Newspapers, not such smarties

When considering a name for this blog, I thought of calling it "Rockinon: Musings." In some ways, it was a better name as I write about stuff I think about, like newspapers. I like newspapers. I read them. I worked for two of them. And now, I muse over them.

When I worked at newspapers, I just grumbled, mostly quietly—now, I blog. I get to grumble openly, loudly, and often. I've been surprised to discover that journalists don't like public grumbling. I get what I would call public-hate-mail for my innocuous observations. And now to today's small grumble. I'm sure some journalists' will soon have their knickers in a knot over this. All too weird.

Paul Berton, editor-in-chief of The London Free Press, claimed, "Newspapers may be increasingly late to breaking news parties, but they have the advantage of getting more (if not all) the facts right." I'm sorry to tell you Paul, you're late to many stories and often wrong.

The London Free Press can't even get a story about the changes in Smarties right. I blogged about this problem of inaccuracy before here and again here. Paul, the columns you write for the paper are all too often error-filled. You, like your staff, are spread too thin. My guess is that the paper cannot spare an editor to edit your column and we both know how important that second pair of eyes can be.

It has been more than four months since Nestlé changed Smarties. Nestlé no longer uses artificial colouring. Their website states the improved candy was "available starting in March 2009." The London Free Press broke the news today, the end of July, in their "monday minute" column. The Free Press, in keeping with the fun nature of the column, doesn't capitalize the "M" on Monday.

I hope the reader is having fun because I know The London Free Press staff isn't. They are stretched so ridiculously thin, as are all the staff at all the Sun Media/Quebecor Media papers, that they simply repackage a bit of stale fluff and report almost word for word the company's press-kit claims. This plagiarism is bad writing and bad journalism. Both the paper and the press release talk about "the trend to healthier lifestyles" driving the change.

Sadly, there is actually a bit of a story here, but even months late to the party The London Free Press had no time to discover the story. Tell me again, why we need big media—like Quebecor with their big layoffs resulting in thin staffs unable to perform.

So, what was the story missed by The London Free Press? Answer: Some colours have gone missing! Temporarily there are no blue nor green Smarties. Nestlé states on their website, "It’s proving very difficult to find a non-artificial blue." This eliminates both blue and green Smarties from the line-up as green results from a mix of blue and yellow.

The other missed story is the claim about Smarties being part of a trend toward a healthier lifestyle. Smarties? Give me a break. Nestlé itself states, "Save sweet and fatty treats for special occasions." When it comes to kids and lunch box ideas, even Nestlé nixes Smarties.

You can get 22% of your daily fat from a box of Smarties.

My mother, back in the '50s, understood what is truly meant by a healthier lifestyle. She gave me apples, navel oranges and even carrot sticks.

By the way, I don't get my knickers all in a knot over serving a child a few—very few—Smarties. But, a few go a long way. They are not my idea of a healthier lifestyle.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Who will shed a tear for the beaver?

A few years ago I wrote a weekly column for The London Free Press. In the course of writing the column I came across the story of how the Canadian beaver, or to be accurate the American Beaver (Castor canadenis), was introduced to the tip of South America, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago.

Walking along the Thames River below the presently kaput Springbank Dam I noticed downed trees, their stumps bearing the distinctive teeth marks of the Canada's largest rodent and smallest lumberjack — the beaver.

If you like wetlands, beavers are environmental engineers. If you like the world just the way it is and want to keep it that way, beavers are environmental vandals.

Argentina and Chile share the beaver infested archipelago at the tip of South American. The beaver were introduced in the 1940s by fur traders eager to start a beaver pelt industry. Beaver fell out of fashion, beaver fur coats are no longer in, and the beavers were left to tinker away at their two most popular pastimes — dam building and family building, not necessarily in that order.

Chile and Argentina don't always agree but when it comes to the beavers they both see them as vandals. Forests, decades old and ripe for lumbering, are being wiped out, drowned by beaver ponds and not downed by South American lumberjacks for profit.

