Ottawa’s power brokers take a hit

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 7:18 AM - 13 Comments

The 3,664 lobbyists duly registered, as required by law, to try to influence the federal government are hardly a model of professional solidarity. In-house government relations specialists for blue-chip corporations often clash with idealistic advocates for non-profit groups. The lobbyists-for-hire who trade on their partisan connections divide along Conservative and Liberal lines. Lately, though, this typically fractious community of clout, clustered around Parliament Hill, is united—by anxiety over a new official interpretation of the federal “Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct,” which they say might unfairly ban them from approaching politicians they’ve legitimately supported in past elections and leadership campaigns. If they’re right, the age-old linkage between partisanship and influence might have been unexpectedly ruptured.

The uproar is over a guidance bulletin, issued early last month by Karen Shepherd, the government’s commissioner of lobbying, on what constitutes an illegal conflict of interest between a public office holder and a lobbyist. Shepherd said potential cases of “improper influence” will continue to be judged individually, but she sweepingly warned that from now on, “political activities” might create such conflicts. Asked by Maclean’s exactly what activities in support of political candidates might mean a lobbyist would then be prevented from actually lobbying those politicians once they’re in power, her office listed “fundraising, communications, logistics, speech writing, etc.” In other words, just about anything.

The problem is that Shepherd declines to spell out exactly when such partisan work might disqualify lobbying later on. “This is so vague,” said Michael Robinson, a lobbyist with influential Earnscliffe Strategy Group and long-time Liberal strategist, “as to make it impossible for somebody to conduct their behaviour in a way that they’re confident they won’t cross a line.” Tories are no more sure of what’s being outlawed. “What I think this interpretation has essentially done is say, ‘There is no black and white, there is only grey,’ ” said Goldy Hyder, the senior Conservative who heads the powerhouse Hill & Knowlton consulting group’s Ottawa office.

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Cameramen not apparently entitled to enjoy holiday season with friends, family

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 12:06 AM - 36 Comments

The Canadian Press, Sun, Star, CBC and Canwest report from today’s unofficial meeting of the Afghanistan committee. In photos, the Sun documents the exit of a cameraman apparently sent by the Conservative side to observe the proceedings on behalf of those government MPs who couldn’t be there.

The Salvation Army invades the Hill

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 6:15 PM - 8 Comments

The Salvation Army hit the Hill and schmoozed with MPs. Below, Justin Trudeau arrives at the reception.

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Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM - 8 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of December 22nd, 2009)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Canadian Forces cleared of all abuse allegations

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 2:24 PM - 4 Comments

The Canadian Forces Military Police says it has investigated about a dozen allegations of prisoner mistreatment by Canadian troops in Afghanistan since 2006 but uncovered no credible evidence any abuse occurred. The only ongoing investigation dates back to 2008; however, investigators say Canadian Forces members have already been “cleared regarding mistreatment of detainees” and that their work is now focused on “other remaining allegations.” While there is no evidence Canadian Forces were ever engaged in the abuse of detainees, a Parliamentary Committee is still looking at claims prisoners transferred to Afghan authorities were abused by their Afghan handlers.

CBC News

Microsoft loses Word patent dispute

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM - 1 Comment

Microsoft has lost its bid to overturn a patent ruling related to its popular Word software that would force it to either pay royalties to a small Toronto company or pull the offending product from store shelves. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today upheld a previous lower court ruling in favour of Toronto-based i4i Ltd., which claims it has a patent on XML, or extensible markup language, technology contained in 2003 and 2007 versions of Microsoft’s popular word processing software. The court also granted i4i’s request for an injunction to prevent Microsoft from selling the offending versions of Word in the United States unless a deal between the two sides is reached.

Reuters

An irresponsibly quick reaction to "responsible communication"

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 1:53 PM - 42 Comments

Don’t expect much from your journalism elite today, citizens: we’ll be busy celebrating our early Christmas gift from the Supreme Court of Canada. It was widely anticipated that the SCC would follow other Commonwealth jurisdictions in creating a new “responsible journalism” defence to defamation. It’s one that encourages contextual analysis of defamatory words, rather than casuistic focus on individual terms; creates less of a “strict liability” environment for journalists; and allows for the repetition of defamatory statements if the mere fact that those statements were made is itself news and the statements were properly attributed and set in context.

