Happiness is a warm, registered firearm

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 1:36 PM - 122 Comments

In a speech to the Canadian Police Association this morning, Michael Ignatieff laid out the Liberal approach to crime, with three proposed changes to the gun registry.

First, we’d change the law, so that people who forget to register their gun can be issued a ticket, rather than face a criminal charge. This will give front line officers the tools you need to distinguish an honest mistake from a threat to public safety. Someone who habitually breaks the law and flouts the regulations should be treated far differently from someone who makes a one-time mistake. One kind of behavior is criminal, the other isn’t. And you need the appropriate tools to deal with each situation. That’s a message we heard loud and clear.

Second, we’ll permanently eliminate fees for new licenses, renewals, and upgrades.

And third, we’ll streamline paperwork, to make registration as quick and easy as possible.

Liberals will apparently be required to vote against Conservative Candice Hoeppner’s bill—a private member’s initiative that would effectively end the registry—when it comes up for a final vote. Eight Liberals (Simms, Russell, Rota, Martin, Easter, D’Amours, Bagnell and Andrews) voted in favour of the bill on second reading and two (Guarnieri and Karygiannis) abstained. In his speech, Mr. Ignatieff said the party had been working with these MPs on the proposed reforms.

Even if you move those 10 votes to the no side, the bill would pass by a count of 156-147.

Is the CBC dumbing down?

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 1:16 PM - 10 Comments

The CBC’s ratings are up, with four shows that draw over a million viewers, as well as good numbers for scripted dramas like Heartland and Republic of Doyle. But there are charges they’ve increased viewership the old-fashioned way: by turning away anything that isn’t fluffy and mainstream. Ken Finkleman, who created The Newsroom for the CBC, says that Canada’s public broadcaster turned down his latest edgy half-hour comedy, Good Dog, which he had to take to cable instead. “Forget about dark and edgy,” Finkleman told The Globe and Mail, “the CBC only seems to want warm and friendly.”

The Globe and Mail

The past few days in things that are somewhat more consequential

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 12:35 PM - 30 Comments

Gen. Walter Natynczyk has written to the special committee on Afghanistan to outline the military’s account of one of the events referenced last week by Malgarai Ahmadshah.

Meanwhile, the Hill Times reports that the Speaker is set to rule this week on the question of privilege raised by opposition members in regards to the House demand that the government produce all documents related to Afghan detainees.

And the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reports that Canada turned over 163 prisoners last year—a figure the Canadian government has not released on the grounds of operational security.

The Junos, on lithium

By Michael Barclay - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 12:27 PM - 9 Comments

The Juno Awards telecast is not about handing out hardware. It’s part genuine musical celebration, part industry backslapping, part CTV cross-promotional orgy, part high school pep rally and/or provincial tourism ad, with as many live performances as possible squeezed into a tightly run two-hour slot.

Which means that 90 per cent of the awards are presented at a non-televised dinner the night before: everything from album packaging of the year to artist of the year. By the time the telecast started, many of my favourite albums of 2009 had already won Junos: Bell Orchestre for instrumental album of the year (As Seen Through Windows), Charles Spearin for contemporary jazz album of the year (The Happiness Project), Billy Talent for rock album of the year (III), and K’naan for artist of the year. After decades of grumbling about the Junos, this was the first year I was predisposed to genuinely enjoy them.

And yet they disappointed again—not because they were awful, but because they weren’t. Normally they are a combination of the painful and the ever-so-slightly profound, thanks to the cheap commercialization and the glimpses of comparatively obscure artists getting a shot in prime time. If we’re lucky, someone makes a decent speech. The 2010 Junos, by comparison, were like lithium: no highs, no lows, just even keel.

One wonders what the cranky and notorious nationalist Stompin’ Tom Connors would have thought of the opening sequence, where Halifax hip-hop MC Classified marched down George Street in St. John’s, rapping a track called O Canada, a completely earnest lyrical litany of patriotic platitudes waiting to be spun into a tourism ad.

As if to immediately illustrate the evening’s diversity—or, more likely, to comfort anyone over 40 who was bewildered by Classified—the show quickly shifted inside to Michael Bublé, who kicks it REALLY old school. He soon wins single of the year for Haven’t Met You Yet—which, in his acceptance speech, he claims he wrote for his fiancé. Was he stalking her at the time? Is she a mail-order bride?

The Barenaked Ladies take the stage to a) announce that they have a new album and b) assure everyone that they are not the hosts of the show. In fact, there are no hosts. Which, for the absence of Russell Peters alone, is a great idea.The always-deadpan keyboardist Kevin Hearn promises, with noticeably forced enthusiasm, “It’s going to be a great night!” (Doesn’t he mean a good, good night? Aren’t these guys supposed to be pop-culture savvy?)

