You can tell there's an election coming up in Alberta: the provincial Tories are playing hardball with Ottawa. First Ralph Klein cocks an asteroid-sized snook at Paul Martin's Healthcare Summit and Travelling Medicare Show, saying he'd rather be in Lloydminster than attend. This has generally caused the federal ministry to start kowtowing like mad, and, speaking as someone who's spent time in Lloyd, it's no wonder: the shock must have been grievous. Then, yesterday, outgoing Treasurer Pat Nelson played Alberta's best-loved national hymn of rage:

Alberta's finance minister warned Ottawa to keep its fingers out of the province's resource revenue pie Tuesday as she forecast a budget surplus of nearly $3 billion.

Pat Nelson said the Tories will be watching for any attempt by the federal government to introduce measures such as the national energy program, which led to a massive shutdown in Alberta's oilpatch in the 1980s. "If they come after us like they did in the early '80s... that hurts the whole country," said Nelson as she released the government's first-quarter fiscal update.

..."Are we cautious? You bet. Because some of us have memories and we haven't forgotten what they did to us."

Nelson said eliminating the debt will provide a lasting benefit to Albertans and all Canadians, who share in Alberta wealth through a national equalization program.

Liberal Opposition Leader Kevin Taft, however, said the Tories should stop patting themselves on the back for paying off the debt. "The Tories didn't put the oil in the ground. None of us put the oil in the ground. It's a gift."

Alberta's NDP said that even though the government is rolling in money, the plight of average Albertans has not improved greatly. "With oil and gas wealth we should be the envy of the country and we're not," said the NDP's Raj Pannu. "Alberta has amongst the longest health-care waiting lists and among the largest class sizes in the country."

It's Taft's statement that is more interesting from the standpoint of this website's perennial obsession with the Dumb Luck Hypothesis. Though, in actuality, it's not very interesting at all: Taft utters this exact line just as often as the Klein government sends some minister into a scrum to repeat a fiscal announcement already made eleven separate times. Which is about once a week (seasonally adjusted).

Do you suppose Taft ever wonders why the Conservatives feel obliged to engage him in this dreary, unending minuet? Could it be that... they somehow consider it politically advantageous when Taft squares himself up to the cameras and tells Albertans that nobody here deserves any credit for our relative prosperity? Doesn't this remind you of when you were a kid and your older brother, or a larger neighbour boy, would hold you down and grab your wrists and steer your hands into your face over and over again while saying Stop hitting yourself! Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself, stupid! Stop it!

Usually, the Dumb Luck Hypothesis is inflicted on Albertans by people from outside Alberta. Perhaps Taft is satisfied that his ordained role in political life is to aggressively represent the fundamental attitudes of non-Albertans to Albertans. If he ever wants to actually win, he will have to work out which end of that shotgun is supposed to point at the enemy. But I digress. Before I read Nelson's war cry I had already been reminded, this week, of the DLH. It happened when I called my mother on her birthday a few days ago and she mentioned something about Saskatchewan diamonds.

Saskatchewan diamonds? Did I hear that right?

Yeah, Saskatchewan diamonds. It so happens that the Fort à la Corne area, east of Prince Albert--which has an intriguing history already--contains what is thought to be the world's largest accretion of kimberlite, the characteristic geological marker for the presence of diamonds. This seems to have been known since the 1960s--magnetic surveys of the province conducted from the air make it blindingly obvious--and now de Beers is working with Canadian mining companies to begin preliminary exploration in the area.

FALC's productive capacity is suspected, or hoped, to ultimately be much larger than that of the mines in the Northwest Territories which are already flooding premium-priced Canadian diamonds onto world markets. By "much larger", I mean "an order of magnitude larger". But any profitable extraction of the glittery stuff is still years away--five to eight, at least. Why did it take so long for serious exploration to get underway, when the financing for it has only been a matter of a few million dollars? One could propose many reasons (an obvious one being that de Beers only recently has lost its monopoly on the diamond trade), but it has been pointed out that Saskatchewan layers a delightful and unique resource surcharge on top of its corporate tax. The surcharge is levied on resource producers' gross annual sales, irrespective of profits; from what I can decipher from the news clippings, the phrase "they get you coming and going" would seem to apply here, as would certain terms of art from the pornography business. Relief arrived only in 2001, in the form of a Mineral Exploration Tax Credit. And suddenly the cry went up: Saskatchewan gots diamonds!

The Dumb Luck Hypothesis, as it applies to Alberta, is terribly popular with people in Saskatchewan. They love to tell me, personally, how lucky Alberta has been to find itself sitting on top of all that oil. (They are generally unfazed when I explain that my parents and an army of kinfolk took the trouble to move here from Saskatchewan, many years ago, precisely because hardworking people were needed to help locate and extract all that oil.) Now I can simply point out that those who stayed behind have suddenly been revealed to be, almost literally, sitting on an assload of gems that has been left unprobed for decades. Luck ain't something you get: it's something you make.

How much gold is inside a bottle of weird cinnamon schnapps treat Goldschläger? And what other potential schlägers (schlägern?) have its unimaginative Swiss manufacturers left unplumbed? Cockeyed.com has the answers.

Why the Acronym SNAFU Was Invented: the New York city police arrested The American Spectator's Shawn Macomber early this afternoon, scooping him up in a round-up of anti-GOP protestors downtown and ignoring Macomber's official convention press credentials. At this hour Macomber apparently remains imprisoned, unable to file copy to TAS. I can't exclude the possibility that Macomber went nuts and started heaving Molotov cocktails around, but it seems counterproductive for New York's finest to pick up a reporter who specifically warned about left-wing protesters' plans for periconvention violence. Assuming he isn't sodomized to death with a toilet plunger, his side of the story should be out soon.

My proposal for a "hat tipping" symbol, or at least the theory underlying the proposal, is getting some good reviews, notably from Evan Kirchhoff. However, I must correct E.K. on one point:

...in [Colby's] serif font, the dagger looks like a proper curly dagger, familiar from books written in other centuries by English people and so on. But my site, like, oh, maybe 40% of the web, is rendered in sans-serif Verdana, a font which illiterately draws the dagger as a tiny cross.

This was good for a chuckle at Casa Cosh, because I don't actually specify a font in the code of this page (except in the text of my transposed Post columns). I've always bridled at the presence of such typographic imposition in a digital medium, though of course it's just another form of editorial control, and thus wholly innocuous. I basically figure that if my mom wants to read this page in Comic Sans or whatever, she should be allowed to. (More importantly, visually disabled readers must be permitted to change the size and style of the body text to suit themselves; I stink on ice at Web design, but I know damn well it makes no sense for people to rant about "accessibility" and then hard-code their pages to consist entirely of 8-point type.)

