Stealing Happy Hours

How time flies!

2010-03-01T21:31:00.000-05:00

Alright, alright....time to 'fess up.

I know in my last post - nearly two months ago! - I said I'd do the 10K with Laurie in May, but I didn't yet know what it meant to be working at an INGO during an emergency as devastating as the earthquake in Haiti as part of a fundraising and communications team, in addition to prepping for the busiest time of the year for the organization (before the emergency!) AND co-producing our second annual V-Day in the Capital event.

I've spent the last two months working longer hours, attending many third party fundraisers, running information tables, travelling, and prepping for International Women's Day and haven't had a chance to rest properly, let alone train! Prepping V-Day has taken a lot of time as well with a fabulous team of like-minded women, but this has left little time for anything slightly resembling a schedule.

Don't get me wrong - it's been so busy - but it's also been incredibly satisfying to be putting this much effort into such an amazing organization. It's also been incredible to see the outpouring of support of so many people who want to help and contribute to some amazing causes.

Given all that....

I propose....I still train for the 10K....but will be completely happy if it ends up being the 5K first. It was for a good cause right?

So who can recommend some good running shoes?

From 0 - 10 in 125 Days

2010-01-18T22:08:00.003-05:00

Stealing Happy Hours Blog: What? Who is this and what have you done with Laura?

Me: I am Laura!

SHHB: No - Laura never blogs (here) anymore and she certainly would never run!

Me: Well, it's 2010. Why not make some changes?

That's right. January 18, 2010. Take note.

Wait....maybe I should back up a bit here. See, Laurie and I were heading for coffee to catch up yesterday (as if we hadn't seen each other since before Christmas!) and chat about the second annual V-Day in the Capital (stay in the loop here: www.hopeangercourage.com - see I have been blogging!) and somehow I left the coffee shop with plans for a new haircut, a trip to Vegas and had somehow signed myself up to run the 10K with her at the Ottawa Race Weekend in May.

Yeah, screw walking, or running the 5K. Let's skip that step! Forget the fact that I don't run. Never have. In fact I quit soccer after the first practice when Laurie convinced me to sign up (hmmm...there's that Laurie again!) when I realized it involved so much running.

Ok. So, Laurie's blogged about it here. Cat's out of the bag. I can't back out now. So I guess I'll have to start training.

So, for those of you at home keeping count, that's in 125 days (actually 124 from today, but from the day I decided...)

Plan for first bit (I'll figure out later how long that is):

Continue Zumba on Tuesdays (good cardio)

Continue Yoga on Thursdays (good meditation, toning, strength, stretching)
EA Active on the Wii (it's fun and got some good overall workouts and cardio in it, and running my Mii through a park :) )

Bike to work (when weather gets nicer)
Practice interval training (when weather gets nicer)
Perhaps join a running clinic as we get closer...
Depend on Laurie and others for LOTS of advice!
Any of you reading who have tips for a beginner (and I mean beginner!!) please comment or send me an email :)

Profile

2009-07-17T12:29:00.002-04:00

Stole this idea from the amazing Stephanie Nolen.

Profile

Patron Saint: 311

Advises against: Chemicals, smoking, not laughing

Best piece of gear: my glasses. I can see with them! I think they make me look smart/er

Can’t: whistle

Was a rabble-rousing student activist: at Carleton University – though I think I’m even more of a rabble-rouser now.

Was an anxiety-ridden graduate student whose brain almost exploded: not yet….but I do miss school often!

Weighs her luggage down with: too many options

Can flirt in a bar: badly.

Secretly: wants to be a gardener

Recommends: books, music, food, friends, life – not necessarily in that order

Gets bloodthirsty over: books, music, food, friends, life – not necessarily in that order

Happiest: Doing anything with the ones I love

Recently discovered: Disaronno and OJ, Lawrence Hill, good friends, Mad Men

Stolen: pt.2

2009-06-29T22:12:00.002-04:00

Continuation of fun quotes:

(ok, this one is more of a passage, but still good)

"It's very good jam," said the Queen.

"Well, I don't want any today, at any rate," said Alice.

"You couldn't have it if you did want it. The rule is jame tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today."

"But it must come sometimes to 'jam today'," Alice objected.

"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day and today isn't any other day you know."

"I don't understand you!" said Alice.
"It's the effect of living backwards. It always makes one a little giddy at first - "

"Living backwards?!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I've never heard of such a thing."

"-but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."
"I'm sure mine only works one way," Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen."

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward," the Queen remarked.

"What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask.

"Oh, things that happened the week after next," the Queen replied in a careless tone.

-Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There -

"The earth is 4,500,000 years old. But in about 3000 years we have almost managed to end civilization. First with the nuclear bomb, and then through destruction of nature and our growing pollution of every space we inhabit. In comparative terms, we have been on this planet less than the final few minutes in a whole year of time, yet we have caused more damage than any other species and may soon make ourselves as defunt as the dinosaurs."
-Doris Anderson -

"...It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby -

"Both healthy minds and healthy bodies may be crippled. The fact that 'normal' people can get around, can see, can hear, doesn't mean that they are seeing or hearing. They can be very blind to the things that spoil their happiness, very deaf to the pleas of others for kindness; when I think of them I do not feel any more criippled or disabled than they. Perhaps in some small way I can be the means of opening their eyes to the beauties around us. Things like a warm hand clasp, a voice that is anxious to cheer, a spring breeze, music to listen to, a friendly nod. These people are important to me, and I feel that I can help them."

-a person with MS in 'Stigma and Social Identity by Ering Goffman -

"Be careful if you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man's rib, not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from his side to be equal, under his arm to be protected and next to the heart to be loved."

-The Talmud -

"Humans are, afterall, storytelling animals. Especially when confronted with frightening mysteries - death, disease, bad fortune - we weave together explanations as best we can, to serve as a kind of rope bridge across the abyss. Even when the stakes are lower we cannot seem to keep from telling stories. We peek half-asleep at a pile of blankets kicked onto the floor and cannot help seeing lurking creatures; we look at the night sky and see swans and warriors in the stars; we hear a handful of random facts and devise elaborate conspiracy theories. And when we are confronted with a disease's bizzare symptoms, we set out at once to find their meaning."

-Edward Dolnick -

"All of the true things I'm about to tell you are shameless lies."

- Kurt Vonnegut -

Stolen: Words that Matter

2009-06-29T16:02:00.002-04:00

I have a little notebook which I received from a friend as a birthday gift quite a few years ago with a little stick figure boy on it with rocks sailing at his head. "Boys are dumb. Throw rocks at them" it says. Well, I don't exactly prescribe to that belief, as it wouldn't be fair with my other dealings, but I began writing quotes in it that I liked, found inspiring or funny, or that I just wanted to remember. So, with that, I am stealing this idea from my lovely friend Lola's page and including some of my faves:

Words are amazing in their power - they can soothe, they can empower, they can hurt, they can heal, they can inspire. There are some quotes that I go back to to find centre, to remind myself of what's important...

(In no particular order...)

"Music and me, we have a special bond. Sometimes we meet in a dark room and slow dance, alone, together. Sometimes we hook up in a jam-packed arena, and yet we're the only two souls there. Sometimes I put headphones on and can hear the universe calling. Ah, music, sweet music. When it's on, when all of the rhythmic planets have aligned and I can close my eyes and feel both immersion and transcendence, I know I'm right where I want to be." - Mike Mettler-

"If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home." - Kurt Vonnegut-

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" -Kurt Vonnegut-

"Planet Earth is an angry place; a searing bauble of rage. All this fury, roaring around the ether - and where does it go? The answer is it simply dissipates, flitters up towards the clouds, where it hangs around making pigeons sick and causing thunderstorms. Not good enough. We've got to work out a way of harnessing all this spare rage and using it to power our kettles. Come on, science. Hurry up. You wouldn't like us when we're angry." -Charlie Brooker -

"Never join a group without being confident of your ability to speak up in disagreement." - Heather Mallick -

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed that is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead -

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." - Jacob Bronowski-

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." - The Talmud -

"Interesting how, if you are silent, democracy is working. If you speak up, democracy is not for you." - Beth Atcheson -

"The body is lazy, the mind is vibrant and the soul is luminous." - B.K.S. Iyengar -

"Qui de nous n'a cherche le calme dans un chant?" - Victor Hugo-

"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." - Carl Jung -

"Legislation may not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless." - Martin Luther King, Jr. -

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide -

"The pollution you breathe may be your own." - graffiti -

"The things we perceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar... when something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of colour doesn't it? It stands out, it shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive." - James Redfield -

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." -W.B. Yeats -

"Never let formal education get in the way of your learning." - Mark Twain -

"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." - Dr. Mark Vonnegut -

V-Day in the Capital - April 25th!

2009-04-08T23:11:00.003-04:00

Friends,

As many of you know already - I, along with my friend Laurie, have spent the last few months organizing a benefit - V-Day in the Capital. We have been granted the rights for a V-Day benefit production of A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer to raise money and awareness for organizations that work to stop violence against women and girls.

A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer: Writings To Stop Violence Against Women and Girls, is a groundbreaking collection of monologues by world-renowned authors and playwrights, edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle. These writings are inspired, funny, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and beautiful. But above all, together they create a true and profound portrait of how violence against women affects everyone, men and women.

The event takes place on Apil 25th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Theatre of the Canadian Museum of Civilization and features an impressive line up including Bill Welychka (former MuchMusic VJ, current A-Channel personality), Paul Dewar (MP for Ottawa-Centre), Hedy Fry (MP for Vancouver Centre), Kerry Pither (Ottawa human rights activist and author of Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror) and Todd Duckworth (actor/director). There are also some amazing items available in a silent auction and a 50/50 raffle!

I need your help to get the word out and get those tickets sold! Could you please either forward this note or send one of your own to your friends and contacts to let them know about the event?

Tickets are only $40 and are available at the CMC box office or by calling 819.776.7000. All proceeds will go to Family Services Ottawa and the Canadian Committee for UNIFEM.

I hope that you can join us on April 25th with your friends for an evening of hope and celebration and to raise some funds for some great organizations who are making a difference.

