Hurricane Eye

Why can't we get it right?

2006-08-07T23:06:00.000-04:00

And by "we" I mean those of us on the left.

Thanks to AP.

Finally!

2006-08-07T18:40:00.000-04:00

At long last, the Borat movie. Brilliant.

Not the British children

2006-08-07T18:38:00.000-04:00

More YouTube goodness...

Shuffle (for pre-dinner drinks)

2006-07-28T19:49:00.000-04:00

Rise Up With Fists!! - Jenny Lewis With The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
Train in Vain (Stand by Me) - The Clash - London Calling
Glad Tidings - Van Morrison - Moondance
End of the Line - The Traveling Wilburys - The Traveling Wilburys - Vol. 1
Chicago - Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Time To Move On - Tom Petty - Wildflowers
When The Day Is Short - Martha Wainwright - Martha Wainwright
This Is Us - Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris - All The Roadrunning
Dance Me To The End Of Love - Madeleine Peyroux - Careless Love
Election Day - Lyle Lovett - My Baby Don't Tolerate
Romeo Had Juliette - Lou Reed - New York
That's Me - Paul Simon - Surprise

On shuffle, prior to dinner, with drinks and friends. Discuss.

Inexplicably left out of the movie

2006-07-22T15:38:00.000-04:00

Fans of Leonard Cohen should check out "I'm Your Man," the tribute concert/documentary screening in theatres now. While the production values are subpar, the performances are decent and Cohen is candid and chatty during the extended discussion sections. Anyhow, the great Martha Wainwright performs "The Traitor" in the film (she also sings a verse of "Hallelujah"); she did my favourite Cohen song, "Tower of Song," on Letterman to promote the film and the upcoming record. The movie ends with U2 (ugh) backing Cohen on "Tower," which explais why Martha's (better) version was left out. Anyhow, enjoy.

Playoffs

2006-04-30T11:48:00.000-04:00

Two important steps:

Grow a beard.
Visit Puck This!, a new hockey blog. Read the amazing EA Sports NHL 2006 tournament liveblogs and sit in awe.

Shuffle

2006-04-17T19:10:00.000-04:00

Recently played:

Leonard Cohen, "Diamonds In The Mine" from Songs of Love and Hate. Rowdy, rambunctious, loud, everything you don't expect a Leonard Cohen song to be. Totally accessible and fun.

Johnny Cash, "Devil's Right Hand" from Unearthed II: Trouble In Mind. I've had trouble getting into these tunes since I picked up the big box set a couple of years ago. I loved the individual American Recordings albums individually, but five discs seemed somehow impenetrable. Here Johnny accentuates Steve Earle's tune with a crunchy electric guitar. Great tune.

George Harrison, "Brainwashed" from Brainwashed. Fucking brilliant. Harrison's last tune before his death (though rumours of oodles of more material, including what can only be a terribly depressing take on Paul Simon's "Run That Body Down," recorded in George's last sick years have been around for a few years). Straight ahead power chords, direct lyrics, a great line about Bullshit Avenue, a tabla and slide guitar break and a minute and a half of George's mantra. So bittersweet.

Van Morrison, "Glad Tidings" from Moondance. Fucking brilliant too. Immortalized at the end of the last Sopranos season, as Johnny Sack is hauled down by federal agents while Tony runs for cover in the snow. The bassline grabs you and won't let go. And those horns. How come nobody writes decent horn parts anymore?

Rick Moranis, "Nine More Gallons," from The Agoraphobic Cowboy. Great non-rhyme:

Working nights
I'm always tired
I hope my boss
Doesn't get me laid off

Rick, you had me at the title. Who else could write a credible bluegrass song about inadequacy that's utterly convincing?

Mood-killer

2006-04-11T23:57:00.000-04:00

Atrios is right. Hopefully Billmon is wrong. Someday someone will ask me what was the news story of my twenties. Instead of America's desire to fuck the whole damned world, I'll mumble something about Scott Pederson, shark attacks and BradJenLina.

"Surprise"

2006-03-28T22:52:00.000-05:00

Paul Simon returns with "Surprise," the singer's first new album in six years, due May 9th. Read more about it at Lasers In The Jungle.

The Associated Press notes that "Surprise" comes twenty years after the mammoth "Graceland" and forty years after "The Sound Of Silence."

Not a bad streak - even better than the Habs.

Heather Mills Has Really Let Herself Go

2006-03-04T02:10:00.000-05:00

Yet another reason not to watch CNN.

Buy my computer

2006-02-09T21:00:00.000-05:00

One of a kind. For sale here.

The Day of Good News

2006-02-05T15:37:00.000-05:00

A couple of items today:

According to the Los Angeles Times, Paul Simon's long-awaited new album, apparently called "Surprise," is due before June.
Bob Dylan spent last week in the lovely burgh of Poughkeepsie New York, rehearsing for recording sessions in Manhattan.

This is news?

2005-11-28T23:33:00.000-05:00

I thought PM PM declared the election with his bold address to the nation last June. Today's special from Ottawa has only brought the vote closer by, oh, seven-eight weeks. Whatever.

The problem of the false dilemma

2005-11-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

Ask an entertainment company executive or an American politician about the problem of file-sharing and intellectual property rights and you'll get a classic false dilemma response That is, that file-sharing inherently enables copyright violation and therefore must be stopped, lest the entertainment business suffer ad inifinitem.

The great Matthew Yglesias points to a study concluding that file-sharing does result in fewer album sales, that file-sharing allows less popular artists to earn a greater market share and that the "gain to society" resulting from file-sharing is worth three times the loss of sales to record companies.

Why is this relevant (the last point in particular)? Contrary to what your favourite D.C. lobbyist might suggest, copyright laws, as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, exist to ensure competition. In other words, to protect the consumer from monopolies and a lack of meaningful choice. Copyright was envisioned to promote innovation by allowing providers to secure the rights to their product for a limited time, not to give music business executives a handy excuse for developing an untenable business model.

The semi-colon; use it

2005-11-20T12:01:00.000-05:00

Writing in the Times, Ben Macintyre delivers a ringing endorsement of the semi-colon. Read it; use it.

Finding ways to win

2005-11-15T21:39:00.000-05:00

A tip of the hat to Bob Gainey, Claude Julien and the Montreal Canadiens, who find ways to win that excite their fans and keep fingernails trim. Unlike the ignoble Ottawa Senators, who would rather score four goals in the first five minutes, the Habs have been squeaking out one-goal victories and come-from-behind rallies, acccepting defeat only in OT, once a handy point has been secured.

Firewagon hockey it's not, and though it might be nice to win by two, the Habs are back. Courage!

Amos Lee

2005-11-15T21:30:00.000-05:00

Man, is this overdue. Amos Lee put in a solid performance at La Tulipe last month, performing just about all of his eponymous album plus a bunch of new tunes before a fucking annoying crowd. The guy in front of me couldn't decide if he should sing along or talk to his ass-ugly girlfriend, so he did both. Despite awful sound (way too much bass; that sort of thing shouldn't happen at a small venue like La Tulipe) and the superficial crowd, Lee and his band played from the heart. New tunes, in particular one about doing coke on a night train (felicitations, M. Boisclair!), whet the appetite for a follow-up record (with a little more bass and drums and a little less sleepy Norah Jones - who has appeared on stage with Willie Nelson, Paul Simon AND Bob Dylan this year - kudos).

The higlight of the night was a gorgeous cover of "A Change is Gonna Come," the Sam Cooke standard Lee performed when I saw him in Chicago, which managed to shut up the chatty Cathy all around us. Lee took some time to come out of his shell on stage, but the band was tight from the first note. Opener Mutlu was a blast (one cannot omit mention of his Justin Timberlakeesque ode to board games) who probably gets straight A's at college.

Luminous

2005-11-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

Liev Schreiber's adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated" is a charming, tender account of intergenerational and international rapprochement. Foer's novel weaves together several stories. That of our hero, Jonathan Safran Foer, and his "very rigid search" for the woman who saved his grandfather from the nazis (aided by his translator, Ukraine's finest playa, Alex; his grandfather, also named Alex, who is both blind and the only one capable of driving; and grandpa's "seeing-eye bitch," Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.) is played out on film. Schreiber has kept out the parallel story of Trachimbrod, the shtetl home to Jonathan's grandfather (his namesake, Safran), which is perfectly understandable, since it wouldn't work at all, and too bad, because it's the most imaginative part of the story.

The film offers some unlikely pairings: Jonathan, an obsessive collector in constant fear of forgetting to remember, and the sister of Augustine (the woman who saved Safran), who heartfully announces that the search for Trachimbrod is over ("You are here. I am it.") before displaying her extensive collection of Trachimbrod mementos (wedding rings, photos, dust, etc.).

The film works best, though, because of the excellent duo of Alex and Alex, who occupy all the empty space emitted by the little boy lost Elijah Wood. Jonathan's search is really (young) Alex's search - to the heart of his own family history. Foer lovingly and sharply gets to the heart of a grand intergenerational divide. The twist at the end of the story isn't a big surprise, and Schrieber treats it well.

"Everything is Illuminated" is funny and visually stunning. It deals with a ticky subject lightly enough to merit a hearty endorsement.

You're a shmuck

2005-11-15T20:58:00.000-05:00

If you don't read Paul Wells. His Maclean's blog, Inkless Wells is a daily first stop. His column in this week's issue would be worth the price of admission alone were it not available free online.

Ballot blues

2005-11-05T20:18:00.000-05:00

Pollsters are expecting very weak turnout at tomorrow's election, owing to the lacklustre campaign (equally the fault of a couple of ho-hum mayoral candidates and a lazy press). Unfortunately, I'll be among those not voting, not because I choose not to, but because I'm not registered. Basically, I changed my address after the registration deadline (which was in September), and am in electoral limbo: I can demonsrate my citizenship well enough, I'm listed in the Quebec election file, but I won't be able to speak my voice at a polling station tomorrow. It should be noted that the federal government will allow citizens to register up to the last minute; only the Province of Quebec won't tolerate "late" registration (the woman who explained it to me attributed the regulaiton to fraud prevention).

In any case, I'm still not entirely sure who should be the next mayor. Being disenfranchised hasn't exactly inspired any desire to compare election platforms and past records. The general shittiness of the campaign - and the media's inability to lift it out of the doldrums, partially by ignoring Projet Montreal's Richard Bergeron - makes you want to support the unconventional choice, i.e., the guy who hasn't been mayor. Then again, having looked at the PM platform, I'd be reluctant to cast my ballot for Bergeron.

That leaves Bourque and Tremblay. Tremblay seems to be a superwonk (not at all a bad thing) who can't seem to get a grip on the horrid crappiness that is municipal government in Quebec. While he's not impressive, he does have a grasp of the city's main challenges, if not an efficient way of overcoming them. Bourque helped validate the Parti Québecois agglomeration of the city with his endless "One Island, One City" blather. If only the results were disastrous; I'll leave it to the municipal policy experts to figure out if properly governing the greater Montreal region will ever be possible. Bourque also seems to be arrogant as hell, but you shouldn't really hold that kind of thing against a politician - the ones who seem humble may just be better at hiding their contempt for others.

So call it a very, very modest endorsement of Gerald Tremblay. Here's hoping yours truly is on the voter rolls come the next election. Lord knows the city won't be giving me a break on my property taxes.

Enlarge Molson Stadium?

2005-10-16T14:23:00.000-04:00

The Als and McGill University are trying to leverage as-yet unpledged $4 million to get the city, the province and the feds to invest $23 million to add 5,000 seats to Molson Stadium. While CFL football has been a hit in Montreal since the Alouettes moved back to the staidum on the hill several years ago. The team is asking season ticket holders to pony up at least $250 each (tax deductible, naturally) to get the ball rolling.

While professional sports and university infrastructure are important to a city's lifeline, there doesn't seem to be anything pressing the team, other than visions of a better bottom line. There's nothing to suggest the team would regularly sell an additional 5,000 seats per game (though it's not hard to imagine), and with Quebec's universities claiming they need an injection of at least $375 million, why should we spend so much to make a football team more lucrative. Why not, say, invest in the symphony orchestra - the plaything of a different kind of elite - and end the MSO strike? Why not tack on a $5,000 assessment to each hypothetical new seat? When will governments learn that sports is a business that should do fine on its own?

