This Magazine articles from May 1999

This Magazine archives from May 1999

Air farce (nine points not mentioned in Drive Clean ads).
May 1, 1999... This spring, the Ontario government, known for its shoddy environmental record, enthusiastically launched Drive Clean, the province's new vehicle emissions reducing program. (Enforcement of emissions tests started April 1 in Southern Ontario,...

Dead ringers (cell phones enslave workers).
May 1, 1999... I WAS 10 MINUTES INTO A PHONE CON-versation with a friend in Vancouver when he paused mid-sentence. "Can you hang on for a second?" he asked. "I have to tack." Tack? It turned out he was out for a sail in the middle of the Straight of...

Apocalypse wow: two magazines. Two very different plans for the millennial meltdown (Utne Reader, Wallpaper).
May 1, 1999... EARLIER THIS YEAR Utne Reader and Wallpaper* each weighed in with their tips for survival beyond 11:59 PM, December 31, 1999. Representing the most polarized sides of millennial hysterics-progressive, Luddite utopians versus end-of-world-weary...

Full Mountie (Peter Montague can't stay out of the news).
May 1, 1999... EVER SINCE THE IMAGE of British Columbia Premier Glen Clark pacing in his kitchen while RCMP searched his home was broadcast across the country, one of the lead investigators in BC's casino caper can't duck the limelight. But then, as Mountie...

Campaigns funded by us: story at 11 (Ontario media political donations go mainly to PCs).
May 1, 1999... IT'S SAID THAT MONEY IS THE OXYGEN of politics and that a free press is the oxygen of democracy. In Canada, the air supply seems to be getting thin; one look at the political donation records reveals a press that's a little too close to the...

Don't get a job, get a movement (squeegee kids raise funds for youth drop-in centre in Kitchener-Waterloo).
May 1, 1999... On a cool October day, a band of rag-tag youth equipped with squeegees and water pails descended en masse on the Oktoberfest extravaganza in Kitchener, Ontario. As the lederhosenclad did the polka, wolfed down pounds of sausage and guzzled...

No man's land (unofficial refugee camps in South Africa).
May 1, 1999... GARANKU'WA, SOUTH AFRICA THROUGH THE BARBED-wire fence, past the row of matchbox houses, across the train tracks and beyond the wild grass, there is a camp. Not the kind you'd associate with a Mountain Equipment Co-op store. Not the kind I...

Bill (Clinton) and Monica (Lewinsky) - and Harold (Innis): ... how gossip became news, then got to be a commodity like anything else.
May 1, 1999... THIS COLUMN IS ABOUT BILL AND Harold. "He's lost it," you're thinking. "He obviously means Bill and Hillary." Well, cast your eyes upwards to the top of this page, and remind yourself that Innis's first name was Harold, and that in his...

Doomsday profits: there are 600 billion reasons for the Y2K crisis.
May 1, 1999... ACCORDING TO THE MORE SERIOUS Y2K alarmists, T. S. Eliot had it all wrong. The world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper. The world, as we know it, ends at the onset of the year 2000 at the hands of a computer bug. What makes this...

Dr. Strangway: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the market (plans to open private, for-profit university in B.C.).
May 1, 1999... In 1989, a development consortium approached the village of Queensville, Ontario (population 700) with a proposal to convert it into a burgeoning community of 30,000. Central to the expansion was the construction of a private, non-profit...

Who's afraid of the big bad banks? Not today's credit unions.
May 1, 1999... "GET HUMUNGOUS." THAT'S THE MESSAGE FROM Humungous Bank, creator of the Humungous Canadian Inequity Fund, and an institution that promises, "We listen to our customers-even you." Because at Humungous Bank, "your money is our money." So...

At play in the fields of the savage god: the art of suicide in popular culture.
May 1, 1999... On February 14, 1994, Moira Farr learned that her lover, poet Daniel Jones, had killed himself. As she struggled with her grief, a more public suicide rocked the outside world--it was the year grunge-rock icon Kurt Cobain killed himself. The...

Money to burn (petroleum companies embrace carbon emissions trading system).
May 1, 1999... Oil companies used to simply deny the problem of climate change. Then they figured out there were big bucks to be made from the solution. Craig Saunders investigates the emerging proposal that could send oil profits through the roof--and still...

Want.
May 1, 1999... YOU LIAR, YOU TOLD ME YOU HAD IT. YOU PROMISED ME WITH YOUR hand between my legs slowly circling that you would give it to me. Said if I only withheld nothing from you, it would be mine. These are the ways you made me believe you: the...

Mexican: The Fell Gang.
May 1, 1999... Take a young violin prodigy from the former Soviet Union, plop him down in Calgary and force-feed him a steady diet of AM radio and K-Tel records. Add a dash of the Beatles and Brian Wilson, and you get an idea of the musical vision behind...

Plight of happy people in an ordinary world.
May 1, 1999... Ever since I put it down, the title of Montreal-born Natalee Caple's first novel, THE PLIGHT OF HAPPY PEOPLE IN AN ORDINARY WORLD (House of Anansi), has been ringing around in my head, bouncing off the corners of my mind like a lunatic pinball....

Zines (Minute:thirty critiques television news).
May 1, 1999... Concision is the intellectual straitjacket that ensures very little grey (or grey matter) seeps into the black-and-white swathes of broadcast news. It's the sort of thing that drives lentil-eating leftists crazy. Thankfully, CityPulse news...

Art (Pharmacopoeia exhibit).
May 1, 1999... When I was in my third year of university, a harsh Montreal winter, an ugly breakup and a Discourse and Textuality class drove me to the verge of a nervous breakdown. I went to a university-provided psychiatrist, who listened to my story for...

See no evil (Health Protection Branch of Health Canada promises of openness are suspect).
May 1, 1999... Bad blood, leaky implants, Bovine Growth Hormone scandals: it can't be fun to be the Health Protection Branch (HPB) of Health Canada these days. In the wake of these crises, the department responsible for food and drug regulations is giving...