welcome to the world, sam

I remember clearly, the emotions of the day... like a bell ringing soundly in the bay. I can even remember what it smelled like. Sweet, sexy, salty. San Francisco.

(heavenly sigh)

Leaning on a pole outside City Lights on a fine sunny day in July. Waiting for my girlfriend and thumbing through an anthology of mostly American writers (e.g. Twain, Bukowski, Miller, Spalding, Dorothy Parker et al), laughing my ass off.

Later, lounging in a North Beach hotel room, K-J said she loved watching me through the store window, smoking a Dunhill and laughing out loud under the California sun. Good times. Six years later, I remember that moment like it was yesterday. Life was good.

I saw Karen-Jane strolling down Denman a couple weeks ago. Literally, strolling with her new baby boy, Sam. We stopped and yakked for 10-15 minutes as she rocked her son to sleep in his hi-tech carriage. What a beautiful boy.

Mommy too. Despite the fact she looked really tired, K-J looked fantastic - brimming with bliss.

Life is good.

So what am I trying to say here?

Fuck all that drinking, smoking and screwing nonsense? Hmmm... good physical and mental health is SO important.

Find a good woman, make a home, a family and settle down?

I dunno, man. Seems like a stretch. LOL

Might be time to pick up a book, head back to SF.

how could I go wrong?

The Boys and Girl from County Clare

Starring Colm Meaney, Bernard Hill, Andrea Corr, Philip Barantini, Charlotte Bradley, Shaun Evans, Patrick Bergin
Directed by John Irvin
Written by Nicholas Adams

Granville 7 Cinemas
Fri-Sun Tue-Thu: 1:50 3:50 6:30 9:00

"an irresistible Irish comedy, lovingly told, beautifully acted and graced with the perfect balance of chuckles and bittersweet heartache"

Set in 1966, the story pits rival brothers who fancy themselves expert traditional musicians and who both lead bands vying in Ireland's biggest annual competition. Both are well aware of each other's ambition. But they haven't spoken or seen each other in years.

The eldest, John Joe (Bernard Hill), stayed on the family farm. Another brother, Jimmy (Colm Meaney), moved to Liverpool years ago and is a successful businessman there. The mid-'60s, Liverpudlian connection invites numerous jokes about the Fab Foursome of that time and locale. During rehearsal, when one player gets a bit adventurous stylistically, a tyrannical John Joe exhorts him to "leave jazz to the Beatles."

That slightly precious air of a bygone time is wonderfully exploited, especially since the lilting music played throughout the movie has been making such a comeback and needs no apology. The brothers don't so much seem dated to us as prescient. Moreover, there's a funny/sad soap opera underlying the competition. The real rivalry between the brothers isn't musical but romantic.
Both vied for the same girl (Charlotte Bradley). After he won and impregnated her, Jimmy abandoned her, so that John Joe, the loser, wound up helping her raise Jimmy's daughter.

That daughter, Anne (Andrea Corr, a lead singer-fiddler with the actual Irish band the Corrs), is now grown and old enough for romantic yearnings of her own. And where does she find them? In Jimmy's rival band, of course, falling for Teddy (Shaun Evans), a boyishly handsome lad who can't quite measure up to the cynical woman-chasing his band buddies encourage.

There is a kind of surface ease to the storytelling and sentiment. This is not the stuff of more grim and multi-layered work by such contemporary Irish playwrights as Martin McDonaugh and Conor McPherson. But director John Irvin manages a nice balance of bathos and blarney, tossing in a surprise twist (involving a third brother) that shrewdly underscores the mix of love and conflict innate in almost every family, Irish or otherwise. And the relationships touched on are complex: Jimmy is the biological father Anne never saw, John Joe her surrogate dad.

The performers act (and play their instruments) as a true ensemble. Meaney, the more familiar among them, is exquisitely crusty and strong-willed, to be sure, but Hill, Corr, Evans and Bradley are superb as well pieces in an amusing and sentimental puzzle that, like the upcoming holiday, you don't have to be Irish to enjoy.

--

Review by Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune Arts Critic

contraception: jamaican style

Dear Doctor White:

Lard thunderin' jassssus, Me a beg you fe operate pon me so me can have me nuts cut off and get sterile.

Me 'ave plenty reason. Me an me wife married for seven years and have 9 pickney, but me come to the conclusion that contraceptives are friggin' useless.

After getting married here in Mo Bay, the priest tell me fe use the rhythm method.

