Ty on the move
We’re off and running! Ty’s ready and raring to go – note the fresh snow on the mountains behind. It’s beautiful but we’re just as happy to be leaving it behind.
See a couple more pictures here.
George Wainborn Park Christmas Day
False Creek, Vancouver Christmas Day
False Creek, Vancouver Christmas Day
Brubin running, False Creek, Vancouver Christmas Day
See more here.
Yes, it’s Yule Log time again, folks. The New York Times reviews the options here.
Let’s close out the year by reflecting on the personalities and events of 2008 and compiling the Third Annual List of Words That Ought to be Added to the Dictionary:
aniston verb the inability to just let it go already: Twelve years after the championship game, Roger still anistoned that untimely fumble.
bernanke verb to appear bewildered and helpless in the face of events. syn. paulson, flaherty, federline
blagojevich noun 1. one who commits a crime with comic ineptness: That blagojevich robbed a bank without a mask—or a gun! 2. a grown man who wears a marmot upon his head.
bush verb to long achingly for someone’s departure: After finding half a pizza in the crack of our sofa, my wife began bushing about my couch-crashing best friend.
cheney noun 1. a creature, rarely seen in public, possibly mythical, believed to feed exclusively upon kitty-cats and the souls of orphans. 2. one who successfully hunts the most dangerous game of all—man!
Conservative (orig. Canadian) noun one who advocates and strictly adheres to principles of free market political orthodoxy, right up until achieving power.
Read the rest here.
This was a big year for women: The first serious female presidential candidate, the first predominately female state senate, the first female Top Chef. Yet the advertising world has not caught up to the advances of half our population and continues to use stereotypes and violence to prey on our most vile desires. Here are the worst of them — the trends that won’t die despite our cultural outrage, and personal boredom.
BONDAGE – This year Remy Martin debuted its “things are getting interesting” campaign that features a mediocre Website and a series of billboards/magazine spreads depicting women in degrading bondage positions. You may think, “hey this one shows two women, there aren’t even men involved, how can it be sexist?” But most of the ads (not available online) have men between the two women in controlling positions. And even without that, these women are obviously putting on a show for an outsider, not having a passionate lesbian love affair for themselves. These types of ads gain traction in cultural periods of female advancement — capturing the fantasy of “putting us back where we belong.”
Read the rest here.
Diana Thorneycroft Group of Seven Awkward Moments – Beavers and Woo at Tanoo 2008
Winnipegger Diana Thorneycroft, whose work was included in Domination and Desire, the exhibition I curated at the Nanaimo Art Gallery this Fall, hits the top ten at number 7:
Winnipeg photographer Diana Thorneycroft reinvented herself with this latest series, “The Group of Seven Awkward Moments.” Using reproductions of artworks by Emily Carr and Group of Seven artists like Tom Thomson as backdrops, Thorneycroft constructs and photographs witty dioramas that plunge viewers into a Canadian purgatory of accidents, disasters and moments of poor judgment. It’s Canadian history with a droll sense of humour and a surprising departure for an artist whose work has sought notably dark themes over the years. With these images, she joins Vancouver’s Myfanwy Macleod as a comedic master. Guy Maddin, watch out; you have hometown competition for remaking history.
Read the rest here.
Don’t look now, but a woman in Ohio has a new face. And the world has a new kind of medicine: socially necessary surgery.
The operation, announced yesterday at the Cleveland Clinic, was a face transplant from a corpse. Similar procedures have been done three times before, but this was the biggest. Doctors replaced 77 square inches of the patient’s face, from her eyelids to her chin. Go look at yourself in the mirror. That’s practically the whole you.
Medically, it’s a triumph. Transplants used to be mortally necessary and relatively simple: kidneys, livers, hearts. Patients got these surgeries because if they didn’t, they’d die. And though the surgeries were risky, the tissues involved were straightforward. The blood vessels that had to be connected were manageable in number and size.