More information can be found on our web site at: www.capitalvday.com

Thanks in advance for your support!

Laura

Excuses, excuses...Now act!

2009-02-09T21:08:00.012-05:00

I've been meaning to write an entry for many a day now. But I always have an excuse. I'm tired. I don't know what to write about. I have too much to write about. No one will care what I write....

But at some point we have to set aside excuses and act.

Laurie has pushed me, and now we're going to act. Back in October Stephanie Nolen of The Globe and Mail wrote an article which I sent to Laurie. The article is no longer available in its entirety online, but you can get the intro here and purchase the full article. Laurie, the wonderful soul that she is, couldn't sleep for days because the idea that the word "re-rape" existed just messed with her mind too much. Not that it didn't bother me to read those words too...but I was able to push it away. Not Laurie. So she emailed me. "Laura, I've got an idea. But I need your help." I didn't know it at the time, but I had just signed up to co-produce V-Day in the Capital.

No more excuses. It's time to act.

Too many women in the DRC are being violated repeatedly as an act of war. In an article by Kris Kotarski for The Calgary Herald, Maj.-Gen. Patrick Cammaert, who was the commander for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Eastern Congo is quoted referring to the mass rapes saying that:

It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.

Closer to home, a 2006 Statistics Canada study, called Measuring Violence against Women, found:

Prevalence and severity
• Women are more likely than men to be the victims of the most severe forms of spousal assault, as well as spousal
homicide, sexual assault and criminal harassment (stalking).
• The rate of spousal homicide has declined in recent years for both women and men, and survey data suggest that the
severity of non-lethal assaults against women has also declined somewhat.
• Over the past 30 years, the percentage of persons charged with fi rst degree murder in spousal homicide cases has
risen; however, men are twice as likely as women to receive this charge.
• Trends in various types of violence against women, as recorded in police statistics, are mixed:
• rates of reported sexual assault have declined since 1993;
• the number of spousal violence incidents against women has declined since 2000 while the rate of
violence perpetrated by boyfriends has increased;
• the number of male partners reported to police for criminal harassment has increased.
Impact
• Spousal violence has psychological, physical, social and economic impacts for victims, their families and society.
• Female victims of spousal violence are more likely than males to report being injured, suffer lost productivity, experience
multiple assaults, fear for their lives, and experience negative emotional consequences.
• Almost 40% of women assaulted by spouses said their children witnessed the violence against them (either directly or
indirectly) and in many cases the violence was severe. In half of cases of spousal violence against women that were
witnessed by children, the woman feared for her life.
• Studies of the economic costs of violence against women to victims and society estimate that costs to health, criminal
justice, social services and lost productivity range in the billions of dollars.

Some more (and fairly recently updated) statistics can also be found here thanks to The Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women.

But, I could spout numbers and percentages until I was blue in the face and that perhaps wouldn't get most to understand the absolute importance and prevalence of this problem.

So why not come hear a story of someone who's actually experienced it? Why not hear from someone who saw their own mother beaten? Or someone who grew up surrounded by broken women? Someone who is raising their son to Not Be One of Them.

That is where V-Day in the Capial comes in.

Here is our first post from our blog/website:

And so it begins....

We are very pleased to announce that as part of the annual V-Day campaign, we will be staging a benefit reading of A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer, on April 25th, 2009 at the Theatre of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer: Writings To Stop Violence Against Women and Girls, is a groundbreaking collection of monologues by world-renowned authors and playwrights, edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle. These diverse voices, of both men and women, rise up in a collective roar to break open, expose, and examine the insidiousness of violence at all levels: brutality, neglect, a punch, even a put-down.

What is V-Day?

V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual slavery.

The V-Day movement is growing at a rapid pace throughout the world, in 120 countries from Europe to Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and all of North America. V-Day, a non-profit corporation, distributes funds to grassroots, national and international organizations and programs that work to stop violence against women and girls. In 2001, V-Day was named one of Worth Magazine's "100 Best Charities" and in 2006 one of Marie Claire Magazine's Top Ten Charities. In ten years, the V-Day movement has raised over $60 million.

2009 Spotlight Campaign

Along with supporting local programs of education and prevention about violence against women, 2009 is also shining the spotlight on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Stop Raping our Greatest Resource: Power to Women in the DRC is a new global campaign to call attention to the wide-scale atrocities committed against women and girls in Eastern DRC and demand an end to the impunity with which these crimes are committed.

By joining this campaign, you will be supporting Congolese women and men who are demanding an end to rape. You will be supporting local efforts to demand justice and accountability. You will be supporting survivors of sexual violence to heal and rebuild their lives and communities. And you will join others around the globe to demand that women and girls in DRC are safe.

The Campaign is being initiated by V-Day and UNICEF, representing UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict

What's Next?

In the coming weeks we will be announcing our performers, where you can buy tickets and who will benefit from the money raised.

Questions? Drop us a line at capitalvday@gmail.com

I do hope you'll join us and take the time to act.

In loving memory of...

2008-11-19T21:00:00.004-05:00

In one of the stars, I shall be living. In one of them, I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night.

Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To Vanessa, Bob, Claudia, Laleah, Emma and family - my love and strength in this difficult time.

For Love of Water

2008-11-17T21:31:00.003-05:00

Watching: Grey's Anatomy from last week

Just finished watching: FLOW - For Love Of Water

The second of my three water-themed events this week was better than the first. It was more cohesive, and had a stronger pitch for what we can do to help with the water problems we're facing.

Sadly I'm pretty tired and don't feel like writing much more than that. So, in lieu of my laziness, I think you should see the trailer here: FLOW, and then I recommend you sign their petition for Article 31 to be part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It's a step in the right direction.

The Myth of Water Abundance in Canada

2008-11-12T21:24:00.004-05:00

Tonight I spent the first of three water-themed events I will attend in the next week. It was put on by the Sierra Club of Canada's Ottawa chapter at St. Paul's University and it was entitled The Myth of Water Abundance in Canada.

The rundown:

MC Adrian Harewood, CBC Radio

Presentation by Maude Barlow, Global Water Activist, Council of Canadians
Published author: Blue Gold, Blue Covenant

Panel Discussion:
Stephen Hazell, Executive Director
Maude Barlow, Chair, Council of Canadians
Meredith Brown, Executive Director, Ottawa Riverkeepers
Clive Doucet, City of Ottawa Councillor, Capital Ward

Some notes:

One of the causes of climate change has been the changes we have caused to the hydrologic cycle
China is creating deserts the size of Rhode Island every year by draining watersheds
Hot spots are being found around the world now (areas running out of water) - Middle East, Australia, 22 countries in Africa, SouthWest United States, Mexico City, India, Northern China...)
Canada's last water legislation at a federal level was the NAtional Water Act of 1970
Water is a tradeable good (i.e.: private commodity) in NAFTA, where there is a proportional sharing agreement so hypothetically corporations could sue if we ever restricted their water usage
Nestle (and other companies across the country, and mostly around the Great Lakes) are getting water permits and taking water out at insane levels -at only the cost of the permit!
Four trillion liters of water a day are removed from the Great Lakes
Lake Michigan actually had its water flow reversed because of so much water removal
Only 3% of the wildlife in the Great Lakes are native
There are more than 300 chemicals in the Great Lakes, including nitrates and chemical fertilizers from livestock and industrial agriculture in the area
Alberta's tar sands, described by Maude Barlow as Canada's Mordor, have shown exceptionally high cancer rates in populations nearby - including the unseen bile cancer in children
Most environmental groups are fighting for a National Water Strategy where there would be a ban/limits on commercial water exports, a right to safe drinking water for all, and sustainability in our water strategy

I'll post more notes after the next two events: the Flow movie, and the Blue Gold movie.

On Packing

2008-07-30T20:19:00.005-04:00

Packing for The Big Move began a little over a month ago...but didn't really kick into high gear until the last two weeks. First came the books. We have two overflowing book shelves, and they took up no less than ten 2 cubic feet sized boxes.

Pretty much everything is packed up now... but the big thing left are the dishes. Yes, those in the cupboards....but more so the ones in the sink. I used to like doing dishes by hand. It was soothing and quiet and didn't take very long. Now I hate it. I like to say it's because it's greener to do dishes with the washer, but really I think it's just because it means being in my small, dark, music-less, window-less kitchen.

So. I've been avoiding those dishes until the very last minute where I'll have to wash and pack them. I'm actually considering packing them dirty and then just throwing them in the dishwasher at the new house. Would that be so wrong?

I'm avoiding doing dishes so badly, in fact, that I just spent the last hour packing and cleaning up the bathroom. Including o-mop-ing the floor behind the toilet where water had dripped for gosh-knows-how-long before we finally noticed and is now stained with rust coloured cirlces of dried water.

Maybe I'll just hire a maid for the new house to solve all my cleaning problems.

On Leaving

2008-07-28T20:59:00.006-04:00

In four days we get the keys to our new house. Our first house. And in five days we move.

T mentioned he was going to miss the apartment and the memories, but not me. I have a bad memory and don't miss my parent's place (though I do miss the cottage) and I don't think I'm going to miss this apartment.

I never liked it, and I only moved here because T was already here. My dislike of things has turned to angry hatred and disgust in the recent months as I anticipate our perfect house (shut up, that's what it is in my head! Don't ruin it for me yet -- let me learn on my own.)

The kitchen here is small, has no counter space, and really crappy lighting.

There's no real suitable place to have a dining room table and guests.

The balcony is small and overlooks the parking lot.

The road that runs out past our window has three bus routes on it and seeminly too many idiotic drivers who live to rev their engines at 2 a.m. as they speed down the street.

The master bedroom is small and I have a computer desk and chair just a few inches from my nose as I sleep.

There is no air conditioning which has been disgusting these last two summers where the average temperature of the apartment is 26 C. Don't even think of turning on the stove or oven.

The TV and video games are on the other side of the bedroom wall which isn't good for sleeping for me when T wants to stay up.

I can only do laundry at certain times and on certain days which isn't conducive to my Martha Stewart ways.

Out-of-town guests have been sleeping on our couch, in our living room where we have a towel for a curtain on the balcony door.

