I Met a Hero

On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending a speaker. Her name is Meagan McGrath and was all over the national news last month after climbing to Everest's Summit. She's young; only a year younger than I am, making her the youngest Canadian on record to climb the highest mountain on every continent. She's also the first member of the Canadian Armed Forces, an aerospace engineer, to do so. In itself, that is remarkable, but it doesn't end there.

After making it to the top and then making her way back down, she explained how she became a hero. She came across someone who was just standing there motionless. After a few moments, she knew that something was wrong with this person. After a communication barrier (She was a Nepalese), and she managed to break through and find out that this person wanted her to get her goggles out to continue up, and to Meagan, it was obvious to her that she wouldn't make her window of opportunity because it was too late in the day at the rate she was going, she she tried to convince the Nepalese woman that she needed to go back down to seek help.

To give some perspective on this, the woman was suffering from a lack of oxygen, and her brain was swelling up and wasn't "all there" because of that lack of oxygen. They have medicine that they can inject to keep the swelling down, but Meagan only had pills. She couldn't really tell where she was, so she managed to flag down a Sherpa who helped her take the woman down to a point where they encountered a seasoned climber who happened to be famous and was familiar with rescue, so he took over from there after injecting her with some medicine. If this encounter wouldn't have happened, this Nepalese woman would have died. Meagan simply couldn't live with the thought of leaving someone die, although apparently it happens quite often, so she had to do something to save this woman. Nobody else had been paying attention and just went past her as if nothing had been wrong; even her own Sherpa.

If that alone wasn't enough excitement, Meagan eventually started to experience a breathing problem and she wanted to get back down to base camp as soon as possible and she didn't have anymore oxygen tanks as she had given her last one to the Nepalese. It was later determined that she had a lung infection.

It's really quite amazing to hear it all come from her. I mean, all of it, from the preparations involved, to the acclimatization, to the climb itself, and finally, to the rescue. You really don't get a sense of how big Everest really is, not even on the IMAX movie, until you see it from someone's very own eyes. She showed us some of the massive crevasses she had to walk over using ladders, which would rightfully scare anyone, possibly even trained tightrope walkers. Some people look at these once and say, "Ok, that's enough! I want to go home!" When you realize that nature takes its course and things melt, such as ladders falling, it's even scarier. One such thing happened. She had crossed a crevasse, and then the next day, the ladder they had walked across had fallen in-between, and only hanging by a rope, and that was due to melting and the crevasse enlarging. Just a night is all it takes. Just amazing. When you think of what it takes to climb Everest, I think these people could easily join the circus, but then again, sometimes you just don't want to do it all over again. Sometimes it's just that one-in-a-lifetime experience that you're searching for.

When the talk was finished, a crowd was surrounding her, and it wasn't until the crowd dispersed enough for me to get to talk to her. I asked her, "What was your favourite part of the whole experience?" This was probably the only question that had given her a serious pause as she thought of what to say. She said, it was the company. Being at the base camp for 2 months, eating food and creating new friends that share a common interest, and then climbing with those friends. It hadn't even occurred to her she was a hero until she arrived at basecamp; and then she was honoured by Nepal for saving the Nepalese woman who was severely ill. A hero indeed.


Here's an article about her: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/0...st-rescue.html

Rental: Bon Cop, Bad Cop

Last summer saw one of the most profitable Canadian movies of all time. Bon Cop, Bad Cop was set to become Canada's buddy cop movie.

It's tough finding something original these days, especially if it's a crime drama, as many cliches fall into place and it's hard to avoid them. So, how do you make a movie that sets it apart from all the rest of these buddy cop movies? You make the crime happen right on the border between two provinces that have trouble getting used to all of their faults. And I mean that literally.

A body is found right on the border between Quebec and Ontario. At first, the two officers assigned to the case on each side of the border refuse to work with each other. And what follows is a wonderful chemistry between Martin Ward (Colm Feore) and David Bouchard (Patrick Huard).

The movie really plays hard on the stereotypes, and the subtitles are an integral part of the movie, as they often switch between English and French midway between their sentences. This makes for a good number of jokes, for both English and French speakers. It's the first bi-lingual movie in Canada, having filmed two scripts; one entirely in english and one entirely in French. Which was used during key moments was only finalized during the editing process. For me, a bi-lingual, the movie was even better because I understood everything. The subtitles aren't always exact, as sometimes they're often part of the joke, so you don't just have the vocal part, but the visual part as well. And believe it or not, it works very well, and the movie is extremely funny.

If you want a good cop movie with some good suspense and comedy thrown in, then rent it. I doubt you will be disappointed.

David Bouchard: [surprised] You speak French?
Martin Ward: No, not really. I had a small gadget installed in my brain and I see subtitles under people when they speak.

Movie Review: Shrek The Third

Shrek was great. I really loved it, and when the second came out, I didn't think it could top it, but I ended up loving it better than the first. There were just so many jokes in references in it to make one's side split in laughter, plus the character had gotten even better.

I was really looking forward to Shrek 3, and I went to see it a few weeks ago. There were a lot of laughs, but there weren't as many as the previous movies. It was as if the characters had been tamed. And they were. They even got along better and didn't get into disagreements or annoy each other like in the previous. Then I read about the fact that it was a different team that had made this one than the first two, which pretty much explains why this one hadn't been as great.

Still, if you're a Shrek fan, you can't go wrong with it. Just don't expect the same level of clever jokes and references.