No Dress Rehearsal. This Is Our Life.
Bloviators – people who speak pompously and excessively or expound ridiculously. Apparently it’s used to describe those to hold forth on subjects in an arrogant, tiresome way.
I was introduced to this rather useful word in a communications association email, and it gave me a giggle!
From today’s Toronto Star article “175 reasons to love Toronto,” here are my favourites:
14. There’s a perfect, tiny old church in the courtyard of the Eaton Centre.
27. Those streetcar drivers who assert themselves over the automated voice system with their own personal shout-outs for various intersections and attractions along their routes.
31. The inspirational messages on the Inglis billboard keep Gardiner Expressway commuters uplifted.
44. From the Humber Bay butterfly habitat, the city looks almost beautiful. (I’d say it DOES look beautiful)
82. The united nations of Baldwin Street.
126. Reading a book on the bizarre slab of granite on Yorkville Ave.
129. …Shakespeare in the Park: keeping green space interesting.
Find your favs in the full article http://www.thestar.com/article/596779
“My sister bought a gift for your baby,” a co-worker said to me on Tuesday. I’ve never met this sister. I don’t even know her name. But she remembered that I lend my metro pass to her sister (my co-worker), and knew I was having a baby, so she bought a gift for a person and child she’ll likely never meet. You never know when you’ll encounter the kindness of a stranger, and it’s very heartening to be reminded that there are good, kind, thoughtful people out there.
CTV will be releasing a new movie about the
early life of Anne Shirley. Here’s what their
press release has to say:
Anne Shirley is one of the world’s most heartwarming iconic characters – but what happened before her surprising arrival at Green Gables in Prince Edward Island? This expansive new movie, which is both a prequel and a sequel to the original films, answers that question.
Audiences will learn about the foundations of Anne’s childhood that shaped her life and haunted her in later years: the origins of her carpet bag; the source of her expression, “kindred spirits”; the development of her intense imagination as a means of survival; and most profoundly, many of the relationships with adults and peers that structured her character so distinctively, prior to her arrival at Green Gables.
“Based on details from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s own diary and descriptions from the original novel, Kevin Sullivan has fashioned a moving and complex glimpse into the circumstances that created one of the most beloved fictional characters of our time,” said Susanne Boyce, President, Creative, Content and Channels, CTV Inc.
“I wanted to create a film that would offer a rare insight into Anne Shirley’s personality,” said Kevin Sullivan, President, Sullivan Entertainment. “I tried to imagine what Anne would have become if she had grown up to be an author like Montgomery herself; a gifted storyteller who was haunted by her childhood her whole life.”
Produced, written and directed by Sullivan, Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning is set as the Second World War is winding down. Anne Shirley (played by Barbara Hershey, Beaches, Portrait of a Lady) is now a successful, middle-aged writer who has returned to Prince Edward Island for an extended visit. While writing a play for the summer theatre season, she discovers a long-hidden secret under the floorboards at Green Gables.
As Anne struggles to complete her play, she delves into long-buried and long-forgotten memories, reliving her troubled years before she arrived as an orphan at the Cuthbert farmhouse. Over the course of one remarkable summer, Anne discovers the truth about her parents, the origins of her quest for “kindred spirits” and the genesis of her brilliant, magical imagination.
As the movie flows between present-day discoveries and past memories, Hannah Endicott-Douglas (THE GOOD WITCH, SAMANTHA: AN AMERICAN GIRL HOLIDAY) portrays the young Anne Shirley alongside Rachel Blanchard (Where the Truth Lies, 7TH HEAVEN, CLUELESS) as Louisa Thomas, Shirley MacLaine (In Her Shoes, Terms of Endearment, Bewitched) as Amelia Thomas, and Ron Lea (RACE TO MARS, THIS IS WONDERLAND) as Gene Armstrong.
Casting for the young Anne Shirley involved an expansive search to find an actress who could play the role made famous by Megan Follows. The quest for the ideal actress involved a cross-Canada audition tour and an open casting call on YouTube. More than 1,000 young girls from Canada, the United States, England and Australia auditioned for the coveted role in the film. After three months of searching, 12-year-old Hannah Endicott-Douglas from Toronto was chosen to carry on the legacy of Anne Shirley.
Filmed in studio in Toronto, ON and on location in Dundas, ON, and Rockwood, ON, Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning recreates, with vivid detail, the setting for Anne Shirley’s tumultuous childhood. The production crew and special effects team were able to re-construct a number of locations made famous in the previous films, including some of the more well-known locations from the original Anne of Green Gables trilogy.
The Globe is running a series called Dear Sweetheart: Letters Home from a Solider. The series tells the story of David K. Hazzard, a Second World War solider separated from his beloved wife Audrey, who soon found a way to fight the loneliness – with his pen. He wrote hundreds of letters, beginning each the same way – ‘Dear Sweetheart.’
