Well, if the Tiger story won't go away, I won't either

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 23 Comments

It is late to be adding to the mountain of Tigerology, but up until now most analyses of the business impact of the golfing great’s tomcatting have been disappointingly superficial. It is not news to advertisers, even if it is news to the rest of us, that athlete brands are fragile assets. Let’s be honest here: it’s still 2009, and one extramural boyfriend would have done as much economic damage to Tiger Inc. as a dozen girlfriends have. A company that puts its image in the hands of a sportsman can never have enough information about his private life as it needs to establish 100% confidence that there won’t be a meltdown. Celebrities are risky business, but the market in them exists anyway.

It will go on existing, with some of the air taken out of the major international assets. The sales value of an “athlete” like John Daly is adjusted up front (and not only downward!) for volatility: an efficient market knows there’s a certain probability he might end up in jail for writing bad cheques or squabbling with his eighth wife or gambling on gerbil fights. It’s surprising information that creates economic shocks—and that’s why “hypocrisy” is a problem for celebrity endorsers. It’s not because people consider hypocrisy a particularly high crime in itself, but because it can lead to an incorrect assignment of human capital. They’ve been using Tiger to sell aspirational goods, an ideal of achievement and dedication and family living, to the middle class. He should have been peddling cologne, wine coolers, and condoms all along.

Woods, as a brand, will never get back to where he was. The story behind the story is that Old Tiger was a marketing asset you could use absolutely anywhere: adult North Americans aren’t really surprised that a super-fit billionaire might sometimes take a nightclub hostess back to the hotel, but let’s not forget that Woods is also the best-known Asian sports hero on the planet. On this continent “family values” is a patently insincere term, a phrase whose comic nature is obvious by virtue of it having to be formulated in the first place. (“Family values” wouldn’t need any defence if most of us didn’t have higher values that we were actually following most of the time.) Asia, I think, is different. Over there, they still just call ‘em “values”.

Tiger will obviously be forced to readjust, especially since keeping his marriage afloat apparently won’t be an option. The expectation of the public and the commentariat appears to be that this will be a process of personal, spiritual readjustment; that would be great for his image if there were very many goods and services well-suited to be sold by a joyless, contrite, perpetually horny sap, though I guess Bibles and self-help books are always an option. But it would be better for him if he had the self-awareness to embrace larger-than-life/folk hero/beyond-good-and-evil status. (Sports ARE, in some sense, beyond good and evil. They don’t put the green jacket on the golfer who gets voted Miss Congeniality.)

Shaquille O’Neal, whose November divorce got bumped off the sports pages by Tiger, is one of the top endorsers in U.S. sports—hell, he’s an MBA-holding expert in the economics of endorsements! But if you heard he had banged a dozen bottle blondes, wouldn’t your honest first reaction be “So was that all in the same night or did the Diesel spread them out over a whole weekend?” If Derek Jeter got caught doing it, wouldn’t you say “Damn, I guess the Captain finally got tired of brunettes”?

For marketing professionals, the watchwords going forward are: Dark-Side Tiger. Demon-Haunted Tiger. Hedonistic Tiger. And, if and when he gets back on the course, Driven, Avenging Tiger—the ordeal survivor, answering the millions of critics the only way he really knows how, with an iron in his hands. It will be an exciting case study for generations of business majors. If Tiger can rise to the occasion, he will be a much more fascinating figure in the end. We may prefer that our kids model themselves on Arnold Palmer, Ken Griffey, Kurt Warner; but sports is also about, and may be mostly about, the Ty Cobbs. The Mike Tysons. The Ayrton Sennas.

Closed for debate

By Erin Millar - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:10 PM - 80 Comments

It was standing room only at the University of Victoria on Oct. 21, when anti-abortion activist Stephanie Gray visited from Calgary to debate distinguished medical ethicist Eike-Henner Kluge. Gray and Kluge duked it out twice that day, to accommodate those who couldn’t fit into the 200-seat room for round one. Not one to disappoint, Gray, who is executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, employed the tactics that make her so controversial: she compared abortion to the Holocaust, showed a video of an abortion, and juxtaposed images of bloodied fetuses with photos of corpses from atrocities such as the Rwanda genocide.

