The sex life of dinosaurs

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 3 Comments

New York’s American Museum of Natural History is set to launch an exhibition on the world’s largest dinosaurs. Among the unknowns about how such massive monsters lived, Slate tackles one particularly pressing question: how did dinosaurs have sex? Paleontologists don’t know much about how dinosaurs mated, because soft tissues rarely turned up in fossils, and even a specimen’s gender was unknown until a few years ago, when it was discovered that females had a special calcium reservoir to help with eggshel formation. Dinosaurs probably had a “cloaca,” a single opening for urination, defecation and reproduction, in which case they may have had sex from behind. It’s also possible that males had no penises and like some birds, reproduced by squirting semen from one cloaca to another. Large males like the Mamenchisaurus, which was 60 feet long, probably mounted from behind like giraffes and elephants. Dinosaurs probably had courtship rituals, too, like triceratops who locked their horns to fight over mates. Even penis size is unknown: judging from different sizes of dinosaurs’ relatives, a Tyrannosaurus rex might have had a penis that ranged in size from 10 inches to 12 feet.

Slate

NATO needs more planes in Libya

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 12:21 PM - 2 Comments

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen requested “a few more” aircraft for the mission in Libya at a summit of foreign ministers in Berlin on Thursday. “Now [pro-Gadhafi forces] hide their heavy arms in populated areas where before many targets were easy to get at,” said Rasmussen. “To avoid civilian casualties we need very sophisticated equipment so we need a few more precision fighter ground attack aircraft for air-to-ground mission.” Both Britain and France have been pressing other coalition members to step up their involvement in Libyan operations. While Canada, Belgium, Norway and Denmark have been participating in air strikes, Spain and Italy have not taken part, although Spain said it would continue to provide aircraft without joining directly in attacks on ground targets.

BBC News

U.S. Representatives vote on budget bill

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 12:16 PM - 2 Comments

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on about $40-billion worth of budget cuts on Thursday evening, after Republicans and Democrats reached a deal last week that prevented a government shutdown. The budget package includes a wide range of cuts to domestic programs and services, including high-speed rail, emergency first responders and the National Endowment for the Arts. On Wednesday, President Obama presented his deficit reduction plan, which involves a mix of spending reductions and tax hikes on the wealthy, which the White House claims would cut the federal deficit by $4-trillion over twelve years, without gutting Medicare and Medicaid. Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan also unveiled his contrasting plan, which calls for cutting the debt by $4.4-trillion over the next ten years, and would overhaul Medicare and Medicaid while reducing the corporate tax rate to 25 per cent. Democrats and Republicans still have to vote on raising the debt ceiling before the government reaches it’s borrowing limit of $14.29-trillion later this spring. If Thursday’s budget vote is passed in the House, it then must be passed by the Senate and be signed by Obama in 24 hours.

CNN

Knit your own royal wedding

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

Andrew Perris/Ivy Press

The most delightful commemorative item of the upcoming wedding is also the most bizarre: a how-to book titled Knit Your Own Royal Wedding. Follow its detailed instructions and on April 29 you can have your own balcony scene, complete with a 20-cm-high Prince William kissing his new bride, Kate Middleton, while the royal family wave in front of a stiff backdrop of Buckingham Palace. Other figures in the book include the archbishop of Canterbury, palace footmen and even a troop of ubiquitous royal corgis.

Author Fiona Goble, a knitting, sewing and crafting expert based just outside London, is astounded by the book’s runaway success. The 64-page paperback sold an astounding 25,000 copies in Britain during its first month. Now publisher Ivy Press is finalizing a third printing of its fastest-selling title.

