Dressed in a mixed Vivian Westwood, Comme des Garcons outfit, he serves iced tea in Alice in Wonderland glasses, setting the beverages on strawberry-patterned coasters.

points to parallels between the two parties, including their association with gangs--in Mrs Turia's case the Mongrel Mob and Black Power, and in the National Front's case, the public perception that it is linked to skinheads. ...National Front national secretary Kerry Bolton conceded yesterday that the pamphlet could be read as an endorsement of the Maori Party. "In a way it is an endorsement... as it says in the pamphlet itself, we are a party that stands up for European culture and identity and to be perfectly consistent we should be able to understand a party that stands up for Maori identity and culture."

Madrid is a lesson for Europe, which has to understand it must distance itself from the Americans. The Berlusconi administration is using the same methods as the dog, and I hope God eliminates this Berlusconi government because it is dictatorial and destroys Islam. We hope God sends them a disaster; let Italy have a disaster.

Today's Post column about the 9/11 Commission report is

EDMONTON - I've been following, with keen interest, the provincial and national reactions to Ralph Klein's announcement last week that Alberta will shortly become "debt-free." They have ranged from the incisive to the eccentric.

Most welcome were the many forensic dissections of Ralph's opportunistic proclamation. They added a welcome note of skepticism to an act that, over the years, Premier Klein has milked for more than it's worth. When the net debt was polished off in 1997, and provincial assets became larger than liabilities, there was a similar outpouring of joy about our "freedom from debt." Yet even now, the last of the debt hasn't been totally licked: There will be paper coming due for years to come. All the latest announcement means is that enough cash has been put away to meet future repayments.

Inside Alberta, everyone is lining up for his share of the newly unencumbered provincial surplus. Seniors are shrieking, public-sector workers are pleading, and, miraculously, even a few voices in favour of the taxpayer are heard. Some of these cries have verged on the delusional: While Klein was basking in glory at the Calgary Stampede, a self-described "person living in poverty" accused him of shucking Alberta's debt at the expense of the poor. "How many people have been killed? How many people have been mutilated?" she bellowed. Mutilated? Holy frijoles! After all these years, somebody finally found a completely new accusation to throw at the Tories.

Outside Alberta, there was some restrained praise, and a certain amount of self-questioning in provinces that have tamed debt less well. But mostly what you heard was the old tune: It's all because Alberta is so lucky, so very lucky. It's our oil, you see, that guarantees us wealth and government surpluses. All we need do is turn on the big faucet.

Murray Mandryk of the Regina Leader-Post, who snarked that "evidently, oil wealth is [Albertans'] birthright," raised hackles here by joking: "It's enough to cause you [to] clamour for the good ol' days of Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Policy." But one must admit that the dismissive tone is struck as often within Alberta as it is elsewhere. Paul Haavardsrud lectured us in the Calgary Herald about the fate of Houston, which congratulated itself often on its free-enterprise rectitude only to suffer bad karma when Texan oil production passed its peak in the 1970s. And New Democrat MLA Brian Mason reacted crankily to Klein's pre-emptive mortgage-burning, insisting that "oil and gas price increases guaranteed ... surpluses regardless of how the Tories steered the economy."

As it happens, there's something of a lab experiment available to teach us the relative importance of resources and sound policymaking to an economy. Venezuela has an oil industry, and tar-sands deposits, roughly equal in extent to Alberta's. That country is run much as Brian Mason's party would like Alberta to be -- but the socialized Venezuelan oil industry has failed to deliver automatic prosperity. Its strike-ridden economy shrank a horrific 9% in 2002 and another 9% in 2003, just as petroleum prices peaked. Unemployment is in the high teens and the government is incurring heavy deficits. If oil were such an unfailing divine gift, this state of affairs would be impossible.

Without doubt, Alberta has benefitted from the war premium on oil and gas prices. But the sheer shortsightedness of the chatterboxes' "dumb luck" view boggles the mind. Thousands went broke in the Alberta oilpatch over 30 years or more before Leduc No. 1 hit it big in 1947. For the next 20 years, E.C. Manning's Socred government built a trusted, universally imitated royalty regime that walked the line between bending over for U.S. capital and driving it out (as other provinces chose to). And in the '70s, the Lougheed government invested heavily in tar-sands exploration and research, which has now given Alberta technically realizable oil reserves greater than Saudi Arabia's. Forget Houston: Our oil production may not pass its peak in my lifetime.

If Alberta has been lucky, it has not been in possessing resources, but in having sensible leaders and a curiously stiffnecked public that voted for them. Premier Klein may have succumbed to the temptations of runaway public spending, but he has never wavered from the swift pace of debt repayment Albertans demanded. Our reduced debt-servicing costs have been a big part of the "windfall" of late, too. Still, I wouldn't object so much to the taunts of "dumb luck" -- if I didn't suspect that they made certain dumb clucks awfully eager to cook Canada's golden goose. (July 26, 2004)

Al-Ahram of Cairo is now reporting that the new Egyptian prime minister's Canadian past is becoming a topic of disapproving discussion in the Arab republic. The disapproval is probably particularly acute amongst those Egyptians who don't have a foreign bolthole somewhere. Note the cameo appearance by Al-Jazeera...

