CPC 2012 Volume 2 — The Mecca of Hockey, & Now, Supermarket Shopping

Maple Leaf Gardens – Part 1 — Yesterday

The Mecca of hockey in Canada is now a hell of a supermarket. All things must pass.

It’s Sunday, right around noon. The weather is unseasonably mild for this time of you, so as soon as I finish the lunch that I am eating while I write this piece, I’m planning to hop on my bike and ride downtown to see the new Loblaws store at Maple Leaf Gardens. Maple Leaf Gardens is a beautiful building in Toronto at the corner of Church and College streets. These days that puts it right in the heard of one of the largest gay neighbourhoods this side of San Francisco. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I like gay people. They tend to be smart, well educated, have good taste and great senses of humour. I also Like Loblaws. They are one of the country’s most progressive marketers and have done well in spite of losing Dave Nichol, who really got them organized and on everybody’s radar.

My association with MLG goes way back to my childhood, when my dad who worked at The Peace Bridge, would often get Maple Leaf hockey tickets given to him as the team passed though Fort Erie on their way back from Boston or New York or Detroit. I remember trekking with him to Toronto, having great Chinese food at Ruby Foo’s and then hitting the Gardens to sit in centre ice gold seats and watch the Leafs, back in the glory days of Frank Mahovolich and Eddie Shack and Johnny Bower.

There was a feeling you got when you entered MLG that you really were in the mecca of hockey. You could smell the ice from everywhere in the building and the walls were lined with pictures of famous Leafs and other famous people. Team shots. Action shots. Portraits of the Gardens. Anything to do with MLG and hockey was plastered up there for all to see. Everything about it was incredibly Canadian including most of the players at that time.

Hockey is and has pretty much always been one of the most amazing sports to watch live. Yeah nowadays we get it in high definition with all kinds of camera angles. But there really is no substitute for the real thing. Back then the game was played mainly for skill as opposed to today’s game with is mainly about giving opponents a concussion, but that’s a whole other argument. Back then, a trip to the Gardens was a big deal. You almost felt like you had to wear a tie which a lot of people did. My dad loved the Leafs and knew almost everything there was to know about the stats and history of the players. He taught me (way out ahead of it becoming a popular thing), that stats were very important if you wanted to really enhance your appreciation of any sport for the purpose of wagering. I was never into gambling, but having an encyclopedia of Leaf stats in the form of my dad made watching the game much more interesting.

Maple Leaf Gardens – Part 2 — Today

The new MLG Loblaws. It is one shiny place to hang out it.

On Sunday afternoon, while the Wife was busy building miniatures in the dining room with two of her pals, I hopped on the bike and headed west along Gerrard Street. About half an hour later I arrived at College and Church, where the former mecca of hockey had been converted into the mecca of supermarket shopping.

Entering the new Maple Leaf Gardens Loblaws store you are immediately assaulted by the din of many people…many many people cruising around with smallish shopping carts and those ugly little long handled baskets, sitting and gorging on deli food at one of three different eating spaces, or like me, just gawking and taking pictures.

The thing that is most overwhelming is the overall design of this space. It literally glistens no matter how you look at it. This is because the walls are mainly composed of highly polished black ceramic tiles and all the lettering in evidence is burnished silver. This is a retail design on a scale and with a visual pop that one seldom experiences in a supermarket. The lighting is designed to showcase everything that is for sale by making it look fabulous. The displays were all full and beautifully managed and you got the feeling that there is a real sense of pride among the employees working there, respecting the space they were in charge of. It’s really something to behold.

The store is divided into sections with a huge see through wall of cheese, and in-house Ace Bakery, two huge deli counters bridged by a large eating area. Along the south wall is a coffee type area and on this day there were three very talented opera singers strolling around and singing Puccini’s greatest hits. Everything was bustling and seats in these areas were really hard to come by.

Everything in this store is photogenic. I could have taken a thousand great pictures of just the deli, meat and produce sections. In behind this massive display area were the regular grocery aisles, about 15 of them, easily a hundred yards long. I didn’t bother walking the aisles because that might have taken all afternoon. I just walked around the circumference and that was enough to convince me that this store sold pretty much every supermarket product under the sun.

As retail design goes, this space is magnificent. You really do have to see it to believe it. There were a couple token homages to the building’s former life. But in actuality that was all dwarfed by the overall modern feel and majesty of the space itself.

The paradox was that I didn’t actually buy anything there, and I was probably the only person that day who didn’t. The most important thing I came away with from this little excursion is that this supermarket, through the genius of retail design, has been elevated to a major tourist attraction. It’s one I’m glad I had a chance to experience.

 

CPC 2012 Vol 1 The Holidays…This Year It Was An Extra Special Time.

The new year always starts off a little on the slow side. This is because a lot of people in my business tend to head south after Christmas to chill out after all the festivities are over.

 Christmas In The East End

Our Christmas was a pretty quiet affair. But there was one thing that was particularly significant. My daughter, whose name is Star, and her husband Ben showed up in our lives again. After a couple years of what we could mildly refer to as estrangement. They were off living on another planet that was quite a distance from ours in almost every way imaginable.  Like most families on this planet, ours has pretty much as much discord as anyone else’s, so I wont go into all the details. We missed her, and frankly had not gotten to know Ben all that well. But that all changed a few weeks before Christmas. I remember that it was a Sunday night and we were watching a movie. After it was over, my wife was looking a bit sad and when I asked what was up, she said that she was really missing her daughter.  Men are a little more stoic and philosophical about things like this, but I had to admit that I pretty much felt the same way.

As fate would have it, my wife went upstairs to check her email and lo and behold there was a note from our daughter.  It was written in a different tone than most of the other emails we had been receiving over the past few years and after reading it a couple of times we were encouraged enough to invite her over to talk.

That was the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a long process of hers and Ben’s re-integration into the family. Needless to say that during any family stuff, there are bridges that get scorched. But because its family, we can only hope that these can all be repaired.

We spent Christmas day with my son Dan, his wife Mel, Rowan the young Prince of Scarborough and Mel’s mother, Jean over at Daniel’s house where a great turkey was consumed along with some of the world best treats.

The next day, Star and Ben came over for dinner and after it was over, they asked me if I was going to come with them over to Ben’s family home to meet his parents, his brothers and “a few other people”.

Christmas in The West End

Ben’s parents, Dan and Deb, live over in the west end in a beautiful older house that appears to be built for large family gatherings, which is exactly what we walked into.

I don’t really do parties much, but walking into this house was really something else. First of all it was filled with people who had obviously been sipping a few more than we had. I genuinely wasn’t sure what to expect, but we were greeted with real open arms.