Other highlights from France (no warts here – they’ve already been covered):
1. Watching endless sunflower fields pass by the window
2. Spending the final day of the Tour in Pizza Pino trying to remember our French with the “belle soeurs”
3. Smelling the incredible mountain air
4. Poking around the cobblestone streets (very steep streets I might add) of the highest town in Europe – Briançon
5. Being close enough to the Tour riders to actually see the effort they put into each turn of the crank
6. Feeling the whoosh of the passing peleton
7. Drinking “Chateau Les Amoureuses” on our first anniversay
8. Picnicking on wild strawberries, fresh bread and black pepper-coated goat’s cheese in a park in Vichy (oh, and successfully navigating the covered market to buy all the picnic goodies!)
9. Hearing Chris’ stories of the ride to and up Alpe D’Huez – the best part was the Dutch guys singing “Oh Canada” to him
10. Tasting the warm chocolate goodness of crêpes with Nutella at the final time trial
11. Building a tent out of our coats to keep from burning on Alpe D’Huez, and then watching episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” under the tent waiting for the riders to get to the mountain
12. Hearing “allez, allez, allez” from thousands of international fans as they cheered on each cyclist- lead riders or groupetto, home team or visitors, just cheering out of love for the sport.
To say that I’ve wanted a KitchenAid stand mixer for a while is an understatment. I’ve pined away (silently and vocally) for years, just waiting for the day when my kitchen could accomodate the ultimate baking tool. But no more pining for this girl – my darlin’ clementine KitchenAid mixer took a place of honour on our kitchen counter last week. Chris found the mixer buried on Williams-Sonoma’s sale table. Lucky me that the very kitchen gadget I’d been after for years was just sitting there, waiting for a new home – and in the same colour as the blender we already had at home. Who knew that we’d have two appliances that glem with pale orange perfect 
Over the Lucky Dice’s finest bacon and eggs on Saturday, Chris and I got talking about equitable pay in the workplace. Our chat wandered into the idea that men’s competitive approach to life had some influnce on why men earn more and hold more high-ranking positions. And today I found this article in the Globe, looking at a new book that concludes most men are hardwired to compete for supremacy in the workplace while women are not. Most women want a balanced life of work, family, friends and community because their biology has evolved this way.
The author is quick to point out that “science tells us nothing about the individual,” but it’s an interesting article all the same.
SARAH HAMPSON
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
March 10, 2008 at 2:38 AM EDT
‘I thought I was writing a book about developmental psychology. I never considered a book about the gender wars,” Susan Pinker says.
The sigh she offers at the close of that statement is understandable, because the publication of The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap, her first book, has placed her squarely in the middle of the continuing cultural fray about why there aren’t more women in the chief executive officer’s chair.
Weaving it together with personal reflections on her life as a psychologist and mother, she sets out a carefully researched scientific discussion of how the brains of men and women are differently hardwired and influenced by their soup of hormones. The conclusion? Most men are hardwired to compete for supremacy in the workplace. Women are not. Most want a balanced life of work, family, friends and community because their biology has evolved that way.
Her exasperation, unprovoked, hints at the controversy she has encountered.
“I will say that it irritates me when people think that my message is that women should go home and stay in the kitchen, and that biology says they have to. That is a complete misunderstanding,” she says, acknowledging that many people have had that reaction.
“When you view it as a polemic, then that might be the response, because biology has been used in the past to hold women down.”
She is careful to point out that she does not speak for all women. She is talking about general tendencies. “Science tells us nothing about the individual,” she notes.
For as many Hillary Clintons there are in the world, gunning for the highest office, there are others like Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who made the surprising announcement on Friday that she is stepping down from her job after only one term to spend more time with her family.
Still, Dr. Pinker’s book points out a difficult and, for some women, painful reality. The feminist movement that encouraged women to be like men may have been necessary, she says – “we needed that view in the beginning when we entered the work force” – but it was uninformed about what makes women different, which, ultimately, has compelled many to opt out of top jobs even though they pursued education that qualified them to take them. “The expectation that we will be clones of men is holding us back,” she states.
She also found that the focus on working like a man made many women feel that they wasted some of their best years and, in some cases, forced them to put off motherhood until it was too late. Would she say that a generation of women sacrificed their lives as a result of that feminist ideology?
“I think that unintentionally that was one effect,” she allows. “And I think there is an awful lot of psychic pain that was the result, where women felt that their feelings were not valid, that something was wrong with them if they didn’t follow the male model.”
The book confirms what many, including Dr. Pinker, have observed anecdotally.
Young boys often struggle in school, yet many go on to high-powered careers. Consider, for example, Richard Branson, the billionaire entrepre- neur who didn’t complete high school.
