Now Martha Stewart’s daughter is giving advice

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Killian/Wireimage/Getty Images

Alexis Stewart has made a career of detonating her famous mother Martha’s carefully constructed mythology. On her radio show, Whatever with Alexis and Jennifer, she and co-host Jennifer Koppelman Hutt exchanged banter that would make Howard Stern blush. Their TV show, Whatever, Martha, mocked old episodes of Alexis’s mother’s TV show. (“Oh my God, she’s sandpapering the roasting stick,” Alexis groaned, watching her mother make s’mores.) Now the strafing continues in Whateverland: Learning to Live Here, a wry, anecdotal how-to manual for people who “hate how-to manuals.” Written with Koppelman, the book dispenses practical advice on everything from living an ordered life (make your bed every day: “What are you, still 10?”) to unclogging a toilet without a plunger (fill it with hot water and wait) to “five things to do with your panties on a date.” Continue…

The House: The meaning of Brad Trost

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 50 Comments

We return to our periodic series on the House of Commons. This time to consider the case of Brad Trost.

Let’s first allow Brad Trost to explain himself. Here’s how, in an interview with the CBC yesterday, he justified his criticism of the government’s decision to fund Planned Parenthood.

“Ultimately, I have the backing of my constituency association and the Conservatives there. That’s who I represent. Because I’ve been vocal on this issue before, I owe them my democratic voice. I also owe my democratic voice to people who disagree with me so they know honestly whether or not to vote for or against me in the next election. It’s the proper thing to do.”

One could quibble with the specific of who he represents and his understanding of same. (Does he really think he only represents his constituency association and the Conservatives in his riding? Doesn’t he represent all of his constituents, regardless of how or whether they voted?) But it’s important to note who he doesn’t represent here: namely the Prime Minister, the Harper government or the Conservative Party of Canada. All three may well appreciate Mr. Trost clarifying from whence he derives his view and putting distance between himself and the official stance, but we should probably appreciate Mr. Trost deferring not to any of them, but to the people who elected him. Continue…

REVIEW: Can Intervention Work?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Stewart and Knaus grapple with the seminal question of modern international affairs: can intervention work? By this they mean: can the West, using military force, end wars, halt genocide, topple dictators, replace them with friendly governments, and build nations, without making things worse? Their answer is yes—but not as often as many of us think, and only with limited goals, and more humility and local knowledge than has typically been the case in recent decades.

Stewart, a young British member of Parliament who gained fame for a book about his 2002 walk across central Afghanistan, says foreigners intervening in a failing or war-ravaged country too often succumb to mission creep. Their mandate swells, drawing in ever more resources and troops to little beneficial effect. “There isn’t an insurgency,” a military friend told Stewart after a 2005 reconnaissance trip to Helmand province in Afghanistan, where Britain was about to deploy thousands more soldiers, “but you can have one if you want one.”

Stewart has argued for years against sending more soldiers to Afghanistan. What is needed instead, he says, is a “light long-term footprint.” Commit, but don’t try to do too much. Foreign soldiers, diplomats and aid workers, deploying for in-country tours that are so short British imperialists of a century ago would scoff in disbelief, don’t develop the expertise to implement grand plans designed in faraway capitals. “We—the foreign government organizations and their partners—know much less and can do much less than we pretend,” says Stewart.

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Canadians love to cuddle up to their furless friends

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment

Photography by Jenna Marie Wakani

A self-professed “neat freak,” Sandra Fargiorgio used to vacuum the cat fur from the carpet every day. She grew tired of the chore, so when her cat died, the mother of three from Milton, Ont., decided to get a new kind of pet, one that wouldn’t leave tufts of fur on her black pants.

She found a breeder of hairless cats—called sphynxes—and the family drove 3½ hours to pick up a light-skinned kitten named Woody. A year later, they got Gilbert, who looked like a little gremlin. “We have a lot of family friends that think we’re really weird,” she says, adding that guests sometimes think the family has a couple of rats running around the house. “People are just kind of grossed out by them because of the way they look.”

