We're from New York, I swear!

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 11:46 AM - 6 Comments

Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is garnering a lot of negative attention for the state. There are calls for boycotts of everything from Arizona tourism, to concert tours, to Major League Baseball’s 2010 All-Star game in Phoenix. And that has some manufacturers getting nervous. AriZona Iced Tea is going out of its way to let people know that it actually based in New York. “In 1992, two hard working guys from Brooklyn with a dream created AriZona Iced Tea,” the company said in a statement released yesterday. “Since then … we have remained loyal to our family-run business based in New York. For the last 16 years, our headquarters have remained on Long Island.” It seems comedian George Lopez made a joke about the brand on his late night TV show, and that the company has been inundated with complaints.

New York Daily News

Mitchel Raphael on the end of the blond troika and the new minister of everything

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 5 Comments

By Mitchel Raphael

SOME NEW FACES IN THE HOUSE WHEN HARPER IS SPEAKING

No longer in the Conservative caucus, Helena Guergis now sits as an independent in the back row of the House. Guergis was part of the blond troika behind Stephen Harper, picked up by the TV cameras whenever he rose in the Commons. The other two were Lisa Raitt and Diane Ablonczy. Now the three blonds in the shot have been replaced with dark-haired MPs: Minister for International Co-operation Bev Oda, Minister of State Denis Lebel, and Rona Ambrose, who took over Guergis’s status of women portfolio. Ambrose now has one of the longest titles in the government: minister of public works and government services Canada and the receiver general of Canada, minister for status of women, vice-president of the Treasury Board, and regional minister for northern Alberta. Or as one MP joked: “Minister of everything.” Ambrose got back recently from a trip to Afghanistan with Defence Minister Peter MacKay. In Kandahar, the two stopped by the Tim Hortons, where the cups are designed to look like camouflage and the prizes for Roll Up the Rim to Win included special edition Kandahar hats. Neither Ambrose nor MacKay won anything.

By Mitchel Raphael

IT’S THAT FRENCH TEACHER’S FAULT

NDP MP Glenn Thibeault was recently in the House foyer going over notes for a French TV interview. The Ontario MPfor Sudbury has been trying to work on his French in an effort to become bilingual. Thibeault comes from a francophone family. When he was younger, his parents sent him to a French immersion school. One of his teachers told him he must learn “French” French and not Quebec French and his parents were so insulted they pulled him out and put him into a regular English school where he lost all his French. He’s currently taking three hours a week of French lessons. He is the youngest in his family and now gets his siblings and parents to speak only French to him—“even if I don’t understand,” he jokes.

SHE’S THAT FABULOUS

Jer’s Vision fifth anniversary gala in Ottawa celebrated those who have helped battle bullying and homophobia. The event was hosted by Global National anchor Kevin Newman, who spoke publicly for the first time about his gay son, Alex Newman. Kevin Newman was the first person to interview NDP MP Libby Davies on TV when she came out. At last year’s event, Davies won a Youth Role Model of the Year award. This time one went to Liberal MP Hedy Fry. One of the youth who nominated Fry noted in a letter that he realized he was gay and went to a Pride parade where he met the MP. “When I asked her what it was like to be gay, she said she was not gay but she was proud to stand with another individual and celebrate working toward equality. I was inspired how someone could be so fabulous, and not even be gay.”

By Mitchel Raphael

THANKS FOR THE SHIRT, I THINK

During his visit to Ottawa, New Zealand PM John Key was presented with an Olympic Team Canada hockey jersey by Stephen Harper. In return, Key presented Harper with a very fitted New Zealand All Blacks rugby shirt. Harper quipped that the New Zealand PM would have an easier time getting into the baggy hockey jersey than he would getting into his gift.

THE VERY LAST ALL-PARY PARTY

NDP MP Peter Stoffer says April 28 will be the last All-Party Party. The bash has been held in 200 West Block for years, but now the building will be closed as of this summer for several years for renovations and asbestos removal. Stoffer says there is not a large enough space elsewhere on the Hill to accommodate MPs and Hill staff, and also that if it were held somewhere else, it would be too costly.

