Farewell, Your Excellency

Michaëlle Jean completes her five-year term as Canada’s Governor-General on Oct. 1, 2010.

The Queen’s representative began her term with a trip to Winnipeg.

A former Radio-Canada journalist, she asked to meet journalism students. So on Oct. 19, 2005 a well-dressed and nervous group of Creative Communications students and I met the Governor-General at Winnipeg city hall.

She smiled gamely and spoke graciously to each of us. As RCMP bodyguards hovered, she asked the students about their studies and encouraged them to use journalism to promote human rights.

Whatever you think of the monarchy – and the Queen’s offspring have frequently revealed themselves as genial idiots – Ms. Jean is different.

Born in Haiti, she represents not so much the weight of British tradition as the current Canada of smart, successful immigrants.

Twice my wife and I had dinner with her (and a hundred other close friends) at Rideau Hall when she presented the annual Michener Awards for public service journalism of which I was a judge.

I can testify that Ms. Jean was much more personable than her three predecessors (although Roméo LeBlanc knew how to have a good time, too).

And keeping Stephen Harper waiting for two hours when he begged her to prorogue Parliament in 2008?

Priceless.

Wham, bam, write you, ma'am

I could have made myself a better person by attending the CBC open house on the weekend, but I read James Ellroy’s latest book instead.

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women is Ellroy’s 18th book, a hard-boiled memoir by America’s king of the hard-boiled, or noir, or whatever you want to call his time-shifting, in-your-face and violent style.

Perhaps his best known novel is L.A. Confidential, which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie.

Geneva (Jean) Hilliker was murdered in Los Angeles in 1958. That crime has never been solved, but it has yielded a literary and financial bonanza for Ellroy, her son. By inventing a curse on himself Ellroy has blessed his bank account and those of a couple of ex-wives.

Erika Schickel, Ellroy’s current squeeze and, he swears, his last, buys into this curse thing. Her Zocalo Public Square interview with him is painful but compelling.

Hilliker’s tawdry life and gory end, played out amid the racism and brutality of the 1950s City of Angels, loom over much of Ellroy’s earlier work. He conflates his mother with Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia of unsolved-murder fame.

“It’s been a fever dream,” Ellroy acknowledges in this book. He reprises his life as a burglar, drug addict and peeper that he has described in an earlier memoir, My Dark Places.

The Hilliker Curse chronicles Ellroy’s caveman-style romantic successes and failures, with plenty of names, places and dates.

Reading it makes me feel unclean. But I will keep reading everything this guy publishes. It’s more vigorous than almost any other current literature.

Ellroy’s declared motivation for invoking this curse and writing this book?

“So women will love me.”

Good luck with that.

Books, cheap like borscht

One of the highlights of my year (OK, I live a sheltered life) is the Children’s Hospital Book Market in Winnipeg.

Two of the highlights, actually.

Twice a year at the St. Vital Centre, a large shopping mall, book lovers can wade through thousands of used volumes and discover our new best friends.

Since 1961 Winnipeggers have donated books year round, and volunteers have sorted, displayed and sold them. Proceeds go to the Children’s Hospital Foundation of Manitoba.

This year’s fall sale, featuring paperbacks, runs from Sept. 23 to 25.

At the sale last spring, leafing through a $1 copy of The Detective, a 1966 novel by Roderick Thorp, I spotted a U. S. $1 bill.

Good deal, eh? Get my money back right away. And, like a true Western Canadian, I had bought my tickets to spend spring break in the States.

Another peek revealed the corner of a U.S. $50. I slammed the book shut and tucked it under my arm with a couple of other cheap goodies.

The gent who took my loonies did not leaf through the book; why would he?

In my car I opened The Detective and found $62 U.S. Someone else’s holiday stash? Who knows? No name in the book.

So I spent it all at The Poisoned Pen, a mystery bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Reuse and recycle, I say.

Dead right

Former National Hockey League coach Pat Burns has joined the long list of people whose obituaries have been published prematurely.

"They're trying to kill me before I'm dead," The Canadian Press quotes Burns as telling TSN columnist Bob McKenzie.

Yes, Burns is ill. But he's not dead yet.

Other victims of premature obituaries include Ronald Reagan and Bob Hope.

Many news media have prepared obituaries of important people for use when the time comes. And to hockey fans, Pat Burns is an important guy.

Today, with retweeting and other methods of instantly circulating information whether it is right or wrong, it is more important than ever to obey Rule No. 1 in journalism.

