Arts

Arts Kids Lighter

What Is Harry Potter Up To Now?

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Or more accurately… what is author J. K. Rowling up to?

The answer is: a mysterious new website called Pottermore.

A few weeks before the launch of the final Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2), Rowling put up an intriguing website at www.pottermore.com.

She also began a Twitter account, twitter.com/pottermore, which has more than 75,000 followers.

It offers no clues as to what the website will be about.

It merely has the words “Pottermore” and “Coming soon…” with J. K. Rowling’s signature.

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Arts

Jane Austen Manuscript Goes Up For Auction

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Jane Austen wrote some very famous novels in the early 1800s. Pride and Prejudice is perhaps her best-known book.

Although she published just six novels, she has millions of fans all over the world. They adore her novels about romance and society.

An extremely rare manuscript of an unfinished novel, written in Jane Austen’s own handwriting, is going to be sold in England.

There are 68 pages, part of a novel called The Watsons. Jane Austen never finished it, possibly because her father died. She wrote the pages in 1804, when she was 29 years old.

Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was not published until 1811.

The Watsons pages are written in her neat and tiny handwriting with many edits in the margins. The manuscript was divided by Austen into 11 booklets.

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Arts

Group Of Seven Art To Travel To England

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The Group of Seven was a very famous group of Canadian painters.

Canadians are very proud of the work they did. Many Canadians feel their paintings captured the Canadian landscape in a very special way.

In October, 124 Group of Seven paintings and sketches will go to England to be the stars of a special exhibit called Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven.

The art will be shown in London, England. The paintings are very famous in Canada and are mostly outdoor scenes, many of them featuring Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park in Ontario.

The paintings are very important because they started a new trend in Canadian art.

However, the Group of Seven is not well known in other countries.

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Arts

Mona Lisa’s Burial Site Discovered

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Arguably, the most famous painting in the world is Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. There is a lot that is mysterious about the painting, from her hint of a smile (what was she thinking about?) to the relationship between Mona Lisa and DaVinci (were they ever dating?) to her real name (is it Lisa Gherardini or Lisa Giocondo?).

One of the unsolved mysteries has always been where she was buried. Well, experts now think they know.

An art expert in Italy, Giuseppe Pallanti, poured over thousands of ancient documents. He said they showed that Mona Lisa was buried in the Convent of St. Orsula in Florence, Italy.

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Arts Lighter Sports

Sleep In A Ping Pong Paddle

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In China, they’re planning to build some very funny-shaped buildings.

One is a hotel shaped like a giant ping pong paddle. It even has a huge ping pong ball out front! The building will be 150 metres tall. The windows in each room of the hotel will be round, forming the ping pong paddle’s rough texture. The “handle” of the hotel will be an observation deck, where visitors can look out over the city of Huainan, China.

Another strange building they are planning is a stadium shaped like a football.

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Arts Politics

Canada Rocks 4 Japan

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Since the earthquake in Japan last month, people around the world have wanted to help. Many people have helped by donating money, clothing, or food.

Artists in Canada and the United States have come up with ways to raise money for Japan. There have been many music concerts in both countries. Recently in Toronto there were three: Canada Rocks 4 Japan, Hope Blossoms Benefit Concert, and Eternal Sunrise Japan Benefit.

A “benefit concert” means that the musicians perform for free, and most of the money made from ticket sales goes to Japanese families affected by the earthquake.

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Arts

Textile Museum Showing Intricate Works In Thread

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Toronto has many wonderful museums. Most people are familiar with the Royal Ontario Museum (the one with the dinosaurs!). But did you know there is a shoe museum with shoes from all through the ages? And a ceramic museum that displays beautiful pottery from many countries?

One of our most interesting museums is the Textile Museum of Canada. The word “textile” means “cloth,” or “fabric.”

There are many beautiful works of art that have been made out of, or painted on, or sewn into fabric. The Textile Museum displays the work of talented artists who happen to work in fabric.

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Martin Edmonds "acting" ill
Arts Health

Acting Like A Real Pain

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When someone is studying to become a doctor, he can learn a lot from professors and textbooks. But there are some things he will have to actually experience, in order to learn them.

Like diagnosing a patient, for instance. Figuring out what’s wrong with someone when he comes into the emergency room complaining of a “sore stomach” or a “severe headache.” Those two symptoms could have many different causes—anything from a gas bubble to appendicitis.

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Arts Entertainment

Young African Pianist Achieves His Dreams

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As a boy, Mehdi Ghazi had a dream. He wanted to be a classical pianist.

But he lived in Algeria, a northern African nation torn apart by a long-standing civil war between government forces and Islamic rebels. The war had shut down the music conservatory. And western classical music was nearly unheard of there—in fact, some called it “the devil’s music.”

Ghazi had no piano. He practiced on a keyboard drawn on a sheet of paper. And he had no teacher, so he taught himself to play.

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Arts

Check out this guy!

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ON NOV. 3, YOU’LL BE ABLE TO CHECK THIS GUY OUT. LITERALLY. His name is Dr. Anthony Hutchison, and he’s part of the Toronto Public Library’s “human library event.” Hutchison is one of 60 “human books” you can check out, […]

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