None of that is surprising and all of it is quite desirable. But before I get too far into this magnum of Krug, I’ll tell you what else leaps out at me in the new Magna Carta:

1. Even given that the Court was going to mimic other Commonwealth countries, it still had an array of options in defining “public interest” for the purposes of the new defence. The definition is chose is a broad one, influenced by past Canadian jurisprudence on the “fair comment” defence. Here’s the relevant lingo from the headnote [emphasis mine]:

To be of public interest, the subject matter must be shown to be one inviting public attention, or about which the public, or a segment of the public, has some substantial concern because it affects the welfare of citizens, or one to which considerable public notoriety or controversy has attached.  Public interest is not confined to publications on government and political matters, nor is it necessary that the plaintiff be a “public figure”.

2. The Court has not chosen, or not yet chosen, to confine the availability of the defence to journalists working for old media in the traditional manner. It consciously did the opposite:

In arguments before us, the defence was referred to as the responsible journalism test.  This has the value of capturing the essence of the defence in succinct style.  However, the traditional media are rapidly being complemented by new ways of communicating on matters of public interest, many of them online, which do not involve journalists.  These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets.

The definition of “responsibility” that publishers are asked to observe is essentially a description of good journalistic practice, so the defence will be available to non-journalists to precisely the degree in which they’re really doing journalism and doing it well. And working journalists will have an extra layer of protection insofar as their work is documented, checked by editors, and discussed with the new court-created definition of “responsibility” explicitly in mind. Still, the new defence is, quite properly, there for everybody. You won’t need to show some sort of professional license to appeal to it.

3. When the journos are finished high-fiving each other, they’ll probably start to feel slightly less upbeat pretty soon. It’s rarely observed in the debate over defamation reform that the problem of “libel chill” really contains two distinguishable component issues: freedom of expression, and uncertainty about what can be published and what can’t. The creation of a “responsible communication” defence will get more journalists (and non-journalists doing journalism) off the hook in the end, and should thus discourage some vexatious or wholly adventurous prosecutions and notices. It is less clear that the creation of a complex test for diligence in reporting, one that sets out a list of seven overlapping questions that isn’t even exhaustive, does anything to promote certainty.

Publishers can get away with more than they did before, but how much more? There’s no caselaw yet: the “responsible communication” defence is a newborn baby. Will the cost of defamation insurance decrease at all, once media outlets adjust their practices to take advantage of the more obvious gains made before the SCC today? Defamation certainly just became a much more complicated topic in the law: the legal costs of each individual suit are likely to increase.

So this decision isn’t exactly a Prague Spring of “libel chill”. If we wanted to get rid of “libel chill” we could adopt a rule tomorrow that “All articles containing the letter ‘q’, but only those articles, are defamatory.” That would make editorial judgments and defamation trials easy, and eliminate all “chill”—i.e., the existence of doubt about whether some subject can be approached and aired without risk. Some degree of “chill”, at some margin of verifiability, is the price we pay for the existence of sensible defamation law that honours freedom.

Bad news for women’s ski jumping enthusiasts

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 1:45 PM - 4 Comments

As of Tuesday, it became official: there will be no women’s ski jumping at the Vancouver 2010 games. Since May 2008, when the International Olympic Committee made the controversial call not to include a women’s ski jumping event at the Games, Canada’s ski jumpers have been on the offensive. They launched a lawsuit against local organizers, claiming the ski jumping ban violated their Charter rights. But the Supreme Court has since announced that it would not reverse earlier rulings in the organizers’ favour, which found that the Charter cannot be applied to the International Olympic Committee. It’s “disappointing,” says Zoya Lynch, one of the women who initiated the lawsuits. “It’s just something that I believe in so much that I can’t even understand why the Supreme Court wouldn’t want to hear this case.”

CBC News

So long, 35 year mortgage with a 5% down payment?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 1:39 PM - 14 Comments

The days of taking of buying a house with next to no money down and spending the vast majority of one’s adult life paying it off may be coming to an end. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is cracking down on Canadians that pile up debt when interest rates are low, only to find themselves in deep financial trouble when the rates rise again. Part of his strategy could include raising the minimum down payment on homes from its current level of 5 percent and scrapping 35-year mortgages altogether. Flaherty believes the measures would prevent people from accumulating more debt than they can handle. But some in the banking world are leery. “You could basically shut down 25 per cent of the market,” lamented CIBC economist Benjamin Tal. “It’s going to be significant because we’re talking about a lot of money that took advantage of those [low] rates.”

