Rogue trader arrested after $2 billion UBS loss

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:38 PM - 0 Comments

London police have arrested a UBS trader who stands accused of losing the Swiss bank $2 billion in rogue trades. Losses from the unapproved deals may have pushed the bank into the red for the third quarter and have likely eliminated any savings from a cost-cutting plan.

Reuters

The new dads with pads

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:30 PM - 0 Comments

Redux; iStock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

The other night at my house, I taught my boyfriend how to use a menstrual pad. His daughter, who just turned 12, had been complaining about stomach cramps. “Maybe she’s getting her first period,” I suggested.

My boyfriend didn’t blink. He just asked if I had any products on hand, in case she did get her period while she was at my place.

“So this seems very thin but it works,” I explained, unwrapping a pad: “You take these sticky things off and wrap them around the underwear.” Did he want me to explain it to his daughter? I asked. He said he’d do it. We went downstairs where he proceeded to hold the pad up like a trophy and made sure his daughter knew how to use it. He wasn’t embarrassed at all. His daughter wasn’t embarrassed at all. He put one in her purse. I admit I was kind of embarrassed. But I was also impressed.

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Tremors hit Vancouver Island

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:24 PM - 0 Comments

A magnitude 4.0 earthquake struck the west side of Vancouver Island on Thursday, making it the second time in a week that tremors have rocked the West Coast. The U.S. Geological survey calls the quake relatively mild, and more likely to be an aftershock of the 6.3 magnitude quake that hit B.C.’s coast on Sept. 9 – the most powerful tremor to hit the area since the Nov. 2, 2004, when a magnitude 6.6 quake occurred.

CTV News

Politics and life

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:19 PM - 3 Comments

Matthew Yglesias counsels progressives with advice that could apply to all political persuasions.

If you’re a progressive and you feel that the political system isn’t doing what you want, it’s misguided to look at this as a personal failure of elected officials. It’s, if anything, a personal failure of you and people like you. Justice and equality doesn’t just happen because it’s nice, people need to make it happen. If it’s not happening, then its advocates are failing. And I do think there’s a lot of wisdom to the old Le Tigre song “Get Off The Internet.” Reading and talking to like-minded people about how powerful people are failing can seem like action, but it really isn’t. 

Yglesias suggests two steps: write your elected representatives and talk about politics, annoyingly if necessary, in the course of everyday existence. That last bit should extend to those who aren’t particularly engaged as partisans or progressives or conservatives and it goes to what is possibly the biggest problem facing “Politics” as it presently is: the idea that there is, or is supposed to be, some separation between politics and life.

NASA discovers real-life “Star Wars” planet

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:15 PM - 0 Comments

NASA’s Kepler telescope has discovered a huge, frigid planet that circles two different stars. This is the first time a world has been discovered that orbits two stars, the Guardian reports, although the scenario was famously imagined on arid desert planet Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet, in the famous Star Wars trilogies. This new planet, named Kepler-16b, is about 200 light years from Earth and has a similar mass to Saturn in our solar system. Temperatures on the planet are likely drop as low as –100 C, where an observer could see two small suns rise and set together, occasionally passing in front of each other. Alan Boss, a member of the team that made the discovery, called the discovery stunning. “Once again,” said Boss, “what used to be science fiction has turned into reality.”

The Guardian

Puzzling Jon Stewart disappointment

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:02 PM - 71 Comments

The Daily Show goes through periods when it’s hot, and periods when it’s not so hot; there’s disagreement on whether the show is on a hot or cold streak, and every viewer will have his or her own idea of when the show is at its best. This is a difference, I think, between an every-day show (or four times a week, at least) and a weekly show. Weekly shows tend to fall into irreversible decline: they can get their groove back, un-jump the shark, but usually they reach a peak and then fall from that. When the producers of a weekly show tell us that they’re going “back to basics” and making the show as good as it used to be, we really know it’s doomed. But for a show with over 150 episodes a season (instead of 22 or 13), each individual show matters less, and the quality of the show fluctuates with current events, the mood of the people working on it, everything you can name. Daily shows can fall into decline and never come back, but they often go through rough and smooth patches instead.

