Something to look forward to . . .

The sign at the LCBO, Liquor Control Board of Ontario, said, "Sale." I am always attracted to that. I never, and I mean never, buy a wine that is not on sale. Hey, I'm retired. Truth be told, I often use a box cutter rather than a cork screw to get at my wine.

It was a small bottle of 2007 Anvers Fortified Shiraz from Australia that caught my eye. I like Shiraz — but I was not sure about the fortified kind. Sometimes fortified wines taste more of alcohol than grapes, not good. But, I picked up the bottle and read the label: "The exotic perfume, spice and blackberry flavours will develop great complexity with careful cellaring over the next 20 years."

I translated that to mean that the alcohol and grapes would get to know each other very well given two decades of co-habitation. The alcohol would give up its individuality and cooperate with the grapes to produce a rich and coherent presentation. For this to occur all that was required was time — lots of it.

I had an idea. I felt inspired. I bought the wine.

Once home I did my customary Internet search. A site associated with the LCBO had this to say about the 2007 Anvers Fortified Shiraz: "This delicious fortified Shiraz displays rich and concentrated flavours (imagine the fruit-sweetness and flavours of Shiraz magnified a few times) with a slightly viscous texture. Sip it alone after dinner or enjoy it with fruit cake or briny blue cheese." Rod Phillips gave it four stars and agreed that it could be cellared, but it could be opened now, no problem. Perfect!

I'm 62. My father died from a heart condition, as did my mother, plus many of my uncles, my father's brothers. I have had open heart surgery. O.K., it was a failed mitral valve but it was a heart problem. My grandfather and one uncle died from cancer. Using most life expectancy calculators, I am good until about 79. After that I'm on borrowed time.

Often heart problems, and always cancer, give us a warning they are stalking us. When I get the word, "Ken you have an incurable heart problem," I'm ready. I'll head home, stopping off for some nice cheese and fine bread. I'll set the table, put out wine glasses for my wife and me, and open my bottle of Anvers. I will toast my wife good-bye and tell her how much I have enjoyed our years together. We'll sip our wine and share a grape-nectar flavoured kiss.

If I don't get the word, we'll open the bottle on my 79th birthday, nibble fine cheese, enjoy some black, nicoise olives — they always go well with Shiraz and remind us of our time in Provence, in the south of France. We'll blow the dust off our copy of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, cuddle up, and have a toast celebrating life.

You meet the nicest people on a Honda. . .

Today I discovered on The New York Times site an article entitled "For Honda in America, 50 Years of Going Its Own Direction." Boring, I thought, and I almost past it by. But, I have a soft spot in my heart for Honda as I owned the biggest, the meanest of Japanese machines back in the mid '60s - I owned a Honda 305 Super Hawk.

If you owned a Yamaha 250 back then, you are probably choking right now. "Biggest? Meanest? Get real!" Yes, that is what I imagine you are thinking and you'd have a good argument. But this is my story after all, and your bikes, with their powerful two-stroke engines did leave a lingering trail of blue smoke as we listened to the "Bwahhhhhhh" roar of your departure.

To many my Honda was simply the big, very big, brother to those plastic marvels, the Honda 55s. Those were the scooters sold under the slogan, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda."

My best friend had a Honda 55, and he was nice. Me, I wasn't so nice; I bought a Honda 90. It was a motorcycle and not a scooter. It was black, not red. I thought I was a biker and not a . . . , uh, whatever people who rode scooters were called. Whatever the word, I knew it had to be something derogatory. (The little scooter has had the last laugh, it is still in production on four continents.)

The Honda 90 didn't live up to my expectations. After a year we parted company. I was moving up. I ordered a Honda 305 called the Super Hawk. This was a twin cylinder, overhead cam, 33 h.p. monster. It was black.

When it came and we got better acquainted, there were some misgivings. It was, as the NYT's said, ". . . without flashy or distinctive styling," it defined "the leading edge of ordinary." Unlike the Yamaha bikes with their red and cream colour schemes, my bike was dull. I painted the gas tank and chromed the front fender. But a tarted up Honda was not a classy, flashy lady but a just an overly made-up tart.

I had a lot of adventures with my Honda. In the end, we did bond. I actually rode it from Windsor, Ontario, to Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring break in its first year. Like I said, we had some adventures.

But, what I most recall about the Honda company was its attempt to enter the car market with the small 2-seater, 4-cylinder, chain driven, S600 roadster; there was a sedan but I recall only the roadster. Chain driven! I thought of it as a glorified motorcycle - well maybe not glorified.

How Honda, the company that made a chain driven car, grew into the company that we all know and admire today has puzzled me since the '60s. Read the NYT's story and you'll find the answer.

If you don't have time for the NYT's article, let me condense the answer down to this: Soichiro Honda.

