BT Calgary Blogs

I had a blast guest hosting with the BT Vancouver team last week.  It was a blast to spend the week with and incredibly talented group – Dawn and Riaz are as fabulous and talented as they look!

Vancouver is so gorgeous – this is a shot from our first morning with the Live Eye crew at The Capilano Suspension Bridge.

During the summer they have birds of prey on site.  This is a 7 month old baby falcon.  Look closely at my glove.  It’s all smiles and pictures until the baby poos!  Put him down shortly after that.

The wild encounters continued at the Vancouver Aquarium!  We shot on location there as thousands of butterflies from Costa Rica were just released into the Amazon Gallery.  You can see them there until the end of the summer.  Tried to get this one to open it’s wings (they are a brilliant blue on the flip side) but she just wasn’t havin’ it.  Still incredible she stayed long enough to take this snap!

  July 2009 has been a grim month for Canadian troops serving in Afghanistan.  This morning we got word that Private Sebastian Courcy, with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal 22nd Regiment  –  generally known as the Van Doos   –  died about ten miles southwest of Kandahar City.  He was 26 years old, was the fifth Canadian soldier killed this month alone, and the country’s 125th combat fatality overall. 

  It’s become a nasty little war, this Afghanistan business, and there isn’t a ranking military officer anywhere who’ll predict the thing is “winnable,” in the conventional sense of that word.  By the time Canadian forces withdraw in 2011 they’ll have spent eight years fighting an intractable mob of Taliban guerillas who have one essential advantage the Canadians do not:  lots of time.  Sort of like the Americans in Viet Nam when you think about it and we all know what came of that. 

  Once they’re out and back home, a significant percentage of the Afghan war veterans, as they’ll then be known, will offer symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, which used to be called battle fatigue and before that was described as shell shock.  But if the descriptive phrasing has progressed, or regressed actually from straightforward to high-flown rigmarole, the mannerisms, the indicators will remain as they’ve always been:  nervous tension, irritability, unexpected bouts of crying, outbursts of temper against families and friends, and let’s be candid here, descent into alcoholism for some of them, drug abuse for others, and occasionally, suicide. 

  As a country, as a populace, we’ll need to help our Afghan veterans who end up losing their way with generosity and compassion, all the professional help we can provide, understanding, and above all, patience.  But I fret about how we may look upon, and where necessary treat the men and women who come back from Afghanistan because historically we’ve tended to be not very good at caring for emotionally damaged troops once they’ve returned to civilian life. 

  All of this brings me to an issue firmly stuck in my craw, annoying me to the point of real anger, and as much as anything I’ver ever encountered, representative of the disdain successive federal governments and bureaucracies have laid upon our veterans.  In December 1941 a tiny garrison of Canadian troops defending Hong Kong against the Japanese was overrun.  The soldiers, 1975 of them, were drawn primarily from the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada:  they were green and inexperienced, but fought with surpassing courage for 17 days before surrendering.  The casualty rate, killed and wounded, was more than 50 percent, which was the highest toll inflicted on any Canadian force in World War II. 

  That was just the start.  The survivors bore four years of unspeakable barbarity in Japanese prisoner of war camps.  Another 250 or so men (the exact number will never be verified) died in captivity, and the rest of them, when at last they got home, were emotionally and in some cases physically scarred for the remainder of their lives. 

  Today, a mere handful of Hong Kong vets in their late eighties and on into their nineties remains with us, and they want to construct a small memorial wall in Ottawa to honour their companions who died in the battle and in the years following.  On their own, this little band of brothers and their families raised $150 thousand dollars for the project. 

  That’s the background against which one Marie Lemay is now mounted on what can only be described as her own wall……of shame.  She’s the chief executive officer of the National Capital Commission, which has decided  the Hong Kong memorial, as proposed, will be just ever so ordinary and won’t fit in, simply won’t be compatible with its location in the prestigious sector of Ottawa near 24 Sussex Drive (the Prime Minister’s residence) and Rideau Hall (the Governor General’s residence.)