But Fargiorgio and her family aren’t alone in their love of hairless pets. It turns out more Canadians than ever before are snuggling up to the naked epidermis of a hairless animal. Aside from sphynxes, there are hairless guinea pigs—also known as skinny pigs—hairless dogs, even hairless rats, mice and hamsters. Both skinny pigs and sphynxes—obviously vulnerable to the cold—have Canadian connections: the sphynx gene can be traced to hairless cats found in a Toronto alleyway in the 1960s, while skinny pigs first turned up in a Montreal lab in 1978.

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The backlash against David Foster Wallace

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 3 Comments

Gary Hannabarger/Outline/Corbis

David Foster Wallace died on Sept. 12, 2008. He hung himself in his home in Claremont, Calif., while his wife, the artist Karen Green, was at work. He was 46 years old. A novelist, essayist and short story writer, Wallace produced a relatively thin portfolio for an author of his fame. But he touched readers in a way few others of his generation and genus—the high-brow literary kind—did. “There was so much of him in his writing,” says the novelist Matthew Baldwin. Fans felt as if they knew him, as if he was their friend.

In the years since Wallace’s death, he has become a kind of fringe pop icon. His name today is almost a shibboleth for a certain kind of reader, a symbol of faith, of conversion to his particular genius. “The undergraduates I’ve taught who love him, typically, they love the person, they love the idea of him they have from his books,” says Alexander Chee, a novelist who now teaches at Columbia University.

Wallace’s pop culture footprint, meanwhile, continues to grow. This summer, the Decemberists, an indie folk band, released a music video based on a scene from Wallace’s most famous novel, Infinite Jest. In October, a character bearing an uncanny resemblance to the young Wallace—a bandana-wearing, tobacco-chewing polymath from the Midwest—will appear in the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. (New York magazine was the first to point out the resemblance.) It’s almost as if Wallace has “become an icon for being an iconoclast,” says the Canadian author Bill Gaston, as if his life is now as important as his work.

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The Commons: Say everything

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 7:06 PM - 64 Comments

The Scene. A day after the Prime Minister’s Office delighted in demonstrating their man’s eagerness to meet with the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Finance Minister—both of them, at the same time—the leader of the opposition stood and asked if Mr. Harper might tell the House what the three men had talked about and what plans they had made. Here is how the Prime Minister responded.

“Mr. Speaker, as I have said many times, we have an economic action plan. That’s why we received a mandate from Canadians. Obviously, we are concerned about developments in Europe and elsewhere, but at the same time, the Canadian economy has created more than 600,000 jobs. This is one of the best records throughout the industrialized world. We will continue to do so.”

Apparently this much was news to Mr. Carney and Mr. Flaherty. (Later, the Finance Minister would say he could not comment on the contents of these discussions because the meeting in question was “private.” Which is a funny adjective to apply to anything that is announced with a news release, then videotaped and photographed for public distribution.)

On matters of the economy, the Prime Minister has mostly settled on two responses: say nothing or say everything. Here, obviously, he had chosen to go with the former. It most other cases these last few weeks, the government has gone with the latter. Continue…

Week in Pictures: September 26th – October 2nd 2011

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 6:04 PM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: September 26th – October 2nd 2011

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Protests on Wall Street

New York police officers receive instructions as they stand near protesters sleeping at Zocatti park, where they camped out before demonstrating outside the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 21, 2011. Protesters marched to Wall Street on the fourth day of protests as they call for action against big businesses and politics. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)

1 of 15 Photos

Next Anti-Semetic protests in Ukrain

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Can Canada avoid another recession?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 4:42 PM - 5 Comments

Brad Trost goes rogue

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 2:37 PM - 44 Comments

The Conservative backbencher describes his conversations with the Prime Minister’s Office in regards to funding for Planned Parenthood, accuses CIDA staff of leaking to the media, mocks the government’s position and vows to take an “aggressive” stance going forward.

The battle over the IPPF continues. Pro-Life politicians have been taught a lesson. The government only responds to Pro-Life issues and concerns when we take an aggressive stance. We will apply this lesson. 