When you walk into a room full of people you don’t know, it can often take a while a while to get the lay of the land, so to speak. For me, this is usually a very uncomfortable feeling as I have never been very good at small talk. But this gathering was different. Ben’s mother Deb, and his father, Dan, immediately introduced themselves and then announced us to everybody in the room. It was kinda like I imagine and AA meeting where everyone shouted back a greeting. It was completely disarming, not having to break any ice whatsoever with these people. It was kind of like a pleasant narcotic that softened you up and opened you up at the same time. Before long, I was deep in conversation with a series of people starting with Ben’s dad who is in the same business as me more or less, so we had a lot in common, Ben’s uncles both introduced themselves and we immediately got into a discussion about network TV series vs US Cable series and how the US cable companies and the BBC and ITV are really leading the way when it comes to series development on TV.

During my chatting, I watched the kids. Ben was deep in conversation with his two brothers and my daughter was perched on a stool beside my wife and Ben’s mother Deb, and all three of them were having a great old time. I remember my wife looking at me with this strange enchanted smile on her face, convinced that we had landed in some sort of people heaven, when it was really just a large family who all seemed to be bonded tightly together.  It felt very much like a complete thing and yet this family opened up and embraced up so easily that I felt like I had been within these walls many times before. It was the strangest thing for me, who had always felt like a bit of an outsider, even in my own life sometimes, to feel so embraced and welcomed by a group of complete strangers. It could only be that the energy this group of people possessed and radiated was something  I haven’t really experienced much in my life. But it was pretty amazing. We had the greatest time and came away feeling really connected to Ben’s family.

Needless to say, I got a bit hammered and was evidently quite amusing on the ride home…or so I am told.

 New Years On The Danforth

The rest of the holidays slipped by in a kind of quiet blur. On New Year’s eve e went to an early screening of the new Sherlock Holmes (√√√√) and then up to the Danforth for some Greek food, then home to watch the ball fall in Times Square. I have always marveled at the people who are part of those crowds that you see on TV, filling up Times Square or the City Hall downtown.  Myself , I prefer to be somewhere quiet and warm when the year ends. Mostly because, for me, it’s not about the event per se, but more about the spirit of the season. And when you work for yourself, it’s kind of an enforced vacation, so you end up in total relax mode for most of it.

This season, I was just happy to have my immediately family all back, albeit it not totally together just yet as there are fences to be mended and other complex matters to be attended to before that can happen. But for us, it was certainly going to be a Christmas to remember, as our family began to both become a family again, and expand in a most delightful way.

 Belated Christmas On The Peninsula

The last event of the season came on the Saturday after New Years day when we drove down to Jordan Harbour to the beautiful Lake House Restaurant and had a great lunch, overlooking the lake with my sister Sharon and her husband Bob. My brother Ray and his wife Bette were suppose to make it, but with Ray, there’s almost always something that gets in the way. In this case, a new client that needed something done right away.  But we’ll catch up them them…we always do.

All in all this was a very interesting holiday season. I hope yours was every bit as wonderful.

 

 

The Last Couch Potato Chronicles of 2011 – My Year In Review.

Well it’s hard to believe it but December is almost done. Another year is getting ready to cash it in. And what a long strange year it has been. There seems to be a genuine changing of the guard going on in the world these days. The chickens are coming home to roost for capitalism as we know it.  Ordinary people in countries rich and poor are in a state of revolt. The status quo just doesn’t cut it anymore. A lot of the conspiracy theories about the superrich are being exposed as conspiracy facts and consequently the world level of anger and frustration is at an all time high.

The deadly combination of Wall Street greed and Chinese manufactured crap continue to put a stranglehold on the world’s economy, threatening to wipe out the middle class that emerged after the Second World War. I can’t really see this situation getting better before it gets worse, so for most of us maintaining a balanced lifestyle has become a much greater challenge than we have ever known it to be in our lives.

I’m not exactly sure what has brought these amazing changes about. It’s never any one factor that you can put your finger on, but usually a confluence of events. But the one thing that all the facets of this world wide revolution have in common is that people are totally fed up with the rich getting richer while they get poorer. And I don’t blame them one bit. People have always been willing to work hard for whatever money they make. But the ‘powers that be’ keep pushing the envelope, trying to wrench more and more out of people without really compensating them for the extra effort they go through.

 THE BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE

In my business, which is advertising, this has been going on in a pretty severe way for the past 20 years or so. When I worked in agencies in the 70s and 80s, the emphasis was primarily on the quality of thinking. After the recession of the early 90s, a lot of people of my generation left the agency business or formed their own agencies and the work ethic during the recovery looked very much like it had changed dramatically to a quantity over quality mandate. The trouble with that is that the quality of communication has always been more important to people on the receiving end than the number of character challenged impressions that are branded on their brains. That’s because the number of advertising impressions that people are exposed to every day has increased exponentially. As a result, the average person’s brain is on total overload all the time and the only way to get through it in any meaningful way is…believe it or not, to be creative.  It’s a classic example of what goes around comes around.

Myself, I didn’t really find it to be a bad year, at least not compared to the few that came before it. But I would imagine that a lot of people felt that those were pretty crappy too. In my business it’s all about the company you keep. One of the companies I do creative work for underwent an expansion and that meant creating a whole bunch of new stuff for them. A number of the supplier relationships I have were in pretty good shape too. So I really can’t complain from a business perspective.

THE SPORTS PERSPECTIVE

The Green Bay Packers, champs in 2011, threatening a rare repeat in 2012.

Looking back over the year in sports, there’s not a whole lot that jumps out at me.  The Green Bay Packers winning the Superbowl was pretty cool.  Watching Tiger Woods mount his inevitable comeback over the past few months, culminating in a win at the Memorial, just a few weeks ago was also something memorable. The MLB playoffs was memorable for a lot of stuff that happened: the incredible late season surge by the St Louis Cardinals, which carried them all the way to the World Series Championship, and the incredible chokes by the likes of the Phillies  the Yankees, the Atlanta Braves and probably most significantly, the Boston Red Sox.  In hockey, all I can remember is that a bunch of assholes tried to trash Vancouver after the Boston Bruins took the cup there.  And some other asshole took out Sydney Crosby, who is currently the greatest active hockey player in the world. How downright stupid do you have to be to do that?

Concussions from hits to the head continue to be the single most critical problem faced by a lot of sports but mainly Hockey and Football. There are workable solutions out there, it’s just that the sports world is made up mainly of a bunch of reactionary old farts who are sitting on huge investments and consequently, move very slowly.

This series changed everything on cable TV...you'll see how in the coming seasons.

