How many CBC producers does it take to put a 90 minute show on the radio?

This reminds me of that Newfie joke about changing a light-bulb.

I caught a bit of "Sunday Magazine" the other day, CBC's flaccid replacement for Michael Enright, the selfish bastard who put his own interests ahead of his audience. We miss you, Mr. Enright!

Anyway, David Common was the guest host, and at the end of the show, he rhymed off the producers responsible. I counted five names, plus a senior producer and an executive producer. That's a total of seven producers! Throw in their support staff, not to mention the actual journos, and holy shit, there's gotta be a cast of hundreds with their fingers in this 90 minutes of, frankly, banality.

Sort of reminds me of the head-count inflation that went on back when they volunteered me to be the official time-keeper for the school football team's home games. That meant I had to rustle up a few kids to hold the signal poles and stuff. Once the kids figured out I had the power to excuse them from class, I got real popular real fast.

Didn't take long before the pole-holders had back-ups. Then, a totally new innovation; umbrella girls, in case it rained! Yup, just in case, we soon had a team of umbrella girls excused from class for the home games. I personally needed three, because I'm a fairly large guy. The pole kids would of course need umbrella girls, as would the back up pole kids. And then of course we had a back-up team of umbrella girls, just in case.

Overall, while I enjoyed the brief burst of popularity my new position brought, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The only game when it actually rained, most of them just buggered off!

Let's raise a glass to Michael Enright and a thousand Sunday mornings

A cynic might suggest that I'm just looking for an excuse to crack a beer before noon.

That cynic would be right.

But that's only a small corner of the carpet the dogs chew on every day. The Farm Manger has got the CBC on the radio, and the more I try to ignore it, the more I can't.

David Grossman?

Leonard Peltier?

Enright scratches the surface of a lot of highly combustible shit.

Unfortunately, at the CBC he'll never be allowed beyond the surface.

What exactly is our role, as Canadians, in Peltier's completely inhumane and politically motivated imprisonment?

That's not a question we seriously ask or seriously expect an answer to.

And every serious person knows that Grossman is just another pathetic self-hating Jew.


Be that as it may, it's always nice to know you're going to hear Michael again a week from now.

I personally am looking forward to the 2000th edition of the Sunday Edition.


Nice work, dude.

It's all relative

There's a story out there about Louis B. Mayer, favourite son of Saint John, New Brunswick, and his meeting with Albert Einstein.

Mayer had been briefed by his staff re why Einstein was famous; he'd come up with the theory of relativity.

So when they finally have a face-to-face, Mayer is alleged to have said, "hey, great to finally meet you! I've got a theory about my relatives too!"

I bring that up only because me and the Farm Manager got into a bit of a shooting match today. She'd read something on the internet about Trump going after Canada's dairy farmers.

"So it looks like your pal Trump is going after our dairy farmers," she says.

My pal Trump?

Them's fightin' words.

I owe Trump a debt of gratitude for the same reason every thinking person owes him; he deep-sixed two of America's most toxic political clans!

Beyond that, there's not much of a palship. Besides, who knows how toxic the Trump clan is gonna be. It's an open question.

Be that as it may, I passed over my initial impulse to ignore the FM's provocations and came back with, "don't worry about our dairy farmers. Trudeau already sold those guys down the river with the European trade deal."

And that's true. Under CETA the Europeans will bring an extra hundred tons or so of real European cheese into Canada every year. That's the kiss of death for pretty much every artisanal cheese-maker in the land. Who's gonna buy Canadian "Swiss" cheese at the Metro when the Swiss Swiss cheese is on for half the price right next to it in the deli counter?

Nobody, that's who.

But that's not what got her pissed. No, she's a Trudeau fan from way back. She even named one of her kids after Trudeau the elder. She didn't waste any time coming back against my Trudeau diss.

Next thing I know she's standing there with the Cooey repeater pointed in my general direction.

Ha ha! She doesn't even know how to load the thing! No worries!

"Just back off on Justin," she says.

"Ha ha..." I rejoinder.

She pulls the trigger.

Holy shit! That just missed my head! Did I leave a round in there the last time I was ground-hog hunting?

I made a break for the stairs and retrieved the old Browning side-by-side out of the dressing room.

This is dicey. I've got the advantage in fire-power but that side-by-side is overkill when you're having an indoor gun battle.

Put a .22 slug through the wall and you can patch up the damage with a dollop of drywall mud.

Loose a couple rounds from the Browning, and holy shit!...

You pretty much have to hire in a contractor to fix the damage.

And that's never a good idea. They've always got nosy questions... "so how did you manage to accidentally discharge your shotgun twice while walking down the stairs?" Next thing you know the cops are there enquiring about gun permits.

That kind of thing.

So I knew it was time for de-escalation. Talk her down instead of take her down. After all, in spite of these occasional gun episodes me and the Farm Manager don't actually want to harm one another.

We engage in a protracted debate about the pros and cons of "free trade."

We both heard Dominic Barton on Michael Enright's show last week. Dominic was all about how great "free trade" is and what a great contribution temporary foreign workers are making to the economy.

I knew I could use this avenue to smooth over my Justin diss. "You know," I said, "Irving doesn't really need to hire tree cutters from Romania. They could just pay a decent wage and the local folks would be all over it."

"And maybe if the lobster processors on the East Coast paid a living wage, they'd find help at home too."

She was warming up. Realized I hadn't intended a personal insult on Trudeau the younger.

"See, it's all relative. Eleven bucks an hour may be a shit wage in Canada, but get a guy out of Romania or Bulgaria, or even better, Somalia, and eleven bucks an hour is golden!"

It's all relative.

And that's why temporary foreign workers are so beloved by Canadian employers.

Those wacky Mooslims

I was listening to Michael Enright's show on the CBC this morning. He had the anti-Muslim Muslim Hirsi Ali on for an interview that was recorded earlier in the week.

That's because certain death awaits Ali at every turn, due to a fatwa demanding her execution, issued by we're not quite sure who, but it gets her a lot of attention, and she has a new book out, so that's a good thing. Enright's interview was typical middle-of-the-road CBC pablum. While it was obvious he wasn't buying into the bullshit, he refrained from asking any inflammatory questions. That's how he managed to pass a 40 minute show about radical Islam without once alluding to the fact that it has been the West that created radical Islam, lock, stock, and double-barrels.

Take the Taliban for example. A bunch of fundamentalist hillbillies of no consequence, until the US of A found them useful in undermining the secular and relatively successful government in Kabul. Suddenly these fringe players found themselves on the receiving end of billions of dollars of American largesse. The results of that largesse continue to reverberate around the world today.

Momentarily given the spotlight in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War," America's midwifery role in birthing violent Jihadism has otherwise faced mass amnesia here. That's why Hirsi Ali can ramble on for forty minutes about how violent Islamic extremism is something that flows naturally out of the Koran.

If we allowed Appalachian white-trash snake-handlers to become the official voice of Christianity, and then funded them billions to make the world a better place, what would that look like?