Paul Gross's film Passchendaele opened this weekend, but when the 90th anniversary of the battle was marked in 2007, Canada had a limited presence at the ceremonies -- especially compared to the attention lavished on Vimy several months earlier.

The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders offered this perspective on Passchendaele -- to me, a synonym for "senseless slaughter;"  Canada would suffer 16,000 casualties -- in a July 12, 2007 article:

A catch-up post, as I am still in a state of post-election torpor.

From the Oct. 16 Globe and Mail:

Ending months of speculation, CBC management has confirmed that it is not renewing the contracts of two of its star, veteran foreign correspondents, Don Murray in London and Patrick Brown in Beijing.

I caught the tail end of Zombie Walk 2007 last year (see this post  for deets).

Zombie Walk 2008 starts at 3 p.m. today at the pit in Trinity Bellwoods Park and works its way south to Queen, east to Bathurst and then north to Bloor.

At the tail end of my post from last year, I wrote this:

PPS

An extremely visual event like this, and the only place I can a photo gallery is on Flickr (TheStar.com only had one picture). Score one for user-generated content.

I note the following in the Globe and Mail from Saturday:

To see more pictures of Greg Dalgetty's zombie transformation and to submit your own pictures of the Toronto Zombie Walk, visit globeandmail.com/arts.

Actually, the transformation photos are worth checking out.

Some people do an amazing job on their look and costumes for this event. Bravo!

As a further aside, the Toronto After Dark film festival kicked off on Friday night  at the Bloor Cinema and goes to Oct. 24:

Undead Tales
There’s plenty for zombie and vampire fans to sink their teeth into with these five unique tales of the undead causing mayhem for the living:

• Let the Right One In (Opening Gala)
• I Sell The Dead (Closing Gala)
• Kevin Tenney’s Brain Dead (6:30 p.m. Sunday)
• Trailer Park of Terror (9:15 p.m. Sunday)
• Netherbeast Incorporated

Marx's Das Kapital makes a comeback

From the AP story on globeandmail.com:

Some Germans seem to be seeking solace in the words of their countryman Karl Marx amid the global financial crisis - to the delight of a small academic publisher.

The Karl-Dietz Verlag has sold 1,500 copies of Marx's Das Kapital this year, making the annotated edition of the dense text an unlikely hit for the Berlin publisher. It moved 200 in September, as many as it used to sell in a year.

"It's definitely in vogue right now," said Joern Schuetrumpf, the publisher's director. "The financial crisis brought us a huge bump."