THE TV PERSPECTIVE

For me, TV was all pretty much about shows not made in North America. This is a very rich area so I won’t go on and on about it. But with the debut of the HBO series, Game of Thrones, the TV landscape changed dramatically. This show was so rich in character, story visual dynamic and straight to the bone hitting power that it pretty much dwarfed a lot of very good shows that came out at around the same time.  Another incredible series that made a real impact in my viewing was a British cop show called Luther, which I thought was probably the best of its kind so far from a country that has an outstanding track record for producing great cop drama. Other shows that left a thumbprint on my brain are Hell on Wheels, the new western from AMC, The Good Wife, which is one of the best of the Hollywood produced shows, Blue Bloods, a great family of cops drama, NCIS which is always strong, the new Tim Allen comedy called Last Man Standing, only because there are so few good network comedies and Person of Interest, the new Jonathan Nolan/JJ Abrams series that’s just about the best thing I’ve ever seen on network TV. Hung, the HBO series about a high school teacher who became a male prostitute is filled with brilliant moments of irony. Bored to Death is a strange little Big Apple comedy, that’s funny in a Woody Allen kind of way and of course, six years old and still piling floating body parts up the Gulfstream is Dexter.

I could give you a big long list of good TV shows, but I’ve done that a couple of times recently on this blog , so check it out.

THE MOVIE PERSPECTIVE

Movies. Well, because there’s so much good TV, I haven’t really paid all that much attention to movies. The last one I actually went to see was…hell I can’t remember.

It was a few years ago that we kind of got out of going to the movies, after a run of having to sit most of the way through a lot of crap. That’s not to say that all movies are crap, but sometimes it feels that way. It’s really hard to judge big blockbusters like the Transformer series and some of the other comic book adaptations…so I tend to look more at the smaller films. One of the neatest of those is a film called Larry Crowne, which was written, produced, directed and starred Tom Hanks. This was a delightful and intelligent examination of the current American experience and how one guy in particular was able to rise above his bad fortune. What was different about it was that it never really got all maudlin and tragic to make to feel some empathy with the character. It didn’t really need to because the acting and the writing was so good, you got the point without having to be hammered on the head repeatedly with it.

Here’s a top 10 List for those of you who like lists. This actually may just be the movies I watched all the way through.

1. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 (better than Part 1)
2. The Eagle
3. The Lincoln Lawyer (mainly because I like Matthew McConaughey)
4. The King’s Speech (Colin Firth is amazing)
5.  The Conspirator (another brilliant Robert Redford pic)
6. Water For Elephants (beautiful to look at)
7. X Men First Class (the roots story)
8. Cowboys & Aliens (good action pic)
9. Rise Of The Planet of The Apes  (Nothing to do with the corny shit that came before)
10.  Killer Elite (period thriller with lots of gratuitous violence and tough special forces guys without a ton of electronic gadgetry)

Now it would be wise to note that I definitely be seeing the new Sherlock  Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the new Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher and the New Mission Impossible, although I’m sure it will be totally forgettable.

THE FAMILY PERSPECTIVE 

On a personal level, the most significant thing for us was that our daughter, Star and her husband Ben are back in our lives again after a self-imposed exile of a few years. This has made us very happy, and though it will be a while before the re-integration into the larger family is complete, (skepticism is high), they have made a very good start and we’re really optimistic about the future.

Families are such funny things. Sometimes the chemistry is perfect, other times not so much. When you have a family that’s mainly composed of rugged individualists, the potential for conflicts can be great. It’s never simple and I won’t bore you with the complex details. Just tell you that as you grow older, holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas are way more about people than things. And this Christmas there are a couple of people we’re very happy to have back in our lives.

THE FACEBOOK PERSPECTIVE

This year, one of the most interesting places I visited on a regular basis was Facebook. I read some inspired opinions, laughed at some very funny jokes, argued politics and bullshit, was blown away by some great photography and painting, followed some amazing stories about the music business, reviewed pretty much everything I saw, gave people some advice and got some good advice myself and was freely able to express my feelings on the state of the world without anybody telling me I was full of shit. I was even so inspired by one post that I wrote a song based on it.

Some of the best conversations I had this year were on Facebook with a lot of people I don’t even know personally or haven’t actually seen in person for years. I like this, because the people on the other side of the conversation really have very little to lose by being totally honest and neither do I. I think that’s the real essence of social media, despite what all the business building gurus tell you about it. I think people go there to vent, relax, laugh, cry and generally be entertained by and satisfy their relentless curiosity about other people they find interesting.

It’s a funny thing. But these people, many of whom are blasts from the past, are a lot of fun and their sense of humour is branded on all their posts and comments. Facebook is one of the few places left where people, at least the people I’ve met are truly committed to having fun, being witty and amusing just for the sake of making other people smile. Or laugh their asses off.

If anything I’ve just said about Facebook lights a little candle in your brain, you should get yourself on board. It’s a lot of fun and a way to keep up with what’s going on without a lot of the editorial biases of conventional media.

Well that about does it for 2011. I hope your year was as good as mine was, and I hope 2012 is even better.

Yadda Yadda Yadda And A Partridge In A Pear Tree

Well it’s the week before Christmas and because I have made hundreds of new social media friends, this blog post which I originally wrote in about 2003 is still oddly relevant today. So here it is, complete with my fond hope that all of you are truly enjoying the spirit of the season that is upon us.

***************

Early December. The weather is unseasonably warm. Christmas is barreling down on us like a big Mack truck with its brake lines cut. But for some strange reason, we would all like to have a little snow on the ground.

Christmas, of course means Christmas shopping. Believe it or not, the only difficulty I have with that is coming up with suggestions for what people should get me. The Wife, who is actually the only person I have to buy for, is always extremely cooperative. Last week I found several catalogues and a neat hand-printed wish list on my desk. It totally negates the concept of spontaneous Christmas gift buying, but replaces it instead with sanity and order, which in a season as insane and disorderly as Christmas, is all good.

How insane and disorderly is it, you ask?

Well, last weekend I had to pick up something from a friend who lived just north of Broadview by the Parkway. So I thought, just a quick hop across the Danforth and a quick hop back. Yeah, right. Stupid me, I hadn’t allowed for the Xmas Principle. The Xmas Principle states that as soon as the Santa Claus Parade is over, forget about quick Saturday hops to or from anywhere on the streets of Toronto until well past New Year’s day. What normally took me about 15 minutes ballooned to well over 45. Now I could have got off and woven my way through the side streets, but I needed to stay in traffic to get that particular stat, as I felt a story brewing in my head. So just imagine how nutty it must be for people who actually have any real distance to travel.

Christmas traffic is not like rush hour traffic, where everybody is used to the grind and are guided by what is essentially a single purpose. No way Jose, the jammers in these jams are what I kindly refer to as “Gawkers and Talkers”. The cars are full of people all with separate agendas, all lobbying simultaneously. Behind the wheels are absent-minded fathers who want to be doing anything but this. All are in search of the elusive parking spot which is an equal distance from all the different places they are going. It is stop and go traffic raised to the power of 10. I passed three minor fender benders in the space of about 12 blocks.

