Rod McQueen's Blog, page 62

Out of luck

The last episode has run in the wonderful HBO series, Luck, which has been cancelled. Alas, it was witty, intelligent, dramatic, and filled with wonderful characters – just the sort of television show that should succeed. They included: Dustin Hoffman as Ace Bernstein out of prison looking for revenge and redemption, Nick Nolte as the old trainer looking for a comeback, and the ragtag collection of misfits seeking a Pick Six. Every character was pitch perfect.

When HBO cancelled the show after one season, they appeared to be caving to complaints by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Indeed, three horses had died during production, but scores of horses die each year in racing accidents and the tracks stay open. The real reason was likely tumbling audience figures, down by half from the out-of-the-gate million viewers. It's a fact that there were scenes where I had no idea what was happening, but then again, that's often been the case when I go to the track and leave behind my money.

Another show that I am trying hard to like is NBC's new Smash, a play within a play about Marilyn Monroe as it readies for Broadway. I was originally attracted by the news that my heartthrob Angelica Huston was involved. I have been a raving fan since she played Maerose in Prizzi's Honor (1985), one of my all-time favorite films. Smash is fine, the choreogaphy and singing superb, but the plot is afternoon soap. I'm hanging in, hoping that Ivy Lynn (played by Megan Hilty) gets dumped as Marilyn and is replaced by underdog Karen Cartwright (played by Katharine McPhee).

Meanwhile, my current favorite series The Good Wife, and the best mini-series since The West Wing, is beginning to look a little frayed as the third season limps to a close. Tell me how Will sitting impotently around the office with a long face helps the drama? Why has Eli become a caricature of himself? Where has Kalinda's raunch gone? Does Alicia really need to buy her old house back? The end of the season is not leaving me hanging.

Fortunately, none of this TV talk really matters. Spring is in the air. Reruns can roll without me.

Steal your heart

Nina, The Bandit Queen is Joey Slinger's best book yet. As a previous winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, Slinger has another winner here.

But first, let me declare a conflict. I am a friend of Slinger and was the titleist on two of his previous books: No Axe Too Small to Grind and If It's a Jungle Out There, Why Do I Have to Mow the Lawn? But I had nothing to do with Nina. Maybe that's why it's so good.

Nina Carson Dolgoy, the lead character, is the kind of person who would steal your heart and steal your wallet. And maybe not in that order. Her motto is: "Being a welfare queen doesn't have to be a dead end." She lives in SuEz, a part of the city so scary that even the cops don't go there. The rest of the hilarious collection of misfits includes: D.S., who lives with Nina and wears a blond wig and nightie so the welfare inspectors don't know there's a man on the premises and cut off her cheques. Ed Oataway who makes a living being paid to steal cars so the owners can collect on the insurance. L. Roy and L. Ray Ewell who are identical twins although they didn't look alike until they were five and, in fact, are not even related. And Jarmeel Tolbert who founded a church in an abandoned grocery store for people who have been taken up into space and probed by aliens. The whole book has a circus tent unreality. The total IQ of all the characters is something less than the wheelbase of the clown car.

Nina wants to raise money to fix the local swimming pool so her daughters have something to do rather than become prostitutes. Her friend, JannaRose, suggests a bake sale but they don't know anyone who bakes. So they decide to rob a bank. They argue it's not really stealing because nothing is missing. After all, the bank has insurance, and the insurance company is backed by the government, and the government just prints more money.

Nina's brother Frank, just released from prison, does the deed. The getaway car is disabled by an accident so Frank escapes by subway with $1.18 million. Or does he? I won't play plot spoiler.

The book is filled with wonderful lines that make you laugh out loud. Even though there is no back door and anyone could walk in, welfare inspectors dig a tunnel into Nina's house to see if a man is living there. She catches them and beats one of them; he later dies. "The marks on his head showed he'd been beaten with an artificial arm," writes Slinger. "When the artificial fingerprints were examined, they showed it had been his own artificial arm, the one he'd lost in the scuffle with Nina."

Police investigate, convinced that this is all part of Nina's master plan, to move up from shooting junkyard dogs to knocking off municipal civil servants. Read this book and weep. With tears of laughter.

Where are the robo-cops?

My hometown of Guelph has been wracked by allegations over robo-calls made in the last election by Pierre Poutine. When the perpetrator is eventually found and charged, I hope the court will go easy on him or her for the deliciously ironic nom de plume. This is no ordinary scallywag!

