Study links ADHD and pesticides

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 11:36 AM - 0 Comments

Now there’s another reason to buy organic. Scientists in Canada and the U.S. have found a link between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and pesticides used on fruits and vegetables. According to a study published in the journal Pediatrics, kids with higher-than-average levels of pesticides in their urine were almost two times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Maryse F. Bouchard, a researcher at the University of Montreal in Quebec and lead author of the study, called the link “fairly significant,” and suggested that parents should “buy as much organic as possible,” and wash produce thoroughly.

MSNBC

Atlantis arrives at the Space Station

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the International Space Station on Sunday, delivering spare parts and a Russian module that will help keep the station operational after the two last shuttle visits later this year. The 100-tonne spaceship docked under the command of Ken Ham as the shuttle and station moved around earth at 17,500 mph, Reuters reports. Atlantis is carrying a Russian module that combines a research lab and docking port for Russian and European capsules; its transportation costs were covered by the U.S. as part of a barter agreement among 16 countries over the $100 billion project. The shuttle also brought an equipment rack with new batteries for the station’s solar power system, and a work platform for the station’s Canadarm, the Canadian-build robot arm, as well as a spare communications antenna. Atlantis is due back at the Kennedy Space Center on May 26.

Reuters

Lying toddlers do better in life

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 11:08 AM - 3 Comments

Toddlers who tell lies early on are more likely to do better in life, according to a Canadian study of 1,200 children aged two to 17. In the study, only a fifth of two-year-olds were able to lie, the BBC reports, but at age four, 90 per cent were capable of lying, which increased to a peak at age 12. The brain processes involved seem to indicate a child’s intelligence. “Parents should not be alarmed if their child tells a fib. Their children are not going to turn out to be pathological liars. Almost all children lie. It is a sign that they have reached a new developmental milestone,” said Dr. Kang Lee, director of the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto. “Those who have better cognitive development lie because they can cover up their tracks,” he said. In the study, children were tested by being told not to peek at a toy placed behind their backs while leaving the room. They were monitored over video, then asked if they’d turned around.

BBC News

Robert Munsch admits to cocaine, alcohol abuse

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 4 Comments

Robert Munsch, the Canadian author of children’s classics like the Paper Bag Princess and Angela’s Airplane, has admitted to a history of drug and alcohol abuse—dependencies he said stem from bipolar disorder. In an interview with Global television, the Guelph, Ont.-based writer said he’s attending Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous and has been clean for four months. The 64-year-old said he started on cocaine only about five years ago, as he struggled with a mental illness that created the manic persona children loved to watch during readings. “My public person was so crazy and my private person was so depressed and unhappy,” he told Global.

Ottawa Citizen

In other news, France claims sunrise and daylight are entirely coincidental

By Michael Petrou - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 9:28 AM - 6 Comments

France today announced plans to release  an Iranian government agent convicted of murdering Shapour Bakhtiar, the last Iranian prime minister to serve under the shah, whose regime was replaced by that of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Ali Vakili Rad stabbed Bakhtiar to death in 1991 and was convicted in 1994.

The news comes one day after Iran freed French academic Clotilde Reiss, who had been jailed for ten months on espionage charges. Iran had linked the two cases, but Paris denies it cut a deal to secure her freedom. Continue…

Private Kevin Thomas MacKay, 24

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 5 Comments

On my most recent trip to Afghanistan I spent a night sleeping on a cot under the unimaginably bright sky of a country with almost no electric lighting to drown out the stars. The venue was the back yard of Combat Outpost Shkarre, in a neighbourhood near the town of Nakhonay the Taliban had held five months earlier. The three dozen soldiers I was travelling with, enlisted men and women to very senior officers, slept on cots all around. This was still dangerous country but we didn’t worry about our safety because we were watched over by the soldiers of 11 Platoon of Delta Company of the Edmonton-based 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, which meant that while we stayed in that camp, no harm would come to us.

