Rochette soldiers on

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:49 PM - 0 Comments

Red is the new black

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:31 PM - 3 Comments

You’d probably never see Kiran Sharma in a Team Canada hockey jersey. But since the 2010 Games began, the saleswoman at Vancouver’s Bluebird tries to dress with some kind of red accent every day-red shoes, a red scarf, a red pin she made to put in her hair, or even just a dash of bright red lipstick. It’s about pride of country, she says, a way to show her support. Customers at the stylish downtown shop are the same way, snapping up red t-shirts and $39 red mufflers ordered in anticipation of the Olympics. Next door, at m0851, a purveyor of cool, minimalist leather goods, a salesman says items in scarlet, a colour they added to the line before the Olympics, are the most coveted.

It’s a phenomenon playing out across the city. There’s so much red here it’s the new black—or should that be the new beige, the tone that in the past best conveyed Canada’s mild-mannered international rep. Now red has morphed from Team Canada’s official colour into a mainstream fashion statement. It’s all over the lower-end: H&M has staged red “colour stories” in its Vancouver stores and plays it prominently in window displays. Its $34.99 red cotton dresses and red leggings are flying out the door. It’s percolating into fancy shops as well: Burberry has red in its window. And Holt Renfrew’s selling its $360 nylon Prada pouches twice as quickly in red as the usually more popular black version.

Much of course is marketing to the sudden surge in nationalist sentiment, even in Quebec, resulting from the Games, as this new poll reveals. On the ground here it’s palpable. “I’ve never seen this country express this sort of nationalism,” says Shayne McCallion, the manager at St. John boutique in the Fairmont Hotel.

It’ll be interesting to see if the sense of community embodied by everyone wrapped in scarlet can be sustained. (Much will depend on how much non-fashionable red ink will emerge in the Games’ aftermath.) Red is a complex colour, signifying heat and passion but also stop and danger. It’s stunning in small doses, fatiguing in larger ones. We’re already seeing signs of that here. “I think I’m Canada-ed out,” I heard a young man in a Team Canada jersey saying last Sunday in Yaletown. Then again, nobody says fashion isn’t fickle.

Ontario premier to prorogue legislature

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:24 PM - 7 Comments

Stephen Harper has made shutting down the government less fun for everyone. Dalton McGuinty, premier of Ontario, will prorogue the province’s parliament for four days, from March 4 to March 8. But after the backlash Harper suffered for shutting down Parliament, McGuinty feels the need to prorogue in the blandest way possible: the shutdown includes a Friday, when the legislature doesn’t meet, and a weekend, meaning that “there will be no time lost in the legislature.” McGuinty says that premiers can’t use prorogation as a way of avoiding problems the way Harper did, because voters “are on to this prorogation thing.” Thanks a lot, Harper; thanks to you, even future government stoppages are going to be boring.

CBC News

Rights and Democracy: I say tomato, you say this has nothing to do with the Middle East

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:16 PM - 220 Comments

Yesterday’s display of bulbous rubber noses and floppy shoes from the seven clowns running Rights and Democracy is wearyingly familiar in every particular.

Tossing a dart from across the room, I hit this passage, at random out of any number of others, to rebut: they write that the executive review committee “gave the former president repeated opportunities to meet and discuss the evaluation in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. He chose not to avail himself of those opportunities.”

Rémy Beauregard actually addressed that point in a long letter to the board of Rights and Democracy on Oct. 26, 2009. “With respect to the efforts made to accommodate the President for a meeting of the Committee,” he wrote, “it is important to clarify that of the 55 days proposed by the Secretary of the Board for such a meeting, the President indicated he was available for 45 of those days.”