This isn’t Goble’s first hit. Last fall, Knitivity: Create Your Own Christmas Scene was snapped up by enthusiasts fascinated by the fuzzy holy scene showcasing Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes in his manger, surrounded by his parents, three wise men, shepherds, an angel and a plethora of animals including an ass, ox and sheep. Even with Knitivity‘s success, Goble was still apprehensive about tackling living subjects: “It’s one thing knitting something that doesn’t have to look particularly like someone, but it’s a bit hard to knit something that looks like someone.”
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Studies dismiss narrowed neck veins as cause of MS

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 9 Comments

A handful of new studies are suggesting narrowed neck veins—a condition called chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency, or CCSVI—are not the primary cause of multiple sclerosis, the Canadian Press is reporting. This condition has been a focus after Italian Dr. Paolo Zamboni theorized it could be behind MS, suggesting that reduced blood flow leaves iron deposits in the brain and leads to neural lesions that characterize MS. Zamboni has tried reversing the condition by unblocking neck veins using balloon angioplasty to relieve symptoms, a treatment that many Canadians have sought abroad since it isn’t available here. One new U.S. study took Doppler ultrasounds of 499 subjects, and found the prevalence of CCSVI was 56 per cent for patients with MS, 42 for those with other neurologic diseases, and 23 per cent in healthy controls, which suggest it isn’t a primary cause of MS. Other, smaller studies have also been presented, including one from a Calgary resaercher looking at 67 people who underwent magnetic resonance venography of neck veins and found vein abnormalities of 20 per cent of people with MS, and 20 per cent of those without.

Canadian Press

'I must respect the Act that governs my work'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 119 Comments

The Auditor General has officially replied to Jack Layton’s letter of Tuesday evening.

The Auditor General Act outlines our reporting responsibility and specifically addresses the situation of Parliament not sitting. Subsection 7(5) provides for the submission of our report to the Speaker of the House. When the House is not sitting, it requires the Speaker to table the report on any of the first 15 days on which the House is sitting after the Speaker receives it.

America's next automaker?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:28 AM - 7 Comments

Shares of carmaker Tesla Motors recently soared 21 per cent after U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to cut America’s dependence on overseas oil and an analyst released a bullish forecast for electric vehicles. It was an unexpected vote of confidence in a species of environmentally friendly automobile that has so far exhibited few signs of catching on with mainstream consumers—mostly because of high prices and a lack of recharging infrastructure.

Nevertheless, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jones suggested that Tesla was poised to become “America’s fourth automaker” thanks to rising oil prices and increasing government efforts to push consumers toward the technology, including subsidies. “In our view, the conditions are ripe for a shakeup of a complacent, century-old industry heavily invested in the status quo of internal combustion,” Jones wrote. “The risks are high. So is the opportunity. Enter Tesla.”

Continue…

Thieves on the lamb

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 1 Comment

A gang of animal thieves appears to be on the loose around Langley and Abbotsford, B.C., where farmers have reported a spate of barn break-ins. Suspects have made off with lambs, ducks, goats—even pigeons. “I’ve been doing this job 2½ years,” says Cpl. Holly Marks of the Langley RCMP, “and it’s only in the last six months” that it’s become a real problem. In neighbouring Abbotsford, the police department now has an officer assigned to investigating livestock theft, a position that wasn’t staffed in 2010, according to Const. Ian MacDonald.

The most recent incident took place in Langley on March 23, when two separate break-ins were reported: one farmer lost 17 lambs, and another lost five. (One lamb apparently escaped the robbers, and was found in a neighbour’s yard.) On Feb. 28, six ducks, 65 chickens and some feed were stolen from a different farm, which was also targeted in late December when 17 ducks went missing. Abbotsford saw four goat thefts in February and March, with a total of 17 animals stolen, MacDonald says. Most bizarrely, in February, up to 4,000 pigeons were taken from three different farms. “That was a real head-scratcher for me,” MacDonald says: at about $7 per pigeon, “the value per pigeon is much lower than goat.” The vast majority of the stolen goats were female, and could fetch “several thousand dollars” through breeding, he says.

No charges have been laid, but police have some leads, especially in the “pigeon scenario,” MacDonald says, where there was an eyewitness. As for the missing lambs, one of the animals was a rare, rusty red colour, “very distinguished,” Marks says, which could help to identify them if they appear at auction. Langley locals wonder if stolen lambs might end up on unwitting buyers’ dinner tables at Easter.

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 1 Comment

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of April 11th, 2011)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

In Defense of Scrappy

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:23 AM - 0 Comments

I was having a discussion the other day that turned to the subject of Scooby-Doo, and the fact that I didn’t hate Scrappy-Doo as a child. (He was on the show when I started watching, so I was used to him. Flim Flam, on the other hand, I did not like.) That led me to this sketch from That Mitchell & Webb Look, which may contain the only pro-Scrappy punchline in the history of comedy.

