Seven years ago, I joined three intrepid souls outside on the William Street mall for the 24 Hours of Homelessness event for Operation Come Home.  Since then the event has grown enormously, with corporate sponsors like Scotiabank on Rideau helping out with major donations, and the number of people participating has increased as well.

     This year, there will be 13 of us all told – eight placement students (who work at Operation Come Home as part of various school programs) and four Katimavik volunteers taking part in the event.  It begins at 4:00 this afternoon on the William Street mall (right beside the Scotiabank on Rideau) and goes until 4:00 tomorrow afternoon…of course it does, it’s 24 hours.  I know.

     In past years, I have used this blog to post comments and thoughts and to keep track of our progress.  This year, that will not be the case.  The internet-hookup thingy we use is too finicky to be trusted, and they won’t let me have it anyway because I apparently “broke” it last year.  Or something.  Instead I will have the promo smart-phone thing which I think does Twitter.  So follow me on Twitter here for updates.

     In the meantime, you can make donations to OCH here, which would be greatly appreciated.  Those donations go toward funding social enterprises (like Bottleworks, which recently announced a partnership with Beau’s beer and now provides home delivery of Beau’s for the charity), the OCH education program which has many graduates every year, and of course addiction services, the reunite program and all the other things OCH does.

     We’re getting ready to head off to Vegas.  Doc has put ME in charge of making sure we don’t get roofied.  I’m torn between pointing out to him that The Hangover was fictional, and being offended that he doesn’t consider me to be the likeliest candidate to actually put roofies in his drink.  I don’t think that’s the biggest worry though – I’m concerned about accidentally ordering a hooker by saying the wrong catch phrase to the wrong person.

     At any rate, this will be  my last post for a week, and I’d like this one to be up for the week – the 24 Hours of Homelessness event is coming up next Thursday.  On the William Street mall (near the Sugar Mountain, just off Rideau Street), from 4:00 Thursday to 4:00 Friday, I will be sleeping outside to raise money and awareness for Operation Come Home.

     I don’t know who’s going to be joining me this year, but usually some college kids and intrepid OCH volunteers join me, and I’m sure this year will be no exception.  We spend the 24 hours outside, trying to draw attention to the fact that on any given night in Ottawa, 100 street youth will have to do the same, whether it’s wet, snowy or bitterly cold.

     Any donations to Operation Come Home can be made by clicking that link, and be sure to tune in to the Doc and Woody show Friday morning, as I will be waking up on the street, trying to gather my thoughts and doing my best to speak through the cold in order to make sense on the radio.

     Frederica Sagor Maas (Freddie Maas in many of her credits) died just before New Years at the age of 111.  One hundred and eleven.  Years old.  She was maybe the last survivor of Hollywood’s silent movie era, where she was a screenwriter for films such as Greta Garbo’s Flesh and the Devil and Norma Shearer’s His Secretary and The Waning Sex.  She also wrote The Rolled Stockings, The Way of All Flesh and The Plastic Age.

     Weird how silent movie titles from the 20s could easily work as porno titles today, huh?

     Anyway, I think the coolest thing about Maas, (and the reason I’m writing about her at all) is that she was pretty badass!  She had to write mostly “flapper” comedies with Clara Bow and Betty Grable because the studio honchos figured that was all a woman could do.  She and her husband, Ernest Maas, became a fairly prolific writing team, but studios wouldn’t take anything of substance from them.

     They continued writing after the silent era, doing a few talkies through the 30s and 40s.  Finally, in the late 40s, Maas wrote a deeply personal, powerful movie script about womens’ struggles.  Hollywood took that script and turned it into the fluffy, utterly vacuous musical The Shocking Miss Pilgrim starring Betty Grable in 1947.  Freddie Maas had had enough, gave the finger to the whole industry and quit in disgust.

     The industry was a little sour about that.  So even though she was out of Hollywood by 1950, they still had her interrogated by the FBI for suspected communist activities, and she and her husband were placed on the Hollywood blacklist.  This is 1950 now, she was already fifty years old.  And she had another 61 years to live.

     So what do you do?  Well, she wrote.  And in 1999, at age 99, she published her autobiography, called The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood.  It was a tell-all book about Hollywood in the 20s, a scathing indictment of the vapidity of the industry, and a series of anecdotes about famous people that by then, almost no one remembered.