While I'm not that worked up about such electoral fraud, I am miffed at another form of robo-calls that promote goods and services in which I have no interest. Like a lot of other Canadians, I naively signed up for the "do not call list" in the hope that this would mean fewer telemarketers interrupting my day or my dinner. Good idea, poorly executed.

Of course, I am well aware that huge swaths of commerce are exempt and can continue to call: newspapers seeking new subscribers, businesses with whom I already have a relationship, and pollsters, among others. In fact, I rarely hear from those groups. I do, however, hear several times a day from outfits who are supposedly denied such easy access. Duct-cleaning is the most popular, followed closely by door and window installations. And that's after a careful screening of my caller ID in order to let the phone go unanswered when the number or name looks suspicious.

Since the do-not-call plan was launched, I have lodged several dozen complaints on the website of the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) where you can blow the whistle on illegal callers. Maybe the CRTC investigates, maybe they don't. All I know is I have never heard back and the number of scammers continues apace.

I don't think governments or government agencies should do everything. But I do think that when an agency such as the CRTC undertakes to do something, they should actually follow through. The plain fact is that telemarketers just mock the regulators. When my five-year signup on the do-not-call list expires, I don't intend to renew. I imagine the number of telemarketing scammers will continue at the pretty much same clip.

Meanwhile, a word to the CRTC. If you do happen to call in response to my complaints, make sure the caller ID says CRTC. Otherwise, I'll assume it's just those ruddy duct cleaners again, and I may not answer.

Fatherly pride

The past few months have been stellar times for my two offspring, Mark and Alison. Forgive a father for feeling such pride, but while they were both already very successful in their chosen fields, their recent accomplishments are particularly compelling.

In addition to his day job as CEO of Wellington Financial, Mark is also chairman of the Toronto Port Authority. Among other roles, this federal agency oversees Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. In the last six years, the airport saw a fifty-fold passenger increase and this year will handle two million people.

The short ferry trip works, but there is a wait. A pedestrian tunnel, first proposed 77 years ago, was the answer. For the past two years Mark has been a tenacious force. He worked with TPA staff as well as federal and provincial politicians and officials to create a public-private partnership that will build the underwater passage. Yesterday, Mark officiated at an ceremony at which he, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Mayor Rob Ford announced the $82.5 million tunnel. In times of restraint, all the participants were delighted to say that – unlike most such infrastructure projects – no taxpayer dollars will be spent. All costs will be covered by the already existing $20 airport improvement fee paid by departing passengers.

Alison, a professor of art history at McMaster University, recently saw the completion of project that took even longer. In her case, it was the publication last fall of a book that required ten years of research and writing. Empress Eugenie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century took Alison to eight countries as she consulted archives, studied art and architecture, and became an expert in the Second Empire. Her book, which has received positive reviews, has revolutionized accepted thinking on Eugenie, a powerful political figure and patron who not only collected and commissioned art but also led France in the establishment of children's health and education facilities.

In January, Alison published a beautiful catalogue entitled From Renaissance to Rodin: Celebrating the Tanenbaum Gift. The scores of works shown in this readable coffee-table book were gifts over the last forty years to the Art Gallery of Ontario by Joey and Toby Tanenbaum as well as Joey's parents, Max and Anne. In addition, Alison has just been named a full professor at McMaster.

Congratulations to Mark and Alison!

The home front

Canada doesn't have enough millwrights, manufacturing engineers and others with the right training required for highly skilled jobs. Time was when such workers were taught elsewhere: Germany, Austria, Hungary and England. Those easy sources dried up long ago. Our misdirected immigration system is focussed on family reunification, a noble cause, but not a policy that produces ready-to-go workers.

Each spring another problem becomes apparent. Too many graduates head for jobs in the United States and never come back. According to a story in the March issue of ROB Magazine, there are 350,000 Canadians working for Google, Apple, Facebook and hundreds of other high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. Even in its heyday, Research In Motion – "We built the refinery right next to the gold mine," Mike Lazaridis famously said – couldn't attract the top grads. Microsoft regularly creamed off the best and the brightest. When Bill Gates toured the top half dozen campuses in North America where Microsoft recruited, he always visited Waterloo, his only stop in Canada.

As a result of this ongoing brain drain, Canada has too few global companies. Imagine what we could do with entrepreneurial managers who knew their stuff and had access to a pool of trained workers who possessed the necessary skills. Here are my two modest proposals, one for each problem:

First, for skilled workers, why reinvent the wheel? Copy the German apprenticeship model. Even the most unlikely proponent, French president Nicholas Sarkozy, is currently advocating German methods to French voters.

