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The Facebook generation: Changing the meaning of privacy

The Facebook generation:
Changing the meaning of privacy

May 24, 2007

Sabrina Saccoccio

When Nadine Kuehnhold began searching for grade school classmates, her first crush Brent Hewko wasn't yet on Facebook.

Three weeks later he appeared.

"I sent him a message on a Monday telling him how awesome it was to have found him after so many long years," explained Kuehnhold, a young professional in her 30s. "He replied on Friday, and no sooner, because he was on a business trip. We ended up speaking on MSN for eight hours and meeting up the next day at a pub."

The couple that had flirted with love 18 years earlier is now in a relationship.

Kuehnhold said she's fairly open with her private life, and doesn't worry about posting the details of it on her Facebook profile: "Well, I don't have that many issues with it."

She is among a generation of younger people open to expressing themselves online, especially when it comes with such benefits.

This is in contrast to the previous baby boomers, who while young trusted no one over 30. With a picket as an extension of self, they marched in the name of civil liberties, fighting for constitutional rights to be respected. This meant ensuring governments wouldn't abuse their powers by meddling in their private lives.

That generation has grown up to hold credit cards close and mistrust online sales. Their kids, meanwhile, use social networking tools that, in essence, divulge enough info for others to access one's coveted plastic.

Creation of a surveillance society

This notion is troubling to Kathryn Montgomery, a professor in the school of communication at American University.

In her book Generation Digital, published this month, Montgomery takes a look at how new forms of technology affect the lives of children and adolescents.

In times of crisis when civil liberties are often trumped, such as after Sept. 11, access to personal information can be invaluable to governments.

If access to cached files of a teenager's drunken escapades exists, what happens when that teenager grows up and wants to run for office?

"The kind of apparatus that's being put into place by the corporations and the marketers is creating a very, very powerful surveillance society for the future. And I think people may begin to take that for granted," Montgomery explained.

But Montgomery has also found there's a positive side to these tools. Some kids use them to get acquainted with difficult social rituals, like using instant messaging to ask for a date or to break up with someone: "Now it's true that they're not doing it face-to-face, but maybe they wouldn't have gotten up the nerve to be honest about breaking up without it."

A new obsession with image

On Facebook and MySpace, profiles and photos tend to be changed often, sometimes daily or weekly. Pictures posted are self-snapped from above, coyly in the mirror or even while wearing a bikini on the beach.

Pre-Facebook generations posed for photos with high necklines, hands in lap and ankles crossed, while Victorian era photographs show evidence of people not even self-aware enough to look into the camera.

But the current younger generation is self-focused and image-conscious like never before. Growing up already tends to be a narcissistic process; kids go through an identity exploration where they think the world revolves around them.

As with a diary or gossiping on the playground, teenagers are naturally drawn to a tool like Facebook that allows them to vent.

While Facebook is a convenient outlet and even a social conduit, Montgomery explained it should be noted that digital companies create these tools knowing kids will eat them up.
"What I've found from looking into the industry, the way it has developed and the digital content services, is that they're purposely created to tap into these developmental processes. So that in some ways reinforces the self-obsession," Montgomery said.

Facebook has become a place to discuss a recent crush or the teacher getting on your nerves.
A program installed in September 2006 launched an automatic profile ticker of this kind of info. It tracked people's every virtual move — a new favourite band added or even a change in relationship status — and fed it back to their friends.

After complaints about too much info being shared, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg worked with programmers to give control back to the users. By allowing them to set their own privacy levels, they regained control of what information they shared.

Hopefully you were smiling

Still, there are stories of student suspensions and employers declining job applicants after gaining access to Facebook profiles.

American companies have reportedly asked college students to do internet checks of potential employees.

Facebook "friends" can upload photos of you and "tag" them, a process that allows all the people in your network to see them. If a colleague is in your network, suddenly they have new insight into your private life.

A Calgary lawyer in her 20s who didn't want her name published was hesitant about co-worker requests on Facebook. As a professional, she feels more sensitive about disclosing her private life than some of her peers.

"If you're like me, I only accept a certain select few people I have a history with and who are actually friends — people I see on a regular basis. That's why I think it is OK to put some of the pictures up that I have," she said.

Facebook has become the most-used photo-sharing site. In the past eight months, members have jumped from nine million to 23 million worldwide, making it the sixth most-accessed site, with 60 per cent of users logging in every day.

A long way from love-ins and communes. The new generation's culture tends toward self-disclosure, spying, voyeurism — and some noted perks.

"It's weird, to be honest with you," said Kuehnhold of reconnecting with her earliest schoolmates. "I feel closer to them now than I did back in high school or grade school."

Bilingual babies keep ability to discern languages from visual cues

I've always wondered about this...

Bilingual babies keep ability to discern
languages from visual cues

Last Updated: Thursday, May 24, 2007 2:22 PM ET

CBC News

Babies as young as four months old can tell whether a speaker has
switched languages from visual cues alone, but only those who grow up in a
bilingual home seem to hang on to the ability, researchers in British Columbia
have found.
In Friday's issue of the journal Science, Whitney Weikum, a
doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and her
colleagues report the results of their tests on infants who were shown video
clips of bilingual speakers.
The caregivers wore darkened glasses to prevent
influencing the babies, who were watching silent video clips of bilingual
speakers.

The study is the first to show young babies are prepared to tell
languages apart using only visual information, Weikum said.

The researchers tested infants at four, six and eight months of age
from English-only homes and six and eight-month-olds from bilingual English and
French homes. Each group was shown silent video clips of bilingual speakers, who
recited sentences first in one language and then switched to the other.

At four and six months, babies paid closer attention and watched the
video for longer when the speakers switched languages, which suggests the
infants were able to discern the change from visual information alone.

While six-month-olds from monolingual and bilingual environments could
tell languages apart visually, by eight months of age, only babies from
bilingual homes who were familiar with both languages continued to be able to do
so, the researchers found.

