It depends on what you choose to remember

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:48 AM - 0 Comments

Glen McGregor notes that the police commissioner for whom the Harper government named the new RCMP headquarters left a debatable record.

The Mounties’ new shop is named for former RCMP Commissioner Maurice Nadon.  Pop open any of three volumes of the McDonald Commission reports into the RCMP’s barn burning, mail opening and other illegal activities in the 1970s, and you’ll quickly come across Nadon’s name.

Vic Toews says of Nadon that “the good certainly outweighs any criticisms he might have been put to.”

REVIEW: Retromania: Pop culture’s addiction to its own past

By Mike Doherty - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 0 Comments

Given all the band reunions, rock biopics, deluxe re-reissues, and whole-album concerts in the past decade, has popular music lost its way? Reynolds thinks so.

A London-born, California-based journalist, Reynolds offers many reasons for the obsessive resurrection of the recent past, among them an aging population’s nostalgia, the flattening out of past and present by YouTube, and the impulse to recapture the fervour of revolutionary musical movements. He plots a history of such revivals, from late-’40s “trad” jazz through “nu-rave” in the mid-2000s, and argues that over time, they lose their original cultural heft.

Reynolds is geekily erudite and sweepingly referential, focusing on music but in a broad cultural context, where Baudrillard rubs shoulders with the Beach Boys, Kim Wilde with Oscar Wilde. His accounts of arcane styles and subcultures such as “hypnagogic pop” and Japanese Shibuya-kei are best appreciated with YouTube, a portal that may, as Reynolds contends, paralyze us through distraction, but also helps make sense of Retromania. His writing is punchy and poetic, as in his depiction of the “ghost dance” of Deadheads, “an endangered, out-of-time people willing a lost world back into existence.”

Continue…

How to stay married

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 19 Comments

Michael Blann/Getty Images

Cynthia is a 68-year-old woman in a 45-year “committed marriage” who has figured out how to keep it that way. Every other month or so she goes out to lunch with her college boyfriend Thomas, who is also married and has no intention of leaving his wife. Usually their outings end in a hot and heavy “petting session” in his Mercedes. Sometimes, he rubs Jean Naté lotion, the scent Cynthia wore in college, onto her legs and compliments her beautiful feet. They’ve never consummated their relationship, nor do they intend to. Being with Thomas is “like a balloon liftoff,” Cynthia reports, one that eases some of the tensions between her and her 74-year-old physics professor husband. “I’m a nicer, more tolerant person because of this affair,” she says.

Cynthia’s story is one of more than 60 confessionals from long-time wives that punctuate Iris Krasnow’s new book The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married. And what their stories reveal is that marital longevity requires wives to establish strong, separate identities from their husbands through creative coping mechanisms, some of them covert. Krasnow spoke with more than 200 women, married between 15 and 70 years, who report taking separate holidays, embarking on new careers, establishing a tight circle of female friends, dabbling in Same Time, Next Year-style liaisons and adulterous affairs, and having “boyfriends with boundaries.” Yoga and white wine also feature predominately.

The 58-year-old Krasnow, an author and journalism professor at American University, writes she was “stunned by the secrets and shenanigans” in her journalistic journey through American marriages. She comes to the subject from the vantage point of her own 23-year marriage to an architect she loves but admits to “loathing” occasionally. She credits summers spent apart, separate hobbies and her close relationships with male buddies for some of their marital stability.

Continue…

The man who never gave up on the Winnipeg Jets

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 3 Comments

Peter Taylor/Getty Images

Fifteen years ago, he was the one who turned out the lights. That April night, after the Winnipeg Jets had been knocked out of the 1996 playoffs, losing 4-1 at home to Detroit and bidding adieu to the NHL, it was Craig Heisinger who stood by himself in the dressing room, long after the last fan and player had disappeared. As the team’s equipment manager, it was his job to wash the jerseys, air out the gear, vacuum the rug, and lock the door behind him. By then, he had decided he wasn’t going to follow the franchise to Phoenix. Uprooting his wife and four young kids—three then still in diapers—from their hometown and extended family simply didn’t feel right. So “Zinger” did the only thing he could: he shed a few tears and moved on.