Autumn

2005-10-15T17:16:00.000-04:00

When speech becomes a crime
silence leads the spirit over the bridge of time - Paul Simon

Autumn
Inside me the season is autumn
the chill is in me, you can see through me,
and I am sad, but not altogether cheerless,
and filled with humility and goodness

But if I rage sometimes,
then I am the one whose rage is shedding my leaves,
and the simple thought comes sadly to me
that raging isn't really what is needed.

The main need is that I should be able
to see myself and the struggling, shocked world
in autumnal nakedness,
when even you, and the world, can be seen right through.

Flashes of insight are the children of silence.
It doesn't matter, if we don't rage aloud.
We must calmly cast off all mere noise
in the name of the new foliage.

Something has apparently happened to me,
and I am relying on nothing but silence,
when the leaves laying themselves one on another
inaudibly become the earth.

And you can see it all, as if from a height,
when you can shed your leaves at the right time,
when without passion inner autumn
lays its airy fingers on your forehead....

-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No fear, no loathing

2005-10-15T16:15:00.000-04:00

It seems that few Montrealers will actually be going to the polls on November 6; nobody I've talked to can tell you the difference between Gérald Tremblay and Pierre Bourque, much less between the various posts to be filled (do you know which responsibilities belong to the city councillor and not the borough mayor?).

In any case, the youth/third-way/intelligentsia (i.e., my friend Tim) suggested I check out Projet Montréal. The PM's platform is prertty typical stuff: naive and noble. I am one hundred per cent in favour of any initiative to slow down, let alone stop, urban sprawl. Entire sectors of the Montreal core are ripe for development, something which has not gone unnoticed by just about anyone who's thought about the future of a great city for a couple of minutes. That said, and as Tim correctly pointed out, nothing is going to bring three million people downtown. The PM promises to create development by parking lots into affordable residential development. Unless they plan on splitting the cost of real estate development down the middle with the builders, the market will continue to dictate what gets converted and what remains cheap parking. Montreal isn't exactly lacking new housing. And thanks to the existing affordable housing grant program, which provides amounts in the neighbourhood of $6,500 to purchasers of affordable housing in the city centre who promise not to move for three years, there's no need for a new mechanism to intice young people to buy property downtown (though some publicity might help: how many people under 35 pay more in rent than they would in mortgage payments?).

The real housing crunchy the city faces, and the trend it needs to reverse, has to do with young families. Imagine a married couple that together earns a decent living. They decide to have a child, maybe two. Mom will take maternity leave and see her pay reduced to a quarter of what it once was. No biggie, they'll get by - but they need a place to live. The five-and-a-half is great but not what they have in mind for their kids. Interest rates are low and there's some money in the bank. Where do they go? You've probably seen this story played out, so you know that the West Island, Laval or the South Shore are add a happy new family to their tax base; they'll buy a nice house, with a yard and a deck, and raise a family.

If the City of Montreal (the old city, not the new additions that haven't demerged yet) is going to last long-term, it's got to make a case for families like these. The residential project that sprung up on the undeveloped land south of the St. Lawrence could have been built in the vast swath of empty lots that fill the southern half of downtown. The options should not be a half-a-million dollar home in NDG or the suburbs.

***
Projet Montréal has some ideas about making the city green, and not in the Pierre Bourque put-flowers-everywhere way. It would reduce speed limits (a smash at the ballot box) on main arteries in the city, because traffic isn't quite fucked up enough, and would order the cops to issue more tickets. Pro-environmental sustainability is crucial to long-term development. Public transit should be fast, efficient and inexpensive. Driving your car shouldn't be the only option, especially for those who would prefer choice. But an anti-car platform is a big middle finger to a middle class that, though it's not toally squeezed, doesn't have a lot of room to move. It also demonstrates an unwillingness to accept that a city needs to be governed by a party that can at least empathize with its total diversity of citizens.

Also, there's nothing easily accessible about how the PM would pay for any of these great initiatives (the $40 bus pass that cost half what it's worth, for instance), let alone surmount the cruel and urgent problems Montreal faces, i.e., the incredible shittiness of our above- and underground infrastructure. It makes me wonder why anybody would want to be mayor of a city that just went through an unwanted wedding and a messy divorce with itself. To top it off, the provincial government, which controls the noose around the mayor's neck, won't pony up the dough to restore the economic centre of the state it governs.

***
The issues seem important and complex, if not urgent - to me, at least. But the candidates have been spending time appropriating and pimping big ideas put forth by others and bickering about non-scandals. Voters have no idea what any of the parties would do in office and get no help from the press. With less than a month to go, what does the Montreal Gazette do? It writes a story blaming everyone but itself for the lacklustre campaign. This from a newspaper whose sole contribution is to try and trump allegations of corruption at city hall (stop the fucking presses). A sampling:

Media coverage has focused more on the leaders' race and campaign glitches - Team Tremblay's English-language "Go" slogan, last-minute candidate dropouts from Team Bourque - than what's at stake for voters, Giasson said.
...
Part of the problem with the 2005 elections in Montreal could be the similarities in Tremblay's and Bourque's programs: beautify the city, keep taxes in check, upgrade infrastructure.

Instead of beginning with that as a premise and then writing about the different levers each candidate would use to bring about those goals, or exploring their records of promises and achievements, the Gaz decides to wallow in its laziness and accuse the candidates of not being interesting enough to cover. Here's hoping that some actual coverage might show up in the next few weeks.

Coolest restaurant ever

2005-10-07T17:31:00.000-04:00

From the Jerry-Seinfeld-Seal-of-Approval department comes Cereality, the world's greatest restaurant. The Pennsylvania-based chain serves nothing but cereal at its shops in Philly, Tempe and Chicago. Co-founders Rich Bacher and David Roth have developed a great niche concept - a restaurant serving cereal, exclusively - and found the right venue for it: U.S. college campuses. Roth and Bacher have tapped into the knowledge that's second-nature to cereal-lovers the world over: twice as many flavours is way more than double the experience (lucky charms mixes with anything). Add toppings and a customized spoon that allows you to slurp up the milk at the bottom of the bowl and you just might figure out what makes Cap'n Crunch shred your soft palette.

Here's hoping Cereality makes it north of the border (Montreal's sizable, centrally-located university student population could easily sustain a céréalité).

More on Ignatieff

2005-10-01T01:58:00.000-04:00

More coming in a future post - would I really not vote for the guy?

In the meantime, go read Sheamus's thoughts on the issue. A sheer joy.

(And stick around for a unique collection of movie reviews, one post below.)

Keep it loose

2005-10-01T01:55:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts I had listening to Amos Lee's eponymous début album while waiting for class to begin:

Amos Lee has two problems. The first has to do with the words, the second, the music. Lyrics. They count. Brian Eno recently told a U.K. paper that working with Paul Simon on an upcoming project (Eno is rumoured to provide musical landscapes for Simon's next batch of songs) revived his interest in lyricism.

Lyrics matter.

Lyrics like "people tell me to keep on dreaming/that's just what I'm gonna do" don't, even if you drag out the last few words so that they're longer than the first. "I am at ease in the arms of a woman" is a great opening line. It's the other 29 that struggle to keep up. Some songwriters aren't worthy of these criticisms - you don't expect poetry from Ringo Starr. But an artist as seemingly clever as Amos Lee flashes enough to create expectations of more. But then you hit lines like "every moral has a story, every hand needs a glove."

I guess the problem with pop music is that so many artists (and executives, and listeners) expect accessible to equal dumb. You don't need a swollen vocabulary and a Ph.D. to make your point, but the words still need to resonate. Songs, after all, are about communication emotions that can't be appreciated when spoken. Emotions that need rhythm and rhyme; but the feeling has got to capture your interest.

Even worse is Lee's great voice. The man has one of the strongest voices out there - his loudness range is huge, from whispery thin to gospelly rapturous. When he ends a set with "A Change Is Gonna Come," you can feel the earth under your feet. Singing about being unable to afford his rent makes you feel the couch imprinting itself on your ass. Which would you prefer?

The second problem - the musical one - has to do with Norah Jones. Specifically, the Norah sound - slow, organic, lush, sleepy. It works for Norah for five minutes on television. It works for Madeleine Peyroux because her band plays jazz. It doesn't work for Amos Lee because it plays against his strengths. Lee is as exciting live - with a crack band - as he is drowy on record. I saw him open two shows for Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard earlier this year in Chicago. Each song had a vitality that I was expecting on Lee's album; I'm still looking for it. The songs he's written are musically interesting enough. What they need are some colourful instrumentation - horns instead of strings, electric guitars matched with acoustic.

Lee will be at La Tulipe in October; I'll be there with high expectations. His guitar will jump, his band will rock and his voice will burst. Here's hoping he'll do "All of Me," the standard he nailed in Chicago. "Keep it loose, keep it tight," Lee sings. Amos - keep it live, already.

King of the press

2005-09-28T22:40:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker Magazine, which it seems can do no wrong under the stewardship of David Remnick (read his "King of the World" to understand why people connect deeply with the sport of boxing), just keeps getting better. OK, so it's support for the war in Iraq was just plain dumb; everybody gets one do-over.

Following last year's complete collection of cartoons, the folks at Condé Nast have put out "The Complete New Yorker," an eight-DVD collection of every single issue the magazine published in its eighty-year history (until this February; updates will be issued annually). And when they say "complete," they mean it. Each disc contains several years of scanned issues - tables of contents, ads, cartoons, articles - you name it.

The best part? The whole thing can be picked up for under a hundred Canadian dollars. Imagine what that would cost in Nexis searches.

The Prophet Neil

2005-09-28T22:34:00.000-04:00

Though "Greendale" received critical acclaim, Neil Young hasn't done much that's interested me since "Silver and Gold." So the hype for "Prairie Wind," his new record, should have been taken with a grain of salt. As it turns out, Young has produced a gem - a touching, gently rocking Nashville record with a series of great tunes on it. The album is one of the strongest of the year, despite its closing song.

"When God Made Me," which Young performed on television post-Katrina, breaks a vital rule of popular music: leave God out of it. While some of the best music out there is only a generation or two removed from the gospel records of the first half of the twentieth century, songwriters who try and tackle theology generally fail.

Alluding to a higher being, addressing issues of faithfulness and mysticism - all fine topics. But putting a pair of dei-glasses and describing what you see belongs in the eighth grade.

The Public Intellectual

2005-09-26T21:15:00.000-04:00

Concordia's journalism program invited Michael Ignatieff to deliver a thirtieth anniversary lecture Friday night. The topic, "The Journalist as Public Intellectual," left something to be desired (though it did allow the speaker to get in some needed self-deprecation). On the shuttle ride over to the renewed Loyola campus, I tried to figure out what Ignatieff would talk about. His credentials, both as journalist and intellectual, are world class; the rumours of his eventual foray into federal politics would humidly surround his remarks, if not his body language. So I thought he might talk about the journalist and the intellectual as catalysts for meaningful social change; a nice set-up for an observer to enter the political fray.

I wondered how an activist journalist can make the transition from observer, dissenter and gadfly to defender of Her Royal Majesty. If Canada's political order is ready for it, what about the rest of us? Presumably, a Prime Minister Ignatieff would lead Canadians along an international human rights interventionist path - finding areas around the world where Canadian minds, might and money could make a meaningful difference, and deploying there. Would welcoming such an agenda signal a shift in Canadians' attitudes toward sacrifice? If so, will the political reality of minority governments and assymetrical federalism allow for more talk about a greater good? And how will Ignatieff's journalism fit in?

***
Ignatieff enters a room with little of the fanfare that accompanies those who seek the highest office; he's no rock star, which means that, for now, he's got to win every room he enters - if he does have political ambitions. Early on in his remarks, it became clear that he does, and the answers he provided during the extended Q&A suggested that his political antenna is sharper than you might think.

Ignatieff approached the issue of the journalist as public intellectual well enough. It seemed that he too had trouble with the topic, though his points about it were well taken. Basically, he argued that the journalist must always ask himself, "Que sais-je?" - "What do I know?" That sense of self-awareness, of understanding the limitations of your knowledge as a stepping stone, not a restraint, is particularly worthwhile for those interesting in pursuing questions of truth and understanding and translating the answers into action. Ignatieff spoke of his journalistic endeavours in Kosovo as providing the spark for his shift toward international interventionism.

