REGGIE JACKSON TRIES TO SAVE TRENT FRAYNE

A MOMENT WITH AN EGOTIST AND HIS GOD


The media have been filled with praise for that elegant jockey of a man, Trent Frayne, who knew how to talk and write as if birds nestled in his words. They could sing or have the sarcastic irony of a Jay.
Here is one story that few know, and one which I promised never to write until Frayne died because it would have seemed like an intrusion that exposed his very soul. A fine companion at a game or the track, but there was walls of silence around the personal.
The California Angels were in town and Reggie Jackson, then one of baseball's superstars, had hit one of his 583 home runs.
Frayne wrote in the Toronto Sun about how the player known as Mr. October for his World Series clutch hits had held court later in the locker room. He stood, flaunting his nudeness, a king holding court before the serfs who would copy his every utterance.
Frayne wrote how Jackson had thanked God for letting him hit that home run. And Frayne had tackled him on that, saying he hadn't thought Jackson was one of those in sports who dragged God into every game.
Frayne had done his usual wonderful thorough story on the Jackson performance. It intrigued me as a fellow columnist about how he had done it. It was filled with quotes. Did he use a tape recorder, which were not as common in the mid-1980s as they are today? Did he scribble notes? Or did he memorize key phrases and flesh out the sentences later?
Frayne was wonderful to colleagues, especially to the cubs.  He always took time to help. And he loved to yarn about the business.
He confided that the heart of the exchange between Jackson and him never made the paper. He censored himself because he didn't want to hurt the great love of his life, his wife, the famous writer June Callwood.
Frayne said that Jackson had replied angrily to his question about why Jackson had given credit to God for just another of his many home runs. And that was the end of what he wrote.
But Frayne confided that Jackson had demanded "Don't you believe in God?" And Frayne said he ducked. He said he wasn't the subject of the story but Jackson was. Jackson persisted. Finally Frayne said that no, he didn't believe in God.
Jackson reacted as if he had been stabbed by the words. He ordered everyone to leave. He yelled at reporters who were slow. He waited. And finally there were just the two, the big black with the bulging muscles and the small dapper writer who usually had the nice crinkle of laughter in his smiling eyes.
But Frayne had decided to dig in.
"So why don't you believe in God," Jackson demanded again? And again Frayne said nothing. But Jackson persisted, the famous athlete looming up over the dapper writer whom generations of sports writers wanted to imitate.
Finally Frayne said: "I don't believe in God because of how he hurt my wife. The most important person in my wife's life was our youngest son Casey. And he came home from university for the Christmas holidays in 1982. He was returning to Kingston when his car was hit head-on by a drunk driver going the wrong way on a highway ramp. He was killed instantly. And I know there is no God because God would never have done that to my wife."
Jackson said how sorry he was, but there really was a God, and they said He moved in mysterious ways. They stood there awkwardly but there really wasn't more to say.
Frayne and I were in the middle of the bustle of the Sun's newsroom, with reporters yelling questions at each other and editors complaining about missing copy. And we also didn't say anything for a few moments. And finally he turned, and looked back with a sad smile, and walked away, leaving me with the tears of any parent who fears the death of their child.
Trent and June buried the ashes of Casey under a stone in the driveway of their home near the Old Mill where they lived for decades. Casey's name is on the home that June founded for HIV-AIDS sufferers, just one of the many ways that the greatest power couple in Canadian journalism left their mark and their words on their adopted city.
They were the couple that everyone wanted at their event. I recall one black-tie dinner honouring Gerald Ford in a fund drive for Israel. Mary and I saw a sign for the VIP reception. As we contemplated whether we should try to go in and hob nob with the famous,  like the former U.S. president, the Fraynes swept us up and we marched in together.
We were standing beside Ford when June asked me in a whisper why all the nearest men were hard of hearing. I told her they were Secret Service guarding the former president and the ear pieces were part of the two-way radio system.
"You mean they're Secret Service," June said, and stuck out her tongue at the nearest one. He was scanning the room when he saw June's tongue out of the corner of his eye and did a double take. He looked away and then looked back quickly, but June acted demure.
I asked why she didn't like the Secret Service but June had no particular reason. As an activist from the radical side of socialism, she was just against all varieties of police out of principle.
We stood there embarrassed. Mary, trying to mend the silence, complimented June on her tan, asking if she had been south. "No," June said, "I'm part Indian you know."
Many people tell many stories about Trent and June because they always made a difference with their actions and their words.
There are also a lot of stories about Reggie Jackson because he acted larger than life. He was an intimidating Hall of Famer and proud of it.  There is the legend about Jackson getting on a busy elevator in New York with two large dogs. Jackson uttered the stern command "Sit" to the dogs. And two young blondes immediately sat on the elevator floor.
Probably not true, but it's been told for years. Then there is this other unknown story, about him giving a lecture on Christianity to a writer in Toronto, which I know, sadly is true.

