This Magazine articles from July 2006

This Magazine archives from July 2006

Flu fool.(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... In Anurita Bains' article "Invisible threat" (January/February) she compares the epidemic of HIV/AIDS with the potential pandemic of [H.sub.5][N.sub.1], or avian flu. Her comparison of the two is like comparing apples and oranges. With the...

Tax attack.(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... Ellen Russell's very good, if unfortunately short article in the May/June issue ("Comrade Harper's one-percent solution") energized me to take pen to paper. I wish Russell could have taken more space to debunk further Harper's "friendliness"...

Original thoughts on plagiarizing.(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... Not a lot of thanks to John Sobol for that piece on cut-and-paste ("The copyright wars of 2017," May/June). I mean, he did get me thinking again about why students plagiarize. But too glib, too glib. It's as though he were himself affected by a...

A matter of trusts.(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... I can't believe how uninformed Ellen Russell ("Trustworthy?" January/February) is. It hurts your magazine's credibility to print someone who obviously has no idea what she is talking about. She claims that income trusts serve no economic...

Enemy agent.(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... I want to thank This Magazine for publishing the story on Agent Orange ("Collateral damage," March/April). I am an ex-Royal Canadian Dragoon and completed all my basic training and tank training at Base Gagetown; I was unlucky enough to have...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
July 1, 2006... In our profile of Pedlar Press (May/June) we managed to misspell the names of Fiona Smyth and Antonella Brion and mistakenly award the City of Toronto Book Award to Wild Mouse. It was Mouthing The Words that received the honour. Our apologies...

Fighting fire with fire.(crime and punishment under Stephen Harper)
July 1, 2006... "So, is this still your dream job?" Lisa Whittington-Hill, our publisher, teases me as I have my 90th freak out of the production cycle, my first as editor. "Of course!" I exclaim, heading back to my corner of our communal office to put out the...

Behind the bedsheets: hotel workers fight for fair conditions.(room attendants)
July 1, 2006... KAREN DUBLIN IS TIRED OF BEING INVISIBLE. For the past 13 years she has worked as a room attendant at the Sheraton Centre hotel in Toronto making beds, cleaning washrooms, changing sheets, vacuuming and taking out garbage. She cleans 15 rooms...

Progressive detective investigating the politics behind everyday things.(using diethyltoluamide)
July 1, 2006... Q I don't want to get West Nile Virus this summer, but I'm worried the DEET-based bug spray you are supposed to use will get me even if the virus doesn't. What can I do? A The caution label on a can of bug spray containing DEET is enough...

Eco blogs go global.(treehugger.com and worldchanging.com)
July 1, 2006... Environmentally conscious bloggers might act locally but they definitely blog globally, and as a result the best eco-blogs are clearinghouses for green ideas from all over the world. Two of the best are treehugger.com and worldchanging.com....

Book marked! School boards turn down the volume on risky reads.
July 1, 2006... Having travelled to Israel and the Occupied Territories and spoken to children there, author Deborah Ellis recently told the Toronto Star, "If children are tough enough to be bombed and starved, then they are also tough enough to read about...

Harper index.(Stephen Harper)(Chronology)
July 1, 2006... From covert cabinet meetings to environmental neglect, in the months since his election, Stephen Harper has been acting more like a commander-in-chief than head of a fragile minority government. Harper Index will watch the Tory regime as it...

Counting backwards.(homeless peoples being counted)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Armed with 10-question surveys and $5 fast-food vouchers, about 400 workers and 750 volunteers fanned out across Toronto in April to count and survey the homeless. Canada's largest city is the latest to get in on the dubiously useful national...

Farewell to Nova Scotia? Here's your bill.(John F. Hamm asks university students to repay the government)
July 1, 2006... Fresh from stepping down as Nova Scotia's premier, John F. Hamm still managed to grab attention with a recent foot-down-throat statement implying that students attending university in the province who leave after graduation should be made to...

The cost of one hand clapping.(applausing is being stopped at Canada's Parliament)
July 1, 2006... Have you ever tuned into CPAC for Question Period and found yourself lulled into a trance by the sounds of self-congratulatory applause of our Parliamentarians? Professional soccer players are no longer allowed to remove their shirts after...

CPP Co. Ltd.: is Stephen Harper plotting to privatize the Canada Pension Plan?(Editorial)
July 1, 2006... ARE LITTLE GREEN MEN CONTROLLING THE finance minister? We were starting to wonder when we learned that the Conservatives want to contribute future budget surpluses to the Canada Pension Plan. Why on earth would they do such a thing? A...

All you, all the time: You Tube's content may be lousy video, but it's great anthropology.(www.youtube.com)
July 1, 2006... PROFESSING TO EMPOWER THE BROADCASTERS OF TOMORROW today, You Tube (www.youtube.com) is a website for posting and sharing original videos. Its definition of "originality" is clearly open to interpretation, as the site has quickly become a tool...