In a most intriguing investigative report in Al-Ahrar by Ahmed El-Dessouqi, he discovered that many of the newly appointed ministers, including the prime minister himself, who is rumoured to hold a Canadian passport, hold dual and in some instances triple nationalities. The writer said that the Minister of Tourism Ahmed El-Maghrabi holds a Saudi passport alongside his Egyptian. The same applies to Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali and the Minister of Housing Mohamed Ibrahim Suleiman. How many more ministers hold dual nationalities, the writer demanded to know in an article stirringly called, "A government of foreigners". The controversy about whether holders of high public office can have dual nationalities rages on.

"The minister of tourism publicly claimed that no less than half of the newly appointed ministers are foreign passport holders," El-Dessouqi wrote. "These ministers must all declare in public what other nationalities they belong to," he stressed. The writer quoted the Qatari-based Al-Jazira satellite television station as saying that many ministers hold American, Canadian, French and Italian citizenship.

In much the same vein, the independent weekly Sawt Al-Umma questioned Nazif's Canadian credentials. According to the front-page article of Monday's edition, Canadian diplomats dropped in at the paper's Editor-in-Chief Adel Hammouda's office to deliver a 12-page statement on the subject, but failed to verify whether or not Nazif was a Canadian citizen. The Canadian diplomats explained, though, that not all overseas students who study in Canada acquire Canadian nationality.

The topic was picked up by the sensationalist weekly Al-Osbou deriding the "Internet café government," apparently an allusion to the hi-tech capabilities of the government of technocrats.

Alex Ross has photos from Bayreuth taken in the run-up to last night's "dead rabbit" Parsifal. Where's the Jockey Club when you need it?

I'm six feet tall: on campus, back in the day, I was accustomed to being in the top quintile in height among males. In present-day Holland I'd be below the mean--and the world's tallest national population is still growing rapidly, according to market research released on the weekend. The Reuters story I've linked to there mentions an wide-ranging study by Robert W. Fogel, who is a household name if your household is interested in the quantitative history of economic output. It contains some truly eerie observations about the role of brute thermodynamics in economic progress.

...[I]t is quite clear that in energy-poor populations, such as those of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the typical individual in the labor force had relatively small amounts of energy available for work. ...It is quite clear, then, that the increase in the amount of calories available for work over the past 200 years must have made a significant contribution to the growth rate of the per capita income of countries such as France and Great Britain.

That contribution had two effects, a thermodynamic effect and a physiological effect. The thermodynamic effect increased the labor force participation rate by bringing into the labor force the bottom 20 percent of the consuming units, who, even assuming highly stunted individuals and low BMIs, had only enough energy above maintenance for a few hours of strolling each day -- about the amount needed for just one hour of heavy manual labor. Consequently, merely the elimination of the large class of paupers and beggars, which was accomplished in England mainly during the last half of the nineteenth century, contributed significantly to the growth of national product. The increase in the labor force participation rate made possible by raising the nutrition of the bottom fifth of consuming units above the threshold required for work, by itself, contributed 0.12 percent to the annual British growth rate between 1800 and 1980... The combined effort of the increase in dietary energy available for work, and of the increased human efficiency in transforming dietary energy into work output, appears to account for about 50 percent of the British economic growth since 1800.

That's purely on a BTU-based analysis, without incorporating any assumptions about the neurological effects of nutrition on productivity.

Today's Post column about Kennewick Man is

Here's last week's column about the CRTC. It was written, you must remember, on the morning after the decision was announced, when it was still theoretically possible that some cable provider might hazard the onerous monitoring regulations placed on the al-Jazeera license. In the event, the cable companies all disavowed any likelihood of doing so. The stuff about CHOI-FM was my original subject for the column, and is the bit that still holds up. Oh, for the days of magazine deadlines...

During the federal election we heard a lot about the CRTC as a protector of "Canadian values." Remember that? The Conservative platform proposed reducing the broadcast regulator to a minimalist role in preventing signal overlap, and culture czars ranging from Margaret Atwood to Paul Gross were enlisted to defend the commission as a protector of Canadian minds from evil foreign influences.

What foreign influences, and what Canadian values, would those be? We all know about the obstacles the CRTC has imposed on cable providers trying to get U.S. networks such as HBO, ESPN and Fox News on to the Canadian cable band, and yesterday the CRTC rejected an application from RAI International, the foreign service of the Italian state broadcaster, despite petitions from 100,000 Canadian supporters. However, the Qatar-based news station al-Jazeera was cleared for domestic distribution.

Many will be puzzled or angry that the mouthpiece of the Arab world's most toxic elements will have surged so far ahead in the queue for Canadian bandwidth. Al-Jazeera, unlike RAI or the U.S. networks, was approved because it won't compete with existing Canadian content providers. On its face, the decision is about protecting the economic integrity of prior licencees, and not merely a matter of cultural prejudice. But cultural prejudice is the ultimate justification for that protection -- for limiting access to our cable dial so that our screens don't become a chaotic hive of nasty American content.

