Mountain Equipment Co-Op Attempts to Shed ‘Granola-Eating, Sandal-Wearing’ Image

From the Canadian Press:

The Vancouver-based retailer unveiled a new logo Tuesday in its first major rebranding since the co-operative was founded more than 40 years ago. The redesigned logo refers to the retailer simply as MEC and does away with the iconic image of a mountain.

MEC’s chief marketing officer Anne Donohoe said the original logo was designed in 1974, and it was time for a facelift.

“The rebrand reflects the reality of the new MEC,” she said from Vancouver. “We’ve grown from six members to 3.5 million members over the last 40 years, many of whom live in urban centres.”

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The First Cut Is the Deepest: Margaret Atwood

Discovering a new author is a primary joy of the reading life, but finding one who already has a shelf of books available for your delectation is even better. The First Cut Is the Deepest examines debut novels by authors who endeared themselves to us much later.

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Before adulthood, there was the adult fiction section of the bookstore and the freeing yet bewildering moment of being set loose upon it. When this happened to me, I wanted to fit in more than I wanted to ask for guidance, so I fell to grazing where I could — bowing to the cliché about picking books by their covers for an embarrassing length of time.

Happily, one of those haphazard selections was Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a novel with extensive teenage flashbacks that neatly bridged the gap between my YA forays and what I felt was appropriate to move onto. The book’s plumbing of what Mean Girls would later call “girl world” — the province of adolescent women whose savagery and byzantine codes no one on the outside would believe — grounded the story in a reality I recognized, and was one that Atwood would return to again and again.

While not a teenager, Marian McAlpin, the heroine of Atwood’s 1969 debut novel The Edible Woman, feels herself similarly unformed, and the belief that getting married will give order to her life nearly kills her. In a marriage plot gone awry, Marian expects, and gets, a proposal from her boyfriend Peter, a patronizing cipher whose feelings on the subject were previously limited to feeling depressed after each of his single friends got hitched. Marian feels satisfied at first, making plans to leave her job and move back home to prepare for the wedding, but also ill, imagining that her food is still alive on her plate — a condition her college friend Clara breezily attributes to pre-wedding nerves.

If Clara, beleaguered and pregnant for the third time, represents one possible pole for Marian’s future, the other belongs to her roommate Ainsley, who earns Marian’s silent disapproval by flitting from job to job, reviewing and openly criticizing the men she meets at parties, and showing no definite inclination toward settling down. When Ainsley announces she’s going to have a baby on her own despite not having a husband, Marian is politely horrified, but a little envious of her determination, which includes seducing one of Marian’s male friends for the required genetic material.
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CFL: Cannabis Football League

Among the many subtle differences between the Canadian Football League and the National Football League, here’s one that may have been missed:

“In the NFL, the most common drug problem is performance-enhancing drugs,” one former CFL head office executive told the Free Press on condition of anonymity. “In the CFL, the most common drug is marijuana.”

While the NFL is sometimes nicknamed the “No Fun League,” perhaps Canada’s professional football players are having a bit too much fun.

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My Teenage Crush on Chris Hadfield

Ok, so there’s this guy I like and he’s really — omigod — he’s like soooooooooooooo cute. But he’s like also really smart and funny. His name is Chris and it’s like, we have so much in common because he likes David Bowie and so do I. Y’know?

But like he doesn’t even know I exist because so many people are in LOVE with him. He has something like a million Twitter followers. So, I mean, I don’t really stand a chance because he’s an International Space Station game changer who like speaks to millions of people around the world, and I mean — school kids, media guys, politicians — everyone is all about Chris. I heard this one Member of Parliament going on about him and I was like ok seriously, calm down and back off.

“He has been a phenomenon, and I mean that in the most positive sense,” says Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut who later led the CSA and is now a Liberal MP.

“Not only was he setting a new precedent for Canada in becoming the first ever Canadian commander of the International Space Station … but in addition to that of course he has been a remarkably effective communicator to the ground.”

Effective communicator is a total understatement, but whatever, Marc Garneau, I guess you’re a politician, so you know best, right? I think Chris’s serious fans would describe him as like totally AMAZING and down to earth and really easy to learn from. He’s like your friend’s cool dad you have a crush on. And your friend’s like ew, that’s seriously weird and you’re like whatever, I just like think your dad is awesome, ok? Continue Reading →

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Most of Canada’s Millionaires Earned It

About two-thirds, reports the National Post.

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Reading Fiction Makes You More Capable of Handling Doubt

Do you often find yourself reaching irritably after fact and reason? Do you struggle with life’s mysteries and uncertainties?

If so, consider reading more literature:

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty — attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

“The thinking a person engages in while reading fiction does not necessarily lead him or her to a decision,” they note. This, they observe, decreases the reader’s need to come to a definitive conclusion.

“Furthermore,” they add, “while reading, the reader can simulate the thinking styles even of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release — of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one’s own — may produce effects of opening the mind.”

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Are Vancouverites Ready to Live With Rats?

Well, they better be because the long-tailed creatures are coming:

  • “Vancouver’s rat population is growing and no neighbourhood is immune to the rodents and their pesky and dirty ways.”
  • “The rocky shores of False Creek have long been a breeding ground for rats, from Granville Island to Science World, but over the past two years Green said an increasing number of calls are coming from elsewhere.”
  • “Sarfraz said Vancouver is welcoming to rats because of plentiful food sources and an active port that brings ‘hitchhiking’ rats from abroad.”
  • “Vancouver’s mild climate means rats breed most of the year, he said.”
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The Current State of Religious Debate on the Internet

Facebook is one big circle jerk. Perhaps, though, if we want to use more polite and theological terms, we could say that the site is a remarkable demonstration of our penchant for self-worship.