     Clara Bow once danced nude on a tabletop!  That would have been huge news in 1925…Jeanne Eagels pissing out in the open right there on the movie set…Louis B. Mayer being an insecure, pompous douchebag who was apparently disliked by every person he ever met…all of this was great – but sort of irrelevant as everyone else who had co-existed with these people was long dead.

     I just love someone who finally decides, at the age of 99, to unleash all of her bitterness toward the industry in a book.  And it makes me think that perhaps anger, bitterness and resentment are some of the keys to a long life – the other Hollywood writer-director that comes to mind when I think of centenarians is Leni Riefenstahl, the controversial Nazi film-maker who bitterly raged against her critics until her death at the age of 101. 

     By this logic, I think a couple of people who post on our facebook page will live a heck of a long time!

     I could write a really long paragraph explaining why this happened.  Or I can just post the picture.

     If you really need the details, and can’t just enjoy this picture for what it is, click here.

     The overwhelming opinion, everywhere around me, is that the people demonstrating on parliament hill, the people demonstrating on Wall Street, and everyone associated with this movement is a psycho, a lunatic, a lazy ass not willing to work for a living, or a silver spoon sleazeball with an outsized sense of entitlement.  I think almost all of that is a load of knee-jerk stupid bunk from people who have the same reaction to all protesters.

     Next time you hear someone complain about the bums hanging around downtown, and the “sense of entitlement” from people who ought to just get off their asses and get jobs, ask them about another protest.  Any other protest.  Darfur.  Falun Gong.  The G8, world hunger, Greenpeace, the seal hunt.  Whatever.  Do those people have the same opinion of those protesters?  Nothing better to do, get a real job, go have a shower, sense of entitlement.  Right?

     Wrong.  I will say this – a lot of these protesters ARE wingnuts.  They dress up in weird clothes and do interpretive dances and shout poetry and in many ways are very, very irritating.  But the thing is – they are RIGHT.  There is a serious problem when 1% of the population controls 95% of the economy.  Does anyone really believe that people are protesting this disparity because they don’t have a yacht and think they should get one for free?  How the hell do you get that out of these protests?

     And then there’s the argument that sure, the banks ARE to blame for SOME of the economic meltdown.  But so too are the PEOPLE who bought houses they couldn’t afford.  Okay.  How much of that blame would you put on the banks versus the individuals who were sold something through a massive, pervasive corporate fraud?  Maybe…99%?  Sounds familiar…

    The real complaint people might have about this 99% occupy Wall Street thing is that they have no coherent, real message.  That’s the very thing I like the MOST.  Sure – some are angry specifically at the widening income gap.  Others are mad about the lack of bank regulations.  Still more are furious because none of the corporate fraudsters that ruined the economy have been held accountable.  Their messages are incoherent, impossible to categorize and stick into a neat little box, and inexplicable.

     But is’t that completely appropriate?  I, too, am very angry at the bankers and corporate tycoons that screwed up the world.  But I, too, can’t explain why.  I can’t explain credit default swaps.  Neither can the protesters.  Neither can you.  There are like nine people alive who can explain them adequately, and eight of them became rich by using them to screw over the middle class.  The other one is Warren Buffett.

     So I love this spontaneous burst of rage.  I love the incoherence and the fact that it makes little sense.  I love the fact that some of the protesters are anti-capitalism and others aren’t.  This is a protest that can’t possibly have an overarching controlled message.  There just isn’t one to voice.  But anger is approprate here, and voicing it at all is what matters.

     In a way, this is the anti-Tea-Party movement.  Both movements have maniacs who dress up in stupid costumes and do idiotic things.  Both movements thrive on rage.  And both have a number of detractors. 

     But the Occupy Wall Street movement is anger against right wing policies and corporations, whereas the Tea Party is an astroturf group started by right wingers and corporate money.  The 99%ers are disjointed and chaotic, with no agreed-upon purpose.  The Tea Partiers mostly agree on their main complaints and goals – and they agree, for the most part, on many other things as well (no separation of church and state, anti-abortion, pro-death-penalty, and Obama is the Devil).

     And finally, the biggest difference is that the Tea Party has this amazing ability to conjure up fury and fight against their own best interests, at least financially.  They fight FOR the banks, AGAINST regulation, and in the end against the middle class and the poor.  Which of course make up at least 99% of the Tea Party.

