Rose's Cantina

This essay is part of an ongoing series of articles I wrote for newspapers in Canada. It appeared in the Globe and Mail on September 4, 2009.  We were expecting an uneventful birth, and all seemed well when Nicholas entered the world weighing eight pounds exactly, with a head the size of a football. "Don't worry," my mother said. "Your brother Bob had a big head, too. He'll grow into it." Something was wrong. Nicholas was jaundiced, as babies often are, but the doctors could not figure out why. "We think he might be hydrocephalic," my family doctor said, adding that water on the brain could have caused an enlargement of his skull, which could destroy much of his neural tissue. I blamed myself, wondering what I had done during my pregnancy to give my child this terrible life sentence. He looked so perfect, I thought, how could he be so broken? That night I tossed and turned, waiting for the nurse to bring Nicholas into my room. I ...

Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net (Stuart Miles) I'll admit it right here, I am a lazy writer. It's so much easier to conjure up images using pop culture references than to explain away a behavior or to characterize a person. For example, when Pamela Wallin stood up in the Senate to skewer Marjorie LeBreton and Carolyn Stewart Olson for being jealous of her infamy, the image that immediately came to mind was Rachel Macadam torturing Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls. I started that on Twitter and 56 seconds later, another journalist came up with the same reference. Was he copying me? I know he was following me. Of course he was, I said, but maybe (a reference to Louis C.K. I am shameless). Maybe he saw the same movie. As a writer, I will never, ever, win a Nobel Prize for Literature and neither will Tabatha Southey who wrote a shameless piece of satire in Saturday's Globe and Mail about the Senate debacle. Read it here I'm sure that Alice Munro could wri...

If this were the wild west, there'd be a lynch mob out to string up Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente for her Saturday column in which she compared so-called Alpha females to the rest of us slugs. Slugs, you know, the women who choose family over career, either out of obligation, love or necessity? Okay, she didn't call us slugs, but she might as well have. Alpha females, in whose company Wente counts herself "are highly educated with full-time careers (and then some). They work like dogs. They have fewer children than most. They’re far more likely to be married to their first husbands...They’re devoted to their children, but never put careers on hold for them". And, according to Wente, they are better mothers, ensuring that their kids go to the best schools and make the right choices, as opposed to the 80 percent of the rest of us. Yeah, you read that right. I know what you're saying. This is so much bullshit from a woman who has never had kid...

In today's Globe and Mail , the activist Naomi Wolf describes a business climate that is rife with discrimination based on how people look. She calls this lookism. In a nutshell, Wolf makes the argument that how a person looks affects his or her climb up the ladder -- or not. Why, she asks, must the media riff on Angela Merkel's wrinkly cleavage or Hillary Clinton's cankles? They don't take Newt Gingrich down for his pottiness or mock Ben Bernanke for his weird facial hair. I don't agree. I think lots of people laugh at Gingrich, if only for having such a stupid name. I do agree that there is a double standard. But it's not the double standard that Wolf is talking about. The double standard has to do with smart ugly men, or smugglies. An ugly teenaged boy with a pizza face and no pecular activity whatsoever might get teased. But if he's smart in a book learnin' sense, he will go to university, take advantage of that nerdiness and excel. While gu...

For those of you who have already hit The Globe and Mail paywall -- and it's only six days into the month -- I am happy to provide you with an analysis of the print edition this weekend First, Julian Fantino is an insensitive, uninformed twat. The International Cooperation Minister apparently stunned the Haiti higher-ups during an interview with La Presse  after he announced he was going to freeze new aid projects earmarked for the embattled little nation. It was also news to his own department apparently. The former top cop says he is tired of the "slow progress" being made in Haiti. How long does it take to rebuild a country shattered by a major Earthquake? It's been two years! "Are we going to take care of their problems forever?" asked Mr. Sensitivity. On to the next item. The hunger strike by Theresa Spence. In its lead editorial, The Globe and Mail suggests that the Chief, who has been striking for weeks to get a face-to-face with Emperor H...

For as long as I can remember, I spent Sunday mornings drinking coffee surrounded by newspapers. When I couldn't afford the Sunday New York Times , I would save the Globe and Mail , and savor it. And there was always the Sunday Citizen or the Sunday Sun as a back-up plan. Ever since I was a wee girl learning to read by devouring the  St. Catharines Standard , I loved the smell of newsprint, the way you had to clean yourself up after reading it. And I adored The Star Weekly with its long articles written by real Canadian writers with odd names like Silver Don Cameron. These are bleak days for people like me. The Sunday Citizen is gone and the cost of the Sunday New York Times is prohibitive. I gave up my Citizen subscription when I got a Kindle for Christmas. Kindling was cheaper but it was never the same. You couldn't save the crossword because there was no crossword. You couldn't even pour over the obits to see if you were still alive. The Kindle edit...