Yet compared to some of the activism on Canadian campuses, the debate was mild, the audience civil, even polite. Periodically, when Gray began speaking, a group of students would hold up signs sporting slogans like “My body is not up for debate.” And there were scattered heckles when she accused pro-choicers of believing that “a woman has the right to directly and intentionally dismember and decapitate and disembowel her child.” But she wasn’t accosted, yelled at, or in any way prevented from speaking her mind. Nevertheless, the debate and other events organized by UVic’s pro-life club, called Youth Protecting Youth (YPY), are shaping up to be the basis of a legal battle over free speech that could change the way student unions and even universities operate.

The spat began in October 2008 when the university’s students’ society refused to give YPY the same meagre funding all UVic student clubs receive. Clubs approved by a committee are entitled to $232 each year and such perks as banner supplies and free room bookings. Upon review in 2009, the committee approved YPY. But the students’ society board stepped in and once again revoked the funding. In an Oct. 5 meeting, the society’s directors accused YPY of “harassing” female students (although they mentioned no specifics). Director Tracey Ho summed up the society’s position by saying, “No one should debate my rights over my own body.”

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Russel John Karonia:re Curotte 1958-2009

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Russel John Karonia:re Curotte was born on June 21, 1958, in Kahnawake, a native reserve southwest of Montreal, to John “Baba” Curotte, a Kahnawake longhouse chief, and Grace Curotte, a homemaker. The fourth of five children brought up in the native tradition before doing so became common again, Russel often travelled with his parents to longhouses of the Six Nations Confederacy.

He played first base on the Kahnawake Little League team—he had a strong though often inaccurate swing. His friend Patrick Phillips, a lifeguard in his teenage years, remembers Russel as an avid swimmer who took to water “like a seal.” His brother Joe co-founded the Onake Canoe Club in 1972, and Russel loved paddling. He was a natural: at five foot eight, with big shoulders and lots of muscle, he easily cut through the rough currents of the St. Lawrence River, where the club practised. In 1975, just prior to the Montreal Olympics, he and his partner Ray McComber bought paddles from the Romanian paddling team, and became known as Kahnawake’s only Romanian paddlers. Continue…

Canada’s Olympians No. 2: Christine Nesbitt

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment

Christine Nesbitt wrote down her great expectations in the summer of 2005. She was the new gal on the Canadian long-track speed skating team, a sport where success usually demands a long, slow apprenticeship. She was juggling geography courses at the University of Calgary, training at the adjoining Olympic Oval and living a proud, if penuriously independent, existence on the $900 a month she received as a national development team carded athlete. The Turin Olympics were six months out when she wrote to her parents, Judith and Wayne Nesbitt in London, Ont., with what seemed an audacious set of goals for a 20-year-old.

Her father recalls she planned to break into a very deep field of skaters and qualify for the Olympics in the team pursuit, where a line of three teammates race three kilometres, exchanging turns in the tough lead role. She also hoped to qualify in the Olympic 1,000-m and 1,500-m races. “It was reaching, no question about it,” says Wayne, a geology professor at the University of Western Ontario.

Her parents, though, had long since learned not to underestimate her competitive spirit, her impatience, or her motivation. “She was born independent,” says Judith. True to her plan, Nesbitt qualified in all three events, no easy feat. Her parents still thrill at the memory of watching from the stands in Turin when Nesbitt and the pursuit team won the silver medal. A leg raced by Nesbitt with Kristina Groves and Cindy Klassen, who dominated Turin with a five-medal performance, set the Olympic pursuit record. Putting things in writing, her father says, “clarifies the mind, doesn’t it?”

Continue…

Burning house on the prairie

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 1 Comment

A few years ago, when Montreal blogger Kyle MacDonald was famously working his way through a series of increasingly significant online swaps in an attempt to trade a red paper clip for a house, the town of Kipling, Sask., population 1,100, got involved. Kipling, 175 km southeast of Regina, happened to have an empty house on hand, and traded it with MacDonald. In exchange, the town received an acting gig (MacDonald had traded for that with American actor Corbin Bernsen, in exchange for a rare KISS snow globe).

Bernsen, best known for his role in the ’80s series L.A. Law, travelled to Kipling to hold auditions for a part in his film, Donna on Demand. “I was so impressed with the talent I told the mayor I’d love to come back and make a movie,” he says. “I guess I must have had a weak moment,” the mayor in question, Pat Jackson, recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t we put up the funding?’ ” The town soon formed Kipling Film Productions and began selling shares in the project to townsfolk, raising $250,000. Bernsen wrote a script—Rust, about a priest in the grips of a mid-life crisis—with Kipling in mind.