He addressed Iraq head on, accepting that he had cheerleaded the war into being (with a long liberal-hawk piece about the American empire in the New York Times Magazine in early 2003), but providing an acceptable rationale for it: he had spent time with the Kurds in Northern Iraq, learning firsthand of the atrocities committed by Saddam. Que sais-je. The experience of being there - of being a journalist - when combined with the work of the intellectual - taking the big view - left him with no choice but to advocate for Saddam's removal.

It's a shame that a man with such an excellent mind and such a grand reach could read the tea leaves about Iraq so badly. Yes, Saddam had to go. Yes, he was a toturer and a threat. But the faith that the pro-war crowd put in the American ability to gather intelligence and nation-build was a tragic disaster.

The question that will dog candidate Ignatieff more than any other is about his reading Iraq so badly. Were his critical abilities swayed by the influence of his admittedly short time in Northern Iraq? Does a man of his pedigree and prestige - groomed in the halls of Harvard and displayed on the BBC - have anything close to an ear to the ground? Will Canadians rally around a genius with the grandest of international ambitions?

OK, a few questions.

***
In any case, Michael Ignatieff's counsel to the crowd Friday afternoon was very useful for a group of budding journalists (not to mention those who'd been around the block, and those of us who've taken lateral moves). It's most important to know what you know, as Don Rumsfeld might put it. But don't stop there. Step back, inform yourself of the context, the existing schools of thought, the critical perspectives you lack. And recognize that sometimes things don't go as planned: "Bieng there really matters, and being there can lead you wrong."

***
Andrew Potter, co-author of "The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed," argues that the Michael Ignatieffs of the world should stick to better things than government. We treat our political leaders like garbage, thereby asking for the same in return. The talent of our country deserve better. And voting for a Michael Ignatieff wouldn't be easy to do. His comments about the CBC (a sacred institution) and the military (fund it and give it a raison d'être) gave his answers to the Q&A a politician's leitmotif. They also proved that his sense of judgment has recovered since the war began. But it's hard to imagine Ignatieff faring better than any potential challengers in the gladhanding that seems to matter in retail politics. His mind may be sharper than Trudeau's, but his flair, if it exists, hibernates. He'd be crazy to run and most of us would be crazy to vote for him.

That said, a section in James Surowiecki's excellent book "The Wisdom of Crowds" ends with a relevant thought: "Individually irrational acts, in other words, can produce a collectively rational outcome."

Vol. II

2005-08-24T23:49:00.000-04:00

Avenue Q - believe the hype. "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" would be an early contender for song of the year if it weren't from like four years ago. Not always ahead of the curve here at Hurricane Eye.
Berger's Delicatessen - everything you would expect it to be. Matzoh ball was a little too fluffy for my taste, but the egg salad sandwich (you gotta mix it up - Katz's provided pastrami on Monday) was divine. Knishes were strange. Quick service in the middle of the Diamond District - can't be beat.
Tenement houses - sound crappy because they are crappy. The tenement museum has a kick-ass shop, though.
Rebuilding the burned-down Central Synagogue (c. 1998) - how hard can it be when the principal donor is the family of Estée Lauder?
Harold and Kumar were right.

Enough, Wente

2005-08-23T23:58:00.000-04:00

Seriously, Mags, can it:

The other day I stuck the nozzle in the tank of my dainty little SUV and paid for my first $50 fill. It was a shock, but I knew it was coming, and I know it's going to get worse. Gas prices in Toronto are about to hit a dollar a litre, and the outlook is not good. I have a feeling that one day I'll remember my $50 fill as fondly as a 25-cent Coke.
Not everyone is miserable about the price of gas. Environmentalists are happy because they think people might drive less.

Wente goes on to write that SUV drivers can basically afford to spend $2.50 a litre on gas (presumably, they consume similar daily quantities of $5-a-litre flavoured water), so the latest oil shock will do nothing to change vehicle purchasing or transportation behaviour. Aside from the dig at "environmentalists," who Wente would have preferring the moral high ground to decent quality environment, the column is ripe with the thinking that elite newspaper columnists engage in to condescend about those less fortunate than them.

Consider. If the cost of milk were $1 for two litres but seventy-five cents per litre, and black single moms routinely bought the smaller quantity (say, because it made the ten-minute walk home from the store less of a chore), a person like Margaret Wente might be inclined to insult this poor mom's incorrect economic choice.

Because Globe and Mail columnists clear enough coin to easily adapt to giant gas prices, they don't need to worry about being called stupid by snarky bloggers like me. Presumably Margaret knows that the line between coy and abrasive can be hard to navigate - especially when your S.U.V. has a tendency to flip over. (John_D at This Magazine also points out that her S.U.V. must be pretty teeny to fill up at $50.)

Anyway, how can you argue with the kind of logic she employs at the end of her piece:

Some day, we'll have to break our dependency on oil (the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned, since I'm no fan of propping up corrupt thugs and sheiks and countries that believe in flogging unveiled women and homosexuals). But break our dependency on cars? Never. We may have to run them on electricity or wind power or moonshine. We may have to pay a fortune for the privilege. But pay we will. Cars mean freedom, and freedom's worth a lot.

In the meantime, old people and asthmatics should stay out of Toronto streets until, basically, November; $1.15 a litre seems like the beginning, not the end; and that sheik, but the way, is doing quite well these days. So what does Wente have to contribute to our car woes? Let's see - rich, suburban Canadians are dumb - and proud of it - public transit is for losers and the poor and never the twain shall meet. Certainly we can do better.

New York Notes, vol. I

2005-08-23T23:36:00.000-04:00

Some highlights from the past thirty hours in New York City:

Charlie Sexton at the Mercury Lounge. Since emerging as a child prodigy in San Antonio in the 1980s, Sexton has been recording and touring for more than twenty years - not bad for a guy who's under thirty (I think). Recenylu, he finished a four-year gig with Bob Dylan's band (where he began playing cowboy chords in the corner and finished up starring on lead guitar) and produced a couple of dynamite albums (Lucinda Williams's "Essence" and "Volcano," Edie Brickell's tour-de-force). Sexton has an album out sometime around now ("The Wish") and is playing a handful of club shows to support it.

The crowd was a quarter Sexton die-hards (who remember San Antonio's nightclubs better than he does), a quarter Dylan fans (of whose "hippie" vibe Sexton announced he's glad to be rid) and a quarter East Village hipsters. The last quarter was a kind of combination of two or more of the above.

Sexton played for about 75 minutes (not too short considering tickets were $15). Despite some lousy feedback problems that popped up whenever he sat down at the piano, he put on a solid performance, thanks in part to a talented group behind him, including the excellent J.J. Johnson on drums and Carter Albrecht on keys. Two or three of his new songs, especially "Sunday Clothes," made me want to pick up the CD next time I see it.

The Mercury Lounge is a tiny venue - a long room with a bar in the back, a stage in the front and room for no more than 299 people - so the current in the room was strong. You could tell that Sexton needed to concentrate hard on his singing, fighting successfully (most of the time) to stay on pitch; his guitar playing, however, didn't suffer (his piano was hard to hear and the occasional cittern sounded cool). I was reminded of Sexton nervously flicking his guitar cord every ten seconds while on stage with Bob - if only because, as he did while touring with Dylan, he had a new axe for every song.
Berger's Delicatessen on 47th. What do you mean they close at eight? As the Extreme Asshole said to Harold in the best movie of last year, "Better luck tomorrow."
Lombardi's Pizza on Spring St. - followed by chocolate hazelnut and cinnamon raisin rice pudding from Rice to Riches. The stuff legends are made of.
The TKTS line - not as hot a deal as you would expect, though the decision to buy bottom-prived Avenue Q tickets should make for a decent Wednesday night. Thursday is an afternoon game at Yankee Stadium; huzzah.
It's official - the Hit Factory is closed (and the Daily Show has moved).

Who's in charge?

2005-07-25T22:43:00.000-04:00

Metablogging Montreal has photos of questionable no parking signs appearing in neighbourhoods hipper than mine. I wonder what the Talmud says about road signs that aren't authorized by the local authorities. Must they be obeyed? Or should we stone some virgins?

Thank goodness for MuchMoreMusic

2005-07-17T20:59:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Britney Spears's life is fabulous. Who knew?

Actually, I am quickly becoming addicted to The Surreal Life.

Ooo... "Election" is on. Great black comedy.

Nice work, amazon.com

2005-07-16T22:24:00.000-04:00

It's the online retailer's tenth birthday, so how does it celebrate? By inviting Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Bill Maher and more to deliver the goods at a concert for employees in Seattle. The icing on the cake? The show is being streamed live at amazon.com. Your move, Heather Reisman.

Oh yeah, Bob fuckin' rocks.

Proper

2005-07-11T21:08:00.000-04:00

Following up Saturday's post, good news from the Government of Canada:

The Canadian government revoked a disgraced Aboriginal leader's membership in the Order of Canada Monday.
David Ahenakew was stripped [of] his membership after being convicted Friday of willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group. He was convicted for telling a reporter in Saskatoon on Dec. 13, 2002, that the Jews were a "disease" and Hitler was trying to "clean up the world" when he "fried six million of those guys" during the Second World War.

Fittingly, the Globe also has news from the opposite end of the moving-on spectrum:

Ottawa — Prime Minister Paul Martin must decide soon who will replace Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson and observers say it must be someone with political savvy.
Ms. Clarkson is recuperating in Toronto after a weekend operation to implant a pacemaker to regulate her heartbeat.

Her Excellency has had a remarkable run as head of state; she's brought dignity and intelligence to her incredibly active role. Unlike David Ahenakew, she represents the best our country has to offer.

I love Canada

2005-07-11T20:57:00.000-04:00

From a White House press briefing today:

QUESTION: Does the president stand by his pledge to fire anyone involved in a leak of the name of a CIA operative?

MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your question. I think your question is being asked related to some reports that are in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation. The criminal investigation that you reference is something that continues at this point. And as I’ve previously stated, while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it.

The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation. And as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, we made a decision that we weren’t going to comment on it while it is ongoing.

C.J. Craig he's not.

Media douchebag of the week redux

2005-07-11T20:48:00.000-04:00

Poor Miles O'Brien. It seems that the CNN anchor was all set to become the first journalist to board the space shuttle and blast off into outer space. Until Columbia disintegrated, and with it, an anchorman's dream.

Sorry, I wanted to know what that would look like if I were writing for CNN (maybe the feature where they display blogs on the Web).

Anyhow, the New York Daily News has the story; O'Brien was set to begin training at NASA when the shuttle was destroyed.

That sound you hear? Legitimate astronauts who were passed over for the shuttle vomiting.

Thanks to Shaky for the tip.

The lazy common denominator

2005-07-11T20:40:00.000-04:00

Over at This Magazine John_D wonders why nobody in Canada seems to give two bits about dozens murdered in Iraq, while we go nuts over attacks in London. While I'm not really interested in getting mired in that thread, I am intrigued by one of the responses, which set off a conversation about the "local angle." The theory goes that the story can only really penetrate the North American psyche if it has a local connection: like Calgary Girl Survives Tube Ride. As Joseph Krengle puts it:

Maybe it's a result of information overload, but the world has gotten bigger and our lives have gotten smaller; and as a result most people have actively cordoned the two off from each other. Events can only translate from one to the other when there is some sort of superficial (but easily digested) connection.

This is bunk. The reason we always hear about the local angle is not because we actually care that a potential neighbour may or may not have been involved; it's because one of the tenets of crappy journalism is that people will only engage if they feel like they have a personal stake in the story. Actually, the idea's not that bad, it's the execution that's messed up. Think about it - of course you won't read a story or watch a report about something you can't engage with. But what do I care if a local man was on the scene half the world away? The London story struck all of us so deeply for so many reasons. It reminded us that our kind of lifestyle is not immune to terrorism and extremism; that the success of our technological era leave us exposed to anonymous attack; that the challenges that face Canada are shared, if not amplified, by others around the globe; and that safety is ephemeral.

If assignment editors are relying on a local angle to a big story to attract an audience, they'll only succeed so long as the public buys into its "role" of unthinking news consumer. Sadly, they need not worry (but you'd expect more from the people at This).