Last June, he was crying again, but this time he wasn’t alone. At the podium, in front of the media and hockey fans across the nation, the now 48-year-old was named senior vice-president and director of hockey operations/assistant general manager of the reborn Winnipeg Jets, a title so unwieldy that he jokes about getting a fold-out business card. Barely able to choke out the words, he thanked Mark Chipman, the team’s co-owner, for “taking a chance” on him. He thanked local fans for letting so many players, coaches and managers—himself included—“cut their teeth” with the AHL Manitoba Moose during the city’s decade-and-a-half in hockey purgatory. And he finally let himself believe that what seemed impossible was now true. Even as an insider in True North, the group that brought the NHL back to the Prairies, Heisinger played the doubting Thomas, steeling himself against another disappointment. “I never really bought in. I knew all the work going on behind the scenes, but I never thought it would come to fruition,” he says, as he sits in his office hours before the transplanted franchise’s first exhibition game. “I couldn’t convince myself that they wanted another team in Canada. I just couldn’t see it.”

Yet as of last May 31, it is real. What once was lost has been found; giving back to a city—and a country—something more profound than a place name in the standings. Proof that bigger isn’t necessarily better. That passion can count for more than dollars. That the game we claim still belongs to us.

Continue…

REVIEW: Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

To paraphrase a U.S. president he doesn’t like, this book shows us a kinder, gentler Michael Moore. The filmmaker and activist uses a flashback structure: the first chapter tells how his 2003 Oscar acceptance speech and movie Fahrenheit 9/11 made him into “a target of the right,” but after that, he takes us back to the beginning, with his birth in Flint, Mich. Most of what follows is a series of anecdotal chapters about his childhood, his Catholic upbringing, and his political experiences; it ends just after Moore finished making his first film, Roger & Me, but before the film made him famous.

Most of the chapters have a political dimension to them. Some are serious, like the story of a friend who got a back-alley abortion. Others are in Moore’s familiar comic style, like his failed attempt to escape to Canada during the Vietnam War: it proved to be unnecessary because he was ineligible for the draft, but it left him “fond of Canada for a very long time.” They are stories about typical experiences for a child of the ’60s and ’70s—an attempt to show Moore as an ordinary person of his generation. The book sometimes seems like a way for him to get back the regular-guy image that made Roger & Me so effective.

There aren’t a lot of surprises, certainly not political ones: like many baby boomers, he reveres Kennedy, thinks Americans “lost our moral compass” by electing Nixon, and had a new world opened up for him by Motown music. But his reminiscences do shed light on a theme that Moore, and other liberals of his era, are becoming interested in: “the death of the middle class,” the differences between the modern era and what Moore sees as his own era of strong unions and strong families. An underlying theme is that his youth was a time when hope and change were not “out of reach to the average person.”

Want to live with your boyfriend? Follow these rules.

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole/Maclean's

First, think of all your deepest, darkest secrets, then write them down and show them to your boyfriend. For the author of a new advice book called How to Move in With Your Boyfriend (and Not Break Up With Him), that list would have included: my hair sheds like crazy, and I never bother cleaning it up; I read my boyfriend’s emails when I’m bored; I’m bossy; sometimes I forget to flush the toilet when I pee.

Tiffany Current didn’t actually hand over this list but she claims she should have, and advises others to do so in this slender guide that takes the stance that most live-in relationships are doomed because too many couples rush in under a haze of “love mist.”

Another thing: if you’re still telling friends that you’re dating the perfect guy, you’re not ready to move in. “No man is perfect,” she writes. “If you think your boyfriend is, you’re either delusional or you haven’t met the real him.” Insist he divulge his quirks, too. Swap lists. “Think of it as an incredibly weird and awkward bonding experience.”

