Maybe They'll Start to Appreciate the Original BUFFY Movie

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 4:51 PM - 7 Comments

That’s the only thought that occurred to me when I read more about the planned movie reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is going ahead without any involvement from Joss Whedon. (You know those two people named “Kuzui” who got producer credits on every episode of Buffy and its spin-off? They were the ones who made the original movie — their second and last big film project after 1988′s Tokyo Pop – and they, not Whedon, have the right to greenlight a new version of the franchise.) There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed either by a discovery that the movie is a) as bad as we all expect or b) less bad than we expected. Either way, it will not be considered canonical by Buffy fans.

I would like to hope that if there is a new movie, it will take some of the pressure off the original film and get fans looking on it a little more kindly. The movie has plenty of flaws: Fran Kuzui didn’t see the project the same way Whedon did, and the result is a bit of a tonal mess as well as an early argument for why writers with very strong personalities were better off in television. (As in, if you want to do the story your way, you need to make a television series where you’re in control. In a feature film, the director tends to be in control.) It also doesn’t have much of the “high school as metaphor” idea that we associate with the franchise, because that was something the TV series added. And it alternates good scenes with mis-handled or poorly acted scenes. But is it a bad movie? Not as far as I’m concerned.

The reason the TV show got made at all was that the movie had an afterlife on home video, and that came about because viewers responded to the many good lines, the unusual if crude tonal mix — it doesn’t whiplash between serious and silly as adroitly as the series, but it is more serious than the marketing would lead you to expect, and the idea of playing an absurd idea sort of straight was a key part of the whole idea — and the satirical alternate approach to the clichés of horror movies and teen movies. Also, “Kill him a lot!” is one of the best lines in the entire franchise. I’d still take it over many episodes from the last two seasons of the series, and I’d like to think that the new movie will at least remind people that there can be something a lot worse than a movie that doesn’t turn out quite the way Joss Whedon wanted it.

How do you feel about the Senate abolishing a climate change bill adopted by the House of Commons?

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 3:48 PM - 65 Comments

WWDCD?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 3:35 PM - 48 Comments

Don Cherry imparts his wisdom on the Vaughan by-election.

“There are not enough words to describe how much respect I have for Julian Fantino,” the bombastic and sartorially outlandish Hockey Night in Canada commentator writes.. “He is honest, brave and always there for the ordinary guy. A class act and someone who will never let you down. He tells it like it is.”

There is more fawning analysis from Mr. Cherry, a former coach – but you get the idea. The endorsement was provided to The Globe by the Conservative Party.

Kate Middleton: An uncommon princess

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 1 Comment

Stephen Gibson/Marie Nirme/Zuma/Keystone Press; Eddie Keogh/Reuters

Catherine Elizabeth Middleton was born on Jan. 9, 1982, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, England, a large commercial town just west of London on the River Thames. Three years earlier, Michael and Carole Middleton, her parents, had purchased a semi-detached home in the nearby village of Bradfield Southend for the middling sum of $165,000. It was here that Kate spent the early part of her rather unremarkable childhood. Yet despite these bland beginnings, she would go on, at age 28, to become the first commoner betrothed to a future British king since Anne Hyde did so in the tumultuous mid-17th century. Unlike Anne, however, Kate, with her thick brown tresses and steely good looks, would first have to endure the longest job interview in history and the sobriquet “Waity Katie.”

Hers was a decidedly middle-class family: Michael and Carole first met while working as flight attendants (he later became a pilot), and Carole’s ancestry in particular is rooted in the coal-mining clans of Hetton-le-Hole, south of Newcastle. Yet Michael’s Middleton progenitors were entrepreneurs whose lucrative wool and cloth concerns date back to 18th century Yorkshire. So it was not a surprise that, in 1987, shortly after the birth of their third child, James, Carole would launch a Middleton venture—Party Pieces, selling ready-made loot bags and other children’s party paraphernalia. It was here, in the mail-order catalogues Carole put together, that Kate received her first public exposure, in photographs modelling her parents’ merchandise.