Cheers,
Rockinon

*Technorati

eb9jcm6z2r

Where were you when. . . ? Watching TV?

Two days ago, I blogged on a column "Where were you when. . . ?" by Paul Berton, editor-in-chief of The London Free Press. I pointed out how the paper, like many others across North America, messed up the Challenger disaster photo big-time. The Free Press was forced to pull the original colour plates and replate for the city edition. For details see my earlier blog.

I must now add that the black and white picture at the bottom of the Challenger disaster front page is not as presented. In the haste to get the best images from the disaster on the wire, AP erred when captioning the photo. Here is the correction from the New York Times:

Editor's Note: A picture on Jan. 29, published after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, showed the parents and sister of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher astronaut. Under the heading ''Family in Shock,'' the editors' caption said the family was watching ''as the space shuttle took off and exploded.'' In response to inquiries, The Times has reviewed its film, frame by frame, against television tape of the sequence, from liftoff to the announcement of the explosion. The review shows that the published photograph was in fact made slightly before the explosion. The suggestion that the family was reacting to the explosion was mistaken. (The London Free Press used the word "reacts" in their cutline.)

Note how the New York Times used television tape to clarify the situation. The dog (television) wags the tail (the newspapers) again. Now, what was Paul saying about, "Newspapers may be increasingly late to breaking news parties, but they have the advantage of getting more (if not all) the facts right."

I wasn't going to mention the following, but since I have had to revisit the column, let's look at some other stuff said in Paul's column.

First, Paul writes: "It (video of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon) was made possible by the electronic media, and, conveniently enough, by the fact the camera was somehow on the moon and rolling before the big step became a news event."

Forty years after the event and The London Free Press does not know there was no camera magically "somehow on the moon." Geesh, shades of moon landing hoax stories or the moon landing conspiracy theories. The historic event was telecast live from the side using a television camera ingeniously attached to the lunar module.

Wired has an excellent story on how the filming was accomplished. Briefly, a young electrical engineer at Westinghouse, Stan Lebar, was given the task of developing a camera that could capture the most memorable moment of the 20th century – the Apollo 11 moon landing. The goal was to send back a live television feed so that everyone could watch it – particularly the Soviets.

Paul tells us, "Those on Twitter were clearly the first to learn about the miracle plane crash on the Hudson River last winter."Yes, but . . .

According to CNET News, "TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken by Janis Krums." (Krums, by the way, is a man, and not a "she" as reported by The London Free Press days after the Hudson River landing.)

"According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, . . . the resulting traffic was too much for the site's servers."

According to Silicon Alley Insider, "Thirty-four minutes after Krums posted his photo, MSNBC interviewed him live on TV. . ." Twitter was first out of the gate, but it was the mature technology of television that won the race and made the world aware of Krums amazing photo. As usual, newspapers were not in the race.

Let's do a little creative editing and let Paul Berton win the last round by quoting his closing words, "Newspapers may be increasingly late to breaking news parties . . . " Well said, Paul.

Today's Word: Spurtle

My wife keeps a funny stick in one of our kitchen drawers. It looks somewhat like a fancy wooden spoon that someone has ruined by sawing off the flat, scooped end. When I cook pasta, I often stir the pasta with this stick to prevent the pasta from sticking.

The other night my wife was handy as I cooked the pasta and so I asked her about the strange stick. "It was your late mother's," my wife said. "She called it a spurtle. She used it for stirring her morning porridge."

"Spurtle?" This had me heading for the dictionary. Ah, spurred, spurt, sputnik, but no spurtle. I knew it wasn't a word. But, I checked Google just to be a hundred percent sure. It was there.

In fact, there was a whole dictionary of words that aren't in my dictionary. I found oxter (an armpit), lum (a chimney stack), and foosty - as in, "Ach! The breid's gone foosty (mouldy)."

If you're interested in knowing more, check out the Illustrated Scottish Words on the Net.

Porridge making champion Ian Bishop, 2008 Golden Spurtle winner, with Miss Scotland.

Where were you when. . . ?

"Where were you when . . . ?" This is the question posed by editor-in-chief of The London Free Press, Paul Berton, in his Saturday column. Maybe I could be so bold as to answer his question with a warning, equally original: "Be careful what you wish for . . ." or in this case, "what you ask for."

Berton asks the expected: "Where were you when you heard President Kennedy had been shot?" Where was I? I was between classes in high school, waiting to enter Mr. Allen's French class. The exiting students whispered the news to us. Some of the young girls were sobbing as they left Mr. Allen's room and all the young boys were stone faced. Some were wet-eyed.

My wife was in her high school cafeteria. Her high school principal announced the event over the school's PA system. She recalls the boys sat quietly numbed while the girls cried openly.

Paul goes on to ask: "Do people still find out about big breaking stories from newspapers, the way they probably did about the attack on Pearl Harbour, the bombing of Hiroshima, or even the assassination of JFK?"