CBC News

Green Shift, redux?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 1:22 PM - 53 Comments

Stephen Harper doesn’t want Canada to have a carbon tax, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. In a year-end interview with CTV, the prime minister admitted the final decision will likely be out of his hands. “I mean, we’re going to have to see what the regime in the United States looks like,” Harper said of the prospects for a Green Shift-like tax on emissions. “We’re going to have to harmonize a lot of our efforts with their efforts to really be truly effective on a continental basis.” Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has already said he expects carbon pricing, either as a straight tax or under a cap-and-system, to be implemented some time in the future. But as far as Harper is concerned, it will be “very difficult” for Canada to do much of anything unless the U.S. implements new restrictions.

Auld Lang Syne

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 1:17 PM - 132 Comments

CBC, June 20, 2008. Prime Minister Stephen Harper pulled no punches on Friday in describing a carbon tax proposal by Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, saying it would “screw everybody” across Canada.

Toronto Star, Sept. 11, 2008. The Liberals’ carbon tax plan will plunge Canada into recession, sparking economic unrest that will revive Quebec’s separatist movement, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says.

Toronto Sun, Dec. 22, 2009. Prime Minister Stephen Harper said today he hopes he won’t have to impose a carbon tax on Canadians as part of the fight to reduce global warming – but admitted he couldn’t entirely rule it out.

Women at risk of breast cancer refuse MRIs

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Up to 42 per cent of women at intermediate or high risk of getting breast cancer decide not to get the recommended MRI screening, even if it’s offered for free, according to U.S. researchers. In fact, one-quarter of women in the study were offered free screening but opted to pass because they felt claustrophobic inside the scanners. Others declined because of the costs that would be involved if something needed following up, and others said they didn’t have the time. In the study, 1,215 women at intermediate or high risk were identified. Even the high risk women, who have a 25 per cent greater lifetime risk of breast cancer, were somewhat unwilling to get the test. Of the 512 women who declined, 25 per cent refused because of claustrophobia, 18 per cent because of a lack of time, 12 per cent cited financial concerns if cancers were identified, 9 per cent said their doctor wouldn’t refer them and 8 per cent said they weren’t interested.

Reuters

A Handy-Dandy List of Jokes That Aren't Jokes

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 11:32 AM - 16 Comments

This post by Nickelodeon TV producing guru Dan Schneider (who also played Dennis on Head of the Class, which means that all his statements carry a certain authority) lists “‘comedy’ phrases that it’s time to stop saying,” lines that are inserted into comedy scripts, and stay there, when the writers don’t have an actual joke to put in there. I can’t really argue with any of these.

(1)  “Not so much” and its even more tired cousin, “Eh, not so much.”

(2)  “Too much information!”

(3)  “And by [that] I mean [this].”

(4)  “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.”

(5)  “Good times.”

(6)  “Did I say that out loud?”

(7)  “Thanks for sharing.”

(8)  “Hey, stop eating my dinner, Eatie McEaterson!” (or any similar phrase that ends in Blank-y McBlankerson).

(9)  “Really?!”

(10)  “It’s like a party in my mouth.”

(11)  “Hey, don’t go there!”

(12)  “Burn!”

(13)  “Alrighty then.”

(14)  “Ya THINK?”

I do find it interesting that “That went well” is not on the list. And come to think of it I haven’t heard it much in recent years, or its antecedent, “he took it better than I expected.” So it is possible for a non-joke to get retired if people decide to stop using it. Meaning that there is hope, fleeting though it may be, that no one will ever put “good times” into a script again (unless it’s done in a semi-ironic way like on NewsRadio).

One non-joke that is still used, didn’t make the list and should never be used again: “I said good day, sir!” It was funny when it originated in the movie Tootsie. It was funny the first few times some Tootsie-loving sitcom writers put it into their scripts. But now Tootsie is almost 30 years old, nobody remembers where the line comes from anyway. Let it go.

Oh, and “let it go” is also a line that should never be used again.

