5 Father's Day gift ideas that are thoughtful and useful
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Okay, maybe your dad is more like MacGruber, but there's really nothing that can bring the MacGyver out in men of a certain age better than a Swiss Army knife. Armed with the Ranger from Victorinox (one of the two companies licensed to make knives for the Swiss military — and essentially anyone else who wants to buy one), he'll be prepared for anything.
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Sure, he'll probably just use it to open bottles and pick corn out of his teeth, but he will also do so with full confidence that in the event of calamity, he'll be fully equipped to spring into action and save the world.
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The Ranger has 21 built-in tools. Are we going to list them all? Yes, we are.
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Blade, small
Nail file
Nail cleaner
Metal saw
Metal file
Corkscrew
Multipurpose hook
Screwdriver 2.5 mm
Toothpick
Can opener
Screwdriver 3 mm
Scissors
Blade, large
Tweezers
Chisel 4 mm
Bottle opener
Screwdriver 6 mm
Wire stripper
Wood saw
Keyring
Reamer, punch and sewing awl
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How long does it take for an album to be considered a classic? Ten years is a nice round number, so let's go with that. By that measure, Vampire Weekend's third LP, Modern Vampires of the City, certainly qualifies.
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In a retrospective essay marking the album's 10th anniversary in 2023, Stereogum's Chris DeVille described Modern Vampires as both a 'masterpiece' and 'one of history's sunnier death-obsessed records'. That's because it strikes the right balance between darkness and levity and between experimentalism and accessibility.
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By 2013, Vampire Weekend had managed to divide the music-critic blogosphere, with many finding the Brooklyn band led by singer Ezra Koenig too preoccupied with the minute tribulations of the privileged, too indebted to African pop, and entirely too precious by half. With Modern Vampires of the City, the group won over the naysayers by shrugging off all preconceived notions and focusing on genuinely brilliant songwriting and innovative production.
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Depending on your budget, this one might be a bit of a splurge, but it's actually a great deal when you consider that a regular Deluxe Reverb amplifier could run you anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 depending on the model.Apart from the price, the major difference between the Tone Master and other Fender Deluxe Reverb amps is that the Tone Master is all-digital, designed to re-create that classic amp sound without tubes. What does this mean for the player? For one thing, it means that the Tone Master models the circuitry and 22-watt power output of an original Deluxe tube amp — but with the added oomph of a high-performance 100-watt digital power amp.
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Globe and Mail
3 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
The Spotlight on Young Chinese Poets at the 26th Berlin Poetry Festival
Berlin, Germany--(Newsfile Corp. - June 30, 2025) - From June 8th to June 14th, 2025, under the invitation of the Haus für Poesie (House of Poetry) in Germany, the Chinese cultural non-profit organisation QiaoDong Archway curated the China section of the 26th Berlin Poetry Festival. Participants included Misty poet Yang Lian, young poets Dai Weina, Li Jing, Yin Zixu, Xu Yi, Zhou You'an, and Yu Zhe, as well as scholar Ma Ke and Zhao Tai, lead vocalist of rock music band Mercader. China's Post 90s Poets Making Their Collective Debut on the International Literary Scene for the First Time To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: Notably, QiaoDong has established a Sino-German Poetry Translation Workshop dedicated to facilitating mutual translation between Chinese and German poets and nurturing a new generation of young translators. The workshop has already achieved remarkable results, which were presented at the Berlin Poetry Festival. Chinese Participants of the 26th Berlin Poetry Festival at the Haus für Poesie To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: On June 8th, Li Jing, Yin Zixu, and Xu Yi participated in the Reading on Green event held at Berlin's Silent Green, organised by the Haus für Poesie. On June 9th, Yin Zixu engaged in a poetry dialogue and mutual translation session with German poet Michel Decar. On June 10th, QiaoDong hosted a translator roundtable on Sino-German poetry translation, featuring Ye Juntao, Jiang Yufeng, Jin Xiaowan, Zou Yousheng, and Sool Park. On June 12th, QiaoDong organised a bilingual poetry reading session. The Chinese readings were presented by Yang Lian, Dai Weina, Ma Ke, Li Jing, Yin Zixu, Xu Yi, Ye Juntao, Zhang Xuemeng, Zhou You'an, and Yu Zhe; the German readings were performed by Ann Cotten, Janin Wölke, Lara Rüter, Mátyás Dunajcsik, and Michel Decar. To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: On June 14th, QiaoDong hosted a Chinese poetry forum at the Akademie der Künste. The discussion featured Zhao Tai, Li Jing, Yin Zixu, Xu Yi, Zhou You'an, and Yu Zhe, with Dai Weina and Yang Lian delivering an introductory and concluding speech. The event highlighted the independence and complexity of contemporary Chinese poetry, articulating its rich potential for multidimensional development. It also offered a concentrated glimpse into China's current poetic ecosystem - where creative practice transcends boundaries of knowledge, profession, age, and social background. People from all walks of life, in every state of being, are passionately pursuing their own poetry. Chinese Participants of the 26th Berlin Poetry Festival at the Haus für Poesie To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: The Chinese program of the 26th Berlin Poetry Festival marked the first collective appearance of Chinese post-1990s poets on the international literary stage. It enabled the world to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese poetry, presented an important aspect of the literary ecology in China's new era, and demonstrated the value and role of Chinese poetry in global cultural exchanges. To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: Company: PathIN e.V. E-mail: pathin@ Contact: Ming Huang (he/him) Website: Source: PathIN e.V. Dateline city: Berlin, Germany
