IRRITATING CONVENIENCE FOR BOORS

One Of Society's Biggest Wrong Numbers

The crowd had been swept from the giant beach by the winds. I plodded along towards the only other person. When I passed, he was shouting instructions about his business to some poor sap.
Nope, you can't get away from the cell phone. No matter how remote and solitary you may be, and no matter how much you yearn for peace from the world, there is always some yahoo bellowing into a phone.
The cell phoniacs are often so rude, they really don't seem to understand when you accuse them of rudeness.Once upon a time, a cell phone would have been the answer to my prayers. As a reporter and later an editor, I was always stuck in some nook of the world frantically trying to contact the office.So you would think that I would regard the cell phone as a wonderful evolution in communications technology.
I do.
But the silly plague that has kids reporting every step they take to school, that allows the chap at the Florida pool to conduct six hours of business while you are trying to toast and tan, that has the jerk in the car just ahead of you wandering in and out of his lane while driving spasmodically, and all of the other nonsense that people pull with their cell phones, has me wishing they were hung and quartered while some supreme being yelled in their ear.
Mary and I sat in a restaurant near I-75 on a trip to Florida while the woman in the next booth, who has a business pumping out or repairing septic tanks, conducted a 30-minute interview on her cell with a customer who wondered why his tank had backed up into his house. She described in graphic detail exactly what would be the problem. When the waitress asked us what flavour of ice cream we wanted, I said anything, as long as it isn't chocolate.
It is amazing, however, just how cell phones have revolutionized journalism.
At Ryerson journalism school back in cave-man days, Ted Schrader taught us that the first thing you did when you got to a story is figure out how to get the story back to the office. Rye grads still talk about his iconic lecture on getting the story back from the Red Lake fire. He had marvelous stories, like the one about bribing a bulldozer operator to park across a mountain road so the opposition couldn't get to a phone and file his story.
The "scoops" often went to the first reporter who could figure out how to get the news back to the presses.
Of course there was also a problem with telexes, telegraphs and LD phones when you wandered the world. It blighted some of my stays in the world's beauty spots. Like the hotel converted from a monastery. How wonderful to have spent the night in a thousand-year-old monk's cell. If only. I ended up being in the room for only 20 minutes because I couldn't get a telex line to North America.
Now you can direct dial from Beijing, or send e-mails from Cape Town, or talk from the peak of Mount Everest, without having to crawl around the floor disconnecting telephones to make your old computer work, complete with its now-ancient acoustic couplers (don't ask).
How great it is in the remotest spots on earth to aim your computer's dish at some satellite and, presto, the editor has the story. Except now the office can get hold of you any time they want, meaning there is no down time. In the bad old days, at least you had peace in between the calls once a day to the boss.
There is no need to talk at length about the plague of cell phones that causes children of all ages feeling they have to talk to their friends every 15 minutes.
And there is no need to remind at length how some people have never mastered the technology and feel they have to talk in a loud voice, or even bellow.
The curse of the driver on the phone also is apparent, damn it, on every road. Even the phones that you don't have to hold can distract a driver right into an accident. Unfortunately, enforcement is spotty. The Ontario Safety League, a venerable non-profit lobby for safety (I have long been a director) was pressuring the Ontario government to crack down on cell phone use by drivers in moving vehicles, only to have the government lurch into action without bothering to spend the necessary time on drafting how the new law would actually work.
Perhaps the abuses will be reduced when the public stop using cell phones as the latest toy instead of a useful tool. Perhaps more people will join the club of which I'm a charter member. We carry cell phones but only use them to make brief calls. Unless we are expecting a call at a certain pre-arranged time, our phones are turned off. Life is simpler that way.
We get all the advantages without being bothered all the time. Now if I can only turn off the sun bather beside me at the pool, or the guy yelling into his phone on an empty beach. The golf clubs that ban cell phones have the right idea. Now if it would only spread to theatres.
On my latest trip, I lost my cell phone in the luggage (Mary takes a lot of stuff) and didn't find it for two weeks. I was kind of hoping it had been stolen.