Tween-pop sensation Justin Bieber performs with only an acoustic guitarist and four male back-up singers and a guest spot from Drake. Say what you will about the puppy-dog eyes and Donny Osmond teeth, the boy can sing, and that swagger coach of his is earning his paycheque. Too bad Bieber’s singing a song with the chorus “I’m like, baby, baby, baby.” Because he looks like baby!

The “action” moves back outside to George Street, where Kim Stockwood and Damhnait Doyle once again have head-scratching Canadians asking: are these two famous for anything other than being the token Newfoundlanders on CBC radio shows and CTV event television? Fellow cutie Newfie (and CTV personality) Seamus O’Regan  shows up to help them all agree that St. John’s is amazing.

Bublé wins the corporate-sponsored fan choice award—do baby boomers actually vote online?—and makes a lame product placement joke in his acceptance speech. By this point in the evening, he’s starting to overstay his welcome, and the next performer proves why. Johnny Reid is a platinum-selling country artist here in Canada, but he just landed an international deal and is planning on making an R&B album. His song Dance With Me is more John McDermott than Johnny Cash, but listening to this guy sing with twice the depth and soul of the cheezeball Bublé, it sounds like he can do anything he wants—as long as he learns some new stage gestures that don’t look like he’s a karaoke king at his local bar, rather than a veteran performer.

Billy Talent are not only the loudest band at this year’s Junos, they’re also the only one performing a song about a Paulo Coehlo novel. They’ve come a long way since their first Juno performance several years back, when Ben Kowalewicz’s shrieking was as much a challenge to old Juno orthodoxy as the first hip-hop performances were. These days, there’s no denying Billy Talent’s melodic strength, and Kowalewicz is sounding more like the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. But he still lets out a high-pitched screech near the end of Saint Veronika—and you would too, if you were a punk rocker who just lost a category to Michael Bublé.

K’naan, named artist of the year at the earlier ceremony is, as always, the most dapper man in the entire room. He’s there to present Bryan Adams with the honorary humanitarian award; Adams, in an apparently biblical mood of generosity, says, “Thank you, Canaan.” Adams is stranded in Europe because of the Icelandic volcano; by video link, he gives a gracious and humble acceptance speech that puts a nice dent in his often prickly reputation. Speaking of gracious and humble, K’naan soon returns to the stage to pick up songwriter of the year—which is well deserved, not just for Wavin’ Flag, but for the fact that he’s one of the most compelling MCs working in hip-hop today, who can write circles around most of his peers, including Drake.

At the halfway point in the ceremony, this year’s Junos are nowhere near the shitshow they were last year, easily the most embarrassing in recent memory (and there’s a lot of competition there). Where are the terrible jokes, the awkward moments, the uncomfortable presenters, the ridiculously over-the-top performances? Why does everyone actually look happy to be there? Can this actually be the Junos?

For a brief moment, it looks like the Olympics, because skeleton athlete Jon Montgomery is standing on the street in a throng of excited, patriotic Canadians, amiably joking with Kim Stockwood and Damhnait Doyle—and with more charisma than either of them put together. He demonstrates his day job skills as an auctioneer by taking bids on Justin Bieber’s phone number and Jim Cuddy’s hotel room key. “This could go on for a while,” Doyle deadpans. Maybe it should—I hereby nominate Montgomery to host the 2010 Junos.

Great Lake Swimmers are a band I never thought I’d see playing the Junos. Not because they don’t deserve it—Tony Dekker is one of the most haunting Canadian songwriters of the last 10 years—but because I once saw their former keyboardist fall asleep on stage. Stadium rock they’re not (nor should they be). Here, however, they do their best, despite a poor sound mix and the fact that the cameraman is clearly more fixated on violinist and backing singer Miranda Mulholland than anyone else in the band, including Dekker.

Every year that the Junos has been held somewhere outside of Ontario, a provincial premier makes a token appearance. For whatever reason, Danny Williams is featured standing innocuously and unannounced somewhere in the middle of the crowd—as if a camera crew just happened to find him there—and only allowed to throw to a commercial. Heritage Minister James Moore, who always looks uncomfortable in the presence of real-life performers, co-presents the award for best new artist. Thankfully, they pair him with fabulously flamboyant loudmouth Jully Black, who all but ignores his painfully earnest introduction by turning around and whooping it up for the crowd: “N-F-L-D! Make some noise!” Moore looks pleasantly baffled that he’s witnessed what these mysterious creative people call an “off-script” moment. They present the award to Drake, who beats Bieber in the only real horserace of the night. Drake thanks his mom, who “is responsible for not only the artist that I am, but the man that I am.” Aw, shucks.

Metric celebrate their win for group of the year—over tough competition from Billy Talent, The Tragically Hip and Blue Rodeo—by singing “gimme sympathy after all this is gone.” Looks like they won’t need it: they’re poster children for international indie success, being, according to their intro, the first band in history to have a Top 20 U.S. single from a self-released album. (Later we learn that April Wine was the first Canadian band to go platinum with an independent album—indie rock is nothing new, kids.) What would Stompin’ Tom have to say about that?