So this text should appear on your screen in your browser's default font, whether it has serifs or not. If you haven't changed the default in your browser settings, and you're using IE, it'll probably be the less-than-optimum Times New Roman. I change my default compulsively every couple of weeks, flipping between Georgia, Trebuchet, and a Frutiger face that makes my weblog look super classy. But even in the serifed Georgia (the best typeface for screen viewing ever designed--holds up nicely at all point sizes), the dagger character is basically a simple, undecorated cross. It never occurred to me that it might look much cooler at the other end of the pipe.

History-prof reader Jonathan Good raised a potentially important objection, though, when he wrote to say that he associated the dagger, as a typographic mark, with death.

I read "†Fark" in one of your entries, without understanding yet why you're doing it, and I think, has Fark gone under?

I don't quite know how powerful this association is: the symbol is indeed marked as meaning "died" in whatever edition of Webster's Collegiate is lying on the carpet behind me, but with the caveat "esp. in genealogical texts." Good says Speculum slaps it onto the name of an author if he has died before a review appeared. I wouldn't want to misuse the symbol willingly just because most people won't notice the misuse, but the dagger is certainly present in contexts having nothing to do with death, too. Comments continue to be welcome.

[UPDATE, Sept. 1: Maybe this is silly, but I have to admit I was looking at the Anglo-Saxon/Icelandic thorn character, þ, as a potential alternative. It carries no baggage to speak of, it actually looks a bit like a tipped hat, and having once belonged to our language, it could stand for "thanks". The only issue is that the dagger is slightly less WTF-inducing... maybe I should put a poll applet here or something?]

As John O'Sullivan and others have been pointing out in the U.S. press, President George W. Bush has not used the power of veto one single time since taking office in January 2001. This is such an extraordinary thing, even with the House, Senate, and White House all in the control of one party, that I wasn't quite prepared to believe it the first few times I heard it. These statistics drive home the point rather well. FDR was a wartime president whose party had a death grip on the House and Senate throughout his time in office, and he dropped 635 V-bombs over 12 years (though of course the dynamic up until the war was very much "executive vs. other branches" rather than party vs. party). The last president to leave office (not that Bush will necessarily have to do that right away) without exercising a veto was James Garfield, who missed his chance by being shot dead six months after his inauguration.

[UPDATE, Sept. 1: George Quincy Bush??]

Today's National Post column is a rambling piece about the changing nature of pop music; it's

The fountain built to honour the memory of the late Princess of Wales was officially opened to the public in London's Hyde Park on Friday -- again. Originally unveiled in July, the ovoid granite trough designed by American Kathryn Gustafson -- which would make for great skateboarding if not for all that water -- had to be fenced off almost immediately after three park visitors slipped on the uneven interior surface and smacked themselves up badly enough to require medical attention.

Which, come to think of it, certainly does call the Princess to mind. Though not, perhaps, in the manner intended. Gustafson's 2001 Chrysler Design Award citation indicates that the architect "believes in the power of nature -- and in the power of the human ability to shape it and to be shaped by it." Being shaped -- that's got to be the cleverest euphemism for head trauma ever coined.

Yes, this is the perfect occasion for cheap shots at contemporary architecture. One might feel correspondingly cheap in making them if high-rated architects such as Gustafson weren't so determined about keeping the price down. A fountain was deemed the perfect way for Londoners to remember their beloved princess, who was at her best amongst children, and would have approved of making space in Hyde Park for them to splash about joyfully. Ms. Gustafson specifically promised to deliver such a space, and looked on at the fountain's opening as the kiddies were turned loose within the slick curves of her meditative fixture.

Now she can't imagine where anyone got the idea that the fountain was for any such damn fool thing as wading, telling The Daily Telegraph on Aug. 3, "It was a mistake when it was opened to think that people should be able to walk or play in it." No one's mistake in particular, you understand. There have been other problems with the fountain: It is ringed with deciduous trees whose leaves instantly began to clog the drains, although Ms. Gustafson knows who to blame for that one. She pointed a finger at a careless deity in the Telegraph piece, talking of an "extraordinary" high wind that "was ripping leaves off the trees." The temerity!

What's truly extraordinary here is that the architect continues to declare her design a success: "As I understand it," she says, "the positive reaction outweighs the negative." This poll sample, one presumes, was not confined to the people physically injured by the design.

The egomania of architects is well past the point of cliche: They have to live with endless jokes about it, the way lawyers do about greed. But lawyers can at least claim that some of them strive, by working pro bono or full-time in the public interest, to dispel the japes. Why is it seemingly impossible for an architect to admit simple failure? Have you ever heard one come out and say "I blew it"? In the case at hand, Product X (the fountain) was meant to be used for Y (facilitating splasheriffic behaviour); X doesn't do Y, or, worse, does it unsafely. How can X reasonably be considered a success?

At all odds, the fountain has been formally declared a "problem of crowd management," which is to say it's ultimately the public's fault for treating it as a fountain. The wire fence that defiled the memorial during its closure has been removed, but the installation is now ringed with ugly pylons warning against wading, and it is to be guarded by a squad of parkies, those fun-deflating figures so characteristically English that one is surprised not to find any in Shakespeare.

The sad part is that the fountain's not bad considered purely on the basis of sensory appeal: Gustafson's intuitionist, landform-sensitive style certainly makes for wonderful photographs. By classical standards it compares very favourably to another project opened this year, Jaume Plensa's "interactive" Crown Fountain in Chicago. At the Millennium Park, situated downtown in the shadow of skyscrapers, water runs down the side of 15-metre glass-faced towers that, during the day, have ever-changing LED images of Chicagoan faces on them. Every 12 minutes, the face of the moment purses its lips and spews a hydrant-like stream into the park's reflecting pool.

It's exceedingly silly, is expensive to maintain and was unveiled along with a lot of ponderous bulldada about "contemporary media." But you can go wading there without breaking your neck, and to say that children are crazy about the giant spitting faces would be understatement. The place is sardine-packed with shouting, laughing kids. The Crown Fountain (a commission Mr. Prensa beat out Maya Lin and Robert Venturi for) may be the hit of the year if public affection is the relevant standard. It doesn't look like the memorial in Hyde Park is going to take away the prize. (August 23, 2004)

Rob Halford fronting Black Sabbath? That sounds like a dream I'd have after eating half a deep-dish pizza. And yet it really happened. (†Fark)

Taking the Piss Dept.: Scotty Mac of the Tulip Café in scenic Prague has a long, involved comic anecdote about a very, very bad neighbour.