So if someone wants to say that The Daily Show is going through a rough patch, that’s a legitimate argument to make – I’ve made it at times; everyone’s made it when they don’t like what the show is currently doing. I think the early Obama era, contrary to expectations, was a good time for The Daily Show: people thought that with the Bush administration gone, he’d have less material, but in fact it freed him up in a way. The Bush material was being shared with all the other talk-show hosts. The Obama era gave new life to Stewart’s favourite target, Fox News, and provided all kinds of political jokes (about liberal frustration with Obama, for example, or the dysfunctional nature of the health-care negotiations) that weren’t in the late-night comedy mainstream at the time. Other hosts, apart of course from Colbert, played down the political humour for much of 2009, wrongly believing that there wasn’t much funny about the Obama presidency; this allowed Stewart to do his own thing for a while. Continue…

No back-to-school jitters here

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:55 PM - 2 Comments

Atlantic: Nationwide, 42 per cent of parents say their kids are stressed about going back to school. The prospect of new teachers and homework can have that effect, it seems. But in Atlantic Canada, most parents feel their kids are feeling fine about getting back to the books. Just 22 per cent of parents there report back-to-school stress.

Quebec: In the wake of Jack Layton’s death, few Canadians feel the NDP will be able to find a leader with similar strengths. Except in Quebec—the scene of last election’s much-discussed “orange wave” of NDP support—where 34 per cent feel the NDP will either “definitely” or “probably” find a new leader as strong as Layton.

Ontario: Ontarians, it seems, have the bleakest outlook in the country. In a recent poll, 59 per cent agreed that “things were better 20 years ago”—the highest of all provinces (Alberta was the lowest, at 46 per cent). They’re also most likely to concur with the statement: “I’m mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.” Thirty per cent of Ontario residents share that anger, compared with 22 per cent nationally.

Alberta: Although some slammed the military’s “royal” renaming as a colonial throwback and retrograde step, most Canadians, it turns out, approve of the government’s decision. Nowhere is approval as strong as it is in Alberta, where support for the renamed Royal Canadian Air Force is sky-high. Eighty per cent of Albertans either “strongly agree” or “agree” with the decision to return the “royal” to the three main branches of the Canadian military.

British Columbia: A new poll finds that 76 per cent of people in B.C. think texting or emailing while driving is just as dangerous as driving drunk. Half of British Columbians, meanwhile, believe that simply talking on a hand-held device is as risky as drinking and driving.

Sources: Ipsos Reid, Harris-Decima, Abacus Data, Angus Reid

And if you don’t get in…

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:45 PM - 0 Comments

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Roughly three-quarters of medical school applicants are rejected each year. Bummer. Luckily for them, wannabe doctors have better alternatives than ever. These four professional health care programs can be completed in just a few years, are in high demand, and pay well directly out of school. That means graduates can start paying off their student loans while medical residents are still driving beat-up old cars to 24-hour shifts.

Health Care Manager

The Job: Health care managers work in hospitals, medical clinics and nursing homes where they direct teams of health care providers. Their job is to make sure patients get excellent care and, simultaneously, that Canadians get good value for the nearly $200 billion they spend on health care each year.

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Nathan Morlando and Scott Speedman on the making of ‘Edwin Boyd’

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Ranking Canada’s law schools

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Ian Barrett

Are a law school’s professors significant contributors to the intellectual life of their discipline? Do a law school’s graduates land the most sought-after jobs in government, the private sector and academia? These are the two questions Maclean’s annual law survey seeks to answer.

All of the data used in the Maclean’s law rankings are publicly available. All focus on law school outputs. Fifty per cent of the overall ranking is determined by faculty quality, and 50 per cent by graduate quality.

The four measures of graduate quality look at the success each law school has had producing graduates able to land the most competitive jobs. The indicators are:

Elite Firm Hiring: Maclean’s calculated how many of each school’s graduates are serving as associates at law firms on Lexpert’s list of the largest firms in Canada across all regions, or at one of the five leading New York firms, according to the employment website Vault. This was done by examining the online biographies of thousands of lawyers at dozens of law firms. To scale this measure to each school, the tally was divided by first-year class size, averaged over the past three years. This measure is worth 20 per cent.

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Bye-bye Bay Street

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Nayan Sthankiya

When she was in law school, Amber Biemans always figured she’d practise in the city. After she and her husband had kids, though, she felt the pull of small-town life. At age 26, Biemans joined a firm in Humboldt, Sask. (population 5,900); two years later, she’d bought out a senior partner at the firm who was ready to retire. Making partner at age 28 was an “amazing opportunity,” says Biemans, now 32, but beyond that, “the benefits here are immense,” from the commute to work—which takes all of five minutes—to the close relationships she’s built with clients.

