As I put it back on December 31, 2006, “I wonder how long it will be before scientists somewhere in the world genetically engineer a unicorn…”. Two years later, it hasn’t happened yet, but with artists and amateurs alike getting into the transgenics game (or, as Vue Weekly would have it, ‘transgenetics‘), it seems, now more than ever, to be not a matter of if, but when.

The Gene Pool is open: Register your prediction in the format of Day/Month/Year in the comments section below. By doing so, you sincerely agree to ante $20 (CDN) into the pot (to be held onto by yourself until Uni’s birth announcement, as verified by reputable scientific authorities). Closest date wins: winner takes all, losers are on their honour to pay up.

My pick: 23/02/2015

For more information, click the Gene Pool link.

[with material from CP]

OTTAWA — The long dream of a national portrait gallery to showcase Canada’s famous faces is dead. The Conservative party, officially, hates our nation.

The Harper government abruptly announced late Friday that it is killing the project, despite the fact that it has been in the works for seven years. “Fuck all that art shit,” Harper said, with a cold, soulless wink.

Newly minted Heritage-Suppression Minister James Moore announced that none of the proposals received by developers is acceptable to the Nazi-style government, “and we are therefore terminating the selection process.”

“In this time of global economic instability, it is important that the federal government continue to manage its own affairs prudently and pragmatically,” Moore unabashedly bullshitted in a cursory news release.

“The selection process failed to meet the best interests of both the portrait gallery and taxpayers. We have therefore decided not to pursue this project further at this time. Yoink!”

The announcement was quietly released just after 5 p.m. on a Friday – a tried-and-true strategy used by assholes to minimize bad press. As has been documented previously, these guys are huge assholes.

The government ironically noted that the portrait collection will continue to be available for viewing in travelling exhibitions and other public programs. Of course, they didn’t mention that the Conservatives had already cancelled the government art transportation program. Good one, hey?

The Portrait Gallery of Canada was announced by the Liberal government in 2001, and was to open in 2005 in the former American embassy building directly across from Parliament.

It was originally projected to cost $22 million, but over time, that initial figure doubled to $45 million and its opening was delayed until at least 2007. In contrast, the new AGO renovation cost 10 times this amount, at roughly half a billion dollars.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government launched an ol’ fashioned “head-up-ass” review of the project after taking office in 2006.

In November 2007, the government created a stir by suddenly, inexplicably announcing that it wanted Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver to bid for the gallery. Fucktards.

Critics quickly slammed the Tories for considering moving the gallery out of the nation’s capital. Liberal Senator Jerry Grafstein even introduced a private member’s bill to keep the gallery in Ottawa.

Nevertheless, eventually the competition came down to three cities, with developers from Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton submitting proposals by last May’s deadline. Those suckers! They actually thought the Conservatives were going to go through on the promise to build the thing. Boy, did they get fooled!

Even the notoriously stingy Alberta government pledged $40 million in its budget Tuesday to support bids to bring the gallery to that province. Oh well, I guess it’s the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, the federal government has already spent roughly $20 million refurbishing the former U.S. embassy. According to these portraits the Tories don’t want you to see, the Harper boys plan to use the space instead for “meetings of their caucus”, if you know what I mean…

Dear Editors,
I read your creepy endorsement of Harper with no small measure of disgust and disappointment.

Harper’s attack on the artist-citizens of Canada is not simply a “rhetorical blunder”, as you sympathetically suggest, but a cynically considered gambit to disempower a demographic that generally rejects the extremist stance of the Reform-cum-Conservative party.

Worse still is your nonsensical notion that associating “Harper with the discredited and oblivion-bound Bush-Republican crowd… is not fair”. Journal, please.

This is the same sucker, Stephen Harper, that happily recited a ‘bomb-bomb-Iraq’ speech that sounded very much like it had been mailed to him (and Australian PM Howard, and who knows who else?) by his bumbling buddy in the White House.

This is the same Stephen Harper that allows a Canadian citizen (an abducted minor who has been abused his whole life, no less), to languish in Gitmo, the US’s widely condemned illegal torture-prison. The ONLY leader of a Commonwealth country to abandon its citizens to such a fate. So please, spare us any more hypocritical, self-serving lectures on ‘fairness’. Please.

This is the same Stephen Harper who approved of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon, ghoulishly calling their murder of countless innocent civilians in revenge for the capture of a single soldier “a measured response”.

Please forgive us all if we citizens feel like vomiting in terror at the thought of Harper’s “hand on the tiller” of our country for a minute more.

