Confederate Wing

A dam good read

Recent U of T grad’s start-up publication, The Beaverton, brings news satire to Canadians

Few things draw attention like a tall, cigar-chomping beaver wearing a tophat. For Laurent Noonan, former editor of the newspaper and U of T improv artist, that’s exactly the point.

Occasionally spotted in costume around Robarts and Sid Smith, Noonan is Editor-in-Chief of The Beaverton, a burgeoning news satire publication in the same vein as The Onion.

After he distributed numerous copies of The Beaverton to a receptive stream of pedestrians this past Monday evening, we sat down with him to discuss the production, presentation, and possibilities of a Canadian news satire publication.

the newspaper: What prepared you for the challenge of creating a news satire publication?

Laurent Noonan: I studied literature and English satire focusing on 18th century works by Swift and Pope, which motivated me a lot. I already had a lot of respect for satire, but after studying it at the university level I felt more at ease with the idea of throwing myself into a project like this. A lot of what we do is silly, but you have to be witty to make it work. As for my experience at the newspaper, what helped me there was building their website. The experience I had designing and maintaining it was what gave me the confidence to start this project. I knew that if I wanted to get this project off the ground, there needed to be a major website in place.

How much of a connection is there between U of T and The Beaverton?

I started networking and using the U of T Career Centre, so a majority of our writers and editors are from U of T, especially UTM because of their writing program. Right now there’s definitely a big U of T connection, but it’s mostly by coincidence. It just so happens that there’s a lot of good, funny writers coming out of U of T.

Editor-in-Chief of the Beaverton, Laurent Noonan (costumed), and Staff Editor Keith Cochrane (far right) bring the Beaverton to the St. George street crowds.

How does The Beaverton develop its content?

Our content is very much a collaborative process, since we pitch ideas to each other and make a lot of decisions on what to produce as a group. A major focus of ours is Canadian content. We had a few articles about Toronto in this issue, and obviously we’re going to focus a lot on Canada. Also, because we’re still trying to build up a readership, jokes that are going to be funny years from now are also very good. It’s just not a good strategy to spend a lot of time working on something that loses its relevance in a month.

Can you talk about the presentation of The Beaverton?

“The idea is to make The Beaverton look really professional. I think some people would expect a joke publication to look weird and goofy. What you really want is for it to look like a real newspaper, using a news format and deadpan style, which is counter-intuitive because you’re almost trying not to be funny. Everything is designed to make The Beaverton seem real, but the story lines and premises are all outrageous. After all, part of the satire is how it plays itself completely straight. In fact we’ve had comments about people reading articles and not knowing that it was fake until a few paragraphs in.

What’s the future look like for The Beaverton?

Right now, we’re trying to get readers across Canada to visit our website. With future prints we’ll look to expand and distribute in cities near Toronto. We’d like to print once per month, but it all depends on whether we can organize distribution, which is something that’s very hard right now. Next to that, we also called The Beaverton “North America’s trusted source of news” since it could branch out and do more US parody and satire, and we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just one market. So though we focus on Toronto and Canada, we also feature generic articles which are pretty funny whether you’re a Canadian or an American, such as the “Comedians make better lovers: study” article, which would still be funny to someone in the US as well.

The Beaverton regularly updates online at www.thebeaverton.com, and print issues can be found with the cigar smoking beaver occasionally appearing near Sid Smith and Robarts.

Shocking new therapy

Electrical stimulation restores voluntary functions of paralysed patients

When it comes to rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, it turns out that neither stem cell treatment nor robotic therapy is as effective as a tiny pulse of electricity. Pioneered by U of T biomaterials and biomedical engineering professor Dr. Milos Popovic in conjunction with Toronto Rehab, this new method of functional electrical stimulation (FES) is currently being used to help restore control and independence to those rendered paralysed by spinal cord injury.

“FES has been extraordinarily successful so far,” said Dr. Popovic. “Up until now, if you had a stroke or spinal cord injury and you went through physio or occupational therapy, you’d see a little bit of improvement, but you’d still be unable to perform many tasks of day-to-day living. What we’re able to do with FES is take patients who are completely disabled and restore their reaching and grasping functions better than anything else out there.”