Then why was there no meeting? Because, as I’ve learned when trying to seek comment from them, Aurel Braun and his pals can be difficult to pin down. Continue…

Bronconnier bows out of mayor's race

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 11:49 AM - 1 Comment

Dave Bronconnier has decided three terms is enough. The mayor of Calgary announced yesterday he wouldn’t be seeking a fourth-consecutive term in the city’s upcoming October election, leaving the field wide open to new candidates. In his nine years in the mayor’s seat, Bronconnier oversaw several major infrastructure upgrades, including an expansion of the city’s light-rail service and the implementation of a recycling program, as Calgary tried to keep up with the oil and natural resources boom. Though he’s been criticized for hiking taxes to pay for the expansion in government services, Bronconnier said in a speech yesterday he had no regrets.  “Calgary is well-positioned for the future,” he said. “That’s the key, that we have made the right strategic investments for the long term of this community.” So far, the early favourite to replace Bronconnier is Ald. Ric McIver, who’s yet to announce he’s running for the job, but who was expected to challenge Bronconnier in a heated race this fall.

Borrowing the podium

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 11:49 AM - 11 Comments

Gary Lunn continues to suggest the federal government won’t make up the funding shortfall for Own the Podium after the Vancouver Olympics. Here is how Roger Jackson, CEO of Own the Podium, has explained the likely result of such a shortfall.

“We would lose about 60% of our funding, we would lose about 120 coaching and sports science positions,” says Jackson, who had already been forced to lay off 37 sports scientists. “The number of disciplines that we’re currently funding right now are about 16; the number we could support in the future would be half that, probably seven or eight. The Top Secret program, all of the new technologies that we’ve been working with, the people we’ve trained, will disappear.”

Rape drugs on the rise, UN warns

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 11:33 AM - 2 Comments

While tough measures against Rohypnol, the best-known date rape drug, have helped curb its use, sexual abusers are now turning to alternatives, leading to a rise in date rape drugs, according to the United Nations drug control agency’s annual report. The UN hopes these alternative drugs, which might be subject to less strict international controls, will be placed on controlled substances lists; the UN is also pushing for safety features like dyes and flavourings, the BBC reports. “These drugs are used so as to tremendously reduce people’s resistance to unwanted sexual activity and then subsequently they might not even remember what happened,” professor Hamid Ghodse of the International Narcotics Control Board said. In one example, London taxi driver John Worboys was found guilty last year of drugging and sexually assaulting female passengers, giving his victims drinks with sedatives. Many only remembered falling asleep, then waking up at home.

BBC News

Another great moment in ambush marketing

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:51 AM - 4 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with that other Olympic sport—ambush marketing. I spotted this the other night on a giant projector screen downtown. Can’t imagine it’s the type of association Microsoft wants to make. Besides, does this mean VANOC has had to hire someone to wiggle the mouse every few minutes?

Ski cross makes a successful debut

By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:44 AM - 7 Comments

Well, the official debut of ski cross as an Olympic sport is over. Canada’s ski cross dream team, assembled a couple of years ago with the express purpose of bringing home lots and lots of shiny round metal disks, didn’t quite live up to expectations. There’d been talk a few weeks ago of three or even four medals, but the men’s team was completely shut out. Whatever. Ashleigh McIvor more than made up for it with her dominating victory over the women’s field.

So what have we learned from these two days of Olympic ski cross?

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

The sport sounds simple enough. Four skiers start at the top, race to the bottom, first across the line wins. It’s just that in between there are steep jumps, hard bank turns and three other people who’ll do just about anything they can to make sure you don’t get down before them. Canadians learned that watching Chris Del Bosco’s gutsy push for silver on Sunday, which unfortunately cost him a podium position when he crashed on the second-last jump. Here’s something else that sets ski cross apart, though. In most sports losing an almost guaranteed bronze in pursuit of a silver or gold just isn’t done. But in the adrenaline-addicted ski cross community, Del Bosco’s all or nothing push earned him more props than if he’d settled for third. Even Entertainment Weekly dubbed him the Olympic Stud of the Day.

MORE CRASH CAMS, PLEASE

Some ski crossers wear tiny video cameras atop their helmets. They’re there ostensibly so viewers can get a feel for what it’s like to hurl down the side of a mountain at 80 km/h. In reality, they’re much better at showing what happens when you go from 80 to zero in less than five seconds, straight into the side of a snow bank. Other sports should follow suit: bobsled, moguls and short track speed skating. And what the heck, let’s wire up the goalies, too.