  Never mind that 24 Sussex is a creaking pile of wreckage needing millions of dollars in repairs, and never mind that Rideau Hall is irrelevant to the vast majority of Canadians for whom the monarchy is a pointless anachronism.  Oh no, my goodness, tsk tsk, you Hong Kong veterans must do better, so they’re now striving to find another  $150 thousand dollars in order that their memorial wall will find favour with the stiff-necked snobs at the National Capital Commission. 

  As Commission CEO, Marie Lemay allowed this happen, perhaps even instructed that it happen.  The NCC might as well have declared the men themselves are not good enough for the pristine, elegant environs of Ottawa.  Not good enough for the nation’s capital.  (This sorry tale brings to mind George Bernard Shaw, who wrote in The Devil’s Disciple  “The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.”  So it seems with our Hong Kong veterans and the elitist twerps at the NCC). 

  But here’s the worst of it:  not one single politician, not a cabinet minister, not a backbench MP has spoken out and said to Ms. Lemay and her swarm of highbrow minions for God’s sake leave these men alone and let them have their memorial and furthermore let us  –  the Government of Canada  –  pay for it.  Not a word and so the Hong Kong veterans struggle yet again, determined to find the additional money even if by nickels and dimes and quarters. 

  But, I suppose this wretched condescension to some of the bravest men the country has known isn’t really surprising.  After all, the battle of Hong Kong was almost 70 years ago, so who cares? 

  Apparently, nobody.  Nobody at all.  This is a dark odium on Canada.

Well Bachelorette fans, what do we think about Reid Bubble Bath Bing getting the boot? I think Reid and Jill are adorable together BUT as one of our very perceptive producers put it, “he’s a boy not a man!” But he’s such a darned cute boy with his crinkly eyes! Bing apparently didn’t have the throw down quality Jilly likes in her bad boys. No edge to the sweetheart. I personally think Reid and Jill have better chemistry than Jill does with Kiptynite, but that man seems to have a superpower hold on her! He is also built like an superhero. Abs of steel. Kiptynite for Bachelor!

Let’s move on to Richie. Or should I call him Edward. What to say about the overnight tragedy?

Obviously Ed has enough substance for Jill to keep him around in spite of a date that went from *hot hot hot* in the bedroom to cold and alone on the balcony. Let’s give the guy a break – who wants to be intimate for the first time with a crew of cameramen and producers sitting in a “fantasy” suite scrutinizing your ever move? Ed is a Technology Consultant, not Ron Jeremy. Weird and awkward. No wonder Ed fizzled under pressure.

I’m still on Team Ed.

PS – How about those spectacular green short shorts Ed was sporting in Maui? Wow. It takes a daring man to wear shorts that short.

Plenty of fake videos get uploaded to Youtube everyday, but for some reason this one intrigued me. Can you really blow bubbles from a melted CD?

The video shows a Russian girl heating up a CD with a lighter, then taking a huge breath and blowing as hard as she can. The end result…a large bubble which quickly solidifies.

Youtube has a handful of these videos, some with nearly a quarter of a million views. Is it real or just one of those viral pranks? Let me know what you think.

I *really* don’t want to believe the spoilers Bachelorette fans.  Very upsetting!  I had a long chat with my fellow Bachelorette fan Meg Tucker from the Energy 101.5 this morning.  Two of the three leaks have been flying around for some time.  We’ll have to see Monday night about the third.  9PM kids.

I just might be switching off Team Ed.

  Reflecting back on it, I’m thinking the first hint of a generation gap between me and people some years younger occurred on December 8th, 1980, when I was nosing around the northern border of Jordan looking for signs of increased tension with Syria.  I was with a camera crew and producer and we’d been told the Jordanians had dug a lot of main battle tanks into the desert and might open up just about any time against a comparable array of Syrian armour on the other side of the line. 

