The first item listed in a recent story on the Atlantic Wire website, “The Worst Reactions to the Japanese Earthquake,” was an awkward construction from P.J. Crowley, a U.S. State Department spokesman, on his Twitter page: “We have been watching a hopeful tsunami sweep across the Middle East. Now we are seeing a tsunami of a different kind sweep across Japan.” The offending tweet was later taken down, and Crowley was asked to resign due to this and other recent publicity gaffes.

Only one of several cited examples of “bad reactions” to the quake, the spokesman’s blunder reveals something more than what the website called “questionable metaphors.” It demonstrates the difficulty most of us in North America, relatively insulated from any of the conflagrations ordinarily dominating the world news headlines, have of grappling with successive crises and organizing them into some kind of mentally digestible arrangement. Comparing the very real tsunami sweeping away whole villages in minutes to the “wave” of protests sweeping through the Middle East in recent months demonstrates this. It shows the concern we all feel to not merely jump from worry about one disaster to the next, as the headlines bid us to, but to stay focused, to remember, to not be swept away.

A 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, of roughly the same magnitude as last week’s in Japan, caused European philosophers to reconsider all their previous assumptions. The problem was how such disaster was possible in a world created and governed by God. It has often been said that the earthquake compromised the very structural integrity of previous philosophy. The earth shook—and everything had to be re-thought.

Connected by remote to the farthest reaches of our global village, we in the 21st century have no such luck afforded to those in the 18th century. Those of us with a major news outlet saved as the homepage on our Internet browser have to face disaster multiple times a day. Try to imagine a non-computerized version of this, someone passing a paper before your eyes with large-print, every time you go do something. Open the refrigerator: CLEVELAND RESIDENTS STILL REELING AFTER GANG RAPE OF GIRL, 11. Pour milk into cereal: MELTDOWN ALERT AT JAPAN REACTOR. It’s a nice morning. Maybe step onto the porch, smell the fresh air, watch a squirrel bounding up a tree: 103 ORPHANS CAUGHT IN MIDDLE OF SOUTH SUDAN FIGHTING. Enjoy your breakfast.

Not only is our exposure to disaster more frequent and more immediate than in 1755—think of the unbearably crisp photos you’ve seen from Japan in recent days—but similarly augmented is our individual responsibility to grapple with such realities. The unenviable task of coming up with a conception of the universe in which earthquakes and tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns make sense is now all of ours, not just the philosophers. We have no such comfort of being told what things mean, but face the burden ourselves. I imagine my response of instantaneous and thorough depression is not as unpopular as it sometimes seems—for instance, when walking on St. Laurent, I see everyone enjoying the nearly Spring-ish weather, populating cafés and burger joints, and driving cars, apparently in total ignorance of the fact that the ground under their feet has the power to move.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the same agents who bring us news of disaster from the corners of the Earth are the same ones who, next week, bid us to turn our attention elsewhere. The responsibility to sustain sympathies over weeks, to continue to care, is the reader’s alone. “Hell today, gone tomorrow,” media critic Jack Shafer has written on Slate.com.

And still the disasters continue to strike. Our private mental compilations of disasters witnessed, history experienced, continues to lengthen. We are forced to grapple with these realities over a morning cup of coffee. We have no idea what to do.

Yuki Edano, the Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan, has this advice for readers of the New York Times: “At this point, there has been no major change to the level of radiation leakage outside … so we’d like everyone to respond calmly.” Good luck.

I’m among the vast majority of McGill students that don’t own cars. It’s not something I think about a lot, and when I do, it’s to reflect on just how relaxing it is cruising the sidewalks rather than struggling to decipher unintelligible parking signs (what kind of city has parking signs that are only comprehensible if you have both a Rosetta stone and a calendar?).

This past summer though, I went back home to Vancouver and got a job approximately a 35-minute drive from my house. Six days a week, I would wake up at 7 a.m. and try to avoid rush hour traffic in order to be on time. As the summer wore on and I cared less and less about renting out RVs to gawking tourists, I began to cut things close in the mornings. By the end of the summer, I was no longer living dangerously. I was getting stuck in full-blown rush hour traffic, leaving me in peril of being spectacularly late.

There was a way around this gridlock, however. At one point, a two-lane highway converges for a tunnel. Where you’re supposed to merge is clearly demarcated but the winning strategy, in my, and some other unscrupulous commuters’ eyes, was to wait as long as possible and bypass the 100-200 cars that had followed the rules of the road and waited their turn.

