Liberals complain their voters are being harassed

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 1:01 PM - 26 Comments

The Liberal party says it is investigating reports by at least seven of its candidates that constituents in their ridings have been subjected to rude phone calls from telemarketers pretending to be Liberal operatives. “[Voters] are calling our office saying people are being rude with them,” Ray Simard, the Liberal candidate in St. Boniface, told reporters on Tuesday. “They (the telemarketers) call them at weird times of the night … and we are checking into it.” Simard added the calls were “obviously” the work of “another party.” Toronto Liberal candidate Joe Volpe has complained of similar incidents in his riding. In another sign the race is turning nasty, Liberal campaign worker Rachpal Grewal was arrested and charged with tpossession of stolen property after police allegedly found Conservative campaign signs in his truck.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/977041–liberals-say-they-re-targets-of-prank-campaign-calls

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 12:47 PM - 22 Comments

This morning in Winnipeg, the Liberals promised a national Freshwater Strategy.

The official explanation is here.

Syria lifts emergency law

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 12:21 PM - 1 Comment

President Bashar al-Assad lifted Syria’s 48-year-old state of emergency law on Tuesday, meeting a key demand of anti-government protesters. The state security court, which handled the trials of political dissidents, has been abolished and a new law allowing peaceful demonstrations has been approved. Syria’s interior minister, Mohammed Ibrahim al-Shaar, ordered protesters “to refrain from taking part in rallies in the interests of safety and stability,” and said that further protests would be suppressed “in the interest of the safety of the people and the stability of the country.” News outlets have obtained footage of security forces firing on protesters in the western city of Homs. About 5,000 people had gathered in Homs’ Clock Square on Monday following the funerals for 12 protesters killed in violence over the weekend, until security forces came and started firing tear gas and live rounds.

BBC News

NASA funds commercial space taxis

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 12:19 PM - 1 Comment

NASA has divided more than $269 million among several companies aiming to build commercial spaceships that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station, Reuters reports. According to NASA, Boeing received $92.3 million and Sierra Nevada Corp got $80 million (all USD). Meanwhile, Space Exploration Technology, which was founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk and is also known as SpaceX, got $75 million, and Blue Origin, which was founded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, got $22 million. These companies were competing for funding in NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program, aimed at developing a commercial alternatives to get astronauts back and forth from the International Space Station. U.S. space shuttles will be retired later this year. These companies have to invest their own resources along with government funds, which is different from how U.S. spacecraft has previously been developed. The goal is for NASA to buy commercial orbital space transportation services by 2015.

Reuters

Men Watch TV Like This, Women Watch TV Like That…

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 2 Comments

Ginia Bellafante, who wrote the New York Times review of Game of Thrones that got so much negative reaction, has responded to her critics. But apart from linking to some good critiques of her piece, she doesn’t exactly clarify what she was saying in that piece. A negative review of the show would be more than fine, but her original piece seemed to mostly sidestep the show itself in favour of generalizations about who its audience is, and what elements of it were aimed at men or women. And in the rebuttal, she continues to make some odd generalizations about who watches what types of show:

As I wrote in the review, I realize that there are women who love fantasy, but I don’t know any and that is the truth: I don’t know any. At the same time, I am sure that there are fantasy fans out there who may not know a single person who worships at the altar of quietly hewn domestic novels or celebrates the films of Nicole Holofcener or is engrossed by reruns of “House.”

First, I’m not sure what definition of fantasy is being used here. If it means the particular type of mythological-kingdom fantasy represented by Game of Thrones (and by many works that aren’t even technically fantasy), I can see not knowing women who love that, though they certainly do exist. But a ton of stories about magic and fantasy are aimed directly at a predominantly-female audience. And of course I’m sure there are plenty of people who read quietly hewn domestic novels and fantasy novels. I can certainly see Bellafante liking one type of story but not the other; but her assumption that there’s a total binary opposition between different types of viewers, or the way men and women view entertainment, led her down some strange paths in that article.

