Paul Mitchinson is a part-time writer and a full-time father of two. He writes when he can. » more about me
Canada’s political leaders, as quoted recently in the foreign press: Stephen Harper, as quoted in George Bush’s recent memoir [via the NY Times' Maureen Dowd]: [Bush] writes of a visit to Russia, when Putin showed him his black Labrador, Koni. “Bigger, stronger, and faster than Barney,” Putin bragged. Later, when W. recounted this to Stephen [...]
R.B. Fleming’s recent life of Peter Gzowski may not be the worst biography I have ever read. It is, nevertheless, quite bad. Fleming manages to write with clarity about Peter Gzowski, a titan of Canadian journalism and radio, and his archival research has been prodigious. He appears to have read every article (no matter how [...]
The slow, sad decline of CBC Radio 2 continues apace, and has been well reported. So it might seem just a little petty to complain about something as insignificant as the official “voice” of the radio: “Promo-boy.” The successor to the the widely despised “promo-girl,” “promo-boy” is unique in that he has defaced not only [...]
Abu Ghraib got you down? Massacres in Falluja making you feel blue? Try a drop or two of Bach Rescue Remedy–it’s recommended by none other than Naomi Klein! After the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, she confesses that she felt a little off-kilter. “It was scary to be a Westerner,” she tells a Styles [...]
Garth Turner has a well-earned reputation as an independent-minded Member of Parliament. I voted Conservative in the last election largely because of his support for gay marriage. I even joined the Conservative Party to help defend him against a nomination challenge. (After Stephen Harper turfed him out of caucus last year, I promptly tore up [...]
Warren Kinsella in today's National Post: Graffiti is ubiquitous; it's everywhere. And one paragraph later, in case you didn't get it: It's all over the place. . . . Kinsella is always tiresome. Tedious too.
Can reading a book rot your brains? Last week's article in the New York Times about the children's book series, Junie B. Jones, got me thinking. The journalist does a good job of drawing the controversy over the books to battles over phonics and "whole language." And her summary of Junie B. Jones' voice is [...]
According to today's Toronto Star, Liberals are calling for an apology from Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, for allegedly referring to Belinda Stronach, the Aurora MP and his former girlfriend, as a dog. As a historical service, I thought I'd offer a brief — and far from exhaustive — sampling of canine-themed insults from recent [...]
Few ideas arouse the righteous indignation of conservatives more than the notion of "moral equivalence." In fact, three weeks ago, the National Post's Comment pages managing editor, Jonathan Kay, explicitly stated that any article that "draws a moral equivalence between terrorists and the nations that fight them," would be"rejected out of hand" by the newspaper. [...]
[I published this in the March 2006 Playbill of the San Francisco Orchestra.] Pity the ghost of Dmitri Shostakovich. Thirty years after his death, it seems his soul will never be allowed to rest in peace. Hounded by Stalinist commissars during his lifetime, ridiculed by Western modernists to this day, Shostakovich remains one of the [...]