When I left my house at an appropriate time, I’d looked with disdain on these lawbreakers, but suddenly I was one of them.

People who had waited were understandably upset when I cut them off. Sometimes they’d box me out, other times they’d just glare into my rearview mirror and honk. Once, a guy let me think he was letting me in and then rocketed forward, inches from my side mirror, flashing me the dirty bird. Needless to say, I called in late for work, citing “car trouble,” and menacingly followed him around for the next half hour as he anxiously circled his workplace.

By living in this pedestrian-friendly city, I’ve excised road rage from my life. Unfortunately, a malignant habit has arisen to replace it—Internet rage.

See, this past summer wasn’t all work. I found the time to start playing a board game called Settlers of Catan. Basically four players attempt to slit each other’s throats (economically, not physically) on an imaginary island until one player wins. It’s about as nerdy as it sounds, but also incredibly addictive. I played a lot in the summer, faced withdrawal during the fall semester, and then went back at it with a passion over the winter break. Faced with the prospect of the shakes once again come January, I downloaded an online version of the game. It wasn’t the same as sitting down with four friends and doing it live, but it was as close as I was going to get.

Now, Catan’s a game of both strategy and luck. It’s a little like poker in that sense. So, it’s very conceivable for a worse player to beat a better one. And, also like poker, it’s not uncommon for a good player (who’s an asshole) to berate a lucky beginner for their poor play. Let me say one thing in my defence: I would never, ever say, in person, the kind of things I say anonymously on the Internet but, for some reason, the combination of rage and the mask of technological anonymity combine to make me the biggest jerk on the planet.

I usually begin fairly innocuously: “Hey, nice move buddy,” I mentally sneer. But soon it escalates. An F-bomb here, an F-bomb there, and it’s off to the races. Soon others berate me for my immaturity. That’s when I usually bring their mothers in.

Being anonymous on the Internet gives me the same feeling of invincibility I always felt in my car, but more intensely. Recently however, I learned that both my copy editor and a friend’s mother (Mrs. Wilkens) also play the game online. Next time I start chastising an anonymous Catan player, I’m going to imagine Mrs. Wilkens’s face reacting to the filth spewing from my keyboard.

I wish I had my car back.

If given the opportunity to be James Franco for a day, would you take it?

He’s creative, sensitive, prolific, and intellectual, but at the same time fashionably disaffected, hinting at a slightly tortured artistic soul. He makes risqué films that screen at Cannes and plans to direct William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy adaptations. He gets his stories published, but not in stuffy magazines. He got an Oscar nomination and hosted this year’s ceremony, but didn’t seem to give a shit about it. He has art exhibitions that blur the line between real and surreal. He plans on having a bar mitzvah, but he’s not weirdly spiritual, either. You can never really tell if he’s being serious or ironic. The man is a mystery.

He has played a comic book villain (in Spiderman), a masculine 1950s movie star (James Dean), a gay Beat poet (Allen Ginsberg in Howl), and an imperiled mountain climber (in 127 Hours). To show that he doesn’t take himself too seriously he did a stint on General Hospital. To show that he does take his craft seriously he takes acting classes. He controls all his facial movements, including his sexy wink. He has a beautiful girlfriend without an artificially enhanced chest.

Some of the top searches in the James Franco category on Google are “James Franco genius,” “James Franco quotes,” “James Franco awesome laugh,” and “James Franco hot pics.” He also moonlights as a college student—NYU for filmmaking, Columbia and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, a small poetry program in North Carolina, Yale for a PhD in English, and Rhode Island School of Design to do artsy stuff. He is the true embodiment of the postmodern pastiche—and he knows it.

If James Franco had been born a couple centuries earlier, for example, in 16th-century Italy, he would have been called a “Renaissance Man,” along with Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo. The question is how Franco’s achievements rank beside these predecessors. Are his accomplishments actually significant in comparison to theirs, or are they simply evidence of how unaccomplished the rest of society has become?

There is no doubt that Franco is a sex symbol. He is the type of guy who would happily have a meaningful, emotional conversation with a girl the next morning, while whipping her up a home-cooked breakfast. People have been known to stare at a particular video of James Franco for hours on end. The clip in question is just him taking a bite out of a burger, then turning around and giving his signature wink. You just can’t help feeling happier after watching it a few times. It’s easy to picture a Pineapple Express-esque scene taking place just minutes before, in the comfort of someone’s living room.