You just made that up! My incredibly short career as a guest on The Michael Coren Show.(Scott Piatkowski in Crossroads Television System)
July 1, 2006... Appearing on The Michael Coren Show is not something I ever expected to do. After all, while Coren is surprisingly progressive on economic issues, the British-born writer and broadcaster is best known for diatribes against abortion and same-sex...

Green inside the box: what condo developers are learning from environmentalists.
July 1, 2006... In most of Canada's cities condominium towers are going up at a dizzying rate--and for the most part, little creativity goes into the cookie-cutter designs. (As Pete Seeger sang, "they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the...

Barring disaster: are tough-on-crime tories paving the way for private prisons?
July 1, 2006... Prime Minister Stephen Harper has apparently earned himself a new nickname on Parliament Hill: people have taken to calling him "Shrub," as in "small Bush." A bit of an eye-roller perhaps, but accurate. From questioning Canada's commitment to...

Canadiana gigantica, genus roadside.(big things on the roadside)
July 1, 2006... Drive along any major Canadian highway for several hundred kilometres this summer--be it on your way to the cottage or as part of a rite-of-passage cross-country road trip--and you'll inevitably come across something unexpected at the side of...

Legal challenges: the real reasons few law students are ruling in favour of activism.
July 1, 2006... When the Federal Court of Appeal struck down a challenge last November that would have seen a massive power plant built in Sumas, Washington, residents of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia were jubilant. The proposed Sumas Energy 2 Generation...

There's Been a Terrible Mistake.(Poem)
July 1, 2006... There's Been a Terrible Mistake Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the applause and everything you've done: the mini-golf coupons, the hooker you sent to my room last night, those kind letters to my mother, ...

Looks like an apple.(Short story)
July 1, 2006... The fourth time they have sex, Sam has an orgasm. Phew, she thinks. And her lips are more sure when she kisses Alan goodbye. Sidewalk puddles give back wobbly pieces of her green coat. At the streetcar stop a man holds out a loonie towards...

Q + A.(Susan Kernohan views )(Interview)
July 1, 2006... Susan Kernohan grew up in Sarnia and has lived in Thunder Bay, Guelph, London and Montreal. She now lives in Toronto, works as a teen services librarian and reads a ton of manga. Her stories have appeared most recently in sub Terrain, The New...

Natural selections: composer R. Murray Schafer enchants the forest.(Raymond Murray Schafer)
July 1, 2006... LATE ON A SUMMER'S EVE, EARTH Mother floats on a candlelit lake, birds and animals talk, and the forest buzzes with fairies. As the sun sets, a majestic white stag meets its death and an evil wizard, bent on razing the forest for timber...

No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, by Tom Slee (Between the Lines) In our free society, even socially and economically progressive outlooks buy into the notion of personal consumer choice....

Greener Than Eden.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... Greener Than Eden, by Michael Kohn (Cormorant Books) Blackflies. Tedium. Remote locations. Tree-planting might not appeal as a summer job, but it proves a fertile subject for Michael Kohn, who's harvested a quintessentially Canadian...

Anatomy of Keys.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2006... Anatomy of Keys, by Steven Price (Brick Books) In his remarkably ambitious first book of poetry, Steven Price depicts the life of Harry Houdini, revelling in the metaphorical richness of the escape artist's vocation. The poems reflect upon...

The dangers of playing it safe: how kindness is killing Canadian political theatre.
July 1, 2006... "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."--Bill Cosby THERE'S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO KILL a playwright. Tomson Highway, for instance, has been smothered into silence by a pillow disguised as...

The Land, See and Hear.(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... The Land, See and Hear (Independent) Since 1997, Winnipeg's Judith Klassen and Simon Neufeld have toured across Canada and parts of Mexico, bringing The Land's acoustic sound to small audiences in bars, schools, festivals and church...

Shapes and Sizes, Shapes and Sizes.(Sound recording review)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Shapes and Sizes, Shapes and Sizes (Asthmatic Kitty) "Girl, you shouldn't have watched him drown, the way his hands waved without a sound," sings Rory Seydel on the closing track on Shapes and Sizes' self-titled debut. Similarly sinister...

Amy Millan, Honey from the Tombs.(Sound recording review)
July 1, 2006... Amy Millan, Honey From the Tombs (Arts & Crafts) The title of Amy Millan's first solo album was inspired by the ancient Egyptian tradition of burying the dead with honey because it never spoils; though the bodies are underground for...

Live poets' society: writers take their rhymes on the road.
July 1, 2006... "What's it take to get a little notice when you're a Canadian poet?" asks Vancouver's Michael V. Smith on his website. Faced with low sales, threats to government funding and a lack of interest even among the fiercest supporters of CanLit,...

Much ado about nothing.
July 1, 2006... THIS SPRING, TEXT-MESSAGING TEENAGERS ACROSS Canada helped MuchMusic, that venerable institution of Canadian popular culture, select 23-year-old metrosexual Tim Deegan of Kitchener, Ontario, as its newest video jockey. Conducted for the first...