"This suggests
that by eight months, only babies learning more than one language need to
maintain this ability," Weikum said.

"Babies who only hear and see one language
don't need this ability, and their sensitivity to visual language information
from other languages declines."

In Depth

Technology

Are cellphones and the internet rewiring our brains?

May 21, 2007

By Sabrina Saccoccio, CBC News

Try reading this article to the end without checking e-mail. Find you can't? Before making assumptions of addictive behaviour, you should know there's a positive side to switching tasks often.

You may actually be training your brain to become faster and stronger.

Studies are beginning to show that cellphone-toting execs and Facebook-friendly teens may be multi-tasking their way into taking on even more, by rewiring their brains to handle it.

The action of using a cellphone or e-mail has an immediate affect on the brain. Answering calls and thumbing texts prepares the human brain to take on such tasks — because its circuitry adapts to the environment it's presented with.

"People will often ask me, 'Are kids today different to kids 20 years ago?' Well, yes, they are. Because the world is different, their brains have wired up in a different way," explains Dr. Martin Westwell, deputy director of Institute for the Future of the Mind at Britain's Oxford University.

For a change, malleable young brains aren't the only ones to benefit. As Westwell points out, "Even during adulthood this happens. The environment in which we find ourselves is really reflected in the way our brain cells rewire."

In fact, Westwell thinks people who grew up with cellphones and instant messaging aren't necessarily better at juggling tasks. Surprisingly, a study he conducted found 35- to 39-year-olds were more able to return to difficult mental tasks after being interrupted by nagging cellphone calls than their 18- to 21-year-old counterparts.

"The older group are just better at switching attention," Westwell says. "What we suspect is, as you get older you have to do more of this multi-tasking."

Which can lead to changes in behaviour, even at later stages in life. Besides the obvious ones, like taking calls in public, unexpected quirks also arise out of being in better touch, including the elusive phenomenon known as "phantom cellphone ringing."

Is that a cellphone in your pocket?

Sort of like Pavlov's dog, people have begun hearing cellphone rings or sensing vibrations when their phones aren't actually going off.

It's an occurrence all too familiar to busy Toronto film executive Link York, who uses his cellphone for work and can expect after-hours calls.

"It's like an audio hallucination in my brain," explains York. "I've even heard it in my sleep, on the cusp of a dream. But when I get up to check my phone, it's completely dead. I've even double-checked the incoming call log."

Not surprising in a society becoming on-call nearly all the time. As Westwell explains: "We're waiting for it to ring."

And the instant nature of the medium - not knowing when a call or an e-mail might arrive - seems to lead to obsessive checking. It's comparable to rats in a Skinner box waiting for pellets.

A study found when given a pellet at the same time every day, rats only depressed a lever around the time the pellets were dispensed. Rats that were unaware of when the pellet was coming checked constantly.

Devices as vices

Much of the talk around new communication devices is extreme. Checking e-mail has been compared to the way a drug addict moves toward a fix. Rather than thinking about it, the response is unconscious.

A Halifax writer who gave up the internet for one month found himself automatically clicking open his e-mail browser.

Robert Plowman took on the challenge for a newspaper article. He had been in the habit of checking e-mail every 10 to 15 minutes.

"That was partially why I wrote the piece. About a year ago, I was hearing a lot of ideas in the media about becoming addicted to or dependent on technology," explains Plowman. "People were going through the classic signs of withdrawal. Some were getting depressed, some were getting angry."

In his case, he did feel withdrawal and found that he was filling his days with appointments, telephone conversations and even coffee breaks (though he had already tried to quit drinking coffee). In the end, he came to terms with his devotion to the technology and went back to it with a new appreciation for the demands it can make on his time and emotions.

Don't ditch the Playstation quite yet

Video games, similarly discounted for their negative effects, have more recently been touted for helping people react more quickly to unexpected stimulus.

As René Marois, associate psychology and neuroscience professor at Vanderbilt University, points out, studies have suggested kids who play a lot of single-shooter video games might have an easier time reacting quickly in certain situations, for example while driving.

Essentially, these kids might one day seamlessly drive and chat on cellphones while dodging unexpected bikers.

Driving while using a cellphone is a challenge because each task draws from the same brain circuits — ones that involve focusing and concentration. These two activities overload the circuits, whereas walking and talking is quite simple for humans, an activity drawing from two separate circuitries.

"Can we improve upon this with practice? There is evidence that we can. To what extent, it's not known yet," says Marois.

But developing skills from playing video games can be a double-edged sword. Kids who play them tend to be more uncooperative with their peers. They can also be anti-social.

"Now young people are able to exit any kind of situation they don't feel 100 per cent comfortable in. So they never deal with discomfort, and this concerns me because I think we're going to end up with kids who are virtually autistic," explains Romin Tafarodi, associate psychology professor at the University of Toronto.

Interestingly, escaping social situations might not be the only thing at play. Some people use technological devices to entertain an audience.

From "happy slapping" (a slap or violent assault taped on a cellphone) to the less harmless answering of cellphones in restaurants, Christopher Dewdney, author of The Last Flesh, a book exploring culture and technology, finds the technology allows people to perform.

"When you're talking on a cellphone, you're actually not talking to one person, you're talking to an audience," says Dewdney. "When people receive calls at a dinner, there are others in the background. So you're not phoning one person, you're phoning an audience."

This is quite a change from the generation that saw the telephone as an instrument for private conversation between two people. But it's a nice take for those worried about becoming addicted to their BlackBerry. They can look at it as performance art.

