HUMMING AT THE TORONTO SYMPHONY

I GUESS IT'S BETTER THAN MUTTERING AT THE TSO

The piano notes poured over me like I was under a waterfall in Cottage Country. I relaxed and enjoyed with all my cares drowned by the music.

Then I heard it. Some damn person was humming to Chopin. It's bad enough when Toronto Symphony patrons crinkle programs or candy wrappers as if they were home on the couch. Or when they comment loudly to companions during lulls. But some idiot near me was humming to the chords, and I wasn't even sure they were on key.

I sit in the front row at Roy Thomson Hall in the seat closest to the soloists. I outlined the history of my tickets in a blog on Sept. 1, 2009 titled Erich Kunzel's Amazing Memory. (I told then of actually playing with the TSO and conducting it in very, very brief moments. I was tempted to inform the snotty usher of that when she told me recently to take my program off the stage edge as I stood during a break because that was only for, and she paused theatrically, "the artists.")

From my vantage point, I know which soloists sing in bare feet under the evening gown. I watch the hairs of the bows fray as the players saw away. Pianist tend to stare right into my eyes as they play. I'm so close that I can see that string players all wear their rings on the right hand.

I wondered during the humming if conductor Peter Oundjian ever felt compelled to turn and glare and hold a shushing finger to his lips. After all, he asks patrons to keep their coughing down when a record is being made of a performance.

I looked closely at the pianist, Andreas Haefliger, as he tinkled and pounded his way through Frederic Chopin's Piano Concert No. 2 in F Minor, OP. 21. Would the humming intrude on him despite his fierce concentration?

I don't know whether it was in the Larghetto or the Allegro vivace parts when I figured out that it was the esteemed pianist himself who was doing the humming. Then Mary confirmed that as the intermission began.

I'm sure there are classical experts who have many examples of musicians getting so wrapped in the music that they feel compelled to vocally egg on their instruments. I'm not a music expert, just a lover. I have trouble keeping track of composers and their works. But even I remember Glenn Gould, the eccentric genius from Toronto, who rebelled from concert performances and became the introverted control freak of studio recordings. Despite the care he took with every note, he became notorious for the singing and muttering that accompanied his playing. Just listen to his recordings of The Goldberg Variations which launched and then secured his world fame. You can hear him muttering over the Steinway keyboard from his slouched perch in that battered sawed-off chair.

I was tempted to call up to Haefliger, who has made some popular recordings too, and ask after his bows if he was aware of his muttering and did it encourage him. However,

in the formal structured world of classical music, where, for example, junior players never dare talk to the conductor god, such impertinence on a mere patron's part may have led to a lifetime ban.

As I write, I'm listening to Classical 96.3FM which hasn't yet been ruined by the incessant promotion of its owner, Moses Znaimer. It appears that the staff's pay is based on just how many plugs they can voice on air for Znaimer and his prospering CARP empire. (I wrote about this on Dec. 8, 2009 under the logical title of Carping About CARP.)

One of the good changes under Znaimer is listeners can request their favourite music. It's Bill's Classical Juke Box. A man just phoned in to Bill Anderson, said he was blind and that his guide dog loved baroque music. Could the station play any baroque music that it wanted because the guide dog hadn't indicated a favourite?

What a nice moment to listen to some nice music being played mainly for a dog. Later there was a comment on air about another guide dog that liked to hum. I missed the wonderful details about the public reaction as the dog led his master around and hummed happily.

As a kid reporter, I did my share of being dispatched to listen when readers phoned in to say they owned a dog that could sing. Some did... a bit. Then there were singing dogs, supposedly, on the Ed Sullivan show. I can recall that my friend, Ralph Pohlman, the irascible psychiatrist, had a wonderful dog which actually did sound like it was singing even before I had a few rums

Whether a dog is humming or singing or growling is really something that each listener has to determine for themselves. As someone has said, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the noise from an animal is in the ear of the beholder. On my recent visit to Romania, I never did get a chance to interview one of those dogs that Romanians claim are humming and others think are giving muffled growls.

I like my sounds straight up. Dogs should bark and pianists play and if they want to do a little freelancing when it comes to utterances, all they will get from me is surprise that they didn't stick to the conventional script. Of course Glenn Gould is the exception!