Me try the Reggaee, Soca and the Ska, me wife get pregnant, and I ruptured meself doing the Cha-Cha. Apart from dat, where do you find a band when yu get the urge at two o'clock in the mornin'?

Another doctor suggested the safe period. At the time, we wus livin' with de in-laws and we had to wait tree weeks fe the safeperiod, when the 'ouse was hempty. Needless to say dat didn't work, and de missus get pregnant again. Twins dis time.

A lady of several years' experience said if we made love while breast feeding we would be all right. Well, I finished up with clear skin, silky hair and was very healthy... but de wife, well she got pregnant again.

Another tale we 'eard was if de wife jumped up and down after intercourse dis would prevent pregnancy. She slipped a disk, stubbed er big toe, but she still got pregnant again. Jaaaaasus nother set of twins.

I asked the pharmacist about the condoms and he demonstrated them, so I bought a big box. Me wife fell pregnant again, which did not surprise me as I never did believe how stretching one of dem things over me index finger could ever stop de missus from getting knocked up yet again.

We tried the coil next but dat didn't work. It had a left-hand screw and me wife is definitely a right-hand screw.

The Dutch cap was next and seemed to be our answer, but the wife got severe headaches when the only size available was too tight across 'er forehead.

Yu can see me problems right?

If I can't 'ave de operation I will 'ave to resort to oral sex, but lard jasssssus I can't believe dat talking bout it is any substitute fe the real ting. Do you??

Yours sincerely,

Eli from Mo Bay

once upon a time in seattle

Seattle's InfoSpace took investors for a ride

By David Heath and Sharon Pian Chan
The Seattle Times
Friday, March 25, 2005

Five years ago, at the height of the dot-com stock frenzy, a young Seattle-area company called InfoSpace was worth more than Boeing.

Wall Street analysts hailed the startup, which promised to bring the Internet to everyone's cellphone, as "a new Microsoft," and its charismatic leader, Naveen Jain, as a visionary.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had hundreds of millions invested. Small investors such as Bev Hess, a real estate agent in Phillips, Neb., poured their retirement savings into what appeared to be a sure bet.

At its peak, InfoSpace was worth more than $31 billion US and Jain himself $8 billion.

What Allen, Hess and hundreds of other shareholders didn't know was this: InfoSpace's success was an illusion.

Jain and other InfoSpace executives deceived the public by making the company appear far more successful through the use of accounting tricks and dubious deals, a Seattle Times investigation found.

The investigation was built on internal company e-mails, confidential documents filed in court and scores of interviews.

One e-mail from a venture capitalist to Jain captures the nature of the deals. The man refused to participate in an investment that Jain had proposed, bluntly telling Jain that if he did so, "I believe that I could go to jail."

The investigation found:

- InfoSpace officials misled Wall Street and the public about how their company was doing, concealing that revenues were falling far short of expectations;

- Much of InfoSpace's reported revenue came from "Lazy Susan" deals, whereby company officials invested in other firms that turned around and gave back the same money;

- While investors clamoured to buy InfoSpace's highly touted stock, company insiders were unloading it. Two executives later angled to get around trading restrictions by asking for demotions to sell stock before its value evaporated. Others just quit and sold their holdings.

Then, unknown to investors, Jain and his top two executives all resigned in a single week.

"I had never heard of anything like that before," Rick Thompson, former InfoSpace executive vice-president, said in court documents. "It was the (Exxon) Valdez running along with nobody driving the damned thing."

When the game was up, investors took a beating. The company once worth more than Boeing fell to the value of two Boeing 777s.

Allen lost an estimated $400 million when InfoSpace shares collapsed. Hess, 65, saw her $40,000 investment shrink to $1,450.

"I scrimped and saved for 42 years, and I feel that I have been duped out of my hard-earned money," she said.

Rather than investigate Jain for misconduct, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission aided Jain in court after he hired a prominent former SEC lawyer to lobby the agency.

InfoSpace today barely resembles its former self. The board ousted Jain more than two years ago and hired Jim Voelker as chief executive. Voelker has restructured the company to make it profitable, and the stock has been on the rebound.

The real story behind InfoSpace's rise and fall comes to light now because The Seattle Times recently won a two-year court battle that led to the release of thousands of pages of records that had been sealed in a shareholder lawsuit.

Naveen Jain, a native of India, came to the United States as a young man through a business-exchange program and in 1989 joined Microsoft.

He watched Netscape's spectacular stock run-up in 1995, marking the beginning of the dot-com era: No longer did companies, particularly Internet startups, have to show a few years of profit before Wall Street would consider offering their stock to the public.