Over the weekend I received word that Private Kevin Thomas McKay, who on Thursday became the 144th Canadian soldier to die on the mission to Afghanistan, was one of the young men and women who kept us safe in that camp on that cool April night. For him it was one night out of hundreds. I thank Private McKay for his work and I mourn his passing.

Today's a big day in Canadian science

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 8:46 AM - 25 Comments

Today on campuses across Canada, university officials and Conservative politicians will be announcing the first winners of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs competition. Sometimes referred to by academics as the “uber-chairs,” the CERCs seek to add an extra layer of, well, elitism (and believe me, I mean that in a good way) on top of the hundreds of federally-funded Canada Research Chairs who’ve already transformed Canadian research.

The goal of the CERCs is to give 20 chairholders and their research teams up to $10 million each for seven-year research programs. That’s a lot of money and, I suspect even more important, a solid long-term commitment to do good science without having to spend half your time doing grant applications for next year. The program is explicitly designed to draw international along with domestic talent, although one of the interest twists is that for the preliminary, short-list round, universities submitted research projects without saying who they had in mind to do the work. (I bet that in most cases, they knew precisely who they had in mind, but I’d be curious to hear if there were exceptions. “Pick us! We want to do photonics! Quick, do you know anyone who does photonics?“)

The selection board for this project is a Who’s Who — Rob Prichard, Margaret MacMillan, a former RIM principal, the president of a big Asian university — and the review panel designed to actually sift the short list is even more international in composition. Close observers of the whole thing will notice that, between the selection board and the review panel, a fast one has already been pulled, so that while the first is heavy with social sciences and humanities experience, the second has only engineers, physicists, chemists and molecular biologists. There will be other reasons to quibble about the results (the news release I’ve seen says Tony Clement will announce only 19 winners in Toronto this morning; I wonder what happened to the 20th? I suspect I’ll keep wondering). But since I doubt you’ll be hearing anywhere else today about the very existence of this program, I thought I’d at least note for you that it’s happening and that, to me, it’s good news.

I’ll update after the winners are announced.

Music: Heaven and Hell

By Andrew Potter - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 8:32 AM - 4 Comments

One of the all-time great voices in rock, Ronnie James Dio, died yesterday, of stomach cancer at age 67. A lot of bands came through Ottawa when I was growing up there in the 80s, and I saw most of them. But one summer, Dio was playing the Ex with Yngwie Malmsteen. I had plans to go with a friend, but we never got our acts together and we missed it. I always regretted it. Dio was one of the first metal vocalists I ever seriously listened to – my friend Adrian had a vinyl copy of Mob Rules, and we would sit up in his bedroom for hours, pretending we were radio DJs and practicing talking over the intro to the songs. Later in high school, we were out one day driving around in a friend’s van, playing hookey from Glebe, and he put in a tape of The Last in Line. I thought I was going to cry it was so awesome. The title track is 100% unalloyed heavy metal, one of the best songs in the genre.  Sure, Dio’s lyrics are naff, sub-Zeppelin swords and scorcery nonsense. But listen to “Last in Line.” Listen to the intro. Listen to the part right after the intro. Yeah.

And that beast-head/double-viking/devil’s horns thing you all do all ironically when You Shook Me All Night Long comes on? Dio invented that.

Music: Steal Away

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 8:01 AM - 0 Comments

Hank Jones died last night at 91.

His career as a jazz pianist dates from the 1930s. He was booked to play the Birdland club in New York City twice this year, including a gig next week.

He was one of the very last survivors among the musicians who were right there on the bandstand when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were still figuring out the fleet, fractured, very difficult music others called bebop. He plays on a bunch of Parker’s records. He made important records with Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Williams, Charlie Haden, Joe Lovano, Oliver Jones and countless others.

He could play memorably in solo, duet, trio, small-group or orchestral settings. He backed the finest singers. He could summon the rollicking style of the great pianists from the generation just before his. He always kept an eye on later generations. His peers, sometimes half a century younger, always treated him as a contemporary, never a relic.

He was older brother to Thad Jones, the wonderful trumpeter and big-band composer, and Elvin Jones, the mighty drummer. This makes the Jones brothers of Detroit the most honoured family in jazz. His little brothers died before he did, which always makes me sad when I think about it.

