Who's suing whom?
By Cigdem Iltan - Friday, June 17, 2011 - 1 Comment
A round-up of weird and wacky lawsuits from across the country
Alberta: A former high school student says she was seriously injured when her desk collapsed and is suing Edmonton Public Schools for $200,000. The woman alleges she suffered post-traumatic headaches and joint dysfunction—the result, she claims, of the desk supplier or manufacturer’s negligence and the school’s failure to maintain the desks.
Manitoba: A Winnipeg hospital is suing its auditor for allegedly failing to notice $1.5 million skimmed from a hospital-operated ATM over the course of a decade. According to the lawsuit, hospital staff—not the auditor—discovered that a finance clerk who had access to cash used to replenish the bank machine had allegedly defrauded the hospital. The hospital alleges that its auditor misstated assets in financial statements and did not act in accordance with “generally accepted accounting principles.”
Ontario: Two seniors are suing Ottawa transit for injuries they suffered after falling on a bus, allegedly because of bad driving. One woman says she fell after the bus jerked to a stop, while the other says she fell when the bus sped up too quickly. The women are each seeking $2.1 million in damages.
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Cooler runnings
By Jenny Manzer - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 4:40 PM - 6 Comments
A Calgary team’s cutting-edge 3-D modelling system diagnoses, treats, and even predicts runners’ injuries
Photograph by Chris Bolin
It was as if my body’s warranty had run out. I turned 40, and my left knee called it quits. After 25 years of running, I couldn’t do it anymore. Full stop. I’d had grand hopes this year of running a 10K race in under 40 minutes. I’d even coined a slogan: “Over 40, under 40!” But I couldn’t even walk or climb stairs without feeling pitchforks of pain.
My family doctor and physiotherapist agreed on the most likely culprit: patellofemoral pain syndrome—pain under the kneecap, a common running injury. For many it becomes recurrent, and some shelve their running shoes for good. By chance I discovered the existence of a cutting-edge 3-D biomechanical test for runners from a research team at the University of Calgary. Their 3-D gait analysis takes some of the guesswork out of injury treatment and prevention. It’s akin to having X-ray eyes to see what’s happening when your foot hits the pavement.
The test involves placing close to 40 markers at exact points on a runner’s feet, lower and upper legs, and pelvis. The subject walks and runs on a treadmill while three video cameras collect pictures—about 200 images a second. The gait information is then modelled into a three-dimensional stick figure. It’s the same motion-capture technology used to create the Lord of the Rings movies, says Reed Ferber, director of the University of Calgary’s Running Injury Clinic.
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Patrick Chan's comeback
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments
He’s perfected the quad, is injury free, and has a new attitude. Next up: world domination
Photography Chris Bolin; Dmitry Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images
A furious Patrick Chan is hard to imagine. Downcast, maybe. Buffeted enough by a bad performance, or the vagaries of figure skating judging, to temporarily lose that wide grin. But the 20-year-old throwing a foot-stomping tantrum, complete with screams and curses, is a mental image about as difficult to reconcile as a fuzzy bunny with a machine gun. It simply doesn’t compute.
Still, the affable four-time Canadian figure skating champion (once as a junior, and for the past three years running, the senior men’s winner) swears it happened, out of public view, at the Vancouver Games, last Feb. 16. On the biggest stage of his career, in front of a hyped-up home crowd and an expectant nation, Chan had bombed in the short program. He bobbled the landing on his opening triple axel, stumbled during a step sequence—usually his bread-and-butter—and even received a penalty for finishing his routine after the music, a mistake he had never before made in competition. The score of 81.12 was good enough for seventh place, but a death blow to his Olympic medal hopes. So Chan smiled, waved, threw some kisses to the fans and cameras, then slipped behind the curtains and erupted. “My coaches had never seen me so mad,” he says. “I just said to myself, that’s not the way it was supposed to turn out.” Thirteen years of skating, building toward one ultimate dream, only to see it dashed in just under three minutes. You’d drop a couple of f-bombs, too.
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Smoke shacks and a waterslide
By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment
Who’s suing whom
Getty Images
Nova Scotia: A 33-year-old man is suing a pub in Dartmouth, alleging that early one morning last May he was left “highly intoxicated” after being “over-served alcohol.” He claims that the bar is liable for the resulting car accident and injuries he sustained as a result of driving drunk. A bartender at the pub denied the charge.
