Harper strikes oil exploration deal with Quebec

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 1:31 PM - 26 Comments

The federal government has come to an agreement with Quebec with respect to oil exploration operations in the St. Lawrence. The deal, unveiled in Gatineau, Que. on Thursday, will open up the Old Harry oil field in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to exploration for billions of barrels of oil and natural gas. Under its terms, the province will be allowed to keep 100 per cent of royalties from operations there. The accord amounts to a breakthrough in relations between the Harper and Charest governments just as the Conservatives start looking for ways to win support away from the Bloc Quebecois ahead of the federal election campaign.

The Globe and Mail

The American SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 1:31 PM - 2 Comments

Well, that’s not what Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce is going to be, but one thing that’s somewhat unusual about it, in the U.S., is that it’s a miniseries written and directed by one person. (Well, written by two people, since Haynes has a co-writer, but you see what I mean.) The normal place of the director in the North American miniseries, or TV movie, is more or less what it is in the North American television series: as a hired gun. The writer or producer is usually the one whose personality dominates the show, with the director in charge of executing it. John Adams, HBO’s most successful recent miniseries, was directed by Tom Hooper, who went on to direct The King’s Speech — he’s a flashy director, but one who specializes in bringing scripts to the screen. The recent Pillars of the Earth was directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, an episodic TV director. Other mini-series use a rotating roster of directors, just like most TV drama series. Episodic TV directors, even the ones who later graduate to features (like Spielberg) spend their TV careers as relatively anonymous stylists: you can see some touches of their own, in retrospect, but the creator of the show has more influence over the style even if he or she never directs a single foot of film.

What’s different about Mildred Pierce, though not unprecedented even in the U.S., is that it’s a Todd Haynes movie that just happens to be made for television: it’s TV as a director’s medium for once, rather than something like Angels in America (which had a famous if past-his-prime director, Mike NIchols, but was clearly Tony Kushner’s show). It’s a writer-director of features making a TV film where his directorial style, as seen in his features, is the key component of the show. People are talking about how its relatively restrained approach connects to the previous work he’s done as a director, and how the story of women in the ’30s is similar to or different from his story of ’50s women in Far From Heaven.

Other countries have done this more often. Ingmar Bergman made several films for Swedish television, including the tremendously successful and influential miniseries Scenes From a Marriage, which he wrote and directed, and which was only subtly distinguishable from his theatrical features (this being TV in the ’70s, he went in for a lot of close-ups, but he’d already been doing that in feature films). In fact it was cut down to feature-length and released, in that condensed form, to theatres, where it was also successful Then there was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which he wrote and directed for German TV.

In the U.S., some directors have tried to make “directors’ television,” particularly Robert Altman, who started as one of the least anonymous of episodic TV directors. The HBO miniseries Tanner ’88 (written by Garry Trudeau) is considered an “Altman film” as much as any Altman film. And another TV graduate, Steven Spielberg, tried to turn Amazing Stories into a showcase for individual directorial styles — the problem being that while the intentions were good, most of the episodes (with obvious exceptions like Brad Bird’s Family Dog) were not very good. But the director is usually very anonymous in U.S. TV, not only in series — which more or less have to be that way, since every director must imitate an overall style — but in stand-alone projects like miniseries and movies. Mildred Pierce might help change that to some extent.

Of course what TV will always be most of all is a producer’s medium, and if a director wants to stamp his or her style on a show, it probably helps first of all to have a producing credit, as Haynes has on Mildred Pierce and Altman on Tanner ’88. (Scenes from a Marriage was produced by Bergman’s regular producer and former location manager, who was in effect acting as a proxy for the director.)

Exotic Indian Reds, all the way from Ontario

By Sarah Elton - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 1:27 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

Jason Verkaik’s family has been pulling carrots from the same brown earth in Ontario’s Holland Marsh for three generations. However, these days the carrots are changing. Some of the thick, orange spears of his youth have been replaced with a red version that is wide at the top and narrows quickly into a spindly tail, not unlike a parsnip. Bred on the subcontinent, it’s called the East Indian Red and is coveted by Indian-cuisine purists who will pay more than double the price of conventional carrots for it.