I don't care for any fond memories here. Everything I want to remember I'm taking with me. The cat, my books, my music and T. What else do I need?

Well, seeing as you asked.

The new house has a large kitchen with lots of counter space and natual light pouring in through the patio door.

There's a dining room and a new dining room table and chairs being delivered.

The backyard is a decent size and will have a BBQ, a patio set and overlooks parkland. There is a library, community center, park, splash park, tennis courts and two baseball diamonds all within a ten minute walk out the backyard.

The street in front of us is residential but at the end of the street is a major road with a bus to take us both to work. Out of earshot.

The master bedroom is large, and though it is currently pink and mauve, it will soon be transformed into a nice oasis for us to get some fantastic shut eye in our new king sized bed...and maybe something else.

The computer and video games will all be in the basement -- also out of earshot of sleeping Laura.

I can do laundry whenever I want.

We will have A/C so we won't have to go "condo swimming" as my friend puts it (showering/bathing repeatedly before bed to try and cool off -- often ends in sleeping naked and wet to keep cool).

Our out-of-town guests (the first of which will be two weeks after we move in!) will have their own bedroom and bed to sleep in. With real curtains in their room!

I can't wait.

Time to make new memories.

When you're bored

2008-06-24T21:55:00.000-04:00

LAYER ONE:
Spell your name with bands/artists
LoudLove
Arcade Fire
U2
Rebel Emergency
A 311...ok I couldn’t think of another A band

LAYER TWO:
-- Name: Laura Anne Marie Nicol
-- Birth date: August 13, 1983
-- Nicknames: Laur , Laura-loo, Laura-lee Laura-loo, chaton
-- Current Location: Ottawa
-- Eye Color: Blue
-- Hair Color: Brown
-- Righty or Lefty: Righty.
-- Best friend(s): Theo, Salma, Daniel, Christine, Nicole ...

LAYER THREE:
-- The shoes you wore today: black flats to and from work, 2 in black heels at work
-- Your perfect pizza: sauce, green peppers, mushrooms, pepperoni, cheese OR bbq sauce, chicken and cheese
-- The last time you cried: Probably like a week ago

LAYER FOUR:
-- Your best physical feature: Eyes? Breasts?
-- Most missed memory: I have a horrible memory. I miss my memory. And the cottage. :>

LAYER FIVE:
-- Pepsi or Coke: Coke
-- McDonald's or Burger King: McDonalds
-- Adidas or Nike: neither
-- Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea: meh
-- Chocolate or Vanilla: Chocolate
-- Cappuccino or coffee: French vanilla

LAYER SIX:
-- Curse: I don’t know what exactly this is asking?
-- Do you sing: Yes...when I’m alone.
-- Take a shower everyday: Usually.
-- Do you think you have been in love: Yes
-- Want to go to college: Went to university and took college classes in PR. I’d go back in a heart beat
-- Get motion sickness: rarely
-- Think you're a health freak: nope
-- Get along with your parents: yes.
-- Play an instrument: I can play guitar, bass and drums in Rock Band 

LAYER SEVEN:
In the past 3 months...
-- Gone to the mall: yes
-- Kissed someone: yes
-- Eaten an entire box of Oreos: no, but I did share one with Mat and Theo
-- Eaten Sushi: yup
-- Been on stage: no
-- Gone skating: noooope
-- Made homemade cookies: Not cookies—but cupcakes and banana bread
-- Stolen anything: nope

LAYER EIGHT:
Have you ever...
-- Gotten in big trouble with your parents: not really
-- Used a fake id: Hmmm maybe? I don’t recall. Don’t think so?

LAYER NINE:
-- Age you hope to be married: No rush...but maybe by 27-28
--Number of Children: 2

LAYER TEN:
In a guy/girl...
-- Best eye color: don't care
-- best hair color: ditto
-- Short hair or long hair: ditto

LAYER ELEVEN:
-- Number of people I could trust with my life?: 10ish?
-- Number of cds you own: tons!!
-- Number of piercings: 4
-- Number of tattoos: none

LAYER TWELVE:
--The one place you never want to go back to: cottage, montreal, kap, toronto, NYC, D.C., boston, Vegas
--The one place where you want to die: wherever home is
--The one feeling you have never felt: loss – true, deep loss
--The one person you would like to meet: Hmmm...does 311 count as a person? If not, George Stroumboulopoulos. I’d love to go to a concert with that guy.

Banksy

2008-06-23T20:51:00.004-04:00

I've been a fan of Banksy for a few years now. I don't recall how I first came across his graffiti/political art ... but I especially adore his recent work in Palestine/Israel. It's not mindless tagging on public property type graffiti - it's always got a point.

At Urban Outfitters I found a book of some of his work. Some of my favorite quotes:

"Once upon a time there was a Bear and a Bee who lived in a wood and were the best of friends. All summer long the Bee collected nectar from morning to night while the Bear lay on his back basking in the long grass.

When Winter came the Bear realised he had nothing to eat and thought to himself 'I hope that busy little Bee will share some of his honey with me.' But the Bee was nowhere to be found - he had died of a stress induced coronary disease."

"The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.

Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side.

It's not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk and shout abuse.

What the human race needs is a lot more streakers."

"We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves."

Banana Bread

2008-04-22T21:24:00.003-04:00

I tried studying his face while he spoke on the phone. It had been 12 hours since we'd heard any news.

Normally I can hear the conversation because her excited voice carries through the 680 km of airwaves to his cell phone and loud enough for me to hear sitting next to him. Not tonight.

"Why didn't you call?" in a frustrated tone. Does he normally chew his bottom lip? Are his eyes welling up or is that the lighting in the room?

"When will you know?" in an anxious tone. He lets go of my hand. Am I making it worse by watching him?

I leave and go to the kitchen. I open my recipe book to the banana bread page and immediately start throwing the ingredients into a large bowl. Not in order. I didn't sift the flour. I had no vanilla extract but used homemade vanilla sugar instead. That looked about a quarter cup. Blend. Butter pan. Pour mixture into pan. Bake at 350 for 60 minutes. Wash, wash, scrub dishes. Clean countertop. I feel better. At least if I have to go anywhere tomorrow I can bring a banana bread. Banana bread helps everything. As a recent recipient of one of my banana breads noted: Banana bread is the greatest stuff ever as it serves as a snack, breakfast or dessert. It's a disorganized mother's best pal. A disorganized mother and an anxious girl.

I'm an anxious eater. And apparently an anxious baker.

Why we should NOT pass Bill C-10 in Canada

2008-03-26T20:23:00.003-04:00

For those Canucks who haven't heard about Bill C-10.... it essentially gives the government the power to not fund Canadian movies with "controversial" subject matter.

Yeah. Ok. Censorship much?

GREAT interview by George Stroumboulopoulos here: Charles McVety on The Hour

From the Facebook group: Keep your censoring hands off of Canadian film and TV! No to Bill C-10!

Please concentrate your letter writing/lobbying on
the Senate Commerce, Banking and Trade Committee.

General email:
banking_banques@sen.parl.g
c.ca

General mail:
Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce
The Senate of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1A 0A4

Here is a list of email addresses of the Standing Committee members:

anguswd@sen.parl.gc.ca, goldsy@sen.parl.gc.ca, bironmi@sen.parl.gc.ca, rokosg@sen.parl.gc.ca, harbm@sen.parl.gc.ca, jaffem@sen.parl.gc.ca, massip@sen.parl.gc.ca, meighen@sen.parl.gc.ca, moorew@sen.parl.gc.ca, ringup@sen.parl.gc.ca, tkachd@sen.parl.gc.ca

Angus, W. David Chair - C - (Alma - Quebec)
Goldstein, Yoine Deputy Chair - Lib. - (Rigaud - Quebec)
Biron, Michel - Lib. - (Mille Isles - Quebec)
Eyton, John Trevor - C - (Ontario)
Harb, Mac - Lib. - (Ontario)
Jaffer, Mobina S.B. - Lib. - (British Columbia)
Massicotte, Paul J. - Lib. - (De Lanaudière - Quebec)
Meighen, Michael A. - C - (St. Marys - Ontario)
Moore, Wilfred P. - Lib. - (Stanhope St. / South Shore - Nova Scotia)
Ringuette, Pierrette - Lib. - (New Brunswick)
Tkachuk, David - C - (Saskatchewan)

Grain Farmer Claims Moral Victory in Seed Battle Against Monsanto

2008-03-24T21:41:00.000-04:00

Grain Farmer Claims Moral Victory in Seed Battle Against Monsanto

On The Fire

2008-03-05T22:12:00.002-05:00

My lovely and very talented pal Teresa is completing her Masters at Carleton -- working on education and the environment. Her very cool blog is tracking some of the things she's coming across in her research/interest and she's looking for feedback on some of her thesis thoughts...

Check out On The Fire.

Entries of interest:

Vampire Energy/Phantom Load
List of Foods that Contain GMOs (2003)

Terminator Seeds

2008-03-04T22:02:00.005-05:00

I've written before about Terminator, or Suicide, Seed technology, but I wanted to include a few more links and facts from a forum I attended here in Ottawa. There were three speakers - Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher of ExoNexus, U.K.; Susan Walsh, Executive Director of USC Canada; and Colleen Ross, Women's President of the National Farmers Union. Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network hosted the evening.

First some notes from Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher's portion:

Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURTs) is used in Terminator seeds to render them sterile in the second generation (ie. the seeds this plant will produce will be sterile). Terminator seeds DO NOT prevent cross-pollination - or contamination - of other fields/plants. Other problems with transgenes/GURTs:

By definition, any biological system is not static, but dynamic, it changes.

Evolution, genetic adaptation, metabolic adaptation

Mutations (alteration of DNA sequence)
Gene silencing (epigenetic changes - as a defense mechanism within the seed)

Therefore - no biological system is 100% reliable.

There is insufficient data for assessment of environmental, socio-economic and cultural impacts, as well as economic, legal, societal and food security impacts.

Have we even considered if we NEED this technology?

