Biz Monday still looking tired

Biz Monday is no longer a tabloid-sized insert.

For years Business Monday, or Biz Monday as it was later rechristened, was a loser. It usually featured something of interest but all-too-often the stories were unfinished, incomplete. Biz Monday was a frustrating read.

Well, the tabloid version of the little insert is finally gone. Good riddance. The London Free Press new editor-in-chief Joe Ruscitti wrote about the tabloid's demise. He admitted Biz Monday was looking a little tired.

The broadsheet-sized Biz Monday is now a reality. Features, columnists and reporters have migrated from the tabloid to the broadsheet. Unfortunately, the tired feeling has also made the transition.

Ruscitti promised the weekly centerpiece [sic] will be a full-page profile. The first "and you are?" was full-page but that was about all that was full about it.

David Taylor, the chief executive and founder of Pacific & Western Bank of Canada, was featured in an amazingly incomplete profile. Taylor is a really interesting man and this comes through in the newspaper's feature but great chunks of the rich, complex Taylor story are left untouched.

Taylor is well-known and, from everything that I know of him, well-respected. In fact, Joe Ruscitti and David Taylor have something in common. Ruscitti is on the board of directors of the London Community Foundation, while Taylor is on the foundation's investment committee.

In fact, the Taylor name is so well thought of in some circles that one investor I know invested in Discovery Air after learning that this aviation start-up was a creation of Taylor's. On the strength of the Taylor name this investor bought a few thousand shares. And over the course of a few months lost a few thousand dollars.

Now let me make this very clear. I like David Taylor. Although I don't know him personally, I have met the man and I know some folk fairly well who are quite close to Taylor. I have never heard anything bad about the man. Nothing.

The value of DA.A stock is starting to recover.

But sometimes being good is not good enough. Despite Taylor's extensive background in aviation and finance and his ties to Canada's north, Discovery Air has had a very rough flight. Check out the attached graph charting the history of its rapidly descending stock price.

The story of Discovery Air was featured in Up Here Business, The Magazine of Canada's Enterprising North, and the story, Things Fall Apart by Jack Danylchuk, is worth a read. This is the important business story missing from The London Free Press feature.

Despite its penny stock status DA.A is profitable.

As I believe I have made clear, I am an admirer of David Taylor. When stock in the high-flying Discovery Air crashed in value, I became interested. Taylor is one smart fellow and after some research I found nothing to justify the incredibly low stock price. When Discovery Air (DA.A) was trading around 16 cents I thought it was time to buy. (Unlike some of my other smaller investments, Polaris Minerals for instance, Discovery Air is a profitable company. Nice.) I even told a retired friend to buy into the little Canadian airline. He didn't; I did.

My DA.A shares up 137.17%.

Yes, I know that Taylor was squeezed out and is no longer at the helm of the company he created. But you wouldn't know any of this from The London Free Press article. The entire Discovery Air story is missing from the Biz Monday profile. A business which once reportedly consumed almost as much of Taylor's time as the Pacific & Western Bank didn't even rate a footnote in The Free Press article.

And how did I do with my purchase of Discovery Air? In the interest of full disclosure I sold half my holdings when the price doubled and completely recouped my initial investment. I still hold some shares and at the moment they are up 137.17 percent. I'm happy. This investment is now all pure profit.

I wonder how many shares of DA.A The Free Press writer owns? My bet is none. When I worked at the paper I learned that one of the business reporters didn't follow the stock market and had no opinion on anything related to stocks. This reporter confessed to letting his wife manage their investment portfolio. Maybe that lady should have edited the David Taylor's profile. She might have noticed the missing airline.
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Some observations about the Biz Monday article on David Taylor and the crying need for thoughtful, intelligent editing.

When I see assumptions stated as facts in newspaper articles I find myself opening a new page and googling the claim. (Yes, I read most of my news online. If The Free Press stopped printing tomorrow, I wouldn't miss the paper edition.)

The article tells us, "Unlike most baby boomers, Taylor is quick to embrace new technology and apply it to his bank and personal interests." Hmmm. I seem to be able to come up with quite a list of tech-savvy boomers: Richard Branson, Steve Wozniak, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Maybe its just me, but I know a lot of tech-savvy boomers. I read that by the end of 2009 nearly 47% of baby boomers were actively maintaining a profile on Facebook. When I think of my Facebook contacts, this sounds quite plausible.

When you think of new technology do you think iPad? You should. According to Gizmodo and others, "The iPad is for old people."

I don't know about you, but when I think about a man as bold and creative as David Taylor I am not at all surprised to learn that he "is a pilot who designed his own plane, a mechanic who owns seven motorcycles, a techno-geek who built his own computer and a biology graduate who majored in fisheries." When the paper tells me that this is "not exactly the skill sets you'd expect", I beg to differ.

Taylor has an outstanding resume. Let's take a look at another CEO's background, say Paul Tellier, a man who has been president and CEO of both Bombardier Inc. and Canadian National Railway Co. In a Canadian Business Online article Tellier reveals:

"I couldn't stand high school — it had too many rules, some not logical. After I failed a year, my dad put me in boarding school. I couldn't stand it either, so I quit and stayed on after Christmas break as a ski patrol at Tremblant. The pay wasn't too bad, something like $5 or $6 a day, plus room and board. But my father thought I was in school. When he found out I wasn't, we had a conversation."