The Simpsons get Fox News

On the 400th episode The Simpsons take on Fox and Fox News:

Part One

Part Two

Hillary vs. Obama

Going With The Flow: The Most Expensive Liquids

Perfume: Chanel No. 5; Bottled Water: at expensive bar; Gasoline: Canadian average as of May 1,2007 (Various sources)

Going with the flow

The most expensive liquids

Last Updated May 14, 2007

CBC News

What is the most expensive commonly-used or well known liquid? It depends. Comparing the crude price per litre of one substance over another can seem a bit like trying to equate chalk and cheese. But CBC News Online has tried to rank some of the most commonly used liquids in Canadian life by listing what we might pay for them if we bought a standard-sized flagon at the corner supermarket, pharmacy or chemical plant. As you can see from the graph above, two of the three most costly liquids are luxury items that are defined — and made more attractive to consumers — by their high prices. It's no surprise either that good old tap water is far and away the cheapest thing we consume.

1. Perfume

Mohammed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods in London, displays a bottle of what's thought to be the world's most expensive perfume. At $256,000 for a half litre, the special edition Clive Christian perfume costs much more than 20 times as much as Chanel No. 5. (San Tang/Associated Press)

At first glance, or perhaps first sniff, the special edition Clive Christian perfume unveiled at Harrods in London recently appears to be the most expensive liquid in the world. A half-litre bottle retails for $256,000, or about $512 per ml. But subtract the cost of the five-carat diamond embedded in the stopper, the 18-carat gold inlay and the Czech crystal decanter, and you end up with perfume that's only slightly more expensive than a top-of-the-line household name like Chanel No. 5 (which costs about $2,816 a litre, if you ever feel inclined to buy that much). Even so, perfume has to be considered the planet's most expensive everyday liquid. Marketing, product development and packaging — not the perfume itself — make up more than 99 per cent of the cost of a bottle of scent.

2. Printer ink

It's pretty much conventional wisdom that computer printer companies make their money from selling expensive ink and toner cartridges, not the printers. Never mind that the chemical composition of black ink isn't all that different from what the Chinese invented thousands of years ago, putting a few dribbles of it into an elaborate plastic cartridge can cost the buyer upward of $60. (It can cost much more if the powder in laser printer cartridges is considered the same as ink. It's not, but it has the same effect in the printing process.) One technology writer recently estimated that filling an Olympic swimming pool with name brand printer ink at the standard retail price would cost you a cool $6.5 billion. No wonder more and more of us are opting for refilled cartridges and generic branded toner.

3. Champagne

Expect to pay around $600 for a litre of the best bubbly at a provincial liquor commission. But why, you might ask. Well, the strain of Pinot Noir grape that morphs like magic into fizzy wine from France is rather expensive. So is land in the Champagne region, east of Paris around the ancient city of Rheims. But the main reason that champagne is so costly is that people are prepared to pay a small fortune for a few glasses of fermented grape juice suffused with bubbles of carbon dioxide. That expensive bottle from your local liquor store works out to about $13 a sip, depending on how deeply you slurp.

4. Nasal spray

A recent survey by gasoline retailers in the United States, who admittedly were trying to show how their product wasn't as expensive as people thought, found that a certain type of prescription nasal spray had a retail price of nearly $600 a litre — which is about the amount that a family might use over several generations if all of them suffered from the sniffles on a regular basis. Pharmaceutical companies say their high prices for proprietorial drugs represent the huge costs of research, development and marketing — not the raw materials.

5. Blood

Saving a life shouldn't have a cost ceiling — but someone has to pay for blood. In Canada, it's the health-care system. In some other places, patients or their insurance companies pay directly for every unit used. People who donate blood for money often receive very little. Villagers in China, for example, often receive the equivalent of $5 Cdn or less per litre. Paid plasma donation clinics in the United States give their donors between $20 and $30 U.S. By the time blood is given to patients in hospital, the actual cost per unit is at least $300 Cdn or much more if administrative and other costs are factored in.

6. Water

The more exclusive the bar, the costlier the designer water. These are specially developed brands for a tiny 'water café' in the town of Chappaqua, N.Y. (Frank Franklin II/Associated Press)

If it comes in a fancy bottle, water can be costly. In some outrageously expensive bars, you can pay $75 for a litre of something fizzy and European. In the supermarket, it's more like $1. But even store-bought water is often more expensive than pop, which is largely made from water. The reason? The costs of marketing and transport. At any one time in the European Union, for example, there are more trucks on the road carrying bottled water to market than any other product. Putting a price on water is also complicated by the huge environmental cost of bottling it in plastic, and the gas and diesel burned as it's carried to consumers. As for what comes out of your tap, it's by far the cheapest thing we have to drink, at less than a tenth of a cent per litre in most Canadian municipalities.

7. Maple Syrup

Many parents have warned their kids to "go easy" on the syrup during a pancake breakfast because "it's real" — read, "expensive." Maple syrup is costly because it can only be produced for a few weeks in late winter and early spring, and is hugely dependent on a narrow set of weather conditions. Also, producing syrup requires vast quantities of maple sap — about 40 litres of sap for a single litre of syrup. The cost of that litre varies widely but is at least $15 and often a lot more. And that means parents are likely to continue being as stingy with the syrup as they were a generation ago.

Maple sap drips from a spigot. It takes forty litres of sap to produce a single litre of syrup. It's one of the more expensive liquids in the average kitchen. (Joel Philippsen/AP/Harold-Press)

8. Soda pop

There's a huge variation in the price of sweet fizzy drinks. Name brands cost more than generics. Cheap pop is often used to lure consumers into supermarkets and restaurants, making it by far one of the cheapest liquids that we regularly purchase. However restaurants and cinemas manage to make us pay relatively high prices for something they buy for very little. Health campaigners and environmentalists say the vast amount of soda pop we consume — on average, about 230 litres each year — has many hidden costs that jack up the real price of a cola or a root beer. Diabetes, dental decay and landfills bulging with cans and plastic bottles all have to be paid for.