THERE’S ROOM TO GROW

Ski cross as a sport is a work in progress. It’s still a toddler in terms of official competitions. The sport debuted at the Winter X Games just over a decade ago. But it does have some limitations in its current incarnation, as some critics have pointed out. One complaint is that whoever gets the fastest start will often win the race. That’s not always true, but in heats with lower caliber skiers, barring a magnificent crash, the race is often determined in the first few seconds. Expect those kinks to be worked out in coming races away from the glare of the Olympic spotlight.

In the end few events at the Vancouver games generated more buzz than ski cross. And with Games organizers and the networks gambling billions of dollars to attract young viewers, any sport that packs excitement, danger, triumph and heart-break neatly into two-minute, easily-downloadable morsels is pure gold. That fact alone will guarantee its return in Sochi in four years.

The health debate beyond the Danny Williams story

By John Geddes - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:34 AM - 123 Comments

The story of Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ trip to Florida for heart surgery hasn’t exactly elevated the argument about health care. To try to shift to a more useful debate, I suppose it would seem even-handed of me to insert here a diplomatic comment about how both advocates and opponents of universal insurance went overboard. But I think the mistakes mostly came from the right, in the form of hasty claims that Williams’ decision somehow proved the Canadian system is fatally flawed.

As more facts emerged, that gleeful assertion just didn’t hold up. All evidence suggests that excellent heart surgery of  exactly the sort Williams needed was readily available in Canada. The other factors that might have legitimately influenced his choice—the amenities of a U.S. hospital where the rich can pay out-of-pocket, the skills of a particular surgeon recommended to Williams by his own doctor, the proximity of a Miami hospital to the premier’s Florida condo—don’t matter much.

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Math teacher hailed as hero

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:27 AM - 5 Comments

The courage and quick thinking of Dr. David Benke, a math teacher at Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton, Colorado, may have saved dozens of lives. In a terrifying scene reminiscent of the Columbine shooting that scarred the town 11 years ago, a 32 year-old gunman showed up outside of the school just as students were leaving on Tuesday. He opened fire with a hunting rifle, wounding two students before Benke could spring into action. “I noticed that it was a bolt-action rifle and I knew that after he got a shot off, I would be able to grab him before he would be able to work the action again,” Benke said. He and another teacher subdued the man until police arrived.

L.A. Times

Men's hockey: Canada vs. Russia

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:26 AM - 0 Comments

Canadian women leading bobsleigh

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:21 AM - 0 Comments

Eastern Promises

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:03 AM - 14 Comments

Domestic politics are playing an increasingly destabilizing role in the coalition mission in Afghanistan.  A disagreement over whether to extend the country’s military mission has brought down the Dutch government. The centre-right prime minister wanted to accede to NATO’s request for an extension, while one of his coalition partners on the left wanted to stick to the agreed-upon plan to leave Afghanistan this year.

NATO isn’t pretending this isn’t a problem.

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Joannie Rochette's grace under pressure

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:11 AM - 7 Comments

Grace under pressure is how Ernest Hemingway described “guts.” He was more of a bullfight fan than a figure skating guy, but in an arena in Vancouver Tuesday night his definition came to life, wearing a sweet black costume, glittering with sequins.

The crowd at Pacific Coliseum was cheering for Joannie Rochette the moment she traded hand-slaps with her coach and skated onto the ice. From that moment on, she must have felt their warm embrace, their goodwill and their sympathy.

There was no attempt at a pasted-on smile, in a sport full of false smiles. Her mother Thérèse had died of a heart attack in Vancouver just two nights earlier; there was nothing to smile about. The only note of cheer was a vivid red flower that crawled up the back of her costume on a winding green stem. One imagines Thérèse telling her daughter how beautiful she looked in this costume,  for indeed she did.

