Seven Ugandan students are seized by "evil spirits"--coincidentally, right in the middle of their leaving exams
The US builds a high-tech antinarco base near the point where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet
Duh dept.: "official prices" and the attendant supply shortages make Cuban retail businesses a hive of corruption for the customer
A former captain of France's rugby team goes on trial for murdering his wife of 24 years
Blowhard blowback: independent retailers selling Citgo gas continue to suffer from the effects of Hugo Chavez's UN speech
Battle of the Black Sea: Ukraine PM Yanukovych is mobilizing parliament against President Yushchenko in order to seize foreign policy and keep the Russian Navy in the Crimea
Hot German trend: custom-painted wooden coffins
New EU guidelines mean that Gruyere is OK in an airplane cabin but Camembert is banned
It began in 1865 as Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik; today BASF's unique biz model has made it the king of clusterf--king its competitors
NGOs attack Starbucks, saying it's behind a move to block lucrative international trademark protection for distinct varieties of Ethiopian coffee bean
The Economist looks at Kosovo's future and sees independence followed by partition
Romano Prodi defends his "honest, centre-left" coalition and says that without stronger growth Italy will be "lost"
A top Ethiopian fighter pilot dies in a "mysterious" auto accident on a lonely country road
The Guardian of Lagos offers Nigerian women some tips on turban care

I used to get worried when I'd hear the phrase "The Onion used to be so cool, but now it’s lame." But you know when I heard that phrase for the first time? In 1991. That's right: 1991. Five years before the Onion was even on the internet at all... There's always a group of "fans" that get their rocks off more on disapproving of the thing they're a fan of than they do on actually liking it. (See Star Wars "fans", for example.) These are the worst kind of nerd--the self-hating nerd who tries to prove that they're not a nerd by talking about how everything else is too nerdy for them. They are, in this sense, a new form of nerd--meta-nerds. They are nerds about being nerds. They supposedly hate something so much, but are still paying enough attention to everything about it to be motivated to write long screeds against it on the internet.
...Don't get me wrong; I got nothing against nerds. I mean, I watch "Dr. Who," man. That is hardcore nerd territory. I'm a nerd through and through. But these new meta-nerd type nerds scare the hell out of me. -Todd Hanson, head writer of the Onion

...yields a remarkable good-news bad-news story about the auto parts market from Auto Service World magazine. The good news for drivers (and bad news for parts salesmen): improvements in technology now mean that more and more of the components of your new car will rarely or never have to be replaced.

According to research recently released by Frost & Sullivan, original equipment parts are becoming too reliable, and lasting far too long. HVAC, lighting, brakes, and emissions systems were all put under the microscope in the company's study, and in most cases, it was determined that replacement rates were in decline, and some significantly so.
Steven Spivey, an automotive industry analyst with Frost and Sullivan, says that the burden of research points to some key market areas. "Growth rates will simply not keep up, and the size of the pie will not grow fast enough for everybody," he says.

What's the bad news? American automakers desperate to decrease weight and improve gas mileage began to sell cars with horrible lightweight brake rotors in the 1990's. (A brief Google-ramble suggests that we're approaching a point at which rotors will have to be routinely swapped out along with brake pads.)

"From our conversations with installers, it seems as though a rotor that used to last on average three to four brake jobs is now really only lasting on average maybe one or two brake jobs," says Spivey. According to Spivey, thinner, lower-quality brake rotors are quickly becoming the norm within the auto industry, as manufacturers--particularly the domestics--look to slash costs.
More often than not, this means importing cheaper parts from low-cost countries like China. In terms of imports from that country in particular, for the automotive market as a whole, and the brake market in particular, the effect of the trend is staggering. According to recent reports from both official Chinese sources and independent study groups like Global Source, China's influence in the market is only going to become more significant in the coming years. In fact, a recent report from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce stated that 2005 automotive exports reached $8.9 billion U.S., a jump of some 23% over 2004.
While that number includes components from the entire vehicle, a more focused study put together by Global Source pegged the value of Chinese brake exports at $1.4 billion U.S. in 2005, an increase of some 30% over the previous year.

If you ask me, the truest comedy is that which is both funny in itself and yet produced in complete earnest. I believe this is true of economist Paul Oslington's paper elucidating a rational-choice theory of God (þ: MargRev). Using a very simple mathematical model of humankind and the deity, Oslington generates amusing explanations for traditional features of religion--why some but not all are saved, why apostasies often seem so sudden and dramatic, and why, as the diagram at left indicates, it might just be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Australia's endangered tiger quoll, a tiny carnivorous marsupial almost wiped out by its taste for cane toads, is mounting a comeback
Swept Awà: can Brazil's last nomadic tribe of aboriginals survive first contact or go on without it?
A Chinese astronaut outlines the immediate future of the PRC space program--sorry, it doesn't include women
Four decades after the world betrayed Biafra, the dream is kept alive by independence group MASSOB
The romantic scenery of Naples becomes a war zone as crank-fuelled gang conflict explodes out of the wrong side of the town
Why do leftist politicians in the West keep filling out their office staff with Tamil Tiger agents?
The fight between Malaysia's Mahathir and his handpicked successor is getting fiercer as Dr. M's megaprojects die on the vine
After ferocious initial protests, the introduction of Lettish education in Latvian schools for ethnic Russian students is proceeding quietly
Bad idea dept.: is Ghana ready for a "middle-to-left-centre" Nkrumahist party?
Mandela and Buthelezi offer surprising tributes to the late P.W. Botha, treating him on the whole a little more kindly than his successor De Klerk did
Why is the Australian state of Victoria selling fresh water to Oz's Coke-bottling company at the insane firesale price of $2.40/Ml?
Two children turn up with suspected polio cases in Kenya, where the disease had been deemed eradicated
Australia is 15 years away from adding a major nuke component to its energy production, says PM Howard
Sun Yat-Sen University approves "Happy Together", mainland China's first gay student organization
Iraq to its army ahead of the Saddam verdict: leaves are cancelled

Did you know that this coming Boxing Day will be the tenth anniversary of the last five-goal game by any NHL player? If that doesn't seem like a long time, let me remind you that the victim on all five of Sergei Fedorov's goals was '96 Vezina winner Jim Carey. In the ten years prior to Fedorov's big night, there had been nine such games, including three by Mario Lemieux alone...

Congratulations go out today to the Vancouver Canucks: barring some disaster, they just won the Luongo-Bertuzzi trade by a mile. Surgeons operated on Bertuzzi today to treat a herniated disc in his back whose supposed effects have kept him out of the Florida lineup since about three weeks into his new career. Unfortunately, treating chronic back pain isn't like digging a bullet out of someone's lung; the relationship between such pain and the lesions physicians find when they go looking is often quite speculative, and the number needed to treat for discectomies (with "good" improvement as the endpoint) is around three, with the benefits disappearing quickly in randomized controlled studies. This is one of those cases, I suspect, where you hope your patient is highly motivated--and that's not necessarily a phrase any Northwest Division fan would use to describe the multimillionaire Bertuzzi after watching him float through last season. In all sincerity, I would consider the long-term outlook better at this point for the big man if he had suffered the obvious, treatable sort of trauma he inflicted on Steve Moore. Feel free to savour the irony; it's a lulu.