9. Gasoline

It's safe to say that most adult Canadians can quote the price of a litre of gas. About a third of the price on the gas station sign goes to taxes. Most of the rest covers the costs of crude oil, refining and transport. Despite perceptions to the contrary, gasoline is not a hugely expensive liquid in Canada. It's actually rather cheap, if you exclude the cost of carbon dioxide and other emissions from the tailpipe of your vehicle. However, many petroleum experts agree with the most radical environmentalists on one thing — gas prices can only go up, as supplies decline and governments look for ways to pay for programs to mitigate climate change.

10. Liquid nitrogen

This is a liquid that few of us will ever see or experience, largely because nitrogen gas becomes liquid at temperatures below 195 degrees C. Yet it's a substance in wide use in industry and science. Liquid nitrogen freezes most other liquids instantly, making it useful for the transport of blood and other biological materials. Research is being done into whether nitrogen might be used as fuel to generate electricity or power vehicles but for the moment, the production of the gas requires more energy than it might produce. Liquid nitrogen is also difficult to transport over long distances because it must be kept very cold, so the further from its source, the more it costs.

HEATHER MALLICK

Challenging authority

Joiners are rarely thinkers

May 21, 2007

In a recent speech, Vaclav Havel said he had encountered two types of people during his years as a fighter for human rights, a prisoner and eventually Czech president. There were "those with the soul of a collaborationist and those who were comfortable denying authority."

I’m not sure I trust the accuracy of the quote, which comes from a column by the American historian Walter Isaacson on disgraced CIA director George Tenet’s eternal "desire to please." Isaacson is an awkward writer. Can Havel really have used the word "comfortable?" Nothing is more uncomfortable, surely, in the Soviet-spanned world then and in North America now, than challenging authority. Havel learned this to his cost.

I suspect what Havel meant is that the world is divided into those who automatically follow orders, like Tenet, and those who instantly and instinctively question them. In Laurie Colwin’s funny and wise novel A Big Storm Knocked It Over, Sven, the amoralist, describes his co-workers before the company is sold: "She’s waiting to see which is the winning team before she joins it. She’s the sort of person who is already learning the new national anthem as the invading army approaches. You poor kid. We know you wouldn’t — would you? We know you’d join the underground, or quit, or get fired. Right?"

Yes, that about sums it up, Sven.

Extreme decency

My editor made a wise change in my last column. I had used the phrase "right wing" and he changed that to "the political right." He was exhausted, he said, by the tired expression.

And so am I, and so are you, I hope.

There’s the political left, the right, the extremes of each and the middle. (In Canada, there may even be an extreme middle. They are nice people to have a coffee and a biscuit with.) But I have great faith in Canadian voters. There is a basic fairness in Canadians, a decency and rationality that has nothing to do with extremes.

And this is the essence of the person who refuses to go along to get along. There’s a stubborn voice in such Canadians that says, "This doesn’t seem right to me. I won’t vote for that."

I was greatly touched last week by a letter from a reader, Douglas Davis in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta. It was an eloquent tribute to the importance of a good, solid education for young Canadians, and it began: "I agree with much of what you have written, although I am on the other side of the political centre. What governments fail to realize is that funding education is not an expense, it is an investment. Granted, it is a long-term one."

So he and I agree on a matter that I have long been shy of discussing lest I be accused of being an "elitist." I believe education is important for its own sake. It is the basis of civilization. I especially believe in the teaching of history.

I am an elitist. I want people to be well-read, to value books. Here’s my reasoning. Educated people are more likely to deny authority. People who don’t read don’t have an intellectual storehouse to help them think independently. They do what they’re told. They have an endless desire to please those in authority; they don’t know they don’t have to.

For instance, no matter what your political beliefs, if you read Neil Belton’s book about torture, The Good Listener, you will come to profoundly oppose torture. Only a twisted mind could still praise it in the "war on terror," as the ludicrous phrase, now officially abandoned by the British government, goes.

Dodge the lingo

I am going through something of a crisis of the soul right now. I fight very hard for women’s rights, but I do wonder whether it is still useful to call myself a "feminist." I’m actually more of a humanist, since I believe men should have equal rights, too, but the word "humanist" is now used to mean something different.

I am questioning "isms" and "ists." Doris Lessing wrote a small book, almost a pamphlet, in 1987 called Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. She writes that nations should teach their citizens to become individuals to resist group pressures, while admitting that no nation will do this. In a section called Group Minds, she writes that we all live in groups — family work, social, religious, political — and most people are deeply uncomfortable if they don’t.

And that’s when groupthink takes over. This is how Nazism began, McCarthyism, the reign of the Stasi in East Germany, the increasing Stasi-like destruction of privacy in the U.S. and the demonization of "liberals." What happens is that dissidents are crushed.

It is genuinely frightening to be an American who suggests that U.S. policy in the Middle East fuelled the terrorism that destroyed the Twin Towers. It’s not so pleasant for a Canadian, either. But surely it is perfectly rational for anyone of any political belief to suggest that Canada’s efforts (at what?) in Afghanistan are pointless. No? Jack Layton is called "Taliban Jack" for his thought crime.

Never join a group without being confident of your ability to speak up in disagreement. Never follow the talking points or use the phrased mandated by the group in power: "partisan," "embedded," "in harm’s way," "support our troops," "coalition of the willing," "collateral damage" or "enemy combatant." This is Orwell’s Newspeak. They are words intended to conceal meaning, not explain it. I won’t use the word "detainee," for instance. I say "prisoner."

Born to be Word

I know other people fantasize about being Nicole Kidman (famous), or Donald Trump (rich), or Noam Chomsky (intellectual) or J.K. Rowling (best-selling). Me, I fantasize about being two words on the great satirical show The Colbert Report on The Comedy Channel. I see myself as "The Word." Stephen Colbert launches into his anti-intellectual, pro-Bush, pro-war, all-American rant, while beside him, supposedly unseen by him but perhaps emerging from another part of his brain, are printed sarcastic responses to his idiocies. "Yeah, right," says The Word. This creature sits back, smirking. It is snarky, ironic, mocking, devoid of sentiment and utterly subversive.

