Shades of Gray at the Movies: Inside Man

Hey, it was fun. If you like heist flicks, see it. Make sure you see it-it's a smart, cool, fun heist flick, with lots of good acting performances, and an interesting way of telling the story. Also, and this is an exciting bonus feature, there's really not much call in it for liberal handwringing, unlike other movies featured here previously.

I've got a soft spot for movies about fantastic thefts-you can root for the criminals, most of the time, and you can enjoy the whole predictable-but-enjoyable parts like The Assembling of The Team, The Execution of The Heist, The Reaction of The Police and so forth. Ocean's Eleven, for example, was also great fun, though I'd say that Inside Man's a better movie on the whole.

And some good news

Finally, I see that the Canadian hostages in Iraq have been rescued. This is, of course, wonderful news. It's awful, of course, that their American comrade wasn't rescued as well-the kidnappers dumped his body earlier this month-but considering that the three remaining hostages had been held for four months, through numerous pay-up-or-we'll-kill-them deadlines, it's a relief to hear that James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, along with Briton Norman Kember, are alive, well, and no longer in danger.

Remind me why we do this again?

Moving from cinematic explosions at Westminister to political ones, I read in yesterday's Globe that Tony Blair is enmeshed in a scandal about appointing people to the House of Lords in return for secret loans to the Labour Party. Now, apparently, one of the sugar daddies in question is resigning from his post at the head of an outsourcing firm.

I have never liked Tony Blair. I will grant that he is an eloquent speaker for the causes he espouses, that some of the reforms he's implemented in Britain's public services are worth a look as we here in Canada try to figure out how to reform our own, and that, for whatever it's worth, he seems to be a sincere believer in most of what he's set out to achieve in public life.

The trouble is that his signature achievements have been a wrenching of the Labour Party to the right, a move that in my opinion was far more dramatic than necessary to defeat the hapless Major Conservatives, a contempt for civil liberties and an enthusiastic endorsement of the most boneheaded foreign policy idiocies of the Bush administration. As I say, I don't doubt that Blair is sincere in believing that all of these things were good and necessary for Britain. I am sure, however, that at least on Iraq, the most vitally important of the three, that he was completely and catastrophically wrong. So if he goes over this scandal, along with the Labour Party's disappointing results in the last election, I won't be sorry.

The other thing that strikes me about the scandal is that it highlights exactly how ridiculous and anachronistic the House of Lords is. The House of Lords is an institution that takes everything I dislike about the Canadian Senate-patronage, clubbiness, the absurdity of an unelected legislative body and so forth-and adds an added dash of class snobbery on top of it to boot. It is possibly the British institution with the least good to be said about it. With that in mind, I can't say that I'm sorry to see its prestige, such as it is, take a hit along with Mr. Blair's.

Shades of Gray at the Movies: V For Vendetta

So I went to the movies Tuesday night, initially intending to see Capote and Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar winning performance and so forth, but I left the house too late and by the time I got to the theatre the only thing that hadn't started yet was V for Vendetta, which was okay, because I had been planning to see that anyhow at some point.

I have mixed feelings about it now, having seen it. The overriding impulse is to say that it was a decent comic-book movie on the surface-I like a good comic-book movie, immature though they are, and while I don't agree with some of the more rhapsodic raves I've seen on some of the blogs I read, I thought it was a competently executed bit of action popcorn.

At least, of course, on the upper levels of the film. Or the lower levels. I don't get exactly what this metaphorical stratification of levels is supposed to look like. But I do know, as does everyone who's seen the picture, that the Wachowski Bros. intended to write a dystopic film about the future specifically relevant to our time, and I have to say that I find myself uncomfortable with the implications of applying the conventions of a superhero movie to what's meant, I believe, as a cautionary tale about our current political disposition.

First, the obvious boilerplate that I hope everyone takes for granted: Neither we, up here in Canada, or our friends and neighbours in the States and Britain live in a fascist dictatorship. Second, terrorism in the current political situation, and for any situation forseeable for at least the time period envisioned by the movie (the fascist dictatorship is well established by 2020, when the movie is set) is reprehensible and evil.

All of that said, I'll admit that I could easily be convinced that in a situation where we actually did find ourselves existing in a totalitarian state, terrorist actions against the state similar to those portrayed in the movie would be a correct course of action. That's not the issue I take with the movie. First, I think we can all agree that the best think to do would be to, well, not vote in the proto-fascist dictatorship in the first place. To be fair, V himself indicts the citizens of Britain for the existence of said fascist dictatorship early in the flick, but the whole assignment of responsibility is, I think, undercut by the whole concept of the character of V to begin with.