It’s now 80 minutes into the show, and Great Big Sea finally show up. They’re introducing their early benefactors Blue Rodeo, who have every right to phone it in at this point of their career—and yet they don’t, performing a delicate and sparse Jim Cuddy ballad that’s easily one of the best songs he’s written in his 25-year career.

The show starts to grind to a halt. April Wine is inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Drake performs his mediocre new single, Over (“What am I doin’? / I’m doin’ me”). He then wins for best rap recording, which comes with a catch: he has to hug every member of Hedley, who present him with the award. Is any Juno worth that? Drake says, “I do this because I believe in all forms of music that come from Canada.” Don’t hold your breath for a Johnny Reid collab.

Milking their post-Olympic glow, CTV trots out Alexandre Bilodeau to present the album of the year award, introducing him as “the king of freestyle.” (All you hip-hop MCs watch your back!) The adorable Bilodeau gets a larger cheer than any single performer or presenter has all night, and also gets the biggest laugh when he announces that the winner is “Michael Bubble!” Buble, having exhausted his thank-you list several times already, thanks Ron Sexsmith, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, and his grandma.

The 2010 Junos wrap up with K’naan performing his anthemic Waving Flag with special guests Drake, Nikki Yanofsky, and Justin Bieber—the latter putting special emphasis on the line “when I get older”—appearing only on the final chorus, making it less of an all-inclusive, roof-raising, Tears Are Not Enough-style closer than it could have been. Damhnait Doyle signs off: “With pride, from Newfoundland and Labrador!” One can’t help but think she wakes up every morning saying that.

The camera then lingers on her and Stockwood dancing awkwardly on George Street, in a spotlight surrounded by hundreds of Newfoundlanders not sure what they’re supposed to be looking at by this point. Neither are we.

Rewards are like drugs for ADHD kids

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 1 Comment

In a new study, researchers from Nottingham University measured brain activity as kids played a computer game, and offered extra points for less impulsive behaviour. They found that the brains of kids with attention-deficit disorders responded to on the spot rewards much like they do to medication, which could lead to lower doses of drugs like Ritalin in severe cases. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder can lead to behavioural problems like impulsive actions, fidgeting and poor attention span, which can affect academics and socializing. In this study, kids played a game that involved catching “aliens” of certain colours, and avoiding those of a different colour, to test their ability to resist the impulse to grab the wrong alien. The reward for catching the right alien was increased fivefold, as was the penalty for catching the wrong one. Activity in different parts of the brain was monitored, and researchers found incentives helped kids perform better, though not to the same extent as a normal Ritalin dose.

BBC News

The struggle’s so vicious because the stakes are so small

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:52 AM - 1 Comment

An extraordinary literary “whodunit” over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain’s leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife. Orlando Figes, an expert on Russia and professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, made the startling revelation in a statement through lawyers following a week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email exchanges over postings on the website’s book review pages. The spat began last week when Rachel Polonsky, noticed among the many favourable reviews of her book on Russian culture, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, one condemned her efforts as “dense,” “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published.” It ended on late on Friday evening with the surprise unveiling of Figes’s wife, Stephanie Palmer, a senior law lecturer at Cambridge University, as the reviewer calling herself “Historian.” Turns out Palmer was also behind anonymous online attacks going back years on the works of her husband’s rivals.

The Guardian

Canada-EU trade: And suddenly it was Christmas for policy geeks

By Paul Wells - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 67 Comments

A coalition of the usual suspects groups dedicated to defending the rights of workers and the downtrodden have this morning released very nearly the entire draft negotiating text of a proposed Canada-EU trade and investment agreement.

Coool.

They’ve sliced it up into more digestible chunks and posted them here at www.tradejustice.ca, where I’ve just become the first person to download all the documents and start reading them. The groups — Council of Canadians, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, National Farmers Union, Sierra Club Canada, Canadian Conference of the Arts — just held a news conference on the Hill and are promising a sustained campaign against the so-called CETA (Canada-EU Economic and Trade Agreement) in the weeks ahead. In the language of these groups:

The Canada-E.U. Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement negotiations are based on commitments to place corporate profit and power before social and economic justice, democratic control, and ecological sustainability. Negotiations are progressing quickly and with little public scrutiny until now.

The Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement is being negotiated as a “next-generation” free trade deal that goes beyond NAFTA and the WTO in shielding corporate activity from government controls. The draft agreement includes extensive chapters on services and investment, government procurement, intellectual property, and standards and regulations. It will also contain a controversial NAFTA-like investor-state dispute process that allows corporations from Europe to directly challenge and sometimes overturn Canadian laws that interfere with profits – even for public health or environmental reasons.