So it is worth noting, in case anyone still doesn't know, that when "freedom fighters" in some Iraqi basement saw the head off a captive foreign-aid worker, they're usually quick to swing by and drop off the videotape at al-Jazeera headquarters the way a FedEx man would leave you a boxful of books. The Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith have described the network's guiding ideology as "virulently" anti-Semitic. The CRTC is requiring distributors to edit out "abusive comment," but the "Islamic CNN" would still serve, without doubt, as an inexhaustible source of anti-Western recrimination and propaganda for culturally stranded Muslims. That's what it's for.

And who knows? Perhaps Maggie Atwood herself will nestle in some night with a big bag of popcorn to watch the latest burqa fashion show from Dubai. It's all about free speech, isn't it? At least, it's about the orderly, clenched-rectum Canadian sort of free speech, which wouldn't dream of making al-Jazeera wait for broadcast approval -- that might be racist -- but has no compunction whatsoever about revoking the licence of a radio station in Quebec City on explicitly political grounds.

The cleansing of Quebec City's airwaves is something, after all, that a Wahhabi emir would understand perfectly well. The CRTC's groundbreaking ruling against CHOI-FM and its unapologetically sexist, Howard Stern-inspired host Jeff Fillion is merely the logical extension of the territory it has always claimed: If it can regulate foreign threats to "Canadian values," why not domestic ones? It is not as though the Commission has ever respected anyone else's right to decide what "Canadian values" are: The term comes pre-defined, and is synonymous with the values of the Liberal Canadian state. Which, of course, include a deep and heartfelt sympathy with the "other perspectives" -- the "anti-Zionist" and anti-American perspectives -- you'll see on al-Jazeera.

On a strictly democratic analysis, CHOI's prattle about boobies, misbehaving competitors and foreign students would seem to be enormously popular with the Canadians in its market. The station is the most popular in Quebec's capital, and the demonized Mr. Fillion is its number-one morning man. In its decision, the CRTC gave figures from the 2002 licence application in which CHOI was given a two-year lease on life instead of the customary seven: "The Commission received 9,468 interventions concerning CHOI-FM's licence renewal application. 9,417 were in favour of the application; 38 were opposed."

No Canadian politician has ever won that sort of landslide. But in Canada, the 38 who despise freedom of expression will always win out against the 9,417 who support it.

Even leaving aside such trifles as that, the CRTC noted that CHOI has been one of the great practical supporters of the Commission's own supposed mandate to enrich Canadian artists and enhance the life of the community. "[Supporting interveners] noted that the station contributes a great deal to the development of numerous alternative rock bands. Interveners from several of these bands appeared at the hearing to support the station. Some of the interveners drew attention to the fact that jobs would be lost if the licence were not renewed, and to the station's involvement in the community and the services it provides, such as broadcasting, without charge, messages about unwanted pregnancy and the promotion of condom use."

Thus has the CRTC become, almost formally, a self-mocking institution. I think those of us who aren't part of the CRTC's Canadian-content cartel -- those who can't leverage its industrial protectionism into a life of pop concerts, book tours, and TV roles -- are owed an apology. We were told the CRTC was supposed to foster an interesting and vibrant domestic cultural dialogue. The Commission is now waging an explicit war against interesting and vibrant domestic cultural dialogue. Meanwhile, it goes along sorting out foreign content for us in its maternalistic, prissy, almost unapologetically tyrannical way. (July 16, 2004)

By the way, you'd have to figure, wouldn't you, that Molson was one of the most ancient family firms still remaining in the hands of the original clan? Not remotely: even in the New World booze business, Jose Cuervo (1758) takes the laurel for antiquity. The Zildjian Cymbal Company, founded in 1623 in the Ottoman Empire, is the oldest and loudest family business in the United States. But the absolute world champion, by consensus, is Japan's Kongô Gumi Co., a temple-construction firm founded in 593 by Shigemitsu Kongô and controlled today by UCLA grad Masakazu Kongô. (Its secret to success: no confining, artificial rule of primogeniture.)

Recommended: the Motley Fool's take on the Molson-Coors merger, now officially proceeding as a straight share swap at market par. The truth about megamergers like these is that most of them destroy shareholder value, and the pretexts presented by the swashbuckling CEOs behind them are usually rather muddled. Is it to be considered a plus that both companies are already selling each other's brands (reducing transfer costs upfront), or a minus (because there's nothing further to be gained by an outright merger)? In a way--if you buy into the underlying narrative here--it's touching to see two family-dominated firms combining to preserve the old Bräumeisterei ways against more natural merger partners (Heineken was mentioned a couple of times in the days preceding the final deal). But then, as Mathew Ingram points out in the Globe, families don't always play nice with each other. Hat tip to Paul Martin: the deal is, if nothing else, likely to enable MoCoBeerCorpCo to avoid high U.S. taxes on foreign sales. With Eric Molson in the driver's seat, it seems as though the new beast can still credibly say "I Am Canadian" in that bullying, insufferable tone we've all grown to despise.