My father once argued that he thought that superheroes were an essentially fascist archetype-the ubermenchen who fly in and save the rest of us, effete, decadent wretches that we are, from malevolent and overpoweringly evil villains who are irretrievably Other from us. The Wachowski brothers, of course, are old hands at messianic tales of humanity being redeemed by The One, but I have to say that it's a dramatic device that I grow increasingly suspicious of as I move further away from my adolescence.

Also, I find it a little weird to be watching a film about resistance to fascist oppression that is so clearly in love with violence in and of itself. The glorification of violence for its own sake is, of course, one of the defining features of fascism, and it rings weirdly false to be asked to cheer on a protagonist (I'll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt when they say that V is not a "hero") for his feats of violent derring-do.

What irritates me about this is that there was a better way to tell the story. Stephen Rea plays an inspector in the regime's ordinary police (the guys who catch thieves and murderers, rather than the dudes in black leather rounding up dissidents) who gradually uncovers the truth behind the regime's rise to power as he investigates one of V's murders. This is not, of course, an original storyline-Martin Cruz Smith did it for the Soviets in Gorky Park and the other Renko books, while Robert Harris did it for a victorious Nazi regime in Fatherland, the book that tops my List Of Pulp Fiction I Must Read Sometime. But it's been done before, and well, because it's a fundamentally interesting question: In a criminal state, what's an honest cop to do? So I was annoyed that that particular plotline was in there as a subplot, because it was a constant reminder that there was a better, more humanistic way to treat the story, and that it had been passed over for knife-wielding superheroics.

Finally, I wasn't wild about the adulation for mercenary terrorist Guy Fawkes. The other guys in the Gunpowder Plot may have been admirable-it's hard to get behind Catholic Emancipation, after all-but Fawkes, at least as far as I can tell, was in it for the money and the explosions.

Anyway, for all of this, it's not a bad movie. It's well acted-Rea is excellent, Stephen Fry is always a treat, and Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman are both good-and I think its heart is in the right place. It's just that its head isn't.

WARNING: Contains Baseball-Related Content

So Japan won the inaugural World Baseball Classic, an oxymoron if ever there was one, knocking off Cuba 10-6 in a game that was far more exciting than the final score might indicate.

A couple of brief thoughts on the whole shebang, now that it's over. First, it was an awful lot of fun, especially for a Canadian fan, watching all of these teams play together for the first time and watching our glorious boys in red shock the world and the Americans in the first round. It was also cool, in a way, to watch teams playing at wildly different levels of skill, to get a sense of where other countries in the world were at in terms of baseball. The South Africans, looking for all the world like Cape Town High School's varsity squad in the group with the three North American teams, were particularly instructive. And to be clear about this, I don't mean this is a mean-spirited way-I can only imagine what a thrill it must have been for the South Africans to play on the same field as the superstars of the game, and then get destroyed by them (except, ahem, for Canada, who Cape Town High led going into the ninth. We simply aren't good enough at baseball to be on the losing end of inspiring underdog upsets, says I.)

It was also very cool to see how much the tournament meant to the fans and players for the various teams, particularly those from the Caribbean, Korea and Japan.It's a very good sign regarding the future of the tournament, and while I wish, as I've said before, that they'd mix up the pools a bit after the first round, I think the future of the WBC (or whatever they choose to call it) is safe for at least two more tournament cycles.

And finally, I think it's rather funny that in a tournament designed to show baseball fans what would happen if the world's best players suited up for their countries, as opposed to those totally bogus tournaments at the Olympics featuring no-names from the minor leagues, the two teams contesting the final were... two teams that between them have won seven of the twelve medals ever awarded at the Olympics. Plus ca change...

Apologia Pro Vita Socialista

So like I say in the "Coming Attractions" thing right below this post, I have an odd political self-identity, that Jay once very ably summed up in an email I quote here without permission.

"1) Willing to experiment with private delivery, and possibly accept two-tiered health care,
within a limited, public-good-focussed context.
2) In favour of robust military action in Afghanistan; impatient with facile peacenik platitudes; in favour of more money for the military generally
3) Opposed to proportional representation
4) A hard-liner on separatism
5) A member of....the NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY? (!!!)"

I'll admit that this seems a little offbeat; and I'll also cop to the fact that these issues are ones that are generally important to me, though I've gotta say that I've never loudly asked a group of people I didn't know were gigantic nerds if they wanted to come back to my place to discuss proportional representation, unlike some people I could name.

So why, exactly, am I a "right-wing New Democrat" rather than a left-wing Liberal or a floating voter or an independent or what have you? The answer is sort of complicated-I've no doubt that a desire to irritate my rock-ribbed Liberal family is part of it, as is a general dislike of the clubby culture of entitlement and corruption that genuinely does infect the Liberal party. But ultimately, I think that I'm a New Democrat because ultimately they're the party that is most committed to building a better, fairer society, rather than tinkering around the edges of our current society.