By the mid-20th century, Detroit’s auto plants had given it a thriving African-American middle class, so thousands of black kids’ families had money for musical instruments and lessons, and space and leisure time to practice. Detroit rose to prominence as one of the leading jazz cities, perhaps exceeded in importance only by New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia. Regional sounds in music can be hard to pin down, but it’s generally recognized that a few elements distinguish a Detroit sound in jazz, whether it was played on piano by Tommy Flanagan or Geri Allen, on bass by Paul Chambers or Ron Carter, on trumpet by Marcus Belgrave, on saxophone by Kenny Garrett: harmonic imagination that never flaunts its depth of invention; fleet execution without a lot of extra notes; ready humour; and the blues in every bar. Mostly these characteristics came to be associated with Detroit because four generations of the city’s musicians wanted to sound like Hank Jones if they could.

Do we really own the Arctic?

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 7:32 AM - 13 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

Arctic historian Shelagh Grant, 72, is an adjunct professor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., and author of the forthcoming Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America.

Continue…

Taking the scare out of Obamacare

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 7:00 AM - 8 Comments

Photo by Darren McCollester / Getty Images

Most opposition to the Obama health care reforms falls into one of two groups: those on the left who lament that it did not establish a public health care monopoly (“single payer”), and those on the right who fear that that is where things are inevitably headed (“government takeover”). Regina Herzlinger takes a different view.

The Harvard Business School professor and renowned health care analyst has mixed feelings about the Obama plan itself: pleased at the extension of coverage to 34 million currently uninsured Americans, but worried about the costs to the public treasury—another $2 trillion, she expects, on top of the existing $38 trillion unfunded liability for Medicare, the public insurance plan for the elderly. Like many experts in the field, she thinks the administration has not begun to properly account for these costs. “The notion that we’re going to find half a trillion dollars from cuts in benefits,” she says, “I think is dubious.”

Continue…

That awkward “lesbian question”

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 6:16 AM - 46 Comments

Andrew Sullivan isn’t winning a lot of friends by challenging Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on her sexual orientation. If all you see is headlines like “Answer the lesbian question, Ms. Legal Eagle”, you’re likely to write this new crusade off as evidence of the brain-porridgification Sullivan exhibited during his earlier “Show us the afterbirth, Madam Vice-Presidential Candidate” campaign. Not (quite) so fast!

…the White House reiterated last week that questions about sexual orientation “have no place” in judging a nominee (but her gender most certainly does). Quite how you defend this argument—from a president whose own criterion for nominees is a real experience of how law can affect ordinary people—is beyond me. It is also beyond most ordinary people out there.

The Obama administration embraced identity politics with the appointment of the “wise Latina” Sotomayor; now, with Elena Kagan, it is putting forward a Supreme Court candidate who appears to have almost no relevant public identity of any kind at all. It would be one thing if she had a long and detailed record of legal philosophizing or judicial rationes, but it appears that even Kagan’s friends aren’t too clear on her principles or on the fine details of her personal life. It’s a little weird; we not only don’t know whether or not the Republic is getting a “wise lesbian”, we don’t know what her basic ideas about the rule of law or the Constitution might be. (It’s only weird because it is happening south of the 49th parallel, of course. Up here senior appellate judges tend to explode instantly into being out of an impenetrable biographical void.)

This is naturally frustrating for Sullivan, who doesn’t, deep down, appear to believe there is any kind of politics other than identity politics. He is serving, and not for the first time, as the wild-eyed radical who takes a popular idea to its logical conclusion and tests it to destruction and beyond. Americans, by and large, probably don’t want a system in which a candidate for the Supreme Court is quizzed on the most intimate details of her life and personality. “Madam Solicitor-General, have you ever allowed a biologically male person to fumble awkwardly with the clasp of your brassiere, and if so for how long and on what dates?”

But Sully’s on board! Having faced odious intrusions into his own privacy, he is willing, even eager to extend to everybody the rules under which he has hitherto been forced to live.