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Cost of long-gun registry is far below Tories' estimates: report

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 2:24 PM - 18 Comments

A 70-page report on proposed legislation to kill the long-gun registry found that scrapping it would save somewhere between $1.57 million and $4-million per year. The Conservative government, who was in favour of dismantling the long-gun registry, had estimated its costs in the billions. After the bill was defeated in September, Christopher McCluskey, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, told the media that the long-gun registry cost $2-billion. Other Conservative MPs are on record saying that scrapping the registry would save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year. The contradictory report in question was commissioned by the RCMP in 2009 and became public today after the Globe and Mail received it through Access to Information rules. Peter Hall, the report’s author, concluded that if legislation to scrap the long-gun registry were passed, the firearms program would eliminate at most, 63 full-time positions and some IT costs, for a savings of $4,025,000 per year.

Globe and Mail

Financial woes give way to political ones in Ireland

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 2:01 PM - 1 Comment

The coalition government in Ireland is facing pressure to step-down on Monday after it agreed to negotiate an EU-led bailout package to rescue the country’s ravaged economy and indebted banking system. On Monday, two independent MPs helping to prop up the coalition said they could not commit to supporting the budget unless the opposition had a hand in drafting it. Now, the two main opposition parties—Labour Party and Fine Gael—have called for an immediate general election. Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said it was “essential that we have a new government elected as soon as possible.” Michael Lowry, one of two independents who currently prop up the government, said it was “highly unlikely” he would “support [that] budget,” indicating there should be an election before a budget was agreed. Jackie Healy Rae, independent for Kerry South, said he would “no longer support this government”, and that it was “very very unlikely” he would support the budget. Once known for its strong economic growth, the country has experienced a property bubble burst, leaving its banks with huge liabilities and pushing up the cost of borrowing for them and the government. These calls for a snap elections are adding to the instability in the country.

Financial Times

BBC

WikiLeaks says next release is massive

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 1:10 PM - 7 Comments

WikiLeaks says that it’s next leak will be seven times the size of the Iraq war logs release which had some 400,000 classified documents. On Monday, the WikiLeaks company sent a tweet to its followers on Twitter saying that the release of the information will be in the “coming months.” Founder Julian Assange hasn’t spoken publicly yet about the upcoming release.

CTV News

Polygamy ban goes before B.C. court

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 1:02 PM - 10 Comments

Canada’s ban on polygamy will come under the scrutiny of the B.C. Supreme Court following the failed prosecution of religious leaders from the Mormon community of Bountiful. B.C.’s attorney general is asking the court to rule on whether a law against polygamy violates religious protections outlined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and whether all polygamy should be illegal, or just marriages involving minors or exploitation. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which is against the ban, and the West Coast Legal Action Fund, which says the current law helps protect vulnerable women and children, are both expected to take part in the trial. Canada would become the first developed country to decriminalize polygamy if the law is struck down.

CBC News

The sales job

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 1:02 PM - 31 Comments

David Pugliese explains how the government hopes to sell the purchase of new F-35s.

The plan is for DND officials to brief analysts about the value of the JSF … Defence Watch has been told that the Joint Strike Fighter PR plan envisions that the analysts will then go out to newspapers, TV and radio to spread the word about the worth of the F-35 as well as the message that the Harper government is making the right move with this proposed $16 billion purchase. Or that they will be ready with such messages when journalists come calling as they write JSF stories…

Meanwhile, a new round of visits of Conservative ministers and MPs to companies who have F-35 contracts, or the potential for F-35 contracts begins again today … Sources tell Defence Watch that the politicians aren’t highlighting new contracts (some of these were awarded years ago).

Meanwhile, sources tell Pugliese the government has kept secret millions in equipment purchases for the Afghan mission.

Rights and Democracy: So everyone agrees! And there's no problem! Right?