Here's what I mean. The issues on which I form a minority of one within the NDP, like proportional representation and health care and separatism, seem to me to be issues of mechanism: how we create given goals, like a health-care system or a Parliament or a federation. This is vitally important. But it seems to me that an even more important component of politics, ultimately, is who you think needs to be served by the political system-what clients need to be served better by the state to create a better society. And I find myself increasingly out on the left wing of the culture wars, arguing for feminism and gay rights and secular values and so forth. In this country, thank god, we don't really have a vicious clash of "values" yet, though I worry that in twenty years we will be fighting the same battles the Americans are fighting now. It has to be said, though, that when these fights arise the NDP always seems to be out on their own saying forthrightly that a fairer, more inclusive society is a good thing in and of itself.

Take gay marraige, the last gigantic carnival of appeals to prejudice and emotion we had in our political arena. The Conservatives were pretty forthright in standing foursquare behind the continuation of bigotry. The NDP was equally forthright in saying that gay men and women should be allowed to have the same marraige rights as everybody else. So far, so entirely expected.

And then there's the Liberals. Under the ridiculous, desperate-to-please leadership of Paul Martin, they hid behind the charter, unwilling to say whther they thought extending the right to marraige was a good thing in and of itself, relying on legalisms about the notwithstanding clause. What irritated me most-then and now-is that this approach to government refuses to talk about what the laws mean to people. Not "the people" or society writ large, but ordinary men and women living their daily lives. I got extremely tired of the parsing of the Charter, and what the Supreme Court had to say when the question was referred to them by another Liberal government seeking cover-I wanted to hear what the different parties thought was important about marraige, gay or straight, to real live people. And two of the parties answered the question, and only one of them answered it in a way I thought was just.

And this stuff, about the establishment of a secular society where we can all try to get ahead, comes up all the time. Equal pay for men and women. Abortion regulations. Established state parochial schools. Labour law. Take your pick.

I dunno. I realize that it sounds weird for a white, heterosexual man from a comfortable family background to say what motivates him in choosing a political party are issues of race, gender, sexuality and class, but those are the issues that tell you where a party's heart is-not their stand on tax rates and administrative reforms to the health care system. That's not to say the other stuff isn't vitally important, but I think that precisely how we order our health-care bureaucracy and the size of our military and how we elect MPs to Parliament and the precise stance federalists in Canada should take vis-a-vis the separatists are all issues on which people of good intentions can and do disagree. The question of whether a better, more inclusive, society should be built isn't in my view, and while there are certainly people who believe that "it's not too late to build a better world" in all of the other parties (including, it would seem, all of my friends) I think there's a higher proportion of people in the Conservative and Liberal parties who like the current world just fine, thanks very much, or who would like in fact to build what they think would be a better world but which I think would be an awful lot worse.

Coming Soon To A Vanity Blog Near You!

So there, nerds. That's what I think about the health care system, and it's every bit as incoherent as I promised.

And now, a pitch for this week's coming attractions at Shades of Gray. Sunday or Monday, I'll be explaining why exactly a pro-private health insurance, pro-military spending, Afghan War hawk who believes in the current electoral system is a New Democrat, followed by a World Baseball Classic wrap-up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. The previously promised post about abortion may or may not come early in the week as well.

Mid-week, I'll be introducing a new (possibly) regular feature: Fortnightly Shakespeare blogging, in which I'll be writing about whichever play it is that I'll be discussing with the Official Little Brother of Shades of Gray on Wednesday night.

A word of explanation is perhaps required here. Colin, the Official Little Brother of Shades of Gray, recently came through Halifax en route to his home at Party Univeristy in Antigonish, spending a Saturday night on the Official Horrible Living Room Sofa of Shades of Gray. In the course of a fraternal conversation otherwise taken up with the far more important topics of sports, girls and pizza toppings, the OLB of SoG asked if I'd help with a 1500 word Hamlet paper he had due that Thursday, which he hadn't even read the play for yet. To which I thought, "Well, he comes by it honestly, at least."

After that, I talked him into actually reading the play, rather than relying on those horrible crib notes, and arranged to talk to him about it on the Wednesday night before it was due. So far, everything is entirely in keeping with the known characters of the Gray brothers-one geeky, one jocky, both procrastinators, etc. And this is where the story takes a funny turn.

He liked it. He had fun reading Shakespeare. Granted, what he especially liked how Hamlet was "chirping" Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, but he liked the play. So much so, that he agreed to buy a Complete Works of Shakespeare and read a play every other week to discuss with me. I feel like I'm in Bizarro World.