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Should teens drink at home?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:14 AM - 3 Comments

According to England’s chief medical officer, parents who allow their children to drink alcohol at home might be increasing the chances of future drinking problems. Parents might think this readies them for adulthood, but that’s “misguided,” Sir Liam Donaldson told the BBC, as new evidence shows this could lead to binge drinking later in life. Official guidelines in the UK now say children under 15 should drink no alcohol, and those under 17 should drink only with supervision, even though parents and care givers can legally give children alcohol from age five on. A major publicity campaign is expected to be launched in England in January. “We know that adults who drink sensibly tend to pass these habits on and that some families choose to introduce alcohol to their children younger than 15 in a supportive environment,” Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said.

BBC News

Show me "peel the banana"

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:12 AM - 8 Comments

A troop of performing monkeys instructed in the martial art of taekwondo has taken revenge on their trainer.
(thx Reevely)

Ekko: the bedbug-sniffing dog

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Meet the team at Scentdogs, a K-9 unit based in Berry Mills, N.B. Maska’s a drug detector and Ace is a personal bodyguard; both are rather imposing German shepherds. And then there’s Ekko, a fluffy Parson Russell terrier, who specializes in sniffing out bedbugs.

Why offer a bedbug detection service? “There wasn’t a lot of demand around here for drug dogs,” says owner Andrew Farago, 58, but infestations were on the rise, largely because people travel so frequently today, picking up bedbugs on the way (some exterminators now get up to 50 calls a week). After consulting with local trainer Bill Grimmer, Farago went looking for an addition to his team, a small dog who could “get behind furniture and sniff around.” Enter Ekko, now 2, the Maritimes’ first bedbug-sniffing dog. Continue…

Vancouver’s drug woes escalate

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 10 Comments

Vancouver’s hard drug trade is going gangbusters. A new report, released last month by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, notes a “ten-fold” increase in the use of crack cocaine, and a major increase in the use of crystal methamphetamine by street youth over the past decade. Roughly 90 per cent of adult drug users say they can score cocaine or crack within 10 minutes, while 60 per cent of street youth say they can buy crystal meth in that same time frame. And just in time for the Olympics, 40 per cent say they have injected in public.

The study, the first comprehensive look at the epidemic of hard drug use in Vancouver, shows that the federal government’s anti-drug strategy is “failing,” say authors Evan Wood and Thomas Kerr. The key to reducing disease and hardship caused by drug addiction, they argue, is “harm reduction” policies. The authors point to a significant decrease in needle-sharing, which has led to a decrease in HIV and hepatitis-C infections, thanks to initiatives like Insite, the controversial supervised-injection facility the federal government has attempted to close. (Ottawa is currently appealing a May 2008 B.C. Supreme Court decision that has allowed Insite to remain open temporarily.)

“How can you call that success?” asks retired RCMP officer Chuck Doucette, vice-president of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada. Vancouver, with “the worst drug problem in Canada,” also has “the most harm reduction programs,” he adds. While harm reduction may work to reduce harm to addicts, it doesn’t curb drug use, he says. “What works,” he says, is “treatment, enforcement, and getting people off drugs.” Continue…

ignatieff n. a pair of self-aware eyebrows

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 10:13 AM - 0 Comments

This week’s magazine includes my look at the prevailing personalities of 2009 and the Fourth Annual List of Words That Ought to Be Added to the Dictionary. An example:

berlusconi n. the inability to keep it in one’s pants: You’ve got chronic berlusconi, the doctor told John Mayer.

I invite you to e-mosey over to the column and add your own definition as part of a Non-Caption Caption Challenge. Winner = prize!

Feschuk’s dictionary, 2009 edition

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 10:10 AM - 38 Comments

NOTE: You are invited to add you own definition of a prominent 2009 personality in the comments below. This Definition Challenge will be culminate with a vote on Monday, Dec. 21 – and the winner will receive a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.ca.

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As the year winds down, let’s reflect on the pivotal personalities of 2009 and reveal the Fourth Annual List of Words That Ought to be Added to the Dictionary.

ahmadinejad vb. 1. to threaten violence upon one’s neighbour: Once spring arrived, Jason ahmadinejaded the Johnsons until they took down their Christmas lights.

baird n. 1. single-minded hostility. 2. hostile single-mindedness. 3. one who, based on his demeanour, can be assumed to type emails exclusively using CAPITAL LETTERS.

balloon-boy adj. ill-conceived, unwise: The slapdash coalition of opposition parties turned out to be a balloon-boy fiasco.