It’s interesting, then, with all this self-worship, to examine the role religion plays on the social network and others like it. Depending on your acquaintances, it’s possible you see daily passages from scripture on your news feed, or perhaps a lively debate beneath a Kirk Cameron YouTube video, or maybe a few of your friends have taken to Liking religious figures, undoubtedly chagrined by the absence of a Love option. And what better way of proclaiming that personal commitment than a click on Facebook?

I suspect that some of these Likes stem from the same sense of obligation that possessed young Sunday school lads such as myself to habitually answer “the Bible” whenever asked to name my favourite book. As a good Christian, you can’t not Like Jesus, can you? I mean, how would that look? And can any self-respecting Sikh not Like Guru Nanak Dev? Heck, I Liked him, and I’m not even Sikh.

Leaving aside pages devoted to “God” — a term not specific enough for our purposes here — I’ve looked up several major religious figures on Facebook. According to their number of Likes on the following selected pages, the various prophets and deities are ranked as such: Continue Reading →

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Stephen Harper Acting Silly

Some, however, are a bit skeptical about what’s really going on here.

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Someone May Be Trying to Poison a Dog Park in Toronto With Raw Chicken

From CityNews:

Pieces of raw chicken have been found in an off-leash dog area at Woburn Park in the Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue West area, Toronto police say.

The meat was discovered on two separate occasions by dog walkers, once in late May and another time on the weekend, Det. Jose Dizon told CityNews.

They were sent to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in downtown Toronto and will be tested for poisons, he said. But he wasn’t sure when the results would be available.

So far, no one has reported that her or his dog has fallen ill after eating suspicious meat found on the park’s lawn. Thank goodness for that.

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The Art of Doing Without Thinking

Most would agree that a rich life involves more than just strong arms capable of moving objects from here to there or robust legs able to jump over this and that. Physical prowess is great and all, but it is contemplation alone that unlocks the treasure chest of self-awareness and spiritual discovery.

Then again, sometimes too much reflection can be harmful. Sometimes the only way to move a particular object or hurdle another requires no thinking at all.

The problem of when analysis leads to paralysis is the subject matter of a recent New York Times opinion piece titled “The Myth of ‘Just Do It,’” in which the author writes the following:

Perhaps you have experienced this destructive force yourself. Start thinking about just how to carry a full glass of water without spilling, and you’ll end up drenched. How, exactly, do you initiate a telephone conversation? Begin wondering, and before long, the recipient of your call will notice the heavy breathing and hang up. Our actions, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty tells us, exhibit a “magical” efficacy; yet when we focus on them, they degenerate into the absurd. A 13-time winner on the Professional Golfers Association Tour, Dave Hill, put it like this: “Golf is like sex. You can’t be thinking about the mechanics of the act while you are performing.”

But why not?

It is an important question that relates back to that wonderful quote attributed to British philosopher Bertrand Russell: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

So ponder away while you still can, but when the pondering turns sour as whatever project you’re supposed to be working on goes stale from neglect, it’s time to get stupid and start jumping over things.

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Should Visits to the Nail Salon, Hair Products, and Crest 3D Mouthwash Be Considered Campaign Expenses?

Maybe. But these are all things Conservative MP Eve Adams claimed as expenses during the 2011 campaign, so Elections Canada should definitely figure that out.

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Hello, Governor: ‘The Champlain Road’ (1939)

The Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction is one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. Yet many of the books that won the award are now out of print, forgotten, or both. In Hello, Governor, Michael Hingston cannonballs into the archives and reads the GG winners in chronological order. If there is a CanLit identity that we’ve accidentally left behind, he will find it.

This month: Franklin Davey McDowell’s novel The Champlain Road, which took home the prize in 1939.

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This column is supposed to be an ongoing act of reclamation, methodically exhuming and re-assessing some Canadian novels that, while famous in their own day, have since fallen by the wayside. After all, the Governor General’s Award is no mere trinket. To have won it, surely, must be an indication of something.

And while I may not have been able to fully endorse any of the books I’ve read so far, each of them has had some kind of redeeming feature — or at least a base curiosity factor — that makes them worth keeping around.

Franklin Davey McDowell’s The Champlain Road, then, has the dubious distinction of being the first book that I wouldn’t even half-heartedly fight to reclaim from obscurity. In fact, this one’s on me, obscurity. Have at it.

On the one hand, The Champlain Road tells us absolutely nothing about Canada circa 1939. It’s untethered, quasi-historical fiction set in the mid-17th century at the tail end of the bloody massacre of the Huron First Nation by their rival Iroquois in pre-Confederation Ontario. But on the other hand, it doesn’t illuminate much about the past, either, filled as it is with stilted writing, one-dimensional characters, zero in the way of stakes or pace — several seemingly important characters are murdered and forgotten within a paragraph or two — and an attitude towards Aboriginal people that could charitably be called “troubling.” In other words, it’s a dull, racist, 300-page Heritage Minute.

Fortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a huge movement to reclaim this book. Information on McDowell himself is even in short supply, but he was a journalist for the Toronto World and the Winnipeg Free Press, and later worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway. It looks like The Champlain Road was his first novel, and that he later wrote another that is now equally out of print.
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