Death Leads to Sitcom Rediscovery

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 3:23 PM - 3 Comments

After Gaddafi died, everyone started circulating this clip from the 1987 flop sitcom Second Chance, where Gaddafi dies in 2011 (though they got the date wrong). All I could really think about while watching it is that Fox sure had some weird ideas for TV shows in its early days, and this – about a guy sent back to Earth to help his teenage self become a better person – was actually one of their less crazy outings. The Wikipedia article goes into quite a lot of detail about how the show was completely re-tooled in mid-run to drop the supernatural stuff. Little did the creators (who then went on to take over Family Matters and retool that into a quasi-supernatural show) realize that the fantasy element would be their only claim to fame.

Spain honours a Canadian who joined its fight against fascism

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 4 Comments

Jules Paivio

Yesterday, under grey skies by the banks of the Ottawa River, Spain fulfilled an old promise to a 94-year-old Canadian.

In 1938, Spain’s republican government was fighting a doomed war against a fascist insurgency led by the Spanish general Francisco Franco and backed with troops and hardware by Hitler and Mussolini. In a futile effort to force Franco to send his Italian and German allies home, Spain announced it would do the same to the thousands of volunteers who had come from around the world to share its struggle.

The Spanish government held a goodbye parade in Barcelona for the departing internationals. Dolores Ibarruri, the Spanish Communist leader more popularly known as La Pasionaria, gave a speech: Continue…

The rest of the story

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:36 PM - 4 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, Conservative MP Brian Jean stood just before Question Period to share some news with the House.

Mr. Speaker, members will be shocked to know that the CBC has not corrected the record on its misleading report from Monday night. It failed to inform Canadians about the drug treatment court exemption in our government’s safe streets and communities act. Today the Quebec Bar Association confirmed that it supports the important drug treatment court exemption in Bill C-10 for those who are seeking treatment for their addictions.

It’s impossible to apply an asterisk to words as they are spoken and Hansard doesn’t include footnotes, but, in case you were wondering, here is the story of that third sentence. Continue…

Meet the Haqqanis

By Jody White - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 1 Comment

Jalaluddin Haqqani in a 1998 photo. (Mohammed Riaz/AP Photo)

Afghanistan has long been a place where hope is in short supply. Its neighbours are hostile and meddlesome. Its government and institutions are corrupt and weak. And despite the presence of thousands of NATO troops, security is elusive thanks to Taliban bombs and bullets. Now this unhappy country faces yet another threat, one that predates the Taliban and may be competing with it at the behest of the Pakistani military as the clock winds down towards NATO’s withdrawal.

On the morning of September 13, six men disguised in burqas entered a partially-built high-rise in Kabul which overlooks both the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters. Within minutes, they were raining fire down on both buildings with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. For 20 hours they paralyzed the city and held off hundreds of Afghan troops, police and Western Special Forces while four other attackers with suicide vests prowled the city in search of targets. By the next day, all 10 attackers—along with 11 civilians and five police officers—lay dead. It was the longest and most wide-ranging attack on the Afghan capital since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001. Continue…

U.S. to withdraw remaining troops from Iraq by year-end

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:35 PM - 0 Comments

US President Barack Obama said on Friday the U.S. will withdraw all troops from Iraq by December 31, ending a conflict that has lasted nearly nine years. The announcement came after the two countries failed to reach an agreement that would have seen thousands of US military remaining in Iraq for special operations and training. Though some Iraqi officials worry that their country still needs a US military presence to help keep the peace in the face of sectarian and ethnic divides, Iraqi leaders could not agree to guarantee legal immunity to American troops left behind, as Washington demanded. The last 44,000 U.S. soldiers are scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of the year, as planned.

