The main symptom of this disease, which I will call Canadianesquity, is marked by the afflicted’s persistence in assuming that all moderately famous people who have ties to Canada must ipso facto be Canadian.

Read newspapers and watch television and evidence of this abounds. Celebrities like Michael J. Fox and William Shatner, whose careers were built upon decades of work in Hollywood, California, are always referred to with “Canadian” as a prefix, as if we, the audience, might forget without the adjective. Peter Jennings, who joined the American Broadcasting Company in 1964, is Canadian as maple syrup since he was born and raised in Toronto.

This sort of thing is to be expected, perhaps, from a nation which constantly worries about how and why one might be Canadian, as opposed to American. And many of these celebrities might well cling to their Canadian roots anyhow, especially if it means they get monuments named in their honour.

Where the disease begins to show its ugly effects is when people who have only the most tenuous connection with the country are still considered Canadian. My current favourite is architectural giant Frank Gehry. As near as I can tell, Gehry, who was born in Toronto, has barely stepped foot in Canada since the 1940s. Read any “neutral” biography of Gehry and you will find him referred to as an “American architect” — a fair assessment since he both studied and made his career in the USA. Read a Canadian assessment of his career and it sounds like Gehry might have played hockey for the Maple Leafs before embarking on a career as the most accomplished Canadian architect.

I thought that this disease, which has irked me for some time, was largely limited to the media, but it is now clear that it is contagious and has spread to “the masses” who digest media.

The evidence is CBC’s The Greatest Canadian, a TV show devoted to making us feel better about just how gosh darned great we Canadians are. The top ten, as voted by the public, include the usual Canadian suspects — Gretzky, Trudeau, Terry Fox, David Suzuki (and sadly, also Don Cherry) — but there is one name that should raise any Scot’s eyebrow: Alexander Graham Bell.

It is true that Bell spent much of his life in Canada, and CBC timidly explains that his greatest invention was “inspired” by his time at his family’s estate in Brantford, Ontario. But let’s be frank. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He wasn’t raised in Canada. He didn’t study in Canada. And while he did dream up some nifty things while living in Nova Scotia, his most notable invention, the telephone, occurred in Boston. The Bell Telephone Company that he founded was an American company.

It’s a pretty sad comment that one of the supposedly top ten Canadians of all time basically just vacationed here.

Some might call me an unpatriotic curmudgeon for being so upset by a behaviour so seemingly innocent. I would argue, however, that we reduce the very meaning of the word “Canadian” to near nil by making it so ridiculously easy for someone to qualify as one. We’ll take whoever we can get is the prevailing message, a sort of desperate plea to seem important. Potential celebrities, take note! If you merely sneeze in Moose Jaw before becoming famous, you can coast on the benefits of being “Canadian” for the rest of eternity.

Canada has plenty of people who have achieved great things, but too often Canadians are guilty of ignoring people until the rest of the world notices. We love our Canadian actors, but only after they’ve become famous in Hollywood. We love our talented storytellers, but only after they win the British Booker prize. It’s time we looked more closely at the talented people who actually live and work here and figured out what some actual Canadians are doing to improve Canada.

Nevermind that CDs have mostly superior technical specifications. There is something warm and inviting about analog sound, physically etched on a surface and interpreted by a needle. And there’s something cold and distant about a laser reading engraved binary code.

In truth, early production practices did much harm to the reputation of CDs. Technicians, still unfamiliar with the emerging technology, did not know how to encode or master recordings properly to bring out the best sound from the digital medium. Older albums originally recorded for vinyl and re-released on CD were the worst offenders, and that’s why today there is an unceasing stream of re-masters and rereleases of old material, as record companies raid the vaults to please demanding listeners (and make an easy profit).

The technical fact of the matter is that today’s CDs generally sound great when played on the right equipment. There is an overall crispness and fidelity to the original performance that vinyl can rarely match. CDs also have a far superior dynamic range — a fancy way of saying that quiet sounds are more audible and the difference between loud and really loud is more, well, different. On vinyl, more soft sound gets lost in the muddy hiss.

The only area where records are demonstrably superior, technically speaking, is in their frequency range. In fact, records can, in theory, play infinitely high-pitch sounds, while CDs actually digitally cut-off sound above 22,000 Hz. Scientists say that we can’t really hear things that high anyway, especially once we’re older and our ears are damaged by the rest of real life. That doesn’t stop conspiracy theorists from saying that there is “something” in records, and although we can’t really hear it, we can feel it. If you know what I mean.

I don’t really believe that, but there is another theory to explain why many people might actually prefer the sound of records, a subjective measure which is nonetheless difficult to deny. (Go ahead: ask some people to listen. Records sound good.) The theory goes, that since real life is full of background noise, music was never meant to be heard in complete silence. In some ways, CDs, with their digital noise-reduction and lack of hiss, artificially eliminate the “aural context” of sound, and so they sound cold. When one plays a record, and hears the hissing and scratching, it sounds more lifelike because life is full of hissing and scratching anyway.

