Montreal voted second happiest city in the world

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments

So says Lonely Planet, publisher of the ubiquitous (and usually dog-earned) bible of the world’s wandering souls. The city earned the coveted number two spot on the Planet’s list of the world’s happiest cities—the only Canadian city to rank. The guide credits the city’s myriad festivals and boozy nightlife for much of this happiness. Try to keep smiling, Toronto.

Montreal Gazette

Stand up and be counted

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:24 AM - 0 Comments

The Globe finds the most comprehensive tally of the outrage.

But the National Statistics Council, whose 40 members are appointed by the government to advise Statistics Canada, asked the agency to provide data on all complaints registered either directly with Statscan, or referred to Statscan from MPs or any other source, concerning the last census in 2006. The total number of questions, complaints and concerns: 166. From a census that was sent to 12 million households.

If you add the two complaints received by the privacy commissioner, that’s 168 recorded and verified expressions of some interest in the 2006 census.

How to talk to spouses who aren’t talking

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TAYLOR SHUTE

Here’s the problem: your wife makes sarcastic comments about you in public. Later, when you object, she insists you have no sense of humour. At home, she withdraws into a stony silence. You try to talk to her but she says she wants to be left alone. If this infuriates you and makes you want to scream or file for divorce, psychologist Robert Nay has some advice specifically for people living with angry romantic partners.

Sarcasm and stony silence are just as much anger issues as yelling and name-calling, says Nay, who’s been helping couples deal with anger for 30 years. In his new book Overcoming Anger in Your Relationship: How to Break the Cycle of Arguments, Put-Downs and Stony Silences, Nay admits it’s impossible to force change on someone, but “there’s a lot you can change even without the co-operation of your angry partner. With a strong lead from you, there’s a good chance your partner will follow, and repairs can be made.”

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Pakistan jet crash kills 152

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

News from Pakistan is often confusing for readers in North America and Europe. Few can keep track of the military, political and religious factions and forces at play. What comes across is usually only a vague understanding that the country is a volatile place in a troubled region. It might matter to the wider world, but that world doesn’t often make the effort to grasp even the broadest outline of the problems. But this morning’s news doesn’t require that sort of effort to comprehend: in Pakistan’s worst aviation accident ever, a passenger jet crashes outside Islamabad on Wednesday, killing all 152 people aboard. It’s a terrible story that might remind jaded readers that even in the most maddening complex country, there’s an awful simplicity and similarity at the core of every human tragedy.

LA Times

Hollywood's fake 3-D rip-off

By Jaime J. Weinman - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

Critics hated everything about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, but especially the fake 3-D. Like several other recent movies, Airbender was not filmed with 3-D cameras, but was altered to seem like it was. Film buffs paid high ticket prices and walked out appalled at how bad it looked. Roger Ebert wrote that Airbender “puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3-D,” while the Boston Globe called it “a ghoulish simulation” of the real thing. It’s Hollywood’s new craze: charging more for a worse viewing experience.

Unlike a real 3-D movie, like Avatar or the upcoming Resident Evil, films like Airbender depend on an elaborate conversion process. 3-D filmmaker James Stewart (founder of Geneva Film Co.) told Maclean’s that “conversion is like colourization,” because converters take the images apart and rebuild them to look like they have three dimensions. “You have to fill in the gaps manually, by painting,” he explains, “and you have to shape each object to give it actual depth within the layer.” A converted 3-D film is almost a computer-animated remake of the original.

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Prosecutor says battlefield shooting wasn't chivalry

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 9:57 AM - 0 Comments

A military prosecutor today argued that Capt. Robert Semrau, the Canadian soldier convicted last week of disgraceful conduct when he shot an unarmed, severely wounded Taliban fighter, should get two years in prison and be kicked out of the army. Semrau’s defence is that the incident was a form of battlefield mercy killing. But the prosecuting lawyer, Lt-Col Mario Léveillée, put an unsettling scenario before the judge at today’s sentencing hearing: what if Semrau had shot a dying Canadian, rather than a fatally wounded Afghan insurgent? “Would we say this is an act of chivalry?” said Léveillée. “We are not in the Middle Ages.” Semrau’s lawyer asked that his client’s rank be reduced and he be severely reprimanded.

Ottawa Citizen

The Drowning of Tony Clement’s Credibility

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 6:42 AM - 0 Comments

Let us pause now and spare a thought for poor Tony Clement. The minister in charge of Statistics Canada – or, as it will soon be known, Vague Hunches Canada – is not that different from you or me. He has a job. He likes his job. He wants to keep his job.

