Princess Diana, undead zombie

The Guardian reports on Peter Milligan, a British comic writer who has made the late Princess Diana a "resurrected mutant zombie" in one of his comics.

In the new strip, Di Another Day, the X-Statix posse save the mutant Di from "a nasty crew of mutant Euro-trash dead set on sending her back where she came from".

British newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, are shocked and appalled.

Hepburn, RIP

Movieblog's take on the career of Katharine Hepburn as a Hollywood iconoclast, not a "screen goddess", is intriguing.

Par-tay

Right We Are! is starting to compile some party recipes for Dominion Day...although for some reason they will be celebrating on the 4th. ;)

The first recipe is a yummy sounding dip.

Cue shower scene music from Psycho

The online Guardian asks Would you survive a teen slasher movie?:

...Certain characters are for the chop. A lucky few will stay the course. But which category do you fall into, and which character do you play? Answer the following questions and see if you would survive Guardian Unlimited Film Bloodbath...

My results:

You scored 3
Sole survivor. We've followed your adventures from start to finish, from the opening murder (you watched it from the window) through to the massacre at the prom through to your climactic showdown with the killer (your mad high-school principal) atop the old bell tower. Congratulations - you've made it. Your reward is top-billing in Film Unlimited Bloodbath II, plus a lifetime in therapy.

I knew all those psycho killer movies I saw in my teens would come in useful someday! Thanks, Mom! :)

Yes, sell the Report

AR alumnus and Edmonton Sun columnist Michael Jenkinson also thinks that the Byfields should be open to selling The Report:

I've never believed the generally accepted wisdom that permeated the magazine's culture that there was simply no way Alberta Report would ever make money because it was too controversial and advertisers wouldn't go near it.

Because the flip-side of that argument is to believe that a right-wing magazine couldn't make a profit in Alberta. And I find that very hard to believe.

Indeed, I submit that if the Byfields would be willing to sell the rights to the Alberta Report name to someone else with a solid business plan, there's no reason why the magazine couldn't continue being the unique voice on the right that it was for so many years.

However, I do disagree with him about one thing. One of the reasons that the Report went national and changed its name was to keep the readers that it had won from B.C. Report, who might have had a hard time subscribing to an Alberta Report. Perhaps in 1999, the magazine should have reverted to being "Alberta Report" in Alberta and being called "Western Report" (with exactly the same content) in the rest of the country.

Another factor, in retrospect, would have been "How can we get the money to keep all the extra reporters and publish every second week?" Did the Byfields really have the money to do this and just not realize it? I don't know, so I will leave that for others to answer.

"....You owned a home Beta video recorder..."

A list from the US VH1 channel: You're an 80s Child If...

Blogs with a bullet

From Online Journalism Review: Bloggers Rate the Most Influential Blogs

Happy reading...

I like a bit of tea with my milk and sugar

Colby Cosh discusses the ongoing controversy on how to make the perfect cup of tea. Does the milk/cream go in first or last?

I was taught to do milk-first for far more pedestrian reasons than the ones that Colby outlines.

If I put in the sugar, and then the tea, I sometimes put in slightly too much tea. Then, when I add the milk, the mixture reaches the top of the cup with the tea too strong. Then you have to pour out a little of the tea-milk mix and add more milk, causing a waste. Doing milk first avoids this mistake. Usually.

I'm sure that my parents are pros at this process (India's biggest tea customers are Scotland and my mother) but as I am a bit of a tea amateur, that's what I do.

Don't mourn The Report?

Ted Byfield is right, in one sense, to not mourn The Report in his Edmonton Sun column today. He notes that he fielded many calls from friends who thought he would be very sad:

....But the brutal fact was that I didn't feel all that bad about it.

After all, nothing this side of the Kingdom of God lasts forever. At least 25 Alberta magazines have come and gone in that 30 years. Newspapers, too, are scarcely eternal. Where are the old Calgary Albertan, the Edmonton Bulletin, the Winnipeg Tribune? Even great nations expire. Anybody visited the Roman Empire lately?