Knockeenahone's most famous native son, Fr. Cornelius Horan, has made an unexpected reappearance on the world stage. The Irish priest, already famous for walking onto the track during a Formula 1 race in 2003, disrupted the Olympic men's marathon today with an attack on the race leader. Some reports have described Fr. Horan as "defrocked", which is correct, but it's worth remembering that he remains a member of the clergy nonetheless. An article printed last year in the News-Shopper of West London explains:

Although still technically a priest, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese (of Bexley) said the archbishop’s permission for Father Horan to perform the functions of a priest, such as preaching, saying mass and administering the other sacraments of the Church, was formally withdrawn in writing in April last year [2002].

Need I mention that the goal of Horan's violent attack on a perfectly innocent person today was to promote peace? After he stood on the straightaway at Silverstone last year, some Roman Catholics with prior knowledge of the man's behaviour argued that he deserved applause rather than, say, a savage hiding from angry bettors.

We have reported faithfully on [Horan's] one-man crusade for world peace, his peace dance at the House of Commons, his correspondence with world leaders and his heartfelt belief that the end of the world, as we know it, is fast approaching and will be replaced by "a glorious new world". Fr Horan’s publicity campaign has stemmed from a genuine belief that the end is nigh and, dear reader, who are we to dispute his stance or dismiss his predictions? His decision to race onto the track at Silverstone while the British Grand Prix was in full flight was the act of a man desperate to get his point across and it confirmed that he was willing to risk his own life be true to his convictions.

Fr Horan has since expressed remorse but said he acted because he felt previous attempts to get his views aired on an international stage had been unsuccessful. "I am not planning any more stunts and I will not break the law again," he declared before adding that he hopes to return to Kerry later this year to visit his family. It is people like Fr Neil Horan that make this world an interesting place and he deserves to be treated with respect and with dignity on his return.

God save us from "interesting" people and the idiots who cultivate them. Like all peace campaigners, Horan has a particular idea of how exactly a "peaceful" world will look, and is quite capable of talking one's ear off about it. The whole thing appears to involve Christ returning to Earth as commander-in-chief of the Israeli Defence Forces. Don't miss this page on Horan, where you can purchase electronic copies of his books A Glorious New World, Christ Will Soon Take Power From All Governments, and his opus majus, The Bible and the Grand Prix Priest.

Ruining It For Everyone Dept.: courtesy of some bright spark, we present the Gmail File System.

James Surowiecki, guest-blogging at Marginal Revolution, recently caught former Nebraska running back Lawrence Phillips in a rather staggering act of economic irrationality:

Phillips was seen in Las Vegas recently pawning one of his Big Eight championship rings--reportedly for $20. "He said he was stuck in Las Vegas," pawnshop owner Steve Gibson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "He said, 'I need to get out of town.' Gibson then sold the ring on eBay for a reported $1,700.

This news is of special interest to Canadians (though I'm not sure anyone up here has the story yet). After dropping out of the NFL, Phillips became a star back and full-time locker-room hassle for the Montreal Alouettes, where he came and went as he pleased, eventually getting himself released despite league-leading yardage totals. He also spent a short spell in Calgary, endearing himself to the community by arguing with coaches and landing himself in legal trouble.

Phillips was fond of declaring himself the CFL's best player, and talent-wise, this was surely no less than the truth. But being an NFL-class back trapped on the three-down tundra should already have been a wake-up call for the guy. It's hard to feel sorry for a jackass who couldn't even hang on as a superweapon in the talent-poor CFL, where coaches are prepared to put up with a lot of static from import stars.

So how do you "hat tip"?

For a while now weblogs have been groping towards a standardized method of saying "I originally got the information in this entry from X." The norm when I started out was "Via X", with variants: I still use that when I need to. A popular method on one-man sites now seems to be "Hat tip: X" or "Hat tip X".

I've been so dissatisfied with the existing shorthands that I use them less than I should (to the ultimate detriment of my traffic, not that traffic isn't an unmixed blessing). "Via" doesn't have the clarity or robustness I'd like; it's always struck me as a suspicious foreign intruder in our language, something best confined to a bus terminal. To use "hat tip" would seem like acquiescing in the coy chumminess that already infects this medium. When's the last time anyone actually tipped a physical hat?--it's too cute.

Perhaps the most popular method of hat-tipping is just to plonk the tipping link down at the bottom of an entry: that's the house style, for example, at Gawker and its spinoffs. If hat-tipping is the quintessence of your site, that works OK. But if the referred material is itself a link--if there's any sort of question of primary and secondary source material--you can create the sort of confusion that's endemic to navigating BoingBoing. The site, a model in all other respects, often steers you with a "Via". But which link am I supposed to follow out of a post like this? Will both work?

Is there an existing body of theory on this issue? What I'd like is if we could borrow one of the less-used HTML characters to stand in for "Hat tip", but I never know what characters will be recognized by everybody's browsers. Is the dagger closely enough associated in people's minds with the concept of a footnote to work, without explanation, as a non-ostentatious "hat tip" symbol?

It seems like by the time I can use this information to get clues to her personality, I won't need it nearly so much. (†Dave's Picks)

And does it even render correctly in Safari and Opera and Lumbago and Valium? Is there a better candidate character not doing other important typographic work? Comments are invited.

[UPDATE, Aug. 31: More here.]

Friday's Post column travels by swift boat from the subject of John Kerry's critics all the way to the

(And how come he is "at the lake"? I thought it was an ironclad linguistic rule that Ontarians retreat to "the cottage" for long blurry summer drinkathons; it's we Albertans who go "to the lake". Is this a sign of divided regional loyalties on Coyne's part? I think we should be told.)

Right now I'm working on a piece about new appointee Rosalie Abella for the Western Standard. Oddly enough, while I was searching for background material, I ran across a trove (the attributive "treasure" has been deleted on purpose) of my own old reporting, which includes this 2001 Report thousand-worder on her woefully dopey decision in the Miglin case. Miglin has been much mentioned in the aftermath of Abella's appointment, so a close-up look at the details may be of interest. Bear in mind that the Supreme Court later overturned (and heaped about a half-ton of nightsoil upon) the ruling discussed herein...

