Saturday, April 26, 2014



There's nothing quite so fascinating as shrunken heads.
 I know. I've held them and smelled them and written about them. If I could weave a novel around them, it would be a bestseller.
For some reason, the prominent specialist from Harvard Medical School was chatting about my shrunken-head adventures during my latest, thank God, routine visit.
Just how do they shrink the skull, he asked? And we pondered that for a few minutes, which was more fun than discussing cataracts.
 I didn't know. So I asked my son Mark, the world-traveller who now lives and works in China, and he looked at me like sons do when they realize Dad isn't quite the genius they thought when they were six.
They can't shrink the bone, he said, and wondered just how bright the doctors from Harvard really were.
They peel the flesh off the skull and then shrink and tan and pickle that, he explained.
 Later, when I was checking up on him, since my sons have been known to try to pull a fast one on the old man, I read that the bare skulls then were used by tribes to plant around their borders or in streams to intimidate rival tribes.
I suspected Mark was right, though, because he was the one who introduced me to the legendary Billy Jamieson and his wonderful collection of the bizarre and the fascinating and the unique. You can get a taste of this since Billy died suddenly two years ago on his 57th birthday and Waddington's is selling his war clubs and electric chair and all the other strange stuff but not, probably for legal reasons,  the shrunken heads.
I must talk to his lady, Jessica Phillips, about that, because as I remember it, Billy guaranteed me that they weren't the products of recent murders or produced according to demand.
Once upon a time, Billy was selling a great blue whale skeleton on eBay, and Mark, who then ran some eBay departments, offered to help him by getting some publicity.
Billy sold it to an Arab sheik for  $200,000, a princely sum but only a shadow of the $2 million he got when he sold a mummy which turned out to be Rameses I to Emory University in Atlanta (but that's another story.) He took a shine to Mark who also likes to explore the Amazon and dig up ancient stuff.
So Mark, Mary and I visited his wonderful collection in his lovely downtown loft several times, including the greatest Halloween parties I've ever attended. They were the stuff of Hollywood thrillers.
I have written about Billy before, and this is the second reason I know people are fascinated about shrunken heads. I have written more than 300 blog columns, and something like 6,000 columns and 3,000 editorials, and I now know that all you have to do is put shrunken heads in the headline and your readership soars.
I will spare you all the stories I know about Billy, which my family will tell you is not normal because they claim I repeat everything...often.
But here are the headlines for some:
You may wonder about the bewildering mix of native artifacts and side-show carnie "treasures" in Billy's collection at Waddington's. Some came when he saved Canada's first public museum in Niagara Falls from extinction - which many older Canadians will remember with affection. That's is where he got the mummy which was just one of several being ignored. Most came when he wandered remote spots and yarned with adventurers over the campfires.
He was a fascinating mix of barker, archaeologist and explorer, happily juggling oddities with the macabre and anecdotes about all the caves and crannies of forgotten worlds.
For him, Raiders of the Lost Ark could have been a page from his diary.

Friday, April 18, 2014


Just as the snow melts and I dream of the cottage emerging from hibernation, the bills arrive from Hydro One with the proof that it sells the most expensive electricity in Canada.
I scanned the bills for the cottage and the humble bunkie with amazement at the gall of the provincial monstrosity. Its leaders know that they are under investigation for stupidity, mismanagement, cheating meters and arrogance towards ANY consumer complaint but they obviously have instructed their troops to keep on trucking when it comes to gouging the consumer.
I last wrote about "hydro's cheating meters" on Feb. 24. In it and columns over the years I have detailed with Hydro's figures the proof that there is something rotten in their kingdom.
When I bought my cottage in 1980, it came with the bunkie and its own meter left over from the days it was a second property and occupied by a drunk. So the Kings who sold to me bought it in self defense when the old man died.
I would remove this second service and run it all through the main cottage,  but Hydro and the local electricians have a cabal that makes it so expensive, time consuming and bureaucratic to do such a simple chore, it is frustrating but still easier just to pay the second bill  after wondering at how  wonky the "smart" meter got this time.
Faithful readers will recall that several years ago, when because of illness we didn't use the bunkie at all, its bills were several times higher than the main cottage. Hydro didn't even bother to dream up an excuse because you can only match such silliness with blank-faced stupidity.
Since Dec. 10, 2012, I have paid $393.47 for the 122.25 kWh used in the bunkie, which is nice and has a huge deck but without water is mainly a sleeping and sitting retreat. Each kWh cost $3.22.
For the main cottage, I have paid $768.31 for 2019.47 kWh. So each kWh cost .38 cents.
Yet Hydro One says the rate for residential seasonal, the service type classification for my cottage, is 7.2 cents per kWh rising to 12.9 cents at peak times.
The bunkie now falls under that rate since an old much reduced classification for such minimal use buildings was scrapped a few years ago because Hydro wasn't making enough money.  There are three-month periods when there is no electricity consumed  but I pay $73.20 for delivery, .75 cents for regulatory charges and $9.61 in HST.
And that charge, of course, has just gone up.  It's only gone up 1.4% according to Ontario Hydro but  when I read the propaganda of it and Toronto Hydro, I don't believe a claim or a figure.
After all, the proof of this pudding of figures is in the paying. And in the last 16 months,  power  at peak periods to my bunkie has cost 25 times that Hydro figure. Even if you add the bill for the bunkie used at most a week a year to the charge for the cottage, you have a rate more than four times the figure stated in the propaganda.
Even when you figure in the huge margin of error when you deal with government accountants, that's still a criminal exaggeration.
 You know the line about how many bureaucrats it takes to change a light bulb. Obviously with Hydro One, it's far too many, considering its expenses.
The cottage consumer just can't win. Hydro One has trouble keeping the power on. And when they do, they overcharge.  And when we turn the power off, they overcharge again. 

