This Magazine articles from November 2000

This Magazine archives from November 2000

Quick, to the admobile! (Mobile billboards).
November 1, 2000... IF YOU'RE AN ADVERTISER, THERE IS NOTHING WORSE THAN spending thousands on an ad that over-saturated consumers won't even notice. What's a poor company to do? Ads on wheels to the rescue. Over the last few years, a new concept in outdoor...

Soft core logo: (Playboy bunny).
November 1, 2000... RIFLING THROUGH THE RACKS AT URBAN OUTFITTERS, I come across a T-shirt with a shiny "I Playboy" iron-on emblazoned on the front. It's one of those icons that's burned into my consciousness. I first remember seeing it on an episode of Laverne &...

Automatic bilking machines: (ATM surcharges).
November 1, 2000... HERE'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T SEE EVERY DAY: consumer advocates demanding increased corporate branding. In December 1999, Intria, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, installed its first 180 white-label "Ready Cash"...

Killer robots: (technologically advanced guns).
November 1, 2000... WHEN I WAS A KID, I WAS MOMENTARILY amused by the amazing "Extenda-arm," a plastic stick with a handle on one end and a set of pincers on the other. By squeezing the handle I could pince a roll of toilet paper on the floor and move it over to...

How to get your (political) party started.
November 1, 2000... IF YOU ARE ANTICIPATING YOUR NEXT TRIP TO the ballot box as eagerly as the January ice storms, you're not alone. The homogenization of party politics is leaving many Canadians cold. Across the country, small grassroots parties are springing...

Dumping eco-protection.
November 1, 2000... THE ADAMS MINE PROJECT SEEMS TO BE dead at last. In the end it wasn't the environmentalists, farmers, First Nations or average citizens that nixed the deal to fill the fractured, waterlogged mine pits with garbage. It's was the fine print in...

Matthew (Coon Come), Marshall and a moderate living: Canada's Supreme Court has ruled that native people have a right to make a `moderate living' from natural resources ...
November 1, 2000... AS MATTHEW COON COME ENTERS THE NEOSKWESKAU arena in Mistissini, Quebec, the 2,000 or more people gathered here--about two-thirds of this James Bay Cree community--are on their feet, clapping and cheering, shouting his name. One thing he does...

Are you ready for boom? Drop the boom-and-gloom, says Jim Stanford, it's time to milk our expanding economy for all it's worth ...
November 1, 2000... ACTIVISTS AND AGITATORS HAVE HAD A LONG-RUNNING argument about whether or not "worse is better." Are people more likely to get involved in a social change movement when times are tough? Or, on the other hand, is it when times are better, and...

Revenge of the chinky Chinaman.
November 1, 2000... Haro, you like flied lice? You like Fu Manchu? Yarrow fevah. A-okay. No undastand? So solly, me exprain. CHINKY CHINAMAN TALK WAS THE CAUSE OF DEATH BY EMBARRASSMENT FOR many of us Asian schoolkids. You had no defense against it. Like being...

Dragon ladies and little yellow men? The real history of ethnicity in Canada is more complex than the feel-good mosaic image perpetuated in high school history classes ...
November 1, 2000... 1885 Chinese migrant labour was first brought into Canada in the mid-19th century to perform the difficult tasks that European settlers shirked. In 1885, B.C. Supreme Court Justice John Hamilton Gray praised Chinese workers as "living machines"...

Hello Kittyism rears is pretty head.
November 1, 2000... I DIDN'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT ASIA, BUT ENDED UP DOING IT ANYWAY. I had read too many bad examples of the white-boy-in-Asia genre. Stories that made sweeping generalizations about a country they had spent a few months in. Stories that...

Inside outsider: (cartoonist Marc Ngui).
November 1, 2000... CULTURAL APPROPRIATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN a matter of course for me. I was born in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana in South America. My father was first generation Caribbean Chinese. His parents emigrated from a small village in China, by ship...

Big trouble in little China? Yellow peril paranoia is alive and well in America. China is frequently cast as the new evil empire - a threat to U.S. power in Asia and throughout the world ...
November 1, 2000... IN THE WAKE OF THE CHINESE HANDOVER OF HONG KONG AND THE 1997 APEC summit, I attended a talk by the Canadian ambassador to Beijing in an out of the way lecture hall at the University of Toronto's Trinity College. The event wasn't advertised; I...

Ill gotten gains: think health care for profit is a neo-con dream? It's already a reality ...
November 1, 2000... FOUR DAYS A WEEK, JAMES ROSE COMMUTES 50 MINUTES FROM Brantford, Ontario, to his job at Cambridge Ventratech where he operates a sheet metal press on a 10-hour shift. About a year and a half ago, he acquired a second full-time job as primary...

Incubator that eats its young: Internet incubator companies think early 20s entrepreneurs are their golden egg-laying geese. They're pouring millions of dollars into projects ...
November 1, 2000... MELANIE MARSHALL IS BUSY, DISTRACTED. NO WONDER. SHE has six months to launch the first website she's ever built and the first business she's ever started. She's 25. ("In this business I'm old," she says.) And she's just been given the chance...

Little suitcase.
November 1, 2000... MY MOTHER'S YOUNGER BROTHER David came back from Romania. He came back with his hair all tangled at the ends in the shapes of hearts, the seat of his pants worn right out, and filled with wild stories about ladies named Rose and Amore. The room...

Hoserista: Captain Tractor.
November 1, 2000... MUSIC What if The Clash came to Canada instead of Nicaragua in 1979? Do you think they would have called their triple album Hoserista? Bless their stars they didn't because that's precisely the name of slop-rock country band CAPTAIN...

Misbehavin': us vs. them in Washington D.C.
November 1, 2000... ZINES Jonathan Culp is a Toronto-based video activist who decided to swap his camcorder for a pen during the anti-IMF and World Bank protests in Washington, D.C. this April. The result is issue #2 of his zine THE STUPID JOURNEY. It's...

(Meesoo Lee's three complition videos Hair fantasy & other delusions, Think and A Dream of Donuts).
November 1, 2000... FILM Meesoo Lee of Vancouver used to have too much time on his hands and not enough money. So earlier this year, he started shooting short art films on his 10-year-old VHS camcorder, and editing the footage between two VCRs. Lee now...

Suspects: a performance for the Police.
November 1, 2000... ART If the Vancouver Police department gets its way, the cameras in Hollywood North won't just be filming the latest cheesy movie-of-the-week. Last year, Lotusland's finest announced plans to install 22 surveillance cams around the...

Realia.
November 1, 2000... BOOKS One of the saddest effects of the exodus of young Canadians to teach English in Asian countries in the 1980s was not the loss of talented university grads, but rather the terribly pious pseudo-Zen writing they seemed compelled to...

Scents & sensibilities.
November 1, 2000... MY HIGH SCHOOL MEMORIES ARE DOUSED WITH THE SMELL OF Ralph Lauren's Polo, worn by the pubescent preppies who layered it on like their pink and green collar and buttoned-down shirts. Polo promised to pony its wearer into the horsey set. Like so...