Small-town lawyers like Biemans are becoming an endangered species. As a group, they’re getting older: outside Winnipeg in southwestern Manitoba, almost three-quarters of lawyers have been practising for more than 20 years, says the province’s law society. Rural lawyers who want to retire are having a hard time finding young lawyers to replace them—but at the same time, in Canadian cities, young lawyers are having a harder time than ever finding work. In Ontario, the lack of articling positions has gotten so bad it’s been called a crisis, and the number of students being hired back has gone down, too. Some U.S. law schools are even facing lawsuits from disgruntled ex-students who allege they were misled about their employment prospects after graduation. Newly minted lawyers have typically chased jobs at the big downtown firms, but given the current climate, it could be that some of the best opportunities are in smaller practices, as Biemans found.

This month, Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, B.C., welcomed 65 students to its faculty of law, Canada’s first new law school in over 30 years. Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ont., also recently got the go-ahead to open a law school of its own—Ontario’s first in 42 years, and the only one in the north end of the province. (Lakehead’s first class of 55 students will start in 2013.) It’s worth noting that both law schools share a similar mandate: to train lawyers in relatively remote settings, in the hopes they’ll settle there. This model has already had success at Lakehead’s Northern Ontario School of Medicine, which has managed to attract and retain doctors in the area. About 60 per cent of graduates stay to practise there, says Lakehead president Brian Stevenson, and “another 15 or 20 per cent go to other rural medical practices in Ontario.”

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The home advantage

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Vincenzo D’Alto

“Canada has gone from brain drain to brain gain,” Stephen Harper told a crowd at McMaster University on Aug. 3. He was speaking at a ceremony to announce the 167 recipients of the 2011 Vanier Scholarships, awards that were launched in 2007 to provide whiz-kid graduate students from around the world with $150,000 in funding over three years. The Prime Minister made the goal of the big cheques clear. Research leads to innovations, which creates Canadian jobs, he said.

But wait a minute. Has the brain drain that sucked south 488 members of the graduating engineering class of 1995 before the ink dried on their degrees really been plugged? Look more closely at the 167 Vanier Scholarships awarded this year. Only eight will fund engineering research. Only five of those went to Canadian citizens or residents.

The shortage of Canadians in our graduate engineering programs is masked by another phenomenon: international enrolments in graduate engineering programs grew by 36.6 per cent between 2006 and 2009, allowing for a modest 3.5 per cent growth overall at a time when Canadian enrolments declined 2.5 per cent, according to Engineers Canada.

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Get them where they live

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Richmond Lam

Ridge Cross-McComber is about as blasé as your average overachiever when it comes to his laundry list of goals for the next few years and beyond. He’ll finish his year at Montreal’s Dawson College, move to Vanier College for either nursing or pure and applied science, then go to medical school to become a surgeon. After that, he’ll practise medicine in Kahnawake, his hometown. “I want to be a role model for my community,” says the 17-year-old, sitting in a café in the native reserve near Montreal. “It’s something I want to do for my town and my people. I want to show that I can do this.”

As far as medical school goes, history and statistics are stacked against Cross-McComber. Wealthy students tend to be overrepresented in the field, for one. According to a study by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, nearly 45 per cent of medical students come from families making over $100,000 a year. (Only about 26 per cent of Canadian families are in this demographic, according to the AFMC study.) And while medical schools are decidedly less uniformly Caucasian than they used to be, the AFMC study indicates that many visible minorites continue to be under-represented.

McGill’s faculty of medicine wants the situation to change, starting with students like Cross-McComber. Last year, the faculty instituted “Towards Health,” a program aimed at actively recruiting from outside the traditional student pool. Towards Health is what is known as a pipeline program, in which the university recruits at underprivileged Montreal-area high schools in hopes of inspiring minds to come its way in the future.

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Poor little rich M.B.A.s

By Paul Wells - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

As defenders of the downtrodden go, Roger Martin deserves points for chutzpah at least. It’s harder to feel sympathy for Martin’s chosen underprivileged group than it would be if he were sticking up for, say, orphans and widows—because Martin has spent much of the year arguing that Canadians, and especially their governments, aren’t giving enough money to the country’s business schools.

At first glance, Canadians might be reluctant to shed a tear. Martin is the dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, not conspicuously a hardship case. The school has raised $130 million on its way to a $200-million fundraising target, timed to coincide with next year’s opening of a new 15,000-sq.-m building in downtown Toronto. But its successes, Martin maintains, come despite the lack of adequate government support, especially from Ottawa.