All around me I could feel the ether crackle with the sparks of shattering nerves. The sidewalks, which I had ample time to study, were a teeming mass of shoppers, weaving in and out of stores like quicksilver. It was hypnotically fascinating and scary as hell at the same time. And all I could think of just how stupid I had been for not deciding to leave this until the next day. But then that wouldn’t have made much difference. Not really.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the Christmas season. It may, in fact, be this spud’s favourite time of year. I mean, besides trying to go somewhere on a Saturday, what’s not to love?

There’s lots of great TV to watch…feel good TV like funky Christmas specials, caroling from big old churches in England and great movies like Holiday Inn, White Christmas, The Bells Of St. Mary’s, Christmas in Connecticut, It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Bishop’s Wife etc.

There’s great Christmas music (the Wife has a rather fine collection of choral stuff). And, of course everybody who’s anybody in Televisionland has a one hour special, that you invariably sit through because there’s really nothing else to watch.

There’s lots of cool seasonal stuff to eat — candy canes, eggnog, fruitcake, stuff with Marzipan and mincemeat in it and those juicy little seedless oranges from the Middle East. You get to put up an evergreen tree in your family room, and get loaded with friends and relatives who you maybe haven’t seen all year.

But best of all, at least for me, the holiday season wraps you up in a warm blanket of memories of Christmases past. If you look deep enough, you see how your life has unfolded through them. You can see younger versions of yourself trying so hard to get to sleep on Christmas eve, but just too wired from a combination of sweets and anticipation to ever get there. Then, in the next instant, you see the same thing happening to your own small kids. They stand at the top of the stairs, dead on their feet, but complaining nonetheless about not being able to sleep. You take them back to bed and try to calm the visions of sugarplumbs dancing so frenetically in their little heads.

You see an old frame house in a small town filled with people, you have known most of your life. They’re eating drinking and asking you about how you’re doing at school and what you want to be when you grow up. They’re letting you sip beer from a tall bottle and messing up your hair every few minutes, marveling at how you’ve grown. Then, in the next instant, the roles are reversed and you’re the one who’s asking the questions and giving out free sips of beer and messing up hair and marveling.

It’s all very emotional in the best way imaginable. For me Christmas has little to do with religious significance and nothing to do with the madness which preceded it.

It’s just Christmas and it’s a time of year that draws us all close together. I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure that why even matters. Some things, I suppose, don’t need to be explained. They just need to be enjoyed. So Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays…or however you wish to express it. Yadda yadda yadda and a partridge in a pear tree.

The Couch Potato Chronicles 2011 – Volume 24

THE FIRST 15 CHAPTERS OF MY SELF-HELP BOOK

A lot of people are writing self-help books these days. I have been studying a lot of them lately and I have come to a startling conclusion. These self-help books are mostly padded with all kind of useless and pointless stuff to fill up the page and make them a book. This is designed to create the illusion that people who buy the book are actually getting their money’s worth. But at the end of the day, people only take away the true nuggets of wisdom that may or may not be contained in these books.

What makes my self-help book different, beside the fact that it’s actually free, is that I have, purely out of respect for your time, eliminated all the bullshit and cut right to the chase.

The idea of having self-help sentences, as opposed to reams of meaningless prose, will give you the time you need to reflect on the points I am making, apply them to your own particular situation and actually be the architect of your own solution. And frankly it doesn’t get any more gratifying than that.

Now Anthony Robbins has nothing to worry about from me. Nor do any of the other gurus out there, because you’re either into guru worship or you’re not. If you’re not and you’re just looking for some pithy stuff to think about, I’m your man and Hey You! Get Your Shit Together! is your guide.

CHAPTER 1: “Stop fucking around!”

CHAPTER 2: “Self help books only truly benefit the guru who can sell the most — readers, not so much.”

CHAPTER 3: “Refusing to accept responsibility for your own shortcomings or mistakes only makes other people think you are an asshole, and nobody wants to do business with assholes, except maybe other assholes.

CHAPTER 4: “There is no problem, personal or business, that can’t be solved while sipping a cup of really good coffee.”

CHAPTER 5: “If you think of business as a game like baseball then you’ll only be content with getting a hit about 30% of the time, which of course will make you a loser because business isn’t baseball.

CHAPTER 6: ” A lot of the advice you get about how to manage your business will be different, so your most important (and difficult), job is deciding on what makes the most sense to you.”

CHAPTER 7: “The concept of sweat equity should really only apply to building your own business unless you implicitly trust the people you are doing it for and even then you should always proceed with caution.”

CHAPTER 8: “If you’re starting a business and you have to decide between Macs and PCs, just ask yourself how much of your hard earned money you are willing to pay for service, repairs, maintenance and upgrades every damn month, and you’ll end up with Macs.” Thank you–that will be $19.95 please

CHAPTER 9: “One of the best ways to keep focused on going forward is to write down what you are aiming to achieve…and actually look at it every once in a while.”

CHAPTER 10: “Always answer your email and phone messages ASAP, because not doing that is how you lose business.”

CHAPTER 11: “It’s very important to read over everything you are planning to send to anyone, not just for spelling and grammar, which can make you look like an ass, but also for tone and manner, which can make you sound like a dick.”

CHAPTER 12: “No matter what business you are in, prospective clients do look at and read your web site, so it’s in your best interest to make sure it doesn’t suck.”

CHAPTER 13: “Success in business consists of one basic principle, which is being able to pick up the phone and get a meeting with somebody you don’t know…the rest is all gravy.”

CHAPTER 14: “If you think you can build a strong, sustainable business that’s based 90% on salesmanship and only 10% on corporate identity…that is your first and maybe last wrong assumption.”

CHAPTER 15: “Estimating costs is always going to be a pain in the ass, so you need to make sure that your client understands that an estimate exactly what the word implies and that re-estimating based the reality of their situation is OK with you.”

Everything in the column is the intellectual property of me.
www.onandup.ca

The Couch Potato Chronicles 2011 — Volume 22

IT’S HARD TO FIND THE CHRISMAS SPIRIT
IN ALL THE SHOPPING FRENZY

Yesterday was Black Friday. One of those days that because it follows the US Thanksgiving which is always on a Thursday, is perfect for drawing people out to get their Christmas shopping jumpstarted before December and the seemingly endless stream of Christmas parties that people have to attend. Unfortunately, Black Friday is aptly named, because over the years, the frenzy that this has created among the class of people I like to call ‘bargain obsessed’ is so high that a great many of these people turn into ‘bargain predators’ and start to behave in ways that they never normally would. This shopping frenzy, in turn creates a ‘media frenzy’, because we all know that media people thrive on conflict and subhuman behaviour. And as it bubbles and churns it becomes a vicious circle where the shoppers hit the stores, not so much looking for bargains, but looking for any advantage they can gain over their fellow shoppers to get at these bargains.