  The tanks were there all right, squat and menacing, only their upper plating and turrets in view and the air was thick with belligerence.  We were careful, ducking into wadis and behind dunes, but couldn’t stay out of sight for long and pretty soon one of the Jordanian big guns swung around and looked as if it might be drawing a bead.  The cameraman managed to squeeze off a quick picture or two and then we got right the hell out of there and went back to the hotel in Amman. 

  We walked into a room full of network staffers in apparent shock, and three production assistants were actually crying inconsolably.  Right away, I worried that one of our folks, or somebody from one of the other networks had been wounded or maybe even killed, and of course I then thought well, if the shooting had started we’d somehow missed it and probably there goes my career.  But it turned out the weeping and wailing was for John Lennon, who’d been murdered a couple of hours earlier in New York City. 

  I couldn’t understand it.  There we were, facing the fairly lively prospect that within the next few hours or days a dangerous mideast war would start, and we’d be back north trying to keep out of the line of shellfire and most likely getting into it from time to time, and there was all this bawling going on about John Lennon.  Beatle.  Singer and songwriter.  Guitar player.  Entertainer.  By his own conceited view bigger than Jesus Christ Himself.  Now shot to death on the Upper East Side of New York.  Not a pleasant story, it’s true, but the end of the world, almost?  Please. 

  I remember when Louis Armstrong died in 1971.  I was sad and mournful and pulled out my autographed photograph of him but there wasn’t any keening and sobbing in my room because I simply didn’t think his leaving us was tantamount to losing some kind of Almighty.  But those production assistants obviously felt that way about Lennon and they cried for hours.

  If I didn’t get it in 1980, I get it now, though.  The generation gap.  I’m clearly up there at the mature end of it which I suppose explains why I’ve been in a mood of considerable irritation about the crazed idolatry attending the 14 days between Michael Jackson’s death and his memorial service in Los Angeles.  That tribute was on Tuesday, and nineteen  television channels, including the major conventional and news networks, went wall to wall. 

  I felt the need for self-defence, so I decided to forego the TV coverage and instead sat in front of my computer for an hour….one hour only….watching wire service updates.  There were 50, almost one every minute, and all slugged “Michael Jackson: Urgent.”

  Generationally gapped fellow that I am, I’m sure you’ll forgive me for wondering why “Michael Jackson: Urgent” was followed by copy which proclaimed “a Los Angeles television station is reporting activity at the Forest Lawn Cemetery that appears to involve the family of Michael Jackson.”  And then “a stage inside the Staples Center in Los Angeles is bathed in blue light.  There’s a spray of yellow and orange flowers in front of the podium.”

  Spare me.  The guy was a singer and dancer, and maybe even exceptional as both.  But I don’t think, as Berry Gordy of Motown declared at the memorial, that Michael Jackson was “the greatest entertainer the world has ever seen,” because when all is said and done he gave us at best a half dozen years of genuinely productive and innovative output.  Lord forbid that little proviso should get in the way of worshipping false Gods, however, and so for the past two weeks the planet has been going nuts. 

  And then there are all the issues, the strange behaviour, the apparent addiction to powerful prescription drugs, the determined sequestering of his children, the appearance changes which soon led to the sobriquet “Wacko Jacko.”  So to the degree I’m not inclined to join in bestowing the title ”greatest entertainer the world has ever seen” on Michael Jackson, I’ve also spent the last couple of weeks in parallel anger about this global fawning over a wingnut weirdo. 

  But comes the generation gap again, together with a concession I perhaps didn’t think this all the way through.  I have to tell you during a spirited newsroom debate this morning, I was brought up short by a colleague whose views and abilities I respect, and who I now find grew up on Jackson’s music and dance.  She was deeply troubled by his death, and while constructing no altars at which to kneel and pray, this woman did take my head off and said I should dismount from my pompous high horse.