Smuggler’s underwear goes to the birds

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 1 Comment

In Australia, tight-fitting men’s swim shorts are known as “budgie smugglers,” but in the Netherlands, it appears they prefer hummingbirds. A Dutch man was arrested this week after border guards in French Guinea found more than a dozen tiny hummingbirds sewn into his underwear. The live birds were individually wrapped in cloth and tucked into little pouches inside the man’s pants. He was spotted by airport guards acting strangely, possibly due to the rows of tiny beaks pointing into his crotch.

Daily Mail

Tony Clement will take your questions, eventually

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1:35 PM - 7 Comments

The President of the Treasury Board says, despite his refusal to do so each afternoon, he’s happy to answer opposition questions about the G8 Legacy Fund.

“We have arranged for myself and others including [Foreign Affairs Minister John] Baird, who had his responsibilities in the program, [Infrastructure] Minister [Denis] LeBel and others to appear before the public accounts committee in the weeks ahead, where parliamentarians will have a full right to ask any additional questions they may have ,” Mr. Clement told reporters Wednesday after the Conservative Party’s weekly caucus meeting.

RCMP hunting for Liberal Party fraudster

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1:27 PM - 4 Comments

A former federal Liberal candidate convicted of defrauding the government remains on the lam after ducking a sentencing hearing in July. Emmanuel Feuerwerker served as a House of Commons clerk in the 1980s and later ran for the Liberals in Etobicoke. Feuerwerker and his wife were convicted of fraud over $5,000 after they billed the government for more than $600,000 for 102 phantom physiotherapy appointments between 2002 and 2005. Feuerwerker is now listed as wanted on the RCMP’s website.

QMI

Violence in Syria spreads as army splits

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1:24 PM - 0 Comments

Largely peaceful protests in Syria have turned increasingly violent as army defectors fight back against government troops in what some analysts worry could be the beginnings of a sectarian civil war. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday tried to take back a central town from opposition troops. Details of the attack remain scant. Few experts rate the opposition’s chances of Libya-style revolt very highly. Many, however, worry that sectarian violence could spread, possibly even beyond Syria’s borders.

Reuters

Market volatility continues as EU leaders debate bailout

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

The prospect of a Greek debt default continues to fuel market volatility as leaders in Europe debate beefing up the eurozone bailout fund and seek ways to prevent the crisis from spreading into Spain and Italy. After hopes of a credible plan to ensure the continued delivery of loans to the beleaguered government in Athens rose earlier this week, disagreements over the burden private lenders should take in the endeavour emerged on Wednesday. Many economic analysts are predicting Greece will eventually default on its debt, regardless of what eurozone leaders end up doing. They say the Greek economy is shrinking while its debt is increasing, and it will soon have no choice but to neglect paying it off. On Thursday, the German parliament will hold a crucial vote on whether it will support the creation of a larger bailout fund. Finland already approved that notion in a vote Wednesday. Greece needs an additional 8 billion euros by mid-October in order to remain solvent.

The Globe and Mail

McGuinty wins Ontario election debate: online survey

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 11 Comments

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty came out on top in Tuesday night’s provincial election debate, according to respondents of an Ipsos Reid online survey conducted for Global News. One third of respondents determined McGuinty won the debate, while 29 per cent thought NDP leader Andrea Horwath performed best. PC leader Tim Hudak had 25 per cent of respondents declare him the winner. The results of the survey also convey that NDP leader Andrea Horwath made the largest impression on respondents, with only 14 per cent believing she would win before the debate. On top of that, 35 per cent thought she offered the best policies during the contest, and a 52 per cent majority picked Horwath as the most likeable of the three major party leaders. McGuinty, Ontario’s Liberal leader and incumbent first minister, came across with the demeanour of a Premier, according to 49 per cent of the survey’s respondents.

