Saturday July 19, 2008
Here's the thing: What do the Harperites do next?
What now for the Harper government?It has already survived for 30 months, much longer than the Harperites thought. They assumed an election within 18 months, maybe 24, for that had been the shelf life of previous minorities. So they got their election promises done: the overwrought Accountability Act, the family allowance cheques, various tougher criminal justice measures, money for defence.
Legalization in disguise
Billy Weselowski has seen it all, and he hates what he sees on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. ''You can't go a block without a bicycle pulling up and giving you all the syringes you want,'' he growls.
On the offence: Where to invest in a down market
The most common, and most ignored, piece of investment advice ever? Buy low, of course.We know this to be true because there was a stunning $70-billion sitting in safe but low-paying money market funds at midyear, almost 45 per cent more than in the same period last year. Investors aren't buying low as the stock markets fall; they're buying safety.
You don't cobble your own shoes, so why invest your own money?
One of the best pieces of financial advice I've read was given by an amateur, one Woody Allen, who said: Comedian, if you want to save the world, don't do politics; tell better jokes.
I can't afford the surcharge on my relationship
''Absence makes the heart grow fungus,'' Stephen Page of the Barenaked Ladies once sang. The singer, who was arrested on drug possession charges this week, allegedly after a dispute with his long-distance girlfriend, should have heeded his own advice.
Nothing sells papers like slap-happy blueblood
As Max Mosley sat in Room 13 of the High Court in London, he was described variously as looking arrogant, calm and implacable. But, really, who was concentrating on his face when all anyone could think about was his bottom? His poor, shaved, smacked, raw, bleeding and bandaged bottom. Max Mosley's bum was the white elephant in that courtroom.
Tinker, tailor, renderer, optimizer ...
I have seen the future, in the brilliant animated feature WALL·E. I'm not talking about the future as depicted in the film, 800 years hence: The earth is choked with garbage; one valiant robot, WALL·E, attempts to compact it; the few surviving humans, on a ship in outer space, are obese, computer-screen-addicted babies.
How to solve the gnarly issue of men's feet? Wear shoes
My husband's feet are gnarled, horny, hairy and callused, and he insists on wearing flip-flops in the summer. Is there any way I can get him to get them groomed before he goes out in public?
Bike culture rolls into the mainstream
I love driving a car. There, I've come out with it: the worst, most inflammatory statement anyone can make at this moment in history. But seriously, I do enjoy driving, even if I lament what North American auto dependence has wrought, in wretchedly unwalkable cities and car-centric sprawl, as I also enjoy walking. What I find as both a driver and a pedestrian, however, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to love my fellow cyclists, who are now so empowered by their environmental correctness that they have begun to proclaim their own (naturally superior and far more fashionable) bike ''culture.''
No laughing matter
Oh, dear. There's such a fuss about that New Yorker cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama. Worse, the cover is a cartoon.It really is too bad that the Americans don't have human-rights commissions to swaddle cartoonaphobics.
Getting the dirt on Mars
For the past month, a sterile vacuum chamber at the University of Guelph has served as a stand-in for the surface of MarsScientists needed to mimic the thin Martian atmosphere to conduct realistic tests on a new piece of space hardware that represents Canada's next major contribution to the exploration of the Red Planet.
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
HOW I LEARNED GEOGRAPHYBy Uri Shulevitz, Farrar, Strausand Giroux, unpaginated, $19.50, ages 4 to 8Uri Shulevitz has drawn on his own childhood during the Second World War in this marvellous picture book, which begins hauntingly with the words, ''When war devastated the land, buildings crumbled to dust. Everything we had was lost, and we fled empty-handed.''
PAPERBACKS
STRANGERS DEVOUR THE LANDBy Boyce Richardson, Chelsea Green, 376 pages, $27.50New Zealand-born journalist Richardson, now living in Ottawa, wrote countless books and articles about indigenous people in several different countries, but this 1974 book - based on the struggles of the James Bay Crees in Northern Quebec - is considered his magnum opus.
Pretty is as pretty does
In the 1968 film Barbarella, Anita Pallenberg as the Great Tyrant says to Jane Fonda as Barbarella, ''Hello, Pretty-Pretty,'' and later repeats the phrase: ''So, my pretty-pretty, we meet again.'' Was she reflecting redundantly on Barbarella's beauty or was she saying the girl was sort of pretty, or really pretty?
Holy, hint, Batman!
If The Dark Knight, the newest (brand new, in fact) entry in the Batman franchise, is too potentially nightmare-inducing for your children, you might want to consider a somewhat gentler new entry into Gotham City at night, and it's a book you might even enjoy yourself.