“It has got a crispiness similar to a radish and it is almost sweet,” said Preena Chauhan, an Oakville, Ont.-based Indian cooking school instructor and owner of Arvinda’s Indian Spice Blends, a company that makes masala mixes for retail. Demand for these carrots, as well as other “ethno-cultural” vegetables typical to Chinese and Afro-Caribbean cuisine, has been met over the last decade or so by imports. And what a market it is. Canadian demand for South Asian vegetables is estimated to be $33 million a month; for Chinese vegetables it’s $21 million. Now farmers like Verkaik are figuring out which ones grow best here in the hope of capturing that niche.

At the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, an independent research institution in Ontario, a team of scientists, plant breeders, and economists is working to fast-track the establishment of these global crops on Canadian farms. They’ve conducted consumer surveys, studied market economics, and made connections with the grocery industry as well as farmers who are participating in trial crops of an array of vegetables: yard-long beans, the zucchini-like kaddhu and fuzzy melon. “At the end of the day, we want the farmer to grow a crop that is selling,” said the organization’s CEO, Jim Brandle.

Continue…

Fighting intensifies in Libya despite air strikes

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 1:25 PM - 7 Comments

Pro-Gadhafi forces have resumed their assault on Misrata, Libya’s third largest city, after being temporarily driven back by coalition aerial bombings on Thursday. Four Canadian CF-18 fighter jets were involved in the aerial assault that bombarded Libyan armed forces in an attempt to stop pro-Gadhafi forces from attacking civilians. While the bombardments were initially successful, government forces soon regrouped and resumed their weeklong assault on Misrata, where an estimated 1,000 people were either wounded or simply taking shelter in the central hospital with no electricity. A spokesman for the National Council, the main opposition group, told reporters that government forces have been “targeting civilians and ambulances trying to enter the hospital from snipers on rooftops.” Meanwhile, Canadian Maj.-Gen. Tom Lawson, the deputy chief of air staff, told reporters at a briefing in Ottawa that Canada’s first bombing run since Kosovo succeeded in destroying an ammunition depot in Misrata, and that the attack “was very successful and their was no collateral damage.”

Toronto Star

Week in Pictures: March 21st – 27th 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Before an election, a bit of language politics

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 4 Comments

Howdy. We’ll be getting to your irregularly scheduled not-yet-quite-an-election coverage shortly. First, though, I’d like to point out this nice little scoop from La Presse’s (absurdly well-connected) Denis Lessard today. It seems the conseil superieure de la langue française, the advising body to the minister responsible for the French language charter, has deemed that it would be a mistake to extend Bill 101 to CEGEPs (our finishing schools). That is to say, to make it mandatory that all Francophones and Allophones attend French CEGEP.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. The idea of forcing Francos and Allos into French CEGEP has been a bit of a warhorse for the PQ for quite sometime. When I wrote about it ages and ages ago, a few people bitched and moaned suggested I was out to lunch: mandatory French CEGEP, they said, was a fringe-y Péquiste thing that would never find its way into the welcoming bosom that is the party’s mainstream.

It did, of course, thanks mostly to this fellow. Pierre Curzi is the PQ’s resident language hawk who made mandatory French CEGEP his baby—necessary, he says, to stanch the burgeoning Anglicizing tide of English. PQ leader Pauline Marois, eager to appeal to the ever-skeptical hard sovereignists within her own party, endorsed the idea.

The Conseil’s decision is a slap in the face for the PQ for a couple of reasons. First, the body has overwhelmingly ruled in favour of restrictive language policies in the past—most recently with the suggestion that the government should apply Bill 101 to private schools in the province. To have it go against one of the PQ’s key ideas hurts the language hawks big time. It also makes a bit of a mockery of Curzi’s own report, which states that mandatory French CEGEP is crucial for the survival of the French language. That said, the conseil’s decision surely comes as a big relief to Sylvain Simard et Marie Malavoy who, as Lessard points out, were against Curzi’s plan—probably because it made the PQ less-sellable to the large soft nationalist vote.

If they don’t endorse the idea during their general assembly next month (and I can’t see that they will), it will mean  the party of Bill 101 will have sacrificed hardline language policy for the sake of electability. What a bunch of softies they’re becoming.

This country for old men

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 80 Comments

The Globe tallies the senior vote.