But to keep his job, Tony Clement must now wake up each morning, walk out into the world and say things that make him sound like a wet-lipped halfwit.

In defending the government’s changes to the census, Tony Clement must:

a) …repeatedly say and pretend to believe things that only the profoundly uneducated and our least savvy domestic pets could accept to be true.

Clement: A greater sample size in the long form will make up for the absence of a mandatory component.

My dog: Ruf!

Clement: I sense Senate material!

/ Dog licks self.

Clement: I sense Senate material!

b) …perpetuate a campaign of fear-mongering that even the most dedicated mongers of fear would hesitate to monger: Defenceless grandmothers receive the long form and Continue…

A few more for the list

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 9:25 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business is disturbed. The mayor of Fredericton is stumped. Peterborough’s medical officer of health is concerned.

The Chinese Canadian National Council, meanwhile, endorses the National Statistics Council’s proposal.

He's In For Some Lovin'

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 6:07 PM - 0 Comments

To prove that I don’t remember every ’80s pop culture artifact, I watched the Simpsons episode “Radio Bart” many times, but didn’t realize until recently that the catalyst (apart from Ace In the Hole) was this commercial:

Maybe they didn’t have that commercial in Canada; if they did, I didn’t see it at the time. If I had, my knowledge of great pick-up lines would have been massively improved, and I would know how to liven up any party.

Why America turned on Obama

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments

Brooks Kraft/CORBIS/ Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/ Alex Brandon/AP

This month, President Barack Obama signed into law a financial reform bill aimed at preventing another financial crisis. It cost him financial backers on Wall Street, but gave consumers new protections and government more regulatory oversight powers. The financial reform bill came on the heels of the hard-fought health-care reform law, which for the first time provides insurance coverage for all Americans. That in turn followed the successful rescue of the U.S. automotive sector and a massive stimulus bill full of Democratic policy victories, like a huge expansion of federal support for environmentally friendly energy technologies. In his first year and a half in office, Obama put the first Latina on the Supreme Court and is on track to have three women on the top court for the first time in U.S. history. He reached an arms control deal with the Russians and picked up a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s been decades since any president has accomplished so much so quickly—and all this without headlines about West Wing interns.

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Court okays 14-year-old's solo trip around the globe

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:28 PM - 0 Comments

Dutch judges have lifted child-care supervisions on 14-year-old Laura Dekker, allowing the teen to embark on a solo sailing trip around the globe, a decision her parents have endorsed. Child care authorities, saying they feared for Dekker’s health and well being, had already halted the trip once by placing her under their supervision last September, and they were trying to again prevent the voyage by extending the supervision by a year. Dekker will have to finish the two-year trip before she turns 17 in 2012 to set the record, and plans to leave within the next two weeks. Judge Suzanna Kuypers said the decision “puts the responsibility for the child back where it belongs: with the parents.”

Calgary Herald

Maury Chaykin, dead at 61

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:26 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian actor Maury Chaykin has died. Chaykin, whose career spanned 35 years, could most recently be found starring in the HBO Canada series Less Than Kind. His 1994 turn in Whale Music landed him a Genie award for best supporting role, while Chaykin’s other award-winning performances include roles in La Femme Nikita and At the Hotel, both of which earned him Geminis. Chaykin was 61.

Toronto Star

The Commons: Verifiable data are no match for riddles and notions

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:18 PM - 0 Comments

It was Mike Lake, the Conservative backbencher doing his best to seem the humble servant simply conveying the wishes of the people, who seemed to give the game away. He was relating his consultations with the electors of Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont. And here he noted that when some of his constituents were informed, by him, that not filling out the census could result in financial penalty or imprisonment they became, in his words, “quite agitated.”

It was Charlie Angus, the NDP member seated kitty corner to Mr. Lake, who pointed out what appeared a rather crucial sequence of events in this telling. It was here that the chain of causation seemed to become tangled.  And it was here that this whole sorry affair found an epitaph. For if we can say anything about the quinquennial census, perhaps it is this: not until it was made an issue, did it become an issue.

This morning of hearings, an industry minister and two former chief statisticians summoned to Parliament Hill to discuss the nature of data collection in a democratic society, was often so profound. And if the 2011 census is destined to be rendered useless to future generations, at least our descendants will have these two hours to tell them all they need to know about the state of this nation’s management as it embarks on the second decade of the 21st century. Continue…

The Scandinavian model (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:10 PM - 0 Comments

Tavia Grant reviews the Danish and Dutch models.