Get it first, but first get it right.

I want to vote! Where am I?

Politicians and pundits frequently complain about low voter turnout in Canadian elections.

So how about making it easier on the poor voter?

All Manitoba communities are holding civic elections on Oct. 27. In 2006, the last Winnipeg civic general election, just over one-third of eligible voters went to the polls: a measly 38 per cent.

Winnipeg, home to about two-thirds of Manitobans, is divided into 15 wards. Every eligible citizen can vote for a city councillor in one ward, and all citizens can vote for mayor.

That’s where it gets complicated. What ward are you in?

The City of Winnipeg website invites you to find your ward and your poll location by entering your address. That’s fine. But what if you want to learn more about the ward, for example its boundaries?

The short answer is that there is no good place to do that.

The city offers several ward maps, but they lack the street names that would be familiar to most residents.

Some incumbent councillors provide maps of their wards, for example Jenny Gerbasi's of Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry. Their quality varies.

Complicating this search are the names of the wards. Many wards cover several neighbourhoods, so they sport hyphenated names such as River Heights-Fort Garry.

But wait! There’s more!

River Heights-Fort Garry includes the neighbourhood of Linden Woods (or Lindenwoods; there does not appear to be an official spelling).

Michael Kowalson, who is running against incumbent John Orlikow, has created his own name for the ward: River Heights-Fort Garry-Lindenwoods.

In an email exchange on Sept. 12, Kowalson told me,

I have chosen to include Linden Woods in my campaign material as many residents of Linden Woods are not aware they are part of the River Heights Ward. Most residents of Linden Woods do not think of themselves as living in River Heights or Fort Garry in the conventional sense.

I believe that Linden Woods is a very distinct and important neighborhood within the city and should be recognized as such. There are many important issues facing the Linden Woods area (as is the case with all neighborhoods in the City) and I hope all residents will come out to vote on October 27th.

Kowalson’s triple-barrelled ward name may be more accurate than the official one, but it’s confusing. It looks as if he and Orlikow are running in different wards.

No wonder lots of citizens can’t be bothered to vote.

Gimme my Timmies, the frozen stuff

I admit it. I’ve dropped a few bucks at Tim Hortons (yes, we have no apostrophes today, although of course we should).

It doesn’t hurt that my employer has seen fit to install a Timmies outlet in my workplace. As the only purveyor of double-doubles in Winnipeg’s bustling Exchange, this one ought to change its slogan from “Always Fresh” to “Always Busy.”

My sons accuse me of having visited every Tims outlet in Canada. They are wrong, of course. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

But, after extensive research and coffee rental I can report that the cleanest Tims I have ever visited is in Cochrane, Ontario. Best-laid-out parking lot, too.

At the other end of the spectrum on both counts is the one in Vanderhoof, B.C.

Blind River, Ontario is no screamin’ hell, either.

But what really gets me worked up (especially after a couple of cups of joe) is that Always Fresh business. It is, to put the matter politely, at variance with the facts.

The doughnuts, bagels, Timbits – highly nutritious all, no doubt – are not fresh. They are frozen.

This is no urban legend. Why, it says so right in Maclean’s magazine, whose apostrophe is a rakish maple leaf. At least they have one.

The Sept. 13, 2010 Maclean’s reports on a proposed $1.95-billion class action lawsuit that is splitting the chain’s management and the franchisees who rake in the dough. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Once a journalist, always a cheap-shot artist.)

The article recalls the scandal in 2003 when Ron Joyce, co-founder of the chain, revealed that its food was not fresh but, in the magazine’s words, heated up from “frozen globs of dough trucked in from a factory.”

The current battle features the assertion that the “Always Fresh” system of reheating frozen food has cut into the franchisees’ profits.

Check out the Maclean’s story. It’s on the long side, but if you start reading it when you line up at my local Tims, you stand a good chance of finishing before you taste your Always Frozen food.

What is journalism?

Check out the blog list on the right side of this page. You will find 16 posts by second-year Journalism major students in my Creative Communications class on the topic What is Journalism?

Their opinions and examples will give you a perspective on the huge range of journalism today -- all sorts of journalism in all sorts of media.

Yes, some media are declining. Think of print-only newspapers or traditional hour-long television newscasts. But even those "old" media are sprouting vibrant new online growth.

In short, it's a great business today for smart, curious, energetic young people, people such as these bloggers.