And now, another message from Dan Schneider:

Wireless wizardry

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 16 Comments

Tony Clement did his best last week not to put himself at the centre of an uproar over Canadian ownership of sensitive parts of the economy. The industry minister announced that the federal cabinet was letting Toronto-based Globalive into the Canadian cellphone business, overturning the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s earlier ruling that the Egyptian-financed company failed to meet Canadian control rules. But Clement insisted cabinet wasn’t “removing, reducing, bending or creating an exception to Canadian ownership and control requirements in telecommunications and broadcasting.” No matter how far he dug into his thesaurus, though, many expert observers weren’t buying it.

The potential implications of the decision, announced Dec. 11, were just too obvious to be smothered under even the wordiest denial. The CRTC had ruled in October that Globalive didn’t satisfy Canadian ownership requirements because Egyptian telecom giant Orascom holds almost all of its debt, owns most of its non-voting shares, and provides its technical expertise. But cabinet exercised its power to overrule the regulator, accepting Globalive’s argument that its corporate structure puts voting shares mainly in Canadian hands. Clement stressed that the decision was “based on the legal facts of the ownership, and not on the government’s position that there needs to be more competition in this marketplace.”

It was the prospect of another competitor, of course, that had led the big wireless companies—BCE, Telus, and Rogers (owner of Maclean’s)—to oppose Globalive’s bid to step onto their turf. The CRTC doesn’t see the Canadian wireless marketplace as too dominated by a few players: it says wireless prices in Canada are about in the middle compared with the U.S., Britain, France and Australia. But the Conservatives perceive a problem. Two blue-ribbon panel reports—one on telecom alone and another more broadly on the Canadian economy—have urged them to open up the industry. “We believe,” Clement said, “that when consumers have more choice, when there’s more competition, that lowers prices and increases quality.”

Continue…

Sitting; less bull

By Paul Wells - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 11:33 PM - 66 Comments

Dianne Sawyer becomes the anchor of ABC World News; does not allow her newscast to become a carnival of asinine gimmickry. Too bad she and her crew can’t keep up with the brave cutting-edge types at the CBC.

Art and the Ashbin of History

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 10:31 PM - 11 Comments

In 2001, YBA Michael Landy, took over a closed-down department store in London’s shopping district where he took everything he owned and fed it into an industrial shredding machine that he had constructed. His stereo, his clothes, his artworks, even his prized sheepskin coat that had belonged to his father – all of it got shoved into the shredder, helped along by Landy’s team of bliue-coveralled assistants. The show, called Break Down, is of my favourite works of installation/performance art of all time, exploring in a powerful way some well-trod themes of consumption, waste, nostalgia, and identity. (It was later ripped off, in a much crasser way, by Neil Boorman for his “Bonfire of the Brands” job application).

Anyway, now Landy is going one further, with a new show called Art Bin.

From 29 January until 14 March 2010 acclaimed  British artist Michael Landy will transform the South London Gallery into a 600m³ container for  the disposal of works of art. Art Bin will gradually fill up over the six week course of the exhibition to create ‘a monument to creative failure’.

The best part is that the public is invited to submit works to be binned and then destroyed  – I know I have a few short stories I might print out and send in.

Happy holidays (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 9:23 PM - 8 Comments

Four years ago tomorrow, Stephen Harper made a campaign stop in Winnipeg, where he outlined his party’s vision for arctic sovereignty. The next day he had a photo op at a Toys R Us in Calgary. He then took three days off for Christmas, before resuming his campaign on Dec. 27.

After the jump, a CP dispatch from Dec. 19, 2005, explaining the Mr. Harper’s schedule for the 2005 holidays. Continue…

Happy holidays

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 5:02 PM - 23 Comments

Laurie Hawn writes to inform the Afghanistan committee that Conservative members won’t be attending tomorrow’s meeting. It appears the committee will carry on without them. Meanwhile, Tim Naumetz of the Hill Times obtains classified transcripts from the Military Police Complaints Commission inquiry.

Maj. Kevin Rowcliffe, then a staff adviser to Lt.- Gen. Michel Gauthier, second in command of the Afghanistan mission under Mr. Hillier, was concerned even in early stages of the Afghanistan mission of the potential for torture abuse and expressed concern at the very top that Canadians were transferring detainees to Afghan police and intelligence forces “not knowing what happens to them after they’re handed over.”

Maj. Rowcliffe and two other Military Police officers who were interviewed for the Military Police Complaints Commission inquiry revealed a state of “mass confusion” over transfers, scarce resources for military police in Kandahar and concern from the police themselves over the way generals in Ottawa, under pressure from the government, were handling the detainee controversy as it later made front-page news in Canada and burst onto the House of Commons floor.

