In 1999, Playboy asked Richard Thompson, among other cult rawk luminaries, to submit his personal list of "the ten greatest songs of the millennium." Contrarian geezer that he is, Thompson decided to take the editor at his word and really pick songs going back a millennium, reaching all the way to "Sumer is icumen in", a Middle English round usually dated to the mid-13th century. The baffled Playboy desk immediately consigned the list to the circular file--but that's all right: Thompson has now recorded an album of his renderings of "1000 Years of Popular Music", featuring everything from Purcell's "When I Am Laid in Earth" to "Oops! I Did It Again" (an ostensibly bizarre choice that actually makes perfect sense for Thompson: he might well have written its lyrics himself on a particularly uninspired day).

"Dr. Stapley is adamant"! The perfect cup of tea, insists the Loughborough University food scientist and expert on diffusion in hot beverages, is made with the milk going into the cup first. In honour of the 100th birthday of George Orwell, the Royal Society of Chemistry has issued a tea guide contradicting Orwell's insistence that the milk should go in second. Seems like a funny way to honour someone, I'll grant, but in a curious way, the sudden tea flap is a fine tribute to Orwell. Really the great man's visibility has increased hardly at all on the occasion of his centenary; if anything he was probably cited a little more often in the press during the runup to the war in Iraq. It's nice to be reminded of his deep feeling for strictly English things--it was a strong element in his literary character, one he wedded to his hatred of injustice. Or perhaps his self-conscious Englishness was the genus of which his hatred of injustice was merely one species.

Orwell didn't have much use for scientists. He considered that the studied apoliticalness they still clung to in his day made them a threat to freedom in a world polarized between brown and red politics. Little did he realize that later generations of "socially responsible" Western scientists would natter endlessly about disarmament and "cooperation" with Communism and be, on the whole, even worse. Like all socialists of his time, however, Orwell had a reflexive respect for Science. But he would have noticed, I think, that Dr. Stapley has insisted on his pet theory in this case without saying a word to rebut Orwell's own.

The voice of science says "Well, if you pour the milk first, the proteins in it won't get denatured by the hot water from the tea." "Yes," responds Orwell from beyond the grave, "but if you pour the milk first, you are likely to get the amount wrong." In so many respects, scientists and humanists have stopped having conversations like these: we are now conscious of concepts like "interface design" and "ergonomics" and "usability" (which, when practiced properly, are grounded in science and contribute greatly to everyday human contentment). But apparently you still sometimes run across the odd old-fashioned engineer who considers human frailty an unquantifiable variable which must be set to zero and forgot.

One should note, too, that saying that denatured proteins make milk taste "stale" in tea comes dangerously close to being a semantic dodge. Perhaps denatured proteins are verifiably associated with staleness in milk, as reported by human subjects. (If anyone is likely to know of such research, it will be the abundantly informed Dr. Stapley.) But how do we know that the milk-second crowd hasn't subconsciously developed a legitimate preference for tea flavoured with slightly "stale" milk? Anyway, I usually take mine black with plenty of sugar...

I watched Wayne's World today. It was released in February 1992--I remember this quite well, because it was such a bleak month at the cinema, and the idea of a Wayne's World movie seemed like a difficult stretch for a concept that had already been reheated on SNL much too often. When it turned out to be a minor classic (and one containing sly coded messages for Canadians, at that), the surprise was general. At eleven years' remove some of the movie's flaws are more glaring. I'm still bothered by the crass inauthenticity of the music, which isn't much like what Wayne and Garth, had they been real, would have listened to. (Genuflecting before Alice Cooper? Surely some mistake.) It was, rather, some Hollywood producer's idea of what they would listen to, which creates an unsettling recursive irony, in view of the movie's plot.

What I was startled to rediscover was that the foil for Wayne's on-air antics, the sponsor (played by Brian Doyle-Murray) who is bamboozled into sponsoring the slicked-up version of the show, is the owner of a chain of video arcades. Only a decade ago this concept was still commercially credible; now, post-Nintendo, it's a distracting curiosity.

So my cell phone rings and I pick it up. A woman's voice is on the other end.

"Is Gord there?"

"Sorry, there's nobody here by that name."

"Oh, well... who is this?"

"It's Colby. I'm pretty sure you have the wrong number."

"Oh, well, that's OK, you sound like a geek anyway." Huh? Click.

These minor indignities always arrive at just the right time, don't they? Whole country outside enjoying the sunshine and the four-day weekend, me trapped in my house wondering about the nutritional value of the wainscoting, and on top of everything--random verbal abuse from a stranger? Thank God she wasn't in any position to say something about my looks; my voice is one of about two and a half things I'm not self-conscious about.

And of course this would be the time for a micro-controversy over, of all things, what actor would play me in a movie. Jack Black is the popular choice, but honestly Jack is far too, uhhmmm, nimble--nimble and energetic. Plus, you know, he's actually a pretty small guy, like most of your outstanding physical comedians; I've got six inches on him. You'd need someone with a more ursine, James Earl Jones frame. That rules out Kathy Shaidle's choice, Curtis Armstrong, who played Booger--yes, Booger--in Revenge of the Nerds, and Herbert Viola on Moonlighting. Apparently I appear in the reader's mind as a 1985-vintage nebbish. But nobody twists the knife like the Ambler, who rightly rejects Jack Black but insists on Philip Seymour Hoffman, ever in demand when a spotty, ravaged tub of mucus is needed to pad around listlessly for the cameras in Y-fronts and tube socks. Realizing he'd gone too far, Ambler rang up the other day and pointed out that he was thinking more of the Almost Famous Philip Seymour Hoffman than the Happiness Philip Seymour Hoffman. He knows our common love for Lester Bangs makes this a powerful trump card, but even wild horses cannot retrieve a meme set free in this, our "blogosphere".

One thing I wish Canadian newspapers would do is to give more space and resources to legal reporting, with particular attention to Supreme Court of Canada decisions. The 1982 Constitution gave us an American-style judiciary, making it an equal partner with the legislative power (from which executive authority flows, de facto, in our system). In practice--even though the supremacy of Parliament was built into the constitutional text--the new judges have been more than equal, having not yet been subjected to a Jacksonian dose of humility. Parliament proposes, the Supreme Court very frequently disposes. Yet we linger under an old order of legal reporting whereby Supreme Court judges give interviews about as often as J.D. Salinger and their lectures at universities remain politely overlooked. The U.S. Supreme Court is the focus of a lively Kremlinological industry; Canada has no analogue. Try reporting on the careers and personalities of the justices, and you're as like as not to get a half-dozen cranky letters from their wannabe successors on the lower benches.

This is all partly a question of what makes for lively press, of course. U.S. Supreme Court justices are, almost to a man, highly intelligent and incisive thinkers (even when they're complete liberal bastards); their prose is often worth quoting on its literary merits. That of Canadian Supremes never, ever is. They are mostly a shy, gray lot, and it's in the interest of the Prime Minister, who chooses them without having to run a confirmation gauntlet, to keep it that way. If the Canadian bar could produce a character like Antonin Scalia, he'd certainly never get higher than traffic court.

Kirk Makin, at the Globe, is carrying on a heroic and lonely struggle to interpret the mind and behaviour of Canada's Supreme Court, 800 paltry words at a time. Here's his piece on the new Figueroa decision, which struck down Elections Act rules limiting federal benefits to those political parties which field 50 candidates or more at a time nationwide. (The plaintiff, Miguel Figueroa, is the leader of the Communist Party of Canada.) There's a muddled reference at the end of Makin's article to a new "12-candidate threshold" that has replaced the older 50-candidate one. That threshold only applies to the candidate's right to have his party affiliation printed on the ballot; it doesn't apply to any of the other benefits which the defunct CPC sued for, including the right to issue tax receipts between elections and the right of candidates to transfer unspent funds to the party's national kitty.

Most interesting, to me, is the way in which the majority (six justices, led by Frank Iacobucci) treated section 3 of the Constitution in this decision. The section reads:

Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.

On its face, the scope of s. 3 is relatively narrow: it grants to each citizen no more than the bare right to vote and to run for office in the election of representatives of the federal and provincial legislative assemblies. But Charter analysis requires courts to look beyond the words of the section. In the words of McLachlin C.J.B.C.S.C. (as she then was), "[m]ore is intended [in the right to vote] than the bare right to place a ballot in a box": Dixon v. British Columbia (Attorney General), [1989] 4 W.W.R. 393 (B.C.S.C.), at p. 403.

"C.J.B.C.S.C." stands for either a really rude high-school nickname or "Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court": either way, Justice McLachlin is now prima inter pares on the Supreme Court of Canada. At any rate, section 3 has often been interpreted to imply a bundle of penumbral rights (forgive the metaphor-mixing) to electoral participation and, for parties, legal preferment. Figueroa cinches up the bundle considerably and covers it in an adamantine shield. Iacobucci writes:

The right to play a meaningful role in the electoral process is not subject to countervailing collective interests.

A rather flabbergasting statement, n'est-ce pas? When citizens have gone before the Supreme Court to plead their section 2 rights of conscience, free expression, and association--described in the text of the Constitution as "fundamental"--they have quite often been told that these rights are constrained by "countervailing collective interests". The Supreme Court, however, is having none of this nonsense when it comes to the "democratic rights" enshrined in section 3. It is something about even numbers they don't like?

Maybe it's just something about individuals, as opposed to groups. Iacobucci's majority ruled, in essence, that it was fine to introduce arbitrary cutoffs for registered-party standing in order to advance the goal of making the electoral system easier and cheaper to administer; but the Elections Act regulations went well beyond that, and failed the Oakes reasonability test which is our secret meta-Constitution:

There is no connection whatsoever between the [law's] objective and the threshold requirement with respect to transfers of unspent election funds or listing party affiliations on ballot papers. Nor is the restriction on the right of political parties to issue tax receipts for donations received outside the election period rationally connected to the objective. The connection between legislation that has no impact upon either the number of citizens allowed to claim the tax credit or the size of the credit and the objective is tenuous at best. Moreover, the government has provided no evidence that the threshold actually improves the cost-efficiency of the tax credit scheme.

But what of the three dissenting justices--Gonthier, Lebel, Deschamps? Hmmm, there's something funny about those names, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Ah!--they're the three Quebec representatives on the court. A reader asked me about this recently: under the Constitution (this is in the unwritten part, a concept I know Americans will consider to be slightly dodgy) there must always be at least three members of the Quebec bar on the court, because Quebec's laws and procedures are so radically different from those of the rest of Canada. (Most notably, Quebec observes codified, French-style civil law, which is governed by English common-law traditions in the other nine provinces.) They are there to speak for the older legal heritage of the two within Canada's bosom, but more normally--as one might expect of Quebeckers, I'm afraid--they are the court's voice of collectivist, group-rights sentiment. In Figueroa it's no different. The Quebeckers' minority report agrees that the Elections Act fails the Oakes test, but speaks more kindly of the "impugned legislation", saying it "furthers significant democratic values by forming part of a scheme that recognizes and regulates political parties" and suggesting that a smaller threshold than 50 candidates may justly serve the goals of the law. Here's Louis LeBel writing on behalf of the trio:

The 50-candidate threshold benefits parties with broad appeal and encourages the aggregation of political will. These are important values, as evidenced by their place in our history and institutions, that in principle could be furthered at the price of compromising individual participation to a certain extent. In this case, however, the legislation goes too far and conflicts with s. 3.

Individual participation is of central importance, but s. 3 is also concerned with the representation of communities. Meaningful participation involves political groups and alliances between groups representing communities. Section 3 must also be interpreted in harmony with our political traditions and a purely individualistic approach is difficult to reconcile with Canadian political values. [Emphasis mine]

Sartre says that hell is other people, but we now know that he was mistaken: hell is unreturned phone calls when you're unemployed. Serves me right for losing my job so close to the Canada Day long weekend, which tends to bleed backward into Wednesday-Thursday-of-the-previous-week territory.

I had this conversation for the thousand-and-first time--though my own dialogue has changed--this evening:

CAB DRIVER So what do you do for a living?

ME Well, until Monday I was an editor over at the Report magazine.

CAB DRIVER Goddamn, I heard about that--you know, I had a subscription to that thing but I just let it run out a few months back. I'm such a right-winger, economically, but I'm not religious, so I finally just got tired of the continual Christian message, you know? I always felt, hey, great magazine, but it's just the same thing, issue after issue... I got kinda fed up, you know?

ME [Pulls out handgun, paints back of cab with own brains]

CAB DRIVER [Swerving crazily] AAAHHH! HOLY SHIT!!! AAAAHHHH!