This campaign was always going to happen. It’s in the nature of the sweeping changes the EU negotiators are seeking (with Canadian negotiators seeking similar enhanced access to European markets, while trying to parry the European advances). For background, here’s a late-2008 post that sums up everything I’d written on Canada-EU trade talks up to that point; and a piece from last summer as the first intensive negotiations approached.

I’m seeking comment from European member states and the European Commission, as well as from Canadian advocates of a CETA (and, just because I enjoy smacking my head against a wall, from the Government of Canada too). I’ll let you know, here or in the magazine, what I find. Advocates of enhanced Canada-EU trade have preferred to low-bridge the whole process since negotiations began. I believe that option just evaporated.

Take this with a grain of salt

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:46 AM - 5 Comments

Some typos are worse than others. The Australian arm of Penguin books was forced to reprint 7,000 copies of Pasta Bible last week after a recipe called for “salt and freshly ground black people” – instead of pepper – to be added to the spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto. The exercise will cost Penguin $20,000, the head of publishing, Bob Sessions, said. At $3,300 a letter, it’s a pricey typo. Stock will not be recalled from bookshops because it would be “extremely hard” to do so, Sessions said. Copies remained on the shelves in city bookshops yesterday, selling for $20. Sessions could not understand why some readers had found the slip offensive. “We’re mortified that this has become an issue of any kind and why anyone would be offended, we don’t know,” he said.

Sydney Morning Herald

Newfoundland flights are back to normal

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 11:41 AM - 0 Comments

Despite earlier worries the ash cloud that grounded European flights would reach Canada’s east coast, Air Canada has resumed its service in and out of Newfoundland. The airline said operations could still be affected and transport officials are still monitoring weather patterns but, so far at least, travel out of Newfoundland be back to normal. Flights to Europe, on the other hand, are still vulnerable to disruptions. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has had to cancel a planned to trip to Russia, Croatia and Finland because of the volcanic eruption, though he hasn’t yet ruled out making his way to a NATO ministerial Meeting in Estonia.

Vancouver Sun

'Let's be frank'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:34 AM - 18 Comments

As noted elsewhere, Maxime Bernier’s Keeping It Real tour made a stop in Quebec City this weekend. The English text of his remarks is now available here.

Let’s be frank: many people in the rest of the country perceive Quebecers as a bunch of spoiled children who are never satisfied and always ask for more.

This perception has some basis in reality. It derives from 40 years of futile debates over independence; 40 years of irresponsible policies adopted by one provincial government after the other living beyond their means and getting us deeper into debt; 40 years of demands to extract yet more money from the pockets of our fellow citizens in the rest of Canada.

We have to get out of this false choice between independence and profitable federalism. We also need to put an end to policies that lead to our impoverishment and to stop expecting the rest of Canada to bail us out with more equalization money.

Never fold another fitted sheet

By Julia McKinnell - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:24 AM - 31 Comments

Martin Klimek/Getty Images/

To the viewers at home, TV host Lisa Quinn looked like she had it all going on. ABC had hired her to be their Martha Stewart-type lifestyle correspondent. “But I had a dirty little secret. I was living a lie,” confesses the former interior designer in a new self-help book for stressed-out moms like her “who want to entertain, and to have the nice house, the clean kids, the decent meal, but don’t want to kill themselves in the process.” Quinn admits, “While I strived to be the perfect picture of domestic bliss at work, I could never quite pull it off in my own home. I could barely get dinner on the table for my family three nights a week. I was an overwhelmed mother of two, and I felt like a complete fraud.”

Her book, Life’s Too Short to Fold Fitted Sheets: Your Ultimate Guide to Domestic Liberation, is a compilation of “cheats and compromises.” The title comes from an incident at work when a producer asked Quinn to teach viewers how to fold fitted sheets. “I have never folded a fitted sheet in my whole life,” Quinn told the producer. “She was shocked to hear I couldn’t do it, and I was embarrassed to admit it.”

In her new anti-Martha, shortcut manifesto, Quinn advises women that folding fitted sheets can only result “in a migraine” and sheets looking like “a huge turban.” “Stop stressing about it. Just wad it up the best you can, and shove it in the closet. Most of the wrinkles stretch out when you put the sheet on the bed, anyway.”

Continue…

What’s really behind Helena Guergis’s fall

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:15 AM - 117 Comments

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

Until recently I had not properly grasped what was behind the spectacular fall from grace of Helena Guergis, the former minister of state for the status of women. I had thought perhaps it had something to do with her equally spectacular underperformance in the role, coupled with her penchant for embarrassing the government at regular intervals, either in her own right (hello, P.E.I.!) or with the help of the prolific letter-writers on her staff—and, at the very end, her husband, Rahim Jaffer, and his dodgy business associates.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. As wiser heads than mine have explained, it’s because she’s a woman. As the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt observed, “it isn’t easy to be a female cabinet minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.” After noting the difficulties encountered by Rona Ambrose, Lisa Raitt and Diane Ablonczy—all still in cabinet, mind, notwithstanding their womanhood—she turned to the hapless Maxime Bernier, the only previous minister to be turfed from cabinet, though unlike Guergis, not from caucus. “A case,” Delacourt asked, “of different discipline for different genders?”