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The man who loves Porgy and Bess

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Austrian conductor who turned 80 last week, is considered the father of the early-music movement, a pioneer in performing Bach and Mozart in period style. So no one expected his latest recording: George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, a Broadway “folk opera” full of jazz, blues, and popular songs like Summertime. Unlike other “crossover” recordings, like Kiri Te Kanawa singing West Side Story, this isn’t the record company’s idea: New Zealand bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu, who sings the role of Porgy, told Maclean’s that Harnoncourt “had been trying to put this project together for the last 40 years.” Never mind Bach and Beethoven; what a famous European musician wants to conduct is Bess, You Is My Woman Now.
Porgy has attracted the attention of other symphonic conductors, but mostly anglophones like the Berlin Philharmonic’s current leader Simon Rattle. Harnoncourt, the son of a Viennese aristocrat, has never performed American music before; he rarely even visits America, because of what he described to the Boston Globe as “extreme jet lag.” He assembled the mostly black cast of Porgy, including Lemalu and soprano Isabelle Kabatu (who filled in as Bess when Canadian star Measha Brueggergosman became ill) in his hometown of Graz, Austria. Classical fans couldn’t resist making fun of a German-speaking Bach specialist taking on the story of a fictional South Carolina town: the blog Opera Chic dubbed the concert “Driving Herr Niki.” Even Harnoncourt had his doubts; he told Le Figaro that Rattle warned him against conducting the piece (“he told me that I don’t have the right passport”), and Lemalu recalls that Harnoncourt was upfront about his lack of experience with this music, willing “to listen to others in the cast who had done the piece many times.” Continue…

In summary

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:45 AM - 37 Comments

Canadian Press pulls together some of the more relevant bits from Richard Colvin’s letter to the Afghanistan committee. CP also reprints the full text of Colvin’s letter.

The Globe, Star and Sun recap yesterday’s developments and reaction. The Star talks to General Stanley McChrystal. The Globe’s editorial board passes judgment.

The government’s message, as reflected in its talking points, is that Christmas is a season for worrying about Canadian soldiers. If Ottawa had dealt truthfully with the torture issue at any point in the past two years, its call for a pause might have been on firmer ground.

Instead, it has tried to evade, duck and otherwise hide from the obvious fact that everyone and her brother – except those in the upper echelons of the Canadian government and military in Ottawa – knew about the propensity of Afghan authorities in Kandahar to torture prisoners. Long before senior ministers claimed they learned about it by reading The Globe and Mail in April, 2007…

The Conservative government’s handling of the detainee issue reflects poorly on its trustworthiness, managerial competence and ability to apply Canadian values abroad.

The real estate gamble

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:33 AM - 17 Comments

It may be winter, but Vancouver’s love affair with real estate is in full bloom. After a brief pause to mark the recession, the hot topic over lattes is once again square footage and million-dollar views. Which is roughly the price tag Michael Lin kept coming across last week as he and a friend sat in a Granville Street café surfing MLS, the real estate listing website, on his laptop.

Lin, a computer programmer in his late 20s, has watched the ups and downs, and then ups again, of Vancouver’s housing market from his rented apartment. Now, with the economy in repair mode and mortgage rates still near record lows, he’s eager to take the plunge into the city’s condo market. He admits prices are higher than he’d like, but believes he can easily cover the mortgage payments even if interest rates start to rise. But when asked whether he will have enough left over at the end of the month to save for retirement, he chuckles. He wasn’t saving much before, either. “This way,” he says, “I’ll be forced to save.”

Lin has plenty of company. A growing number of Canadians have come to view their homes as the ticket to a secure retirement. There’s a lot to be said for that approach. Your house is the biggest investment you’ll ever make, and it compels you to watch your pennies. It’s also true that those Canadians who had all their money tied up in their homes instead of stock markets have come through the financial crisis with their household balance sheets largely intact.

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Apocalypse Now II: Being Andrew Coyne

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:22 AM - 41 Comments

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Post will join forces to provide top online coverage of the Vancouver Games.

The collaboration, announced Wednesday, is a first for CBC — and one that will allow both organizations to use their resources to the fullest, said Scott Moore, executive director of CBC Sports and general manager, of CBC media sales and marketing

I told you so. Remember when the CBC and the Post announced a content-sharing agreement that would leverage each organization’s strengths — CBC on sports, Post on Business?  I warned you at the time that this was only the beginning.  Not only that, but I warned you about the problems with broadcasters and newspapers getting together. I see no one is listening to me.