STRONG MAYOR CAN GIVE WEAK GOVERNMENT

STRONG LEADERS WITH FEET OF CLAY

It's the lazy approach to politics. Instead of worrying about all the pieces in the jigsaw of government power, the voters worry only about the boss of it, the person they think holds the jigsaw.

So we had a municipal election that for most voters and the media was simply a contest between Rob Ford and George Smitherman and not the hundreds of other candidates for mayor, councillor and school trustee.

It's an old gag in Canada that voters emerge from the voter's booth waving the ballot with puzzled air and demanding to know where is the name of the person they want to elect PM or Premier, not having figured out that can only be the choice in several ridings, and that the PM or premier only gets power if they have most of the MPs or MPPs whose names are on all the other ballots.

Of course, after the elections in the senior levels of government, the voters and the media pay the most attention to the leader and, to vary a cliche, the ordinary MP or MPP is not known 100 steps away from the Parliament Buildings or the Legislature, and too many of them don't even feel they have recognition or power within the buildings.

The municipal election focussed almost completely on the views of Ford and Smitherman. Since election day, the talk is all about what Ford will do. There is the occasional story about the plans of mere councillors for the TTC or in environmental and cultural areas. But there's been drowned by the attention to whom Ford is going to choose to be committee chairs or to run important bodies.

Let's not forget that Ford is only one of 45 votes on Toronto council. With his perceived and real powers, he leads the most important voting bloc. Yet he still needs the support of 22 councillors to pass anything important.

It has always been that way in Toronto because even though a "strong mayor system" has been thrust upon it, Ford still doesn't have many of the mayoral powers of the United States where strongmen have flourished in New York, Chicago and all the other big cities.

There are many who wish the Toronto mayor had more powers. Count me out! Just look at the damage to the basic infrastructure of Toronto because Dave Miller was so busy dancing on the world environmental stage, he forgot to fill the potholes.

The people who I join in opposing a strong mayor system point out that it's fine if you get a great man or woman, but what happens if you get a lemon. You can't just make lemonade.

I summarize the argument here by reciting one of the common sense rules of life : Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Ford has promised as his term comes to an end to deal with the size of council, perhaps cutting the number of councillors in half. Council should also decide to reduce the term from four years to three, because the first four-year term was hardly a success. I also think council and Ford should consider reducing some of the powers under our modified strong mayor system.

In 2003, the Toronto Board of Trade, to its credit, established a task force examining City Hall governance. The membership was led by Mike Wilson, the former finance minister and U.S. ambassador, Al Leach, the provincial municipal minister who brought in amalgamation, and some who had been powerful insiders at City Hall as the clerk and CAO.

Most task force members favoured Toronto adopting a strong mayor system and a longer four-year term. They argued that this would allow a mayor to implement the platform upon which he had been elected. As the only media member of the task force, I was pleased to have some former City Hall senior bureaucrats argue along with me that there were dangers in giving too much power to a mayor. He or she should have to persuade a majority of the councillors. The mayor shouldn't be able to impose the will of the office.

We also saw value in having a deputy mayor elected in each of four sections: Etobicoke/ York, Toronto/East York, North York and Scarboro. They would form a cabinet with the mayor. The position would also be a launching pad for good deputies to challenge the mayor at election time who now has the incredible advantage of being the only politician elected previously in a race over all 22 ridings.

Our report got lost in the process. I last wrote about it on July 28, 2008, under the blog headline Overdosing On Powers At City Hall.

Cub reporters are told not to write many stories about political process because most readers have little interest. Process stories are covered by the cliche that you should never watch sausages being made. Trouble is, that's when the horse-trading is done, in the backrooms, in the tedious progress of any bylaw or law through the political machine.

Tinkering with council's structure is process, not seen as important as the future of the TTC, police staffing and decayed roads. But unless we have a more efficient council in dealing with the city's needs and the voters' wants, it's a little like asking a carpenter to renovate your kitchen while leaving most of the tools in the truck.

LET'S TALK TURKEY ABOUT CROSSING BORDER

FARMERS ARE PROTECTED BUT WHO PROTECTS CONSUMERS?