And, ultimately, he has a point: if we accept the premise of identity politics, then we are going to need honest, detailed information about the identities of those who propose to rule—about the “life experiences” that they “bring to the table”, to use the childish liberal argot. Sotomayor was a fountain of such dreck until she came, unprepared, to the attention of an audience skeptical of identity politics—an audience, that is, who sees the “wise Latina” stuff not as a harmless toasty-warm piety, but as a tendency that would, if unopposed, turn government into an irrational contest of identity groups, an exercise in token-counting.

Sullivan’s Palin issues make more sense once you see him as an identitarian ultra-radical. He was unwilling to take Palin at her word concerning matters in which there was no really good evidence of lying and no convincing natural explanation for lies. He smelled a specific rat that almost no one else has yet detected. Why, even granting appropriate leeway to his editorial intuition, would he react so strongly to the sort of distasteful childmongering we’ve accepted from politicians for a hundred years or more?

Simple: if identity is to be everything in politics, then lying about one’s identity, adding artificial “richness” to one’s experiences, is the gravest sin. It makes the golden ticket of victimhood/otherhood available for a dangerously small price to brazen liars. The scrutiny to which we subject candidates for office—especially if they have no objective way of demonstrating their talent, intellect, or seriousness—must correspondingly be very intense, in a Sullivan World.

The Montreal Sovereigntists

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 4:50 PM - 56 Comments

Ordinarily I frown on people trying to inject politics into sports, but in this case I’ll make an exception:

DRUMMONDVILLE – In her closing speech to a Parti Québécois meeting Sunday, PQ leader Pauline Marois drew a parallel between her party’s goal of making Quebec a sovereign country and the Montreal Canadiens’ quest for the Stanley Cup.

“The whole nation is vibrating in tune with a team of players who were called too small, not talented enough, not proud enough to win” Marois said.

“I am talking about the Montreal Canadiens,” she said winning applause from about 600 delegates and observers, some of them wearing Habs sweaters.

“Today, like Quebecers, it is because they played as a team, that they sacrificed themselves for the team, that they can aspire to the highest honour,” Marois said….

“When we have solidarity, determination, pride we can succeed at everything, starting with the sovereignty of Quebec.”

Because, you see, she has a point. The Montreal Canadiens are the precise embodiment of everything the Parti Québécois has ever stood for, a living example of the compassionate, social-democratic, and above all sovereign Quebec Ms Marois is trying to build. After all, they are:

- foreign owned. Well, technically Anglo-owned, ever since the Molsons bought it back from George Gillett, but same diff

- made up mostly of foreign players. Of the current 25-man roster, only 14  are Canadian-born. Just three are from Quebec. There are more Americans, more British Columbians, more Torontonians on this team than there are Quebecers — and as many Czechs. Needless to say, the language of the workplace is English

- part of a league in which they are forever condemned to be a minority. Although the team’s share of representation in the NHL  has dwindled over the years from one-sixth to one-thirtieth, they have as yet not elected to separate, or threaten to.

I could go on. The Canadiens are not only mostly foreign, but exclusively male. Selected by a remorselessly Darwinian process, they play a game noted for its anarchic violence and cut-throat competition — possibly owing to its British origins. I’m told they are paid many times the average worker’s wages for it.

In short, nothing says Quebec pride and solidarity like a team stacked with visiting Czech millionaires playing a Scottish game for American money. Oh, and did I mention they’re called the Canadiens?

Still, at least they’re paying Quebec’s punitive tax rates. As Ms Marois said, it’s all about “sacrificing for the team.”

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 4:38 PM - 9 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

This week has four sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 2:09 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly look back at all we saw and heard.

Monday. Be serious
Tuesday. Yelling with purpose
Wednesday. The loneliness of the opposition leader
Thursday. Does anyone here know how to balance a cheque book?