By Paul Wells - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:32 PM - 81 Comments

Over at the CBC, our their Kady O’Malley points out that Parliamentary privilege being what it is — powerful — “none” of the exemptions claimed by the industrious board of Rights and Democracy “are remotely relevant” to the Foreign Affairs Committee’s request for the Deloitte forensic audit.

You know what’s kind of cool? What’s kind of cool is that, nearly a year into my coverage of the mess at R&D, there are thousands of people in this country who actually understand what I’m talking about in the first paragraph above. For those who need a refresher, start with my next-most-recent post and then start at the beginning by clicking the “Rights and Democracy” tag at the bottom of this post.

Anyway. What this means is (a) the committee has asked for the audit; (b) the R&D board has made an elaborate show of voting to release the audit to the committee — subject to a comically elaborate list of conditions — contractual confidentiality, solicitor-client privilege, privacy concerns, the Official Secrets Act — which are (c) perfectly irrelevant to any serious consideration of whether the audit can be released, for reasons Kady explains. Well, one item on the list would be relevant if it were germane: “Confidences of the Privy Council.” The problem is that the Deloitte audit is an investigation into the ordinary financial transactions of a quasi-NGO during a period, the years 2005 to 2009, when it was not the subject of any public controversy. There can be no Privy Council confidences in such transactions.

So the confidentiality emperor is, to mix up a metaphor, buck naked. Rights and Democracy must release the audit.

Now here’s the interesting thing. Nobody on earth claims to want to keep the audit from being released. Continue…

Living With Fran

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:26 PM - 2 Comments

Tonight HBO is airing Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on raconteur/bon vivant Fran Lebowitz. Rachel Shukert at Tablet has some thoughts on the documentary in the context of Lebowitz’s career, and specifically the fact that she doesn’t exactly have a career in the traditional sense: though she became famous for two books of essays, she’s written very little since, and her never-finished novel is so much a part of her public persona that you get the feeling people would lose interest in her if she actually finished it.

Lebowitz is a very New York character, which is one of the reasons she continues to be famous enough to have Martin Scorsese following her around with cameras and David Letterman inviting her on his show. As Shukert says, she has cultivated the absolute perfect look for a cranky, witty New Yorker. And in an era when no one can make a living writing funny essays — not just because of the decline of publishing, but because the internet has made it possible for people to write short, funny pieces for free — she’s one of the last links to the older culture of the professional wit, someone whose dry sense of humour not only gets her published but gets her into all the best parties; the character who at once embodies and lampoons the appeal of the New York culturati. It’s not surprising, really, that HBO would want to do a show about her, since quite a bit of the show’s programming feeds into this image of New York literary culture.

This image is, to some extent, a myth. After all, Dorothy Parker, who Lebowitz is often compared do, had to support herself in the traditional way: doing a lot of writing and hoping the cheques added up to enough. She was a full-time critic, sold tons of her poems to paying outlets, secured regular positions at major magazines. But the vague memory of Dorothy Parker and the other, equally busy Algonquin Round Table types is of a bunch of people sitting around, swapping jokes, and drinking. And Lebowitz has kind of become what we like to think those other people were. If you wanted to be really nasty you could compare her to Elliot Vereker, a James Thurber character who was invited to all the fancy parties (and whose anti-social behaviour was excused) because he was considered a writing genius — even though he never wrote anything.

Not that Lebowitz is Elliot Vereker. Her two books are still fun reads today, not so much for the jokes as for her brilliant idea of phrasing those simple observational jokes in formal, old-fashioned prose. It’s like reading someone from the 18th century who was transported forward in time and decided to become a stand-up comedian. Hence memorable lines like “I consider getting out of bed. I reject the notion as being unduly vigorous.”

Today, though, the short humour essay is (as I said) more the province of the internet; some people get paid for writing these pieces, but others are either doing it without pay, or doing it as an adjunct to their paying work. So Lebowitz represents a link to a charming imagined past, where wit and personality was a more valuable commodity. She’s a perfect HBO heroine.