Washington Post

Galactose Intolerant

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:31 PM - 3 Comments

The question doesn’t yet seem settled over whether the new Battlestar Galactica movie will focus entirely on remaking the original, or whether it will take some elements from the TV remake as well. Personally I would like to see the movie be a bit closer to the original. Not because the original was better; obviously, the remake was a lot better. But fans of the original – and there are a lot of them – probably deserve something too. The point of the remake was that the original show had a good premise but did almost everything wrong. This was not very far from the truth, but it’s also true that the original show charmed and excited a lot of people, particularly kids. A movie that tried to emphasize what the Glen Larson show got right (while adding a better budget and more consistent scripting, if possible) might add something to the franchise, whereas a movie that tried to be dark and adult would just seem like it was trying too hard to imitate the excellent TV remake.

Besides, from a cynical commercial point of view, appealing to childhood nostalgia is usually a better bet for a big studio movie than appealing to fans of a cult cable TV series. Someday there will be intense nostalgia for the smart adult sci-fi shows of the ’90s and ’00s, and then we can get a movie based on the Ron Moore Galactica. For now, it’s time to throw the 1978 Galactica fans a bone.

I don’t think I would apply this to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer remake movie, because first of all, the original movie (while better than its reputation) doesn’t have the same intense following that the original Battlestar Galactica does, and second of all, because the Buffy TV series is not a clean, complete break with the movie – it tried to do better than the movie, and succeeded, but it was written by the same person, followed the events of the movie, and tried to go for a similar tonal mix (comedy and horror and teen angst) just more competently. The Buffy series was by people who found the movie disappointing, but could and did appeal even to the people who discovered the movie on video and made it a minor cult hit. The Galactica remake certainly had some admirers among fans of the original series, but was basically a different kind of show taking off from the same premise.

So is that a no?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:32 PM - 17 Comments

I’ve noted Bob Rae’s persistence in this regard before, but here, from yesterday’s QP, is the interim Liberal leader asking the Prime Minister again about tax relief.

Rae: Mr. Speaker, the small business federation has been clear about the fact that taxes on employment kill jobs. I have a simple question for the Prime Minister: in light of the current difficult economic situation in Europe and in the United States—we are seeing signs of a recession—why not freeze taxes on employment now and ensure that people are not contributing to killing jobs in Canada?

Harper: Mr. Speaker, I am surprised by this question from the leader of the Liberal Party because that party voted against tax cuts for small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada. This government has a clear objective: to keep taxes low. Obviously, it is an essential aspect of our plan for the Canadian economy, a plan that continues to create jobs. Continue…

Gel reduces women’s herpes risk, study shows

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

A vaginal gel that reduces a woman’s risk of becoming infected with the AIDS virus is proving to be even more effective against genital herpes, according to a new study reported in the New York Times. The microbicide gel, whose active ingredient is a drug called tenofovir, was created to reduce the risk of AIDS infection in Africa, but it shows great potential to reduce the chance of getting infected with herpes, too. The World Health Organization estimates that one-fifth of all sexually active adults have herpes. Getting the gel approved for the U.S. market would cost millions and take at least a few years.

New York Times

IQ can change through teenage years

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:19 AM - 1 Comment

Experts have long assumed that intellectual capacity (measured as IQ) stays about the same through a person’s life, but new research suggests it might actually improve or decline through our teen years. In the study, 19 boys and 14 girls underwent brain scans as well as verbal and non-verbal IQ tests in 2004 and 2008. A change in verbal IQ was found in 39 per cent of them, the BBC reports, and 21 per cent showed a change in performance IQ, which is a test of spatial reasoning. Increases in IQ corresponded with changes to density in certain regions of the brain.

BBC

ETA to lay down arms

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

ETA, a Basque separatist group that waged a decades-long campaign to carve a homeland from parts of Spain and France, declared a “definitive cessation of armed activity” Thursday, bringing to end a conflict that claimed more than 800 lives. The breakthrough, hailed by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as a “victory for democracy,” came after a one-day meeting Monday with international figures including key representatives from former Irish paramilitary groups. “Ours will be a democracy without terrorism,” said Zapatero, who led a crackdown on the ETA shortly after his election in 2004, “but not without memory.”

