‘

  

Where’s Trev?
If you’ve been watch-

ing the CBC out of
habit, hoping to catch an unannounced
hockey game, then maybe you’ve noticed
The Greatest Canadian. After months of
collecting the public’s votes, the program

a

wWewewwwrer rrr eer ewww we Te ewww

LAURA SECORD LECENDAKY FATAIC

HEROINE LECENDAIRE

 

began last week by whittling down to 10
finalists for the distinguished television
honour: Frederick Banting (patent-free
insulin), Alexander Graham Bell (respon-
sible for your stupid picture-taking,
text-messaging, emailing phone with
Black Eyed Peas as your ringer), Tommy
Douglas (gave Saskatchewanians a pot to
piss in), Terry Fox (toughest SFU grad
ever), Wayne Gretzky (duh), Sir John A.
MacDonald (got the founders drunk and
made Canada a nation), Lester B. Pearson
(Nobel Peace Prize for peacekeeping),
David Suzuki (actually gives a shit), Pierre
Trudeau (had a personality), and Don
Cherry (ummm, he keeps us from leaving
the room during the intermission to take
a whiz?). Each finalist will have an hour-
long case made for them, with the winner
being announced November 29.

But did you notice anything strange
about the ten greatest Canadians ever?
Yup. Not one is female (although Avril
Lavigne did rank in at number 40, so, yah,
girl power).

“I think it’s absolutely appalling,”
series host Wendy Mesler said of the lack
of great women, “but I don’t think it says
anything deep.”

How could it? In a country with near-

B | STHERPRESS

  

That'd be

News Wears Short Shorts

Brandon Ferguson, News Editor

ly 150 years of history, it’s hardly surpris-
ing that the finalists | whose
accomplishments pre-date 1975 are men.
It’s equally unsurprising that half the
finalists achieved “greatness” in the past
quarter century. We are a people with
short attention spans—proof enough that
teenybopper Avril even made the list.

Of the great Canadian women miss-
ing from the top ten (artist Emily Carr,
Nellie McClung, writer
Margaret Atwood, cup-of-coffee Prime
Minister Kim Campbell), only patriot and
pudding endorser Laura Secord really
deserves the
Canadian Heritage commercials are to be

suffragist

nomination—if those
believed, anyway. But any one of those
women should be there before Don
Cherry. Well, maybe not Kim Campbell.
like nominating Shawn
Desman for breaking down the door for
Canadian white-boy hip-hop.

So while there’s an utter lack of ladies
on the ballot, who really cares? We all
know that Gretzky’s going to get it any-
ways. And if any hockey player ever
deserved the award, it’s Trevor Linden.
Go, Canucks, Go.

Take a Pill

A new study that contradicts convention-
al wisdom has found that women who
take birth-control-pills are less at risk for
cardiovascular diseases. The findings
come from a new analysis of the Women’s
Health Initiative (WHI) study, a study that
has previously found that hormone use
after menopause increases health risks for
women. Women on the pill are 17-50 per-
cent less likely to suffer
cardiovascular diseases like angina and
heart attacks, 10 percent less likely to suf-
fer a stroke, and 12 percent less likely to
have a vascular disease.

At the annual meeting of the
American Society for Reproductive
Medicine, researchers from Wayne State
University in Detroit announced the find-
ings that fly in the face of recent studies.
It was previously thought that oral contra-

from

ceptive use was dangerous in different
ways, depending on the brand. But these
new results debunk the belief that “this
one might cause deep vein thrombosis
(DVT) or blood clots in the leg, or that
one increases the risk of something else,”
Dr. Roger Pierson, formerly of the
Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society,
said after the results were released last
Tuesday. “What we hope in the medical
community is that the risk of taking the
hormones is vastly outweighed by the
benefit.”

The WHI involved 161,000 women,
67,000 of whom were on the pill. The rea-
son for the wide gap in lessened risks
associated with cardiovascular disease was
attributed to the history of oral contra-
ceptive use—the longer the use, the less

the chance of getting sick.

Although the study is based on ques-
tionnaires filled out by the women
involved in the WHI, and the findings
were released by Wayne State University,
one wonders if the whole thing wasn’t
sponsored by those manipulators of med-
ical fact, the Association of Men ‘Too
Lazy to Buy Condoms.

That’s Scary

In the spirit of Halloween, here’s some-
thing really fucking freaky. By the time the
next issue of your favourite student news-
paper comes out, the US election will
have taken place. While that doesn’t nec-
essarily mean we'll know who won, it
means that the formality of democracy
will be over with and the legality of
President-electing will have begun. So
here’s some scary stuff to think about.

In what has been called the “secret
nuclear war,” depleted uranium has been
left behind in Irag, Bosnia, Serbia, and
Kosovo over the past decade, leading to
the highest rates in childhood leukemia in
the world. In Iraq, the rate of children
dying from cancer has increased 17-fold
since 1990. Some babies are born with
their organs on the outside; some are
born without brains or spines (which puts
then in line for the American presidency, I

 

guess). All those bombs that used deplet-
ed uranium were dropped by our friendly
neighbours to the south.

Still the undeniable military champ of
the world, the United States has been in
global decline since the 1970s (a political
science teacher told me once; I believed
her). Blocs like the European Union have
formed, while awakening giants like India
and China (who is predicted to have the
largest global economy in the next few
yeats) continue to gain ground. The
American dollar is going into self-inflicted
devaluation (an almost illegal economic
measure that is used to offset a declining
economy), but they still won’t allow
Albertan beef over the border, nor have
they refunded a single cent from the soft-
wood lumber tariffs that an international
body deemed fully illegal.

The US would like a missile defense
shield to protect themselves (and their
8,000 active nuclear warheads) from rogue
nations who somehow got the idea that
they could only gain legitimacy through
nuclear weapons accumulation. Hey,
Pakistan and China, go tell North Korea
and Iran that they’re way off on that.

Anyhoo, I’m just saying that it doesn’t
really matter who eventually wins the elec-
tion. Hug an American and maybe
mention something about a coup against
the powers that be. Oh and by the way:
Boo! Scary, huh?

 

Qcetaber 27/2004