According to Dr. Popovic, FES is a very complicated process that works by programming electronics to mimic the different biological systems. Once the system has been calibrated, FES can be used to retrain the patient’s brain, often to the point where FES itself is no longer needed. By asking patients to envision themselves performing specific tasks – reaching for a cup, for example – and then stimulating the nervous system with a pulse of electricity, dramatic improvements to the control and operation of their voluntary functions are visible after just 40 one-hour sessions.

“All the stroke and spinal cord patients we work with show signs of improvement,” continued Dr. Popovic. “Some patients show more improvement than others, but all show improvement.”

While FES shows immense promise, Dr. Popovic is keen to make sure that it isn’t understood as a cure. “There are multiple issues to consider when dealing with spinal cord injuries,” he said. “But as regards stroke and spinal cord patients, we can really help a large number of them improve their voluntary functions: eating, drinking, brushing their teeth, and so on. Some people may still need help getting in and out of wheelchairs and bathing and things like that, but they’ll be much more independent than before.”

“What we anticipate is improving their function significantly so that they need less assistance and can perform simple tasks on their own,” Dr. Popovic concluded. For sufferers of spinal cord injury who have spent many years of their lives relying on caregivers to perform even the most basic of actions, a measure of independence means the world to them.

Dullest provincial election ever?

Inside the election your probably slept through

There were no surprises in what is quite possibly Ontario’s dullest general election yet. Dalton McGuinty will serve his third consecutive term as premier of the province, Tim Hudak will feebly lead the opposition as he feebly contended for the premiership, and Andrea Horwath will sit third in Queen’s Park with her plucky yet underwhelming New Democrats.

“One of the differences between the federal and provincial elections in Ontario is that the disproportionality of the youth vote for the NDP was higher in the federal election,” said Nelson Wiseman, associate professor of Political Science at U of T. “I think that’s because a lot of people vote strategically. Voters in the provincial election concluded that the NDP couldn’t overtake the Liberals, so if their priority was to keep the Progressive Conservatives out, they favoured the Liberals over the NDP. Federally, that trend reversed in the end because a lot of people had given up on the Liberals.”

While McGuinty may be premier yet again, his Liberals are no longer a majority force in the Legislative Assembly, albeit just barely. They only earned 53 of the 107 seats available, having lost 17 of the 70 seats earned four years ago. But the results seem more likely to reflect a dwindling faith in McGuinty’s administration, rather than a drastic shift of power into either PC or NDP hands. This may not only indicate a lack of faith in the Liberal platform, but an insidious burgeoning sense of voter apathy as well.

CBC reports that the voter turnout for the election was a record low 49.2%, sinking below even the previous nadir of 52.8% set in 2007′s general election. Only 18.4% of eligible voters chose the Liberals, while more than half of the remaining population evidently chose not to bother.

The reasons for the embarrassing turnout figures are not easy to pinpoint, but the disconnect between civic obligation and political passion could be a key factor. In lieu of strongly identifying with a particular platform to rally behind, those who abstained possibly lacked adequate incentive to vote since no party truly championed their concerns.

For many young voters who tend towards the NDP – that warm and inviting orange tide which less than six months ago swept over the Liberals in the most recent federal election – their performance on Thursday does not at all seem to reflect the palpable momentum they’ve gained on the national scale. They may have gained seven seats and the most influence they’ve had since 1995, but for a party thought to be riding the “Orange Crush,” the results are underwhelming.

With federal successes and provincial stumbling, some curious eyes are now fixed upon the Ontario New Democrats. “The long term questions surrounding the NDP seem to revolve around their base shifting from downtown Toronto toward Brampton and parts of Mississauga and Scarborough,” said Wiseman. “The NPD has generally done well among poor folk, and poor folk increasingly can’t afford to live in the downtown core. They live in the margins of the city, and it was interesting to me that the NDP won a seat in the 905 which they’ve never won before. I think that might be a harbinger of things to come.”

In the meantime, the Liberals have a stranglehold in urban centres while the PCs retained the support of rural areas. And while the NDP collects themselves, one thing remains clear: nobody – neither the government nor its opposition parties – wants another election.