They're Lumberjacks and They're OK

Champion chopper Marie-Chantal Houde. Photo: Owen Egan

Forty teams from Canada and the United States competed in January in the 49th Annual Woodsmen Competition held at Macdonald Campus, and the McGill men's and women's teams can chop, hack and saw better than any of them. With events like the axe throw, the chainsaw, and the standing block chop, all performed in the bitter winter cold, the competition will not be confused with a chess tournament. The Mac lumberjacks and lumberjills took top honours at the McGill event. They followed this up in February by slicing through the competition at the Canadian Intercollegiate Lumberjack Association championships in Truro, N.S., winning both the men's and women's competitions.

Nostalgic former woodspeople will be interested to know that a reunion celebrating the 50th anniversary of McGill's participation in intercollegiate competition will be held at Mac in the fall of 2004. Start honing those hatchets!

A Cad Comes Clean

Rick Marin, BA'83, is upfront about it. He was a cad. He slept with women, then showed them the door. He didn't return phone calls. He used the breakup of his marriage as a pickup line. When one lover asked point-blank if he was seeing other women, he lied.

Still, Marin, a journalist who has written for The New York Times and Newsweek, doesn't think he was too bad a fellow. "This is what a lot of guys go through," he says. "I don't see myself as Mr. Extreme Super Cad." Men and women take markedly different approaches to dating, argues Marin. "Women tend to rush in emotionally. They go from zero to intimacy with the speed of a Ferrari. Guys hang back a bit more. I would argue that's the more appropriate way to behave."

Marin's new book, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, recounts his years on the dating scene, chronicling his entanglements with kinky medical students, pretentious restaurateurs and ex-strippers. Miramax bought the movie rights and Marin will soon be penning the screenplay. Cad the book has been widely reviewed, drawing both praise and scorn.

The Chicago Sun-Times calls it "a voyeuristic guilty pleasure full of laugh-out-loud funny detail." The St. Petersburg Times has another take. "One doubts Marin would know a meaningful relationship if it slapped him in the face. Which is what you want to do while reading this [book]."

"It's a little weird how people are judging me as a human being, instead of just judging the book," says Marin. "Someone once said that all book reviews are autobiographies. With this book, I think that's especially true. Everybody thinks they're an expert when it comes to relationships."

Marin, who studied literature at McGill, originally toyed with writing a novel before settling on a comic memoir. "One thing I've learned is that you don't have to inject symbolism, you don't have to manufacture turning points. It's all there in real life." In Marin's case, the trauma of his father's death helped him realize how much he cared about the last girlfirend he writes about in the book. The two are now engaged.