Media douchebag of the week

2005-07-09T14:22:00.000-04:00

CNN's Miles O'Brien, who had this to say on Thursday:

You know, we were talking to one of our analysts earlier -- one of our security analysts, and he said, you know -- he made that parallel between the summer of 2001 and the summer we had up until this morning. The focus on sharks, the missing people, all of the things that seem to occupy our attention in that summer were -- seem to be repeating themselves. And that was ominous to some people who look at these things and make it their business. I don't think the summer's going to be the same after this.

Meanwhile, in Aruba...

Oy vey

2005-07-09T12:01:00.000-04:00

Paul Wells pointed this to my attention:

Le prochain scrutin risque d'être catastrophique pour Jean Charest et le parti libéral. En effet, «si la tendance se maintient», ce parti sera confiné à peu de chose près à ce qu'était celui du Parti Égalité en 1976, soit une quinzaine de circonscriptions de l'ouest de Montréal à forte concentration de Juifs anglophones. La pire débâcle de toute l'histoire du PLQ qui arriverait au troisième rang pour le nombre de députés, derrière l'ADQ de Mario Dumont.

As Wells points out, the EQ didn't exist in 1986, let alone 1976, the party never won more than four seats and there aren't enough Jews in Quebec to deliver 15 electoral ridings to anybody.

Meanwhile, in the Prairiers, Native leader David Ahenakew has been convicted promoting hatred, after making a series of anti-Semitic remarks to a journalist. At a press conference following his court appearance, he continued his anti-Jewish diatribe. Thankfully, the movement pushed forth by Peter C. Newman to have his Order of Canada revoked is gathering steam. On the National last night, a spokesman for the Assembly of First Nations refused to comment. I guess the AFN was then (who knows if it will have a change of mind) of the mind that it's inappropriate for Aboriginal leaders to call a fellow chief the racist that he is. That's inappropriate.

If the most meaningful criticism is supposed to come from within, then I'm guilty of taking my time to weigh in on the latest Zahra Kazemi affair. Kazemi was in the news in Montreal recently when the Cote Saint-Luc city council voted to remove an exhibit of her work at the borough's popular municipal library. The council was reacting to a small number of complaints about some of the murdered photographer's works, which contrasted Taliban oppression with Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied territories. Councillors and borough Mayor Robert Libman claim that the exhibit's accompanying texts equated the Israeli military's treatment of Palestinians with Taliban brutality toward women.

The exhibit was prepared by Kazemi's son, Stephan Hachemi, who insisted it be dismounted once the CSL library removed five photographs. It seems the borough council was quite content to comply with his all-or-nothing directive.

When the news hit the airwaves a few weeks ago, I called the library to find out what was going on in crazy CSL and I emailed Robert Libman. Surprisingly, both my messages were returned. One city councillor told me that a decision had to be made and that the council felt bad but had no choice. Libman, who had told the press that the borough had a tight connection to Israel and could not stand for this kind of Israel-bashing on its dime, was less conciliatory. He said that Hachemi had tricked the library by misleading it abouut the substance of the text, and that he was unwilling compromise. Apparently, incredibly, nobody at the library vetted the work before mounting it. To be so negligent and then to complain about a work being "too politically charged" for the community, as Libman later told Canadian Press, is the worst kind of cop-out. As I wrote to the library, the "decision brings you closer to the guiding principles of the fanatical regime in Iran than to the mitzvot of the Torah. The rationale that the works are too political, is incomprehensible; what were you expecting?"

My friend Chad Lubelsky has more at rabble.ca. In the meantime, in the wake of her posthumous silencing, it's worhtwhile to remember why Zahra Kazemi was killed.

Before

2005-06-25T20:36:00.000-04:00

2005-06-25T20:34:00.001-04:00

After

2005-06-25T20:34:00.000-04:00

2005-06-25T20:33:00.000-04:00

Downtown at twilight

2005-06-25T20:19:00.000-04:00

Bedroom window, dusk

2005-06-25T20:16:00.000-04:00

Hi-tech

2005-06-25T20:04:00.000-04:00

If you're trying to access the Internet with your DSL modem, you could do worse than to properly plug the phone cable into the jack in the wall...

The move is done. Long live the move.

Western Front

2005-06-14T20:44:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the quiet. Fucking carpal tunnel syndrome. Bastards. We are indeed a stiff-necked people.

Anyhow, as my fingers seem relatively functional right now, I thought I'd answer the challenge from Phoff and Murphy and do this book list thing. By the way, on what 19th century planet was this game conceived? No magazines? Newspapers? Web sites? Anyway.

Number of books I own: About 200. Many of my faves have been lent out or were borrowed to begin with, meaning my shelf feels a little hollow. I recently threw out about 65 New Yorkers, so there's some free real estate.
Reading now: Sort of nothing. Trying to dig "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand, but am also flipping through "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris and "What's the Matter with Kansas" by Thomas Frank. Perpetually skimming "America: The Book" by the Daily Show writers. Thinking about finishing some others I've begun but abandoned (Bernard Avishai's "The Tragedy of Zionism." Isn't his Harper's essay enough?).
Last five I read: Who the hell remembers? Umm..., in some kind of non-chronological order:

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer
"The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy"
"Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe
(Most of) "The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed," Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter
(Most of) "At Home in the World: Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century"

Last five I bought:

The first three
"The Metaphysical Club," Louis Menand
Can't remeber. This exercise would rock if my books weren't packed in boxes right now.

Favourite books: This is tough. How about five I remember fondly?

"Empire Falls," Richard Russo. See old posts about Russo's craftsmanship.
"As a Drive Leaf," Milton Steinberg. A modern Jewish identity tale set at the height of Hellenic times.
"Shampoo Planet," Douglas Coupland. I hardly remember the book; I remember well that it was one of the first books I really read.
"Genesis," God/Moses/Some Guy (Ed. Ezra). Did a wonderful seminar with three other students and a philosophy teacher at Dawson College. Read Genesis after Plato's Republic, comparing the two as manuals of political philosophy. Mesmerizing stuff.
"The Devil, Delfina Varela and the Used Chevy," Louie Garcia Robinson. Who? What? An enchanting book I picked up at a used book sale for a dollar, on the strength of the odd title and the interesting cover. Lovable. Gut-busting funny. Many books paint pictures. Some play like records. This one smells of steamy kitchens and summer sun. A real treat; sadly, Robinson hasn't published since, and it's out of print.

Saturday

2005-06-04T19:15:00.000-04:00

By far the King of All Days. Full of the optimism that comes with the knowledge that, no matter what, the weekend doesn't end soon (take that, Sunday night) and the energy restored by "some good sack time," as Kramer once put it. Add lots of sunshine and a nice breeze and you've got yourself a winner.

Montrealers have a bit of a geographical bias problem. Mt. Royal, the Plateau and the waterfront are more or less equidistant from pretty much any point downtown, yet the psychological distance of walking down Peel to the canal is much greater than than walking up to the Mountain or up and east to the Plateau. Part of the problem is that there's more to see walking up Peel than walking down.

Anyhow, this afternoon I took a long walk along the Lachine Canal, from the Charelvoix Lock to the Peel Basin, where I decided I'd probably tear a hole through my old sandals before making it to the port. I can't remember ever walking that stretch of the Canal; it was lovely. In-line skaters and cyclists whizzed by me, while many folks were picnicking or catching some shade under the trees that line the water. Kayakers and paddleboaters made the Canal seem beyond inviting, and the great views of Montreal's industrial past in the foreground and its unique downtown in the background were a treat.

The surrounding neighbourhoods are coming alive (some more than others, as I'll soon find out) and there's a feeling that they might yet be restored. I spent a weekend in Chicago two months ago and was thrilled to be in a major city that so embraced its waterfront. If you're ever there, take one of the architecture riverboat cruises (I caught mine at the Navy Pier and learned about most of the city's 100+ skyscrapers).

Montreal can continue to expand to the South Shore and Laval, or it can make the centre of town, much of which is down and out and ready for a comeback, chez-nous. There's some politial will, and real estate developers have begun to conclude that there's money to be made. The Société du Havre has done a great job imagining our city twenty years from now. Loto-Québec wants to bring the Casino downtown, which, though it would make gambling a bigger problem than it ought to be, represents some kind of vision for a large-scale project to invigorate the area south of downtown, stimulating further development and making the city centre its coeur. So who's going to lead the way? If Mayor Once, Mayor Forever Pierre Bourque makes it a priority, he'll be close to getting my vote this fall. Same goes for Mayor Uncle Junior. In the meantime, leave it to a bunch of bright McGillians.

Time to find a terrase.

HTML Broken

2005-06-04T18:49:00.000-04:00

No idea why this blog has been coming up all screwy in IE lately. Must be some post with too many bandwidth-stealing pictures. Anyhow, I can't figure it out, so switch to Firefox or Opera.

Some Things Are Worth Repeating

2005-06-04T18:47:00.000-04:00

And the inexhaustible Matthew Yglesias makes a point that isn't made enough these days:

It's all been said before, but it bears endless repetition -- it's a strange form of moral clarity indeed which argues that America's conduct in the world should be judged in accordance with the lowest depths of human depravity.

Indeed, one might say that the clearest signpost that a truly noxious rot has taken root in our culture is that it even occurs to people to argue in this manner. Can you imagine Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all sitting in a dock somewhere in hell pointing fingers at each other and maintaining that they should be let off because the others were worse? "Stalin killed the most!" "But Pol Pot killed the most percentagewise!" "But just think what Adolf here would have done if he'd won the war!" I like to think we wouldn't take such statements very seriously. And, no, George W. Bush is not as bad as Pol Pot. Good for him -- mom and dad must be proud. He even compares favorably to Richard Nixon in most respects (albeit not in his attitude toward very poor Americans). Let's give him a medal.

Do We Need This?

2005-05-31T23:00:00.000-04:00

The CBC is promoing its movie about the Halifax Explosion. That's all well and good, but how's it going to top one of the best Heritage Moments?

Family

2005-05-30T21:09:00.000-04:00

Most will miss my sister's comment to the Ups and Downs piece:

wow sometimes it's so clear to me why we're related-- i loved kolbert's article too! and russo! and bonfire! and i also write to companies telling them they suck -- i've scored chocolate (aero), shampoo and conditioner, and vouchers for the train.

aw, brudder.

For the record, when I was 11, I had a homework assignment that consisted of writing a proper letter to a corporation. I wrote the WWF and complained about two of their characters - The Beveryly Brothers, heels (villains) who were supposed to be gay. I was inspired by a segment I heard on As It Happens, which followed a performance in Vancouver. I wrote that it was offensive, but I never stopped watching.

Social justice! Cranky letters to customer service! All in the family!

Joey Rats

2005-05-30T20:53:00.000-04:00

Readers respond...

I've been thinking about your old blog posting about Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, and I've decided that's there's something very wrong with your insistence that the point of the Catholic Church is not to change. I can see your point about it (and Orthodox Jews) representing a conservative strain of a diverse variety of beliefs, but the problem is that Catholicism is not a philosophical set of ideals that you chose, and can renege on, as a mature adult, like Communism or Noe-liberalism or say Kanitism (?). It's a living community, in which people are included into at virtually the moment of birth. A Catholic is brought up in this community, and taught, again from birth, a moral mindset based on the precepts of the teachings of Ratzinger and Wolyita (sic?) and so on. To disagree with Catholicism, to find it too conservative or unresponsive, is not to have a philosophical disagreement with the old white guys in Rome. It's to refuse the act of communion-which, as much as it is a sacrament remembering Christ's sacrifice, is more importantly a communal meal, which demonstrates membership in your community-a community, remember, which you're born into and, if raised "correctly', is all you know. It takes enough courage to reject the world view which you've been taught since birth, it takes much more to refuse communion with your friends, neighbours and family. I know-on the odd occasions when i end up at Mass, I find it difficult to not take communion, even though my conscience is quite clear that I should not be taking part in a sacred right which demonstrates adherence to all sorts of crazy, and dangerous, doctrines. So your point about the Catholic Church being conservative by definition is premised on the idea of the Catholic church as a set of theological beliefs. It's not, it's a community of believers. And the Pope-father, remember, Shepperd of his flock and so on, has a duty to these believers who look to him as spiritual leader. And his duty should not be to condemn them to death by refusing to allow people to use condemns, or to destroy the planet by opposing birth control. And I imagine the same goes for Orthodox Judaism.

