1) Canadians Love Pirate(d) Movies: American movies premiere in Canada on the same day they do in the US. Everyone else (you) has to wait. Then Americans have to wait aboot six to twelve months before they can see their favourite movie at home, while in Canada the DVD’s of those movies go on sale the day after the premiere. According to Twentieth Century Fox and the MPAA, Canada is responsible for 50% of the worlds movie piracy.
Considering the size of my brothers DVD collection, and the shit quality of the cover art, I’d almost have to agree with the 20th Fox people. I’ve walked through Chinatown in Toronto and found DVD’s of movie’s that haven’t even been in full release yet (6 DVD’s for $20). The sound and video quality of these pirated DVD’s sucks of course, because the movies are being filmed by kids hopped up on Red Bull and PopRocks using tiny-toy cameras that come in cereal boxes. But, then again, most of the actual Hollywood movies suck pretty huge regardless. Hollywood has been testing out new distribution methods over the past year, including at least one movie that was available for download, as well as on DVD the same day it was released in theatres.
As a result of the “Canadians are mass media pirates” thing there have been some vague threats aboot delaying releasing movies in Canada, so that we’d get them when Europe got them. Ouch. I’ll bet that’ll be enough of a deterrent to stop those underage kids and their cameras — that mom and dad bought them — from accepting hundreds of dollars to watch movies. Of course the MPAA are almost completely full of shit.
One of the worlds foremost experts on all things Internet and Technology, Michael Geist, debunked the MPAA “study” a long time ago. Canada does produce a lot of the worlds camcorder reproductions, but nowhere near the numbers produced by Hollywood. There have been instances in the past, notably the whole music downloading brouhaha, where American lawyers have taken random and wild swipes at Canada, only later to be debunked. There was also that whole “the 9-11 hijackers were from Canada” bullshit urban myth started and maintained by American Senators who, you’d think, would have at least one fucking clue to have made it that far in their careers.
2) Celebrating The Canadian Movie Community: The Canadian Movie Awards were held this week. At least that’s what Section B, Page Three, of the second largest Canadian National Newspaper says.
The National Post celebrated “The Genie Awards” by turning an entire two columns — eight inches each including headline and subhead — over to the event. The entire front page of the “Arts & Life” section was dedicated to a 2.5 star review of “Music and Lyrics”, a RomCom starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore.
The biggest “Genie” winner was “The Rocket”, a bio-picture aboot Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. Richard (ReeShard) was a hockey legend, and a French-Canadian hero (#9: Sainte Maurice). People I know who have seen the movie say it was aboot a 3 star thing… Richard had this insane Death Glare while playing, and from what I saw of the movie the actor did a reasonable job being Richard, but his death glare was just silly-laughable.
Way back in the day Richard literally attacked Boston Bruin Hal Laycoe with his hockey stick and got into a minor wrestling match with referee Cliff Thompson and was suspended for the playoffs. The NHL Commissioner then attended the next Montreal Canadiens game, which started a riot in the arena. The riot spread into downtown Montreal. There are a lot of people, myself included, who believe this riot was the official start of The Quebec Revolution, which saw French-Quebecers eventually become full citizens in Canada.
The “Best Motion Picture” Award went to “Bon Cop, Bad Cop”. This would be like giving the Academy Award to “Lethal Weapon.” BC-BC sucked donkey cock, but it made some cash for some people, and everything was in focus… it was also selected as the “Golden Reel Award Winner” which, I think, means the donkey got off.
3) Sundance & Canada: “Padre Nuestro”, a Canadian movie directed by Christopher Zalla aboot an illegal immigrant’s search for his father in America, won the Grand Jury Prize at The 2007 Sundance Film Festival for best drama. Tamara Podemski, a Canadian actor, won the Special Jury Prize for Acting for her role as an American Indian in “Four Sheets to the Wind”. Podemski, who starred in Bruce MacDonalds “Dance Me Outside“, has always been one of my favourite actors (she’s also a major hottie). She was one of the only reasons to watch “Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis”… Gary Farmer and Alex Rice were the other two. Most “Native American” roles in American movies are played by Natives From Canada. If you’re ever in New York City you can ask Adam Beachaboot it.