Ontario: Tobacco farmers in Ontario have launched a $500-million class-action lawsuit in federal court against Ottawa for failing to collect taxes from illegal smoke shacks. The suit alleges that Ottawa ignored “flagrant violations” of the prohibition on the sale of black-market tobacco.Manitoba: A Winnipeg man is suing a North Dakota hotel for damages, alleging to have suffered head and neck injuries because an attendant was not in place on the receiving end of a waterslide. The man is seeking $194,000 for medical bills and other economic losses, and at least $75,000 for personal injuries. Lawyers for the hotel say the lawsuit has no merit and asked that it be dismissed.
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Olympic secrets revealed
By Ken Macqueen and Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 21 Comments
Maclean’s exclusive: An inside look at our high-tech, mind-bending plans to dominate the podium at the 2010 Games
In early December, Bob Joncas, the high-performance manager for the Canadian Snowboard Federation, boarded a jet for Switzerland. In the cargo hold, rolled into a heavy bag, was the result of three years of hush-hush research, development and testing. Joncas was bound for a mountainside factory in Braunwald to deliver a secret weapon of sorts, one of dozens of clandestine products and tactics that Canadian athletes will deploy in February at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games.
Joncas presented the bag’s contents to Hansjürg Kessler, considered by many elite athletes as the world’s best custom snowboard maker. Kessler was at work on a special Olympic order for the Canadian national team—tailored-to-measure boards with at least two significant modifications from any he has ever made. One was a super low-friction base, to be applied to the bottom of the boards from a 30-m roll of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene that Joncas carried from Canada. The other is a composite plate for bindings that is so revolutionary Canada’s boarders have hidden it under duct tape and MACtac during their frequent appearances on World Cup podiums this winter.
The base, which alpine boarders won’t use until Games time, cuts friction by 15 to 20 per cent compared to commercially available products, its creators say. “Small differences can be huge,” says Christos Stamboulides, the University of British Columbia researcher who formulated the product. Less friction equals more speed, and perhaps a podium finish, says project supervisor Savvas Hatzikiriakos, a specialist in fluid mechanics and friction. “In the last Olympics, Canada won a lot of fourth places,” he says. “Nobody remembers the fourth-place athletes.”
That quest for those small differences is what drives the aptly named Top Secret project—a five-year, $8-million technological arms race unprecedented in Canadian sport history. Researchers across the country have been breaking down the science of winter sport, looking for any edge in training, human performance and equipment. “To date, we’ve completed 55 projects, using 17 different universities and institutions,” says Todd Allinger, the Vancouver-based biomechanist who manages the program. “I think it’s been very successful.” Now, a month from the Olympic opening ceremonies, Maclean’s takes an exclusive inside look.
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The reawakening of Capt. Greene
By Ken MacQueen - Sunday, December 14, 2008 at 11:00 PM - 32 Comments
Trevor Greene not only survived an axe blow to the head, he lived to speak, move, write a book, and soon, marry.
Canadian army Capt. Trevor Greene is talking. Really, it’s hard to overstate how amazing that is. He’s sitting in the big easy chair in the den off the kitchen of the Nanaimo home he shares with his fiancée, Debbie Lepore, and their 3½-year-old daughter, Grace. The voice is quiet, for a big man of six foot four. The thoughts are clear and unflinching. Words are rationed; the sentences short, stripped of extraneous weight for their march across the wounded terrain of his brain. Like when he describes first meeting Debbie in 2001, at what he calls a Vancouver bar and she prefers to think of as a restaurant. They were with separate groups at separate tables. “I looked across the room,” the infantryman says, “and she captured me.” That says it all.
Lepore, smiling, arches an eyebrow at his hyperbole. “Across the room,” she says, “wasn’t it about five feet?” He shrugs. “It was her smile,” he continues, “and her laugh.” Whatever the distance, they’ve been closer ever since. Except for his deployment to Afghanistan, of course. She wasn’t there on March 4, 2006, when the platoon he was part of visited the village of Shinkay, when they sat with a circle of village elders under the trees, in the shade by the river. It was his last memory of Afghanistan. The Canadians had their helmets off as a sign of respect. Greene’s job was civilian-military co-operation, to help villages in Canada’s area of responsibility with access to clean water, medical facilities, electricity and schools.
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One nasty looking football injury
By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 5:04 PM - 2 Comments
Not sure why the hell there were service carts in the endzone, but this …
Not sure why the hell there were service carts in the endzone, but this just looks downright painful. And believe it or not, the Houston WR who ran into the carts isn’t mad at Marshall University for their unbelievable negligence.
NOTE: You might want to fast-forward to about the 30 second mark.