Compare David Taylor's skill set to other successful CEOs and Taylor's background seems perfect. If he starts another business, I'd consider investing. (And I'd keep an eye on Paul Tellier, too.)

25 anniversary of the catastrophe in the sky

Read why the catastrophe in the sky was also a disaster in the newsroom.

It's the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. This was an event so shocking, so unexpected, so emotionally intense that most of us still can recall that day with rare clarity. Today I am linking to an earlier post that examined the disaster and why newspapers around the world had disasters of their own when it came to running the picture of the shuttle disintegrating high in the sky off Florida.

The linked post was inspired by an editorial by Paul Berton the former editor-in-chief of The London Free Press: Catastrophe in the sky.
_____________________________________________________________________

As to the question of did or didn't Challenger explode, the following is from the Huffington Post comments accompanying the Huffington Post article on the 25th anniversary of the disaster. As you can see, the argument continues 25 years later.

jsarets   4 hours ago (4:26 AM)

499 Fans

After reading the comments below, it's worth noting that Challenger did not explode.

A jet of hot gas leaking from the aft segment joint of the right solid rocket booster burned through the aft attach strut between the SRB and the external tank. When the aft end of the SRB swung loose from tank, it drove the tank and orbiter into the oncoming airstream at a high angle of attack.

Aerodynami­c loads caused the near-immed­iate structural failure of the external tank, releasing a massive plume of hydrogen and oxygen that ignited in the wake of the left SRB. This is called deflagrati­on, which differs from detonation in that the propagatio­n of the flame front is subsonic.

The rest of the vehicle, including the wings and vertical stabilizer of the orbiter, proceeded to break up due to the aero loads, but the crew compartmen­t -- which is a self-conta­ined pressure vessel attached to the airframe at four points -- was flung from the vehicle and remained structural­ly intact until it crashed into the ocean at over 200 mph.

Three of the four Personal Egress Air Peaks (PEAPs) on the flight deck were activated and exhibited air consumptio­n consistent with the 2:45 ballistic trajectory between breakup and crash. These packs provide unpressuri­zed air and would not have kept the crewmember­s alive if the crew compartmen­t had lost pressure integrity at over 60,000 feet in altitude.

Additional­ly, several lever-lock­ed switches on the pilot's right-hand electrical power system control panel were thrown after the loss of telemetry downlink, which indicates a futile attempt to restore power to the crew compartmen­t (which had ripped free of its connection­s to the fuel cells).

Even if the crew had been equipped with full-press­ure ACES suits and parachutes as they are today, it is unlikely that they would have been able to successful­ly bail out the crew compartmen­t on a free-fall ballistic trajectory­. The emergency egress system designed in the aftermath requires that the orbiter is in stable controlled flight (but will not be able to make a safe landing).

The only thing that could have saved them would have been a parachute system for the whole crew compartmen­t, similar to those equipped on the F-111 fighter-bo­mber. This was rejected, ironically­, because of the perceived cost and complexity of separating the crew compartmen­t from the vehicle, when Challenger plainly demonstrat­ed that the crew compartmen­t is quite capable of being flung free of the vehicle in the event of a complete aerodynami­c breakup.

Readers question Free Press online poll

I read the headline; I read the story; I read the online poll. I  shook my head. Then I saw the tweets posted on Twitter by The London Free Press reporter Jane Sims. The paper was apparently taking some heat for an online poll associated with a recent story.

A couple of Londoners, Clara Madrenas and Jeff Preston, disagreed with the poll and were fighting back with logic and humour. The two publish the online comic Cripz.

The Free Press headline read: "$12M for city crossing overhaul." The story went on to inform readers that almost 400 intersections and pedestrian crossings throughout the city are slowly going to be upgraded in the coming years with the addition of auditory signals to assist the visually impaired crossing the city's busy streets.

I thought to myself, "About time." I saw these signals in use many years ago in Slovenia in eastern Europe. The Slovenes were very proud of their little country and liked to boast that in many ways they were far advanced compared to countries like the United States and Canada. I smiled, "Finally. London is catching up with Ljubljana ."

The paper followed the story with an online poll asking: "Spending $12M on London crosswalk traffic-light buttons is: Ridiculous or Reasonable?” 86 percent voted “ridiculous.”

It was this poll that got the attention of Madrenas and Preston, inspiring the following online cartoon.

To see clearly, please click on image. It should enlarge.

The online attack grabbed the attention of the paper and reporter Jane Sims interviewed the two for Monday's paper. Priming the pump for her story she tweeted late last week:

"Just had a fun interview with Clara Madrenas and Jeff Preston about their web strip Cripz. Check it out — you'll learn something! . . . I interviewed them because of this week's strip taking a shot at the Free Press question maker for web poll without depth."

The Free Press response failed to address the major questions raised by online polls such as the ones run by the paper. As Jeff Preston pointed out when interviewed, on the surface a poll such as this one "appears to be pretty damning evidence that Londoners don't want this." Is this true? Is this poll accurate? 

This is not a new issue. Almost five years ago The Rothenberg Political Report ran a piece entitled: "It May Look and Smell Like a Poll, but Is It?" Stuart Rothenberg wrote:

"Why would a media Web site run polls that most polling experts call unreliable and unscientific? . . . generally, I suspect that part of the answer is ignorance, and some of it is sloppiness. Most of it is simply about business — putting up “content” to draw page views.

Many reporters and editors simply know little about methodology, and I expect some of them regard talk about such things as arcane.