4) The Academy & Canadian Movies: Paul Haggis has been nominated for a 2007 Academy Award for his work on the screenplay for “Letters From Iwo Jima”. Haggis has won the ‘Best Screenplay’ award twice already for “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash”. The stunning movie, “Water”, directed by Deepa Mehta, is nominated in the Best Foreign Film category. “Water is set in 1930s India against Mahatma Gandhi’s rise to power, and describes the appalling treatment of Hindu widows.” Ryan Gosling was nominated for ‘Best Actor’ for his role in “Half Nelson”. And the [Canadian] National Film Board (NFB) was nominated for ‘Best Animated Short Film’ for “The Danish Poet.” The NFB has been an animation and documentary powerhouse for decades, and has been nominated for 69 Academy Awards over five decades. They’ve won eleven.
5) Canadians Invented Hollywood: Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Canadians invented Hollywood. Mary Pickford, who starred in 248 movies and co-founded United Artists Studios, was a Canadian. So were Jack Warner, who founded Warner Brothers Studio and Louis B. Mayer who, along with his brother (also a Canadian), founded MGM Studios. Funny how no one offers this as proof that Canadians rule the world… or… maybe we do?
1) Iran Responds To American Accusations: Diplomats from the United States and Great Britain have been complaining for years aboot Iranian involvement in Iraq. Over the weekend American intelligence and military officials showed off declassified proof of recently built Iranian weapons found in Iraq. Today Diane Sawyer, a correspondent from ABC News perpetually on the verge of tears, had an exclusive interview with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Clips of the interview were played on BBC, ABC and CBC, in it Ahmadinejad never denies sending weapons into Iraq, but he does a pretty decent job of saying ‘the Americans are stretched to their limit so, no, we don’t fear an attack’ (loose translation of the English translation). There was a BBC reporter in Tehran who reported that Ahmadinejad, in the ABC report, made a veiled threat of intensive suicide bombings against American interests around the world. Ahmadinejad has mentioned in the past that Iran has a Suicide Bomber Unit of aboot 30,000 to 50,000 volunteers called the Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison.
In the past few months Iran has announced a weapons system upgrade for their air defence, which they’ve purchased from the Russian government, and they’ve had a ‘war games’ were they claim to have tested super-fast torpedoes. The Americans, meanwhile, have sent a second Aircraft Carrier Battle Group to the region, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds because one Battle Group has more nuclear weapons than any other country on earth except Russia and — maybe — Great Britain, and more air power than any other country on earth including Russia.
2) North Korea Agreement Rumoured: after spending so much time on Iran the BBC went into “Brief Mode”… apparently the “Six Party Talks” (not nearly as fun as the name suggests) have entered the final phase… at least the final phase not involving nuking North Korea. There have been concessions regarding the amount of food and fuel North Korea will receive for not blowing up South Korea and/or Japan.
3) Clashes Over Israeli Construction Site: Putting shovels into the ground anywhere in or around Jerusalem is a good way of starting a fight. This one’s aboot a bridge that may or may not collapse without some repairs. It just so happens the bridge is pretty close to the Al Aksa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site… seriously, how many fucking holy sites do religions need? There should be a two-site limit, everything after that gets ranked as a “Curiosity”. So there were enough protesters that the cops needed to be called, then a couple of people got arrested. All-in-all it was probably the calmest, most civilized religious confrontation in the region in a decade.
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(6.30pm) ABC: World News Tonight
With Charles Gibson
1) North Korea Agreement: “Sign Of Hope”. Four months after North Korea performed an underground nuclear test, and tried to launch a couple of medium-range rockets, the Six Party People (the United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea) have agreed to give North Korea 2million pounds of Fuel, and 2million Kilowatts of power. In return North Korea will shut down its reactors, however there will be no timetable or deadline for dismantling any nuclear weapons already built. Apparently the deal almost collapsed over the weekend but a 16 hour marathon negotiating session yesterday (Sunday) sealed the deal. Most of the fuel and power will be coming from South Korea.