Quebec's boy wonder lives the dream

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 1:25 PM - 2 Comments

Xavier Dolan, Niels Schneider and Monia Chokri in 'Amours imaginaires' ('Heartbeats')

Xavier Dolan’s career erupted out of nowhere last year in Cannes with the triumph of his award-winning first feature, I Killed My Mother, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar. Now, just a year later, he  is back with a second feature, Les Amours imaginaires (translated as Heartbeats in English, for reasons that escape me), and with it he has climbed another step on the Cannes red staircase, with a spot in the more prestigious sidebar program, Un Certain Regard. Unable to attend the advance press screening, I saw it at last night’s premiere, where it received a rapturous standing ovation by a crowd, who followed him and his co-stars all the way out into the lobby. This movie is made for Cannes. Les Amours imaginaires is a vibrant expression of youthful passion, an energetic explosion of style that does look and feel like a film made from start to finish in less than a year.  It’s a cinematic water-colour, with a thin narrative and more visual elan than dramatic depth. But it confirms that Dolan is a phenomenal  talent–a director who has a great eye and is fired with that unique combustion of tender naivete and precocious erudition that only the young can possess. He is 21 years old.

Monia Chokri

Les Amours imaginaires is a reverie of mad love involving a gay man (Dolan) and a hetero woman (Monia Chokri) who are infatuated with the same elusive mirage of narcissism–a golden-haired Adonis played by Neils Schneider, who also co-starred with Dolan in his first feature. Like so much contemporary pop music from Dolan’s generation, the film is a retro reinvention of vintage Sixties style that feels classical and modern all at once. As a whimsical tale of a love triangle, this high-style romance is reminiscent of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim but Monia Chokri is coiffed and costumed as dead ringer for Godard’s Anna Karina.  Meanwhile, the film’s fetishized sense of fashion, and its dreamy slo-mo sequences of her walking, set to Sheila’s Bang Bang, could be right out of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love.

Godard muse Anna Karina

The film is a romance, but it’s ultimate object of desire is cinema itself. Out-Frenching the French, it’s the kind of ultra-Nouvelle Vague piece that even the Euopeans don’t make any more. That may be partly why Dolan–its wunderkind writer/director/star is being embraced with such exhuberance here. He’s a voice from the new generation who’s bringing fresh blood to the altar of auteur cinema by honouring the past.

I interviewed Dolan on the beach a few hours ago. Looking oh-so-French in a striped marin jersey, he seemed right at home. Having fielded too many questions about his influences, he’s already defensive about his originality. But he happily confesses that the Anna Karina homage is deliberate. As for Wong Kar-Wai, he says he doesn’t see why the Asian auteur should have the monopoly on slow-motion shots of ”asses in beautiful dresses.” His adoration of Godard and Truffaut is honestly expressed and feels oddly fresh. If Jean-Luc and Francois are, respectively, the Stones and the Beatles of the French New Wave. So, I asked, which is favorite? Dolan paused a long, long time, unable to decide. And then, the moment the tape recorder was switched off, he said: “Godard!”

Well, well. Jean-Luc will be in Cannes tomorrow. The old oracle of the New Wave will be holding court at a press conference for his new movie, Film Socialisme. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Britain’s headache

By Charlie Gillis - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Stefan Rousseau/AP

There are no short cuts on the long journey back from fiscal crisis—take it from someone who knows. Paul Martin was a rookie cabinet minister when he assumed the reins of Canada’s Finance Department back in 1994. But as a businessman, he understood a balance sheet, and the politician in him sensed the risk of promising half-measures. “You cannot tell people it’s going to be easy and then think they’re going to accept harsh medicine,” the former prime minister says from his office in Montreal. “And don’t think people are going to stay with you through the tough measures if you don’t hit your targets.”

To many Canadians, Martin’s role in leading the country from the brink of financial ruin is now a fading memory, overshadowed by his anticlimactic turn as prime minister. But in Britain, where five days of fevered negotiation this week produced a minority Conservative government, he is an exemplar to those contemplating the Herculean task that lies in wait: tackling the U.K.’s disastrous finances. “What Paul Martin did has been incredibly influential in Whitehall and academic circles,” says Patrick Dunleavy, a political scientist at the London School of Economics. “It’s seen as a good way to go about budget rebalancing, while limiting the damage that’s done in the process.”