The long reach of the long-form census

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:14 PM - 13 Comments

Statistics Canada documents show how, and by who, the long-form census was used.

The Department of Finance reported using long-form data to track Canadian migration patterns during economic changes. Health Canada employs it to assess well-being in first nations communities, while the Public Health Agency relies on this information to target services to clusters of immigrants or particular ethnic groups. The Canada Student Loan Program uses this census data for demographic analysis of post-secondary enrolment, and the Department of Justice uses it to tailor studies on elder abuse to different ethnic populations.

Cooking lessons for college kids

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Pope justifies use of condoms to help stop spread of AIDS

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 10:58 AM - 4 Comments

Condom use can be justified in some cases to help stop the spread of AIDS, Pope Benedict XVI has said, marking the Vatican’s first exception to its policy banning contraceptives. The statements were made in interviews with a German journalist to address some criticisms of his papacy. The Pope’s statement was limited; he didn’t approve of their use, or suggest the Roman Catholic Church was changing its stance prohibiting birth control. The one example he cited in which condom use might be appropriate was by male prostitutes. Even so, observers call the statement a real change for the Pope, who was criticized last year when he said condoms didn’t help prevent the spread of AIDS while en route to Africa, where the disease represents a health crisis.

New York Times

One billion can’t afford health care, WHO says

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

According to the World Health Organization, around one billion people around the world can’t afford any health services, and 100 million are pushed into poverty each year trying to pay for it. All countries, rich and poor, could do more to encourage universal coverage, says the UN body’s global report on financing health systems, urging countries to think about new taxes, efficiencies and other ways to boost access. The World Health Reports 2010 found that direct, out-of-pocket payments should make up less than 15 to 20 per cent of a country’s total spending. Even so, in 22 mostly low and middle-income countries, direct payments from people receiving healthcare still account for more than 50 per cent of total health spending.

Reuters

Run by children

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 10:10 AM - 93 Comments

In a wider conversation with CBC radio last week about his impending departure, Liberal MP Keith Martin noted the incredible power of the young and unelected in Ottawa. A rough transcript of his comments.

I think the larger problem is that within leaders’ office, the people around them are unelected, generally very young, tend to be extremely partisan, they’re hired by parties, by leaders, to do the job and they have much more power than members of Parliament do. They control much of what goes on on a day-to-day basis with respect to the tactics and strategy. But these are very young people, for the most part. They’re not terribly experienced in the real world. They may be smart in certain ways, but they haven’t gone and knocked on doors, they haven’t run for political office, for the most part, they are not as connected to the people on the ground, our citizens, as those who have gone through the election process. So the people calling the shots, that rabid partisanship tends to revolve around leaders’ offices, and they basically tell the MPs what to do. And that’s a complete perversion of democracy…

Continue…

The canonization of John Lennon

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 4 Comments

The New York years are the focus of a revealing new documentary, LENNONNYC | Ben Ross

Monday, Dec. 8, 1980. The last day in the life of John Lennon starts with a haircut, then a photo shoot for the cover of Rolling Stone. Annie Leibovitz, his upstairs neighbour at the Dakota, has him pose naked, curled around a clothed Yoko Ono. Outside, his born-again Christian killer, Mark David Chapman, waits on the sidewalk, the morning after spending his last night of freedom with a prostitute.

2:30 p.m. John and Yoko’s five-year-old son, Sean, appears with his nanny. “Oh, isn’t he a cute sweet boy,” says Chapman. The boy politely shakes his hand when it’s offered, the same hand that will soon cut down his father with a .38-calibre snub-nosed revolver—bought for $169 from a Japanese American whose surname happened to be Ono.

5 p.m. After a marathon radio interview, John and Yoko finally leave the Dakota and are stopped by Chapman, who asks Lennon to autograph a copy of his new album, Double Fantasy, handing him a black Bic pen. Lennon scrawls, “John Lennon 1980,” and as Yoko waits in the car, he lingers for a moment and asks, “Is that all you want?”