This is very similar to the deal former President Bill Clinton signed off on aboot ten years ago. North Korea broke that deal virtually as it was being signed.
2) Obama & Clinton: Until it becomes clear, after another sixteen months of campaigning, which of these two is going to secure the nomination for the Democrats, they’re going to be compared and contrasted Every. Single. Freaking. Day. Without discounting John Edwards, who will probably win the Iowa Primary, it’s going to be Clinton-Obama versus McCain-Giuliani in 2008. There’s this weird movement on right now in American politics… there are a lot of black-Americans who believe that Obama doesn’t qualify as an “African-American” because his heritage doesn’t go back to the slave days. Basically, Obama isn’t African-American because his father was borne in Africa (Kenya). And this isn’t some fringe thing, a lot of black-American scholars are writing articles aboot this. Right now only 20% of black-Americans plan to vote for Obama. Hillary, on the other hand, is actually attracting female voters, a voting segment that have traditionally never voted for a female candidate.
Then Australian Prime Minister John Howard, on Australian TV, said that al Qaeda would be circling November on their 2008 calendars and praying “several times a day” for an Obama victory. Obama responds by calling Howard Bush’s monkey. Or something. Then Obama refers to the deaths of the 3000+ American soldiers who have died in Iraq as “wasted”, which is not cool if you want to be president and many, many parents of those soldiers happen to believe their sons and daughters died saving lives and, you know, important stuff. Whoops.
3) Golden Mosque Anniversary: This was the one-year Anniversary of the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra, Iraq. The 2006 bombing of the ‘Golden Mosque’ is now considered to be the event which turned the Shiite and Sunni militia’s attention away from the “Coalition” and onto each other. On the Anniversary 88 people were killed and over 250 injured as a result of suicide attacks in Baghdad. The largest explosion occurred while Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was holding a press conference, the explosion could be clearly heard while al-Maliki was speaking but no one seemed to notice. Attacks over the last two months have actually decreased substantially in number, but have increased in ferocity. Instead of a single truck bomb, now it seems as though two or three suicide bombers are being assigned to the same target with larger bombs. The market attack on the Anniversary involved three truck bombs, including one in a parking garage. There was also a short report attached at the end concerning the “troop surge”. The American goal is to have 90,000 mixed Iraqi/American troops in Baghdad, up from 50,000 currently, but it won’t be fully realized until at least the end of the summer.
1) Baghdad Suicide Bombings: More footage of dead Iraqi’s. The report was from Independent Television News (ITV). The market that was blown up was the last remaining open market in Baghdad. One of the shops was a tailor so maniken torsos were strewn all over and mixed with the dead, human, bodies. The pools of blood were deep and everywhere. The ITV reporter made a point of mentioning al-Maliki’s non-response to the noise of the explosion.
2) Saddam’s VP To Hang: PBS does a news-in-brief segment that lasts aboot ten minutes, then they have four fifteen minute segments on the top stories of the day. The second story during the brief-segment was aboot Saddam’s former Vice President Yassin Ramadan. Ramadan had originally been sentenced to life in prison, but an appeals court has decided that he gets to hang as well. He was convicted for the killing of 148 Shiites in the 1980s.
3) Iran Denies American Claims: Pretty much the same report as ABC, they use some ABC footage of Diane Sawyer interviewing Ahmadinejad, but PBS brings up the fact today (Monday) is the 28th Anniversary of the “Iranian Hostage Crisis” where Iranian Revolutionary Students took over the American embassy in Iran. There was also some talk aboot possible American plans to bomb nuclear and military sites in Iran, but this was dismissed by Presidential Spokesman Tony Snow as “speculation by Democrats being politicians” (or something close to that). Also, the point was made that for the past twenty years Iran has been supplying Iraqi Shiites with money and weapons, so this is really nothing new.
