Edited by author 06-09-2004 06:39 PM
Captain America is Dead! Long Live Captain America!
It's good to hear some dissenting voices in all the Reaganmania white noise.


He should have died alone--a long, long time ago. But oh, no, not him: outliving his century by four years, his presidency by 16, and his own mind by a decade, Hollywood legend Ronald Reagan was 93 when he went to rejoin his makers--Thomas Jefferson, Louis B. Mayer, Lew Wasserman, and Barry Goldwater, in that order--on Saturday. A noted fantasist, Reagan is perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States. To the old trouper's delight, this was a delusion shared by most of his compatriots, which is why his imaginary nation still subsumes ours to this day.


And don't forget to check out the Zombie Reagan website:


The Constitution offers no specific prohibition against zombies serving their country. In fact, the majority of the Administration is already composed of the undead. It is a little known fact that Secretary of State Colin Powell is the only cabinet-level member that still has a beating heart.

Zombie Regan, however, cannot become President, because he has already served two terms in that office. If George W. Bush were to die during his second term (say, by being eaten by Zombie Reagan), three options exist: the Speaker of the House would be elevated to the Presidency, Congress would convene to elect a new President or the President would undergo the zombification process and complete his term.

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Espionage, Murder and... Vanilla?
Who knew vanilla had such a colourful history?


This is a robust foundation for a superstructure of globalised trade in a very valuable commodity. People die, people cheat, fortunes are made and lost, companies have interesting history: all this happens and Tim Ecott is there to tease out its meaning -- with a ready writing style, energetic research and wide reading. He needed energy and determination because dealing in vanilla seems much akin to international espionage and/or gun running. Quiet Americans in sharp suits wander the globe with infinite amounts of cash in hand striking deals with shadowy suppliers, middlemen and fixers. Their movements are kept secret, for fear of upsetting the price or attracting rivals intent on spoiling the bargain. Stocks are guarded in bombproof sheds by private armies of heavies (at $400 a kilo, a shedload means riches). And all this in a region of decidedly shaky politics.

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Googlewhacked

Some guys have all the luck.

"I'm the luckiest man alive," Gorman said last week, in Toronto en route to Montreal for his 16-gig performance at JFL. "I ended up with a best-selling book about my inability to write the book I was supposed to be writing."

I bleed envy - from self-inflicted wounds.



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The European Dream
I keep wishing aloud that Canada would leave NAFTA and join the EU. Can you blame me?


Europeans often remark that Americans "live to work," while Europeans "work to live." The average paid vacation time in Europe is now six weeks a year. By contrast, Americans, on average, receive only two weeks. Most Americans would also be shocked to learn that the average commute to work in Europe is less than 19 minutes. When one considers what makes a people great and what constitutes a better way of life, Europe is beginning to surpass America.

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But is it Art?
Umberto Eco ponders the aesthetics of the 20th century.


But when pop art took over and began to turn out provocative experimental works based on images from the worlds of commerce, industry and the mass media, and when the Beatles skilfully reworked certain traditional musical forms, the gap between the art of provocation and the art of consumption grew narrower. What's more, while it seems that there is still a gap between "cultivated" and "popular" art, in the climate of the so-called postmodern period, cultivated art offers new experimental work that goes beyond visual art and revivals of visual art at one and the same time, as the tradition is continually reassessed.

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Edited by author 10-03-2004 05:11 PM
Surely this doesn't include Halliburton
For those of you who haven't read The Corporation, which claims corporations exhibit the typical characteristics of psychopaths, the Guardian has an excerpt:


In the report, Ivey multiplied the 500 fuel-fed fire fatalities that occurred each year in GM vehicles by $200,000, his estimate of the cost to GM in legal damages for each potential fatality, and then divided that figure by 41m, the number of GM vehicles operating on US highways at the time. He concluded that each fuel-fed fatality cost GM $2.40 per automobile ... The cost to General Motors of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes, estimated by the company to be $8.59 per automobile, meant the company could save $6.19 ($8.59 minus $2.40) per automobile if it allowed people to die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid such fires.

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"You need pscyhos like us"
The New York Review of Books takes a look at two books -- Generation Kill and The Fall of Baghdad -- about Operation What Plan B? over in Iraq.

