A Taste of Canadian Racism

Well, after all that stuff about the Milwaukee paper, here’s a letter to the editor straight outta 1845 from today’s Globe and Mail — authored by one Wayne Valeau of Calgary: The Black-Eyed Peas are a perfect fit for the CFL (Imported Peas — editorial, Nov. 29). What we saw at the Grey Cup’s half-time …

Report on the Ongoing Canadianization Project

The Milwaukee trip over thanksgiving was its usual pleasure (though this was our first trip to Milwaukee for said purpose). One of my colleagues commented that she found Americans’ devotion to thanksgiving bizarre, a sentiment echoed by other Canadians I’ve met. I don’t have a profound answer except to say that like Halloween (my other …

Reading + New Pub + Meditations on Communication Studies

This week’s reading for my Repetition seminar was particularly easy (compared with the thicker theoretical stuff we’ve been doing), but I found it quite refreshing, actually. Probably because the authors are quite clever. Anyway, this was a good thing, because next week we’re going to slog through Derrida’s differance essay. That should be fun in …

Profound Thought of the Night

Courtesy of Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, in his section “On the Eating of Meat”: Although human phenomena–whether attitudes, wishes or structures–may be looked at on their own, independently of their connections with the social life of people, they are by nature nothing but substantializations of human relations and of human behaviour, embodiments of …