Lawyers are usually fairly cagey about commenting on judicial rulings; they know that there is a fine line between criticizing a judgment and trashing a judge. But when it comes to the Ontario Court of Appeal's April 26 ruling in Miglin v. Miglin, no one seems to be mincing any words. "The s--t is really gonna hit the fan now," one prominent family lawyer told this magazine about the decision written by Justice Rosalie Abella. Another kicked off an interview by asking "You want to talk about Miglin? I sure hope it's because you know a way to get it overturned."

Across Canada, divorce lawyers are grinding their teeth over the unanimous Miglin decision. By wiping out a mutual separation agreement between Eric Miglin and his ex-wife Linda, Justice Abella has opened every existing divorce settlement in the country to potential revision by the courts. Before Miglin, courts were extremely reluctant to annul an agreement reached in good faith by both parties. But if the decision survives Supreme Court scrutiny, divorced spouses could find themselves hauled back into court five, 10 or 20 years after they had thought their obligations discharged.

Eric Miglin is a resort owner who lives in Toronto; he married Linda in 1979 and they had four children together. They ran a remote northern hunting lodge together until 1993, when Linda filed for divorce. That December, the pair reached a settlement which gave Linda $60,000 a year in child support and full ownership of the couple's Toronto home. She relinquished her shares in the lodge, but signed a five-year side deal to act as a "consultant" for $15,000 a year. They shared custody of the children, and Linda signed a paper promising to "specifically [abandon] any claims she has or may have against the Husband for her own support."

After the divorce was finalized in 1997, the friendly relations between the ex-spouses deteriorated quickly. Mrs. Miglin converted to Judaism, making Mr. Miglin nervous that his children would be raised in a faith he did not share. Mr. Miglin took the children to a psychologist behind his ex-wife's back, enraging her. In June 1998, when it became apparent that Eric would not renew her consultancy payments at the end of the five years, Linda went back on her agreement and sued for spousal support.

Trial judge Peter Tobias (who suffered a heart attack just before the appeal court ruling and died five days after it) decided that the side agreement on the consultancy was really just a tax dodge, so he agreed to overturn the divorce agreement and give Mrs. Miglin $52,800 a year for five more years. Mr. Miglin's lawyer, Charles Mark, told the Ontario Court of Appeal that Judge Tobias was wrong to undo a mutually agreeable contract between a divorcing couple: the Supreme Court had established this principle in the so-called Pelech trilogy of cases heard in 1987.

Before Pelech, the tradition in Canadian divorce law had been that marriage was a lifelong commitment; there could be no "clean break" between the parties, however much they might want one. The Pelech rulings implemented a more modern view. Although it acknowledged the court's responsibility to ensure fairness, it specified that final agreements between couples should be respected whenever possible.

In their pleadings for Miglin, neither side actually made much of this particular part of the case. But in her ruling Madam Justice Abella pounced on Pelech like a cat. Although Pelech was handed down in 1987, it had been heard under the terms of the old 1968 Divorce Act. Parliament had rewritten the act in 1985, the justice noted, appending a list of "fairness" principles to be observed in spousal-support arrangements. Clearly, fairness came first in the eyes of Parliament, and the "clean break" a distant second. Justice Abella not only upheld Judge Tobias's ruling, she erased the five-year limit he had imposed on the support payments. (Mr. Miglin intends to appeal.)

In a single blow, one of Canada's most famously progressive judges has turned back the clock 60 years on divorce law. The revived doctrine is that it is a husband's job to support his wife, and not the state's. But Miglin also makes the state, and not the husband and wife, the arbiter of how they are to divide assets. Madam Justice Abella's old-fashioned view of marriage will warm some hearts, but men and women who quite reasonably thought themselves free of their spouses are chilled to the bone. Family lawyer Grant Gold of Toronto's Goodman and Carr bemoans the effect. "I've had at least 10 former clients call me in just a few days," he says. "I just had a client in here signing a spousal support release, and I had to tell him it may not be worth the paper it's written on."

Miglin is not binding outside Ontario unless the Supreme Court ratifies the reasoning behind it. If that happens, family lawyers fear that it will add even more antagonism to divorces, encouraging husbands to fight to the last ditch. The profession has been desperately trying to sell "alternative dispute resolution" and mediation to an increasingly litigious society. Some of that work may now be undone. "More and more, the rule is becoming 'A deal is not a deal,'" says Vancouver lawyer Georgialee Lang. "It's true that sometimes women do sign agreements they shouldn't, or things don't work out for them after the divorce as well as they thought. The claims of these women deserve consideration. But when I talk to husbands, what they want most is certainty. They're willing to be generous if they can get that. There's no question that decisions like Miglin could take it away." (May 28, 2001)

The curious topsy-turvy conservatism she displayed in the Miglin case is, in fact, one of the great themes of Abella's career. There is something poisonously Victorian about the way she constantly confuses the disadvantaged with the helpless. The transliberal view of justice she upholds carries us back to the world of Dickens and Tolstoy and Flaubert: God forbid a divorced woman should have to make her own way in the cruel, wintry world! Perhaps, given time, Abella's Supreme Court jurisprudence will find its defenders on the right.

JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) - In an unexpected coda to his pivotal Friday speech about the U.S. government's longterm budget commitments, Federal Reserve Grand Imperial Wizard Alan Greenspan, 102, stood upright on bionically enhanced legs and told an aging conference that he wished to "die with dignity--immediately".

"I was already tired of this job under Bush Senior," recalled Greenspan, who was originally appointed Fed chieftain by President William Howard Taft. "I've tried to refuse re-appointments but the Secret Service keeps threatening my family members. Now I ache for the sweet balm of death."

Over the years Greenspan's presence at the Fed has become a totem of international economic stability, despite the relative unpopularity of the nebbishy goldbug's actual theories. Bill Clinton once said, when asked about the possibility of Greenspan expiring in office, that he "pitied" whichever chief executive had to "take cover from that shitrain". Asked last year why he had re-confirmed a centenarian as the helmsman of world capitalism, George W. Bush developed a blank animal stare and proceeded to recite twenty minutes of passages from the Book of Revelations.

As a consequence of Greenspan's indispensibility, he now lives under 24-hour Secret Service supervision at a heavily guarded compound whose location is undisclosed. A meagre, porridgy diet is prepared for him by a team of extropian nutritionists, and his collapsing physical body is sustained by constant cellular and orthotic upgrades. The RAND Corporation estimated on Greenspan's 100th birthday that he already consisted of less than 15% original organic tissue.