About 75 per cent of Canadians over 65 are reliable voters, meaning they voted in the last federal, provincial and municipal elections, according to the Statistics Canada General Social Survey (and nearly 90 per cent vote in federal elections). Among 25- to 44-year-olds, the proportion of reliable voters is closer to 45 per cent. Targeting older voters is clearly an efficient way to campaign. And as political scientist Christian Leuprecht points out, rural ridings, which are often only half or one-third the size of urban ridings, also tend to be older. That makes seniors’ votes even more significant in areas such as Atlantic Canada, rural Quebec and Northern Ontario, where several races will have a significant impact on the election.

Clip o' the Day: It's Like M*A*S*H But Different

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 13 Comments

Just when you think you’ve seen the main title to every show from the ’70s, you find another one. This show, called Roll Out!, ran on CBS in the 1973-4 season, and was a half-hour comedy set during World War II. It looks a lot like M*A*S*H, which had premiered the previous season, and the creators of the show were the producers of M*A*S*H — Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds. The network asked them to come up with another war comedy, so to counterbalance M*A*S*H, a show with no black regulars (after Spearchucker was dropped during the first season) they created a period war comedy that would comment on contemporary race issues. I’ve never seen the show so I have no idea how good or bad it was. IMDB says Gelbart wrote seven of the eleven aired episodes himself, the same season he was writing fourteen episodes of M*A*S*H. A prolific man, is what I’m saying.

Japan’s stores begin rationing supplies

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:28 AM - 1 Comment

Radiation fears in Japan have prompted stores to ration supplies as some countries have halted food imports. The purchase of essentials such as milk, rice and toilet paper has been limited while supermarkets have sold out of water. Manufacturers and importers of bottled water have ramped up production to meet the increasing demand, and households with infants will get three half-litre bottles of water each. Water distribution centres have been established to provide children under a year old, after Japanese officials reported that radioactive iodine levels in tap water were considered unsafe for infants. Meanwhile, Canada, Australia and Singapore have joined a growing list of countries that have blocked food imports from Japan, but the overall impact on the Japanese economy is reported to be relatively small. Japan exported only $3.27 billion worth of food products in 2009, while it imported $53.5 billion.

CBC News

Wall Street Journal

Is Portugal next on the EU's bailout list?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 3 Comments

European officials say Portugal may need a bailout worth as much as $99 billion to relieve its debt crisis. Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates offered to step down this week after his government’s package of austerity measures was rejected by the country’s parliament. Socrates’s resignation in light of Portuguese lawmakers’ unwillingness to pass the reforms is believed to have inched the country closer to needing external help. “It’s pretty inevitable” that Portugal will need a financial lifeline, said Jacques Cailloux, a London-based economist at RBS. “The market will deteriorate in the absence of other measures going through. There is obviously the risk of further downgrades, which will become anticipated by the markets and be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Bloomberg

Uninterrupted sustained silent reading time

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:18 AM - 29 Comments

The Star dissects the government’s claim that the opposition parties didn’t read the budget before rejecting it.

The Conservative government arranged briefings for each of the opposition parties on budget day, where the leaders, senior MPs and staff spent part of the afternoon reading the documents and reaching their conclusions.

Vitamins won’t stop cancer, heart disease, study suggests

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 6 Comments

In a new study of over 180,000 people—some who took multivitamins, some who didn’t—researchers saw the same number of deaths from cancer and heart disease in both groups, Reuters reports. Some small studies have shown that specific vitamins, not multivitamins, might protect against cancer or heart disease among older people, but they looked at undernourished people, not healthy adults. More than half of American adults take multivitamins, even though they are generally prescribed only fo those who need extra vitamins. A large clinical trial is underway that may confirm results.

Reuters

The woman who shoos off sacred cows

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 1 Comment

Every time a man tells me he doesn’t want to marry me after all I buy a horse. That’s not my thought, actually, because as diligent readers know, I am happily married. Anyway, buying horses while my husband is on bail, and all sorts of Nosy Parkers in Ontario have to be told about every little investment we make until his contretemps ends, puts a bit of a crimp on things. No, the sentence belongs to Melissa Kite, who used it once as the opening of her Real Life column in The Spectator, and I liked it so much I was determined to use it at the first opportunity. Canadian readers would be absolutely venomous if I wrote that I was purchasing a horse and would inform me that since most people couldn’t possibly afford such a purchase, mentioning it shows how callous and uncaring I am about real life in downtrodden Canada.