Link Byfield, the Report's editor-in-chief from about 1986 to early 2003, always insisted that it was impossible to sell the magazine in the cities, where the bulk of the 1992-2003 circulation decline took place. (He also insisted it was impossible for his ad salesmen to leverage the magazine's golden-years demographic, for which roughly 100 magazine publishers in this country would happily kill a drifter.) But of course you don't have to sell the magazine to people who already take it: you just have to give them a product they'll keep buying. If I had $100 a year for all the former urban subscribers who loved the magazine's anti-Liberalism and got sick of its religious axe-grinding... well, I suppose I'd have the makings of a magazine, wouldn't I?

Speaking of direct democracy... here in Canada its effects are also most strongly felt on the West Coast (the east-west cultural gradients being much the same as in the U.S. and, for all I know, Mexico). The British Columbia legislature has voter recall for members of its legislative assembly. Premier Ralph Klein promised years ago to introduce direct-democracy measures here in Alberta, but that was long ago, when the world was young and the spirit of procedural reform was in the air and Ralph hadn't yet attained his current state, in which he could cannibalize live orphans on the Legislature steps and still win sixty seats.

Anytime the recall exercise is so much as threatened in B.C., British Columbians go through the same silly soul-searching you can now see in California. The term of office, we are told, is part of a contract made between the politician and the public; but how is the provision for recall any less a part of that contract, in a jurisdiction that has recall? Most politicians are lawyers. They are aware, beyond mere awareness, of the significance of the phrase "the fine print". In the end the hesitancy about recall seems to be a species of compassion for dumb animals. It seems we agree that Mr. Gladhand's nun-rape spree was inappropriate, but is it really right to use our power to interrupt the smooth passage of an elected politician's life? After all, they are The Anointed, and what is the consent of the governed but an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese...?

The Society for American Baseball Research is holding its 33rd Annual Meeting in Denver next month. Among the research presentations scheduled for July 10 and 11:

· Sheila Nguyen, "Psychological Skills and Player Position: A Qualitative Examination of Catchers"
· Shayna Sigman, "A Jurisprudential Analysis of the Decisions of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis"
· Bob Lewis, "Raceball: Major League Baseball as a Neocolonial Power"

Trust me, these (that last one, anyway) are better than anything I could make up.

The Ambler has received a wonderfully hostile communiqué from former B.C. Report staffer Robin Brunet, whose creepy references to a worshipful circle of "younger friends" lead one to wonder if he's become a bent scoutmaster since leaving the trade.

I wish I had your grasp of words, your cunning turn of phrase, your keen wit, to describe how utterly hilarious it is for I and people like me (that is, the gainfully employed thanks to sheer guts and determination) to read how you, Cosh, etc. are now begging for money as shamelessly as the welfare bums, ex-government whiners, single mothers and sundry deadbeats you so relished applying your poison pens to up until recently.

Perhaps in another life Robin will enjoy the intellectual gifts denied him in this one, and I'll get a share of the "sheer guts and determination".

I'm just starting to educate myself about the threatened recall of Gray Davis, the budget-fudging California governor who can be bumped out of office by the collection of 900,000 registered voters' signatures. It now seems to be taken for granted that wealthy Davis opponents, led by Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, will probably succeed: they've got 400,000 of the necessary names under lock and key and the story's only getting bigger. Midterm voter recalls stir such passions--the word "coup" is being flung back and forth openly, just as it is in Canada's Westminster-style democracy when the government caucus begins to come unravelled--that no one pauses to notice the contradiction embraced within opposition to the procedure. You need so many signatures to bring about a recall election that, clearly, the process leaves the governor's mansion at the mercy of the rich and powerful! But because there's no runoff before such an election, and a mere plurality of votes will be needed to succeed Davis, clearly the process leaves the governor's mansion at the mercy of some random wacko not approved by the rich and powerful!

Each of these irreconcilable tendencies, in turn, represents an enduring mystery (to me) about the views of the American punditariat. The first: that money's influence in politics is mostly regarded as completely malign, and preventable by some simple procedural change to American democracy. The second: that the two-party system is seen as ordained personally by God (though don't consult his civic representatives, the Founding Fathers, for confirmation: they don't seem to have responded positively to the notion of "party"). These ideas are both pretty daffy, though the first at least contains a kernel of truth. Nobody wants a billionaire buying the Smithsonian Institution and its contents on the sly because his 12-year-old son likes "smashin' stuff". But no one without a wide Marxist streak can really object to a rich man openly exercising the power of persuasion; it is one of the non-coercive ways in which rich people are favoured in defending their interests, one of the things that gives being rich its meaning. To say we don't want rich people to be able to buy newspaper space, television advertising, or direct-mail campaigns is to say that we don't really like the idea of rich people at all. (Not, mind you, that the media suffers from liberal bias!) Yet it is precisely the rich man's broad access to the means of persuasion that attracts the largest volume of complaint in the American system--a sign, to me, that the U.S. suffers from very little true corruption to worry about, relative to other liberal democracies.

And, no, I don't exclude Canada from the set of "other liberal demoracies". It's no coincidence that Canada's new campaign-finance legislation was cooked up by the prime minister and injected into an environment of total public indifference. Here, political reform is a means of distracting the public from what it knows damn well to be the real problems.

[UPDATE, June 27: a slight return to this subject here.]

Weblogging now resumes: I spent yesterday cleaning out my desk, and if you don't think that job takes most of a day you obviously never swung by my desk. Fortunately I was able to borrow the necessary Semtex from a passing prospector. Fun activity for the near future: trying to convince PayPal and the Royal Bank of Canada to speak the same language. Already one attempt to transfer funds electronically to my local chequing account has failed. PayPal's canned account of the reason is distinctly unenlightening--"Your bank reported a problem"--considering that the bounced transfer cost me $30. But then, this is a company globally infamous for atrocious customer service; I'd have put up an Amazon Honor System button instead, but they won't deal with customers outside the United States. For the bank's part, it has no record of the attempted transaction and reports no "problem" at all in accepting electronic transfers, though it is generally quite discombobulated--or pretends to be--about matters digital. It remains to be seen which of the three of us is the stupid one.

Why is it that whenever an Environics poll is reported in the papers (warning: link will rot quickly), I can never find a press release or a formal report of any kind on the Environics website? The last presser on the site for their research group is dated a month ago. There's no press release on Canada NewsWire, the usual repository, either. I infer--and if I'm being unjust please let me know--that Environics hands out fresh poll results directly to a selected coterie of journalists and doesn't want the proles combing over their precious numbers. Environics runs a communications branch and a "scientific" polling branch, and this is the kind of ham-handed practice that should jeopardize their reputation in regard to both.

Not that I seriously question the results in this case, mind you:

TORONTO (CP) - When it comes to "Canada's most priceless national symbol," it's a virtual tie between the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian flag, according to an Environics poll. About 28 per cent of young Canadians (aged 16 to 25) chose the charter, while 27 per cent chose the flag in the poll. Among baby boomers (ages 45 to 55), 30 per cent chose the charter and 32 per cent the flag. Other national symbols were chosen by fewer respondents. Nineteen per cent of boomers chose medicare, while nine per cent chose hockey. Among young Canadians, 20 per cent chose hockey and 11 per cent chose medicare.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. When choosing "national symbols", it appears that we get stuck for anything--except hockey--that is not the specific political accomplishment of a Liberal government after 1964. In the popular mind, Canadian history began right about then, and, like the flag, it is dyed in Liberal colours. Well before year zero, a hundred thousand Canadians died fighting for their country in two world wars: they could have no foreknowledge of any of these political symbols, but for some reason, die they did all the same, poor pitiful fools. Imagine how they feel about being outfaced in the afterworld by Pierre Trudeau, who wore Nazi regalia in the streets of Montreal during the Second World War:

When asked which Canadian best represents their personal values, both youth and the boomer generation chose Pierre Trudeau, although boomers selected the late prime minister at almost twice the rate (30 per cent versus 17 per cent) of young people. Regionally, however, there was some variation. In Quebec, the late premier Rene Levesque (16 per cent) outranked Trudeau (11 per cent) among young people.

It would be one thing if people had reported that Trudeau represented their political values, but what can they mean when they say that he represented their personal values? What values would those be?--bespoke suits? Dating Barbra Streisand? Raising your children to be gormless hippies? Little help here? At least Levesque's person "represents", if nothing else, the energizing visual and moral qualities of a cigarette.

Despite all the hullaballoo I don't want to forget to link to Porphyrogenitus's extended blues-boogie riff on some comments I made about American imperialism before the war. You can add scare quotes to "imperialism" in that sentence if it's strictly necessary for your mental health. I need to read P.'s piece once more before I venture a response, and in cases like this it's just as well if you have some time to chew it over, too.

As a service to general economic knowledge about weblogs, and in order that potential donors can make an informed decision, I am obliged to mention that my "pledge drive" has raised about a thousand U.S. dollars so far, which is amazing and humbling. I'd venture to say, though perhaps unfairly, that the $1,000 means more to me, both as a collective gesture and in quality-of-life terms, than eighty grand does to Andrew Sullivan. I think I'm solvent through August (though certain utility companies may be well pissed at me by then), and by Labour Day I expect I'll be doing something to pay the bills, even if it's only driving a packer for Syncrude. Thanks to all.

Jeremy Lott's website, unexpectedly, has become the clearinghouse for reactions to the demise of the Report. His "see ya later, skater" departure from the staff immediately after Mike Byfield was made editor-in-chief left no sign, to understate things considerably, that he'd have trouble letting go psychologically. I had kind of a sneaking admiration for Jeremy's instantaneous flight; he blew off a steady job for the uncertain life of a full-time freelancer, which takes guts, or a blind heedlessness which is indistinguishable from guts. He bargained for a higher salary than mine before he even got on a plane to Edmonton, then kissed it goodbye when the job conditions became, in his estimation, impossible. Really I should have walked out the door the minute the Byfields gave J-Lo the big bucks (not to minimize his considerable gifts) while thumbsucking about the magazine's poverty, but I freely accepted the slap in the face as the market price of my own cowardice-slash-pessimism. I was never confident that Googlepower could be turned into cold cash. I'm still not, but now I have no choice, do I?

Of the countless responses to the death of the Report, I found this one particularly touching, for the obvious reason that it contains kind words for me from a complete stranger who had no love whatsoever for the magazine as such. (Scroll down to the third item in the section.) There's a quote in James Clavell's King Rat, I think, to the effect that when things are going terrific an Englishman says they're tolerable, when things are merely tolerable he says it's all a complete bloody cock-up, and when there's actually a fiasco of some kind, he says things are going absolutely smashingly. Journalism operates under a similar rule: you know you're doing pretty well when someone uses the ostensibly reticent term "readable".

One of my financial supporters--who are more numerous and generous than I would have guessed--says she'll double her donation if I write something positive about Patrick Roy. She may be jerking my chain, but she already ponied up some cash, so she's probably not the kind of person who would do that to somebody who is staring in mute horror into an endless void. It's an interesting exercise anyway, and if she comes across it'll be my first writing for pay since my congé. What can I say that's positive about Patrick Roy?

Four Stanley Cup rings is a lot. One was bought and paid for, and two of the others were titles his teams had no business not winning; but four Stanley Cup rings is a lot, more than almost anybody now playing has. (It wouldn't surprise me if Mark Messier ended up being the last guy to bag as many as six.) Gordie Howe, as I've pointed out before, enjoyed history's longest career and played mostly in the six-team league, and he only won four. The 30-team league we now have is inevitably something of a crapshoot. If you buck the odds four times, you're entitled to credit for it.

Roy has prima donna characteristics, but few goalies don't. Forwards play in threesomes, defencemen in pairs, but a goalie is on his own, staked invisibly to a metal post like a padded Rottweiler. His performance is unusually dependent on the highest state of well-being he can muster; there is only so much he can do to compensate for slowed reflexes, and he must live in Howard Hughesian dread of viruses or injuries that wouldn't keep a forward off the ice for two hours. As a consequence, goalies inevitably present themselves as touchy eccentrics, and their psychological and physical comfort is an overwhelming priority for NHL clubs. If a skater does something annoying, unfair, dangerous, or distracting to a starting goalie in a practice, he'll get torn a new poo chute unless he has "LEMIEUX 66" on his uniform. Roy's desertion of the Canadiens after the infamous nine-goal night is still, to me, indefensible; but indefensible or not, the great majority of NHL coaches would not now have let such a thing happen. In fact, the quick hook is more common every year--often shockingly common, to one such as me who grew up watching 8-6 Oilers games.

