Napoleon the Movie; Who Answers the Phone? and the World's Cheese Eaters.
November 27, 2023 Volume 4 # 28
Napoleon, The Movie
The Anglosphere pretty much loves it; The French plain hate it. How much?
Le Figaro, a French daily newspaper, said that Napoleon could be renamed "Barbie and Ken under the Empire." GQ France said there is something "deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally funny in seeing French soldiers in 1793 shouting 'Vive La France' with American accents." As for Napoleon biographer, Patrice Gueniffey, he told Le Point magazine that the film is a "very anti-French and very pro-British" take on history. This from a story about the movie and the controversy from Movieweb.
A scene from the new Napoleon movie by director Ridley Scott. Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, having just crowned himself as Emperor, crowning Vanessa Kirby as Josephine. In a rather brilliant piece in the weekend’s Financial Times, the British historian Simon Schama says there have been about 1,000 films made on Napoleon, the first one in 1897: Napoleon Meets the Pope. And books on the Emperor would fill a small library.“Napoleon ranks third behind Jesus and Hitler in the number of books written about him.”
Younger People Don’t Answer the Phone
These are British Statistics from Ofcom, the Office of Communications, the government agency that sets rules for British telephone and broadcasting companies.
The headline in the Daily Telegraph: 54 billion minutes of silence: the astonishing death of the phone call.
What the raw stats don’t show is that younger people don’t answer the phone. Their inboxes are sometimes full; their message says text me or email me; or even worse, if you’re a reporter: You can find the information on our website. My own daughter, a successful business woman, says she finds it rude if people cold call her at work. I spend a lot of time on the phone. You get more information from talking to people than having them send you what they have to say in an email or text.
One-ringy dingy. Ernestine the phone operator from the TV show The Laugh In.
Uranium
That photo is Three Mile Island, which you can see from the photo is on an island that looks like it is three miles long. The accident there in 1979 did more to stop nuclear power development than any anti-nuke group could ever hope to. It didn’t kill anyone. President Jimmy Carter visited it and he is still around. I covered it on the ground and I am still here. The media coverage was a disgrace. I remember a CBS reporter in the makeshift news centre struggling to write something. His field producer said: “Throw in some shit about the China Syndrome”, an anti-nuke scare flic starring Jane Fonda. Now there is a global push to revive Nuclear power.
Now the world needs nuclear power if it is to meet all the net zero targets politicians have set. That means uranium. Luckily this is one are where China is not number one.
Pass the Cheese Please
It is no surprise that France, the land of Brie and Camembert has the largest cheese consumption. But Iceland? There are 700 dairy farmers in a country of 300,000 and their goats, sheep and cows. Canada is way down on the list. Cheese is outrageously pricey in Canada because the dairy farmer’s cartel.
Home on the Icelandic Range
Icelandic sheep have a high fat content, the better to make cheese with. Up until the 1980’s there was a ban on importing foreign cheese so Icelandic famers learned to overproduce. Once the ban was lifted they started experimenting with cheese they saw from other countries, like goat’s milk Brie.
It’s Safe to Walk on Water in Yellowknife
The ice is at least six inches thick on the lakes in Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. If you plan to go snowmobiling, you can head out with fear of the ice collapsing. Rivers can still be risky. Safe freezing conditions are late this year. It will be safe to walk and even drive giant trucks on the ice until late April or early May.
This week it got down to -24C in Yellowknife. On Monday the sun rises at 9:23 n the morning and sets at 3:26 in the afternoon. Six hours of sunlight. This past summer the entire city of 20,048 people was evacuated because of forest fires.
Yellowknife is on Great Slave Lake. It is 604 meters deep, the deepest lake in North America and the 10th largest lake in the world. But is only the second largest lake in the Northwest Territories. Great Bear Lake is larger, the 8th largest lake in the world.
Bike Paths and Obesity in Europe
The End of A Great Hamburger
About 15 years ago, a friend of mine and I went on a hamburger tasting venture. Each week we would try a different Toronto restaurant. Anything that abided by the rules and burnt it to well done received a thumbs down. The winner: The Rosedale Diner.
It’s going to close. Boo-hoo.
A Beautiful Car, Now Ruined
The 1957 Corvette. Simple lines, a robust V-8 engine. A modern Corvette is nowhere near as gorgeous and has the same negative panache as a Playboy logo.
Essay of the Week
An obituary I wrote that ran in the Globe and Mail earlier this month
Lorna Jackson became one of the early female announcers on national CBC Radio in the 1970s. Over the years, her distinctive voice could be heard reading The World at Eight morning newscast, on As It Happens, reading listeners’ letters on Peter Gzowski’s Morningside, on Quirks and Quarks and doing voice-overs for television programs such as The Nature of Things.
Canadians knew her name and her voice, but because she was mainly on radio, few knew her face. When she and Allan Bonner married in 1981, they went to Newfoundland on their honeymoon. Mr. Bonner wanted to meet Joey Smallwood, Newfoundland’s first premier, but he did not get a response to his request. However when Mr. Smallwood heard Ms. Jackson’s name, he immediately arranged a meeting.
Ms. Jackson, who died of cancer in Toronto on Nov. 4, had little or no professional training in voice work; she was a natural. She loved words and the way they were used. Her husband said it helped that she never smoked, seldom drank alcohol, and sang in a choir as a young woman.
