IN MANY RESPECTS, Garnet Angeconeb is representative of the countless Aboriginal children beaten and raped in Canada’s Indian residential schools. For years he told no one, including his wife. Angry, pain-filled and confused, he drank heavily to dull his feelings. The turning-point in his life arrived during a business trip to Ottawa, on October 31, 1990:
MEAGHAN DALY is the President at Boxx Media. A former Bay Street equity trader, she specializes in capital markets, advanced trading and financial literacy. She is currently developing a line of computer game software to teach financial literacy in the public school system. I interviewed her near her Toronto home. This interview was published in the Fall 2012 edition of the Journal of Aboriginal Management.
THE ACTING CHIEF of Winnipeg’s police is correct that his comments about prayer and crime were taken out of context. Here is an excerpt of the interview as it appeared in Christian Week on October 11:
I‘VE TAKEN IN all the US presidential and vice-presidential debates. Over the years these have become highly rehearsed and scripted affairs, meticulously polished and doubtless focus group vetted and — well, who knows what else the candidates do these days. Computer modelling, maybe. Virtual reality simulations. Testing on non-human animals. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that media experts and pollsters and psychics are also consulted. The result of all this engineering is debate not unlike processed food: enjoyable, but who knows what’s really in it.
TRUTH, LIKE WEATHER, arrives in degrees. Just as the weather is all around, so too dishonesty in writing. Indeed, the taking of the media’s temperatures is a primary moral responsibility of the modern reader. The question which confronts us is how do we read well in an age where dishonesty on many of the important topics may be taken for granted.
AT LEAST A FEW of you, dear readers, weren’t yet born thirty years ago when Frank Zappa and his daughter Moon Unit recorded “Valley Girl.” At that time I thought it was a clever piece of work, but that it must be an exaggeration, maybe even a fabrication, of San Fernando Valley speech. I’d never heard anyone talk that way in the small Canadian town where I grew up, and I expected I never would.
IT IS FASHIONABLE among the political left to affect dislike for Walt Disney movies, mostly on the grounds of Disney’s crude commercial tactics and their representations of peoples of colour. And yet, let’s be honest; haven’t we all thoroughly enjoyed at least one Disney movie? There is perhaps only one Disney story, variously told, and that is the story of the underdog who, against all odds, triumphs. This is the gist of every Disney movie I have seen, from Cinderella to Matilda. Only the characters and the settings change. The subject may concern a soccer team, or a princess; the setting may be early America or ‘The Orient.’ Nevertheless, we get a certain unmistakable sort of story, a recognizably ‘Disney’ story. Careful marketing dictates that it shall be thus, but marketing only discloses what seems to work, not why it works. Why do we enjoy a Disney movie? And why is the left reluctant to admit they do enjoy it?
I‘VE NO OBJECTION in principle to NDP Member of Parliament Dany Morin’s motion this week to pursue a national bullying-prevention strategy. This proposal was conceived some months ago, but it is now widely mis-held to be an outcome of the suicide of fifteen year-old Amanda Todd. You are doubtless familiar with her appalling and sad and outrageous story, which has been widely reported and which has now got a great number of people talking about something called “cyberbullying.”
FOR A SHORT time, the writer George Orwell worked in a book store. There he observed the depressing chasm (as he saw it) between what was praised in public versus what was actually sought and read in private.
LAST WEEK the vice-presidential candidates for the 2012 USA federal election appeared in a televised debate. The ABC news journalist and debate moderator, Martha Raddatz, posed the following question:
RADDATZ: I want to move on, and I want to return home for these last few questions. This debate is, indeed, historic. We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country ….
FOR THE PAST twenty years and more I’ve maintained a collection of quotations in black, made-in-Czechoslovakia, Pragotrade-branded volumes. This sort of collection is known as a “commonplace book,” and the keeping of one commonplacing. I take such care to mention the Pragotrade name because I purchased a number of these at Coles in the early 1980s and have been unable to find them for over two decades. Simple and unadorned, these dollar-something books could be had in your choice of blue, red, or black cover, the paper inside a serviceable unbleached pulp with the faint bluish lines you may recall from your grammar school “foolscap.” This was long before the market became flooded with overpriced and pretentious looking “journals,” designed to separate you from an inflated amount of your money with the implicit suggestion that nothing is too dear for your precious thoughts. I have always preferred, however, my cheap Pragotrade notebooks and the thoughts, only some cheap, of others.
ONE OF THE most useful pieces of knowledge I’ve acquired is the proper cooking of rice. I was recently moved to Kingston and attending Queen’s University, sharing an apartment with two women who enjoyed wine and Moroccan, Thai, Persian, and Indian foods. Some years later I was living with a Chinese roommate who got me into the habit of using leftovers in the preparation of a Chinese familiarity, fried rice. The secret to a good fried rice, as I’ve already indicated, is the use of cold rice from the previous day’s meal.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 