I was reading Melissa Kite because whenever I contemplate my underachievement, I read people I admire—Orwell, Camus, Melissa Kite, Dorothy Parker. And Fran Lebowitz—who is actually the point of this column and appears in a must-see HBO documentary called Public Speaking, available on DVD in May. Lebowitz is pea-green enviously literate and very funny. Even if she is not writing books anymore.

Meanwhile, absolutely everyone I know, except me and Lebowitz, whom I do not know, alas, is publishing a book even if sans words. Like Wagner’s Eternal Ring, published by Rizzoli, whose “author” told me all about it at the last dinner party I went to. The book arrived from her today and it is huge, 240 pages of photos each 34 cm x 22 cm. Even my sister co-authors books every new moon when not in the kitchen updating recipes in her husband’s The G.I. Diet books.

Continue…

Cribs: despots edition

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 10:32 AM - 1 Comment

Luke MacGregor/Reuters; Alastair Grant/AP

Moammar Gadhafi may prefer living in tents when he visits the West, but his son Saif likes British red brick. In 2009, he plunked down $18 million for an eight-bedroom mansion in London’s tony Hampstead suburb. Gadhafi, like so many of his region’s oil-rich princes and potentates, knows the value of a safe bolthole in Europe’s banking and retail centre—regime change so often comes without warning. (During the first Gulf War, the Saudi royal family bought 10 homes on “billionaire’s row,” Bishops Avenue. Just in case.)

Indeed, sizable chunks of the most exclusive areas of the British capital have been snapped up by the mega rich of the Middle East, either as investments or for their personal use. The emir of Qatar shelled out more than $55 million for a 200-year-old fixer-upper at 100 Park Lane. His PM, and cousin, signed up for a $65-million-plus apartment at a prime new development, One Hyde Park, which he is backing financially. The head of finance in nearby Sharjah, part of the United Arab Emirates, also bought a flat there. In 2009, a Saudi royal got planning permission to knock three houses in Belgravia into one $80-million “super home,” complete with a two-storey below-grade complex. Gamal Mubarak, son of Egypt’s recently ousted ruler, also owns a piece of Belgravia, namely a luxurious pied-à-terre at 28 Wilton Place.

Continue…

Selling Canada

By Jacqueline Nelson - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 2 Comments

Irwin Fedriansyah/AP; NASA/Courtesy of Apercu; Adrian Wyld/CP

Doughnuts, hockey, Mounties and self-deprecating gags are effective at branding Canada to Canadians. But globally, these stereotypes just don’t translate. Some of the strongest national brands and companies, like BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, aren’t largely known to be Canadian outside our borders, and there was only so long the country’s space reputation could rest on the shoulder of the Canadarm. Just a quarter of Canadian business people surveyed by Maclean’s and Canadian Business as part of the Business without Borders initiative last year felt there was a distinct brand surrounding Canadian companies and products abroad.

Over the past few years, though, Canada’s image has matured, and some sectors are developing new strategies to communicate the country’s strengths. That doesn’t mean beating a patriotic drum. Many companies that have found success abroad did so by adopting the country’s “post-nationalist” attributes, and blending in with the places they do business.

The Great Recession has proven a big factor helping forge Canada’s brand. While the country was hit by the economic collapse, it wasn’t hit as hard as the U.S. or Europe. As our banks required no bailouts and our dollar strengthened, other countries looked to Canada’s economic policies for answers. And the more foreigners ask why Canada is different, the more it gives businesses a chance to explain and define Canada as a country and a brand.

Continue…

What was Stephen Harper up to in 2004?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 9:01 AM - 230 Comments

In response to the charge yesterday during Question Period that the Harper government had shown contempt for democracy, John Baird offered the following.

Mr. Speaker, it is the leader of the Liberal Party who is showing contempt for Canadian voters. He does not accept the fundamental democratic principle that the person with the most votes wins elections. He wanted to establish a coalition government with the Bloc Québécois and the NDP and now the coalition is back again. That shows utter contempt for Canadians.

Mr. Baird’s invoking of fundamental democratic principles was particularly noteworthy in light of what Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe had said two hours earlier in their respective news conferences. Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of March 21st, 2011)
Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Augustine's Confessions: A Biography

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 9:34 PM - 2 Comments

One of the most significant Christian thinkers of all time, St. Augustine (354 to 430) was enormously influential in framing such theological concepts as original sin, just war, grace and predestination. His autobiographical Confessions contains history’s second-most famous conversion story (after St. Paul’s), including the very human prayer, “Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” He and Wills, 76—one of the most distinguished Catholic intellectuals (and American historians) alive—make a potent pair in this lovely little volume, a biography not of the author, but of the book itself, especially of how it has been received in the 16 centuries since its creation.