But her mother was not in the seats, not beside her father Normand, to share this moment. There was only the program to carry her, and the music: La Cumparsita, a tango at points jaunty and wistful and sad. Sometimes, goes the bumper sticker, life is just about showing up. Rochette did so much more than that. She launched into her triple lutz-double toeloop combination. It was clean and solid and brave, and if she was relieved, there was no hint of it. She carried on: flying sit spin,  double axel, and on and on. There was no attempt to sell the program to the audience or to the judges. It was obvious by being here how much this meant to her. It ended with a spin. Her composure cracked when the music stopped and the crowd exploded in applause, and the real world came back into focus. She shuddered with emotion and grief.

Floral bouquets rained down from every corner of the rink, and young girls recruited from local figure skating clubs flashed across the ice to gather them. One hopes their coaches and parents were there tonight to tell these girls to savour this moment, to remember its grace. Rochette skated off the ice into the arms of her coach Manon Perron, and the tears flowed. She composed herself in the place known as the kiss and cry zone. It’s a tiny place; just room enough for a skater and a coach, and 11,700 members of the audience.

The marks came: 71.36, her season’s best. There were marks for skating skills, for transitions and linking footwork, for choreography, performance and interpretation. There are no marks for showing up. Her skate put her into third place, far above Miki Ando of Japan in forth, and well behind first-place Yu-Na Kim of Korea. She looked up into the stands and blew a kiss.

Later, after leaving the ice, she was asked about the support of the crowd. “It was hard to handle,” she said. “But I appreciate the support.” She was asked how she is doing. She said: “Words cannot describe.”

She skates her free program Thursday. Until then, she is surrounded by good people. The Canadian team here has pulled together as family, and the skating community is smaller still. It can only have buoyed Rochette’s spirits to watch her Olympic village roommate, ice dancer Tessa Virtue, and her partner Scott Moir, skate to gold a night earlier with their fluid, interpretation of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

Earlier, Rochette and her coach posted a message thanking Canadians for their support. “We have received so many emails and texts and we wanted people to know that we read everything you are sending. We also wanted everyone to know these are helping us get through this. We are going to do it with Thérèse.” And so,  together Tuesday night, they skated, mother and daughter, bound by a lifetime of memories.

Playing the penalty shot odds

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 12:14 AM - 0 Comments

As it turns out, the decision didn’t make any difference. It wasn’t even that important at the time. But if the same scenario unfolds against the Russians Wednesday night—and Canadian coach Mike Babcock makes the wrong choice—the nation won’t be so forgiving.

With Canada already up 4-0 in the second period, a German defenceman hauled down Rick Nash as he barreled toward the net on a breakaway. (Or at least the referee thought it was a breakaway; the truth is debatable). Either way, Nash was awarded a penalty shot. Under international rules, however, the shooter doesn’t necessarily have to be the player who draws the penalty. The coach can choose anyone.

Enter Sidney Crosby.

As Babcock later explained, the numbers don’t lie. Sid the Kid has converted more than 50 per cent of his penalty shot opportunities in the NHL, while Nash’s average is closer to 35 per cent. That’s exactly why Crosby led off the shoot-out against Switzerland last week, and why, when the score was still tied after the mandatory three shooters, Crosby came out again for shot number four.

And it’s why Crosby—not Nash—lined up against German goaltender Thomas Greiss Tuesday night.

Unfortunately, the percentages didn’t pan out this time around. Crosby faked left, shot right, and watched the puck bounce off Greiss’s pad.

“It’s one of those ones when he didn’t score, you wish you didn’t do it,” Babcock told reporters after the game, an 8-2 romp. “But the stats show that Crosby’s got a better chance to score. So it’s real simple. To me, it’s all about winning. I even said to Nash: ‘You do all the work and you don’t get to take the shot.’ I said that right to him. The reality is this is about Canada, not about me or not about Nash. It’s about winning. He’s fine, he’s a big boy, and he understands that.”

For the record, Nash did take the decision like a big boy. “It’s international rules, you can pick anybody,” he said. “If I was the coach I think I’d probably pick Crosby over me too.”