The Mint tracks down the gold it "lost" last October

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 3:49 PM - 3 Comments

The Royal Canadian Mint has an explanation for all that gold that went missing from its reserves last October: one part of it never left the mint, while the rest was sold off for a fraction of its value. While the Mint says its 12-page report closes the book on the mysterious disappearance, though it concedes the 3,500 ounces (worth $3 million) it sold as refinery slag to U.S. refiners is gone for good. “At the end of the day, we’ve learned a lot of lessons,” said Mint spokesperson Christine Aquino. The Mint blames the mix-ups on the heavy toll the increased demand for gold has put on its operations. Still, employees aren’t entirely off the hook: the government has suspended the issuing of bonuses to the Mint’s executives as a result of the report.

Ottawa Citizen

Rugby star comes out of the closet

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

The closet is getting smaller and smaller. Gareth Thomas, the fearsome rugby back who led the Welsh national team to a Six Nations Grand Slam victory in 2005 (their first since 1978) and captained the British Lions touring side, has announced he is gay. In an extensive interview in today’s Daily Mail, Thomas, who is 6-foot 3, 224 pounds, and nicknamed “Alfie,” supposedly because of his resemblance to ALF, speaks of his struggle to accept his sexuality, and his fears about coming out. Things didn’t go so well with his wife, but his team-mates shrugged and moved on. How long will it be before we see a similar story about an NHL player?

"We're going to out-Klingon Klingon!"

By Colby Cosh - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 20 Comments

A strong late entry in the “significant word of 2009″ sweepstakes would be the noun and verb “conlang”. A conlang is any consciously constructed language; familiar examples include “auxlangs” developed in earnest for international use, like Esperanto, but the hot new conlang is the tongue developed for the giant soft-porn Smurfs in James Cameron’s Avatar by business professor and linguist Paul Frommer.

The best-known precursors of the Na’vi language are Marc Okrand’s Klingon language for Star Trek and the various fictional-poetic tongues developed by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a philologist whose fictive universe seems to have been a consuming spiritual vocation that accidentally generated the Lord of the Rings books as side effects. Assigning features of real human languages to the tongues of different imaginary races came naturally to him, and he probably never anticipated that these languages would become objects of passionate study and popular extension. Okrand was hired to add realism to the Trek universe, building on a small vocabulary base devised for thespian purposes by James Doohan, but he probably knew from a start that there might be a nice little sideline in it.

What’s different now is that a conlang like Na’vi is an anticipated feature of big science-fiction projects. People would have been discouraged and hostile if James Cameron hadn’t hired a linguist. Avatar was released three days ago and fans are already pleading with Frommer for the information that will let them learn Na’vi and speak it with fellow fans. For nerds, the complexity built into Na’vi is a feature, not a bug. Like Elvish and Klingon, Frommer’s language has some un-English features, like grammatical infixes, that make it particularly “alien” to English-speaking viewers but that are found often enough in the “wild”, the world of non-constructed human languages, to be convincing.

Indeed, if there is a problem with Na’vi as an pure exercise in exobiology, it is probably the inherent human-ness necessitated by the use of human actors. If we ever do run across sentient creatures ten feet tall, their design is likely to be unrecognizable and surprising. Just for starters—well, there’s an old engineering joke about God’s curious choice to put a sewage system in a recreational area, but surely having our talk-hole be our eat-hole is an even clumsier kludge?

Tom and Jerry, and boughs of holly

By Sarah Elton - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 1:50 PM - 8 Comments

When we emptied out my grandmother’s  house for her move, I inherited a number of obscure kitchen objects: her  oatcake flipper, her ancient cast-iron Yorkshire pudding moulds, and her  bright red enamel paella pot. What I cherished most, however, was an old  mimeographed copy of the family recipe for the Tom and Jerry, a hot beverage  served in the days around Christmas and New Year’s. My family has made the Tom  and Jerry to mark the season for as long as I can remember. I can’t imagine  Christmas without it, and yet I’ve never met another person who knows of its  existence.