From Susan Walsh, who presented on Terminator technology and Farmers from the Global South:

1.4 billion people are dependent on seeds farmers save (seed banks - both formal and informal)
Biodiversity is even more important with climate change already showing its head
To buy new seeds every year the Canadian Wheat industry (85%) would cost US$85 million according to the ETC Group.
The companies behind Terminator technology say that this is too expensive for farmers in developing countries and therefore wouldn't affect them -- this is not so. Farmers around the world receive seeds via farm aid, food programs, and cross-pollination.

From Colleen Ross' portion on Farming in Canada:

Not all technologies are good
We embrace it -- doesn't mean it will embrace us!
Canola, cotton, corn, and soybeans are often genetically modified
85% of farmers have off-however -- this isn't profitable for the farmer, and isn't healthy either
We're losing 2% of our diversity every year

So -- what can you do to stop this?

You can take action to Ban Terminator here
Educate yourself - tell your friends and family. Get a great discussion started with this Seed Map
Article on Doomsday Seed Vault

Article: GM Crop Trial Locations May be Hidden from Public

2008-02-18T08:57:00.004-05:00

I will not go into a full entry here on my opinions on Genetically Modified (GM) Foods because I fear I will never stop writing.

The Guardian in the UK reports that there are plans for GM crop trials out of the public eye. The companies behind GM organisms and food are well aware of the public backlash against this attack on their foods, their privacy and their freedom of choice.

Another story, perhaps more shocking/disturbing, on the consequences of GM crop contamination, something we're all too familiar with here in Canada.

I strongly suggest you learn more about the terminator seeds, the campaigns to ban them around the world, and what you can do to help stop this. The future of our food is at stake.

Brain Purge

2008-02-12T22:58:00.002-05:00

(inspired by pamused who was inspired by audra)

thankful for:my family and friends

proud of: finally getting my ass to the gym consecutively
missing: what can never be again
looking forward to: a warm bed to crawl into

preoccupied by: politics, capitalism, the state of the world. What style will i get my hair cut next?thrilled by:everything

disappointed by: politicians, fellow humans, that my Christmas tree won't grow

thinking of:being more creative

wondering:if anyone can ever know for sure

hoping:that i'm over exaggerating everything negative

wanting: une maison to call home

reading: The Story of French

recommending: lying on the floor at 3 am in the dark and listening to konstantine by something corporate

making:cupcakes

listening to: patrice

would kill for: 311 day concert in New Orleans

forgetting to:breathe

most recently snuggled by:toby cat

most recently slept on: not so comfy bed

Recommendation: Empire Builders - Third Wall/GCTC

2008-02-08T22:10:00.000-05:00

We have season tickets to the Great Canadian Theatre Company, here in Ottawa. They put on fabulous and energetic plays and performances by Canadian and local playwrights, with Canadian and local actors. The new Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, newly opened this season, provides a lovely space and location for bigger productions.

Interestingly, the new theatre also has a smaller studio theatre so two productions can be rehearsing and performing at the same time. Enter Third Wall Theatre Company. At the last GCTC production we saw an advertisment for the upcoming Third Wall production to be held there.

Third Wall has made the studio theatre it's new home, and we were delighted to catch their adaptation of Boris Vian's 1958 play Empire Builders. It's funny, because neither of us fully understood everything about the play, but we both loved it. It's one of those plays that encourages discussion afterwards. This family who is continually fleeing an unknown enemy/fear and who refuse to talk of it raises questions that are eerily relevant today. How do we deal with fear? The Enemy? The Unknown? What/how much are we willing to risk for freedom/safety? Do we collectively repress the past so as to pretend it's not how we arrived to the present?

The actors were all phenomenal. Katie Bunting, Julian Doucet, Matt Miwa, Alix Sidaris, Maureen Smith and Riley Stewart all played their parts (some of them non-speaking!) extremely well and it really added to the performance. We've been lucky enough to see some of these same actors in other productions at the GCTC and love when we get to see them return!

One of the things I love about theatre is the use of the stage and props. The studio theatre is quite small, but the whole team did a lovely job with the space. The actors were in between the audience and the story moved from side to side. Voice projection wasn't a problem in the small area, even if the actor had their back to you. The costumes were eerie and great - though I haven't figured out if the all-white clothing and pale faces/white hair was supposed to sybolize something? Death? Limbo...? Regarless...it was striking.

I don't want to give away too much, except to say it's a stellar performance and a great play to follow up with a coffee or drinks or a nice drive home to discuss the issues raised.

The show runs until February 16 at the GCTC and I strongly recommend you check it out.

Up next: For the GCTC it's The Optimists, by Morwyn Brebner, running until February 17. For Third Wall, it's Moliere's Tartuffe, running May 27th to June 7th.

Ten Myths about the Canadian Healthcare System

2008-02-05T20:18:00.001-05:00

Great article here debunking common myths about our healthcare system.

Election Fun

2008-02-04T19:42:00.000-05:00

While I am born and bred Canadian, I can't help but be interested in US politics. They're such a global player, and so close to home, that practically everything they do, say, and make policy has some bearing on us folks to the North.

Some interesting quizzes you can do to see which candidates your views align with most:

Glassbooth

Electoral Compass

Happy quizzing!

Green Giant

2008-01-26T09:34:00.001-05:00

Some very interesting green initiatives by my fave love to hate big box behemoth - Wal-Mart. As any of you who know me probably know, I grew up in a Canadian retail family and therefore have a big hate-on for Wally World as we fondly call it. I have many issues with their employee policies around triple-split shifts, inadequate pay and their shady PR practices. I also think they are largely responsible for pushing this "lower price" mentality on people to the point where everyone would gladly drive farther to save nine cents on whatever cheap product it is they want...only to be hugely disapointed when they discover how poorly the product is made to get it to them at that 'great' price or what it's driving those suppliers to do to stay afloat. I also have issues with Wal-Mart coming into small towns and putting all the other small mom and pop shops out of business only to close up and leave town. I have issues with them also bullying employees/stores where unions are trying to be formed to protect worker's rights. I do not shop at Wal-Mart, and haven't for years, because of this and much more.

However, I have to admit that they carry a lot of weight. Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world and have a lot of buying power and influence. Take a moment to read this article on Wal-Mart's greening efforts. They've realized that there are financial benefits to going green. I'm not sure I'm ready to drop my boycott and start shopping there yet, but at least they're heading in the right direction, and hopefully setting a green path for other retailers to follow.

Good News and Bad News from Starbucks

2008-01-21T21:50:00.000-05:00

To be honest, I don't know how applicable this is in Canada, as I was under the impression that Canadian cows do not get these hormones, but I made need to brush up on my homework. The story here discusses Starbucks move to hormone-free milk (yay!) but how this means they will also not sell organic milk anymore (boo!).

How about we just stick to Bridgehead instead?

Roll Up Your Sleeves, America!

2008-01-21T21:02:00.000-05:00

http://www.relocalize.net/u_s_oil_dependencies

By the wonderful Art Spiegelman

Environ-mental

2008-01-21T20:22:00.000-05:00

Great article here about a book on greening your life, without the depressing serious 'tude.

Excerpt from the article:

And if if you think you're pretty eco-conscious already, there is still some fun facts to learn. Here's some of my favorites:

"Some 20 billion diapers are buried in US landfills per year, representing about 7 billion pounds of garbage."
You can flush dog poop down the toilet but not cat poop (and ironically, it seems you can potty train cats, but not dogs -- drat!).
"There is a Green Wi-Fi project, which has developed a solar-powered wireless router that can run for up to four weeks even in prolonged periods of gray skies."
Burning a single gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of C02.
Lunch boxes are hipper than tupperware.
"Americans are said to throw away enough aluminum in three months to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet."
"The average dishwasher uses about 15 gallons of water per load, while the average dish-washer (that would be you) uses about 5 gallons of water per minute at the sink.
The US airline industry uses 53 million gallons of jet fuel each day.

I don't see it on the Octopus Book website yet, but Chapters and Amazon have it if your local indie book store doesn't.

Guess who's back?

2008-01-21T18:49:00.000-05:00

So....I'm back.

I stopped posting here seriously almost a year ago. I blame facebook. I'd just post up links, funny stories and the occasional comment so easily to facebook, that I figured there was no point in repeating it here, as I think most people who read this are people I know. However, I still have been getting statistic reports every week and it boggles my mind that there are still (a few) people who just stumble onto the site. Also, I come across so many interesting articles etc. that I want to share, that I inundate my "friends" on facebook and lose most of the posts as the page only fits so many entries.

So, Stealing Happy Hours is back. I'm sure I should reorganize it somehow...but for now it's going to remain the melange of articles and interesting links and occasional comments on everything from eco-friendliness, to travel, to shopping, to music, to activism, to politics, to humour, to books, to food and photos.

Please send me any comments or suggestions!

Connect

2007-09-11T19:45:00.000-04:00

From City Blog today:

We must never lose that feeling of connectedness, a necessity once
described like this by the great American novelist James Baldwin: “The Earth is
always shifting. The light is always changing. Generations do not cease to be
born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they
have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children
cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith
with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

American author and clergyman Henry van Dyke: "Time is too slow for those
who wait, too swift for those who grieve, too long for those who would rejoice.
But for those who love, time is eternal."

Elie Wiesel wrote this about the blackest night a human being can know: "I
have learned two lessons in my life. First, there are no significant literary,
psychological or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second,
just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope too
can be given to one only by other human beings."

Eliot Spitzer, who took office in January and spoke at the 9/11
commemoration for the first time as governor, said:
"We stand on this
terrible threshold remembering all that happened. We feel today as we felt then,
that we belong to one another, not because we are inhabitants of the same city
or same country but because we are all part of the same human story, part of one
community of our fellow human beings. John Donne wrote these immortal words
centuries ago: "No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of
the continent, a part of the main, any man's death diminishes me because I am
involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It
tolls for thee."

As the poet William Blake wrote centuries ago, "Can I see another's
woe, and not be in sorrow too?"

Steveo's new blog: Selective Focus

2007-06-22T21:22:00.001-04:00

Do you like photography? Do you like my brother? If you answers yes to at least one of those questions you should check out my bro's new photo blog here.

Stop Your Junk Mail

2007-05-24T16:13:00.000-04:00

What a great idea!

