Maclean's

What's causing this crazy weather?

LAST MAY, WHEN ten inches of soggy snow fell on Sydney, Nova Scotia, even the most pious citizens cast reproachful, Job-like glances heavenward. The unexpected storm brought the 1964-65 total to exactly twenty feet of snow — two and a half times the normal average. By BILL STEPHENSON

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THE OUTSTANDING CANADIANS OF 1965

THIS WAS A YEAR in which most Canadians seemed reasonably content to have stayed alive, made another dozen payments on the mortgage, and moved a year closer to retirement on bigger pensions. But in November more than seven and a half million of us dutifully overcame ennui and unpleasant weather to vote in an election, fought principally on the question of whether there even ought to be an election.

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THE NEW GASTRONOMY

THERE’S A STORY about a Paris chef who used a meat cleaver to guillotine a man who shook salt on sole bonne femme the chef had already seasoned to perfection. At his murder trial he pleaded that seeing his masterpiece destroyed by an insensate clod had driven him temporarily insane. The jury, with a French appreciation of haute cuisine, speedily acquitted him.

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MACLEAN’S

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HOW THE CHIEF LOST (AND WON) THE ELECTION

IT WAS NOVEMBER 4 — four days before the election — and John Diefenbaker was still acting like a man who was certain of victory. Yet, strangely, his words on that bleak, snowy Edmonton night sounded almost like a valedictory: “Almost a final personal word, ladies and gentlemen,” said the seventy-year-old Chief, leaning intimately toward the microphones in the Jubilee Auditorium. By SUSAN DEXTER

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WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T LIKE TELEVISION COMMERCIALS?

ARE YOU A VICTIM of cultural fatigue? When you wake with that philistine feeling, do you have to force yourself to admire op art. Bob Dylan, the Sassoon cut? Then turn to television commercials for deep, lasting relief. Even in these days when it’s In to be far enough Out, commercials are still stubbornly regarded as unfashionable. By JANICE TYRWHITT

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WILL THE REAL AUTHOR STAND UP-PLEASE!

SOMEWHERE IN North America, possibly starving in a third-floor walk-up in New York, Chicago or Montreal, lives an obscure hack novelist who is called (or has sometimes called himself) Charles Williams. Although he apparently doesn’t know it, Williams is the talk of London town, the embarrassment of that arch circle of contemporary English criticism and the unwitting instrument of one of the biggest leg-pulls in the archives of British literary history. By BARNABY MACLEOD

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MACLEAN’S REPORTS

AN IRISH REBEL ROCKS QUIET OLD McGILL

WHEN HE WALKS through the McGill University campus to the offices of the McGill Daily, Patrick Dominic MacFadden is a rebel striding through an estranged land. The student newspaper’s 29-yearold editor-in-chief doesn’t wear the trademarks of the current radical. By IAN ADAMS