Uncategorized – Page 38 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Every blog has its reason.

April 21, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The following was originally run October 8, 2009. We need to run it more than just every couple years.

Have you ever asked a blogger why? Did you get an answer? Did you get an honest answer? You wanted to know why they did it. You cannot believe that so many people have that big an ego. Could they really consider their pontificating so profound?

Or is the answer very simple. Take the case of this blog. What is it all about? Why call Barrie, Ontario Babel? Simple answer: I am a professional writer. As a writer, I am available for hire. I write for people who pay me. If someone needs a writer to produce a speech, a lecture, a presentation, a brochure, a résumé, a book, a script, a poem or a posting for twitter, I am your ghost. The web site babelonthebay.com is a sampler. It showcases my wares.

It helps that I love writing.

I also make it easy for people who wish to hire me. Take a speech, for example. All you need to tell me is to whom you will be speaking, what is the subject and if you are for it or against it. You can tell me more if you wish but I am mindful of the time a client gave me a two-hour explanation of a 15-minute speech he needed. He was angry when he read my first draft. “This is just what I told you,” he blustered. “What have you contributed?” I thought I had done an excellent editing job.

And then there are clients who are not interested in your view. I was once offered more than twice my normal rate for a 50-minute lecture a client was giving at an American university. The reason for the higher rate was that the client was extremely rightwing politically. The client might have got a standing ovation for his speech but I deserved every penny of that fat fee for fiction writing.

Hands up everyone who thinks all business people write their own presentations. Those of you with your hands up; you must also believe in the tooth fairy. When I started writing presentations for others, we were still using slide shows. PowerPoint makes life much easier.

Modern low-cost, on-demand publishing has given impetuous to the world of business book ghost writing. It has reached a point that if you open a restaurant, the opening can be shared with the introduction of your new book of recipes that is a regular reminder of a good place to eat out. You have an auto parts firm, so you produce a book of tips on doing minor auto repairs. No matter what your business, there is a book that can be written that reminds people that they should deal with you because you are the expert. Just leave the writing to an expert at writing.

I am not sure I want to resume writing résumés. I used to brag that nobody I wrote a résumé for ever failed to land a suitable job. Today, it is necessary to qualify that bravado. One problem is that younger people do not trust someone my age to know their audience. And they might be right. Today, there are many barriers to getting your résumé to the person with whom you really need to communicate. I still believe in my résumés but I am losing touch with those barriers. It is becoming more of a team effort.

Poetry is something else. I tend to inflict it only on friends and family. While they are not always enthusiastic about my poems, they are kind.

What some people say is missing from this sampler blog is humour. I apologize for that. I have been accused of being a bit capricious with whimsy. That is the reason that I refer to Barrie as Babel. I think Barrie gets a bad rap. Babel is a more whimsical place, more open and accepting. Babel seeks challenges and opportunities. Barrie is a harsher, colder environment, full of potholes and bars, hockey players and hookers. (Yah, I know, your sister plays right wing.)

But I love twitter. This is a venue where writers can shine. Effective tweets are full of alliterative allusions, weighty words of wisdom and devoted to doggerel. It is a medium that eschews whole sentences while demanding clarity. It is in twitter where everybody knows your name but not the name of your writer. Can you imagine a writing gig that pays you to write less than 280 characters a day? It’s golden!

And one last comment about the art: Writing to precisely fill a column is a big part of a writer’s training. A column is usually limited to an average of 800 words. As is this one.

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Creating controversy for Multiple Sclerosis.

April 14, 2012 by Peter Lowry

“Just spell the name right please.” If you think any controversy is good news, you are mistaken. People who try to pose Chronic Cerebro-spinal Venous Insufficiency (CCSVI) as being opposed by the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society of Canada are wrong. The MS Society functionaries are not the bad guys. The only people being hurt by this manufactured controversy are people with MS and their families.

Being a past president of the MS Society of Canada, a former executive member of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies and being married to a person with MS for the past 50 years, we have some knowledge of the disease and what is being done about it. When we took over the MS Society in the early 1970s, it had a budget of $180,000 per year and that much in the bank to pay for its next year’s grants to scientists.

Our first act as president was to bring together all the leading neuroscience researchers from across Canada at the time and demand that they give us more and better research into MS to fund. We told them that whatever they brought to us, that our scientific board thought was of merit, we would fund it. When we stepped down from the executive, we were funding over $10 million a year in research and research fellowships.