Global News

Palestinian statehood bid moves forward at UN

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

The UN Security Council has forwarded the Palestinian application for statehood and full membership to the committee on new admissions. The committee is set to discuss the issue in meetings on Friday, the CBC reports. It is expected to be weeks before the application is put to the 15-member Security Council for a vote. Palestinian envoy to the UN Riyad Mansour told reporters in New York that he appreciates the speed with which the application was sent to committee, adding that he hopes to see “positive action” taken by the international body. The U.S. has promised to veto the Palestinian statehood application if it wins support in the Security Council. In a speech last week, President Barack Obama told the UN General Assembly that the best route to statehood was through bilateral negotiations with Israel. But the Palestinian Authority that governs the occupied West Bank says it will not return to talks with the Israelis until all settlement construction in Palestinian territory is frozen—a condition Israel rejects. Earlier this week, the government approved the construction of 1,100 new housing units in East Jerusalem, the prospective capital of a future Palestinian state.

CBC News

The police blotter

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: RCMP arrested a 65-year-old Surrey man for allegedly selling homemade “moonshine” to walk-up customers from the basement window of his home, as well as operating an illegal still containing approximately 200 gallons of illegally distilled spirits in various stages of fermentation.The homemade booze was found in a trailer at the rear of the property.

Alberta: An Edmonton man wanted for an offence committed in June has been arrested and charged with assault causing bodily harm. The 25-year-old allegedly boarded a public bus inebriated on June 3 and sucker-punched the driver when asked to refrain from singing. The attack was recorded and uploaded onto the Internet, where public tips eventually helped police identify the man.

Continue…

Is MMA as dangerous as it looks?

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

Felipe Dana/AP

Horseback riding and mixed martial arts have little in common, except to Dr. Chad Ball. A few years ago, he conducted a study revealing how injured Canadian riders are different from those described by researchers in places such as New Zealand and Australia, where the typical patient is a young, inexperienced female practising English-style riding. In Canada, it is a man in his 40s with decades of western-style experience and a veteran horse. “Cowboys,” says Ball, a Calgary trauma surgeon. “They’re all over.”

So too are mixed martial arts fighters: Alberta has several promoters and leagues devoted to the full-contact combat sport, which combines boxing, wrestling and martial arts. The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which promotes MMA internationally, drew more than 55,000 fans to Toronto in April for a series of bloody matches. Knowing the sport’s popularity, and recalling how his equestrian study presented a different reality than previous research, Ball was skeptical when the Canadian Medical Association proposed banning MMA last year. Is this sport “savage and brutal,” like the CMA claims, or is it just perceived that way because the matches are gory? Is it really more dangerous than other sports, wondered Ball?

With this in mind, he and fellow surgeon Dr. Elijah Dixon wrote a response to the CMA published in the Canadian Journal of Surgery in February. They argue the proposal is based on “emotion, not evidence,” and note the dearth of long-term studies. The best data shows fighters get concussions in three per cent of matches, and a quarter of matches are stopped for head shots. At Foothills Medical Centre, where Ball and Dixon work, none of the eight trauma surgeons have admitted an MMA fighter—despite seeing 1,100 severely injured patients a year.

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How the federal competition bureau ‘is shifting the game’

By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 1 Comment

Peter J. Thompson/National Post/CP

In Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, it’s not often that a public official makes a sustained splash. The Prime Minister prefers his bureaucrats quiet, diplomats discreet, and even high-level appointees, like Governor General David Johnston, unobtrusive. In this circumspect climate, Melanie Aitken, the commissioner of competition, stands out. As head of the federal Competition Bureau—the independent agency that enforces laws on anti-competitive behaviour—Aitken has taken on everyone from the real estate industry, to credit card companies, to airlines. The bureau has gone from largely invisible to impossible to ignore. “We are trying,” Aitken says, “to increase the accountability of companies that have taken advantage of Canadians, and show that there are consequences.”

Those consequences hit home for many last year when she pressured the Canadian Real Estate Association into opening up its Multiple Listings Service to brokers who don’t charge full-service fees. She is taking Visa and MasterCard before the quasi-judicial federal Competition Tribunal to try to end their practice of forcing merchants to accept all cards, including premium plastic that comes with higher transaction fees. In the telecom sector, Bell Canada agreed to pay a $10-million penalty after Aitken accused the company of advertising lower prices than were available, and she is pursuing Rogers Communications (owner of Maclean’s) over what she calls “misleading advertising” involving a discount cell service.