Second: any graduate who leaves the country for a job in the U.S. (or goes to the U.S. for grad school and does not return) must remit to the province where he or she graduated all the money spent by the state on his/her post-secondary education. Why should our taxpayer dollars go to enrich another country?

Money from the second could pay for the first. The benefits would accrue to all.

Bowling alone

The wins yesterday in Arizona and Michigan by Mitt Romney, known to the media travelling with him as Mittens, show that Romney is nowhere near the Republican candidate presumptive. Michigan, in particular, was too close – he won by just three three percentage points – given the fact that he was born and raised in the state.

Romney has the money to sustain a campaign through tough times, but even if he wins the nomination, my earlier prediction that he will beat President Barack Obama is beginning to look tenuous at best. The more I see of Mittens, the more I realize he lacks the common touch. Too often, he makes a comment that causes me to cringe. Yesterday, he tried to explain why he doesn't try to rouse crowds. "I'm not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support," he said. Or how about that man-of-the-people line last week when he said that his wife "drove a couple of Cadillacs."

As Democratic commentator James Carville has said, "I can't imagine one of his senior staffers saying, 'Let Mitt be Mitt.'"

Mitt's father, George,  was equally hampered. The telling line about the governor of Michigan was this: "Way down deep he's shallow." During George's own run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 he rolled a bowling ball for the photographers but it went into the gutter. He threw another, also into the gutter. He would not stop and, with a grimmer and grimmer look on his face, threw more than thirty balls before he finally managed to keep one safely in the alley all the way to the pins.

My advice to you, Mittens, is this: don't go bowling.

Straws in the wind

Two recent stories provide welcome news for Research In Motion at a time when some bloggers and analysts have declared BlackBerry to be little better than the devil incarnate. First, this piece from Nextgov saying that the U.S Air Force has cancelled a planned bulk purchase of 2,861 iPads because they fear a security breach from the Russian-made GoodReader software that's contained therein.

The second positive citation comes from a story in The Catholic Register about Tom Collins, who grew up in my home town of Guelph, Ont., and was last weekend made a cardinal. "The call of God comes deep from the heart," Collins said. "The call to be a bishop comes by telephone. I got the call to be a cardinal over a BlackBerry."

iPhone owners: read that and weep for your sins.

Birds of a feather

I'm just back from some time away in southeast Arizona looking at birds. I've been a birder ever since moving to England in 1987. You grow up in Canada knowing the 15 birds that inhabit your backyard at various times of the year, then suddenly, you're confronted with birds you have never seen. I bought a birding guide published by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and I was hooked. One time I even met members of the Surrey Wildlife Trust on Wimbledon Common at 3 a.m. We stood in the dark and listened over the next few hours to the dawn chorus, hundreds of birds invisible around us beginning to sing as the sun rose. These days, I get out birding half a dozen times a year, mostly around Toronto, and it's a great way to leave the stresses of the world behind for a few hours.

The tour in Arizona was run by Wings, an organization founded 35 years ago by Will Russell. As luck would have it, Will was our leader. He not only knew every bird by sight, he also knew all their songs so could tell us what we were about to see. The group was small, only seven, many of whom were far more knowledgable about birds than I am. Among them was Joey Slinger, my long-time friend and former Toronto Star columnist. We shared a room at various places including the Circle Z Ranch and Casa de San Pedro, using those spots as central locations to look for birds in grasslands, wetlands, desert and canyon. All of the other birders were Americans.

During the week we saw about 150 species of which one-third were "life listers" for me. Among the birds I saw for the first time were Lazuli Bunting, Abert's Towhee, Hepatic Tanager, Gambel's Quail, Bewick's Wren, Williamson's Sapsucker, Townsend's Solitaire, and Spotted Owl. The owl required clambering up a treacherous canyon path for an hour – and slowly back down again. The weather was perfect and we spent all of our time south of Tucson, often within sight of the Mexican border because many birds either reside or winter in Mexico so that part of Arizona is their northernmost habitat. One amazing morning near Lake Patagonia we had all three bluebirds – Eastern, Mountain, and Western – in the same binoclular field. Even our leader had never before seen such a spectacular gathering.

Travelling that close to the Mexican border, we also saw many members of the Border Patrol. On several occasions we went through highway checkpoints; once an officer stopped to see who we were at the side of the road inspecting a field. Visible for miles high above was an aerostat, a tethered dirigible that uses radar to track the movement of illegals with pinpoint accuracy. Even during a tough economy, Border Protection is a growth industry.

