I don’t want to instigate another Olympic showdown here, but there’s an interesting article from The Tyee that indicates Canadian atheletes didn’t do so badly after all. Read this article on The Tyee’s site Apparently when you factor in population and GDP, Canada actually did better than the US… and Cuba and Jamaica kicked ass! More »
Thanks to one of those strange confluences that the information age occasionally produces, poetry has been forced onto the front burner of my consciousness this week. Unpacking my last box of books, I came across an old copy of 15 Canadian Poets. I sat down, took a break, and quickly reread some of my favourite […] More »
The lead story in today’s Post — big headline, above the fold — is Scott Taylor’s weeklong kidnapping/beating ordeal at the hands of Al-Qaeda in Northern Iraq last week. It sounds pretty harrowing… Canada could have had our own hostage/beheading threat, which certainly would have given Post editorialists the opportunity to say “we told you […] More »
Three years ago today I was running late for work because of a bad headache, and I stepped into a local coffee shop on my way to the office, only to be stopped, like everyone else in the world, by a television and a crowd of silent onlookers. Today, riding a city bus downtown with […] More »
Summer seems to have finally arrived in southern Ontario (thanks probably to all those devastating storms happening south of us). I have a message in my inbox today from a worthy cause and a good excuse to get outside this weekend and over the course of the rest of September. The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup […] More »
Canadians are about to get a nice lesson in one of the curious features of our Parliamentary system. Contrary to popular belief, party discipline and cabinet solidarity do not undermine reponsible government. Rather, they embody it. In many ways, party discipline is just an extension of cabinet solidarity, reinforcing the idea that, in Parliament, there […] More »
Edited b/c I can’t spell Purolator Last week, I was waiting for a Very Important document (ok, a cheque) to arrive by Fedex. Oops — Ms. Delivery Woman knocked while I was in the shower, leaving a note saying “pick it up tomorrow at…” But I wanted the cheque NOW. So I called Fedex, got […] More »
Further to Potter’s comment on my post about “root causes” of terrorism, New Statesman has an article about significant changes underway in Islam, prompted at least in part by the activities of al-Qaeda and the fact that many moderate Muslims are sick of the bad name their faith is getting worldwide. A short excerpt: “For […] More »
I had to laugh when I got this response from my good friend Christy while warning her about the perils of Google’s new Gmail service. Gmail is a free, web-based, e-mail service (similar to Hotmail) that is in beta testing now; it uses Google’s search and advertising technology to read through a user’s messages and […] More »
The Walrus settles into a comfortable position just below THIS Magazine as one of Canada’s most interesting and relevant general interest magazines. October’s issue responds to THIS magazine’s profile of Jack Layton with a look behind the curtain at Stephen Harper’s Conservative strategy machine. Most interesting is the debate-by-essay on the American election, featuring psychographics […] More »