But I also suspect that some don’t really care about whether the numbers are entirely reliable or whether they meet some standard that they don’t understand. Media Web sites and 24-hour cable television networks consume a great deal of information, and for some, it doesn’t matter whether the data is right, only that it exists."

In Monday's Free Press, reporter Jane Sims tells us that Madrenas and Preston called the newspaper's poll “brutal” saying the question was too one-dimensional. What the paper failed to say was that the two Londoners were right. The poll was brutal.

Jeff Preston said this about the online poll: "The way you word it is everything." The $12 million charge is not due immediately, and the cost may not be at the discretion of city council. At some point in the future, there may be provincial legislation demanding the installation of Accessible Pedestrian Signals (APS).

According to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), APS is a system providing audible cues and vibrotactile signals to ensure the same level of pedestrian crossing information is provided to everyone. APS devices meet the accessibility needs of those with disabilities other than visual impairment.

With the estimated $12 million dollar cost spread over a number of years and shared by all Londoners, the actual amount added to any individual's tax bill may be very small. And remember, many benefiting from APS devices are also taxpayers and they've been quietly footing the bill for our present inadequate traffic signal system for decades.

There's a little reason posts are sporatic: Fiona

For more than a year this collection of blogs enjoyed regular, almost daily, posts. This activitiy has come to a grinding halt and for that I apologize. With both of us in our early 60s, my wife and I have taken on the quite enjoyable task of babysitting a beautiful little girl, Fiona, our granddaughter.

The kid's awake!

The little tyke can be quite demanding --- in a sweet sorta way. I can't move without having Fiona following along. Working at the computer is completely out, unless I want to visit YouTube and share some videos with the kid. She loves movie trailers like the ones for Tangled or Despicable Me and music videos are always worth a look.

As you can see from today's picture, Fiona arrived asleep. I have just a few moments for an explanatory post; Judy tells me the little girl is starting to stir. I best get ready to share a banana and maybe a crushed and chopped pear with the kid.


Have a great day,
Cheers,
Rockinon!

Replace soothers regularly

What is this stuff that I found in an aging pacifier nipple?

Fiona is now almost 17-months-old and should be past the soother stage, but she isn't. She especially likes a soother when falling to sleep.

I read the instructions that came with her soothers. I know the manufacturers advise inspecting the soothers frequently for signs of wear and age. And I know this is especially important after a child develops teeth.

Grunge is hard to see.

The other day I peeled the pacifier nipple back from the plastic mouthshield and found foreign material inside the clear nipple, material that had been hidden from view.

Yuck! I tossed the soother, boiled a new one to sanitize it, and replaced Fiona's soothing friend.

I took a quick picture of the pacifier before tossing it out. When I blew-up the image, I was disgusted at what I discovered. Keeping these things clean is really important! And the younger the baby, the more important it is to keep soothers sterile.
  
If you didn't read the instructions that came with your baby's soother, read the following:

1. Keep soothers clean. Sterilise them regularly by placing them in a baby bottle steriliser or boiling for five minutes. Boil new pacifiers for five minutes before the first use.
2. Check soothers regularly, especially if baby's teeth are appearing. Cracks in the nipple can harbour germs and bacteria. Do not use a damaged soother. In all cases, replace soothers every two months.
3. Do not attach ribbons or cords to a soother; These are strangling hazards. The soother itself is designed to eliminate any choking hazard. In the rare instance where a baby manages to squeeze a whole soother - nipple and shield - into its mouth, the mouthshield always has holes to allow air to pass for breathing.
4. Do not coat soothers with anything sweet and sugary, this can promote tooth decay.
5. If you are establishing breastfeeding, do not use a soother until your baby is about a month old. The shape of a soother is different from a mother's breast and this can result in  'nipple confusion'. Also, the sucking technique for breastfeeding is different; the baby having to suck harder to gain the milk. Using a soother too early can prevent a baby from developing successful breastfeeding technique, leading to mom giving up breastfeeding too early.
6. Lastly, there is widespread agreement that babies should be weaned off their pacifiers around the age of 12 months. Long term use can have a detrimental effect on the development of a baby's teeth. (See comment, below.)

Your pacifier is on borrowed time, Fiona.

Reporters! Get a life, get a camera!

Super-zoom bridge cameras are perfect for reporters.

It is becoming more and more common for working journalists to be required to shoot their own pictures. Coming from a former newspaper photographer this may surprise you, but I think it's a good idea that is gaining traction at exactly the right moment.

When I was on the street shooting for a daily paper, the equipment was big, clunky and somewhat difficult to use. To expect a reporter to carry that stuff would have been silly. To expect them to come back with professional quality pictures with the amateur gear then available would also have been silly.

Shot with an FinePix HS10.

No more. With the advent of bridge cameras — cameras that bridge the divide between amateur and professional gear — the birth of the successful two-way reporter/photographer is at hand.

There is absolutely no reason that a reporter cannot take a head and shoulders picture to accompany a story. I recall the contempt that award winning photographer and photo editor Dick Wallace had for headshots. He refused to call them portraits.

The new Fuji FinePix HS20, to be available this March, with its 24mm to 720mm zoom can replace a whole camera bag of lenses. It will even take a hot shoe mounted flash syncing to the camera with through the lens metering (TTL).

I've written about this before but then I was pushing the HS10. As good as it was, I still had some reservations about that camera. The HS20 has put many of my qualms to rest.