That’s my fantasy version of myself, eternally in disagreement with the powers that be. You may call this mad; I could not possibly comment. I just know I was born this way.

This Week

The Sopranos is nearing its end, with creator David Chase killing off something that irritated him over the series’ lifespan, the fact that viewers were fond of Tony and the Mob crew. Chase says these men are monsters. He is now making this point agonizingly clear. People aren’t murdered; they are disposed of like meat. Evil roars. The devil twitches his pointy ears. Hell beckons.

I'm moving to Venezuela

Ok, not really... but wouldn't life be grand free of the bloody shackles of capitalism?

Chavez Keeping His Promise To Redistribute Land

The Immortals

Today I share this amazing article from Rolling Stone magazine from a few years ago:

The
Immortals

The fifty greatest artists of all time

Posted Apr 15, 2004 12:00 AM

It is a fundamental lesson in the history of rock & roll and its
continuing power to inspire and transform. The Immortals is a tribute to those
who created rock & roll, written by their peers and heirs, those who have
learned from their innovations, struggles and legacies.
This year, rock
& roll turns fifty, and this is the first of three special issues Rolling
Stone is publishing to mark the occasion. Scholars have debated the precise
birth date for as long as the music has been around. We chose July 5th, 1954 --
the day Elvis Presley recorded "That's All Right" at Sun Studio in Memphis. On
that date, the nineteen-year-old truck driver not only made his first and most
important single. He created a new world -- initiating a way of life and
expression -- that, even at fifty, is still evolving. There is no better
standard for rock & roll immortality.

The Immortals began last year with the creation of a panel of
fifty-five top musicians, historians, industry executives and critics, selected
by the editors of Rolling Stone. Voters were asked to pick, in order of
preference, the twenty artists they deemed to be the most significant and
influential of rock's first fifty years, those whose work continues to have an
impact today. More than 125 artists were named. The ballots were tabulated
according to a weighted point system that was overseen by the international
accounting firm Ernst & Young.

Rolling Stone then asked a blue-ribbon collection of singers, musicians
and producers to explore and describe the importance and impact of these
immortals: on the writers' own work and personal lives; on history and society
at large; and on generations to come. The stories and opinions, the incisive
analyses and open admissions of love and influence, are as exciting and
unpredictable as rock & roll itself. Van Morrison repays a lifetime of
soulful debt to Ray Charles. Robbie Robertson describes Bob Dylan typing out his
lyrics as they made Blonde on Blonde. Steven Van Zandt salutes the original
R&B genius of the Rolling Stones and their undiminished prowess forty years
later. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers pays homage to the raw power and
fiercely independent spirit of Neil Young. And Little Richard proves to be the
world's greatest expert on -- who else? -- Little Richard.

He also makes an important distinction between success and immortality.
"I wish a lot of things had been different," Richard writes. "I don't think I
ever got what I really deserved." The Immortals is a commemoration of a
half-century of excitement, ambition and hit records. These are the musicians
and bands who gave us everything they had, regardless of the rewards, often
against insurmountable odds. Here, Rolling Stone and the artists who carry on
their work try to give them back a little of what they so richly deserve.

(From RS 946, April 15, 2004)

An Open Letter to Paris Hilton from Skip Church

An open letter to Paris Hilton, from Skip Church.

Dear Paris,

I saw you cry the other day. and that hurts me... from the inside. Please don't cry.

Paris, I still love you. I have always believed in you. When people say you're stupid, I ask them 'compared to whom?' When people tell me you're 'spoiled, I ask them 'have you smelt her beautiful perfume?' When people tell me you're a 'b*****,' I tell them 'that was Tinkerbell. her Chihuahua.'

You're nothing like what they say. You're caring, beautiful, and a wonderful singer. I've downloaded your whole album off the net for free when it first came out. just thinking of that moment gives me the goose bumps.

Paris, I offer this to you. I will take care of you. You need someone right now that will support your 'habits.' You need love, and more importantly you need a hug. I want to be your lawyer. and I offer this service at no charge. Just say the word.

Love,

Skip Church
skipchurch@hot899.com

p.s. I'll send a limo over. because driving yourself may be a bad idea.

Heather Mallick: Resigned to Stay

More from one of my fave writers:

HEATHER MALLICK

Resigned to stay

Whither the principle of ministerial responsibility?

May 7, 2007

"I resign. I did my job badly. I take responsibility for my shortcomings."

I only have it in quotes out of a mad hope that one day someone might actually say such a thing. But they won't.

As of this writing (I include this qualifying phrase because my middle name is Pollyanna), I await the resignation of the following:

• Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor for his professed ignorance that prisoners handed over to Afghan forces by Canadians were being tortured.
• Gen. Rick Hillier for his rush to sign the handover agreement in the first place.
• U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez for politically wringing-out federal attorneys and then forgetting about it while under oath.
• World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz for twisting bank rules to pay the one woman on the planet willing to sleep with him.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for defying his nation's contempt (a banner in a huge demonstration reads "You failed, go home") over the Lebanon disaster.
• Former CIA director George Tenet, who won't even give back his Medal of Freedom for puffing up a war that he knew at the time was based on false intelligence.

The list goes on.

BF lie skewers BP chief

Lord Browne, the chairman of British Petroleum, didn’t quit last week because he was found out to be gay, he quit because he was caught perjuring himself in court during a financial quarrel with a buff young Canadian boyfriend. The judge seemed willing to recommend charges (both Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer were jailed over perjury) unless Browne paid the price of losing his job. So Browne resigned.