JACK BENNY LOVED STEPHEN LEACOCK

THE SUNSHINE OF A GREAT COMEDIAN

It was a sunny walk that I will never forget.
When you walk along Yonge with one of the most famous mugs in comedy, the fun is watching the people's reaction as they saw Jack Benny's face.
Some actually walked into sign posts. Some just stood and stared. And Benny smiled at them all.
Somewhere around Queen he told me how much he admired Stephen Leacock. And that's the reason for my story.
In the Toronto Star the other day, Rob Salem,  while writing about the new and good CBC TV movie about Leacock and his wonderful Sunshine Sketches Of A Little Town, said that the Canadian humorist/economist's most famous book was not just acknowledged here at home "but also south of the border. Anecdotal history has Groucho Marx giving a copy to Jack Benny back when both were still struggling vaudevillians."
I'm not sure that's the way it happened. Not only was Benny closer to the brother Zeppo Marx,  the way he told it to me, he first read Leacock in a scrawled line on the dressing room wall in Winnipeg. He was struggling and  playing the Canadian loop of the vaudeville circuit that circled from Manitoba to Toronto and then Montreal before performers return to the States.
Benny was to die in a few months but there was no sign of his illness when he came to the the Toronto Men's Press Club for lunch in 1974. As president, I hosted the lunch on behalf of the club's executive, and then said I would ride shotgun when Benny talked about strolling back to the Royal York Hotel.
He was 80 but he loved to walk. He said he walked every day in every city where he performed. He told me about playing a Chicago night club when after the first show he headed out the door to stretch his legs. The club's owner ran after him, waving to the limousine at the curb. "I rented it for you," he said. Benny said he preferred to walk. The owner insisted. And Benny got stubborn. Finally the owner said that if Benny didn't take the limo, he was cancelling him because he didn't want to be known as the owner of the club where Benny was playing the night he got shot.  I really didn't need Benny to tell me  it was a tough neighbourhood.
So we walked and Benny talked and Torontonians gawked. And then he mentioned Leacock.
"Mr. Benny," I said, "I love Leacock and I'm proud of being a Canadian and I really like you. You  don't have to praise Leacock just to make me feel good.
And Benny stopped in front of the old Birk's jewellery store and the crowd parted around us as if we were boulders in a river and he started quoting the sinking of the Mariposa Bell and the legendary yarn about getting panicky in the bank.
"Oh yes, John," he said, " I love Leacock."
The world did too. Salem is a fine writer but he didn't quite seem to grasp that Leacock was a world figure. As a McGill prof he authored a book on economics that was a world best-seller. In Orillia, which he named Mariposa, he was the cocky gentry that everyone gossiped about. (He was also a strange employer. He hired the father of James Bartleman,  our former lieutenant-governor, to do chores, and when Leacock saved him from drowning one day, he phoned the item in to the Star so that everyone would know. Another Bartleman relative was hired just to clean the dogs' slobber  off the sheets in the bedrooms.)
It wasn't unusual for Canadians to stride confidently on the world stage a century ago, particularly when it came to books.
Why even our governor-generals from England took their turn. John Buchan wrote the thriller The Thirty Nine Steps which was made into at least four movies, one of them by Alfred Hitchcock.
A forgotten huge success is Ralph Connor. His books about Upper Canada life, such as Glengarry School Days, were world best-sellers.
One of the most famous medical texts ever written,  The Principles And Practices of Medicine, made Sir William Osler one of the most famous doctors and medical professors on earth. (And I prize the copies my father bought a century ago after he taught long enough to make enough money to go Western's medical school.)
I told Benny about the other famous Canadian writers and scholars. We never got around to Wayne and Shuster because there was no need. After all, everyone in show business knew about how they had appeared more on the world's top variety program, the Ed Sullivan Show, than any other act.
Benny was a nice man. Nothing like his stage persona where he acted the mean skinflint. One story illustrates that so much that I imagine his friends used to tear up when they told about the provision in his will. He had used his wife Mary Livingstone as a foil for his TV, radio and stage comedy. But every single day after he died, for the nine years that Mary lived, a florist delivered one single red long-stemmed rose to her.
They still tell stories about Benny, and young comics have said they watch his old TV shows for the timing when he delivered his lines. No wonder people loved to watch him for 60 years. And on that day on Yonge St. when he walked and talked as if life had been very good to him after those tough times when he and the other teenagers known as the Marx Brothers struggled towards their first break.