Ted is right in one sense. The values that he has espoused for years will have value and meaning after The Report dies.

However, this writer below points out that Canadian journalism from a faith-conscious perspective is still needed:

It is commonly claimed nowadays that Christianity is no longer relevant in the discussion of pressing public issues, but this contention is the precise reverse of the facts. For what are the hot-button issues now before the country? Let's name a few: terms of marriage and divorce, parental rights, origins and importance of human life, human cloning, freedom to publicly express a moral viewpoint, the justice of war, the content of school science curricula, the appropriate scope of social welfare, man's relation to his environment, and on and on.

At the very core of each of these issues a traditional viewpoint collides, often sharply, with what advances itself as a more modern one, and the Christian faith inevitably underlies the traditional. Innovation in all these areas therefore involves the rejection of some aspect of Christianity, yet the defence of the position on purely Christian grounds is rarely undertaken.

It sounds like Ted Byfield is advocating the creation of something like The Report in his
National Post op-ed of a couple of days ago.

Unless, of course, there is no need for Canadian social conservative journalists to write on these issues any more.

One could argue that position papers, for example, could replace The Report quite easily. But, eternal issues of faith have often needed to be brought into a modern context to help people understand that in a moral sense, the more that society changes the more that it stays unchanged when it comes to the deepest matters of the human condition. Using news is a way to remind people that while the circumstances of life may change, the central moral issues that all people address do not.

Faith-conscious journalism is not the only, or even necessarily the best, tool in the toolbox. But you can't fault Canadian conservatives for wanting to still use it.

This raises an issue. Many pundits are wondering whether some kind of Canadian conservative magazine can work when "fiscal conservatives" are leery of "Holy Roller" or "Bible thumped types."

I think such a magazine can work. I will explain how in a future post.

I Accuse The Byfields....The Report movie

Kevin Michael Grace is making fun tongue-in-cheek casting suggestions for the movie version of The Report that you may see here. He thinks that Jared Harris should play me, which is a good choice. Mr. Harris does have some facial resemblance to me.

I think, however, that we should count our blessings. Given all the media and weblog reminiscing about The Report's alleged wackiness, it's a good thing that this didn't happen 60 years ago during the last days of the exploitation films. These were cheap quickie films catering to the lowest impulses of film viewers. For a quick mental image, the infamous Reefer Madness is an exploitation film.

With all the media and weblog tales of pot merchants, "insane" editors and brain-surgery-dogs that are swirling around, perhaps a quickie exploitation movie would be the best way to handle the story. Either that or something that would be shown on Showcase as Canadian content. Or an ABC After School Special.

The end of our magazine is being made to sound like something that would have been dubbed, oh, I Accuse The Byfields, a tawdry tale of journalists gone wrong, back in the day.

(Exploitation film makers reused everything (Stock footage? Try "stock mileage"), so the filmmakers may have used a variant of the title from I Accuse My Parents, one of my favourite B-movies with exploitation overtones.)

As much as we Report alumni might hope to at least get a Roger Corman to direct such a film, we would probably be stuck with an Edward D. Wood Jr.. I'm suddenly glad that no one wore angora in our office.

It's good to see that Kevin is trying to have some fun after all that has happened to us. Good for him.

Blooper of the day

Thanks to Charles Stough's Newsgorilla for spotting a howler:

THANKS FOR THE CORRECTION, WASHINGTON POST. "The last name of National Spelling Bee winner Sai R. Gunturi was misspelled in a May 30 KidsPost article and on the front-page promo and caption.".

His weblog is uniformly fine. Please visit it.

Link Byfield: The Report can be replaced.
Interim editor: By us. Thanks!

Two interesting nuggets in LifeSite's story on the death of The Report.