Also, Game of Thrones has been officially renewed for a second season. It didn’t do nearly as well as Boardwalk Empire‘s premiere, but it has room to grow, the reviews are good, and most importantly from HBO’s perspective, it’s already selling really well overseas. The network hasn’t had many big international hits recently (and international sales are a big part of their business model), and this show has a truly international, beyond-borders feel to it that even the specifically regional True Blood does not. I figure that even if this show doesn’t build its audience to True Blood levels, it’ll be safe for as long as it needs to tell the story.

Besides, HBO always gives two-season pickups to everything – the only question is how long they’ll wait to announce it. With a big new show that they have a lot of plans for, like Boardwalk or Thrones, they announce the second season pickup a day or two later. With other shows, they may wait, but they do announce it. Even Tell Me You Love Me, which didn’t do well at all (one of those interesting, experimental shows that fell through the cracks during the network’s late ’00s transitional period) got a second season pickup; then the creator announced that she couldn’t find an approach for the second season and was voluntarily deciding not to come back. How voluntary that was is a question I can’t answer; I have visions of HBO executives acting like a stereotypical boss, trying to get someone to quit because they can’t fire him/her. But anyway, since Lucky Louie and John From Cincinnati, HBO doesn’t cancel things right away.

Update: Wil Zmak mentions that The #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was canceled after one season, so that’s a more recent example. And as with the cancellation of Deadwood, HBO put out the story that they might keep it alive with TV movies. Similarly, when the network canceled In Treatment they announced they might spin off the lead character in a different format. It’s important to their brand that they shouldn’t be seen as canceling something outright, with no options for its revival, even if in most cases that’s what it means.

Nardwuar v. Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 35 Comments

As he did with Paul Martin, Jean Chretien and Jack Layton before, the incomparable Nardwuar did the hip-flip with Michael Ignatieff the other day in Vancouver.

Does the CBC want Quebec to separate?

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 29 Comments

Ezra Levant is wrong. The CBC Vote Compass thing isn’t a shill for the Liberal Party of Canada*. For fans of National Unity™, it’s actually much worse. The CBC, or at least the CBC Vote Compass, is apparently in bed with the coalition-loving, Canada-hating, tax-and-spend separatists. Gadzooks!

A nefarious CBC mole of my acquaintance pointed this out to me while we rode the Métro together yesterday. Basically, he pointed out that if you say you’re from Quebec and answer the Vote Compass questions in a mildly lefty fashion (strong yes to getting out of Afghanistan, soft yes to government policies to stimulate economy, etc), you have a good chance of being designated a Bloc Québécois voter—even if you answer “strongly disagree” to “Quebec should become an independent state.”

I did it with my riding, just for fun. Here’s the crucial question:

I finished the questionnaire, the Vote Compass thought long and hard, and spat out the following:

Weird. Based on the national unity question alone, you’d think the national unity question would disqualify the Bloc entirely. It’s the reason the party exists, after all, despite whatever late-game spin Duceppe is spouting these days.

*A quick note: my God, Sun News been slogging that tired narrative for all it’s worth. I guess it sucks for them/it that most Canadians are part of that giant, mushy, feel-good sort-of-left-of-centre usurped long ago by the Liberal Party of Canada. They even used to win election after election thanks to it.

Review: Science fair season: Twelve kids, a robot named scorch, and what it takes to win

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

If we believe the stereotype, high school heroes are athletes, drama kids, and prom queens. So-called “nerds,” meanwhile, are left to toil in relative obscurity over their science experiments and math equations. In Science Fair Season, Brooklyn-based writer Dutton blows that well-worn stereotype apart. Following 12 teens to the Super Bowl of science fairs—the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) brings together 1,500 kids from over 50 countries, and offers up to $4 million in prizes and scholarships—she shows that science can be exciting, creative, even glamorous.

Take, for example, 14-year-old Taylor Wilson, also known as the “Radioactive Whiz Kid,” who shows up at Intel ISEF with a showstopper: a nuclear fusion reactor. Or BB Blanchard, a pretty and popular teen, whose science project on leprosy—a condition that’s highly treatable today, but still misunderstood—was inspired by the fact that she was diagnosed with it herself. We also meet Philip Streich, whose project, which found a way to mass-produce graphene (a cheaper replacement for silicone), spawned a multi-million- dollar company. And Canadian Kayla Cornale, who developed a way to teach her autistic cousin to communicate with music.

