Canadian history defers to internet cesspool

Blazing Cat Fur, whose name I, in all primness, once took to be a play on "Kaffir", is going to have an opinion on this. I'm a little ashamed to joke about it, but in all seriousness I think there is something to think about here, the future of language, as we become entwined in the darkness of the net:

The Beaver is history.

Thanks in part to the naughty connotations of its title, The Beaver, the 90-year-old Canadian history magazine will be rebranding and relaunching itself as Canada's History this spring.

The inaugural issue will be available on April 1.

The less sexy handle for the Winnipeg-based magazine, with a subscriber base of 50,000 and an estimated readership of more than 350,000, was done intentionally, based on market research that suggested it was time to drop The Beaver.

“In the research, the results showed that people were twice as likely not to pick us up because of the name The Beaver,” Deborah Morrison, president and CEO of Canada’s History Society, said Tuesday.

“As for women, they really didn't like it.”

The name was also a deterrent to the newly planned online strategies. The magazine had been told students couldn't access much of their content on the Internet because school filters often blocked anything that had "beaver" in the parameters.