Jain saw an opportunity. In March 1996, he started InfoSpace.

Though InfoSpace was a tiny, unprofitable company offering a hodgepodge of online phone books, stock quotes and horoscopes, Jain was able to take it public in late 1998 during the dot-com frenzy.

On its first day on Wall Street, Jain's shares were worth $110 million.

He soon realized, however, that making money from charging for ads on its websites was a long slog with limited potential for growth.

So he came up with a new plan: What if InfoSpace offered the same content -- weather reports and stock quotes -- to cellphone users, charging them a monthly fee?

He finally had a business that people could understand: the web in your pocket. InfoSpace was no longer just another dot-com. It was the pioneer of the wireless Internet.

With contagious fervour, Jain told people there would soon be a billion cellphones in the world and InfoSpace would get $1 to $3 per subscriber per month.

"You do the math -- that's a (expletive) load of money," he said.

Analysts bought the concept and gushed over InfoSpace's prospects. An analyst from US Bancorp Piper Jaffray even proclaimed: "A new Microsoft is born."

Fuelled by hype, InfoSpace's stock went stratospheric, soaring 1,300 per cent in just five months.

But the rise was short-lived. In early March 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, and InfoSpace's stock went into a freefall.

The news only got worse. On April 20, 2000, InfoSpace's finance director sent an alarming e-mail to Jain about wireless Internet revenues. It warned of a disaster with Saraide, a company InfoSpace had just bought.

Saraide was backing away from its promise to bring in $31 million from Europe that year, InfoSpace finance director Garth MacLeod had just learned.

Instead it would come up with only $12 million -- a devastating $19-million shortfall for a company expecting $106 million in revenues for the year.

"This is not good," Jain wrote back.

Although InfoSpace was slashing its internal revenue forecast, Jain gave a rosy forecast about InfoSpace's prospects to a Merrill Lynch analyst.

In an April 24 e-mail, analyst Sofia Ghachem wrote to her colleague Henry Blodget: "Naveen saying we won't be embarrassed if we go out on a limb for results."

Privately, Blodget already had reservations about Jain and InfoSpace, asking a colleague in an e-mail just the week before: "Is this really a world-class company or just a world-class storyteller?"

But, on April 27, 2000, as Jain had urged, analyst Blodget boosted his own estimate of InfoSpace's annual revenue by 18 per cent and gave the stock his strongest buy rating.

This burst of renewed optimism about InfoSpace stopped the stock from tumbling and even pushed it up that day from $63 to a closing price of $72.

The bump in the stock price that Thursday put extra money in Jain's pockets. The following Monday, he sold 220,000 shares at $68.75 a share for a total of $15.1 million. The misguided euphoria over expected revenue growth had increased Jain's gains by at least $1.2 million.

Other InfoSpace insiders, who had been included in an e-mail warning of revenue shortfalls, also sold stock in the ensuing weeks. In all, InfoSpace insiders sold $158 million in stock from May to July 2000.

Failing to meet expectations, InfoSpace relied on accounting gimmicks and questionable deals to make up the shortfall, records show.

InfoSpace bought an $8-million interest in netgenShopper, owned by Jain's brother Atul, which in turn sent $5 million of it back as payment to InfoSpace for promotional services.

It was the kind of deal that InfoSpace insiders referred to as "buying revenue" or "a Lazy Susan" because the cash the company gave out came right back to it as revenue.

Experts say these types of deals are suspicious because of the inherent conflict: one company doing business with another company it owns.

Lazy Susan deals are illegal when they're not genuine business deals but instead merely a fraudulent way for companies to convert their own cash into revenues.

Atul Jain declined to comment about netgenShopper for this story.

By the end of 2000, more than one-quarter of InfoSpace's revenues came from a host of one-time deals, such as Lazy Susans, and other accounting tricks.

Meanwhile, key executives were looking for ways to cash in their stock, whose value was quickly evaporating.

InfoSpace general counsel Ellen Alben demanded a demotion to skirt trading restrictions created by a recent merger, according to court records.

Violating the restrictions could be disastrous for the company, forcing it to use less favourable accounting methods.

After the demotion, Alben made $1.6 million selling her stock. The new general counsel urged Alben not to sell, but later said in court records that she brushed him off, saying: "You don't know what I know."

Chief accounting officer Tammy Halstead, who clashed with new management over her accounting methods, took a demotion to staff accountant and sold $627,500 of stock. Jain said in court records that she wanted an "Ellen deal."