So we kick off the "not for class" portion of the programme this Wednesday, with Macbeth, and I will posting something about the play here prior to the tele-colloquy of intellectuals based out of Halifax and Antigonish. It will probably be even more sophomoric and confused than the health-care stuff, but if you want insightful, incisive writing, read the baseball stuff.

See you at the show!

So I have three kinds of news

The good news is that this humble blog now has at least two readers. Hiya, Doc!

The bad news is that the geekiness quotient of Shades of Gray denizens has at the very least stayed static, if it hasn't actually increased. I mean, catcalls calling for health care posts? That's truly spectacular.

The news that may be good or may be bad, depending on your aforementioned geekiness quotient and tolerance for incoherence, is that the much-promised, much-delayed health-care post is here!

As Emily points out in the comments section (the plural is justified! Huzzah!) that immediately precedes this post, my views on the whole shmozzle are perhaps particularly important, as I'm now a year older and hence a part of the aging of the Canadian polulation that's driving the whole crisis to begin with. So sorry, folks. It's all my fault that waiting times have gone through the roof.

Jokes aside, it's pretty clear that what's driving the health-care crisis, such as it is, is the aging of the population coupled with rising costs for medical treatment, whether it comes in the form of new technology, new drugs, rising salaries for personnel. So you have more people using more medicine at higher prices. This, to no one's surprise even at this math-challenged blog, is going to lead to higher costs. So we find ourselves in a situation where "There MUST be more money!"

All of this is entirely obvious. There are certainly administrative changes that can be made to improve things as well, which I'll get to in a minute, but the most pressing thing is getting more money into the system, in my view. As magical rocking horses seem to be out as a fundraising option, I (brace yourself, kids) would like to see this financed, as far as is feasible, with tax increases. As I said earlier, the anti-tax crusade the right wing has been on for the past twenty-five years has done an awful lot of harm to the possibility of effective social programmes, and it's past time for someone to make an argument for shared sacrifice.

That said, I'm under no illusion that tax increases are any sort of political winner. So, as Jay suggests in an earlier comment, I think allowing people to pay for private health insurance seems to me to be only just if we aren't going to make the sort of financial investments to make the system work collectively.

The issue, I think, is that this is yet another excruciating example of Canadians comparing their situation to that of the United States and to nobody else. Our health-care system, for all of its problems, is still a lot better than their more expensive, more Byzantine, more Dickensian mess of a "system." The trouble is that they've got the worst system in the developed world, bar none. It's roughly like taking the Russian criminal justice system as a point of comparison and then saying that our flawed system is perfect because we at least don't have transparently political prosecutions and rampant corruption.

Instead of thumping our chests about beating the pathetic Americans in the healthcare league, we should perhaps be looking at other countries to see what they do well. Like, say, France. Or Britain. Or Sweden. Or anywhere but the States, because we have problems, and being less fucked-up than the most hopeless case in the room does not make you any less fucked up.

I think Jay has it right when he suggests in the comment linked to earlier that what's important is giving people options within the system. Setting up specialized care centres is only common sense-even I know about economies of scale and the efficiency benefits of specialization-and as he says, who cares, other than nutty ideologues, if the centres are run by corporations provided that people can still get the care they need?

Tying funding to patients, as he also suggests, is another excellent idea. The vast oceans of cash we spend on health care are meant, at least in theory, to make people well. I think we should allow people to buy supplementary private insurance if they want it, again provided that we fund the public system sufficiently well to avoid an exodus of doctors to the private sector.

None of this will ever happen, of course-absolutely every interested constituency sees their ox gored, and it can be demagogued from every angle. But it could also be sold by a particularly savvy politician as a grand compromise as well, I think-better care for all and freedom of choice for the lucky few in exchange for an acceptance of a certain amount of inequality and higher taxes for all. And then we'll all ride a rocking horse to find a winner.

Matters of the Gravest Importance

Given that I promised Jay, who's the only person I know who actually reads this bloody thing, that I would be writing a fuller version of my half-baked thoughts on health care sometime last week, and given that I haven't done so yet, I thought that I would give my two cents on recent pressing developments in the world of...baseball.

Hey, it's my blog.

In chronological order, then. Barry Bonds, beyond all possible doubt unless you believe in extraterrestrial conspiracies, is a drug cheat. Or, rather, he is a user of steroids of such enthusiasm and openness to experimentation that I'll freely admit that I'm, as we baseball intellectuals like to put it, grossed out by some of the stuff he's alleged to have put into his body. I mean, cattle hormones?