In my Tuesday Post column (subscriber-only, alas) I misspelled the name of the Calgary Herald's (and formerly the Post's) Paul Haavardsrud. The desk didn't catch the error, and one of Haavardsrud's colleagues chided me on it in an e-mail yesterday. I told him that karmic payback would not be far behind, and so it has proven: the Vancouver Courier, citing somebody named "Colby Cash", is the instrument of retribution. I get an awful lot of mail and even phone calls for this "Cash" fellow, though I'm sure Mr. Haavardsrud still has it much tougher than I do.

Jesse Walker over at Hit & Run has opened a thread with a link to my TAS piece on Bobby Fischer. One commenter accuses me of fudging the central issue slightly:

Fisher's [sic] 1992 match with Spassky was an attempt to influence world opinion in favor of the legitimacy of Slobodan Milosevic, his regime, and the then-ongoing genocide in Bosnia. It was not simply a chess match, either--it was a multi-million-dollar enterprise. To say that Fisher has no record of having harmed anyone other than himself is naive.

There is a touch of black comedy here. Jugoskandic, which was essentially a pyramid scheme designed to suck hard currency into Yugoslavia, collapsed shortly after the match. (The "bank" was offering foreign investors 15% interest on their own currency and an irresistible 200% on the dinar.) Six months later, "Gazda Jezda" (Boss Jezda, as Vasiljevic is known) had fled the country, and Fischer was reported to be living on his own means in a Montenegrin hotel, still waiting for his prize money. It's not clear whether he ever received it, which may or may not weigh in your assessment of his culpability.

The comedy--keeping in mind Fischer's feelings about Jews--is that when the Yugoslav Interior Ministry ostensibly turned against Jezda and accused him of fraud, he immediately fled to Israel. According to various sources in Serbia, Israel, and the West, Vasiljevic had been responsible for negotiating a under-the-table arms deal between Israel and Milosevic. There's some detail in a paper by Israeli ethicist Igor Primoratz; if that doesn't convince you (and it's worth noting, I guess, that it's archived on a Croatian web page), one might mention a telling detail from a contemporary personal account of Jezda and his entourage that appeared in a Chess Monthly interview with journalist Cathy Forbes:

...he surrounded himself with thugs, and you can judge people by the company they keep. Like many Serbian men with a machismo problem, Boss Jezda's idea of impressing a girl is to show her the gun in his trousers. He told me it was an Uzi pistol. A real charmer.

During his stay in Israel, Jezda managed to convince Western reporters that he was building a "government-in-exile" and had turned against Milosevic for good. Shortly thereafter he was back in Yugoslavia and back, apparently, in Slobo's good books. Since then he has been in and out of prison, fending off the Hague tribunal like many former Milosevic cronies. Apparently he was contemplating a run for president in the recent Serbian elections on an anti-kleptocracy platform--you can't say the Balkan peoples lack for a sense of humour--but didn't follow through.

A further note to my column: I mentioned that Boris Spassky, Fischer's opponent in the 1992 match, was punished only gently by the Russian Federation when he returned home. But there was a third high-profile participant: Lothar Schmid, the legendary German arbiter who had overseen the 1972 Fischer-Spassky showdown (and who saved it from falling apart several times by means of deft diplomacy). Schmid wasn't punished at all for going to Yugoslavia, even though his participation was almost as crucial as Fischer's.

Schmid is not only famous for chess--which he plays at an exceedingly high level--but is also the owner and high priest of the Karl May Verlag, which he inherited from his father. This is the publishing house built on the profits from May's ill-informed but romantic Wild West books, which have influenced central European history in weird ways for over a century (Hitler was a fanatic admirer). May's work still sends hundreds of wide-eyed German tourists to Alberta every year to blunder into crevasses and talk nonsense to Indians. In 1960's adaptations of May's books, mountainous Yugoslavia even stood in for the North American West, apparently quite convincingly.

Congratulations are in order for Clarence Simonsen, the Airdrie resident who is the top living expert on aircraft nose art of the Second World War. Simonsen, whom I profiled for the Report early in 2003, is the co-author of two canonical texts on nose paintings in Allied fleets and has a good line in replicas painted on genuine paneling from downed bombers. As a researcher he has pulled together photos of nose art, finding many in private collections that might have vanished otherwise, and has brought recognition to some of the more talented exponents of the form.

Answering an invitation from the Smithsonian, Simonsen gave a talk yesterday at the Dillon Ripley Center in Washington, D.C. The art painted on the sides of bomber aircraft, often by crew members, is recognized in the United States as a uniquely charming and democratic part of the military heritage. The Canadian historical establishment has never quite gotten on board, and Simonsen has a somewhat prickly relationship with the national War Museum.

Here's the story I wrote for the Report, with some links added. Unfortunately I can't say exactly when this ran, but I believe it was in April or thereabouts.