There’s often more than just prestige at stake. Katlin Hornig, a farm girl who creates a “horse therapy” program to help police officers deal with post-traumatic stress, pins her hopes on scholarship money so she can go to veterinary school. And Garrett Yazzie, who lives on a Navajo Indian reserve, builds a solar-powered heater out of junk, warming up the trailer he shares with his family.

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Mansbridge v. Layton

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 27 Comments

The NDP leader talks to the CBC host.

Layton said “there’s no question” Harper’s goal in 2004 talks with his party and the Bloc Quebecois was to become prime minister. Harper has also denied that he was trying to topple the Martin government and seize power in 2004.

Layton told Mansbridge that Harper is “fabricating things here.” Layton said the Conservative leader, who was then the Leader of the Official Opposition, was the driving force for the “arrangement” with other opposition parties at the time. ”We were called together by Stephen Harper to send a letter to the governor general to make it clear that if Paul Martin was defeated by the speech from the throne, she should turn to the other parties to govern,” Layton told the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge on board his campaign bus near Charlottetown. ”There was no question about it that the ultimate goal here was for Stephen Harper to become prime minister.”

'When you've said something, you've said it'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:51 AM - 36 Comments

Further to this, Tim Naumetz finds a blurb from Stephen Harper’s past.

“Gratzer proposes a workable solution for the biggest public policy problem of the coming generation—our government-controlled health care monopoly,” Mr. Harper said in comments that are quoted on the back cover of the book. “Our health care isn’t just sick, it’s killing people. Canada needs Gratzer’s new prescription.”

The Use and Abuse of Literature

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Literature, as Harvard professor Garber points out, was once something an educated person possessed, a familiarity with the best writing and criticism, not something he or she read or studied. And even when that usage—Samuel Johnson said that John Milton “had more than common literature”—passed, the familiarity with quotations and references remained as a signifier of education, a means by which people of similar backgrounds and interests recognized one another. That social function has long since been usurped among most people, by references from film, TV and the digital world. Small wonder then, Garber argues, that those still immersed in the old literary culture—and who fail to separate literature’s intrinsic value from its social utility—feel we are plunging into the cultural abyss: it’s all part of what Garber calls the abuse of literature.

The title of her book is archly ironic. It pays tribute to Nietzsche, author of On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, and thus father of dozens of book titles like Use and Abuse of Statistics. Readers understand instinctively what their authors mean to say—any human construct can be turned to good or ill. But, contrary to her own title, Garber argues persuasively that, in literature, use and abuse are distinctions without a difference.

That’s because, whatever its past social role, literature is practically useless. It answers no questions—it only raises them. Endless questions, too: people have discussed the meaning of Hamlet for centuries and will go on doing so until the end of time. Indeed, to paraphrase a famous judicial remark about recognizing pornography, that’s how we know literature when we see it: the real thing is inexhaustible and subversive. As Emily Dickinson said, “If I read a book and I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Literature has no set meaning, or real use, or real capacity for abuse. It merely makes us think and imagine; it merely blows the tops of our heads off.

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Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 5 Comments

We’re all guilty of wilful blindness—delaying having a troubling symptom checked by the doctor or not opening the credit card bill or avoiding obvious problems in a relationship or at work. Why we overlook red flags may seem obvious, Heffernan argues in this riveting, important book: it feels better not to know; we don’t want to rock the boat or have our value system shattered. But the underlying mechanisms fuelling denial are more complex, and far more dangerous in that they put us at even greater risk.

To make her point, Heffernan nimbly analyzes an endless stream of personal, corporate and political malfeasance, including the BP refinery explosion in Texas, Enron, hurricane Katrina, the subprime mortgage meltdown, tanning beds, Bernie Madoff and global warming. The former BBC producer, who now works for multimedia companies, is an engaging writer able to marshal fascinating multi-disciplinary research into a narrative that traverses the quest for conformity, groupthink, how an overloaded mind leads to moral blindness and the crucial role of Cassandras and whistle-blowers. There’s much fodder for outrage, including the tale of Alice Stewart, a British researcher who unearthed a relationship between X-rays and childhood cancer in the 1950s; yet it wasn’t until the 1980s that the medical system acted on it.