NO LONGER AN ONTARIO PLACE TO STAND

OR A PLACE TO GROW EITHER

It was Tory penis envy. This time over a place.
When Ontario Place opened its three islands to the people whom Bill Davis hoped would continue to vote for his revamped Conservatives, it could trace its raison d'etre to the huge success of Expo '67, the Montreal world's fair that left Toronto, and Ontarians,  greener with envy than any environmental activist.
Now the province had scored a coup itself at Expo with the deserved success of the Ontario Pavilion and its catchy theme song A Place To Stand A Place To Grow. It became a provincial anthem even before Hollywood noticed and gave an Academy Award to a documentary about the pavilion which featured that song.
Expo made the Canadian National Exhibition look like a really Old Lady of the Lakeshore. And the Tories, hunting for ways to retread their reign, figured they would reproduce Ontario Pavilion, and all the zany and interesting architecture and media gimmicks of Expo, right on the capital's waterfront on bridges and fill, just like Montreal did in the St. Lawrence.
Queen's Park presence at the CNE was wrapped up in the triangular Ontario Government Building, which featured tanks of fish and pens ofwild life in its courtyard.  Kids loved the wild life displays, but they weren't flashy enough for the Tories who wanted to create an image that they knew what came next in life.
They chose a cigar-chomping wiz called Kirk Foley, technically only director of economics in the finance ministry, to be the Moses leading them to new votes. First it was OB, then the disaster known as the Urban Transportation Development Corp. which tried to make mag lev trains work several decades before China did at an airport.
 Left behind in the dust of really old Toronto was the provincial Ex building, which evolved into the first CNE Casino, and its initials OGB were said then by staff in cheeky racism to stand for the Oriental Gambling Building. (Because Canadians from Asia sure outnumbered the staid Torontonians.) Now it's evolved graciously into the Liberty Grand, and I'm proud to boast I moved the approval motion.
The irony now that the end of OP's first era has arrived is the certainty that it couldn't be built today. Do you really think that radicals of city council  and Ontario politics would tolerate the government sinking several old freighters as a breakwall and doing those great costly creations of Eb Zeidler on fill?
If you have survived to your 70s in Toronto, you remember driving the Lake Shore when it really was the lake shore because the lake came right to the iron railing beside the road.  Most of the land that now extends south of the road, from Marilyn Bell Park in the west to Coronation Park in the east, has been created by man. It was the way Toronto grew until recently. They just were copying all the landfill that created much of the Ex, the waterfront and Toronto Island.
As proof that all that landfill wouldn't happen today, I cite as my witness Tony O'Donohue, the veteran city politician and municipal engineer, who was hired in the 1980s to develop a scheme that not only would have enlarged OP with a useful island created from all the earth being dug out by construction, the scheme would have produced a million dollars for the city.
It was blown out of the water, so to speak.
The days of Ottawa and Queen's Park using their powers to ignore city council when they built OP and the CN Tower without permits or any form of permission are long gone. I guess I should say thank heavens for that in honour of city democracy but we did get iconic buildings as a result, like Cinesphere.
Then there was the minor problems of costs. Premier Davis and his aides like Claire Westcott, who had clever ideas about just about everything,  downplayed costs, of course, when they set out to win elections with a modern fun park on the lake off the Ex and fancy trains without drivers or wheels floating on elevated guideways around the Ex.