Some of my fans (I know you're out there, you're just very difficult to observe in the wild) have doubtless been waiting for a definitive statement about the death of the Edmonton Eskimos' 34-year streak of playoff appearances. In a recent column for the Western Standard [free registration req'd] I gloomily foresaw the end coming and consoled myself by using a quantitative measure to compare the Eskies' accomplishment to similar streaks in other pro sports.

The last time Edmonton missed the CFL playoff tournament, Joey Smallwood was premier of Newfoundland, Torontonians could still subscribe to the Telegram, and Paul Henderson was best known as Norm Ullman's linemate. So it's understandable that within Edmonton, the streak is perhaps the most discussed element of the Eskimos' legacy. It is considered to be the longest such streak in North American pro sport. But how impressive is it really? For most of the 34-year period, the CFL has been a nine-team (and sometimes, as now, eight-team) league in which six teams made the post-season. It could be argued that shorter streaks in leagues where it's harder to reach the playoffs might be more significant.

Probably the best way of comparing playoff streaks in different leagues is to assess them by how likely they would be to happen if a team's placing in the standings was decided entirely at random every year. In a nine-team league where six teams make the cut, any given team's initial chance of getting through is 6/9, or two-thirds. For two straight years the chance would be two-thirds squared, about 44 per cent. Multiplying percentages like this yields a rough measure of difficulty that allows one to assess streaks attained under changing rules, and to compare streaks from different sports.

For a specific post-mortem on the Eskimos you can check out this comment thread at the Battle of Alberta website:

The Esks would have been pretty much a .500 team with a few more bounces this season and Lord knows luck kept the streak going a couple times. To be totally honest with you, everything after that Pete Ketella [sic] fiasco has been pure gravy.

If you've gone to the trouble of registering with the Standard website you may enjoy my other recent articles about how a Calgarian suddenly became the toast of English soccer and a profile of the man behind the strange corn-maze madness that's sweeping the continent.

He who would comprehend the soul of Canada must first get to know street hockey. This photo set [slideshow] from Saturday's Oilogosphere Classic will get you three-quarters of the way there.

Apparently the Edmonton Oilers are the reigning champions of the Super Nintendo version of NHL '94 Online. In other news, you can totally play NHL '94 online now. I know people whose careers were just destroyed by those seven boldface words.

Here (þ: MeFi) is a remarkably information-dense 2005 interview with Judith Martin, an outstanding American comic writer who is overlooked because her medium happens to be a syndicated etiquette column. One passage reflects something I've lately been thinking about:

Both my parents were big history and archaeology buffs. We went for a vacation to Egypt and in the Cairo Museum there was a tablet that was a letter from a man to his son, a Polonius-type letter. Do this and don't do that and don't forget this and that. We started to laugh because we realized we got a very good picture of what the kid was like, as the father knew only too well.
My parents said to me at that time, "If you want to understand a society and what they do, look at their rules. Whatever they are being told not to do, that's what they are doing, because otherwise you wouldn't have to tell them not to do it."

Right now a street north of my house is undergoing the fascinating, stressful transformation from hobo to boho; pawnshops and crumbling hotels are being elbowed aside in favour of cheap condos for the Kreative Klass. A typical new feature of the neighbourhood are street signs meant to "send a message" to the truly indigenous occupants; each one reads

The US's liberation of ICANN has made an upcoming UN internet summit for dime-store fascists irrelevant. Surprise, surprise: the summit's going ahead anyway
Is an Israeli-Jordanian water pact responsible for the slow demise of the Dead Sea?
Books, satellite dishes, internet: Iran's Ahmadinejad is leaving no medium undesecrated in his quest to suppress opposition sentiment
Meanwhile, an Argentine prosecutor has formally charged Iranian officials and Hezbollah figures with the 1994 Jewish centre bombing that killed 85
Though outlaw tiger-slayer Sansar Chand is still safely behind bars, his gang--led by the wife who smuggles the skins to market--is still on the loose
Yellow peril: Commie China opens a new front in its charm war against Taiwan, waving cash at farmers burdened with surplus bananas
Found in SA: the world's oldest fish fossil, a 360M-yr-old lamprey that looks just like its present-day brethren
Book your seats now: the first World Pesto Championship is happening in Genoa next March
Stuff you won't read about in the Chinese press: 10,000 college students battle SWAT teams in the southeast over a private-school crackdown
Car-crazy Saudis enjoy the kingdom's first-ever jet-propelled dragster show
There's still no sign of Julio Jorge Lopez, Argentina's missing dirty-war witness
"Screaming listeners, veiled women swaying in their seats..."--it's not Beatlemania, it's a performance by Hossam Sakr, the Egyptian rockstar of Sufi-style religious chant
An Australian Broadcasting Corp. cameraman goes on strike... right in the middle of a live news broadcast
Six months after her death, bureaucracy is still delaying the burial of Italian screen siren Alida Valli
Officials investigating an Australian day care find seven babies with their legs tied together with bedsheets

A little YouTube fun in honour of the Phoenix Coyotes, who've just changed the name of the former Glendale Arena to Jobing.com Arena:

Another scene from the murder of culture by hysterical IP law: these mordant Judge Dredd stories from the British comics magazine 2000AD will never again be seen in print. (I thought giving the pistol-wielding Michelin Man a French accent was a clever touch.)

The Edmonton Oilers have played eight games this year, and eight times the fans have come away shaking their heads in disbelief at how good rookie centre Patrick Thoresen is. Thoresen, an undrafted player who unexpectedly made the Oilers out of rookie camp, is just the fifth Norwegian to play in the NHL, and is already pretty well the best of the bunch. Last night against the Phoenix Coyotes he picked up three assists, giving him six points and a +4 through eight games. Only a fluke Curtis Joseph save with the butt-end stopped him from adding a goal to the tally. Rarely does any first-year player out of Europe look so complete in the NHL environment: the guy passes accurately, hits hard, knows when to attack the net, forechecks and backchecks, and even fought Mike Comrie in a preseason game, an act which immediately won him about a million new northern Alberta fans.

One of the most delightful things about Thoresen's success, though, has been monitoring the response in Norway. Hockey is not a leading sport there, but the Norwegians, like all civilized peoples, know the legend of the storied Oilers. When Thoresen survived the final cut in training camp the Norwegian embassy in the United States actually issued a press release celebrating the event. It must be admitted, though, that sometimes this sort of thing can lead to amusing malapropisms: Thoresen might be good but it is unlikely that Coach MacTavish actually praised him for his excellent "tackling."

Embittered by the Eskimos' failure to make the 2006 CFL playoffs--the last time this happened, I was six months old--I decided to spend an afternoon watching a game that Edmonton absolutely couldn't lose. It was a perfect day for football.

Advertising spam delivered straight to your Google Desktop: a bright new idea from the Globe & Mail.

YouTube addicts have learned to enjoy fan-made highlight reels of the world's most astonishing athletes, almost to the point of taking them for granted. But the trend has a dark side, as this reel of Marc-Andre Bergeron lowlights made by a frustrated Oiler fan--and taken from just the first six games of the NHL season--demonstrates.

In defence of MAB, the "Getting Beat Wide" chapter shows him having trouble with Jarome Iginla (making him a member of a very large fraternity) and battling Joe Thornton to a draw pretty effectively. Plus, is there really anybody alive who isn't going to look like an idiot with "Yakety Sax" playing in the background?