And what a book it is. Some of Augustine’s works are theological masterpieces and landmarks in Western intellectual history. But Confessions is unique—it is all that and a classic of world literature, a psychologically brilliant journey into memory. It’s been called the first autobiography, but Wills is having none of that. In looking back on his conversion experience a decade before, Augustine sees the hand of God and Scriptural parallels to actual events in a way he didn’t at the time, Wills says, leading to a symbol-laden narrative reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “We are not in the realm of autobiography but of spiritual psychodrama.”

That insight allows Wills to clear away past misconceptions. Romantic writers saw Augustine as the hero of a libertine tale, a concept with no basis in the text. (Augustine, completely faithful to his partner of 15 years, was addicted to sex but not to promiscuity.) But none got it so wrong as the Freudians, who gave the saint a mother fixation, an Oedipal complex and a gay orientation, while detecting scenes of masturbation hidden behind theological symbolism. Augustine is always going to matter to the Western tradition, atheist or religious, for his insights into the human psyche, and his thoughts on memory and the elusiveness of time. Wills, by stripping away centuries of myth-making, makes him more accessible than ever.

American Idol: The Untold Story

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 9:31 PM - 0 Comments

For the contestants and the viewers, American Idol is all about fame. For creator Simon Fuller, it’s all about control. As Rushfield explains, the British pop entrepreneur came up with the Idol franchise in frustration after his biggest discoveries, the Spice Girls, dumped him as their manager. He wanted to create a star-making machine that “wouldn’t be based on the unpredictable talents and personalities of a group of performers.” Though Idol became the ultimate expression of the belief that anyone can be a star, it’s really a show that’s bigger than any of the so-called stars it creates.

Drawing on his years of experience covering Idol for publications like the Los Angeles Times, Rushfield recounts many of the famous stories about the show, like the time it had to re-tape a scene because Simon Cowell called Randy Jackson a “monkey.” Sometimes it can seem like the book’s getting bogged down in a sea of anecdotes; it’s fun to be reminded that Paula Abdul “felt like American Idol‘s poor step-cousin,” but readers may get tired of the play-by-play recaps.

Still, the recaps put the emphasis where it really belongs in Idol: not on the hosts and judges who get a lot of the press, but the contestants, who come off so charmingly on the screen and whose lives are so completely controlled by the producers. Ace Young complains to Rushfield that he and another contestant “were grown-ass men and we had an 11 o’clock curfew, and we couldn’t have family in the room with us. It was weird.” When Rushfield tells us, near the end, that Fuller’s ambitious Internet star-making projects are intended to put “power back in the hands of the people,” we can be forgiven for wondering if that’s true; it may mostly put power in the hands of Simon Fuller.

The Shah

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 9:06 PM - 2 Comments

“What kind of people are these Persians? After all we have done for them, they still chose to opt for this disastrous revolution.” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was hardly the first man to be baffled by Iran and its people. But he also ruled the country as its shah, or king, for 37 years, and so his ignorance mattered. Pahlavi’s life is chronicled in detail by Milani, director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. Milani interviewed many who were close to Pahlavi, and makes excellent use of archives and memoirs. The result is a comprehensive portrait of a man who modernized Iran—and in doing so ensured his own downfall.

The shah’s reign, writes Milani, was one of “cultural freedom and political despotism.” During the 1960s and ’70s, Iran was one of the most tolerant societies in the Muslim world in terms of religious freedom, cultural expression, and the state’s non-interference in the private lives of citizens. But political opposition was crushed, and the resulting tensions were unsustainable. “The middle classes he helped create wanted democracy and the hubris of his increasing authoritarianism made them increasingly uneasy,” says Milani. By denying opposition activists the political rights they sought, the shah inadvertently strengthened the hand of Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamist cohorts, who hijacked the revolution that overthrew him. The Islamic regime that emerged to take the shah’s place was far more repressive and murderous than Pahlavi’s.

Milani, who was imprisoned by the shah, doesn’t gloss over his faults. Vain and needy, the shah craved Western approval, once seeking membership in Britain’s Most Noble Order of the Garter. The only Persian food served at his lavish coronation feast was caviar, to which the shah was allergic.