1) StatsCan Census Controversy: There have been… “problems” with the latest Census in Canada. Enumerators haven’t been paid, or have been paid up to five months late, and were apparently told to fabricate ‘non-crucial’ information. It’s not really a top story, at least it probably wouldn’t be a top story in any other country, but the CBC does like stories involving government screw ups.
2) Heart Attack Risk Cut By Napping: A study released today from Harvard University shows that people who managed to get “good, quality sleep”, including daily napping, lowered their risk of heart disease by 37%. The study ran over six years and involved 26,000 people. The effects were most noticeable in “working men”, but the reporter said this was probably due to the number of men versus women in the study. The effects should be seen equally across both genders. The report then showed a Canadian company, Intuit Canada, which has several nap rooms available for their employees. They didn’t mention anything aboot bedhead emergencies.
3) Day 80 Of Canadian Prisoners Hunger Strike: After the attacks on September 11th the Government of Canada, then led by The Liberal Party of Canada, wrote up a bunch of new laws kind of similar to the American Patriot Act. The Justice Minister of the time, Anne McLellen, actually said that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms did not guarantee any of the Rights and Freedoms listed in the Charter. Yes. Really. The way it currently works is the government can hold people it considers to be a grave risk to the security of Canada or Canadians by issuing a “Security Certificate”. These people can be held for as long as the government wishes (up to aboot six years at a time) without showing the evidence to anyone, including the lawyers or the defendants… because they’re not really defendants because they haven’t really been charged with any crime. So… there are three men, Mahmoud Jaballah (2001), Mohammad Mahjoub (2003) and Hassan Almrei (2001), they are all Muslim and all from “Elsewhere” before they got to Canada. The government claims to have evidence tying them to al Qaeda. They are being held in a special facility in Kingston, Ontario, and they have been held without charge. Under the security-certificate process, the government can detain foreign nationals believed to pose a national-security threat and withhold “sensitive evidence” from their lawyers.
So the three men are actually free to leave at any time, as long as they travel back to their “country of origin”, which means Egypt and Syria. The three men claim if they return there they will be arrested and tortured. So… the hunger strike… it’s into it’s 80th day now — the men are surviving on water and juice only — isn’t aboot getting out and not facing any court, but aboot getting access to medical treatment and some exercise time inside the prison. Each of the men has lost an average of 45lbs. Millhaven has been referred to as “Gitmo North.” But, honestly, not by that many people.
1) Students Cyber-Bully Principal: A school in Ontario banned cellphones from classrooms so nineteen students started a website specifically to leave messages aboot the school principal. Several of the messages were borderline pornographic and attacks on his character, even leaving his phone number. When the site was discovered the students were suspended by the school board for a few days. The students, being morons, were surprised this could happen because, like, it’s free speech man, like, there are laws, you know, that allow citizens to, you know, express their opinions. Fucking tools. There was one interesting question: “Where does the school jurisdiction end?” asked Kevin S*ltana, a tool. Apparently the jurisdiction can and does extend to defending school employees from slanderous punks like Kevin Sult*na. According to the Media Awareness Group, 1 in 4 Canadian students are, or have been, digitally harassed by slanderous punks like that fucking moron, Kevin Sulta*a and his eighteen punk friends. Fucking idiots.
2) Karla Homulka/Teale Has Child: Karla Homulka/Teale is Canada’s third most notorious killer, after Clifford Olsen who murdered a whole lot of children, and Paul Bernardo, Karla’s ex-husband. Paul will be in jail for the rest of his life. Due to a severely broken Ontario Justice System, Karla was released after only twelve years in prison despite having killed at least three girls — including her own younger sister — in a series of bizarre and truly Evil sexually based attacks. And now she has a child of her own. Yippee. At least one nurse refused to take part in the birth. The lawyer for the victim’s families said “she should never have been in a position to have a child.” In response to the nurse refusing to assist, a medical ethicist said “nurses and doctors are not Priests, their role is not to judge their patients.” The baby could not be reached for comment.