This sketch is a TV version of a radio sketch (from the show “That Mitchell & Webb Sound”), so since I was talking earlier about radio comedy and how it translates to TV, here’s Continue…

'I’m a Canadian and a taxpayer first'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:09 AM - 4 Comments

Two weeks after gaining the support of the former Liberal candidate in Vaughan, Conservative incumbent Julian Fantino loses the support of the former Conservative candidate.

Two Vaughan Conservatives have quit their riding association over a $10 million federal grant given to a health care project spearheaded by MP Julian Fantino’s former fundraisers. “I’m a Canadian and a taxpayer first,” said Richard Lorello, who ran as a Conservative candidate in the riding in 2008. “It didn’t look right to me. If it was the Liberal party doing this, (the) Conservatives would be jumping up and down.”

What is the most neglected issue so far in this election campaign?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 97 Comments

Econowatch: April 2011

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 5 Comments

If you tried to count the worries investors face today, you’d soon run out of fingers and toes. We’ve seen rising inflation, unrest across the oil-rich Arab world, a U.S. fiscal crisis and sovereign debt woes in Europe, any one of which might have kneecapped a lesser bull market. Not this one. Two years into the strongest rally ever, not even the prospect of nuclear fallout and the collapse of the world’s third-largest economy is cause for concern.

There are basically two ways to view what’s going on right now. One is that a fundamental disconnect has occurred between market sentiment and reality. In this scenario, investors have affixed blinders to obscure all that ails the economy. In other words, the markets are driven by momentum. When that momentum stalls, look out below.

The other possibility is that all these fears are overblown. Investors have learned from the stock market rout and correction of 2009 not to lose their heads at the first (or even umpteenth) sign of trouble. Instead, some argue there are real reasons to be optimistic: corporate profits are robust, manufacturing is on the upswing and gains in the U.S. job market are picking up speed.

The ultimate test of which scenario is behind the rally will come this year. Central banks are expected to tighten their monetary policies. Interest rates will rise and the virtual printing presses that created trillions of dollars in new money will shut down. With the end of easy money, investors will inevitably become more attuned to risk. Meanwhile, an important crutch that has helped prop up the recovery so far will be gone. If we’re fortunate, both markets and the economy will remain resilient. If not, we’ll look back and wonder why investors ignored so many obvious signs of trouble.

By the numbers

11 The percentage of homes in the U.S. now sitting vacant. In many vacation areas across the country, hit particularly hard by the downturn, vacancy rates are over 60 per cent.

50 The number of years of oil supply that may be left in the world, given current supplies and demand, notes a senior economist with HSBC.

428 The number of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell franchises in Canada owned by Prizm Income Fund, which has filed for court protection from creditors.

106,000 The number of high-tech jobs that will need to be filled in Canada in the next five years as the dot-com boom returns, notes an industry report.

$4.9 billion The amount U.S. hedge fund manager John Paulson earned in 2010 after betting big on the economic recovery.

Signs of the times: conspicuous consumers

*The U.S. housing market may be in brutal shape, but billionaire Russian investor Yuri Milner just plunked down US$100 million for a California mansion. Milner is an investor in Facebook, Groupon and game-maker Zynga. A sign of life in the housing sector, or just another oligarch with too much money to burn?

*Saks Fifth Avenue had to limit customers to six one-ounce packages of La Prairie’s latest skin care product. The price: $500 each. American consumers, it seems, are flooding back into the US$2.7-billion “prestige” skin care market. No sense looking like you just weathered a Great Recession.

*Subprime mortgage bonds—three words that would have sent investors screaming until recently—have been making a comeback. The bonds, which are backed by thousands of poor quality mortgages, have doubled in value to 60 cents on the dollar since early 2009, as investors have rediscovered their appetite for risk.

*President Barack Obama, an admitted “crackberry” addict, has been a boon to Research In Motion’s marketing campaign. But Obama told reporters he now has an iPad, too. Is that a bad omen as RIM readies to launch its PlayBook tablet?