Let’s look at this new agreement.  According to Scott Moore of CBC sales and marketing, this partnership will provide Canadians with “up to the moment coverage of every aspect of the Games, delivered to our audiences whenever and however they require it” and will involve a “co-branded Olympic Winter Games website featuring continuous coverage”.

This is no longer about two organizations leveraging their own strengths in two separate areas of coverage. They have now combined forces on a single issue, for a single event, offering “co-branded” coverage. That is, for the purposes of the Olympics coverage, the CBC and the Post have effectively merged.

This makes no sense.  Isn’t “up to the minute coverage” what all news organizations are supposed to be doing these days? If the CBC isn’t offering us up to the minute coverage in all aspects of news, what does it think it is doing? How can we trust it, once the Olympics are done?

There are two ways of looking at this. One, the National Post, a private newspaper, is now increasingly funded by the taxpayer.

Two, the CBC is being increasingly privatized.

Either way, the implications are profound. As I asked before, should the CBC’s public subsidy be reduced proportionately in line with the amount of privately-funded content it runs? What does the CBC union think of this?

But this co-branding of a single event makes the whole thing even more problematic. It is hard to think of an event that is more of a political minefield than a domestic Olympics. What happens if the CBC runs a column or editorial denouncing Olympics as a pointless spectacle, or what if the Post’s editors find the CBC’s coverage pointlessly boosterish or ridiculously politically correct?  What if there are more allegations about political interference in the Olympics, as there has already been with respect to the Torch Relay and the uniform logo?

What a mess.

I warned you.

King of an alternate world

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 2 Comments

Talking to James Cameron is daunting. He speaks with quick, coherent, unhesitating precision, as if he has a brain with a faster hard drive than the rest of us. So it takes a while to get up the nerve to ask him about the YouTube video of Adolf Hitler trashing Avatar. A scene ripped from the much-spoofed 2004 film Downfall shows the Führer in his bunker during the last days of the Third Reich. The German dialogue is subtitled to turn Hitler into a James Cameron fan who’s crushed that the Avatar trailer sucks. “I wait 10 years for a f–king Captain Planet with cats!” he screams. “Cameron has spent too much time underwater. He should have left the remake of FernGully: The Last Rainforest to Lucas.”

The spoof is just one example of a fierce online backlash against Avatar that’s been raging ever since 15 minutes of Cameron’s 3-D opus were previewed last August. Next week, the highly anticipated blockbuster will be released worldwide—12 years after Cameron’s previous movie Titanic became the biggest hit of all time. So you’d expect its creator to be a bit jumpy. But when asked about the online jabs at Avatar, Cameron responds with affable good humour. “The Hitler one cracks me up,” he admits during a lengthy phone interview from Los Angeles. “It’s hysterical. I want to get a copy of it, but it’s on YouTube and I haven’t figured out how to download it—I’m not very technical.”

James Cameron is not very technical. Ha! That’s rich. These days, the 55-year-old Canadian, who studied physics at university, is as much a scientist as a filmmaker. When he makes a movie, he’s like a one-man nation going to war, inventing new weaponry to meet the task. To create the quicksilver villain in Terminator 2, he led a revolution in computer graphics. For Titanic, he built deep-ocean camera housings to explore the wreck at a depth of four kilometres. And for Avatar, he invented a 3-D camera rig and refined performance-capture technology—the digital voodoo that lets an actor, covered in electrodes, inhabit the body of a blue, 10-foot alien with a tail and cat ears on a distant moon called Pandora. But the question a lot of people are asking is, why?

Continue…

The emperor’s new carbon credits

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 218 Comments

For a small country, Denmark sure attracts a lot of attention. A Chicago Muslim, David Headley, was recently arrested at O’Hare International Airport en route to Copenhagen to kill the commissioning editor and artists of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Alas, a far bigger group flying in to Copenhagen for a massive suicide bombing were permitted to board their flights: these were the jet-setting bigwigs of the climate-change circuit en route to Denmark to blow up the global economy and individual liberty in order to get back to paradise and enjoy their reward of 72 virgin-growth forests.