Did you give Sid a hard time after he missed? “No,” Nash said with a chuckle. “I will, though.”

Canadian men gird for Russia

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 11:37 PM - 0 Comments

Shea Weber once had his shot clocked at a whopping 103.4 miles per hour. But never—not in the NHL, not in junior, not even in his minor hockey arena up in B.C.’s Shuswap country—has he fired one clean through the net.

There really is a first for everything.

At 3:10 of the second period during tonight’s game between Canada and Germany, Weber launched one of his patented howitzers from the right point, getting the puck on net through a forest of legs and sticks. If you didn’t have your eye squarely on the netting above German goaltender Thomas Greiss’s right shoulder, you would have missed the tell-tale ripple of twine, and one of the strangest occurrences in Olympic hockey history.

But Weber saw it, and the 24-year-old defenceman knew that unless he’d just witnessed a breach in the laws of physics, the trajectory of his shot dictated that he’d scored.

“Yeah, uh, the net doesn’t usually move on its own like that,” he grinned after the game. “It didn’t look like it went over the net or beside the net. It was kind of a funky play. I’ve never witnessed  anything like it.”

A video replay confirmed what Weber suspected, and the goal counted as Canada’s second in a convincing 8-2 victory over the Germans in a playoff qualifier.

The emphatic nature of the win—not to mention the awe induced by Weber’s shot—were good signs given the challenges ahead of this team. Canada now faces the formidably talented Russians in a quarterfinal match tomorrow night, and will take any psychological edge it can get. At least some will come from the crowd which with four minutes left indulged in a deafening chant of “We want Russia! We want Russia!”

The whole atmosphere was a welcome change for the Canadians, who entered the tournament as odds-on favourites to win gold yet have appeared to struggle under the weight of expectation attached to playing an Olympic tournament on home soil.

A 5-3 loss to the Americans on Sunday exposed the team’s apparent fragility, as the players poured some 45 shots on U.S. goalie Ryan Miller yet coughed up the game through a series of costly errors in their own end.

Tonight, coach Mike Babcock’s chemistry experiments worked, as a line made up of Sidney Crosby, Jarome Iginla and Eric Staal combined for six points. Iginla scored twice, while Crosby, Rick Nash, Mike Richards, Joe Thornton and Scott Niedermayer scored the others—the latter on a breakaway after emerging from the penalty box.

Nash also drew a penalty shot, which Babcock handed to Crosby on the basis of IIHF rules allowing a team to pick any shooter it wants. The Pittsburgh Penguins star couldn’t convert on an attempted deke.

Most heartening of all for Canada was the play of goaltender Roberto Luongo, a Vancouver Canuck who got the nod over presumed No. 1 Martin Brodeur, and played a strong game before his hometown NHL crowd.

“I felt good throughout the whole game,” said Luongo, who turned aside 21 of 23 shots, including several bouncing pucks and deflections. “I’ve played a lot of games at the international level and this one ranks up there with the big ones. Hopefully it’s not the biggest one this week.”

Babcock confirmed after the game that Luongo will get the start in Wednesday’s game against Russia, even though the 30-year-old from Montreal is sometimes knocked for failing to come through in important games.

“I think his bank account shows that he’s a pretty good goalie,” said Babcock, who as coach of the Detroit Red Wings has seen a lot of Luongo. “I know every time we play him he puts up this wall, and I’m excited he’s playing for us tomorrow. We’re going to give up some opportunities, that’s just reality. [The Russians] are that good.

“But he’s a big man and he doesn’t let it go under him or through him, and if they put it around him, we’ll line up for the face-off and get on with it.”

Luongo was equally respectful of the Russians, noting the dangers posed by their top line of Alexander Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin and Alexander Semin. “They’re shooters, so we can’t give them a lot of time and space,” he said. “I know when those guys get the puck, I’ll be getting ready.”