3) US Shooting Sprees Leave Six Dead: Crazy people, including one fuck up in a trench coat, shot and killed a lot of people who didn’t deserve to die or to have tragedy in their lives. At least one of the crazy people killed themselves, I think the other was shot dead by police. Which, if true, was probably for the best.
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
…so having a system of timekeeping where, if it was 6pm in Paris it was five minutes sooner in London, kind of made sense. Or at least it didn’t cause enough fuckups to be considered something which needed fixing. At least if you were European.
But European-style timekeeping, where everyone’s clock was set by the height of the sun at noon, was useless in a country like Canada, which is three times the size of Europe with a tenth the population. It was in 1878 when Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian engineer who was surveying the first Trans-Canada Railway, realised just how fucked “Euro-Style Local Time” would be when designing an engineering project that was 3200 miles long and twelve feet wide — picture a train travelling West to East and having to reset your watch every fifteen minutes for twelve days because every train station had a different Time Zone.
So Fleming had the idea to break the world into 24 one hour segments. And, of course, the world adopted the idea straight away and in no way was there any hysteria at the possibility of change. The End. Oh… wait, there were a lot of people who considered his idea to be “against God’s will”. There were some who even condemned Fleming as an “Internationalist” (re: commie) for even thinking aboot bringing the world together under a single measurement of time.
Most of these people were European and probably pictured North America as aboot the size of Denmark. But in 1884, at the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington DC, the system of International Standard Time Zones was adopted and put into place a year later. So Fleming made it possible for FedEx and UPS to actually schedule deliveries without suffering brain aneurysms, because Globalization doesn’t happen without standard measurements and time zones.
In 1851 Fleming also designed Canada’s first adhesive postage stamp, the “Three Penny Beaver” (featuring a beaver, and costing three cents). He also fought for the construction of a transoceanic system of communication cables that eventually connected the entire British Empire. Fleming was made a knight in 1897 by Queen Victoria, and he served as chancellor of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario for 35 years.
Nelly Furtado: is nominated in the Best Pop Collaboration w. Vocals category for her collaboration with Timbaland.
Neil Young: is nominated in three categories — Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song for “Lookin’ For A Leader” and best Rock Album for his record “Living With War”.
Michael Buble: has been nominated in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category for “Caught in the Act”.
Sarah McLachlan: was also nominated in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category for “Wintersong”.
Diana Krall: picked up a nomination for “From This Moment On” in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category.
Walter Ostanek: the St. Catharines-Ont. “Polka King” and Fred Ziwich were nominated for “Good Friends Good Music” in the Best Polka Album Category… this guy has been nominated for thirteen Grammy Awards and has won three. Canada: Polka Capital Of The World, and proud of it.
Bonus Track — The Juno Awards: The Canadian music awards are called “The Junos“. They used to be ridiculously, stupidly, uncool. They started to get better… and a little more “with it” back in 1990 when Vancouver-based “Sons Of Freedom” won Most Promising Group of the Year. SOF were so fucking cool. They were part (beta version) of the ‘pre-Seattle-style’ metal-grunge movement. Before SOF I think Anne Murray won every award in every category every year for thirty-seven straight years. But SOF poured water on her and were duly rewarded after she melted. Then they put out another album and disappeared into the weirdness that is CANCON.