Hated and despised our beavers are caught in the swirling currents of angry lies being spread to support their eradication from their adopted homeland. Our beloved beaver is being compared to the plague of rabbits destroying Australia or the crayfish infestation laying waste to the Nile River in Egypt. It just can't be true, can it?

Take the Egyptian crayfish, known as the cockroach of the Nile, they have their defenders. The abundant crustaceans eat the Nile River snail known to carry bilharzia, a water-born disease affecting millions of Egyptians. Deaths from bilharzia have decreased in recent years along the river where the crayfish are most common .

If you have ever been to New Orleans, you know that the little crustaceans are good to eat — a Cajun delicacy. Boiling them in water spiked with Louisiana hot sauce, gives their white, sweet meat a gentle spicy heat. Six of the little tails, they're similar to lobster tails but smaller, leaves the mouth warm and longing for a cool, heat-quenching beer. We must teach the Egyptians to eat crayfish, and to drink beer. In the end, they'll thank us for both.

And those rabbits in Australia, well there are very few people who have a good word for those bunnies, millions and millions of bunnies to be accurate. Even the fence builders, who benefited so greatly in the past from the building and maintaining of thousands of miles of rabbit-proof fencing criss-crossing Australia, had nary a good word for the varmints.

It's ironic that the pack animal credited with making the building and maintaining of the thousand mile fences possible was the camel — another species foreign to Australia, and like the rabbit introduced in error.

So, what of our beavers, are the South Americans enjoying hidden benefits? Or, are they just plain bad news, like the rabbits in Australia — or the rabbits in our tulip garden, according to my wife.

She assures me the little rabbits that frequent our backyard are the reason her tulip beds are so sparse. Singing quietly to themselves, "When you eat the tulips do you eat the red ones first?" they wipe out her spring-welcoming flowers — red ones first. Honest!

I hate to admit it but our beavers are building an environmental disaster in South America. The best I can say is that contrary to the belief the beavers having no natural predators at the tip of South America, some are claiming the crocodiles (should we say caiman) of the region are benefiting from our national rodent and have the beaver on their menu.

The beaver, in cutting down trees and large shrubs, in damming the region's wild streams, causes large ponds to form, providing habitat for fish and crocodiles. The Argentinian national park in Tierra del Fuego may have more beaver than in the past, of course in the past it had none, but it also may have a few more crocodiles with the beaver-induced expanding crocodile habitat.

If the beaver is successfully eradicated from the tip of South America, and that is the plan, at least the crocodiles will shed a tear.


Cheers,
Rockinon

Home Concert Featured The Laws

I'd never heard of home concerts. Friday night my wife and I attended one at the home of Christine Newland and her husband Walter Bietberger. Christine is the principal cellist for Orchestra London in London, Ontario. They are a cool couple and I'm not surprised that these two brought live music into their home and shared the experience with friends.

Christine and Walter's home concert featured The Laws, the husband-and-wife singer/songwriter team of John and Michele Law from Wheatley, Ontario. Their appearance, along with that of Nashville guitarist Brent Moyer, was not a one-off, unique event; no, it was part of a movement which is opening new venues to performers. One musician remarked Friday night, home concerts beat playin' bars.

There is a Canadian website, from the east coast, dedicated to home concerts — Acoustic Roof — but this is not simply a folksy Maritimes' movement moving west. I found references to home concerts being held everywhere from Arkansas, in the southern States, to various towns throughout Canada.

The Laws have performed on stages throughout North Amercia and have completed three music tours of Australia. They have been featured on Entertainment Tonight Canada and the PBS series Legends and Lyrics. The PBS site compares The Laws "to some of the greatest duos of all time... The Everly Brothers, The Louvins and Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons."

In the words of host Christine Newland, it was "an incredibly magical evening."

And now, listen to The Laws . . . and if you only have time for one, my choice is Away about Michele sleeping in her husband's shirt when he is away. My wife smiled when Michele talked about the obvious inspiration for the song. My wife liked to iron my shirts when I was away on an out-of-town assignment, or simply working the night shift.




Visit Reverb Nation for more of the music of The Laws and to purchase. Enjoy.











Addendum:

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

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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.