I think of myself as having a good nose for early traces of big trends. So I should mention, while disavowing any serious understanding of the hard physical structure of the Internet, that the Blackbox, Sun Microsystems' new data centre in a shipping container, raises the same set of neck hairs that Mosaic, jarred salsa, Kurt Cobain, the Drudge Report, and satellite radio did. It's probably just because it looks so cool. Bob Cringely envisioned pretty much this exact thing a year ago, and if you're a stock-picker, pay special attention to this hint: "Expect... to see a new business appear with companies renting Blackboxes."

From this morning's Edmonton Journal:

The headline on a story on A2 Monday referred to oil workers as "rig pigs." As the story explained, that term is derogatory and outdated.

Allow me to glue a short technical note here for the benefit of some poor soul who might googling desperately for help while in the predicament I found myself in on Wednesday. In recent months I've found myself increasingly convinced, by research and experience, that added monitor space can improve the efficiency of a desk jockey and possibly even pay for itself. (When I lived with Kevin Grace I used to make fun of him for his geek-macho preoccupation with monitor size; now, and not for the first time, I find myself grudgingly accepting what he seems to have known all along.) This morning I spotted a good "instant rebate" deal on a 22-inch monitor at Staples, and I managed to get to the shop just in time to grab the last one in stock. The resolution of the new monitor is 1,680 pixels by 1,050, giving me more than twice the acreage I formerly had. I have owned Japanese cars whose hoods weren't this large.

But I began to panic when I went to readjust my monitor settings and I found that the maximum monitor size my XP box and its graphic card seemed willing to handle was 1,600×1,024. Moreover, at this close-but-no-cigar resolution, text and images on the new monitor were unacceptably rastery. It slowly dawned on me that I probably should have made sure my graphics card was capable of communicating with the new display and that I might have to go back to Staples, forfeiting at least double my savings from the monitor purchase on buying a new video card.

Fortunately, I remembered one of the principles that has been battered into my soul over decades of trying to coexist with computers: when in doubt, update your driver software. Downloading the latest driver for my oldish Nvidia GeForce card magically bumped my computer's maximum resolution to the necessary 1,680×1,050, and now the new monitor is working like a dream (literally--the thing is so visually immersive that buying it might well constitute a fatal symbolic farewell to meatspace). These, then, are the lessons: check for compatibility before you impulse-buy new hardware, and update your drivers when you're having unexplained problems. Sure, these maxims are obvious and well-known. "Back up your data" is obvious and well-known too, but who amongst us doesn't still find himself occasionally embarrassed by ill-timed software crashes?

This evening I went to a book-signing featuring Chester Brown, the acclaimed Canadian illustrator and graphic novelist. The event was exceedingly enjoyable; the helium-voiced Brown has a way of kind of sneaking up on an audience, starting with overheads of rough layouts for his Louis Riel book and working his way through the creative process to some remarkable unpublished material, including unused New Yorker illustrations and his front cover and flaps for a forthcoming Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. (Brown's artwork will be worth very nearly the price of that book.)

I swear this actually happened: during the question-and-answer session Brown was asked about his reaction to the controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. He started by saying that, having investigated the facts, he felt that the newspaper probably was acting in bad faith and had been trying to bait Muslims deliberately. "But I believe strongly in freedom of expression," he added, "and I'm pleased that there were other publications, like Harper's and the Western Standard, that were willing to reproduce the cartoons. That took courage."

I don't know if anyone's discussed Brown's anarcho-libertarian streak--I'm sure if I googled around I'd find that Reason had interviewed him one time or another--but here's an interview with the artist in which he catches a slacker interviewer off-guard by citing Tom Bethell's The Noblest Triumph. It also contains a bad scan of his strip "My Mom Was a Schizophrenic", which features a guest appearance by Thomas Szasz.

Easy money: Malaysia goes on a crazed dam-building binge without customers, impact studies, or common sense
Partition appears on the horizon in Iraq as the parliament passes the first law governing the mechanics of federalization
High political office: of 50 Italian MPs tricked into taking a drug test by a TV comedy, 12 tested positive for THC and four for coke
Mere hours before the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, the agency that awards it gets some bad news in the Norwegian budget
What fraction of U.S. drug prescriptions are for products that found their way into the PDR without ever being submitted for FDA approval? The answer may surprise you
Liberia began as a haven for Africans returning from the United States. In 2006, it's being pulled out of the doldrums by a second wave of returnees
Don't look now, but France and Germany are already squabbling over possible job cuts at a debt-wracked Airbus
Not long ago, cider was for winos and the senile: now it's the hip bevvie of the health-conscious, young, and affluent, but can the trend last?
Belgium revives the memory of Herbert Hoover's remarkable relief work; when do you suppose the U.S. will get around to doing the same?
A paper IPO makes Cheung Yan the first woman to be the richest individual in China
Analysts: Kim Jong-Il's nuke test isn't a message to the world--it's private theatre for the Koreas
Lula was supposed to win the Brazilian election in a walkover, but unfortunately, that's exactly how he campaigned--with predictable results
Will Pakistan be left with nothing but a hole in the ground when China's ten-year lease on a giant copper mine runs out?
Al-Ahram scopes Sadat 25 years after his murder, finding a flawed figure who restored Egyptian pride but plunged the country into a cultural deep freeze
Why is the American power tool industry giving the cold shoulder to the inventor of the miraculous but expensive SawStop?
Norway rejoices on word that new national hero and Edmonton Oiler Patrick Thoresen has been told what every rookie wants to hear: "go ahead and rent an apartment"
Efforts to pin down the ethnicity of Columbus still haven't borne fruit three years after DNA samples were taken
De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer warns the World Diamond Congress that industry certification of "conflict-free" rocks is leaving gaps and will come under increasing scrutiny
"Spengler" to American neocons and loony leftists: what this here clash of civilizations needs is a dose of old-fashioned German theology
Taste the happoshu: a case study in how Japanese tax policy is changing its beer culture
Argentine president Kirchner finds in NYC that despite huge economic growth, multinationals still have their backs turned five years after the big bond default
Proton, Mahathir Mohamed's pet automaker, "will collapse" unless it can find another sucker "international partner" soon
Chosun Ilbo never misses a trick with hard-hitting stories like "Singer's Hotpants Inflame Cyberspace" [youtube]

NEW YORK -- As the abortion debate rages, Ms. magazine is releasing its fall issue next week with a cover story titled ''We Had Abortions'' that lists names of thousands of women who signed a petition making that declaration. ...The signatories include Ms. founder Gloria Steinem, comedian Carol Leifer, and actresses Kathy Najimy and Amy Brenneman, but most are not famous names.

Boy, the A-list really took one for the team, didn't they? Carol Leifer (sometimes referred to as "the poor man's Elayne Boosler") must be thrilled at implicitly being referred to as a "famous name" in 2006.

I've often thought it would be a useful publicity coup for the pro-choice cause if a whole bunch of really famous women, including both high-grade celebrities and women in positions of genuine social responsibility, would come out simultaneously and own up to having had an abortion. Ms. leaves the impression it tried to get some celebs for its list and failed, thus potentially doing more harm than good.

Ostensibly no woman is proud of having had to visit the clinic (with the exception of Steinem, who would surely be far more reluctant to sign a "We Got Married to Men" petition), but then we're not supposed to be proud of rehab stints either, and you can't get Hollywood people to shut their cakeholes for two minutes about those. Outside the Ms. petition, how many female celebrities can you name that have admitted to having an abortion or been reliably reported to have had one?

...with their iPods and their Interwebs and their Menger sponges...