The Financial Times of London — a newspaper that even Noam Chomsky suggests is the best paper in the world because it reports unpopular stories that others won’t touch because money, not democracy, rides on such news. Soft angles don’t much interest financial journalists — wrote that Browne should have quit long before the sex scandal came to light. The financial press said he should have bowed out after the 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas that killed 15 people, injured 180 and cost BP at least US$2 billion. He should have quit after pipeline corrosion in Alaska last year caused huge losses. These were the result of Browne’s cost-cutting on safety and maintenance.

But Browne only resigned when faced with personal harm. The harm he did to his company and other humans? Not germane to his corporate governance ethic.

Path of most resistance

Nora Ephron wrote in the Huffington Post last week that she could not remember anyone resigning over a point of principle since Attorney General Elliot Richardson quit 33 years ago rather than fire a prosecutor at Nixon's request.

I admire Ephron, but it saddens me to see how the myth of American exceptionalism infects even their cleverest citizens. In 1982, after the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington quit over the failure of the Foreign Office to foresee the event. So there.

Still, I take her point. People stopped quitting. They hung in there. They stayed if they thought they could get away with it, weathered the storm, and embraced the passive tense, as in the eternal "mistakes were made."

And, amazingly, from the Bonfire of the Vanities 1980s through the late '80s era of mass layoffs (to raise stock prices and CEOs' salaries) to the current era of the hedge fund, neither politicians nor businessmen quit because they were incompetent or venal, or, dare I say it, sufficiently rich.

Nobody resigned over anything, ever.

Why should this be?

Part of the reason is narcissism. As voters grew more despairing and therefore less likely to vote, politicians felt less accountable. Why? Because they were less accountable.

It's godly at the top

An American politician (I can't remember who) said: Once you ride in your first motorcade, with regular traffic blocked, motorcycles speeding beside you, a whole city shut down for you, you're never the same.

Is it coincidence that as salaries for egomaniacal CEO became grotesque and they began flying in private jets, they lost even the opportunity for a peek at normal people — and for example how they fly, i.e., like cattle? I am Icarus, they think. I fly close to the sun. I am a god. I shall charge it to the company … which is me.

In the movie Little Miss Sunshine the little girl's father bankrupts his family to promote a self-help book/PowerPoint deal called Refuse to Lose. As in Oprah's favourite book The Secret, the path to success is wanting to win. Self-doubt, castigation and common sense are mere weakness.

All the men listed above might as well be reciting "I refuse to lose." George W. Bush, "the commander guy" as he now calls himself, literally vetoes disagreement. Bill O'Reilly uses derogatory names every 6.8 seconds during his Fox News editorials. Alberto Gonzalez presents himself as man so distracted by the rigours of National Meth Awareness Day that he didn't recall crucial meetings he personally attended.

Imagine disproving John Kenneth Galbraith's law that "anyone who says he won't resign four times, will." There's something psychotic about it.

Calcium deficient?

Winners never quit and quitters never win. It's the American homily that has done more damage to that country than Horatio Alger's ridiculous fantasies. Which would be fine if this dim notion of self-infatuation and vainglory hadn't rapidly travelled worldwide like a modern virus.

You knew I'd turn to Winston Churchill for an explanation of this phenomenon, if only to compare his 1931 performance — an assessment of the dodgy Ramsay MacDonald — to what we hear in our own Commons now.

"I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as 'The Boneless Wonder.' My parents judged that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the boneless wonder … sitting on the Treasury Bench."

And that's what they are, a collection of boneless wonders. What an awful thing to be. What a sorry thing to see.

This Week

Last week, I enthused over Rory Stewart's painful protracted walk across Central Afghanistan, recounted in his book The Places In Between. The sequel, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing Iraq, has just been published. I don't know whether to snicker or stare in shock at the very short distance between us and the Victorians.

For in 2003, Stewart pestered the Coalition Provisional Authority in Southern Iraq to make him a deputy governor of the province of Maysan. They did. For nine months, he was in charge of 850,000 brown-skinned people. What qualified him? A Scottish male who had attended Eton and Oxford, he had joined the right regiment and worked for the Foreign Office. In other words, he was an upper-class Brit who spent nine months playing Lawrence of Arabia.

I've always thought Britain's Arabists became so because of their attraction to a world where women are veiled and kept in small rooms. But I did not think such men were still ruling a phoney British Empire. For all Stewart's merits, it astounds and sickens me.

I’ll reap when I’m dead

Great article from the CBC on people who are more famous after their deaths. Some great Arcade Fire trivia in here too!

I’ll reap when I’m dead

Pop culture’s biggest posthumous successes

By Andre Mayer

May 1, 2007

The Children of Húrin. (Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Getty Images)">
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and now, 34 years after his death, The Children of Húrin. (Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Getty Images)

It’s shaping up as another stellar year for J.R.R. Tolkien — even if The Lord of the Rings musical tanks in London the way it did in Toronto. Tolkien has a new book out: The Children of Húrin. Granted, Tolkien’s son Christopher shepherded the novel along, but the fact that the British fantasy author has been dead for more than 30 years has been no impediment to his making the bestseller list again.

The Children of Húrin is not the only post-death triumph of ’07. Waitress, the directorial debut by the late Adrienne Shelly, was a darling at Sundance this year, where Fox Searchlight acquired distribution rights for $4 million US. (The film opens May 2.) Here are some of the biggest posthumous successes in pop culture — obscure artists who found fame after their demise or bona fide stars who refused to let death curtail their productivity.

Will Rogers

Living years: Famous for his wit, Will Rogers worked as a standup comedian (in the Ziegfield Follies), a syndicated humour columnist, a radio broadcaster and as a prolific actor; in pre-Second World War America, he was just about the biggest name in showbiz.
Died: Aug. 15, 1935 (plane crash)
Comeback: At the time of his death, 20th Century Fox was in possession of two completed but unreleased Rogers films: Steamboat ’Round the Bend and In Old Kentucky. The studio was uneasy about showing them, fearing audiences might find it in poor taste. When Fox finally did release the films later in 1935, audiences streamed to see them in a collective act of commemoration. In 1936, Fox re-released the Rogers film Dr. Bull (1933) to great profit.