Canadian social conservatives don't need a print periodical as badly as they used to, argues Link Byfield:

Link Byfield, who took over the magazine from his father, told LifeSite today that "especially for pro-life people it is a blow, I think we had a very useful function. So that's a shame." "But," he said, "they have an awful lot of new media they didn't have like LifeSite News, it's not as thought they lost access to information."

Oh yes they do need something in print, says the editor of The Interim, who knows a market--thousands of paying subscribers who used to get The Report--when he sees it:

Interim editor Paul Tuns told LifeSite "The Left is doing cart-wheels, giddy that the proudly redneck publication has been silenced."....

....Adding that, "People hungry for moral and social conservative news and commentary in dead tree form (on paper), subscribe to The Interim, Canada's life and family newspaper, edited by none other than yours truly. We cover abortion, euthanasia, the gay-rights agenda, feminism, educational choice, judicial activism and religious freedom, among other issues."

Charlie McCarthy: "I have here in my hand a list of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department...."

The ladies on The View were eager to condemn Senator Eugene McCarthy for his superpatriotism until Ann Coulter corrected them. If this intrigues youRight We Are! has posted a transcript of the recent program featuring the exchange.

The new "Joan of Arc" ?!?!

Expect conservatives worldwide to start swooning over Sabine Herold, a 21 year old college student who is leading protests against French trade unions' efforts to block conservative government reforms. The Telegraph is besotted, as the newspaper gave her a red-caret tour of right-leaning London. Here's a photo and story.

Thanks to the vacationing Instapundit for the link. No, he's not made a beeline for France.

Report post-mortems watch

Ted Byfield, notes Licia Corbella in today's Edmonton Sun (sorry, not online), is philosophical about the death of his old magazine. Here's the gist of what he said:

"It's always been a borderline operation at best," he says with a chuckle, "and it was sinking too far below the borderline, so when it actually happened it didn't surprise me much.

"As society has changed radically, the magazine didn't change, it just kept asserting the same things it had 30 years ago. The effect was to make it look more stridently right, but the magazine never changed, what changed was society. That was eventually going to do it in, and it did," he adds, almost brightly......

and

But, surely he's sad? "No," he says, bluntly. "Look, there's no such thing as permanence ... this side of the kingdom of heaven anyway. You don't like to see something like this happen, but at the same time you never really expect anything to last forever."

Meanwhile, in the Globe and Mail opinions differ on what the end of The Report signifies. This story implies that the death of the magazine is bad news for Canadian magazines in general. Eric Reguly reports on his days at the Alberta Report Calgary bureau, which he describesamusingly. The newspaper's editorial on the death of magazine, although critical, offers some gracious words too.

The Vancouver Sun does regret that the magazine shut down but today's editorial chastens the magazine for being too conservative, not growing with the times, blah, blah, blah. Well, I'm looking forward to the Byfield response to this and I'm confident that some of my Report blogosphere colleagues will address it.

Readers of Alberta's alternative news and entertainment papers should keep an eye out for these items that aren't online. Calgary's Fast Forward Weekly does a small story with no quotes explaining what happened while Edmonton's See Magazine reprints some of its favorite Report quotes from the past. Colby Cosh may want to fetch a copy because he is on their list.

P.S. Link for those who have read Kevin Steel's blog entry today. When Kevin first used the phrase "Where are the helicopters?" in conversation, I thought he was referring to when the North Vietnamese took Saigon in 1975 and Americans and their friends had to be evacuated by helicopter. I said this to Kevin and he laughed and told me the story you've read.

I would sometimes call Kevin to see what he had heard about how the magazine was doing. (It's just a matter of place--Kevin worked in Edmonton where the head office was, and I didn't.) We would try to figure out how our own prospects would pan out, and I would often let him go by saying "Enough joy and frivolity. I'll talk to you soon."

"I hate Illinois Nazis."

The New York Daily News is reporting that some very confused Jews in Israel areNazis. Very odd.

Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

Thanks

I have thought about it, and I think it appropriate to write a few thank yous for my 11 and a half years with Report magazines.

The reason that I argue so passionately that something like The Report is necessary is partly due to my own story. I first entered journalism during my days at The Ubyssey, the student newspaper at the University of British Columbia. I won't go into it in any detail, but The Ubyssey was a very liberal place back then, so when I started to ease towards working for British Columbia Report I enjoyed being able to work and learn in a newsroom full of like minds.

I'd like to say thanks to Ted and Virginia Byfield for patiently working with me. I hope that someone picks up the vision of what they created. I am glad that I was able to help them to do what they have done in a small way.

I respect Link Byfield as well. Although I disagree with him in the post below, that doesn't lessen my gratitude for our good working relationship.

When British Columbia Report was folded into The Report in the fall of 1999, I wish that more attention had been paid to the good work that the sister magazine to AR had done. Our readership was overwhelmingly located outside of the Lower Mainland, so the Vancouver media never really understood how helpful B.C. Report, and it's editor, Terry O'Neill, was to the conservative cause in B.C..

I owe Terry extra thanks for his unfailing work to develop me as a reporter. My future bosses will be grateful for his patience with me.

I also thank Kevin Michael Grace for his patience-of-Job labours with me when I worked in the same newsroom as he did.

I never did work in the Edmonton newsroom. I have tales of my own about the Vancouver office, but Alberta Report must also have been a fun place to work.

That I am thankful for my continuing relationship with my Report Blogosphere colleagues goes without saying. Except I just did. Rats.

Why not sell The Report?

David Frum has eulogized The Report in his online diary at The Corner.

Mr. Frum raises an interesting point that I would like to comment on myself: This exploitive relationship has taught Albertans to look at the doings of the Canadian federal government with more skepticism than any other group of Canadians. And it was this skepticism that the Report powerfully expressed - and forwarded. For the Report was more than a magazine: It was the vanguard of a movement. The Report midwifed the Reform party, which
became the Canadian Alliance, which is today Canada's official
opposition.

I would go further than Mr. Frum does. The West's discontent with Ottawa extends beyond Alberta. I came to work indirectly for the Byfields through my five years on staff at the Vancouver-based sister magazine of Alberta Report, British Columbia Report. In the 1990s, "B.C. Report" had thousands of conservative subscribers of its own. The various incarnations
of The Report had many subscribers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The fact that these magazines were at one time a Western Canadian and not just an Alberta phenomenon implies that many conservative concerns that The Report expressed were shared across the West.

Mr. Frum hints at something that I experienced during my last years as a contributor to the magazine. Especially in its last incarnation as the Citizens Centre Report, I would argue that The Report was evolving into Canada's version of National Review, albeit in fits and starts. In the last few months, we were taking indepth looks at policy questions with no hard news peg, such as a cover story on the thinkers that
made Canada the non-conservative nation that it is today and an entire issue devoted to the subject of "Reconfederation"--reopening and renegotiating the Canadian constitution. We still did non-political coverage, but we were also beginning to take the sort of long perspective on the changes that are affecting our country that National Review often adopts for the U.S..

Canada badly needs a National Review-type of magazine for the right. My concern with the Citizens Centre Foundation for Freedom and Democracy's decision to just kill the magazine is this--we had a magazine that could have become our NR. Now, whomever wants to start the Canadian version of
National Review will have to start from scratch.

Writers of the Report's obituaries may be celebrating the alleged
"wackiness" of the Byfield clan, but at least they tried to do something that Canadian conservatives have talked about doing for years. The Byfields acted while fiscal conservatives sat around saying "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if we had a national conservative magazine...."

I have lots of respect for Link Byfield, who was the magazine's last owner as the guiding force behind the Citizens Centre Foundation. So, I hope that he won't take offense that I am disagreeing with him in public. I wish that he had sold the magazine instead of folding it, even if doing so would have meant that I was sacked by the new owners.