A SHUTTLE OF PAST GLORIES

The Good Old Days In Space

It wasn't a moment I had anticipated, one that I planned for. I turned in my chair and there was this glorious fireball in the sky. And as I watched and people around me gasped, the fireball kept climbing and then there was this magnificent tail tracing white against the blue sky.
Another shuttle launch.
It's something we take for granted. We barely notice the delays because of weather, the safe returns.
We do notice the questions about cost and value. Except in the days of 50 billion dollar frauds, the cost of space are dwarfed.
Once upon a time, I would have plotted for days to see a shuttle launch in Florida. I would have consulted maps and newspapers and the Internet, maybe even phoned NASA.
It was part of my training as an assignment editor when before political conventions, Stanley Cups and Grey Cups, I plotted camera positions and reporter assignments and knew just about everything it was possible to know about an event the day before.
Like many other Canadians of a certain age, I cheered when our American cousins finally matched and then surpassed the Soviet Sputniks.
On a bedroom wall, ignored, is the large iconic photograph of the astronaut staring at the camera, the reflections in the mask showing his surroundings. The photograph was printed from the actual negative of the actual film that had been to the moon. NASA said the picture was only available to certain senior media executives. I was impressed but I don't think my sons were. They had already adjusted to a real man in the moon.
But years pass and we even get used to portraits shot on Mars.
So when two friends and I escaped from the noise of a St. Patrick's Day dinner in the clubhouse of the Boca Shores condo clubhouse at St. Pete's Beach and some people came out on the balcony behind us and started talking about the shuttle, I almost didn't turn around.
Then I heard the explosion of excitement, and there it was, climbing, climbing, climbing while all of Florida gazed into the sky and felt a little closer to the heavens.
It started to curve left, or so it seemed, and it traced sort of a flattened question mark. How symbolic I thought, since questions about the space program persist and it seems, if you leave national ego out of it, that robots can do the job of space exploration much easier than worrying about men in capsules.
The talk used to be about costs. Funny how trillion-dollar deficits and the tender treatment of even the fatcat crooks of Wall Street have made that almost irrelevant.
Since it has been revealed that the financial world has been criminally inept for years, and the financial media were toothless watchdogs, and the bureaucrats who were supposed to be watching were either sleeping or on the take, spending billions on shooting metal and humans into space seems a much better use of taxes than rewarding bankers for being stupid when they weren't being robbers.
Funny how a few seconds of gazing into the sky can remind us of younger days when space was still a Jules Verne science fiction tale and the idea of actually going outside the envelope of earth was still the impossible dream.
When the shuttle landed almost two weeks later, all of Florida, it seemed, was on high alert. There was a delay because of wind and clouds but the state was filled with people searching the skies. They must have known they wouldn't be seeing anything. And they didn't. But there was a big boom when the shuttle broke the sound barrier, and everyone asked that evening, even to strangers in the supermarket, did you hear that noise when the shuttle came back. And then they grinned, as if they had been at the controls.
In this days of broken everything, the shuttle is a victory rocket over a troubled sea. A reassuring sight. Just like the jetliner landing safely in the Hudson. At least we still get something right.