It was the last straw this morning. I was already frustrated reading my online edition of the Ottawa Citizen . I had decided to try it out for 99 cents and the truth is, it's so poorly organized I cannot find anything. There's old stuff on the splash page. Half the news is hidden in some cyber cranny that I cannot access. When I went to the obit section, I got a "cannot open" notice. It used to take me an hour to read the Citizen's Saturday print edition. Now it takes an hour of clicking just to get anything worthwhile to read. I cannot stand it. So I decided to dump the Citizen's online edition after three days. It's not worth ten bucks. If I want to read a paper, I'll walk over to the Quickie. So I turned to Twitter, which is now my go-to place for all the really important stuff. There I saw what looked like an interesting story by Ian Brown in the Globe and Mail. So I clicked on it. I was immediately alerted to the fact that I'd rea...

These last two weeks have been a journalism professor's dream. Imagine teaching second year journalism students and being handed the Margaret Wente affair, a shining example of what not to do as a columnist or reporter. Down at the Mop and Pail , I'm sure the mood is not so jovial. Imagine being Jeffrey Simpson and being handed guidelines to follow (published yesterday in the Globe ) -- as if you were a Grade 10 history student who's just got caught cribbing the text book. How incredibly insulting. By publishing those guidelines in yesterday's paper, Public Editor Sylvia Stead dug herself in the shithole even deeper. Now she's tainting all Globe reporters with the Wente brush and sending a message that no one in the newsroom can be trusted. I've got my eye on you, and now your mine. I'd love to be a fly on the Globe newsroom now that editors will be acting like prison guards inspecting everyone's bunk for contraband. Hee-hee...

A few years back, the Globe and Mail jumped on the mental health bandwagon, along with a number of other corporations, looking for a new and trendy cause that would raise its visibility among its rapidly shrinking clientele. Usually, companies look for causes that won't cost too much. Because the Globe and its mothership BellMedia have all kinds of free air time and space to fill, they usually look for a cause that allows them to spew hyperbole and good feelin's, causes that make them seem like they care. These causes allow the corporate sector to rub elbows and knees with politicians who also look for similar causes to raise their profiles. Before mental health and mental illness, there was literacy. It made perfect sense for newspapers to align with literacy. People who don't read don't buy newspapers. Dah. But alas, Southam got to literacy before the Globe. Literacy was a good cause because it wasn't as messy as mental illness; people who are illi...

I was noodling around my Kindle last week, looking for something good to read. The bestsellers were a bust. I'm not going anywhere Fifty Shades of Grey sequels after having nearly ralphed through the first instalment. And the Hunger Games ? Kid stuff. Besides, fiction bores me stiff. I can rarely slog through a novel, anymore -- even by authors whom I admire like John Irving. Maybe I'm getting old and the attention span is going. So I went looking at some of the Canadian non-fiction titles. I came across the Kindlet, the one by Paula Todd, about her successful search to find Karla Homolka. I do love true crime and thought this might just be a booklet for a sun-dappled backyard. So I took a sample. What a piece of crap. The first paragraph nearly made me hurl my Kindle into the dog's mouth. From the smudged window of the rattling prop plane, I see the Caribbean up close for the first time. It's exactly as advertised: emerald ovals of jungle floating in t...

Scott and I finally got paid this week so we celebrated Christmas yesterday doling out presents to the family and engaging in a long lunch at Kelsey's where Stefan, my favorite server works. Jay, the bartender, sent me an extra glass of Wolf Blass which, I believe, was one too many. When I got home, I ended up drunk ordering on Amazon.com and mistakenly put two copies of Stephen King's newest book on my credit card instead of one. I can barely order anything online when I'm sober -- I accidentally ordered Weight Watchers online twice -- because I'm too impatient in waiting for the processing. I always think they missed my order the first time. I got on the phone with a nice lady from Amazon who expertly fixed the problem. Truth be told, she did her job too well and deleted both books. So now I have no books and my 22 dollars times two is in limbo on the pay-as-you-go credit card I use for on-line purchases. Today, I will be attempting another transaction with ...

I hate being patronized by Americans, especially in our own Canadian media. There's an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail today by the actor and director Robert Redford who emplores us, as Canadians, to reject the Jellystone pipeline. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think there's much I can do about the pipeline. I suppose I could write a letter to my MP, but he's a Liberal and I doubt that the Harper government will listen to him. I suppose I could rail in this blog against the pipeline and its impact on the environment but I don't think it will do any good. So I'll probably lay on the couch this afternoon and try to figure out how to make enough money to pay my Hydro bill. What I can do is stop buying the Globe and Mail , until it stops running drivel written by actors who are supposed to be experts on the environment. Really, Bob, the whole Jellystone thing is more about ruining your backyard than mine, isn't it? I doubt Bob Re...