And yet. (We all knew this was coming, right?) None of these substances were against the rules of baseball when he took them. Maybe they should have been, but they weren't. "But steroids, without a prescription, are illegal in the United States," I hear the drug warriors howling. Absolutely true. So are amphetamines, which are used, according to credible anecdote, by roughly 98% of ballplayers at some point during the season to get themselves "up" for games. Ballplayers, including such sainted idols of the game as Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, have been using speed forever, it seems. Yet no one says a thing about that.

So as to what should be done about all of this, I'm ambivalent. If individual sportswriters want to refuse to vote for him to make it into the Hall of Fame-there is a "character" clause in the election criteria, so they'd be within their rights-then fine. If enough sportswriters don't vote for him, he won't make it in, and that's fine too. I think, myself, that the character clause is idiotic and that steroids or not he was the best player of his generation and, finally, that he cheated, if you can cheat without breaking the rules of the game, to win, in the time-honoured tradition of guys like Gaylord Perry and Leo Durocher, so I'd vote for him, but whatever.

The "solution" that drives me absolutely bonkers is the suggestion that some or all of his statistics should be stricken from the record. What infuriates me about this is the airy, thoughtless way it's always proposed-"just strike out the 297 homers he hit after 1998, and then we'll have a record of what he did when he was clean." Right. Except it's not like track and field. It's a team game, and the Giants scored runs and won ballgames in part because of those home runs. Do you go back through the record and take away runs that Bonds drove in? That he scored? Both? Do you void any games he played in? Do you, like the pinheaded NCAA in reference to the 1992 Michigan Wolverines, say that the 2002 Angels won the World Series over...nobody? I think we're all capable of applying whatever mental discount we choose to Bonds' statistics, and monkeying around with the records of what actually happened on the field is to be discouraged.

Next on the list of events in baseball is the elimination of the United States from the World Baseball Classic. To this I say, hooray. Not because of any particular anti-American animus, but because the upending of predictable storylines is always good for a sport, and the WBC, to my delight, has been a lot of fun. Also, given that the Japanese got robbed in their game against the States, and probably deserved to go through anyway. I wish that baseball had broken up the pools a little, so that we got to see different matchups each round, instead of the same teams playing each other repeatedly (is everyone ready for Korea-Japan III?) but otherwise it's been a great success, it says here.

And finally, and most importantly, the Blue Jays have locked up Doc Halladay through 2010.

Given that this offseason, exciting and hope-inducing though its been, resulted in both my second-(Orlando Hudson) and third-favourite (Dave Bush) Jays getting traded away, I can't say how relieving it is to have my favourite player under contract to my favourite team. I think Halladay might be a Hall of Famer one day, and it would be awfully cool if he did it as a career Blue Jay. I can't wait for opening day against the Twins, when he'll square off against the one guy I think might be a better pitcher in the American League-Johan Santana.

Just two more weeks to Opening Day...

Tempus Fugit

It's funny how we measure time. A year, obviously, is a fairly straightforward measure of time even if you know nothing about the heliocentric solar system and a month makes perfect sense as well and so on, but the fixing of a moment in time, such as, for example, the early hours of the morning in Vancouver on March 15th, 1982, as special and significant is sort of strange, when you think about it. I can go back, if I wish-though for some reason I never have-and find out what people were reading in their morning paper as I made my first appearance, squalling and mewling, into the world. I can find out who died that day, who else was also making their debuts, as it were, at the same time I was. I know what the weather was like, because my father's told me that it was a beautiful spring morning when he left the hospital.

Obviously, there wasn't anything special or significant about that day for most people. People got up, went to work, and school, and turned on the television, and argued and talked and fell in love and despaired and got drunk and fell asleep, soundly or not, like any other day. Nothing of particular import happened that particular Ides of March in the world of History with a capital H-it's been a quiet couple of millenia for the date, with the exception of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in 1917. It was, as far as I can tell, an ordinary day.

Except, of course, for me, and my family, and however many other people there are who made their entrances (and exits, I suppose) on the stage we all ab lib our way across that day twenty four years ago. Like any anniversary, my birthday is simultaneously meaningless-yeah, it was exactly twenty-four years ago that I was born, and what does this have to do with the price of fish?-and one of those moments for stock-taking and so forth that seem to crop up every year.

Enough of the navel-gazing. It's a beautiful spring day, and I want to walk around in it. So Happy Birthday to me, and to Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Eva Longoria and Harold Baines and Ry Cooder and Finnish snowboarder Antii Autti and even to you, Jimmy Swaggart. One more year to the quarter-century...

List Madness

Before we begin, I'd like to say that by my prediction standards, two out of six ain't bad. It is also entirely unsurprising to note that my correct predictions came in the fields I knew the least about.