Friday, April 11, 2014



It already happens.



I have reached the years where my friends read the obits in the papers first.
I don't, because if I manage to get  up, I know my name isn't there.
I write about a trio of passings who were honourable hard workers who wore well on the rest of us because they were decent and able and understood BS without flinging it like a Jays pitcher on a bad day..
Back in the mists, I remember a song that became far more famous than the singer, Kitty Kallen, who made it a huge hit. The key line was "little things mean a lot."
And they do for me because they matter more in politics and journalism and life in general than the big set pieces, the big deal performances, whether the budget speech, the huge scoop of a headline, or some grand formality of camaraderie.
It's how you act when the lights are on someone else that are the measure of the man. I have never forgotten that the legendary Johnny Carson, during the two-minute breaks for commercials, ignored totally his guests with whom he chatted with charm when the cameras were live.
Jim Flaherty would probably have been as good a premier and a better prime minister. Willis Blair was appreciated but should have had a bigger platform. Vince Devitt was the sort of tough experienced veteran that any good newspaper needs in its spine.
I remember one agreeable August morning when we were opening the Ex and I found Faherty standing alone and unannounced to one side of the crowd before the ceremonies. We gossiped about how things were going in the quiet days in Ottawa and at Queen's Park, the circuses he had dominated with the ease of the ringmaster.
I said of course he would have to say a few words, and he said that wasn't necessary, but we both knew that with an election coming, no politician of his worth would ignore any crowd larger than a couple.
Turned out, however, that when I raised this with colleagues running the opening, they were opposed because the invited dignitary was a provincial Liberal minister who had given us a grant.
 I said Flaherty may be a Tory but he was also the federal finance minister, the second most important politician in the country, and you just don't ignore such a man. Besides, I said, he was a pro who would give a short graceful speech and not raise partisan hackles.
 Flaherty performed as advertised. And everyone was pleased that someone of such note who had been coming to the Ex his entire life had said a few words without us having to go through the normal hassles of getting a major operator to the fair.
He may not have been big like Blair, a baron of beef in a blue double-breasted suit who had been East York mayor, but you could imagine a scrappy Irishman dominating Princeton hockey back in his scholarship days.
For Blair, baseball was the game and long after  he had left formal politics, we would chat at Jays game because he had been a loyal supporter from the start and very helpful in the bargain $17.8 million conversion of Exhibition Stadium for baseball. (If only all our stadium deals could be so economical and easy on the taxpayers.)
Blair was into curling too and brought the World Junior Curling Championship to East York in 1975. It produced a sports anecdote I will always treasure. As part of a PR stunt to promote the event, Blair had the reigning champs from Switzerland play Don Chrevier and two CBC types, with me as lead. We won 4-0 and enjoyed watching their supercilious smiles at the old farts freeze to frowns.
Blair and I were in the City Hall cafeteria one day when a man shyly came up to his mayor for advice. He volunteered that Blair didn't know him but about a minute later, the guy would  have thought Blair knew the age of his kids and how many dandelions were on his lawn.
If only all our councillors could have the common sense and good humour that Blair had even in the face of some of the stupider votes and rhetoric of the lefties whom he deplored.
The provincial government knew his worth, had him on the OMB, the supervisory planning board,  and had him tackle municipal assessment, always a thorn in the side of everyone associated with the issue. Blair's shrewd report as a commissioner for Premier William Davis stated baldly on the first page that something like 2.1 million properties in Ontario paid no municipal taxes at all.
Just how the hell does that happen, I demanded of Blair. He said it happened "by hook or by crook," an old English expression meaning by any means necessary, whether that meant crooked bureaucrats and assessors, or just properties that had managed to escape detection.
Afterwards, there were a lot more people paying municipal taxes, although Blair in his agreeable  way never boasted about reforms.
With his encyclopedia knowledge of Torontonians and politics, Blair was a stalwart source, one that as a reporter, columnist and editor I relied on to give me the inside on what was going on without malicious overtones. I would imagine Devitt did the same, as a veteran of everything in newspapering who ended up on the inside as a press secretary to Premier Davis.
Devitt and I went through the wars together, and shared many of the same scars, whether the wounds came from provincial and federal elections and leadership contests,  or whatever  the major story was.
At the end, I was the editor and he was the reporter on whom I had to depend to sort Star blarney from Globe fiction.  On several occasions, thousands of dollars in street sales depended on the advice he gave me minutes before the edition.
For example, the Saturday Star had a headline story during the 1970 kidnapping of James Cross, the British diplomat, about FLQ terrorists hidden inside the wall of a house being searched by police. The Mounties had leaked such a story to the Star but Devitt, the Tely's main man on the story, couldn't confirm it. I finally decided, based on Devitt, not to "scalp" or copy the story,  so the second-largest  edition in the country came out that noon without that exciting angle.
Devitt never mentioned it to me again, although my bosses certainly did because of the loss of sales. He expected that the Telegram would do the honest thing for its readers and not repeat a phoney story.
He repaid me in a way weeks later when I was in Montreal to buck up our troops. We all ended up in the lamented Montreal Press Club, a normal gathering after big stories then.
A Boston Globe reporter announced he was about to beat the shit out of me. As I turned to face him, Devitt inserted himself. I was the biggest and youngest in the coming fight but for Devitt - and Flaherty and Blair for that matter -  you always jump in to help your friends.
The Globe reporter warned that we should be careful because he had been the boxing champ of the U.S. Marines. (Strangely enough, that turned out to be true.) Devitt replied: "Screw you, I was a Toronto bartenders.) (Which he had been to get enough money to attend Ryerson Journalism school two years ahead of me.)
And that was that. We didn't even stop drinking. After all, it was only 5 a.m, and these were the glory days of newspapers when work consumed your life.
These are the things you remember when you sift through the obits,  after you are grateful that you haven't yet made it into print, the faces and events that will never fade.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014



