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The old hacks who make The Ex-Press the glorious, old-school rag that it is.

After a life in news, one last plea

People: Tribute to Ron Rose (1919-2015) A veteran newspaper man files a final message to readers: "Do what you can to stem the unedited and often unsourced outpourings in the flood of social media." By Rod Mickleburgh We said farewell late last month to a good man. Part of the great generation that survived the Depression, World War Two, the tinderbox of the Cold War and Liberace, Ron Rose was part of this crazy world for nearly a century, falling just four years short of the big One Zero Zero. But that’s not why so many of us gathered to pay our respects. We were there because Ron Rose, besides being the most gracious and generous of individuals, was a newspaper man. It was a gathering of the clans, a celebration of someone whose working life as a knight of the keyboard stretched back to the Depression. Ron Rose was history. When he started at the Vancouver Sun as a copy boy in 1938, he reported for work in the celebrated Sun Tower, then topped by the paper’s majestic neon ...

Pick a Pepper, Stuff a Pepper

Food: Recipe - Cheesy Stuffed Poblanos While stuffing peppers is a cross-cultural tradition, Mexico's passion for stuffing the warmly flavoured poblano is close to perfection By Louise Crosby For eons, people have been stuffing vegetables – with rice and other grains, beans, meats, cheeses. Think of eggplant stuffed with spiced lamb and pine nuts, pale green zucchini stuffed with ground beef and rice and cooked in a yogurt or tomato sauce, mushrooms stuffed with bread crumbs and cheese, squash stuffed with quinoa and feta. It’s a traditional and creative way to liven up a vegetable, make it the star attraction, in fact, and to pack more nutrition into your meal. Peppers are a natural for stuffing because they’re hollow, and in Mexico, chiles rellenos – poblano peppers filled with cheese, dipped in an egg batter, and fried – are a favourite food. America’s Test Kitchen The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook played with that idea by first microwaving the peppers for a ...

Robert Carlyle boards new train as director

People: Robert Carlyle Robert Carlyle gets back to his Glaswegian roots and takes a bit off the top as a barber with Barbicide on his mind, and a mother who loves a good game of bingo as much as a grisly murder in The Legend of Barney Thomson. By Katherine Monk VANCOUVER, BC – Everyone’s been asking him about Trainspotting 2, but Robert Carlyle has more on his plate than a plan to reprise the role of Begbie in an as-yet-to-be scripted sequel to Danny Boyle’s breakout film about heroin addicts. For the past few years, he’s been living in Vancouver playing Mr. Gold in the successful Disney TV series Once Upon a Time, and before that, he was Dr. Nicholas Rush in the B.C.-shot SGU: Stargate Universe. He says he loves Canada’s west coast. But after making his directorial debut with the Glasgow-shot black comedy Barney Thomson, released in theatres this week, Carlyle says he’s looking at a tough decision somewhere down the road. He may want to hang around town. Even ...

Peanuts, Macbeth, a big whale and an evil car hit home entertainment

Entertainment: @home releases for March 8 Embrace the joy of Snoopy or explore the many faces of man-made evil as Michael Fassbender cuts to the bone in Macbeth, James McAvoy breathes life into Frankenstein and James Brolin tries to stop a killer car   By Katherine Monk We love you, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (4/5) The hand-drawn essence of Charles Schulz’s iconic comic strip comes through with flying colors in this gentle transition to digital from Ice Age director Steve Martino. Martino and the animators realized they didn’t need to reinvent the characters for a modern audience by making Charlie Brown look like a human kid, or turn Snoopy into a drooling lump of pixelated fur. They went for the feel of the source material: ever roving between pre-teen daydream, birthday party bliss and existential angst – with an emphasis on the latter, because it’s that quiet ache of looming adulthood that makes Peanuts the pop culture monolith it is. Charlie ...
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London Has Fallen and it can’t get up

Movie review: London Has Fallen Gerard Butler returns as the bulletproof bodyguard who slays terrorists, butchers an American accent and saves the free world before breakfast
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Movie review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Movie review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot WTF: What the Tina Fey? It's a feature-length Liz Lemon playing a war correspondent in Afghanistan

Macaroni and Beef Casserole: Comfort food gets all haute cuisine

Food: Recipe - Macaroni and Beef Casserole As the modern food revolution continues to make the exotic feel everyday, it's also taking old standards such as the humble macaroni casserole and turning them into something that's not just comforting, but au courant By Louise Crosby Pick up a food magazine, check the Internet, or tune into your television and you’ll notice that the conversation around food these days is quite sophisticated – it’s all about cooking like the pros and how-to videos, organics and heritage crops, locally-grown and artisanal foods, and sustainable, small-scale farming. Ingredients that were once exotic are now everyday, there’s nothing the home cook can’t do. So a dish that harkens back to the 1950s and ’60s and calls to mind something Betty Draper might have taken to a neighbourhood pot luck in Mad Men, had she been friendlier, might strike you as passé. But you’d be wrong if you thought this Macaroni and Beef Casserole, developed by ...

Falling apart at The Citizen

The Sick Days: Part 21 - Hot and Bothered Moving from The Toronto Star to The Ottawa Citizen was supposed to reduce symptom-inducing stress, but once installed in the national newsroom, Shelley Page starts feeling like a lobster By Shelley Page While I never told the editors who hired me at the Ottawa Citizen that I had a serious chronic illness, I confessed my secret to the doctor performing the employer-mandated medical exam. I had to. Otherwise, my blood would betray me. A routine white blood cell count (WBC) would reveal I suffered from neutropenia and leukopenia — chronically low numbers of white blood cells which left me highly susceptible to infection. Lupus often attacks and destroys these disease fighting, workhorses of the immune system. A normal WBC is between 4,500 and 11,000, mine hovers around 1,800. If the doctor requested more sophisticated tests, she might also have seen extremely high levels of anti-double-stranded DNA antibodies, which ...
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Loved The Danish Girl, Hated Lili

Movie review: The Danish Girl How Alicia Vikander's performance as a wife who loses her husband to another woman proves there's more to being a female than donning silk frocks and fancy shoes

The Ben Affleck Batman Smackdown!

Superheroes: Who Makes the Best Batman? Batman vs. Superman - Dawn of Justice may be getting all the attention, but Ben Affleck has already fought the first battle just by taking on the role of the truly human superhero beneath the cowl. By Chris Lackner Holy happenstance Batman! Who could have predicted Ben Affleck would give us the best caped crusader yet? That’s not one of The Riddler’s tricky questions. The supporting evidence was there long before Affleck’s greying, embittered, flinty-eyed Bruce Wayne showed up in trailers for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Affleck’s initial casting sent fans and pundits into an uproar. (Apparently, two Oscar wins doesn’t give you enough cred to don a cape). Ahead of the film’s March 23 debut, we examine why the actor’s critics were blind as a bat: Hollywood’s Dynamic Duo: Affleck was tailor-made for this part. He’s been playing Batman to Matt Damon’s Superman ever since Good Will Hunting. Damon has always ...