Erin Davis

Just a Thought

A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg even if you are half-cracked.  [Author Unknown]

Hey there - just two more days left in November.  Although I was feeling it was a bit early for Christmas shopping, I’m beginning to sense a bit of a deadline breathing down my neck lately.  I did a bit of e-tailing  online Monday, I’ll get my sister who’s wintering in California taken care of this week, and we need to get our BC stuff on a bus.  Otherwise, though, I’ll just stay sane, centred and be grateful that my hours allow me to shop at, say 10 am when the malls open on a Thursday morning, instead of lining up with everybody else on a Saturday afternoon.  Thank goodness.

I had a great opportunity to shop Tuesday while Rob was in North York doing some bookkeeping work for a friend, but my head felt like a lead balloon with this cold, so I just stayed home.  The whole ordeal of moving into the “new” closets is going well, and although Rob’s almost banished from the bedroom closet, he has inherited another three drawers in the bedroom dresser.  So he’s a little giddy about that.  No, really.  (You know you’re showing signs of age when getting in your wife’s drawers means just that - and you’re totally okay with it!)

Last evening I had the honour of emceeing an event at the venerable Albany Club, which was begun by a fellow named (Sir) John A. MacDonald 125 years ago.  The event was the official introduction of CAPE, the Canadian Association of Professional Educators.  From Montessori teachers to hockey coaches, through all points in between, this initiative is one that will spread across Canada and offer interaction, alliance and accreditation to members.  It sounds like an interesting, timely and very useful association, and I wish them every success.

Rob’s hitting the road to visit his mom in London today, but not before stopping off for a funeral - yes, another one - this time in Meaford, near Georgian Bay.  If you ever listened to AM radio in Toronto, you might remember Keith Rich, long time morning host in the 70’s and 80’s at CKEY and later CJCL when it was “Music of Your Life”.  While Keith was at CKEY, Rob was to him what The General and Gord are to Mike and me, his morning show producer for six laugh-filled years.  They shared many hours together on and off the air, and Rob felt a genuine fondness for and closeness to Keith.  My memories of him and his wife Elizabeth were few by comparison, but included a wonderful evening spent laughing and drinking wine at their country home near Orangeville.  We took Lauren to visit them when she was just a baby, and I recall very clearly almost having to hose the baby down in the Riches’ bathtub after a certain corn/diaper incident in the car.  (You should have seen Lauren’s face when I told her that story this week!)

At any rate, this is the second loss Rob’s been faced with in the space of one month - his father on October 20th and Keith Rich on the 19th of November.  It was with joy and laughter, though, that Rob listened to a cassette tape he happened to find in the office on Tuesday.  The only tape in the house (the rest are up north) it was of the final show Keith did at CKEY before moving up the dial to 1430 am.  Parts of the tape will be played at the memorial today, and I’m so glad he found that little cassette.  And Keith’s children will be grateful too, no doubt; up until the moment the tape was located, I don’t think they had any of his air work to share at the celebration of Keith’s life.  He was 80, by the way; his wife and friend Elizabeth Sheldrick died two years ago in her early 50’s.

One of the wonderful stories that Rob tells about Keith was his way of reminding dinner guests that he had an early morning radio show to do - something, of course, that I can totally relate to.  Keith would bring out his old alarm clock and start winding it up, with absolutely no effort to be subtle about it, just to make sure everybody got the message that it was time to go.  Pretty good, huh?

Well, my journal about airplane etiquette sure struck some nerves yesterday!  I’ll share your responses here tomorrow, as we welcome the weekend - and December - together.  Do take care, and thanks for coming by.

Just a Thought

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. [Herm Albright]

Good morning. First of all, if you came to find my journal at chfi.com yesterday and today - thank you. You went the extra mile and I am grateful. My server has been down since Sunday; I’m not sure why and I don’t know when it’ll be back up, but a big BIG thank you to Jay Kennedy, our CHFI web whiz, for getting the journal up just on chfi.com, since www.erindavis.com is pooched. I appreciate it.

Jay comes in around 5:30 every morning to handle all of our web content needs: the Birthday Game Spotlight Song at 5:55 am, hot topics that we’re discussing (and how to get more info) and all kinds of other stuff. He’s cheery, he works really hard and although the website woes can be enough to make anyone pull their hair out, he maintains a terrific attitude. Also, at 7 am, just about the time that the first (and/or second) coffee has worn off, Jay makes a run for fresh ones for us all. We’d love him anyway but, well, that’s just the icing on the coffee cake!