Get this--I've been battling a brutal outer-ear infection for about four days. What a thing to be stricken with at age 35, considering that I don't even swim; I always figured my illnesses would get older as I did (acne, chlamydia, arthritis, Alzheimer's), but apparently my body has chosen to revert to childhood instead. The enraging part is that it's not even reverting to its own childhood. As a kid I never suffered the recurring otitis that seemed to nag and developmentally delay of about 20% of my classmates; in general, considering the amount of time I spent running in bare feet on unpaved roads and skipping rocks off of our town's stagnant, evil-smelling "lake", I must have had an immune system that was could have warded off Exocet missiles. Now, for no particular reason I'm aware of, I'm half-deaf and stuck scarfing aspirin, pouring Cipro and cortisone into my head, and reading about exotic complications of simple earache that involve facial paralysis and the slow transformation of the skull into Brie. Whoopee.

Did you know that Gerard Kennedy studied economics and political science at the "University of Edmonton"? Other newspapers tell you what you didn't know; the Toronto Star tells you things you couldn't possibly have known.

[UPDATE, 9:40 am: The Star also calls Kennedy's Manitoba hometown "Le Pas", but then again, so did the Globe... þ: Derek.]

I spotted about a dozen bottles of the new Coke Blak in (an almost-hidden corner of) the beverage cooler at the local drugstore this afternoon and decided to put the new category-killing energy drink to the test. The packaging's certainly clever--the stuff comes in a slightly dangerous-looking shrink-wrapped glass bottle, producing a medicinal effect that should signal to unwitting buyers that they are not purchasing an ordinary soft drink. I am less impressed with the taste. It basically comes off as Coke mixed in about equal parts with coffee, with a strong caramel overtone. The elements never really come together, and there is a slight metallic savour, along with the distinctive presence of aspartame (as ever, stimulating your sweetness receptors in the distracted, perfunctory manner of a discount hooker giving a handjob). I hesitate to say that Red Bull tastes "better" (than anything, really), but at least it does produce its own irreducible sensation on the tongue, and since Coke Blak has only half Red Bull's caffeine it's hard to know what the point of the former might be unless you're a Coca-Cola shareholder.

You could do this better, and more cheaply, using your own recipe. By any chance is this "coffee" substance they speak of available in stores separately? I bet that would taste pretty good.

You'll notice that on the label the name of the product is actually spelled "Blāk" (hope that shows up correctly in your browser). Graduate students in history will wish to purchase this item so that they can pronounce its name "cook blake" as an esoteric joke.

Presented together, here are two rival accounts of the free concert held yesterday at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in downtown Toronto. One is by an instant-messaging correspondent, the other (in italics) is by Star critic John Terauds.

The Canadian Opera Company's new house is now officially open to all, thanks to an ambitious series of free late-afternoon concerts that will run to late June of next year. Yesterday's event marked the first in the upper-lobby amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. It was a chamber concert of 20th- and 21st-century music.

i told you i was going to free concert yesterday w/ mom
it's the COC's inaugural concert to kickstart the season
this fucking bldg is brand new, smack dab in downtown
they had an open house when the bldg was completed, about a month or two ago. mom went with all her friends. when they showed up, the auditorium was *locked* and they wouldn't let anyone in.
she was told that they could only enter the auditorium on a "guided tour" and those tours were full already.
and mom said, can't we just take a peek inside? she thought, what are we, vandals?
but there is def'ly interest, lots of people showed up last night
i get there and this skinny, pimply, smarmy kid all dressed in black with wire-rim glasses won't let me in
they tell me that they've reached maximum capacity already
i'm standing there w/ this old man next to me
and i say, that's fine, but my mom is inside waiting for me
she's got a seat saved next to her
Sorry, I can't let you in.
i said, but she's got a seat SAVED, which means I'm not going to be tipping you over max cap
and he says in a smarmy tone, we COUNTED the number of heads coming in, so we're at MAX CAPACITY.
and I said, we'll she's got her cell phone turned off and she's waiting for me. I need to go in and let her know.
He says: Sorry. No.

Funded through private donations, these programs ensure that the glass-walled space overlooking University Ave. is as lively as the sidewalks outside. Yesterday's hour-long premiere wasn't the first concert to be held in that space. As was the case at events held there during the Ring cycle, the setting--a feeling of being at one with the performers as well as the city beyond--was the true star.

I started raising my voice
there were people behind me, and i knew my voice would carry through the atrium
I said this is ridiculous
i've got my mother waiting inside for me, and you won't let me in to let her know I won't be meeting her. Is this how you treat your patrons?
and at this point this plain-looking middle-aged woman in a lavender sweater set comes by and puts her hand up gently to snotty kid
we'll just check with our manager to see if we can allow a few more people, she said softly
it's a safety issue, she said
and I said, frankly, if i can't stay i'm just going to go in there and take my mom OUT, and this gentlemen here can have our seats.
it's not an issue of safety for me, it's a matter of letting me the fuck in so i can get mom
and the attitude was, like, i was lying my way into a fucking free concert
like i was some kid at a nightclub going, but! my FRIENDS are in there man!!!
it was absolutely fucking ridiculous
so they finally let us in
me and this old dude
so i go in and meet mom
turns out it's not in the auditorium
the show is on like, a fucking landing in the stairway
the whole opera house has a glass front
then there's, like, this atrium bit with the stairs and then another wall separating that from the auditorium
so they've packed all these people on diff levels on these landings
and i'm at the top one with mom

Not that the musicians were anything less than stellar. They included flute player Douglas Stewart and three violinists: COC concertmaster Marie Bérard, her assistant Benjamin Bowman and Lyn Kuo. They played pieces by an international cast of composers that included Canada's Harry Somers and Clermont Pépin.

it was horrifically bad
a chick and guy come out dressed in black
there are four music stands in front of them, set about 3 feet apart, staggered
they start off at the first one
oh god
and the chick starts. hardly audible at first
she's just dragging the bow across the strings
it sounds like a dying mouse
then the dude starts in on a discordant note
two mice dying. horribly
they do that, muddling about for about 4 min
I could see the look of bewilderment on all the seniors' faces around me
one of them behind me asks her friend, When are they going to stop warming up and start playing??
halfway through the first violin piece she looked over at the CityTV cameraman and said, "I sure hope they're not FILMING this for TV!! It'll put everyone to SLEEP!!"
20 minutes of this torturous shit
when i first got there, there were all these old people, young cool-looking kids. one in particular, really good-looking kid was sitting next to me. he had shown up by himself to check this out
the second the set ended, he got up, threw his program book onto the chair and stalked out
the four stands were there to represent some kind of "continuity"
so they would finish dying at one stand
then they would pause, then walk to the next one
and start all over again
some other middle-aged dude in a MEC jacket also left. I could hear him complaining to one of the ushers: THIS IS AWFUL. he looked angry
i was pretty pissed myself, i wanted to leave. mom said, let's give the next one a try first
some solo flute piece that's supposed to be a reflection of picasso's works
SIGH.