Maybe. Or maybe it’s because he was not suspected of having committed a crime. All we can know with certainty is that, unlike a man in the same position, the female politician who comes under criticism, on whatever grounds, can always rely on the support of a well-rehearsed chorus shouting “sexism.” Mind you, sometimes it takes some work. After failing to coax former B.C. finance minister Carole Taylor into joining the refrain (“I think she was treated the way we would treat a guy that did such foolish things”), the Globe’s Jane Taber found a women’s shelter director from Alberta to insist Guergis was an “awesome minister” who had done many good deeds, like funding women’s shelters. The moral of the story? “It’s pretty hard to be a woman in politics today.”

Continue…

The last 72 hours in Guergis

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:14 AM - 25 Comments

The private investigator tells his side of the story to the CBC and Globe. Mr. Ignatieff questions Mr. Harper’s judgment. Mr. Jaffer will appear before a parliamentary committee on Wednesday. The Hill Times ventures that Ms. Guergis’ political reputation may forever be damaged.

Maclean's Interview: Biographer Kitty Kelley

By Kate Fillion - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Steve Simon

Kitty Kelley, queen of the unauthorized biography, has written bestselling tell-alls about the royal family and Frank Sinatra, among others. Oprah Winfrey, queen of daytime confessions, denied Kelley’s repeated requests for an interview for her new biography, Oprah.

Q Was it harder to get people to talk about Oprah than about your previous, famously private subjects Jackie Onassis or Nancy Reagan?
A: They’ve all been very hard, but in this case, it was extraordinarily difficult because present and former employees are terrified to speak. They signed confidentiality agreements, so they’re afraid they will be sued.

Q: And Oprah bears a grudge, doesn’t she?
A: She’s not a screamer. She says she has “a disease to please,” so she wouldn’t confront you directly. But if you displease her, a curtain falls, and it is never, ever lifted. The displeasure can come from anything: asking her for a quote for a book or, in the case of one Chicago photographer who took quite glamorous pictures of her, recommending that she wear black lipstick—she never spoke to him again. [MetaFitness author] Suzy Prudden had done Oprah’s show many, many times, but then in promoting Suzy’s column the tabloids called her “Oprah’s exercise instructor,” and that was enough.

Q: What are the differences between Oprah and her TV persona?
A: There are two Oprahs. What you see on television is a woman who is just wonderfully warm, embracing, humorous. At other times you get an idea of a very cold and aloof woman. On camera, she can be totally charming. Off camera, she’s very removed, almost anti-social, which is hard to believe.

Q: Is she like that with celebrities, too?
A: No, she loves celebrities. They get the on-camera version.

Q: What surprised you most about her?
A: That this is a woman who appears to be so open and uninhibited, but she is absolutely choked by secrets. Some of the secrets she’s revealed, mainly because she’s been forced to. For instance, when one of her former lovers claimed they’d done drugs together, crack, she denied it, denied it, denied it. She only admitted it when he sued her, and under oath, she had to. The same thing with having a baby [when she was 15]. Her sister sold the story to the tabloids, and then Oprah had to admit it. [Talking about her secrets has sometimes] been so helpful and beneficial to others. For instance, revealing that she was sexually molested from the age of nine to 14 helped a lot of people, by bringing that taboo into the public arena.

Q: Does she have any secrets left?
A: Other secrets have shackled her. As she herself said in her autobiography [which Oprah withdrew pre-publication in 1993], during her teenage years she was a prostitute. And I got hauled into the secrets. Her Aunt Katharine told me who Oprah’s [biological] father is, and then told me I couldn’t tell because Oprah doesn’t know. Aunt Katharine feels it’s Oprah’s mother’s place to tell her. I wondered why her mother hasn’t, and Aunt Katharine said, “Because I don’t think she wants to revisit it at this stage of the game.”

Q: She isn’t close to her mother. Why not?
A: I think she blames her mother for putting her in a situation where the sexual abuse could happen. Also, she really dislikes her mother for being greedy. Oprah’s been very good to her financially, but she will not give her mother her phone number.

Q: Oprah’s father really turned her life around when she was out of control as a teenager, and she’s acknowledged his influence. Are they close?
A: No. When I interviewed Mr. Winfrey in Nashville, he was very angry and upset because Oprah had called and asked why he was writing a book about her. He said, “It’s not about you, it’s about my life,” and she said, “Well, the only reason anyone would be interested is because of me.” He loves Oprah, but it’s a complicated relationship because he knows he doesn’t get that love in return. Yet she is very good to him financially.