Heck, I'd even give photographers at newspapers one of these babies. And yes, news shooters are still needed but give them a pen, some paper and encourage them to write more. Let's make reporters AND photographers more productive.

Shot through my windshield with my HS10 while stopped behind school bus.

To see an example of a story both written and illustrated by a (former) newspaper shooter see my report on the new urbanist development of Cornell and Upper Cornell in Markham, Ontario, or my two recent looks at sledding, etc., on a small, local slope: Upside to snow, and More on snow. Important note: The action pictures would be better if shot with the soon to be released HS20.

Honey, I shrunk the paper.

Recently my local paper, The London Free Press, ran a piece by Dan Brown, their senior online editor, on the paperless world many see fast approaching. Brown took a careful look into the future and reported the demise of "dead-tree media" is not imminent.

Fiona is comfortable with screens.

A month ago I would have said that I couldn't have agreed more, but that was a month ago. Today I'm not so sure.

At a family gathering Boxing Day, I met a young woman busy reading stuff from the screen of her Apple iPad. The iPad had replaced a lot of paper in her life and in the life of her family. When her mother went on vacation, mom took along three books all downloaded to the iPad.

I watched as my young granddaughter, only 15-months-old, played comfortably with the device. Reading a book or a newspaper from a screen will not seem strange to Fiona. She might even think a printed newspaper quaint.

But what really made me think that maybe, just maybe, it was time to re-evaluate my position was the size of The London Free Press the other day. The entire paper was just eight big sheets of paper — two folded sheets to a section.

Years ago I went with a reporter, Kathy Rumleski I believe, to interview a man with an incredible collection of London papers. He showed us his copy of the first issue of The London Free Press Sunday paper. As I recall, it had about 72 pages. At its birth, the fellow told us, the paper assured readers that this young paper, this baby, would grow into a full-fledged Sunday read, filled with features and pictures and lots and lots of good, interesting stuff.

Then, he showed us his most recent Sunday paper. It was half the size of the first paper. Rather than growing, expanding, the Sunday paper had shrunk. It had become a weirdly shaped tabloid presenting readers with a news hole half the size of the first Sunday paper.

Today there is no Sunday Free Press. It's gone. For those readers who cannot get through a day without their news hit, some stories do get posted to the Web.

As I looked at my mighty thin daily, I thought of the fellow with the newspaper collection and I recalled the incredible shrinking Sunday paper. My daily paper is infected. Some days my paper is so small that it seems the paperless newspaper is already here.

Some days the paperless newspaper is almost here.

If you'd like to read an excellent little piece on how magazine sales are faring on the iPad, read How to rescue magazine sales on the iPad posted on the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Cornell and Upper Cornell in Markham

This street in Cornell is not marred by garages thrusting out from homes.

I spent Boxing Day in Upper Cornell, an extension of the new urbanist suburban development of Cornell in Markham, Ontario, north of Toronto. I was pleasantly surprised. I rather liked the place.

It does not completely live up to its hype but then what does? And a walk about the subdivision makes me believe many of the reporters writing about Cornell have never actually visited the place.

The Cornell development needs a few years to age; Subdivisions are like fine wines, they take a few years to mature, to reach their full potential. Give the little stick trees a few years and many of the streets will be as inviting as claimed.

Note apartments above the street with bikes on balconies.

Unlike almost all subdivisions, Cornell has a downtown core. This commercial district is not so much reminiscent of the downtowns once found in small towns but is more in tune with the shopping blocks built in the early part of the last century along major urban thoroughfares in many North American cities.

I even saw a neighbourhood corner store in Cornell. I was visiting friends whose place was rather close to that store. If we needed milk for the toddler, there was no need for the car; We could just walk. (In reality it was freezing cold and a car was used for the milk run.)

The lanes in Cornell are wide and well lit.

I'm not a big fan of laneways. When I was a child there was a lane, we called it an alley, behind the family home. Coal sheds, rather than garages, lined that laneway. This kept the coal deliveries and the coal dust away from the homes. The city garbage trucks also used the lanes as did the junkmen. These junkmen patrolled the alleys looking for scrap iron or other discarded stuff, tossing their finds into their horse-drawn wagons.

When people switched from coal to natural gas one might think that the coal sheds would have been converted into garages but no. Today many of those 1940s laneways are gone. The lanes were not liked for many reasons and over the passing years they were closed and merged into the adjacent backyards.

The lanes in Cornell are not at all like the lanes I remember. The Cornell lanes, I discovered, are easily twice as wide as the lanes behind my childhood home. And these Cornell lanes are brightly lit by rows of simple, modern lights, similar to the ones illuminating many mall parking lots.

I have often read that one immediately noticeable  feature of new urbanism is the width of the streets; they are narrow. I did not find the streets in Cornell particularly narrow.

In fact, I rarely encountered a boulevard in the genuine old neighbourhoods in which I hung out as a child. Cornell has some very wide streets that just about shout "built with you and your car in mind." (And this is good!)

I found the Cornell streets comfortably wide and some had cutouts to encourage on street parking. Although, one fellow told me that overnight parking on the street was a no-no. He did it a few weeks earlier and received a $40 ticket. I parked my car overnight in front of my hosts' garage doors at the edge of the rear lane way. This was legal.