The fact that we pay more for our dairy products, poultry, meat and other foods than the Americans just across the border was shoved into our face again, like a pie hitting a clown, with the kerfuffle over bringing more than one frozen turkey into Canada.

It had been reported that you couldn't even bring in one turkey without paying duty. Nope, Toronto Star readers objected, you can. The feds confirmed that, but warned if you try to bring in a second one, that would end up costing you 154.5% in duty besides the purchase price. (Let's not forget that .5 per cent because our government is always determined to get every last cent.)

Oh yes, you also need a special form from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

Turkeys have been big news recently. Not only did all the American news come basted with turkey gravy for a week or so, there were more announcements that turkeys may be an incredibly stupid bird, and they've been bred so they're too top heavy to walk easily, but their meat is healthy as well as tasty.

Of course there is always the publicity over the U.S. president "pardoning" two turkeys. When I first saw that on an hilarious West Wing TV show, I thought it was a clever writer's gag until it turned out to really happen. An unpopular president pardoning turkeys is an early Christmas gift for stand-up comics. The gag for Jay Leno was that the bird pardoned by the president went on to commit a crime.

An official for the 546 turkey producers in Canada said that charging duty on two or more turkeys is needed to make sure our producers make money.

If that sounds familiar, you have heard similar arguments over the years when the media spotlight that we pay more for milk, eggs, poultry, cheese, pork, beef - and the list stretches over the horizon - because our Canadian producers have to make money.

Since many of our family farms have evolved into larger agri-businesses instead, one wonders why our giant farm businesses can't compete better with the multi-national farm goliaths south of the border. Aren't we just helping huge corporations rather than a farmer with a mixed 100-acre operation that used to beroutine in Canada until they vanished under the huge cost of land and machinery.

Why do we have to pay duty if we bring in more than 20 kilograms of any fresh, chilled or frozen poultry or meat for personal use?

My mini headline about who is looking after the food consumer is an issue that has bugged me for decades. I remember in 2001 writing about the stats in a speech by the federal agriculture minister which appeared to indicate that the value of what our farmers produced was equal to the government aid that they received. Why, I wondered in a column, don't we just forget about helping the farmer and enjoy the lower food prices when the support levels were removed. I waited for the reaction about how I had misinterpreted the figures but there wasn't a peep.

In 1990, my son John Henry, working as a consultant to Small Business Ontario, which was a creation of the provincial trade ministry, completed a study of cross-border shopping in a number of cities near the border. He found that a Canadian Tire store in Cornwall was selling a popular Nintendo video game at a lower price than any store just across the border, yet local customs records showed that between 30 and 40 of those games each day were being imported by shoppers. We're so used to bargains there than we really don't shop around here.

My son now lives in California and daily enjoys the lower costs and better service. He says a major reason Ontarians shopped in the States two decades ago was the cheaper gas and the cheaper booze because our government taxes on them are so much higher. Our booze is also more expensive because our brewers and distillers must buy their grains in Canada even though they are cheaper in the U.S.

Even our bread costs more. That is significant because there are countries like Egypt where the price of bread is kept as low as possible to keep the people happy. The same thing happened there thousands of years ago, and beer was included too. In countries like Japan today, their staple of rice is not only not taxed, the production is subsidized heavily to make rice cheap.

The turkey should be the icon for the needed debate into why Canadians have to pay more for their food than Americans, even in restaurants. After all, its nickname is "gobbler," after the call of the male. And we all know that "gobble" is not a nice term for devouring.

Which leads me to accuse the federal and provincial governments of gobbling our taxes and not being ashamed that they care more about rural voters than city voters.

Who speaks for the Canadian consumer? No one! Even the consumers' associations and food critics are brushed aside by the marketing boards who have captured the politicians and all the officials who probably used to work for the marketing boards.

WORD PLAY BEATS FOREPLAY

PUNS ARE THE HIGHEST FORM OF HUMOUR

I really like foreplay too, but I wanted your attention.

I also like puns more than jokes, mainly because too many punch lines have become predictable due to the tsunamis of email jokes flooding the Internet.

I also confess that when I coin a word, if anyone actually can claim to do that in the English language, I tend to write it into the ground. Long-suffering readers know that Grits are often "gliberals" for me, and that I've reached the "anecdotage" of my life. Hopefully, that's only the sixth stage and not the feeble last one listed by Shakespeare in the wonderful "all the world's a stage" lines in As You Like It.

