The Looney Tunes Brand, Rebranded Again

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 4:58 PM - 4 Comments

Slowish TV news day (particularly for those of us who are a bit Lost-ed out), so the article that caught my eye was this New York Times piece on one of my favourite topics, Warner Brothers’ attempts to re-introduce the Looney Tunes brand to a generation of children that has largely forgotten who the characters are. Because I’ve talked about this subject a lot, I don’t need to talk at length about the background; suffice it to say that the company benefited tremendously from all the years when their cartoons were available on network TV every Saturday morning, and has never figured out what to do once they weren’t.

The idea of 3-D Road Runner shorts is… well, it’s inevitable, and 3-D animation has made enough advances in its ability to do “cartoony” animation and movement (thanks more to Dreamworks than Pixar; Kung Fu Panda was probably a more important movie, in terms of advancing the art of computer animation, than most of the recent Pixars) that they can support this kind of storytelling. The Road Runner and Coyote concept seems fairly well suited to computer animation, since the gags rely on speed, timing, and the Coyote’s broad facial reactions to the stuff that’s about to fall on him. All of these things can be done effectively on a computer.

What is more of a problem is re-creating the kind of animation that relies on squash-and-stretch distortion of characters’ bodies, or uses exaggerated movements that bear no relationship to real-life movements. The Continue…

Marc Emery headed for U.S. prison

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 3:37 PM - 44 Comments

Famous marijuana activist Marc Emery is on his way to the U.S. to serve a five-year prison term after selling marijuana seeds by post to American customers, the CBC reports. According to his wife Jodie, Emery was driven from a Vancouver jail to the U.S. border and handed over to authorities. A rally is planned in protest, she said. Emery was arrested in 2005 for allegedly selling seeds over the Internet to U.S. residents, and made an agreement with American prosecutors last year that he’d plead guilty to one charge of drug distribution for a five-year sentence.

CBC News

Vive le Double Down!

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 3:33 PM - 3 Comments

Americans are lovin’ KFC’s now-notorious Double Down sandwich: bacon, sauce and cheese held together not by bread, but by two signature fried chicken filets. In fact, they’re loving it so much that the chicken chain is set to surpass 10 million Double Down sales later this month. And that’s why KFC, which introduced the sandwich as a limited-edition item, has agreed to keep its caloric creation on the menu for good. (Or, at least, until demand for the 540 calorie/32 grams of fat/1,380 mg of salt meal runs dry.) The sandwich’s notoriety has spread in recent weeks, with celebrities like Stephen Colbert giving it the thumbs up, and every day fast food gorgers posting YouTube videos of themselves chowing down. ABC reports that “some have questioned the sandwiches’ nutritional value.” Umm… Duh?

ABC News

Rousseau as Red Tory

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 3:32 PM - 16 Comments

All should read Jacob Levy’s Cato piece on Red Toryism. For obvious reasons, I really liked this part:

The claim that commercial modernity necessarily represents a time of mutual alienation, dissolution of traditional communal bonds, decline of virtue, and perpetually increasing wealth for the wealthy and poverty for the poor — that claim found one of its most profound and influential formulations in Rousseau’s work. In short, Rousseau has as good a claim to be the founder of Red Toryism and conservatism as anything else — and much better a claim than to being any kind of founder of liberalism.

Link.

Warrant issued for Lindsay Lohan’s arrest

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 3:29 PM - 6 Comments

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of Lindsay Lohan after she didn’t attend a mandatory probation hearing in Los Angeles today, the Toronto Sun reports. Lohan was to appear in front of judge Marsha Revel at the Beverly Hills Courthouse, but was stranded in Europe after losing her passport during a trip to France for the Cannes Film Festival. This follows reports she’d failed to complete court-ordered alcohol education classes after a 2007 arrest. The probation hearing went ahead, but the judge didn’t accept her excuse and issued an arrest warrant. Her bail is set at $100,000.

Toronto Sun

What’s best for troubled teens?

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 25 Comments

Kristen Schmid/ St. Petersburg Times/ Zuma/ Keystone

Using boot camps or wilderness programs to treat youth suffering from emotional, behavioural or addiction problems is a divisive issue in the mental health profession. So a conference in Toronto this month that will include representatives of more than 100 such residential therapeutic programs—four are Canadian, the rest are U.S.-based—has reignited the debate about their efficacy, and the increasing placement of Canadian youth in these facilities.

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The Catholic Church's bold new recruiting drive

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:58 PM - 259 Comments

Say, there, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, what do you think about abortion in the case of rape? You know, rape: just about the most vile thing you could possibly do to another human being. Even the most ardent pro-life/anti-choice/whatever types usually agree on this: being forced to bear a child conceived through rape is probably the second most vile thing you could possibly do to another human being. So, slam dunk, right?