As Heffernan presents it, conditions enabling wilful blindness are high right now—rabid conformity, a technology-distracted populace, a disregard for history, which teaches that it’s always been with us. She quotes a letter written to an Austrian concentration camp by a local woman during the Second World War: she asks that “inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where no one has to see them.”

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Say it ain’t so, Warren

By Jason Kirby - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 3 Comments

When 40,000 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders descend on Omaha, Neb., for the company’s annual meeting later this month, they can expect an awkward moment early on. Each year, Berkshire’s grandfatherly CEO Warren Buffett kicks off the event with a video montage of comedy skits and advertisements for his many subsidiaries, such as Dairy Queen and Geico insurance. And every year the movie features a classic newsreel from two decades ago, when Buffett went before Congress with a principled message for his employees: “Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.” Until a few weeks ago that was just one of many folksy aphorisms Buffett is famous for. But if the clip rolls on April 30, and the Buffett of 1991 utters those words, all eyes will be on the Buffett of 2011, who just sat by while one of his most high-profile employees put Berkshire’s reputation through an industrial shredder.

An uproar over questionable stock purchases by former senior executive David Sokol has put the world’s most famous investor on the hot seat like never before. Buffett has endured intense criticism from lawyers and financial columnists, while Wall Street types everywhere have suddenly discovered their moral outrage and gone on the attack. He’s been called a con man, a hypocrite and, perhaps most biting of all, “very unBuffett-like.” In short, the incident has sparked a wholesale reassessment of the Creamsicle-loving, ukulele-strumming billionaire. The cult of Buffett is in turmoil.

The question now is whether the crisis will leave any lasting damage. It’s hard to imagine those investors in Omaha, who Buffett has made exceedingly wealthy, ever giving up the faith. And there’s more than a little envy and resentfulness behind many of the attacks on his character.

But the fact is, Buffett is not just another billionaire with a keen eye for cheap companies. For people on Main Street America who understand the importance of the stock market but deplore the greed and dirty tricks associated with it, Buffett was the guy in the modest corner office they wished all CEOs could be. And now they’re left to wonder whether he’s really all that different. “People have elevated Warren Buffett into the god of value investing,” says Vitaliy Katsenelson, chief investment officer in Colorado’s Investment Management Associates. “Now we’ve found out that the god is not perfect.”

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Partisan judges, how the Supreme Court runs our lives—and why it should be an election issue

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 68 Comments

Photographs by Andrew Tolson

Philip Slayton is a former law professor and Bay Street lawyer. In 2007, he roiled the legal world with his scorching book, Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession. Now he is taking on the pinnacle of the legal profession with his new volume, A Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life.

Q: You write, “The Supreme Court of Canada runs our life.” How so?

A: Since the 1982 Charter, fundamental social, economic, and political decisions have been taken by the Supreme Court of Canada: more than by Parliament or by the cabinet or by the prime minister. The court runs the life of every Canadian by deciding fundamental issues that we care a lot about. For example, in the Morgentaler case of 1988, the court struck down Canada’s abortion law and since that time there has been no abortion law at all. We are the only country in the Western world in which that is true. In the Vriend case, the court overrode the express wishes of the government of Alberta, and decided that provincial human rights legislation protected a gay man. The court has also said, for example, that same-sex marriage is okay, and that Quebec cannot secede unilaterally.

Q: Do you think the judges have overstepped their role?

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The hard work of reality TV

By Jenn Cutts - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Enduring poolside lounging, shouting matches and trysts that are over before the commercial break may look like fun and games, but a French court ruled last week that appearing in a reality TV show is, in fact, work—work that’s worth $1,900 a day.

French lawyer Jérémie Assous convinced the country’s highest court in 2009 that contestants who appeared on the French version of Temptation Island (a bikini-themed show in which couples’ fidelities are tested) were entitled to contracts and salaries—just like professional actors. After nearly two years of wrangling over the details, an appeals court decided that participants should be allowed benefits, a 35-hour workweek, and overtime, in addition to the $1,900 day rate (more than what a minimum-wage worker in France earns in a month). French production companies are likely reacting with their own hand-wringing, as the ruling could cost them over $71 million in back pay—mind you, that’s roughly what the Idol franchise brought in during three months in 2009.