IN GPS WE TRUST

Don't Leave Home Without A Map

You read it here first. Driving tests will soon have you demonstrating that you know how to use a GPS as well as park.
Countless people are wondering how they ever managed to drive to another city without help from the four satellites in the sky. How quickly they forget that learning period where they really wanted to throw the damn thing out the window when it chirped at you that it was recalculating the route because you were too stupid to follow the first directions.
It doesn't exactly say that, but the woman's voice can sound like a nagging wife.
I was given a Magellan Maestro 4210 by my oldest son, John Henry, a scarred veterans of the Downing fights in many of the countries of the world when I tried to drive and Mary tried to read a map.
I still think it wasn't an accident when in the south of France, in the middle of a debate about why she wasn't allowed to drive in Europe, she told me to take a right turn at the next intersection - right into the maw of a one-way street delivering five lanes of angry motorists right to my bumper.On another trip, we went around the Arc de Triomphe twice - in Friday evening rush hour traffic - with Mary announcing she couldn't see the street our hotel was on but she didn't really care because she was getting out. The fact she then wouldn't know where I was in Paris didn't concern her much.I have plenty of stories like that but I will refrain. After all, some female reporters once posted a petition on the bulletin board announcing that the Editor was a jerk because I had written too many columns, or so they felt, on Mary's problems reading maps.
So the GPS seemed like a God-send. Trouble is there was no book of instructions. So after I downloaded 60 pages of instructions from the Internet - actually my son Brett did that for me after I failed several times to make Acrobat do the proper somersaults and produce anything for me - and I then spent several nights trying to figure them out, I figured I was ready for just about anything.Now once upon a time I drove from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale without a map. Someone had left the bundle behind from the CAA. And once I drove from Zagreb to the north of Slovenia without a map and then went on to Budapest still without a map. In those days in Hungary, there were few service stations and no maps to be had at the few there were.
So I can manoeuvre without a map. And I thought with my new GPS I wouldn't need one. Turns out you do. I'm sure after a few expeditions, I will have mastered feeding info into the GPS, but right now I need a map just to make sure the GPS has me in the same state.
We were driving from Howey-in-the-Hills, which is a vacation hamlet northwest of Orlanda back to Tampa, when I discovered that there was no Florida map in the car and the GPS seemed to have me going southeast instead of southwest. So I watched the Toyota compass and kept driving west while ignoring the GPS chirping away telling me to make legal U-turns or recalculating the route at every intersection. I figured at worse I would end up in the Gulf, at best I would cross I-75 flowing south to Tampa. I hit the interstate before the Gulf and all was well.Later, looking at a map, I found I had driven about as far as you can go in Florida without hitting a major settlement. I was in a triangle between I-75 and Florida's Turnpike. Now I wouldn't have worried if I could have placed all these towns I was going through, like Linden and Mascotte, somewhere on some map. But we had left all ours back at the rental condo. After all, we thought smugly, we have GPS.
At one point we drifted through the Withlacoochee State Forest, which seemed like I had driven off the end of the world. If I had known that the forest was supposed to be in my vicinity, I would have relaxed and enjoyed the drive.I suspect I will become a big fan of my GPS, But right now, I drive along with a map at my side and the GPS chirping at me from the dashboard. And judging from the conversation around the pool, most of the vacationing Canadians seem to be having the same problem. It's not as simple as putting in your home address and driving for two days without a worry. My main problem is the screen is hard to read, except at night, because of glare.
I find my Magellan functions wonderfully 90% of the time, but it's the other 10% that worries me. We go from being told to keep left at the next confluence of roads to silence for half an hour or so. Now technocrats will say that my device will only work well if I know exactly how to use it. You know, garbage in, garbage out. But I'm still puzzling my way through the instructions. Maybe there's a course I can take, a new form of driver's ed.
On my trip home from Florida to Toronto, the GPS gave me heartburn twice and was wonderful the rest of the time. I decided to take a shortcut up 301 to the north-east instead of taking a longer route running through Gainesville. My GPS simply didn't understand and kept urging strange turns on me. Then while driving along the south shore of Lake Erie, expecting to cross at Fort Erie, the GPS gave us mysterious directions which finally had us crossing at Lewiston.
The reward was a shorter trip home, up I-95 through the more picturesque mountains, rather than the winter route south from Detroit on I-75. About 120 kms and a good hour shorter. And done with a lot less tension than the last time before the GPS.
Now I feel like tackling the roads again in the south of England. The last time, we almost divorced.