Behind closed doors, new president Russell Horowitz was sounding alarms about lagging revenue. In an e-mail to Jain and others, he noted $16 million in revenue was coming from one-time deals that "fall off" at the end of the year.

"In looking at Q1, we have some SERIOUS work to do," Horowitz wrote on Nov. 15, 2000. He warned that InfoSpace needed to come up with another $40 million just to meet the first quarter target of $78 million.

Two weeks later, Horowitz received more bad news from the finance director. For the second and third quarters of 2001, InfoSpace had signed contracts for only one-third of the revenue the company had told Wall Street to expect.

As for deals in the works, the "pipeline is anemic," the finance director wrote.

Yet the company was publicly forecasting rapid revenue growth for 2001, up 70 per cent to $360 million.

To counter negative news, InfoSpace issued a news release Dec. 13, saying it expected to meet its fourth-quarter revenue target.

It added: "InfoSpace continues to experience momentum across all of our areas of focus, and we remain very confident with the financial guidance we have previously provided."

Internally, Jain accused insiders who sold of trading on insider information, according to court records.

Horowitz sold $1.4 million of InfoSpace shares on Dec. 15.

It was obvious by then that InfoSpace could not meet its target of $360 million for 2001, Jain would later insist. He was in India at the time and said he wasn't involved in the release.

In court documents, Horowitz said he didn't know the $360-million forecast needed to be revised until a month after he sold his shares.

He contended the Dec. 13 press release was not about the $360-million figure.

Horowitz quit weeks later and sold all of his stock for $32 million.

Jain now hopes to take a new company -- Intelius -- public one day.

-30-

hate to say it, predictable

X-celling Over Men

By Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
March 20, 2005

Men are always telling me not to generalize about them.

But a startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.

Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that women are genetically more complex than scientists ever imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.

"Alas," said one of the authors of the study, the Duke University genome expert Huntington Willard, "genetically speaking, if you've met one man, you've met them all. We are, I hate to say it, predictable. You can't say that about women. Men and women are farther apart than we ever knew. It's not Mars or Venus. It's Mars or Venus, Pluto, Jupiter and who knows what other planets."

Women are not only more different from men than we knew. Women are more different from each other than we knew - creatures of "infinite variety," as Shakespeare wrote.

"We poor men only have 45 chromosomes to do our work with because our 46th is the pathetic Y that has only a few genes which operate below the waist and above the knees," Dr. Willard observed. "In contrast, we now know that women have the full 46 chromosomes that they're getting work from and the 46th is a second X that is working at levels greater than we knew."

Dr. Willard and his co-author, Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, think that their discovery may help explain why the behavior and traits of men and women are so different; they may be hard-wired in the brain, in addition to being hormonal or cultural.

So is Lawrence Summers right after all? "Only time will tell," Dr. Willard laughs.

The researchers learned that a whopping 15 percent - 200 to 300 - of the genes on the second X chromosome in women, thought to be submissive and inert, lolling about on an evolutionary Victorian fainting couch, are active, giving women a significant increase in gene expression over men.

As the Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, who is writing a book about human evolution and genetics, explained it to me: "Women are mosaics, one could even say chimeras, in the sense that they are made up of two different kinds of cell. Whereas men are pure and uncomplicated, being made of just a single kind of cell throughout."

This means men's generalizations about women are correct, too. Women are inscrutable, changeable, crafty, idiosyncratic, a different species.

"Women's chromosomes have more complexity, which men view as unpredictability," said David Page, a molecular biologist and expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Known as Mr. Y, Dr. P calls himself "the defender of the rotting Y chromosome." He's referring to studies showing that the Y chromosome has been shedding genes willy-nilly for millions of years and is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. "The Y married up," he notes. "The X married down."

Size matters, so some experts have suggested that in 10 million years or even much sooner - 100,000 years - men could disappear, taking Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning with them.

Dr. Page drolly conjures up a picture of the Y chromosome as "a slovenly beast," sitting in his favorite armchair, surrounded by the litter of old fast food takeout boxes.

"The Y wants to maintain himself but doesn't know how," he said. "He's falling apart, like the guy who can't manage to get a doctor's appointment or can't clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it.

"I prefer to think of the Y as persevering and noble, not as the Rodney Dangerfield of the human genome."

Dr. Page says the Y - a refuge throughout evolution for any gene that is good for males and/or bad for females - has become "a mirror, a metaphor, a blank slate on which you can write anything you want to think about males." It has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene, the inability-to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the fascination-with-spiders-and-reptiles gene, the selective-hearing-loss-"Huh" gene, the inability-to-express-affection-on-the-phone gene.

The discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing themselves: because their genes do.

-30-

all the best from canada

Photo: Ottawa's Kathleen Edwards is a big hit at SXSW Music Fest '05

Canadians stage strong showing at SXSW

The crowd picks of SXSW include Hot Hot Heat, Kathleen Edwards, Death From Above 1979 and The Dears

Times Colonist (Victoria)
Sun March 20 2005
By Sandra Sperounes

AUSTIN, Texas -- New York publicist Frank Woodworth is jumping for joy in the middle of the Austin Convention Centre, the main headquarters for the South by Southwest music festival.

Why? Did he score backstage passes for Elvis Costello? Did SXSW keynote speaker Shawn Fanning slide him some Napster stock? Is he celebrating a tryst with the University of Texas cheerleading team?

Uh-uh. He's ecstatic about Canadian music.

"All the best music is coming from Canada," he smiles before rattling off his favourite artists.

"I listened to Broken Social Scene on the plane ride here. Feist is friggin' amazing. I was telling everyone to buy the Arcade Fire disc -- I let The New York Times cut in line so they could see their sold-out show at the Mercury Lounge (in New York)."

Woodworth doesn't work for any Canadian acts, but he might as well be one of our ambassadors. As he ponders what's behind the northern nation's musical greatness, he forgets he's supposed to be handing out gig flyers for one of his New York clients, The Fame.

"It could be that the (Canadian) government invests money into music. It could be the cold -- look at all the great music coming out of (Europe's) Nordic countries a few years ago. Maybe there's nothing else to do but make music," says Woodworth.

None of Woodworth's favourite Canucks are playing at this week's SXSW, but plenty of others are. At last count, the official number is 76 -- about five percent of SXSW's entire roster and the largest contingent ever from Canada.

The list reads like a who's who of our best and brightest acts, including Victoria's Hot Hot Heat and Leeroy Stagger as well as Buck 65, Death From Above 1979, The Dears, Kathleen Edwards, Tegan & Sara, Kinnie Starr, The Be Good Tanyas, Boy, Lorrie Matheson and Ann Vriend, who will soon be recording her second soul-pop record in New York.

SXSW's music director Brent Grulke says the inclusion of so many Canadian acts is not a token gesture.

More than 8,000 acts applied to get into this year's SXSW and he says Canadians deserved to make the cut.

Thanks to funding from Canadian Heritage, Grulke has travelled to many of our festivals and events and knows the quality of our scene.

"There's a lot of buzz about Canadian acts across the board," he says. "There's been a real outreach by the Canadian (music) industry and cultural funding industries to promote talent in the U.S. On a personal level, I've become so much more exposed to Canadian music. There's a greater awareness of it."

In the last 15 years, Canada has produced a growing number of superstars -- Avril Lavigne, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, Sum 41, Nickelback -- but we're now also considered one of the world's major epicentres of cutting-edge, left-of-centre rock, rap and electronica.

U.S. publications such as Spin and The New York Times recently lauded Montreal's flourishing art-rock scene, anchored by The Arcade Fire, Stars, The Dears and the now-defunct Unicorns.

Rootsy rapper Buck 65, Winnipeg's The Duhks and Caribou are also quickly becoming critical darlings in the U.S., while Britain's BBC Radio regularly plays The Dears and Hot Hot Heat, Victoria's dance-punks. Not even our own country offers the same radio support.

Based on murmurs in the clubs of Austin, the picks of SXSW include Hot Hot Heat, Kathleen Edwards, Death From Above 1979 and The Dears. Their names are mentioned in at least one of three conversations -- usually followed by the occasional crack about our colloquialisms and climate. "There's lots of snow there, right?" (Hey, don't joke -- last week, Edmonton was warmer than Austin was on Tuesday, eh?)

Such hype doesn't necessarily pay dividends for every Canuck. Wednesday's "Canadian Blast Off" showcase -- featuring Radiogram, The Nice Ones and Old Reliable -- was sparsely attended for most of the night.

Wade Sheedy of Toronto's Shikasta isn't taking anything for granted. Canadian or not, he knows he still has to drum up a crowd for his band's SXSW slot.

"Last year, we were the only Canadian band on a Japanese showcase, but we managed to draw people off the street," he says. "This year, I'm going out to every club and handing out flyers."

Death From Above 1979, Toronto's fiercest rock duo, has no trouble drawing hundreds of fans and SXSW delegates to the sweaty Blender Bar.