The view from the inside, I suppose. I think what I disagreed with so vehemently following JPII's death was the notion, lurking beneath the surface of much of the commentary about the future of the church, that Catholicism was somehow more authentic and closer to God than its competitors. I suppose that notion is defensible, given the huge number of Catholics in every corner of this globe. But the idea that those who had lapsed from the church, either by choice, by drift (like Bruce Springsteen, who compared watching the reports of BXVI to hearing about a blockbuster trade involving a team you no longer root for) or by force (homosexuals, for instance) were kicked out of God's inner circle is really insulting.

If, among mainstream Christianity, Catholicism is supposed to be the stalwart right wing or if it merely happens to be isn't a distinction I'm yet prepared to recognize. The Pope should not be condemning his followers to die; but insisting the church change its ways despite the myriad of viable, attractive spiritual options (many of which having arisen out of the same text) isn't so much admirable as it is sad.

Customer Service

2005-05-25T21:29:00.000-04:00

The best customer service I ever received was from Nestlé. After buying a Kit Kat bar that had no wafer in it (it was just four slats of solid chocolate), I rang up the toll-free line and explained the situation to a friendly staffer. She told me this sort of thing happens from time to time, and that coupons for two free Nestlé chocolate bars were on the way. Days later, the coupons arrived, along with an extremely detailed account of what probably occurred (with the wafers no-showing) and why. Though some stores refused the coupons, all was right with the world. I still have that letter. If I had a scanner, I'd post it. A thing of beauty.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the Coinamatic laundry card refill machine in my lobby had changed. Gone was the old machine that accepted any bill; this new one, which actually involved more steps, only takes tens and twenties. Naturally, when you want to do laundry, the only money you're bound to have lying around is the kind that doesn't fit in the machine (don't get me started on the fact that it doesn't accept change). And filling your card with $20 for $5 worth of laundry seems like a dicey proposition - what good does my $15 do sitting unused in the card machine? Wouldn't it be better to stimulate the local economy by, I don't know, buying some gum, or something?

In any case, having to go out in the rain to get change for a twenty was no fun (it also led to the purchase of a late-night latte, followed by a fitful night of no sleep. Fuckers). So last week I decided to email Conamatic and let them know that this new system was something of a step backward - and to find out how this sort of decision gets made. If Malcolm Gladwell thinks that decisions made in an instant - without pause for second thought - are ideal, or at least worthy, surely some drawn-out consultative process must have led to the creation of the Shitty Laundry Machine. Perhaps there was some kind of government intervention that forced Coinamatic to dampen its competitiveness to level some kind of laundry-machine playing field. A reason shouldn't have been hard to find. Anyhow, here's the full email exchange between myself and the customer service rep (with names removed to heighten the mystery). The lesson: smarminess begats smarminess - not answers:

-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXXXX
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 2:04 PM
To: customerservice@coinamatic.com
Subject: what happened to the $5 bill machines?

Dear Coinamatic,

Recently, your company installed a new card refill machine in my apartment building in Montreal. The old machine accepted $5 and $10 bills. The new one will not accept fives, meaning you've got to pump your card up with extra cash, when all you really need is about five or six bucks to do a couple of loads. As five-dollar bills are more common than tens, and loading a card full of twenties is excessive, what's the rationale? Seems like an all-around bad decision.

Thanks,
XXXXXXX

----

Hi XXX

Thanks for your email. I appreciate you contacting us with your concern.

The reason why we eliminated the 5.00 bill is because we were experiencing an influx of extremely upset customers resulting in service calls due to the bill continuously jamming the bill acceptor. We conducted a national study with our other branches across the country and found the results unanimous.

In conclusion, by replacing the bill acceptor we have eliminated a lot of aggravation and service calls.

---

What specifically about five-dollar bills caused the bill acceptor to jam? And if the maching jamming is a concern, why not have a slot for coins?

---

To be honest XXX, I'm not exactly sure why the frequency is higher on the 5.00 bills.

In regards to coins, this is the reason why the decision for reloader machine was installed at your location was to avoid coins. It's much more of hassle to gather exact change instead of using bills.

Make of it what you like - I'm actually surprised at the quality of the response, given what a jackass question that first email is. Then again, life is worth little without moments like those when "we have eliminated a lot of aggravation" and "it's much more of hassle to gather exact change instead of using bills" come across the daily terrain.

By the way, the customer service rep's point was valid; according to the Bank of Canada, $5 bills are not meant to last as long as twenties, which might explain why they have a habit of instigating angry phone calls. One last question: why do crown corporations get to have Web sites that are much cooler than the look & feel of the Government of Canada?

You Didn't Think I'd Forget

2005-05-24T23:08:00.000-04:00

Happy 64th, Bob.

Old-Fashioned

2005-05-24T22:46:00.000-04:00

On a more serious note, Sunday's New York Times Magazine features Sen. Rick Santorum in its cover story. "The Believer" doesn't tell you much you couldn't glean from paying attention to domestic U.S. politics during the last two years, though reporter Michael Sokolove tries his best to portray Senator "Man-on-dog" as nothing more than an earnest, decent guywho happens to be a major player in the legislative branch, despite his real desire to be a full-time gardener and father of six.

As nauseatingly dull as it is to read about this guy, Sokolove does reveal one nugget I didn't already know, that prior to serving in the House, Uncle Rick was a lobbyist for, you guessed it, the World Wrestling Federation.

That's right, good ol' Catholic, family-fun, sports entertainment.

As his brother says, "'Rick has always been that way, in anything he has ever done... We were, for the time, good practicing Catholics, but Rick took it further.'" If there's one thing you've got do with the ol' WWF, it's take its misogyny, its xenophobia and its violence-for-kids, and take it further.

The saddest part is that you know he'll run for president someday, and he'll probably win.

Things That Are Not News

2005-05-24T22:24:00.000-04:00

Any story that involves the phrase, "buyer beware." CBC, you've been notified.

New York Minute

2005-05-24T22:20:00.000-04:00

Today's Times includes a shocking report about the origin of all of New York City's famous hot dogs (I could so scarf down about six Gray's Papaya dogs right about now). Turns out, they all come from the same source: ~~a trucker's dirty toenail~~ Marathon Enterprises, of East Rutherford, N.J., henceforth to be known as MetaDog Industries. (It should be noted, Gray's adds a "special ingredient" to the hot dog, uh, batter, I guess.)

We also learn everything we need to know about life in New York from this piece:

On the other end of the price scale, New York has hot dogs that approach the $20 barrier. The Old Homestead serves an 11-ounce footlong made from American-raised kobe beef for $19. I found it mushy and bland, and not redeemed by the white truffle mustard, the kobe beef chili, the Vidalia onions, the Dutch bell peppers and the Cheshire Cheddar sauce that accompanied it. For the same price you can have a Gray's Papaya special of two stupendous hot dogs and a papaya drink ($2.45) for a week and still have change in your pocket.

I think Ed Levine just might have a Pulizer Prize all lined up. What he doesn't tell us, and what I'd like to know, is how you become a member of The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Perhaps the Times will run a follow-up tomorrow. Then again:

But when you are surrounded by screaming Mets fans at Shea or Cyclones fans at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, and the score is tied, and you bite into one of those less than exemplary franks slathered with mustard, you just might be having the peak hot dog experience of all.

Amen, sela.

Impossible?

2005-05-21T11:55:00.000-04:00

Today's missions:

Determine whether a kitchen island is appropriate. If so, find a decent, inexpensive one. Purchase it.
Answer the age-old question. If your large windows (several feet in height - like five) open in, what kind of blinds/curtains do you buy?

You can taste the excitement.

Ups and Downs

2005-05-21T11:53:00.000-04:00

If this blog has been a little quiet lately, it's partially because I've been catching up on some reading. I finished Bonfire of the Vanities, which held my interest from start to finish. In retrospect, I think I liked Bonfire so much because it reminded me of the best work of my favourite author, Richard Russo. (His Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls will premiere as an HBO movie in the next few weeks.) There are few writers producing today whose books gather momentum as they go on, rushing you to the finish, even though you'd rather stop and savour the story. Russo's strength is in writing deeply compelling characters, using their quirks to propel the story further. His novels are cinematic (he also wrote Nobody's Fool, which eventually starred Paul Newman), full of wide, sweeping scenes and the detailed minutiae that makes writing magical.

I got through Jonathan Safran Foer's highly-anticipated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the follow-up to his superb Everything is Illuminated, and I loved it. The story is that of Oskar Schell, New York's most intelligent and imaginative nine-year-old, the son of a victim of the September 11th attacks. The book is about Oskar's touching quest to unlock a secret he thinks his father has left for him; it takes him all across the five boroughs, using his charm and inspiring wit to make friends and get closer to his father before he can let him slip away. Foer, who is about my age, is a marvelous writer, using word and image to tell a haunting and gorgeous tale. Books like these make life beautiful.

More recently, I finished the three parts of Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker essay on climate change. Kolbert, whose 2001 article "Ice Memory" remains one of my favourites, tells the harrowing tale that is the story of Earth in the twenty-first century. Her piece touches on science, archaeology, environmental forecasting and politics, and stresses some important points. First, the "debate" about climate change is nothing more than partisan hackery. It is accepted science that human beings are contributing to the greenhouse effect and climate change, and that we can do something to prevent the worst-case scenario. Second, there's no time to act like the present. If we don't get our act together and slow the course of global warming, we're fucked. Global warming is basically impossible for humans to reverse; its effects serve up a perverse side dish: they speed up the process. Ten more years and all could be lost. The fact that we might not suffer the consequences of our actions today for another hundred years, like the U.S. deficit, is a crime against future generations. Finally, the U.S. government is complicit, if not an eager spectator, in the unnecessary damage being done to our planet. Kolbert's third installment lays out our options: B.A.U. (business as usual) or some combination of fourteen enviro-technological "wedges" that would impede climate change. The Bush administration, in walking away from Kyoto, heaping its scorn on its own scientists and pathetically insisting that developing nations clean up first, has the ball, but it won't run with it. Kolbert concludes: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

Read "The Climate of Man" - I urge you. Part one. Part two. Part three.

Next up: Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which seems to be abook about ideas and knowledge among ruling Americans. Antidote.

Unwired

2005-05-16T18:59:00.000-04:00

WiFi in the eye of the storm. Works surprisingly well. All I need is a laptop, a Wireless Media Player and my friend's collection of ~500 divx movies, all on CD and DVD (oh yeah, I need a DVD-reader on my PC too).

Giddyap.

Queries

2005-05-12T21:38:00.000-04:00

Am I the only one endlessly entertained by the way Google filters ads for this site? Oh yeah, a handful more clicks and I get a quarter. Freakin' sweet.
Does anybody enjoy Daybreak?
Anybody know how I can get my hands on a pair of tickets to one of Madeleine Peyroux's sold-out shows at the Jazz Fest?

The One-Line Movie Review: The Interpreter

2005-05-12T21:31:00.000-04:00

The mysteriousness of Nicole Kidman's face will not save this international incident "thriller," no matter how slick the production or how elaborate the story.

Clarity

2005-05-07T18:13:00.000-04:00

GWB, Februay 4, 2005:

Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Something's happening...

2005-05-03T23:08:00.000-04:00

Mr. Ross knows what it is. The New Yorker's indispensable Alex Ross (his majestic take-down of "classical" music is here) checks out Dylan during a five-night run at the Beacon (where I met Paul Simon and sat across the aisle from Edie Brickell. I am such a name-dropping douche tonight) and lives to tell about it.

DVD Afternoon in Canada

2005-05-03T22:59:00.000-04:00

This Saturday's presentation was Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen's 1986 film. Those who have called it his best are not far off. Though not as trailblazing as Annie Hall or as genuinely beautiful and stirring as Manhattan, Hannah delivers where it counts: the writing is quick, witty and interesting; the story is captivating, but not loaded with the improbability that has plagued much of Allen's recent work; and the acting is brilliant.