CNN

Brian Topp goes there

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:08 AM - 21 Comments

The NDP leadership candidate talks taxes.

“I will be talking about income taxes and I think it’s time for our party to step up to that plate and to be pretty clear about that because then we’ll have a mandate to act if we’re elected,” Topp said in a wide-ranging interview. He also called for a hike in corporate taxes and did not rule out a sales tax increase “at some point,” once the fragile economy is on surer footing.

Questions remain over Gadhafi’s bloody death

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:01 AM - 4 Comments

As Libyans continue to celebrate ousted dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s bloody demise, questions remain about the circumstances of his death. According to the official version of events out of Tripoli, the Colonel was killed by crossfire during fighting. That clearly contradicts video and photographic evidence that went viral on the Web on Thursday. In one video, the former leader is pulled from a truck and pushed around in a crowd of government fighters. In another, he allegedly appears dead, with blood pouring from his head staining his khaki uniform. According to the New York Times, forensic experts said the wounds in his head were consistent with an execution-style, close range shooting. A fighter on the scene told Al Jazeera that the former dictator fled an intercepted convoy and dove into a drainage pipe, soon emerging to beg for mercy. The fighter said Gadhafi carried a golden pistol in one hand and a Kalashnikov rifle in the other. A Syrian television station reported Friday that Gadhafi’s wife is calling for a UN inquiry into the circumstances of her husband’s death.

New York Times
Reuters

Greatest Hitch

By Flannery Dean - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 10:54 AM - 18 Comments

Your challenge should you choose to accept it: describe journalist Christopher Hitchens without using the words ‘contrarian’ or ‘provocateur.’

Mission impossible? It sure felt like it. Take away the well-worn descriptors—toss out agitator, fire-brand, fire-eater (there’s a lot of “fire” talk around the famous atheist) and antagonist while you’re at it— and you’re left with having to consider Hitchens’s work apart from the hard shell of his cultural persona.

That’s as it should be.

And not only because the author’s 2010 diagnosis of esophageal cancer has drawn a line under his mortality, but in an era in which Lady Gaga is also considered to be a provocateur, the term has lost something of its cachet, if not its thrust (political rather than pelvic). Continue…

Euro-zone rescue talks stall

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

Euro-zone leaders will not be able to hammer out a system to contain Europe’s spreading debt crisis in time for a much-awaited summit on October 23. Any comprehensive solution to shore-up the continents’ crumbling finances will instead have to wait until Wednesday at the earliest, an unidentified German official told the Financial Times. Stalling progress is a fundamental disagreement between France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on how to increase the resources and power of the European Financial Stability Facility to enable it to tackle the existing threats to Europe’s banks and southern Europe’s bond markets. The impasse comes as alarm bells have been sounding off all over the euro-zone this week, with Moody’s Investors Service cutting Spain’s credit rating for the third time since 2010 on Wednesday, Germany lowering its growth forecasts for 2012 on Thursday, and Italy flip-flopping on the nomination of its next central bank chief in a messy saga that’s unnerved the markets.

Financial Times

Bloomberg

BBC

Wall Street Journal

Tax the super-rich, says NDP’s leadership hopeful

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 13 Comments

The perceived frontrunner in the NDP leadership race, Brian Topp, is promising to open the door to a conversation many politicians have shied away from in recent years: hiking up taxes for the rich. Speaking with the Canadian Press, Topp said he wants to discuss raising the income tax levels of Canada’s wealthiest people. “I think it’s time for our party to step up to that plate and to be pretty clear about that because then we’ll have a mandate to act if we’re elected,” Topp said. A future hike in the sales tax and the corporate tax rate would also be an option once the economy is more stable, he added. As the Globe and Mail notes, since the Reform movement emerged from Western Canada in the early 1990s and became the backbone of today’s Conservative party, talk of tax hikes—whether only for the rich or otherwise–has become taboo in the nation’s public debate. It remains to be seen whether other contenders for the NDP’s top job will follow Topp’s lead.