Neither do The Dears, Hot Hot Heat or Kathleen Edwards, who performs in a purple and black room reminiscent of a '70s discotheque, minus the glitter balls and lines of cocaine. Several Edmonton musicians, including Shawn Jonasson of the Swiftys, park their weary bones near the front of the stage and talk to her guitarist/keyboardist Jim Bryson as he sets up his gear.

A line of 30 or so fans wait on the sidewalk, trying to peer into the windows to catch a glimpse of Edwards, who looks like a rosy-cheeked farm wife in her jeans and cowboy boots.

For the next 40 minutes, she delivers her sassy roots-rock (Back To Me) and forlorn twangy folk (Six O'Clock News) with the help of her partner/guitarist, Colin Cripps. The two often stare at each other like they're ready to attack with their guitars or teeth.

"That was the best show I've ever seen," gushes a girl as she leaves the club.

"I didn't know she sang so many of my favourite songs."

--

Check out the official SXSW website for more music info:

http://2005.sxsw.com/music/

time we switched to red wine

I Am Coor-nadian

The Edmonton Journal
Sat March 19, 2005
By Todd Babiak

Canada, as we know and love it, is finished. Am I referring to the declining power of the federal government? The plummeting interest in the Anne of Green Gables series of books and television properties?

No. I'm talking Molson Coors. This week, the multinational brewer announced it is retiring the most successful and most annoying tagline in the history of domestic advertising: I Am Canadian.

Of course, the sorrow began months ago, when Molson announced it would seek to merge with Denver-based Coors Brewing. Molson is a Canadian institution, founded in 1786 on the windy banks of the St. Lawrence River. The company has traded on its essentially Canadian character for years, attaching itself to institutions like hockey, downhill skiing, and the promise of drunken sex near a body of water, in the context of loon calls. But no one, not even the Molsons, could have foreseen the I Am Canadian thing.

After thousands of young men filled their wardrobes with I Am Canadian T-shirts and hats, tattooed the logo and phrase on their arms and calves, drank themselves stupid on July 1, 2001, and smashed up Whyte Avenue, this is how Molson treats them? Like a bunch of customers?

All of this is deliciously educational.

There is something sad and withering about millions of men discovering a love for their country through a series of beer ads. History lessons didn't work. Travel and bilingualism? Nope. It took a few loud snowboarding ads and a spoof of an American political speech written by an American to inspire our young people to wear and wave the red and white.

I don't know many people who feel strongly about the actual beer that comes in a Molson Canadian can, which is the great genius of advertising firm Bensimon Byrne. Of course, it's about the brand, not the beer. Patriotic packaging has been around since the dawn of modern capitalism, but since Molson's success with I Am Canadian it has exploded in this formerly humble nation. Truck manufacturers, coffee shops, hardware stores, football leagues and department stores work at attaching their brand to the maple leaf and to your need to be loudly, proudly "something significant that isn't American!"

The new campaign, It Starts Here, will focus on other concerns dear to the young Canadian male, namely sports and bars and scantily clad women. These concerns also happen to be dear to the young American male, which shouldn't surprise anyone. Mergers often mean merged advertising campaigns and business cultures.

So what is Coors?

Adolph Coors, a Prussian immigrant, started the brewery in the wild foothills west of Denver in the 1870s. The company survived Prohibition and expanded during the Cold War from a regional to a national and, eventually, an international brewery. Adolph's grandson Joe Coors reacted strongly against the social changes of the 1960s and applied literal interpretations of the Bible to workplace policy. He started the Heritage Foundation; the family continues to sink millions of endowment dollars into other ultra-conservative causes.

One of these is the Free Congress Foundation. On its website the Free Congress Foundation explains, "our main focus is on the Culture War. Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture? Or will we continue the long slide into the cultural and moral decay of political correctness? If we do, America, once the greatest nation on earth, will become no less than a Third World country."

Now, the Coors family is free to do whatever it likes with the fortunes it has derived from selling beer. Their Dark Age values clash with Canadian values, but they are distinct from company policy. The family can spend a billion dollars to erect a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in America, but the brewery remains legally separate.

However, in the era of the big, living, all-encompassing brand, how can we separate the Coors family from Coors, or Coors from Molson Coors? If you wear the shirt, the hat, the tattoo, you wear the family's reputation and philosophy.

The only sentimental tragedy in this merger, and in the retirement of I Am Canadian, is that we always fall for the advertising identity game. It isn't Molson's fault that Canadians are so needy, so desperate to feel singular and important, that we accepted beer commercials as a key part of our national mythology. Perhaps it's time we switched to red wine. It Starts Here.