I claim to be the first to dub Mel Lastman "supermouth." You know, the mouth that roared, the first mayor of Toronto's amalgamated city. The Bad Boy of excited language. Nooobody could gush or goose the language like Mel.

I remember that in my 1970s crusade for streetcars, I popularized the term "red rocket." (I don't think I would do that today because buses and reserved lanes are the better way.)

Nope, I didn't dream the rocket imagery up, some streetcar buffs did, but they told me at lunch. So I'm credited by historians in this fight with making most Torontonians familiar with the term by using it so often in my columns.

Before the explosion of media, a term spoken in the 1940s, like "Big Blue Machine" to describe the Conservative party in Ontario, could linger unnoticed for two decades before it became part of political language.

Not today. There are so many columnists, bloggers and talking heads that a word can become common in commentary in days. Think of "refudiation."

Then we have great speeches, like JFK's "ask not what your country can do for you," which really are echoes of speeches given decades or centuries before. Not that that should detract from their inspiration, luster and fame.

Towards the end of each year, we are treated by writers and newspapers to new words, puns and bastardizations from 2010 that may have been said before. But so what! Yet any person who believes that he or she was really the first to say anything is living in a fool's paradise.

The Washington Post has printed a clutch of neologisms (which are funny alternate meanings for familiar words) and entries in a contest where you are challenged to add, subtract or change one letter to give a word a great new twist.

Why do I think about "gliberals" when I survey some of the neologisms. There's "glibido" meaning all talk and no action. And "intaxication" meaning your euphoria at a tax refund before you remember it was your money to begin with. And "cashtration." And "bozone" meaning what surrounds stupid people to block bright ideas. And "sarchasm" meaning the gulf between the authors of sarcasm, who are often political commentators, and the people who don't get it.

But enough of politics and "gliberals" with their "glibidos."

I like several of the Post's nelogisms. Such as "flabbergasted" for being appalled at how much weight you've gained. And "willy-nilly" for impotence. And "balderdash" for a rapidly receding hairline. And "coffee" for the person upon which you cough.

There are also lists of words that should be retired. They include "closure, outside the box, shovel ready, czar, sexting and teachable moment." I would also like to scrap "junk" in favour of the honourable expression of "family jewels." And politicians should stop talking about "working Canadians" as if it's one group because that's almost all of us.

And then there are lists of the nicest words, which often have touches of onomatopeia - where the word has the sound of what it's describing, like thunder. You find "bucolic, dalliance, redoubtable, comely, demure, fetching and lithe." Ah yes, remember those comely lithe cheerleaders who turned out to be redoubtable when you wanted a dalliance in a bucolic setting.

A cousin, David C. Prescott, Esq., who grumbles if I don't give him credit, sends along the winning entry in the University of Arkansas annual contest for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term.

This year's term was "political correctness." The winner wrote that it is a "doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end."

If you have coined some concoction of letters into a great word, or have a great definition, send it to me. I promise not to claim it for my own for at least a ....month.

SHOULD ONTARIO HYDRO BE PROSECUTED?

ARE SMART METERS JUST A CASH GRAB?

The line is that figures lie and liars figure. Let's change that to Hydro lies and Hydro figures.

The public fury at Ontario Hydro bills is real and justified. There are just too many horror stories. And I will tell you one of them, and throw in another for dessert.

They're not as huge as some of the bills I've heard of. But I can authenticate every detail. It leads me to believe that we need an electric ombudsman until we can wade out of this mess, ignoring all the Hydro hype about all these smart meters and great hours to do the wash because the costs keep rising no matter what we do.

Or we should start legal action in small claim courts.

Because math teachers will testify that I am challenged arithmetically (I needed 12 courses to qualify for university) I keep every bill. And when my math seems dubious, I ask one of my three sons to double check, and if they grumble, I point out who financed their five degrees.

So I say confidently that Hydro has stolen from me on at least two of my three accounts.

I am not mollified about this promise by the sinking McGuinty Government to give us a 10% discount for five years on Hydro bills, not when those bills are supposed to rise almost 50% during the same period because of decades of stupidity, overspending, failed projects and flatulent management of the provincial utility.