In the end, the thing about James Franco that makes him so appealing (despite your overwhelming jealousy) is that he seems like he could be your friend. He is the type of person with whom you can easily picture yourself having a casual conversation, finding common interests, or just hanging out. Despite his many and diverse successes, James Franco represents the modern day everyman and people seem to love him for it.

McGill Tribune

Even to Canucks themselves, Canadian politics can be a vague procession of events that occur in another dimension; somewhere between an ice rink on Jupiter and a Tim Hortons at the end of the universe sits our Parliament. There, people discuss the two topics urgent to the Canadian agenda: our temperament and the weather. Being nice is essential to our self-image, and so is surviving winter. Maintaining pleasantry in 40 degrees below zero is the paramount objective of our leaders.

Assured that our government is happily plugging away in la-la land, we spend our time looking below the 49th parallel to comment—respectfully—on our neighbours’ woeful ignorance of their own state of affairs. We chuckle—politely—as the majority of them struggle to name a single Supreme Court justice or pinpoint Iraq on a map. We enjoy how their right wing satirizes itself, and find it amusing that some think they actually have a left wing. But the irony here is striking: we whole-heartedly delve into Americans’ political system and criticize their own ignorance of it while completely ignoring our own. Rarely do we look into the nitty gritty of our own political machine. And why should we? Our leaders seem to be doing fine up there, somewhere … whereever they are. Canada, relatively speaking, is doing great. Our banks rocked it during the recession, our income inequality is relatively low, our cities consistently rank among the top places in the world to live, and we continue to find really valuable stuff to sell in our massive north.

But things might not always look so rosy, and when they start to pale—or to keep them from paling—we should know who’s got the power to do what. And so to properly tackle low voter turnout (which is decreasing every year), there’s political enthusiasm to re-spark. And no, I don’t mean standing in front of Parliament holding a poster with a bad pun and yelling obscenities (though that could count as well). I mean realizing that the issues our government deals with are complicated, diverse, and—dare I say it—just as interesting as those in the U.S. of A. Sure our television shows don’t bake them into tasty partisan pastries for a partisan crowd to gobble up, either in fierce agreement (Bill O’Reilly) or raucous laughter (Jon Stewart). But they hold intrigue without this sort of decoration. Between the Canadian warship currently lingering on the Libyan shore, to the Conservatives’ push to gain support through a tough-on-crime plan that makes most social scientists shudder, you’ll find something that sparks your attention—and hopefully a reaction.

If you’re still not convinced, watch the parliamentary debates. Seriously. While U.S. congressional “debates” may suffer from C-Span Comatose Syndrome, Canuck leaders barely stop short of throwing tomatoes.  As nice as we all are, it’s not all hugs and high-fives when it comes down to the big decisions. The kind you don’t want to disagree with in hindsight. We should engage in these debates now, while the decisions haven’t yet been made. It simply comes down to directly shaping the world you’re living in. That, and bringing our galaxy-abolished government back to a place where we can stare it in the face, and maybe even make it blink.

mccord-museum.qc.ca

ericsquire.com

McGill was built with the help of a number of generous patrons. Perhaps one of the most interesting of these benefactors is Sir William Macdonald, a man who made his fortune in the tobacco industry. Macdonald grew up on a farm in rural Prince Edward Island, and donated a large portion of his money to McGill in order to improve the quality of education. This funding eventually led to the creation of buildings on campus like the Macdonald Engineering Building and the Macdonald Physics Building (later renamed the Schulich Library). He was also behind the creation of Macdonald Campus in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, as he had particular interest in agriculture.

In addition to his philanthropy, Macdonald was an odd fellow. He lived a quiet, reclusive existence, never married, and spent little money on himself. Macdonald, despite growing rich on the tobacco industry, could not stand people smoking around him. Whenever he was spotted entering the Physics Building, it is said that warnings would immediately circulate among the students, who would hurriedly extinguish their cigarettes and throw open the windows to air out the rooms before Macdonald arrived. If he caught anyone smoking, he could often be heard exclaiming “Disgusting habit!” and students would know they had just received the ultimate admonishment.

Tobacco’s involvement in the university’s expansion did not end with Macdonald. During the Depression, McGill was in desperate need of funds and resorted to creating a brand of cigarettes that came in packs of 10s, 20s, 25s, and 50s. They were emblazoned with the McGill logo, and half of the proceeds from their sales facilitated the construction of the Arthur Currie Memorial Gym.