Over the past decade Juno organizers have turned the evening into a concert with an occasional thirty-second speech by a laughing “hey, look what I did” musician who knows how silly it all is… basically the artists usually have a lot of fun. The event is also held in a different city every year. It’s a lot more fun to watch now than it was then. Definitely a lot more fun than The Grammy’s… watching people, who really aren’t artists or who have anything even remotely interesting to say, jabber on for three hours is not a good time. The musicians that seem to be celebrated by The Grammy’s now, at least the new crop, are ‘artists’ only in the loosest sense of the word. Like how the guys who paint over graffiti can be considered ‘artists’. They have to stop treating the event like it was the Oscars (the “Joe Strummer Tribute” was pretty fucking cool though)… they make the performances seem like separate events from the awards. They take ‘musicians’ who perform in clubs, arenas or football stadiums and put them into a setting best designed for opera and have them perform in front of a hundred hired rythmn impaired speed-freaks in The Pit and three thousand uninterested “colleagues”. Then there’s the five minute commercial breaks… The Juno’s, if my memory is right, are now done live in an arena where the stage is basically at audience level. It’s a concert. Because they’re musicians.
MuchMusic used to have the best music award show, the MuchMusic Video Awards (MMVA‘s)… at least until they started allowing the “Lindsay/Paris/Britney” types to show up. Now it looks like everyone who attends was painted with the same palette of high-shine gloss selections of beige. MuchMusic had a definite Canadian character until they got rid of Moses Znaimer, now the VJ’s are clones, children and boring. If you’re in Canada and you want to see what MuchMusic used to be check out the Quebec-French version, MusiquePlus. The American equivalent of the MMVA’s would be the MTV Awards, which are just silly-stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised if next year they had an award for Fastest Meth-Fueled Weight Loss. Great Britain has “The Brit Awards” which come fairly close to The Juno’s, but when you’ve got Oasis and Robbie Williams et al trying to outcool each other while George Micheal strikes new and ever more remarkable poses in the corner, it just sinks into parody. The nominees this year are fairly young and heavy on ‘The New’ so maybe this year will be different. But, of the bunch of them, The Juno’s are the most fun… and they sure as shit beat out the Canadian Television Awards, “The Gemini Awards”, which actually aren’t even televised live anymore.
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
1) The First Three News Stories On ABC: World News Tonight, 6.30pm 02/05/07:
A) Bitter Cold Snap: Fifty-eight straight hours of sub-zero weather across the American mid-West, including a wind chilled -32 in Minnesota. Two feet of snow fell in the same period in Buffalo, New York. Emergency workers were finding people “at risk” (which is a nice euphemism for “not quite poor enough to qualify as homeless”) whose heat had been turned off for delinquent payments, or whose pipes had burst from the cold and flooded their homes. The only ones they were able to find, surprise, were black families and the elderly. In Ontario (Canada) it is illegal to shut the heat off, for any reason, as long as the landlord is responsible for the heat payments. I’m reasonably certain that it’s just plain illegal to turn the heat off during the winter period, it’s considered “an essential service“.
B) President Bush Requests $2.9 Trillion In New Spending: Defense spending would increase by 16%, he’s asking for $163 Billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, and another $142 Billion next year. To date the two wars have cost, in dollars, $532 Billion. A US Congressmen used a chart to emphasize former Sec.Def. Rumsfelds promise the Iraq expedition would never cost more than $50 Billion. The spending announcement also came with a cutback announcement…Medicare and Medicaid will both be cutback this year and next. There were also some not-so-vague hints that more and larger cuts to social programs are coming. President Bush was then quoted as saying “there will be no tax increases and the budget will be balanced over the next five years.” In a weird side note that was left as either a note of irony by the reporter, or just dropped and forgotten, apparently the budget can only be balanced if “war spending” is decreased to $50 Billion by 2009. So either the Americans finally have an exit strategy or Rumsfeld’s running the budget office.
C) Senate Resolution On Iraq Filibustered: The Democrats want the Republicans to look like fascist assholes, the Republicans want the Democrats to look like commie fuckups. It’s a non-binding resolution that means nothing today, but later on someone can fill four-seconds of a thirty-second campaign ad that 20% of Americans will watch, but will not sway one voter to change sides.
