Brushes with fame #2
Given the overwhelming response to my piece on meeting the Queen (OK, it was just Mahoney who begged for more) I thought I’d continue in the Brushes with Fame series, and the Brushes with Royalty subset. Yeah, yeah, another anecdote from my distant past… You want I should rob a bank just to blog about it? Besides, this isn’t a bad headline:
When I was a young lad, I was nearly trampled by Prince Charles on a horse.
My family is from England, and we used to travel back there every other summer. On one occasion, when I was about seven years old, we attended a charity polo match in which Prince Charles was competing.
One of the charming traditions of polo (along with tight pants, jaunty hats and other foppery) is the custom of allowing the spectators to come out onto the field at half time to stomp the divots of grass back into place. (In Miami, they let you onto the turf at Dolphin Stadium to backfill the craters where Daunte Culpepper was sacked.)
Anyhow, it’s really just a chance to mingle with the players, including the celebrities like the Prince of Wales.
Charles was still astride his steed, muttering “jolly goods” to the great unwashed. I was shy, and short, so my mother urged me to push my way forward to catch a glimpse of His Royal Highness. I did, and found myself almost directly underneath his horse.
Charles looked down at the wee colonial child about to be trodden on by princely hooves, and grew concerned. He paused in mid-sentence, leaned down from on high, and said to me:
“Push off a bit.”
That’s it. But how cool is that? I’ve never washed my ears since (though I have tried stretching them, in imitation.) And I’m sad to say that if you haven’t yet been almost-trampled by the prince, you’ve missed your chance: he’s retired from playing polo.
Here’s a poll-o on which brush with greatness should come next:
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If there’s only one vote, I’ll know it was Mahoney.
I’m in a pretty competitive Yahoo! fantasy basketball league (which I won last year), and we just drafted our teams on Sunday night.
I lucked out, getting first pick overall (LeBron James, of course), but I’m quite happy with the rest of my roster too.
The same cannot be said for my brother-in-law Rob, who didn’t prerank enough players and ended up with “Dallas’ equivalent of Darrick Martin” on his bench.
His team is called the Overpaid Smacktalkers. To cheer him up, I had my daughters (ages 3 & 5) record the arena announcement of his starting roster. Have a listen:
MP3 (1.5 Mb)
Here’s his roster:
- Baron Davis (GS - PG)
- Kobe Bryant (LAL - SG)
- Vince Carter (NJ - SG,SF)
- Antawn Jamison (was - SF,PF)
- Al Harrington (Ind - SF,PF)
- Troy Murphy (GS - PF)
- Shaquille O’Neal (Mia - C)
- P.J. Brown (Chi - PF,C)
- Sam Cassell (LAC - PG)
- Ben Gordon (Chi - PG, SG)
- Derek Fisher (Uta - PG)
- Jumaine Jones (Pho - SF)
- Michael Finley (SA - SG,SF)
- Anthony Johnson (Dal - PG)
Cute, huh? Well, I think so. I got the idea when the three-year-old was looking at my fantasy basketball magazine, asking the names of the people in the pictures. I told her, and she repeated them with what I thought was remarkable clarity.
So I got out my minidisc recorder and had her repeat the names. The five-year-old wanted in, of course, and repeated the names too. The remarkable thing is that she’s never been to a sporting event, and has never heard an arena announcer (e.g. Herbie Kuhn, above, introducing “Your Torontooooooooooooo RAP-Tors!”). Yet my little girl hammed up each name just like they do - it must come with the microphone.
I cleaned it up a little in Sound Forge, and there you have it. Uncle Robbie and I are probably the only ones who find this amusing. Unless Jumaine Jones checks my blog…
Livin’ the stereotype
My sister snapped this photo of a pickup truck we were following along the 401 yesterday. Note the Alberta plates, and the bumper sticker that says, “Keep Honking, I’m Reloading”.I’m not sure if it was affixed with any sense of irony, but it’s pretty damned funny.
(Click photo to enlarge)
I treasure my reading time, because I don’t have too damned much of it. Two small kids, full time job, and two blogs eat up most of my waking hours. Which is fine.