Now, on to tonight's list: hobbies I have taken up and later dropped, either intermittently or permanently. It's a game the whole family can play!

Juggling
Model-making
Racquetball
Diplomacy (the board game that takes hours and hours to play, not actual international intrigue)
Attending Model United Nations conferences (fake international intrigue)
Chess (I was damn good, I'll have you know)
Ultimate Frisbee
Magic
Poker (In my defense, this was for work)
Croquet
Solitaire
Elaborate, self-created card games simulating world events and sports
Fantasy baseball
List-writing
Writing bad short stories
Writing slightly less bad plays

I will add to this if I think of anything else.

And Now For Something Completely Different

It has been pretty heavy weather here of late, eh? Seal hunts, taxes, rape...it seems like one of those blogs where life is grim and life is earnest, and no speck of frivolity lightens the picture.

So I'm going to talk about the Oscars, which I don't care about and think are ridiculous but watch anyway so I can gripe about how good movies never win. And in case you think this is going to be some sort of serious analysis, never fear, because I've seen hardly any of the films up for the top awards. It's as ignorant an analysis as you're going to find anywhere. Shades of Gray: I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but it's free.

So without further ado, on to the haphazard predicitions!

Best Supporting Actor: I have seen all of two of these actors, Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain and George Clooney in Syriana. While George Clooney is my hero, he really didn't, as far as I can tell, do anything particularly special in Syriana. It was a decent performance. Jake Gyllenhall, in my opinion, was better than Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, and it seems to be the conventional wisdom that Ledger's going to win Best Actor. So unless Matt Dillon, Paul Giamatti or William Hurt were incandescently good in Crash, Cinderella Man, or A History of Violence respectively, I think it should go to Gyllenhaal. I think it probably will, as well.

Best Supporting Actress: We're breaking with Shades of Gray editorial policy here in actually forcasting an Oscar race in which we've seen more than half of the nominees (Yes, we're using the royal we. We're pretentious bastards.) Rachel Weisz, while good, wasn't anything particularly memorable in The Constant Gardener-this appears to be the Leading Actress version of Clooney's nomination. Michelle Williams was brilliant in Brokeback Mountain. So was Amy Adams in Junebug. Both of them, interestingly, were playing wives of husbands who didn't love them, for differing reasons. I think Adams was a hair better, but Williams was in the bigger movie. The two I didn't see are Frances McDormand in North Country and Catherine Keener in Capote. Both are very talented actresses, and could very well deserve it (I'm starting to feel like Jackie Harvey here.) I'm going to predict Williams winning it, though.

Best Actress: Things are back to normal here, as I've seen exactly one of the actresses up for this award-Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line. She was very good in it, which isn't surprising, because she's an excellent actress. I doubt that Charlize Theron will win a second Oscar for North Country so soon after winning for Monster, and I think Judi Dench will also be hamstrung by her previous Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Keira Knightley is, I think, unlikely to win for Pride & Prejudice, so that leaves Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica. I think the technical difficulty of a woman playing a man trying to become a woman is self-evident, and from what I understand she's extremely good. Fun though it would be to imagine right-wingers' heads exploding in anger across America as a movie about gay cowboys sweeps the Oscars with an assist from a movie about a transsexual, I think Witherspoon might actually win this as the "safe" pick.

Best Actor: Heath Ledger is probably going to win. Unless Philip Seymour Hoffman does for Capote. As to who deserves it, I don't know, because I haven't seen Capote. If you don't like the analysis, send me an email and I'll send you your money back registered post.

As to the other guys, I've seen both David Strathairn in Good Night, and Good Luck and Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line. Both were good, Strathairn was better, and neither was close to Ledger. Terrence Howard is the fifth nominee for his role in Hustle and Flow. Given that I think more people are talking about Phoenix in this category, I doubt he will win. I'm calling it for Ledger.

Best Picture: This category shares all of its nominees with Best Direction, and I think both awards will go to Brokeback Mountain. Full disclosure: I've only seen it and Good Night, and Good Luck. I understand Crash is very good, and it appears to have a lot of "buzz," as Jackie and I like to say, but I doubt think it'll catch Brokeback, which really does deserve the hype. I think Capote is here on the strength of Hoffman and Keener's acting (though how would I know?) and I don't think Munich is going to win. Finally, in the category of things I actually know something about, Good Night, and Good Luck, while a nice pick-me-up for us lefties (and lord knows we can use one right now) really isn't Best Picture material.

Finally, as to the awards show itself. I actually don't have terribly high expectations for Jon Stewart-I think that the show will be a straitjacket for his best political stuff, and while he's a smart enough guy to be funny anyway, I don't think the Oscars really leads to memorable comedy from the host most of the time.