The irony of his lonely cyborg existence is apparently not lost on Greenspan, who has outlived nine wives and dozens of concubines. He fended off handlers with powerful mechanical arms Friday as they attempted to cut his remarks short. "I've been saying for decades that the entitlements of the aged will eventually bankrupt the treasury," Greenspan shouted hoarsely over the whir of servomotors. "Little did I anticipate that 6.1% of the federal budget would one day be used to trap me, personally, in the stinking, besotted world of the living like a housefly."

"Damn you all," he added, smashing a marble conference table to dust. "Damn you all to hell!" The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 38 points, or 0.4%, on word of the outburst.

The Matrix Revolutions. Only one comment seems necessary: it's not every movie that has an actual character named Deus ex Machina.

- 11:36 pm, August 26 (link)

---

Bad batch II

I guess Carolyn "Americans Are Bastards" Parrish felt left out of yesterday's feature on Liberal women and their opinions on continental missile defence. She'll be getting all the attention she wants and more, if only from the Prime Minister, after her Wednesday outburst:

"We are not joining the coalition of the idiots," Parrish said at a small anti-missile-defence rally outside the Parliament buildings. "We should be joining the coalition of the wise." ...Asked to clarify her latest outburst, she denied saying Americans are idiots and asked media not to air the comments.

That's one way of putting it: the Reuters account has the Wisdom Queen literally begging reporters not to quote her after being caught in a lie.

Parrish... at first denied using the term "idiots", and when reporters pointed out they had her remarks on tape, she said: "I don't mean Americans are idiots. ...Please, guys, don't put that on tape. I already got into trouble once... Really, please, I've had enough trouble."

It's those damn tape recorders that keep landing Parrish in the soup! There really ought to be a law...

- 12:32 am, August 26 (link)

---

Quadrophenia 2004

Alexander Panetta's CP story on the unanimous stance of the Liberal women's caucus against Canadian participation in continental missile defence provides a ringing answer to all those questions about why Paul Martin didn't elevate more females to cabinet: he got stuck with a bad batch.

Panetta could locate no Liberal women MPs who support cosmetic political cooperation with a military plan that we don't have to pay for or devote resources to, that is purely defensive, that has a bipartisan consensus behind it in the U.S., and that could enrich potential Canadian military and engineering contractors. He got four quotes from opponents of missile defence, all of which--even, perhaps, to an opponent of the idea--display varying degrees of defective thinking. Least objectionable is Anita Neville's--

...many feel very strongly about it--that we did the right thing in Iraq and that (abstaining from missile defence) is the right thing to do here.

--although it ties together two completely unrelated topics: the whole basis of objecting to participation in Iraq was that it was not justifiable on the grounds of national self-defence, one had thought. (Is Iraq to be used as a permanent pretext for opposing all American initiatives involving the common defence of the continent?) Slightly more befuddled is Sam Bulte's quote:

Personally I think that you'll find a lot of consensus among women my age, who are mothers and parliamentarians, that we're not interested in missile defence. All this weaponization of space, the reality is Mr. Bush has not said he's going to rule it out. ...I think we should be proactive, the same way we were in Iraq.

Leaving aside the "weaponization of space" canard (and the horseshit about "mothers"), what strikes one here is the surprising redefinition of the word "proactive" as a synonym for "passive". Eleni Bakopanos, by contrast, embraces a venerable form of political insanity without being too mealy-mouthed about it--

There's generally a consensus among women that pacifist options should be pursued at all levels.

(Don't you love it, ladies, when someone saves you the trouble of expressing your own opinions?) But the booby prize surely belongs to electoral fraudster Maria Minna, who offers a confusing objection to the concept of missile defence.

It will only encourage rogue states to build and proliferate instead of minimize nuclear weapons. And really we should be dealing with the real threat--and that's terrorism. Terrorism isn't going to come in through missiles from rogue states. It's coming in every day, anyway. Look what happened on Sept. 11.

It's a proverbial failure of generals that they are always ready to fight the next war on the principles of the last: here, we have a rare armchair general who actually seems to think that's a good idea. One must say that the "terrorism vs. mass destruction" thing sounds somewhat like an informed objection to missile defence--it echoes Robert Gard's arguments--as opposed to the merely philosophical and self-refuting objections of an Eleni Bakopanos. But national defence planning, in general, doesn't take the nature of a choice between mutually exclusive single threats. Is it really Minna's view that the U.S. isn't doing anything, at all, to resist the "real threat" of terrorism?

One can also imagine that there might be some merit to her argument that missile defence, pursued in earnest, will force "rogue states" to redouble their nuclear arsenals and missile programs in an effort to overwhelm the half-implemented shield. But we're talking about countries here that are trying to reinvent the atomic wheel with scientific and administrative cadres depleted by the inevitable anaesthetizing effects of totalitarianism. Countries where--as travellers in the Middle East can tell you, and as I'd presume to be true of North Korea--ballpoint pens are prized artifacts of irreproducible foreign manufacturing sophistication. These "rogue states" are never likely to be able to stamp out working warheads and missiles in numbers that would vex the productive capacity of the United States of America. And even if they had unlimited access to cash, brains, and fissionable materials, it's not clear that engaging them in an arms race would be the wrong thing to do. There appears to be an unrefuted consensus that the mere threat of American missile defence won the Cold War; you would think that even a "soft power" advocate would have learned this large-print lesson of recent history, and made suitable emendations to her screechings.

It is, of course, welcome to hear that the Tamilophilic Minna has developed such grave concerns about terrorism. She can convince me easily that she's aware of the next "real threat" the continent faces from without: having cited September 11, she only needs to point out where in the record she is shown, with all her confidence as a strategist, to have foreseen it. She claims to have a crystal ball now; where was it when it might have done some good?

- 1:34 am, August 25 (link)

---

First you need endurance

Updates to the site were patchy over the weekend because I was recovering from the final stretch of what I'm now calling the None But a Blockhead Project, a 2,500-word backgrounder on Canadian politics for an upcoming Dave Sim Festschrift in The Comics Journal. Dirk Deppey, who I think was still mixologist-in-chief of ¡Journalista! back then and is now managing editor of TCJ, didn't have to work too hard to convince me to do a long essay that I'd have the whole summer for and that would appear in one of my favourite magazines. Although the compensation is meagre, I am glad I was forced to go past 1,200 words for the first time in, probably, two years. I'll probably need the expanded wind if I'm to take up the slack from the truncation of my Post workload.