She was also well-read and when she was reading a national newscast brought a serious tone to her work.
“Lorna had a sense of gravitas, a word you never hear at CBC Radio now,” said journalist Michael Enright, who has hosted several CBC programs including As It Happens and Sunday Morning. “She had one of those voices that operated like a scalpel. It sliced through the rubbish and got to the point of something.”
Her colleague Judy Maddren, who was also among the first female announcers hired at CBC Radio, agreed that Ms. Jackson had a gift for lifting the meaning of words from the scripted page.
“I would say she had empathy which I valued so. When she read a story, you knew she was ‘in’ the story, feeling it but that doesn’t mean she was telling the listener how to think or how to feel but you knew she was connected,” Ms. Maddren said.
“I liked Lorna’s warmth, I felt as if she were talking to me. Also, she had children when I had children so that was another thing that we could talk about, the vicissitudes of being an announcer/mother, the weird hours and all that kind of stuff. She did a weekend run for quite a long time which is not easy when you have a family.”
Ms. Jackson was far more than just a reader of other people’s words, according to Ron McKeen, a retired CBC Radio producer, who said Ms. Jackson would often make suggestions to fine tune the copy.
“We had a segment on Quirks and Quarks that featured short news stories from the world of science that particular week, and I often produced it with Lorna,” Mr. McKeen said. “Lorna was our regular reader as we wanted a female voice given Jay Ingram was our host and so many of our guests in those days were male. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. Besides loving that voice, we liked working with her. She was always on time, gracious and very calm. And she didn’t just read the copy – she absorbed it.”
Lorna Christine Jackson was born on May 21, 1946, in Winnipeg, though the family moved to Edmonton when she was a young child. Her father, John Jackson, served overseas in the army as a military police officer during the Second World War and played the trumpet as a member of the army band. She got her middle name from her mother, Kristin Anna Jackson (née Halldorson), who was of Icelandic extraction and spelled her name the Icelandic way.
Lorna graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in English and philosophy, and started work as an assistant to a senior manager at Chieftain Energy. When she heard of a job as a researcher at the CBC in 1973, she jumped at it. It wasn’t long until her natural voice landed her behind a microphone. She moved to Regina, where she doubled as a reporter and covered a royal tour.
When she was sent to cover Regina’s agricultural fair, she asked a farmer why his prize cow was such an odd colour. “He admitted he’d dyed the animal with Clairol. The story made the front page of dozens of major North American dailies,” Mr. Bonner said.
In Regina she met Mr. Bonner at the CBC. He remembers the two of them flying to Las Vegas in October of 1980 to see the Larry Holmes/Muhammad Ali heavyweight boxing match. Later, when Mr. Bonner became a consultant, she would travel with him on overseas trips to places such as Hong Kong and Geneva.
Ms. Jackson moved to Toronto as a national announcer in 1979. Today most newsreaders began as journalists in the field, however for decades the news was read by career announcers, such as the famous Lorne Greene during the Second World War, whose deep voice inspired the nickname the Voice of Doom.
The announcers were in a separate union from the news writers and were not even allowed to change a comma. They were all men until the 1970s, when Jan Tennant started reading the news, soon joined by a small group of female colleagues including Ms. Maddren and Ms. Jackson.
“I first met Lorna in the announcers’ lounge of the old radio building. The announcers were all CUPE [Canadian Union of Public Employees] and all men who were born around the time of the War of 1812,” Mr. Enright said. “She was a sign that things were changing, as one of the first women announcers.”
Ms. Jackson read The World at Eight with Rex Loring, a CBC announcer of the old school. In those days if there were two readers of a major national newscast one of them had to be a man.
“I worked with Lorna, but it was in the days when you never had two women co-hosting, it was just not done,” recalled Ms. Maddren, who at the peak of her career oversaw language used on the CBC. “So, she and I would not have co-hosted on The World at Six or The World at Eight or World Report. So, I knew her mostly in the newsroom.”
Though the name Lorna is not common, there was another Lorna Jackson in the Toronto area: the mayor of the suburban city of Vaughan. It caused some confusion. One listener wrote in to say it was a conflict of interest that an elected politician should be reading the news.
Lorna’s interest in domestic and industrial design, led her to visit the Bauhaus museum in Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was also a news junkie who subscribed to major newspapers online and listened to newscasts on radio, television and her iPad.
She and her husband went to New York at least three times a year and he estimates they saw a thousand plays. They also saw theatre at the Shaw and Stratford festivals in Canada and travelled to London, as part of Mr. Bonner’s business, where they would also take in the theatre.
“Blue was her favourite colour. I think it had to do with her Icelandic background, the love of blue skies,” Mr. Bonner said. “She had blue handbags and wallets, blue China, even a blue umbrella holder.”
Ms. Jackson leaves her husband, Mr. Bonner; two sons, Michael and Christian can I add: Bonner? Is this their last name?; and three grandchildren.
“When I reflect over the years I have spent with CBC, I feel like I have filled in on just about every show on CBC Radio One and CBC Radio Two,” Ms. Jackson said upon her retirement. Her last day reading the news was on Sunday, May 27, 2007, on The World This Weekend.