Reward miles for charity

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 10:17 AM - 1 Comment

Japanease Red Cross/Getty Images

Spurred by images of devastation in Japan, donations to charities like the Red Cross are soaring. To make it even easier to give, many companies with loyalty programs are now letting members donate their points to relief efforts. Just last week, Shoppers Drug Mart launched a one-month campaign encouraging customers to donate their Optimum points to the Red Cross, which it will match with cash donations up to $150,000. But while charitable giving is certainly a good thing and is to be encouraged, not all points-for-charity programs are the same, and it’s important to read the fine print before deciding if this is the best way to help out.

Canada’s largest loyalty program, Aeroplan, was one of the first to make such an offer available. It set up a special Aeroplan Miles account for the Red Cross, and kicked things off by donating one million “miles.” Since then, members have donated an additional 440,000 miles to the account, according to Isabelle Troitzky, communications director at Groupe Aeroplan. The Red Cross can redeem the miles to pay for flights or buy merchandise like computers through the Aeroplan website.

Continue…

Making your vote count

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 10:09 AM - 81 Comments

Adam Chapnik makes a case for the per vote subsidy.

Votes for losing candidates become virtually meaningless the moment the election results are announced, while voters who supported landslide winners – and particularly those who consider elections like this one unnecessary – are left to wonder why they bothered coming out in the first place. The voter subsidy changes things. For now, Canadian ballots – at least at the federal level – are never wasted. Even if Canadians know that their candidate does not stand a chance of winning in a particular riding, they can be assured that their vote will make a difference. It will serve as a $2 contribution to the political party of their choice, a donation that can then be used by that party to develop stronger policies and run a better campaign the next time.

Final Jeopardy: Man Vs. Machine And The Quest To Know Everything

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 8:35 AM - 0 Comments

You saw Watson the computer humiliate humans on Jeopardy!, and now you can read what is effectively a tie-in book. Baker (The Numerati) tells the story of why and how Watson was created, and the long process that went into getting the talking bucket of bolts ready for its game show appearance. We see the technicians at IBM, led by Watson creator David Ferrucci, trying to prepare Watson for every Jeopardy! contingency, suffering through failures on the way to the eventual success: at one point, Watson suffers a classic meltdown right out of an episode of Star Trek: “it developed a small speech defect” and started delivering answers like, “What is Pakistand?”

Of course, IBM always has its ultimate goal in mind, taking down the world’s smartest human, Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings. We learn that they actually had a “Jennings arc,” based on data about Jennings’s quiz show achievements, that formed the basis of their goals for Watson.

It may seem odd at first glance that IBM put so much time and so many resources into getting a computer ready for a syndicated game show. But as Baker explains, there was a larger purpose in mind. Proving that a computer can be as nimble as humans in figuring out things like, “two of Jesus’s disciples whose names are both top 10 baby male names and end in the same letter,” and even faster when it came to buzzing in, points the way to the type of artificial intelligence scientists have been unable to create in the past. In rolling out a computer with “advanced powers of pattern recognition” and a familiarity with the English language, computer geeks may finally be able to create machines that can take all the jobs humans are still able to do. In the end, though, Baker tells us to cheer up, because these job-taking computers will leave us more time to do things “from singing and swimming to falling in love.” Until Ferrucci builds Watson II to take that away from us.

Chart of the week: spending spree

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 3 Comments

Real consumer spending in Canada hit record highs while other major economies stalled. But with retail sales now softening, are Canadian consumers about to hit their breaking point?

King of teen queens

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:55 AM - 0 Comments

Colette De Barros; Aaron Warkov; Getty Images; Disney/Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

Meet the man who’s killing Disney. Or, at least, beating Disney when it comes to supplying children with lighthearted sitcoms and wholesome teen stars. The real king of kids’ entertainment is Dan Schneider, a portly ’80s sitcom actor turned comedy mogul. Schneider is the creator and producer of iCarly, the most popular live-action kids’ show in the U.S. and Canada, and Victorious, a very similar show that’s on its way to similar popularity. The shows, which currently air on YTV and are preparing for an hour-long crossover episode this summer, are dominating the kids’ sitcom market; Jocelyn Hamilton, who supervises original programming for YTV, says that “iCarly is the No. 1 show on YTV,” and that the audience for Victorious has “grown immensely” in the year since it premiered. This follows previous Schneider hits like Drake & Josh and stars, like Amanda Bynes, who were discovered on Schneider’s shows. Disney may once have been the leader in this world with shows like Hannah Montana, but now it’s Dan Schneider who’s become, as one critic called him, “the Norman Lear of children’s television.”

