With parliament prematurely prorogued and a spate of wild winter weather dubbed "Snowmaggedon", Canada isn't currently as awesome a country to live in as that Economist cover with the moose wearing sunglasses made it out to be.
What happened to her in the doubles match at Wimbledon – when she served a spate of wild double faults, was helped away from the court, then was spirited off the premises in her playing kit, wrapped in a towel and declining to talk to the media – might never be properly explained.
The 2008 crash made a once-expensive country seem affordable, and the 2010 volcanic eruption reminded the world of its wild beauty, as did a spate of films and TV series shot there, such as Game of Thrones.
But some passengers are angry at the spate of delays.
After a spate of performing animals – wild ducks and Russian dogs among them – comes a veritable brattery of child actors.
The province, which concealed the emergence of the SARS virus for four months in late 2002 and early 2003, has not acknowledged a flu problem in birds despite a spate of deaths of wild birds and backyard chickens in Hong Kong near the Guangdong border.
With a spate of incidents involving not-quite-domesticated wild animals fresh in the news, including the mauling of tiger trainer and illusionist Roy Horn, the U.S. Senate has passed a bill cracking down on the burgeoning trade in exotic big cats.
Not least, he did so by building a specialty division, Paramount Vantage, that delivered a spate of awards contenders — including "Babel," "Into the Wild," and, with Miramax, "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men" — only to shut it down quickly.
Interesting piece by A. O. Scott in the Times (online today, in print Sunday) about a recent spate of children's movies, such as Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are," in which "the regressive infantilism of grown-up comedies and action pictures is answered by a grave precocity".
This visionary disposition shows affinities with two contrasting poets associated with the north-east, Barry MacSweeney and Gillian Allnutt, and, like them, draws on northern landscapes ("It is a wild fucking kingdom"), such as Simonburn near the line of the Roman wall, "the runnels in spate at Alston" and "Gateshead the Golden".