When I do sneak in some reading time, it’s either on the streetcar, on the odd lunch break not spent at my desk, or just before bed. So when I pick a novel to start reading, I try to select something fast paced, portable, and digestible in erratic chunks. And I try to pick something really good, because I might be stuck with it for a long time.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve gone back to buying books instead of borrowing them. Anything I read is going to be with me for the long haul, and end up battered beyond recognition. I used to be fussy about keeping my books pristine - as my sister likes to remind me, as a child I once charged her 10 cents for every white crease she put in the spine of a borrowed book. Nowadays, I’m happy to give them away when I’m finished, if they are in one piece. I won’t be getting around to rereading them.
So, quality is the general rule. But this summer, I tried an experiment: mediocre books that have languished on my bookshelf for the “when I get around to it” read that I never get around to.
You know those books, right? The one you picked up on a whim at a charity book sale, the birthday present from someone who doesn’t know you that well, the one you grabbed from a colleague emptying out her office, the less-known second book by the author of something good, or the marginally intriguing item from your wife’s book club?
Well, those were on my hit list this summer. Cleaning out the closet, so to speak.
Of the dozen or so most likely candidates, I chose these four to tackle:
- Ecstasy Club, by Douglas Rushkoff (free, comp book from a CBC Radio show)
- The Trade Mission, by Andrew Pyper ($3.00, at a silent auction at my daughter’s school)
- Baa Baa Black Sheep, by Gregory Boyington (50 cents at a used book sale at Geneva Park Lodge - the alternatives being 100 Robert Ludlum titles or 1,000 Danielle Steeles)
- Virtual Light, by William Gibson ($1.00, CBC charity book sale)
That’s 1,377 pages for $4.50 - not too shabby!
Seeing as how I invested a few weeks of my life in these books, here’s a quickie review of each, in the order I read them. I’m not going to knock myself out here - you can get better reviews of them using something called Google.
——————
Ecstasy Club
Rushkoff is a smart fella. I like his columns and nonfiction stuff, and his new comic looks really interesting.
I’ll even forgive the hand-on-chin pose on his site, because it’s a cartoon. Besides, I’m off that kick now. Ian Tracey pulls it off on Intelligence (good show, BTW), so I’ll let it go.
What about Ecstasy Club? Well, the story is set in a similar time period as The Trade Mission, though in an utterly different location. It takes place in the early 90s in San Francisco, at the height of the birth of rave culture. A group of smart young people establish a sort of raver commune/cult off the grid, tapping into a number of counterculture movements at once.
But their enormous, drug-fuelled parties are only the cover for a strange electronic quest to break the limitations of time and space. The book really turns trippy and paranoid as the ravers discover a world run by religious leaders and government operatives that have already figured things out.
I quite enjoyed this story - the characters were believable and well-developed, the setting was interesting, and I enjoy an X-Files-ish uncertainty about who to believe and what is and isn’t real. Reminds me a bit of Philip K. Dick’s Valis, an almost unreadable book that cracks your head open like a melon and mashes up the soft parts with a fork.
Recommendation: Not a bad read, and I’d read Rushkoff any time. You can probably do better than this one, though. Not terribly rewarding.
———————
The Trade Mission
I saw Andrew Pyper read a short story in a smoky bar years ago, and I was impressed. I had heard he was a good novelist, though this was not the novel being discussed.
The Trade Mission is about a couple of young dot-com entrepreneurs who get stuck in an ugly fight for survival in the rainforests of Brazil. The scenery is lush (and nasty) and having lived through the dot-com era, I recognized the characters. I hadn’t seen that era as a book setting before, and it was interesting - far enough behind us to seem anachronistic, but still fresh.
The story is gripping, to be sure, though it’s exactly what you’d expect. Take three parts Heart of Darkness, add a splash of Deliverance and Mosquito Coast, plus pages 97-139 of your first year anthropology textbook on the Yanomamo, and there you have it.
The story is OK, I guess, though I wasn’t thrilled with the ending. I won’t give it away, but it had a few… issues. A colleague who says he knows Pyper told me the book was written shortly after his break-up with Leah Mclaren, and that puts it in a whole new light.
Recommendation: Pyper writes very well, but pick one of his other books. Lost Girls is supposedly much better, and I may read it some day.
————————
Baa Baa Black Sheep
I bought Baa Baa Black Sheep for the sole reason that I remember fondly the NBC TV series with Robert Conrad that aired after school when I was a kid.
My buddy Brady and I would watch it, then zoom around pretending we were Zeros and Corsairs, making rat-a-tat-tat noises as we swooped off the sofa. Even at the time I recognized that the show seemed to have about five minutes of actual airplane footage that was recycled through every episode, but we didn’t care. Hell, The Mighty Hercules had about 30 seconds of footage, and Spiderman wasn’t much better.
