Monthly Archives: March 2005

Grey’s Anatomy

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Following on from Desperate Housewives on a Sunday night comes ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. It’s got an amazing cast with Sandra Oh (Sideways), Patrick Dempsey who I know from Will & Grace, Katherine Heigl (Roswell) and the real star of the show, Ellen Pompeo who’s acting is far more subtle than her explosive name would suggest. It’s based around a group of newly graduated interns at a Seattle teaching hospital. Though the show doesn’t appear to try and have the same production values as others like ER, it has a directness and subtlty that evades many lesser shows.
I hope it’s carried forward because the start looks so promising.

IMDB: Grey’s Anatomy
Sandra Oh’s new job

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Seals battered by dawn

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arctic seal hunt

Local residents and companies in the North Eastern Canadian provinces Tuesday began their annual cull of young seals – often born only days beforehand. With an estimated 300,000 to be harvested and skinned before the end of the season – 15th May, the Canadian government describes the seal population as “healthy and abundant”.

“It’s just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see,” Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States

– The Guardian

The Canadian Marine Mammal Regulations, which govern the hunt, stipulate sealers may kill seals with wooden clubs, hakapiks (large ice-pick-like clubs) and guns. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, clubs and hakapiks are the killing implement of choice, and in the Front, guns are more widely used.

It is important to note that each killing method is demonstrably cruel. Because sealers shoot at seals from moving boats, the pups are often only wounded. The main sealskin processing plant in Canada deducts $2 from the price they pay for the skins for each bullet hole they find—therefore sealers are loath to shoot seals more than once. As a result, wounded seals are left to suffer in agony—many slip beneath the surface of the water where they die slowly and are never recovered.

– Humane Society of the United States Website

Brigitte Bardot sums up her feeling over the lack of progress, despite campaigns to stop the hunt, in a message to Prime Minister Paul Martin and the federal fisheries minister: “You are jerks.”

Why we have to speak for them
Canadian seal pup hunt begins
HSUS Seal Hunt Facts
Letter to Canada’s National Post, supporting the hunt

UPDATE:My friend Rachel comes back at me with an email containing this thought that I hadn’t put clearly into words:

Here is a question: If Canada is a land of plenty, i.e. have a huge surplus of resources etc, then why is it suggested the people who live on the coast have to cull seals to make a living? Simply sticking to old traditions because they’re traditions doesn’t mean they’re appropriate for the modern world.

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Where did BlueMountain go?

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The NYTimes has a really nice article about post dot-com entrepeneurs who’ve moved on from the web medium and are now living lives completely detached from the wired web. Most of interest is bluemountainart’s founder Jared Polis who has now joined the Colorado State Board of Education following his company’s buyout by Excite@Home.

Others featured, like Harry Knowles of aintitcoolnews are still around, but it’s the touching nature of the story that’s interesting – that these are people who – like celebrities – the casual browsers of the web will know and recognise. You remember when bluemountain would pound your yahoo email account with junkmail and you’d get messages from friends, through them, wishing happy Easter and Valentines… Now they’re passed and people have come to realise that physical cards are still the best and that the internet, though a social medium, just doesn’t work as a digital Hallmark.

NYTimes link

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Quinze Ans? You could be married!

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France’s parliament has passed an amendment to raise the age at which women may marry from 15 to 18. This move is taken in order to block the (2003) estimated 70,000 adolescents living in arranged marriages. This phenomenon is mostly restricted to the immigrant communities of South-East Asian communities.

Although no statistics exist on the practice, most girls forced into wedlock are believed to be Muslims whose immigrant parents arrange a marriage for them in their native countries.

France has Europe’s largest Muslim minority of 5 million, or eight percent of its population. Most of them are of North African origin.

– Reuters

The amendment, approved by an overwhelming cross-party majority, is also backed by the justice minister, Dominique Perben, who said allowing girls to marry at 15 was “manifestly a false freedom”.

- The Guardian

The original law, part of the Napoleonic code enacted in March 1840. The code, also known as the Civic code, largely enforced liberal ideals such as equality before the law and property rights, but was also used to establish patriarchal rights – that of the husband being the ‘ruler’ of the household.

Though the act already maintains that citizens cannot be married without consent, this new law reinforces this by blocking all marriages under the age of 18. The origial civic law stood as follows:

  1. A man before the age of 18, and a woman before 15 complete, are incapable of contracting marriage.
  2. The government shall be at liberty, nevertheless, upon weighty reasons, to grant dispensations of age.
  3. There can be no marriage where consent is wanting.

The Guardian

Reuters

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