Q: He told you that he’s disappointed in the ways she’s changed and, alluding to “dark secrets,” said, “I know the truth. So does God and so does Oprah. Two of us remain ashamed.” What was he talking about, exactly?
A: I think he was talking about the sexual promiscuity and the prostitution. He didn’t go into great detail about speculation around Oprah’s friendship with Gayle King, but he was so indignant about Gayle King. He called her “that girlfriend of Oprah’s.”

Q: And also a “dirt hog” and “street heifer.” Why?
A: He dislikes Gayle because she told him not to write his book. And it seems like there’s more than that, but he didn’t say. I said, “You sound so disappointed in your daughter, she’s the most admired woman in the world.” But he doesn’t admire her New Age guru beliefs, the fact that she no longer believes Jesus is her saviour. He said, “She was raised in the church, and she’s left the church.”

Q: A number of family members talked to you about what they call “Oprah’s lies.” Which lies most upset them?
AHer Aunt Katharine and her sister felt that Oprah exaggerated the conditions in which she was raised, by saying she never had dresses and spent the first six years of her life barefoot, that her only playmates growing up were the pigs that ran around her grandmother’s farm—those are the kinds of things the family objects to. Oprah says, “People don’t want to hear the truth, they want drama.”

Q: Do you think, given the thousands of interviews with Oprah that you’ve reviewed and the hundreds you’ve conducted with people who know her, that she is generally truthful?
A: It depends how you look at exaggeration. For instance, Oprah tells a very funny story about working at a Baltimore TV station. She claims that the dunderheaded male management wanted to remake her, wanted her to have plastic surgery on her nose, change her look, and so they sent her off to a hair salon where they did a permanent that caused her to lose some of her hair. But her co-workers at that time say that because she had done so poorly at the station in the beginning, and because she was under a great deal of stress, she started losing her hair. Oprah is quite right that people do love drama, so she gives them a very dramatic story.

Q: You reveal that she dumped her long-time friend Eppie Lederer, a.k.a. Ann Landers, after she told Oprah she’d heard “distressing stories about Stedman Graham’s sexual preferences.” Is Oprah in denial about her long-time fiancé?
A: She used to talk about all the wonderful sex they had when she got thin. But I think they share something beyond that. They know each other very, very well. He looks upon her as someone very special. He’s very spiritual. And he likes Gayle—that’s a good thing, I guess, because Oprah is with her all the time. Oprah says that they could never have been married because both of them are wedded to their careers. That tells you something about their priorities: work comes first, not each other.

Q: You strongly imply their relationship isn’t romantic.
A: There’s been a great deal of speculation about Oprah’s sexuality, and she’s put it into the public domain by continually denying that she’s gay. Maybe five years ago, based on everything I know, I might’ve suggested “bisexual.” But now that Oprah is 56, I would really say that she is asexual. I think she has poured all of her sexual energies into her career. In an interview [years ago] with a black entertainment magazine, she said, “I don’t really consider myself a sexual being.” I’m taking her at her word for two reasons. I think sexual molestation leaves scars that are rarely healed, and healing has to be done with therapy, none of which she’s had. The other thing is that she had a tumultuous four-year affair with a married man in Baltimore that truly brought her to her knees, and I don’t think she’s ever been able to fully trust a man since then.

Q: Oprah was very confident even as a teenager, predicting she’d be rich and famous. But as she became successful, she started saying things like, “I know people really, really love me, love me, love me . . . Being able to lift a whole consciousness—that’s what I do.” Why?
A: She has got an entire corporation, about 500 employees just within Harpo, and as one of them described it to me, it’s a cult. She’s got more than yes-people around. She has adorers. It’s like a church.

Q: What matters most to her?
A: In the beginning it was money, she was determined to be the richest black woman in America, and she was very smart to camouflage that. Now, I think what makes her happiest is probably what makes all of us happiest: being with family, but in her case she views her friends as her family. The thing I think that makes her unhappiest goes back to the secrets again: the secret eating—it’s just trying to fill some mammoth hole inside her that she cannot fill. I think it creates a lot of anxiety that she doesn’t look the way she’d like to look.

Q: There’s a memorable incident in the book when she orders two pecan pies from room service and gobbles them both in an hour.
A: It’s the total excess. And pecan pies! They’re so sweet and rich.

Q: She has a reputation as an über-philanthropist, but looking at your research, her donations are relatively small given her income—yes, she gives millions, but she makes hundreds of millions a year. Is she generous?
A: The only way to ever say with any kind of accuracy or fairness is to do what I did: pull all the tax returns, and list the information so readers can see it. It’s interesting, too, that she’s like Donald Trump, everything has to be named after her—she does make sure that you know about her giving. Now, maybe she’s doing this to stimulate giving from others. But [her philanthropy] is not commensurate with the amount of money she makes, no. That’s part of the difference between the public image and the private reality.