The real Pappy Boyington isn’t much of a writer, but he lived hard and crammed a lot into his years. The book is really just a series of anecdotes strung together to illustrate his war years - but what years they were! He was an unofficial combatant in China with the Flying Tigers, then an ace in the Pacific, then a prisoner of war in Japan. In between, there’s plenty of fightin’ and whorin’ and drinkin’ to last several lifetimes, so it makes for an entertaining read.
Perhaps most entertaining is the utter political incorrectness of the thing - it was written in that period of the 50s and 60s when you called everyone by their racial epithet, treated women like sex objects, authorities like the enemy, and America like the promised land. More than once I found myself uncomfortably shielding the book from people sitting beside me on the streetcar as Boyington talked about the Japs and the hookers and whatnot.
Still, it’s highly amusing, and easy to read. And I’m a total sucker for air combat, so it didn’t have to be that good. The book did bog down a bit in Boyington’s post-war descent into alcoholism and self-loathing, but that’s a mercifully short section, and one of his points in writing the book was to talk about what war does to people. Fair enough.
Recommendation: Fun for war buffs, but nobody else.
———————-
Virtual Light
I read the seminal cyberpunk book Neuromancer, and it left a strong impression. But the more I think about it, the more I think that for all his vision, Gibson just isn’t all that good a writer. Idoru was just OK, and Virtual Light is distinctly mediocre.
Don’t get me wrong, the writing is really clean, engaging and interesting. His settings for the future are believable and eerie, and there are some fascinating elements to this one (set, like Ecstacy Club, in San Francisco. I’m going to have to visit there again, after all this.)
Virtual Light is the story of an out-of-work rent-a-cop and a bicycle courier who find a petty theft turning into a run from the law (and from some very unsavory elements that are seemingly above the law.) The street scenes of post-quake California are rich, and there’s one location that blows my mind: the disused Golden Gate Bridge, turned into a lengthy squatters town that spans the water, makeshift rooms lashed onto its struts and supports. Reminds me of the 18th Century London Bridge as depicted in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books - a dangerous and freeform makeshift community that accretes and decays like a living organism.
Sadly, the great setting and interesting characters are saddle with a really lame plot device. The object that might get them killed is… Wait for it… Spoiler ahead… Ready?… Is… Is… A pair of VR glasses with real estate maps in ‘em. Wowwee!
I thought the ending was building toward an epic takedown of the secret powers that be, a la the Stephen King as Richard Bachman story The Running Man (book, not film - the text was clever and dark, while the Ahhhnold movie was glam, cheese and lame.) But it wasn’t, wrapping up cleverly but not terribly impressively - simply a relief.
Recommendation: As much as a wanted to like this book, it’s nothing more than read for two days on the beach. My copy still looks brand new after whipping through it, so perhaps I can get my dollar back at a garage sale.
—————
So, what did I learn? Well, none of the books surprised me much - I think I had them pegged from their covers, despite addages to the contrary. That said, I might not have experienced these writers if I had to wait for them to make the cut on a more considered selection process (or one that involved paying, say $10.) I now know what these guys are all about, and I wouldn’t shy away from reading their better works in the future.
Still, summer’s over, and the experiment ends here, not to be repeated. The remaining stack of not-quite-good-enough books will be making its way to a donation box near you.
——————–
Coda: So, tell me about your mediocre reads - were they worth the effort? How picky should we be about what we read? And don’t forget to cast your vote in my new sidebar poll on the subject. Thanks!
Paul v. nature, part three…
Spiders. Damned, dirty spiders.
I remember a Far Side cartoon that featured two spiders that had spun a web across the bottom of a children’s slide at the park.
“If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings!” one said to the other.
That’s the sort of spiders we have outside our house. Full of ambition, relentless tenacity, an no brains.
They congregate in three places:
- By the back door, where they rappel like Navy SEALS from the top of the door frame whenever it is opened. Freaks me out every time I take out the recycling (otherwise known as feeding the raccoons)
- By the front door, where every single night they string a single, invisible thread across the porch steps, right at face level. Every morning, I get clotheslined by the thing, and flail my arms around in a manner that makes the neighbours frown and cross to the other side of the street. Worse, my wife tells me that she finds the exact same thing - and she leaves for work an hour before I do. Which means that either I’m taller than her and find a new snare, or the spiders are actually resetting the trap between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m.