At this time of worldwide economic crisis, do we want a leader like Harper, whose so-called conservatives cook their own election finance books under their “in-and-out” scheme, then try to cover up their shady dealings by calling a snap election, contrary to their own promised fixed election date, ahem, “law”?

Thanks, but no thanks.

My brother Jon’s torture and death in 2005, in the form of advanced esophageal cancer at age 31, came as a devastating surprise, and remains an inconceivable mystery.

“In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain of a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. For to him who does know, children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of. Nonetheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: ‘Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse – until at last the worst of all arrives.’”

“The “worst of all” snuck up on Jon and beat the living shit out of him, for no good reason. I say, we chase the bastards down, and give ‘em what’s coming to ‘em.”

The Canadian Cancer Society Relay For Life is an overnight non-competitive relay that celebrates cancer survivors and pays tribute to loved ones. It’s a night of fun, friendship and fundraising to beat cancer.

I will be participating as a member of the Jimmy Coole #1 team, in the Edmonton event on 24 May 2007.

You can be part of a community that takes up the fight. Please pledge me now and help make cancer history.

Online pledging is secure and it saves the Society money by reducing administrative costs (more about how your donation helps).

Thanks for your support!

Ambum Stone, prehistoric, New Guinea (different photo – page 50)

Right up until I pulled the FedEx ripcord on the package I had no idea I was a winner. Excepting the cover art, it’s mildly awesome: our new Art Atlas. Thank you Abbeville Press and Artblog.net.

After a brief perusal of titles, pictures and captions, I think I can say that the text is not really about art so much; rather, it uses art (among other potent visual artefacts) to track global human activities. Its pictures are small and its maps are big. The Art Atlas maps the spread and diversification of human civilization, devoting two pages per landmass per time period in a constant geographic and chronological narrowing towards our near past. Upon taking measure of the 70+ anthropological specialists who contributed to this 300-page+ compilation, I am astounded.

B.C. pledges $49M for downtown Vancouver arts campus

“Premier Gordon Campbell was in Vancouver Tuesday to announce the province will contribute $49.3 million toward a new art school that will be part of the Woodward’s redevelopment project in the Downtown Eastside.

Campbell said the new campus for Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts will help British Columbia recruit and retain creative, talented people and support the renewal of the troubled neighbourhood.

The 11,845-square-metre school, scheduled for completion by late 2009, will fill five stories and will include public space, performance venues, teaching studios, a 400-seat theatre and a multimedia lounge and lab for new media.

The state-of-the-art performance spaces will engage the community and showcase creative works by some of Canada’s most accomplished students and faculty in the arts, said Campbell.

The university will pay for the remaining $22 million cost of the school through a fundraising campaign.

When it is completed, the school is expected to increase economic activity in the Downtown Eastside by up to $7.5 million per year.

The campus is part of the larger Woodward’s redevelopment built on the former site of the heritage building. A portion of the original building has been incorporated into the new development, which will include a market and social housing as well as office and retail space, childcare and City of Vancouver services.”

Great idea… too bad things like this aren’t happening here.

(via CBC)
Portrait gallery looks nationwide for new home

“Our government has set forth the notion that national cultural institutions do not necessarily have to be located in the national capital,” said Heritage Minister Josée Verner at a news conference Friday announcing what she called “a bold and innovative step.”

The competition will seek a qualified developer in “the best possible location in Canada” for the Portrait Gallery of Canada, Verner said.

The Conservative government has launched a request for proposals from Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.

Verner said those cities are being considered because they have large populations, strong tourism and would make the gallery accessible.

Information about the contest will be posted next week on the Public Works and Government Services Canada website, and the winner will be announced before summer 2008.

Public Works Minister Michael Fortier said the government wants to ensure maximum tax-dollar benefits by including the private sector in developing the new gallery.

He estimated it would open in 2011 or 2012, and he said the historic Ottawa building originally chosen to house it will not be considered as a possible site.

When asked about the $8 million spent on the portrait gallery already, Fortier said about half of that would have been spent on the project even if work hadn’t begun on the site in Ottawa.

The gallery was announced by the Liberal government in 2001, and was to open in 2005 in the historic former American embassy building across from Parliament Hill in Ottawa at an estimated cost of $22 million.

However, the project’s cost grew to $45 million and its opening was delayed until at least 2007.

After Stephen Harper‘s Conservative Government launched a review of the project in 2006, rumours began circulating that the gallery might move to Calgary.

The gallery’s collection of portraits is currently housed out of public view in an Ottawa area building operated by the national archives.