Is HAPPY TOWN the Greatest Thing In Human History?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 11:12 AM - 6 Comments

Most new television shows are not very good, because good shows are rare. But what’s even rarer than a good show is a bad show that is so totally absurd that it’s great fun to watch. Such a show is Happy Town, which premiered last night and is not likely to last more than 13 episodes. It’s from the people who brought us the demented U.S. remake of Life On Mars; here they’re trying to do Twin Peaks, either not knowing or not caring that the world has had enough of eccentric small towns with dark secrets. But what made the pilot irresistibly fun was that it seemed to have been written by aliens and awkwardly translated into English, then back into alien, and back into English again, leading to a script where not a single line sounds like a human being could have said it. There’s a fine line between “stylized” dialogue and dialogue that belongs in The Oscar, and this show crosses that line, then crosses the line that shows the absolute farthest you can cross that other line. Leading to lines like this:

“Mommy and Daddy still sneak off for smoochy-smooch despite the fact that they’ve been together since prom. So tell me, Emma, why would we trade any of that to go to a place full of earthcakes?”

“The Thaw Fest is about dogs and carousels. Ain’t about darkness.”

“It’s Grow-a-Pair Day.”

“Look at you! Cuter than a mouse’s pocketbook!”

“You’ve got the ladies in the boarding house in quite a dither.”

“Chin to the moon, son.”

“I will make no apologies! In fact, I may just be laying across that slice of toast on his night stand!”

Then on top of the dialogue, you’ve got the acting: everyone seems to pitching his or her performance for a different show, but they’re all in their own separate ways trying to convey “weird” and “eccentric” and “sinister” with every inflection. (An old lady’s overwrought, giggly delivery of the word “murder,” as “MURR—DERRRR!,” is the defining moment.) Then on top of that, you’ve got the director and cinematographer casting wacky green light on the characters or trying to whip up spooky discombobulating atmosphere with every shot. The end result is the TV equivalent of a Midnight Movie, something that future generations will watch and enjoy in the same way that they enjoy the movies featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. And by “future generations” I mean “people right now, after a few drinks.”

The negotiations (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 11:08 AM - 4 Comments

Liberal house leader Ralph Goodale and justice critic Dominic LeBlanc emerged just now to report on this morning’s discussion amongst parties. Both seemed reasonably confident. Mr. Goodale said the meeting was not confrontational. Mr. LeBlanc said there appeared to be a determination from all parties to find compromise.

The parties will meet again early next week.

‘The Good Wife’ has a few tricks

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jeffrey Neira

How did The Good Wife become a darling of the critics when it’s what critics are supposed to hate? Focusing on an older-than-usual junior lawyer (played by ER’s Julianna Margulies) whose husband (Chris Noth) is a disgraced Eliot Spitzer-style state political figure, the show is basically a courtroom drama where murders are solved in an hour. Noel Murray, who writes the TV column “A Very Special Episode” for the entertainment website The AV Club, admitted to Maclean’s that “there’s very little about The Good Wife that would grab the high-end TV-watcher right away.” Yet the show, whose first season ends May 25 on Global, has appeal for people who usually prefer Lost or other more complex shows. Not every critic goes as far as Entertainment Weekly, which proclaimed it “the best show on television,” but they mostly agree with Canadian critic Myles McNutt of the blog Cultural Learnings, who called it “exactly what fans of dramatic television should be looking for.” Who knew a lawyer show with a middle-aged cast would fit that description?

Created by the husband-and-wife team of Robert and Michelle King (whose last show was the flop In Justice), The Good Wife mostly follows the procedural formula of its network, CBS. Every episode has a crime story, intercut with scenes about the lawyers’ personal lives. Alicia (Margulies) usually investigates a mildly topical case while dealing with family problems and her attraction to her firm’s cute, mildly unprincipled partner (Josh Charles). And like CSI or Cold Case, it courts older viewers by reminding them that kids are up to no good: one recent episode included a subplot about the power of Twitter to spread ugly rumours. In outline, there’s nothing to distinguish it from CBS’s critically loathed new drama Miami Medical, except that show has doctors, not lawyers.

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Williams faces additional charges

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 10:55 AM - 1 Comment

Russell Williams, the disgraced colonel accused of murdering two Ontario women and sexually assaulting two others, will now face 82 additional charges. They include 61 counts of breaking and entering and theft, 11 counts of attempted breaking and entering and 10 counts of breaking and entering with intent to commit an indictable offence. The charges stem from a review of unsolved crimes around southern Ontario in areas where Williams lived and are all of the offences police have linked to the Colonel so far. Williams make an appearance by video link in a Belleville court on Thursday.

CBC News

Arctic national park on horizon: government

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 10:54 AM - 0 Comments

The Canadian government is moving to create a new national park that likely won’t get a lot of visitors, the Ottawa Citizen reports. In a deal with nearby Inuit communities that would see 5,700 square kilometres at the north end of uninhabited Bathurst Island set aside, Parks Canada has described it as a “rock-strewn, mostly barren, polar desert.” It is, however, an important habitat for polar bears, Arctic foxes and endangered Peary caribou.