PUMPING GAS AND LIES

Ruining The Open Road

As Mary and I contemplated our annual trip to the Florida sun, leaving behind the crap, and I'm not just talking about the slush on Toronto streets and at City Hall, we groaned as the Canadian dollar sank but cheered as the price of oil fell even more.
Surely that would ease the price of gasoline which becomes quite important when you've travelled 5,000 km by the time you return.
In Ontario, the price was still above 80 cents a litre, even though the price of a barrel of oil had collapsed below $35 a barrel from its high near $150. And I told Mary about how the giant oil companies had complained to the Sun whenever I wrote an editorial complaining that the price of gas seldom sank when the price of crude oil went down. There were always these explanations about how they had actually bought the oil months ago when the price was high and we would have to wait until cheaper product got into the distribution network.
Except those bountiful days never really came. And then there was the notorious gouging at the start of long weekends about which even the oil bureaucracies seemed embarrassed.
Even though the CAA gives you a special map, and I have a Magellan GPS, we took the wrong turn in Detroit just a few seconds after we left the Ambassador bridge. It's always an ordeal finding the big Interstate south, and construction there this year doesn't help.
Of course the signage has always stunk. I remember the year we ended up in the wasteland of downtown Detroit.
Then there was the time the bridge authorities told some pre-cleared truckers that they could use the car-only lane, but there was no indication to motorists of that, meaning I wasn't expecting an 18-wheeler to compete with me and finally come over and crush my fender. Since we were between Canada and the United States, no police force wanted to show up for a minor accident, meaning the trucker escaped punishment for his dumb and dangerous driving.
Oh yes, bridge officials told me there was an accident once a week at that spot of the bridge, but no improvements have been made there for three years. And the confusing labrythn on the American side, and the rickety toll booths, make for a seedy entrance to a country which keeps boasting that it's the best in the world.
Despite its shoddy entrance at Detroit.Of course, two years ago, coming back from Florida and crossing at Buffalo, I found the construction maze and signage so bad there that I kept ranting at the Canadian customs official that it was all so Mickey Mouse that he kept apologizing and sent me on my way after forgetting to ask questions.
My trip south this year did feature, as hoped for, lower gas prices, with me paying from $1.75 to $1.93 for a gallon. Then it jumped higher. Translating this into a comparison with Canadian prices involves so much math, it's not worth the effort. Comparing the Canadian cost per litre with what the Americans are paying for their gallon is a little like comparing sour apples and kumquats since the exchange rate is involved too. But there's no disputing the obvious conclusion: Canadians pay a lot more - and that is far too much - for their gas, and the provincial and federal governments aren't going to do a damn thing about it because they benefit. The higher the price the oil companies charge, the higher the tax revenue that the governments get.
So it's a case not of authorities watching out for their citizens but of robbers watching thieves.
There is a new frustrating wrinkle for Canadians driving down the I-95 "Main Street" to Florida. And I'm not just talking about the endless miles of construction.
Stick your Visa card into the American gas pumps and you find they just won't work. Oh they may appear to work, but then they ask for a Zip Code for verification and then the pump freezes. Or the pump just blinks at you and says "see attendant inside." It got so complicated at a couple of stations that I just left.
So I turned to what was a reliable fall back, the little black cylinder that Esso uses for its Speedpass system. It was rejected. Phoned Esso/Exxon and they said my Visa card had been changed without me notifying them. So they would correct that. Tried to use the black thingamajig several days later, and it was rejected again. The attendant accepted my cash with the comment that he always uses cash because everything else had become so dang complicated.
Which is what I've been doing for weeks. With any luck, my Canadian cash will soon be worth a lot more, because surely the American dollar doesn't deserve to be that much higher than the beaver buck. And if that luck holds, the cost of gasoline will fall to a price that truly reflects the low cost of oil.
But I'm not holding my breath, not with oil companies showing that they're still the robber barons that the world thought they were a century ago, not with governments showing that they're as incompetent as banks when it comes to business.
All I can do is sit on the sand and drink. At least it's not snow.

MAJOR MUSLIM CLERIC DEFENDS ISRAEL

A Muslim Voice For Peace

I have written more than 5,000 columns but this one from May 5, 2002 in the Toronto Sun continues to be a favourite on the Internet because it came from the other side of the great war between Muslims, Jews and Christians. The names of the leaders have changed, and there would be changes in the figures - although refugee figures are often frozen cruelly - but the anguish and the blindness and the hypocrisy continues.

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Downstairs in the wine cellar of a trendy Yorkville restaurant is an unlikely setting for an Islamic scholar as he rips at Saudi Arabia for its destabilizing evil and condemns those who pretend the Koran justifies the slaughter by suicide bombers.

To further confound those Muslims who will never rest until they drive all Israelis into the sea, Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi points to passages from the Koran showing the land of Israel was given to the Jews.
For example, Palazzi, chief imam (cleric) of Italy's Muslim community, quotes the Koran (17:104, The Night Journey): "And thereafter We said to the Children of Israel: 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.'"

For this controversial cleric, who says his views are more traditional than the present "politicized" consensus of Mideast Islamism, world terrorism and the agonies in Israel can be blamed on the Wahhabis, once just a tribe of Bedouin nomads but now a primitive sect which rules Saudi Arabia through wealth and control of Islam's holiest sites.