The Globe and Mail

The Herb Gray School

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 17 Comments

Steven Fletcher, Oct. 19. Mr. Speaker, I reject the premise of the member’s question.

John Baird, Oct. 19. Mr. Speaker, it will not come as any surprise to my friend from northern Ontario that I do not agree with the premise of his question.

Ed Fast, Oct. 19.  Mr. Speaker, I do not accept the premise of that question.

Stephen Harper, Oct. 19. Mr. Speaker, I completely disagree with the premise of that question.

Denis Lebel, Oct. 18. Mr. Speaker, I do not accept the premise of that question.

John Baird, Oct. 17. Mr. Speaker, it will not come as any surprise to that member or to the House that I categorically reject the premise of the member’s question.

Brent Rathgeber, Oct. 17. Mr. Speaker, I absolutely disagree with the premise of that question.

John Baird, Oct. 7. Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend from Winnipeg Centre that it will not come as any surprise to him that I disagree with the premise of his question. Continue…

Difference of opinion alert

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, the official opposition suggested a difference of opinion on the government side perhaps indicated that the Prime Minister had “lost control of his caucus.”

Yesterday, with a difference of opinion on the opposition side, the government sent up Rob Merrifield to declare the NDP was consequently unfit to govern.

Mr. Speaker, our government is focused on what really matters to Canadians; that is, creating jobs, creating economic growth. Instead of working with us, the NDP caucus members have become so disunited that they are contradicting each other on important issues that are important to Canada, particularly, western Canada.

Yesterday, the NDP leader tried to argue, wrongly, that Parliament could not amend legislation that would give farmers marketing freedom. One of her own colleagues, the member Winnipeg Centre, said that he actually did not buy her argument. Now, I seldom agree with him, but on this one I do. In fact, he recognized that our legislation can give farmers the freedom that they are asking for. Unfortunately, his leader does not agree with him.

This contradictory position from the NDP is just yet another worrying example of how weak and disunited the NDP is and that it is nowhere even close to being fit to govern.

Johnny English Reborn: Mr. Bean with a licence to talk

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 3 Comments

Williams Belle (left) and Rowan Atkinson in 'Johnny English Reborn'

I’m not sure what I was doing in July of 2003 that was so pressing I neglected to see  Johnny English. Must have been sitting on a dock somewhere. Which means that I come to the sequel, Johnny English Reborn, with an unjaundiced eye. Well, not entirely. The only opportunity to see this kid-friendly movie was at a kid-friendly preview on a Saturday morning. Unless you’re actually stuck with trying to entertain a child, no self-respecting adult really feels like going to a movie on a Saturday morning, unless you’re in the thick of a film festival. So I was tad grouchy. But the movie isn’t so bad. It’s amiable, inoffensive and fitfully amusing. Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean it’s so amusing that it sends you into fits of laughter; it was amusing in fits and starts. Now, I realize “FITFULLY AMUSING!” is not a roaring endorsement, even with the exclamation point that studios routinely add when turning quotes into blurbs. But it’s hard to get terribly excited about a movie of such modest ambition. Its gentle laughs are well earned but never quite reach the belly. But compared to this weekend’s juggernaut, The Three Musketeers—which reboots Alexandre Dumas’ classic  with special effects, fireballs, airship galleons, a flying ninja sexpot, and a lot of naked ambition to launch a Pirates of the Parisians franchise—Johnny English Reborn is almost quaintly subdued. With the sequel arriving eight years after the tepid success of the original, it’s as if it can’t be bothered to be a franchise.