In recent years, Allen's films have followed one of two formulas (with the exception of the charming mockumentary, Sweet and Lowdown, and the odd Celebrity): zany comedy based on a silly premise (Hollywood Ending, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Small Time Crooks) and the ongoing saga of love in Manhattan (the tour de force that is Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else), with some overlap (Melinda and Melinda, the musical Everyone Says I Love You). Leaving aside the former (even Woody Allen should be told no once in a while, though Hollywood Ending was more charming than cockamamie), Allen's take on romance in New York has grown cynical and jaded to the point where his characters are almost farces. Deconstructing's Harry Block, though a delightful novelist, is hard to stomach after 80 minutes, and that seems to be the point.

The heroic Woody Allen character of the 1970s, though physically inadequate and always a nebbish nudnik, was still that: a hero. Twenty years later, he's a pill-popping, down-on-his-luck, multiply-divorced failure (Harry, with his writer's block - not a clever double entendre - hits closest to home). Alvy Singer, of Annie Hall, and Isaac Davis, of Manhattan, were whimsical at their core - never far from the eager Jewish hustler that Mordecai Richler has so well portrayed in his Montreal novels. Annoying and pushy though they might have been, they were defined by being lovable. The late-Allen shmucks are the epitome of unlove.

So what does this have to do with Hannah and Her Sisters? Paul Simon's painfully personal song "Hearts and Bones," which preceded Hannah by a few years, sketches "the arc of a love affair," and so does Hannah. If Simon instructs that, once entwined, hearts and bones "won't come undone," Allen offers a those unlucky in love a second chance. In the end, the hypochondriac ne'er-do-well divorcé and the always-broke, can't get into adulthood, casual cokehead (it was the mid-80s) find pleasantness - and domesticity - together. The final scene, a touching shot of Allen and deserving Oscar-winner Dianne Weist in front of a mirror, is Woody's nicest touch. The arc becomes a circle, and, as Simon would put it in "Thelma," an ode to unexpected love in middle age, "everything else becomes nothing at all."

Great Television

2005-04-27T20:40:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the magic of the Internets, I've been catching up on old episodes of Northern Exposure, one of the sharpest TV series of the past twenty years. Though the first two seasons are available on DVD (wrapped in smart parka jackets) and a third is due this spring, NX seems to have missed the TV revival boat. Perhaps North Americans are still not ready for a show that's principally about a pushy New York Jew doctor forced to spend the first years of his post-med school career practicing in the backwater Alaska town of Cicely. Though Ally MacBeal is credited with innovating the genre of the 60-minute dramedy, NX was the real deal. Created by the duo of Joshua Brand and John Falsey, and executive produced by David Chase, who's Sopranos is the best thing to happen to TV since colour, the show was a modest hit for CBS in the nineties. Known for its fish-out-of-water premise, which may have turned off many potential fans, NX featured the deepest, sharpest cast of characters on television. It presented a unique take on modern American life, engaging issues of nature and technology, the meaning of community and the clear-eyed warmth that makes any day above ground great.

Surprisingly, Brand and Falsey haven't done much show biz work since leaving the show partway through its run. While Chase has found a niche with the Sopranos, B&F couldn't make smart succeed the way it should have.

In the age of the DVD, when television is seen as a unique cultural identifier and audience segmentation means a success doesn't have to be huge, Northern Exposure, with its warm, talented cast and razor sharp writing, should stand out. That it made it to network television in prime time - odd for a show as kooky as NX - has always made it somewhat unique. That nothing like it has come since is both a shame and obvious. In a medium that craves uniqueness but rewards bland mimicry more than any other, there will never be anything quite like Northern Exposure.

New Music Monday

2005-04-26T22:21:00.000-04:00

A sampling of what we're listening to these days:

Madeleine Peyroux, Careless Love - Billie Holliday may have died and gone to heaven, but Madeleine inherited her voice. Whether tackling Leonard Cohen ("Dance Me to the End of Love"), Bob Dylan (a sublime "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go") or W.C. Handy (the infectious title track), Peyroux effortlessly demonstrates what it takes to be a great singer. It helps to have a great voice. It can't work if you haven't got a love for the song, and Peyroux has a lot of love to sprinkle on each of these twelve greats. Perfect dinner music.
Bruce Springsteen, Devils and Dust - Tom Joad meets The Rising. It's too bad that Springsteen hasn't gotten stingier as he's aged. While the Boss cranked out the hits in the eighties, his recent work has suffered from too little editing. The Rising's fifteen tracks should have been ten, and on Devils, Springsteen lets a couple of dullards slip through. Nevertheless, the record's brightest moments are really great, including "Black Cowboys," "All I'm Thinking About" (on which Bruce shows off his country soul) and "Maria's Bed," a Tex-Mex take on The Rising's "Mary's Place." Those who enjoyed The Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska will dig the stories, which benefit from the full development of Springsteen's literary voice, though Devils is a much sunnier, livelier record. And at $10, Amazon is a full third cheaper than HMV. Serious fans will devour the bonus DVD.

Doofus

2005-04-26T21:53:00.000-04:00

The leader of the free world, in South Carolina today:

President Bush raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he asked locals in Galveston, Texas: "Do you still have Splash Day?"

["Splash Day" is the annual "adult oriented enormous beach party" celebration on the Gulf Coast.]

BUSH: Do you still have Splash Day?

(LAUGHTER)

BUSH: You have to be a baby boomer to know what I'm talking about.

(LAUGHTER)

BUSH: I'm not saying whether I came or not on Splash Day. I'm just saying, Do you have Splash Day?

(LAUGHTER)

You'd think he'd remember if he came.

Whither Weather?

2005-04-24T14:21:00.000-04:00

If some Canadian conservatives are thinking about following in the footsteps of the reverse douchebag in chief in the United States, they'd better think again. Sen. Rick Santorum (he of the "gay marriage leads to 'man-on-dog'" school of rights) has drafted a bill that would prevent the National Weather Service from competing with for-profit weather information providers, like the Weather Channel and AccuWeather. Apparently, the aim is to enable the NWS to spend more time providing info on hurricanes and tsunamis, according to bill suppporter and AccuWeather's Executive Vice President Barry Myers.

Two things: First, here's hoping Santorum throws his hat into the 2008 presidential race. Please please please. Second, don't even think about tinkering with what just might be the best service the Government of Canada provides online (though I don't know why they think it's proper to forecast so much rain). A rigid, scientific survey (I asked my friend Abba once) led me to find that Environment Canada does a better job of predicting the weather than, say, the Weather Channel. Why? EC is simply bearish. The Weather Channel will tell you that there's an 80% chance of rain or that it's going to be 27 when, in realtiy, EC's more tempered 60% and 25 win the point.

In the meantime, let's not ponder the notion that everything would be better if we just privatized it and charged a small user fee (even if it consisted of nothing more than watching an ad before you get your forecast). Let's just will it away.

Worth Preserving

2005-04-24T14:09:00.000-04:00

A story about my grandather's family told at last night's Passover Seder reminded me why this country is better than its political options these days.

It's 1939, the war has just begun and the Kaplan family of Memel (Klaipeda), Lithuania, has managed to escape Europe. The clan headed for Canada (though some came by way of Japan), and wound up on a small farm in a small town called Williamstown, Ontario, about an hour and a bit from Montreal.

In their first days in their new country, my grandfather's family was visited by the local Christian clergymen, which might have been a frightening prospect. It was not. The Kaplans were told plain and simple, We know you don't share the same faith as us, and we know there aren't many Jews around. Montreal is too far to go to practice your religion. Our church is open to you for your own religious use, whenever you need it.

At the end of each Seder, we sing le-shana haba-ah biyerushalayim - next year in Jeruslaem. It seems to me that Canada has always done right enough by us. As Jews around the world celebrate the enabling story of our people - the exodus from Egypt, the redemption from slavery, the birth of freedom - it bears noting that those of us north of the 49th parallel are blessed.

My Kind of Cardinal

2005-04-23T14:24:00.000-04:00

***

The International Herald-Tribune has the story of the election of Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph "Cardinal" Ratzinger, aka one of two guys who have never been in my kitchen (thanks Shaky). One of the things that's always struck me as odd about the selection of the Pope is that the Cardinals, through a very bizarre process (white smoke, black smoke, bells, secret oaths), make the decision. I understand that they are supposed to be divinely inspired, which is a nice concept. So I can't imagine I'm the only one who finds the details of their (s)election to be so jarring from the way things are supposed to go. The Herald-Tribune's detailed account of the supposedly secret balloting reminded me of the special editions of Time and Newsweek that follow each American presidential election - full of all the teeny-tiny behind-the-scenes details of each campaign's successes and failures.

Cardinal Ratzinger's blatant political posturing was enabled by his "vice-Pope" status and cemented by his convincing performance officiating over his peers following the death of his predecessor. Ratzinger's campaign, as it were, came down Politics 101 - vote for the guy endorsed by the popular predecessor, and don't worry about things changing too much.

Ah, change. Tuesday night's National featured quite a bit of grumpy reaction on behalf of liberal Catholics. It seems that there was an expectation that the Cardinals - almost all those who could vote named by the hard-right John Paul II - would choose a liberal among them to guide the next phase of church doctrine. Presumably, many were surprised with the choice of the ultra-conservative Ratzinger (one Italian used the sly headline, "The German Shepherd," Wednesday morning). Still more seem to be disappointed.

That's where things stop adding up for me. Though the only purpose served by the church's stance on women's right and homosexuality is to perfectly exemplify how not to behave, and though its position on birth control in the developing world is terribly reprehensible, that should be no surprise. The Catholic church, it's seems to be forgotten, is not supposed to change.

Recently I've been thinking about a film called Trembling Before G-d which tells the sad story of a handful of gay Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. Forced to lead double lives or shunned by their families and communities, the individuals profiled in the documentary let it all hang out. Though it's been quite well received for its iconoclastic look at the intolerance of the ultra-religious Jewish world, the film failed to deliver.

The ordinary viewer is supposed to think that things would be better if only those pesky Orthodox Rabbis would give in and welcome the few homosexuals in the flock. We are supposed to feel terribly for people whose singular purpose seems to be to be gay and Orthodox at the same time. Well, it doesn't work because it can't.

The principle of Orthodox Judaism - and Catholicism as well - in the year 2005 is simple: to preserve ancient rules for daily life in opposition to the shifting borders of our secular world. If you want to be a good Orthodox Jew you've got play by the rules. Sadly, the rules are not going to change. So the viewer is left wondering what to make of the excluded homosexuals. Surely they are entitled to lead a Jewish life in a Jewish community.

Sadly, the film frames the issue in very narrow terms. If gay Hasidim can no longer be Hasidim then there must be something wrong with Judaism. Like Christianity, which is not limited to the doctrinal rulings of the Catholic Pope, Judaism consists of streams, each catering to the needs of certain kinds of Jews. While ultra-Orthodox Jews are about as likely to eagerly welcome homosexuals as is Benedict XVI, other viable options exist. Reconstructionist Judaism, Reform Judaism and even Conservative Judaism get short shrift in Trembling, much the way non-Catholic Christianity has since John Paull II died.

It's futile to insist that Orthodox Judaism and the Catholic Church flip-flop on fundamental stances. It's worthwhile to create a thriving system of faith options. To whine about the first and neglect the second is to reveal a desire to complain and not to build.

Extra! Extra!

2005-04-21T23:32:00.000-04:00

Hey! CTV's Rosemary Thompson has got the goods on Benoit Corbeil's super hot Gomery testimony! What? Radio-Canada had this yesterday evening?

Should've had Ben Mulroney on the case.

Paul Martin's Last Stand?

2005-04-21T23:31:00.001-04:00

Jack Layton had a great night - shifting the focus even a little from the Liberal scandal flogged to death by each of his predecessors, including the prime minister, to the business of governance, even adding a shout out to past minority governments. Then again, he also acknowledged that this minority government hasn't worked. But, of course, he thinks it could (and for the New Democrats, it could theoretically work a lot better than a Conservative minority government).

On the CBC, Layton tries to talk about the environment (smog season is here). Peter will have none of that, browbeats him, condescends and changes the subject. If Layton can dig in and fight back a little and show a little bit of the aggressiveness that can make a political heavyweight, the NDP might be the belle of the election ball. Then again, he'll have to overcome the media narrative of the next election as a two-horse race that. Them's the breaks.