The UTDC costs were enormous, confused and hidden. OP was said to be budgeted at $5 million, is now said to have cost $29 million, and I used to use the figure $34.5 million without the Tories getting too incensed.
The problem was, just as the obscene building rush later at SkyDome, that anything goes when politicians and their captive bureaucrats are drunk with the need to open as quickly as possible.
I wrote after the flush of excitement had died out after the OP opening that the government even paid triple time to the guys fashioning the cloakrooms, hardly an essential.
After months of bashing away in my column at OP and the new spending monster called UTDC, I passed Doug Creighton, the founding Sun publisher, in the hallway. He remarked he was getting tired of my criticism and having to field calls next morning from powerful Tories.
He had a strong argument against me. "Damn it, John," he said. "The public loves Ontario Place."
And they did too. A fact I went to great pains to note that evening when I wrote another column bashing OP.
Doug, of course, never mentioned it again, which was another great thing about the Toronto Sun during its baby steps.
OP in its early days bought acceptance with clever ideas and marketing, bolstered by free passes that rained on the media and any useful person. My favourite moment was lounging on a grassy knoll and watching the Toronto Symphony brass its way through the patriotic stew known as the Last Night At the Proms. All free at the Forum, which was too bucolic and nice and not large enough for the hot money dreams of OP bureaucrats who only seemed to know how to lose a lot of money.
So the Forum hardened and expanded into the Ampitheatre. Successful for a time because it didn't have to deal with unions, compliments, strangely,  of Bob Rae's NDP government.
Just to the north, Exhibition Stadium, which was saddled with unions, couldn't compete because it cost $31,000 just to open and run for a night. I brokered a deal as a CNEA executive that we would cover those costs and give the stadium free to any promoter who was willing to stage an event that would bring people to the Ex. No promoter was interested.
 Then the city used the $5.5 million repair fund put aside from ticket revenue to demolish it, a stupid move, and then built, in another stupid move, a smaller stadium for $72 million in a deal that benefitted mainly MLSE, the millionaires who soak us with the lamentable Leafs.
I can't wait to see what happens at OP next. Merging it with the CNE has been so logical, it has been proposed by just about every one of the hordes who have studied the taxes being wasted by OP.
Then there's the idea of having a casino there. Of course the OP staff aren't exactly ecstatic about that because they know Queen's Park would grab all the revenue.
One useful deal would be for OP and Exhibition Place to merge and to be kept afloat by an expansion of the present CNE casino which operates in August. This can be done without legal or political hassles because the Ex is allowed a casino under the provincial regs governing agricultural fairs.
The Ex and OP would operate the casino and some other attractions from Victoria Day to Thanksgiving but really concentrate on July and August when high school and university students would be available for staff.
This is such a logical merger that it could be up and running this year instead of all the people studying the issue running around like a headless chicken just before death.
There's only one thing certain for now if we're not careful.  Listen to the wet dreams of all the politicians and it will cost you and me a lot of taxes. And we will also have to listen to a lot of hooey and baloney. But if  the new creation makes money and not just fuss, it truly will be a wonderful new attraction on our waterfront.
No, make that it will be a wonderful new miracle, and God knows, we need one considering the chuckleheads mismanaging City Hall and Queen's Park.