STOP YOUR JUNK MAIL

Did you know more than 100 million trees are destroyed each year to produce junk mail? About 28 billion gallons of water are also wasted, and the energy used to produce and dispose of junk mail exceeds 2.8 million cars.

For $41, 41 Pounds will do all the leg-work to reduce your junk mail by 80-95% for five years, and will donate $15 to a charity of your choice. When you sign up, 41 Pounds will contact direct marketing organizations to remove your name from their lists. This includes credit card applications, coupon mailers, sweepstakes entries, magazine offers and insurance promotions, as well as any catalogs you specify. Save time! Save trees! Save the planet!

The Facebook generation: Changing the meaning of privacy

2007-05-24T16:10:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-24T16:00:00.000-04:00

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."

Are cellphones and the internet rewiring our brains?

2007-05-22T21:57:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-22T16:37:00.000-04:00

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

Part One

Part Two

Hillary vs. Obama

2007-05-22T16:13:00.000-04:00

Going With The Flow: The Most Expensive Liquids

2007-05-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

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.

Challenging Authority

2007-05-21T10:57:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-17T23:24:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-17T22:44:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-15T19:52:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-07T22:04:00.000-04:00

I’ll reap when I’m dead

2007-05-06T22:03:00.000-04:00

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

2007-05-01T16:53:00.000-04:00

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.

Event @ Octopus Books

2007-04-26T17:33:00.000-04:00

Adria Vasil author of Ecoholic
Thursday May 3, 7:00 p.m
Arbour Environmental Shoppe
800 Bank St (between Third and Fourth Ave)
This event is free and accessible (please note the washrooms are downstairs)

Octopus Books and Arbour Environmental Shoppe are excited to invite you to an evening with Adria Vasil and her much anticipated book - Ecoholic. Filled with helpful tips on everything from which seafood is safe to eat and where to find organic clothes that don’t look like a burlap sack to which green cleaning products actually do the job, Ecoholic is a witty and informative companion on the road to sustainability. Don't miss this great event and learn how to make your world a greener place.

Adria Vasil has been writing the Ecoholic column for NOW Magazine since the spring of 2004 and has covered environmental issues for NOW’s news section for four years. Vasil has a degree in development politics and cultural anthropology from the University of Toronto and a degree in magazine journalism from Ryerson. An advocate for the earth, women’s issues and human rights since her teens, Vasil has appeared on MTV Canada and CBC’s Newsworld to promote environmentalism.

Questions - please call Octopus Books at 613-233-2589

I Heart Stuart McLean

2007-04-26T17:10:00.000-04:00

Many of you have read my previous entries on Stuart and the Vinyl Cafe and know I'm a huge fan.... so you can imagine my delight when I read this:

Stuart McLean captures third Leacock medal CBC radio host Stuart McLean has
captured his third Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his book
Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe. McLean was named the winner at a luncheon Wednesday at the Stephen Leacock Museum in Orillia, Ont. He joins former CBC radio host Arthur Black as a three-time winner. McLean’s other wins were for Home from the Vinyl Cafe and Vinyl Cafe Unplugged. The Leacock award, worth $10,000, was first handed out in 1947. Past winners include Mordecai Richler, W.O. Mitchell, Farley Mowat, Roch Carrier and Will Ferguson.

AlterNet goodies

2007-04-22T22:29:00.000-04:00

Chomsky and Zinn on Patriotism in America
An interview with two of America's leading dissidents on how the highest act of patriotism would be opposing the war in Iraq and calling for a withdrawal of our troops.

Revenge of the World Bank Secretaries
Want to know what really goes on at the World Bank? Read a copy of Bank Swirled, an underground satirical newspaper published by World Bank employees.

Bill Moyers on why the press bought the war

2007-04-21T23:11:00.000-04:00

Great article and teaser video here for the PBS special on this Wednesday, April 25th.

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal by Naomi Shihab Nye

2007-04-21T22:46:00.000-04:00

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.
Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a,shu-biduckhabibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard my words she knew -- however poorly used -- she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El aso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late, who is picking you up?
Let's call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her.This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar rumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers --non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American -- ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar, too.
And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands -- had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped -- has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen, anywhere.
Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet of Palestinian background.

More great animations from Mark Fiore...

2007-04-21T15:38:00.000-04:00

Outta' Africa

MC Rove

Feeling the Heat

We cannot go on living like this

2007-04-17T22:27:00.000-04:00

I know I'm way behind in posts, so let me try to catch up on a few things now...

Theo and I just got back from the last GCTC play at 910 Gladstone before they open the new theatre in Westboro next season. Great play, and great company, but I don't think I'll miss the old theatre much! I'm looking forward to a modern venue with more leg room, that's for sure!

My very first GCTC play, which I went to see with my OAC Writer's Craft class: A Guide to Mourning.

Then, a few years passed before Theo and I began seeing every performance since, beginning with The Last Liberal, Rock n Roll (starring Theo's baseball team mate Todd Duckworth), and seasons tickets to this last season at 910 Gladstone.

Goodbye Gladstone, you served the GCTC community well!

We Will Rock You - Again!

2007-04-09T21:30:00.000-04:00

Going to see WWRY again in a couple weeks while we're in Toronto for Toronto FC and Blue Jays games...

Alanis Morisette's version of 'My Humps'

2007-04-07T19:34:00.000-04:00

Boston

2007-04-07T18:54:00.000-04:00

Well, I survived my first business trip with no real problems. In fact, I think I'm a pro at security, having done it three times in the one trip...but more on that later.

Tuesday morning was spent at the Ottawa airport waiting (another thing I got to be very good at) until our flight left shortly after noon. Security, which I was most nervous about, seeing as the last (and only) time I flew it was pre-9/11 security. Flight attendants, construction workers, a woman with a baby carriage and a cage cart full of Coke were all allowed to go in front of me...but I got through eventually!

Once we arrived in Boston it was into a cab and off to Burlington where our U.S. headquarters are. It wasn't until we got there that we all realized how hungry we were and that the cafeteria was already closed. Thank goodness for vending machines:

Coke, popcorn, orange cheese crackers and a Snickers ice cream bar....Adrienne and I shared!

Adrienne and I were sharing a conference room, and a network cable, so we switched back and forth checking e-mails and catching up on work. Took a conference call with the team and then we headed out to Cafe Escadrille for dinner. It was excellent -- the food, music, ambiance, and of course the company. It was nice to get to hang out socially with the team and get to relax.

Wednesday was our full day meeting with the members of the PR agency we work with and it was very productive, but long. It didn't help we were using these smelly markers for the white boards and the fumes were giving everyone headaches by the end of the day!

Mid-afternoon it began to snow -- big time. Here it was, April 4 and there was a snow storm. Our cab to the airport was an hour late getting to us, and we made it to the airport with a little over an hour before the flight was scheduled to leave -- but it was delayed by about an hour so we actually had time to eat. Logan is set up a little strange, and the Air Canada terminal had little food to offer. So, we checked through security for another terminal in order to be able to go eat at the very tasty Legal Sea Food restaurant. After going through security again to get to our terminal we finally boarded the plane back to Ottawa.

It was at this point I realized I had somehow incurred some serious damage at some point during the trip (in addition to my luggage being broken a bit):

That is a huge blue/purple/red bruise I have on the back of my left bicep...no idea how I got it...

At this point it was just pouring rain...I felt as though we were on the tarmac for ages...at one point we were actually lined up behind six other planes waiting to take off in the rain...

Luckily for me, on the way home no one was sitting next to me, so I curled up on the seats and tried to catch a little shut eye - but before I knew it we were back in Ottawa...

Library Thing

2007-04-01T22:22:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have noticed the new widget on the left side -- Library Thing. I highly encourage you to check it out or add it to your blog -- it's a neat way to see what your friends are reading or who else likes the same books as you do.

At the Sens game the other night...

2007-04-01T22:17:00.000-04:00

...enjoying our ice cream!

Sadly, the Sens did lose....

Lessons learned at IKEA

2007-04-01T21:58:00.000-04:00

Salma and Tracey have gotten an apartment together and so I went with them yesterday to go furniture shopping. Other than the madness of driving around the city only to find the store we were looking for to be closed or moved to another location (*ahem, the importance of updating your Web site or phone messages) we had a fun time testing out various couches.

Salma and I continued on to IKEA after grabbing dinner (and finding another store which had closed) and Salma chose a bed, bedside table and dresser. (I bought two glass jars for pasta.) After the sales woman assured us it would fit in the car as long as we folded down the seats, we set off, paid, and drove to the warehouse down the street to get the boxes. Weren't we overjoyed after 20 minutes of the two of us lifting and jamming various sized boxes into the trunk of her Acura TSX to find that one box was too wide to fit through the trunk and into the back seat area.

It ended up I called my parents to borrow their van. We drove to their place, got the van (and took out one of the boxes from Salma's car because she had already changed her mind about the bedside table) and back to the warehouse to get the last box, then back to IKEA to exchange the table and get the other one.

The funniest part is last time Daniel and Salma were at IKEA to get Daniel a desk it wouldn't fit into her car (I think it was a Honda Accord then) and so I went and got them and the stuff with the van too.

Lesson learned? Either get your IKEA stuff delivered, or bring a friend with a van. :)

I can't wait to help her put it all together!

We Will Rock You ROCKS!

2007-03-30T22:46:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry this review is so late- - but it's been a hectic week! (Thanks for the push Suze!)

Ok, so this show is soooo good. It's so worth the drive to Toronto to see it -- you should all go! The music is awesome, the story is hilarious and the acting very well done. There are some great little pieces of Canadiana thrown in and it just worked so well!

Suzie McNeil did a great job -- I already knew she could sing, but she acted very well also!

I loved Yvan Pedneault who played the lead character -- he was so loveable. He played in the French production of RENT in Montreal -- ohh that would have been awesome to see!

Erica Peck played the other lead role, Scaramouche, and she was amazing! Plus, she's like 20 years old and halfway through school. She's amazing...I can't wait to see her again!

Everyone was great really...the songs, the music...everything! I loved the Killer Queen, and of course The Seven Seas of Rhye! :)

This show is awesome... I can't express it. It pokes fun at the state of music today (basically, after Bohemian Rhapsody, music went downhill) and it's just so much fun!