He calls Saudi Arabia the "roguiest nation in the world." It isn't a word, but the knot of journalists at the table know what he means, that when you talk about rogue nations, three others of which belong to George W. Bush's "axis of evil," Saudi Arabia must be the leader as it has a foreign policy of using petro-wealth to spread terrorism via fundamentalism.

Those views are the reason Palazzi was busy last week from Montreal to Winnipeg, brought here from his professorial post in Rome by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research to speak to synagogues, to religious leaders and at the University of Toronto.

When we in the media kept pointing out how different his views were from those coming out of the Arab world, Palazzi reminded us there are Islamic voices speaking out for Israel in the non-Arab Muslim world, from Turkey to the republics of the former Soviet Union. He doesn't brandish his doctorate, by appointment of the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, or his studies at Italian and Egyptian universities, but points out many Koran interpreters are unordained and little educated; that one, for example, a charismatic Hamas leader, admits his title of "sheikh" is honourary.

Palazzi is a roly-poly 40-year-old whose commendable ecumenical beliefs are rooted in family. His father converted to Islam after marrying his Muslim mother, and he's married to a Catholic. There's nothing roly-poly about his rhetoric or logic, though. So much so, a colleague wonders whether he fears death threats from an Islamic world that finds it easy to kill infidels.

He has been "criticized, attacked, insulted, nothing more," he replies. Besides, he imagines the fundamentalist Muslims of Italy - who control more than 90% of the mosques despite their few numbers, thanks to the fact, he says, that they get all the money they need from the Saudis - talk to each other about leaving him alone because, "We can buy space in the media, we can buy politicians, so what do we care if someone is criticizing?"

He demolishes any religious excuse for suicide bombers.

"They (Muslim clerics) play with words to justify it. They are lying in order to please their governments. It is anti-Islamic because suicide is, by itself, anti-Islamic in principle."

Indeed, there are many moral people and faiths who would support his argument, which goes this way: "You are permitted to kill for three reasons in the name of Islam. When you are a soldier, part of an army, you can kill the soldiers of the enemy, not the civilian population. You can kill in self-defence, if all of a sudden someone is trying to kill you, you have a right to defend yourself by killing him. You can execute someone by order of a court for a capital commission. Apart from those three cases, there are no others in which someone is legitimized to kill in the name of Islam, or in which Islam permits killing."

But then a colleague asked about martyrdom, when a Palestinian feels his land is occupied and he has no hope and his children have no food or future. Palazzi said there is no moral difference between this man throwing himself under an armoured vehicle and blowing it up, or running into a pizzeria and blowing up 20 people eating dinner.

It would be wrong, the cleric said, even in the case of oppression where a regime denies religious freedom. Resistance can be organized against the military if religious freedom is denied, but where religion is respected (as in Israel) but there is other oppression, then Islamic law says you "have passions and bear that injustice or you have got to exile and settle in a land that has no oppression."

Palazzi is savagely cynical about the Saudi-American relationships. He says attacking Afghanistan after 9/11 made as much sense for the U.S. as attacking some other country than Japan after Pearl Harbor. The Americans "attacked the soldiers of terror but not the generals of terror," he said. "If they invaded any country, it should have been Saudi Arabia where they must feel invincible."

And going after Iraq is just the U.S. doing what the Saudis desire. Palazzi says Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization don't want a state because PLO leaders make more money now than they would running one. If it happens, he says, the Saudis would just say they had won the first stage of a war and Hamas should keep going.

His arguments spill out in a richer mix than the meal.

Then I climb to the street from the wine cellar and walk by the patio tables under the budding trees, where weather is the only concern, not the fear of those who would kill you because they have been deluded into thinking it is a holy act.

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The second part of the column appeared May 12, 2002 under the headline:FINDING A HOME FOR THE PALESTINIANS. It dealt with the sheikh's argument that Israel isn't the only mideast country that should be considered as a home for the Palestinians. Surely we must pay attention to this argument as Gaza continues to be a running sore for the Israeli state.


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No wonder so many world leaders ignore the history of the bloodstained rocks of Israel and demand the Palestinians be given their own state. They don't want more coming to their country, as they proved again last week when it became so difficult to find a place to deport the 13 Palestinians from the birthplace of Jesus.