Black Friday and Boxing Day shoppers. It's every man and little old lady for themselves.

And this of course has the logical consequent of an endless series of flare ups, arguments, fist fights, pepper spraying and in a few cases this year, knifings and shootings. In short Black Friday and Boxing days Sales have become, for the customers, a full contact sport and a potentially deadly one at that. What amazes me the most about all this is that it’s not about religion or race or ideology or any sort of social issue at all…this war is about shopping. Shopping…think about that for a minute.  

People Have Been Hypnotized.

There’s something very Pavlovian about the way advertising, PR and the media have been able to condition people to become completely and utterly ruthless and self-centred on these particular days. They say it’s a real stimulus for the retail business. But I have trouble believing that because to me the point of being in a retail business is to sell your stuff at a markup that makes your business profitable. Deep discounts to attract a class of people who are really only there for the bargains doesn’t seem to be a very smart business move. It could be argued that you make up for it in volume, but you have to hire extra security, you have to pay your staff extra because you’re open longer, and what happens if there’s damage to your store or if one of your customers or staffers get seriously hurt and sues you, and end up with a civil suit on your hands that you’re either going to lose or have to settle. Poof there goes your profits and what have you really gained in the end?

Sell Sell Sell…

People line up all night for these sales. They must not value their time very highly at all.

Since I have been in advertising for most of my life, I understand the pressures that can come about at this time of year in the retail business. It’s all about bringing as many people as you can into your establishment and getting them to buy as much as possible. But times are tough at the moment in the US and customers do not have the same kind of bucks to shell out as they have in past years. And those are two of the key ingredients in the deadly brew that we saw manifest itself yesterday in all kinds of violent and strange behavior. But those are all just symptoms of something major which is the need for capitalist economies to keep growing. All these holidays and occasions that have been created over the years are designed with an overt and a covert purpose in mind. The overt purpose is to show the people you care about that your love for them manifest itself in a material way, which is kinda sad when you think about it. The covert purpose is to use any method you can employ to keep people believing strongly in the overt6 purpose. Keep them buying. Because this is what stimulates pretty much all of the retail environment outside of the essential areas (ie groceries, gasoline, home sales etc).

Call me old fashioned if you like, but this is more the kind of Christmas I see when close my eyes and think about it.

The Real Christmas Spirit

Personally I think we buy each other too much stuff on holidays like Christmas and birthdays. I don’t really have room for more stuff in my life. In fact, I’m in the process of unstuffing and getting rid of a lot of the stuff I don’t or never have used. But that’s an argument for another time. The best gift that most people can give each other at Christmas is the gift of just being there. Sharing a meal. Hanging out for the day. Talking and enjoying each other’s company. Yeah, gift giving and the receiving of gifts is OK. But when I think back to Christmases past, I’m hard pressed to recall any of the specific gifts I gave to anyone or received from anyone. But I recall the people and the times we had together and at the end of the day, isn’t that really all that matters?

This column is the intellectual property of yours truly http://www.onandup.ca 

The Couch Potato Chronicles 2011 – Volume 22

SEXUAL ABUSE IN SPORTS

Living in North America, we have the advantage of being exposed to a wide variety of both pro and amateur sports. I try to take in as much as I can, because I’m basically a fan of sports. Some sports, like football, baseball and golf, I like to watch the pros play. Other sports like basketball I prefer the watch the college level games. I don’t know why I feel that way about the sports I watch because I’ve never really thought about it.

Every so often sports both amateur and professional sports will find itself crossing over into the realm of real news. A few years back, for example, the Duke lacrosse team was accused to rape, which turned out to be bullshit. Pro football quarterback Michael Vick got himself in a peck of trouble for his involvement with dog fighting, and served two years in a federal pen because of it. Former NY Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress served a couple of years for a firearms violation, not to mention shooting himself in the leg, which was a total bonehead move. Kobe Bryant got charged with rape by a physiotherapist and that turned out to be bogus too. In fact there is a hell of a lot more. But just lately there has been some stuff going on that makes all this look like petty crime.

Joe Paterno, legendary Penn State football coach is the sharp end of the spear of this abuse scandal.

Both Penn State and Syracuse University have been big time in the news lately with regards to coverups associated with coaches sexually abusing children. This is the lowest of the low kind of crime that human beings can do to each other. It’s the kind of stuff that will get you killed in prison, because while prisons are filled with all manner of lowlife murderers and rapist and arm robbers, the common denominator among even the most aberrant of humanoids is their love of and protectionism of children.

Sexual abuse, according to Theo Fleury, who played in the NHL for years and was himself an abuse victim, affects one in every four human beings on the planet. Which means the fact that you have never experienced it yourself makes you pretty lucky, but that you might know someone who has is very very possible. It is by a long shot the worst disease we have out there. Because it’s something that can change the victim’s life forever. That can haunt them, drive them mad, or even worse, turn them into the kind of predator that abused them in the first place.

Jim Boeheim, the Syracuse basketball coach is also in a peck of trouble.

Like all cases of abuse, The Penn State and Syracuse revelations are probably just the tip of the iceburg. The awfulness of the crimes of abuse committed here are exacerbated by the great lengths that the university’s administrations have gone to in order to cover this up and attempt to sweep it under the rug. These universities are very much like big time pro sports franchises, assuming that their incredible popularity somehow gives them an ‘above the law’ status in society.

I think what we’re finding out is that this is not the case. And this is one of the few times that I would applaud and encourage the bloodthirsty media vultures to dig as deep as they can and drag out every skeleton in every closet out there to get some justice for the poor abused kids and the fucking monsters who did this to them.

This column is the intellectual property of your stuly.
www.onandup.ca 

The Couch Potato Chronicles 2011 – Volume 21

The World Outside…Huh?

I don’t usually write about things that happen out in the world, mainly because I live in pretty much self-imposed exile from the news. I tend to live in a world of sports, entertainment and literature and I like it that way. I used to watch the news all the time but found that it frayed my nerves and made me think too much about what a shithole the world has become. When I don’t watch the news, the world is still a shithole, but it somehow doesn’t feel that way so much. I actually recommend it for everyone, although I know that not everyone is a spoiled brat like me.

 On Doing My Own Thing, Which I Have Always Done

I have been lucky in that I been doing pretty much exactly what I want to do for most of my adult life. The twenty years I spent in advertising agencies made me a communications expert of sorts, and writing every single day of my life has made me an adequate communicator. So I am able to eke out a decent living helping people communicate whatever it is they have to communicate. These days I’m focused on sustainability in all its various forms, helping companies who are part of the solution. That has the added advantage of making you feel good about what you are doing, although I have to admit I’ve never really felt bad about it, because I never really helped anybody sell evil stuff like cigarettes or cover up nasty shit like oil spills.