Ottawa Citizen

Global troublemakers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 2 Comments

Lucas Jackson/ Reuters

Its population is smaller than metropolitan Victoria. It sits in a forbidding corner of the North Atlantic far off the beaten track. Even its name seems designed to keep visitors at bay. Yet for a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere, Iceland certainly has a knack for being at the centre of things.

The Eyjafjallajökull volcano is not the first to wreak havoc on the world. In 1783, the much more devastating Laki volcano—it erupted for four months—covered Europe and much of Asia with a dense cloud of gas. A quarter of Iceland’s population died and temperatures around the world fell the following year, causing severe famines from Japan to Egypt.

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'Nuff said

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 9:07 AM - 13 Comments

Thanks Jamie.

Bestsellers

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of April 26th, 2010)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Sign up to fight unilinguaphobia!

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 414 Comments

Chris Wattie/ Reuters

After two years, my campaign to rid the nation of its “human rights” commissions doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. So, in a spirit of rapprochement, let me try a new tack. Given that there seems to be insufficient actionable racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia to justify the budgets of the “human rights” regime, how about a new ground for complaint?
Unilinguaphobia.

As we know, every job that matters in Canada is bilingual, from her viceregal eminence in Rideau Hall down to the village postmistress in Pakenham, Ont. The House of Commons has just passed, all but unnoticed, a bill requiring that henceforth all Supreme Court justices should be able to hear cases in English and French without the aid of an interpreter. That’s to say, it’s not enough to be a distinguished jurist capable of a little light banter with a francophone colleague or a discussion of Denys Arcand’s oeuvre at a Canada Council cocktail party: you have to be able to understand highly technical legalisms in a language other than your own, unaided. As things stand, three of the nine judges have to come from Quebec. If the new bill takes effect, it’s hard to imagine any jurist west of Ontario ever meeting the qualifications.

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Mailbag: Jason Spezza, Tony Clement and why William Shatner can suck it

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 6:32 AM - 18 Comments

Welcome to the Mailbag, where I recently received a nice piece of fan mail that made flattering remarks and then concluded with this: “Wonderful job Scott, and it’s great to see that the proverbial apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – I also enjoy the superb sportswriting of your son Dave in the Toronto Star.”

Thank you very much, “fan.” Thanks for making me feel approximately 150 years old. Dave Feschuk is not my son. Dave Feschuk is my brother and he is FOUR YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME. If I didn’t have to tie this onion around my belt, it being the style at the time, I’d have half a mind to march over there and teach you a lesson right after Wheel of Fortune ends and I take an excessive amount of time to sift through my change purse at the checkout while thinking that Rex Murphy makes a good point.

The following queries were actually submitted by actual readers. And remember – there are no stupid questions, unless you’re asking whether it’s possible that Jaroslav Halek is not a witch.

•••

Dear Scott:

For the fifth spring in a row, I wonder why we call grass seed …. grass seed. My question to you Feschuk is: wouldn’t there be more truth in advertising if we called it bird seed and not grass seed like suppliers seem to do? – bergkamp

bergkamp –

I’m not sure I understand this question. Do the birds eat the grass seed? Is the scattering of grass seed a futile endeavour? Is that what you’re saying? I’m not much of a backyarder. We had a bunch of people over recently and the extent of my “landscaping” consisted of taking a large flower pot and placing it strategically over the gaping hole in our rotting deck. Your move, tetanus.

Truth be told, I was pretty happy with myself. I may have even theatrically wiped my hands with satisfaction. No one will ever know the splintery horrors that lurk beneath you, ceramic pot! Beer me.

Sure, the lawn was still patchy and brown, the flower beds were still crammed with dead leaves, part of the fence was falling down and there was Continue…

Tonight in Guergis

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 11:02 PM - 6 Comments

Mr. Gillani appears before the government operations committee and, while denying the involvement of hookers and cocaine in all of this, produces a document that seems to indicate he and Mr. Jaffer had entered into some kind of a contract. Meanwhile, the Canadian Press, Canwest, Star, CTV and CBC review e-mails Mr. Jaffer sent to individuals in various government departments—e-mails that came from Ms. Guergis’ parliamentary accounts, appear to contradict some of Mr. Jaffer’s testimony and detail how Mr. Jaffer’s entreaties were received. CBC has posted the whole raft of documents online.

