This Magazine articles from March 2002

This Magazine archives from March 2002

I don't swim in your toilet - or do I.
March 1, 2002... YOU PROBABLY DON'T GIVE MUCH THOUGHT TO WHAT YOU FLUSH, BUT you should. In cities across Canada, sewage--a nasty mix of more than 200 chemicals, bacteria, viruses and parasites--is released raw, or with minimal treatment. The cities below...

Road warriors (SUV's).
March 1, 2002... FOR THOUSANDS OF NORTH AMERICANS, THE world changed forever on September 11. I'm talking, of course, about the dawning realization that international crises can lead to cool new shopping experiences. Corporate marketing gurus are no...

Brokers are revolting.
March 1, 2002... HERE'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T SEE EVERY DAY: STOCKBROKERS NOT just supporting collective bargaining, but engaging in it. The National Post recently reported that a group of six investment advisors at TD Evergreen, the Toronto-Dominion Bank's full...

Technology is so gay.
March 1, 2002... IF YOU BELIEVE THE NEOLIBERAL PUNDITS, techno innovation--and the economic growth that comes with it--is about three things: tax cuts, tax cuts and tax cuts. But a new study by Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon University suggests that these...

Counting the days.
March 1, 2002... THE FRASER INSTITUTE SURE KNOWS HOW TO rile folks up, especially at tax time. In addition to the many enlightening treatises on their website, there's a clever little applet you can use to calculate your "Tax Freedom Day," the day you've earned...

How to fund your first feature.
March 1, 2002... YOU'VE GOT TO START SOMEWHERE. BEFORE Atom Egoyan became the Canadian ambassador of cinema, he was out there in his backyard too, making edgy little shorts starring friends and family. If you spend your nights dreaming of four-star reviews,...

Spinning vinyl.
March 1, 2002... ENVIRONMENTALISTS LOVE SPRING--IT'S annual report Season. PR spin blooming from seeds planted by corporate polluters in the previous year herald the new quarter. The fiction is worth a thousand Gillers. The Vinyl Council of Canada's (VCC)...

Terminal City lives up to its name: when bad things happen to good alt-weeklies.
March 1, 2002... IT LASTED FOR JUST SIX SWEET MONTHS. WE barely had time to note its presence, before it was gone again. From July to December of last year, Vancouver upstart Terminal City kept it together, spewing opinionated gonzo reportage all over the...

My day in the market: our intrepid economist Jim Stanford takes a whirlwind tour of the free market and encounters the creativity of untold entrepreneurs ...
March 1, 2002... CONSERVATIVES HAVE OF LATE TAKEN TO gloating over the apparent triumph of the market, and hectoring lefties to stop whining and jump on the bandwagon. The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson, for example, thinks the road to electoral success for...

Streets of Iqaluit: a the edge of the Arctic Circle, local Inuit line up at a soup kitchen for their next meal ...
March 1, 2002... Inusiq Shoo has been wandering the streets for months. He passes his days traversing Iqaluit's small downtown core, from the Arctic College cafeteria to the local hunter's lodge and several indoor shopping centres scattered across the former...

Luck be a lady: charity gambling used to mean blue-rinsed grannies ... not anymore ... are a huge source of revenue for charities and public institutions ...
March 1, 2002... FRIDAY NIGHT IN MY HOMETOWN IN NORTHERN Ontario usually means one of two things: Doing donuts in the parking lot of the A&P, or taking in the musical talents of our many gifted Tragically Hip cover bands. I was scanning my North Bay Nugget,...

It's the carcinogens, stupid: although cancer survival rates are getting better all the time ... a growing number of researchers say that we could save more lives if we started looking at the toxic chemicals ...
March 1, 2002... Flipping through one of many magazines piled up around my desk, I come across an ad for the Canadian Cancer Society. The new campaign features a sweet-looking uber-grandma. "Jemima Prout wants to sink her first hole in one, turn her green thumb...

Dissent should be tax-deductible: Canadian charities are governed by an archaic, 400-year-old law that prevents them from really playing politics ...
March 1, 2002... "CANADIANS ARE MILDEWED WITH CAUTION." THUS SPAKE MARSHALL McLuhan, back in 1967, and as the guru's sayings go, this one was pretty uncontroversial. Then, in 1980, the American sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg wrote his cheeky analysis of...

Azalea.
March 1, 2002... THE DOORBELL RINGS AND BETHANY LETS HERSELF in. She's wearing a red blazer and navy skirt. Coming from early morning mass. Leaves fly in behind her; scrabbling sideways across the linoleum. Trigger leaps off the kitchen chair and shoots...

Lisa Moore opens up.
March 1, 2002... REMOVE MOST OF THE VERBS FROM AN Alice Munro story then put it through your Cuisinart--the result should look like a Lisa Moore story: sharp, sparkling, sensual. Lisa was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, and studied painting and art...

(Edmonton artist Tony Baker).
March 1, 2002... NOW AND THEN I BET YOU WATCH Sesame Street. I know your type. Remember those little vignettes of multi-ethnic tots all clamouring around big sheets of paper, just going ape with paints and crayons, effortlessly making a beautiful mess of...

Dig.
March 1, 2002... Think literary journals like The Whispering Prairie Gopher are a mite stodgy? Find poetry irritating, confusing and/or opaque? Allow DIG to assuage your prose-related concerns. Since 1997, editor Jennifer LoveGrove has combined snazzy...

Great School Crisis.
March 1, 2002... Teachers' strikes, school closures. standardized testing and slashed budgets aren't exactly the stuff that jokes are made of--unless you're TED JOHNS. The Toronto playwright and comedian has managed to turn the sorry state of Ontario's public...

Wrecks of eden.
March 1, 2002... Catherine Owen's THE WRECKS OF EDEN (Wolsak and Wynn) might be more appropriate for Earth Day. Taking her cue from the fall from Eden, Owen's poems focus on species extinction and environmental devastation. A legitimate subject, but the...

Instruments of surrender.
March 1, 2002... Christine Wiesenthal's INSTRUMENTS OF SURRENDER (BuschekBooks) is a laudable--and very Canadian--first collection, full of imagery of nature, winter, stoic Westerners and housework. The final section, "Vaterland," is the only downside--poetry...

Ogress oblige.
March 1, 2002... The best thing about Dorothy Trujillo Lusk's OGRESS OBLIGE (Arsenal Pulp) is the title. The poems are free-form free-fall, with lots of word-play and random images. But what the poems lack in cohesion, they make up for in energy and humour.

Tulpa.
March 1, 2002... Louise Bak's TULPA (Coach House) is similar in style, but more intensely academic and purposefully political. If you liked Bak's last collection, Gingko Kitchen, you'll like this. If you expected to see the author evolve since then, well......

Raising eyebrows.
March 1, 2002... Cheerfully, cheekily mortal, Gary Barwin's RAISING EYEBROWS (Coach House) is the best of the bunch. Odd, evocative images are strung together unpredictably by narrative. Inventive, fast and unpretentious, Barwin's poems are filled with dreamy...

Charity cases.
March 1, 2002... CHARITY TENDS TO COME IN BOX FORM. IT'S EASY TO SEE THE appeal; it's neat, aesthetically pleasing, physical. It goes like this: you take your old clothes and you stick them in the box marked Planet Aid, or Goodwill, or Salvation Army (God...