Besides, since we own Hydro, this is just robbing from us to pay us, with the middle men of Hydro living obese lives. I had a secretary who had worked at Hydro. When I said no to some office equipment, she said that at Hydro she got anything she wanted. And so did everyone, from the army of PR guys with their fat expense accounts to the men who designed the huge generation projects that always cost two or three times more than estimated.

I have two meters at the cottage because my bunkie used to be a separate property. To eliminate that meter and link to the main cottage is hardly easy because the estimates and bureaucracy, from red tape to the waiting, multiplies a simple project into a costly one.

For years, my cottage neighbours and me have howled more about our Hydro bills than a wolf pack at a full moon. And it just got worse.

Last year, I paid $209.72 for service to the bunkie. Much of that was monthly charges of around $15 even when the electricity had been off for months. Just how much did I use? Well, Hydro says it was 610 kWh, of which 560 came in one monthly blow. As a result, I got a form letter saying that because I had used more than 500 kWh in 2009, I had exceeded the limit for the lowest system of billing for "secondary service" and would no longer be exempt from a monthly service charge. (So what were the monthly charges I was paying even though the bunkie was closed?)

The damning thing about Hydro's calculation is that it indicated I was consuming power at a rate two to three times what I had in previous years. Seems suspicious!

This year I have paid $199.38 for electricity for the few times that the bunkie was used. Oh yes, the consumption, according to Hydro, was 97 kWh for the year.

Gee, I said to a Hydro guy on the phone, doesn't that seem strange to you? Last year you claim that my consumption was six times higher, and that consumption also was several times higher than previous years.

So I go back to the lowest rate, I asked? Nope, he said, we don't know whether we're doing that any more. The way he talked, I asked if they still intended to provide any service. Oh yes, he said. Which, I guess, is a relief.

A friend who has a year-round cottage/home at Stoney Lake said he phoned Hydro about a huge bill, much larger than mine, and was told that it might be a neighbour running an extension cord into their property when they weren't around.

"But I live on top of a cliff," he said.

I feel like pushing our electric bureaucrats off a cliff.

The charges for the main cottage also are baffling, and I have suspicious thoughts about its fancy new meter that arrived early in the year. (The billing for the bunkie ignores the arrival of its new meter.) The main cottage last year used only a mystifying low of 327 kWh. Yet the annual charges were $736.68. This year the consumption was said for the summer period to be an incredible 2,202 kWh, with total consumption for the year at 2,719. The charges so far are $976.24 but I'm sure there will an ugly Christmas gift of another bill even though no electricity has been used since October.

So let me give you the executive summary, particularly for Hydro officials who are easily confused. There were no major changes in use for the two years. But last year Hydro claims I used more power in the bunkie than the main cottage. This year, it claims, I used eight times the power in the main cottage that I used last year.

Something's screwy in Cottage Country, and it's Hydro that is turning the screw into us. And it's not just in Cottage Country. In Toronto, I have paid $1,300 for electricity in 2009 and the same this year and I'm away more than I'm at home. I must see if the neighbours are sneaking in extension cords.

When I was a kid reporter, you knew you had arrived when you were invited to the big two media Christmas parties, one thrown by the vanished Eaton's empire and one by Hydro. Hydro wasn't exactly popular. One year each of us got an electric warming tray in addition to the Hydro banquet and flowing bar. Yet many overly-refreshed scribblers still threw buns at the Hydro chairman, W.E.P Duncan.

Next year there were no buns so they sailed slices of bread like frisbees. Hydro gave each of us a frozen turkey. One police beat reporter was stopped by a cop on the way home, got exasperated at the questioning, and erratically hit the cop over the head with the turkey. A deputy chief warned that some day he was going to do something really bad and would be charged.

Obviously 40 years ago we should have been throwing more questions than buns and bread at Hydro chairmen. I just hope we don't keep paying for Hydro's huge accumulated debt for the next 40 years.

P.S.
On the last day of 2010, I received three Hydro bills for a total of $600. The bill for the bunkie said I had used only seven kWh after the meters were read on Sept. 8. The charge was $74.24. I guess it would have been cheaper to use batteries to light the place. The charge for the main cottage was $195.41, and I wasn't there nearly three months of the time.