Ashleigh McIvor

By Shanda Deziel - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 9:41 PM - 2 Comments

Men's hockey

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 9:37 PM - 0 Comments

Facing off against Hayley

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 9:11 PM - 1 Comment

“Tough.” That’s how teary-eyed Slovak goalie Zuzana Tomcikova described her team’s 18-0 drubbing at the hands of Team Canada. The five-foot-ten, 161-lb. netminder, who plays for Bemidji State University in Minnesota, says she had never allowed so many goals “in her life” (she may never have faced as many shots—67—either). “I’m really happy my team didn’t quit on me,” says Tomcikova, tears streaming down her face. “They were cheering me on after every single goal. We just need a good night’s sleep.” By then, she was sobbing. “We have to put this game behind us. Tomorrow, it’s a new day.”

That’s about all I could make out through the tears. It was a painful interview. When I tried to tell her how well many of the journalists in attendance had thought she’d played, she cried even harder. I should have told her that I can relate, that I felt her pain; I know what it’s like to have your face pasted by the likes of Hayley Wickenheiser, Colleen Sostorics and Gina Kingsbury.

I’ve since hung up the skates, but until a couple of years ago, I played centre for the B.C. Breakers in the Western Women’s Hockey League, and faced off against Calgary’s Oval X-Treme in league play. Half of its roster was made up of members of Canada’s national team program. The Breakers, on the other hand, was a ragtag bunch of mostly ex-university and college players trying to map out the next phase of their lives; I was then an intern for Maclean’s.

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The Bilodeaus: an inspiration

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 8:52 PM - 16 Comments

Often over the past four years, during the hard times and during the quiet moments after training, Alexandre Bilodeau would ask his “big sister” Jennifer Heil what a gold medal feels like. And the woman who won Canada’s first Olympic gold medal at the 2006 Turin Olympics would say this to her friend and training partner: “Alex, you’ll know. There are no words for that.” And she was right, as 22-year-old Bilodeau, from the leafy Montreal suburb of Rosemère, now knows. In either official language there are no words appropriate for those rapturous early hours, just a jumble of feelings tinged with a sense of unreality, he would later reflect.

The answer came to him, appropriately enough for a revelation, from a mountaintop on the second night of competition. It came after he scorched down the Cypress Mountain moguls course in 23.17 seconds, bumping to second place Dale Begg-Smith, another Canadian, if an indifferent one, who races for his adopted country of Australia. It came after waiting to see if one last competitor, the formidable Frenchman Guilbaut Colas, could take his gold away.

When Colas’s marks were announced and the run fell short, Bilodeau leapt to his ski boots, pumped his fists and picked up a Canadian flag. He saluted the screaming crowd, their emotions jacked by patriotism, cans of Canadian beer and the realization they’d witnessed history: the first Olympic gold medal won by a Canadian on home soil. Almost literally home soil, for the surrounding weather-battered ski hills were pockmarked with patches of dirt and studded with exposed rocks. Michael Chambers, outgoing president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, would later liken it to Paul Henderson’s goal that sealed Canada’s victory at the 1972 hockey summit with Russia. “Where were you when Alex Bilodeau won the first gold medal on Canadian soil?” Chambers said.

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Hollywood’s shocking reel Indians

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 8:44 PM - 3 Comments

As Avatar completes its quest for world domination, critics are still circling the wagons, asking if James Cameron’s visionary epic is revolutionary or retrograde, or both. The Vatican frets about its creed of nature worship. U.S. Conservatives condemn it as anti-military eco-liberalism. And the rest of us wonder how the characters in this 3-D marvel can be so flat. But there are Aboriginal people who have a more personal gripe. The Na’vi aliens on Pandora are clearly patterned on North American natives, or more specifically their Hollywood stereotype—noble savages in braids riding bareback with bows and arrows. And as in Dances With Wolves, their messiah is a white man who goes native. “Avatar angered me,” says CBC film critic Jesse Wente, an Ojibwa. “You have blue aliens with tails—why do you have to put feathers in their hair? The Na’vi even do the war whoop, which is a sound completely manufactured by Hollywood.”