Q: She’s a very contradictory person. On one hand, clearly a brilliant businesswoman with sharp elbows. On the other hand, susceptible to flaky ideas like those in The Secret, namely that you get what you wish for.
A: She does not see that timing or luck has had anything to do with her success. She feels that she wished for it and wanted it, and that’s why she got it, and you can do the same.

Q: Maybe the weirdest thing about her is her penchant for bathroom humour.
A: The occasion that threw me the most was when she was giving a speech at the Holocaust Museum and started talking about how hard it is to be famous, that she’d used the restroom and the woman in the next stall told her, “You pee like a horse.” It was such a bizarre statement to make in a situation where you’re remembering the devastation of concentration camps. She also talked about peeing when she went back to her hometown for Oprah Winfrey Day and at a graduation ceremony at Wesleyan College. I was there for that one, and people were stunned. But you know, that potty humour makes Oprah seem as country as cornbread, and maybe that’s why she does it.

Mailbags – while we still have time!

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 80 Comments

As the ash cloud moves toward us, bringing with it the likelihood of flight cancellations and the certainty of death at the hands of the alien hoverfleet concealed within, let’s knock off a couple mailbags this week in between the looting and the panicky ash sex.

Questions?

Don't mind me; I'm on a math bender

By Colby Cosh - Monday, April 19, 2010 at 3:11 AM - 19 Comments

As the paid-up holder of a Mainstream Media club card, can I warn the sportswriters away from making too much of the statistical fluke of all eight first-round NHL playoff series starting out tied through two games? The warning will arrive too late for some, but others may yet be saved.

As a landmark of NHL parity, the large number of 1-1 results in 2010 is not going to prove very useful. Imagine that game outcomes are statistically independent of each other and that the better team has a p chance of winning each individual game in the home team’s rink. If that’s the case, then the chance of a given series standing level after two games is 2(p)(1-p).

The 1-1 tie is always, for realistic values of p, the most common outcome. In a world of perfect parity—all teams are equal, no home-ice advantage, p = 0.5—half the series will be tied 1-1 after two games. And because the chance of the better team going up 2-0 is counterbalanced by a decreased chance of the other team going up 2-0, the overall chance of a tied series doesn’t drop off very fast as you depart from the parity condition, p = 0.5. For p = 0.6, about 48% of the series are still tied 1-1 after two games. (The better team is ahead in 36%, or 0.6²; the worse team is up 2-0 in 16%, about 0.4².)

But you can see that having eight series tied 1-1 will be incredibly rare even in the world of perfect parity. The probability of that happening in a given year will be the total product of the chances of a 1-1 tie in each of the series. Given an average overall value of p, the odds of all eight series starting out equal works out to, at most, (2(p)(1-p))⁸—a pretty small number, demonstrating the great flukiness of the “eight ties” outcome. Even in the perfect-parity world the expected frequency works out to 1 time in every 2⁸, or 256, years. In the real world, the right average figure for p is probably around .54, giving us an “eight ties” year about 1 time in 269. In a fairly extreme non-parity world where the 1-4 seeds had an average 60-40 edge—that is to say, p = 0.6—the “eight ties” outcome would happen once every 355 years.

In other words, using this fluke as any kind of sign, indicator, or test for parity is about like insisting on reading a book only by the light of Halley’s Comet. You’d better have a comfortable chair. And plenty of kids, so they and their progeny can continue the observations (over several millennia) after you die in it…

Music: Blow your horn

By Paul Wells - Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 11:23 PM - 10 Comments

The National Broadcast Orchestra, reborn from the unfunded ashes of the CBC Radio Orchestra, had its premiere concert in January and the results are now archived on the CBC Concerts on Demand site, where you can get all kinds of good music for free. There’s assorted fun on offer, including Anton Kuerti on a Beethoven piano concerto written before  the canonical five. Of particular interest are the original Canadian compositions. No wait, come back! They’re fun. There’s a Michael Osterle symphony that chugs along tidily without, perhaps, going very far, but it’s all quite stately and tuneful.

For me the highlight is the piece that puts on the fewest airs: “Kalla” by Allan Gilliland, who teaches composition at Grant McEwan MacEwan College University (a fine institution; I can now recommend the music faculty) in Edmonton. Ostensibly inspired by legends of call-and-response competitions among New Orleans trumpeters, it’s mostly just a chance for Canadian trumpet star Jens Lindemann to show off. This he does, with broad tone, jazzy inflections and bold orchestral backing. Gilliland started as a trumpeter, and it shows in the way he knows how to let the instrument shine. There must be plenty of trumpeters in other cities who’d be thrilled with a showcase as sturdy as this. I think you’ll agree it’s worth 11 minutes and 32 seconds of your time.

