It's a miracle!
Michael Levison ( New Holy Grail? - letter, March 8) is indeed prophetic: No fragments of the True Stick have yet been seen, but images of Sidney Crosby are reliably reported to have spontaneously appeared on walls in every province in the country.
George Peabody, Woodstock, N.B.
La marcha real
Re Anthemically Challenged (letters, March 8): Perhaps the next politician to have a run at the lyrics to O Canada should take a page from our Spanish friends and just delete all of the words. Thus no one is excluded, so no one can take offence. This would have the added advantage that we would no longer need to endure the yodelling approximations of our anthem at opening ceremonies by vocal stylists who believe the spotlight belongs on them, rather than on the country.
Ken MacDonald, London, Ont.
Vexatious dispersal
Brendan O'Neill ( The Weaponization Of Classical Music - March 8) says driving unruly youths away from public spaces with Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 is understandable. It's unfathomable.
There's only one piece to recommend to disperse crowds, although it may be more intoxicating than intolerable. It's the aptly titled Vexations, by French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). It consists of a unit of four slow, strange phrases that's played 840 times. Make that 3,360 times for the unchanged melody.
That Satie actually intended all those repetitions is unlikely. Although he probably would have appreciated the joke of using music to get rid of people, he might also have been appalled at the whole idea.
Paul Rapoport, professor emeritus, School of the Arts, McMaster University
International Women's Day
In their search for funding, our universities seem to have become willfully blind to the issue of women's rights (or lack thereof) that lies at the heart of their gushing acceptance of Saudi petrodollars ( Guess Who's Coming To Canada - March 6). Are we so desperate for cash that we applaud what we should condemn - the Saudi government's mandate that women must have a male chaperone to attend school? This is shameful by Canadian standards. Our universities, funded by our tax dollars, are implicitly serving to oppress women by supporting Saudi Arabia's gender apartheid.
Avi Benlolo, president and CEO, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies, Toronto
Lest you forget
I would like to set the record straight: The Lest We Forget project is not being cut ( Saving Living History - editorial, March 8). On the contrary, it is being expanded through partnerships and published online to facilitate access.
Currently, four out of five of the students who use Lest We Forget do so by receiving photocopies of military records sent from Library and Archives Canada to their schools. This practice continues, as does on-site access to these records at our offices in downtown Ottawa.
On April 9 - Vimy Ridge Day - Library and Archives Canada is launching a representative sampling of 200 digitized military service records on its website. These digitized files will allow teachers to conduct Lest We Forget activities across Canada and, in fact, around the world.
Over the past six months, Library and Archives Canada has been looking at partnerships to enhance the delivery of this and other programs. The objective would be to offer a Lest We Forget workshop anywhere in Canada with the help of veterans, local libraries, remembrance volunteers or any qualified facilitator. The goal is to maximize the number of Canadian students who will discover, first-hand, the individual stories that these soldiers' files have to tell. This approach frees up our resources for other parts of the collection.
Daniel J. Caron, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Ottawa
A new classic
Re Tories To Unveil Public Service Efficiency Plan (March 8): Is this a new oxymoron?
Bob Kotyk, Toronto
Give Haitians a reason to smile
Margaret Wente has a point ( Is Haiti Hopeless? Can We 'Fix' It? - March 6): Helping individuals works best. But it's a sad affair when a Haitian's best hopes are friends and family who leave the country to work as taxi drivers. The problem with authoritarian paternalism is not the money itself - it's the way Western authority continues to feed the problems it's created. The gold-seeking Spanish conquistadores, the slave trade and the 1915 U.S. invasion "to protect U.S. property" all speak of abusive pirates who hide behind Western flags.
It's time our governments stopped sending bandages and carrots on a stick. Send real rebar for concrete and people with patience who know how to help without holding a gun to anyone's head. Leaving it up to the Haitians themselves is like sending an abused foster child out into the world to fend for themselves.
It may take more than a few decades to reverse centuries of damage but providing solid people and solid materials to rebuild the country will help all Haitians to smile again. And their smiles will last longer when their buildings stand up to the next natural disaster.
Richard Watson, Vancouver
A Cuban education
I commend you for your editorials Cuba's Other Face (March 2) and No End To Repression (March 8). Cubans' struggles for basic rights and liberties, especially in Cuban jails, is a topic Canadians need to know about. Because we have a long-standing relationship with Cuba, it's incumbent on us to ask ourselves hard questions about our travels and our intentions. Tourism, after all, is by far the biggest revenue source for the Cuban government and military. It's very clear that our tourism dollars are funding repression, and thus causing prolonged hardship for our Cuban friends.
Andrew Watson, Stratford, Ont.
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My brother-in-law just returned from one of those "cheap" all-inclusive vacations in Cuba. But instead of spending his time in the resort, he travelled around the island. On his return to Toronto, he described Cuba as one huge prison with great weather visited by vacationers who couldn't care less about the plight of the locals. Ordinary Cubans, he said, live an unbelievably hard life of oppression, poverty and squalor. Like your editorial, he doesn't expect change any time soon.
David Honigsberg, Toronto
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As a recent visitor to Cuba, I was disappointed by your screed on repression. Are Canadians restricted from using the Internet? We would say no. Neither are the Cubans. Other than it costs $6 to $10 an hour and there are long line-ups to use the freely available but frustratingly busy public computers. And, yes, the connections are "dial up."
In Cuba, I read the news from many sources, including your anti-Cuban newspaper, and checked the stock market online. My guide had a well-worn BlackBerry, which he used to chat with his girlfriend in Miami. As for the claim that Cubans are restricted to government-controlled media, I must ask: Which government controls CNN? I watched coverage of the Vancouver Olympics and winced at the vapid CNN commentaries masquerading as news, just like in Cuba.
The Cuban channels were like community cable, with announcements punctuated by interviews with artists and authors and many items praising the 1,500 or so volunteer medical personnel who are in Haiti to help build a functioning public health system.
Victor Svacek, Nanaimo, B.C.
Middle lane annihilators, indeed
What a marvellous example of horse-hooey that Andrew Clark provides in Middle Lane? Meet Middle Finger (online, March 5). As one who commutes between Toronto and Stratford, I can attest that no one in the middle lane of Highway 401 chugs along at 80 kilometres an hour, or even the posted limit of 100 km/h. Yet, as sure as God made little green apples, some A-type will sit four metres off your rear bumper and flash his lights feverishly. What Mr. Clark and others like him really need are anger-management courses, along with refresher training on basic physics and road safety.
L.W. Naylor, Stratford, Ont.
What if you like your kids?
Must we endure articles such as How To ... Survive March Break (Life, March 8) every time we have more than a three-day weekend to spend with our children? Has family life in our culture deteriorated to the extent that helpful "guilt-free" hints for dealing with our kids include "hire a babysitter" or "send them far, far away"? Not all of us want to run screaming from our kids when there's a possibility of togetherness.
Timothy Hunt, Ottawa
Well, we'll always have Paris
People have changed ideologies, beliefs and, yes, even gender. Converting to a different religion is also common, but converting to a city is indeed unique. In American-Born Spokesman For Al-Qaeda Arrested, Pakistan Says (March 8), you say Adam Gadahn, a U.S. citizen with a $1-million bounty on his head, "converted to Islamabad." After his conversion, he moved to Karachi, where he was arrested. I guess he didn't like the congregation in Islamabad.
Murtaza Haider, Toronto