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2) The First Three News Stories On PBS: The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, 7pm 02/05/07:
A) Baghdad Security Clampdown: 90,000 American and Iraqi troops started to move into Baghdad in an effort to finally stabilize the city. An American general said “this will be [the largest operation] this city has ever seen.” The report went on to say it’s estimated more than 1000 Iraqi civilians were killed in “sectarian violence” last week, including 132 in a suicide truck-bomb on the weekend. President Bush was then quoted as saying “it’s a good thing that there’s a desire on the Iraqi government’s part to fix this.”
B) Soldiers Killed: Two American soldiers were reported to have been killed on Sunday, a British soldier was also killed.
C) Resolution Again: More aboot that non-binding thing.
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3) The First Three News Stories On CBC: The National, 10pm 02/05/07:
A) Two Firemen Killed In Winnipeg Fire: Two firefighters were killed when a house fire flared out of control. Six firemen were trapped in the blaze, three escaped relatively unharmed with another receiving “life threatening” injuries. The two firemen who died were both thirty-year veterans. There was something called a “flashover event” where the intense heat, over 1000C, ignited the ambient gases and caused a super-intense and prolonged ball of flames. The firemen were in the home searching for residents.
B) Man Who Planned Canadian Diplomats Death Detained: Last year a suicide bomber in Khandahar, Afghanistan, killed Glynn Berry, a Canadian diplomat and critically wounded four of the Canadian soldiers detailed to protect him. The car was owned by a man named ‘Pir Mohammed‘, who was later found with a stash of heavy weapons and Taliban paraphernalia in his home. Soon after his arrest he was released due to pressure from “tribal elders”. This time he was arrested and brought to Kabul. In an interview with a CBC reporter Pir said that he had sold the car, but had no papers to prove it. An “elder” was also quoted as saying Pir bought and sold cars as a living. Pir also said he expects renewed pressure from “elders” will have him back out on the streets soon.
C) More Canadians Caught Up In Mexican Violence:Two Canadians were shot over the weekend while on vacation in Mexico. Neither were seriously wounded. Last year two Canadians were murdered in their hotel room, and just a few weeks ago a young man was “run over” outside a night club. There have been just enough screw-ups and shit work by the coroners in Mexico to leave a lot of questions in both of the later cases. Mexico is currently the number one “sun and fun” destination for Canadians.
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4) The First Three News Stories On CTV: The National, 10pm 02/05/07:
A) Two Firemen Killed In Winnipeg Fire: Just tragic.
B) It Was Cold: CTV used exactly the same footage of American rescue people looking for shut-ins and poor people, but they spent more time on the Canadian part of the story… according to the CTV weather dude it was -49C in Winnipeg today, which is not a record.
C) Dude Steals Van With Kid Still Inside: I think this happened down around Toronto… guy steals minivan (which are really popular in Canada), then crashes it into a post, then steals another nearby car. Kid’s safe, thief got away.
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Hawksley Workman: Canadian “Striptease”; ‘(Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves’ (2001)
Thomas Edison was still dicking with his wire while a couple of Canadians were busy inventing the lightbulb.
On July 24, 1874, Henry (or James, but probably Henry) Woodward filed for a patent on “The Woodward and Evan’s Light” — Mathew Evan was Woodward’s business partner and a bar owner… which makes a lot of sense considering they were Canadian.
In 1875 Edison purchased half of the patent, then in 1879 bought the rest of the patent and the prototypes from Woodward and several Canadian investors. Over the next five years Edison and a Brit named Joseph Swan worked together and fiddled with their filaments until they found one which could last over 1200 hours.
But it wasn’t until 1910, four years after the General Electric Company invented the long-lasting tungsten filament, that a GE employee named William Coolidge discovered a means of making low-cost tungsten filaments which allowed lightbulbs to become widely used.
James v. Henry: while researching this piece (and I use “research” fairly loosely) I encountered references to both James and Henry as first names to Mr. Woodward. Sometimes both names were found in the same article, sometimes even in the same paragraph. Except for his work on the light bulb, and the original patent letter, I can find very little information on Mr. Woodward. If there’s more information out there — other than what’s available on the immediate web, please feel free to leave a note.
0_o
cultural sn:afu 