IN PRAISE OF NORA EPHRON

A POLYMATH OF WORDS

After 53 years in journalism, I have no idols but some great favourites. I have interviewed some of the most famous people in the world, but have never asked for an autograph. I treasure my memories instead, but I have just been reminded that memories can leak through the holes of your nostalgia like bathwater leaving the tub.

Some of that, of course, has to do with seniors' moments, which apparently expand as old farts age. I have just read that one of my great favourites, Nora Ephron, who is only 69, also can't remember some of the more notable events of her life, like meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, Cary Grant and Dorothy Parker.

Now I am at the melting Swiss cheese stage of my anecdotage, where if I had had a drink with Parker at the old Algonquin in New York, I may not remember that repartee but would still be able to quote some of her great lines. Like "women and elephants never forget." Or "you can't teach an old dogma new tricks."

I remember interviewing an explorer who says he found Noah's Ark but not his name or anything else. (He gave me what he said was a splinter from the ark, which is lost somewhere in my home along with a mummified finger (don't ask) and my first wedding ring.)

I remember interviewing Sir Edmund Hillary and remember that he was a bluff genial sort, but apart from asking the predictable question about whether he or Tenzing were first to the peak of Everest in 1953, I can't recall anything beyond the reply that they climbed as a team.

For 15 years I was a member of the prestigious International Press Institute which met in difficult foreign locales for press freedoms and always attracted the cream of national leaders plus a smattering of Nobel laureates, former PMs etc. Most of them are a memory blur, and only if I refresh myself with old notebooks from the basement does their voice and thoughts come back...a bit.

Ephron's latest book of musings, I Remember Nothing, deals with how seniors' moments have become the Google Moment of our time, because of the irrevocable forgetting of names and faces. One example for her? She no longer knows anyone in People magazine. That resonates with me. Thank heavens, I'm not the only one who finds its people and facts to be baffling trivia.

Ephron has been making the rounds of the arduous book tour. She was on the final show of the season for Bill Maher and didn't talk enough. She was interviewed in the National Post by a fan, Nathalie Atkinson. who writes and edits, stars allegedly in that weird comic strip The Posties, and is a great cottage guest.

Let me borrow her quotes, where Ephron explains that it's not because our brains become wise enough to realize that it's not important to recognize the latest 15-minute celebrity in People.

That's just a rationalization, she says. "But the truth is when you're young, you are in a desperate need to accumulate friends and information. And you clock it all. You file it all. If you meet someone at a party, there is no chance you won't recognize them if you bump into them several days later ... That stops in a way that you have no idea. You think you have an idea because every so often something slips your mind and you go 'oh my god, am I losing it?' But you don't. But you will."

I was rereading the interview, wondering whether she was stretching it when she said she couldn't remember meeting Eleanor or Cary, when the phone rang. My friend Ted Aver wanted me to come to the Tory holy-of-holies, Toronto's Albany Club, to hear a former colleague. And Aver reminisced about politicians he had invited me to interview over the years.

"Remember that Tory from England that you wrote about. He's doing quite well. I see him on TV all the time, "Aver said. I said I had never interviewed anyone from the British Government at the club. Aver is older too, and he blanked on the name but remembered the wife had a unusual name.

So I resorted to Google, which has replaced our memories, and after 10 minutes or so, determined that yes, I had interviewed a British Tory whose wife's first name was Ffion. To my embarrassment, it is quite a famous Tory, the former party leader who is now Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague.

Maybe it's just Tories who blank out most for me. A Tory friend, Jeff Lyons, who is in disfavour due to City Hall shenanigans, once asked me to interview a western friend who was running for leader. So I had breakfast with the friend, and we talked for three hours. I drove him downtown, and thought he was a bright agreeable politician without a chance. And I forgot about him. Then when Joe Clark became leader and then PM, I couldn't find my notes and there was this black hole in my memory space.

It wouldn't be so bad but I used to be consulted when reporters needed a fact in a hurry. (I didn't remember their name but I remembered the fact.) I was the institutional memory for some organizations. I never had the photographic memory of prominent people like Senator David Smith or Conrad Black but I could hold my own in trivia contests.