Last month the Lancaster Air Museum in Nanton, Alta., held a quiet ceremony to pay belated tribute to Calgarian Matthew Ferguson, who served in the Royal Canadian Air Force as an aircraft mechanic from 1941 to 1945. Between war's end and Ferguson's death in 1982, few suspected there was anything to distinguish him from thousands of other RCAF crewmen who came home and lived quiet civilian lives. But in 2001, Clarence Simonsen, an Albertan who is probably the world's top living expert on aircraft nose art, made the discovery that Ferguson had been the British Empire's most prolific painter of decorative designs on Second World War bombers.

After publishing his opus majus, RAF & RCAF Aircraft Nose Art in World War II, Mr. Simonsen had received a telephone call from Ferguson's widow Adele, now 86, who still lives in Calgary. She had kept an album of photographs of her husband's work, little suspecting its wider significance until she learned of Mr. Simonsen's book. The album proved to be a treasure trove, maybe the greatest single find in Mr. Simonsen's 37 years of research. All along--while Mr. Simonsen had been talking to dozens of nose artists and air crewmen--the collection had been sitting in a house just a short drive from his own residence in Airdrie.

Such frustrations and joys come with the territory when you are breaking new ground in historical research. Simonsen is an amateur whose driving passion is to preserve a record, and the context, of an important folk-art form before its practitioners disappear entirely. And his work is not made any easier by the fact that most of the surviving examples were shot down over Europe or sold for scrap after the war. "There wasn't a single book in existence on this subject when I started out," says Mr. Simonsen. "Veterans like Ferguson came home after the war was over and promptly forgot about this aspect. For the most part, the only record that exists is in photographs. I realized that 35 years ago, so that's what I go after, matching up photos with aircraft serial numbers and log books. It sounds simple, but it's very difficult."

The History of Aircraft Nose Art: WWI to Today, a 1991 book Mr. Simonsen co-authored with American Jeffrey Ethell, is just entering its fourth edition. Yet Mr. Simonsen has never been able to make a full-time job out of his research, and sometimes he is frustrated by the obstacles thrown in his path by living in Canada. In other combatant countries of the Second World War, military history publishing is a small but profitable business. Here, Mr. Ferguson says, "the guys with the interest don't have the money, and you can't get a foot in the door at the big houses. I'm totally unknown in Canada. If you're Pierre Berton you can churn out a million books, but if they haven't heard of you you can't get through to them." After Mr. Simonsen completed the text of RAF & RCAF Aircraft Nose Art he spent months trying to find a Canadian publisher; when he gave up and called the U.K., the first imprint he contacted, Hikoki Publications, signed him up almost at once.

He has not had much better luck trying to raise awareness of nose art at the Canadian War Museum, which is currently having an expensive new home built in the national capital district. In 1946, a Canadian officer named Harold Lindsay was working at RCAF headquarters in England when he realized that a lot of distinctive Canadian art was being consigned to the scrapyard along with the aircraft that bore it. On the sly, he went to an aircraft graveyard with an English confederate and had 15 panels of nose art cut from Canadian and British planes. "Thirteen of those Lindsay panels are in the collection of the War Museum, and the public's never seen them," says Mr. Simonsen. "Maybe one or two have been on display occasionally. The rest have sat in a box somewhere." Meanwhile, in the United States, nose art is treated with the care and esteem Mr. Simonsen believes it is due; entire museum wings are devoted to it.

It is hard to put into words why young men--mostly ground crewmen working in their spare time for no pay, except perhaps some free beer or smokes--felt the need to decorate airplanes with pictures of pretty girls or rampaging animals. But the need is real; the history of the art form stretches from the First World War to the Second Gulf War. Partly it must have been a psychological release from military uniformity and starchiness. Partly it helped distinguish crews and thus bind the members together, and partly it would have symbolized and reinforced the care taken with the machines on which their lives depended. Survivors of Bomber Command's grim mathematics agree that nose art had meaning to them. "They wouldn't have taken such pains if it hadn't," says Mr. Simonsen. "The artists had to paint outdoors, often in lousy weather conditions. Imagine how hard it was during wartime to obtain paint or brushes. It took a lot of guts to climb into those planes, knowing you had a five, ten percent chance of not coming back. The nose art helped them, and it reappears every time there's a war."

Mr. Simonsen came to an understanding of these truths during his own career as a war artist of sorts. Sent to Cyprus in 1965 with a Canadian peacekeeping contingent, Mr. Simonsen went from amateur cartoonist to muralist, painting pinup girls and hockey players on the walls of army buildings to remind his fellow soldiers of home. Later he worked as a policeman in Malton, Ont., where Canada's aviation history was (and is) still a living subject. Malton was where Avro's Lancaster Mark X was built, and where the legendary Arrow project had experienced its short life. One thing led to another, and by 1978 Mr. Simonsen's writing career went into full swing when he started a column about nose art for the magazine of the U.S. 8th Air Force Historical Society.