This is my answer: Ever since the first historic radio signals crossed the Atlantic early in the last century newspapers have been losing ground. They were rarely, if ever, first out of the gate with the big story.

The assassination of JFK was a radio and television story. And after they broke the shocking story, word of mouth quickly made all the world aware. When JFK was shot in mid-day in Dallas Texas most newspaper presses were sitting idle, the press rooms empty. Newspapers were not slow out of the gate, they were not even in the race.

Try googling Paul's question. It's interesting. It appears that no one, absolutely no one, first learned of Kennedy's assassination from a newspaper. From my admittedly shallow research, it appears radio gets the nod here. A quick investigation into Pearl Harbour sees radio declared the winner here, too.

Now, Paul's mention of Hiroshima raises other issues more complex than just "where were you when . . .?" A lot has been written about the press and the handling of the Hiroshima story. If you're interested, a good place to start is with Greg Mitchell's piece The Press and Hiroshima: August 6, 1945, republished from Editor and Publisher.

Paul goes on to share his recollections of the Challenger disaster and how he first learned of the explosion from the front page headline in the Toronto Star. Let me share my recollections of the Challenger disaster and how the newspaper coverage was not only bested by television but, in many cases, lead into embarrassing errors by an unearned faith in the accuracy of the televised image.

According to MSNBC the belief that ". . . millions of television viewers were horrified to witness the live broadcast of the space shuttle Challenger exploding 73 seconds into flight . . . " is actually a myth. "What most people recall as a 'live broadcast' was actually the taped replay broadcast soon after the event." (Many now argue the Challenger didn't explode, or blow up as apparently the Toronto Star reported, but I'll let you google that.)

But whether television broadcast the event live or not, what is clear is that newspapers were left out of the loop. Newspaper newsrooms everywhere scrambled to put together a story by following it minute by minute. Newspaper reporters and editors around the world were glued to newsroom television sets.

When it came time to place the front page picture, many newspapers were horrified to discover the AP image by Bruce Weaver showed the shuttle apparently exploding against a night-black sky. The disaster occurred against a blue sky; The editors knew this, they had watched the actual event on television. Editors across North America were howling: "The sky was blue, damn it! It wasn't night!"

Back then, in 1986, it took the better part of half an hour to receive a colour transmission at a newspaper. The entire process for publishing colour pictures in the paper was long and tedious. After a transmission, all that an editor had in hand was a collection of three black and white pictures called printers. The pictures were identical except in tone and the labels magenta, yellow and cyan.

These paper printers were labeled cyan, magenta and yellow and were sent to the back-shop by editorial to be proofed. As you can imagine a lot was necessary to transform three black and white images into a colour picture in the daily paper. To give editors and the press crew an idea of how the image should look when printed, a proof was pulled. This involved three, overlapping coloured images: one cyan, one magenta and one yellow and all on a transparent base. Making these took time. As I said, this was a slow, tedious operation.

By the time the editors had proofs in hand, they were sitting on deadline. The deadline at a newspaper is well named. If you are the editor in charge of the front page, you do not miss deadline. The press must roll on time. The papers must be delivered to the waiting trucks on schedule. Release your page late too often and the newspaper will release you.

Editors everywhere were in an awful bind. The Challenger disaster had to go front with art and they knew their front page picture, the one they must use, was incorrect. The sky colour was wrong. There was no time for a corrected transmission from AP and as this was in the days before Photoshop — there was no easy way to turn the sky blue.

The solution decided upon at The London Free Press was to take the magenta and the yellow printers and opaque the negatives. Opaque was a special water-based paint used in the back-shop on negatives. Once opaqued, an area would not print. The Free Press would turn the sky blue by using only the cyan printer.

This was a quick solution. Unfortunately there was no time to pull another proof. With fingers crossed, the colour plates were sent to the press room and the big Goss letterpress rumbled into action. As the press rolled and everyone saw the first papers, hearts stopped.

The editor in charge of the front page ran into the newsroom waving one of the first papers. "We've got dog shit on blue linoleum," he bellowed in anger. "We've got to replate for city!"

The flooring picture went out to the district but was pulled and replaced for the city edition. This time the original image was used as transmitted. The sky looked black but it was better than the alternative.

The truth is the blue-black sky is correct. It is an accurate representation of the image captured by many of the photojournalists shooting at the disaster. Transparency film, used by photojournalists at the time, records images differently than electronic television cameras.

Would all those editors have been panicked by the oh-so-dark sky if they had not viewed the actual event themselves on television? I doubt it.

Too Big to Succeed

Numerous newspapers are on the financial ropes. All too often newspaper executives simply blame the Internet; it steals their ad revenue and their readership base, coaxing away readers with information gleaned from the venerable old news-providers themselves.