Continue…

Suicide watch in Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 9:15 PM - 2 Comments

We’re always looking for trends in Cannes. Well, here’s one: I’ve seen six suicides in three movies within the span of 24 hours. Bummer. So as not to spoil anyone’s future viewing enjoyment, I won’t reveal exactly who killed themselves in which movies. But here’s the tally so far: a woman stepped off a building ledge; another leapt through a window; two guys in two different films threw themselves in front of trains; a girl hung herself; and finally, in a piece-de-resistance of self-annihilation, a woman hung herself and burst into flames all at once. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. I wouldn’t want to read too much into this mini-epidemic, but it makes me wonder if creative suicide is the art-house equivalent to the Hollywood car crash: the violent implosion. There’s still more suicide on the horizon. Tomorrow there’s a midnight premiere of Gilles Marchand’s Un autre monde (darkened to Black Heaven in English), a French film about an online femme fatale who coaxes folks to commit suicide—a phenomenon we’ve already seen in an ungainly Japanese movie called Chat Room.

Today, the theme of depression—which matches the unseasonably chilly weather here—continued with a vengeance. This morning we saw back-to-back movies about messed-up, unloved Englishwomen—Mike Leigh’s Another Year and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The Leigh film begins with a haggard Imelda Staunton begging a lady doctor for sleeping pills. She is referred to a lady psychologist, who asks her to rate her happiness on a scale of 1-10, and she says, “One.” In the Allen film, a matriarch swallows 40 sleeping pills in a failed suicide attempt after being dumped by a Viagra-popping Anthony Hopkins, who gets remarried to a gold-digging hooker (Lucy Punch). With no real plot aside from ultra-real relationships that unfold on a delicate knife-edge of wit and pathos, Another Year is a quiet masterpiece—a pitch-perfect study of the “quiet desperation” that, to quote Pink Floyd, “is the English way.”

Leigh has been refining this study for a long time, and here he distills it to the pure essentials. This deft ensemble piece revolves around a needy, flighty, middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Manville) who is desperate for love, and who clings to a happily married and infinitely tolerant couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). It’s a gentle yet ruthless portrait of common garden angst (as opposed to the existential French variety),  lubricated by dinner-party alcoholism.

Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts in 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"

Viewed right after it,  Woody Allen’s buoyant confection comes as a tonic. It, too, involves a middle-aged divorcee, and it was a breeze to watch. But after Mike Leigh, Woody’s shameless contrivance seems awfully broad, as it jockeys between a parody of Viagra entitlement (Anthony Hopkins) and old-fashioned fantasies of adulterous lust (Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas and Josh Brolin). The actors are a pleasure to watch. But in Woody Allen’s prolific canon, the film is average, just another gig from the compulsive auteur who makes a movie a year, rain or shine. He, in fact, could have used Mike Leigh’s title, Another Year.

Woody, meanwhile, did some sedentary stand-up at a Cannes press conference with his characteristic meditations on mortality:

“My relationship with death remains the same. I’m strongly against it. I find it a lousy deal. There is no advantage to getting older . . . I’m 74 now and you don’t get smarter, you don’t get wiser, you don’t get more mellow, you don’t get more kindly. Nothing happens. But your back hurts more, you get more indigestion, your eyesight isn’t as good and you need a hearing aid. It’s a bad business getting older and I would advise you not to do it if you can avoid it.” Relatively speaking, that’s a sunny outlook in this year’s Cannes: it does, at least, preclude suicide.

Wall Street: Oliver never sleeps

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 8:58 PM - 1 Comment

Shia La Beouf, Josh Brolin and Michael Douglas in 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Trying to catch up to the blog in the early hours of Sunday morning, though it’s still yesterday back home. Saturday was a long day, with two movies in the morning, two at night and a full afternoon spent down the coast at at the fabled Hotel Du Cap—shivering on the seaside in cold, rainy weather doing  press junket interviews with Oliver Stone and the cast of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in an outdoor cabana. It was a weird place to get an economics lesson, from movie stars no less. And from a rambling semi-coherant Oliver Stone, who looked utterly exhausted after last night’s premiere party. According to Michael Douglas, “he burns the candle at every end.” More on that later, in the magazine.