At the same time, Canada had taken a lead position with the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies. We helped to strengthen the societies that existed, we helped create new societies where they were needed and we accelerated the growth of world-wide funding for MS research. We made MS a world-wide cause. Co-ordinated research from around the world was working on MS.

Our only regret is that we have yet to solve the mystery of MS.

And then along came Dr. Paolo Zamboni of Italy. A vascular surgeon and professor, Dr. Zamboni postulated the theory that it was constrictions of the veins from the brain that cause MS symptoms. His ‘Liberation Treatment’ for MS patients was to use balloons and/or vascular stents to improve the blood flow. He had anecdotal success. He did not have the resources to do a full scientific study of his theory.

Both the American and Canadian MS societies set aside research funds to investigate Dr. Zamboni’s approach. Some experts thought it was worth checking out. Others were sceptical. You expect some differences of opinion. That is why you do trials and the layman can only keep an open mind.

But some people cannot wait. Politicians jumped on this side and that. Everyone likes a cause. Impatient patients wanted solutions now. That is understandable.

But to send patients off to places where the medical ethos is not as rigid as ours is endangering them. To take funds away from the controlled medical research and pour it into an unproved theory is to make a lie of all the hard work of people around the world who want the solution to MS. There will be a stream of reports available in the coming year from legitimate research into CCSVI. We hope it quells the controversy.

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Why we write what we want?

January 20, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Somebody asked recently why we sometimes write articles critical of individuals here in the city we call Babel. The person understood the criticism of Conservative politicians. He thought they were fair game. The concern was about people in Babel who might be upset about something written about them. The question asked was, “Don’t you want those people to like you?”

This took some explanation. First of all, the questioner needed to be reminded of why we write this blog. Nobody pays us to write it. It is written for fun and it is a sample of our writing skills. It produces an occasional writing assignment. We do not run advertising as we easily cover the cost of the blog and we like the cleanness of the appearance of Babel-on-the-Bay. To be effective in this, the material has to be a bit controversial. It has to be edgy. It needs to be noticed.

And anything written in this blog is written as what is called ‘fair comment.’ We are well aware of—and quite respectful—of the laws related to libel and slander and have kept abreast of recent rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada that have reduced the ability of people with lots of money to use what is called ‘libel chill’ to keep people from questioning some of their public actions. A former Canadian, publisher Conrad Black was quite expert at that until he ran afoul of a Chicago prosecutor who put him on the sidelines for a while.

And, yes, we do care if some public people in Babel are not pleased with our comments. They have our telephone number and are welcome to call us anytime to discuss what we have written with which they might disagree. We are also more than willing to discuss the terrible state of journalism in this community. It is quite shocking.

But we have more questions to ask than just about people’s feelings about our blog. We would dearly love to hear from some of our readers in Beirut as to why we have had a twelve-fold increase in readers in that part of the world. (It could be a relay point for some recent spam.) Heck, we have never figured out why we have more readers in Kitchener/Waterloo than we do in Montreal.

The analytics that are available to bloggers are quite fascinating but the reality for the work we do on Babel-on-the-Bay is how much work we get from it. We rarely blow our own horn but we have been known as one of the best speechwriters in Canada for many years. There are still a few companies that would not have any other writer work on their product catalogues. There is not much demand for literate newsletters in Babel but that was one of our mainstays for many years and we would love to do more.

That is one of the beauties of the Internet. It hardly matters where the customer resides. We have easy and fast communication. We can be paid through PayPal and never worry if the cheque is in the mail. We love to write. If you have the need, try us.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Playing the monopoly card with Olympics.

January 18, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Bell could not wait. They had practiced their high-handed monopoly tactics on Canadians for years. Now they are taking on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the team owners of the National Hockey League. Bell had learned the tactics in the years when it was the only game in town. Mind you, the previous management of CTV, that knocked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation out of the Olympic ballpark for the Vancouver and London games, was no slouch at the monopoly game. Now Bell owns CTV, it invited the CBC in on the game and then low-balled the IOC.

For the package that included the 2010 Games in Vancouver and the London Games this year, CTV bid and won with its very generous offer of $153 million. They did not expect any profit on Vancouver and, with $100 million in production costs, CTV and Rogers are reported to have lost more than $20 million. They expect to lose more on the London games this coming summer. It is no wonder Rogers has bailed out on the Olympics for the next round. Now that Bell owns CTV, it decided to invite the CBC back and play in a field in which the taxpayer-owned corporation had particular skills. Canadians still remember the excellent job the CBC has done on international sports over the years.

