might finally be closing, according to this TorStar article: Shift magazine publishes its last issue. I was a reader since its original Lit-mag incarnation with the round logo, and although I’d stopped keeping track when the second of the two founders stepped aside, I still think it’s a big shame that it couldn’t keep on going.

That said, it’s Shift – it could just as well be reincarnated as anything else.

but Bill O’Reilly just comes across like an idiot in this exchange with Jeremy Glick the other night. Glick, it seems, lost his father on 9/11/2001 but nevertheless is against the war in Iraq. Poor Bill just ends up sputtering, asking to “cut his mic” at the end. Pathetic.

American commentators since 11/09/2001, but his Op-ed piece yesterday in the Times was just silly it was so far off the mark. But no need to go into detail: Tom Coates has already deconstructed Friedman’s piece at his site plasticbag.org.

the lowest form of humour, but nevertheless, there is an “award-winning pun” (as a friendly correspondent put it) in this New Yorker review of the Genius Stanley Coren’s The Pawprints of History. To wit: “Ever since, many psychologists and animal behaviorists, reluctant to be twice fooled, have followed Descartes in his refusal to attribute to animals any conscious intelligence whatever. Only recently have animal behaviorists realized that science, in heeding Cartesian dogma more than the demonstrable ingenuity of animals such as Clever Hans, had got its logic backward: it had put Descartes before the horse.”

When reading this passage, you must remember that denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. Puns are funny!

the other day I went to see 25th Hour, Spike Lee’s recent film starring Edward Norton. As I often do, I went to Salon to read the review after having seen it. So the article loads and instead of waiting, I start to read before the photo appears. By the time it does, I’m at the end reading, “Lee is a pro, and he knows how to work with reference, allusion and metaphor: There’s a “Cool Hand Luke” poster in Monty’s apartment…” and then 20 seconds later I scroll to the top, only to find that the photo I skipped should feature that very poster – but it has been blanked out! And blanked out artfully enough that if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t know that the photo was NOT true to the film itself. This isn’t that big a deal, but it does make you wonder how widespread this practice is.