The Senate says the penny’s gotta go.

An obsolete body of unelected political appointees pointing a finger a the lowly penny for being obsolete.

A pasture of sinecured bagmen and yes men (and women) who are paid a princely sum have decreed that the lowly penny is worth less than its cost.

They don’t even get the irony.

Or maybe they do, and they’re laughing at us.

Here is my column on the penny and the Senate.

Whether WikiLeaks founder goes down as a hero or a villain has yet to be seen.

But he has lifted the lid on Pandora’s Box. And it will be hard to screw it back down again, even if Julian Assange is thrown in jail.

The diplomatic information business is facing the same scenario as the music industry did ten years ago when people started helping themselves.

Here is my column on the subject. It should be live for another week.

Literally.

In 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbour, one carrying munitions bound for the war (WWI) in Europe.

The ensuing explosion killed 2000 people and hurt another 9000.

On that day, my grandmother – now 106 years old – was in a one-room schoolhouse in Chezzetcook, a rural community about 30 miles away from the explosion.

She recalls the door of the wood stove blowing open with the arrival of the huge pressure wave of the massive explosion. Things fell off surfaces, windows cracked, everything shook. The children and their teacher thought it was the end of the world.

My grandfather, now deceased, told me he was blown off his feet as he ran to school – late. The explosion happened at 9:05 am. Grandad was about 10 miles away from the explosion. At least he had an excuse when he finally arrived at school

It was the biggest man-made explosion before Hiroshima.

Each year Halifax delivers a massive Christmas tree to Boston because the Americans were the first to arrive with emergency relief.

Our city has never forgotten the terrible explosion.  I hope it never does.

How we are going to miss Leslie Nielsen.

He had a way of seeing the world through for its absurdities.

He helped us see them and laugh at them – and ourselves.

The king of deadpan may be gone, but the world he saw will always be with us.

Long live Leslie Nielsen.

Here is my column on him this week.

Paul Gauguin’s paintings have interested me for his use of bold colour  and his depiction of  ”Other” in the figures of his Tahitian women.

So I was looking forward to seeing this collection of his life’s work. Interestingly, I came away from the show with a very different view of the man than I’d expected.

I’m not attempting to capsize the reputation of an artistic giant. I’m in no position to do that. I only offer an honest response based on my experience in the exhibition.

I do appreciate his accomplishments. He was a pioneer in his use of colour  - the dreamy blues, lush greens, tropical yellows and striking fushia evoke the heat and humidity and “otherness” of place. And he deserves credit for busting out of the bucolic French countryside of Impressionists in search of a new subject and way of seeing. He brought to modern art a new way of seeing.

But what a found in Gauguin was a wholly unpleasant man who exploited his subjects and showed (I thought) questionable talent in some respects. His early work in Brittany was unremarkable and it was clear that he needed something new to make his mark as a “world class” artist.

My strongest reactions emerged as I moved onto the Tahitian women who made him famous.  I began to turn on him, despite the seductive colours.

Gauguin arrived in Tahiti expecting a land and people untouched by Western sensibilities and values. To his disappointment, the Christian missionaries had beat him to it and his subjects were not the tribal water nymphs he’d hoped for.

He was just another tourist in paradise.

So he made up the story. He mythologized the women, imagining them as primitives and gentle savages, lounging by pools, their pert breasts displayed without shame, their eyes gazing in innocence. Imagine the contrast to the laced-up women of French Impressionism.

Gauguin called up a fantasy that predated the reality, if that vision ever existed at all.

I was unimpressed by the forms of his women. They appeared out of proportion, thick and squat, almost amateurish in some instances. The depictions weren’t disjointed in the purposeful Cubist sense seen in Picasso or in the native works of folk artists. They just appeared unskilled.

I had a similar response to his clouds. Unconvincing.

Syphilitic and nasty in character, it would be easy to dislike him as a person.

But I disliked him as an artist. He used these women to promote himself in the competitive market of French art. He made a fiction of subjects but sold them as the reality of the “Other.”

He was very successful in creating a legacy. He is regarded amongst the greats of post-Impressionism.

But I don’t buy it and that is the joy of visiting a life exhibition like this. You can see and decide for yourself – whether it’s the work of a master or not.

Thanks again to the lovely Zed for the prompt on this post.

Each year products in stores are swathed in pink to support breast cancer research. Corporations donate a proportion of profits.

But there’s a backlash brewing against the pink campaign. And it’s happening on many levels.

Some stores cap their donations.

Some pink products contain ingredients or produce emissions linked to breast cancer risk.

Some people think the annual pink blitz crowds out efforts to raise awareness and funding for other cancers and diseases.

Here is my column on the subject

If you want to get ahead in the entertainment biz, you have to strip n straddle for the camera

You have to watch your back too because some creep could be stalking you with a hidden camera and he’ll put pix of you on YouTube.

You’re not save in your sleep either because the “Sleepwatch” could be in your room watching you.

BTW, you’re under-represented in government, business and high-income bracket jobs too.

But hey, who needs feminism. Feminism is dead.

Go here for my column on this and more.

This typist has been blogging since the summer of 2007.

And then for some reason, I hit the wall. Life sometimes overcomes even the most committed of typists.

So call me Slacker Typist or Absent Typist or Uncommitted Typist if you like.

But if you aren’t feeling the vibe, there’s no point in typing in pretence?

Anyway stay turned: The typist is back at her typewriter.

It’s illegal to do that in this province but people do. Apparently they don’t think it’s dangerous.

Well, it is dangerous to your health and mine. Some studies point out that its as dangerous as drinking and driving.

My column this week

But it’s true.

A bunch of kids were kicked off a quiet suburban street in April for playing road hockey.

In this world of troubled teens, obese kids and too many video games, someone decided to call the cops and complain about the kids playing hockey on the street.

Too much noise probably. Or maybe this person is tired of waiting two or three seconds while the kids move the nets off the street.

Instead of yelling “caaaaaaar!”

They should yell “priiiiiiick!”

There’s more along these lines in my column.