“For some reason the federal government thinks it’s a good idea to spend hardly any money on business education,” Martin said in an interview. “And that’s just confusing. Why is it that a government that’s interested in competitiveness and productivity—not just this government, it’s any government—doesn’t live up to that priority? I just don’t get it. Where do they come up with their theory that says business schools are unimportant?”

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In praise of video game subsidies

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 4 Comments

Zach Dill/Flickr

Oh that Jesse Brown. He’s at it again. Regular readers probably remember our spirited back and forth recently about Apple’s relative level of importance to technology over the past decade. Now, with his latest post, Jesse has me frothing over another topic: video games.

In his post, Jesse takes issue with the big tax breaks and other financial incentives that video game companies have received in many countries to set up shop there, especially Canada. As Jesse puts it, it’s a highly profitable industry that’s also one of the most subsidized: Continue…

Shame

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

Shame

I didn’t especially “like” this film when I saw it early in the festival, so I’ve resisted adding it the list. Until now. Although it’s superbly crafted, and powered by a brave, impeccable and award-winning performance from Michael Fassbender, I found Shame incredibly cold and bleak and passionless. Like American Psycho or Cronenberg’s Crash—without the wit or the satire. And Carey Mulligan’s role as Fassbender’s sister felt cruelly under-developed. But Steve McQueen’s graphic portrait of man addicted to pornography and emotion-free sex has become the most talked about movie at TIFF for a reason. It’s a film that I can’t get out of my head: it keeps arguing with my reactions to it. So I’ve come to accept that what turned me off about Shame at the time is precisely what has made it so effective. When I walked out of the screening, I thought, “Well there’s a movie I won’t want to see again!” Now I think I might have to.

When the moon hits your eye

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Goh Chai Hin/AFP/Getty Images

Some might call it a pie-in-the-sky idea, but Domino’s says it plans to build a pizzeria on the moon. The company’s Japanese arm outlined its cosmic ambition on a website, moon.dominos.jp, with an artist’s renderings of a two-storey concrete dome containing a kitchen, eat-in space and plantation (staff living quarters and a “play room” with zero-gravity bowling lanes are below the surface). The project, envisioned with the help of well-known Japanese construction firm Maeda Corp., would cost roughly $21 billion—about 240 times Domino’s profits in 2010 (though costs would be offset by using the moon’s mineral deposits to mix the concrete).

In light of that shortfall, and NASA’s recent shutdown of the space shuttle program, the plan is likely nothing more than an elaborate publicity ploy. Domino’s Japan is known for cheeky stunts—last year, it had a flood of applicants for a one-hour pizza delivery job that paid $32,000. But, in a video on the website, Domino’s Japan president Scott K. Oelkers (in a space suit, naturally) assures “fellow earthlings” of his company’s sincerity, saying, “Perhaps you think we’re foolish to take on such a challenge, but we have a dream to deliver our pizza on the moon.”

REVIEW: Canadian Symbols of authority: Maces, chains and rods of office

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 0 Comments

The gilt, jewel-encrusted rods and maces that occupy pride of place in Parliament, the provincial legislatures and even city halls might seem emblems of a dusty bygone era, but not to co-authors Pike and McCreery. To them, the objects represent “continuity in an ever-changing political world.” They are the ceremonial representations of a democratic tradition. If the mace isn’t in the Commons, then no business can be done until it is returned.

Yet though virtually all levels of Canada’s government have had the hardware for generations, relatively little is known about them. McCreery, an expert on protocol as well as the private secretary of Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor, and Pike, the regal jewels designer at Garrard in London, have delved deeply into the lore. The mace has been a symbol of power since ancient times. And even when its use as a weapon was gone, it retained its aura of authority. Indeed, when republican Oliver Cromwell entered the Commons in 1653, he said: “Take away that bauble [the mace]. Ye are no longer a Parliament.”

The book is also an exhaustive encyclopedia of the various objects, including the silver or gold chains worn by officials at the opening of Parliament. What could be a dry and dull subject is instead a fascinating exploration of the evolution of the various symbols. Parts of the Senate mace date back to 1793, just after the first legislature of Lower Canada met. Originally crafted by François Baillaragé of Montreal—the book has pictures of his original workbook and design—it has survived four fires, two riots and a rebellion.