Having set a precedent, Assous is now in talks with reality stars the world over. “I have no moral objection to reality TV and it has never been my intention to destroy it,” he told the Guardian, “but participants have to be treated fairly.”

This bubble won’t burst

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Identifying asset bubbles before they pop is a mug’s game. And gold is no different. As its price continues to set records, now closing in on US$1,500 an ounce, a long list of skeptics has emerged to warn that the gold party is on its last legs. “Naysayers started calling gold a bubble back when prices hit $250 an ounce, and though gold’s bull market has tossed and flung the bubble callers around for almost a decade now, their voices have only gotten increasingly louder as prices broke through $1,000, $1,200 and now $1,400 an ounce,” Frank Holmes, the CEO of San Antonio-based U.S. Global Investors, Inc., wrote in his blog recently.

Now Holmes and a few others are questioning whether current gold prices should really be viewed with gaping jaws. Gold has long been viewed as a “safe haven investment” during shaky economic times, and Holmes argues the recent gains in the price don’t seem as severe when compared against other asset bubbles, including Japanese equities in 1986 and tech stocks during the dot-com boom. Nor is there much evidence that average investors are piling into gold.

Canadian investment guru Eric Sprott is also in the no-bubble club. He argued in a March letter that new investment in gold over the last 10 years totalled a relatively meagre US$250 billion compared to the nearly US$100 trillion funnelled into other financial assets. Sprott noted that ownership of gold as a proportion of total financial assets has remained less than one per cent since the early 1990s, compared to as much as five per cent in 1968. “Investors can rest assured that they are not participating in any speculative bubble by owning gold,” Sprott concluded. “They are merely protecting their wealth.”

Indeed, there would appear to be abundant “fundamentals” to support continued price increases, what with the continued economic uncertainty in the U.S. and Europe, and political instability in the Middle East. Holmes, for one, predicts gold prices could double over the next five years. Of course, another frequently cited bubble warning sign is the emergence of those who would tell you that, with respect to the boom in question, this time it’s different.

Building a better mosquito

By Sarah Scott - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 7 Comments

David Scharf/Science Faction/Corbis

The East End district of Grand Cayman Island bills itself as an offbeat paradise for divers, a place where you can swim past spectacular coral reefs, practise yoga under water, and even get married in the process. But last summer, the wildest action was taking place on land, in a quiet village a couple of kilometres from the beach. Here, amid the town’s modest pastel bungalows, pest-control officials arrived with an unusual group of eager visitors: three million genetically modified mosquitoes.

They were brought in to fight a terrifying disease—dengue fever, which is racing through the tropics, infecting over 50 million people a year and killing more than 12,000 of them, often young children. You can’t prevent dengue, or stop it from killing you, which is why the island’s mosquito-control department treats the insect that spreads dengue, the yellow fever or Aedes aegypti mosquito, as a lethal invader. Insecticide was winning the war until 2006, when hurricane Ivan tore through the island and left debris that served as perfect nurseries for a new generation of local Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. That was when the island’s Scottish-born mosquito- control chief, Dr. Bill Petrie, decided to take radical action.

The problem clearly was the mosquito, the transmitter of disease, so maybe the solution was to get rid of it in a new way, without the blunt instrument of insecticide. An English company, Oxitec, was tweaking the DNA of mosquitoes in its Oxford lab, and its scientists had invented a new biological system called RIDL—Release of Insects carrying a Dominant Lethal. It was effectively a morning-after pill carried by the males. It would work like this: when a genetically modified male mated with a wild female, they would still produce progeny, but the offspring would die within a few days. This was a death sentence for the mosquito population—or at least it was in the lab.

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This story is awesome

By Sarah Lazarovic - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

“The tide of awesome is definitely rising,” says Tim Hwang, the San Francisco-based founder of the Awesome Foundation, an international organization that gives monthly grants to anyone with an awesome idea. Indeed, awesome has handily supplanted amazing as the exuberant adjective of our time, and managed to stake its claim as a noun in the process. Which is a bit of awesome.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago, Sam Sifton referred to the cheese in a greasy meat sub as “melting awesomeness.” A benefit gala for the Child Development Institute in Toronto this month is called “An Evening of Awesome.” The dress code is “casual elegant, with a hint of ‘awesome!’ ”

Neil Pasricha, author of the hugely popular blog 1000 Awesome Things, is partly to blame for the word’s increasing popularity. His Book of Awesome, which came out last year, is a bestseller. He’ll be on the Today show in May to preach the gospel of awesome and promote The Book of Even More Awesome, which comes out at the end of this month. And he’s in talks with both The Office and Martha Stewart to bring some awesome to the small screen.