The authentic old neighbourhoods with which I am familiar were developed before cars became as ubiquitous as they are today. The fact that many, if not most, of the residences in Cornell have parking for two cars says it all; Cars are important in Cornell. As a rule, one doesn't walk to work if you live in Cornell.

My hosts both face hour-long commutes when it comes to work. The car is an important part of their lives and the car is an important part of life in Cornell despite the place claiming to be a new urbanist centrepiece.

Lots of floors with lots of visual interest.

The rich mixture of housing said to be found in Cornell is a fact. And the architecture in Cornell is interesting. I would love to see the inside of some of the townhouses which border a large park near the place where I stayed.

I also noted that Cornell has lots of open areas.

In the end Cornell seems to be simply a different approach to urban sprawl, but it is still urban sprawl. It sits on land that just a few short years ago was some of Canada's best farmland.

Repairs needed.

How Cornell will age is a question. A lot of wood has gone into all the doodads decorating the place, and wood ages quickly. How often will residents be willing to replace all this stuff before much of it is removed.

In the past many an old wooden porch has been demolished as the upkeep of the once elegant century home became prohibitive.

Oddly enough, considering all the new urbanist talk of porches, aging large porches will not be a big problem in Cornell; there are not many large porches in the place.

A small porch.

The residence where I stayed did have a wrap-around porch but neither the porch columns nor the porch railings were wood. All appeared to be painted aluminum.

There's a lot to be learned from Cornell and the other new urbanism developments. It looks like a fine place to raise a family, kinda like my own subdivision in Byron on the southwestern edge of London, Ontario.

A wide street with boulevard cutouts for parking welcomes cars to Cornell.

Some homes still have views of garage doors.

The car is part of life in Cornell.

Correction: Editors are wonderful folk. Indispensable. I left the "e" out of alley in my original post. Oops! Gosh, I miss those wonderful newspaper editors.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

and a 

Happy New Year

to all!

. . . and now to go and watch Fiona unwrap her gifts. Maybe I'll post some pictures. I do hope you are all having as wonderful a Christmas as I am. 

Cheers!

Captain Beefheart has passed away

Don Van Vliet, known to many as Captain Beefheart, is dead at 69, succumbing to complications from multiple sclerosis. Once a darling of the counter-culture, I encountered Beefheart's music at art school in Detroit and at parties in both Ann Arbour and Berkeley California back in the late '60s. Van Vliet abandoned the music scene in the '80s to focus his energy on his painting

Trinidad, California, is a small, coastal town in the north of the state.

He moved to Trinidad California with his wife Jan and worked there, hid out there, and died there. Even during his days as a rocker, Van Vliet showed a propensity for staying out of sight. He passed on a chance to have his Magic Band play at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967 ostensibly because guitarist Ry Cooder had quit the group just days before the event.

The Shine Beast of Thought

Even in the years when he was at his creative peak he chose to play relatively few concerts. Known to be a bit tyrannical, his original band revolted in 1974 and deserted him en masse. Van Vliet struggled through the following decade to finally retire from the music scene completely in the mid '80s, becoming something of a recluse being rarely seen, often not even attending his own gallery openings.

Possibly his best known release was Trout Mask Replica which he cut with his original Magic Band in 1969. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the double album fifty-eighth in their 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Credit: Jean-Luc

His early music, from the late mid '60s, was rhythm and blues with a sound reminiscent of the early Rolling Stones.

Trout Mask Replica was not derivative like his earliest work but ground-breaking.  The New York Times called it, "A bolt-from-the-blue collection of precise, careening, surrealist songs with clashing meters, brightly imagistic poetry and raw blues . . .  it had particular resonance with the punk and new wave generation to come a decade later, influencing bands like Devo, the Residents, Pere Ubu and the Fall."

Van Vliet’s life is a story of creativity. He even created his name. He was born Don Vliet. He added the Van in 1965. To quote from the NYT again:

"Van Vliet demonstrated artistic talent before the age of 10, especially in sculpture, and at 13 was offered a scholarship to study sculpture in Europe, but his parents forbade him. Concurrently, they moved to the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, where one of Don’s high school friends was Frank Zappa.

His adopted vocal style came partly from Howlin’ Wolf: a deep, rough-riding moan turned up into swooped falsettos at the end of lines, pinched and bellowing and sounding as if it caused pain.

'When it comes to capturing the feeling of archaic, Delta-style blues,' Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote in 1982, 'he is the only white performer who really gets it right.' "

In the early 1980s, Van Vliet's Captain Beefheart  persona made two albums for Virgin, Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow, backed by again by the Magic Band but this time the band was a crew of musicians who had idolized him while growing up. The albums were enthusiastically received.

Garland

Ice Cream for Crow was his last album.

For the past two and a half decades, painting and not music has been the focus of his life. In the exhibition catalog to a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the museum director, John Lane, wrote, "His paintings — most frequently indeterminate landscapes populated by forms of abstracted animals — are intended to effect psychological, spiritual and magical force."

Van Vliet would have turned 70 on Jan. 15. Two days before his milestone birthday former Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas had planned a symposium at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.

Just a little over a week ago The Los Angeles Times wrote in an article announcing the upcoming symposium, that Captain Beefheart was rumoured to have multiple sclerosis but that the media-shy Van Vliet refused to comment.

At this time, it appears Lucas still plans to hold the Jan. event. Unreleased Captain Beefheart tracks will be played, slides of Van Vliet's art and a film of the band will be shown, and Lucas will demonstrate Van Vliet's out of the ordinary techniques. It is doubtful that the media-shy artist was planning to attend.