Meanwhile,  a few words on the movie. Wall Street is the only Hollywood picture in official selection, and though it has had a mixed reception, it has attracted a lot of attention. Canadian media at the press conference were tickled to hear Oliver Stone praise the Royal Bank for opening up its doors to his crew while various American institutions refused. Ah, gotta love those Chavez-loving money men at RBC! You’ll be hearing a lot more about Wall Street in coming days and months–it doesn’t open commercially until September. But as a quick primer, I’ve compiled a list of homilies that pop up in the dialogue of the film almost as frequently as the product placements (the most blatant is Michael Douglas asking  Shia La Beouf, “Would you like a Heineken?” in a restaurant —followed by a close up of a Heineken.)

Top 10 Wall Street aphorisms:
1.  “I once said greed is good. Now it seems it’s legal.” [Huh, wasn’t it always legal?]
2. “We take a buck and we shoot it full of steroids and we call it steroid banking.”
3.  “The mother of all evil is speculation–leveraged debt.”
4.  “Money is a bitch that never sleeps, and she’s jealous.”
5.  “Money is not the prime asset in life; time is.”
6. “It’s not about the money it’s about the trade.”
7.  “Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.”
8. “You stop telling lies about me and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
9. “Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.”
10. “Green is the new bubble.”

You're not helping, Mr. Szabo

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 3:51 PM - 16 Comments

While the auditor general remains delightfully passive aggressive, Liberal Paul Szabo explains that one reason the public can’t have a look at the books is because, well, then we’d know about all the lawsuits we’re paying to fight and settle.

“If they were opened to the auditor general and open to the public, all of a sudden people would jump to conclusions without having all the facts,” he said.

“If you identify the member, or the law firm or all this other stuff, all of a sudden people could say … what’s wrong with this member, this member is getting sued all the time,” he said.

Szabo said a large chunk of the board’s budget is used to pay for legal costs because MPs are “very susceptible” to lawsuits and “our reputations can be ruined if it would ever get out.”

The Sun bureau, meanwhile, has apparently set out (scroll down) to interrogate every MP they come across, with predictably awkward results.

The good old (Scottish?) hockey game

By macleans.ca - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 4 Comments

It seems the birthplace of hockey wasn’t in the 1800s in Windsor, Nova Scotia, or Deline, N.W.T., but someplace in Scotland in the late 1700s, according to two hockey-history researchers from Sweden. The historians have also determined that a rudimentary form of the British Isles’ stick and ball sport, which evolved to become hockey as we now know it, was played in New York and Philadelphia before it was recorded being played in Canada.

Vancouver Sun

In deep trouble

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 4 Comments

Reuters

This past September, the Deepwater Horizon tapped the world’s deepest-ever oil, boring a well 35,050 feet—or 10.7 km—below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The size of two football fields (the standard measurement for describing really big things at sea for some reason), the $350-million drill rig was a state-of-the-art marvel. Able to maintain its free-floating position, regardless of the weather, with the aid of computers and GPS, it was also self-propelling, simply picking up and chugging to the next site when the job was done. On board the high platform, there was a gym, a movie theatre, poker tables in the lounge, and queen-sized beds and satellite TV in the cabins. Its 126-strong crew referred to it as a “floatel.”

Today, what’s left of the Deepwater Horizon lies 5,000 feet (1,500 m) down on the sea floor, a short distance from the well that blew out on Apr. 20, touching off an inferno that killed 11, injured 17, and caused the rig’s sinking two days later. As much as 750,000 litres a day of crude oil continues to spill into the waters of the Gulf, threatening marine life, and it is only a matter of time until the slick—6,500 sq. km and growing—coats some of America’s most ecologically sensitive shores. The inability of British Petroleum (BP), who leased the platform for $500,000 a day from Swiss company Transocean, to stop the flow after almost three weeks has raised the ire of the Obama administration and brought the oil giant’s own survival into question.