As for Roy's refusal to play for Canada in the 2002 Olympics... well, for the fan, nationalistic feeling is a indulgence easily afforded, isn't it? Guys like Yzerman and Lemieux sacrificed a lot to play on that team; Yzerman arguably flirted with costing his team a Stanley Cup. I feel these tournaments are important not so much because Canada must destroy all rivals at every opportunity, but because they are good for the game--good for its narrative, good for marketing, and good for its international profile. But denying oneself the chance to appear on what's arguably the ultimate stage is a private decision which carries its own costs. Nobody was going to pay Roy cash to play in the Olympics, and we can't necessarily expect a Quebecker to share our national sentiments or even our core values. The fan has a sovereign right to judge, and to bitch out loud, but what are you gonna do, shoot the guy?

Finally, it must be said that Roy is candid, intelligent, and, by all accounts, a fine mentor to younger players. His counsel will be sought as long as hockey is played. He's certainly aloof, but he doesn't duck direct questions from the media. In the English press, at least, he's refrained from elevating his own place in the game with rhetorical bombast. And, as far as we know, his family isn't involved with Hells Angels loansharking.

Wimbledon is underway, and for me the subplot of surpassing interest will be the performance of Daniela Hantuchova, the Slovakian no. 9 womens' seed. Until recently Hantuchova was the thinking man's bit of tennis totty--an angular alternative to Anna Kournikova's skanky, Pam Anderson-esque sexual persona. She had even been photographed in gauzy, moistened outfits for GQ. But when she emerged for a Wimbledon warmup on grass in Eastbourne, England, last week, her skeletal appearance attracted the audible gasps that Karen Carpenter used to hear from the foot of the stage. Ever since, Clive Brunskill's unflinching photo has been putting news readers off their breakfast: you can see it about halfway down on this CNN/SI page.

Unwisely, Hantuchova responded to press inquiries about her health with a classic stock phrase from the library of anorexia: "I'm just lucky that I can eat what I want and not put on weight." She practically apologized for her poor 2003 tournament results to date, admitting that she had other interests: "Although tennis is my priority, I'm still taking up a few modelling offers because we girls naturally like the attention this sort of thing brings. That's natural." Ordinarily this would play in the ear like charmingly unenlightened East European candour ("we girls"? Is this 1952?), but under the circumstances one must question what Hantuchova considers "natural". A crowd flinching in instinctive horror from the sight of your body? Ceasing to menstruate? Fainting spells? The poignance of anorexia--and perhaps a clue to its etiology--is that its sufferers have transcended the "natural" altogether, self-preservation being the sine qua non of the "natural". When Daniela said she was lucky that she can eat what she wants, she slyly left something relevant out: someone ought to have asked exactly how much, if anything, she "wants" to eat anymore.

Sportswriters are a stupid bunch, with a few exceptions: sometimes even the really good ones are sort of stupid. What makes the good ones good is that they know when not to stray into territory best left to people of wide and civilized interests. Here's CNN/SI's Jon Wertheim trying to overcome the difficulty that Hantuchova owns her body (he openly concedes her "a certain autonomy" regarding it, which is damned generous):

Of course, just because the WTA can't necessarily take formal action doesn't mean it can't bend over backward to help Hantuchova. Offer her the services of a counselor and nutritionist, for starters. Make sure that her mentor (Martina Navratilova, I believe) is on the case. Let Carling Bassett-Seguso tell Hantuchova how anorexia wreaked havoc on Bassett-Seguso's career. Get Hantuchova a copy of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth. (We assume the tour is doing some or all of these already.)

I'm no tennis expert, and Wertheim is, but I'm pretty goshdarned confident that the world's ninth-ranked female tennis player does not lack for qualified nutritional advice. Martina Navratilova, urged in this June 23 story to intervene in Hantuchova's case, had already done so three days earlier, as had other stars of the past. And Wertheim's suggestion that Hantuchova consult the discredited bible of pop social constructionism, The Beauty Myth... well, can't you just hear him shooting the shit with his editor on this one? "Hey, uh, what was the name of that book that tells chicks it's, like, okay to get fat because they find it sexy in Africa? Man, you know what's weird?--the woman who wrote that thing is actually a stone fox! Anyway, get me the title and I'll drop it in."

The Beauty Myth, as is now well known, made some dodgy claims (since openly retracted by Wolf) about the incidence of anorexia and blamed the disease on modern, consumerist, patriarchal Western ideals of female attractiveness. Although anorexia appeared until recently to be a culture-bound disorder, the Beauty Myth myth still wouldn't, and didn't, survive scrutiny. It ignored the fact that female body-image neuroses are overwhelmingly inculcated in early life by female authority figures, it inappropriately treated full-blown eating disorders as a mere variant of these neuroses, it overlooked the subtle pride anorexia sufferers (in a sense, rightly) feel in their power of askesis, and it was falsified by later research which suggests strongly that there may be a genetic component to anorexia. If you can overlook all of that, and blithely recommend the book to eating-disorder sufferers as a quickie curative, you still have to confront the slight difficulty that people who have anorexia--the ones who have supposedly succumbed to a pervasive miasma of social signals about body fat--seem unusually resistant, behaviour-wise, to very strong social signals about adding weight from family, friends, and, in the case of Hantuchova, the world's sporting media and the heroines of her profession.

Anyway, Daniela won her first-round Wimbledon singles match today, 6-4, 6-1.

A news release, dated 10 a.m. June 23, from the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy:

Citizens Centre Shifts Emphasis from Publishing to Advocacy

EDMONTON - [Blah blah blah blah blah--continue for 120 words--blah blah blah. Citizens Centre chairman Link Byfield said:]

"Although The Report magazine is thirty years old, it has not been profitable over time. And after the Citizens Centre acquired ownership earlier this year, the first thing we did was turn down a $360,000 federal grant for which the previous owners had applied and which they had received on an annual basis."

In light of these financial considerations and what our members are telling us, we will cease publication of The Report.

"This was a tough decision," said Byfield. [Fifty more words about how great the future is, etc.]

· After thirty years, the magazine formerly known as The Report, Alberta Report, St. John's Edmonton Report, and perhaps other names, no longer exists. It's kaput. Done. Toast.

· After--what, seven? Eight years?--I'm out of a job. Or, to put it another way, I'm suddenly a freelance writer with a lot of free time. Offers of employment will be gratefully entertained.

· My previous statement about not wanting you to use the PayPal button is now, as the late Ron Ziegler used to say, inoperative. The new shibboleth is "Give till it hurts." I assume, with the insane optimism of the freshly brutalized, that I will eventually be able to build up an income, maybe get some steady gigs. But even the money that exists in my orgiastic fantasies is four to six weeks away. Some readers have already contravened my explicit instructions and sent donations. My gratitude is inexpressible. If any of you were hesitating just because of a stupid little thing like me telling you not to contribute, you can stop now. (Stop hesitating, I mean.) Don't worry: I'm not going to become the PBS of the Internet. In fact, this will be my last word about the Paypal button at left. Shuttin' up now. Gotta make some calls.

[UPDATE, 2:14 pm: Rick Hiebert went to the trouble of posting the full text of the press release summarized supra.]

Christie Blatchford, the earthy doyenne of Canadian print reporters, is rumoured to be bolting the imploding National Post for the ascendant Globe and Mail; could be true, but on this bleak Monday morning, she's there in her familiar Post slot on page A1. Her lede is an excellent case study in why she's so popular:

The man alleged to be Holly Jones' killer looks for all the world like the most endearing and harmless of Canadian comedy's vast cast of characters--Ed Grimley, Martin Short's most famous creation.

All that Michael Briere is missing is the tall point to which Mr. Short used to gel his hair when he became Mr. Grimley. Virtually every other element of Mr. Grimley's signature look was present when Mr. Briere appeared briefly in a small, hot basement courtroom before a justice of the peace on the weekend--the long-sleeved white dress shirt primly done up to the very top button; the dark pants worn a shade too high on the body; and that body itself soft-seeming and tending toward the pear-shaped.

I'm never sure whether Blatchford is great because she's willing to write that an accused child murderer looks like Ed Grimley, or because she is--through a lifetime editorial indulgence earned by dint of sheer cussedness--permitted to.

[UPDATE, 8:04 am: The Ambler reminds us by e-mail that Blatchford's defection to the Globe was officially reported on the Globe website Friday afternoon. I'd link to the article, but the Globe site crashed my computer by trying to upload some kind of Zip-compressed advertising file last time I visited.]

I was thinking of talking a bit more about Harry Potter anyway, and Daniel Radosh has already tackled the whole Dickens thing, which provides a suitable occasion. (Incidentally my favourite Radosh piece is "Inside the Making of the Star Saga Saga", which I re-read every few months just on principle.)

Radosh's misgivings about Harry Potter are related to the aggressive, almost sinister secrecy now being imposed on the world with respect to each new title in the series. Mostly this secrecy is something that fans and media have accepted voluntarily: between the release and today you would have had a hard time finding out any details of the plot, though the National Post has now, daring public wrath, printed an obituary of the major character who dies in Order of the Phoenix. Fansites observed a consensual embargo on plot points, refusing to mention them for 48 hours after release even under cover of spoiler warnings. When one of the UK tabs--I think it was the Sun--obtained a mislaid copy of the galleys months ago, it milked the publicity for all it was worth and more: the paper piously declared that it would not "ruin the secret" for legions of innocent British children, and an editor was photographed entombing the bootleg book in a very thick-walled safe. All this combined with litigation threats from the publisher to kill rumour-mongering very effectively, considering the size of the Potter audience.

Like Radosh, I don't quite like breathing the weirdly Maoist atmosphere. (As we know, Rowling even hid major plot elements from her husband, although for all we know he might have made it easier by not giving a crap about Wizzo Boy and his Dostoyevskian trainload of peripheral characters.) But this hasn't come about solely through malignant market manipulation; sometimes hype fails, after all. Hype isn't hype without plenty of willing participants. I suspect people experience Harry Potter as a unifying force in a media world which has an ever greater tendency to shunt us into demographic veal pens. Although reading a book in the knowledge that no one but the author knew what would happen to the characters before yesterday is certainly a minor pleasure, it is one that can only be enjoyed once. Naturally it's emphasized while it is still available. It is almost a separate commodity, one which acquires most of its value through scarcity.

Is Harry Potter's unique ability to generate buzz founded on any real, enduring literary quality? I'm not sure what else it could be founded on, since to say it's founded on hype is to immediately propose the further question of what makes the hype possible. We're not talking about Chicken Soup for the Soul or A Brief History of Time here--when it comes to fiction, you can't sell people something serialized unless they care, for whatever reason, what's going to happen next. J.K. Rowling is plainly no Dickens (although Dickens would have spotted a kindred spirit the first time he saw character names like "Dumbledore" and "Snape"), but then again, I'm not so confident that Dickens' place in history was established purely by the quality of his texts, with their gooey secular piety and maudlin apostrophizing. Dickens, owing to his insight into manners, sensitivity to cruelty, and comic gifts, remains nutritious to us despite developments in English prose style and our psychic separation from his worldview. But if nutrition alone did the trick, Trollope might be just as widely read. The plain fact is that Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim were rammed home into the permanent heritage by proto-mass-media hype, and not by literary vis viva alone. Yet I can't say I'm certain we perceive Harry Potter and his friends as keenly; the readers are passionate, but the books have not yet proven their ability to establish clear images in the mind even of a reader who hasn't picked them up (or seen the movies). That, perhaps, is the test--the Sherlock Holmes test, one might call it.

Here's humorist Daniel Radosh, groping for a contrarian angle on the Harry Potter phenomenon:

Call me a muggle, but this whole thing about not wanting to "spoil the surprise" of the new Harry Potter book only proves that HP is less and less about literature (I like the books, except for Goblet of Fire) and increasingly about hype. After all, if HP loses value because readers might hear something about it, doesn't that give it a shelf life of about a week? Are the Narnia books or Lloyd Alexander or Wizard of Earthsea "spoiled" for kids, because the plots aren't a big secret? Of course not, but with Harry, the focus is now all on the big reveal--and not on the followthrough (which is why after all the hype over GoF, most people never figured out how crappy it was). That means there's a good chance that these books, unlike the classics Rowling cribs from, won't be passed down from generation to generation.