TORONTO'S LINK TO THE FIRST OSCAR MOVIE WINGS

THE ARTIST SHARES A UNIQUE DISTINCTION


Wings, the first movie to win an Oscar, is also remembered in the golden footnote in Hollywood history as the last of the great silent movies. So it has just been released on Blu-ray. Now its distinction as the only silent movie ever to win an Oscar must be shared with The Artist.
Somewhere, Sterling Campbell is giving a dashing smile, just like his buddy Douglas Fairbanks for whom he was a stand-in on quiet days.
Not that there were many lazy days for the handsome pair.
Campbell's link between Toronto politics and fabled Hollywood was not really known to his neighbours on leafy Rowanwood Ave. in old Rosedale. Yet he had drank and danced and fought and directed some of the greatest names in movies. There was even a marriage to a famous star that he never ever talked about. So feature writers from other cities came calling even if the local media ignored him.
When Sterling sat and yarned over rye in the upstairs library of the big old house, with his proud wife, Margaret Campbell, sipping and smiling with him every minute into the wee hours, the talk was not of Maggie's career as a renowned lawyer, alderman, MPP and judge, but what Buddy Rogers and his wife Mary Pickford (always called Toronto's own) had done.
The flames from the fireplace would throw dancing lights over pictures of Sterling with his arm around just about anyone who was anyone in movies.
The first time he mentioned the 1927 movie Wings to me, he did so modestly, not mentioning it was the first movie to win an Oscar. His connection was enormous. Officially he is listed as the technical director of flight sequences, the supervisor of the famous dogfight scenes. Unofficially he not only flew in the sequences (he had been a World War I flying ace) but he also did some acting as he also developed his technical skills that would make him famous half a century before computer tricks.
It was his limp from a war wound that was noticed by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille,  who admired veterans. So he worked with C.B.  (which he said was largely standing beside him as armies clashed below and then being told which of 31 takes should be printed.)
He worked with Howard Hawkes too, but fought too much with Howard Hughes to stay on his movies because Sterling didn't believe his guff.
His friends were the stars. He lived with Gary Cooper, the unknown whose career was launched by Wings. He danced with Clara Bow who was the star of Wings and was having a secret affair with Cooper. He golfed and joked with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and drank with Errol Flynn. He told of visiting W.C. Fields in the hospital where a stunning redhead offered him, to his puzzlement,  a vase of flowers and a straw. The vase was filled with gin to be hidden from the doctors.
His success in Wings was noticed, because Hollywood loves a winner, even if Wings was very expensive for its time. So Sterling was involved with any Hollywood movie with pilots, especially the famous Dawn Patrol.
Naturally he was pressed into service in World War Two, which came to a shuddering halt when he was smoking on deck during a blackout. A kid naval officer told him to put it out and Sterling put him out. The difference in age was enormous so the brass decided it would be safer in PR if Sterling resigned rather than be courtmartialled.
He came to Canada to direct the movie Bush Pilot and stayed to work on the early CBC series called Cannonball which is still remembered in nostalgia binges.  His life had been rich enough that he was in Ripley's Believe It Or Not but he retired to Toronto politics which was to be his third war.
The fires still burned. He threatened to get into the ring and punch out a much younger B. Michael Grayson, his wife's ward partner, who he thought had been rude to her.
 Maggie wasn't exactly a shrinking violet either. She had been a spy for Canada in World War Two and was so tough on pimps, one threatened to bomb her house. That night she went out with me and walked the so-called Sin Strip to show she was not intimidated. She was propositioned twice in five minutes and I had to play bodyguard to get her away from her horny admirers.
She only slept several hours each night because of all her energy (she claimed the rye was medicinal.) So she read and wrote and published several who-dun-its under a pseudonym. She was a loyal Toronto Maple Leaf baseball fan and had season's tickets beside the dugout. The players were intimidated by her formidable presence. She seemed a Rosedale matron but then the players found she could curse better than they could.
She got more than 50,000 votes but lost in the 1969 mayoralty race, then went to the Legislature as a Grit. I squeezed into the last pew at  her funeral with four "captains of industry," as we used to say.
Today we would call them a power couple. They sure were fixtures at all the best city events.
 I worked late at City Hall. After I was through chasing the latest silly stories, I headed for the Campbells and the tinkling ice and the library where in the pictures coating the walls, Sterling was dancing with Mary Pickford or mugging with Clark Gable, big toothy grins under their debonair moustaches. And Maggie would listen with fond attention as Sterling fleshed out the pictures, her deep rumbles of laughter punctuating the night
I should have taken a tape recorder along, but that would have ruined the mood. After all, he was reminiscing, not boasting, and it was  nice to sit there as the fire crackled and the liquor burned too and think of yesteryear when the movie stars were the kings and queens of our imagination.