Though Schneider has been at Nickelodeon long enough for some of his viewers to have children of their own, his biggest hit came in 2007 with iCarly, the broadly acted story of a girl making her own Web series. Its highest-rated episode drew 12 million viewers, millions more than any episode of 30 Rock has ever had. In Canada, Hamilton says the show started slowly but now rules every kids’ demographic, and the New York Times reported that “nearly eight per cent of England’s population tunes into iCarly.” And while Disney has shown an uneven track record trying to create the new Miley Cyrus, Schneider has built his own personal star factory. Miranda Cosgrove, who used to play a bratty little girl on Drake & Josh, got moved up to starring in iCarly, where she’s done such a good job of staying out of the tabloids that the Times called her “the good girl” compared to the misbehaving Disney stars.

Continue…

The End | Htoo K'Bru Paw | 2000-2011

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 5 Comments

Illustration by Marian Bantjes

Htoo K’Bru Paw—”Bright Flower”—was born on March 19, 2000, at Mae Rama Luang refugee camp in western Thailand. Htoo, pronounced “Too,” was one of 13 children born to Say Ler Moo and Poe Gay, rice farmers from Burma’s persecuted Karen minority. Her parents had fled Burma just before Htoo’s birth. For years, the family had been on the run in the jungle, surviving on rice broth and bamboo shoots, never speaking above a whisper, hiding from the military, who’d razed their village, and slaughtered their relatives.

Although Mae Rama was a dirty, tightly packed refugee camp with no electricity or plumbing, it was paradise, says Poe Gay. The family was safe at last. They lived in a one-room bamboo hut, two metres above the ground. Sometimes, the bamboo would rot and you’d fall through the floor, Poe Wah, Htoo’s eldest brother, explains—far better, he adds with a smile, than falling into the outhouse. They ate rice, though there was never enough. Over time, Poe Gay acquired eight chickens, which she sold to supplement their rice rations; it was the first time she had ever seen money. The kids had no shoes, and were often sick. At any given time, 40 per cent of the camp’s children were ill with malaria, TB, or chronic diarrhea. Death was all around them.

Htoo’s world ended at the grey fence surrounding the camp. She didn’t have any toys: her prized possession was a collection of stones she’d amassed over the years. School, her great love, was an infrequent luxury. Once, she misplaced a textbook, and was inconsolable. Htoo, wise and funny and a whiz with her younger siblings, always kept the family laughing and happy. That was her role, her brother explains. She was their warm soul.

When Htoo was eight, Canada offered to take the family in. Each underwent medical testing. That’s when Htoo’s parents learned she had thalassemia, a genetic blood disease. She’d worked so hard caring for everyone, no one had realized she herself had been hurting. She immediately began blood transfusions. The camp hospital was grotesque. The sick were squeezed into one room, some screaming in pain. Drips were hooked to rotting thatched walls. Infections were constant. Once, Htoo awoke to find the woman lying next to her had died in her sleep. But soon, she would leave all this behind.

The journey to the Bangkok airport took five days. The only food Htoo’s parents could afford for the trip was a bag of chips. Inside, there were 12 chips: one for each child. On June 27, 2008, Htoo’s family landed in Langley, B.C., with no English, or any experience with the world outside of a refugee camp. Htoo entered Grade 4 at Nicomekl Elementary. Every afternoon, she and her sisters studied together, memorizing vocabulary lists, grammar rules and reciting Scripture. No one worked harder than Htoo, who always placed first at the Karen Heritage School, where she took weekend classes.

She learned to skate and play soccer, and flourished. Her health improved so much that doctors suggested a bone marrow transplant to cure her, thus ending monthly blood transfusions and visits to hospital. Poe Wah, it turned out, was a perfect match, and in June, Htoo underwent surgery.