One of the things that helps me be effective at what I do is that I’m a pretty regular guy.

I live in a regular part of town…not too hoity toity but not too shabby either. I get to see all the sides of city life here on the east side of Toronto, and while it’s not always pretty, it’s always interesting. Most of the people in my neighbourhood work pretty hard for their money. They shop at No Frills instead of Loblaws and they use the dollar stores a lot. Most of the people are friendly. Some of them are pissed off. And some of them are idiots. But I guess you get that everywhere.

 My Crappy Body, Which Is Getting Less Crappy.

I’ve had to lose a lot of weight lately because my blood sugar levels were elevated and it was either lose the weight and change my diet or become diabetic. This happens a lot to regular guys. I also have a nervous condition known as tic syndrome, which is a very mild form of Tourette’s syndrome. No I won’t call you a fucking shithead for no reason. But the tics have two downsides. One: they are relative to any emotional pressure I may be feeling and, Two: they have, in the past, caused me to unconsciously eat a lot of crappy stuff, to keep myself distracted. I still have to do stuff to keep myself distracted…I just no longer eat crap and lo and behold, my blood sugar levels are lowering and so is my weight.

The downside of losing weight is that a lot of my clothes don’t fit me anymore. They look way too baggy.  I got hell from my wife for the way I looked when we went out shopping yesterday. I’m also getting that chicken neck thing that happens because, for some reason, the first place the fat starts disappearing from is your face and neck. I guess it’s working its way down. Hopefully it will find my mid section soon and flatten it out a bit more.

Now I have lost around 40 lbs since I started in July and still have another 30 to go. So I am kinda stuck. I don’t want to buy a whole bunch of new clothes that I’m just gonna shrink out of, cause that’s just dumb. But it’s actually not that bad because in point of fact I don’t really wear a lot of clothes. Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to go to many meetings at all. Mostly work comes in  by email and goes out the same way. A lot of the people I work for, I have known for quite a while so they know what I dress like and don’t care as long as I keep writing good stuff for them. The only time I see my clients is to have lunch or a beer. And that’s fine with me. I have a long attention span for writing and talking to people casually. But meetings…I’m only good for an hour at best. I loved working in advertising agencies, but the meetings were a killer. We all hated them. Meetings are actually the least productive form of business activity. Most of the stuff that needs to be decided in a meeting can be done in about five minutes. Yet they always seem to take a couple of hours. I could never figure that out.

I Ride A Schwinn With Skinny Tires

One of the things I have been doing to help myself lose weight is riding my bike. I usually ride fairly hard for about 5 to 10 miles every day. And will do all that to achieve just one errand. Today I’m riding up to Wally World (Wal-mart) on Eglinton to see if I can find some smaller pants.

My bike is a Schwinn touring model that I bought at Canadian Tire. It wasn’t very expensive. I believe expensive bikes are nothing but targets for bike thieves. The first thing I did with the Schwinn was take it into Cycle Solutions on Kingston Road and have them put in a new crank shaft and bearings and set up the gears properly. Then I added a custom seat, a heavy duty rear carrier rack and a good Shimano transmission. Now it was an expensive bike that everybody would think is just a cheap one. I also mounted a crappy looking Sealtest milk case on the rear carrier to haul my shit around in. This is because I hate having anything on my back when I’m riding, plus I do the shopping around here, and need the cargo space for hauling groceries from the stores I go to.

The other reason I bought the cheap Schwinn was because I felt comfortable riding it and when you ride as much as I do, comfort is really important.

Bye Bye Rogers.

I have recently decided that I want to quit Rogers. Because I pay a ton each month for a whole lot of stuff that I don’t watch. I can get by with what I download and what I can see on the main networks. And so Rogers must go. I would also love to have Bell out of my life too. Who wouldn’t? These are two of the companies everybody loves to hate. I won’t go into a big long thing about why, because that won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know. So I am in the process of finding out about high definition antennas. My friend, and web guy, Simon Browning put me on to a place called Save & Replay, which is, evidently the best place in the GTA to find high definition antennas and digital converters. But they are way out in Mississauga, and I’m sure as hell not going their on my bike. This whole process will take a couple of months. Any major change to the way you do things usually does.

Touch & Go

I also want to send a shout out to Bunny Brown a Facebook friend and great Toronto singer/songwriter who wrote a line in one of her FB posts that inspired me to write this lyric. The line was, “Everybody’s life is touch and go”.

Touch & Go
(For Bunny)

All the bridges I have crossed are burned
All the lessons life has taught me I’ve unlearned
The only answer that makes sense is ‘I don’t know’
Everybody’s life is touch and go

Everybody wants to be your friend
But is it just another means to their end?
So many liquid questions freely flow
Everybody’s life is touch and go

(chorus)
Everybody’s getting out of town
All the right side up is upside down
Everything is shifting to and fro
Everybody’s life is touch and go

All I want is something to believe
But everybody’s got a trick or two up their sleeve
Makes me all confused about friends and foes
Everybody’s life is touch and go

 Nobody hangs around for very long
Nobody ever admits when they are wrong
Everybody’s swimming against the flow
Cause everybody’s life is touch and go

 

 

The Couch Potato Chronicles 2011 — Volume 20

TV – What A Big Wide Wonderful World

Being as I mainly advertise this blog as a review column and not merely a place for me to rant about all the stuff that’s pissing me off on any give week, I thought that this week, I would write about TV.

The thing about TV is that it’s constantly in a state of being not what it used to be. And depending on how big a fan you are of TV, its either evolving or devolving right before our eyes. I’m in the latter camp. The most critical element of the devolution of TV in recent years was the appearance of a new kind of TV called Reality TV. Now you could argue that there always has been some sort of reality TV in one thinly veiled form or another ever since the advent of TV itself. But the establishment of shows like Survivor and Big Brother and The Bachelor were really the innovators in a long and rather gruesome sequence of wannabes.  But this has always been the case with TV- imitation following closely on the heels of innovation. Take Mad Men, which has been through 3 seasons and is already starting to spawn cheapo imitations. The doomed Playboy Club and the hopefully soon to be doomed Pan Am. What these shows lack that Mad Men has in spades s true cultural significance. Mad Men was set at the very beginning of the largest cultural revolution in modern day America, and the characters in the show were on the front lines of the commercial culture. As well known an entity as Playboy is, there were only a few people who gave a rat’s ass about the Playboy Club brought to life on TV. Mainly because all the characters were pretty one dimensional and hard to give a damn about. Same for the bimbos in Pan Am. Not to demean their profession, but really. They’re basically just glorified cocktail waitresses.