The IOC officials were the ones in for a shock when they opened the one bid from Canada for the next set of games. These will be the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. The new Canadian consortium offered less than half of the Vancouver/London bid. It is estimated at just $70 million. The IOC took its marbles and went home in a huff. They would rather take nothing.

The broadcasters will go back with something, eventually, but what they really would like to know is if there will be National Hockey League players on the men’s hockey teams in Sochi. That makes a huge difference in the size of the Canadian audience and the profit from the commercials. The networks could be in for a long wait to find out as the NHL is playing its own game. The NHL team owners want a share of the profits that their players produce and the IOC does not believe in sharing. This means three powerful monopolies are locking horns and seeing who blinks first. To complicate matters further, the team owners have to negotiate with the players later this year and the players will also want some of the profits from their participation.

Unless somebody breaks the chain by acting reasonably, there will either be no NHL players in the Sochi Olympics or no Olympic coverage except from an American television network or the CBC could be trying to do the whole thing on the cheap itself without government support. Nobody really wants any of those scenarios.

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The acquisitive Ma Bell.

January 14, 2012 by Peter Lowry

You have to be a bit older than most to remember the days when Bell stock was the mainstay of widows and orphans. It was reliable. It was like working for Bell. People used to say with pride that they worked for Bell. It was always an honourable job and a job for life.

Not any more. Times have changed. Prime Minister Harper’s friends at Bell discard employees like used tissues. Stephen Harper and the executives at Bell Canada seemed to be joined at the hip. They even throw people out of work simultaneously. The other day it was reported that while Bell was dismissing hundreds of employees from its Mississauga call centre, Stephen Harper’s henchmen were firing hundreds of security people from Pearson Airport which also happens to be in Mississauga. We should send an appropriate condolence card to Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion.

Mind you, there is no such need to send such a condolence card to Stephen Harper or Bell chief George Cope. Nobody they know would be working at such a low pay type of job. They do not know nor do they care about the hardships those people face in today’s job market. People at that pay level are the last hired and the first fired and they go through life with one discouragement after the other.

It was just a few people who know how to read the political tea leaves who were deeply worried when broadcasters (specifically CTV) and the cable and satellite distribution companies got into a fight over what was believed to be an argument for the distributors to pay for the local broadcast content they were distributing. It became clear later that the argument was a smokescreen for the satellite distributor Bell to take over CTV and cable/satellite distributor Shaw to take over Global. The only piece that is missing in English Canada is for Bell to take over Rogers. Just be patient.

Nobody paid much attention to the new arrangement until recently Bell and its new friend Rogers bought the Teacher’s share of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE). There is nothing that Bell cannot buy today if the company executives just put their minds to it. And gather around sports fans, you can now get all your instant sports information on your Bell or Rogers telephones and ipads.

It is all about control. While the deal with MLSE Chairman Larry Tanenbaum might seem odd—they gave him a gift of stock worth about $80 million—they are certainly not treating him like an employee. For $80 million it is a little easier to understand if you consider it as an encouragement to break off negotiations with other broadcasters. It is hard to turn down $80 million. The people George Cope and Stephen Harper fired could really live high off the hog if they had a share of that kind of money.

Someone asked the other day, where this acquisition spree of Bell is going to end? It’s a good question. We suggested that we will have to wait to hear whom Mr. Harper chooses as the new CRTC chair before we can guess where it is heading. Bell is supposed to be regulated by the CRTC.

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Twitter twaddle in Canadian politics.

January 1, 2012 by Peter Lowry

In advising aspiring politicians about communications, you can hardly ignore the phenomenon of social media on the Internet. It is reality and it can be useful, is your advice, but—and it is a very large ‘but’—you have to keep it controlled. Do you, for example, call yourself a blogger if you remember to post something every few months? Do you think, your followers will be satisfied with a twit on twitter every other day? Do you consider vapid twits from twitter as sufficient postings for facebook? Obviously the answer is ‘no’ to those questions and that is the sum of the problem.

If someone is doing their job as a politician, there is really no time for social media. If you are Prime Minister Harper, you have staff to do that sort of thing. And even then it is not done all that well. The Harper spoof sites are far more entertaining than the real Harper site.