This seems pretty reasonable: after all, who now remembers that risible footnote to literary history, Charles Dickens (1812-1870)? Dickens was the first author whose work was greeted with such media-fed exuberance; in collaboration with his publishers, Chapman and Hall, he constructed a recognizable form of the same hype machine now churning furiously on J.K. Rowling's behalf, serializing his work in newspapers made cheap by advancements in printing and paper milling. Where we have "Pottermania", the 19th century had "Boz-o-mania". In the UK, labourers skipped meals to husband shillings for the next chapter of Oliver Twist; in the USA, readers descended on east coast harbours en masse to get first word from Blighty of Little Nell's fate. But it's not like those books have been passed down from generation to generation.

[UPDATE, 5:25 pm: More here.]

It's funny how rarely those who support state policing of speech come out and actually confront the opposing view. Lawyer Marvin Kurz, writing in Friday's National Post, comes closer than most... but even he can't resist the heavy reliance on obfuscation and argument-from-authority (the Supreme Court is on my side: I therefore win) that always characterize support for "hate law". Newspeak, anyone?

"Our hate speech laws do not criminalize opinion; they criminalize conduct." The specific conduct they criminalize, of course, is expressing particular opinions. This isn't a counter-argument, but a foul cloud of squid ink.

"[These laws] balance the right to free speech with the rights of minorities to be protected from incitement." A typical Canadian use of the expression "free speech" to mean its opposite. You can't "balance" X's right to freedom of speech with Y's right to arrest, prosecute, and imprison people who say bad things. But if you call what you've accomplished "balance", the profoundly inattentive may overlook the element of coercion involved.

Top prize, however, goes to the article's punchline: "The law is not meant only to punish, but also to rehabilitate the offender... Perhaps through a plea of guilt and the process of a sentencing circle, David Ahenakew can find the rehabilitation he so sorely lacks." Consider the historical resonances, and recall that it's a human rights worker for an organization representing Jews who has formulated these words. What's wrong with this picture?

Mr. Kurz's op-ed is not without its comical aspect. One paragraph is inadvertently revealing:

[Ahenakew's] remarks were not merely hateful. Coming as they did from a prominent human rights spokesman, they were a breach of trust. They added injury to insult at a time when Jews are under attack around the world. Jewish children are afraid to walk to school in France. The Chief Rabbi of Belgium was attacked by a group of Muslim thugs while travelling in a train. University campuses in North America have seen Jewish students roughed up and intimidated.

Did you catch that? Kurz has conflated hateful speech with assault so thoroughly that he refers to Ahenakew's rant as "injury" and actual physical assaults on Jews as mere "insult". He literally can't tell the two things apart anymore. Upon precisely such cultivated stupidity is "hate law" ultimately founded.

Those of you who have seen Saturday's Journal will know why I've finally gotten around to putting up a PayPal button, despite my longtime misgivings about its subliminal effect on the reader. I don't want anybody to use the button just yet, but the time to have a "pledge drive" may be about to arrive. Quite in spite of myself, I laughed pretty hard at the lede of Duncan Thorne's article:

EDMONTON - Report, once Alberta's most widely read magazine, has delayed its latest issue because of a financial crisis.

The crunch comes as the group that runs it, the right-of-centre Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy, grapples with plans to make the magazine an "agent for change" in pressing for Canadian "refederation" to change federal-provincial relationships.

"We haven't been able to bring in the revenue that we need to keep it going," associate editor Terry O'Neill acknowledged Friday. "I don't live paycheque to paycheque, thankfully."

I'll summarize the main points in the article, which is accurate as far I'm capable of confirming:

· The latest issue was readied for the press about a week ago, just ahead of the usual printing deadline, but has not yet been sent to Quebecor. Management says the issue will appear, but it has not been decided how soon.
· Staff members were paid on Friday and have not yet missed a cheque, though I've heard vague indications that freelancers may have been paid late, and the Journal suggests that upper management skipped a week's pay. It's been made clear to the minions that the next cheque may not be the usual two weeks away, but we are supposed to get more information on Monday.
· The company needs a $1.5 million cash top-up to remain in business and meet payrolls. Link Byfield, the publisher of the magazine, spent last week presenting his plans to the business community in an effort to raise this money. It is important to emphasize that much of the shortfall comes from the magazine's recent decision to stop accepting federal postage and and publishing subsidies.

Some of you may be wondering "How can I help?" (and if you're a subscriber, you've already been asked for help), but if you've got that kind of money, I'd much prefer you gave that PayPal button a jab. I know I said before I didn't want anybody to use it, but I'm not crazy: if you have $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket, go ahead and give generously--I am pretty goddamn broke. I just don't want to beg actively until I go in on Monday and find out the exact situation.

I don't imagine anyone exactly likes being hit with questions about their views on race by Luke Ford, the muckraking porn journalist turned conflicted Orthodox Jewish convert. But most of them probably handle it less catastrophically than the ordinarily quite clever British gadfly/author Toby Young:

Luke: "Did you read The Bell Curve?"

Toby: "No. I read a long essay about it in the New Republic, but I'm not a big believer in genetic determinism. Both my father and my maternal grandfather died with all their hair whereas I'm almost completely bald."

My paragraph about the Flaming Lips and Steely Dan has provoked strongly contrasting reactions. Bruce Rolston thinks it indicated severe substance abuse. The Agenda Bender saw fit to enshrine me in a weblog entry alongside J. Lileks, Mark Steyn, and William Gibson. Both men are, of course, profoundly misguided, although the drug accusation can be made to stick if the term is stretched to cover the excretions relinquished by the brain under conditions of intense sleep deprivation.

"It's over," is Andrew Sullivan's verdict on the Canadian government's decision not to appeal the Ontario court of appeal's ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. If Andrew means that what Canadians--and civilized human beings generally--have known as marriage is over, then yes, he is exactly correct.

These are the first two sentences of David Frum's diary entry on the Halpern gay marriage ruling. Those of you who have weddings planned for later this year might as well not bother! Cancel the caterer! Burn the engraved invitations! You're wasting your money!

Apparently some of Frum's correspondents disapproved of the Armageddonish tone of these words, and he had to add an apologia today.

Gay marriage opens the doors to a series of changes in the law of marriage. Not the law of marriage for gays--the law of marriage for everybody. The whole point to gay marriage is to make the rules for gays the same as the rules for straights. Logically, then, the rules for straights will have to be the same as the rules for gays.

It's a good guess, for example, that we will see an end to the concepts of "motherhood" and "fatherhood" in our legal practice. The law will increasingly see couples as interchangeable "parents."

The bit of "logic" in that first paragraph is rather deft--but possibly also daft. It may be likely on historical grounds that the law of heterosexual marriage will change because gays can now get married, but to claim that it is an a priori truth is, honestly, just verbal Three Card Monte. Even granting Frum his "logic", the one concrete change he seems able to foresee in marriage is that men, as parents, may now enjoy the same esteem in the eyes of divorce law as women. Does it help his case that he is honest enough to acknowledge that gay marriage will bring about one of the most urgent legal reforms advocated by conscientious conservatives, probably without exception, across Canada? He's almost made me a believer in the opposite side of the argument.

Frum is convincing when he writes, in his first entry, that the Liberal government cannot be trusted to protect, for small-l liberal reasons, the historic rights of religious communities to solemnize marriage according to their own traditions. But is gay marriage really at the top of this particular slippery slope? He cites three causes for concern:

...today Chretien promises that his government will never compel churches, synagogues, and mosques to sanctify same-sex marriages. That would be more reassuring if:

1) the Ontario human rights commission had not ruled in 2000 that religious conviction was no defense against a charge of discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation;

2) a Saskatchewan court had not held in 2002 that a man could be punished under the province's hate-crime statute for publishing a newspaper ad in which the only text were four verses from the Bible condemning homosexuality;

3) and a bill were not pending in the Canadian House of Commons right now to make anti-gay "propaganda" a criminal offense.

In this sense, the argument is really a sideshow, like battling over iron production versus steel production in Mao's China. The worst possible consequences that can practically be imagined from permitting gay marriage are of far less importance than the damage which has already been done to both religious freedom--and, if you like, to marriage (considered strictly as a social institution). Ammunition should be husbanded for the important battles, and it may be useful to take some care not to alienate our gay and lesbian brethren and sistren, though admittedly they have hitherto, as a group, shown little care for the causes of free expression and press freedom in Canada. (But what organized interest group of any kind has shown any appetite for these things? They are attacked more than they are defended even by our supposed "civil liberties" lawyers. If professional lesbigays are enemies of human freedom, they are at least far from alone.) Still, I think we are foolish to worry about the particular quiddities and quillities of our homosexual neighbours' cohabitation arrangements in a country where people cannot say what they think, print what they think, and consort or trade with whom they choose.

Frum envisions a left-Liberal war on the churches:

...while the pressure groups and the courts may exempt the churches at first, it is hard to imagine that they will exempt them for long. The Canadian churches receive, after all, all kinds of public support. Not only are they exempt from taxes, but Catholic schools are subsidized from public funds. Would we permit people who receive public money to refuse to marry inter-racial couples? Hardly! So how can we allow them to persist in refusing to marry same-sex couples?

The problem is, I'm not sure there is an actual answer to the question, aside from "Well, as a matter of logic, perhaps we can't". Fortunately, tax exemptions for churches aren't particularly logical to begin with, and may therefore be expected to survive in defiance of logic. Even though the Liberals have long forgotten what the name of their party means, there is one very important cause for hope if you're a believer. The central principle of the Liberal party is electoral power rather than liberty, and traditionalist churches are a great source of that power for the Liberals. Do the Liberals want a war with moderate Catholics, who vote for them in overwhelming numbers? Do they want a war with Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims? Without these and other religious groups, would there be any bottom at all to electoral support for the Liberals in Canada?

The Liberal government is, in fact, not particularly happy with attacks on religious bodies by provincial human-rights commissars, though they will wait until the last possible moment to ever enter that fight. The aforementioned statutes of Saskatchewan and Ontario are neither the fault nor the problem of the federal Liberals. And while they apparently intend to criminalize criticism of "sexual orientation", there is in fact no possibility that such a bill will be enforced uniformly; it will be used only against enemies of the Liberal state. Catholics, Muslims, and the like do not qualify, to say the least, and will remain perfectly safe as long as they continue to turn out dutifully for the red team at every election. It's those of us who aren't conveniently allied with a powerful interest group who have to watch what we say a little more carefully every year.

This discovery about the Y chromosome, distinguishing genetic characteristic of your garden-variety male, is really mind-blowing. A Y chromosome is always paired with an X, so if the information in the sex-specific part of the Y chromosome is damaged, it can't just scootch up against its unlike partner and replace base-pair sequences that way. The Y chromosome has thus been considered a slightly poor cousin to the more robust X. But now it turns out the Y chromosome can self-repair because its sex-specific sequences are palindromic--they read the same backwards and forwards, like the sentence "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama." If a genetic "sentence" in the chromosome gets garbled, ("A man, a plan, a canal--Canada?") it can be checked against the opposite half of the "text" (oh, it's supposed to be "Panama"!). Isn't that the craziest thing you've ever heard in your life?

If SARS hasn't permanently discredited "alternative medicine", what will? Consider this advisory from Health Canada:

There have been reports in the media and on the Internet of home remedies and over the counter products being effective in the prevention and/or treatment of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Recent examples of products with unsubstantiated SARS-related claims include Vitamin C, colloidal silver, belladonna, and other herbal or homeopathic products. It is important consumers are aware that these claims have not been proven to be effective in the prevention or treatment of SARS.

Generally, advocates of a quack remedy will cite anecdotal evidence, and the antiquity of their particular therapy, as reasons for the unprejudiced to suspect it might work. X thousands of people have used Aunt Mabel's Mercury Salts to cure neuralgia for 120 years; tribe Y chewed pine needles to cure testicular torsion--weren't they maybe onto something? Well and good, but now we see that when a certifiably new disease appears in human beings, the same panoply of bullshit panaceas is trotted out.

How would anyone know, at this early date, whether megadoses of Vitamin C helped treat SARS--or made it worse? How would anyone know that colloidal silver (which can cause argyria) or homeopathy accomplishes anything? There hasn't even been time to build up a fraction of the anecdotal databank which is normally used to justify the use of these products. Aren't alt-med consumers even mildly suspicious that curative powers are being claimed for old remedies in treating a distinctive, brand-new disease?

The Canadian Statistical Assessment Service has some priceless examples of alt-med opportunism. "Kiwifruit a day keeps SARS away". Yes, but don't forget the holy water.