There are a lot more examples of innovation spawning imitation in TV land, because like any other land you can think of, big original ideas are hard to come by but easy to copy in a slightly altered form.  Writer David E Kelley is a great example of somebody who is an innovator and imitates his own innovation on a regular basis. He writes pretty much the same shows over and over again only in different cities, with different characters and sometimes with different characters doing

The Good Wife. Still the best thing on Network TV.

different things. But because he knows how to create characters that are memorable and easy to care for, his work is some of the most enduring stuff on TV. James Spader and William Shatner sitting on a stone terrace in stone chairs sipping scotch and smoking cigars and having a weekly dialogue that elevated the art from of the written word on TV.  This is the stuff of true greatness because they were characters that you really loved.

It’s All Personal, Isn’t It?

Granted, a lot of what we like or don’t like in the way of TV has to do with personal preferences and there’s certainly enough variety out there to satisfy almost any taste. But this is my column, and therefore all about me and the things I happen to like personally. And what I happen to like mainly stems from the writing. I’ve always believed that great TV series or shows are generally about the writing, because without the writing you can’t really have the plots or characters, which is really the stock in trade of most successful TV series since they don’t have James Cameron style budgets. There have been a lot of attempts to throw a bunch of money at a series to try and make it work, but  if it doesn’t have a strong foundation of character and plot, it’s just not going to keep you coming back.

Luther. Pretty much the best cop series I have ever seen.

A classic example of this is a series called Fringe. Fringe is in its 4^th season and up until the end of the second season, it was a total enigma, I didn’t really see where it was going, even though it was actually going there. But what happened was I went along for the ride because I really liked the characters and thought the shows were cleverly plotted. Then when the real idea behind the show was revealed, it was the thick layer of icing on a great tasting cake. My appreciation of the show and the cleverness and vision of the people writing it rose even higher than I thought it would. Shows like Fringe and its pedecessors, in the ultra-popular cult series area, Lost, and Alias were both created by the same creative genius JJ Abrams.  These shows all functioned along the same lines in that they hooked you on the characters, gave you great stores to watch and then slowly revealed a big idea.  And unlike movies that only have a couple of hours to attempt the same thing, these series do it all in detail over the course of 100 or more episodes.

Now JJ Abrams and David E Kelley don’t have a monopoly on developing compelling series. I was having coffee with Frank Caruso a while back and he postulated that most of the great writing talent that used to be in the movie business have moved to TV because they get a much larger canvas to paint on and they also get to actually work on something real instead of constantly being in ‘development hell’. And it’s true. You could argue that this migration began a while back with the development of the Sopranos, arguably one of the great TV series of all time. David Chase who created the show brought in and trained a whole slew of writers who have since gone on to create some of the most innovative series on TV. But the real credit here belongs to Fox, HBO, AMC, A&E, FX, USA Network, TNT, SyFy and Starz  among others, that are financing these innovative series ideas and throwing them up on the TV screen for all of us to see. The development of TV series outside the big three networks is really what the revolution in TV is all about. These series are all created and run by people who a) understand how different TV is as a medium from movies and b) want to give people like me (probably the majority) something to watch beside spinoffs, unfunny sitcoms, reality crap, undramatic drama and overly stylized CSI style cop shows.

If I were to analyze in detail what I have watched on TV over the past 5 years,  I would see a definitely trending away from the typical network shows to those produced by the aforementioned US cable networks and the Brits as well. That’s not to say that there are good TV series running on the networks, there are, but they are definitely being crowded out and feeling the pinch of competition from the cable networks. This in turn lowers viewership and advertising revenues, which mean fewer shows produced or fewer episodes per season of the shows that are pulling a decent audience. Economics 101.

The best show of the new fall season, by a long shot.

This Season…If You Can Call It That.

This brings us to this year and I’m afraid that TV, at least North American TV is coming up very short in the quality department. Oh sure, you have great production values and the visual imagination in a great many of the shows is off the charts. But the key element of  character development and story lines are truly suffering. But all in all, this season has pretty much been the most disappointing yet.

What follows is a list of the best TV series I’ve encountered. What’s most astounding about this list is how long it actually is and how little of it, relatively speaking comes from the main networks. I got fed up with all but a small handful of network TV shows a few years ago and started looking around for alternatives. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were literally dozens of great shows that never made it to network exposure. There’s a whole world TV out there that you want see on Rogers or Time Warner unless. No, you have to pretty much rely on the Internet to bring this stuff your way, especially for the high quality series being produced the BBC or ITV over in England.

What I’m really saying here is that there’s a ton of really good entertaining stuff being produced for TV, but that lot of it isn’t where you’d expect to find it, on the networks.

BIG 3 NETWORK SERIES

√√√√ – Must See:   

The Good Wife
The Big Bang Theory
Person of Interest
A Gifted Man
Prime Suspect
The Jessie Stone Mysteries

√√√ – Worth Seeing:

Criminal Minds
The Mentalist
NCIS
Harry’s Law
Blue Bloods
Prime Suspect
Modern Family
Last Man Standing

√√ – Take It Or Leave It, Unless You’re A Fan:

Castle
Grimm
Suburgatory

US CABLE NETWORK SERIES

√√√√ – Must See:   

Mad Men
Bored to Death
Dexter
Entourage
True Blood
Justified
Necessary Roughness
Damages
Suits
Franklin & Bash
Game of Thrones
Rescue Me
The Walking Dead
The Killing
Rubicon
Hell on Wheels
White Collar
Terriers
Nurse Jackie

√√√ – Worth Seeing:
The Glades
Fairly Legal
Episodes
Californication
Burn Notice
The Closer
Rizzoli & Isles
Wilfred
Teen Wolf
Against The Wall
Sons of Anarchy

√√ – Take It Or Leave It, Unless You’re A Fan:

Breaking Bad
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Warehouse 13
Leverage
Death Valley

BRITISH OR FOREIGH SERIES

√√√√ – Must See:   

Spooks
The IT Crowd
Luther
The Shadow Line
Hidden
Thorne
Outcasts
The Wallander Series
The Fades
Torchwood
Strike Back
Scott & Bailey
Doc Martin
Downton Abbey
Lark Rise To Candleford

This column and all the opinions in it are mine.
To find out more about me got to www.onandup.ca 

The Couch Potato Chronicles 2011 – Volume 19

THE PARK

We were in Zellers today, the one at Danforth & Victoria Park, and as we were coming out of the checkout I saw some kids buying cotton candy from a vending machine. I thought that was pretty weird in and of itself, but when they opened up the door and I got a whiff of it, my mind was suddenly flooded with memories of my childhood. I said to my wife, “Did you smell that cotton candy, it smells like the Lions Club Carnival in Oakes Park.”

I grew up in Fort Erie, which for those of you who don’t know is across the Niagara River from Buffalo, right where Lake Erie empties into the Niagara then flows north for 20 miles or so until it hits the Falls and eventually empties into Lake Ontario.

