Yale Shmale

Lakehead University has this great new advertising campaign to try to attract young students to its rather small school in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The ad has made the news with some controversy, although personally I think that it's not only a great ad campaign, but it's also true. Ivy League schools do not necessarily produce smarter graduates than smaller universities. Admission to Ivy League schools isn't necessarily determined by one's intellectual potential either--at least not when daddy's trust fund is a source of the donations that allow the big schools to stay big. And when daddy is a governor or president, as Dubya's daddy was, is it really that surprising when someone not quite up to par makes it through with a diploma in hand anyway? Ditto for Dubya's drinking daughters. So why is the ad controversial? What's wrong with a little truth in adversting for once?

Science in the skies

Last week I flew home to Nova Scotia--sans toothpaste, shampoo, or the eye drops which are medically necessary to prevent scars from forming on my eyes but for which I don't actually have a prescription because the bottles are sold over the counter for $20 a pop. Although I went through security in the Montreal and Halifax airports rather quickly--the standard 15 minutes max that it normally takes me to get from the check-in counter to the gate--it was highly inconvenient not to be able to take these items with me (because it's not like I'm going to check a bag, and then wait 15 minutes on the other end to pick it up, all for a tube of toothpaste). Before I went, which was just one day after the alleged liquid plane bombing in Britain, I already thought that the new security measures were highly exaggerated, over-the-top, fear-mongering by the U.S. government--as is their wont--which would have absolutely no security effect but merely inconvenience travellers.

Well, it turns out that there is science out there--gasp! yes, actual scientific facts, imagine that!--which confirms that the new no liquids security measures are completely ridiculous and that it would be impossible within the known laws of chemistry and physics for the suspected terrorists to blow up a plane in the way that the mainstream media ruckus reported. Not that that's really a big surprise.

This article in The Register entitled "Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?" explains the chemistry alleged to be underlying the plot and how the proposed plot described in the media would not be able to produce an explosion capable of taking down a plane. This article at Working for Change entitled "Was British terror plot a load of crap?" cites from The Register article and gives a bit of a political analysis at the end of the benefits of fear-mongering in a U.S. election year. The Register article claims to be based on a 2005 peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society--ie, it's based on actual research by real scientists and further vetted by other real scientists, not just thrown out there to terrorize (how ironic where the terror really comes from) ordinary citizens by the likes of the pretty faces on CNN or the Republican cronies on Fox News.

After seeing Loose Change, I'm not surprised that there hasn't been a lot of reporting out there on the science of this plot. Loose Change puts forth the argument that it was scientifically impossible, according to the laws of physics, for the Twin Towers to implode at a free-fall rate from planes hitting them--ie, that only demolition-like explosions within the building, which can been seen going off in the original news footage, could have brought down the towers--and it examines how the science of the other two reported plane crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania doesn't add up. Why should we be surprised that the science of this alleged terror plot doesn't add up either?

PhD comics

I stumbled across this website today for PhD comics. Two hours later I had only scratched the surface of the archives, but it sure was fun reading through them. I guess that I'm not quite as far removed from the PhD experience as I thought I was (and, yes, there were some postdoc quips in there too), or perhaps it's just that one never really forgets all the quirks of the PhD experience. In any case, it was nice to see how universal that experience really is. Of all the characters in the strip, only one was a humanities PhD candidate, and the rest were in science and engineering, but the trials and tribulations, ups and downs, and hurdles to jump over and hoops to jump through were essentially the same. I'm sure glad that there are no more of those flaming hoops to jump through anymore--although perhaps it's more accurate simply to say that now I've got a whole new sets of hurdles and hoops ahead of me to look forward to...

Bon Cop, Bad Cop

I saw Bon Cop, Bad Cop on Friday night and I think it was really great--as entertainment, of course, not as art, obviously. It was so hilarious I couldn't stop laughing out loud the entire time, and neither could anyone else in the cinema, which was Quartier Latin (ie--I saw the French version with the English bits subtitled in French, as opposed to vice-versa).

It seemed clear to me that it was a Québécois film. I went in expecting some kind of Trudeau-esque version of bilingualism, and expecting not to like it for that reason. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the film was clearly taking the mick at English Canada's expense, and bilingualism in general, since everything Québécois always comes out on top: Patrick Huard's Québécois bad boy cop tactics win out over Colm Feore's polite English style; Huard gets Feore's sister but Feore doesn't win Huard's wife; and in the end Feore not only adopts Huard's rebel style but also learns to curse (à la Caliban peut-être?).

I really liked the "grammaire du sacre" scene. Muse described it on her blog, and I thought it would be nauseatingly bad to watch, too pedagogically serious, but the on-screen performance is quite humourous, and again seems to be taking the mick at English Canada's expense for Feore's ignorance, since it's not like we don't do the same thing when we curse in English too. Just like "calisse", "fuck" can be a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb too--and sometimes all in the same sentence.

The only thing really "Canadian" about the film was Rick Mercer in the Don Cherry role. That was a great casting choice in my opinion and a really nice touch to the film, especially the "frog" reference and the "tie" comment, which just about sums up Don Cherry vs. Québec. Nobody in the audience at Quartier Latin seemed to recognize who Rick Mercer was though, which I thought spoke volumes about the cultural divide. Given the bilingual theme, I also thought that casting Mississippi-born, Québécois star Nanette Workman as the ballet teacher was a nice touch.

The closing credits confirmed my conviction that it was a Québécois film about bilingualism, not a bilingual Canadian film. About 90% of the names scrolling across the screen were Québécois, and it turns out that the comparatively few Toronto scenes that were in the film were actually shot in Ottawa--I guess Toronto wasn't a good working environment and they needed to film the anglo scenes in a bilingual city! Plus, the music that played during the credits was an originally composed Éric Lapointe song--hard to get more Québécois than that!