Today, transplantation has advanced to parts that are less vital and sometimes much trickier: ovaries, uteruses, penises, hands, arms, and now faces. As surgeons venture closer to the body’s surface, two things happen. The recipient’s body becomes more likely to reject the transplant, increasing the need for drugs that suppress the immune system, which in turn raises the risk of infection and cancer. By some estimates, the price can be a decade of life. And the muscles, nerves, and blood vessels involved become ever smaller and more intricate. One doctor involved in the Cleveland transplant calls it “the most complex surgical procedure ever performed.”
Then why do it? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and risk a patient’s life to fix a nonlethal defect? The Cleveland doctors give three reasons. First, this patient had facial damage that impaired her physical functions. She couldn’t eat normally, and she could breathe only through a hole in her windpipe. Second, faces, unlike kidneys, have social functions. “They are essential to our communication with the world,” argues Maria Siemionow, the doctor who led the Cleveland team. They convey emotion as well as speech.
Read the rest here.
Bernard Madoff outside his Manhattan apartment
One of the funds that invested almost exclusively in Madoff, Fairfield Greenwich, stands to lose 7.5 billion dollars, no small change. Given that, the Noel family may have to cancel Christmas celebrations.
Read more here and here and here.
And here is the Fairfield Greenwich group investment strategy outlined – note the use of modern art in illustrating their marketing brochure.
By Kate Harding, Salon Broadsheet
You could be forgiven, reading this article by Gemma Soames about “the new feminists,” for thinking you’d woken up in 1994. Hey, you guys, did you know there are self-identified feminists who admit to liking lipstick and high heels and retro dresses? It’s true! And also, there’s this woman named Katie Roiphe, who doesn’t relate to those hairy, stinky old feminists from the ’70s. And oh my god, have you seen that new show, “Friends”? I totally want that Rachel chick’s hair!
Seriously, my first thought when I read this article was “I choose my choice!” — and even that’s a woefully outdated reference. On the upside, when I Googled that phrase to find the article I just linked to, I also ran across a relevant blog post by Lisa Jervis (hey, did you know there’s this new magazine about feminism and pop culture that reclaims the word “bitch”?), in which she discusses the tension between respecting women’s individual choices and trying to preserve a definition of feminism that goes beyond, say, Soames’ cutesy explanation of the “new feminist” agenda: “The right to do what the hell you like, however you like, in heels — if you like.” (Oh, ha, it’s so true! Female empowerment in the 21st century = selfish behavior with zero reflection! It’s like you read my diary, Gemma!) Writes Jervis, “How can we deal with this? Can we find the right place on the continuum between uncritical acceptance of every woman’s ‘I’m doing it for me‘ boob job… and actually writing those Feminist Clubhouse Rules that some people think we have?”
Great question. Except, even asking it is capitulating to a false binary similar to the one created by journalists like Soames nearly two decades ago, not that Soames noticed it. As a “young” feminist (at least by the standards of an article that invokes Courtney Love as a current style icon) who does indeed love lipstick and retro dresses, I can’t tell you how sick I am of reading articles that feature a bunch of self-proclaimed feminists somewhat closer to my age than Gloria Steinem’s going on about how ridiculous second-wavers were for acting as if women were, you know, oppressed or something.
Read the rest here.
by Gary Younge
‘What an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality,” Alan Greenspan told the Congressional House oversight and government reform committee on 23 October. “Everyone has one. You have to – to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.” As the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, from 1987 to 2006, Greenspan stood at the helm of US monetary policy during the time conditions for the current meltdown were being created.
“And what I’m saying to you,” he continued, “is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact … [I found a] flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”
Greenspan’s ideology was unfettered, free-market capitalism. Its understanding of how the world works was rooted in self-interest. It was a value system that placed the private before the public, the individual before the collective, and the wealth of the few before the welfare of the many.
So pervasive was this worldview that, after a while, it was not even understood to be a view at all. It was just the hard-nosed reality against which only lunatics and leftists raged. “Unlike many economists,” Bob Woodward wrote of Alan Greenspan in his book Maestro (the title speaks volumes), “he has never been rule driven or theory driven. The data drive.” They drove a sleek black limousine over the edge of a steep cliff. And since the invisible hand of the market ostensibly guided everything, there was no one who could really be held accountable or responsible for anything. The buck didn’t stop anywhere. Indeed, for those who were already wealthy, the bucks just kept rolling in.
Read the rest here.