Lezlie Lowe

Broken windows Gee, thanks, Rudy. Rudolph Giuliani last week told Vancouver the way to clean up its act and decrease crime is to follow hislead in scrubbing graffiti and punishing petty crime on the streets of New York. (Funny, considering Vancouver’s violent crime rate is half New York’s, but I digress… .) It’s called the […]

Sleep tight. Or, at least, Todd Palin will. Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News in May, said her hubby, Todd, “can go on just an hour or two of sleep a night. He says, ‘I can sleep when I die.’” Mr. Sarah Barracuda isn’t the only one […]

That’s what a friend of mine said recently. The opening ceremonies—with CGIed fireworks and a lip-synching nine-year-old—have just gone too far. The packaged event—in China, where the markets are open but based on the closed mouths of protesters it’s still clearly a Mao, Mao, Mao, Mao World—had too many folks throwing their arms up in […]

The harbour is a sewer. At least, that’s the connection my little brain can’t seem to shake after a lifetime of flushing my unmentionables down the tube.So, swimming there? My involuntary response to the idea of clambering over the rocks and clumsily tipping shoulder-first into the murky depths at Point Pleasant Park’s Black Rock Beach […]

I have this cell phone plan—free evenings and weekends and 300 daytime minutes a month. But I’ve recently come across a better offer. So I’ll ditch the cellphone—Motorola 120c, circa 2002—and buy, as a replacement, not the newest and holiest of holies, the iPhone G3, but, instead, a watch. You know? Tick-tock? Instead of the […]

Everyone’s talking about the Nova Scotia government’s ATV fiasco. I’ve heardabout it half a dozen times this week. And that’s really saying something, because I’m writing this while on vacation in Ontario and Quebec. Now, bulletins from Atlantic Canada don’t much make news up here in the National Capital Region in any sort of on-the-street […]

And in case you haven’t read H.G. Wells’s subtly terrifying short story, that means it’s really, really bad. They seem so harmless, ants. We even praise them for their industriousness.Like beavers. But would you invite a beaver into your backyard? Would you welcome aline of buck-toothed fur-hats-in-waiting marching through the back door to climb up […]

Pardon? I’m sorry. Did I hear right? Did David Paterson from General Motors just explain away with a whisk of his hand the imminent closing of a truck assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario, because his company just figured out—no, really, only just—that people are buying fewer large trucks and SUVs? GM just—how did he put […]

Stephen Harper’s been to an apple orchard. And he’s got a set of new food labelling guidelines to prove it. Big blooming deal. Our Tory blue-sweatered PM went to the orchard in Beamsville, Ontario, last week to announce the introduction of new laws on food labels. Harper was at the orchard with a big old […]