The negotiations

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 9:26 PM - 23 Comments

The Star reports that government house leader Jay Hill and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson will be negotiating with opposition parties tomorrow on the release of Afghan detainee documents.

The Liberals have mandated house leader Ralph Goodale to work on this file, while NDP house leader Libby Davies and defence critic Jack Harris will play key roles for their side. Separately, Jack Layton met today with Gilles Duceppe and Michael Ignatieff and hopes to meet with the Prime Minister later this week.

The Miracle of the Nearby TV College

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 8:34 PM - 4 Comments

I’m sure TV Tropes already has a long entry on this subject, but I couldn’t help but say something when I noticed that tonight’s Cougar Town will tackle that beloved television question: “Should I go to college far away, or right here in my home town where the producers won’t have to build as many new sets?”

Frequently, though not always, the far-away college is a real one while the at-home college is fictional. (Oddly, the few shows that are set in college towns — like Mork and Mindy, which took place in Boulder, Colorado — don’t use the college setting as much as shows that aren’t set in college towns. You’d think a show might plan ahead for this stuff by taking place in a real town with a real college, but not usually.) And the show will, of course, always find some reason for the character to go to school at home, even if he or she has a choice between a full scholarship to Harvard and playing his/her way at the fictional Noname Memorial Community College.

None of this is bad, mind you. No, it’s not realistic that everyone in a TV high school winds up going to the same college, but it’s a convention that sensible viewers accept, like the convention that people tend to discuss their problems in their office or their friend’s living room, or that there aren’t any nights when the kids don’t hang out at the Peach Pit, or that people can combine full-time jobs with seemingly infinite leisure time. But I can accept the convention and still point it out.

Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs and Cougar Town, is a guy who uses standard TV plots while wanting us to be aware that he’s using them. So it’ll be interesting to see if the show throws in any twists on the way to the inevitable ending, or at least acknowledges that we know (or think we know) a major character can’t actually go to college in another city.

A bilingual Supreme Court? C'est pas si simple.

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 6:36 PM - 61 Comments

I haven’t seen a single mention of this interview with former Supreme Court Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé by those weighing into the debate over a law that would force nominees to the Supreme Court to be bilingual. While John Major’s opposition to the bill has been amply cited, L’Heureux-Dubé’s support for it has gone virtually unnoticed in the English media. And yet, her statements undercut one of the core arguments against the law—namely, that it’s a solution in search of a problem:

Mrs. L’Heureux-Dubé notes that that during the judges’ deliberations, no interpreter is present, and the presence of a unilingual judge at the table forces everyone else to defend their point of view in his or her language, most often English.

The former judge added that the presence of a unilingual Anglophone occasionally requires Francophone judges to write in English because the time needed for translations delays judgements.

Turns out the status quo does require substantial trade-offs, all of them borne by the Francophones on the Court. The benefits of having fluently bilingual judges are not simply “symbolic” as Dan Gardner describes them. (Gardner is hardly alone in opposing the law but, in his habitual way, he’s made the most lucid and compelling case against it, which is why it stuck with me.) In the case of deliberations, a fully bilingual Court would mean Francophone judges could defend their points of view in their first language rather than default to English. That alone amounts to a substantial change in process, never mind what impact it might have actual rulings.

Gardner also points to a laundry list of appointments that wouldn’t have happened had the Official Languages Act been extended to cover the Supreme Court—Bora Laskin, Brian Dickson, Bertha Wilson. Indeed: if things were different, they wouldn’t be the same. As Chantal Hébert points out, if Lester Pearson or John Diefenbaker were running for election today, they probably wouldn’t stand a chance of becoming prime minister until they learned some French. But what’s that got to do with whether things ought to be different?

Besides, it’s equally true that if Antonio Lamer had been born in, say, Port-Cartier or Rimouski, he probably would’ve been a unilingual Francophone and therefore unable to function in the Supreme Court L’Heureux-Dubé describes or, for that matter, the one Yvon Godin is proposing. More than two-thirds of Quebec’s bilingual population lives in either Montreal or Quebec City, and even a place like Trois-Rivières, which sits right smack in the middle of the two, has a population that’s 74 per cent unilingual Francophone. So while the current system allows for English Canadians born outside major cities to accede to the Supreme Court, the same can’t be said for rural Quebecers. (The results bear it out, too: most appointees from Quebec were born in either Montreal or Quebec City.)