Directed by Oliver Parker—an Oscar Wilde fan whose films include An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest and Dorian Grey—Johnny English Reborn is a spy spoof for those who find the Austin Powers franchise too filthy. Or you could say it’s a Rowan Atkinson movie for those who find Mr. Bean too much like silent movie character. Atkinson’s Johnny English is basically Bean with a licence to talk, and the comedian animates the character with the same arsenal of rubber-faced farce that has made Bean so effective. The smug, self-possessed Johnny English is less infantile than Bean. He has a dry, misplaced poise. But he’s still a bumbling nincompoop—one whose stupidity hinges on an exaggerated sense of his own intelligence. Continue…

A kind of chaos that is always with us

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 5 Comments

National Archives of Canada/CP

History never feels like history while it’s happening. It usually feels like chaos. Like this:

“Throughout the greater part of May 1870, the Ottawa Times kept a six-column obituary of Macdonald set in type so it could be used at any time,” Richard Gwyn writes in Nation Maker, the thumping second volume of his biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. In May 1870, the new Confederation was not yet three years old. Sir John had passed a gallstone of epic proportions and he was drinking too much anyway, and the combination of the two nearly took him to his maker.

In the end he had another 21 years in him, but even if the gallstone had finished him on the spot he’d still be remembered as a veteran of countless glorious battles. Building this new country in the middle of nowhere was never an easy task. The ship of state started springing leaks almost as soon as it was launched.

Continue…

Newsmakers: Oct. 13-Oct. 20, 2011

By Martin Patriquin, Cathy Gulli and Michael Friscolanti - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 1 Comment

Samir Hussein/Wireimage/Getty Images

A royal fuss

Now that Kate is married to Prince Will and the wedding is out of the way, royal watchers and tabloid scribes can devote their full attention to her uterus. Prime Minister David Cameron has even taken an interest, proposing changes to allow any first-born child to ascend to the throne. Could the amendment have been quietly requested by Will and Kate, the tabs wondered (some noting Wills’s “thrill” with his pin-thin wife’s apparently “curvier” figure)? The Queen, according to royal sources, has meanwhile “let it be known” she is fully behind moves to repeal the primogeniture law. So is Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, despite saying, during the spring election campaign, he didn’t believe the law should be revised.

Rookie sensation

The Oilers’ Ryan Nugent-Hopkins—fondly known as “The Nooge” to Edmontonians—broke Dale Hawerchuk’s 1981 record for the earliest career hat trick by a first-round draft pick last Saturday, leading to a shower of over 100 hats at Rexall Centre, where the Oilers were edged 4-3 by Nugent-Hopkins’s hometown Canucks. Speaking with reporters after the game, the 18-year-old B.C. boy—who doesn’t look anywhere near his listed 175 lb.—shared credit with his linemates: last year’s No. 1 pick Taylor Hall, 19, and Jordan Eberle, 21. Granddaddy of hockey contentiousness, Don Cherry, meanwhile, finally caved to widespread calls for an apology to Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan and Jim Thomson after labelling them “pukes” during a characteristic rant earlier this season. Cherry, 77, withdrew his criticism of the retired NHL enforcers, who had expressed support for a ban on hockey fighting.

Continue…

No room (for rent) in Saskatchewan

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 2 Comments

Rent control might be an issue more commonly associated with a heaving metropolis like New York City, where mayoral candidate Jimmy McMillan made an Internet meme of himself last year with his exclamation that the “rent is too damn high.” But the issue has now reached comparatively sleepy, but economically booming, Saskatchewan.

In Regina, the vacancy rate is around one per cent and with monthly rates on the rise, affordable housing and the availability of rental properties are looming as key issues in the provincial election. The provincial NDP is promising, if elected, to commit $321 million over four years toward a plan that would increase the number of units, help first-time homebuyers and introduce “next generation rent control” that would include “allowances for new construction and non-corporate landlords.” Premier Brad Wall of the incumbent Saskatchewan Party has proposed a first-time homebuyer tax credit, but has only voiced support for a “voluntary” rent control system—as championed by the Saskatchewan Rental Housing Industry Association—that aims to facilitate agreements between tenants and landlords.

