his brother Malachy, “he was doing fine but he got meningitis two weeks ago and it turned the whole thing topsy-turvy.”

New York Times

Blue-chip panels and the summer doldrums

By Paul Wells - Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 9:53 PM - 51 Comments

The EI working group prepares to meet (I was told on Friday that it’s already met. At any rate, it’s sort of floating around, never far.) Conservatives refuse to comment and yet somehow produce “subterranean Tory rumblings” that the Liberals are ruining everything. Enthusiasm for the whole project seems to have collapsed. “No one wants to be talking about this right now,” “another Liberal” confides. Here we get an insight into Conservative and Liberal styles. When a Conservative spins off the record, it’s to denigrate what the Liberals are doing. When a Liberal spins off the record, it’s to denigrate what the Liberals are doing.

The phrasing of that last off-the-record quote rang a bell. No one wants to be talking about this right now? When did they want to talk about it right now? Researchers suggest that date may have been May 23, when Michael Ignatieff’s “Make EI Work” op-ed used the phrase “right now” three times.

Fires in B.C. force 11,000 from their homes

By macleans.ca - Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 10:36 AM - 0 Comments

Since the fires broke out on Saturday, 11,000 people from British Columbia’s Okanagan region have been told to flee their homes and another 6,000 are on evacuation alert. Gusty winds and dry conditions are making it difficult for firefighters to fight the blaze that has destroyed at least nine buildings. So are high temperatures, which aren’t expected to dip below 30 C in the Kelowna area until at least next weekend.

CBC

MUSIC: Architecture about dancing. But mostly singing.

By Paul Wells - Friday, July 17, 2009 at 11:16 PM - 14 Comments

An extraordinary event next Thursday in Calgary deserves national attention. In a public show at the Grand Theatre, five architects will present their proposals for the Cantos Music Foundation’s new national music centre, which will be built on the site of the old King Eddy Hotel in Calgary’s East Village.

Cantos has been active in Calgary for several years, and it’s kind of a bunch of things at once. It houses easily the most complete collection of historical keyboard instruments in Canada, from historic and replica harpsichords and fortepianos, to a big old movie-house organ with drums and noisemakers attached, to the piano Elton John used to write Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and assorted electronic keyboards. It’s a peformance space and it organizes musical events in the broader Calgary community. It has music-education programs. And it’s the new home of the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame collection.

But that’s just the beginning of what comes next. My conversations with the people at Cantos suggest they want to move, in one great big step, from being an important Calgary organization to being a significant national institution. The amazing list of architects who’ll be in town pitching their wares on July 23 gives a hint of the scale of that ambition. How’s this for a short list:

• Jean Nouvel, winner of the 2008 Pritzker Prize and designer of more kind of crazy-wonderful buildings than you can shake a stick at, including the Abu Dhabi Louvre and the new Paris Philharmonie. Continue…

Walter Cronkite, 1916-2009

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, July 17, 2009 at 9:14 PM - 2 Comments

This is a big one, though not an unexpected one, since he had been ill for some time. But Walter Cronkite is dead at the age of 92.

No TV news anchor will ever again reach as many people as Cronkite did, for better or worse. Cronkite’s hosting of the CBS Evening News started the same year The Beverly Hillbillies started on TV, and there’s actually a point to bringing that up: just as The Beverly Hillbillies is still the most-watched TV comedy of all time, Cronkite’s CBS duties had more influence than any single news show could have today. He epitomized the function of TV news in a three-channel universe with a still-un-fragmented audience. The point was not so much to be objective — the pretense to objectivity was there, of course, but it is in all TV news-anchoring . (The Cronkite era may have been the last era when the “liberal media” charge actually had a point; there is hardly any “liberal media” on network TV today, but Cronkite worked from what might be called the old New Deal Consensus, and certain assumptions underlay his work, assumptions that had been more or less dominant in both U.S. political parties in the ’50s.) The point was to have authority, and also to appeal to the widest possible audience.

The same principles that hit scripted shows started from — broad appeal, a sense of being just hip enough to appeal to the young and just square enough to appeal to the old — also applied to TV news, and Cronkite was the most famous anchor of that generation because he was the best example of what a successful news host had to be. There will never be another host like him because a single television show can never again have the broad reach it had in the ’60s and ’70s. There are good and bad things about that, but what’s certain is that Cronkite was very good at what he did.

One more thing that’s notable about Cronkite’s CBS Evening News is how incredibly low-tech it was. This was back when TV news departments functioned as though they were semi-independent of the network’s entertainment arm, and part of that was the contempt for production values: no flashy graphics, little music, and very crude video and audio for the correspondents’ reports. Today, there’s no local news show that would have so little showbiz glitz. Of course, this production style helped the show by re-enforcing the idea that the anchor was telling it “the way it is,” that he wasn’t just an entertainer.

Here is the opening of a Cronkite episode from March 17, 1977:

And here is Cronkite anchoring the 1956 Democratic presidential convention:

Palin and the presidency? Not so fast.

By John Parisella - Friday, July 17, 2009 at 5:30 PM - 21 Comments

It is becoming obvious that Sarah Palin is leaving the Alaska governorship in order to become the face of Republican politics. In that role, she will have to respond to Democratic initiatives with criticism and, hopefully, alternative policies. This will have her opposing healthcare reform, environmental policies designed to reduce carbon emissions, and any overtures aimed at jump-starting the peace process in the Middle East. She will fight for lower taxes, less government and a return to a strong national security policy. Sound familiar? It should.

Continue…