James Dean. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

James Dean

Living years: James Dean had scored bit parts in Hollywood prior to 1955, but had no profile to speak of until he appeared that year in East of Eden, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel. Dean played the insecure scion of a First World War-era California farmer. Most critics agreed that his performance hinted at a great talent. Dean had wrapped up work on two other films before he…
Died: Sept. 30, 1955 (car crash)
Comeback: Posthumously, Dean appeared in Rebel Without a Cause, a 1955 film that would come to represent a generation of American teens. Dean’s complex performance — brooding, mumbling, vulnerable yet irreducibly cool — made him an avatar of disaffected youth. In 1956, Dean was seen as an oil prospector in the film Giant. He received posthumous Oscar nominations for both East of Eden and Giant. More significantly, his image became a fixture on bedroom walls the world over.

Emily Dickinson

Living years: The American poet Emily Dickinson was a textbook hermit who spent the bulk of her time scribbling bons mots in a notebook. During her lifetime, she published only 10 poems. (Is it any wonder she wrote one called I Am Nobody, Who Are You?)
Died: May 15, 1886 (natural causes)
Comeback: After her death, Dickinson’s family stumbled upon 40 hand-bound volumes containing more than 1,700 of her poems. 1,700! Trying to redress Dickinson’s obscurity, family members sent her poems to all manner of publishers. It wasn’t until the 20th century that Dickinson got her due, when she was acknowledged, alongside Walt Whitman, as one of the most important poets in American history.

John Kennedy Toole

Living years: Thwarted Louisiana novelist.
Died: March 26, 1969 (suicide)
Comeback: When Toole committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31, he left two unpublished novels in his wake. One of them was a boisterous fugue called A Confederacy of Dunces. His mother took up his cause, campaigning tirelessly until the work was finally published in 1980. A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, has sold over one million copies in 30 languages and is rightly considered one of the finest comic novels ever written. (Toole’s other book, The Neon Bible, was published in 1989. It was adapted into a movie with Denis Leary in 1995 and inspired the title of the latest album by the Arcade Fire.)

Tom Thomson. (National Archives of Canada/Canadian Press)

Tom Thomson

Living years: The Ontario artist spent many years toiling as a graphic designer before finding a patron who could support his transition to painting full-time. It was during the period of 1913-1917 that Thomson created his most famous works — majestic oil paintings of the Canadian wilderness. He had only sporadic showings in galleries.
Died: July 8, 1917 (drowning)
Comeback: In 1918, Canada’s National Gallery bought The Jack Pine and Autumn’s Garland, along with 27 sketches. The Jack Pine was part of Canada’s contribution to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London in 1924, which brought Thomson worldwide notice. As a sign of the latent saleability of Thomson’s paintings, in November 2006, one of his works was snapped up for $934,000.

Ray Charles

Living years: One of the pivotal figures in 20th-century American music and the ultimate crossover artist, this pianist helped define rhythm and blues while also exploring jazz, country, gospel and unadulterated pop.
Died: June 10, 2004 (natural causes)
Comeback: August 2004 saw the release of Genius Loves Company, a duets album that paired Brother Ray with stars like Elton John, Diana Krall and Norah Jones. At the ensuing Grammy awards in 2005, Genius Loves Company won eight awards. (By any standard, a gratuitous haul.) In September of ’05, we got Genius & Friends — another duets album, this time culled from vocal collaborations he had done in the period 1997-05. The next fall, Concord Records released Ray Sings, Basie Swings. This disingenuous record sets Charles’ vocals from a 1973 performance to a new accompaniment by the Count Basie Orchestra (who are still touring 23 years after Basie’s death).

Jimi Hendrix. (Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Jimi Hendrix

Living years: The creator of indelible psychedelic rock statements like Purple Haze, Foxy LadyThe Wind Cries Mary. His well-documented performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival leaves no doubt: Hendrix is the most incendiary guitarist ever.
Died: Sept. 18, 1970 (drug overdose)
Comeback: Hendrix was ridiculously prolific in the studio; given how much he recorded in his four-year burst of creativity, you almost wonder whether he saw the end coming. The first two posthumous records, The Cry of Love (1971) and War Heroes (1972), were whole albums of unreleased studio tracks. The Hendrix estate has proven a savvy lot: every decade since, they have OK’d 10 or so new albums — either new compilations of Jimi’s biggest tunes or collections of previously unreleased live material. And, by all accounts, the well is far from dry. and

Zora Neale Hurston

Living years: Zora Neale Hurston was an essayist and novelist who, along with Langston Hughes, was a large force in the Harlem Renaissance, a group of artists who expressed the African-American experience in 1920s New York. Her most famous works include Mules and MenTheir Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Many of her contemporaries viewed her depiction of black slang dialogue as minstrelsy; while Richard Wright, author of Native Son, claimed her books were weightless and written for a white audience. The criticism greatly damaged Hurston’s career. In her final years, Hurston worked as a librarian and substitute teacher in Florida.
Died: Jan. 28, 1960 (stroke)
Comeback: At the time of her death, Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave. In the mid-’70s, writer Alice Walker was so shocked by this ignominious fact that she took to restoring Hurston’s battered reputation in American letters (as well as giving her a proper epitaph). The result was a cavalcade of new Hurston essay and short-story collections, as well as the first-ever production of Mule Bone, a play she had co-written with Hughes. In 2005, Oprah Winfrey produced a TV movie version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry. and the novel

Tupac Shakur. (Chi Modu/diverseimages/Getty Images)