Both the radical Islam of David Headley and the Church of Settled Science of David Suzuki seem almost parodic responses to the hollowness of the modern multicultural West and the search for alternative, globalized identities. Indeed, it is hard to say which is wackier. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Prince of Wales. One’s a millenarian apocalyptic loon, and the other’s president of Iran. On balance, widening the streets of Tehran for the imminent return of the Twelfth Imam seems marginally less deranged than insisting the planet is doomed in 96 months unless humanity abandons the evils of capitalism and “the age of convenience.” (This from a man who has never drawn his own curtains.)

Ah, well. When I compare the eco-cultists to the humourless fanatics of the jihad, I get barraged by stern emails denouncing me as a “denier.” Apostate! And Mr. Suzuki wants deniers jailed. Call the Inquisition! Continue…

Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, Prime Minister

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 5 Comments

Took in Handel’s Messiah last night at the National Arts Centre. A fine show, as always, but everyone left a bit disappointed at the lack of a Stephen Harper cameo. I figured for sure he’d come out and point to himself during the part about people walking in darkness seeing a great light.

I know two things about classical music: jack and squat. So I won’t attempt to review the vocal performances of the four singers. But I will review an equally important aspect of a singer’s repertoire: the facial expressions of feigned interest that he or she makes while not singing.

Ratings are on a scale of one to four protruding tenor bellies (Þ):

Geraldine McGreevy, soprano: Kinda frowny. Kept her eyes angled upward, as though scanning the loges for a hot octogenarian to make it with after the show. Ultimately, this proved distracting. Whenever I looked at her, I felt the urge to turn around to see what she was staring at. Is someone threatening to jump? Is a couple in a private box in the process of joining the 60-Feet-High Club? Rating: ÞÞ.

Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto: Classic squinter. Scanned crowd with Continue…

NFL Picks Week 15: In spirit of season, Jay Cutler will giftwrap interceptions for $5

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 7:00 AM - 1 Comment

Scott Feschuk Last week: 11-5 Season: 106-99-3

Scott Reid Last week: 6-10 Season: 111-94-3

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Indianapolis (minus 6.5) at Jacksonville, Thursday night

Reid: I am one who always craves the chance to bear witness to history –much like Max the 2000 Year Old Mouse. So I was angry when David Tyree used his velcroed head to rob us of the chance to see the Patriots go 19-0. But now I want something even better: A clash of the undefeated in the Super Bowl. Imagine it. 18-0 Indy takes on 18-0 New Orleans. It would be the greatest of all games. The most historic of all seasons. And finally, Mercury Morris would be forced to shut his yapping hole. In other words: Don’t even think about it Jacksonville! Pick: Indianapolis.

Feschuk: I don’t know, buddy – Jacksonville always plays Indy tough. This one is going to be as close as the riveting season-long tussle between Terry Bradshaw and borderline literacy. Pick: Jacksonville.

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Dallas (plus 7) at New Orleans, Saturday night

Feschuk: When Brett Favre returned to Lambeau, Fox kept a camera on him all game long – you could watch the “Favre feed” live on your computer. And you know what? It was boring. But you know what wouldn’t be? A camera that Continue…

Put me in next year, coach!

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 6:05 PM - 8 Comments

Stephen Harper once had this to say about Canada’s cozy and important upper house: “Canadians understand that our Senate, as it stands today, must either change, or, like the old upper houses of our provinces, vanish.” Granted, this was over two years ago, more than enough time for any politician to make their supposedly heartfelt convictions go poof. And there it is: a year and a bit into his mandate and Harper has been appointing senators–who, if the Harper of yore is to be believed, are unelected, (at least) $132,300-a-pop professional thumbsuckers steeped in patronage–like your average power-drunk Liberal: 27 jowly, carbon-emitting pontificators in a single year. Far from ushering it into well-deserved oblivion, Harper seems instead intent on making sure the Senate has a very long, very blue future. Mein Gott.

But then, like a pack of avenging angels sent from the heavens of Quebecor, Le Journal de Montréal arrived on the (virtual) doorstep and laid waste to my pitiful knee-jerk cynicism. One look at the front page picture of possibly-still-illiterate former Habs coach-cum-Honorable Member Jacques Demers in all his pasty, bespectacled glory and it hit me: Harper has clung to his principles all along. By appointing a completely unqualified, barely literate hockey oaf who hardly bothers to show up, and who literally broadcasts his potential conflicts-of-interest on cable television, our Prime Minister is rubbing our noses in the sheer futility of the institution. He’s destroying the senate from the inside. It’s Machiavellian, Clausewitzian and even Sun Tzu-ian. An explanation after this here jump.