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Twittering traders

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

CP/AP Photo/Alastair Grant

Even experienced traders talk about the difficulty of predicting the stock market. But new research suggests there’s a useful device out there to guess the market’s mood: Twitter. With thousands of investors exchanging tweets every day, the micro-blogging site is like an earphone plugged into the very conversations and rumours that move the markets. For investors who tune in, the rewards are substantial, according to Timm Sprenger, a doctoral student at the Technical University of Munich.

After tracking 250,000 tweets a day for six months, he showed that buying and selling shares based on following market-related tweets can reap an average rate of return of 15 per cent. Sprenger, who offers his services on TweetTrader.net, used tweets to extract sentiment rankings that he says predicted movements on Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index a day ahead of time. But some warn that Twitter can be manipulated to promote or discredit stocks. Eavesdroppers beware.

Stalking the wild fashion of New York

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

First Thought Films

For institutions so wedded to fact, newspapers are rooted in fantasy, in the enduring romance of the obsessed reporter who finds his stories in the street and lives for the chase. And in all of journalism it would be hard to find a nobler paragon of that myth than New York Times veteran Bill Cunningham. He’s the original street fashion photographer, the inspiration for hip imitators like The Sartorialist. For decades, he has been riding a bicycle through Manhattan, capturing fashion in the wild for his weekly column in the paper’s Sunday Styles section, “On the Street.” Snapping pedestrians, often unawares, he tracks fashion trends with a keen eye, crafting what amounts to an ongoing collage of cultural anthropology. At night, he changes out of his eccentric uniform—the blue smock worn by Paris sanitation workers—puts on a suit, and heads out to photograph charity soirees for his social column, “Evening Hours.”

Now 82, and still working round the clock, Cunningham is a legend at the Times. A stubborn holdout in the digital age, he still spools 35-mm film into his camera. He has no phone, no computer, and spent 60 years living in an artist’s apartment in Carnegie Hall with a shared bathroom down the corridor. Notoriously shy, he shuns the limelight. But he has finally allowed the lens to be turned on himself, and the result is an enthralling documentary: Bill Cunningham New York.

Director Richard Press took a decade to make the film, but spent the first eight years just trying to persuade his subject to co-operate. As a freelance graphic designer, he met Cunningham at the Times while designing one of his columns. Press then teamed up with producer Philip Gefter, who spent 15 years as picture editor at the Times, and they proposed a film. “He just laughed,” Press told Maclean’s. “He thought it was the most ridiculous thing imaginable. Bill is profoundly modest. He doesn’t think he’d be of any interest to anybody. Even his work, though he takes it very seriously, he doesn’t see it as significant. He sees himself as a reporter.”

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Testosterone on and off the screen

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

HBO Canada

Incest, fratricide, rape, murder, corruption—no, not The Borgias, even if there is a family resemblance between the Renaissance poisoners and the viciously perverse aristocratic killers of Game of Thrones. But there’s more of everything sex-and-blood in this 10-hour series, debuting on HBO on April 17. Producers working with the first book in George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire, weren’t constrained by any sort of historical record—they weren’t even constrained by Martin’s record. The novel opens with the discovery of a group of dead people in a wintery landscape, all lying peacefully as if they had perished from the cold; the TV version prefers to have their heads stuck on stakes, except, that is, for the little girl nailed to a tree. This is HBO, after all, and not only are there buckets of blood—beheadings are full-screen experiences—the whores (and the odd heroine) get to bounce around topless.

They do their bouncing in a faux-medieval world in which seven great noble families jockey for power in a realm recently racked by civil war and now ruled by a parvenu king. It’s hard to say much more about Martin’s saga without posting all-cap SPOILER ALERTS every few lines. Martin is a master plot-maker with a penchant for killing off characters, even ones who seem vital to the story, even the ones fans love best. His other guiding principle is that no good deed goes unpunished: mercy and folly are much alike.