They were said to be militants, proven troublemakers. But there's nothing new about not wanting Palestinians in your backyard. For 50 years, thanks to their leaders, they have proven a troublesome, costly crowd with their home industry of terrorism.

Just ask Israel's neighbours, who are so insistent it give up vital defensive space because they don't want Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority in their cities and towns.

There's Lebanon, with 376,000 Palestinian refugees, Syria, with 383,000 such refugees, and Jordan, with 1.57 million refugees. In fact, in Jordan, the Palestinian state already exists that is the hot wish of the UN and now, George W. Bush. The population of Jordan is over 55% Palestinian, making things unstable for the supposedly purer Bedouin tribes.

The only reason it wasn't called the kingdom of Palestine when it emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, as some suggested, was to make it plain it was exempted from a Jewish home state.

It was the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan then. And Transjordan became just Jordan in 1949 after its Arab Legion seized the Jordan River's West Bank. The UN designated these biblical lands of Judea and Samaria as Arab lands, not giving them to Jordan or Israel (and Israel should have got them, not only because of their history but because Israel got less than 50% of the land it had been promised in the original British declaration). When Jordan formally annexed the West Bank, it was resented by Arab states as well as Israel.

I remind you of this history because when the UN insists Israel withdraw from "illegally occupied Palestinian territory," diplomats are making several mistakes as they kowtow to Arab oil. It is not an occupation and it is not illegal for Israelis to be there. It is disputed territory that Israel conquered in the Six Day War with Jordan, land the world had never recognized as being Jordanian after Jordan seized it against the UN's wishes.

Got that? I don't have enough space for all the language of the Geneva Convention showing that land taken in a defensive war may be kept until a treaty is worked out. Yet I quote the past for another reason, to justify the answer two weeks ago when Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, the Muslim scholar and Italy's grand imam, was being interviewed here.

We asked about this demand for a Palestinian state. The sheikh argued there are already two Palestinian states, Israel and Jordan, and what the world is calling for is a new one on the Jordan's West Bank, one he's not confident the Palestinians really want because their leaders like Yasser Arafat are getting so rich from terrorism.

Palazzi doesn't think the Mideast agony would end with a new state. Surely, only the foolish clutching at straws think it would. Such a state, with or without Arafat, who once again is giving us doubletalk on stopping his suicide bombers, would have terrorism as its largest export, an offensively gross national product. And not just against Israel. What about the old Jordanian targets, especially the royal ones?

I doubt it is ever far from the mind of Jordan's King Abdullah, who met with George W. Bush after another suicide bomber had Ariel Sharon cut short his own talks with the president. After all, his great grandfather, the first King Abdullah, was assassinated by a Palestinian in 1951, a terrorist killed the prime minister in 1960, there was a civil war with the Palestinians in 1970, then in 1971 another PM was assassinated by Black September, a Palestinian guerrilla group, and his father was wounded by a Palestinian assassin in 1971. And there was unrest in between those lowlights.

King Abdullah and his country enjoy good relations with the West since such real peace emerged with Israel in the mid-1990s that Jordanian airliners could fly over the Holy Land and no longer have to go around. I was in Israel the day the king's father was at the controls of the first such flight.

I loved Amman and the great archeological treasures of Petra and Jerash on a visit in 1996, after a world media organization tried to meet in both Jerusalem and Amman but the Jordanian part failed. Old habits die hard, especially where the press isn't free. But I enjoyed the country and its great expanses. Plenty of room here, I thought, if a new Palestinian state was established on both sides of the Jordan River.

After all, Jordan has nearly five times the land Israel has, and its history intertwines with the Palestinians. The only reason the UN isn't hammering it like Israel to donate land to the Palestinians is that they're not the Jews or Christians that evil Saudi billionaires want to exterminate.

