To Walk or Not to Walk
Gracing the floor of Laurier’s Hall of Fame is the school’s Golden Hawk, a symbol of all things Laurier: school spirit, pride, community, and everything else the school brochure’s highlight as reasons why Laurier is amongst Canada’s Best. Tour guides and ice breakers alike are eager to tell prospective students or the new batch of [...]
Thrifty’s Top 5 Fair Trade Gift Ideas
The good news is that you’ve fallen in love. The bad news is that her birthday is on Tuesday. What can you get someone that you’ve only known for two weeks? Before you buy her the ubiquitous gift certificate, check out Ten Thousand Villages. Ten Thousand Villages is a fair trade store that has unique [...]
Friday Night Lightweights
Football ain’t my sport. I don’t understand the game’s rules and I certainly don’t count myself among its fans. So when the film Friday Night Lights was released this year, I zoned it out with the casual indifference that I reserve for tampon, adult diaper and yeast infection commercials. Enter the Salon.com review of the [...]
The Pleasure in Having Enough
I have a list of demands written on the palm of my hand. –Saul Williams. I also have a list of demands. However, my demands are more to myself than to anyone else. I demand of myself that I stop succumbing to the endless selling of a narrowly defined ‘good life’ and the things that [...]
Good Musicians Evade Labels
What do Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live, Lindsay Lohan on Good Morning America, and most performers at the MTV Video Music Awards have in common? They all lip-synched their performances; in the cases of Simpson and Lohan, lip-synched quite badly. Lip-synching isn’t anything new; you could go back to the New Kids on the [...]
Knitting a New Social Fabric
Have you been shaking your head at the state of the world? Want to do something to make a difference, but can’t decide what to do? Don’t lose heart – even the tiniest action can be an act of resistance, so stop sitting around and start knitting! Yes, really, knitting. But needlepoint, crocheting, sewing and [...]
Internet Nation
What would it be like; what would our twenty-something university lives be like without the Internet, cyberspace, www’s and dot.com’s? This query has haunted me lately as I become increasingly aware of my own participation in this phenomenon, aware of my existence as a slave to the techno-culture. As little as seven years ago the [...]
UR Addicted
“I think I’m addicted to MSN,” she admitted limply. “I have dreams about my contact list expanding to fill the entire world, a monolith of names all decrying their insignificant plans for the night. And I like it.” I nodded, distracted. “When I was in Peru, one of the Incan ruins looked like a text [...]
Lucky We Aren’t American
Perhaps it was the absence of The National Hockey League. Without hockey I’ve never been entirely sure what Canada really is. Sure, sure, I’m not a raving lunatic who believes that Canada can be defined by CBC’s Saturday night programing or that Don Cherry really is the greatest Canadian. But yes, Hockey springs to mind [...]
Canada’s No Utopia Either
In this grand country of ours we tend to define ourselves largely based on our differences from the cultural behemoth to the south. But in the last four years, since the rise to power of the Bush/Cheney administration, something has changed. We don’t just see ourselves as different and better, but we seem to hate [...]
Noam Chomsky and Friends Crush Children’s Hopes, Dreams
Noam Chomsky, Ebenezer Scrooge and The Grinch offer their viewpoints in this holiday-themed edition.