By mid-July, she’d regained her strength, and doctors were set to release her when she caught an infection. By August, she was near death, but fought it and won. But constant infections meant her siblings couldn’t visit. Nurses hooked up a webcam; back in Langley, her family scrambled to borrow a matching set-up. The day the cameras went live, Htoo’s siblings rushed to take turns speaking to their favourite sister. As the novelty wore off, they resumed their routines. But no one turned off the camera. For hours, Htoo sat hugging the laptop to her chest, listening as her sisters recited their vocabulary lists and her brothers chattered away.

At Christmastime, she took a turn for the worse, and in January was admitted to the ICU. Htoo, wise beyond her years, understood how sick she really was. Only at the very end did she finally allow herself to cry. “I just want to see my brothers and sisters,” she told her dad, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t want to die yet.” But she just didn’t have any fight left. Her family gathered round her bed; when Htoo could no longer open her eyes, she would squeeze her siblings’ hands. On Feb. 3, Htoo, who’d survived infection and disease in some of the ugliest hospitals in the world, died in Canada, of an infection, at one of the world’s best. She was 11 years old.

Art And Madness: A Memoir Of Lust Without Reason

By Patricia Dawn Robertson - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:49 AM - 0 Comments

American novelist Anne Roiphe’s chaotic personal life is perfect fodder for a John Cheever story. Roiphe, who penned the bestselling Up the Sandbox, has written a dark account of her bad marriage to a failed playwright. Yet she spices up the grim narrative with her adulterous liaisons with New York’s boho elite like George Plimpton and William Styron. As a self-confessed muse, Roiphe’s ambitious list of lovers is crowded with horny National Book Award winners—at least she kept the mid-list writers at bay. Throughout this authentic and revealing memoir, we’re witness again and again to Roiphe’s careless treatment of her own talents and creative energy. She relentlessly subverts her own creative impulses and consciously plays second fiddle to larger-than-life men of letters.

In 1957, Roiphe marries an emerging alcoholic American playwright, Jack Richardson. He spends their Paris honeymoon money at the bar, leaving her alone each night to cry and worry. The sad story continues when Roiphe has Richardson’s baby and spends more lonely nights in front of the tube waiting for him to stagger home to sleep it off. Like Pablo Picasso’s miserable muse, Dora Maar, Roiphe’s masochism matches perfectly with her hubby’s indifferent streak.

The faltering marriage finally grinds to a halt and, coincidentally, Roiphe’s own writing career takes off. But the madness of the muse truly comes to an end when Roiphe meets and marries a stable psychoanalyst. Despite her ruined history, Roiphe confesses she still seeks out the dangerous company of her tribe: “Artists and writers and their molls don’t decay. They explode, perhaps, which is much better. I think of Hemingway and his big fish.”

Sacred Trash: The Lost And Found World Of The Cairo Geniza

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:49 AM - 0 Comments

A geniza is a storeroom in a synagogue, a final above-ground abode for worn-out or discarded books and papers written in Hebrew (or in the Hebrew alphabet), since Jewish practice forbids throwing away writings containing—as even primarily secular documents often do—the name of God. In other words, genizot are useful for any researcher who can mine their riches before, as is the usual custom, they are periodically cleaned out and their contents buried in a cemetery. But the geniza at the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo—a room the size of a walk-in closet that was left undisturbed for an entire millennium until Victorian scholars, descending like locusts on a wheat field, stripped it bare—turned out to be a treasure trove like no other.

Hoffman and Cole tell an engaging story about the extraordinary characters involved in exploring the hoard. They included the Scottish twins, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson—wealthy, fearless travellers, self-taught scholars knowledgeable in nine languages, including Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew—who sound like they were invented by Rudyard Kipling. It was the sisters who, in 1896, brought back to Britain the geniza material that sparked the scholarly gold rush, led by their friend, the Talmud scholar Solomon Schechter.