     The 99% movement, on the other hand, has just one thing in common, and one thing that unifies their purpose in any way.  And that is the fight FOR the poor, and FOR the middle class, AGAINST a gigantic myriad of things that are currently ensuring that the income gap will get wider and wider and the economy will never recover.  It may be a fight against an unknowable and invisible and impossible-to-identify-specifically enemy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fight worth having.

     We checked out the Chills For CHEO haunted house last night.  It’s as amazing as it was the last time they did this – but much bigger this time, with more cool stuff inside.  Stuff I don’t want to tell you about because that ruins the experience.  But it’s scary.  How scary?  I made this tape last night, walking through the place with my wife and her friends Sara and Ashley -

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

     Toward the end of the tape you can hear Randall and Doc, who had started out ahead of us but were going so slowly, and so carefully, and so apprehensively that we caught them about halfway through.  By the way – when you go through this thing, don’t do like Doc and Randall, who were talking about everything as they saw it.  I understand, talking is a good way to hide the fact that you’re frightened.  But it ruins it for the people coming behind, who want to be surprised.  Okay?

     Truly scary, put together by amazing volunteers and actors who man the stations inside the maze, and very affordable – $10 for adults, $5 for kids who go through the less-scary kids’ side, and all proceeds go to the Doc and Woody Fund for the operating rooms at CHEO.  It’s on Baxter Road, just behind the giant new IKEA.  You can see it from the queensway, the big sign that says “Fun Haven”.  A great night out, especially this dreary rainy weekend – open until 10 tonight (8 for the kids’ side), and all weekend.  Here’s the website, you gotta check this out.

     For the time being, I realize that you can’t play the audio file I included here.  My hope is that someone will fix my blog while I am home sleeping today, and eventually it will work.  Until then, just take my word for it – the girls screamed, it was scary, and a good time was had by all.

     Thanks to Steve Colwill for forwarding this to me – as I think he knows I am an enormous fan of all things aggressively mediocre (as my complete collection of Steven Seagal movies will attest).  See, there was once a band called the Shaggs.  I heard of them back in the 90s, when Nirvana was huge and Kurt Cobain expressed an affinity for their work – but then, he was all over a ton of obscure artists (Daniel Johnston, for example) and I never bothered to seek out their music.

     Until now.  A musical is being created based on The Shaggs, considered by many to be the worst band that ever existed.  Their album, Philosophy Of The World, recorded in 1969, is certainly one of the absolute worst offenses against music ever committed to vinyl – none of the instruments seem to be interested in playing the same rhythm, the drummer is barely competent, and the singer is dreadful.  But the lyrics – the lyrics!  They are hilarious!  What makes this so amazing is that they’re actually trying!

     This reminded me of one of my all-time favourite CDs (though it IS one I rarely play).  It’s called Murder On The High C’s, and features the “finest” work of the woman who may be the worst singer in the history of the world, Florence Foster Jenkins.  In 1909, Jenkins inherited a huge sum of money that allowed her to do whatever she wanted in life – and what she wanted, more than anything, was to be a famous soprano.  And…amazingly…she succeeded!  In the fame part anyway.  Despite a complete lack of timing, pitch and vocal ability, she went ahead with her dream.  Just like William Hung.  But in the 1920s.

     Remember William Hung?

     God bless him, he’s trying!  I love them all.  Now, who is the worst artist in here – Hung, Jenkins, the Shaggs, or…

     I went to Bluesfest last night to take in the final day with my family – my dad, my wife, my sister and her boyfriend Abdullah.  This was my dad’s first huge concert event, outdoors at Lebreton Flats, even though he has been a resident of Ottawa for thirty plus years.  Abdullah, who is Omani and lives in Kuwait, has been in Ottawa nine days.  This was his third trip to Bluesfest.  Dad needs to catch up! 

     My sister wanted to see Lupe Fiasco, a rapper who was playing the Claridge stage at 6:00.  He was pretty good, engaged with the crowd and even though I’m not a fan of his music I found him very entertaining.  He played around (as Peter Frampton did) with the popcorn-on-a-stick, and kept wondering why no one ever told him Ottawa was the Hottest Place On Earth.  Yesterday afternoon, it was.

     With the heat so intense, it was no wonder that Lupe Fiasco had to stop his show a couple of times to direct paramedics toward women who had passed out in the crowd.  That, of course, was nothing compared to what was about to happen.