And, if you are a serious politician, you pay attention to the spoof sites. We were delighted that a spoof site was created on twitter recently for a fictional Peter Lowry @babelonthebay. We are being recognized! It was reasonably well done and linked the Babel mayor’s tweets to give it some content. A spoof site shows that you have pissed somebody off. It is the highest award you can earn in social media.

You have to remember that social media is dominated by 13-year olds. You have to work in their mindset. It is not a grouping of rocket scientists. From a marketing perspective, the most important product discussion is about acne treatments. If you make somebody angry, you get a childish response. You try to encourage people to communicate with you directly if you have written something with which they disagree but a childish mindset cannot handle such direct contact.

Obviously, Babel-on-the-bay is not written for 13-year olds. It is written for people interested in politics—mainly Canadian. It appreciates that the reader is an adult and uses adult language. It is an attempt to communicate ideas for Canada’s future. It seeks to deflate the pompous. It is for people who want to understand. It is fun to write. Please communicate if you wish to comment or to disagree, we rarely bite.

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Think as a loser: be a loser.

December 31, 2011 by Peter Lowry

One of the resolutions that will be debated at the Liberal Party of Canada gathering starting January 13 is to promote preferential voting. This is a system where voters indicate their first, second and third choice and the tally of votes is based on who would (mathematically) win more than 50 per cent of the vote, should the last place candidates be dropped and their second choices be given the vote. The idea is to ensure that the final victor is someone who is preferred by more than 50 per cent of the voters. And yet, they are really indicating who they do not want.

It is a losers’ strategy. It says that those voting for the resolution think our first-past-the-post system does not work. In reality, it works too well for losers. If Canadians were voting for the Prime Minister (President or whatever) on a one-person-one-vote basis across the country, there could be a very good case made for a run-off election if no candidate received at least 50 per cent of the vote. The voter could then (maybe reluctantly) vote for a second choice.

But no matter how you do the mathematics of the voting, the preferential ballot is just a step away from proportional voting. Proportional voting is the anathema of our electoral system. From the time when voters had to shout out their preference at a town meeting to the coming time of Internet voting, our system has been built on the assumption of the knowledgeable voter. It has also been based on the interaction of politician and voter. It is an ignorant and lazy voter who will vote for a person not bothering to learn about them or to meet them.

The trend towards voting for the party leader without caring who the local candidate might be is also in defiance of the opportunities offered by our system. Better than any other political system, Canadian politics has long offered the citizen direct involvement in choosing candidates and choosing the elected member of municipal, provincial or federal government. And we can do it without fear of corruption or coercion.

As we said, those voting in favour of preferential balloting at the Liberal January conclave are supporting a losers’ strategy. It is saying that you want to be elected—even if by being the second choice of the voters. Would you really want to hold your head high and serve in government for four years because you were second choice? What shallow person would want that? If you think as a loser, you will be one.

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Political polling is not what it used to be.

December 30, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It was our late friend and former Senator Keith Davey who provided the name. It was called Polar Research. It was the only research firm we trusted. It was ours. We never really trusted the mainline firms. We knew their weaknesses. We also knew better than to release our conclusions.

Our major weakness was the availability of skilled interviewers for Polar Research. We had to work with the political volunteers who were available. There is little time in a political campaign to train and motivate your callers. It was for that reason that we developed a weighting formula that was based on a known factor within the polling sample. It was only when we applied the weighting to the gross results that you could get a picture of what was happening. Maybe we were just lucky but our polling—with its good or bad news—was always on the nose.

Today’s pollsters are probably more frustrated with call display than anything else. Sure, you can overcome call display but too many people let the unknown go to voice mail.

The silliest survey technique to be developed in recent years is the automated telephone calls rudely asking a single question. The call will ask you to press “1” for this candidate and “2’ for that candidate, etc. By the time people get the third or fourth of those calls, they are punching a number at random to get rid of the call. And these calls are only to people who have land lines.

No matter what technique is used, nobody today does really good surveys of political opinion. The news media promote the foolishness because it is an opportunity for them to create a story. These stories fill newspaper pages and air time. They are biased by the media opinions. (You thought they had no opinions?)

Not even the well proved reliability of door-to-door canvassing is as effective today as it was 30 years ago. It is only when you go out door-knocking yourself that you realize that there are many people who will not answer the door to a stranger. And you can be doubly rejected if it is obvious you are a political canvasser.