So there you have it. The first in what I hope will be a regular series, Ian's Fearless and Ignorant Predictions. All Predictions Right, Or Your Money Back.

Hi, I'm Spike. I'm against the mauling of toddlers.

Noodling around today on the internet, as is my wont, I came across this question, which struck me as a question that I simultaneously think is straightforward and uncomfortable. To whit, how exactly do men, as men, think about rape?

I mean, on one level the answer is entirely straightforward. Men hate rapists. They're cowardly, vicious criminals who give all of us a bad name. They hurt women whom other men love. It's pretty simple, at least on the surface.

And yet. I can't help but think of the defensive shell the boys, myself included, pulled into in the twelfth grade discussion we had about date rape. Yes, we all seemed to say, rape is awful and rapists are awful but sometimes it's so confusing, you know? When I think even then, when we were as callow as it's possible to be when you're technically an adult, we knew that usually it really isn't that complicated. I mean, how hard is not taking advantage of someone?

The issue, I think, is that decent men feel guilty for their rapist brethren without really knowing what they, as men, can do to help the problem beyond not being rapists themselves. I recall P.J. O'Rourke comparing a group called Men Against Rape to a hypothetical one called Rottweilers Against Mauling Toddlers. As he put it, "you approve of the sentiment, but what do they talk about in their meetings?" Which is not to suggest that men shouldn't be active in trying to shift the responsibility in rape prevention away from its current spot entirely on women's shoulders-they clearly should, and the "No means No" campaign of my salad days at university was a start, though a goofy one. I just don't know what, specifically, I can do about it.

Shakespeare's Sister asks if men talk about rape amongst themselves. My experience, in every setting I can think of, is "absolutely not." On the one hand, it would be weird to talk about any violent crime in the abstract, I think. And on the other, I think everyone would probably rather avoid a discussion of hypotheticals that might end with one guy calling another a rapist.

Finally, she asks if I've ever known anyone who took advantage of a woman and didn't consider it rape. At first, I was inclined to think that I hadn't. And then I remembered that I had, and that I'd lived with the guy.

Now that all of my ex-roommates are worried that I'm going to finger them for a rape they didn't commit, I'll say that it was a long time ago, when I was at a summer school programme studying drama (I was quite an actor in my youth, you know.) I had a wonderful roommate, a guy who didn't mind arguing with me but who was grounded enough not to follow me into my more lunatic flights of fancy. And it was grat for the first week or ten days, as we settled in and he started to date this girl.

Now, in the event in question, all of the parties agree that there was nothing that anyone would call sex. I know that rape isn't sex, but I use it here to be clear. Instead, there was just kissing. Except that she was asleep, and he claimed that he didn't realize.

I don't know if he was telling the truth. He was a genuinely nice guy, I think, and for him to deliberately take advantage of a girl seems wildly out of character, but she definitely took the view that he'd violated her. And maybe all of this is overblown. But I remember how awkward it made me feel, and the wedge it drove into my circle of friends, and I don't really know if he meant to take advantage of her or not.

That wasn't rape, though it was definitely wrong if intentional and a horrible mistake to make if not. And that's about as ambivalent a case as I can construct. Most of the time, the guy is far more clearly in the wrong.

That, I think, is the other reason that men feel uncomfortable about this topic. We're the only ones who commit this particular crime, and it happens more frequently and to more different types of person than I think we'd like to admit. So you wind up in this position, if you do talk about it, where you wind up saying "I'm not like all those other guys." Except who's to know if you're not? You do, presumably, and maybe your wife or girlfriend does as well, but otherwise? You really are the Rottweiler whose owner says is "great with children."

What?

You were expecting a pun?

Dire Straits Politics

That would be a reference to the band, rather than a ridiculously portentious title.

Jay, replying to my musings on the proposed new Alberta health care system with far more detail than I initially provided, points out that in the end we need more money for public services before all of the other good reforms we should enact (he mentions a few of them) will amount to anything. He makes the entirely correct point that if we don't pay for things publicly, we have to let people pay for things themselves if they have the cash. It's as just an outcome as you're going to get.

I recently filed my taxes. For the first time in my life, the government will be keeping some of the money that I earned with the sweat of my...uh...well, I didn't really sweat for it. As I was doing the arithmetic that the return entailed, I thought that tax time is sort of a necessary check on my left-wing utopianism-the social democrat's Good Friday.