I believe the Internet may not be at the root of their financial crisis. It's size. Newspapers, or at least the chains that control them, have become too big to succeed, or at least too much in debt to succeed.

Take the Tribune Co. in the States — Sam Zell brought $315 million to the table to leverage control of a company valued at $13.5 billion. Just 353 days later the now private company filed for bankruptcy in a federal court in Delaware. Source: Newsosaur.

What went wrong? According to the Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Co. was unable to service its massive $12 billion in debt. Under Zell, the Tribune became the second most leveraged of the 20 largest public media companies in the States, carrying a debt load 9.2 times the company’s operating earnings.

Such massive leveraging immediately resulted in the company's bond issues falling deep into junk territory, raising borrowing costs. Considering it took only a year under Zell's leadership for the Tribune to enter bankruptcy, such massive leveraging seems to have immediately thrust the entire media operation deep into junk territory, not just their bonds.

In a financial bind like this a company can either increase profits or decrease costs. Under Zell it appears the approach of choice was to decrease costs with layoffs, more layoffs and yet even more layoffs. I call this the employee-as-ballast theory. It is followed by many in the publishing business; jettison employees and watch the company soar, not!

Closer to home, we have Quebecor Media in Canada headed by PKP, Pierre Karl Peladeau. Once called the King of Convergence by the CBC, PKP is the gentleman many credit with guiding Quebecor World, once the world's largest printer, to financial ruin, bankruptcy, insolvency.

PKP's own Canoe carried a story calling Quebecor World the "insolvent printer" in June, 2009. In early 2003 the stock reached $35; the last time I checked it could be picked up for 2.6 cents. Under PKP's leadership the world's largest printer lost 99.9 percent of its value!

In June 2009, the following was reported: Chicago-based printer RR Donnelley tendered an unsolicited bid to purchase Quebecor World, the insolvent (Sun Media's term) printer. This bid was rebuffed, but later in the month Mark Angelson, a former RR Donnelley CEO, was named chairman of the printer reorganized to "satisfy" bankruptcy code requirements.

Quebecor World and Quebecor, the owner of Sun Media, are now totally separate companies with a shared past but unlinked future. I thank an alert reader for this additonal information.

PKP has brought his magic touch to the world of Canadian media. In 1999 Quebecor gained control of Toronto-based Sun Media for about $1.3 billion, creating the second-largest newspaper company in Canada. The layoffs started almost immediately. The little paper that grew began to wither, shades of Sam Zell.

In 2007 Quebecor Media bought competitor Osprey Media Income Fund in a deal worth about $517 million. Quebecor executive vice-president Luc Lavoie said Quebecor intended to respect the traditions of its new titles.

A couple of years later the Cobourg Daily Star, founded in 1831, the Port Hope Evening Guide, founded in 1878, and the Colborne Chronicle, founded in 1959, were closed — replaced by a new Sun Media print and online newspaper, Northumberland Today. So much for tradition.

Again, the layoffs started almost immediately. Quebecor sees its now truly paper-thin newspapers as lean, mean, fighting machines. Others see the often century-old papers simply as gutted, like dead fish but with greater stench.

An ad builder and two graphic artists were laid off by the Sault Star and the pre-press department closed, said Elaine Mills, president of the Local. "They took all their computers out on Sunday and moved them to Barrie."

Mills gave an example of the cumbersome nature of the Sun Media/Quebecor Media approach called "centres of excellence" by the chain and called outsourcing by those losing their jobs.

A classified adviser who was working on a monthly real estate section had to fax every ad, along with a cover page, to Barrie where it was being produced. Dozens of faxes had to be sent and the phone lines were often busy on the receiving end, turning it into a hair-tearing chore. For full detail, see the CWA Canada article on the hollowing out of the Osprey chain.

Years ago, when I still worked for a paper under PKP's control, I was asked by the business section to take a studio photo of a voodoo doll stuck with pins clearly labelled CEO, VP, etc. I jabbed the doll with one of the large pins and joked, that one is for Pierre. Man, I wish I still had that doll.
_________________________________________________
Since writing this in early 2009, CanWest Global Communications Corp. in Canada put its newspaper division under creditor protection on Friday, January 8, 2010.

A group of lenders led by Canada's five largest banks agreed to take ownership of the newspaper operations under a “pre-packaged” financial restructuring under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act. CanWest continues to search for other buyers, hoping for a superior offer.

The Asper family, which controls CanWest Global, no longer has ownership of the newspaper operations under the restructuring proposal. The family got into the newspaper business in 2000 when CanWest agreed to buy the former Southam Inc. chain of papers from Conrad Black.


The group, saddled with $1.3-billion in debt, includes many of Canada's leading daily newspapers, such as the Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun. The National Post newspaper is not included in the bankruptcy filing.

Read the whole story in the Globe and Mail here.