Continue…

Everybody knows the dice are loaded

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Roman Cho/Getty Images

“You’re asking a very profound question,” singer/songwriter Adam Cohen responds when asked if he thinks he was born a musician or became one because of his world-famous father, Leonard Cohen. The 39-year-old Cohen fumbles as he tries to come up with an answer. “The truth is I truly don’t know. I truly don’t know if I’m a product of circumstances or the beneficiary of great genes.”

Cohen talks about growing up with the elder Cohen and the lifestyle he witnessed. “I saw the magnificence of it and the reaction of men and women to him and the adulation,” he admits. “So there really was no decision involved.” In early October, Cohen is releasing his fourth album, Like a Man, the first that pays homage to his famous father—the same tone, lyrical style and voice, something he always fought against. “I was enamoured with the idea that I could forge my own way. And family, friends and institutions bolstered this.”

Cohen speaks eloquently and poetically, much like his father. “Success has been a fruit very slow to ripen for me,” he says, adding, “it’s embarrassing to say that at age 39 I’m coming of age.” Becoming a father made him see the “wondrous circle” of inevitability. “I have a four-year-old son and now know the profound way that waking up to your dad in his underwear strumming the guitar at the kitchen table can affect you. I woke up to that, and now my son finds me in my underwear at the kitchen table strumming on the guitar.”

Continue…

‘If we don’t start talking about it, nothing will change’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

Tuesday night the House overwhelmingly passed the Liberal motion calling for a national suicide prevention strategy. Debate on the motion stars here and resumes here. Liberal MP John McKay’s speech in support of the motion is below.

Bestsellers – Week of October 3rd, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

They said it

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 5:10 AM - 55 Comments

“Every time I stand up in the House of Commons and speak I look around and I can see it, this surprise that a young, attractive woman is saying something important and intelligent.” -NDP MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan

“Mr. Speaker, my understanding about going into a country to assist it militarily with the hope that the country will establish itself is the reason that we are in that country right now, which is to assist it during the military phase.” -NDP MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan being important and intelligent in the House of Commons, Sept. 26

(Cheap shot, I know. What really bothered me is that when asked if she is treated differently by male parliamentarians, Ms. Sitsabaiesan told the Star “Sometimes I get asked more about my lipstick rather than what’s coming out of my mouth.” Are we really, really supposed to believe that middle-aged male colleagues are asking her about cosmetics?)

Steve Jobs is America (and so can you)

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 1:11 AM - 10 Comments

In a classic case of “where were you when,” I was just finishing up as a guest discussant at York University in Toronto Wednesday night when I found out Steve Jobs had passed away. It was sad news, especially given that Jobs, Apple and the iPhone had ironically come up many times during the class, which is all about broadband, the Internet and technology.

My book Sex, Bombs and Burgers is actually part of the course reading, presumably selected to give students a break from the dry TCP/IP protocols and CRTC regulatory issues they normally have to digest. The chapters assigned for reading and then discussion in class were those dealing with the Internet’s formation, as well as the pornography industry’s influence in helping to develop it. Continue…

Once a hacker, forever an artist. RIP, Steve Jobs.

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 1:05 AM - 18 Comments

Yes, Steve Jobs was a genius, but I think a misunderstood one. He wasn’t really an inventor—he was an artist. And like all great artists, he was a tyrannical control freak, an absolute perfectionist. With art, that’s not a problem. Picasso’s Guernica would not be improved in the slightest if I were allowed to add a few brushstrokes.

But the wonder of computing used to be that anyone could make it better. Anyone could take apart their machine and tinker their way to a better machine. Anyone could write code, usually by building on someone else’s code. Anyone could innovate from their garage, and they didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do so. That’s what allowed Steve Jobs and his hacker buddy Steve Wozniak to create Apple I in the first place. But Apple products aren’t made like that anymore. As elegant and intuitive and beautiful as they are, they are also perhaps the most closed computers ever made—devices without screws, devices with rules, devices that are increasingly better described as appliances than as computers. Continue…

Steve Jobs, dead at 56

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 12:54 AM - 3 Comments

Steve Jobs, the tech visionary whose company gave the world the personal computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad, has died at the age of 56.

