Incidentally, the original quote is from an address to the Canadian Parliament during the War (December 30, 1941):

“When I warned them (the French Government) that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did their Generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’  Some chicken!     Some neck!”

That said, there’s more than the garlic in the omelet raising a stink here.  The layered onion mentioned elsewhere  will make itself seen one pithy little layer at a time in the weeks, no months to come. 

Those who are told as commentators that they might be better spending their time working on discussing the merits of the programs of the various parties can be forgiven for the contemptuous snorts of laughter that follow.  Aside from taking dead time from convicts and dissembling the long gun registry and figuring out how to make sure the Olsen doesn’t get his pension what is the program of these clowns.  The Liberals have at least taken a shot at development, a good part of the NDP’s non-electability is their candor with their policy,  The Conservatives are in a class of their own.  On one hand they dare not show their fangs to the centre electorate they are courting for fear of sending them deeper to the suburbs, never to be found.  On the other they’ve ground these same fangs down on the hustings to the point that the faithful don’t even recognize them. They’re certainly not sharp enough to get them through a season on the farm.  Can one get dentures for fangs? 

Toothless policy, toothless scandals…sigh – we deserve better dialogue, better policy.

You take this wee little bit……

And stuff it in this wee bag!

ADWARE HAS A FACE!

Yes, folks –the fellow that the press down under have dubbed Mr. Miserable – Dale Cass-Beggs – took a silver in the Men’s Freestyle event at the Vancouver Olympics racing for Australia.   Australian newspapers have also crowned him  THE SPAM KING!

It looks good on him.

Why? Because in addition to being one heck of a boarder, young Dale is also no slouch in computerland, having been making a good living in adware since his mid-teens.

It hasn’t been dull. The Globe and Mail reports that he left Canada after getting into a dispute with sport officials who felt his outside interests in business interfered with his training – he capped it off by cleaning out his business partner and successfully defending himself in a lawsuit brought by him.

Young Dale has a regal je ne sais quoi to him, as if his favorite way of looking at people is down, if you catch my drift.

No matter how much Canada’s Own the Podium Program spends, it’s unlikely they will be trying to repatriate this grumpy looking god of the slopes.

And from now on, whenever you’re cursing the junk mail that makes your life so rich and wonderful, you’ll be able to summon the visage of Australia’s Mr. Dale Cass-Beggs.

I duly submitted the piece to Geist Magazine, knowing the extent to which they deify old Stan as part of the Canadian Landscape.

Every magazine has a right, responsibility, even a duty to edit.  God knows many of our best-known writers would be hard to recognize without a steady hand here and there – though I’m sure that is open for discussion.  I invite you to read the Geist posting of my piece and then the item in its entirety as it follows.   Decide for yourself whether the piece was edited or excoriated, dressed-up or diminished.  I feel the story was sacrificed in the name of iconography.  Please, bolster or set me straight as you wish:

Stan’s Last Stand

Stan was agitated.  When a big man is worked up, a six-foot, 200-something pound fellow, not petite and in a hurry, you have a force not to be trifled with.  This was the state of Stan Rogers in May, 1983 as he barreled into a Vancouver presenter’s office, band in tow.  They were in town en route to the Kerrville, Texas Folk Festival, where Stan and a few other frostbacks were invited to give the Texans a taste of Folk Music, Canadian style.  The Kerrville event had a reputation well beyond the size of the town and the invite and ensuing performances were seen as valuable exposure for the Northern Nationals.

A concert, be it folk, classical or rock ‘n’ roll, does not exist in isolation.  It is most often part of an extended tour, planned months, even years, in advance, to maximize exposure while minimizing expense and intangibles like time away from loved ones.  Other times a gig may be booked to fill in down time necessitated by travel arrangements.  In this case, the Kerrville engagement was an anchor – travel arrangements were likely defined by economics which dictated an overnight in Vancouver en route to the Main Event. 

There were good reasons not to have a Stan Rogers show on this run through Vancouver.  Time was short, making it impossible to apply the usual template.  The usual comfortable venue was not available; it never was on a Friday night unless you were in for the week.  It was a long weekend, death to a city concert and difficult for accommodate folkies on the cheap.  There was that Canadian rite of spring, the Stanley Cup to contend with.  Irrespective of nature and common sense, the road abhors a vacuum and commitments were made for the concert. 

Time in Vancouver would also be used to secure the necessary visas for the group to play the gig in Texas.  As the American Consulate closed early on Friday afternoons, the deadline was looming as Stan and company charged into the promoter’s office.  They were given a hastily drawn map and pointed towards the Consulate while a harried staffer was directed to phone the Consulate to check on the flexibility of the consular closing time.  It was the age before we were herded by security guards  who worked for companies with predatory names and wore ill-fitting uniforms.  Governmental office security was very ably handled by the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, semi-retired veterans of the armed services and other worthies who attended to their duties with unquestioned authority and composure.  The Commissionaires were generally stationed in the lobby of a government building and controlled access to offices.  The breadth of their duties was made to work for Stan Rogers this Friday afternoon as a marvellous realization dawned: one of the myriad of functions that the this gentleman was responsible for was locking up the shop when citizens had done their business with the state.  Banking that the good man with the key was a civil sort who would not be so rude as to interrupt a querulous citizen, the gofer offered extremely detailed descriptions of the group.  Had the commissionaire seen these fellows?  Every negative response was met with yet more detail.  Finally the musicians reached the door and were recognized by the kindly fellow, admitted to the office of the visa granters and tragedy was averted.  Man Friday hung up the phone, minor triumph making the day.