Er, no:

“I totally understand that a raped woman lives a trauma and that she must be helped. But the being in her belly must be kept in mind when she receives this help. She is not responsible for what happened to her. [Ed's note: God forbid!] The perpetrator is responsible. But there is already one victim. Does there need to be another one?”

And, later:

“Taking a life from someone is always a moral crime.”

So, a rape victim who gets an abortion is actually worse off, morally speaking, than her aggressor–who, while responsible for a nasty deed, certainly didn’t take a life. How refreshing! (Oh, and he also took on the evils of photography. No kidding. UPDATE: actually, he was kidding. Well, he wasn’t; the site linked here was. I missed the satire, moron English heathen that I am.)

The French media has been all over this for the last few days, culminating today in a page one Journal de Montréal poll saying 94 percent of Quebecers disagree with this country’s biggest Catholic cheese. This is no surprise: out of all the provinces, Quebec has the largest drop in church attendance–13 percentage point drop between 1989 and 2001, according to Statistics Canada. I have to admit: for years I thought French Quebecers, particularly those born to baby boomer parents, shunned the church either out of lethargy or a sense of duty to the older generation. Happily, Ouellet’s frankly medieval sortie proves me wrong.

UPDATED: Human rights abuse in Cuba: Canadians should be alarmed

By John Geddes - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:45 PM - 29 Comments

[UPDATED BELOW WITH CANADIAN GOVERNMENT COMMENT]

When Canadians concern themselves with human rights abuses these days—if they do at all— their minds tend to turn to jailed Chinese dissidents, to detainees in Afghan prisons, and maybe to Omar Khadr, the young Canadian citizen still held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s good reason to worry about any or all of these issues. But it seems strange to me that Cuba, so long a focus of fascination for many Canadians, rarely seems to register on our human rights radar. It should, and maybe it soon will.

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Devon Ronald Butler Clifford 1979-2010

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 1 Comment

Illustration by Christopher Hutsul; Justin Tyler Close

Devon Ronald Butler Clifford was born in Abbotsford, B.C., on April 23, 1979, the second son to teachers Ron and Edna. James, his older brother by a year, had Down’s syndrome, a situation that quickly led Devon to assume the part of, as Ron puts it, “the guide, the protector,” a role he later extended to his younger sister Estee. Together, Dev, as the family called him, and James hung her dolls from the clothesline by their hair, calling the display, “Torture Me Barbie.” Such early lessons in difference—the fact that despite James’s disability both boys took the same pleasure in tormenting little Estee and in The Dukes of Hazzard—moulded Devon as he matured. “If I got teased, my brother just stood in front of me and he’d take it,” James says. “He was really good at that.”

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Cooling off a hot housing market

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 14 Comments

Nathan Denette / CP

Canadians still appear eager to jump into the country’s hot housing market even as mortgage rates begin to climb, but they would be wise to consider the possibility they could experience, if not buyer’s remorse, at least a borrower’s reality check down the road.

An estimated 375,000 mortgage holders in Canada are already having trouble making their monthly payments, while another 475,000 say they could be in the same boat if lending rates head to 5.25 per cent, according to a study released this week by the Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals. That’s about 15 per cent of the country’s 5.5 million mortgage holders. At present, the average five-year rate among Canadian homeowners is 4.02 per cent. Banks have been raising their rates in recent weeks ahead of an expected hike in the prime rate—now at an all-time low of 0.25 percent—by the Bank of Canada next month.

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'Wow-ee' fairy tales for grown-ups

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

At the first Toronto preview of Frankenstein earlier this month, Catalyst Theatre company tried something different, though tame by its usual audacious standards. The Edmonton-based ensemble staged a midnight show of its acclaimed 2½-hour musical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. A crowd that ranged from tweens to octogenarians flocked to the Canadian Stage presentation, eager to experience Catalyst’s stylish version of the classic tale, one that features such “Wow-ee”-inducing spectacle as a 14-foot magistrate, a phantasmagorical papier-mâché forest, and a poignant pas de deux between the grotesque, love-starved Monster and his ill-fated Bride.

The witching-hour timing fit perfectly with Catalyst’s recent Gothic trifecta: Frankenstein in 2007; then, in 2009, Nevermore: The Imaginary Life And Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, which travels to London, England, in July and New York in October; and a current adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame due to open in Edmonton next March. Nevermore, particularly, has won the company a legion of teenaged goth fans: “It’s weird when the audiences’ clothing is stranger than the costumes on stage,” says production designer Bretta Gerecke with a laugh.