Beer Baron Adolph Coors (1847-1929)

the man knew his elbows

Marlon Brando's secret sex trick: 'Elbowism'

by Lisa Fitterman

The Gazette (Montréal)
Friday, March 11, 2005

MONTREAL - Okay, girls. Tell me if you've heard this one before: You've just had a rousing session of lovemaking and your partner, who has whispered or even shouted sweet nothings to you during the act, simply turns over and starts snoring within seconds.

I'm pointing no fingers, mind you, but I know it happens.

After such a gloriously intimate act, some people (read: men) can speedily -- and sleepily -- separate themselves from their significant other. Not that the poor shlubs can help it, according to an academic study out of England that was released last month.

Sleep researchers at Surrey University found that a brain chemical is released immediately following orgasm that makes men feel very sleepy.

The blood rush after climax apparently depletes the muscles of energy-giving glycogen.

All you runners out there know what I mean when I refer to "hitting the wall," the point at which you keep your body moving only through sheer will.

Of course, while I'll hit the wall at, say, 20 miles, most guys tend to hit it right after orgasm because they have more muscle mass than women do.

The most they can do before rolling over is yawn and grunt "good night" or whatever.

What to do? How to take the "boring snoring" out of your Casanova?

Why not teach him a little trick practised by no less than Marlon Brando? The late actor was a legendary ladies' man who, before becoming grossly fat and reclusive, apparently bedded scads of women, including Ursula Andress and Marilyn Monroe.

Once, when pop anthropologist Desmond Morris asked his friend Brando why the actor was so successful with the ladies, he replied that he'd always been a great "elbowist."

Contrary to what you might think, this art of "elbowism" does not mean employing one's sharp joints to push competition aside, making your partner scream in shiatsu-like ecstasy or knowing how to gently and diplomatically cut off conversation.

Instead, it's the exact opposite: The ability to prop yourself up on your elbows and talk and listen, or at least look like you're listening, for as long as it takes.

"Women love talk," Brando told Morris.

You bet we do.

For us, talking equals emotional closeness. It's our reassurance that we aren't mere vessels or tools to an end, where any body will do. We need to feel wanted and loved.

Yep, I really like Brando's concept. It's simple, to the point (so to speak) and I can only hope that English-language dictionaries take note and include it in their next editions.

I can see the entry now: "elbowism (el-bo-iz-em), noun. The art of propping oneself up on one's elbows and talking, especially after sex. Variations: elbowist (el-bo-ist), noun or adjective. One skilled at the art of elbowism."

Think of it as Brando's lasting gift to humankind, along the lines of On the Bedroom Front.

"So I got that goin' for me, which is nice."

here

there

and everywhere

l8er, sk8er

"In April 2004, Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell declared the first ever Skateboard Week in Vancouver. Although this step in recognizing skateboarding’s contribution to Vancouver was an important one, relations between skaters and the city have not always been so warm.

Opening May 1st, 2004 at the Vancouver Museum is Skateboarding Vancouver, a look at the colourful and controversial history of skateboarding in this city and beyond.

See skateboards and equipment from all eras of the sport from the surf-inspired sixties to the electric eighties to the fine-arts inspired nineties. Learn how skateboarding has been shaped by this city and how skateboarding has shaped it.

Based on the collection of PD, a local skate shop owner, collector and curator of The Online Skateboard Museum, this exhibit shows, for the first time, hundreds of skateboards and related gear from the 1920s until today.

While illustrating the technical evolution of skateboarding, this exhibit also addresses the social evolution of the sport."

-- more --

Note: The Vancouver Museum offers free admission on Tuesdays from 5pm-9pm, year round. Yes. I'll remind you when the time comes. Sounds gr8, eh? ; - )

how old do you think I am?

What Age Do You Act?

Apparently, I'm 28 yrs old. Still.

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe.

13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world.

20-29: You are a wild-eyed twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences (i.e. sex, drugs and new music).

30-39: You are an ambitious, insecure and totally self-absorbed thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! Maybe not babies.

40-49: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax, enjoy the fruits of your labour. If you're lucky.

50-59: You're a lazy, miserable sob. Get yer arse off the couch and do somethin' with your life before it's too late. You think I'm kidding?

60-69: You're probably feeling like dead meat right about now. Try to enjoy what little time you've got left. The clock is ticking, pal...

70+: You act like you don't care: "age is irrelevant!" Well, that's a fine way to act.

What age do you act?