"I don’t like getting out when I could be painting," he told The Associated Press in 1991. "And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around."

Sadly, Don Van Vliet himself is no longer around. But his body of work — his music, his paintings — all will continue to resonate through the coming years.

Good-by Don, you've left me with some fine '60s memories.

Trinidad California Lighthouse with flag Photoshopped to half staff.

Deja vu

Loew’s [Century] Theatre, London, rear of auditorium, 1938

"Century Theatre gets new lease on life" read the headline in The London Free Press. "An old downtown movie palace could soon be reborn," claimed the lede. But please read on . . .

Farther into the news story we're told, "The Century closed as a movie theatre in 1987, and plans to turn it into a performing arts centre failed. . . . the Century Theatre building is in poor shape and the auditorium has been demolished . . . " The auditorium is demolished!

When did we last read such silliness? When the Capitol Theatre was claimed to be restored is when. That theatre was restored sans auditorium, sans lobby and sans marquee.

It was opened as a Loew's vaudeville theatre in 1920, then it was sold, twinned and renamed the Century Theatre in 1964, and finally it was closed in 1987. A few years later, in the early 1990s the auditorium was demolished. I doubt very much this "movie palace" will be reborn in 2011.

That said, the LFP article promises "the lobby portion will be restored as much as possible, including two original chandeliers." I'm not holding my breath.

Loew’s [Century] Theatre, London, entrance hall, 1938

This is the entrance to the "restored" Capitol Theatre. It even lost its lobby.

Babies pick up on more than you think

Fiona knows kisses show affection. She appears to love the little ornament.

No real post today. I'm taking the easy way out and linking to a story on the Huffington Post.

Now, that I'm babysitting almost daily, I'm getting a firsthand introduction to babies. They are amazing. I agree wholeheartedly with the John Medina, the doctor and writer of the Huffington Post piece.

How I read the news has changed.

Originally, I was going to write "How we read the news has changed." That would be presumptuous. I have no idea how you read the news. I only know that I no longer read in a purely linear manner, restricted to the article immediately at hand. I surf a wave of questions raised and links provided, as I find own personal way through the maze that is is news.

Let's not get too academic here. Instead, let me show you how I read one story this morning.

I clicked my bookmark for Digital Journal. The fourth story was, "Hackers retaliate in support of WikiLeaks founder."

This article peaked my interest in the WikiLeaks story. I wanted to know more, so I returned to my iGoogle homepage which is filled with news windows, and I had spotted a story in the Top Stories window. I cannot link to this as my iGoogle page is constantly being updated. The story I found was from The Telegraph in the U.K., WikiLeaks' 10 greatest stories.

I read the first story: Iraq Apache helicopter attack. The following is from that story.

"Horrifying video footage showing 15 people including two Reuters journalists being shot dead by a US Army Apache helicopter gunman, taken from the helicopter's gun camera, appalled the world when it was released on WikiLeaks.

The crew were heard laughing at the "dead b-----ds" and saying "light 'em up!" and "keep shooting, keep shooting"

The US military refused to discipline the helicopter's crew, saying, "At the time we weren't able to discern whether (Reuters employees) were carrying cameras or weapons."

The brother of one of the dead Reuters journalists was skeptical: "My question is how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their hi-tech information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher."

Two journalists killed. Having worked for The London Free Press in London, Ontario, a paper in the Sun Media chain, which is part of Quebecor Media, I wondered how my old paper tackled the story. I went to The London Free Press site, I have it bookmarked, and searched "two Reuters journalists".

This brought up the following screen:

The third story listed, Punishing WikiLeaker misses point by columnist Eric Margolis, examined the killing of the jounalists. I clicked the link. I read:

"George Orwell wrote: 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

A true journalist's job is to expose government wrongdoing and propaganda, skewer hypocrites, and speak for those with no voice. And wage war against mankind's two worst scourges: Nationalism and religious bigotry. Not to lick the boots of government.

I've always felt kinship for free thinkers, rebels, and heretics.

That's why I am drawn to the plight of Pte. Bradley Manning who apparently believed Ernest Hemingway's dictum: 'Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.'

The 22-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst caused a worldwide furor by releasing to WikiLeaks secret military logs that exposed ugly truths about the brutal conflict in Afghanistan, including widespread killing of civilians.

To again quote Orwell: 'During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.'

Manning also released a suppressed tape of a U.S. Army helicopter gunship killing two Reuters journalists and a civilian.

A civilian hacker, employed by some shadowy U.S. government intelligence 'contractor' spying on the Internet turned Manning in.

Revenge was swift.

Manning was thrown into solitary confinement and faces a long prison term.

. . . WikiGate provoked a flood of bombastic pro-war propaganda from America's mainstream media, its rent-a-journalists, and Canada's wannabe Republican neocons.

. . . When I served in the U.S. Army, we were taught it was our duty to report up the chain of command all violations of the Geneva Conventions and war crimes. These included killing civilians, torture and executions.

Manning reportedly sought to report to his superiors just such crimes committed in Afghanistan by some U.S. forces and their local allies and mercenaries.

He was ignored. Just as was the courageous Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin when he warned Ottawa that prisoners were being handed over to the brutal Afghan secret police for torture and execution.

