Misogynist
photographer!?
I’m continually amazed by the way in which your photographer, Jason Felker, photographs women. While the men (whether transgendered or not) photographed by Jason always look about as good as one feels they can look, the women almost always come out looking slightly grotesque. Distorted angles are almost always used when Felker photographs women, and the results are usually extremely unflattering.
Whether Jason Felker is a misogynist or whether he simply has a very eccentric view of female beauty, I cannot say. But the women you feature deserve better.

I urge you to hire a second photographer and to divide assignments along gender lines. Felker takes excellent photographs of men (of all sexes), but he should only photograph women who want to come out looking like their worst nightmare.
-Liad Wood

Tongue trooper defence
Brent Tyler of Alliance Quebec should get to know his enemy, the Chartre de la langue française, a bit better [“Tongue goons bully more ethnics,” Aug. 8]. He doesn’t realize that they only act on complaints received, so he should stop speaking of “overzealous tongue troopers.”

I’ve made similar complaints myself against anglo businesses (and I don’t know what an “ethnic merchant” is, by the way) where clerks have had an impossible time understanding me when I speak French, all the while accepting my bilingual money.

Of course, people will retort that they’re in their own store and I could do business elsewhere. Well sure, that’s exactly what merchants say in the southern U.S. who refuse to serve black people.
-S. Auclair

I’ve always believed in the power of words. Indeed words, and the manner with which one can assemble them to obtain the maximum effect, have been at the centre of my professional life for most of the last 25 years.

But it didn’t take that experience to know exactly what Kristian Gravenor’s intentions were in his story about La Commission de protection de la langue française, when, in just a few sentences, he tried to impress readers by piling up such words as, “...cops have threatened two more allophone[s],” “...harassing ethnic merchants,” “government threats,” “fear of reprisals,” and the ever powerful and image-laden “...72-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor [was] dealt similar threatening government missives.”

I believe, Mr. Gravenor, that you should flee as fast as you can this sordid country before it starts setting up camps, or better yet, take a Valium and smell the roses.
-André Dalpé Gignac

Ageing Alliance
Kristian Gravenor tells us in last week’s issue how the president of Alliance Quebec writes “fuck-off-and-die” letters to the Commission de protection de la langue française.

I fear he does this out of envy. Alliance Quebec members are so old that they can only do the latter activity and not the former.
-Chris Dye

Nutrition tip
I guess that it would be hard for women in their childbearing years to get enough folic acid if their only dietary source was white bread [Angel, Aug. 8]. Fortunately, there are many folate-rich foods to choose from, including strawberries, black beans, spinach, oranges, cantaloupes, and whole-grain breads.

Do we really need fortified pasta? I don’t think so!
-Anne Chudobiak

Italian
stereotyping
Yes indeed, Italians are the bull’s eye target of the media and the elite [“Targeting Italians,” The Kristian Perspective, Aug. 8]. Worst of all, Hollywood and the print media consistently pile up crime at our collective Italian-American doorsteps. Be it a Hollywood script with pseudo Italian-American gangsters created out of a typewriter ribbon, or the usual press’s buzz words like “Mob,” they’ll make sure that we recognize an alleged wrongdoer has an Italian name.

In reality, despite our large numbers in North America, we only account for .02 per cent of all crime.
-Walter Santi, Bloomingdale, IL