But Milani’s biography is also sympathetic. The shah’s decadence and cruelty paled in comparison to contemporary dictators such as Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, or Idi Amin of Uganda. But none were treated with the same contempt and derision. He “loved Iran,” writes Milani, “not wisely but too well.” Forced into exile, Pahlavi spent his final months flitting from place to place in search of asylum: “A dying man, ‘un-kinged,’ and hounded by terrorists, was denied even the dignity of a quiet corner to die.”

Pym

By Dafna Izenberg - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 9:06 PM - 0 Comments

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a meandering tale of seafaring set in the first half of the 19th century and full of bizarre inaccuracies and plot twists. But Chris Jaynes, an English professor at an upstate New York college and a mulatto frequently mistaken for a “garden-variety white guy,” believes the book offers a unique window into “the primal American subconscious,” specifically its “pathology of Whiteness.” Which is why Jaynes sees nothing wrong with making Pym a part (the only part, in fact) of his syllabi on African-American literature. The college where Jaynes works begs to differ, and as Johnson’s novel opens, Jaynes is newly unemployed.

This proves convenient because Jaynes shortly finds himself in possession of a box of bones that once belonged to Pym’s companion at sea, a black man named Dirk Peters. Determined to bury Peters’s bones on Tsalal, the tropical Antarctic island where Pym and company were outwitted by the darkest of savages, Jaynes assembles an all-black crew to sail south with him. There is his best friend, Garth, who lives on saturated fats and moves “like a dump truck on a highway”; his cousin Booker Jaynes, a civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver with long silver dreadlocks; a gay married couple who fancy themselves daredevils; and an ex-girlfriend for whom Jaynes has pined for seven years—along with her brand-new husband. The group sets up camp in the cold continent only to collide with a tribe of albino beasts. Excited at the prospect of naming rights and intellectual property, they follow the creatures into their caves, into the very heart of Whiteness.

The topic of slavery repeatedly makes subversive and sometimes hilarious appearances. Booker’s dog, for example, is named “White Folks.” Says Jaynes: “My cousin loved calling his name in anger.” Johnson’s Pym is unpredictable and wide open to interpretation. Is Jaynes’s journey about reconciling his mixed heritage in a world where even “one drop” of African blood makes you a “Negro”? Perhaps. In a story as entertaining and intriguing as Pym, it hardly seems to matter.

Do you still support the political party you voted for in 2008?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 6:50 PM - 41 Comments

The Commons: Uncontrollable democracy

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 6:37 PM - 169 Comments

The Prime Minister looked a bit frustrated. He had concluded his prepared remarks and invited questions and now various members of the mob before him were shouting various queries in his general direction. This was not as Mr. Harper prefers it. No, when Mr. Harper has his way, those who wish to ask a question of him are to present themselves to a member of his staff beforehand. Once the Prime Minister is ready to entertain other voices, a member of his staff then calls on the questioners by name and employer. After the Prime Minister has finished responding, the next questioner is called by name and employer. No follow-ups are permitted.

Here the woman from the Prime Minister’s Office called out the name of the journalist assigned the first question, but the mob was unwilling to cooperate. Amid the shouting, she called out again, to no effect. The Prime Minister seemed at a loss, obviously unused to being treated like a common politician. Eventually, after a few uncomfortable seconds, he pointed in the direction of a TV newsman to his immediate right. After a perfunctory response, the shouting returned. Mr. Harper managed to point out a francophone voice in the crowd. Another question, another response and then he turned on his heels and took his leave. Continue…

Reconstructing the head shot that knocked out Max Pacioretty

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 6:22 PM - 3 Comments

Scientists at the University of Ottawa have reconstructed a hit similar to the one sustained by Max Pacioretty of the Montreal Canadiens during a game on March 8.

That’s when Zdeno Chara of the Boston Bruins slammed him headfirst into a stanchion—knocking him unconscious, breaking a vertebrae and causing a debilitating concussion from which he has yet to recover.

The impact occurred at a speed of 36 km per hour—nine kilometres faster than the hit Sidney Crosby took on New Year’s Day. He hasn’t returned to play since being diagnosed with a concussion on January 5.

The reconstruction was conducted by Blaine Hoshizaki, director of the Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory, and his team.

Maclean’s will have more on what science can tell us about the Pacioretty hit and concussions in hockey…

Video provided by Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory, University of Ottawa