Apple Inc. revealed the news late Wednesday, barely a month after Jobs stepped down as CEO and handed the reins to Tim Cook, Apple’s former chief operating officer. Jobs said at the time that “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” Continue…

Steve Jobs: This American life

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 11:31 PM - 11 Comments

The question before the house now, or one of them, is whether Steve Jobs was an innovator. It’s easy to come up with perfectly fair definitions of the term that leave him offside. The mouse and the graphic user interface came from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Music downloading was huge before he ever did it, or at least it seemed huge before he changed the scale on which the word is understood. I remember taking my first iPod to a computer store where one of the geeks showed me how to pry the back off. The magic came off with it. Just a thin battery, a thin hard drive, and a circuit board. Anybody could do it. Many already had.

So if innovation means being the very first, count Jobs out. There’s actually a parallel argument in jazz music, if you can believe it, where people have spent 30 years debating whether Miles Davis innovated anything. The obvious answer is that, if innovating means being very first, he didn’t. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie showed him how to play bebop. Lester Young was stripping ornament from his solo lines when Miles was in short pants. And so on. But Miles heard new currents, found ways to make them consistent with his own aesthetic, and presented them in ways a general audience could grasp and then love. And then he did it again and again. If an innovator is a conduit between an idea and all its possible audiences, then both of these guys were at the heart of that game. Continue…

Steve Jobs is dead

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 8:06 PM - 1 Comment

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, died of cancer today at the age of 56. In August, Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple after battling the disease for several years. Jobs’ work at Apple made it one of the most successful and influential companies in the world; products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad were developed under him. As head of Pixar, he also helped make computer-animated films tremendously successful. Apple’s Board of Directors announced his death, saying “Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”

MarketWatch

Sarah Palin won’t run for president

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 7:23 PM - 1 Comment

Sarah Palin announced today that she will not be running for President of the United States in 2012. The former Alaska governor and John McCain’s 2008 running mate had been the subject of intense speculation about her plans, due to her large Republican fan base and fundraising capabilities. But on the show of conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, Palin read a prepared statement saying that she has decided she can “be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office.” She added that she will continue to fight for her favoured policies, including lower taxes, in a non-elected role.

ABC News

The Commons: All in favour of cutting taxes, say ‘yea’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 6:51 PM - 34 Comments

The Scene. “I don’t believe,” the Prime Minister once declared, “that any taxes are good taxes.” Most everything Stephen Harper says is sure to be contested by at least a couple people, but on this point all parties now seem mostly to agree. Even if they do make a great show still of objecting to each other.

“Mr. Speaker,” the NDP’s Libby Davies began this afternoon, not bothering to pause for her colleagues’ applause and talking fast, “the Conservatives’ reckless policy of corporate tax cuts has helped gut our country’s manufacturing sector. The Conservatives do not mind helping profitable oil companies and the big banks just love the handouts that they get, but there has been no benefit for the manufacturing sector, and now we have lost hundreds of thousands of good jobs. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ontario, with even Mr. Hudak saying as much. Will the Prime Minister wake up, see the evidence and cancel his next round of pointless corporate tax giveaways?”

The Prime Minister stood to respond, but a rejoinder had already been tabled moments before by Conservative MP Eve Adams. ”The last thing Canada’s families need now,” she had warned the House, “is the NDP’s massive job-killing tax hikes that would cost jobs and hurt our economy.”

Continue…

What Ailes the News

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 4:28 PM - 5 Comments

It wasn’t my intention to do three straight posts on Fox shows, but it’s hard to resist reading Roger Ailes talking about the 15th anniversary of Fox News and why he considers himself so awesome. (This is the interview where he said that he hired Sarah Palin because “she was hot and got great ratings.”) The interview, with his boasting about how much better his network is doing than the other news networks, is a reminder that triumphalism is one of the key components of the Fox News style, and it comes from the top, with his statement that criticism comes from people who are “getting [their] ass beat.”