But before Europe is held up as an example in showing censuses are archaic, a second look may be worthwhile. Canadians who fear the census is an intrusion of their privacy would swoon at data collection in countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, where the government tracks every move from a new address to changes in income or education levels.

“It is an entirely different technique that is stunningly more invasive and presents a greater privacy challenge,” said Ian McKinnon, Victoria-based chair of the National Statistics Council. “To our sensibilities, it’s absolutely remarkable.”

The nuclear puppet-master

By Charlie Gillis and David Armstrong - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Shahpari Sohaie/Redux

When Mahmoud Yadegari became the first man in Canada convicted of supplying nuclear equipment to Iran two weeks ago, his lawyer was quick to downplay his importance. The 36-year-old Iranian-born Canadian was nothing more than a “rube” caught up in Tehran’s global smuggling operation, said lead counsel Frank Addario, noting that, before his landmark conviction under UN special regulations and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Act, Yadegari was merely a truck driver in desperate need of a dollar. “I think if he could redo it,” said Addario, “he would have continued driving a truck.”

The depiction required a certain leap of imagination. In the six months leading up to his April 2009 arrest, Yadegari had contacted 118 companies across North America and sent more than 2,000 emails to suppliers in hopes of getting his hands on parts used in the enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel. Several firms warned him that his activities ran afoul of international law, while his “handler” in Tehran—a man named Nima Tabari— instructed him on how best to avoid attracting the attention of authorities. Yet the hapless Torontonian pressed on, and in March 2009 was caught trying to ship devices called pressure transducers to Iran via the United Arab Emirates. He now faces up to 10 years in prison.

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Ayahuasca: that South American drug everyone’s raving about

By Noah Richler - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 45 Comments

Floris Leeuwenberg/TCS/KPA-ZUMA/KEYSTONE/ Jorge Vinueza G./Redux/ Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters

For a couple of years, I’d been noticing that a bunch of my forty- and fiftysomething middle-class friends were raving, sotto voce, about the transformative and even spiritual aspects of a South American drug called ayahuasca, the plant known in more disinterested circles as Banisteriopsis caapi. It was the Toronto filmmaker Richard Meech, whose documentary Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca is to be broadcast on VisionTV in November, who first brought the drug to my attention, but it was a musician friend who found a place for me at a ceremony that was to take place in a small lakeshore village, now more or less a suburb, an hour north of Toronto.

“For sure, you’ll meet the snake,” said my friend Deborah, an art critic whose curly black locks bring Medusa to mind, when I let slip my plans to try it on the weekend. “No matter your culture, or language, everyone meets the snake.”

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Maury Chaykin (Less Than Kind) dies

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments

Very sad news for TV and film viewers: the veteran character actor Maury Chaykin died last night, just one day short of his 61st birthday. Most recently we knew Chaykin as the father on Less Than Kind, which incorporated his health problems into some of the stories in its second season. His biggest part was Nero Wolfe in the A&E adaptation of the Rex Stout mysteries (opposite Timothy Hutton as the Watson-esque Archie Goodwin). He was also, as you can see from his filmography, a classic “hey, it’s that guy” actor, dependably making the most of small roles in film and television. For example, his role as Tod Johnson (“one bark for good, two barks for evil”) in Danny Boyle’s movie A Life Less Ordinary.

One hopes that Less Than Kind will still go on for a third season as planned; it’s certainly the kind of show that can deal openly and interestingly with the death of a character. But he was one of the best things on that show, and he will definitely be missed. Here’s Jim Henshaw’s tribute to him.

And here he is earlier this year being interviewed on CBC’s Q, talking about Less Than Kind and other subjects:

[vodpod id=Video.4111007&w=640&h=385&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

Update, from comments: “Chaykin deserves a much more effusive obituary than this! Whale Music! Amazing cameo in Dances with Wolves – absolutely amazing, a small but crucial ambiance-setting role, which Costner often praised for its brilliance and importance. and much more.”

Your National Household Survey

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 3:05 PM - 0 Comments

The new NHS is now online.

Mr. Clement’s lamented questions about the number of bedrooms, what time you leave for work and whether your home is in need of repair are all included.

The Tea Party—one year later

By John Parisella - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 1:21 PM - 0 Comments

The origins of the Tea Party movement can be traced back to the winter of 2009 and a rant by CNBC anchor Rick Santelli claiming the Obama administration did not understand what the American people were facing with high unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. Spurred on by Fox News personalities like Glenn Beck, it was not long that public displays of anger soon became part of mainstream media reports. Eventually, last August’s town hall meetings on healthcare reform laid the groundwork for a more organized national movement.