We bought the soundtrack from the London production and it's a lot of fun...I have to be careful listening to it on my ipod or at work -- I always want to sing along!

Former child soldier to speak in Ottawa April 17th

2007-03-29T21:48:00.000-04:00

Octopus Books Presents

Ishmael Beah - former child soldier, human rights activist and author of
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Hosted by CBC Ottawa's Adrian Harewood

Tuesday, April 17, 2007, 7:00pm Bronson Centre Theatre 211 Bronson Avenue

Tickets are $10 or $5 for students/unwaged(tickets available in advance at Octopus Books, Books on Beechwood, Collected Works, Leishman Books, Mother Tongue Books and Perfect Books)

A gripping story of a child’s journey through hell and back.
There may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s, in more than fifty conflicts around the world. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. He is one of the first to tell his story in his own words.

In A LONG WAY GONE, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion. This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.

the new octopus bookstore
613-233-2589
critical thinking for over 35 years
http://www.octopusbooks.ca/

The first day of spring!

2007-03-23T16:38:00.000-04:00

Ok, so that was technically a few days ago -- but this is the first official Friday of spring, and oh what a day! I didn't wear a coat this morning, just threw on a new cord blazer my mom got me yesterday and a scarf, and off I went. I got off work around 3:30 p.m. and it was so nice and sunny out, so I walked home.

I happen to be wearing a pedometre today -- at I was at about 3100 steps when I got off work. It took me about an hour to walk home, and I'm now at 8365 steps! :) Sweet.

I guess that makes up for missing yoga class today.

I'm super psyched as Theo and I are leaving for Toronto tomorrow morning and going to see We Will Rock You - the musical based on the music of Queen! I listened to Queen the whole way home today and it occured to me that Queen's music is made for the stage -- it's very grandios and dramatic.

One of my favorite songs: Killer Queen (sorry, I can't get it to embed)

I just found out that Suzie McNeil will be in the production - yes! That Suzie McNeil!

Full report on Sunday night! :)

Mondays notoriously suck

2007-03-19T18:14:00.000-04:00

Ok, I'm being a little harsh there... today wasn't that bad. Mat went back to Kapuskasing yesterday, so back to the normal grind today.

Ah, Mat visiting...

Theo and I have season tickets for the Great Canadian Theatre Company, and last Tuesday we went to see the show "The Four Horsemen Project". We got an extra ticket for Mat and off we went.

This was a first, for all of us, as The Four Horsemen Project isn't so much a play, but interpretive dance done to Canadian icons The Four Horsemen's sound poetry. While some parts were funny, and entertaining, the majority of it wasn't exactly our cup of tea. While I can appreciate the talent that goes into dance, and went into the script and lines (a lot of tongue twisting phrases!), I wasn't expecting so little acting/plot and wasn't prepared for watching interpretive dance.

To see what I mean please visit the Volcano Web site and watch a streaming clip, or download it to your Mac or PC.

From the Volcano site:

Five years in the making, The Four Horsemen Project is a multi-disciplinary extravaganza conceived and co-directed by Toronto's dance-theatre dynamic duo, Ross Manson and Kate Alton, in collaboration with
Vancouver animation studio Global Mechanic. Live, on-stage, swirling animation and sonic hi-jinx make the poetry of Canada's 1970s avant-garde scene leap off the page and onto the stage.
The show is based on the work of Toronto's original Four Horsemen: Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and bpNichol. Their outrageously fun sonic poetry is brought to life by a stellar cast of performers, who surprise with their combination of physical and vocal
virtuosity: Jennifer Dahl, Graham McKelvie, Naoko Murakoshi and Andrea
Nann. Animation Director Bruce Alcock (TIFF, Venice Bienale) sets the
visual poetry of bpNichol and the Horsemen to motion. Archival footage from the 1970s is similarly woven into the show. Work-in-progress showings of the material have received tremendous acclaim.
The Four Horsemen Project uses the philosophical goal of the early sound poets themselves as its structural spine: the idea that poetry is far more than words on a page; poetry encompasses sound, breath and the human body. With this remarkable collaboration, a new generation of artists breathes life into some nearly-forgotten work - iconoclastic, brilliant, delightfully irreverent – work that set the whole world on its ear. "The Four Horsemen Project, a reworking of a 1970's piece by Canadian sound poetry ensemble the Four Horsemen, is hilarious and brilliantly
performed"

I'm not sorry I saw it – it was a very interesting experience and I learned quite a bit. But, it hasn't turned me onto going to see other shows. I found it interesting to learn that the authors learned of The Four Horsemen from one of my favorite CBC Radio Shows – The Vinyl Café with Stuart McLean. I appreciate the fact that The Four Horsemen thought poetry was too confined and unnatural by having to rhyme or write it out – the sound aspect is an interesting one that they play with extensively. Great review from when it ran in Toronto before coming to Ottawa The lighting, animation and use of the stage was very well done – I'll definitely give them that!

If you have an open-mind, and $30, it's worth it to check it out and experience some real Canadian talent, and history.

From Rabble

2007-03-10T21:53:00.000-05:00

Goodbye Studio 60 :(
Here's how things work (really)

And the always great, Heather Mallick:
Magazines: where are the women writers?

This week in the media...

2007-03-10T18:58:00.000-05:00

Interesting stories this week...

From the Globe and Mail:

Draft international climate report warns of droughts, starvation, disease

Europe turns to greener energy by 2020
Sleep is all downhill past age 12

Fish are up to their gills in mercury

Committee reviews CBC mandate

From AlterNet:

Hey, Under-30s Crowd, Have You Overdosed on Narcissism?

UPDATED: Women soldiers have died of dehydration to avoid late night trips to toilet [VIDEO]

How to Save the Middle Class from Extinction

Drinking and Rape: The Rest of the Story

Happy Birthday Steveo!

2007-03-09T21:18:00.000-05:00

My lil bro is 22 today! Happy birthday to the best bro a girl could ask for! :)

Mat hearts the 613

2007-03-09T21:09:00.000-05:00

Mat is here! He managed to get an early flight on stand by from Kapuskasing to Ottawa this afternoon. :)

Party in the 613 for the March break!

I think some plans are going to be:

Go see the movie 300 (there aren't many films showing in Kapuskasing)
Xbox 360 games (poor boy is home alone with the cat all day!)
Theo's birthday on Monday, also our first night of curling playoffs
GCTC play
Top Karting perhaps
Yuk Yuk's for Mike Wilmot next Friday
Xbox 360 games (see note above)
Lots more!

Yay! :) Welcome to Ottawa Mat!

SatireWire

2007-03-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

I love this site -- it's so funny!

One of my faves:

ANGERED BY SNUBBING, LIBYA, CHINA, SYRIA FORM AXIS OF JUST AS EVIL

Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs

Another:

INTERVIEW WITH THE SEARCH ENGINE

What a way to start a new contract!

2007-03-02T14:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the first day of my new contract. I got to work for 8 a.m. and my security pass wouldn't work. Because the front desk hadn't received any new papers from HR, they had terminated my pass and I wasn't allowed in until my manager could sign me in. My manager came in at 9:15 a.m. and signed me in, only to get up to my cube and see that my other manager was already there! He had gotten in around 8:15 a.m. for a call, and we had somehow not seen each other.

To top it all off my computer access was also terminated, and couldn't be reinstated until today. I went home to "work from home" because I would at least have Internet access and personal e-mail to use. My managers sent me a few releases to work on, but there wasn't much else I could do without my computer and files from work.

This morning I went in for 7:30 a.m. so I could leave early to go get my passport application done. At 9 a.m. on Fridays we have donuts and coffee for half and hour. I wasn't planning on going today because I wanted to catch up on stuff I had missed yesterday, but I decided to go over for 10 minutes to catch up with people and have a donut. We had some nasty weather here in Ottawa today, including hail and gusting winds. A colleague was telling us how the wind tunnel created between our parking garage and the first of the two buildings (which are attached) was so crazy that it blew a metal awning off of a doorway and came crashing down. He also noticed the smell of gas and reported it to the front desk.

No sooner did he finish his story, and I finished my last bite of donut, did the alarm go off. I wanted to rush back over to the other building where my cube is to get my coat, but the doors connecting the two buildings closes and locks automatically when the alarm is activated. A voice came over the loud speaker and told everyone to evacuate to the far side of the building (away from the side near the parking garage) right away. A colleague grabbed some coroporate branded sweaters and a coat for me to wear and we headed outside with our box of Timbits.

A short while later people became coming around to the hundreds of us standing outside saying it was going to be a long time and that we were all being sent home. I had no keys, wallet, phone, coat etc... so someone drove me to my parent's work to get a key for their house and I waited there.

Theo left work early and came to get me and here I sit at the apartment now. I had three tickets to the Vagina Monologues presentation at the Bronson Centre tonight -- but they are in my wallet at work. My passport application is also in my bag at work, so I guess I won't be going to get that until Monday or Tuesday.

What a crazy way to begin a new contract, and end the week.

I'm very tired and blah now -- and I'm not sure if it's from not sleeping well/getting up early, or if it's from the gas... weird.

Let's hope on Monday I can actually get some work done! For those of you in Ottawa -- please do go see the show -- it's great!

From the CBC

2007-03-02T14:44:00.000-05:00

Serious
Jailed Journalist a symbol of Internet Age

Funny/Weird
Indiana man charged with fraud after he tried to cash $50,000 check from God

Hot potato: Italian woman finds WWII hand grenade in sack of potatoes

Not-so-precise Swiss army unit mistakenly invades Liechtenstein

MishMash of Media

2007-02-27T20:45:00.000-05:00

In Russia, Media Watches You

Satan Rides The Media

Is Lt. Watada an Isolated Case of Military Dissent?

Global Warming Demands Local Fixes

Costco Rules, Wal-Mart Drools

The Iraq Effect: War has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide

Come see the GCTC's Museum!

2007-02-26T19:04:00.000-05:00

As many of you may know, Theo and I have season's tickets to the Great Canadian Theatre Company. It's an excellent local theatre with some of the very best in Canadian talent.