Once Fox became the most popular 24 hour channel, its ratings became literally a part of its brand: every personality on the network, every PR person, is trained to remind people that Fox is the #1 network and to imply that criticism from other news outlets is due to jealousy. (And given that CNN and even MSNBC have both tried to imitate Fox News at times, there probably is some jealousy there.) The message is that Fox is a winner and other networks are losers, and that message itself is part of the strategy for winning: it’s the Patton theory, that people love a winner and will gravitate toward it. I don’t want to make Ailes out to be too much of a sinister genius, though; he probably also just really likes bashing other news outlets. But it probably does work strategically too.

To make the strategy work, of course, he had to get to #1 in the first place. The question I can never quite figure out how to answer is how much of that has to do with the packaging of the product – the shows – and how much of it has to do with the product itself. Fox News grabbed its own specific audience, the audience that thinks the rest of the news is liberal. Other networks are fighting over bits of at least two different, ideologically incompatible groups (liberals and self-proclaimed centrists) and even try to lure some conservatives away from Fox; they don’t know who they’re aiming for. Fox came along right when it started to became clear that audience fragmentation wasn’t going away, and successfully aimed for a specific portion of that fragmented audience. And because there are more conservatives than liberals in the U.S., there can’t really be a pure liberal version of the Fox approach: even if a network could get as many liberals as Fox gets conservatives, it wouldn’t be enough. This is also one of the reasons liberal talk radio has never taken off – another reason being that some liberals prefer NPR anyway.

Ailes is probably right, I have to admit, that his network does have a better grasp of the fundamentals of broadcasting than MSNBC or CNN. (As he notes, Wolf Blitzer just isn’t a star personality and his show doesn’t even make good use of him) and like most television, it benefits from reflecting the vision of one person rather than a quilt of random decisions from easily-replaced people. But I think the network benefits from knowing who it wants to entertain, as opposed to CNN , which has no idea.

REVIEW: Life itself

By Joanne Latimer - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 4:15 PM - 0 Comments

The author of 21 other books, Roger Ebert has finally written a memoir about his personal life, touching only tangentially on his career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and TV personality. That’s risky business, since many readers will expect Hollywood anecdotes in a 415-page book written by someone who saw an early draft of Mean Streets, made movies with Russ Meyer, visited the set of Ingmar Bergman films, bought Quentin Tarantino a chicken sandwich at Cannes, drank with Robert Mitchum in Ireland and went on a pseudo date with Oprah. The memoir is a much more thoughtful reflection on Ebert’s trajectory from a sports reporter in Urbana, Ill., to the living rooms of America.

“I was born inside the movie of my life” is the opening line. Thankfully, he soon drops this conceit and tells an uncontrived tale about his family, his hard-living mentors and his alcoholism. He examines his uneasy relationship with his mother, Catholicism, his weight and his late co-host Gene Siskel. (They were strangers thrown together by a PBS producer. Originally, each thought the other was redundant.) When he does reminisce about showbiz, it’s to record his awe for freewheeling legends like Mitchum, Lee Marvin and John Wayne.

Ebert has had time to think about the Big Questions—God, death, love—while recovering from thyroid cancer treatments that left him unable to talk or eat. Bergman films and Cormac McCarthy’s book Suttree gave him cheer because he “had no use for happy characters. What did they know?” Without a hint of self-pity, Ebert describes what it’s like for an articulate man to have no voice, aside from a computer generated stand-in. What has been his saviour, aside from his selfless wife, Chaz? His blog, where he still follows his winning film-review formula: “Focus on what you saw and how it affected you. Don’t fake it.” Ebert took the same approach to writing this memoir, and the unflinching honesty sent this reader to the library for his other books.

Your mostly unalienable right to fly the flag

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 3:56 PM - 51 Comments

Seems the Conservative bill on flag-flying will not apply to the most powerful condo board of all.