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Refuse the "refute', and give us an inquiry

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 5:43 PM - 89 Comments

1. A headline on the National Post website:

Colvin refutes Afghan detainee testimony

2.  From a press release from Laurie Hawn that just came out:

In past weeks, committee members have heard from numerous senior military and diplomatic officials who have all strongly refuted Mr. Colvin’s claims.  There is nothing substantially new in Mr. Colvin’s recent correspondence.

This is driving me crazy. Simply stating the opposite of another’s position, or saying it is false, does not refute it. It might rebut it, or it might contradict it, or dispute it. But “refute” is an accomplishment verb, and to refute a claim or opinion is to successfully prove it to be false or erroneous. So you can refute another’s argument through logic or evidence that successfully meets a given standard or test of truth.

Aside from the fact that the ongoing misuse of the term in headlines and news stories scratches on my eyeballs like fingernails on a chalkboard, it matters in more serious, and less pedantic way. What we have in the Colvin affair now is a whole lot of he said/she said/they said/we said testimony, much of it rebutting or disputing or contradicting what others have said.

Who is right? Who has been refuted? Where lies the truth? What is the required test or standard?

We need an inquiry. Now.
The full Hawn statement after the break. Continue…

Happy Beethoven's Birthday!

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 4:02 PM - 8 Comments

It’s also Jane Austen’s birthday, but being a Jane Austen fan is kind of tough in this day and age, and I prefer to wait until she gets a little more obscure and it’s safe to love her books again. (I read all Jane Austen’s books — being a lit-nerd — before the huge glut of Austen movies and miniseries from the ’90s. Back then it was assumed that Austen wasn’t a good prospect for movie adaptation, because her novels had so little action in them. Then came the Austen boom, but that had its cost, because her novels are a balancing act between romantic fantasy, clear-eyed realism, and her angry moral scolding, and now she’s mostly just synonymous with romantic escapist fantasy. That’s not her fault, but still…)

But Beethoven is safe, so I looked around and found this recently-uploaded performance of his most famous symphony.

The conductor, Frans Brüggen, is a world-famous recorder player who built a second career as a conductor of 18th and early 19th century music on period instruments. The interesting thing about this recent performance of Beethoven’s 5th is that the sound and style aren’t really what we associate with the early music movement (a movement he helped create). The instruments are old instruments, played without a lot of vibrato, but the performance is slowish, weighty and even a little “romantic,” with quirky phrasing and dynamics. The movement for Period Beethoven has changed a lot; now it almost has more in common with early 20th-century Beethoven, which was more subjective and gave the conductor more leeway for his personal idiosyncracies.

So here’s the first movement in this “period” performance:

And here’s that same movement in a performance by Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic (a studio peformance directed for film by Henri-Georges Clouzot, famous for movies like The Wages of Fear). It’s faster, more brutal and clipped-sounding, and sounds more like the approach that was associated with “period” performance in the ’80s and ’90s.

The rest of Beethoven’s Fifth (as performed by Brüggen and the Orchestra of the 18th Century) after the jump.

Movement II Continue…

Colvin responds (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 4:02 PM - 14 Comments

Richard Colvin’s letter to the Afghanistan committee is now available here.

The Liberals suggest a public inquiry is the only suitable response. The NDP says likewise. The Defence Minister’s office shrugs. Gen. Michel Gauthier quibbles.

Hint: "LOL" doesn't stand for Liberal Opposition Leader

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 3:48 PM - 39 Comments

Attention newspapers: trying to milk the Lee Harpey Oswald scandal for every possible ounce of news value may seem like fun now, but you do realize, don’t you, that we journalists will end up being bound by the standards of taste we’re all now blithely applying to partisan propagandists? The longer we countenance this grotesque farce, the more likely it is that editorial cartoonists will eventually be forbidden by custom from drawing statesmen with knives sticking out of their backs. (It’s a direct reference to assassination! How dare you?) This is a problem, since the code of their profession requires them to do so a minimum of five times a year. (I think it’s in the handbook right after the “Dead celebrities being greeted by St. Peter” quota.)

By the way, let me extend a hearty “Welcome to the Internet!” to whichever Liberal flunky thought that a Photoshop competition was certain to be a bastion of good taste and non-offensiveness. Yes, you’ll notice the place is one big ethical minefield—best of luck navigating it with the remaining leg!