Of course real life also has turntable-destroying warps, scratches only your cat could appreciate, and needles dull enough to tickle a baby. Let us not forget that enduring sound of yesteryear: the record on permanent skip-repeat. (Although when scratched CDs skip, they invariably sound even worse.)

What if there were a way to have that great analog sound, without the hassle of actually going to Value Village and filtering through the endless copies of Nana Mouskouri’s Greatest Hits?

Enter RetroPlayer, an incredible program for OS X which inputs 21st century MP3 sound and outputs pure, hissing 1970s magic.

Unfortunately — for we English speakers anyway — it’s only in Japanese, but the controls are fairly simple to figure out. Make sure you find the preferences and play around with the settings. If you turn down the speed wobble setting and eliminate the skipping (yes, kids, it even simulates skipping), you can actually get an enjoyably warm sound that should only have come from a 331/3 RPM spinning device.

By the way, I found the link to this program at the Cult of Mac blog, written by Wired’s resident Macintosh zealot, Leander Kahney. A good read if you’re into Mac stuff, as Mac users tend to be.

The latest polls show that Google is leaning to the right. Why, just last week we saw Dick Cheney knocking on Google’s door, asking it how it felt about gun control and gay marriage. With 160,000 different answers to the question though, Google’s feelings were, needless to say, somewhat difficult to discern.

It’s starting to smell like autumn.

The documents (one, two, three and four) appear to be have been written in 1972 and 1973 by Bush’s squadron commander, Col. Jerry Killian, and suggest that Killian received interference from above to allow Bush to escape duty.

The controversy is over the typographical characteristics of the documents. Though faded, they appear to have been composed with a proportional font (in which each letter is a different width), something that very few typewriters in the early 1970s were capable of doing. In fact, they look suspiciously like Times New Roman, and include certain features — superscript letters in ‘187^th’, proper curly apostrophes, and centre-aligned text — which are awfully easy to do in Microsoft Word, but either impossible or ridiculously arduous on a typewriter.

Given that the documents in question are supposed to be memos, and are not even official military documents, it seems pretty peculiar that they would have been created on a machine sophisticated enough to add these typographic details.

Consult one or another of pro-Bush blogs that are talking about this, and you’ll come away an official skeptic, no matter what your political bent.

It’s a little surprising, but not really shocking, that 60 Minutes and CBS News might have fallen for a forgery of this nature, although they are claiming — for now — that independent experts verified the documents.

So now the conspiracy theories begin: was it a Kerry supporter not smart enough to find a typewriter? Was it a Bush supporter trying to make the Kerry supporters look stupid and rally support for the president?

Or maybe, just maybe, the real conspirator was a sneaky Canadian blogger trying to get Americans to realize that they’ve forgotten that elections are about the future, not about events that happened thirty years ago.

I’m all for exposing weak and misleading journalism as much as the next communication studies graduate, but what the U.S. public needs is a story about what Bush and Kerry are been up to now. It’s practically a clich� to ask this, but could the American press possibly be any more obsessed with spin and image and any less cognizant of bona-fide political issues?

By extension, does anyone seriously doubt that the historical decline in voter turnout in North America is related to this fact?

Remember Iraq? Afghanistan? The state of the American economy? Out-sourcing? Hello? Anyone?

I thought I wanted a PowerBook, but this here iMac G5 thing is a pretty mean beast when you factor in the price and the speed, not to mention the gee-whiz, “I could’ve sworn my LCD monitor alone was thicker than that,” factor.

Sigh.

In the “You know Canada isn’t doing so well at the Olympics when” department: a story in The Globe and Mail about the “controversial version” of O Canada which played as Kyle Shewfelt was awarded Canada’s first gold medal of the Athens 2004 Games.

I must admit, I didn’t think much of the version either. Fittingly, for a country largely composed of immigrants, it was arranged by Peter Breiner, who moved to Toronto from Czechoslovakia in 1992.

The story is seemingly not so much about the piece itself, popular or unpopular as it may be, but rather how the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) approved it apparently without listening to it (a committee member said it “sounded like the anthem on ouzo”).

Breiner actually arranged all 204 anthems for the games (apparently Canadians are respected for something at least), but Canada was the only country to offer no response to Breiner’s submission.

The Globe has thoughtfully provided an MP3 of the offending melody, as well as an alternate version also penned by Breiner, but which was rejected by the COC. There are certainly some unique, some might say awkward, harmonies in version one. But version two, although more traditional, sounds more appropriate for a funeral than for a country’s moment of pride. It’s lugubriously slow, the sort of music Hollywood would use to depict a courageous group of soldiers as they valiantly fight, in slow-motion, against overwhelming odds — but then come up short and get taken down by enemy fire.