When was the last time the bureau was fighting on so many fronts? According to John Rook, a competition lawyer at the Toronto firm Bennett Jones, never. “It’s unprecedented,” says Rook, who worked closely with Aitken when she was at his firm, and sometimes takes on cases for her bureau.

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CSIS and torture

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 10 Comments

Two and a half years ago, Geoffrey O’Brian, a CSIS lawyer told the public safety committee that the agency would use information that may have been obtained through torture if faced with potentially grave circumstances.

Frankly, I’m tempted to say that there are four words that can provide a simple answer, and those four words are either “yes, but” or “no, but”, and the “yes, but” is, do we use information that comes from torture? And the answer is that we only do so if lives are at stake.

Peter Van Loan, public safety minister at the time, rebutted that a day later, saying such information is “discounted” and that Mr. O’Brian had engaged in “some kind of hypothetical discussion.” Jim Judd, CSIS director at the time, said Mr. O’Brian might have been “confused” and Mr. O’Brian subsequently retracted his remarks.

But a year ago, the Canadian Press obtained briefing notes for CSIS director Richard Fadden. And those notes outlined a position similar to that expressed by Mr. O’Brian.

CSIS will share information received from an international partner with the police and other authorities “even in the rare and extreme circumstance that we have some doubt as to the manner in which the foreign agency acquired it,” say the notes prepared for use by CSIS director Dick Fadden. The notes say that although such information would never be admissible in court to prosecute someone posing an imminent threat, “the government must nevertheless make use of the information to attempt to disrupt that threat before it materializes.”

This brings us now to the Security Intelligence Review Committee report released this month on CSIS and the handling of Afghan detainees. Contained within that report are references to a deputy director operations directive issued in 2008 and a ministerial direction issued in December 2010. At the bottom of page 14, SIRC states as follows. Continue…

What your wine label won’t tell you

By Pamela Cuthbert - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 5 Comments

Photography by Colin O'Connor

They are airborne, free for the taking—and lately, highly contentious. Wild yeasts, a traditional ingredient in making wine and leavened bread, were arguably the first micro-organisms to be domesticated, some 6,000 years ago. Now, they’ve got people locking horns. The bread and wine worlds are clashing over who goes native with the naturally occurring stuff and who opts for using common cultivated varieties. “Basically it’s sort of a culture war, like in the United States,” says Geoff Heinricks, Keint-he Winery and Vineyard’s winemaker, based in Ontario’s Prince Edward County: “Both sides can be ridiculously bombastic.”

Wild or ambient yeasts inhabit wineries and vineyards, often carried by insects such as fruit flies, and introduce complexities of flavour and texture in the early stages of fermentation. They die when the wine reaches a low-alcohol level of about five per cent (wine is typically 12 to 14 per cent), then give way to the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae—it occurs naturally and is also the commercially produced variety—that finishes the process.

The alternative, inoculating crushed grapes with commercially produced yeast, promises results of speed, expedition and predictability, or standardization. This practice took off with the demand for New World mainstream wines in the 1970s and is still the mainstay in these markets, although there’s an increasing fringe interest among major producers in making small-batch wines that are labelled “wild-yeast” vintages and generally come with a higher price tag. “Like a marketing thing, splashing it on the label,” says Heinricks.

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Giovanna Quarin

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Juliana Neufeld

Giovanna Quarin was born on Oct. 2, 1933, in Biauzzo, a village in Italy’s Friuli region, in the northeastern end of the country. Her father, Giovanni Ottogalli, died from appendicitis while mother Ida was pregnant with Giovanna; Ida was left to raise their daughter and son, Mario. (She later remarried and had another three boys.) By 13, Giovanna had left school to work full-time in the fields, and in a tobacco factory with her mother. “This was during the war,” says Rita Zoratti, Giovanna’s daughter. “They were quite poor,” but the family made do, raising rabbits to eat. In the night, Giovanna would sneak outside with a sickle in her hand and “steal grass” from a nearby landowner’s property to feed the animals, Rita says.