- On our car. Specifically, between the driver-side mirror and the door panel. No matter how often I sweep them away, they are always there the next day, glinting merrily in the morning light. These strands are strong enough to withstand Don Valley Parkway airstreams. One time I took the car through a touchless car wash, and they were still there on the other side. I suppose the author of this web is trying to catch all those Don Valley Parkway bugs, which would be like stopping a 120 kph bullet - a feat I have no doubt they could pull off.
Of course, Halloween is approaching, and what did my kids spend all weekend doing? Yep, decorating the front of our house with fake spider webs.
Laugh now, but keep your eyes open next time you are passing through the east end in the morning. If you see a crazy person flail at invisible assailants, then leap into a car that has been webbed firmly to the sidewalk, wheels squealing helplessly as an army of arachnids watch and laugh… keep on driving. When I’m dry and desiccated, you’ll be next.
And now for something completely different…
Yesterday was picture day at my daughter’s kindergarten.
Of course she looked adorable in her pretty little dress, white stockings and red bow in her hair… but the finishing touch was the addition of these faaaaabulous ruby red shoes.
These works of art were a gift from Auntie Alison. Not exactly practical - the sequins come off, they scratch the furniture, and we’ve glued the rosettes back on twice. Doesn’t matter, not the point. These shoes rock - and her little sister has a matching pair.
Anyhow, the photographer shows up, and my daughter lines up with the other kids. Like me, she’s tall, so she’s in the back row. All of a sudden, the teacher cries out, “WAIT!!” She hauls my daughter out of line, and says, “No way are you hiding in the back row wearing THOSE shoes! Come on up to the front, dear.”
CLICK!
So, at least once in her life, my daughter will be in the front row. Thanks, Auntie Alison!
There are moments when I realize that I’ve lived a charmed work life.
In my final week of journalism school, I was offered a job with CBC Radio’s Ideas - helping produce hour-long radio documentaries for the national broadcaster. I had been told that if you wanted to get into CBC, you’d have to start by getting coffee for the midnight shift in Iqaluit, and spend a few years working your way south (which I was prepared to do.) But I got lucky.
The real charm, however, came when I arrived at Ideas, and met a real charmer: host Lister Sinclair, a broadcasting legend, program host and truly excellent human being. Lister Sinclair died this morning at age 85.
At Ideas, I was the youngest (by far) and Lister was the oldest (by farther) - but only chronologically. Lister was in his 70s, and as full of life as anyone I’d met. By that point he’d already written hundreds of plays, hosted a dozen shows, and served as vice president of CBC. He was an actor in the golden age of radio, an executive in tough times, a recipient of the Order of Canada.
Me? Well, I knew a little bit of HTML.
Still, Lister made time for anyone. I recall sitting in producer Max Allen’s office and watching Wimbledon, just Lister and me. I don’t follow tennis, but I’d have stayed even if it had been Scrabble in Spanish. There was Lister, Diet Coke in hand, tossing off stories about the origins of the tennis, the physics of grass courts, the length of tennis skirts. And I was just soaking in it.
And that couldn’t compare with the experience of directing Lister in the studio, something I did a few months later for the World of Ideas series I helped produce.
It’s not an easy thing to interrupt a man with 50 years more experience, and tell him that his voice is “sticky” (which it frequently was.) But he took it with good grace, as he did when I got him to introduce the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen (for the 1978 anniversary show), or when I helped teach him how to pronounce a website address (”It’s ‘www / dot CBC / dot ca,’ Lister, not ‘www dot / cbc dot / ca’. The dots come at the start of the syllables.”)
Lister’s razor-sharp mind was much heralded, but also struck me as a little tragic. It’s like he never forgot an interesting anecdote, a scientific explanation or a joke. By the time he was 70, there was no subject upon which he didn’t already have more interesting things to say than time to say them.
Locked out of his office, he told the story of Richard Feynman picking locks at the Manhattan Project. Asked if Feynman was a genius, he told me the story of his son figuring out how to wash windows. (”Vertical strokes on the outside, horizontal on the inside. Then you’ll know where the streaks are. That’s genius.”)