All of which isn’t to say that a pool of potential jurists already diluted by regional, political or other considerations wouldn’t become impossibly so if bilingualism were added to the list. It’s just to point out that, far from being free of linguistic compromises, for the Supreme Court to keep functioning the way it does now requires at least three things: the tacit acceptance by Quebec’s unilingual Francophone majority that no one from its ranks will ever be appointed; a steady stream of suitable, bilingual jurists from Quebec; and an implied agreement among those on the Court that the closed-door business that happens without the aid of interpreters will take place in English. Do any of these conditions amount to an undue burden? Probably not, though L’Heureux-Dubé thinks they do. Still, that hardly makes them unsubstantial.

The Commons: Never mind the fine print

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 6:09 PM - 117 Comments

The Scene. “Mr. Speaker, I hope I speak for everyone in this House when I salute your historic decision made yesterday.”

At least four Conservatives clapped at this submission from the Liberal leader. Michael Ignatieff paused to let the Speaker receive the House’s thanks and then continued.

“I would like to ask the Prime Minister if he will fully comply with your ruling yesterday,” he said, “and will he now work with us in good faith to do what we first proposed five months ago, that is respect the authority of Parliament, deliver the documents, and provide Canadians with the truth that they deserve?”

Confronted with the ramifications of a Speaker’s ruling as to the very foundation of Canadian democracy, the Prime Minister stood and shrugged. Continue…

Week in Pictures: April 22nd – 28th 2010

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 5:47 PM - 0 Comments

“He felt it was the humane thing to do”

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 5:11 PM - 16 Comments

Capt. Robert Semrau fired two bullets into the chest of a severely wounded Taliban fighter because he “couldn’t live with himself” if he left another human being “to suffer like that,” a fellow soldier testified today. “He said it was a mercy kill,” said Cpl. Steven Fournier, the only Canadian who was with Semrau at the time of the alleged shooting. “He said he felt it was necessary. He felt it was the humane thing to do.”

A key witness for the prosecution, Fournier provided a damning account of what he claims unfolded on the morning of Oct. 19, 2008, when he and Semrau stumbled upon an injured insurgent who, moments earlier, had been shot out of a tree by a U.S. Apache helicopter.

Both soldiers were part of a small Canadian team assigned to mentor a company of Afghan National Army (ANA) troops, who were conducting a “sweep and clear” patrol in a dangerous district of Helmand Province. When ANA members first discovered the maimed fighter—who had a gaping hole in his stomach and a mangled left leg—their commander, Capt. Shafiqullah, ordered them not to provide medical treatment. As Fournier quoted him saying: “If Allah wants him, he will die. If not, he will live.” Continue…

A Time For Immaturity

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 3:45 PM - 6 Comments

I said my say about the Archie gay character, and why it’s a good thing, in a previous post. Brigid Alverson has an article in Publishers’ Weekly on how this move fits in with the many other aggressive moves the company is making to become relevant across a multi-media spectrum. A comic book company, in this era, can’t survive on physical sales of comic books alone. If Archie can’t get the movie and TV spinoffs that have eluded it for decades, it will have trouble staying around — and the increased publicity it’s getting are presumably going to be helpful in convincing movie and TV producers to look at their properties. So it’s not just the character that matters, though it certainly does matter; it’s that the introduction of the character gets people talking about them, and that gives them a boost in marketing their established characters in other media.

But having said that, I haven’t quite run out of panels that, taken out-of-context, can make one snicker immaturely. So, after the jump, here are some Archie comics panels that prove that Kevin Keller is not as big of a breakthrough in Riverdale as he thinks he is. And don’t worry, I promise not to make this a regular feature. I just couldn’t resist doing this just once. Also, I have chosen to identify who the artists are after each panel, not Continue…

It's one thing to cheat on your wife and lie about it

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 3:33 PM - 3 Comments

Just how bad can embattled get? Today, Tiger Woods was asked to explain his appearance at an Orlando Nickelback concert, where he partied backstage after the show without his wife Elin Nordegren, who is reportedly in Sweden with the kids. “Couple of band members are friends of mine so I went,” he told a news conference before complaining he was criticized for the appearance. Woods is said to be a big fan of the Canadian band, but we wonder what he thinks of their sexually explicit lyrics and their promotion of promiscuity.

TMZ

Finding Green Hotel Deals, Back-Up Your Travel Documents Online

By Takeoffeh.com - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

How Green Is Your Hotel?
Here’s an interesting fact: fewer U.S. hotels have earned the Green Building Council’s LEED Certification than have been awarded AAA 5-Diamond status. The LEED program certifies buildings for water and energy efficiency, green materials and environmental friendliness. In a recent survey, travel deal site Travelzoo found that 90% of respondents would pick an eco-friendly hotel if it was offered at the same price as a comparable hotel without a strong green commitment.