Oddly enough, it’s what’s missing in any summary of Martin’s saga that stands out: the most talked-about fantasy series going actually has little in the way of traditional fantasy elements in its early stages. (The series promises more in the future: the Others, ice-cold malevolent beings from the North, haven’t been seen in 8,000 years; as any fantasy reader knows, that means they’ll be disembowelling unlucky peasants soon enough.) Thrones, inspired by England’s 15th-century War of the Roses, relies on real-world treachery and sex for its appeal. The TV version’s closest comparison is actually HBO’s earlier series Rome, often referred to as “Sopranos on the Tiber,” in tribute to the series that was the making of HBO; Thrones could be called “Sopranos in Camelot.” For the network, the low fantasy quotient must be a bonus. Thrones will capture Martin’s rabid fan base—seven million copies sold of the four volumes he’s published so far—without risking Rome fans tuning out a show derived from one of publishing’s most disparaged (if lucrative) genres.

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Fergie on the outside looking in

By John Fraser - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

She’s not invited to The Wedding. Her daughters are coming, and her ex-husband, of course. But then, he’s the second son of Queen Elizabeth II and uncle of the groom. There’s no justice in this world. If there was, they would make “Fergie” a saint for helping in her own unique way to sustain the monarchy by setting standards its members can never live down to. This is not a joke. Well, not completely and certainly not in the case of the Sarah, the divorced duchess of York.

The lack of an invitation is not just a little bit of extra salt to add to her already festering psychic wounds. Her most recent caper guaranteed the no-show. Filmed in a sting operation set up by the wicked News of the World, she was caught accepting a pile of loot in return for access to Prince Andrew. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to hobnob with the dullest blade in the family should have set off alarm bells, but so desperate for money was the poor woman that not much was penetrating. It may be why we love her, or why we love to hate her. At the level of public ownership for people like pathetic, beleaguered Sarah Ferguson, the two emotions are weirdly similar.

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Sun News Network: Hard News. Straight Talk. Short Skirts.

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 5:08 AM - 344 Comments

Sun News Network launched yesterday with a half-hour “pre-game show” in which we were introduced to some of the on-air talent and their thighs. “They said it couldn’t be done and boy were they wrong,” anchor Krista Erickson declared – although to be fair, I’m pretty sure what they actually said was “It shouldn’t be done.” Still, it’s done now.

If you didn’t see the launch, you can watch some of the buildup while simultaneously watching this random guy watch it and talk over the national anthem for some reason:

You’re probably thinking that an upstart news network would hire a bunch of dull, uncurious people and set them to work on stories that no one cares about. But not Sun News! Sun does things differently. Curious reporters! Stories people care about! Eat that, status quo. One reporter emphasized that she’d be interviewing people “in the middle” of the day’s big news stories, proving yet again that the mainstream networks get it wrong with their stubborn allegiance to News Gathering From the Distant Periphery.

Other apparent guiding philosophies of Sun News:

• People in the West think differently from people in Toronto and Ottawa.
• Free speech? Good.
• Political correctness can suck it.

Pat Bolland, a broadcast veteran, is one of the Sun News personalities. He pledged that his new program, The Roundtable, which he’ll co-host with Alex Pierson and his moustache, would be a “breakfast show with bite.” That seemed to be description enough, but Bolland decided to Continue…

Your seat projections have arrived (UPDATED)

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 7:46 PM - 124 Comments

Above is a summary of the latest seat projections from a variety of sources. As can be seen, the consensus has the Fascists (Conservatives) short of the 155 seats needed for a majority, with the Visitors (Liberals — the former Crooks (2004/6) and Not a Leaders (2008)) making only a slight improvement on their dismal showing last time out. The Commies (NDP) and Traitors (Bloc) are down slightly from their 2008 totals, though these projections may not reflect the rise in NDP support the polls have been picking up in recent days.

Oh, and the Ewocs (an acronym, from the immortal Tabatha Southey epithet for the Greens, “Europeans without cigarettes” — though it also has a pleasing furry-critter connotation)? Shut out again.

In sum: at this point everybody is losing.

UPDATE: Refreshed with new numbers from Ekos and ThreeHundredEight.com!