What Schechter found in that room—280,000 manuscript fragments—offers a superb portrait of a thriving medieval community. Snippets of Scripture mixed with personal letters, clouds of insects and a thousand years of dust. There are marriage contracts, including one between two members of antagonistic Jewish sects. The couple are remarrying—that is, marrying each other again: this time, they swear, they won’t insult one another’s religious rituals. The renowned philosopher and physician Maimonides appears, prescribing wine for his patients and writing loving letters to his merchant-traveller brother (who eventually drowns in the Indian Ocean). In total, 35,000 individuals are named, all people of the book—as Muslims call non-Muslims who nonetheless possess sacred texts—and all saved from oblivion precisely because of Judaism’s profound regard for the written word.

Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course In Getting His Kid Into College

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:49 AM - 0 Comments

If the purpose of art is to elicit an emotional response, then this is a book of intense artistry. The reaction from most Canadian parents who read it will be intense, hand-raising, thank-you-God relief they don’t have to participate in the madness that is the U.S. college application process.

Crazy U combines U.S. writer Andrew Ferguson’s first-person account of helping his son get into college with a behind-the-scenes investigation into the American university industry. It is a world of competition, conflict and confusions that can apparently only be solved by generous applications of cash.

Ferguson provides a brief history of the controversial SAT test, its opponents and the various prep courses that cling like remora to its underside. He visits with Kat Cohen, an independent college admission counsellor who charges $40,000 for her “platinum package” of advice on how to get into the school of your choice. As personal essays are now a major component of applications, and since these unfairly favour Type-A boasters, Ferguson finds a “model essay development service” that promises to turn every student into a mouthy extrovert. He spends $199 on an essay and finds “every sentence contained a little stink bomb of braggadocio.”

While fascinating in their own right, Ferguson’s experiences—thankfully—have limited applicability to Canada. Some Canadian schools do require personal essays. But aggressive competition for spots in top schools, driven by what Ferguson calls “that feral look of parental ambition,” is largely absent north of the border. For that we can thank the uniform quality of Canadian universities, a more civilized application process and our muted interest in the provenance of degrees.

Regardless of cross-border differences, however, Ferguson is a witty writer worth reading for his talent alone. Describing the university brochures sent to his son, he says they “were printed on paper so thick and voluptuous they might have been mistaken for the leaves of a rubber plant—you didn’t know whether to read them or slurp them like a giraffe.” There’s plenty to slurp here.

Say cheese with Stephen Harper

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:45 AM - 60 Comments

What a moment.

I never thought that I – a regular, ordinary Canadian – would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.

But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.

Needless to say, I’m in.

As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.

Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.

Boxers. This simple undergarment serves as solemn commemoration of the triumphs of my ancestors, who bravely rebelled against the tyranny of Continue…

Freaks, geeks, and other outlaws

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:34 AM - 3 Comments

Calgary clothing designer Danika “Demonika” Challand knows fashion. And if anything is out of fashion in 2011, it’s censorship. In March, Challand, the impresario behind the Demonika’s Symphony of Horrors burlesque cabaret show, had to work around good-taste guidelines enforced by the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission.

Inspectors who read about the event in a newspaper visited an adults-only Edmonton venue, the Starlite Room, which was preparing to host Challand’s celebration of carnival acts, fetish wear, and horror movies. After negotiation, and some reining-in of near-nudity, the AGLC gave its imprimatur and the show went on. It doesn’t always. In 2008, freak-show performing duo the Great Orbax and Sweet Pepper Klopek trekked to Grande Prairie, Alta., only to find a “cancelled” sign on the venue door as a result of a last-minute inspector visit. “We stayed and watched something the commission has no problem with—ultimate fighting,” says Orbax, who is a University of Guelph physics instructor when he’s not having nails driven into him or cinder blocks smashed on him. The fights were fun; losing weeks of work and thousands of dollars wasn’t.

Alberta appears to be alone among provinces in having liquor inspectors make value judgments on entertainment, as opposed to pure health and safety policing. Its liquor-licence handbook says “any entertainment or games that may be considered bizarre, grotesque or offensive” must have advance approval. The rule is an AGLC regulation, not part of the Liquor Act. “The board didn’t sit and create this policy on a whim,” insists commission spokesman Christine Wronkow. “It was adopted [in 1996] based on public feedback and stakeholder consultation.” With presumably no more than a glance at the Charter of Rights.