More than one-fifth of respondents said it is difficult to find green hotels that fit their budgets, and a similar number said the process of determining a hotel’s eco-practices can be cumbersome and time-consuming.

In response to the survey and in honour of the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, Travelzoo has published a list of special offers from LEED-certified properties across the U.S. The list strives to overcome both previously mentioned objections – that green hotels are expensive and hard to find.

Some sample prices: $99 rates through August at San Francisco’s boutique Orchard Hotel; 60% off at the 4-Diamond Proximity Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina (rates from $119); a rate of $159 (regular $249) through September 6 at the 4-star AT & T Conference Center & Hotel in Austin, Texas; and half-price rates starting at $59 at the Hilton Vancouver Washington.

A New Way To Protect Your Travel Documents
A Canadian company is offering a new service for travellers that aims to ease the pain if vital travel documents are lost, stolen or damaged. AccessMyID.com allows subscribers to digitize, upload and securely store vital travel documents, including passport, driver’s licence, travel itinerary, visa, medical insurance details, prescriptions, parental travel permission letters – basically any records you need for your journey.

The information is stored online on a secure site so it can be accessed anytime, anywhere. High-resolution scans of essential ID’s provide irrefutable identification at government embassies or consulates — even a bank. The site’s founders point out that the service is also useful here at home in case a wallet or purse is lost or stolen.

Many people photocopy documents and carry them in their luggage, but these can get lost too. Some travellers do their own scans and e-mail the documents to themselves so they can be accessed from abroad. But security experts advise against it because e-mail is not normally encrypted and also because travellers are likely to access e-mail from unsecured Wi-Fi or Internet cafés while on the road.

Photo Credits: proximityhotel.com, accessmyid.com

Michael Ondaatje, the songwriter?

By John Intini - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Newscom/ Ivan Otis

Michael Ondaatje didn’t waste any time, recalls singer-songwriter Justin Rutledge, who turned to the famous novelist last summer for some guidance on a few songs before recording his new album. “I brought some lyric sheets to his place and played him the songs,” says Rutledge. “He acted almost like an arranger, an editor. He saw the words on the page and would say ‘What about moving this there?’ or ‘What about trading these lines?’ ” Ninety minutes and a couple of cups of homemade cocoa later, Ondaatje had made suggestions on five songs, and co-written another, On The Russian River, 1849, from scratch.

Rutledge describes that tune as a lullaby, set during the San Francisco gold rush, “about a poor boy diving for gold and burying timber to impress a stately lady.” Rutledge, who admits that he usually hates co-writing, says working with Ondaatje (who declined to be interviewed for this story) was the best experience he’s had yet. And though Rutledge is confident their song will find a spot on one of his next albums, On The Russian River, 1849, didn’t make the final cut of The Early Widows, which is out on May 4. The English Patient author does, however, get 100 per cent of the credit for the second line—I am a pause in a storm on a dark stair whenever your name is spoken—of Be A Man, the first single. It’s classic Ondaatje, and fits in perfectly on Rutledge’s fourth album. That’s because while Rutledge lacks Ondaatje’s household-name status, the 31-year-old alt-country musician from Toronto is considered one of Canada’s most thoughtful young songwriters.

Continue…

The sad decline of the Irish pub

By Rachel Mendleson - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

Richard Cummins/ Lonely Planet

When Joe McGuinness decided to open an authentic Irish pub in Halifax, the Dubliner says he “spared no expense trying to duplicate the atmosphere.” Everything that appoints Durty Nelly’s—from the light fixtures to the chairs to the mahogany bar—was shipped over from the Emerald Isle. But while business booms at the Halifax establishment—in its first year, sales exceeded $2.5 million—pub culture in Ireland is fading away.

Increasingly, exported replicas of Irish pubs, which have been cropping up everywhere from Estonia to Dubai, are a homage to what was, rather than what is. Thanks to anti-smoking legislation, changing habits and the economic downturn, the country’s traditional gathering places have seen better days: since 2001, domestic drink consumption has fallen by 21 per cent; 833 pubs have closed in the last three years; in the past 18 months, 15,000 industry jobs have disappeared. Kieran Tobin, chairman of the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland, recently described 2009 as “the worst year for our industry in living memory.”

Continue…