Those who carry out this killing will pay a terrible price. As the unit approaches Baghdad they become weary with the indiscriminate shooting of unarmed Iraqis, including families that drive too close to roadblocks. Wright notes that "...the enlisted Marines, tired of shooting unarmed civilians, fought to be allowed to use smoke grenades." Many of these young men will never sleep well for the rest of their lives. Most will harbor within themselves corrosive feelings of self-loathing and regret. They will struggle with an unbridgeable alienation when they return home, something Evans sees glimpses of in the final pages of the book.

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Great Canadian Speeches
Quick, quote a line from one! Can't do it? Then you'd best get this book.

But although the book has been called "a history of Canada from the podium," the speeches aren't all historically or politically motivated: Pierre's not the only Trudeau in the book, for instance: Justin's teary eulogy to his father, "Je t'aime, papa," makes it in, as does an entry from David Suzuki about the environment, as well as a speech by Stephen Lewis on the HIV pandemic in Africa.

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"What do you believe even though you cannot prove it?"
Edge.org posed this question to science writers such as Richard Dawkins. Great stuff.

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

If you like this feature, take a look around Edge. It's a pretty fascinating site for science nerds.

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C'mon, fight already!
Authors Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki debate the fine points of each other's books over at Slate.

Malcolm, I spent a lot of time trying to come up with an appropriately inventive way to start this unusual version of a "Book Club" (unusual because we wrote the books we're going to be talking about). I failed, so instead I'm just going to jump right in. (Requisite disclaimer: You and I are friends, you blurbed my book, and I think Blink is a terrific book. Now let's argue about it.)

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Our school is studying American wars. I teach American History on the Navajo Indian Reservation. We don't have many books on the subject and would appreciate any book or video contribution. I appreciate hearing from you.
Thank you for your help.

Mark L. Marquez
Navajo Nation Teacher
PO Box 413
Farmington, NM 87402

Size does matter
Relax, poets, I'm talking about nonfiction.

Today's publishers and authors tend to prefer it either enormous -- or tiny. At one extreme, historians and critics have taken to worshipping the god of small things. A cluster of current titles turn their literary microscopes on decisive crossroads and turning-points -- whether in Bob Dylan's release of "Like a Rolling Stone" (Greil Marcus), the hand-gun assassination of William the Silent (Lisa Jardine), or that epoch-shifting year, 1603 (Leanda de Lisle). At the other end of the scale, a variety of high-powered telescopes have offered panoramic overviews of whole galaxies of ideas and events.

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Edited by author 05-30-2005 10:45 AM
Lindbergh's dirty little secret

A dame in every port? Well, not exactly.

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I always wondered what non-fiction from Mark Leyner would look like

Apparently, it's exactly the kind of manual I need to properly run this site: Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini. Could someone buy this for me?


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The Chelsea Revolution
Canuck writer Timothy Taylor heads over to England for an in-depth article on soccer culture. I don't know what any of it means, but it's probably of interest to our more athletically minded readers. All two of you.

The hairs on the nape of my neck are standing up. A strange feeling sweeping through. Hyperreality: an experience inexplicable without reference to the television version known previously. Because I've heard football songs before. I've joined the Chelsea crowds many times via broadcast signals ghosted off satellites in geostationary orbit in the exosphere overhead. I've felt the connection. At least I thought I had until I entered this narrow surge channel passing from the West Stand up onto Fulham Road and encountered the passionate, on-the-ground reality of team devotion.

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Edited by author 09-23-2005 11:04 AM
Diet for God

Now you can read The DaVinci Code and lose weight at the same time; just don't be eating loaves and fishes.

Warner announced this week that the book, "The Diet Code: Revolutionary Weight-Loss Secrets from Da Vinci and The Golden Ratio," will be the first in its new line of books called Warner Wellness, which will focus on health, fitness, relationships and similar topics. The book is scheduled for release in April 2006, with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies.

The diet is based on the Golden Ratio or Phi, a mathematical value that was used to built the pyramids and has since been found to exist most everywhere in nature. Da Vinci is said to have used the Golden Ratio to proportion the human figures in his paintings -- which is how it found its way into Dan Brown's best-selling book.

A diet based on the fibonnacci sequence, hmm. It'll work like this: you eat dimishing amounts of food, gradually losing wieght. Now, how'd he spin a book outa that?

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