Accommodation was next on the list.  Even if the gig had been contemplated for years it was unlikely that Stan’s wish for rooms at the Sylvia Hotel on English Bay would be granted on the Victoria Day weekend.  The band would have to make do with rooms at the Holiday Inn on Broadway.  At this point, the aide uttered words that would return to haunt:  “At least at the Holiday you know what you’re getting.” 

A brief word concerning Garnet Rogers, the fiddle player in the band and some years Stan’s junior.  Many have endured the scorn of an older brother, but few in such a public way as he.  Being around an older sibling is a challenge; having to live out struggles with him on stage, in front of anywhere from fifty to 10,000 people, exacerbates the situation beyond description.  The filial relationship was worked into the Stan’s stage patter, with capacity audiences often hearing that “I want to fire him but my mom won’t let me.”  In the same sense that Stan wore his growing success and recognition as a proud big man, Garnet’s bitterness was on call, ever ready for all to see.  He seemed a simmering cauldron of resentment, ever ready with a sneering cut for the lesser beings he was obliged to deal with in his travail with the band.  He was tired, one might safely assume, of living in the long shadow cast by his older sibling.

With a few hours to kill before the concert, the group went to their rooms to recuperate from the harried arrival.  At his room, Garnet discovered thoroughly plugged plumbing.  His call to the front desk was acted on with great speed and courtesy.  A smiling bellhop, ambassador of the hostelry, grandly presented him with a plunger before promptly disappearing.  There was no suggestion that he would have any assistance with this problem, which was not of his making.  Know what to expect, indeed!

Fortunately Stan’s Vancouver following was such that a week’s notice and an informal phone tree could take of filling the venue for the show, thus sparing economic shame midst the chaos.

The venue for the concert, Isadora’s Cooperative Restaurant was one of the last gasps of the 1960’s.  Offshoot of an imperially minded housing co-op movement of the era, it offered shares with dividends in the form of free food.  A swell place for a family meal, it could accommodate carnivore and vegetarian alike with the advent of the Nut burger on the menu.  An oily old machine shop that transformed into a trendy two-tiered family restaurant west coast style, Isadora’s was part of the makeover of Granville Island from inner city Industrial Park to “non Mall”.  The otherwise pedestrian bar menu became exotic by virtue of a ‘cosmic’ sobriquet, homage to the aging hippie who managed it. Since taken down by infighting, naively generous collective agreements and uneven management, Ms Duncan’s bistro saw none of that in the future this fine May evening.  Indeed, this was the unheralded inaugural concert for the room – totally free of any dry runs or testing that might have flagged some of the production challenges the untested venue would present.  The sound board, for example, a vital and integral element of any modern-day concert, whose operator is charged with ensuring that all the bits of noise emerge as meaningful sounds to artist and audience alike, must be properly placed within the venue.  This vital strategic element was lost on whoever had set up Isadora’s for that evening’s event – there was hard wiring to a placement for the sound board that saw the operator’s view of the stage impeded by both a glass window and a monstrous West Coast potted fern.  This untested room that the presenter had failed to reconnoiter in preparation for the concert would not give this Easterner one lousy inch this balmy evening, 

By the mid-1970’s performing artists had become very dependent on monitors, on-stage speakers that offered a different mix of the sound than that which went to the room at large.  Most audience members had no notion of how vital a component monitors were for a successful show.  The artists needs, blending of voice and instruments and even volume demand a separate mix.  Stan would not be afforded that luxury on this evening, another entry in what had made for an arduous and interesting day.  Miscellaneous sounds that had little to do with his songs found their way through the monitors.  Desired levels between instrument and voices became dim aspirations and the night just got worse. 

Picture a flustered, even angry man the size of a modest linebacker stuck on a postage stamp stage in the middle of cutlery clatter, unable to hear his own voice, for God’s sake.  But none of the audience caught a whiff of the disaster unfolding on stage.  He soldiered on.

This was not a man who confused work with play, generally confining himself to a drink after the performance.  Not so tonight.  He hoisted a well-deserved brandy at the half and, referring to the chaotic audio elements of the room said “It’s like a bloody windstorm out there!” 

For an artist, a music festival is more like a convention or a trade fair.  Aside from playing to eager audiences, they connect with their community – stories are shared of where the good gigs are and where the stinkers reside.  A day like this would be in the Epic Nightmare column – a day that started shakily and just got worse; a story to be told and retold.  The worst, however had not been imagined.  Having stayed on in Kerrville a day after the guys left for Canada, Stan was heading home from a triumphant gig at Kerrville.  On June 2, 1983, Air Canada Flight 797 had an on-board fire and Stan’s was among the lives claimed.  One can speculate endlessly on what the future might have held for the big fellow.  Decades later his albums sell as briskly as any folkies in the country. What is clear is that Canadian music was robbed of a singular talent. 

Brother Garnet would emerge from his grief and his brother’s shadow to develop his own distinctive and excellent songwriting voice, not to be measured against the loss of Stan, but to be favorably judged on his own considerable merits.

Canadian travellers abroad will no longer be sporting the flag as a means to identify themselves as “different from them”.  The lack of Canadian policy in Copenhagen is shameful – as with so much it appears that Stephen Harper awaits his cue from Obama, though there is a real sense that he was much happier taking them from Mr. Bush 

What on earth will travelling Canadians be sewing on their backpacks now that our flag is not a credible badge of honor?

• How about a waffle?  It’s compatible after all, with maple syrup!
• An empty desk?  With the amount of policy being set at the provincial level, it sometimes appears that no one is home in Ottawa.
• We could cook up an appropriate symbol for the oild sands.  What does a fast buck look like, anyways?

Over to you, if in fact anyone reads this, it’s time for suggestions.