It was also neat the the production company was called Park Ex pictures. Some of those bar scenes certainly had a Parc Extension feel to them.

I'm certainly not convinced that the movie is the kind of endeavour that will unite the two solitudes, as it's being touted by some, but I certainly like the idea of house full of burning pot as a strategy for breaking down cultural barriers!

Melissa Etheridge in Montréal

On Saturday night Melissa Etheridge played at Place des Arts in Montréal. The venue really hampered the audience from audience--the sit down chairs and the theatre setting discouraged people from standing up and dancing, and in my particular section of the balcony people in the back yelled at people in the front who stood up to dance so that dampened spirits even more--but Melissa was great. It was the first time that I've seen her play, and I was not disappointed. I'd heard that she had a good following in Montréal and Vermont--northern liberalness, posited one friend--but I was surprised at how many straight couples and how many francophones were in the audience. Apparently she appeals to more than just dykes and she can even break the language barrier.

Melissa was very political throughout the show, which was a really pleasant surprise. She opened up with "Lucky", although surprisingly didn't sing her even bigger hit "Breathe" from that same album. Not long into the show, Melissa started talking about how great Canada was--which made the crowd go wild--because of our approach to gay rights. She talked about how she, like many others, considered moving to Canada after ol' Georgie boy got relected in 2004. She pointed out that she could actually get married if she lived here (this after an earlier reference, in response to an audience compliment, that her "wife" [Tammy Lynn Michaels] spiked her hair for her), and then she went into a series of her most political gay rights songs: "Silent Legacy" about being closeted; "Scarecrow" about Matthew Shepard's murder; "Tuesday Morning" about Mark Bingham, a gay man among the four people believed to have taken down United Flight 93 (although see the Loose Change post below for other theories on 9/11); and (after "The Letting Go") "Yes I Am", the title song on her first album following her coming out at Bill Clinton's inaugural ball. "Tuesday Morning" was really interesting because not only did she talk about how the partners of gays who died on September 11th weren't eligible for survivor's benefits, and therefore how having a gay hero created an ideological problem for the country, but she also modified the lyrics. Normally the chorus goes, "Stand up America / Wake up America", but that didn't really make much sense for a Canadian audience, so she replaced those lines, and changed the pronouns from "Can you live with yourself in the land of the free?" to "Can they live with themselves". It was nice of her to be so gracious about Canada.

She praised us again when she sang another political song, "I Need To Wake Up", which is the closing credit song on Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. She talked about global warming and encouraged everyone to see the film, not just as a commercial plug but because of the urgency to convince people to do something. And of course she couldn't resist joking that with global warming Canada is looking better and better every day. (It wasn't entirely praise though, as she wryly pointed out that despite living in the home of Dubya, she thought that we "still have some business to take care of" ourselves, i.e., Stephen Harper, aka Dubya's mini-me.

She also talked about having gotten breast cancer (which forced her to cancel her last scheduled show in Montréal a couple years ago) and did two songs that she wrote after surviving the chemo: "I Run for Life" and "This Is Not Goodbye".

So gay rights, the environment, and cancer all in one show, and quite prominently at that. I was very impressed!

Other highlights were the highly romantic "Baby, You Can Sleep While I Drive", which always makes me want to take my girl on a cross-country road trip, and "The Letting Go" for which a grand piano was wheeled on stage and which she played poignantly, a nice change from the rocking guitar. For an encore, she did a very long version of "Like The Way I Do", which I'd read was her closer that she draws out much, much longer than on the album, and which turned out to be true, and then she did Joplin's "Piece of My Heart", the same song that sung at the 2005 Grammy's when she was fresh out of chemo and still completely bald. It wasn't as utterly amazing as that performance, which I doubt anything could top, but it was still quite an awesome closer.

On top of the endless Canada praise, she was also very gracious to the audience and interacted a lot with the front row. Had I have been lucky enough to have gotten seats there, I'm sure that I would noticed electricity in the air. She chatted with people in the front row, and several times she apologized because of a techincal screw-up with Place des Arts that meant that the people in the first row were really the people in the third row. Apparently, PdA had raised the orchestra bowl in order to bring some of her equipment on stage, and it got stuck there, so the first two rows of seats disappeared and those people had to squeeze over to the two ends of the stage instead of getting the seats they were supposed to. She apologized to them at least three or four times during the show, and she made a point of singing at the front of the stage / orchestra bowl, even though the stage and all of the set decor was placed about 6 feet further back where it was supposed to be. She really made a point of maintaining contact with the audience even though there was an extra 6 feet of stage where there wasn't supposed to be.

Move over Margaret Mead Made Me Gay. Melissa Etheridge made me a dyke, and I sure am grateful!

Saturday was also the last day of the 1st ever Outgames here in Montréal (as opposed to the Gay Games which moved to Chicago after a bitch fight between our local organizers and their powers that be) and Sunday was the last day of Divers/Cité, our pride festival. It was really amazing to walk down the streets and see people wearing the blue Outgames necklace-keychain-nametag holders, and even their Outgames medals. It was enough to give one whiplash from turning around identifying everyone as "Gay!", "Gay!", Gay!". The city was overrun with queers, and it was fabulous! Well, except for the fact that there were so many queerst that there was a line-up to get into the 7-floor Drugstore bar, which was completely ridiculous! Still, having to find another bar is a small price to pay for having more than a week when it feels like queers make up the majority of the city--how refreshing!