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Gene Stone in conversation

By Kate Fillion - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:15 AM - 1 Comment

Shaul Schwarz/Getty Images

The bestselling health writer is a participatory journalist who has tried everything from body scans to biofeedback to rolfing. In The Secrets Of People Who Never Get Sick, Stone supplies tips (and the scientific rationale behind them) from unusually healthy people.

Q: One of the health tips in your book is to take brewer’s yeast daily. What’s the scientific basis for that?
A: Brewer’s yeast is a pretty amazing way to get your vitamin B: thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, panthothenic acid, folic acid—it’s got everything except vitamin B12. Vitamin Bs also keep homocysteine levels low. Epidemiological studies have linked high levels of homocysteine to stroke and coronary heart disease. And brewer’s yeast is a good source of protein, plus you get all these amazing minerals like selenium and potassium. It’s a natural way to get substances your body needs, without having to buy a bunch of different pills.

Q: If you drink beer regularly are you getting the same stuff?
A: I talked to a beer manufacturer who claimed that you did, but it’s not absolutely clear. It looks like if you skim the top off of a beer you might be getting the same stuff, but oddly enough, no one has ever done a double blind, random controlled study on beer as a preventative for colds! Seriously, things that tend to be free or easily available aren’t money makers for drug companies, so there isn’t much research on them. That doesn’t mean they don’t work.

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Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:01 AM - 77 Comments

Erin Anderssen considers the merits of guaranteed income.

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, one of the more vocal proponents of no-strings-attached aid for the poor, points out that the guaranteed-income program for seniors has greatly reduced poverty, especially among women.
“There’s a bias that when given the chance people will be lazy,” he says. “That’s not my sense of reality.” Mr. Segal argues that giving money with no conditions removes the stigma and shame around poverty, allowing people to focus instead on how to improve their lot.

Poor Pakistan

By Julia Belluz - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 45 Comments

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

When U.S. President Barack Obama touched down in India last week on Air Force One—part of a staggering 40-aircraft, six-armoured-car entourage—his was the biggest trip to India of any U.S. administration. And the scale of Obama’s much-discussed retinue matched the sizable gesture the U.S. made toward India, as the President described the India-U.S. friendship as “one of the defining and indispensible partnerships of the 21st century.” Other presidents have fostered closer ties with India, but Obama stayed in the country longer than he has in any other, and announced America’s backing of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council for India, making it the second nation—after Japan—to earn such a distinction.

But there was an equally significant, though more implicit, action that came with the strengthening ties between the world’s largest democracies. Shirking the long-time habit of U.S. presidents to pair a stop in India with a trip to the country’s archrival, Pakistan (long seen as America’s most important strategic ally in the region), Obama continued on to three other democracies (Indonesia, South Korea, Japan)—without any such nod to Islamabad. Though the U.S. has been working on “de-hyphenating”—or separating—relations with India and Pakistan for about a decade, four of the five previous trips by U.S. presidents to India were either preceded by or followed with stops in Pakistan, mainly to avoid upsetting either of the long-standing rivals in the zero-sum game that characterizes U.S. relations with the two nations.

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The best man, for better or worse

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Prince Harry with his mother—mischievous from the start. In the military he found a real sense of purpose and belonging. | Tim Graham/Getty Images; John Stillwell/AP

If there is any justice, Prince Harry will get to organize the stag night. It wouldn’t just be his duty as presumptive best man (current odds from British bookmaker William Hill: 12-1), it would play to his proven natural talents. For of all the royals, 26-year-old Henry Charles Albert David, third in line to the throne, is the indisputable party boy.