Globe and Mail
5 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Eating the rich? We're barely tweaking the rich
Adrian Lee is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. This weekend, Jeff Bezos enjoyed a very Amazon Basics wedding – not because his nuptials spared any expense, but because they somehow seemed cheap all the same. In a monument to nouveau riche gaudiness, one of the world's wealthiest men spent more than $63-million to be wed in front of hundreds of their nearest and dearest celebrities in Italy's iconic sinking city. Even Thomas Mann couldn't have imagined a Venice holiday this depressing. Predictably, social media had a field day with whatever scraps were tossed our way. There was an ugly wedding invitation that looked inspired by Microsoft Word clip-art; an office-grey carpet lining the ceremony; a fratty foam party held on a superyacht; a shrink-wrapped bride wearing gems the way the rest of us wear sunscreen. What do you get for the oligarch who has it all? Maybe a wedding that wasn't planned by algorithm. If this sort of snideness comes naturally or feels delicious to you, that's because it's the postmodern condition. You have to get your jokes off, you gotta post through it – what other option is there, when you feel powerless? What does a bride wear at the most talked about wedding of the year? Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez's extravaganza dubbed 'wedding of the century' kicks off in Venice Our popular culture has mirrored this, dominated as it has been by comforting critiques of monstrous wealth. The White Lotus may be the signature TV series of our times – a glamourous soap opera exploring the greed and pettiness of the one-per-cent – but it feels like just about every other show is grappling with, making fun of, or at least displaying the moral vacancy of the very monied: Your Friends and Neighbors, The Righteous Gemstones, And Just Like That, Loot, Big Little Lies. So many people are trying to skewer the rich, it's a marvel that Canada's economy hasn't been fixed by all the demand for lumber. But the Bezos wedding's brazen extravagance is precisely the signal that ridiculing the wealthy and powerful, who seem to have immunized themselves from shame, isn't having its intended effect. And while The White Lotus earns plaudits for its social commentary, its only measurable real-world impact is driving more demand for the luxury tourism it lampoons. When pop culture is telling us that it's good enough to generate nothing more than a 'Ha! Got 'em!', satire and sarcasm feels increasingly like an impotent response. Take, as a more recent example, the HBO movie Mountainhead. Written by Jesse Armstrong – whose show Succession made him the poet laureate of disaffected wealth – the manic parody of Silicon Valley overlords succumbs to the growing instinct for erecting and knocking down paper-thin caricatures of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg. Calling Mountainhead a send-up of tech billionaires is like saying Sharknado contains subtle wisdom about ocean safety. Unless you weren't aware they might see themselves as demigods – the hopped-up uber-rich accessing geopolitical power? Could you imagine? – the movie plays like a reaffirming smugness generator for the already-converted: A couple hours where you get to feel a little superior amid the bleakness, letting you think that knowing winks are sufficient. Satire should expose absurdities through art, but when the real world is even more absurd, it's no wonder that modern institutions of political commentary have felt defanged. The Onion has lost its bite. Stephen Colbert, once at the vanguard of sending up the right, has since become a smiling valet to the A-list. The Daily Show and John Oliver's Last Week Tonight are pulpits for their own flock. Comedy in these contexts was meant to make emperors feel nude; Today, it feels like just another doughy offering amid all the bread and circuses. As David Foster Wallace said in a 1993 interview: 'Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff's mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do?" We're no closer to answering his question, three decades later. We scramble for the cheap calories of quick catharsis against easy villains, or for yet another self-protective layer of detached irony, when the braver place to be is in uncomfortable conflict with the world as it is. It's easy to mock the cartoonishly wealthy Bezos's garish tastes – but that doesn't sit with the hard question of how, exactly, one person could get so rich in the first place. Class critiques miss their mark when people can decide they're always about other, richer people – no one is more other than Jeff Bezos – so our culture's most facile ones often fail as a result. 'Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own,' said the Gulliver's Travels satirist Jonathan Swift, 'which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.' So let's dare to offend more, or at least resist the easy laugh. Making fun of Bezos's taste level might be fun – but it's not doing anything.
CTV News
15 hours ago
- CTV News
Polish pride takes the stage in Greece
Magda Jhagru and Chris Malkiewicz from Iskry Dance Ensemble talk about representing Canada at an international festival in Greece.