My house was on Gilmore Road at the west entrance to Oakes Park. It was named for the famous Oakes family who were a big deal back in the nineteenth century. The park itself covered about 30 or 40 acres in two parts The west part and the east part on the other side of Central Avenue, which was known locally as The Sugar Bowl, mainly because it looked like a huge crater, with sloping hills and a big flat bottom.

The Park, as it was called, was the centre of my young life. Almost everything we did in the summer or the winter was done in that park. There were four baseball diamonds that I played on at various stages of my youth. I played first base, because I was a lefty and a half decent hitter. There were tennis courts, which were used mostly for road hockey. The Italian guys in my neighbourhood all loved road hockey more than any other sport. There was a football/soccer field where I played exactly two games of high school football as a wide receiver and retired after being violently tackled by a young Troy Palomalu wannabe from Wainfleet. My knee has never been the same since.

THE BEGINNING

The earliest memory I have of The Park has to do with the maple trees that ran along the ringroad that went from one entrance to the other in The Park. These maples were not very big, because they had been planted right after WW2. They started branching at about 6 feet off the ground. So you could lean your bike up against the trunk and pull yourself up into the tree pretty easily. There were three trees that were really good for climbing. They were also good for shade in the late afternoon, after a full day of whatever you were playing. The ringroad trees were also close enough to the entrance and the surrounding neighbourhood that parents could call you when it was time for dinner. The park mainly bordered Jennet Street and the west side. This is where a lot of my friends lived. Somebody’s dad, I believe it was Russell Rossitani’s, cut out a section of the park fence and made a wooden gate into their back yard, and that was how you got to Jennet Street without having to go all the way around. Nobody ever gave him any grief for cutting the fence although I’m sure it must have violated some bylaw somewhere. In a small town people don’t really sweat the small stuff.

BASEBALL

The fence along the north side of the park separated it from Horton Steel, a big foundry and one of the town’s largest employers. One of the jobs you could have as a kid was to be a ball shagger which meant climbing the fence into the steel company’s yard and fetching foul balls that were hit from the adjacent grown-up baseball field. You could also shag balls down at the other end where the ladies played softball. But it was cooler at the big field. There was something really neat about the way a baseball hitting a rust coated steel girder sounded. Also the big baseball field wasn’t lit so all the games took place before sunset. The softball field was lit and finding foul balls in the steelyard behind there was a pain in the ass.

A lot of baseball got played in The Park. There were a couple of grown up leagues and the senior kids leagues played there too. I played most of my baseball in the east end of the park, The Sugar Bowl. There were two diamonds in the bowl facing each other diagonally. Then one year the town put a wading pool right in the middle, so all the moms could sit on lawn chairs and watch their older kids play ball while the younger ones hung out in the wading pool. It was a win win if you were a parent.

CARNIVALS

On special weekends the Kinsmen and Lions Clubs would host carnivals. They would be set up on the football field in the middle of the West Park and that would be our Las Vegas. All kinds of games of chance, rides and goodies like salt water taffy, candy apples, carmel corn and the memory evoking cotton candy. Over the carnival’s three nights in the summer, pretty much everyone in town put in an appearance and blew some money on the games of chance. It was kind of a fun form of municipal taxation.

WINTER

Fort Erie always got a lot of snow in the winter. Some winters the flat part of The Park would freeze over and turn into a gigantic ice rink. All my friends used my back yard as a place to put their skates on. Once it looked like the ice was gonna hang around for a while, the guys who ran The Park would flood it at night to add a layer and smooth it all out. There would be kids skating everywhere and makeshift hockey games too.

The town was divided up into three areas. The North End, The West End and The South End. There was no East End to speak of because that was basically the River. But we all had teams. Baseball, Football and Hockey and we would play organized games against each other all the time. The North End guys were the WASPs, because that was the more affluent area of town. The South End guys were a little more working class and tough. We were the dagos, because with the exception Doug Ineson and his cousin Rick Shuler, who were some kind of Scandanavian, the rest of us were all fully or partially Italian. The South End guys were the better athletes. The North End guys didn’t really give a shit but played hard anyway and the dagos tried really hard and got lucky every now and then. But The Park was the thing was all had in common. Once in a while we would go to the North End and play in a smaller park they had over on Bowen Road. But it was never the same.

In the winter we also used to spend a lot of time on the long sloping hill that rimmed The Sugar Bowl on sleds and toboggans and flying saucers. You could be freezing your ass off all day long and never even think twice about it because you were having so much fun. There was a parking lot on the south side of the Sugar Bowl and when it got plowed, they piled the snow up into gigantic banks, maybe 10 or 12 feet high. I had a friend named Larry Jackson and his dad was in a combat regiment in WW2 and a good carpenter. When he came back home he started making wooden replicas of a number of the rifles and machine guns he remembered from the war. He hung them up in the garage and let us use them to play war games on the big snow dunes in the winter and in the woods that separated the Sugar Bowl from the school yards to the north.  This was not something that the South End and North End teams ever got involved in. There weren’t enough of the cool wooden guns to go around.

This is a map of The Park today. It's changed quite a bit, and probably for the better. But in my mind, it will always look the way I have described it here

EPILOGUE

I spent the first 18 years of my life in Fort Erie and between the ages of about 5 and 14 I spent most of my time in The Park. We all did. We made our own adventures and played games, made and lost friends and nursed benign rivalries. Once I hit 15 or so, I started working at the Park Lane Bowling alley in the winter and caddying at Erie Downs the rest of the year, playing pool at Oocho’s Pool Hall and getting to know all the girls in town who were suddenly more important than any of the games we used to play.

I was looking at a satellite shot of the park on Google Earth. It’s called The Sugarbowl Park now. No more Oakes. And man, it’s really changed. But then again so have I. But the thing that won’t ever change is my memory of the time I spent in that park. For ten years of my life, it was pretty much the centrix of my existence. I can’t recall a single day when I didn’t set foot in that park. I kissed my first girl in that park. Smoked my first cigarette there. (that didn’t last long though). Drank my first sip of wine there. Broke just about every bone I have ever broken in my life there. And lived a life that was free from any outside influences there. It was all about playing, talking, joking, laughing and generally having the time of our lives.

They say that the only constant in our lives is change and when I look around and see the way things are though the cynical and critical eyes of the writer I became, I sometimes find myself wishing I could have it all back again – that time and place when the only things you worried about were getting a hit or catching a fly ball or whether you could get the nifty wooden Thomson submachine gun to do battle with in the snow dunes that bordered The Park.

This blog is the intellectual property of me. Jim Murray.
Feel free to send it to anybody you like. I don’t mind.

If you want to know more about what I do visit
http://www.onandup.ca