The audience also got a foretaste of Swoon, a new opera by Toronto's James Rolfe (with libretto by Anna Chatterton). Sung by Virginia Hatfield, Melinda Delorme and Lawrence Wiliford, accompanied by Elizabeth Upchurch, it was a charming, witty and tantalizing taste of a full one-act production in December.

i read the program, the rest of it didn't hold any promise. in fact, the fourth piece had something to do with "pre-recorded sounds on a tape" and how the "violin initiates the gesture to the tape, with the tape responding..."
and the interplay between this pre-recorded shit and some fucking screeching. I couldn't stay. there was no fucking way
it was painfully retarded
I mean, the whole thing made me so ANGRY.
this new opera house, who is it MEANT for
the city?
the community?
and to go in there, with this nice cross-section of potentially loyal patrons
and start with this....SHIT
it smacked of elitism, don't you think?
we're the new operah haus...we shall educate the masses with this stunning atonal composition...
PLAY A FUCKING MELODY
WILL IT KILL YOU?
it was wholly unwelcoming
the whole experience was terrible

The Telegraph checks in with Beharry VC, still struggling with his wounds and sudden celebrity, while Brit mil sources say up to six more Victoria Crosses may be in the pipeline
A teenage prank in the Altai fills a school with pepper spray and sends 65 to hospital...
...while schoolkids in Gothenburg interrupt a youth ballet by tossing stinkbombs into the orchestra pit
Jack Ma, China's rockstar dotcom billionaire, says the secret to making a fortune in technology is easy: know nothing about technology
"I want to show those scoundrels that the whole city mourns her": Florence says goodbye to the insolent, vivacious Oriana Fallaci
A TV investigation finds that a Swedish general's "very deviant" sexual tastes endangered national security by exposing him to blackmail
The paradox of Japanese baseball: Japan's complex, hierarchical idea of "teamwork" can sometimes lead to unexpected displays of rebellion and individualistic fury
Does context count? A German mail-order business goes on trial for depicting Nazi symbols on anti-Nazi badges and stickers
CSM: despite theoretical democratization at the village level, it ain't easy being the non-Communist on the ballot in local Chinese elections
In Milan, Armani learns to love self-imitation and brings back the designs that defined the 80s
As a civil-union bill hits the SA parliament, controversial politician Jacob Zuma tells a crowd that "gay marriages are a disgrace"
In Argentina, the chief witness in the trial of a "dirty war"-era general has "mysteriously" disappeared as the judge faces death threats
Mideast analyst: why is Iran ignoring its interests flagrantly when it comes to confronting the USA but protecting them carefully when it comes to Russia and the Chechens?
A fool at forty? Nigerians are better off than most Africans, but just the same they seem to enjoy a certain breezy disrespect for their nation
Economist: how protectionists are strangling the saurian flag telcos of Europe by blocking consolidation
An Italian economist sets off a national firestorm by daring to suggest that civil servants should be capable of being fired if they don't work
WW1 vet Francois Jaffre dies, leaving just five surviving poilus
When a Sony laptop battery blows up, Korean manufacturers throw a party...
...but Samsung advises you not to let your dog answer the phone if it's got a lithium-ion battery
The bizarro Lefebvre: Zambia's Archbishop Milingo [wikipedia] ordains four married bishops and is automatically excommunicated
Musharraf: the day we lost East Pakistan was the "saddest and most painful of my life"
A secret report says that some of the Madrid bombing suspects may have been trained in Afghanistan by a Moroccan terrorist group
Carlos Menem, 76, grabs his chest and collapses at an early campaign rally; supporters say it was just hypoglycemia (?)
Declaration of independence: China looks to boost its animation industry out of its cheap-labour subcontracting role for North American production

I had a column in Friday's National Post about Mrs. Ralph Klein and the crystal-meth panic: don't worry if you missed it, because it's on the free side of the subscriber wall. Alberta citizens, and people who like to get a real good look while driving past the scene of a bad auto accident, can read the report of the Premier's Task Force on Crystal Meth for themselves. What stands out, aside from the contempt for the rule of law, is the lack of hard data, not to mention the way that every possible bad idea that ever emerged from a self-described democracy has been embraced without any attention to effects or scientific verification. (Do illiberal proceeds-of-crime seizures actually limit drug availability, or is their function merely to satiate the spirit of revenge? No one knows; more to the point, no one cares.) As I wrote in the column, I think the timing of the report's release says everything about how it's really been greeted in political circles.

If you're registered at the Western Standard's website, you can now view a couple of my recent columns there too. In one I look at the Second Lebanese War under the light of military history and conclude that "we are entering an extraordinary new age, one in which wartime propaganda will not only be intended for mass consumption, but actually mass-produced." In another I try to come to grips with the problem of transsexuals in women's sport. Incidentally, the next time you're near a Canadian newsstand you should thumb through the Standard and check out its brand-new top-to-toe redesign. I had no input into the work but I think they did a hell of a job, one that should win the magazine some awards if there's any justice (N.B.: there isn't).

Finally, I have a guest post at the Battle of Alberta hockey weblog that's timely, especially for Oiler fans of a statistical bent.

An Italian porno queen says her male compatriots are losing their traditional gusto and suffering from endemic "performance anxiety"
Is Pakistan providing most of the fuel for the fires of civil war in Sri Lanka?
Birds of a feather: a replica of Santos-Dumont's airplane will fly alongside the Wright Brothers' Flyer in Dayton, Oh.
That Muslim tradition of tolerance: Islam becomes the official faith of Somalia and conversions and proselytization are promptly banned
U.S. immigration policy faces a test as "temporary protected status" for Liberians fleeing civil strife runs out
Some Western tech companies are making millions by selling censorship technology to oppressive Asian governments: why, asks the Asian Trib, aren't others supplying countermeasures to subvert the rising firewalls?
After six weeks of cola war, a Kerala court opens the door for the sale of Coca-Cola in the Indian state
A Saudi female historian argues that the "women's cage" within the Mecca Grand Mosque is neither safe nor theologically sound
A hospital in Ghana urges TB patients not to sell the special meals they've been given to boost their immune systems
Sony's Japanese price point for the PlayStation 3 turns out to be too high at 2× the XBox 360 and the Wii

Randy Gregg, one of the outstanding defencemen of the '80s Edmonton Oiler dynasty, is remembered most often as one of the last professional athletes in a major pro sport to practice medicine during his career. He enjoys another lesser-known distinction: he's an alumnus of the Kokudo Bunnies, a Japanese (men's) pro hockey team. (Here's a photograph of a recent version of the Bunnies uniform.) Current Oilers assistant coach Billy Moores, former chief of the U of A Golden Bears hockey team, is also a former Bunnies head coach.

So Edmonton fans will be sad to hear that the Bunnies, long owned by the founder of the Seibu railroad empire, are no more. Major Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun reports today that the franchise has been upgraded in dignity--though demoted in whimsicality--and is now known as the Seibu Prince Rabbits. The rechristened lagomorphs are two-time defending champs of the Asia League (which also features teams from China and South Korea), and they debut against the Nippon Paper Cranes on Saturday.

Extraordinary news arrives from England tonight, but none of the big North American news sites seem to have placed it near the top of the queue. So let me step in on behalf of those editors who aren't aware how popular BBC's Top Gear is on DVD, cable, and the Internet: it seems co-host Richard Hammond has been seriously injured in a wreck arising from an attempt to break the British land speed record. The Hamster is known to millions as a giddy travel-sized foil to his fellow presenters, the prune-faced Tory roisterer Jeremy Clarkson and the inscrutably dry James May. Under the trio the show has become perhaps history's most popular motoporn series. Former host Quentin Wilson is probably correct to describe Hammond as "irreplaceable," but from early omens it appears that a replacement may be needed: the Guardian has the celebrity patient being treated in a neurological ward. Hammond, whose ubiquity on British TV is frequently used by his TG mates as fertilizer for jokes, often gets behind the wheel for adventurous Top Gear experiments. His unscheduled excursion, however, is certain to raise questions about why such a daunting task wasn't left to the show's "tame" racing driver, the pseudonymous Stig (widely suspected to be F1 veteran Julian Bailey).