I think this anecdote says more about the British character than you could in an entire book. AP reports that even Joanne Rowling's husband, Dr. Neil Murray, doesn't know which of the major characters will die in the forthcoming fifth Harry Potter book.

After writing the death scene, Rowling recalled, "I walked into the kitchen crying and Neil said to me, 'What on earth is wrong?' And I said, 'I've just killed the person.'"

"And he said, 'Well, don't do it then.'"

I spent the evening listening to music--most notably, ascertaining after all this time that Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots lives up to the hype and, incidentally, makes it just that little bit more respectable to have had a heavily prog-skewed musical self-upbringing. (The Flaming Lips' Michael Ivins owns a cat named Tarkus: consider this, and tremble.) Everything comes back into vogue eventually--everything--although some people will probably have to wait two hundred years instead of fifteen (sorry, acid-wash fans!). I also listened to some of Steely Dan's Everything Must Go, while we're on the subject of explosive cultural recrudescences. I only learned a few weeks ago that the Dans were favouring the 21st century with a second album. It's nice to have them back for reasons of jammies-'n'-duvet-type comfort, but isn't this music a little minimalist? And "Pixeleen" struck me as an uncharacteristically transparent billet-doux: I thought the decoding was supposed to be half the fun with this band. A line like "Dream deep, my three times perfect ultrateen" leaves room for approximately none of Empson's seven types of ambiguity.

[UPDATE, June 20: See also this note, supra.]

I can't exactly fault Greg Weston for reporting this morsel in the Ottawa Sun (link will rot quickly):

In the likely event Paul Martin takes control of prime ministerial appointments book next winter, word is he may well decide no one should replace Adrienne Clarkson as governor general when her five-year term expires in October 2004.

Sources tell us that while tradition would all but prohibit Her Excellency's being reappointed for another full term--it is doubtful Clarkson would want it in any case--there is a good chance her term will be extended for another year into the fall of 2005. ...a source well up in the Martin organization told me extending Clarkson's tenancy at Rideau Hall "wouldn't be at all far-fetched."

Jeremy Lott abases himself as a means of getting a fresh link from my site. Honestly, I'm sure I'd link to J-Lo more often if I shared his various unhealthy preoccupations, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Unfortunately, Buffy was already an overanalyzed cult object by the time it really came to my attention--it arrived on the radar screen trailing sulfurous clouds of obnoxiousness, so I've never taken the trouble to watch more than ten minutes of the show at a stretch. I'm unusually confident--thanks to reports of self-contradictory story arcs and frequent admissions (from fans!) that much of the show's run was crap--that my decision is an instance of economically sound rational ignorance.

The Non-Smokers' Rights Association, Canada's ill-named anti-tobacco lobby group, has filed a complaint with the federal Competition Bureau over the labelling of low-tar, low-nicotine cigarettes as "light" or "mild". You can read the CBC story or the NSRA's own press release.

The move is an admission of failure. The NSRA would have pursued the case in a real court if it could honestly prove that "light"/"mild" labelling had "caused the death of thousands of Canadians." In 2001, Allan Rock appeared ready to go after the tobacco industry and ban "light" labels by ministerial fiat: he made a big show of moral indignation about it, anyway. In the end the health ministry crapped out and introduced voluntary labelling guidelines, which have been ignored. The NSRA's Competition Bureau brief is a consequence of the ministry's failure to play ball--a attention-getting temper tantrum.

There was a certain intellectual honesty in the federal government's choice to back off the labelling issue. As a certain brilliant young reporter noted during Rock's short-lived hardball campaign:

...recent research has shown that most smokers of lights and milds are no better off than regular smokers. Psychologically, even subconsciously, they compensate for the lower nicotine by taking longer puffs, smoking more cigarettes, or even covering the ventilation holes in the filter.

If lower-nicotine, lower-tar cigarettes are no safer than regulars, however, why has the government insisted since 1989 that cigarette packets display the tar and nicotine content of the brand? Is the ministry prepared to admit complicity in the "lies" of Big Tobacco? Not quite, says Murray Kaiserman, director of research for Health Canada's Tobacco Control Program.

"The numbers are part of an education process to inform smokers of the risks," he says. "They have been linked, in a lot of minds, to the 'light' and 'mild' descriptors. And the truth is that if you switched from a cigarette with 15 mg of tar to one that delivers 1 mg of tar, without changing your habits, you would reduce your exposure. So the government had a valid belief that those numbers provided useful information." Then why aren't product descriptors useful too? Switching from regulars to ultra lights can save lives, no? "You might receive a potential benefit if the change were dramatic, but the issue is that people use lights and milds as a means of not quitting. They think they're reducing the amount of tar they inhale, but the vast majority don't."

There's an interesting wire story on food banks in today's Vancouver Sun. UBC professor Graham Riches is at the core of the story, arguing that food banks ought to be closed down in order to make the poor suffer more and put political pressure on provincial governments to raise welfare payments. It's compassionate leftism!

For Riches, food banks started out as a well-intentioned effort to feed hungry people in the 1980s but have become a crutch for government and society.

"Essentially they've become a second tier of the welfare system and enable governments to look the other way and neglect their obligations to make sure that people have a decent social wage," Riches says. "Food banks are in a sense telling us that Canada's welfare state has failed."

Even aside from the bloody-mindedness, this is a, shall we say, interesting argument for oh so many reasons.

1. It's convenient, for one thing, that the story should appear now, when British Columbia has a Liberal government. This is perhaps a bit like that outrageous homelessness problem in the States, which magically leaves the front pages when a Democrat is in the White House. The suggestion in the CP story is that poverty is now especially horrid in B.C., and that something has suddenly changed; but it has always been Prof. Riches' position that food banks make it "easier for governments to ignore poverty." I interviewed him on the subject for one of my first Alberta Report cover stories, back in, oh, must've been '95 or so. He's against food banks in principle: actual social conditions have nothing to do with his opinion.

2. Note the hidden premise in Riches' thinking: private charitable institutions like food banks, in his view, properly exist only as a supplemental appurtenance to welfare. For some reason, food banks are a "second tier" of the social structure that provides for the poor--not part of the "first tier". Why should this be so? (It's certainly not true as a historical proposition: does he think giving poor people food is a novel practice?) Well, you know why. Welfare reforms have been politically popular everywhere they've been tried in North America because most people prefer to minimize the coercive "tier" of support for the indigent, rather than the voluntarist one. But if you believe that welfare is justified because the money is ultimately taken from taxpayers--if you believe that theft is actually morally superior to begging, because begging doesn't serve the interest of class war--then of course you'll share Prof. Riches' view. But, remember, he's not just a tub-thumping cod-Marxist, he's an expert in "social work".

3. Of course, the professor really does know a lot about food banks. In fact, he knows something you don't, something that is rarely if ever mentioned in stories on this subject. This one's no exception. The fact is this:

Food banks did not begin primarily as a means of assisting the poor: they began as a means of using food that would otherwise be wasted by groceries and supermarkets. Most of the food distributed by food banks comes, not from individual donations, but from these stores. If you shut down the food banks, most of the food on those shelves would be thrown out.

Have you ever read Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book? It's full of advice, most of it not relevant anymore, on how to live on the bum. One of the themes of the book is that a well-organized hippie "cooperative" can feed itself amazingly cheaply on food that groceries can't sell for one reason or another. We're talking about dented packaging, incorrect labelling, food that's approaching its sell-by date but is really only quasi-perishable, mistaken deliveries, excess inventory, edible produce that's mildly bruised, day-old bread. It's all fine to eat: you just can't sell it. Making a few contacts round the back of the store can get you, as Abbie repeatedly emphasizes, a positive bonanza of free, healthy food.

Food banks are just an institutional and, normally, church-run version of that. They're saving food that would otherwise go to waste. The roots of the food-bank movement are not primarily charitable, but ecological. From an environmental standpoint, going to a food bank would be a worthy act for a rich Bay Street stockbroker. But, as things have panned out, the working poor (and the miserly: food banks don't means-test recipients) have discovered that food banks are a good way to stretch a small paycheque. They have use for the food, which would otherwise be destined for the landfill.

Food banks are, to be fair, migrating further and further from their origins: they fund-raise and actively solicit food donations more. Demand is always rising, because--hell, it's free food: would you expect demand to fall? Edible food waste from groceries doesn't correlate too well with the nutritional needs of families, so sometimes food banks will become overstocked with produce (as Edmonton's did this spring) and fall short on homogenous staples like flour. Still, they do an overwhelming amount of good for very little money. I think food banks are a success story, and I think Edmonton's can be proud to have served as a model for Canada. But the people who actually run food banks don't agree with me. They're reluctant to ever claim even a modicum of success: they're mostly liberal Christians with a "social justice" mindset, and they think it's shameful that money should be tight in working-class households while one rich man exists in Canada. They're just too good to go as far as Graham Riches--to shut their doors, as he urges, and make life harder for the working poor as a means of hastening the revolution.

Some ordinarily sensible people, no doubt influenced by the recent polarization of intellectual-property issues, are making fun of Honeywell for seeking trademark protection on its classic round thermostat interface. "Companies in every industry should start snapping up the basic geometric shapes, forcing competitors to design strange Dali-esque alternatives," wisecracks Julian Sanchez. "What's next--Microsoft asserting rights to the square?" asks a BoingBoing correspondent.

Oh those silly goddamn IP lawyers, trying to trademark a shape. But then again, no one would expect a car maker to get away with stamping out autos in the shape of the classic VW beetle. Of course shape can be a distinctive, IP-enclosable design element; and this is especially true when you've had to research underlying technical developments to make the shape possible. Anybody who's cracked open one of those round thermostats knows that everything is different on the inside. As it turns out, it took Henry Dreyfuss thirteen years to perfect the round thermometer interface.

Placing all the elements in a circular form was more difficult than it first seemed; attempts to make a curved thermometer were especially problematic. World War II halted the development program but helped provide technical solutions. The substitution of a bimetal coiled thermometer and use of a sealed mercury switch eliminated problems with contamination from dust. By 1953, the thermostat was refined into its now-familiar form, referred to simply as the Round. Its low price and ability to fit most situations has made the Round one of Dreyfuss's most successful designs.

This affair is not one of those sick IP jokes like British Telecom's attempt to patent the hyperlink. It's a hard case. Sympathy for Honeywell's position is warranted if you believe in intellectual property at all, and even if you don't, you can see that they're not merely trying to "own the circle." Let's not start being jerks about industrial design just because a few lawyers need to be shot in the head.

[UPDATE, June 16: Don't miss Julian's response in the comments thread over at Hit & Run.]

Follow-up dept.: Fantagraphics Books, the comics publisher that issued an emergency plea to fans May 29, has met its goal of staying liquid and independent by selling $80,000 worth of inventory. Dirk Deppey has the official announcement. Gary Groth's post-crisis interview with Newsarama.com is a mini-education in publishing economics. Interestingly, after the public appeal was made, Fantagraphics' downstream retailers actually chided the company for not coming to them for cash first. Which is counterintuitive (capitalism being heartless and cold and dehumanizing and whatnot) until you consider how important those books' pulling power must be: having them on the shelves serves an emblematic purpose, for indie bookshops and comic stores, which is bound to be as valuable as the actual markup.

I feel guilty about being named an official "Friend of Fantagraphics" for having reported its money woes to my paltry readership. I'd feel like more of a "friend" if I had the cash to come across and buy books more than once a year. Consider this letter I received from reader Lydia Piper:

A few years ago I read about Fantagraphics' Prince Valiant reprints in Practical Homeschooling magazine. I hoped they would tempt my youngest son to read more. They did, and 40-plus volumes later I'm still buying. Hope the "panty-sniffing hillbilly" fans appreciate this homeschooler's support of Fantagraphics.

Are there any physicians reading this weblog? I need a doctor's note so I can sit out future rounds of Canada's gay-marriage fight. I couldn't stand to be seen battling on either side, you see. On one hand you have the judges, who have elevated the preservation of "dignity" to the highest legal principle of the land without coming within a parsec of defining it, and the gay and lesbian activists, whose blind worship of the state has them virtually falling over themselves to obtain marriage licenses the very hour Leviathan permits them to acquire one. We've got "dignity" now; I read it in the Globe and Mail. Poor sods, all they've done is relinquish whatever dignity they had to begin with. But on the other hand you have a pack of perspiring Christians (and Muslims and Sikhs) so befuddled about their own doctrine that they believe a change in civil marriage procedure somehow threatens the special status and nature of the marriage sacrament. I swear I'm just waiting for these people to call for a government ban on soda crackers because some consumers might accidentally conclude that they are ingesting the corpus Christi with their Campbell's tomato soup.