Friday morning after the 8 am news and during a rare quiet moment, I saw one of the listener phone lines flashing. As we’re all wont to do (when time permits or there’s not a contest coming up that means callers are just trying to get through early to qualify) I answered and the gentleman on the other end was quite insistent that he talk to Mary Ellen Beninger. Logistically (unless he were to call the 680 newsroom) it wasn’t possible and since he was clearly in transit, an e-mail address wasn’t going to help. So I asked if there was anything I could pass on to her.

The man - whose name I didn’t get, I’m afraid - took issue with MEB’s segue from a story about the then-$1.06 Canadian buck, to another story, with the line “…in other good economic news…”. He asked me to ask her, “How can the Canadian dollar’s strength be good economic news?”

He went on to explain: he runs a company with about 180 employees in Brampton. The product that they make is usually sold to a large Canadian chain store, but he’s worried for his employees’ - and presumably his own - future. As he puts it, why would this chain keep buying his goods as the Canadian dollar soars when they can be bought far more cheaply from a company that makes them in China?

I wasn’t able to address that, of course. And who can? When you have goods being made by workers who earn $4 an hour (and that’s on the high end of the scale) then how on earth can any company compete? A story in one of the papers’ financial sections last week illustrated that point: a car made in North America, once you figure in the cost of health care benefits, costs about $120 an hour in labour. In China, those numbers are more like $4. Not $40, but $4. Two toonies. That’s it. How can we compete, indeed?

I’m not an economist, so I won’t pretend to know any more than what I read, and what this upset business owner told me on Friday.

But it got me to thinking about the strong dollar, the economy, farmers and sunshine. Where do the last two come in? Here’s where:

On a Friday morning last September, Mike and I were talking about the weather for the upcoming weekend and we were unabashedly delighted about the sunny forecast. You may recall me journaling about a man named Markus who wrote about how fed up he was with people on the radio and television (and since I happen to read my e-mails, I guess writing to me was Job #1) raving about the sunshine. Didn’t I know that farmers were suffering through the worst August (and Sept.) ever, thanks to a lack of rain? And what about gardeners? Didn’t we know that rain was needed there, too?

I thought it over and wrote back to him that I couldn’t celebrate a rainy weekend, no matter how hard I tried to put myself in someone else’s boots. I can definitely sympathize (coming from farmers on my father’s side) but in the end, it’s what our listeners feel and want to hear that we have to try very hard to reflect. As it happened, the days approaching included the Weekend to End Breast Cancer, and I didn’t wish a soggy two-day walk on anyone. Who could? I never heard back from him; maybe he just needed to vent. Lucky me.

So, how does this tie in with the heady Canadian dollar? The fact that we’re heading south with listeners in under two weeks has us thinking about the astounding exchange rate, and how - for a change - we aren’t going to have to add another 10, 20 or 30 percent to the price of goods as we’re figuring out the Canadian to US dollar swap at the airport and everywhere else. As well, Rob and I are booking travel for 2008 and to be actually saving money on accommodations or tours is so brand new that it makes us giddy.

But there’s that damned guilt. Even though I’m not among those Ontarians going across the border to shop (buying American retailers’ Chinese-made goods instead of our Chinese-made goods in many cases) I know that my glee over a strong Canadian dollar is tempered by the worry and anger that people like that Brampton businessman feel every day that they hear the latest exchange rate. Somebody tell me, where is the happy medium? How do we reflect what our listeners feel when they’re going through two extremely different experiences?

And on a more rhetorical level - can’t we all just agree on anything? Just one thing? And why does everything positive also have to have a down side - the negative yang to the cheery yin?

More to the point, why on earth do I have to care so much???

Jeez, I hope Lauren decides to become a shrink, so I can get a family discount. As it stands now, she wants to go into radio. Well, maybe we’ll get a mother/daughter rate.

Have a great day - and we’ll talk here tomorrow.

Erin

Just a Thought
 
TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.  [Author Unknown, from New York Times, 1939]
 
Good morning.  Feeling a little more refreshed than usual for a Monday?  There’s a good reason for that: you got that extra hour’s sleep on the weekend.  I’m not sure I feel the good effects as deeply as I suffer from losing that hour in the spring, but I’ll take it!  Woke up this morning at 3:00 am to the alarm clocks at the cottage, and felt like it was 4:00 am.  Whoo hoo!  Yes, I know, I’m deeply disturbed.
 