Heritage Minister James Moore told reporters on Wednesday that he and his fellow parliamentarians would still have to abide by the rules of the House of Commons that say no flags may be flown in the windows of Parliament Hill offices…

When asked if condo owners should not be required to follow the rules of their building, in the same way that MPs are required to follow the rules of the Parliamentary precinct, the minister turned and walked away.

Do school-based obesity interventions really work?

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 3:45 PM - 20 Comments

Alan Cleaver/Flickr

We’re fatter than ever and efforts to reduce our ever-expanding waistlines are failing, according to a new report by the Community Foundations of Canada.

Between 1981 and 2009, obesity roughly doubled across all age groups and tripled for youth (age 12 to 17) in Canada. This translates to a rate of obesity that’s close to 25%.

Our padded figures have left governments scrambling to address the chronic condition. Carrying extra weight increases the risk of a range of health conditions (from Type 2 diabetes to high total cholesterol and several cancers), meaning health-care costs balloon with our waistlines. (The Community Foundations of Canada put the price tag on health spending related to obesity at between $4.6 and $7.1 billion each year.) Continue…

Ottawa pledges new Champlain bridge for Montreal

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 3:40 PM - 1 Comment

The federal government announced Wednesday it would replace Montreal’s crumbling Champlain bridge with a brand new structure. Transport Minister Denis Lebel was in Montreal for the announcement of the project, which is expected to take 10 years and cost $5 billion. In its accompanying press release, Transport Canada says it wants to explore implementing tolls on the bridge, and using public-private partnership to build it. Lebel said he doesn’t know when construction will start, adding that his ministry needs to conduct more studies.

Montreal Gazette

REVIEW: Seppuku: A history of Samurai suicide

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 2:45 PM - 0 Comments

In 1581, the Japanese lord Kikkawa Tsuneie, who had agreed to surrender his besieged castle if he was allowed to commit suicide, “heroically disembowelled himself,” according to a contemporary text. On his death day, he carefully chose his robes (“a pea-green kimono and coat of black silk with matching pea-green lining”), graciously allowed three retainers to kill themselves too, recited two poems, sliced himself once across the belly and again in a north-south direction, spoke to the swordsman ready to deliver the coup de grâce (“Generals will be inspecting this head. Make sure you cut it off well”), and died. “Such was the glorious end of lord Kikkawa, who was 34,” sums up the chronicle.

Honour cultures have always put a premium on a good death, meaning a bloody and defiant one, but few have taken it to Japanese extremes. Medieval Japan, racked by endemic warfare, had no tradition of prisoner-taking; to fall into enemy hands was, usually, to be put to death in a shameful fashion. (The very act of being captured, which inferred cowardice, was shameful in itself.) Samurai fighters also cultivated an aesthetic sense foreign to Western feudal warriors—King John of England entertained his dinner guests with hangings, not poetry recitals.

Seppuku combined everything samurai cared for. Exceedingly painful, it demonstrated courage and offered an opportunity to recite poetry or, even better, to write a poem in one’s own blood: it allowed a samurai to see himself as the master of his own fate. By the end of the Middle Ages, it was the only right way to die. After the Tokugawa shogunate enforced peace on Japan in 1603, it used seppuku as an upper-class death penalty—enemies would be ordered to do it—but smoothed its edges. The condemned had barely to touch the dagger (or a substitute paper fan) before the headsman struck. When Japan modernized in the 19th century, resisters brought back the real thing in a last-ditch defence of Old Japan, seeing seppuku as the very essence of national honour.

Marriage does a man’s body good

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 2:37 PM - 1 Comment

Canadian women are less healthy than Canadian males, according to the results of a survey conducted by Scienta Health for Maclean’s. Last year, nearly 30,000 Canadians took the survey, which asked respondents about the frequency and intensity of approximately 150 symptoms associated with discomfort, disease and emotional stress. (Take this year’s survey here.) While some of the results shouldn’t come as a surprise, others are more likely to raise eyebrows.