Ideas cultivated that sense of omniscience, and listeners were in awe. They also made it a point of pride to correct the tiniest detail. I had to answer e-mails along these lines:
Dear Mr. Sinclair,
How on earth do you find time to research, write and produce five hours of documentary by yourself each week? Hats off to you!
Dear Ideas,
September 5th will always disturb:
Lister Sinclair used “access” as a verb.
Dear Mr. Sinclair, Why is it that you only introduce yourself as “Mister Sinclair” when all your colleagues grace us with their first names? Is such formality really necessary?
There are a lot of words bandied about to describe Lister - Renaissance man, polymath, prodigy, genius. But they don’t really describe what it was like to work with him. Lister was like a walking Wikipedia - a constantly-updated, wide-ranging and slightly questionable source of knowledge on all things, ever. Except Lister would skip straight to what he called the “‘Ah ha’ moment”, when the real meaning and relevance of something became clear. In the days before Google, Lister had his own “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
I’m feeling lucky to have known Lister Sinclair, even as I mourn him. I’ve recently been put in the awkward but proud position of writing his obit for the CBC Digital Archives and for the Inside the CBC blog.
Which reminds me that my charmed work life continues (of all the world’s bloggers, how many people get paid to do it?) There are times when I wonder why I continue to work for CBC, but a small part of the answer is meeting people like Lister Sinclair on your first day on the job.
Rest well, Mr. Sinclair. We miss you.
(Ideas staff, late 1990s. That’s Lister in the suit, me in the football jacket.)
Last night was the first instalment of CBC’s October 1970, about the FLQ crisis. And today is the anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s famous “Just watch me” interview.
This is by far my favourite clip on the CBC Digital Archives site. I even caught the tech guys who work beside me watching it yesterday, and they were as enthusiastic about it as I am.
What’s so exciting about the clip is not just the context of terrorism and the War Measures Act, but Trudeau’s electric personality. You are probably familiar with the soundbite, but watch the full six minute tete-a-tete posted on the Archives site. Trudeau really takes reporter Tim Ralfe on, questioning his own beliefs and taking as much time as he wants (transcript here).
You’d never see a politician engaging with the media that way today. It’s partly a reflection of the time, and partly of the man - but it’s certainly captivating.
For me, at least. Turns out that 36 years later, Canadians are still divided over the P.E.T. legacy.
Two weeks ago - before the TV series - this message was sent to our “contact us” e-mail address. It was sent by someone who works for the government, sent from work, using their lastname.firstname address - I should publish their name here, but I won’t. Asterisks inserted by me.
Subject: Could you give me a f*cking break with Pierre Elliot Trudeau for Christ’s sake
Message: Is this guy the only person of interest in the entire history of this country or are you guys just too f*cking lazy to research other subjects?
Then today, we got a message from someone else, who saw Trudeau in our newsletter:
I loved the Trudeau clips from the last letter. But I am enjoying so much receiving these newsletters! I can scarcely get anything else done on the days they arrive.
So, does Trudeau drive you nuts with excitement or rage? I’ve installed some poll software, so you can have your say - just vote in my sidebar, a few inches down and to the right of here.
EDIT: Poll moved to the Polls Archive.
Perhaps the worst thing about moving my blog to a new system is the fact that most people have lost me. Or I’ve lost them, or something.
Because stupid Netfirms forced me to use a new URL, the addresses of all my posts have changed, as have the RSS feeds. So people who have bookmarked my posts or look them up in Google go to the old blog, and those who signed up via RSS think I haven’t posted in two weeks.
The worst part of it is that Blogger and stupid Netfirms simply will not talk any more. Ever. I cannot publish a message on my old blog saying that I’ve moved. (I may be able to hack into it manually and write something.)
I’ve tried all the supposedly simply ways of redirecting traffic (.htaccess, redirect scripts) but I simply can’t seem to make them work. So I’m down to my last card: writing manual redirects for each post and pasting them into the HTML files for all 50-odd posts. Best I can do.
I’m also having an odd problem with Technorati, which won’t acknowledge my pings. Other services do - if you search for “hrrrmmm” from yesterday’s post, you’ll find me via http://blogsearch.blogger.com/ or http://blogsearch.google.com/ or http://www.icerocket.com/ you’ll find it, but not on Technorati (the important one.) It’s in my WP update services list, and I’ve pinged it manually, but they haven’t visited in 42 days. I’ve even tried deleting it from my claimed blogs and re-adding it.
OK, enough complaining. Here’s my plea:
Please change your bookmarks and RSS links!