November used to be one of the craziest, busiest months of the year for me, but I’ve finally learned to say “No, thank you,” and trim down my schedule.  This Sunday is the always spectacular Celebration of Hope Luncheon, raising money for breast cancer research in York Region - especially for diagnostic equipment at Markham Stouffville Hospital - and then Monday Rob and I will be collaborating (as we usually do) on my Living Out Loud PowerPoint speech.  Those two events are the big ones on my calendar; we also have our winners’ get-together this week before we head off with listeners on our trip later this month, and - oh yes - I’ll be helping the Breakfast Television bunch this Friday as we all try to set a world record for the number of people playing Twister at one time.  You’re invited to join in the fun; just come to the Rogers Centre after 6 am Friday, and at 8:30 we’ll endeavour to set the record.  I’ll be heading down at 8 am and hope to be on hand (or on my butt) for the big moment…so if you’re in the vicinity, please come by!  We want your body (but we respect you for your mind, as well).  Go to our home page at chfi.com for info.

Saw a couple of movies on the weekend.  Gord Rennie lent me his DVD set of The Godfather trilogy, since I’d finally seen part one on A & E a week ago.  Part two, which featured a very young Robert DeNiro was a treat to watch just for the actors even though DeNiro and Pacino never shared a screen (they were separated by a generation, as DeNiro played Pacino’s father as a young man).  Part Three was painful on so many levels I won’t even go into it.  And given that the movie came out, oh, seventeen years ago, you are likely more than familiar with it.  Let me just say that Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to cast his daughter Sofia as a main character (the daughter of Pacino’s character) has to rank among the top ten casting mistakes of the twentieth century.  I only wish I was exaggerating.  After investing hours in the first
two installments, I felt cheated and angry over the way the third chapter was botched - including a very convoluted plot line that extended all the way to The Vatican - and wonder how Coppola (and Mario Puzo for that matter) could have gotten so far off track.

Coppola’s nephew, meantime, was the star of one of the other movies we watched on a gray November weekend: World Trade Center.  Nicholas Cage didn’t chew the scenery (for a change), as John McLoughlin, a Port Authority Police sergeant trapped with a rookie cop in the rubble of the collapse of the concourse between the two towers on 9/11.  It’s a gripping film directed by Oliver Stone that we taped months ago on TMN.  Not for anyone who’s claustrophobic, that’s for certain.
 
We also caught up with Blood Diamond, the gripping and violent 2006 movie about conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone.  Incredibly powerful, it was easy to see why Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou were nominated for Oscars.  But perhaps more important, the closing credits say that it’s up to the consumer to determine where the diamonds he or she buys come from.  But how exactly are we to do that?  Unlike, say, An Inconvenient Truth, there are no actual calls to action or suggestions as to how we as individuals can bring about change.
 
Finally, we enjoyed Man of the Year, starring Robin Williams as a late night comic who throws his hat into the presidential ring and, thanks to a computer glitch, ends up holding the highest office in the land.  Not quite as biting as say, Wag the Dog, this Barry Levinson flick (also on TMN) is worth the time spent watching it.  I especially enjoyed watching caustic comic Lewis Black playing Williams’ head writer.  I like to see people stretch a bit and step outside of the realm that we’re used to seeing them in.  It’s part of the reason the Rick Mercer Report is a delight week after week; he puts himself and his guests in “fish out of water” situations, and they usually end up being tremendously entertaining.  Of course, his Rants are state of the art, too.  His delivery and the accompanying camera work are modern wonders.
 
You have probably heard that Hollywood writers are on strike as of this morning.  I can remember the last time they went out (twenty years ago) and how it shook my little world.  This time, I have to confess, I couldn’t care less.  I watch so little television (and most of that is stuff we catch up on much later on the PVR) that it just doesn’t affect me, while I know that fans of daytime dramas will be anxiously awaiting the writers’ return.  If you stay up to watch Letterman, Leno, Stewart or Colbert, you’ll be getting more sleep which, coupled with the Standard Time we’ve returned to, can only be a good thing, right?
 
Have a great day and we’ll be back tomorrow; I have a story to share with you about a distraught business owner who called the studio Friday.  I couldn’t help but think about him all weekend and I’ll explain why tomorrow.
 
Erin