Yesterday, while thinking about hockey, it occurred to me that new Oiler Ladislav Šmid is actually a perfect onomastic fit for a team that already has a Smith and a Smyth. The names are all cognate with the old, old proto-Germanic word for someone who shapes metal, and the same concept is at the root of familiar European names like Kowalski and Kovács; taking the Joycean logic to its natural conclusion, it would seem that the Oilers' future hiring of Ray Ferraro as an assistant coach is inevitable. (I'm guessing that Ilya Kovalchuk is part of this same family, but I'm not holding my breath for that one.) Purely by chance, I later found myself reading a Wikipedia entry about Latin and I bumped into the very fellow who came to Edmonton with Šmid:

Definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjective; compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective ille, illa, (illud), in the Romance languages, becoming French le and la, Catalan and Spanish el and la, and Italian il and la. The Portuguese articles o and a are ultimately from the same source. Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from ipsu(m), ipsa (su, sa); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after the noun, eg. lupul ("the wolf") and omul ("the man" — from lupum illum and homo illum).

It's hard to see how you can resist giving Joffrey Lupul a cool nickname like "The Wolf" when he was literally born with it. (Consider this my "Orbs of Power" for 2006-07.) However, I DO NOT recommend following the same nicknaming procedure in the case of fellow new Oiler Petr Sýkora.

Reader John Thacker writes:

Did I miss your post on the upcoming chess showdown between Kramnik and Topalov to unify the titles?

You missed it because I never finished it, but I did intend to direct readers' attention to the remarkable fulfillment of the 2002 Prague Agreement, which 18 months ago had been universally declared dead. Since 1993 chess has lacked a single world champion, with the traditional over-the-board succession to the title going one way and FIDE, the sport's governing body, going another. On Saturday, current FIDE champ Veselin Topalov and "classical" champion Vladimir Kramnik will begin a 12-game match in Elista, Kalmykia, to merge the rival claims at last and permit the re-establishment of an orderly, periodic structure of candidature tournaments.

It's difficult to market a sport or game without being able to promote a single world champion, and for more than a decade the schism in chess was universally lamented without any tangible progress being made on repairs. Then (to oversimplify) two things happened which cleared the way. The first took place in March 2005 when Garry Kasparov quit the game to concentrate on Russian politics. Kasparov had helped initiate the original title split when he found sponsorship for a title defence outside FIDE auspices; then in 2000 he handed over the classical championship to Kramnik, suffering perhaps the most surprising defeat in the annals of chess. After 2000, however, he remained chess's foremost figure and its most outstanding player. This gave him an anomalous amount of leverage, and complicated unification talks. In essence, anyone planning to get the classical and FIDE champions together over the board also had to get Kasparov's OK, because no playoff structure that excluded Kasparov could hope to be seen as credible. Kasparov's retirement, though lamented by every chess-lover as the loss of the game's most dynamic and creative active performer, was a breath of fresh air for chess politics.

The second event happened late in the year when senior figures in chess began looking ahead to June elections for the top offices in FIDE. The presidency has been occupied since 1995 by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also the self-mythologizing President-for-Life of the Republic of Kalmykia. Kirsan has poured millions into chess, keeping money in the top players' pockets without quite stopping them from grumbling about the sinister figure who controls their sport. He has also messed around in tone-deaf fashion with some of the sport's traditions, awarding the FIDE world championship at glitzy knockout tournaments that featured rapid tiebreaks and drug testing. And while no one can deny the benefits to players from his largesse, he has also used his bankroll to sew up support for his presidency from backwater national federations. What happened in this election was that he faced serious, principled, united opposition for the first time; the forces of transparency and democracy, and most of the top Western players, were able to unite behind Dutch chess doyen Bessel Kok. Kok had been an original creator of the Prague Agreement, and in order to keep his presidency from becoming an even more complete joke-cum-moral catastrophe, Kirsan seems to have realized that he needed to mend fences with Kok (after using Third World support to defeat him), relent a little on FIDE's control of the supposed championship, and provide the final impetus for unification. That's how the Kramnik-Topalov match finds itself in Elista, which is, to say the least, an out-of-the-way place to be holding the world championship of any sport.

ChessBase.com is, as always, an excellent place to go for daily coverage of the title match. The storyline here is an archetypal one, with the Russian Kramnik as the patient, precise defender and the Bulgarian Topalov as the fiery, improvisational attacker. The quality of play we can expect to see from the impassive, philosophical Kramnik depends heavily on his freedom from the minor health problems that sometimes derail his game; in early photos from Elista he looks fit and is seen offering a rare smile (as opposed to his usual grudging grin). Keeping in mind that I have a poor prognosticative track record when it comes to chess, however, I would put my money on Topalov, the debonair assassin. Top took the FIDE title late last year by scoring 6.5 out of 7 points in the first round-robin against a field (Anand, Svidler, Morozevich, Leko, Kasimdzhanov, Adams, and Judit Polgar) that could have been improved only by Kramnik's presence. This may have been the most impressive display of dominance in chess since Bobby Fischer's 12-0 run against Taimanov and Larsen (1971). Moreover, Kramnik does not have draw odds here as he did against Leko in 2004, when he won the 14th game to draw the match 7-7 and keep the title (yes, the man is clutch); if this match ends 6-6, the championship will be settled with a rapid tiebreak, and in that format Topalov is undoubtedly the stronger.

Despite these considerations, however, Kramnik is currently a very slight favourite to win over at TradeSports.

Classic SCTV sketches continue to flow onto YouTube, providing viewers with a grand opportunity to get stoked for the imminent release of SCTV: The Early Years. "Betty Bain, Professional Juror" features some textbook scene-stealing from Joe Flaherty and John Candy (watch for the big fella's oddly-modified left hand in the climactic scene); "Corna-Bix" is so incandescently silly that I still find myself proclaiming "Yum-bo!" in the presence of appealing food nearly thirty years after it aired; and the early "Sammy Maudlin" episode that completes the set below is one of the strongest. If you have time, YouTube also has the complete My Factory, My Self, a never-equalled send-up of glib '70s cinema. (In at least one regard My Factory couldn't be more timely: it begins with a joke about a change of anchors at the CBS Evening News.)