Nobody in Canada has ever, to my knowledge, uttered twenty consecutive lucid words about "gay marriage" that don't contain some evasion, equivocation, fallacy, or factual error. (Some, for example, have cited Canada's principle of "church-state separation" as the reason for permitting gay marriage: I'm worried that these people may veer right off the road the first time they drive by a Catholic school.) And now that great conservative hero, Premier Ralph Klein, is threatening to use the "notwithstanding" clause in the Constitution to forbid homosexual marriage if the Supreme Court introduces it Canada-wide in the appeal of Halpern. Here is some late-arriving cavalry indeed. Five years ago the Supreme Court, in the Vriend case, rewrote Alberta human-rights law to forbid discrimination in housing, employment, and "public" services on the grounds of sexual orientation. That was a legal issue in which genuinely fundamental rights--freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, property rights--were sacrificed by the judiciary on the altar of "dignity". Albertans reacted with visible outrage, because on that issue the secular libertarian interest which is the true aminating spirit of the province was allied with the reflexive reaction of the churchy crowd (a loud, organized minority here, as elsewhere, but a minority all the same, despite what you may have heard). Ralph refused to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause, spitting unkind words at the constituents who had deluged him with faxes, letters, and phone calls. Now, on a purely fanciful issue--a technical question of the limits of a civil privilege--he declares war to the knife. Of course, Ralph may be well served by his changing political instincts: in electoral fact, and doubly so in Progressive Conservative calculus, the votes of the fever-browed evangelicals awaiting the End Times in the countryside count for more than those of us citified folk. And these pillars of PC-dom, for whatever reason, honestly do believe that Christian institutions require active, exclusive state sanction to "survive" (granting the laughable premise that heterosexual marriage has "survived" as an institution in our society). It's welfare for Jesus! And why shouldn't he be eligible then, eh?

When you have a romantic triangle involving an Olympic champion, a billionaress, and a former U.S. president, you just can't keep it out of the papers.

OTTAWA - Belinda Stronach, the billionaire chief executive of Magna International, has developed a close personal and business relationship with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, but friends of the auto giant executive insist they are not "romantically linked."

Stronach, who recently announced plans to divorce Olympic speed-skating champion Johann Olav Koss, struck up her friendship with Clinton after he attended a charity event at Magna's private golf course in Aurora, Ont., two years ago.

The online version of this story is missing an anonymous-sourced quote which appears in the Ottawa Citizen's print version:

A close friend of Ms. Stronach, speaking on background, insists they are simply good friends, although he acknowledges the wealthy socialite is attracted to Mr. Clinton.

"I haven't met a woman yet who is not attracted to Bill Clinton, but it doesn't mean they are going to marry him," said the friend. [No shit, Sherlock. -ed.] "They are good friends but there is not a romantic linkage. It's just not that way... You shouldn't jump to conclusions that they are having a serious fling."

So it's maybe a fling, but not a "serious fling"? Does that mean it's just one of those things where he asks her to "kiss it"? Sheesh. Apparently you can give a woman a billion dollars and a chiseled Nordic god of a husband, and she'll still go for the bad boy every time.

The New Criterion now has a weblog.

I guess the point I'm groping towards is that predicting the breakup of Canada along provincial lines due to a lack of national identity presupposes fairly strong provincial identities, and I don't think those exist either. There are certainly deep regional divisions within Canadians, but they don't track provincial boundaries especially well--and if there's no good answer to "what it means to be a Canadian", try and ask "what it means to be a Manitoban". I lived there for 21 years, between the ages of 5 and 26, and that doesn't even parse as a sensible question to me, although I do have a fairly strong sense of being from the city (Winnipeg) I lived in. If anything, I think Americans get much stronger identities from their individual states than most Canadians do from their provinces (with the possible exception of the Maritimes). (Is there an Alberta identity? Colby?)

This query appears in the midst of Evan Kirchhoff's response to Steven Den Beste's recent discussion of Canadian national cohesion. (Sample SDB quote: "[If the western provinces] applied for US statehood, they'd have to expect to be territories for at least 20 years before statehood was even seriously considered, just to make sure they truly wanted to join us and really did share our values.")

There is such a thing as an Alberta identity, and it is real and quite powerful. Often Albertans have to move to Ontario to really discover it, mind you--but they do, soon enough.

Alberta comes close to being what Americans call themselves sometimes: a politicized "proposition nation", one concealed within the bosom of Confederation. A half-century of labour flow hither and thither has given Alberta a population with anti-statist instincts and a Protestant work ethic that are, by Canadian standards, off the charts. In a real nation-state this would make us odd, but not essentially separate. However, Canada itself has been redefined as a "proposition nation" over fifty years of mostly Liberal government. The Canadian project is no longer the creation of an imperial outpost, a haven in the New World for an essentially British way of life (with a space demarcated for the preservation of the French-Canadian way). Canada has been remade, in the Liberal image, as a multicultural European-style social democracy whose slogan might be "Medicare o muerte!". This redefinition of Canada has permanently and effectively alienated the great mass of Alberta voters from Canadian national sentiment, except where things like international hockey tournaments are concerned. If being Canadian means loving big government, what are you if you don't love big government? A: you must be an Albertan.

If this Albertan self-identification were merely a matter of political advocacy and voting behaviour, one wouldn't necessarily be inclined to make much of it; mere political opinions change within an individual's lifetime. But the distinction reaches down deeper than that. It creates cultural differences and personality differences which are less subtle with each passing generation.

Put it this way: it's fairly obvious, I think, that Quebec really is a separate nation within Canada. And it's fairly obvious that Quebeckers aren't just English Canadians who happen to speak French. A Quebecker grows up with a different version of his national past, his personal prehistory, than an Ontarian has; he interprets every event in the "history of Canada" differently, and so the history itself is different, even though it may be knit from the selfsame events. Albertans shared a national narrative with the rest of English Canada (with some tension during the Great Depression) until Trudeau was elected. His contempt for the hinterland polarized Albertans, and his creation of the National Energy Program--an uninvited declaration of economic war by Confederation against Alberta--bifurcated Canadian history, for Albertans, completely. Most of what has happened since then has only intensified the alienation.

Canadian law, in its infinite majesty, is going to put David Ahenakew on trial for "spreading hatred". Believe it or not, Ahenakew is getting off easy. He's being charged under section 319(2) of the Criminal Code for "wilful promotion of hatred". Given the substance of his reported comments, he could easily have been charged under 318(1), "advocating genocide", which carries a five-year maximum prison term instead of the two-year maximum that comes with "wilful promotion". This policing of opinion is a complicated business.

Ahenakew's not going to go to jail, of course. He'll cop a plea which involves some combination of "re-education" and a donation to B'nai Brith or some such group. Practically, Ahenakew cannot defend himself from the charges, even though the text of the Code would seem to require that his statement of opinion actually served to promote hatred--that it actually influenced some person to have more intensely negative feelings about Jews than before. Alas: in that regard, it would probably make more sense to charge Ahenakew with promoting hatred of Indians amongst Jews and philosemites. That, he may well have accomplished.

By a curious coincidence, the appeals panel of the Federal Court has, on the same day, struck down the trial division's earlier ruling that Treaty No. 8 between Canada and the Indians of northern Alberta and Saskatchewan somehow contained an unwritten tax exemption that applied to status Indians living off the reserve as well as those living on it (who have always been understood to be tax-exempt). This is a relief, I suppose, but there's no telling how the Supreme Court will rule when it gets its hands on the case. The crux of the matter is that the Supremes have allowed "oral tradition" about the meaning of the treaties, as understood by the Indian signatories, to carry evidentiary weight in such treaty cases. If necessary, that "oral tradition" could (and has been adjudged in other cases to) override the written treaty text.

The plaintiff in the tax case, Gordon Benoit, was able to locate a few slivers of oral evidence that Treaty 8's tax exemption was understood to apply to Indian signatories wherever in Canada they might happen to roam. This was good enough for the trial judge, who shrugged off attempts to critique the plaintiff's record of that evidence. Not only that, but the judge failed to notice that his own reasons for decision revealed that the historical Indian signers, who supposedly came from an "oral culture" ignorant of European contractarian ways, placed great weight on the written text and made damned sure of what exactly they were signing. I actually came away from a laborious study of the Federal Court trial decision (undertaken for a 500-word story on the subject) with a profound respect for the savvy of the Indian negotiators of Treaty 8. I ought to have known better to begin with: Treaty 8 was signed in 1899, after all, which is hardly a matter of weeks after "First Contact". By then, Indians throughout North America were well aware of how the white man ran things, and how little his vague oral promises could be trusted. "Get it in writing" would not be a bad summary of the Treaty 8 chiefs' attitude.

But it is now a matter of law in Canada that an "oral culture" could not possibly have mastered the interpretation of written agreements, and that the honour of the Crown therefore requires giving treaty Indians whatever they credibly believe themselves to be owed, without reference to the treaty text. The question for the Supreme Court will be the definition of "credibly". If the standard used by a good working historian is applied, I believe Benoit's case will fall well short. The evidence on which his argument stands amounts to, as I say, a small set of statements, transcribed and translated with varying reliability, from a handful of elders and from people who were not themselves elders but who had conversed with elders at some point. When the federal government tried (1) pointing out just how questionable some of this stuff was, (2) showing the mountainous size of the matrix of transcribed oral evidence from which it was plucked, and (3) complaining that including it was tantamount to permitting hearsay without any possibility of cross-examination, the judge's response was basically thus: "Well, we are enjoined by the Supreme Court to entertain evidence of oral tradition, which is necessarily going to suffer from self-contradiction, potential transcription problems, potential translation problems, and problems of provenance. Since it's a settled issue that I can't exclude oral-tradition evidence, I can't apply a standard of evidentiary rigour that would have the effect of excluding all the relevant oral-tradition evidence here."

So the question is whether the trial judge was right--whether there really is no practical evidentiary standard can be used to separate the good o.-t. evidence of this sort from the bad, even though it's the sort of thing historians do all the time. (I've now studied the appeal decision, which is a fascinating, complicated inquiry into the subject outlined above--and which is very hard on the trial judge, accusing him of rather outrageously skewing the interpretation of what little evidence Benoit provided. Encouraging sample quote:

It must be emphasized that a consciousness of the special nature of aboriginal claims does not negate the operation of general evidentiary principles. While evidence adduced in support of aboriginal claims must not be undervalued, neither should it be interpreted or weighed in a manner that fundamentally contravenes the principles of evidence law, which, as they relate to the valuing of evidence, are often synonymous with the "general principles of common sense.")

The Embarrassing Declaration of the Year Award now has to go, I think, to the Canadian Medical Association Journal for its May 6 statement on the SARS outbreak.

What we need now is a hard look at public health responsiveness in the long term. The next "SARS" could easily be more contagious and more virulent. We were lucky that the initial outbreak of SARS was in Toronto, a city with excellent and abundant clinical and public health resources. But this is not true everywhere in Canada. [Emphasis mine]

Funnily enough, the next SARS has turned out to be SARS all over again. Developments over the past month should have CMAJ staff wondering if they've been a bit too chummy with those people who manage Toronto's public health resources. We must now suspect that it is far from a mere matter of luck that SARS cut a swath through Toronto first, then did so again, then spread from Toronto to Whitby while Toronto nurses actually congregated to state openly that they don't have sufficient training in infection-control procedures. If this is good luck, what would bad luck look like?

Evan Kirchhoff has some pretty unkind things to say about Christopher Caldwell's piece on spam in the Weekly Standard. Hey, I'm willing to meet Caldwell halfway: I'll support anti-spam legislation--if it also contains a clause forbidding people who don't know the difference between "e-mail" and "the Internet" from writing lazy, overwrought magazine articles about e-mail and the Internet.

It would be illegal, unethical, and possibly carcinogenic for you to go watch complete streaming video of Todd Haynes' movie Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was suppressed by a court at the request of Richard Carpenter. The film, created mostly with file footage and, um, Barbie dolls, has hitherto been available only to VHS-swapping obsessives congregating in mildewy basements to watch sweet-mother-of-Jesus-knows-what. Haynes has since gone on to direct highly esteemed movies starring real human beings and also Julianne Moore. Superstar, as I could possibly tell you if I had sat there, utterly rapt, not quite believing my eyes, watching the whole thing at 3 a.m., displays the same camp sensibility and command of period elements as Haynes' much-praised 2002 movie Far From Heaven. (Link via D. Sankey.)