     We moved over to watch Cheap Trick, and were going to stay at the MBNA stage for about half an hour before moving to the National Bank stage to catch Chali 2na (formerly of Jurassic 5), the guy I most wanted to see.  From there, we would take in some of Galactic and some John Butler Trio and maybe catch a bit of Satriani on the way home.  At least, that was the plan.  My sister took this photo of me, my wife and my dad at about 7:20.

     The sky seems…threatening, no?  Seconds after this picture was taken, my wife suggested we get the hell out of there, fast.  I scowled and said a little rain never hurt anyone, and it’s an outdoor concert, and stop being a sissy.  Even my dad and sister were not worried at all about getting wet.  I’m not sure about Abdullah.  But then, he doesn’t speak English much and couldn’t complain anyway.

     We started to make our way over to the National Bank stage, away from the MBNA stage, to catch the beginning of Chali 2na.  As we got to the corner, the wind hit.  Sand was blowing in our eyes and the rain was obviously coming hard and fast.  Normally you can look across the river and see trees and buildings on the other side.  Now, you couldn’t even see the river.

     We turned away from the stages and ran toward the bus stop.  People along the route were already hiding under the trailers that lined the road.  Before we could get to the street though, Bluesfest volunteers were blocking our path and directing us down into the parking garage of the War Museum which had been opened to accomodate people.  As we ducked inside, we heard the last few notes of Cheap Trick, then a crazy BOOM.  I thought it was some strange-sounding thunder.

     We made our way through the parking garage, up to the main lobby of the museum.  People were milling about, and no one seemed to know what was going on – there were occasional announcements asking people to move away from the windows and move to the parking garages, but it was almost impossible to get through the crowd.

     I saw a guy moving through the crowd from a distance – he was easy to spot, as he was a good head taller than everyone else.  He had an entourage around him, and people were snapping pics as he moved through.  It was Chali 2na, whose show (along with everyone elses’) had just been canceled.  He waved off his security detail, and shook hands and posed for pictures with everyone who crowded around.  That was pretty cool.

     After a while, the sun seemed to be back out, the rain had slowed to a trickle, and we were able to leave and make our way to the bus stop with everyone else who was being evacuated from the festival.  Only then did we notice that the MBNA stage was – gone!  It had been blown over backward onto the trucks parked behind it.  Thankfully, it hit the top of those trucks and so did not trap anyone underneath.

     Early reports are that three people were taken away in ambulances, and one is seriously injured.  Cheap Trick are fine (they got off the stage EIGHT seconds before it collapsed), but their bus driver suffered a broken leg.  Having seen the wreckage of the stage, and every paramedic and fire truck in the city flying in, it’s miraculous that injuries were not more widespread and that no one was trapped under the stage.

     We made our way to the bus stop, wet but safe – now we’re checking the news all morning, hoping everyone is OK.

     I wonder when it is that the kids of say, sports stars, discover that their parents are a big deal.  I imagine it’s pretty early on, as kids get into sports and would start fawning over say, Alfie’s son, in grade school.  I think it might take a little longer for the kids of rock stars – seven-year-olds might be into hockey at an early age, but they likely wouldn’t recognize Mick Jagger if he came to pick up his kid from school.  For a rock star’s kid, it’s probably a slow realization – like, I was just out with dad and these twins offered to do some crazy stuff to him in the elevator!  Maybe he’s a pretty big deal!  Milhouse figured it out when he was ten on The Simpsons “my dad is a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory”.

     Now, I must say that I have always thought my dad was a big deal.  ‘Cause he’s MY dad, and everyone thinks their own parents are the best.  But it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I discovered that others thought so as well!  I was in Brandon, Manitoba over the weekend to see Dad get an honorary degree from Brandon University.  There are four convocations at Brandon U, and each one had an honorary doctorate recipient – Gary Doer, Buffy Ste-Marie, Heather Bishop and my dad.

     They put him in a silly hat and dress and sent him up to make a speech.  Each honoree had to make about a 10-minute speech about their field of expertise – in my dad’s case, that is the agricultural economics of rural and small town Canada.  It seemed that it was his job to inspire and motivate the students graduating with a degree in rural development.  His speech was good – some day, I’ll post it to youtube, where it will surely get tens of hits.  Then the 200 graduating students came up to get their diplomas.  Including BOTH students graduating from the school of rural development.