In just under seven pre-recorded minutes of videotape, Paul Martin provided something of an awkward start to what will be an unwanted but unavoidable election campaign. The only question now is whether we'll be in campaign mode for two months (oy) or for eight (oy vey). Judging by Stephen Harper's notable quotable: "But how can we continue - politically, ethically, or morally - to prop up a government that is under criminal investigation and accusation of criminal conspiracy?"

Well, since you put it that way.

The prime minister's plea to postpone the writ drop until Justice Gomery wraps up Montreal's second circus will only push the Conservatives over the edge. Like a kid who can hear his mom coming up the stairs but has almost got his hand in the cookie jar, Stephen Harper and his gang couldn't possibly resist the temptation to call a spring campaign.

Actually, Martin's offer (which turned out to be not quite ready for prime time, clocking in early at 7:02 EST) leaves Harper with no choice. If the government can barely get anything done without an expiry date, why would - why should - the opposition enable it once it appears? It pains me to write it, but if not now, when?

Sadly, the clearest message from Canadians the past two weeks has been the utter lack of anything resembling a desire to go to the polls. The Conservatives, the Liberals and the Bloc just don't want to listen, either by forcing the government down, in the case of Harper and Duceppe, or by forcing the opposition's hand, as the PM did this evening.

Let it be noted that the only parliamentary leader who seems genuinely troubled by the fact that where we are headed is where we do not want to be is Jack Layton.

A Chilling Vision of Things to Come

2005-04-21T23:31:00.000-04:00

On the National, aka the funniest show on TV today, Peter asks Stephen Harper if he thinks Paul Martin and his government is corrupt. Harper answers with a two-minute complaint about about Martin not giving straight answers. Note that he never answers the question.

He's got some work to do, but if Stephen plays his cards right (it might even take a roll of the dice), he could wind up being the next Paul Martin.

Silver Lining?

2005-04-17T17:59:00.000-04:00

Paul Martin's recent flirtation with the idea that a vote for the Conservatives/NDP is a vote against Canada is not a reassuring sign for Liberals. The idea that some other party could do more for the Quebec (heck, and Alberta) separatism movement than the Sponsorship Squad is on a plane of absurdity worthy of Ionesco. If the Tories weren't so seemingly reactionary (is it fair to say they have any real policy perspectives on social issues?), the Liberals would be in serious danger. If the NDP could get itself together and get on the map, federalist Quebecers wouldn't be so reluctant to see the next election as anything other than a two-horse race. And in that race, the suddenly not-a-joke-anymore Gilles Duceppe is going to be a lot harder to fight than the old we're-the-lesser-of-all-these-evils line that Martin has been road-testing.

The always excellent Chantal Hébert provides aid and comfort to those of us not interested in living through another exhausting and frightening referendum season (especially since we went and bought property in downtown Montreal). In Friday's Toronto Star (memo to Le Devoir: give it up online already), Hébert writes that, as much of a godsend the Liberals have been to the indépendantistes, the support (like Stephen Harper's surge in the polls?) is ephemeral: "In the case of the sponsorship scandal, it is the Liberal party that they are turning their backs on in disgust. But that feeling has, so far, not translated into an outburst of referendum fever."

A Tory sweep to minority - or even majority - power may not be much worse for Canadian unity than another lacklustre Liberal victory (though it would open the door to new blood on both sides). Though that's about as grey as a silver lining can be, for the moment, I'll take it.

As it happens, and as Hébert wrote a month ago, Quebec separatists may be getting all they need from the ailing provincial Liberal government. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Jean Charest's days are numbered, and that the party just might be able to turn things around enough in the next two years to neutralize a Parti Québecois whose house is not exactly in order either. Another grey lining, but, again, I'll take it.

Gosh

2005-04-17T17:23:00.000-04:00

I watched Napoleon Dynamite for the second time yesterday, which turned out to be a good thing. The first time I saw it, about three weeks ago, I could barely sit through its eighty-or-so minutes. There's not much of a story here, but that seems intentional. The film is quite stylish, so no problems there. And the acting is superb - though I don't know how much range the principals have. Their futures may not be as bright as they think.

The eponymous hero of the film is so backwards he's just about forward again. His precious older brother Kip is touchingly portrayed, as is Uncle Rico, who's stuck in the third quarter of a championship football game in 1982. These losers are sad losers, not like the asshole losers who torment Napoleon all day long.

What drove me nuts the first time around was the fact that, though stuff happens in the movie, nothing really happens. And in between the bits of something that amount to nothing is a bunch of nothing that's always been nothing and will forever be nothing. Think of a Wes Anderson movie minus the charm and the weight.

On second viewing, with the knowledge that I was in for 80 minutes of nothing, I was able to enjoy the film. It occurred to me about twenty minutes in that everything that came out of Napoleon's, Kip's or Rico's mouths was basically funny. From childish insults (Deb: "I'm selling these so I can save some money and go to college." Kip, off-screen: "Your mom goes to college.") to frustrated grunts ("Idiot!") to the idiosyncracies that make or break characters ("It's pretty much my favourite animal"), the dialogue was crisp and funny. Let me qualify that further - lots of things are funny in a reflective or ironic way. This film had us laughing out loud throughout.

So it's unfortunate that, pace a second chance, I find myself sharing Napoleon's own frustration. What could have been a dynamite recurring skit on Saturday Night Live, or a great vehicle for a hipster "retro" sitcom, got stretched to a feature-length film. Twenty-two minutes of concentrated Napoleon would be, indeed, dynamite. By making a movie out of it, Jared (director, writer) and wife Jerusha (writer) Hess tried to infuse the story with affection for a North American world as distant from pop sensibility as possible. In so doing, they set themselves up for failure. As New Yorker critic David Denby put it, "The movie might have worked if it weren't so dead-aired, malicious, and cool." By expressing their own strong feelings for a world they may not quite have left behind using an ultra-cool, ironic sensibility, the Hesses end up undermining the film's soul.

But dammit if I haven't been walking around saying, Gosh! for three weeks now.

Think

2005-04-17T15:04:00.000-04:00

In today's New York Times, Barbara Whitaker writes about the first results from the new and improved Scholastic Aptitude Test, administered by the College Board in the United States. Until recently, the SAT consisted of two equal parts: reading and math. Each section, scored out of a possible 800 points and graded electronically, was worth 800 points. The new portion, ~~blogging~~ writing, is also scored out of 800, and includes an essay worth 25% of one's final score.

Whitaker, I think, makes too much of a deal about the newness of the SAT - students who took it seem to be unimpressed with the notion that the writing component was being administered for the first on them. (So much for progress, I suppose.) Presumably, Kaplan and all those other SAT consultants will require a couple of more years to fine-tune their preparatory materials. In the meantime, a whole bunch of not-quite-college-bound students decided to use the good ol' five-paragraph essay format (Kevin Drum gives it the treatment it deserves here) to guarantee a spot in the mediocre middle. Let's also presume that this group of students overlaps considerably with what can only be another bloated bunch who share the thoughts of one Anya Kanflo, who told Whitaker, "It's difficult to know how they graded the essay, since it's the only part of the test not done through a machine.... There's always going to be a certain amount of bias on the part of the grader, even though there are two readers." (For the record, Anya supports the new section of the test: "You can't fake good writing. If you can't write a complete sentence, that's going to show, and I think that's a good thing for colleges to know." She scored a 9/12 on her essay.)

On the whole, the addition of a writing component to the SAT probably does more good than harm. Yes, enormous swaths of the high school student population might wind up revealing their inadequate writing skills. And yes, certain college programs - and, by extension, careers - require little in the way of decent prose. However, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine one of the new SAT's residual effects being the recognition that the ability to write reasonably well is undervalued and underappreciated, often only recognized when it's absent. If the SAT inspires young people (and their parents) to want to learn how to write, and forces teachers to dedicate already scarce time and resources to teach them, the Board should declare victory and go home.

***

There are certainly those who see the latest evolution of the SAT as another chapter in an already too controversial history. Almost since its introduction, the SAT has been accused of making higher education - and social mobility - out of the reach of those who need it the most. For many Americans who saw in a post-secondary system endless opportunity for all children - black or white, rich or poor - the SAT did nothing but institutionalize an inequitable pecking order. While the question of access to education in Canada tends to focus on family income and the idea of the first-generation student (whose parents never went to college or university), the language and politics of higher studies in the United States is shrouded in the culture of racial awareness. Talk of Affirmative Action, quotas and the Supreme Court is heavily weighted in deeply personal feelings of an individual's identity within his own community and the greater America.

In his wonderful book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, New Yorker writer and Columbia Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann (who authored a brilliant profile of Karl Rove available here) chronicles the development of the SAT. In mid-century America, men like Henry Chauncey and James Bryant Conant, empowered by the new science of intelligence testing and a super-secretive organization called the Educational Testing Service, looked to the future, realized that the continued success of American society would depend on the careful stewardship of its institutions, and came up with a plan. The SAT, a test designed to accurately predict who would and would not succeed at college, would allow those who deserved it to assume positions of great responsibility - running the organizations and agenices that would keep America strong. (It's important to underscore the goal of the SAT. As a scientific test, it sought to provide its takers with scores that would correlate with their first-year college grades - not to test nascent ability, though the distinction remains contentious.)

In short, the founders sought to nurture, if not outright create, a large bureaucratic class based on nothing short of absolute merit.

Lemann's account of the devoutness with which the founders of the SAT brought to their work is deeply moving. A small group of men, inspired by those who came before them, sought to eliminate a class system (that handed down wealth, responsibility and power from one generation to another without regard to ability) with a mobile, fluid structure designed to enable progress, not entrench luck. Lemann details the rise and fall of Affirmative Action, and reluctantly dismisses the dream of the SAT's founders ("you can't undermine social rank by setting up an elaborate process of ranking"). With a heavy heart, he acknowledges that standardized intelligence testing has done little more than replace one imperfect system with another.

If an equitable and equal division of wealth, responsibility and power were supposed to be the byproducts of the SAT, they have proven terribly elusive. Assessed on its face, it's easy to see why testing late teenagers may do little more than rubber stamp the pathways they're already on. After all, the horizons of our lives are not set at eighteen - they're set during childhood. The dream of Bryant and Chauncey was decent, respectable - to encourage the development of a society that can be left in the capable hands of a dedicated class - think of the Biblical Levites or Plato's Philosopher Kings. However, concentrating opportunity on a precious few doesn't fit with modern notions of equality and egalitarianism. In our day and age, we must raise the tide, so that all boats may be lifted.

And now the News

2005-04-16T19:19:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I really wish I still had cable. Though I've got more DVDs than I can watch for now (will I ever get through the three Woody Allen box sets? That's more of a pleasant problem) none of them are ever on when I'm surfing the Web. So it's early evening on a Saturday and the local news is on (that's CFCF, by the way). Before I realize that Seinfeld is probably on another one of the five stations I get (crap, why didn't I switch?!), I settle in.

Is there a more annoying aspect of modern life than the weekend evening newscast duo? The following is a word-for-word account of a real live exchange this evening, following a tearjerker of a story about a group of kids marching together against drunk driving. At the end of the shmaltzy report, the anchorpeople summed it up:

Anchorwoman: Good story.
Anchorman (not missing a beat): Great cause.

Ugh.

The 22 minutes of "news" wraps up and the thirty-minute sports panel sausagefest begins. While I'm hunting for the damned remote, this week's panel of barely-literate morons begins to discuss Tiger Woods's <insert excessively hyperbolic adjective here> performance at the Masters last week. The shmuck panel starts goes into Tiger Woods Fan Club mode, discussing his godlike characteristics, both on and off the course. Actual quote:

"He was one of the most charming guys I've ever interviewed. We [a group of reporters] had his back to the wall and he said, politely, 'if everybody could just step back a bit.' Wonderful."

Indeed. "Wonderful" is the best word to describe a guy who asks you to move two spaces. And kudos on treating your interview subject with such dignity. The same reporter added the following, referring to the thought of picking up a $59 pack of Woods's signature balls (ho ho ho): "You're intrigued to buy it."