  “Lookit,” she said.  “Who’s the greatest entertainer of all time?  Beethoven?  Maybe, although I prefer Chopin.  Elvis?  Maybe, but he was a bloated wreck when he died, all screwed up and a mess.  Take your pick, but what I think about Michael Jackson is that he was a wonderful musician.  I was brought up with his records and videos, the Jackson 5 and then all the music in the eighties.  I also think it’s very sad that you’d have a guy like Michael Jackson so tortured by his life, his surroundings, his inner torment that he’d mutilate himself and maybe without even knowing it sort of start on a long journey to suicide.  He was only 50.  I think it’s just so sad.”

  I hadn’t quite thought of it that way.  I should have, because it is sad that a man who to begin with endured all kinds of abuse at the hands of a brutish father, was denied a normal childhood, and at the end of it all was nothing more than a lonely and caged prisoner in his own Neverland freak show, should not have been allowed to depart with dignity, and in peace.   

  That’s what my colleague found so disturbing, but then again, she did say ”take your pick,” so I’ll stay with Louis Armstrong, although I know that puts the words “generation gap” into boldface and capital letters. 

  Okay.  Maybe I’ll go out and get that T-shirt with Old Fart printed across the chest.  I still think the Michael Jackson memorial was overdone, but I kind of see now my reaction was, too.

I’ve never smoked, thank goodness. But it seems that quitting would be super difficult. This story is about smokers who have to quit while they’re in hospital for a heart attack. And these patients want to smoke after they go home from hospital!But there is a new treatment plan that shows very intensive education and support helps a lot of patients kick the habit for good.

Here’s the story.

Jason Pike has been a smoker for years. And he’s tried to quit.

“Two times…the first time a year and a half, the second time two weeks.”

All smokers know, quitting is very hard. But a new treatment plan may help.
Doctor Ellen Burgess researched how this protocol could help people who’ve had a heart attack stay off cigarettes.

“We wanted to see if this new treatment plan would improve the number of people who stayed quit after they went home from being hospitalized for their heart attack.” 

The plan started with an education session for the patient while they were still in hospital – that included watching a video, and problem solving with the nurse about what life will be like when they’re discharged.

Burgess says having a plan is critical.

“What are you going to do when you’re at home, and sitting there, watching tv and you’re kinda bored and in the past you would’ve had a smoke.”

The nurse also follows up with the patient via  phone calls at home.

“The nurse calls them on a decreasing frequency over time, explains Burgess, “so the first phone call would be when the patient has been home for a couple of days.”

The nurse called 7 times over the course of a year, and the results were very positive.

“Having the nurse educate the patient and follow them up results in more people staying off cigarettes over the course of the study.”

And when the average cost of a patient being readmitted to hospital is 11 thousand dollars, Doctor Burgess says, the plan is worth it.

“When you consider how much a nurse gets paid for one year, you would only need to prevent 6 people from being readmitted and that would pay for a salary of a nurse.”

It would also free up beds.
Pike wants to avoid a heart attack all together – that’s why he’s trying to quit again.

“I’m down from a pack a day, to 8 smokes a day now.”

——–

For more information on the actual study, it was recently published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Here’s the link:

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/180/13/1297

Look who we happened to run into at Stampede Park this morning – Jillian Harris!  I had a chance to interview Jill – it was *not* planned and a complete coincidence Jill was at the same breakfast we were at this morning.  I spotted The Bachelorette in the crowd (she is teeny tiny!) and Jill is a sweetheart for squeezing in some impromptu chat time on BT this morning.

The Bachelorette is ramping up to the Final Rose ceremony (July 27th mark it on your calendars!) and Jill has to be super careful not to drop any hints about how the show ends.  We DO know she is about to shoot the “Men Tell All” episode (she’s off to LA tomorrow) and she is “on fire” and in “an excellent place”.  Jill also took the high road talking about Wes and said “I’m a really forgiving person sometimes too much and there was a side of him that I just really loved and I just wanted the world to see that side….all of them deserve to be happy and deserve  be with good people so I hope he finds himself.”