I had underestimated the amount of research required for the piece (it came to about 3,000 pages of reading), and, more relevantly, the difficulty of burrowing to the core of Sim's blistering contempt for modernity. Any attempt at a summary, even the pictorial sort one might construct in one's own head, will raise more questions than it answers: OK, he's a hyperrationalist antifeminist who practices a personal form of gnosticized Islam... wait, what the hell did you just say? It's obvious enough that the man is a national treasure, but it's honestly hard to tell whether it's the sort of treasure you find in Dante or Milton, or the sort represented by Simon Rodia or Dr. Emanuel Bronner. In the end I stuck close to the safer shores of recent Canadian political history. I'll add a link to the TCJ piece from this site when I'm able.

- 2:55 pm, August 23 (link)

---

Your correspondent waxes cultural in today's National Post (subscriber-only link) with a column about the catastrophic fountain, dedicated to the memory of the Princess of Wales, that re-opened Friday in Hyde Park. The botched design of this granite abortion is so awful that there have been more problems--a mudslide (!) and another injured tourist (!!)--since I filed the column less than 24 hours ago. Since the story's still developing, perhaps a relevant excerpt from the column is in order:

A fountain was deemed the perfect way for Londoners to remember their beloved princess, who was at her best amongst children, and would have approved of making space in Hyde Park for them to splash about joyfully. [Architect Kathryn] Gustafson specifically promised to deliver such a space, and looked on at the fountain's opening as the kiddies were turned loose within the slick curves of her meditative fixture.

Now she can't imagine where anyone got the idea that the fountain was for any such damn fool thing as wading, telling the Daily Telegraph on Aug. 3 that "It was a mistake when it was opened to think that people should be able to walk or play in it." No one's mistake in particular, you understand. There have been other problems with the fountain: It is ringed with deciduous trees whose leaves instantly began to clog the drains, although Ms. Gustafson knows who to blame for that one. She pointed a finger at a careless deity in the Telegraph piece, talking of an "extraordinary" high wind that "was ripping leaves off the trees." The temerity!

Here's last week's poo-stirring column about the future of marriage in a "multicultural" Canada...

Are you enraged by the presence of polygamy in Canada? Too bad: You might as well learn to like it. Some newspaper columnists and a great many letters-column correspondents have suddenly become concerned with preventing backwoods weirdos and self-made sheiks from forming plural marriages in our country. Best of British luck to them. We can, and surely shall, choose to drag this issue through every court and arena of public opinion we possess. But the final outcome, for my money, is inevitable.

For years, troubling reports have been emerging from Bountiful, a southeast B.C. town where polygamists have been practising an unreconstructed Mormonism for decades, marrying off 16-year-olds in job-lots to community elders thrice their age. The B.C. government is now investigating reports of coercion and abuse in Bountiful, and there are questions about possible immigration violations. There may well be cause, in the end, for traditional criminal charges to be brought. And perhaps adventurous prosecutors can, on grounds other than multiple marriage, topple the icky patriarchal structure that governs the town.

But the British Columbia police have long refused to take action against the community's open practice of the polygamous lifestyle, as such. Despite the statutes limiting us to one husband or wife at a time, the cops say their hands are effectively tied by Charter of Rights guarantees of religious freedom. What they mean is that these guarantees are likely to be construed by the Supreme Court of Canada, should it come to that, as permitting marriage between one man and many women.

There exists a serious question whether the police are usurping the function of the judiciary by anticipating it in this way. But no one acquainted with the animating ideology of our high courts can doubt the cops' mind-reading is more or less accurate. If it were simply a question of snaggle-toothed proto-Mormons versus feminists concerned that polygamy is facilitated by (and perpetuates) an environment of psychically oppressive sexism, the Bountifullers would certainly be helpless against our laws and governments. But they will have on their side, if only implicitly, Canadian Muslims who regard polygamy as a sacralized cultural tradition. And by the time the matter comes to issue, if it ever does, they are likely to be able to cite the existence of legal same-sex marriage in their favour as well. The lesbigay cavalry, without doubt, will be pressed into the rescue effort whether it wishes to be or not.

Canada is standing on the precipice of abolishing the traditional legal definition of matrimony as involving one man and one woman. This will be done with the support, judging by polls, of about half the Canadian public. I count myself in that half, though in a wavering sort of way. But I am aware, in so counting myself, there is no logical seam that will let you change "man" to "woman" or vice-versa in the classic equation, but then balk at changing a "one" to a "two" or a "three" or a "sixty." This slope, I'm afraid, is pristine in its slipperiness.

Having unmade matrimony, we could simply dig in and assert stubbornly, arbitrarily, that "marriage is defined as the union of no more than two whatevers." I expect that this would be a pretty popular solution, despite its illogic. But it wouldn't be popular with the minorities excluded by it, or with courts that need important pretexts for restricting the civil privileges of such minorities.

One of the ironies on display will be that of liberal feminists hoping to prevent harem-formation by pounding their fists and asserting the cultural superiority of the Western way of life they have spent 30 years denouncing as a femicidal conspiracy. They will be left looking even sillier the first time some moneyed Saudi immigrant to Canada asks why homosexuals should be the only ones who get to rewrite the common law of marriage on selfish grounds.

And there is no good answer, unless you think "That's just not how things are done here, dammit," is a good answer, as stern conservatives do. Polygamy -- to understate the matter considerably -- has a much firmer track record than same-sex marriage. It is a genuinely tenable "alternative lifestyle" that extends real benefits to its practitioners. The most notable victims, actually, are probably the men ultimately denied wives by someone else's collector instinct, since males and females are born in roughly equal numbers. Feminist opponents of polygamy are, thus, probably serving the interests of those men more than anyone else's.

During the argument for gay marriage, we have been asked, incessantly, to simply "keep an open mind" and imagine the possibility that such an arrangement might be happy, permanent and beneficial. But open your mind that far, and you'll find that polygamists -- like it or not -- can make the same case, upon a good deal more data. There is a line here that, for better or worse, we simply do not have the cultural courage to draw yet. (July 30, 2004)

- 7:50 am, August 23 (link)

---

Big Blue Machine

The 1994 Montreal Expos are one of baseball's great what-if stories--what if they'd played out a full season?

...I was playing around with the Streak Reports on BaseballReference.com some time ago, and noticed that from August 19, 1993 through May 5, 1995--a full 162-game schedule including the entire 1994 regular season--the Expos won 110 games and lost just 52. The Expos finished the 1993 season on a 31-10 tear in a futile attempt to catch the Phillies, went 74-40 to post the best record in baseball in 1994, and opened 1995 with a 5-2 spurt before slumping to a last-place finish with a depleted lineup. For that stretch, they were, in plain sight, a great team for one full season's worth of games, similar to, say, the 1975 Reds (108 wins), the 1986 Mets (108 wins), or the 1984 Tigers (104 wins).