Those persistent Indian clichés are the subject of a new documentary called Reel Injun, directed by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond. By turns funny and shocking, it’s a chronicle of how native people have been absurdly misrepresented onscreen from the days of silent film to the present. Growing up on a reserve in the James Bay community of Waskaganish, Diamond, now 41, remembers watching old movies as a kid in a church basement. “Raised on cowboys and Indians, we cheered for the cowboys,” he says, “never realizing that we were the Indians.” When he moved south, his new classmates asked this Cree from the Subarctic if he lived in a teepee and rode horses, because that was the image of Hollywood’s all-purpose Plains Indian.

With a mix of movie clips and talking heads, Reel Injun unearths some fascinating examples of inauthenticity. The Indian headband, it seems, was largely a Hollywood invention—for an actor doing stunts and falling off horses, it kept his wig in place. Indian dialogue was often just as fake. In one vintage western, it’s just English played backwards. In A Distant Trumpet (1964), Navajo speak their own language, but after Diamond heard stories of improv mischief, he had the dialogue translated and found them saying things like “You are snakes crawling in your own shit!” Some clips are more sobering. In The Searchers, cowboys uncover an Indian grave and John Wayne shoots out the eyes of the corpse, saying, “Ain’t got no eyes, he can’t enter the spirit land.” Talk about rough justice.

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When you’re the only hope

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 8:42 PM - 10 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

As a young boy in the far north of Pakistan, Muhammad Abbas would find pieces of scrap wood at the nearby air force facility and, with a little help, fashion them into rudimentary skis. He attached them to his feet with rubber bands. It was cold, he remembers, and there wasn’t much else to do in winter.

Pastime became hobby, hobby became obsession—and 15 years later, Abbas is in Whistler to ski the giant slalom. No more rubber bands: at 24, he is Pakistan’s flag-bearer, its sole representative and the first athlete in his country’s history to qualify for the Winter Olympics. “This boy,” says Zahid Farooq, a now-retired member of the air force who nurtured Abbas as a young skier and remains his coach today, “This boy, a nine-year-old, on his little skis—he could do anything the adults could do, and more. We said, ‘Here is someone to be groomed. Here is our future.’ ”

When these Games began, Abbas walked into B.C. Place as part of a curious fraternity: almost one quarter of the 82 countries at the Vancouver Games are, like Pakistan, represented by a single athlete. Some of these competitors are using what cynics describe as “flags of convenience”—a back door into the Olympics after one fails to make the cut in his homeland.

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I feel pity for Colonel Williams if he’s guilty

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 8:41 PM - 92 Comments

Reading about Col. Russell Williams, the soldier who allegedly has a taste for stolen ladies’ underwear, sexual assault and murder (likely sexual murder, though police are tight-lipped on details), gets one thinking, or at least it gets me thinking, about the “why”: why do any human beings have this special predilection? As far as I know, no other species kills for sexual excitement. Possibly there exists in tall grasses or stony wastelands some terrible creature, weird bird or testosterone-filled amoeba that needs to tie up the object of desire in sticky strands of something in order to satiate needs, but wouldn’t we have heard of it were it common?

A number of animals and insects kill their mates, but for logical reasons. The victim may be a food source or is simply an irritant. They may become homicidal because a mate refuses to mate or insists on it. The black widow spider does not inevitably kill during or after copulation any more than the praying mantis, but both can do it if the male is not cunning enough to dismount at the right moment and escape being a tasty snack. The notion that these insects are aroused sexual predators is one of those myths that human beings—who may indeed need violence to achieve arousal—have ascribed to the innocent arachnid in a display of redirected psychopathy.

Perhaps our uniqueness in this matter explains our culture’s fascination with a hint of sexual murder. The presumed innocent colonel had barely been fingered and fingerprinted before the announcement was made of a book about him to be published this fall. The author is a newspaper reporter, in itself not a promising start, but so in a manner of speaking was the great author Émile Zola. All the same, were it Zola or Tolstoy, a book purporting to say anything insightful about Williams by this fall, when he will be inaccessible and any letters, diaries or genuine artifacts unavailable, can only be alluring trash at best based on tittle-tattle.

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