Love that Jill looks at the bright side!  Considering how RUDE Wes was last episode, Jill is a class act in handling the fallout.  Very cool girl.  And it’s impressive she turned out to hand out plates at Kids Day.

***On the rumour front – one of my friends *thought* she saw Ed on the grounds yesterday.  I asked Jillian about it – she just laughed.  As we know, he is my #1 pick for Jill.  Just sayin’.

I had so much fun doing this story. I tried a lot of food I had never tried before, like corn dogs, deep fried jelly beans, deep fried cheesecake (ew!) and deep fried oreo cookies (yum.)

I went to the grounds with registered dietitian Jane Rose. Basically what we found is the food on the midway is all about sugar and fat. Both really bad for you. However, there are a couple of strategies Jane recommends…. share with friends and enjoy your favourites in moderation and get back on track tomorrow. Also, bring your own water. You don’t want a lot of empty calories in the pop, lemonade or iced tea, when you’re saving up for corn dogs and minidonuts!!

The food that came out as the best of the worst:

- the corn dog, a regular sized corn dog is only about 250 calories, not outrageous compared to say, a turkey leg which is over 1000 calories each

- next to the turkey legs though is corn on the cob – jane says that’s a great option

- the classic treats – cotton candy is only about 200 calories a bag, a candy apple is at least a serving a fruit!

- the greek and italian options on the midway are not too bad either

Let’s be clear – the most healthy food at Stampede Park is on the lower level of the Big Four building. There, you can get sandwiches, fruit and juice.

And remember – enjoy!! Stampede is only once a year!!

How sweet it is to see Wes get dismissed.  See ya Bucko.  Beat it.

Let’s sum Wes up in his own words from tonight’s episode:  “Feed my ego” or “My single was #1 in Chihuahua Mexico” or how about “That bird has no foot – God what is wrong with me?!”  What???!!!  Best quote ever.  Nice try to distract Jill away from an evil web of lies.

I’m happy Wes let his true motives shine through so Jill could send him packing. Props to Jill for keeping it classy in the face of such a piece of narcissistic work.

Onto the good!  The final three are amazing – Kiptynite, Reid Bing, and Steady Sexy Eddy.

Kiptynite is a perfect specimen of a man and also happens to look fantastic in a pair of tight flamenco pants.  Thankfully the tight pants carried him through an uber awkward performance.  Kip is out of Jill’s league – she says so herself – and that means he is the one being chased.  Not good.  He is cautious, a little aloof, and not really declaring his interest.  If something doesn’t click to make him step it up next week in Maui, he’s out.  Heartbreaking we won’t see his glorious abs every Monday (but maybe Kip will be the next Bachelor?!  Hmmm.  Kip – Jake – Kip – Jake…. my vote is for Kiptyn.)

How sparky was Reid’s date?!  Bing!  Jill’s carefree spontaneous attitude is disarming for Reid’s neurotic nature and they bring out the best in each other!  Great match.  Jill could easily end up with Reid or Ed, my personal fav.

Eddy, Eddy, Eddy….talk about making up for lost time.  I loved the make out montage and random stroll through a public pond.  Ahhhh love makes a technical analyst do crazy things.  What sells me on Ed is he is so sure about Jill. He is confident in their relationship and he actually seems to think about how they would make it work in the real world.  When the cameras stop rolling it’ll be dinner and a movie in Chicago, not zip lining through downtown Los Angeles.  Sometimes practical thinking can be super sexy.

One more things kids.  Who else is proud Jill didn’t give it up to the guys on overnight dates?!  Good girl!

See you in the morning rosy Bachelorette fans!  Pulled out some Wes gems to rehash with the BT team at 830am.