Apparently, I will die at age 58.

"Not bad, considering your super wild lifestyle. Want to live longer? Try losing a few bad habits."

When Will You Die?

tell it like it is, lloyd

Missile Counter-Attack

Axworthy fires back at U.S. -- and Canadian -- critics of our BMD decision in An Open Letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Thu March 3, 2005

By LLOYD AXWORTHY

The Winnipeg Free Press

Dear Condi, I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.

As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we've had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we're going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.

Sure, that doesn't match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a "liberation war" in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.

Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government's role should be when there isn't a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.

Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such a missile defence can be made openly.

You might also notice that it's a system in which the governing party's caucus members are not afraid to tell their leader that their constituents don't want to follow the ideological, perhaps teleological, fantasies of Canada's continental co-inhabitant. And that this leader actually listens to such representations.

Your boss did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defence in front of a highly controlled, pre-selected audience.

Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one-party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire.

If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don't embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond.

Now, I understand that there may have been some miscalculations in Washington based on faulty advice from your resident governor of the "northern territories," Ambassador Cellucci. But you should know by now that he hasn't really won the hearts and minds of most Canadians through his attempts to browbeat and command our allegiance to U.S. policies.

Sadly, Mr. Cellucci has been far too closeted with exclusive groups of 'experts' from Calgary think-tanks and neo-con lobbyists at cross-border conferences to remotely grasp a cross-section of Canadian attitudes (nor American ones, for that matter).

I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.

These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states.

To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto.

To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court -- which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan.

And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed -- beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices.

On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' while you're in Ottawa. It's a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will.

This is not just some quirky notion concocted in our long winter nights, by the way. It seems to have appeal for many in your own country, if not the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal or Rush Limbaugh. As I discovered recently while giving a series of lectures in southern California, there is keen interest in how the U.S. can offer real leadership in managing global challenges of disease, natural calamities and conflict, other than by military means.

There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world's largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water.
Why not discuss these issues with Canadians who understand them, and seek out ways to better cooperate in areas where we agree -- and agree to respect each other's views when we disagree.

Above all, ignore the Cassandras who deride the state of our relations because of one missile-defence decision. Accept that, as a friend on your border, we will offer a different, independent point of view. And that there are times when truth must speak to power.

In friendship,

Lloyd Axworthy

Lloyd Axworthy is president of the University of Winnipeg and a former Canadian foreign minister.

evening out with donna

So at the hypnotist last night, one of the things we did was become our "favourite celebrity". Of course I chose Angelina Jolie. Duh. I gave out copious autographs. I even signed one girl's arm.

Before the show, the line-up into the Commodore was huge, and we got there half an hour before the doors opened. In front of us were a couple of Langley boys (I'm from Cloverdale, but escaped -- therefore, there was much mockage) who ended up chatting with us after being drawn into our conversation by talks of blowjobs such.

(I think the comment I made was "Okay, who do I have to give a blowjob to get to the front of the line?" Being as I was with a couple of lesbians, they were icked by said statement. And amused, as well. I promised that I'd bring them. Three for one, I say.)

This will always get boys' attention. I had to inform them that they weren't close enough to the front of the line to apply.

Amusing chit chat went on. They ended up sitting behind us at the show, and there was some chatting going on. Amusing. The one we talked to the most was a cute redhead named Brian. Between him and my roommate, they convinced me I should go on stage. So I did.

At intermission, I became Angelina. My roommate became Milla Jovovich. Nobody seemed to know who she was. Are there no science fiction fans in the hypnotist crowd? Who knew?

Anyhoo, there was some flirting. After the show, he tried to get me to ask for his phone number. Very amusing. And sort of flattering, although I suspect he hit on me because I was the only one in our group who actually sleeps with men. (Note to self: Hang around with cute lesbians more often.)

While I was deciding to go for the bait or not (he was cute, but what the heck am I going to do with another langley boy? They live too far away to be very useful, and I try to avoid the one night stand thing.

This sounds cold, but I prefer to think of it as being practical.) I got distracted by my friends and when I looked back, he'd gone to catch up with his friends. So, 'twas not to be.

My roommate got the DVD of the show. I may have to make a copy of it. I mean, who doesn't want to see the look of disgust on my face as the hypnotist rubs his 12" cock (aka, a microphone) on my head?

(Reasoning: What the hell am I going to do with a 12" cock? All I can think of is stuffing it and mounting it on the wall....)

Listening to: "Magic Man" - Heart

4:22 PM | Comments (3)

Dainty Donna