The added problem today is that one in three of the people you want to speak with are not even interested in going to vote. Maybe these people could perform a public service by putting a plague sign on their lawn or door that says “I don’t vote.” That could certainly save time.

But the facts are that no pollster can match the accuracy of the poll done at the election’s end by the Chief Returning Officer. It is the only one that matters.

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We are going to have a Jubilee.

December 20, 2011 by Peter Lowry

It has been more than a century since the last Diamond Jubilee celebrating the reign of Queen Victoria. We Canadians will be honoured with another Diamond Jubilee next year to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Victoria’s great-great granddaughter, Elizabeth II. If the House of Hanover has proved anything, it is that boring works.

As proof of this boredom, are you going to gather the family around the radio or in front of the tely next Sunday, to listen raptly to a message to the Empire from our dear Monarch? No you are probably not. If it were not for the hard-working news media people trying desperately to find something quotable from the bilge, nobody would notice the broadcast.

During the Second World War, mother considered this broadcast an essential part of Christmas in Canada and she insisted us children listen quietly while George VI stuttered his way through another weary effort. Maybe we were not supposed to notice when we heard his Queen Consort Elizabeth quietly correct him on something. It was not as though mother was raised to the custom, spending her childhood in Chicago.

Luckily, winning the Second World War was not dependent on the oratorical skills of the British Royals. Having heard earlier oratory from Adolph Hitler, even if you did not speak German, they were a chilling experience.

Regrettably Elizabeth II and her hubby are too old and frail to drop by and see all the peoples of their dominions during the Jubilee year. We Canadians are getting second best with a visit by heir apparent Charles and his lovely wife Camilla.

If they should decide to visit Babel while they are here in Ontario, no doubt we shall do them up proud. We could have all kinds of fetes to enliven the occasion. For example, Babel could have a crockery painting contest. This is in recognition of the very large market for souvenir crockery at these events, mainly hand-painted cups and saucers.

What we could do is have this crockery made with just paint-by-numbers designs and sell them to the loyal citizenry of Babel who could then have the fun of hand painting them. There can be a contest as to who could add the most personality to the Royals depicted on the cup and saucer. Charles and Camilla can be the judges. It will be even more fun if the best hand-painted efforts are served full of tea, which the Royal couple could drink while doing their judging.

Will that be with milk or lemon?

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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

To polemize or to blog is the question.

December 18, 2011 by Peter Lowry

When Christopher Hitchens died the other day, many people learned about polemics. Considered the greatest polemicist of our time, Hitchens’ work was for the elite. He was no mere blogger. He challenged lowly bloggers with his command of the English language. He showed bloggers a finer future. Polemicists such as Hitchens can take a controversial stand and use words and images as the artist wields his brush. You did not have to agree with him but he could put you in awe of his command of the subject.

Polemics is controversy. As a Brit, Hitchens despised his country’s pretentious royalty. He was a revered atheist. He was happiest when ranting for the causes of the left wing. He was a civilized Philip Roth. He betrayed those of us who believed in him when he supported the Iraq War. That was how he made the point that nobody is perfect.

Hitchens proved that only the good die young. He must have really pissed off God. The rest of us are cowards. The trouble is we want people to like us. Hitchens got them laughing and then he would outrage them. He told them God, Jehovah and Allah were all full of crap and he almost got away with saying it. We advise you not to try this at home, boys and girls!

Hitchens could debate with the Prime Minister of England on the subject of dumping the Royals and win the debate hands down. He lived in the United States later in life because he found more to laugh at there. Living with a bunch of Brits can depress anyone.

His attitude towards the American right wing was outrage. He understood that these people were among the stupidest on earth and could not believe that they thought they should be the world’s leaders. He would expose their hypocrisy, ridicule their leadership, denounce their direction, laugh at their liturgy and denounce their demagoguery. He agreed though that their basic problem was probably poor potty training.

Living in the Washington area provided him with a plethora of material to polemize. Only living in the Vatican could have given him more opportunity for derision. What might have shortened his life was that he was running out of intelligent opponents. People were starting to be entertained by him when what he really wanted to do was inform them.

Bloggers can only learn from Hitchens as the master. He knew his opinions and bon mots were of value. He did not cast them as pearls to the swine. He was not like the blogger who is a slogger in the fields of the environment. He knew that people would seem to agree but you would know they could really care less.

Maybe Hitchens was right. Blogging is just practice.

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