A correspondent to Virginia Postrel's weblog defends the prevalent use of "media" as a singular noun--a solecism which I'm sure readers could catch me in if they sought hard enough, but a solecism nonetheless:

Yes, "media are," in isolation. But there are other grammatical patterns pushing it to become, like "opera," an English word construed as singular. ...Over time, languages tend to flatten out irregularities. "Media" is very commonly used as an adjective. Furthermore, the singular is really quite impossible: "Bloggers indulge in a lot of medium-bashing" (too many other possibilities - psychics? a fondness for extremes?). So people are constantly hearing "media" in a slot they know (not consciously) is reserved for singular words, and after a while it starts to sound singular.

The second part of the argument is true: "medium-bashing" rings false in the ear. But the singular "medium" is still alive and kicking outside the context of such compounds. It is much more unlikely, still, that someone literate would write "Television is a media that softens the brain" than it would be for them to refer to "medium-bashing". The only question is which "irregularity" will be flattened. We still say things like "the print medium" all the time, and are comfortable saying them. Having to commit an occasional grammatical inconsistency by writing "media-bashing" is a matter of far less concern than entirely losing the distinction between a single medium and multiple media would be.

As to the alleged analogy between "media" and "opera"... quick now, what is the singular of "opera"? Yes, I'm sure a few of you know.

The singularization of "opera" in non-Italian languages had a utilitarian justification, because the original singular form is doing other valuable work in those languages. A new concept arose when a new thing (a new medium, actually) was invented. It might be argued that "the media" require a new concept all their own, too, and the travel rights of a singular noun. I don't buy it. The media are still mediums, whatever other sort of unnatural monstrosity they may be accused of having become.

This L.A. Times interview with a between-books David Foster Wallace has some interesting stuff in it: the unsuspected influence of Tom Clancy on Wallace, for example ("Wallace marveled at the way Clancy can suspend plot for a 25-page treatise on how a nuclear weapon works"), and how Wallace is approaching the new-to-him task of teaching literature to undergraduates ("There's a weird kind of flabby mythos around creative writing that it's more subjective, more expressive, like high school was, and therefore attracts students who don't think they have to work that hard. I'm sort of a fascist opponent to that pedagogy"). It also contains a strangely underplayed surprise:

Asked what he was writing, Wallace would only say that he's finishing a nonfiction book on the inventor of set theory.

On the...? This can't possibly... And yet it is: Wallace appears to have written a 320-page book about Georg Cantor. This is really only surprising for a moment: it was inevitable that Wallace would eventually put his love of mathematics to direct use, since he's shown he can't write about tennis for ten straight words without mentioning epicycloids or the Central Limit Theorem. I am really, really looking forward to Everything and More. I hope you know enough about Cantor to get the pun in that title, because it's brilliant.

I suppose a lot of you have read Paul Robinson's "Canada: best country EVER!" piece for the Spectator of London. Robinson denounces Mark Steyn en passant a couple of times without seeming to be quite aware that Steyn is Canadian. I don't know to what nationality Mr. Robinson belongs, but I haven't met many Canadians who are as cheery about all Canada's foreign and domestic policy choices as he is. The government of Canada was right, it seems, to remain on the sidelines of the Second Gulf War--but it was also right to help NATO bomb the bloody bejesus out of Serbia! And right to help give those wicked Boers what-for back in the day! And right to combat regional domestic terrorism in 1970 by declaring cross-country martial law! But it was also right to take a leadership role in the international treaty banning land mines! Canada is soft but strong, like high-quality toilet paper!

Really, it's too much. Dear Mr. Robinson is so swoony over Canada that he makes a rhetorical foray any sensible patriot would know enough to avoid: he strings together the names of pop-music succubi Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Avril Lavigne, pointing out that all are Canadian. In any fair-minded reader, this concatenation will immediately arouse the suspicion that there is something profoundly sinister about Canada. Hell, even I think so, and I'm Canadian.

A few nights ago I watched Witness and enjoyed it immensely. Sometimes these movies that aren't quite old enough to become classics will surprise you. Basically, if you're about thirty years old, you have to go back and watch everything you saw when you were an '80s kid to see if it holds up, or whether the ties are just too skinny and the tacit ideas behind the movie too superannuated. Quite often those '80s movies display a misogyny, unnoticed at the time, that would startle even the most hardened antifeminist. But the events in Witness are particularized enough that you don't feel it's making the usual Hollywood case for sexual awakening as a universal cure for social and personal ills.

One moment in the movie has acquired an unintended note of humour with time: it's the scene, probably still the most famous one in the film, in which the townies are abusing the Amish and Book (Harrison Ford, playing an aptly named by-the-book copper) comes forward to beat the hell out of them. I think everyone remembers Ford getting his hat knocked off, taking his usual quizzical expression up to a whole new and cosmic level of quizzicality, and saying, in a voice whose timbre ought to have convinced anyone of the statement's truth, "You're making a big mistake." The scene still works and probably always will: it became archetypal enough to be parodied in "The Simpsons". But if you blink you might miss Viggo "Aragorn" Mortensen in the background, playing one of the Amish. Hey, Aragorn, how come you didn't get Han Solo's back when he was beating on those guys? What's up with that?

Actually, Viggo's acting in that one shot is pretty good: when Ford goes back to the buggy, and everyone else is making tsk-tsk noises, Viggo is looking at Ford with just a hint of awe, as if to say, "Wow, I may be Amish, but that kicked ass."

Hollywood is a town where a good 90% of the population seems to consist of people who probably consider the Amish a little too warlike for their taste. The temptation to idealize these dissenters from civilization must have been great and constant; at times, the movie succumbs. (Where, one wonders, are the birth defects with which inbred Amish communities are habitually plagued? Are we to believe that blond, strapping Alexander Godunov is the genetic norm amongst these people?) The buggy sequence may be enough of a refutation of pacifism for most tastes (though note that Book's rash action is what finally puts the crooked cops on his trail), but much more powerful is the scene where old Eli Lapp (Jan Rubes) and his grandson Samuel, the titular murder witness of the movie (Lukas Haas), are discussing Book's police revolver, which Samuel has been caught playing with.

This gun of the hand is for the taking of human life. We believe it is wrong to take life, that is only for God. Many times wars have come and people have said "You must fight, you must kill. It is the only way to preserve the good." But Samuel, there is never only one way, remember that. Would you kill another man?

I would only kill a bad man.

Only the bad man. I see. And you know this bad man by sight? You are able to look into their hearts and see this badness?

I can see what they do. I have seen it.

I decided the only way to get the Conflict: Desert Storm monkey off my back was to play the frigging game to the end. (Totally forgot there was a hockey game. 6-3??) I'm speaking to you mere moments after putting a sniper round through the head of "General Aziz"--the very thinly-disguised ringer for Saddam Hussein whose death is the goal of play. Apparently the creators had that itch go back in time and finish the war right--the same itch that President Bush & co. have now indulged, although it's unclear whether "General Aziz" is still alive in real life.

Now, with PC-gaming addiction out of the way for another few months, I can get some proper work done and maybe even weblog a little. Being a virtual special-forces soldier is so engrossing that it even kills the desire for nicotine, though when you do decide to get up from the keyboard you end up inhaling about three coffin-nails in a row. Plus if you have to take a cab ride somewhere and you draw a Middle Eastern driver--which is not exactly the uncommonest occurrence on God's green earth--you always have a half-suppressed expectation of seeing crosshairs in your visual field.

Today's Globe and Mail reports that Paul Martin's supporters in the federal Liberal caucus took advantage of Chretien's temporary absence this week to hold a meeting of their cabal in an Ottawa restaurant. A telling passage:

Previously, those who supported Mr. Martin had been afraid to meet because of the outcry provoked by reports of a private meeting of Martin MPs at a Toronto airport hotel on the eve of the 2000 Liberal policy convention.

At the time, Chretien supporters charged the Martinites with attempting to organize a coup.

I've sometimes heard people say they are reluctant to join in the range of opinion which refers to the Chretien administration as a "dictatorship". There are good reasons to be careful with the term. But as a metaphor it's at least as accurate as calling a caucus revolt a coup d'etat, and it follows from the fact that no one is willing to challenge the latter characterization--not even the planners of the "coup". No, we don't live in a dictatorship per se, but, my God, are we ever labouring under the weight of William Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles".

As an exercise in remedial liberal democracy, let us all remind ourselves that if a Prime Minister does not command the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, he can be removed. That's not a coup: it is the essence of a Westminster parliament. For some reason, we have come to regard power of party leadership as constitutionally superior to the support of elected MPs in the Commons. The lagomorphous timidity of the 130 or so Liberal MPs who want Paul Martin to be Prime Minister bespeaks a terrible subversion of our system. It's terrible because it is rarely discussed, and lacks even the slender theoretical legitimacy of, say, the Supreme Court's activist rewriting of statutes--which is the cause of a good deal more conservative hand-wringing than the triumph of sleaze-ridden intra-party "democracy".

The reason we have most of a year to go in Chretien's administration is that the Martinites are as eager as anyone to preserve the fiction that authority in Canada flows from party conventions rather than parliamentary consent. The Liberals introduced this innovation, and where would we end up if we started allowing Liberal errors to be corrected in this country? Normally the tension between party leadership and the caucus serves the Liberals well, keeping opposition parties in a great deal more disarray. It neutralized Diefenbaker for the last half of his leadership, for example, and tore apart the Canadian Alliance under Stockwell Day. The Conservatives are the latest victim--they will have to decide now who is the master of their parliamentary caucus: the actual members, or a carefully hidden piece of paper signed by Messrs. David Orchard and Peter MacKay. You don't need three guesses to know what the answer will be. Why, a caucus rebellion against the newly-"elected" leader would be a "coup". Vox delegati, vox dei.

From three letters about Canadian drug pricing and manufacture:

· John Hall points out that in 2000, the Fraser Institute (Canada's analogue to the Cato Institute) studied the pharmaceutical price differential using 1990 data and concluded that the reason for it was American litigiousness. "There is evidence that one-third to one-half of any pharmaceutical price differentials... were due to the higher cost of protection from legal liability in the United States. In Canadian courts, compensation for personal injury is capped at CDN$250,000 and judges rarely award large liability settlements." Unfortunately John's link to the original study doesn't work, but I'll trust him to have cut and pasted the quote properly.

· Alex Elliott notes that a small group of powerful buyers are technically an oligopsony, not an oligopoly. Yeah... well, so's your old man!

· Ikram Saeed takes issue with Derek's claim that Canada "doesn't have a drug industry":

Canada has a huge biotech industry. More specifically, Quebec has a huge biotech industry. Here's a link to an Industry Canada site, and a list of about 50 Montreal-area biotech companies.

Not all of these are drug companies, though most are. The list contains such "Canadian companies" as Pfizer Canada and Merck Frosst Canada. Canada does have a drug industry in the sense that there are lot of people here working in it, but the big companies are branch plants, and most of their key R&D is done elsewhere. If one of the small startups wins the lottery, it will leave or sell out: that is, I'm afraid, simply a given in the business plans of firms like this (some of which are located here in Edmonton). BioChem Pharma used to be the big domestic player in that Montreal tech cluster--but it is now a subsidiary of UK-based Shire. Canada's universities and research subsidies make it a great place to run an immature pharmco, but in the end, as Derek was suggesting slightly loosely, the action is elsewhere.

It's just not fair... if you read Steven den Beste's entry about the postwar weblog crisis, and you go to the second chart in his entry, which shows Steven's traffic rising steadily from January to mid-March, with a spike when the bombs started falling in Iraq, and a pretty dramatic decline since then--well, my traffic looks just like that too, scaled down, of course, by a factor of approximately twenty. Even though I only had three or four things to say, at most, about the war, all of which were rather noncommittal and garbled, my traffic is suffering just the same kind of dropoff. People couldn't ever have been coming here for serious war coverage, but I guess they were going to the sites I rely on for traffic. And now they're not, so, as a consequence, I am a collateral victim of postwar malaise. Is this what it was like to work at CNN after the first Gulf War ended?

Derek Lowe has been attracting attention with his coverage of the prescription drug "crisis" in the United States. He touches on the subplot of interest to Canadians--namely, that our drugs are cheaper and that there is a burgeoning cross-border market, created by sharp Canadian operators who have installed cyberkiosks to peddle pills to discount-seeking U.S. seniors 'n' sickies. In the U.S. the pharmcos have been trying pathetically to stem the cross-border action by warning that Canadian drugs may be somehow "contaminated" (with what? Mad cow disease, maybe). In Canada they've been leaning on the pharmacy regulators, with mixed success, and warning that there may be shortages on Canadian shelves if the south-pointing drug funnel gets too big.