JUST READ ME, ROB FORD, AND LOSE WEIGHT

BEST ADVICE COMES FROM REFORMED FATTIES

I'm an expert at losing weight. After all, as they say, I've done it so often. I've lost hundreds of pounds over the years but now, believe it or not, I easily stay below my highs.
What prompts these confessions of a former fat man? Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his wingman brother are trying to woo their way back into some semblance of popularity by dieting. Which is the thing you do every January, whether you're the mayor or a well-aged pundit.
Someone objected to me saying Rob had a piggish look but he does and will until the fat melts. He's hardly handsome but he will look OK when (and if) he loses 50 pounds.
After all, at 330 pounds, he should be seven feet tall, but he's not. When you're only five foot ten, you should stop talking about football - he doesn't really appear to have played much university ball - and start talking about eating less and enjoying it more.
Believe me, I know.
My wife confessed after several decades of marriage that she and her girlfriends had discussed whether she had hooked a fat guy.
I ate a lot after marriage. But then at the old Tely when I was City Editor and surrounded by free food and booze, I really got heavy. Maybe 280. So I read that a famous U of T prof named Harding LeRiche was testing appetite suppressants for the Ontario Heart Foundation.  I signed up.
I shrank to 230, which had been my weight playing high school football. ( I was one of the heaviest in the league. Obviously an eternity ago because now even the cheerleaders are heavier.)
The pills sure revved me up. That hit home when I passed the bulletin board in the City Room and found that someone had posted a petition pleading with me to stop the diet pills. It seemed everyone, including the copy boys, had signed. Seemed the City Editor was considered a tyrant.  I didn't even know that the copy boys could spell the word.
My weight went through the yo-yo boom-and- bust cycles familiar to big people. You get used to buying your clothes in big men shops and having a second slice of apple pie with cheese. And then comes January and you lose 15 pounds, for a few months before ice cream season.
One day I went to a new doctor for some ailment that had literally crippled me. It turned out I had gout,  and my former doctor was so dumb he couldn't figure out a rather common condition.
While I waited, I stepped on the scales and discovered I was 319.
It shook me. Migawd, I thought, Billy Shipp, one of the legendary linemen of the CFL/NFL, was put on a diet when he hit 300. The Chicago Bears had a famous 300-pounder nicknamed the Refrigerator who even plunged for a touchdown. Now I was 19 pounds heavier than athletes with notorious weights.
Bernie Gosevitz, one of the world's best doctors, came in and peered over my shoulder at the awful figure.
I quickly took the pledge. "You don't have to say a word," I said to Dr. G. who was too heavy himself. (I don't really deep down trust diet advice from experts who have never been fat. I remember Shakespeare's famous lines where Caesar says: " Let me have men about me that are fat. Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much."
Caesar was certainly right about Cassius, just as I'm right when I say the Cassius of Ontario is Dalton McGuinty, the premier who could use a few pound as much as a higher IQ.
Each month after that first visit to Bernie I was lighter. And Bernie kept his mouth shut. I would hit plateaus, and float, say between 270 and 280, but then I would graduate to a lower plateau.

1. You have to make it obvious that you know you're too heavy. Don't kid yourself. Confession is good for the waist line. We were making TV commercials for the Toronto Sun and something wasn't quite right about my script. I was supposed to talk as the Editor about how we were a lean paper compared to our obese competitors like the Saturday Star. I scribbled some changes and showed them to the ad agency and our promotion people. They were surprised I would say it but thought it was just right. Which is why the TV audience heard Downing say that he was fat but his paper wasn't. The family didn't grumble at my bravado but friends did.Then I evolved into just being heavy.  Although I still had a big stomach, which Santa used to call a pot belly and our grandparents said was a bay window. (I had a disadvantage in dieting because my height and weight were inherited, which is common, since my father was also six foot two and big and my mother was six foot.)
2. Things settled down a few years ago. My weight floated between 240 and 260 and I could now wear a 48 rather than a 54, and my shirts no longer had to be a 19.