Trivia quiz: name the European country whose lack of bestiality laws has made it the continent's "animal whorehouse"
Fake hate-crime watch: turns out an Italian "beaten by right-wing thugs" just fell off a railway platform
The Bible code: does a Sicilian mobfather's copy of the Good Book contain encrypted secrets of his crime empire?
Meet the Sandhurst-trained, gout-plagued new king of Tonga, Taufa'ahau V
Even under terrorist attack, Turkey remains mysteriously preoccupied with its sex-doll issue
Wouter Basson, South Africa's "Dr. Death", is still getting a $6,800 monthly paycheque from the SANDF
Beirut bombshell: hard as it is to believe, it looks like Hezbollah dominated the signals-intelligence theatre in its war with Israel
So just what are these "European values" anyway? The "God debate" continues in Euroland
Swedes are considering turfing the ruling Social Democrats: with their typical lucidity, the Economist's charts explain why
Gas and electric workers strike and cut off power to a government spokesman's home in response to privatization plans for Gaz de France
The Green Vault, a European art treasury whose inventory escaped the incineration of Dresden only to languish in Communist hands, reopens to the public
Despite opposition from Spain, Gibraltarians will now be allowed to vote in EU elections
At a Lubavitcher school in the Ukraine, Jewish students get a terrific education for free--but must accept the movement's freakish dualism about Israel along with it
Meanwhile, there's a rising need within Israel for scholarships that help the apostate ultra-orthodox recover from their stunted secular education
At 76, David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, makes a long-anticipated visit to the resting place of the German ship Magdeburg
Uruguay becomes the surprising battleground in an economic chess game between the USA and Chavez
French prez candidate Ségolene Royal loses her cool at a party rally, needlessly berating a young woman
The Eurasian Economic Community, a talk shop for Russia, Belarus, and some 'Stans, may become an OPEC for Euro natgas
As India goes bourgeois, diabetes joins AIDS and malaria on the list of major public-health concerns
Germany is about to gain its first domestically ordained rabbis since 1942
EU court: Britain can't tax Irish-based subsidiaries at higher UK rates unless the offshore entities are "wholly artificial"
Turkey's opposition leader wonders if he has to pull a Khrushchev in order to call attention to worsening religious and ethnic strife
Joachim Fest, possibly the historian who best understood Adolf Hitler, is dead at 79

What's your favourite post from the HFBoards.com thread about Rick DiPietro's 15-year, $67.5M Islanders contract? I have to admit I cracked up when the one guy pointed out how lucky the older fans are because they won't have to live through the whole deal. But there's also this instant classic:

Did Wang kissed too many cows? How stupid is that? He signs a goalie for 15 years and the amount is garanteed? Oh god let rain brain from the sky!

One moderator finds a slender hint of upside:

I finally own a jersey of someone who won't get traded. Why am I not happier?

I spent Sunday morning with BoA correspondent Andy Grabia and Jose Reyes worshipper Avi Schaumberg watching the Oilers rookies work out at the Black Gold Arena in Leduc. Watching, and photographing. (Let someone else do the damn reporting for once!) Here's the resulting Flickr fotoset as an ordinary webpage; here's the same content in compelling slideshow form. Oiler fans can find verbal coverage in this thread, along with my thoughts on the workout. Looks like hockey's back!

Owing to my travels hither and thither, I might easily have missed Friday's Supreme Court decision from Justice Fish in Blank v. Canada. It's not one of those big individual-rights cases that reverberates across society like a hammerblow, but it is rare in that it is likely to occupy the general interest of all Canadian lawyers, and (by firmly establishing the distinction between the related concepts of litigation privilege and solicitor-client privilege) it does serve the beneficial libertarian purpose of removing a wholly bogus exception to freedom-of-information law. Anonymous Canadian lawblogger Pith and Substance has background and comment.

Just got back from a couple of days down on the farm... I've brought back some new photos for the visually inclined.

On a related note, a reader asks if I'm related to the family of Roughrider fans recently profiled on TSN. Shockingly, his suspicions are correct: the star of the clip is my uncle Robin. Which means that, vis-à-vis my father, the notorious "Sister Saskatchewan" who stalks Taylor Field in a nun's habit is actually a sister-in-law. Despite their unwise choice of role models like Trevis Smith, we all love Rob and Lori and their kids are turning out great. I'm confident that at least some of them will eventually realize that it's the Edmonton Eskimos who stand for professionalism, dignity, and integrity in Canadian football. Conversion to a faith that's founded on victory instead of victimhood cannot be far behind.

Have we been lied to? Mandarin is often said to have nearly 900 million speakers: now a Chinese official is saying 40% of the PRC population can't speak it despite intensive education efforts
Japanese Imperial Princess Kiko delivers the dynasty's first male heir in four decades and--for now--relieves the constitutional crisis
Tell us something we didn't know--Cardinal Glemp says the Soviets had priestly spies in the Vatican checking up on JP2
Germaine Greer op-ed: "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Steve Irwin"
The imitation of Christ: an apartheid-era National Party minister washes the feet of an ANC activist he once tried to murder
Did Israeli troops in Gaza use mystery superweapons to destroy people's organs without external damage? Al-Jazeera thinks so
Saudi girls gone wild? The Kingdom's Court of Grievances prepares to issue a verdict on a racy novel about Arab girls in revolt against conservative religious norms
Aftenposten wonders whether the newly-recovered Munch masterpieces were part of a secret deal in Norway's explosive NOKAS armed-robbery trial
The nuclear taboo is crumbling in Chile as the ruling coalition, despite Bachelet's disapproval, looks for a way to break Argentina and Bolivia's energy strangehold
Oh so civilized: Rwanda bans the death penalty
Have archaeologists really discovered the Etruscan capitol described by Livy after 500 years of searching?
A retired Indian engineer gives his US$2,200 life savings to a Calcutta high school made of mud
Austrian dungeon girl Natascha is to give her first live TV interview Wednesday evening
"Cairo will never be the same without him": a monumental statue of Ramses II is moved from Egypt's capital to Giza, inspiring (what else?) anti-Zionist rumours
Allied WW2 spy Noor Inayat Khan, a Sufi princess who died in Dachau [wikipedia], receives overdue recognition in her homeland
The traditional European tontine takes on a new form amongst female entrepreneurs in Senegal
Sport of filth: it seems even Vietnamese second-division soccer isn't free of hippodroming
The Lopez Obrador crisis hits a new level as the embittered loser threatens to defy the courts and form an alternative government
Today's African separatist movement in the news comes from the Caprivi region of northeastern Namibia [wikipedia]
Western Standard take note: Princess announces plans for the first-ever Antarctic megaliner cruise
Can a bandwidth pipe stretching from South Africa to Sudan overcome the squabbling of the 23 countries it will pass through?

I've always been dialed into Canadian culture. I really dig it. I feel very at home there. It's kind of like the movie version of America to some degree, because everything is just like in the real world, or my real world, but the names are different. Everything sounds made up there. Instead of Macy's there's Roots. It feels like you're in somebody's movie, where they couldn't clear Macy's so they made up fake names for stores.

This take on Canada from Kevin Smith in an interview with Maclean's isn't unfamiliar; a lot of actors come north and experience the different shops and brands and civic features and feel as though they're on a movie set, or in some surrealistic fairyland where everything is just slightly different and skewed. This isn't a problem except insofar as it may lead some Americans to treat Canada as a joke... as they implicitly do when they wear the Maple Leaf to get by more easily overseas--a practice that is recommended often to tourists in complete earnest, that is insanely offensive, that's disgraceful from a patriotic standpoint, that (to the degree that it might even succeed) unjustly imposes on Canadians the hazards and nuisances that it is meant to deflect, and that no one in the U.S. has ever, to my knowledge, denounced or apologized for. But I digress. The opposite phenomenon for Canadians is that, when encountering familiar American venues or symbols in person for the first time, one sometimes feels plunged into a weird sort of hyperstylized reality--the "Oh, look, it's the Empire State Building" effect.

I have to admit I had some subconscious trouble dealing with Americanness when I went to Florida last year for the Western Standard Cruise. It was really my first time anywhere on the east coast proper, and my first time in the South, and as it turned out I hadn't psychologically prepared myself. So I'd run into these freakishly genial people with various flavours of southern accent--

'Ey, man, how y'all doin' this mawnin'? Y'mind if I just take a little ol' look at your bawdin' pass?