In fact, what prompted Dr. Pinker to write the book was seeing, in the span of one week, three newspaper profiles of a successful young man who had been a patient of hers, suffering from a variety of behavioural and learning problems, when he was 7.
“He had become a designer of some renown, and I thought, ‘There is something going on here. I wouldn’t have predicted that outcome. There has to be some biological thread.’”
Many girls, meanwhile, excel in school and acquire fancy graduate degrees, only to withdraw later from the fierce competition for money and status and lead what she calls a “more modulated and moderated life.”
Dr. Pinker found that “women who had choices were crafting these really interesting lives that made room for their aging parents, for their interests, for their friends, for their careers and for their children, and they weren’t going to make those kind of Draconian adjustments that men were willing to make.”
Research she cites in the book shows that “about 60 per cent of gifted women turn down promotions or take positions with lower pay so as to weave flexibility or a social purpose into their work lives.”
The glass ceiling, she points out, is largely self-imposed. Biology makes most women more inclined to work with people and to want to see a positive outcome of their work in the community – jobs that may not be available in the corner office.
“They are less satisfied about selling widgets in Hong Kong and never seeing them, or about watching the market rise and fall and not knowing what their role is. They want to feel their work has some social context. Even without children in the picture, women still leave certain careers more often than men do.”
All the “victim feminists” have been wasting their breath. “In Western society, I really don’t think that outside forces are controlling us against our will,” she states unequivocally. “And that is much of the message that women have been hearing, certainly in gender studies courses.”
What is admirable is that Dr. Pinker, who writes a column about ethical and interpersonal issues in the workplace for this newspaper, tiptoes carefully through the minefield of gender discussions. She does not use negative language to describe this feminine approach to work. Rather than having a softer or weaker ambition, they have what she calls “a considered perspective that contributes to their happiness.”
Not only that, she believes the “vanilla gender idea” – her term for the standard-issue definition of male success – hurts men too. In fact, it often kills them, she points out, citing longevity statistics for men compared with women.
What women contribute to society, in their pursuit of people-involved and empathetic work, is valuable and indispensable, she argues.
And that is where the patriarchy is to blame – it set up the work world in which traditionally male pursuits were more highly compensated than female ones.
“I hope that my book will open up that debate,” she says.
“If you want men and women to earn the same, then you have to start paying the same salary to social workers that you do to building contractors.”
Her book is creating a stir, but Dr. Pinker is calm and measured, protecting herself in the guise of a scientist who can say that she is only reporting what she found, not offering a prescription for anyone.
“It’s a mistake to be afraid to look at science because of political ideology,” she says from her chair across a table slick as a laboratory counter.
“This book is what I see is happening in science, and that’s separate from how I think the world should be. I call that the is-ought gap. I’m looking at what is. I’m not really saying what ought to be.”
If Mother Nature gives us a cloud-free evening tomorrow, we’ll be treated to full lunar eclipse.
The show gets under way at 8:43 p.m. and by By 10:01 p.m. the entire moon will resemble a Halloween pumpkin.
Normally only one area of the country is treated to favourable skywatching during an eclipse, but tomorrow all of Canada will be graced with front-row seats.
If you miss this show, then next one’s scheduled for 2010.
I stumbled across this article today and couldn’t resist passing it along:
Smurfs, one of Belgium’s greatest exports, turned 50 years old today with numerous events being planned at museums and comic bookstores nationwide.
They’re blue, and according to some they stand only 3 apples high, but they have their very own language, come from Belgium, and celebrate a significant birthday.
At the the Centre for Belgian Comic Strips in the Belgian capital Brussels, a Smurf figure takes pride of place just inside the main entrance, attracting visitors to the centre to pose for photos alongside the little blue man.
_Michelle and Natalie, visitors from Australia, are fans and grew up watching the Smurf cartoon on television. “They’re cute, but they all have their own little character,” said Michelle.
The Smurfs, or “Les Schtroumpfs” as they were originally called in French, first appeared in “Le Journal de Spirou” comic strip in 1958 as the brain-child of the Belgian comic artist, Peyo. By 1960, the Smurfs had their own comic strip series and, with the advent of the Hanna-Barbera Productions animated cartoon in 1981, the Smurfs secured a global fan base.
To many, the first attraction will always be their blue and white appearance, but as Willem De Graeve, deputy director of the Centre for Belgian Comic Strips, explains, the Smurfs have hidden depths. “First of all the Smurfs are very cute so they are little and people say they are like (being) 3 apples high,” De Graeve told Associated Press Television. “They manage to have a perfect society and altogether they enjoy life and they have fun,” he added.
The Belgium Museum of Fine Arts will be one of three European cities, along with Paris and Berlin, to officially host the European tour of “Happy Smurfday,” said to be a unique, striking, and European retrospective of the Smurfs.