three wise monkeys

Mar 31, 2008 04:30 AM
Martin Knelman

STRATFORD

A recent cover of The New Yorker magazine depicted Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sharing a bed, both drowsily reaching for the same fabled red phone at 3 a.m. The image gave one hilarious answer to the question of who would be better equipped to handle the ultimate crisis call. Why couldn’t they share ultimate responsibility at the White House?

Almost as ludicrous, it strikes me, was the notion that several people could share the job of artistic director of the Stratford Festival. But that is what the festival announced, in 2006, with no joke intended.
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Apr 09, 2008 04:30 AM
Antonia Zerbisias

If you think that some of the Bush administration’s conservative politics – and Orwellian moves – in the U.S. can’t affect Canada, then you have some research to do.

Ten days ago at the University of California in San Francisco, librarian Gloria Won was running through POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), billed as “the world’s largest database on reproductive health.” Maintained by Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, and freely available to medical schools, health organizations and the public, it is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
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New research into inter-ethnic unions suggests we’re reverting to a less romantic idea of marriage

Mar 15, 2008 04:30 AM
Nicholas Keung
Immigration/Diversity Reporter

I grew up in a traditional Chinese household, where I was taught my future life partner must have an equal, if not better, upbringing than mine. That mentality is embedded in the ancient saying, “A bamboo door should match a bamboo door; a wood door should match a wood door.” Essentially, what it means is you have to marry someone in the same social class if you want the relationship to last.

The Chinese are not alone in this worldview. Many Indians are still bound by caste and the arranged unions that flow from it. And acute class-consciousness is a persistent feature of British identity.
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By Oliver Whitehead

The Harper government’s latest move to deny support to film and television programming that it deems offensive is an assault on the values of civilization.

As such, of course, it is nothing new; the Harper Conservatives have merely taken their modest place in a long but dismal line of authority figures whose fear and suspicion of the power of creativity has stifled the expression of original ideas for centuries.
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MARK SCHATZKER
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
February 9, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST

The Globe and Mail

TOKYO —

Not a single grain of wheat flour goes into the noodles at the Tokyo soba shrine — I mean restaurant — called Kikouchitei. The noodles are hand-cut from freshly rolled dough containing buckwheat and only buckwheat.

If that doesn’t strike you as unusual, then there’s something you should know about buckwheat dough: It is the world’s most temperamental substance. Without the glutinous binding properties of wheat, the dough becomes so prone to shredding that learning how to make it takes a staggering three years of training — after which one attains the status of “soba master.”
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It all began when Canadian Blood Services banned gay men from donating blood.
By JOHN MINER, SUN MEDIA
Wed, January 16, 2008

A London gay activist group is ramping up its campaign against Canadian Blood Services and hospital organ transplant programs for restrictions on donations from men who have sex with men.
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Labia Majora Carnage [Printed in the "Spoof" edition which came out on the 30th of March]
by “Xavier”
Gazette Staff

Last night, local women hit the streets for the first ever Take Back the Nightie march.

The march was led by members of Western’s Women’s Issues Network, who, for the first time all year, left their circle in the University Community Centre, where witnesses claim they perform tribal dances and yell alienating slurs about pussies and cunts.
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Apr 11th, 2007
Gazette ’spoof’ angers readers

By Bob Klanac

The student Gazette’s annual April Fool’s Day parody issue has drawn widespread anger for comments about women and other groups, and the condemnation of University of Western Ontario President Paul Davenport.

In a statement released Wednesday, Davenport said he was offended by material in the issue and he will be looking for ways to ensure the Gazette and University Students’ Council, owner of the paper, prevent such articles from appearing in the future.
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Buffalo’s odd rite of spring

Once a year, pussy willows and water get their very own festival, writes Francine Kopun
April 08, 2007

In Buffalo, N.Y., the mad, last-minute rush to prepare for Easter includes two items that don’t make many shopping lists: pussy willows and squirt guns.

That’s because the city is home to the largest celebration of an ancient Polish rite of spring – Dyngus Day, traditionally held on Easter Monday. That’s when thousands of residents and visitors will gather in community halls and neighbourhood pubs around Buffalo and its suburbs to eat and drink and polka, and – oh yes – sprinkle each other with water and tap each other with pussy willows.
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Why is a man who has sex with a 12 year old girl branded a paedophile, but a woman who does the same is not?

*****
Sex with boy, 12, woman jailed 15 months

Mar 29, 2007 06:01 PM
Canadian Press

QUEBEC – A woman collapsed and burst into tears today after being sentenced to 15 months in jail for having sex with a 12-year-old boy.
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