Tupac Shakur

Living years: This controversial West Coast rap artist is best known for All Eyez on Me, one of the biggest-selling and most influential hip-hop albums of the ’90s; Tupac Shakur’s name is regularly bandied about in discussions of the best rapper ever. Shakur also nurtured an acting career, starring in Juice (1992) and Poetic Justice (1993).
Died: Sept. 13, 1996 (assassination)
Comeback: Having flirted with death while living — he survived an attempt on his life in 1994 — Tupac has been remarkably lively in death. Like Jimi Hendrix, Shakur was apparently inexhaustible in the studio. Six studio albums have been released posthumously, as well as a handful of compilations. (Comedian Dave Chappelle once did a hilarious satire of Tupac’s recorded output, addressing the alarming prescience of his lyrics.) As well, Shakur appeared posthumously in three films: Bullet, Gridlock’d and Gang Related. Live 2 Tell, a screenplay he penned while in prison in the mid-’90s, is slated for a film release in 2008. No word yet on whether Tupac will make a cameo.

Ernest Hemingway

Living years: Ernest (Papa) Hemingway was the author of American classics like A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, which scored him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. He took the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year.
Died: July 2, 1961 (suicide)
Comeback: Since his death, his estate has issued a litany of new titles, including the memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) and the novels Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of EdenTrue at First Light (1999) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005). Hey Papa, shall we pencil in another for 2011? (1986),

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

For Motherly X Chromosome, Gender Is Only the Beginning

Great article:

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: May 1, 2007

As May dawns and the mothers among us excitedly anticipate the clever e-cards that we soon will be linking to and the overpriced brunches that we will somehow end up paying for, the following job description may ring a familiar note:

Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world’s illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don’t exist.

As it happens, the above precis refers not only to the noble profession of motherhood to which we all owe our lives and guilt complexes. It is also a decent character sketch of the chromosome that allows a human or any other mammal to become a mother in the first place: the X chromosome.

The X chromosome, like its shorter, stubbier but no less conspicuous counterpart, the Y chromosome, is a so-called sex chromosome, a segment of DNA entrusted with the pivotal task of sex determination. A mammalian embryo outfitted with an X and Y chromosomal set buds into a male, while a mammal bearing a pair of X chromosomes emerges from the maternal berth with birthing options of her own.

Yet the X chromosome does much more than help specify an animal’s reproductive plumbing. As scientists who study the chromosome lately have learned, the X is a rich repository of genes vital to brain development and could hold the key to the evolution of our particularly corrugated cortex. Moreover, the X chromosome behaves unlike any of the other chromosomes of the body — unlike little big-man Y, certainly, but also unlike our 22 other pairs of chromosomes, the self-satisfied autosomes that constitute the rest of our genome, of the complete DNA kit packed into every cell that we carry. It is a supple, switchbacking, multitasking gumby doll patch of the genome; and the closer you look, the more Cirque du Soleil it appears.

Although the precise details of its chemical structure and performance are only just emerging, the X chromosome has long been renowned among geneticists, who named it X not because of its shape, as is commonly presumed — the non-sex chromosomes also vaguely resemble an “X” at times during cell division — but because they were baffled by the way it held itself apart from the other chromosomal pairs.

“They called it X for unknown,” said Mark T. Ross of the X Chromosome Group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. (When its much tinier male counterpart was finally detected, researchers simply continued down the alphabet for a name.) Many of the diseases first understood to be hereditary were linked to X’s span, for the paradoxical reason that such conditions showed their face most often in those with just a single X to claim: men.

Scientists eventually determined that we inherit two copies of our 23,000 or so genes, one from each parent; and that these genes, these chemical guidelines for how to build and maintain a human, are scattered among the 23 pairs of chromosomes, along with unseemly amounts of apparent chemical babble.

Having two copies of every gene proves especially handy when one of those paired genes is defective, at which point the working version of the gene can step in and specify enough of the essential bodybuilding protein that the baby blooms just fine and may never know its DNA is hemi-flawed. And here is where the Y’s petite stature looms large. Because it holds a mere 50ish different genes against its counterpart’s 1,100, the vast majority of X-based genes have no potential pinch-hitter on the Y. A boy who inherits from his mother an X chromosome that enfolds a faulty gene for a bloodclotting factor, say, or for a muscle protein or for a color receptor won’t find succor in the chromosomal analogue bestowed by Dad. He will be born with hemophilia, or muscular dystrophy, or color-blindness. But, hey, he will be a boy, for male-making is the task to which the Y chromosome is almost exclusively devoted.

In fact, it is to compensate for the monomania of the Y that the X chromosome has become such a mother of a multitasker. Over the 300 million years of evolution, as the Y chromosome has shrugged off more of its generic genetic responsibilities in pursuit of sexual specialization, the X has had to pick up the slack. It, too, has pawned off genes to other chromosomes. But for those genes still in its charge, the X must double their output, to prod each gene to spool out twice the protein of an ordinary gene and thus be the solo equivalent of any twinned genes located on other, nonsexy chromosomes.

Ah, but women, who have two X chromosomes, two copies of those 1,100 genes: What of them? With its usual Seussian sense of playfulness, evolution has opted to zeedo the hoofenanny. In a girl’s cells, you don’t see two pleasantly active X chromosomes behaving like two ordinary nonsex chromosomes. You see one hyperactive X chromosome, its genes busily pumping out twice the standard issue of protein, just as in a boy’s cells; and you see one X chromosome that has been largely though not wholly shut down, said Laura Carrel, a geneticist at Penn State College of Medicine.

Through an elaborate process called X inactivation, the chromosome is blanketed with a duct tape of nucleic acid. In some cells of a woman’s body it may be the chromosome from Dad that’s muffled, while in other cells the maternal one stays mum.

Every daughter, then, is a walking mosaic of clamorous and quiet chromosomes, of fatherly sermons and maternal advice, while every son has but his mother’s voice to guide him. Remember this, fellows: you are all mama’s boys.