And the historical symbols are still being made. Months before Nunavut officially became a territory, Aboriginal artisans were busy creating a heritage mace from narwhal tusk, soapstone, silver and semi-precious stones. At the opening of the legislative assembly in April 1999, the Speaker remarked: “It embodies the soul of our land, this assembly and our people.”

REVIEW: Someone else’s twin

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Ten years ago, in Spain’s Canary Islands, 28-year-old Begoña was browsing in a clothing store at the mall when a shop assistant approached and offered a friendly hello. Begoña had no idea who the assistant was, and left without returning her greeting. In fact, the assistant had confused Begoña with another girl, named Delia, who—unbeknownst to any of them—was Begoña’s long-lost identical twin, and lived in another town on the island. Begoña had a non-identical twin sister, named Beatriz, but she’d soon find out they weren’t related by blood at all. Due to a hospital mix-up, Beatriz and Delia had been switched at birth.

Psychology professor Nancy L. Segal (who founded the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton) examines several cases like this. In Ottawa in 1971, three boys—identical twins George and Brent, and another named Marcus—were placed with the same foster family by the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa. Somehow their records got mixed up; when the twins’ parents reclaimed their kids, they ended up taking George and Marcus home. The twins finally met in 1992, when they were both members of Carleton University’s strategy club, for fans of board games, cards and chess.

Segal, who is a fraternal twin herself, brings remarkable insight to these and other cases. Even twins raised apart, it turns out, feel a strange connection when they finally meet again—although the shock of reunion can have a devastating impact not only on them, but on friends and family, too. Cases like the ones mentioned above are extremely rare, but they do happen: according to U.S. estimates cited in Segal’s book, 20,000 accidental baby switches could happen every year in that country alone. Thanks partly to advances in baby monitoring, most switches get corrected in the hospital. Even for twins who are raised apart, like George and Brent, or Begoña and Delia, Segal shows that the bond can run surprisingly deep.

REVIEW: The reinvention of love

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

History, that incubator of stranger-than-fiction stories, provides the plot outline for Humphreys’ intriguing new novel set in the literary ferment of 19th-century Paris. Its focus is the doomed affair between journalist and literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve and Adèle Hugo, the wife of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve’s friend and neighbour. It’s a tale whose potential scope is as epic as a Hugo novel, given the sensational details. Cross-dressing! Hermaphroditic genital malformation! Social climbing at the court of Napoleon III! Literary rivalries! Insanity!

Yet Humphreys, a nuanced, evocative writer, chooses to fill in the bold outline gently, even pallidly, with pastel hues, alternating Charles’s and Adele’s voices over 30 years. Their affair, conducted in hotel rooms and furtive public meetings for which Sainte-Beuve disguised himself in his mother’s clothing as “Charlotte” with odd alacrity, is truncated, though not because of Sainte-Beuve’s hermaphroditic genital malformation, “a sex the size of a snail,” which turns out to be a bonus for Adèle, who doesn’t want more children. When the arrogant Sainte-Beuve boasts to Hugo he’s bedding his wife, the writer moves the family across the Seine and later to virtual exile in Guernsey, where lovesick Sainte-Beuve later pops up.

It’s not a spoiler to say they don’t live happily ever after. The pompous Sainte-Beauve spends his life pining for Adèle, social climbing at court, travelling in circles that include Chopin, Alexandre Dumas and George Sand (another cross-dresser), and philosophizing about love and his encroaching mortality.

The sympathetic Adèle fares more poorly: tethered to a self-preoccupied husband who flaunts his mistress, devastated by the drowning of her eldest daughter, and unhinged by her daughter Adèle’s dramatic descent into insanity. Her death of heart trouble warrants only one line in Sainte-Beuve’s account. It isn’t the only glaring misstep. In another, Sainte-Beuve, who died in 1869, mentions Marcel Proust, born in 1871, which would make him clairvoyant. Then again, given the extraordinary details that animate this pale yet oddly compelling fictionalization, maybe he was.

REVIEW: Beauty pays: Why attractive people are more successful

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 1 Comment

Should ugly people sue their employers for paying them less than their attractive colleagues? Can prostitutes charge more if they’re pretty? As the title suggests, yes, according to Hamermesh. A professor at the universities of Texas in Austin and Maastricht in the Netherlands, Hamermesh culls decades of research on “pulchronomics,” or the relationship between economics and beauty, to show how much better off the better-looking are—and what should be done about it.