COME SMELL MY SHRUNKEN HEAD

Collecting, Even Fingerprinting, The Ages

It's been 50 years between my visits to the Niagara Falls Museum. But its wonders have grown beyond the believe-it-or-not stuff, like two-headed sheep, thanks to the fascinating additions from the ages of everything from shrunken heads to, perhaps, a ghost.
And the collection has moved from the Falls to downtown Toronto, to a loft with expanses of wooden floors, freaks of nature and ethnological gems.
It may have all started in 1827 when this was Canada's first museum with curiosities like those that later dotted the CNE Midway and small tourist museums everywhere. But mixed in between war clubs and swords, and one of the first electric chairs, are costly relics that would be right at home in the great museums of Egypt and the Americas.
Hold a shrunken head in your hand like a grapefruit, smell its old leather scent, then close your eyes, and you can almost hear the war drums beating and the shrieks as warriors are cut down and triumphantly beheaded. The smell is a trifle disappointing because you expect smoke from cooking fires or even a trace of the hallucogenics that transported shadowy figures far beyond the Amazon.
It's all thanks to Billy Jamieson, a beguiling mix of collector, showman and enthusiastic salesman. He saved the museum as it disintegrated into leaky shabbiness, and in the process of financing its purchase sold mummies and coffins for $2 million U.S. to an Atlanta museum.
So Jamieson is remembered in the tight world of Egyptologists as the Canadian who sold the missing mummy of Ramesses 1. The pharaoh now rests in the famous mummy wing of the national museum in Cairo near the Nile. (The Carlos museum didn't feel it could keep one of the kings of Egypt.)
It's a great story about scholarly detective work and it was detailed in a NOVA show on PBS titled The Mummy Who Would Be King. Fascinating, but then Jamieson is rather fascinating himself.
(I have let him describe himself at the end of this blog in material extracted from his Internet site: www.jamiesontribalart.com which is one of his tools in generating interest in his hobby/business/passion. There's also www.niagaramuseum.com)
Walking around his museum/home and listening to him romp verbally from weirdness to displays that have other collectors sweating with envy is a unique experience. He merges an encyclopaedic knowledge with a grisly fascination for the really odd.
It happened for Mary and me because our son Mark was home from China for a visit. He had worked for eBay in Canada and noticed there was a listing for a great whale skeleton. He followed up and as a result a Reuters story appeared around the world about this Canadian who now owned the big whale skeleton that I had marveled at in 1954 while on a high school outing. As a result of the publicity, the skeleton was sold to a sheik for $200,000. (We're not talking about stamp collecting here.)
It was a cold snowy night when Mary, Mark and I visited the Falls collection with a small group, including a forensic constable from the Toronto police and students from a course he teaches. We were an attentive audience as Jamieson walked us through his collection after insisting we must give him our full attention. It was worth it. (The loft is often the setting for fund-raising, even book launches.)
Then the constable and students conducted a unique class project - seeing if they could get a finger print from a mummy that Jamieson still owns, The mummy's value was reduced by the ancient grave robbers that left it unwrapped after probing for treasure, but it's plain from its crossed arms that it is a high priest.
A rubber liquid was squirted around a finger - with a business card below in case it dripped - and then after it hardened, we all had a look. Yes, there was a print. No, the mummy was not damaged, although I kidded the forensic crew as they carefully pried away the mould that if the finger came too, I was going to tell the Sun.
Here I was holding a mummy's leg when normally you can't even touch. Indeed, for more than a decade, the mummy wing in the Egyptian museum was closed while scholars and bureaucrats argued whether it was appropriate to let tourists gawk at the bodies of your royalty.
You can tell from the fingerprinting anecdote that Jamieson is a happy throw-back to the good old days when museums were a lot of fun. Now education often drowns out entertainment.
Oh yes, you were wondering about that ghost. One of Jamieson's acquisition, along with the whale skeleton, the mummies and the two-headed sheep, was the baroque rear of a real hearse that looks like it was made for a Victorian horror movie.
Inside its glass windows you can see a large tropical fish tank. Which takes away some of its spookiness. Except there have been sightings of a ghost that perches above the skulls that line the hearse roof and presumably tries to communicate with the shrunken heads.
I've investigated several ghost houses and have heard two ghosts. So I volunteered to do a vigil with Jamieson to see if this ghost reappeared. I'm not sure the ghost would bother me as much as spending a night with more body bits than are in a small cemetery.
But if a great talker like Jamieson was keeping me company, the night would pass in a twinkling.