The history of National Review illustrates a different way that the
long-term future of The Report could have been handled. William F. Buckley Jr. realized that his son Christopher wanted to be a writer and editor, but he did not insist that the future of National Review be placed in his hands. Instead, Mr. Buckley looked for ideological children of his who could also guide the future of the magazine. That way, Chris Buckley had the freedom to decide what was the best way for him to help the conservative movement and National Review could have a long-term future no matter what Chris Buckley did.

The Report's end suggests that a lot of pressure was put on the second generation of Byfields to keep the vision alive. It led to a situation where either the magazine was published *or* the foundation was freed to do its important work.

Am I suggesting that Link Byfield should never have taken editorial or financial control of the magazine? No. He was a passionate editor and publisher for many years and others could have failed ignobly and not continued the magazine's good work as long as Link did. But, I do think that the Byfields should have considered a possible post-Byfield future for the magazine.

In a CBC Newsworld interview on Tuesday, Link Byfield expressed a lot of frustration with recent Canadian history. In the 30 years that he has been covering Canadian politics there has been setback after setback for Canadian conservatives. Understandably, he wants to concentrate on the work of his foundation and use seminars, position papers and advertising to create conservatives from scratch and not just write for the traditionalists we do have. Thinking of the very-long term is a wise thing for his foundation to do. It also makes sense for Link Byfield, wanting to leave his own legacy for the future through the foundation. I hope that it does well.

I hope that Canadians rally behind the Citizens Centre and what it will try to do. Link Byfield is right in thinking that that work is very important. But my concern is that although the foundation has decided to move on, there are some conservatives who want to join the battle in an old-fashioned way by continuing what the Byfields led in doing for so many years. The Centre should help and not hinder them.

I wish that the Byfields had considered that our magazine was a
"movement" business and not just a "family business". Folding The Report, if there are no other conservative Canadian magazines to take its place, is a decided blow to the conservative movement. I would respectfully suggest that although the second generation of Byfields have decided for very valid reasons to turn to what they see as as more profitable methods, that they let someone else have a go at making The Report succeed or let new owners buy whatever's left of the Report's resources to start something new.

I admit that this is a bit of a personal issue for me. Yes, I lost my job, but I think that I would be sad for other reasons too. I regret that other conservative Canadian journalists will lose the opportunity that I had to learn and work in a newsroom where you don't have to forsake your convictions on deadline.

There are other Canadian conservatives who want to carry on the Byfield tradition of conservative journalism. It may be a little different from what the Byfields did for so many years, but I would suggest that that's okay.

Please let them try.

Darn, I wanted to be Tobit ;o)


You are Ephesians.


Which book of the Bible are you?
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The Report's end updated

The end of The Report got some coverage today.

The best place to start is the CBC online news page because there's an eight minute audio interview (taken from the CBC Newsworld story this morning) with the magazine's former owner, Link Byfield, available for viewing on the website. Just click on the link at the top right hand side of the page linked above.

You may also read online coverage from CBC Calgary and the Canadian Press story that ran in the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

The CBC National News did a story last night (sorry no link) as did the local CBC news in Edmonton. Broadcast News (Canada's national radio news service) did a short story and an update (sorry no link).

A National Post story, by Paula Simons of the Edmonton Journal, is interesting as it is her affectionate look back at her days at Alberta Report in the late 1980s. Although today she is quite liberal, she writes that it was important for something like AR to exist and that she learned a lot there. Ditto, says me.

Speaking of the National Post, here's a report from the pro-life site Lifesite analyzing the paper's recent coverage of abortion and other social issues. In recent months, the site argues, the paper has become much more socially liberal. Well, I hope that pro-lifers find some Canadian print outlet that will give them a fair break.

Jeremy Lott is starting to flesh out some of his thoughts on the death of The Report. He seems not to be happy that the magazine was euthanized, not at all.