--and my first, split-second reaction would actually be rage. I'd think to myself "What the HELL? Is this guy goofing on me? What's with the put-on accent?" I kind of had to stop and remind myself: this way of speaking isn't invented. It's not just the Southern speech, which you normally only hear on television in the mouths of sitcom buffoons and which doesn't throw me for such a loop when I hear it on the phone; it's also the chatty, aggressively genteel overall approach. Which might maybe feel natural to some Canadians, ones who don't come from an introverted, cold, Protestant/East European place. All it did was vaguely antagonize and unnerve me. At first I felt most comfortable with the cabdrivers, who up here are among the most colourful and approachable people (many are Africans and Middle Easterners), but who down there seem to be mostly gruff if not outright hostile.

(In Fort Lauderdale I hailed one hack who assumed wrongly from my light luggage that I was headed somewhere other than the waterfront. It turns out his work day consists mostly of avoiding the Homeland Security hassles and lineups that you have to confront in order to drop off a cruise passenger. He had no compunctions against explaining this to me, but it was still pretty clear he was wishing he'd just stepped on the gas and flattened me like a cartoon character instead of picking me up.)

There was a related but very different effect once I got onto the boat, where the WS passengers were immediately immersed in a sea of overtanned gravel-voiced northeasterners between the ages of 50 and 80. For some reason all the Seinfeld accents (Oh my gawd, Lenny, you have to troy the smoked SAAA-m'n) just made me giggly instead of resentful. Whenever possible I'd just hang out in one of the restaurants after breakfast, listening to old Italians and Poles, folks from Philly and Boston. Everything these people say sounds like movie dialogue to me--they could be talking about shaving their corns and I'd be inhaling it like it was Chekhov. Again, it's not strictly a matter of accent but also of how outlandishly oral these people are because of the different cultural influences--it's like absolutely everything that's ever in their minds has to be communicated at once or they'll physically explode. Going to the States always makes me despair of ever writing a novel, because I discover I was born with a great disadvantage--namely, that I live in a place where people's inner lives are actually interior. It's not even fair, really: in the U.S. it just seems like you could create excellent literature with a tape recorder.

"I'm laughing, so I'm still alive": a new book reveals the hidden history of "laughter under Hitler"
Back to the future: Greenland, whose name was accurate until the 14th century, is looking forward to a revival of agriculture and animal husbandry in the warm 21st
Boffins tell a Jo'burg conference on global security that Africa will be al-Qaeda's next playground
I'm not sure it's such a hot idea, but Czech Airlines is trying to reduce fears of terrorism by sticking passengers inside flight simulators and staging depressurizations and hijackings
Russia announces plans for a manned flight around the Moon, proving itself to be only 43 years behind in the space race
Estimated tax bill for South Korea's 2009 reacquisition of troop control along the DMZ: US$510 per person
Which European country has done the best job of integrating Muslim immigrants? You'll never believe the Pew Research Center's answer
Russia's constitution specifies church-state separation, but that's apparently not stopping regional governments from introducing new, mandatory courses on Orthodoxy in public schools
Mob rule in the Netherlands: nativist/laissez-faire MP Geert Wilders can't afford the security he needs to campaign in public, and the justice ministry won't help
Keeping up with the Gateses: Li Ka-Shing transfers $2.4B in shares to his charitable foundation
Rats, spies, storms, thieves--it's all part of camping out with Mexico's stubborn Lopezobradorista army
Argentina and Chile bicker over an Argie tourist map that undoes a 1998 agreement over a disputed cross-border icefield
Germany will contribute ships and planes to UN peacekeeping in Lebanon--but it's still too soon for German infantrymen to be sent where they might have to confront Jews
Chile joins hands with England on the banks of the Thames to celebrate the life of half-Irish, Anglo-schooled libertador Bernardo O'Higgins [wikipedia]
Embraer completes a $2.7B deal to sell 100 regional jump jets to a Chinese airline
MPs from the Faeroe Islands call for a repatriation of the Faroese diaspora
Blaming the victim: St. Petersburg authorities say that fire-code violations at the gutted Troitsky Cathedral were reported but never corrected
Does it ever seem like most of the ancient human remains found by anthropologists are murder victims?
Latin affluenza: Chilean dietary habits are taking a turn for the worse as healthy traditional items disappear from menus
SZnews has some interesting details of new Chinese anticorruption rules (much tougher than Canada's) that require CPC cadres to disclose personal biz affairs
The JPost reports that David Irving is comfortable in Austrian prison, but prosecutors are trying to lengthen his sentence
Alberta-trained TV chef and ethnic caricature Martin Yan shows off Chinese cuisine with all-American ingredients at a trade show in Shenzhen
Is a new wave of free newspapers in Denmark somehow facilitating nighttime home burglaries?

Subscribers to the Western Standard will have noticed that my byline now appears in the magazine a little more often. In addition to my sports column, I now have a couple of pages in each issue that fans of my old Upfront notebook feature in Alberta Report will enjoy. The plan is to devote half that spread to a piece of reportage or research--like this primer on Western Canada's underreported and unprecedented summertime anthrax outbreak [reg. req'd]. The other half contains "Satellite Dish," a digest of especially significant or amusing bits of international news from the same sources I use for my patented world-press roundups.

Needless to say, the sports columns will keep coming (here's a recent one comparing the fates of Barbaro and legendary '70s mare Ruffian) and I'll still be appearing just as often in the great and good National Post (watch for a new column from me Friday morning).

A 17-year-old daughter of Aum Shinrikyo's leader bids for a new guardian in an effort to escape the Japanese death cult
The dazzling, absurd panoply of African currencies may be due to collapse if supporters of an African Central Bank, now slated to be situated in Nigeria, have their way
...and it can't happen too soon for Zimbabwe, where the government has bungled the introduction of new banknotes in a manner shocking even by the standards of Mugabe's fiefdom
Caesar's wife: in the world's first political podcasting scandal, a contract to produce online video messages for German chancellor Merkel goes to a firm that has Edmund Stoiber's son-in-law on the board
Meanwhile, Merkel emerges from an interview with the Pope and calls for explicit recognition of Christianity in the EU Constitution
How Morocco deals with undocumented migrants passing through en route to Europe: dumping them in the middle of the Sahara without water
The Tamil Tigers' m.o., usefully exemplified in the Daily News of Colombo: swindle Canadians, then send the money home to terrorize civilians
Meanwhile, the Daily Star of Dacca is wondering why it can't seem to confirm Canadian Press reporting on Niko Resources Ltd.
200 families from around the world are suing SNCF, France's rail monopoly, for bundling relatives off to death camps under Vichy rule
Pakistan's scandal-plagued PM survives the second confidence vote in the National Assembly's history as the army gives up on excavating the body of Baluchi underground leader Bugti
Hardball: the Russian government, hoping to acquire or starve the only refinery in the Baltic, switches off the Transneft tap delivering oil supplies to Lithuania
The premier of Flanders remarks "ironically" in a Libération interview that francophone Belgians are too stupid to learn Flemish
Gene expression? Japanese researchers find to their surprise that some people are advantageously born with more muscles, numerically, than others
In other Japanese science news, Kyoto researchers have discovered that a species of damselfish engages in underwater agriculture, pulling "weeds" that threaten colonies of its favourite algae
Fatal FieldTurf? Authorities in Arnhem find "clouds of toxic gases" emerging from an artificial surface that uses rubber crumb
Ségo may lead the French polls, but before she runs she'll have to beat the old