The recipe, typed on a now-yellowing sheet of paper by my  great-grandfather and adorned with a hand-drawn sprig of ivy, calls for six  eggs, separated, with the egg whites beaten stiff. The instructions are to  blend the yolks with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and so much powdered sugar that  the mixture becomes too stiff to stir—I’ve witnessed the beaters of my  grandmother’s Mixmaster seize while making the Tom and Jerry. Then the whites  are folded in and the batter is ready for the addition of brandy, rum and some  hot milk. The drink is often mistaken for eggnog. But eggnog it is not. A Tom  and Jerry is light and spicy, with a sweet foamy crown that forms when  scalding hot milk is poured onto the batter placed in the bottom of a mug,  then stirred quickly, which causes the egg whites to rise. Once you’ve  sprinkled the top with freshly ground nutmeg it is ready to drink.

The Tom and Jerry’s origin is a bit of a mystery. Ted Haigh, author of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, says it was probably invented by Pierce Egan, a British journalist who lived in the 1800s and wrote the popular novel The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom (hence Tom and Jerry). Egan is said to have named the drink after his characters as a publicity stunt. Others hold that a famous American bartender, “Professor” Jerry Thomas, concocted the Tom and Jerry in the 1850s. The recipe credited to him calls for 12 eggs and is served with hot water rather than milk; yet another version suggests mixing the booze and batter with coffee. The only Tom and Jerry certainty is that there is no connection between the drink and the cartoon.

However it began, for about 100 years the drink was extremely popular in the United States. So popular that you could buy Tom and Jerry sets, with a large bowl for the batter and matching mugs with “Tom and Jerry” written across them in cursive gold. My family owns two of these and you can still buy the mugs on eBay. People could also order a Tom and Jerry when they went out: throughout the winter, bartenders would whip up a mug to warm a chilled patron.

Which could be why we make the Tom and Jerry in my family. As a university student in San Francisco in the 1930s, my grandfather was a bartender at the famous restaurant Trader Vic’s, which served them. (It still sells a jar of the mix for US$4.99, which can also be ordered online.) Then again, it could have been my great-grandparents who started the tradition— they made them too. If you count my kids, we make up five generations of Tom-and-Jerry drinkers. Haigh was shocked to learn this. “I’ve never known anyone to make it as an aspect of tradition rather than revival—as in through their family line,” he said.
My grandparents were known for their annual Tom and Jerry parties, where they’d serve hundreds of mugs of the stuff in one night. (Marshall McLuhan, a friend of my grandfather’s, was a frequent beneficiary.) My grandmother swore the milk countered the effects of the alcohol, and after the Second World War, when my grandfather went to work for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, NATO’s military arm, they took the Tom and Jerry with them. In Paris, a German general was flummoxed to receive an invitation to a Tom and Jerry party. He was dismayed by what a “Jerry” could be.

I love Tom and Jerries and I drink them in quick succession as I did at those annual parties at my grandmother’s house. That house was sold last year. It has been gutted and rebuilt by a developer to suit modern tastes, the wood panelling stripped and the fireplace in the hall demolished. Haigh posits that it was central heating that wiped out the Tom and Jerry, relegating it first to Christmastime—a quaint bit of nostalgia for 20th-century folk—and then to the history books. Such is the path of progress. And I wouldn’t trade my furnace for a Tom and Jerry, but it is nice to go back in time once a year.

Soldier charged with murdering Taliban fighter

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 1:12 PM - 9 Comments

A Canadian army captain will face a court martial next month on charges he killed a severely-wounded Taliban fighter in Afghanistan last year. Captain Robert Semrau is accused of second degree murder and is the first-ever Canadian soldier to be prosecuted for the alleged homicide of an enemy fighter. Semrau allegedly shot the sole Taliban survivor of a three-day firefight with Canadian and Afghan forces in December 2008 after it was determined his injuries couldn’t be treated on the battlefield. The proceedings against Semrau are scheduled to begin Jan. 25 in Gatineau, Que.

The Globe and Mail

Brittany Murphy was "very ill"

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 21, 2009 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

Brittany Murphy, the 32-year-old former star of Clueless and 8 Mile who collapsed at her home on Sunday, appears to have died of natural causes, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Coroner’s Office told the Toronto Star. “There are no signs of foul play or trauma,” Coroner’s Capt. John Kades said, adding that toxicology tests would be performed “as soon as possible.” According to celebrity website TMZ.com, the actress was “very ill” in the hours before her sudden death. “We’re also told authorities did not find illegal drugs in the house,” TMZ reported, “but Murphy was definitely taking various prescription meds.”