He starts by dispelling the notion that attractiveness is subjective. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he writes, “but most beholders view beauty similarly.” Most people asked to rank a person on a scale from “homely” to “strikingly handsome or beautiful” will agree on the allure of a given individual. Using this system, researchers have long established that more people are ranked as good-looking than bad-looking, youth is more appealing than maturity, and female beauty is more contentious than male handsomeness.

The book takes a titillating turn when the topic of beauty runs into questions of money and fairness. Attractive people earn five per cent more than average-looking people, who in turn earn 10 per cent more than ugly people, says Hamermesh. That means, he argues, that an unattractive individual is “disadvantaged” in the same way one might be physically disabled or lacking intelligence, and therefore vulnerable to discrimination.

During a recession, for example, good-looking people will have a better chance of keeping or finding a job and securing loans than their bad-looking counterparts. This creates a legal opportunity, suggests Hamermesh, for ugly people to sue for compensation for potential loss of earnings: “A market for looks-based lawsuits is waiting to be born.”

For now, Hamermesh’s book reinforces a uncomfortable reality: beauty pays. But in the future, ugly may pay too.

Daffy Duck Goes Anime

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 3 Comments

“The Looney Tunes Show” is not really my thing, but this short is getting some attention after it aired this week. It certainly can’t be accused of being a pale imitation of earlier Daffy Duck cartoons, and the anime style is more pleasing than the sitcom style of the show proper. One of the problems with the animated sitcom approach with classic cartoon characters is that it’s sort of been done. The early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons, often written by Looney Tunes veterans, removed the movement and animation budget from old-school cartoon stories. And they proved that what you’re left with is a very talky sitcom (which worked in those shows because of the high calibre of the voice acting). Putting Daffy into an anime-tinged fantasy sequence requires more emphasis on the visuals – rather than the dialogue – to sell the thing, which is closer to what makes these characters work. Maybe if they’d just put the characters into every unexpected visually-oriented animation style they can think of, it would be a better show.

REVIEW: Newspaper titan

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

“When your grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page,” was the pugnacious if never observed motto—presumably the occasion never arose—of the Medill family, rulers of the Chicago Tribune newspaper empire. That guiding principle was never supposed to apply to the Medill women, of course, but when 48-year-old Cissy Patterson, who had spent most of her life as a society matron, gained control of William Randolph Hearst’s floundering Washington Herald in 1930, she took to the tabloid life with a vengeance. By 1945, after a merger with another Hearst paper, the Washington Times, the Times-Herald had 10 daily editions and annual profits of $1 million. Almost unknown today, Patterson was unprecedented in her time: sole owner of a major newspaper and perhaps the most influential woman in America.

A classic old-school Republican, hyper-capitalist and deeply isolationist, Patterson usually had kinder words for Hitler than for FDR. And even the war stopped only the pro-Axis comments; her paper remained vigorously anti-Roosevelt. Readers forgave the attacks on the popular president (mostly: one did send a letter bomb), because they loved everything else about the Times-Herald, particularly its enticing gossip columns.

They were in large part the work of well-connected young women (called “Cissy’s hen house” by her male rivals) hired on the cheap—they didn’t need the money—and ferociously protected by Cissy. Kathleen Kennedy, sister of John F., was one, as was her future sister-in-law, Jacqueline Bouvier, who took on the “inquiring camera girl” position in 1951. (There were men on the gossip beat too: one was tarred and feathered in the Virginia woods by the male relatives of a young woman maligned in his column.) Six years after Patterson’s death in 1948, her failing paper was sold off. The Times-Herald had tried to keep up the old winning formula—animals, crime and gossip—Smith writes, but some animating (belligerent, actually) spark was fatally missing.

The rebel sell

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 9 Comments

Andrew Potter considers the overarching theme of Samara’s findings.

To begin with, Samara’s findings underscore the profound amateurism that permeates our national politics. When the vast majority of members of Parliament, upon leaving office, feel obliged to insist that well, they never really wanted to be a politician in the first place, that only reinforces the broad cynicism that many people feel toward public life. After all, if our members of Parliament don’t take their jobs all that seriously, why should anyone else?

To amplify that point a bit, it raises the question of who is ultimately responsible for the health of Canada’s democracy. Institutions are not buildings, they are sets of norms and procedures designed to achieve certain goals, and being “institutionalized” simply means that you accept those norms and are committed to keeping them healthy. Parliament’s central function is to enable representative self-government, which in our system involves working within and through institutional structures that are centuries old.