You remember the $600 toilet seat. How could you forget? Back in the 1980s, reporters, cartoonists, and comedians relished the revelation that the Pentagon paid that much for an everyday object you could supposedly pick up for a few bucks at the hardware store. There’s a reasonable explanation ...

For men and women who’ve voluntarily joined an organization that demands (legally) blind obedience and counsels its minions to “Embrace the Suck,” American military personnel can be surprisingly pushy about getting official approval of their unorthodox lifestyle quirks. The ...

“Why is there ALWAYS a big screen tv?” That was Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan’s one-line post about Canada’s “First Nations communities” last Friday night. So she noticed that, too—Canada’s presumably oppressed “natives” always own big-screen TVs. Ten months ago, New ...

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing Oprah Winfrey likes to recall how excited her neighbors got the first time The Supremes performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. “Come quick,” someone supposedly yelled out the window, “colored people on the ...

It ain’t “nostalgia” if you weren’t there. “Anachronistic” more accurately describes the current left-wing sensibility. Watching twenty-somethings at Occupy gatherings clad in late-1970s punk gear while cheering ancient commie Pete Seeger proves that today’s “progressives” live in ...

What was it Orwell allegedly said? “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because men in suits are ready to put teenagers in clown makeup on the government’s list of dangerous gangs”? Doesn’t quite have the same clarion ring as the original. Millions no doubt sighed with ...

Squatting. It’s so…European. Like the bidet, squatting as political theater never caught on in America. Lengthy “vigils” and “tent cities”—such as the Ottawa Peace Camp on Parliament Hill (1983-85) inspired by Greenham Common—tend to be a foreign phenomenon, too. I’m guessing ...

Michael Moore’s unsolicited tongue baths to the contrary, Canada’s crime rate isn’t lower because we have fewer guns than America, as yet another peer-reviewed study proved this month. One theory holds, as Colby Cosh put it bluntly after crunching the numbers, that it’s because we have ...

Last week, Italy’s version of Wikipedia cloaked itself in advance of wiretapping laws they say may force them to delete the site entirely. If you’re like me, you immediately wondered whether Italians keep their “good” computers covered in clear plastic slipcovers and use the crappy old ones ...

Canada’s prolific pop historian Pierre Berton quipped: “A Canadian is someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe.” I know: That’s dumb and not funny. We’re usually funnier. That line only got funny when someone (likely a foreigner) finessed it: Drinking Budweiser is like having sex in ...