Manning's motivations for whistleblowing matter not. What does matter is he revealed to the public the brutal nature of the colonial war in Afghanistan and the bodyguard of lies protecting it from public scrutiny.

If Americans and Canadians really knew the truth of this resource-driven war, and its carefully concealed cost, they would end it quickly.
--- --- ---
After 27 years, this is my last column for QMI Agency. I am grateful to QMI for allowing me to freely express my views even when it disagreed with them. My Sunday column continues on ericmargolis.com and at the Huffington Post, LewRockwell.com and newspapers abroad.

Follow ericmargolis on Twitter."

What a surprise! This was the last story moved by Margolis to Sun Media. Margolis was not like most of the other Sun Media columnists. He was not right wing. A Free Press reporter once told me that he made a point of seeking out and reading the Margolis column. Its presence in the paper made him hopeful that some semblance of balance might survive in the pages of the Freeps as the newspaper moved into a tight Sun Media orbit. Now, Margolis was gone.

I wondered what was being said on the Web about the Margolis departure from Sun Media after 27 years. I googled "why did eric margolis leave sun media."

I clicked on the Sun Family link. I read:

"Eric Margolis out

Veteran Sun op-ed columnist Eric Margolis is another casualty of Sun Media's shift to the far right, with little regard for longevity or popularity.

'I wrote for the Sun chain for 27 years because it allowed me total freedom of expression even when the editors disagreed with my opinions - something very rare in the media,' Margolis told Toronto Sun Family in an e-mail today.

'This policy has changed. My views are displeasing to Ottawa," he says. "Accordingly, the Sun and I are parting company.'

We'll miss his unique analysis of world politics. We also mourn the loss of op-ed diversity.

. . . Eric says, there was a time during the glory years of the Toronto Sun when opposing views were welcomed by management and appreciated by readers.

Quebecor's newly-planted henchmen are putting an end to that editorial freedom.

It's eyes right these days as Sun Media turns into a haven for former PMO staffers intent on morphing the chain's print and broadcast image into Fox North. . . . "

I went back to my Google search and clicked the antiwar.com link. It was two down from the previous link. I found the following story: Sun Newspapers Fire Eric Margolis After Receiving Canadian Govt Grants.

The story claimed that antiwar columnist Eric Margolis was fired in a shake-up at Sun Newspapers in an unlikely coincidence: "It was recently revealed that Sun Newspapers is now receiving Canadian government money," the story said.

Following the story brought me back to the Toronto Sun Family website and a story about the Feds funding some Sun Media papers. I learned that the following amounts went to the following papers.

• $57,291 to the Goderich Signal-Star
• $40,673 to the Shoreline Beacon
• $32,246 to the Kincardine News
• $28,518 to the Clinton News Record
• $23,190 to the Huron Expositor
• $21,325 to the Lucknow Sentinel

Before leaving this post, let me leave you with the thoughts and the questions that immediately come to mind, at least mine.

Sun Media has been attacking the CBC recently. In turn, Sun Media itself  has been attacked by others in the media who are "convinced this is all about advancing the economic interests of Quebecor president Pierre Karl Peladeau." I read the quoted part on Canoe. Which also makes the claim that Quebecor is "not subsidized by taxpayers."

Well, we now know that isn't the whole story, don't we. Forgive me while I google.
 

 

Why does Larry Cornies feel disquiet?

The following has been added after receiving a response from Larry Cornies. Some questioned why "I longed for the editors who once kept me safe." Some thought I was making a joke when I mentioned that "Larry Cornies was one of those editors" with whom I wished I was still working.

It was no joke. Larry was an excellent editor. This shows in his response.

The reason for my guessing is that this piece is more of blog post than a news report. Just as Larry revealed that he was guessing when he wrote that he was of "the opinion that, a few Sun Media columnists aside, most of the Canadian journalism fraternity is supportive of Wikileaks." Also, Larry's column itself left me guessing.

Following blog etiquette, I tried linking to all relevant places. Also, I made sure I tweeted on this post as I knew that would give Larry a chance to respond. Larry often sees my tweets. And Larry has made an excellent response.

One thing that comes through in Larry's comment is that Larry is a gentleman. But Larry did leave me with one lingering puzzle: Why would a man like Larry have respect for Ezra Levant because he has built a strong brand with a loyal following? (So?) I think Larry is simply being far too gracious. (That's another guess or opinion.) I find it hard to respect someone who, to borrow Larry's words, "should face some hard questions and, if warranted, prosecution" [when it comes to talk of assassinations.]

And yes, I still have my copy of The Free Press Style Guide. I should use it more often (as should The Free Press.) Larry and I both recall the days when the paper would have had a style guide recommendation for spelling WikiLeaks. Today the paper runs it both ways.

Here's wishing Larry a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Cheers!
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Saturday I read Larry Cornies' column in The London Free Press and I was left puzzled. Cornies confided in us that on the WikiLeaks story he "felt decidedly out of step." He suffered the disquiet that comes from sitting "on the other side of the fence from everyone else."

Cornies wrote:

"Canadian journalists and their employers have been among the site's supporters, at least philosophically. The collection of information, its contextualization and distribution to audiences is, in large measure, what journalism has been about for centuries. To that extent, it's understandable that news organizations and individual journalists have largely been in WikiLeaks' corner."