As a self-taught painter, Mr. Simonsen spends much of his time recreating wartime nose art from the black-and-white photographs he has collected over the years. Perhaps uniquely, he prefers to paint on metal taken from genuine wartime aircraft. He is currently working with panels from a Handley Page Hampden retrieved from a Norwegian lake in 1996 and now being restored to flying condition (with new parts and exterior metal) in Trenton, Ont. "I give the panels an acid bath, mount them on plywood, and put rivets in the original holes," he says. "As long as it's well primed the panels aren't hard to work with, and I finish with an acrylic sealant." The Aerospace Museum of Calgary has a collection of Mr. Simonsen's work, and he has given panels to other museums, to veterans, and to aviation collectors. He says, not without a hint of regret, that he may start executing work for private buyers to allow him to continue his artwork and research.

As his rediscovery of Matthew Ferguson shows, his research has not stopped with the publication of his books. "I'm still looking for people who might have painted aircraft themselves, or have photos of painted aircraft," he says. "There are thousands of photo albums sitting in this country that might contain important [visual information]."

France has just finished its own version of the U.S.'s young-Elvis/old-Elvis philatelic controversy. It is time, as happens occasionally, to replace the existing postal image of Marianne, the goddess of the Revolution. As a French thinker recently observed, "Like a Barbie doll, she has many outfits." The French public was allowed to vote their favourite from amongst ten finalists. Most are intriguingly modern images, and some seem to bear hallmarks of outright fashionista influence. The French wisely chose Thierry Lamouche's stylized Marianne.

Elsewhere in the world press, the "other" pope--Shenouda III, 90th spiritual head of Coptic Orthodoxy--is in Switzerland to open a church and to visit the town of St. Maurice, which is named for a martyred soldier of the 3rd-century Theban Legion. Meanwhile, the Germans are trying to decide whether it's possible to sell souvenirs at a concentration camp, and Bollywood is discovering the unexpected virtues of shooting movies in Alberta.

My new Bobby Fischer column is now

It has become strangely fashionable for columnists to insist that they are Marie of Roumania, a Dorothy Parker reference which lets them fabricate a darling little mudpie of sarcasm while still appearing erudite. (Most rather ruin the allusion, however, by spelling "Romania" in the modern manner.) Let the record show that a thoroughly modern real-life Marie--Susan Ward, the Australian-born and uncrowned queen consort of Albania--has died at the age of 63. Like many of the Balkan kings, her husband Leka I was allowed to return to his country in post-communist times: in his case, his initial visit in 1993 was only his second stay in the country his family had been forced to flee when he was two days old. Officially he pulled in 33% of the support in a 1997 referendum on the restoration of the monarchy; unofficially, it's thought he probably won the damn thing.

A note to followers of my National Post column: my usual Monday piece will be appearing on Tuesday instead this week. As a bonus you can watch for my new TAS Online column about the arrest of Bobby Fischer. That should be posted Sunday night, and I'll link to it when it is. Just two weeks ago TAS posted my June review of a new book about Fischer, which has some relevant background.

Today's National Post column about the CRTC is

Stephen Harper, it now appears, is going to hang in as leader of the federal Conservatives. And it appears, too, that he is going to take the advice he has received from all quarters, and particularly from Ontarians hoping to be saved from eternal Liberal government: make the party "centrist" and bring some diehard Progressive Conservatives into the circle of power. All he has to do is centre-ize the party without destroying it, and actually locate PCs willing to enter the sanctum.

Simple, right?

What I've heard since the election is a disguised universal clamour from Eastern Canadian Conservatives for another Brian Mulroney--someone who can build a coalition including the West while keeping the West in its place. You should notice that this tacit longing is being expressed mostly by advocates of the PC-Alliance merger, which lost a net 45% of the Ontario PC vote from 2000 and was hence a near-total failure. But advocates of the New Mulroney strategy will not apologize: the merger is merely a foundation for the future, they'll say.

The strategy seems to be predicated on the idea--I am dignifying a psychological defence mechanism here with the term "idea"--that Harper's Alberta origins (as a politician) had nothing to do with his failure to fulfill the promise of his campaign's first days. It also tacitly proposes that a Calgarian will serve just as well to reconstruct the Conservative Party in Quebec (and Ontario) as a boy from Baie Comeau. Shucks, who'd ever think otherwise?

It's charming, really, to witness how far central Canadians--and brilliant ones at that--will press these points. Andrew Coyne insists that the cultural separation between Ontario and Alberta is a "myth" even as his compatriots (comprovinciots?) chastise us on our redneck rage and make envenomed jokes about cowboys. Diane Francis attempts a judo throw, arguing that it was Albertans--I damn near shot half a Coke out my nose reading this--who really failed to "deliver the goods" electorally, having given just 26 of 28 seats to the Conservatives.

Well, surely we can agree that there is some non-zero number of Ontario and Quebec voters who will find it difficult to contemplate any Prime Minister of Canada from Calgary. This means that to credibly drop his "regional baggage", so-called, Harper will have to be more ruthless about suppressing socially conservative dissent and blurtcrimes than a leader from outside Alberta would.