How did I do it? By eating less. I still eat everything but there's only one piece of pie. And I try to walk and swim. Exercise can be a problem since I love to swim long distances. After  1 1/12 kilometres in Memorial Pool or around the cottage at Burnt Point, you inhale just one slice of pie.
Lately,  I can't swim because of bed sore ulcers that have lingered for nine months after my three months in hospital. The only good thing about being incarcerated in hospital hell was that my weight now varies between 215 and 220 which is great for blood pressure and just about everything else.
My suggestion to Mayor Rob and his brother and all the other dieters this January? Keep on eating what ever you want but just eat less. If you like chocolate chip cookies, have one, not three. If there are still Christmas chocolates around, let someone else empty the box.
I used to start the day with oatmeal, tomato juice and green tea. In my campaign to keep that weight near what I was in high school, I skip grains 99% of the time and mourn my loss of cheese bagels from Tim Hortons.
My breakfast is a Downing smoothie from the blender: tomato juice, cinnamon, banana, apple, pear and flax seed. Good for all parts from prostate to heart. And it allows me to cheat just a  tad later.
Oh yes, you don't have to starve like a fasting monk. Just feel virtuous every time you eat less, whether it's a forbidden goody or Greek yogurt. And if you don't feel like a brisk wall,  just stroll. Studies show that's 70% as good as the joggers pounding by you, who will need knee and hip surgery while you're still ambling along smelling the flowers.
Oh yes, find a doctor who was heavy (fat) once. Never listen to sanctimonious dieticians who have never known the joys of a cheeseburger or a grilled cheese sandwich. I still munch such delights, after discarding half the bun or bread.
After a few months,  not only will you be slimmer but hopefully so will  Mayor Ford.  Now if only that happened to the city budget.



'

DING DONGING BELL

MA BELL HAS GONE SENILE

What used to be the only phone company - and it acts as if it still is - is known to investors as BCE.
As I discovered years ago in a newly fashionable museum, the mystifying initials of BCE also stand for Before Common Era, as non-Christians, the PC folk and academics ditched the old dating system of AD, or Anno Domini, to mark exhibits that dated before the birth of Christ two thousand years ago. Using BCE instead of AD started small in the 1700s and has become very in.
The two meanings for BCE come together in my mind because the phone company operates as if it were a couple of thousand years old, at least in technological terms.
I am almost embarrassed to admit I'm still suffering with Bell because most logical people would have ditched it long ago.
Although now Bell has lost me, the final blow, or the telephone pole that broke the camel's back, having come with the latest bill. A petty sum but I hate being gouged even in petty ways!
Once again I'm embarrassed to confess I actually still pay some monthly bills and don't have them  automatically deducted from my bank account. The reason in Bell's case is I don't trust it to dip into my bank without scrutiny because lately bills have been as mystifying as the accents when I call the call centre located in India or beneath the polar ice or some place other than the best country in the world which needs such routine jobs.
When I pay via TD on line, I dutifully authorize the payment a few days earlier than the due date, as instructed, although I notice the bank can process the payment the same day when it wants. (Are the banks making money on this?)
 Lately there have been problems with Amex saying it got the money from TD late, and my cottage phone payment being credited to my home phone account.
By the time I straightened that one out, Bell said I owed nine cents for a cottage phone that is out of service. Not really a big deal.  Only nine cents. But Bell's computers charged a "regulated" late payment fee of thirty seven cents and then $2.20 for a late "unregulated" fine.
So the nine cents became $2.66, which my son Mark informs me - since my arithmetic isn't great - is 2,855 % in penalty.
It's not that long ago that such amounts when it came to fines or credit card charges were considered usurious and illegal as well as immoral.
And if Bell keeps doing it without us rebelling, BCE stock will be worth a lot more than the current record of around $42.
I don't know anyone who is happy with Bell service. I wrote on Dec. 30, 2010, about the screwing up of the "do not call" list, and also on Sept. 3, 2009 ( The Wrong Number of Bell ) when the staff's  incompetence left us without service for nearly two weeks.
Unfortunately for Bell, its bill arrived the same day as a brochure from Primus.  So I know that I don't have to pay $25.02 for basic service (Primus $9.59) or $6.95 for long distance (free with Primus) or $2.80 for touch tone (.40 with Primus.)
The one that really galls me is the $6.95 for "wire care maintenance" so a Bell worker will come inside your home without charge.  Since phones are so inexpensive, you just can throw away a phone that doesn't work, these days it has to be a line problem if there is no dial tone.  (Oh yes, at the cottage, I have to pay $2.95 monthlyfor a phone, even though it's my phone, or Bell won't give me the rural service.)
I'm not recommending Primus because I haven't done comparisons with other companies. All I know is it's obvious there are better deals out there, and there aren't penalties of 2,855 % when either the bank or I goof and are allegedly slow with payment.
I feel like I've just kicked an old lady down the stairs but Ma Bell hasn't been serving tea or any service  for years.