All of the Americans we encountered were universally friendly. We stopped in one small town and were welcomed into the backyard of a house with hummingbird feeders where we saw Violet-crowned and Broad-billed. On the main street, locals on foot spoke to us or called out greetings as they bicycled past. As tight-assed Canadians we have a lot to learn from the more relaxed and always generous Americans about life and how to live it. Plus the birding's good, too.

Nordstrom north

Nordstrom, the U.S. luxury department store, has supposedly been scouting locations in Canada for months. Last May, a spokesman confirmed the story, and every once in a while there's another reference. A recent article on Larry Rosen, now CEO of men's clothier Harry Rosen, talked about how he was gearing up for their arrival.

Nordstrom. The very thought makes me salivate. During the research for my book The Eatons, published in 1998, I visited two of the more decrepit Eaton's stores in Brantford and Sarnia. Then I crossed the border into the U.S. to take a look at the Somerset Collection, a mall in Troy, Michigan. At 10 a.m. Nordstrom was just opening and Millicent Leigh Schneider was playing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" on a grand piano on the main floor.

The megamall was like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. By comparison, Canada looked third world. In Troy there were four anchors: Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and a local chain, Hudson's (it's now a Macy's). In addition, there were 181 other stores contained in 1.5 million square feet of vaulted gallerias with skylights, palm trees, a score of restaurants, 6,000 employees, and parking for 7,000 cars.

This how retailing is done in America. I've also been to Tysons Corners in Virginia, Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas, the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania, and South Coast Plaza, in California, among many others. I always buy shirts, socks and underwear at Nordstrom. If you were to make a list of things that Americans do well, retailing would be in the top five. That's why so many U.S. banners have come to Canada. Their panache and product lines are easy to replicate, although I have to say that service here never quite reaches home country standards.

On the Nordstrom website, they list some eighteen locations (mostly for Nordstrom Rack, their discount outlet) where there's an opening planned this year and next. Nothing is scheduled for Canada. There is only one international expansion, in Puerto Rico, at a date as yet to be determined.

Here's my suggestion how Nordstrom could make a quick, splashy and all-encompassing grand entrance into Canada: buy the Holt Renfrew chain. It's upscale and has 11 stores across Canada including four in the Toronto area. Mall stores, like the one-floor Holts at Sherway Gardens, could easily be converted to the two-floor format Nordstrom favors.

So Galen W. and Galen G. Weston, are you interested in selling? I need some of those Nordstrom shirts.

The 38-channel universe

Everybody hates Rogers. Not me. Six weeks ago, I phoned and complained that my cable TV bill was getting too high. The helpful woman in customer service said she could do something about that. If I'd agree to a one-year contract, my rented PVR would be free for twelve months, a savings of $300. Since I had no intention of going anywhere else, it was an easy deal.

Of course, I immediately signed up for The Movie Network at $16.95 a month, but I was still ahead almost $100 a year, plus I had another eight channels of commercial-free movies. What's wrong with that?

As a result of my recent bonanza, I was sanguine when I received a letter last week announcing a rate increase. I figured, hey, I'm still ahead of the game. What caught my eye was the fact that the form letter from Matthew Ariker, Senior Vice President, Customer Marketing, was dated January 23. I had received it on January 18. I thought, I guess delivery by Canada Post is improving.

In an attempt to mollify those who might be grumpy about higher rates, the letter pointed out, "We have recently added 38 new channels and 36% more content to On Demand, free with your Rogers subscription." I assumed that the On Demand content was more pay-per-view movies, but what about those 38 new channels? As a guy who likes free, I wondered what they were.

For more details, said the letter, call a 1-800 number. The customer service associate didn't know but she put me on hold twice – for 2-3 minutes each time – while she gamely consulted with colleagues only to report back that no one seemed to know anything about these 38 new channels.

Undaunted, I emailed Matthew Ariker with my query. On Tuesday I received a phone call from someone at Rogers in the Office of the President. I thought maybe there were several divisional presidents, so I blithely asked, "Which president?" "Nadir Mohammed," she said, "There's only one president." I don't know who was more surprised, my caller, or me, that this matter had been kicked upstairs all the way to the very top.

She had gathered some information from the programming department and explained to me that the 38 channels included some On Demand channels, some channels now in HD that were previously available, and some new channels. The exact mix and number depends on where you live and what package you have.

All in all, a good explanation. She said she'd email me the list so I could see my possibilities. That was Tuesday; I haven't seen it yet. Doesn't she know the deal Rogers has with Canada Post? If she'd given the list to Canada Post this past Tuesday, I would have received it last week.