TORONTO, CANADA. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009. This grey autumn morning a doe, a female deer, showed up downtown. She was first spotted at Union Station, very early, strolling among the gathering crowds, on their way to work in the financial district, deep in the city with the heart of a loan shark. No one knows […]
Present-day fans of the Toronto representatives in the National Hockey League will find it inconceivable. But Ted “Teeder” Kennedy, “perhaps the quintessential Maple Leaf” (or just “quintessential Leaf“), played centre for only 14 seasons in the 1940s and 1950s, and was actually “PART OF FIVE STANLEY CUP VICTORIES.” Alas, the hockey-star Ted Kennedy of the […]
TORONTO. SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2009. [UPDATED MONDAY, JUNE 1]. According to Time magazine, there was a crowd of 5,000 inside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre yesterday, listening to former US presidents George W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton share their experiences … as commander-in-chief. Meanwhile, only a few hundred protesters gathered outside …. Most of the […]
TORONTO, CANADA. Monday, March 23, 2009. At some points in the history of your own time you realize that if you keep taking the mass media seriously you will probably contract some dread disease. (In Canada of course our mass media are so modest that it is sometimes hard work just to find them on […]
TORONTO. TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009 (and kudos to whoever waved the Canadian flag last night, in front of the MSNBC booth, on the National Mall in Washington). [UPDATED : MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2010 ; SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2011 : see below]. “Who cares about local media personalities in Toronto, Canada?” is a good question. And […]
The day after the inspirational election of Barack Obama, four US Marines (“including one known as Psycho,’”) were charged “with the execution-style slayings” of a young mixed-race couple “in Winchester, in Riverside County southeast of Los Angeles” (aka “an exurb of San Diego”). Like others, no doubt, I was having trouble understanding the grisly murders […]
Almost everyone I ask still says they aren’t watching Matthew Weiner’s stunning new TV series, Mad Men – about a mid-level New York advertising agency in the early 1960s. Or they haven’t even heard about it yet. So it makes sense when John Sturgeon, who writes for a student newspaper in Philadelphia, describes the show […]
I ended with Helen Mirren on TV. But I told my wife I was going out to look for Jennifer Aniston. The one thing I did learn from her at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, however, is that “grand romantic gestures … only happen in movies.” So I guess I was bound to be […]
TORONTO. AUGUST 10, 2008. (UPDATED AUGUST 12). Punctuated by a dramatic propane plant explosion very early this morning, the news that Forbes magazine has just rated the old Canadian hogtown # 10 among the “World’s Most Economically Powerful Cities” is striking many in this place as a kind of (pleasant enough) joke. Only nine days […]
When 55% of Canadians say they support “Canada’s ending its formal ties to the British monarchy” (and only 34% oppose), the bad old colonial days of British North America are on at least the beginnings of their very last legs. Yet who can deny that the old anglophone global empire has left a few enduring […]