HOSPITAL HELL JOKES

IT HURTS TO LAUGH

And so I greet the new year with mental scars, real scars and a wound on my bottom which won't heal.
When people wish me Happy New Year, I say 2012 has to be a improvement because there's no way it could be worse than 2011.
When unsuspecting neighbours and relatives asked me about my three months in hospital, I said that if they really wanted to know, I have a 20-minute lecture. And there's a PowerPoint and 20 pictures that I can download to any pad or computer. I pretend there is a test afterwards, and anyone who gets over 50% wins an autographed copy of my essay on what to avoid with hospitals and travel insurance.
Strangely, no one wants the lecture.
For all those incarcerated within the OHIP system, and all the relatives and friends who brave the exorbitant parking costs in order to visit, I have two laughs, even if the first is more bitter than funny.
I wade each day through my emails about alleged jokes and great pictures. I pass on only about 1%.
But I just received one about the sweet grandmother who telephoned a hospital and asked timidly if it was possible to find out the condition of a patient.
Now as many of us know,  often that would be refused on the grounds of confidentiality and general cussedness but the hospital operator took pity.
"I would be glad to help, dear," she said. "Just give me the name and room number."
The grandmother in a trembling voice said: "Norma Findlay, Room 302."
The operator said: "Let me put you on hold and I will check with the nursing station."
After a few minutes, the operator reported: "I have good news. Her nurse just told me that Norma Findlay in Room 302 is doing well, her blood pressure  is fine, the blood work just came back normal,  and her physician has just scheduled her to be released tomorrow."
The grandmother said: 'That's so wonderful. I was so worried. God bless you for the good news."
The operator replied: "You're more than welcome. Is Norma your daughter?"
"No," the grandmother said. "I'm Norma Findlay in Room 302. And no one tells me anything."
Now this Internet anecdote is circulating with a tag saying it's real and happened at St. Joseph's.
And I believe it because I was a patient in St. Joe's for more than a month and got most of my info from my family.
One of my nice hospital visitors was an old friend who walked from his central Etobicoke home, just like he had been doing from his office at University of Toronto where, armed with his doctorate from Johns Hopkins, he teaches a tough stats course mainly for graduate and doctoral students.
Despite all the walking and paddle tennis even in the cold, he developed chest pains which they were sorting out at Trillum Hospital. The goods news was that the side with the pain was OK but the bad news was the other side needed a triple bypass.
So the cardiac surgeon came to see him. And Paul, who prides himself on all the work he has done over the decades to put names and faces to his students and not treat them as anonymous blobs, said to the cardiologist that he looked familiar.
"I took your course," the surgeon said.
And Paul replied: "If you didn't get a good mark, I would be happy to fax in a higher mark for you."
And everyone laughed, and everything was fine, and Paul got home in a fraction of the time that I spent in hospital.
There are a million  stories in the hospital system of Ontario. And few of them are funny.