Like the commies before them

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments

The recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate from 1951 outlines a frightening world where soviet agents could have been everywhere, smuggling bomb parts into the U.S. to construct and detonate with the aid of their American sympathizers. It’s startlingly similar to the security problems of today, where specters of sleeper cells and terrorists with bombs built from weapons tossed out during the cold war haunt the American consciousness. The biggest difference between then—when clandestine submarine landings and a permeable Mexican border were thought to be viable options for Ruskies to get WMDs into the country—and now is that while the U.S. used to know its enemies had weapons and feared whether they’d use them, it now knows that terrorists are willing to detonate a bomb, and has to fear one falling into their hands.

New York Times

Pope meets with abuse victims

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 4 Comments

Pope Benedict XVI met with a small group of victims of sexual abuse by priests in Malta on Sunday. According to a statement from the Vatican, the Pope “prayed with them and assured them that the church is doing, and will continue to do, all in its power to investigate allegations, to bring to justice those responsible for abuse and to implement effective measures designed to safeguard young people in the future.” It was the third time the pope met with sex abuse victims but the first since a scandal broke last month in which the Church was accused of covering up accusations against pedophile priests. Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said after the visit he doesn’t think it set a precedent under which the Pope would have to visit abuse victims in every country to which he travels.

New York Times

Poland holds state funeral for Kaczynski

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 11:45 AM - 3 Comments

Thousands of mourners gathered in Krakow Sunday for the state funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was one of only a few leaders who defied restrictions on air travel caused by volcanic eruptions in Iceland to attend the service. Krakow’s Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz specficially thanked the Russian leader during the funeral, saying “the sympathy and help we have received from Russian brothers has breathed new life into a hope for closer relations and reconciliation between our two Slavic nations.” The mass was held at St Mary’s Basilica and Kaczynski will buried in the historic Wawel Cathedral.

BBC News

Maxime Bernier rips into Quebecers

By macleans.ca - Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 4:12 PM - 35 Comments

Former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier lamented the fact many Canadians see “Quebeckers as a bunch of spoiled children who are never satisfied and always ask for more.” And according to Bernier, they’re not entirely off the mark. “While we were debating independence, we accumulated an enormous debt and we became dependent on borrowed money to fund an unsustainable level of public services,” the Beauce MP said in a speech to two riding associations. “The political choices that were made in Quebec in the past four decades have led us in a dead end.” Quebec’s principal problem, Bernier said, is its long-standing enthusiasm for government programs. “It should be obvious enough that unbridled state interventionism does not lead to prosperity. If that were the case, Quebec would be the richest place in North America instead of being one of the poorest.”

Montreal Gazette

Were the pilots of the doomed Polish jet obedient to a fault?

By George Jonas - Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 67 Comments

Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

Last Saturday the city of Smolensk, Russia, was shrouded in heavy fog. Before departing Warsaw, Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s flight crew would have studied the weather charts. Fog forms at dawn and often dissipates. Military pilots Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk, 36, and Maj. Robert Grzywna, 36, probably expected it to lift by 10:30 a.m., the estimated arrival time for their planeload of military, business, political and ecclesiastical dignitaries at Smolensk Air Base.

On this day the fog lingered. Visibility was insufficient for landing. According to one report, the pilots tried three times. On their fourth attempt, the three-engine Tupolev contacted trees about a kilometre from the runway and broke apart. All aboard perished.

It was a puzzling accident. Crashing in fog, though still available to venturesome pilots in the 21st century, belongs to an earlier age of aviation. The weather may not have changed much since powered flight began, but our ways of coping with it have. Aviators have developed drills, procedures, avionics and navigational aids to make flying in inclement weather almost as safe as flying in blue skies, even if not quite as predictable.

Continue…

General warns of cyber attacks

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 16, 2010 at 5:44 PM - 2 Comments

General Keith Alexander, the man in charge of Cybercom, the U.S.’s new cyber security command, is warning of massive increases in the number of attempts by hackers and foreign countries to breach the nation’s internet security. Alexander told the Senate armed services committee that online infiltration could cause huge damage to the U.S. military and the nation’s infrastructure, and that the government is not prepared to secure itself against such attacks. The Obama administration is promising to spend billions to upgrade cyber defences, and has already hired hundreds of specialists with doctorates in computer technology to work at the Cybercom and start building better security measures.

The Guardian

Tennessee town elects dead man for mayor

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 16, 2010 at 5:43 PM - 0 Comments

Some people elect leaders and subsequently wish they were dead. Other places, like the tiny Tennessee town of Tracy City, simply cut to the chase and elect a dead man in the first place. Despite having passed away a month before the vote, Carl Geary was elected mayor of his town with over three times as many votes as his nearest competitor. “I knew he was deceased,” says Chris Rogers, owner of the town’s Lunch Box restaurant and one of the 285 people who cast their vote for Geary. “I know that sounds stupid, but we wanted someone other than [current mayor Barbara Brock]. If he were to run again next week I’d vote for him again.”

The Telegraph