The Baseball Crank has all the numbers.

On a cheerier note, you can now download a Devo-enhanced trailer for Wes Anderson's forthcoming The Life Aquatic.

- 8:27 pm, August 20 (link)

---

Highs and lows

Marc Emery, the Canadian businessman and marijuana activist, has been given a three-month jail sentence by a Saskatoon judge for handing a joint to a supporter in the aftermath of a pro-hemp political meeting in March. "Trafficking", you know. I'm afraid CP's wire story doesn't quite capture the flavour of the proceeding, so one must turn to the Star-Phoenix's Dan Kinvig:

Emery, a well-known marijuana seed dealer who founded the B.C. Marijuana Party and Cannabis Culture magazine, was arrested at the Vimy memorial bandshell on March 22 following a pro-pot speech at the University of Saskatchewan.

Crown prosecutor Frank Impey told the court that between 20 and 30 university-aged people showed up at the bandshell with Emery. A witness interviewed by police confirmed seeing Emery pass one joint, but no money changed hands. Emery produced four marijuana cigarettes containing a total of 2.3 grams when searched by police.

Bear in mind that a gram is about the weight of a paper clip.

Impey conceded the amount of marijuana in question was small, but emphasized Emery's 10 prior drug offences warranted more than a suspended sentence or a fine. "Mr. Emery has been fined in the past and his behaviour continues," said Impey, who suggested a term of three to six months.

Leanne Johnson, Emery's lawyer, said her client was making a political statement and he did not profit from passing the joint. Johnson also argued that the public attitude toward marijuana has changed, noting Prime Minister Paul Martin plans to reintroduce legislation to decriminalize possession of small amounts of the drug. But [Judge Albert] Lavoie cut her off.

"I'm not here to discuss the pros and cons of marijuana," he said.

In this land of "conditional sentences" in the "community" for manslaughter, it seems the law's hands are still tied when it comes to victimless crimes.

- 9:35 am, August 20 (link)

---

More content! In today's National Post you can read my assessment of the outgoing Governor-General and a piece of controversial advice for the next one. That link is for subscribers only, but all and sundry can now read last week's column about flying things.

I'm afraid I take the Generation X view on missile defence. Retired American Lieutenant-General Robert Gard was in Ottawa on Tuesday, trying to convince Canada to take a stand against the Bush Administration's imminent deployment of experimental anti-missile technology. Gard argues that continental missile defence probably won't work, isn't needed, and will divert funds from other American security initiatives. It's a serious subject with potentially profound geostrategic ramifications. But I'm afraid I couldn't summon up much more than slacker anti-platitudes. "Missile defence? What-ev-errrr."

It just seems to me that we Canadians don't spend much time enjoying the benefits of our inattention to national defence. I would love it if we had elected a federal government with a practical foreign policy and a plan for rehabilitating the Canadian Forces. But most of us voted the other way. Fine. So let's go ahead and enjoy our lassitude. Having forfeited a practical say in continental defence, surely we can chill out and let the neighbour that cares about this stuff, and is capable of paying for it, make the decisions?

Apparently not. The people responsible for discarding the practical mechanisms of our national sovereignty are naturally most insistent on preserving the pretense of it. So although nothing we say or do can alter the American administration's true course of action (though it could certainly injure NORAD), we regard ourselves as obligated to replay the American debate on missile defence domestically, and decide for ourselves -- like an eight-year-old meditating on Daddy's tax return -- whether it is a good thing. The whole box of eels could even be a potential deal-breaker for the Liberal minority government, which must placate starchy New Democrat feelings about the Reaganite heritage of "Star Wars" while meeting a firm electoral commitment to co-operate with the U.S. government. And it serves them right.

Lt.-Gen. Gard's credentials are usually presented with a curious gap: Few reporters mention his close connection to that convert peacenik, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. As McNamara's executive assistant from 1961 to 1968, Gard was something of a sub-midwife to the Vietnam War. It would be mean to suggest that he brings to this issue all the brilliant strategic insight which drew America into that struggle. But it is worth noting that, for all his long public service, his views (like McNamara's own) are now outside the mainstream of contemporary American leadership in both parties.

There is a curious tendency on the left to treat missile defence as a singular obsession of the so-called "Bushies," but the Clinton administration went ahead with what used to be called the Strategic Defence Initiative. It's President Clinton's timetable, more or less, that Bush is now trying to meet. Clinton did slow the pace, but only late in his second term, when he was a half-lame duck and international support was needed for NATO action against Serbia. John Kerry, who as a senator voted against SDI funding about a zillion times, suddenly "evolved" into a supporter when it came time to run for the presidency. There is no anti-missile-defence candidate in the presidential race, any more than there is ever an anti-medicare candidate in Canadian elections.

The U.S. public and its military establishment have made up their collective minds. And as North Korea and Iran proceed with nuclear development -- coupled with some hair-raising missile testing in the former case* -- one is inclined to regard dismissals of the ballistic threat from rogue states with hyperextreme skepticism. Gard makes the point that American ports may be a much weaker link in the chain of defence against nuclear and radiological attack, and it's a good one. But he makes an odd bedfellow of the disarmament crowd travelling in his wake to denounce missile defence.

He helped organize the "generals' letter" of March, in which 49 senior U.S. military figures urged the Bush administration to scale back active deployment of certain ground-based anti-missile systems. Far from being a disarmamentarian charter, that letter's argument is predicated on the old Cold War-era doctrine of mutually assured destruction. It is "highly unlikely," the letter says, "that any state would dare to attack the U.S. or allow a terrorist to do so from its territory with a missile armed with a weapon of mass destruction, thereby risking annihilation from a devastating U.S. retaliatory strike."

In essence, Gard's stated position is that as long as the U.S. is still prepared to wipe small countries off the map, missile defence is unnecessary. Do the NDP and the anti-war left agree?

Gard might even be right about this, though I would say he is dangerously overestimating the rationality of the adherents of death cults like radical Islam and Korean-communist juche. In any event, the generals' letter is now being used as an internationalist shell game. Gard was able to find many signatories because the complaint is closely circumscribed: Mostly, it's a quarrel with the degree of testing to which one stage of American missile defence has been subjected. But now it's being waved around (outside the U.S.) as a supposed cri de coeur from the upper ranks of the American military, in the same precincts where mutually assured destruction used to be described as "MADness." History takes some funny turns. (August 13, 2004)

*Even as I was writing these words last week, Iran was doing its level best to catch up with North Korea in the unapologetically aggressive nutbar missile-testing sweepstakes. What was that you were saying about an Axis of Evil, Mr. President...?