I don't know exactly what people want when they demand, like Ms. Francis, that Harper "boot out" certain people from the party. But I know imposing order on these elements will be harder for Harper than it would be for, say, Peter MacKay. Mulroney never had to strait-jacket his caucus's "social conservative" elements; when Westerners blew up his party, it was asymmetric federalism, not gay marriage or abortion, that lit the fuse. MacKay himself escaped criticism for being joined at the hip to queerbashing granny Elsie Wayne throughout the Conservative leadership race.

Only a fool (or a Liberal) could really want Harper to tear up the membership cards of popular so-con MPs--but he may have to go that far. In the Conservative party, candidates are chosen by the members in each riding: to give Harper the necessary control, the party may need to adopt the autocratic Liberal style of candidate selection. This "booting" business, examined closely, begins to look like a secret plan for reviving the Reform Party.

Albertans and other Westerners are not, contrary to popular belief, especially "conservative" on social issues: Alberta's level of church attendance, to choose one obvious indicator, is lower than Ontario's. There are an awful lot of us pro-weed, pro-sodomy, pro-abortion unbelievers out here (and we have our share--yes!--of abortion clinics, gay hangouts, and feminist bookstores). But many of us acquiesce in being represented politically by religious politicians, who are more likely to develop an altruistic interest in public service and who possess ready-made social networks upon which to base a candidacy. We share the Christian's devotion to Western civilization and Anglo-Canadian traditions. We may even sense that our Christian fellow-citizens are increasingly beleaguered by an elite for whom perpetual revolution constitutes its own unpalatable religion.

And, yeah, we dislike the Supreme Court's habit of reading the Charter to us like the Riot Act, only backwards and upside-down. If you were to toss out everybody in the present Conservative caucus who agrees with Randy White about our courts, the remainder would easily be outnumbered by the exiles. If Harper weren't engaged in a ploy for the prime ministership, he'd probably be one of the ejectees.

As it is, he will have to behave cruelly to impose his vision of a "moderate" Tory party on a caucus that is, a priori, immoderate. However well he succeeds in this Stalinist task, the exercise will still be insincere. Ontarians are smarter than Ontario Conservatives think: they won't forget Harper's political history (or his home address) overnight. He has already tried, doing minimum violence to his own principles, to steer close to the Liberals on abortion, gay marriage, bilingualism, the "notwithstanding" clause, and other matters. He tried to play the moderate, and was vilified as a radical.

If he tries harder, will he win people over, or just encourage the belief that he's a bullshooter with a "secret agenda"? As an Albertan who supports the Conservatives, I fear that it's the latter, and that Harper's decision to cling to the leadership may hurt both province and party. (July 9, 2004)

The latest Oxford English Dictionary newsletter contains a snapshot of the in-house staff's work during one particular recent day.

On Monday I did penance. Actually, I revised the Latin component of the etymology of the word penance. This also involved looking at the entry for penitence; Latin paenitentia is the ultimate source of both words.

...I spent a very interesting time investigating the etymology of the noun panzer, eagerly searching for early uses of the word in its �tank� sense in German. The earliest German occurrence I've found so far is from 1934, but this can probably be improved upon!

...On Monday I edited my way through eighteen entries, from pinkishness to pinlock. En route I found six new antedatings, including a 1917 example of the verb pink-slip (meaning to fire someone, and previously only known from 1953); I also learned that it is better to be pinkish (fit, well) than a pinkling (a weak or delicate youth), that pink lady cocktails can be made with cream instead of egg white, and that in Australia drinking too many such alcoholic beverages may make one pinko.

Ahmed Nazif, the new prime minister of Egypt, was once a professor of engineering on the faculty of McGill University and got his Ph.D. there. I'm not sure any Canadian newspaper has noticed this yet, so if you're checking in from a newsroom, get on your bike...

A slice of life in central Asia: the Altavista Babelfish catches the press apparatus of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov trying to hog the credit for Rustam Kasimdzhanov's victory in the FIDE "World Championship" knockout:

[Since 1886], 16 chess players have been world champion, including Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, and Anand. Now among them stands a son of Uzbek soil, Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

And all this because of independence! Since the achievement of independence under the management of President Islam Karimov, the necessary conditions have been created in our country for the development of all sports, and chess in particular, so that our athletes can completely display their talent and craftsmanship.

Now we see the result of this enormous work. Could an Uzbek fellow have attained this high title if our country had not attained independence? Would the flag of Uzbekistan have been raised, would our national anthem have played? Today all of Uzbekistan, and all Uzbeks, must rejoice. ...We congratulate you on your victory, Rustam! Our entire people desire from the soul that this crown will belong to you for a period of long years!

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has just withdrawn the operating license of a radio station, Quebec City's CHOI-FM. It's the first time the federal broadcast regulator--doubtless emboldened by the Liberal victory in last month's election--has ever done so on the grounds of content. Radio Weisblogg has a good brief summary. And the Globe's Tu Thanh Ha has a long list of verbal outrages perpetrated by the suppressed station (which sounds about a skrillion times more entertaining than anything in English Canada).