Then Google made recall irrelevant. I phoned a friend, Ralph Pohlman, the psychiatrist, trivia maven, and former Sun columnist, and lamented that Google had replaced us. (My example to him is that at a party we were arguing about the height of Conan O'Brien because of his Jumping Jack style of physical humour. Within 15 seconds and Google, I knew he is 6' 4.)

Dr. Pohlman's comment on the erosion of memory is that some of his older colleagues end up with patients who know more about their conditions than the doctors remember because they've been surfing the Internet.

Fortunately, I don't have to Google many of the great Ephron lines from her romantic comedies, books, plays, articles, musings etc .... The orgasm line from her Harry Met Sally movie. The line about her second husband, Carl Bernstein, in the movie Heartburn, after his fictional double was caught in an affair with a mutual friend. He was capable of "having sex with a Venetian blind."

I once interviewed Bernstein and introduced him as a banquet speaker. I really wanted to talk more about Ephron than Watergate, but I was afraid he would stampede. He had threatened to sue Ephron but never did.

Ephron says her love affair with journalism is over, that her "pretentious days" as a scribe writing "the first draft of history" are over, just as her illusion died of reaching objective truths. "Eventually, when I started writing about what you might call fiction, it became clear to me that there was no such thing as the truth. That, except for a very few things for wont of a better word we call facts, everything is a story, a point of view. And that was a kind of revelation."

Yet she says she loved journalism, that there's no better job when you're young.

Now that is something that I will never forget.

ROBBING ONTARIO AND THE WEST

CONSERVATIVES ARE AS BAD AS LIBERALS

Woe Canada, the land where rural voters have more clout than big city voters, where squeaky activists get the grease of millions, where the "have" provinces give and give and give to the "have- not" provinces, where you better move out of Toronto or Vancouver or Calgary or Edmonton if you lose your job and are looking for help.

There's nothing new or questionable in my first paragraph. I wish there were. I wish someone in Ottawa could deny that last year the unemployed of Ontario and the West received only half the benefits per person that the jobless got in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, that the notorious financial cuddling of Quebecers has ended, that the failed program of bilingualism was designed only to benefit francophones and not anglophones who were also fluent in French, that the flood of billions continues to Atlantic Canada no matter how flush they are with new resource discoveries.

Of course our federal pols also are capable of discriminating within a province as well as with ridings that weren't smart enough to have an MP in government. Consider the bizarre discrepancy between all the millions that went to Muskoka for the G20 meetings, where everything went swimmingly, and the trickle that came to Toronto, which doesn't vote Tory, and was turned into an armed camp by the over reaction of cops to the jerk activists.

But let's deal with billions rather than mere millions. I was sitting on the subway during the morning rush and I had more time than I wanted to examine a National Post story about the latest study into what it called "stealth equalization."

Nope, it wasn't another story about the baffling transfer of equalization payments between the feds and the provinces. The idea is that the "have-not" provinces don't have enough economic activity to generate enough revenue to deliver adequate public services to their residents. So they get help from Ottawa's tax revenue. Politicians have been squabbling over this for years.

But there's a new wrinkle in the figures, as far as I was concerned. If you study how many federal employees each province has for each 100,000 residents, you find that Manitoba and the Maritimes have far higher levels of federal employment than if those employees had been distributed proportionally in the country.

Ironically, that is true even though the capital is located in Ontario. So you would expect to find more federal employees in and around the capital. Yet Ontario last year had 1,742 federal employees per 100,000 population while Newfoundland had 1,823, P.E.I had 3,657, Nova Scotia had 3,219, New Brunswick had 2,655 and Manitoba had 2,619.

Provinces with fewer federal employees than Ontario were Quebec, (1,378) Saskatchewan, (1,210) B.C., (1,187) and Alberta, (936).

So we know all about the gush of equalization tax money that takes from the west to give to the east. But why, for example, would Manitoba have twice as many federal employes as its neighbour, Saskatchewan?

I know figures lie and liars figure. Yet this is compelling evidence that all the salaries and benefits that flow to these extra federal employees in five provinces from the federal treasury is an additional transfer of wealth from Canada's most productive provinces to those that have failed to be successful at supporting themselves.

Some time I think we should worry more about the West leaving than Quebec.