Ezra Levant

Cornies tells us that this is where his feeling of disquiet comes in. I want to tell Cornies to take a deep breath and relax. I'm not sure where Canadian journalists stand, nor do I know what position their employers are taking, but I do know that the media giant for whom Cornies is writing does not appear to be in the WikiLeaks and Julian Assange corner.

Back in October Pierre Karl Péladeau, President and CEO of Quebecor Inc., Quebecor Media Inc. and Sun Media Corporation, proudly announced that he was very pleased to have Ezra Levant join the hard news, straight talk Sun TV News team. "Ezra isn't afraid to challenge conventional wisdom," Péladeau said.

The Quebecor press release reminds us Levant first started writing for the Calgary Sun in 1995. I think it is fair to say that after 15 years of being in bed together, so to speak, hiring Levant for such a prominent position shows support for Levant and his views by Sun Media and Quebecor.

Levant recently wrote the following in his Sun Media column:

"Why isn’t Julian Assange dead yet? . . . Why is Assange still alive? . . .

Assange and his colleagues act like spies, not journalists. WikiLeaks could have its assets seized, just like the Taliban has. And U.S. President Barack Obama could do what he’s doing to the Taliban throughout the world. He doesn’t sue them or catch them. He kills them. Because it’s war. Obama has even ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

How does Obama see Assange any differently?"

I took a quick cruise around the Web and discovered that Levant isn't alone at Sun Media in damning Assange. For instance, Sun Media columnist Michael Den Tandt wrote:

"Assange is the e-version of the anarchists who ripped up downtown Toronto last summer. Smart guy, handy with computers, perhaps stuffed in one too many lockers in high school. Out for revenge. That's it."

Although I did find some opposing viewpoints among Sun writers. Michael Harris of the Ottawa Sun wrote:

"The New York Times, for example, was the Julian Assange of the Vietnam War era. When the matter came before the U.S. Supreme Court, here’s what the judges concluded: 'Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.'

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, had this to say about the WikiLeaks affair: 'Powerful forces in America who thrive on secrecy are trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.'

In Canada, the RCMP tried to do the same thing to journalist Juliet O’Neill, invoking the Security of Information Act to ransack her house, and carry off her notes and even the hard-drive from her computer in their efforts to identify an internal leak. Ten months later, the legal process began that ultimately saw parts of the act struck down by the Ontario Superior Court and O’Neill’s material returned.

Assange is facing now exactly what faced Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers, Katherine Gun with documents about the Iraq War, and former ambassador Craig Murray when he informed the U.K. government that Britain was condoning torture in Uzbekistan.

It’s called blackening the messenger.

In the Assange case, the shrill calls for charges, prison and even death for the founder of WikiLeaks are much better to talk about than the substance of the leaked diplomatic cables: U.S. companies holding little boy sex parties in the Afghan desert; Britain letting the Lockerbie bomber go because it feared reprisals from Libya if the bomber died in a Scottish jail; British bureaucrats telling the U.S. not to worry about what their own prime minister was saying about nuclear submarines; Americans killing Yemeni civilians and allowing the government of Yemen to take the blame."

Personally, I find Levant's support for assassination, for murder, repugnant. I agree with those like Glenn Greenwald who wrote in Salon:

The way in which so many political commentators so routinely and casually call for the eradication of human beings without a shred of due process is nothing short of demented.

Dan Gardner, writing in theThe Ottawa Citizen, said Levant was advocating "Mafia tactics."

I just cannot understand why Cornies believes his stance leaves him "lonely." Cornies is in step with Sun Media, Canada's largest newspaper publisher. Cornies is sitting with quite the crowd on his side of the fence; He is sitting with possibly the bulk of the Sun Media columnists. He should relax.

But maybe, just maybe, he can't and it's his own personal and very strong moral principles that are making him squeamish. Maybe it's the crowd — Ezra Levant, et al. — that Cornies is now hanging out with that's responsible for his feelings of disquiet. I don't know. I'm just guessing.

I recall when Cornies worked at The London Free Press some years ago and the paper suffered its first strike by the editorial department, Cornies crossed the line. He endured the cries of scab thundering from his co-workers. I chatted with Cornies about his decision and he talked about morality and duty and the truly hard choices one is sometimes forced to make. Cornies was out of step during the strike. Whether he was right or wrong is not my point, he was out of step, and yet he was strong and secure in his position.

Cornies appears to be in step with Sun Media, with Quebecor, and therefore with a majority of Canadian newspapers. Maybe, just maybe, being in step with the likes of Ezra Levant makes Cornies feel uncomfortable. Just suggesting.

Oh, and one other thing that surprised me, Cornies spelled WikiLeaks without capitalizing the "L". Michael Harris got it right.

I make mistakes, lots of 'em. I feel so embarrassed when I read one of my blog posts from days or weeks ago and see grammatical errors and spelling mistakes jumping off the page. At those times I long for the editors who once kept me safe. Larry Cornies was one of those editors.

Let me take one more stab in the dark. I bet Cornies has never gone to the WikiLeaks site. I'll guess that he formed all his opinions without actually visiting the site. Because of this he did not know the correct style for writing WikiLeaks. I can understand. I haven't been there either. I don't want to have my Internet address linked to them.

Who knows who's watching.

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It is late Dec. 2018 and WikiLeaks has a badly tarnished image. I'm again reading stuff about WikiLeaks. It no longer seems to be great journalism.

The WikiLeaks-Russia connection started way before the 2016 election

Why I felt I had to turn my back on WikiLeaks by James Ball in the Guardian