FROM THE JAMIESON WEB SITE
Ethnologist, musicologist, antique tribal art collector, dealer. Bill's interests evolve around the forgotten cultures and customs of the South Pacific, Indonesia, South America and North America. Also Bill's fieldwork among the Shuar of Ecuador and Peru helped him learn a great deal about that tribal group. His expertise has been drawn upon by National Geographic's documentary production unit for a series on headhunting, human sacrifice, and canabalism. He is also consulted by museums and researchers.
Because of his interest in disappearing Andean-Amazonian tribal rituals, he has financed and led five expeditions into Ecuador and Peru from 1995 to 2001, researching traditional naturopathic healings and related rituals. Focusing on the Shuar tribe, famous for their past custom of shrinking heads, Bill has amassed the most extensive Shuar library in existence, including a collection of shrunken human heads. Bill has also taken an interest in other cultures and collected early ethnographic material from the Native cultures of North America, South America, South Pacific, Dayak of Borneo, Naga of the Highlands of India and Batak of Sumatra.
IN 1998, Bill purchased Canada's oldest museum, the Niagara Falls Museum. Established in 1827, the museum held title to the name The Explorers Club in Canada. Bill donated the name to The Explorers Club in New York City. Nine Egyptian mummies that had been in the museum's collection since 1861 were sold to the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta.
Bill is also an antique tribal art dealer and he has set records at Sotheby's for sale in Polynesian material. He continues to find great material through traveling, chasing old collections and constant communication with other dealers. He wants to acquire great old North American Indian, Pre-Columbian, African, Oceanic and Indonesian Art, plus oddities and curiosites from around the world.

REHEATING A STEW OF BEEFS

Some Gripes Never Change

Readers used to envy me when I devoted a column to beefs and what bugged me about the careless service of modern times.
So when I vented on Jan. 8, 2009, in a blog titled DOES ANYONE CARE? IS THERE ANYONE THERE? I'm sure there was some envy about how a little publicity could erase some gripes out of daily life.
If only....
My newspapers now seem to be thrown further from the door. And TIME magazine, one of my favourite reads, hasn't appeared with my mail since I complained about not getting the watch for subscribing again.
My son Mark tried two more times to convert some Chinese money and deposit it into his Royal Bank account. He also tried at TD. Finally got RBC to take the money, on the fourth try, and then got a phone call of apology from the manager the next day. Nice, but he would have preferred to have been able to change the money on the first try.
My wife Mary and I have been banking near Royal York and Bloor for 46 years. The building and the name keep changing - from Eastern and Permanent through Canada Permanent to Canada Trust to TD-Canada Trust. We've got older, the tellers have got younger, the service has got worse.
I did two electronic transfers to ING from our joint TD chequing account in November, one to Mary's account, one to mine. For some strange reason, my ETF didn't go through and Mary's was taken from her separate chequing account, leaving her overdrawn by $3,500.
My wife seldom uses this account but had told them she wanted money automatically transferred from her savings account if need be. Apparently they haven't done this since 2002 and Canada Trust days, but no one told Mary that.
So TD honoured this ETF, because she had overdraft insurance, but then proceeded to charge Mary $150 in fees since then without ever telling her. And she had been in the bank at least eight times in the two months since. Temporarily, there was $30,000 in her savings account. If you wonder how she wouldn't notice, she doesn't use either the chequing or the savings account on a regular basis but uses the joint accounts with me.
So we descend on TD on a snowy day at the end of January to ask what is going on. And filling in temporarly at the info/reception desk is a large efficient man who handles our complaint and eliminates the extra fees. Later we found out he was the manager, Sean Donegan, and he was great.
Except...
Surely in the age of computers and ETFs and the fact that any bank can tell you, when you finally get to the head of the line, exactly what you have in that second in all your accounts, there is no need or excuse to be punishing a customer because someone made a mistake on an electronic transfer. Surely when the customer has ten times that money in a savings account a transfer can be automatically made to the chequing account, which, of course, they used to do. But they don't want to do that now because they make more money by not performing such a simple task.
A friend listened to my recitation of beefs in that Jan. 8 blog and just couldn't believe the part that dealt with the ordeal of trying to get my wife out of Mount Sinai hospital after her operation. He's on one of the boards at the Trillium health complex (and I'm also on a hospital board) and pointed out that there a volunteer would have delivered Mary to the side of my car without problem.
If only the downtown hospitals made it that easy. If only they had a reasonable excuse. But these days you often doesn't get an answer, that is if you get them to listen in the first place.