Every year there is a "lawyer play", where local lawyers, judges etc. put on a play at the GCTC as a fundraiser.

If you're in Ottawa this weekend, do yourself a favour and see Museum -- you don't be disappointed!

Julian Beever

2007-02-25T21:41:00.000-05:00

From Steveo -- amazing chalk art.

Lots of great articles in the March issue of Yoga Journal

2007-02-24T19:41:00.000-05:00

I've just begun reading the March 2007 issue of Yoga Journal, (don't worry, I am keeping an eye on the Sens game!) and I'm very fascinated by a few articles and I'm only on page 24!

Good news! Dark chocolate is good for you, as it has 14 times as many antioxidants as broccoli. In an article entitled Concious Chocolate discusses the importance of choosing sustainable chocolate (which is second only to cotton in the amount of pesticide used to produce it - according to the Pesticide Action Network). Look for these descriptions of your chocolate next time you're buying: organic, fair trade, pesticide free, rainforest alliance certified and ethically traded.

Leave No Trace - eco-travel tips brought to you by Yoga Journal:

Take a train or bus if you are travelling less than 600 miles (planes use a lot of fuel to take off and land). (*Sigh. Ottawa to Boston is just over 300 miles...maybe my passport won't be sent in time and I can take the train. I love the train!)
Don't fly at night. Airplane condensation trails, or contrails, cool the atmosphere during the day. But night flights heat teh atmosphere and contribute more than half of the climate warming that originates from contrails.
To offset the pollution your trip generates, measure your greenhouse has emissions by visiting a Website like www.travelmatters.org or www.terrapass.com. Then, choose to contribute money to help plant trees and fund alternative energy. (My round trip to Boston will be 618 miles and 395 lbs of CO2 -- If I got to http://www.carbonfund.org/site/ I can purchase 6,000 miles of carbon offsets for only US$6.25!)
When staying at a hotel, opt not to have linens cleaned daily.
Eat cuisine that is native to the area you are visiting.
Bring a refillable water bottle or thermos instead of using disposables.

I really enjoy this magazine, but I also subscribe to ascent - a Canadian yoga mag. I also picked up another new one I hadn't seen before -- Shambhala Sun, mostly because it has an article on Eve Ensler -- so it must be good! Will let you know...

What a day...

2007-02-23T21:57:00.000-05:00

So much to talk about...

Next week I start my full-time hours, but I've really been feeling like I could have used the full-time hours since coming back from Christmas break. It just seems like things have really ramped up and there's always lots to do. Don't get me wrong, it's great! I love what I do and I love having lots to do and not being bored. It will just be nice next week when I have enough hours to do everything. I stayed an hour extra on Wednesday because meetings ran over, and I really could have stayed longer to finish up things. Today I stayed a little late for a customer interview and to tie up a few things before the weekend...which I don't mind, but it will just be nice to have more time now.

I left work around quarter after two and waiting in the ABSOLUTE FREEZING COLD WIND for my bus, which was late, and had to go to my doctor's office to leave my passport application with for her to sign. (Oh yeah, WOOHOO, I get to go to Boston for work next month!) I get to the office and they informed me that she had called in sick, and may call in sick tomorrow, and is off on Sunday and Monday so I may not get it until Tuesday at the earliest. *Sigh. For those of you who haven't heard, I need a passport to fly to the U.S. and everyone has realized the deadline at the same time and so there are massive lineups and delays already.

Anyways, after picking up some schnitzel for dinner at the deli across from the doctor's office, waiting in the freezing cold again (I swear I thought I had frostbite and I was so cold and angry at winter that I thought I would cry) I finally made it home at 4:30 only to realize I had no buns for the schnitzel. I didn't want to go out again in the cold (in fact, I promised myself I wouldn't leave the house until spring) so we had to order in. Tomorrow is grocery shopping day obviously.

Anyways...enough rambling... I'm declaring a full out I Hate Winter campaign. Who's with me?

Good news today:

Top court rules against security certificates

Eco Lingerie! Organic Cotton!

2007-02-20T21:07:00.000-05:00

Why organic?

How exciting! Eco lingerie, panties and bras made from organic cotton and bamboo!

La Senza

I'm sooooo going to buy the zen baby outfit when I have my first baby!

Sage Creek (Canadian!)

Green bling!

Green jeans!

And, as always, the Great Jon Stewart and friends.

Officially the weirdest bus moment I can remember

2007-02-18T12:37:00.000-05:00

From a few weeks ago -- forgot to post it!

7:30 a.m. South Keys station.

I enter the shelter at my bus stop and there is a guy at the far end. I stay near my door just simply because I was checking to see if my bus was coming. The guy at the other end YELLS something really loudly, which was very difficult to understand because he yelled so loud and there was only the two of us in the shelter so it was all echo-y. I think he yelled something about how he could see his breath because it was so cold. I nodded and turned back frantically hoping my bus was pulling up. He yells some more and I turn and just kind of reply "yeah".

Another person enters the shelter *thank goodness!* and Mr. Yell-Everything says "Oh, I should not yell anymore because he'll think I'm weird. I'll come stand next to you." Yeah, ok buddy. He then goes on to tell me all about how he got up at 5 a.m. and went to some job place that couldn't hire him because of his age.

"How old do you think I am?"
Me, not wanting to be insulting because he's acting like a five-year-old with Tourettes, "Umm…22?"
Mr. Yell-Everything: "Nope! 18 and three-quarters."

Who counts their age like that past the age of nine? Anyways, a few minutes later his bus comes, thank goodness again, because I was ready to get on the next bus regardless of whether it would take me in the direction of work or not.

He says "It was nice to meet you," and shakes my hand. I wish him good luck in his job search and he then kisses my hand and says "you won't forget me anytime soon now will you?", smirks, and heads off to the bus.

Oh, my. Weird. He didn't look strange or like he was on drugs. He just seemed very chatty and off. Harmless guy I suppose. Still, it was a very odd way to start my Monday morning!

A Few Good Expenses

2007-02-18T12:30:00.000-05:00

A funny parody of A Few Good Men, turned into something for finance and management and the items found on expense reports.

Exxon linked to climate change pay out

2007-02-18T12:25:00.000-05:00

I know this is old news, but in case you missed it...

From my friend Jason:

All this from the company who earned 37.4 Billion in profit last year. That's 4 Million dollars in PROFIT PER DAY. And now they are paying scientists 10,000 to debunk global warming. Warms the cockles of the heart doesn't it....

Exxon linked to climate change pay out

Think tank offers scientists $10,000 to criticize UN study confirming global warming and placing blame on humans.

Some more great Mark Fiore Animations

2007-02-18T12:05:00.000-05:00

Victory is...

Warming of Mass Destruction

The New Climate Almanac

2007-02-18T09:57:00.000-05:00

Sometimes humourous, sometimes just plain scary -- the 2007 Globe and Mail's New Climate Almanac.

Celebration x2

2007-02-17T23:04:00.000-05:00

Last night a bunch of us went to the Social to celebrate Theo's new job - which he starts Monday. Actually, it was more of a celebration of him leaving his current one. :)

The dinner begins, the drinks continue...

We ended up having two reasons to celebrate however, as yesterday right before lunch I got word on my contract -- starting March 1 I begin a one-year, full-time contract (and more money!) This is pretty big -- it's my first full-time job since graduating last spring. Last February I began a six month, 15-hour a week "internship", then in September I began a six-month 25-hour a week "consulting" contract, and now I'm finally full-time! The consensus seems to be that folks are on contract for around two years before they are hired on permanently.

Late-night revelers...

I'm absolutely thrilled at having the opportunity to continue working with the team(s) that I do. My immediate PR team is fantastic -- everyone works so well together, and they are always encouraging me to learn more and do more. They don't mind stopping to show me the ropes or answer my questions.

Seline was a little cold so she decided to warm up by the candles...

I absolutely love where I work. Some of the extended teams I work with are great, and I'm starting to feel like I'm becoming part of the fabric there.

Mark and Bruce talking baseball probably...

It's amazing to think how much I've grown and learned in the past year! There was so much to learn, not only about the inner workings of PR, but of the business itself, of business in general and all the things that come with working in such a huge company.

Teresa and Marie-Andree...

I'm still trying to remember all the acronymns of tech products and business verticals etc...!

Meg-- soon to be a doctor!

Anyways -- back to the party. From 5 until 7:30 ish we had cocktails in the lounge area and there were a ton of people there. At one point I had left to go to the powder room and a family with young children came in and sat at a nearby table. Theo and a friend were talking about how it's a very expensive and chic restaurant to bring such young kids to. Theo, always wanting to be the devil's advocate, said he'd bring his kids there. So, Theo's friend jokes around with him saying something along the lines of "Oh, what are you trying to tell me?" hinting that Theo and I were expecting. Anyways, a few moments later when I came to sit down, Theo's friend jokingly says congratulations to me -- except I think he's talking about my contract -- so I replied something along the lines of "Oh, thanks! I'm so excited...I've been waiting a long time to find out..." Eventually, we realized that we weren't talking about the same thing...

More late-night revelers...

Oddly enough, earlier in the evening a former colleague of mine arrived and also said congratulations - another colleague didn't know of the contract (she only knew of Theo's job) and so she immediately assumed that that meant Theo and I were engaged!

Christine and Serge

My, my...by the end of the night I was engaged, pregnant, and my new nickname was April O'Neil. (Long story for another time.)

Theo has clearly had enough to drink...

Anyways....about 14 people stayed for dinner -- I had steak frites again -- delicious. Dessert was "chocolate" which was incredible! Highly recommend this restaurant for those who are in Ottawa!

The two celebrators -- Theo et moi!

V-Day

2007-02-14T21:46:00.000-05:00

V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop worldwide violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual slavery.

V-Day Ottawa
Worldwide Campaign Event
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
2 March 2007 - 8 PM
3 March 2007 - 8 PM
[See more details]

V-Day Carleton University
College Campaign Event : Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
2 March 2007 - 7 PM
3 March 2007 - 7 PM
[See more details]

V-Day University of Ottawa
College Campaign Event : University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
(dates to be announced)
[See more details]

Please note: The events listed here are those that have been approved by the V-Day Campaign directors. The event information that appears, however, is input and maintained by the individual event organizer.