But isn't there something missing from the Globe piece? In recounting CHOI host Jeff Fillion's railleries against foreign students and chesty newsreaders, the Globe neglects to mention one of the complaints that got CHOI heaved into oblivion:

106. In March 2003, Astral Broadcasting Group Inc., the Bell ExpressVu Limited Partnership (Bell ExpressVu) and Cogeco Radio-TV complained that host Jean-Fran�ois Fillion promoted piracy on the air by urging his listeners to pirate Bell ExpressVu and Vidéotron ltée. signals and that the host was thereby seriously and deliberately undermining the Canadian broadcasting system. Several pages of stenographic notes were appended to the complaints, which contained six comments to the following effect:

[translation] How many times have I told you that it's a good thing to pirate Bell ExpressVu... the message is loud and clear.

[translation] Listen, I'm going to tell you again what I told you yesterday: Keep on scamming the system and pirating signals, either Vidéotron or Bell ExpressVu; they haven�t got the message.

[translation] Keep on going to the store, you know, the one that supplies the stuff you need to pirate Bell ExpressVu. You're doing the right thing.

Or is this whole subject just a little too embarrassing for newspapers, generally, to confront? Broadcasters wear a much tighter straitjacket than we print types because of the cretinous interbellum fiction that the airwaves are "public property". Most of the trees cut down to feed newsprint mills were originally "public property" too; there is no logical reason why broadcasters should be allowed only a revocable lease over their medium, while newspapers are permitted to own theirs free and clear. Then again, maybe I shouldn't say that out loud in a place like Canada.

"Who? Whom?" Dept.: Pete Townshend has a bone to pick with Michael Moore. (Via Tim Blair.)

It seems like a good time for an update on the laborious process of unifying the world championship of chess. I last discussed this at the beginning of March, as FIDE was making controversial plans to hold a playoff in Tripoli to determine the "FIDE World Champion"--who would, essentially, be the last semifinalist chosen for the grand unification process.

That tournament is now over, but the controversy didn't go away. When he first announced the event, FIDE (and Republic of Kalmykia) president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov gave his word that holders of Israeli passports would be permitted to enter Col. Gadhafi's fiefdom for the purpose of getting a fair crack at the FIDE title. That's not how it worked out. When the Libyans refused to guarantee entry visas or security for Jewish players, most of the eligible Jewish grandmasters and many gentile ones refused to participate. Swiss national Vadim Milov, a high-ranked protegé of the great Soviet emigré Korchnoi, chose to call FIDE's bluff. On the eve of the tournament he finally received personal assurances that he could set foot on Libyan soil, but it was too late.

Despite constant requests from Milov and the Swiss Chess Federation, Milov's invitation - necessary to obtain a visa - was delayed until 23.30 on the night before the arrival day. At that time Milov was informed that after a long meeting with FIDE chief Ilyumzhinov, Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi had agreed to allow Milov to play. FIDE even offered to pay for Milov's travel expenses, but the offer came too late for Milov to find a flight to Tripoli which would allow him to arrive on time. Earlier that evening Milov had been told by a FIDE official that FIDE had been tricked by the Libyans, who had never intended to allow any Israelis to play.

Absolutely everyone outside FIDE, of course, saw this "trick" coming. The tournament--already weakened by the absence of Indian genius Viswanathan Anand, a dissenter from the unification process--proceeded without stars like Gulko, Gelfand, or Milov. On one side of the draw, Cornishman Mickey Adams, a perennial presence among the world's top ten, reached the final. From the other side emerged a young 100-to-1 longshot from Uzbekistan, Rustam Kasimdzhanov. The six-game final was a display of bizarre blunders unusual even by the standards of FIDE knockouts. But one can't say it lacked excitement. After a quick game-one draw, Adams and Kasim alternated victories, with the Uzbek winning games two and four. Game six was a wacky draw that either man could have won with reasonably correct play.

This morning Kasimdzhanov won a rapid-chess playoff against Adams to complete an incredible Cinderella run. His string of scalps already included those of the volatile Ukrainian legend Vassily Ivanchuk, the emerging Russian star Sasha Grischuk, and the Bulgarian assassin Veselin Topalov. Ivanchuk was the second-best player alive as recently as 1996, and Adams and Topalov were the top seeds in the tournament. Going in, Kasimdzhanov was rated just #54 in the world.

This makes the Uzbek the "FIDE world champion", so-called. If all goes according to plan, he will soon have the dubious pleasure of defending that title against world #1 Garry Kasparov. Meanwhile, real (or "classical") world champion Vladimir Kramnik--who took the belt from Kasparov in a 2000 match--will make his overdue first title defence against Peter Leko beginning on September 25 in Switzerland. The idea is that the winner of Kasimdzhanov-Kasparov is eventually supposed to play against the winner of Kramnik-Leko. But there is widespread doubt as to whether FIDE will be able to hold up its end, given the organizational tone-deafness it displayed by allying with the Gadhafi regime. FIDE will continue to bleed credibility for as long as it remains in the hands of a comic-opera strongman from central Asia.

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