Was it Oscar Wilde or GBS who said, “There is nothing so provincial as a provincial celebrity”?
Well le voilà:
and Gawker is all over it:
Gladwell did the ad for charity, so we’re going to let it go this time, but, uh, wow, they really have a different idea of celebrity up north, don’t they? Also, we want to know if they used a hairstylist for the shoot or if that’s just the way he showed up.
This is the story of the 2DTV ad featuring George W. Bush that was banned, along with the whole story of how it happened, who said what to whom, and what they did then. You’ll have to watch to see how it relates to bin Laden, but trust me; these guys owe him bigtime! I bet they’ll be strip-searched in airports for the rest of their lives.
And on workers. This is from News of the Weird, and doesn’t need any embellishment from me.
In July, according to a Canadian Press report, a Wal-Mart in St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, received a bomb threat and immediately dispatched about 40 employees on duty to look through the store to find the explosive. (Customers were allowed to leave, though, and ultimately, it was a false alarm.) [Globe and Mail-Canadian Press, 7-11-06]
Seriously, what’s the ETA of the scandalous revelations on this one?
According to the Observer there’s an 11-year-old girl in China called Nancy Yi Fan who’s gotten herself published by one of the big guns. The story goes that she just up and emailed her manuscript to Jane Friedman, the CEO of HarperCollins, and Friedman (that incredible talent scout and kind, tweedy publisher at heart as well as hardened businesswoman) was so bowled over by the sheer literary merits of the ms that she could not rest until she had somehow and against all odds managed to persuade her peons to pick it up.
Astonishing. *wipes tear from eye*
A fantasy novel about tribes of warring birds, written by a gifted 11-year-old girl who lives in the southern-most province of China, is to be published worldwide in English.
The young author, Nancy Yi Fan, won the extraordinary opportunity by simply emailing her manuscript to the chief executive of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman, at the publisher’s New York office.
Fan has since been hailed as a prodigy by her editors who will use her book in a new attempt to establish the firm in China . Her story, Swordbird, is an epic allegory about the struggle for peace and will be printed in this country in the new year. Those who have seen it talk about it as the product of a mind as imaginative as some of the greatest names in children’s writing.
Fan wrote the novel in response to learning of the war on terror, and it is described as ‘an action-packed tale of birds at war’, set in the once-peaceful Stone-Run Forest. It tells how local woodbird tribes, the Cardinals and the Blue Jays, find themselves pitted against each other in a search for precious food supplies – some of which have mysteriously gone missing. Fighting breaks out and an evil hawk, Turnatt, turns the tribes against each other as part of a plan to take over the forest. He enslaves captives from surrounding tribes and is forced to build an impregnable fortress in which to confine all the woodbirds.
Born in Beijing in 1993, Fan lived in New York with her parents from the age of seven, graduating ‘with excellence’ from an elementary school there in 2004. When she was in sixth grade, at the age of 11, she was taught about terrorism and the events of 9/11. That night, she explains, she had a startling dream all about birds at war and the next day she started writing Swordbird in her bedroom as a way of trying to convey her worries about violence in the world. She now lives back in China, on the beautiful Hainan Island with her parents and their three pet birds. The girl, now 13, is a compulsive writer and reader who spends most of her time in the library, but she also loves bird-watching and martial arts.
The hero of Swordbird is an escaped ‘slavebird’, Miltin, who leads the woodbirds once they learn of Turnatt‘s strategy. The title refers to a legendarily heroic bird of peace. The Swordbird is the only one who can save the forest, so young birds Aska and Miltin fly off on a dangerous mission to find the Leasone gem. This stone, paired with an ancient song from the ‘Old Scripture’, will conjure Swordbird‘s help. The story has been chosen to launch the publishing house’s new push into China.
Quel suprise. New push into China? Why, what an amazing coincidence. As is the fact that the names in the book aren’t Chinese, nor even easy for Chinese to pronounce, nor are cardinals and blue jays native to China (nor Manhatten, come to that; they need woods). Nor does anyone graduate from an American elementary school, with excellence or 
without, in four years. Seriously, people, is there a seedy, unheated warehouse in Fulan or Maine stuffed with Old Oxbridgers, furiously churning out what the People’s Republic hopes will be the next Harry Potter?
They’d rather let their crops rot on the trees than respond to the market forces and increase their wages. There is no labour shortage in the US fruit picking labour market; there is a gap between the asking price for labour and the price the farmers are willing to pay.
It is much the same in Canada, although instead of Mexicans we have migrant Quebecois. They smoke almost as much pot, but they complain about the climate less, as you would, too, if you were from James Bay or some godforsaken spot.
In the Fraser Valley, just outside of Vancouver, there have
been several convictions over the past decade for slavery, as well as numerous housing infractions (it is Canada; insulation and roofs are advisable and may be compulsory, imagine that!), assault (beating) charges, one murder that I can recall, as well as several cases of holding workers’ children or elderly parents captive until their work contract was up. Passports? Oh yeah, they keep the passports, too, which is one reason they’re not getting so many immigrants who want to work in this industry; the word has gone around India, and now the farmers are whining loudly about uppity brown people.
Which brings us back to the Americans:
“It’s a laborer’s market right now. My pickers all look at me and say, ‘How much are you going to pay?‘ ” he said. “They all have cell phones, and all they have to do is call up the road and see if anybody else is paying a little more.”
Farmers in that situation are left to decide whether it’s even worth picking the fruit, or just letting it rot, said Dan Fazio, director of employer services for the Washington state Farm Bureau.
“I can fill 10,000 jobs at $15 an hour right now,” he
Farmers across the West for years have complained about a labor shortage to harvest their fruits, vegetables and other crops. Critics have always discounted those claims, saying farmers who pay higher wages have plenty of help.
“At some point, it’s like the boy who cried wolf,” said David Groves, spokesman for the Washington State Labor Council. “It’s just that, at different points in time, we’ve heard this, and we’ve seen evidence that there’s not a labor shortage. There’s just an unwillingness to pay decent wages.”
raincoaster 