- Here’s the best address for the blog (it does not have index.html at the end):
http://www.gorbould.com/blog/
- The new RSS feed address is here:
http://www.gorbould.com/blog/index.php/feed/
- And you can get a feed of the blog comments here:
http://www.gorbould.com/blog/index.php/comments/feed
Thanks.
![Gor[b] meets Her Majes[t]](http://www.gorbould.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/paul_with_queen.jpg "Gor[b] meets Her Majes[t]")
Four years ago yesterday, I had an audience with the Queen.
She was touring the Canadian Broadcasting Centre to mark CBC-TV’s 50th anniversary, a stop on her 2002 Golden Jubilee tour. The royal “visit” consisted of a blitzkrieg through the lobby and atrium – in one door and out the other, with a bit of puttering in between.
CBC.ca was to be the last stop of the 30-minute tour (next: a concert at Roy Thompson Hall.) The powers that be decided the CBC Archives was a fitting site to demonstrate for the occasion, and they needed a couple of bodies to man the display.
We were supposed to represent the future, the next generation of CBC. My boss had selflessly decided that his follicly-challenged, middle-aged self didn’t fit the bill, so the honour fell to myself and fellow writer Sabrina Saccoccio.
A few days before the event, we were given a whole package of preparatory material: what to say, what to do, what to wear. There’s a rather complicated list of protocol: bow with the head, not the body; speak only if spoken to; call the Queen “Your Majesty” on first reference and “Ma’am” after that; call her husband “Your Royal Highness” and then “Sir.”
(For more interesting arcanery, check out the Canadian government’s Guidance Notes for meeting The Sovereign and Members of the Royal Family.)
Despite all the preparations, Sabrina and I were told to expect the royal party to simply breeze past us after chitchatting with the more important types in the atrium (white-haired former CBC stars, all wearing their Orders of Canada.) On the off chance that they stopped to speak to us, we were give a short written script to memorize, which had passed through 14 levels of management before it reached us. It went something like this:
“This is the CBC Archives website, Your Majesty. It features thousands of radio and television clips going back almost 70 years, in both English and French.”
If Her Majesty asked a question, we were given a second line and a few suggested things to mention.
I think my family was more excited about the whole business than I was. My mother, a British ex-pat, was of course thrilled; without asking, my mother-in-law ironed my shirt and my father-in-law shined my shoes.
The night of the event was a bit of a blur. Sabrina and I went out for a very large nerve-calming beer, then returned to stand around and watch the security sweep – big, muscled guys in flak jackets running around with German shepherds and beeping electronics.
Then, showtime! The Queen, Prince Phillip and then-CBC chair Carol Taylor wandered through the atrium, then headed for our hallway and the door. But the Queen spotted the giant (and borrowed) plasma screen we used to show the clip of the royal couple at the 1959 Calgary Stampede (perhaps it was the ridiculously large white Stetson on her husband’s head) and the party stopped.
The Queen extended her hand. I shook it. She said:
“Hrrrrmm.”
Just like that. Just the way they make fun of her on Air Farce, actually.
That left me with a conundrum – was that a word? Had I been spoken to, and could therefore recite my line?
I decided “Hrrrrmm” counted as a word, and delivered my line. She nodded, and then repeated, “In both English and French?” A few more seconds, and that was that. She disappeared out the John Street exit into a fog of camera lights.
That’s about it. The thing I remember most was the Queen’s brilliant green eyes. That, and the delightful fact that she was wearing a little tiara crown thing – as a child, my sister had been miffed to discovered the Queen didn’t always wear the crown jewels.
I dredge this up now because there was a bizarre story about it in the Globe & Mail a few days ago. I discussed it in a piece I did for Inside the CBC, but figured it was worthy of expansion.
One thing I didn’t mention there – and this may be CBC paranoia speaking – was the raw deal our site got in terms of window dressing. Nine of the 10 paragraphs were about CBC, with one about the BBC. Yet the print edition features a BBC screengrab that’s twice the size of the CBC one. And the online edition features a link to the BBC site, but the CBC URL is typed but not linked. Ah well.
So, there’s my best “brush with fame” story. I fear it may be the first of yet another rambling series of anecdotes written to prove that I once did interesting things. (See Signage, Bad Jobs.) Anyone interested in hearing how Prince Charles nearly ran me over… or how I nearly ran over Russell Crowe?
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