     I thought that was pretty funny.  A ten minute speech, well received by me, my family, and a young Ugandan woman who was the lone graduate to cross the stage to receive her rural development diploma.  But if you have reached just one person…after the ceremony, the young woman approached my dad and had a long discussion with him about the books he’s written, the papers he’s produced and some kind of document he wrote that she just finished studying in school.  Or something like that.  I’m not sure exactly what they were talking about, but to me it looked as though my dad was, in fact, the Mick Jagger of agricultural economic statistics, Rural and Small Town Canada division!

     That was a pretty cool moment for me, and I’m sure an enormous honour for him.  When I was a kid, I would participate in that my-dad-is-better-than-yours game on the playgrounds.  I’d be honest about it.  When some kid said his dad could kick my dad’s ass, I said that was plausible.  My dad isn’t very big, he works in an office of some kind, and he has taken few, if any, ninja classes.  They would say their dad makes more money than mine.  That was plausible to me also, because my parents refused to buy me a horse for my birthday so I assumed we were very poor.  I could always come back with “my dad can calculate the mean income of dairy farmers in the rural area surrounding Kamloops faster and more accurately than yours” but that always failed to impress the other kids, for some reason.

     Anyway, congratulations Dad, we’re all proud of you!  Here’s the writeup for the honorary doctorate from Brandon University:

Dr. Ray Bollman — Doctor of Literature (honoris causa): A former Stanley Knowles Visiting Professor at Brandon University, Dr. Bollman is an agricultural economist and the Chief of the Rural Research Group with Statistics Canada. He has served as President of the Canadian Association of Rural Studies, President of the Canadian Agricultural Economic Society, and as a member of the founding committee of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation. A prolific writer, he has edited a range of documents, including Statistics Canada’s Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletins.

     Boxing is over.  I decided this on the weekend as Bernard Hopkins became the oldest champion in boxing history with his light-heavyweight victory over Jean Pascal in Montreal.  46 years old, and he’s the champion.  Any sport where a 46-year-old can be the best in the world is no longer a “sport”.  There are now six “sports” I can think of where a 46-year-old can be the “best”.  Curling.  Golf.  Archery.  Chess.  Croquet.  And now boxing.  It isn’t the fault of Hopkins who, much as I dislike him, is still a good fighter in great shape with solid skills.  It’s that there are no more decent boxers in the world.  There’s Manny Pacquiao and a million jars of mayonnaise.  It’s over, boxing.

     I LOVED the Red Sox-Cubs series over the weekend.  Well, except for the results of the games, which didn’t favour my BoSox.  But what other sport can see two teams play each other for the first time since 1918, and they play in…the same stadium in which they met 93 years ago?  No arena in the world has the history of Fenway Park, and no sport has the incredible history of baseball.  That being said, the “throwback” uniforms really showed that in some ways, baseball has improved a LOT over the years.  I could barely tell who was who.  The team in the potato sacks beat the team in the cut-up bedsheets, I think.

     It’s too bad Canadians are paying little or no attention to baseball these days.  Toronto isn’t going to win anything this year, or any year, but they have the best hitter in the bigs and the best reason to watch game in game out – Jose Bautista is a monster.  19 homers already?  In the low-production post-steroid era?  Ridiculous.

     What’s Tim Thomas thinking, guaranteeing the Bruins win in the series?  That’s just asking for trouble.  If I’m a defenseman, I’m not even trying any more.  We’ll just go ahead and win this one – the goalie’s got it.  I’ll just skate around a little to make it look good.

     Why is it even news when someone else gets drawn out to tell the world he saw Lance Armstrong using steroids?  Is there a single person left in the universe who believes Armstrong, the greatest performer in the dirtiest sport in the world, was clean?  And if you give him the “benefit of the doubt”, and say “innocent until proven guilty”, and all that crap, aren’t you just being soft-headed and a little hypocritical?  Would you extend the same suspension of disbelief to Barry Bonds?  Michael Vick?  Mike Tyson?  Or are you willing to ignore the mountain of evidence because Armstrong is such a good guy and has a great story?  Snap out of it people – the entire myth of Armstrong, the great story, and his feel-good impact on the world is all based on a lie.  All of it.  Bite me Lance Armstrong.

     There is, however, some good news in sports.  And that is, the Badminton World Federation is mandating skirts for female badminton players.  This might well have the effect of boosting ratings for televised badminton to maybe half the take of beach volleyball, after that federation mandated two-piece bathing suits.