Last month, the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce released a report arguing that rent control has little impact on prices, while discouraging both the creation of new rental properties and the renovation of existing properties. “The concept of government intervention into rental rates, into any market place this dramatically, doesn’t make sense,” says chamber CEO Steve McLellan. The chamber would prefer changes to the tax code to encourage market expansion. “What the government should do is eliminate barriers to new growth,” McLellan says.

Barring some kind of solution, McMillan’s The Rent Is Too Damn High party may have to consider expanding north.

In conversation: Brendan Shanahan

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 9 Comments

Steve Simon/Maclean's

In 21 NHL seasons as a player, winning three Stanley Cups and an Olympic Gold, he always made things happen on the ice. But now Brendan Shanahan is out to change the game itself. As the league’s new senior vice-president of player safety and hockey operations, the 42-year-old is charged with both enforcing and rethinking the rule book. And he’s drawing a lot of heat from the game’s “purists.”

Q: The NHL season has just started and already you’re under fire. Were you surprised that the honeymoon was so short?

A: I knew that it was a controversial position, but it’s an endeavour I believe in. There’ll always be those who think every decision is too much, and there will be those who think every decision is too little. I try to keep my focus on the goal: keeping hockey physical and entertaining and passionate. But I think it can also be safer. And I think the players are already showing their ability to adapt.

Continue…

Best employers: The dragon dishes

By Claire Ward - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 1 Comment

Photography by Andrew Tolson

In a red leather jacket and black slacks, arms folded over her chest, Arlene Dickinson cuts an imposing figure on the Dragons’ Den billboards towering over Toronto’s downtown. Her dark red hair, with its signature grey streak, falls around her shoulders as she casts a no-nonsense stare down the barrel of the lens. At 55, she is a self-made millionaire, CEO of Venture Communications—a marketing agency whose blue chip client roll includes Toyota and Red Rose Tea—mother of four, divorcee and most recently, an author.

In her new book, Persuasion: A New Approach to Changing Minds, Dickinson gets personal: she writes about everything from her bad track record as an employee to the affair that led to her messy divorce. “Allowing who we are personally to come through makes us better leaders,” she tells Maclean’s. “You need to let people see you for who you really are.” Pretty bold thinking for a public figure. Most would downplay mediocrity or infidelity. But for Dickinson, transparency is power. “It’s about controlling your own narrative,” she says.

Dickinson was born in South Africa to Mormon parents of modest means. They immigrated to Calgary when she was three, and later divorced. Dickinson married at 19 and had four children in short order—an attempt, she speculates, to create the domestic bliss she never really knew growing up. She and her husband lived paycheque to paycheque, scarcely earning enough to support their young family. And she was a lousy employee, she admits—fired “more times than I care to remember.”

Continue…

Best employers: They’re happy and they know it

By Richard Warnica - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 1 Comment

Photography by Cole Garside

Emily Moore never saw herself as a lifer. “If you had asked me, would I still be an engineer 20 years out of undergrad, I would have said no,” she says. As a student at Queen’s University, Moore loved politics and literature. Today, she deals in the world of cutting-edge autoclaves. “What I’ve found,” she says, “is that it is incredibly interesting.” Today, she wouldn’t dream of leaving the world of high pressure sterilizers.

Moore graduated in 1992. She’s now the director of technology development at Hatch; the Mississauga-based engineering firm is one of Canada’s Best Employers, according to Aon Hewitt’s annual survey. Hatch isn’t the only engineering and construction firm on the list. PCL, EllisDon and Graham also ranked among the best of the best. In fact, overall, engineers were found to be more engaged in their work than any other industry in the country.

Part of the reason, says Aon Hewitt’s Neil Crawford, is that engineering firms tend to be well set up for employee ownership. That’s certainly true at Hatch, which is entirely employee owned. That lets the company take the long view, says John Pearson, the firm’s global managing director. Because they’re not focused on quarterly returns, Hatch executives can maintain staffing levels through lean seasons and invest in technology that might not pay immediate dividends. “We’re working on stuff right now that honestly will probably benefit my grandkids,” Pearson says.

Continue…