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Enough with the Friends nostalgia

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 14, 2010 at 5:24 PM - 7 Comments

I don’t have a lot to say about most of the pickups (Chuck gets another season to infuriate ‘shippers and action fans alike; better news is Human Target, already a better show, getting a second season), but like Sean O’Neal I do notice one pattern here: a lot of the shows being picked up by the networks appear to be rooted in Friends nostalgia. All the comedies are about good-looking young people hanging out and talking about their relationships, and the ones that aren’t have Matthew Perry or Courteney Cox in them.

I guess you could argue that some of it has to do with imitating How I Met Your Mother. And in fact, HIMYM is having a huge amount of stylistic influence (probably not all to the good), with many shows trying to copy its time jumps and its blend of single and multi-camera techniques. But How I Met Your Mother isn’t the most popular comedy on TV by a long shot. The most popular comedy on TV is about two cynical, broken men in their 40s, and nobody wants to imitate that except the guy who created it. What How I Met Your Mother is is the closest thing TV has these days to Friends, and everybody wants to imitate it because everybody wants to make Friends again.

You can also see this on the NBC Thursday night comedies, which are deeply — maybe even absurdly — obsessed with the memory of Friends. Leslie Knope on Parks & Recreation is a big fan. Abed on Community made a whole speech implying that the ideal thing would be for their show to be as beloved as Friends and complaining that the two leads are “no Ross and Rachel.” 30 Rock has too many to count, but at least it has the excuse that it’s set at NBC and therefore refers to every show NBC ever made. Throw in Michael Scott’s occasional Friends references, like the time he got it confused with Seinfeld, and NBC’s Thursday night lineup is entirely composed of shows that won’t stop talking about NBC’s much bigger Thursday night hits of the past.

It’s disturbing that there is so much Friends-mania, still, because Friends clones nearly destroyed the entire sitcom genre in the late ’90s, with endless terrible shows about young, pretty, not-particularly-funny people sitting on a couch and whining about their stupid problems. You would have thought the networks might have learned how very, very hard it is to do this kind of show. It’s hard because young and beautiful people aren’t usually funny, and because the problems they have are not usually interesting. (Worse, the problems they have on these shows tend to be incredibly trivial, small-stakes problems. I’ve said before that one reason Two and a Half Men manages to beat the competition is that its characters have such screwed-up lives that everything they do winds up being tied to some real, high-stakes issue that they prefer to avoid dealing with. Not to mention Everybody Loves Raymond, where every trivial problem turned out to be about some genuinely important, deeper problem that the audience could care about.) Even Seinfeld is easier to repeat — Curb Your Enthusiasm did it, after all — because it calls for a cast of experienced comedians and farcical, surreal plots.

I think network executives have become obsessed with Friends for a number of interlocking reasons. It (along with Raymond) was one of the last representatives of the mass-audience comedy, and the executives feel that if they can do something like that again, the mass audience will return. Execs genuinely prefer casting young and pretty people. A new generation of execs has come along and this new generation actually watched NBC Thursday nights in the ’90s. Trying to re-create Friends is their version of Ben Silverman trying to bring back his ’80s youth.

This is not a dis to Friends, by the way. It was a fine show. But Friends was practically a one-off, managing to sign up people who were pretty and funny and making genuinely funny scenes out of genuinely trivial — but relatable — things. Everyone since then has tried to do a scene like this, and everyone has failed.

Tamil Tiger fundraiser jailed for six months

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 14, 2010 at 5:23 PM - 4 Comments

A Vancouver judge has sentenced Prapaharan Thambithurai to six months in jail for financially supporting the rebel Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Thambithurai plead guilty before the British Columbia Supreme Court earlier this week of “providing financial services, knowing that they will benefit a terrorist group, namely the (LTTE).” Thambithurai, who has been out on bail since his arrest in 2008, is the first person to be charged under new Canadian legislation against financing foreign terrorist organizations.

Agence France-Press