The number of Ontario public employees paid out of taxes who made more than $100,000 last year has grown 11% to nearly 98,000, but public outrage hasn't thundered out against the traffic cops, parking ticket officers, jail guards and assorted civil servants who make a lot more than most of us thanks to overtime and inflated salaries.
In fact, a respected news letter out of the Legislature called Inside Queen's Park has noted the lack of fury and the fact that it wasn't raised during Question Period and suggested the annual list be scrapped because it's not worth the bother.
That would be unfortunate. I have often referred to the compulsory reporting of maximum compensation under the Sunshine Law and suspect that many find it useful, even if they don't foam at the mouth because we have become too accustomed to the outrages.
I wonder what has happened to my old friend Bono, who now advises Tory Leader Tim Hudak on verbal strategy from speeches to questions.
Does the volcano slumber?
Surely Mark Bonokoski, after decades as a reporter, columnist, editor, commentator and publisher with the Sun chain, hasn't mellowed to the degree that he thinks the overburdened middle class accept this guff, especially as they run around pulling together all the info they need to pay too much income tax.
I shared an office with Bono during some chaotic days, when he marched around rehearsing his invective, bellowing into an unneeded phone to his buddies about his latest cause. It was a wonder that afternoon that the murderer could get through to tell him the cops had arrested the wrong guy.
I know his feelings about overpaid civil servants. Wotinhell is going on, Bono, the opposition should be going after the provincial treasurer, Charles Sousa, who was silly enough to say the latest Sunshine listing shows Ontario runs the leanest government in Canada.
What crap! Is that a civil servant thanking him, or do they aim lower down?
Why do I keep thinking of blaring brass bands when I listen to barrages of hot air from some guy named Sousa?
This rich "cream" making more than double the average wage curdles to a nasty total of $12.5 billion. That's disgusting in a province that now has a debt that some said erroneously was larger than California. That would have been obviously wrong in the old days, but it's nauseating that spending grew so gross in Ontario that we would even be mentioned with a state that was so notorious for  financial ruin before its death bed conversion.
There are plenty of  Grit bull's-eyes around to shoot at but the Tories should blaze away at this one too because the New Democrats certainly won"t.
The average guy, according to StatsCan, is struggling to get to $50,000 a year. The average woman is concentrating on just keeping the job where she earns less than the guy.
You think it doesn't bother them that some cop lounging in the back of traffic court, or some parking  ranger circling the glory pits around hospitals, is making more than $100,000 a year when some of the time they'r just struggling not to doze off.
You think it doesn't bother the robbed middle class that the shuffle of incompetents out of political offices, which is greased with platinum handshakes and deals on benefits, is the only time we hear of changes in departments and agencies.
I think we should continue the law forcing the reporting of public pay over $100,000 but give it another name.
Rogues' Gallery.  Most Unwanted.  How You Wasted Your Taxes.