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Programme alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 8 Comments

David Cameron and Nick Clegg have released the final draft of their joint plan for Britain.

We stood for Parliament – and for the leadership of our parties – with visions of a Britain better in every way. And we have found in this coalition that our visions are not compromised by working together; they are strengthened and enhanced. That is why this coalition has the potential for era-changing, convention-challenging, radical reform.

One clever plant

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 8 Comments

Getty Images

Henry Ford, the father of the modern assembly line, predicted a future where fuel would be mass-produced from natural materials like fruit, weeds, or even sawdust—renewable alternatives to finite fossil fuels. Still, one energy technology being developed by Joule Unlimited, a company in Cambridge, Mass., might have surprised even him: a plant that sweats diesel.

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Want to be a paperback writer?

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 2 Comments

At a publishing industry event in New York last week, a Google official dropped a bombshell: the company plans to launch its own e-book store as soon as next month, pitting it against heavyweights Amazon and Apple. But just as observers were predicting an all-out digital book war, another online media star quietly unveiled a very different scheme. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind Wikipedia, will now allow users to convert its digital articles into old-fashioned paperbacks.

Heiko Hees is the managing director of PediaPress, the German company that’s partnered with Wikimedia (it’s based in Mainz, where Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press). Why turn to printed books, as everyone else goes digital? People “cherish their off-line moments more and more,” Hees says, adding that they read up to 30 per cent faster when it’s on paper.

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San Dimas High School Football Rules

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:54 PM - 6 Comments

So apparently this is  New Media Week in the middle of the country. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was at a conference sponsored by the PPF and UNESCO on Reinventing Canadian Media. At the same time, the Evans/Ingram MESH Conference was exploding down in Toronto, even as the latest installment of the excellent Samara/Massey journalism seminars was taking place.

Me, I was at the PPF event. The keynote was Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and — it would appear — one of the architects behind the “digital first” strategy that Paul Godfrey is implementing at his shiny new chain of dailies. Jarvis was excellent, by turns insightful, entertaining, and pleasantly, annoyingly glib. My role at the event was to give a sort of insta-wrapup of the day’s events, which turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.  Thankfully, I’m getting a second kick at the can; I’ve been asked by David Mitchell at the PPForum to write an extended essay about the themes addressed at the conference. I’ll be delivering that sometime soon (well, before summertime anyway), and will point it to you when it is up.

For the time being, I’ll say this: I’ve probably been to a dozen or so conferences or talks over the past few years on new media, journalism, and the future of democracy, and for the most part they’ve been exercises in treading water. But at this this conference, for the first time, I thought we were starting to make some progress. We have a better sense of what the problems are, both with respect to journalism and its place in a democratic society. There has been a bit of a shakeout in the many alternative journalism models that sprung up (e.g. citizen journalism, crowd-sourced media, philanthropic models such as pro publica, and so on). Finally, we are starting to see the contours of a new business model emerging. Or I should say business models, since it is increasingly apparent that there won’t be a single solution, and magic app that will restore the ad-based model to its former, profitable, glory.

The times remain interesting (in the Chinese sense of the term), but slightly less so.

Anyone at either the Samara or MESH events? I’d love to know what you thought.

Ninjas to the rescue

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:46 PM - 1 Comment

A German exchange student was being mugged in Sydney, Australia, when students at a nearby ninja school noticed the attack. “We just ran outside and started running at them, yelling and everything,” said ninja master Kaylan Soto who instructed his students to take action. “These guys have turned around and seen five ninjas in black ninja uniforms running towards them. They just bolted.” Two suspects were arrested and police are looking for a third. As for the attackers, “They just picked the wrong spot,” Soto added.

BBC

Never mind the auditor general

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:23 PM - 6 Comments

David Eaves proposes a solution to the current dispute over MP expenses.

Today, the accounts are kept in a digital format. It should be easy to convert them to Microsoft Excel or another computer format. They could be posted online where anyone could download and look at them at no cost. And, as the Guardian newspaper proved last year, thousands and thousands of people would be interested in using their computers to analyze and write about them….

What Parliament needs to do is hand over their expense accounts to everyone. Indeed, I am making a formal request right now. I would like Parliament to invite Canadian taxpayers – the people who vote for them, who pay their salaries, and who cover their expenses – to review their books. Please take all the expenses and post them online. Today.

The Bloc at 20: a conversation with Gilles Duceppe

By John Geddes - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:10 PM - 9 Comments

The Bloc Québécois is 20 years old this month. Gilles Duceppe, its leader since 1997, has been elected to the House of Commons five times, going back to a by-election victory in his Montréal riding in August, 1990. An article about the Bloc’s unusual role as a long-entrenched separatist party on the federal scene appears in this week’s Maclean’s. Duceppe spoke with John Geddes for the story. An edited text of the interview:

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Get yer fossils, folks. Step right up.