Then again, while nations both far poorer and smaller than ours — hello, Romania, Belarus, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, Cuba — continue to win more medals than we Canucks, maybe a mournful crawl is exactly the right speed.

(Congratulations, though, to Lori-Ann Muenzer, who won Canada’s second gold medal today in the indoor cycling sprint. May her anthem be merry and boastful.)

Update: I tried to find a good version of “O Canada”, but even the Canadian government has failed us with their offering. As a friend noted, it sounds like it’s being played by an elementary school band. Roughly fourth grade. (No offence to all the ten-year-olds out there.)

The best free, online recording I could find is actually a 1916 recording of the Victor Military Band from the National Library’s archives. In fact, the band seemed to enjoy playing it so much, they recorded it three times in a row — which, alas, might be too much for even the hardiest admirer.

At the new Paris Starbucks near the Opera metro stop, French people approached for an interview seemed ashamed on some deep level to be there, or at a minimum felt the need to explain themselves.

The Boston Globe eyes those funny, snail-eating neighbours across the Atlantic in a piece about the ennui over France’s waning importance in the world.

You know, Starbucks made sense when the only coffee you could get was at the local diner, where the brew percolated hours ago and sat on a burner for hours. Hell, in English-speaking countries we don’t even have our own words for good coffee, so we have to use Italian. That’s why Starbucks was not such a bad thing. But Starbucks in Paris? Why would anyone order a grande-latte-no-foam when they can order un caf� au lait en bol?

There is a Starbucks in my neighbourhood in Montreal too which perplexes me to no end. Some of the finest lattes in the city can be had from the Italian coffee joints a couple blocks away, and they cost literally half as much. And if you need to pay more, there are three other hoity-toity cafes within earshot of the mermaid. One of them gives you a gourmet chocolate with your coffee! And still, some people seem to require the bland sameness, inflated prices and maltreated, minimum-wage employees of the green, black and white.

PS: I note with irony that even in uptight Paris, Starbucks is just called “Starbucks Coffee”, while in Montreal, they felt the need to placate the Office de la langue fran�aise by calling the franchise “Caf� Starbucks Coffee.” (No joke.)

PPS: Link snatched from the rather odd blog entitled Starbucks Gossip.

Starting with a cogent observation about recent comments by the Quebec education minister, continuing on to the question of social equity and finishing with evidence from British Columbia, Wells tries to prove that governments should raise tuition fees everywhere to force those that can afford to pay more to do so.

According to reports cited by Wells, Quebec has decided to cut the number of bursaries it hands out rather than raise tuition fees because the former is more politically palatable. Evidently it is necessary to alter the funding in some way due to budget restraints, and raising taxes for the general population is also politically impossible.

The folly of this is that it means students who receive bursaries — those from families with the lowest incomes — will have to take out more loans instead, while students who might in theory be able to afford to pay more, with no loans at all, will continue to get their prized piece of paper on the cheap.

(Meanwhile, in British Columbia, a lack of funding has forced universities to limit enrolment to the point that you now need nearly a 90% average in high school grades to gain acceptance to UBC.)

Quebec has a very strong student federation lobby which clamourously opposes even the merest mention of tuition fee hikes. I’m forced to agree with Wells though: better to raise tuition to a level that allows adequate funding and then offer bursaries to those with lower incomes to compensate. Moreover, punishing people for anything less than perfection in high school is asinine. If you accept the correlation that rich people usually have access to better education and tend to perform better (for whatever reason), then this policy of maintaining flat tuition rates for all makes even less sense.

During the four years in which I completed my bachelor’s degree, it seemed pointedly obvious that my school was underfunded. We had old equipment in our labs, crumbling classrooms and next to no scholarship opportunities. I would have happily paid more if I knew that it were going towards my own education, since I could have afforded it, with the knowledge that if one couldn’t, there would be ways around it.

Canadians love to talk about the exorbitant tuition fees at most American schools, and how our education system is so affordable in comparison. The fact is, the U.S. schools that charge the most also have cauldrons of money to pour over students in scholarships and bursaries — if you’re a smart kid from a poor family, you’re still going to have a good shot at a world-class education. And there is still lots of money left over to hire the best professors, build the best research labs, and keep the country’s schools at the top of the educated world. If you’re rich, then you are helping to subsidize the best. If you’re poor, you can come along for the ride anyway. Here we instead seem to accept that everyone should have the opportunity to pay full, if cheap, tuition for a second-rate education. Odd for a country that normally prides itself on having such a high measure of democratic socialism.

They’re sounding a bit rough, a bit sloppy, a bit out of tune, but I’m enjoying the new material from the most recent album, Grab That Gun, their full-length debut.