All of which is a convoluted way of saying that I don't mind paying taxes. I don't look at a paycheck and see the money in the "taxes deducted" column as some sort of theft. But if you listen to public discourse here or especially in the States, there's a widespread belief that we're all groaning under the burden of sky-high taxes. Politicians from all parties (even the NDP, for God's sake) offer tax breaks of one kind or another and nobody proposes raising taxes. Down south, where they have, of course, a deficit of mind-blowing proportions, the consequences of said mind-blowing deficit is always pitched by gentlemen wearing metaphorical green eyeshades as being gigantic cuts to social programmes. No one talks about fixing the problem on the revenue, rather than the expenditure side of the imbalance.

Or take the much vaunted "fiscal imbalance" here in Canada. Provinces complain-rightly-that they don't have the money to perform the services they're required to. But almost no one proposes raising provincial tax rates as a solution. And when they do, as Dalton McGuinty did, they get hammered for it.

Organizations like the Canadian Taxpayers Foundation and the like always talk about how government programmes "are paid for by taxpayers," in a tone that casts the unfortunate taxpayer as the long-suffering martyr of the national drama, beset by a plague of bureaucrats, wasters and layabouts, watching their money being frivolously misspent. Conservatives talk about the new government "restoring" the "freedom to earn." Everywhere, we hear that we are overtaxed.

And then we hear that the public supports things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, universal public primary and secondary education, financially accessible universities and colleges, a stronger military, more foreign aid and on and on and on. The real anti-tax activists don't want all of these things, to give them their due. But the mass of people do in fact want to have their health care for nothing and their chicks for free. And I'm not sure this is going to change unless some charismatic politician or politicians go out and actively make the case for higher taxes.

The whole thing does not speak terribly highly of democratic electorates and their collective maturity. "I've got mine-go get yours" is a social ethos that I think most people rightly reject. The trouble is that they also reject the only other sustainable social model, which is the far less cool "everybody pitches in" model. Instead, we either have the "put everything on the credit card model" they use in the States, or the completely half-assed approach to health-care finance we use here.

"Money For Nothing" is one of my favourite songs. But it's a bad, bad way to run public programmes.

Why I can't stand Paul McCartney

Granted, the man had a pretty good career with the Beatles.

And I'll admit that his Super Bowl halftime appearance was less cringe-inducing than most.

But his deciding to join the parade of celebrities decrying the seal hunt is really grinding my gears, as Peter Griffin would say.

Point one: The seal population is three times what it was when annoying celebrities deciding that Harp seal pups (pedantic grammatical aside: they are not baby seals. Only humans have babies.) were too cute, of all bloody things, to be killed. I've interviewed fishermen who blame the exploding seal population entirely for the complete collapse of the Atlantic Canadian fishery, and while I've no doubt that they're exaggerating, I don't think a three-fold increase in the population of a predator will have no impact on the population of prey.

Point two: The methods used to kill the seals are far more humane today than when, as mentioned above, annoying celebrities began to protest the seal hunt.

Point three: I give Paul McCartney credit for being consistent in his opposition to animal cruelty-he is, after all, the world's most famous vegetarian. But I would wager that a lot of the support his campaign receives is, in fact, of the "look at the adorable white seals-you can't kill them" variety. Of course, you can't legally kill the whitecoated pups. But you'd never know that from the images of the seals you see in anti-sealing advertisements, which are invariably the most plush-toy-like whitecoat the photographers can find.

Point four: The hunt is an economic necessity for a number of families in Newfoundland and Labrador. It's one thing to be opposed to bull-fighting or bear-baiting and so forth. They're not economic drivers. The seal hunt is. And the sight of one of the world's richest men airily telling impoverished Labradoreans that they can make it up with "eco-tourism" is frankly revolting. Aside from the fact that they can't (apparently, tourists would disturb the calving female seals too much, and besides who the hell wants to go to Labrador in late February or early March?) it's very easy to be pious when it's not your daily crust that's on the line.

So there. It's not just the terrible music of late ("Freedom," anyone?) or his bland public persona. Paul McCartney hasn't given us anything good since Let It Be.

And we're back

Spring is here. I say this not because of the date on the calendar (though Russians, shivering in the below-zero temperatures, will insist that spring officially started on the 1st) but because of the fact that men are back playing baseball for obscene amounts of money again.

Spring Training's here, folks!

In other news, the future-for better or worse-of medicare in this country arrived in Alberta. I have trouble believing that allowing doctors and nurses to work in both the public and private sectors isn't going to lead to even longer waiting times for people who can't afford to pay for private care. That said, there's no way the current system is going to survive ever increasing costs, regardless of the efficiency problems that crop up everywhere in the media these days.

So I don't really know what to think. I suppose, in the end, it comes down to ends-will people still be able to get essential medical care whether they can pay for it or not? Ralph Klein and co. assure us they will be. I hope they're right.