V-Day College Campaign events are independently organized by students and listings on V-Day's web-site do not imply the endorsement or official sanction of any institution.

What's Your Superhero Name?

2007-02-14T21:41:00.001-05:00

Your Superhero Profile

Your Superhero Name is The Azure Tiger
Your Superpower is Willpower
Your Weakness is Reruns of the Cosby Show
Your Weapon is Your Flame Gel
Your Mode of Transportation is Snowboard

What's your Superhero Name?

What's Your Irish Name?

2007-02-14T21:40:00.000-05:00

Your Irish Name Is...

Aislin O'Sullivan

What's your Irish Name?

What's Your Pirate Name?

2007-02-14T21:39:00.001-05:00

Your Pirate Name Is...

Iron Ivy the Infected

What's Your Pirate Name?

What Type Of Blogger Are You?

2007-02-14T21:38:00.001-05:00

You Are a Life Blogger!

Your blog is the story of your life - a living diary.
If it happens, you blog it. And make it as entertaining as possible.

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

How Leo Are You?

2007-02-14T21:35:00.000-05:00

You are 93% Leo

How Leo Are You?

What's Your Personality Cluster?

2007-02-14T21:34:00.001-05:00

Your Personality Cluster is Extraverted Intuition

You are:

A true wordsmith - a master of words
Original, spontaneous, and a true inspiration
Highly energetic, up for any challenge
Entertaining and engaging, both to friends and strangers

What's Your Personality Cluster?

What's Your Inner Talent?

2007-02-14T21:28:00.000-05:00

Your Hidden Talent

Your natural talent is interpersonal relations and dealing with people.
You communicate well and are able to bring disparate groups together.
Your calming presence helps everything go more smoothly.
People crave your praise and complements.

What's Your Hidden Talent?

What's Your Inner Child?

2007-02-14T21:27:00.000-05:00

Your Inner Child Is Surprised

You see many things through the eyes of a child.
Meaning, you're rarely cynical or jaded.
You cherish all of the details in life.
Easily fascinated, you enjoy experiencing new things.

How Is Your Inner Child?

What Year Were You Born Under?

2007-02-14T21:26:00.000-05:00

You Were Born Under:

No worries, you're not really pig-like in your personality.
(Though you have been known to have a healthy appetite!)
You are highly intelligent - forever studying and gaining knowledge.
You have a heart of gold and you are appreciated by many.

You are most compatible with a Rabbit or Goat.

What Year Were You Born Under?

What Element Are You?

2007-02-14T21:17:00.000-05:00

Your Element Is Air

You dislike conflict, and you've been able to rise above the angst of the world.
And when things don't go your way, you know they'll blow over quickly.

Easygoing, you tend to find joy from the simple things in life.
You roll with the punches, and as a result, your life is light and cheerful.

You find it easy to adapt to most situations, and you're an open person.
With you, what you see is what you get... and people love that!

What's Your Element?

Save Darfur

2007-02-14T18:47:00.000-05:00

From the good people at SaveDarfur.org:

Infamous Sudanese President Bashir has just thumbed his nose at yet another U.S. deadline to cooperate with efforts to end the Darfur genocide.

The time for talk is over, it's time to act.

The Bush administration has already developed "Plan B," a multi-tiered plan to push Sudan to end the genocide, but they keep delaying its launch. Adding to the frustration, despite the continuing mass-displacement and attacks, Special Envoy Andrew Natsios claimed last week that genocide is no longer occurring in Darfur.

Please join us in contacting President Bush right now to urge him to launch "Plan B" without further delays, before more lives are lost.

Click below to send your letter to President Bush now.
http://action.savedarfur.org/dia/organizationsORG/darfur/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=6716

Then please forward this message to your friends and family and ask them to join you.

If you'd like to make a donation to support the campaign, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org/Donate

Thanks for your help.

David Rubenstein
Save Darfur Coalition
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Donate to Help Save Darfur
Help build the political pressure needed to end the crisis in Darfur by supporting the Save Darfur Coalition's crucial awareness and advocacy programs. Click here now to make a secure, tax-deductible online donation: http://www.SaveDarfur.org/donate

Who's Funding Global Warming?

2007-02-12T19:26:00.000-05:00

Excellent article.

Are you more Calvin or Hobbes?

2007-02-10T22:43:00.000-05:00

Mostly Calvin

You are 80% Calvin and 20% Hobbes

Your inner Calvin often prevails, but, as in the image below, you have a significant Hobbesian component. I'm going to try to stretch the visual metaphor here: you have a good head on your shoulders, but when you don't use it, your crazy body gets you in trouble? Does that work? Odds are you're impulsive and imaginative, but it's possible you've collected just enough wisdom to hold your most anti-social urges in check. Most of the time. It's a precarious balance, like a boy on one foot with a tiger head.

This test tracked 2 variables. How the score compared to the other people's:

http://is1.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif">

Higher than 94% on calvin

http://is1.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif">

Higher than 0% on hobbes

Link: The Calvin Or Hobbes Test written by gwendolynbooks on Ok Cupid

[86]

2007-02-10T14:58:00.000-05:00

Listening to: Love Ain't Free by Panic and the Rebel Emergency

I am writing this post from our new laptop! I'm totally in love with it! It's pretty looking, and very nice to use. And the spacebar works much better than the old one! The screen is big and has amazing clarity and picture (much like our beautiful big screen tv!) And its lighter than the last one we had too. It's really cool because it works with our Xbox360 and has this incredible media centre.

:)

Lots of new things lately, but I won't write it all here. Theo got a new job which he is insanely excited about (so am I) and we're going out to celebrate with friends next Friday at Social.

I am still waiting to hear about my new contract, and my mom calls me daily to see if there's any news, even though I said I would call her the second I find anything out.

We're saving to buy a house next summer, which is very exciting!

We missed each other for dinner every night this week. (Meetings, dinners with work colleagues, class, more meetings.) And tonight we're going out for dinner with Steve and Veronica - but at least we're together!

I have a lot of interesting articles to post - but here are just a few for now:
From Mother Jones:

If Chris Rock Says It, It's Funny; If Sarah Silverman Says It, It's Tasteless

Largest Student Protest of Global Warming Yet

And from Environmental Defense:

Global Warming Myths and Facts

The 2007 Global Warming Globie Awards

That's all for now friends, until next time!

You're Gone, You're Gone, You're Gone Away

2007-01-30T15:30:00.000-05:00

Well, she didn't get three months to say goodbye to her mom. Four days after being diagnosed with cancer my friend's mom passed away...

I've been listening to Something Corporate a lot lately...

It's a long song, but it's very much worth it: Konstantine

Another friend and I spent Saturday afternoon taking her grocery shopping, as she hadn't been in weeks. Between work, school and visits to the hospital there just wasn't time.

Time.

My how it changes it's mind.

After grocery shopping and stocking up the fridge we went through clothes we had brought for her to choose something to wear to the funeral.

Twenty-three-year-olds are not supposed to be spending their Saturday nights like that. Though I was glad to be able to do something. Anything.

It's quite a feeling of helplessness knowing that there's nothing you can say or do to calm the tide of anger, sadness, pity, that was tearing at her inside.

Her brother's six-month-old baby girl seems to be the thing that is holding everyone together in one piece (peace?). This tiny, innocent, obliviously ignorant wonder cooing and laughing was bringing smiles and warmth to everyone in that house.

The same thing yesterday. A bunch of us were all sitting around the funeral parlour, choking back tears and grief, and this little baby was laughing and making us see there is still something bright in this world.

"Did you know I miss you? Did you know I miss you? I'll always miss you."

MBNA/Bank of America's new version of One

2007-01-28T11:32:00.000-05:00

This is so sad...

Angry computer user

2007-01-28T10:22:00.001-05:00

Heehee...do you ever feel like this?

Angry computer user

85

2007-01-27T10:39:00.000-05:00

Sometimes there are good articles on Sympatico -- Activism Made Easy

Stealing Happy Hours

How time flies!

From 0 - 10 in 125 Days

Profile

Stolen: pt.2

Stolen: Words that Matter

V-Day in the Capital - April 25th!

Excuses, excuses...Now act!

In loving memory of...

For Love of Water

The Myth of Water Abundance in Canada

On Packing

On Leaving

When you're bored

Banksy

Banana Bread

Why we should NOT pass Bill C-10 in Canada

Grain Farmer Claims Moral Victory in Seed Battle Against Monsanto

On The Fire

Terminator Seeds

Article: GM Crop Trial Locations May be Hidden from Public

Brain Purge

Recommendation: Empire Builders - Third Wall/GCTC

Ten Myths about the Canadian Healthcare System

Election Fun

Green Giant

Good News and Bad News from Starbucks

Roll Up Your Sleeves, America!

Environ-mental

Guess who's back?

Connect

Steveo's new blog: Selective Focus

Stop Your Junk Mail

The Facebook generation: Changing the meaning of privacy

Bilingual babies keep ability to discern languages from visual cues

Are cellphones and the internet rewiring our brains?

In Depth

Technology

May 21, 2007

By Sabrina Saccoccio, CBC News

Is that a cellphone in your pocket?

Devices as vices

Don't ditch the Playstation quite yet

The Simpsons get Fox News

Hillary vs. Obama

Going With The Flow: The Most Expensive Liquids

Last Updated May 14, 2007

1. Perfume

2. Printer ink

3. Champagne

4. Nasal spray

5. Blood

6. Water

7. Maple Syrup

8. Soda pop

9. Gasoline

10. Liquid nitrogen

Challenging Authority

HEATHER MALLICK

Joiners are rarely thinkers

May 21, 2007

Extreme decency

Dodge the lingo

Born to be Word

This Week

I'm moving to Venezuela

The Immortals

An Open Letter to Paris Hilton from Skip Church

Heather Mallick: Resigned to Stay

HEATHER MALLICK

Resigned to stay

Whither the principle of ministerial responsibility?

May 7, 2007

BF lie skewers BP chief

Path of most resistance

It's godly at the top

Calcium deficient?

This Week

I’ll reap when I’m dead

Pop culture’s biggest posthumous successes