- 3:52 am, August 20 (link)

---

Isoperialist? Impolationist? Brand new and 100% live at Spectator.org--my thoughts on the newest version of the "Fortress America" canard.

- 8:39 pm, August 19 (link)

---

Cigarette absolutely not optional

I couldn't be more proud to introduce the latest awesome Internet craze to the Dominion of Canada and the ships at sea. Ladies and gentlemen, break out your digital cameras and Do The Lynndie.

- 1:49 pm, August 19 (link)

---

Just say nault?

Only in the Medical Post--where physicians occasionally tell each other things they might not necessarily share readily with the general public--would you get a headline like "A colonoscopy to remember". The jest here is that normally patients don't remember colonoscopies because they're given Versed beforehand; the MP story is a rare after-the-fact account by a doctor who took it like a man without letting her memory be erased. But the surname in the byline--"Arsenault"--has to be a pseudonymous bit of bathroom humour, doesn't it?

- 1:32 pm, August 19 (link)

---

Random browsing day

And finally, one gets the impression that we are about to hear more about unrest in the northeast Indian state of Manipur, where a student protester set himself on fire Monday and ran nearly a mile before collapsing with mortal injuries. Short version of the trouble, as best as I can work it out: Manipur, the ancestral home of the game of polo, was not made part of India when the British pulled out in 1947, but was cajoled--in a transaction no doubt involving many crores of rupees--into merging its independent principality with the new Indian state two years later. For much of the time since--thanks to separatist sentiment, standard-issue ethnic tension between hill and valley people, and Communist meddling--it has lived under the sour black cloud of an "Armed Forces Special Powers Act". We all know how much ordinary folks love that sort of thing. Keep your pen ready, War Nerd. (Manipur also appears in history as the entry point of Subhas Chandra Bose's Japanese-backed Indian National Army into the subcontinent in 1943.)

- 4:07 am, August 18 (link)

---

Theoretical novelty

Fischer file latest: the chess legend's Japanese girlfriend has suddenly announced the couple's intention to wed. Let no one say that she failed to answer when opportunity knocked! The move, obviously, will be too late to prevent Fischer's deportation, but there is hope amongst Fischer's supporters that it will introduce "humanitarian considerations" to the Japanese government's decision-making. Apparently Fischer has implicitly backtracked on his claim that he wants nothing further to do with Japan.

Chessbase.com has a long Japanese magazine article about the arrest and a pretty unsettling photo of a Saddam-emerging-from-his-hole-esque Fischer being detained.

- 2:38 pm, August 17 (link)

---

One less competitor

At 87, that old crock Walter Cronkite is quitting his syndicated newspaper column, which most of you probably didn't know he had. I never did see a single person cite it, hear anyone discuss it, or even witness an attack on it. An entire nation simply averted its eyes in pity. I haven't read his valediction, but judging from Reuters' excerpts he seems to lack the vestigial humility one might demand of someone whose preeminence in American life is long vanished, and was based mostly on the parts of his career spent reading other people's words into a camera lens.

The newsman said he values the Internet as a research tool, but he finds some stories published on the Web -- scandals especially -- play too fast and loose with the facts.

"I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. I expect that to develop in the fairly near future," he said.

Well, here's hoping you live long enough, Wal-Tor, to behold that day when people finally wake up and realize that the Internet is a mere "research tool", incapable of the serene objectivity and probing intelligence of network television news.

- 2:20 am, August 17 (link)

---

You get what you pay for

I am losing too many valid messages to Hotmail's blindly aggressive spam filter--it dumps good ones into "Junk" faster than I can add correspondents to my "Safe List"--so I'm switching the link at top left to point to a new Gmail account. I had thought to road-test Gmail a little while longer, but the Hotmail false positives are just growing too outlandish for me to persist in my notorious inertia (you know, the kind that still has me hand-coding a weblog). You can still reach me at colbycosh@hotmail.com indefinitely if you're inclined to chance a wrongful junking.

- 7:35 pm, August 16 (link)

---

RECENTLY TRUNCATED:
· The last of the Hiroshima mothers
· Inkless is right: time to rethink higher-ed
· Post column: McGuinty's plea for forgiveness
· A farewell to Booknotes
· No, they weren't named Paris and Nicky
· Return from Trantor
· Post column: "Fair trade" delusions
· Were Bush and Gore just two votes apart?
· TAS review: Things Worth Fighting For
· One door closes, another... opens?
· Fischer: he didn't read the fine print
· Post column: aviation's worst day--and finest hour
· A paleoclimatologist reviews The Day After Tomorrow
· The death of a cherished typo-myth
· Post column: Kennewick Man set free
· The "mystery" of Fischer's passport
· X-Non-Presidents vs. Bush
· Kim Jong-Il and the inconvenient missiles
· Ted Kennedy's shirt 'round the world
· The black victims of Title IX
· Global grab bag: Novala Takemoto, The Who in Australia, marching Maoris, etc.
· Post column: the Dumb Luck Hypothesis
· A different take on economic history
· Post column: more on the CRTC and CHOI
· Keeping it in the family: oldest clan businesses
· The Molson-Coors marriage
· Addressed to a Mr. Colby Cash
· Wheels within wheels: dimensions of the Fischer saga
· From the Cosh archives: a talk with Clarence Simonsen
· French postage news: So long, Marianne
· TAS column: Fischer Agonistes
· ...and she was Marie of Roumania (sort of)
· Post column: will Mulroney's shoes fit Stephen Harper?
· The OED minds its Ps
· A slice of chess life from Central Asia
· Missing links in the CHOI-FM story
· The world chess scene: two steps forward, one step back
· Globewatch: Korean capital follies, working harder in Germany
· Here she is, Miss Padania
· Cinema: Comedian, Shattered Glass, etc.
· Post column: the Shrine of Canadian healthcare
· Post column: Klein's betrayal, Harper's Sisyphean task
· To diversify the economy, first leave it alone
· Percy Wickman and more on PR
· An abortion scandal from 1894
· Post column: our pervasive confusion about violence
· The big man from Willow Bunch
· Yes, Virginia, there is a "No Albertans" clause
· Post column: the discreet charm of the ballot box
· Book review: Dalton Conley's The Pecking Order
· We're not separatists, we're just drawn that way: the firewall as anteroom

---

Find ANY word Find ALL words  Find EXACT phrase    Help

---

This site and its original content are ©2002, 2003 Colby Cosh. The author supports traditionally acknowledged doctrines regarding the reader's fair use of this material.