Charles and Diana’s second son, or “the spare,” as the late princess used to teasingly call him, has long had a taste for fun, and occasionally trouble. At 16, the tabloids revealed he’d been drinking to excess down at the local pub, and smoking pot on the grounds of his father’s Highgrove estate. (The Prince of Wales reacted by dispatching him to a London drug rehabilitation clinic for one short, sharp, shocking afternoon.) At 20, he got involved in a 3 a.m. scuffle with a paparazzo outside a posh London nightclub, leaving the man with a cut lip, and a highly lucrative photo. He celebrated his 25th birthday—and the official inheritance of $14.5 million from his mother’s estate—with a $32,400 African booze cruise, on a houseboat filled with friends, lager and smokes.

“Does everyone expect me to be just the caring person and not to have a cigarette, not to have a beer?” Harry asked an interviewer who inquired about his “party prince” reputation a few years ago. “If that’s a problem with anyone, then I’m very sorry.”

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Welcome to the (TSA) machine

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 10:36 PM - 28 Comments

“We’re taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don’t have to face them here at home.” President George W. Bush, June 9, 2005. Of all the nose-stretchers W ever told, this one rings the most hollow in 2010, with American air travellers said to be in a state of “revolt” against the system of industrialized sexual assault that has been implemented in their airports. The more the United States takes the fight to the terrorists abroad, the hotter the war being raged against the travelling civilian by the Transportation Security Administration. Not so long ago, there ran a common, bitter joke that we would all one day have to fly naked. Anybody laughing at that one now?

The term “revolt” is not exactly freighted with the violent overtones it once was. The most radical of the revolutionaries who have captured the American imagination in recent weeks is a fellow named John Tyner, whose blow for liberty took the form of refusing to submit to either being photographed in the nude or subjected to an “enhanced” groping, and then, most treacherously of all, leaving the “security area” of the airport without permission—a federal offence that could see him fined up to $11,000. He didn’t black the eye or batter the groin of any TSA personnel, and he certainly didn’t barrage Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with rotten eggs and filth.

There is probably no sense blaming the employees of the TSA, although if we’re really talking with “revolt” as our underlying moral premise, not being blameworthy doesn’t mean you are not an appropriate target of abuse. The airport rage of Americans is being fuelled by legitimately illogical, cruel, dumbass moves by frontline TSA workers—errors that, for the most part, represent the inflexible application of rules in situations that either (1) were not anticipated, (2) do not arise often enough to be covered in training, or (3) simply aren’t amenable to handling according to a script or a 20-word official doctrine.

In other words, America is keeping its airports safe the way it builds its cars and fights its wars: on the assembly-line model. It has been presented with an enormous responsibility to create safety, or the appearance of safety, over a huge universe of flights and passengers; it probably cannot, unlike Israel, approach this problem by training a small corps of intelligent persons and leaving them free to improvise, applying general principles using nuance and extensive local knowledge.

Given that merely living with the threat level we were all exposed to without much complaint in the 1980s is no longer an option, the Republic has to break down the great task of making-safe into small chunks that can be taught to people with IQs of 85—and taught by people with IQs of 105. The U.S. Army helped liberate Europe, a couple of times over, by means of the same industrial methods. (There’s a reason that in both the British-Canadian fighter and bomber commands during the Second World War, pilots and other crew who displayed particular talent were made instructors very quickly; not infrequently they became instructors of instructors.)

But generals and factory owners have continuous Darwinian pressure helping them with the organizing of human capital. Airport security officers aren’t easy to evaluate, even collectively—we don’t know how much value there is in having a TSA at all. Individually, the workers are like the household tiger repellent in the old joke. Are they of any use? Well, when was the last time you saw any tigers around here?

Without competitive pressure, any industrial apparatus becomes increasingly bloated and clumsy. The market for subsidized tiger repellent is potentially unlimited. TSA is going to get worse before it gets better—especially with new arbitrary prohibitions being fed into the system every time there’s a failed terrorist attack.

Hezbollah, the United Nations, and the murder of Rafik Hariri

By Michael Petrou - Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 9:44 PM - 32 Comments

Excellent and enormously consequential reporting by the CBC… Also infuriating, depressing, and, sadly, not all that surprising.

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 3:08 PM - 10 Comments