Why don't they just increase the Canadian prices to the American levels? Two reasons, if I understand the mess right. The minor one is that Canadians simply have less purchasing power, so any across-the-board price increase will simply lead to a loss of market share here to unpatented alternatives. (Lots of things are cheaper in Canada--and, for that matter, in Mexico--for this very reason.) But the major one is that provincial welfare programs subsidize prescription drugs for the poor here and are hence big drug buyers, bigger, perhaps, than any existing in the States. So the pharmcos are up against a moderately heavy oligopoly that has a lot of clout in setting prices.

Until the cross-border market appeared, the pharmcos never did anything about the price differential. For some reason they are uniquely outraged that some Americans are now getting the same prices which they've always extended to, and still extend to, Canadians. But the small amount the industry seems to be devoting to stemming the cross-border flow ($450,000) suggests their outrage may just be for show--a peevish kick against the pricks of historical inevitability. Before anyone suggests that Canada's lower drug prices are a wonderful example of the great good wrought by socialism, remember to consider the hidden cost, noted by Derek in his closing paragraph:

Perhaps we'll legislate the drugs to be cheap as they are in Canada, oh happy day. But before we do that, I'd like for people to know that I work with a number of talented Canadian researchers. We have folks from Newfoundland to Vancouver; all I have to do is go up and down the hall to cover the whole country. Doubtless several of them would prefer to have stayed and worked in the country they grew up in. It's not like Canada lacks the infrastructure--there are plenty of high tech companies up there, of course. But those companies are allowed to charge what they think the market will bear. What Canada doesn't have, for some reason, is a drug industry.

[UPDATE, June 4: More here.]

The other thing that kept me busy Saturday night was hanging out with a friend who'd come north from Calgary in his newly-bought 1987 Porsche 928 S4. Any randomly-chosen male individual is bound to know more about cars than I do, but I gather from some websurfing that the 928 was meant to supplant the 911 on the North American market; the first production automobile built with the Weissach axle, it was to be a high-performance car in a body suitable for touring. This allows the driver to keep the gas pretty much nailed to the floor in a ninety-degree turn at high speed--a phenomenon I've now experienced, with my eyes rolling in my head like loose aggies, from the passenger seat.

The 928 received wild praise for its technical innovations but never did get off the ground as a commercial mainstay for Porsche. This, I guess, is because its designers eschewed the noxious visual vocabulary of the performance automobile. It speaks only quietly--and only to those who know it is basically the fastest car ever built that can still, practically, be driven to work every day--of the driver's wealth and virility. The speedometer, amusingly, goes to 300 kph, which isn't the top end by any means, even without modifications. The owner hasn't taken it above 220 yet. I asked him how it felt at that speed. He gave an embarrassed look and said "The only word I can come up with that describes it is 'creamy'." Dunno why he felt so self-conscious: I could do a month's work writing and not come up with an adjective so informative and well-placed.

Quite a few of you have probably already read Jacob Sullum's piece for Reason about how the perils of heroin addiction are systematically overstated by the anti-drug industry. The article, adapted from Sullum's new book, notes particularly that withdrawal from heroin is not quite as difficult or dangerous as it's generally made out to be. It is worth remembering, if you're a bit skeptical, that "Theodore Dalrymple", the brilliant British prison physician and conservative essayist, made the same point in a 2002 interview.

...Drug addicts come in and they spin me a line, and I just won't have it. There's initially friction because I refuse to prescribe for them, and one of the things that's very difficult to get across is that withdrawal effects from heroin, for example, are very minor. They're trivial.

Really? That's not the way it's portrayed, is it?

It's not the way it's portrayed but it is actually the truth. I can't tell you how many people I've withdrawn from heroin. You never get any problems with it. It's not like withdrawal from serious drinking, which can be, and often is, a medical emergency. From a medical point of view, I'm much more worried in the prison when someone tells me he's an alcoholic. I'm much more worried about the physical consequences of his withdrawal because they are really serious, and he can die from them. But nobody ever dies from heroin withdrawal. With the vast majority of them, you just take them aside and say: "I'm not prescribing anything for you; I will prescribe symptomatic relief if I see you have symptoms, but what you tell me has nothing to do with it. I'm not going to be moved by any of your screaming."

So the Conservative party has a new leader and a big problem. On Saturday night I was having dinner with my mother and sister when I decided to sneak into the lounge for a cigarette and to see how the hockey game was coming along. It was the first intermission, and the news was on, but with no sound. Ten seconds of PC convention footage was followed by an image that almost knocked me off my barstool: Peter MacKay shaking hands with David Orchard after the third ballot.

It was the first real surprise in a convention that had proceeded like clockwork--or at least according to my own forecast--until then. (Certainly I can boast that I provided a clearer picture than Peter van Loan, whose every utterance on the non-partisan CPAC bespoke a hidden but desperate desire for MacKay to win at any cost. Looks like he got his wish.) Orchard was always bound to come out third on the third ballot. The question that hove into view early on was whether Orchard would announce support for MacKay, back the survivor of the Prentice-Brison undercard, or merely let his supporters be blown by the wind. I'd have bet on option number three myself. And it probably would have allowed MacKay to pick up enough votes to get to 50%, or indeed arrive there by virtue of Orchard supporters catching early flights home.

Orchard was expected to go to Prentice if he went to anybody, since Prentice had been careful to throw a dose of environmentalism into his policy mix and had even made noise, in the immediate runup to the convention, about "reviewing" NAFTA. Prentice had potentially burned bridges with Orchard by saying in January that Orchard didn't belong in the party, but the rhetoric of MacKay's campaign had been just as poisonous: as Greg Weston pointed out on Sunday [link will rot quickly]:

Not two months ago, MacKay's campaign chairman sent out a memo to 1,000 prominent Tories, decrying Orchard as a menace to the party's ideals [please, no giggling -ed.], and calling on them to mount a concerted effort to 'ensure he does not take over the leadership.'

Which seems to be just what MacKay has now allowed to happen. Orchard's extraction of a written policy agreement from MacKay is an extraordinary event. It flies in the face of all custom. While the ardent free-traders who spent the weekend worshipping at the altar of Mulroneyism may understand the political calculation, it is unquestionably a transgression. The only reason MacKay could have had for agreeing to it was that he thought the overwhelming majority of Orchard's votes were headed to Prentice without a strong directive to the contrary from their shepherd.

That's not really a "reason", of course: it's an excuse. MacKay started Saturday close to winning, close enough to have the smell of it in the pipes of that prominent nose. He couldn't resist Orchard's apple of temptation, and now, whether he betrays his word or holds to it, there will be the devil to pay. But, honestly, one cannot imagine that the electotral consequences will be too serious. As the convention rhetoric made clear, the Conservative party exists only to be a big tent--why, it's the biggest and finest in all the land! It exists, as its name suggests, to take both the progressive and conservative side of every issue. MacKay was merely putting the old principle-of-no-principles into practice. The shock will wear off soon.

However, we already have a party that exists solely to attain and hold power: the one that already has it. And like the mass of Canadian voters, the Liberals learned a long time ago to live with the established reality of NAFTA. The true nature of MacKay's faux pas is this: it makes it impossible, for those still cussed and dumb enough to vote Tory, to entirely ignore the facts of life. Paul Martin, on learning the convention news, told a Vancouver audience that "It's hard not to think that the Tories haven't put a gun to their head when you look at what happened." (It's presumed that the double negative tripped him up, and he meant the opposite of what he said.) MacKay's response was just plain astonishing: he said that Martin had no credibility because he, at one time, opposed free trade. This is the kind of absurdity that being a Progressive Conservative will involve one in from now on.

This is pretty cool. I did an entry Friday night relating and interpreting Dirk Deppey's bad news about the financial plight of Fantagraphics Books. Dirk runs The Comics Journal's weblog, ¡Journalista!. As it turns out, he also reads this weblog, and sent a long letter about the meaning and fate of Fantagraphics. (Fantagraphics publishes TCJ, which, incidentally, is worth checking out for its quality as a magazine even if you aren't into comics.)

I told Dirk I'd like to publish his letter here, and he hasn't couriered over any pipe bombs yet, so with his tacit permission, I'm pleased to present his insider view of the situation.

I should... probably qualify this at the outset by stating that I have little to do with the business side of the company, and thus don't have as full a command of the situation as, say, our accountant.

I've been with Fantagraphics for three years now; in my first year here (before we got the W.W. Norton account), the company was floundering pretty badly. To understand why, you have to realize that (a) for most of its history, Fantagraphics' primary market was North American comic-book shops, which are notoriously intolerant of anything that doesn't feature men in their underwear beating the crap out of each other, and (b) the company's flagship publication is The Comics Journal, the single harshest critic of that market and its favorite products. We've made any number of enemies within the industry over the years, and the number of people celebrating our recent tribulations on comic-book message boards has been breathtaking to behold. Were it not for the bookstore market, we'd be pretty much fucked. I think it's safe to say that had we not gotten the Norton account, Fantagraphics would have had to take drastic measures to ensure its survival several years ago--measures that would undoubtedly have compromised the company's activities in one form or another.

Having witnessed two bankruptcy scares and a round of layoffs in my first year here, the Norton years have been like finding water after being lost in the desert--suddenly, we actually had access to a market that actually wanted to buy our books without fighting us tooth-and-nail over our "elitism". The Current Situation has me feeling like the surviving campers in a Friday the 13th sequel, where Jason returns again after we'd just plunged a knife in the bastard's chest.

One really does need an insane love for what this company does to justify aligning oneself to it. Hell, I cut my previous salary in half when I signed on with these guys. I did it because I loved (and continue to love) what they do; I consider this the best job I've held in over a decade, but you'd have to be a pretty big art-comics nerd to agree with me. Fantagraphics publishes a lot of what most comics industry-types would call "marginal work". Last year, for example, we released The Doofus Omnibus, a collection of strips about a panty-sniffing hillbilly that's probably a little too disturbing for most readers; that it's also knee-slappingly hilarious and rendered in a style that would've made Wally Wood proud can't be much of a justification for its existence for anyone whose primary duty is to the bottom line. How an outside investor would view such a book is anyone's guess so long as the situation remains hypothetical, but the precedents within the industry aren't good. Kitchen Sink Press--a publisher with roots in the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s--was ripped to shreds after its investors decided that the candy-bar business it was running as a sideline was more valuable than the comic books it was founded to publish in the first place. The funny thing is, KSP's stockholders were probably right. This is a field of astonishingly marginal profits. That we're among the most militant publishers in the industry in terms of "creators' rights"--the cartoonists we publish maintain ownership of their work, along with most ancilliary rights--probably wouldn't help us in attracting outside capital either.

I do think a little panic is warranted; it's difficult to believe that we could find outside investors willing to part with their money for as little a hope of significant profit as we could offer without substantially altering our business model, and that model--our uncompromising art-first, comics-as-literature stance--is the whole point of the company in the first place. Fantagraphics exists first and foremost to elevate the medium; I don't see how we could continue doing so while having to issue dividends to people wondering what they were getting for their money. Gary and Kim's answer to that question (a shelf full of really neat books) just doesn't seem sufficient. I have a difficult time believing that our publishing schedule would attract much in the way of venture capital without fundamentally altering Fantagraphics' character as a business.

A chance note of interest to the goldbugs in the audience. I was messing around with different ways of expressing income in weights of gold, and I discovered that the Canadian dollar passed a remarkable symbolic milestone in 2002. For the first time ever, the annual average price of an ounce of gold was more than C$480--in fact, it was $486 by my reckoning, using World Gold Council and Bank of Canada figures. (The current spot price is around $500.)

Do you recognize the number 480? Well, I wouldn't have--but gold comes at 480 grains to the troy ounce. The grain is an old English measure of weight, originally meant to represent the size of a grain of wheat. Therefore, in 2002, for the first time, the Canadian dollar was worth less, on average, than a single grain of gold.

No one is shocked by inflation anymore--or no one old enough to remember buying candy and soda pop in the late '70s, anyway--but I'll note that under the pre-WWI fix the Canadian dollar was freely convertible to about 23 grains of gold. During WWII it was pegged at about 12, and this was the approximate price during the mid-'60s period of the stable Bretton Woods C-dollar. In the four years from '71 to '74 it remained roughly at par with the U.S. dollar, and hence, thanks to the closing of the U.S. gold window, ratcheted down from 11½ to 8 to 5 to 3. The horror story since then is, I think, familiar.