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 1 Comment

Andrew Tolson/ Hans Thater / Science North

Some natural history museums show visitors taxidermied bats in glass display cases. Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum invites them into a bat-infested cave. With its spooky lighting, sound effects, and plastic bats hanging from the ceiling, the Bat Cave has been one of the ROM’s most popular exhibits for over 20 years. But after its recent relaunch—which promised more bats, more animatronics, “bigger, scarier and better than ever!”—long-time fan Janet Taylor, 27, found herself disappointed. “I had an open mind,” she says. “But they should have kept it low-key. They ruined the Bat Cave.”

Some parts of the new cave are still low-tech—like the plastic cockroaches that litter the floor—but unlike the old one, it now has a plot line, like a movie. A narrator’s voice, tinged with a Jamaican accent (the exhibit is modelled after the St. Clair Cave in Jamaica), plays on a loop: “Did you see that?” he exclaims, as a bat’s shadow flaps across the wall. At the end, a sound-and-light display creates the impression of bats flying away, a fan blowing on them so they bob up and down. The revamped Bat Cave seems to be popular with an important museum-going demographic: kids. But Taylor misses the old one. Without the narration loop, “there was less noise and you could appreciate it,” she says. “It’s better to use your imagination.”

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NATO and the spy from Estonia

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Sicherheitspolizei Estland

When former Estonian senior defence official Herman Simm was convicted in 2009 of sharing NATO secrets with Russia, it wasn’t immediately known how much harm he’d done. But according to a classified NATO report, the consequences of his espionage, which spanned 12 years, were far-reaching indeed, earning Simm the dubious distinction of being the “most damaging [spy] in alliance history.”

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A syphilis epidemic hits China

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 2 Comments

Reuters

Every hour, around 1,900 children are born in China. At least one of those helpless squalling babes will have congenital syphilis—and that rate has exploded by a factor of 12 in the last five years. Syphilis is now the No. 1 communicable disease in Shanghai. The nation is in the midst of the fastest-growing epidemic of the disease the world has seen since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which can quickly cure the sexually transmitted infection (STI).

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North Korea warns of war

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:34 AM - 6 Comments

South Korea’s accusations that North Korea was responsible for the attack on one of its naval warships in March, killing 46 sailors, has prompted deepening tensions and harsh words. After a multinational investigation of the sinking pointed to North Korea, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak promised “stern action” against his not-so-friendly neighbour. For its part, North Korea is dismissing the results of the investigation as a fabrication, and issued a warning of its own: “If the (South Korean) enemies try to deal any retaliation or punishment, or if they try sanctions or a strike on us,” said Col. Pak In Ho of North Korea’s navy, “we will answer to this with all-out war.”

CTV

Mind the gap? I bet Peter Donolo does: Attempting to explain the "sideways Ekos V"

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 285 Comments

The “sideways Ekos V” is what you get if you tilt your head to the right and look at the CBC-Ekos poll results for party preference since about January 10, and especially if you look at the results over the past five weeks. In the New Year, Conservatives and Liberals were trading at rough parity, but since then the Liberals are trading at a substantial discount.

Today’s question: How come? Speculation welcome in the comments below. But BE NICE to one another! Snide, boring, predictable personal swipes at fellow commentators are not what I’m asking for. I do think it’s fair to contrast the results over the past couple of months with the dominant news narratives: detainee documents, Speaker’s ruling, Guergis on the teevee, etc. etc. etc. Oh: and if Frank Graves is a secret Liberal plant, then clearly his strategy is to lull the government into a false sense of euphoria. And it’s working!

Anyway. Do try to be pleasant to one another as you share theories, guesses and hunches.

Justin Bieber: So hot. Who cares if he’s white?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 17 Comments

Justin Bieber: Tween idol. Canadian darling. And now: racial barrier crosser? On Thursday, our sultriest sixteen-year-old nabbed a nomination for a Black Entertainment Television award. Some may raise their eyebrows at BET’s choice. After all, the BET Awards have historically honoured black artists. But others, like P. Diddy, are tipping their hats to Bieber, whose “My World 2.0” hit the No.1 spot on the Billboard charts earlier this year. “The beauty of BET is, if Justin Bieber’s hot, then he deserves to be on stage,” Diddy explained at a press conference on Tuesday. “Sometimes, at other award shows, the color of your skin or the type of music you make takes away from getting the accolade you deserve.” BET President Stephen Hill described Bieber this week as someone who “has crossed the colour boundaries.”

Daily Telegraph

NY Daily News