***

Sadly, local news really matters. And while inanity is fine when it comes to the weekly sports wrap-up, the actual news, delivered by the plastic-heads who inhabit the anchor desk, counts for a lot these days. The cynicism that many North Americans feel about the news media tends to stick to the big shots alone - whether you're at least grade-three literate and you find Fox news to be the Republican wankfest that it is, or whether you're a mad-as-hell GOP wealthmonger who can't understand why the New York Times won't rag on homosexuals and immigrants. The major TV nets have done a particularly good job at heralding their lack of depth and credibility, simply by attacking each other and turning the volume up on their own supposedly good qualities. (Just how, exactly, is CNN's claim to be "the most trusted name in news" supposed to have meaning?)

National newspapers take a lot more shit than they get, but that's mostly because the neanderthals on Fox like nothing more than to lob feces at the "liberal" New York Times and Washington Post. Major dailies, though, are not nearly as tarnished (though there's quite a bit of nonsense going on at both the wire level - Google the AP's Nedra Pickler - and in your typical city daily - one doesn't have to look far).

While synergy may have worked at the accounting level (an economist can tell you whether AOL owning a whole chunk of media companies at various stages along the assembly line is worthwhile), it's rendered the news as we know terminal. And yet.

The local TV news, which has always been heavy on fluff, continues to matter (like the smalltown newspaper editorial page). At the very local level, outside the eye of those who delight in criticizing the press (including, sadly, me), many North Americans get their news. With the bullshit detector turned off and stored away in the bedroom closet, local news audiences are fed a super-sized portion of fast food. Some important stories get covered (local fires, missing children, municipal politics, etc.), but the amount of Santorum processed through the PR machine and delivered into your living room, is terribly disheartening.

As network TV executives are almost ready to realize that young people are so over the news, government is getting in on the act of pre-fabbing news. The Bush administration has been criticized for its fake news delivery a number of times in the past year, and the president, in one of his prouder moments, asserts that no laws have been broken, thank you very much, now get the fuck out of my way. CNN operates a video news release service for local stations, providing content to resource-poor affiliates. It also makes money accepting and distributing phony video releases. Naturally, the network is mum about the whole thing. The good folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting lay it all out in their recent annual report. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, the picture ain't pretty and it's on a way-one ride to Ugly Town.

***

It's understandable to throw your hands up in the air. Hell, you can announce the death of the worst parts of traditional media, get your info from blogs and the Daily Show and feel pretty good about yourself.

But remember, if you should find yourself at home on an early Saturday evening with the TV on, for the love of all that is good, try and find a Seinfeld rerun, because the cocky plastic people who deliver the "news" have got a half dozen cute little quips just aching to come out.

Bear in Mind

2005-04-13T20:59:00.000-04:00

Think Paul Martin's a megalomaniac? Does Stephen Harper creep you out but good? Think Jack Layton's head is too big for his body? Not one for a Bloc party?

Remember.

At least we're not stuck with this guy.

Him too:

Oops - time to watch TV!

Film at Eleven

2005-04-13T20:33:00.000-04:00

On the heel's of last night's entry about the apparent lack of decent investigative journalism in Canada, I was reminded today of Aaron Derfel's excellent reporting for the Gazette this February about the state of - you guessed it! - private health care in Quebec.

With regard to his reporting, Derfel makes clear something that may not be as obvious as it should: the mere opening of private clinics (in Quebec or elsewhere) doesn't really take the strain off of public health care in Canada. While we do need more MRI machines, we do not need radiologists abandoning the publicly-funded kind for the expensive variety reserved for, in Derfel's words, "queue-jumpers." (Why is English Canadian journalism so full of Britishisms?)

If two-tier care is the way to go in this country, let's be upfront about it. The gist of Derfel's series is that private care can prosper in Quebec because Ottawa's finest lack the courage to shut it down. In so doing, they're paving the way for private care in the rest of the country (though you get the feeling that, if only because it can really afford it, Alberta is just dying to jump the queue, as I suppose I should say) and allowing the public system to atrophy and fester along the way.

If we are ultimately to reject private health care, Ottaw ought to enforce the Canada Health Act as strongly as possible, put Quebec in its place (setting an altogether different example) and find a real solution.

That's FYI's Frank Fontana

2005-04-13T00:46:00.000-04:00

This guy:

Not this guy:

Where have you gone, Frank Fontana?

2005-04-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

Mason Wright and John_D over at This Magazine want to know why there isn't more investigative journalism going on in Canada.

Tonight's National had an interesting piece on what smacks of an awfully lazy coverup by the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Seems the brain samples of two deeply sick, deeply suspicious cows were misplaced, lost, left in an envelope on a table during a bathroom trip at Restaurant Frank or simply made to disappear. Kelly Crowe has done a decent job on this story, and it makes you wonder if Mason's thinking about the media is begging the question, so to speak.

Could it be that there's lots of decent, inquisitive reporting going on in this country that the blogosphere can't bother to comment on? At This, Andrew Potter and Tu Than Ha point out that the Sponsorship Sadness began with a group of journalists - lacking subpoena power and giant commission budgets - who followed some leads and uncovered a shmozzle, as Shaky might put it.

Paul Wells may just be right: if the mainstream Canadian media (from the Globe/CTV to CanWest to CBC) got its head out of Paul Martin's butt, we might just be able to learn something about the state of our country that isn't connected to a crooked Quebec ad firm. In that sense, Mason is spot on: the news about the news is not really about news, but about who's going to call chicken and head us all back to the polls (against the general will, but points for being opportunistic).

So maybe the news isn't so lame - only the news about the news. In the meantime, when is somebody going to look into the mess that is the stretch of Sherbrooke Street in front of McGill University? Even more importantly, just how the hell are 514 and 438 going to get along?

Even more importantly: when is this gang going to make it back to Montreal?

This Kid Has Some Serious Issues

2005-04-12T19:00:00.000-04:00

Go watch (not so work safe).

Un regard vers l'avenir

2005-04-12T00:02:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's post about health care in Quebec must have been written in the stars, for the New York Times's great Paul Krugman weighed in on U.S. health care today, sparking comments from Kevin Drum, Kash and more. In short, the French system is the envy of the world - and yet it costs about $200 less per person that ours. So what gives? Could it be that the French are just much better organized at delivering decent medical care than us Canadians? Is it a population density issue? Is our crisis more of the manufactured kind? Could things actually be better than we are certain they are?

Not that the French have got it down to a perfect science. It seems that a system that encourages consumption causes, well, overconsumption - of pills and doctor visits. And, like any big government program, French health care is probably bloated and somewhat unaccountable. This primer on couverture maladie comes to the rescue of La France, highlighting the effectiveness of its blatant two-tier system. Les Français are entitled to visit public physicians and hopsitals, or pay a premium for private care. Though the system enables, and is saddled with, doctor-shopping, one assumes a small copay ($10 per visit?) would nudge patients to pick a doctor and end the browsing.

French doctors, I might add, don't appear to be unhappy with their wages and their substantial degree of professional freedom (I don't know how many would want to be stationed in Kujuuaq at the start of their careers). I can't imagine they're any worse off than my med-school friends will be in about ten years when they start to earn a living. Right now, they routinely work insane 28-hour shifts, somehow doing a little bit of learning while miraculously not butchering some straightforward procedure. In a year's time, they'll be shipped off to the far reaches of our country on an almost purely random basis.

The price of all this, though taking its toll on the country's budget, seems to be worth it to the French. I defy anyone to show me a poll saying only one in five Canadians are dissatisfied with medicare as we know it.

Yesterday's lesson was that adequate health care coverage is a fundamental human right in the developed world. Caring for each other noursihes the fundamental sensibility of our collective identity. Today's lesson, I suppose, is that it can be done.

I Heard the News Today

2005-04-11T00:36:00.000-04:00

Mason over at This Magazine raises an interesting question: what's wrong with Canadian investigative journalism? Among others, the Globe & Mail's Tu Than Ha weighs in. Let us all pause and remember that a small but important group of reporters paved the way for the auditor general's scathing report on the sponsorship filth.

Whither medical care?

2005-04-11T00:20:00.000-04:00

The affaire Terri Schiavo, which the death of the Pope finally took off media life support last week, raised important questions among many North Americans about living wills and what constitutes life, not at its beginning, but at its end. Many of these recent arrivals to the house of thanatophilia, including, doubtless, a host of self-affirmed culture warriors invigorated by a "debate" manufactured and encouraged by the news networks, would do well to consider the end of an individual's life, not merely the end of times and the inevitable redemption of the strong.

The death of John Paul II (the Hebrew niftar, signalling the completion of one's life, seems a more appropriate term in this case), marked by the Pope's refusal to be propped alive by machine (to the dismay of the zealots across the Atlantic who invoked his name), is worth another look. As is Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), Denys Arcand's fine 2003 film, which I happened to watch yesterday afternoon.

Arcand reunites the principals from his 1986 succès Le Déclin de l'empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire), who have grown apart, as friends do, to celebrate the end of one friend's life. Reunited by the son of paliative Rémy, the group gathers to reminisce, catch up and reflect on the meaning of their own lives. The conversation, generally consisting of a delightfully embracing wit, eventually turns to the subject of intelligence, which we are told doesn't exist in a vaccum: the grouping of Michelangelo and Leonardo, coupled with Raphael and Machiavelli, is invoked, as is the trio of Plato, Socrates and Euripides. In fact, the experience is so genuine and loving that you hardly remember that Rémy's life is coming to an end. Intelligence can be thoughtful after all.

It doesn't hurt that Rémy's estranged son Sébastien has returned from Europe under the pretense of easing his mother's burden (though she's Rémy's ex) to leap at the role of prodigal son, using his self-made wealth and inherited smarts to secure his ailing dad the kind of care ordinary Quebecers could never dream of. Rémy's death is touchingly self-prescribed (a series of heroin doses) and delivered by the junkie-with-a-heart-of-gold-turning-the-corner estranged daughter (another!) of Rémy's friend (who also serves as a near foil to Sébastien's perfect fiancée, though fils has not inherited dad's lust for just any woman).

Though Arcand overdoes the chaos that is public health care in Quebec, perhaps to underscore the meaning of Sébastien's act of love, the real thing isn't that much better. At best, when the stars line up and loved ones are capable of making the right kind of effort, Québécois medicare can be reasonably quick and comprehensive. At worst, patients who shouldn't die are left to perish for no good reason. Generally, the rest of us find ourselves in the middle. If Rémy's death - painless, loving and on his own terms - is the best we can hope for, and Terri Schiavo's is of a kind so dreadful we are urged to plan for it in great detail, what must be done?

Canadians are hesitant to accept "two-tier" medical care (while Americans, if only due to incomplete coverage, inadequate insurance options and the unneeded burden on small businesses, are moving toward a single-payer system - surely there must be some middle ground). Arcand makes it quite clear that, by traveling to the U.S. to get a PET scan or greasing the right pockets to open up a long-shutdown wing of a crumbling hospital, accept it or not, we're already there. (Interestingly, Quebec - where we're all supposedly in it together - is home to the most private-pay health care options in Canada.)

Meanwhile, public spending on health care continues to grow, eating up badly-needed funds for education and infrastructure (and if schools are unfunded, the tax base of tomorrow will be unable to sustain the quality of health care aging Baby Boomers will demand). The future, it seems, is pretty grim. Our options are limited: to accept a private-public system and install it across the board (and fast) or continue to invest in our aging system and hope things come out alright. Somehow I don't think this is what Tommy Douglass had in mind.

***

John Paul II, whose brave stance against Communism helped usher in real live freedom to Eastern Europe (and whose rigid opposition to liberalism inside the Church is tough to accept), chose to eschew the route of feeding tubes, unproductive surgeries and life-by-machine. Much like Rémy, he set the broad terms of his life's ending, and in so doing weighed in on the ugly Schiavo nonsense in the U.S. Deuteronomy tells us that there is a choice we must make between life and death - and that we must choose life. In the end, though, life does not always choose us back. Much like Rémy, the Pope knew when the choice could no longer be made; the opportunists who used Terri Schiavo so viciously did not. Each story, though, imparts a similar, powerful lesson. Life, life that is lived, is precious, and it isn't permanent. In guiding our way through the challenges that await a nation that will be demaning more and more from a system that can no longer sustain itself, we must bear that in mind. Through care and comfort do we honour the living and sanctify the dying. The devil is in the details, so remember Rabbi Akiva: the rest is commentary, now go and study.