Unlike the Republican social conservatives of recent decades, the Tea Party fed on economic uncertainty using a message that married libertarian politics with strict fiscal conservatism. Its initial audience was an angry segment of the electorate, but its influence soon spread to the mainstream parties, the extent of which became clear by the time the Republican primaries rolled around. While liberal newscasters like Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow were quick to present the movement as a far-right outlier supported by Fox News, right-wing bloggers, and Rush Limbaugh, it seems the so-called fringe movement was much more than that.

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How Afghans see others

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

I’m reading Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. A couple of chapters in, it’s the model of how to write academically for a broader audience. He also has a great, dry wit:

Few peoples in the world, particularly the Islamic world, have maintained such a strong and unproblematic sense of themselves, their culture, and their superiority as Afghans…. Although the great powers might have been militarily, technologically, and economically superior, because they were nonbelievers, or infidels, their values and way of life were naturally suspect. Afghanistan’s Muslim neighbours, however, fared only slightly better in (Sunni) Afghan eyes. The Uzbeks must have been asleep to allow the Russians to occupy central Asia for more than a century; Pakistan is a suspect land of recent Muslim converts from Hinduism (Pashtuns and Baluch excepted) that never should have become a nation; and Iran is a nest of Shiite heretics who speak Persian with a ludicrous accent.

A crack-down on high-energy drinks?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:21 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Medical Association Journal is urging strict rules for energy drinks, as some contain enough caffeine to potentially cause intoxication. “Caffeine-loaded energy drinks have now crossed the line from beverages to drugs delivered as tasty syrups,” the CMAJ says in an editorial to be published today. The editorial calls for an end to targeting children in advertising campaigns and more transparency around caffeine content so that labels list the total amount of caffeine in each serving. Many drinks are loaded with syrups and typically contain 80 to 140 mg of caffeine per 250 ml, which is the equivalent amount of caffeine in one cup of coffee or two cans of cola. Some drinks, though, contain the caffeine equivalent of 10 cans of cola. Of the health concerns surrounding caffeine, CMAJ editor Dr. Paul Hebert said, “With acute intoxication you can get nausea, vomiting, heart palpitations… GI [gastrointestinal] upset, potentially heart arrhythmia, feelings of anxiety and nervousness.”

Vancouver Sun

Canada's first test-tube bull goes public in Montreal

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:18 PM - 0 Comments

Starbucks II, Canada’s first cloned bull, is on display at the St. Hyacinthe Agricultural Expo, a Montreal fair for the farming business. The bull, which was raised in one of the country’s best artificial insemination centres, looks like a regular bull, except that he was reared in a test tube. The imposing creature—weighing 1,100 kilograms and standing 6 feet tall at his shoulder—was bred from a champion stud who is said to have supplied $25 million worth of bull semen to breeders in 45 countries. While Starbucks the younger may be the offspring of a prize-winning stud, Environment and Health Canada regulations prevent the sale of his flesh and semen.

Montreal Gazette

Young people trust Google too much

By Shanda Deziel - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:12 PM - 0 Comments

In a new study, 102 students from the University of Illinois in Chicago sat at computers and performed information-retrieving tasks, while videos recorded their activity on screen. Researchers found that what matters to students when tracking down info isn’t the quality of the site, but where it ranks on a brand-name search engines page, like Google or Yahoo or AOL. “Just because younger people grew up with the Web doesn’t mean they’re universally savvy with it,” said Eszter Hargittai, one of the study’s researchers from Northwestern University. “Educators should show specific websites in class and talk about why a source is or isn’t credible.”

Science Daily

Chinese government calls for an end to public shaming of suspects

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:04 PM - 0 Comments

The Chinese government has called for an end to the public shaming of criminal suspects after increasing public outcry. According to the state-run media, the Ministry of Public Security has called on local officials to enforce laws in a “rational, calm and civilized manner,” rather than parading suspects in public. The new regulations are thought to be in response to the public outcry over recent “shame parades,” in which suspected prostitutes are shackled and forced to walk in public. Police in various cities have also taken to posting photos of suspected prostitutes on the Internet, or publishing the names and addresses of convicted sex workers and those of their clients. Public shaming has been a long tradition in China, and although public executions have been discontinued, provincial cities still hold mass sentencing rallies where convicts wearing confessional placards are driven though the streets in open trucks.

New York Times