Giovanna dreamed of leaving her village, and at age 16, she left Biauzzo to work as a maid to a wealthy family in Florence. After four years she returned home, and struck up a correspondence with Luigi Quarin, a Friulan who’d moved to Canada (they were re-introduced through a mutual acquaintance). Luigi, who lived in Hamilton, Ont., “didn’t speak a lot of English,” Rita says, “and he wanted to marry an Italian girl.” In December 1954, Giovanna boarded a ship for Canada. She arrived on New Year’s Eve, and the couple was married on Jan. 29. The reception was held at Hamilton’s Venetian Club, where they were members.

Giovanna and Luigi moved into a house in the north of the city with Luigi’s parents and brother. “It was a very Italian community,” Rita says. “There was an Italian grocery store, an Italian doctor, and everybody on the street was Italian.” Luigi worked as a roofer, and Giovanna got a job at a candy factory until their kids were born. The first, Ed Quarin, came in 1955; Rita and Linda Viola followed. At home, the family spoke the Friulan language native to their region of Italy. “Our friends all spoke Friulano, and we sang in Friulano when we got together,” Ed says. Hamilton’s Friulan community was so big that they eventually splintered off from the Venetian Club to start their own, Ed says. The Famèe Furlane of Hamilton (the name translates to “Friulan family”) was founded in 1969; Giovanna was frequently at the club cooking food for events, helping with committees, or visiting friends.

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Tony Hayward’s comeback

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Alex Wong/Getty Images

He became infamous during the Gulf of Mexico spill. Now he’s drilling for oil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Drilling for oil has become an increasingly risky business. Most unexploited reservoirs are either far below the ocean, or in parts of the world where extracting the fossil fuel is either exceedingly expensive (like Alberta’s oil sands), or too dangerous. And Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP, doesn’t seem fazed by any of it.

After leaving BP last year in the wake of the disastrous Gulf of Mexico spill, Hayward recently re-emerged at the helm of a London-based energy investment company that, far from playing it safe, is hoping to strike it rich in one of the most geopolitically challenging places on earth: Iraqi Kurdistan. With Americans still furious about his now infamous Gulf crisis remark, “I want my life back,” Hayward earlier this year joined forces with financier Nat Rothschild, ex-Goldman Sachs banker Julian Metherell and entrepreneur Tom Daniels to create a so-called “blank cheque” investment company. Called Valleres PLC, it promised to buy and run an oil company somewhere in the world—and raised US$2.2 billion. “He is one of the most talented oil executives in the world,” says Karl Moore, a business professor at McGill University. “And some rich people saw that and said, ‘Hey, now we can get this guy to work for us.’ ”

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The bitter battle between Tassimo and Keurig

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 2 Comments

Robert Sorbo/Reuters

In the world of single-serve coffee makers, debate over which brewer is better, the Keurig or Tassimo, is as heated as an extra-extra-hot skinny latte. Each machine takes its own type of coffee-grind packet—a “K-cup” or a “T-disc,” respectively—and each machine is aligned with different coffee bean companies. So when Starbucks announced a few weeks ago that it will sell one-cup pods of its grinds exclusively fit for Keurig machines, caffeine addicts were further inflamed: Tassimo used to have an exclusive deal with Starbucks. All that changed when, in March,

Starbucks split from Kraft Foods, which launched the Tassimo in Canada in 2006 and saw it gain popularity in large part because of its partnership with the Seattle-based coffee house. The breakup proved felicitous for Keurig: in late August, Starbucks unveiled plans to sell K-Cups throughout the United States, starting in November, and in Canada next March. According to Jeff Hansberry, president of global consumer products for Starbucks, sales are forecast to top US$1 billion.

But this news is a loss for Tassimo users, many of whom bought the coffee machine out of loyalty to Starbucks, not Kraft. A Facebook page called “Tassimo Division” has emerged for the disgruntled. Other consumer websites reveal that when rumours spread of an impending split, many people started buying Starbucks T-discs in bulk. “I stockpiled about an eight-month supply,” admits one commenter on singleservecoffeeforums.com. “I’m really upset that they left me hanging here with nothing,” laments another named “tassimodepressed.”

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