Emotional Overload
Americans think the economy is in the dumpster, inflation is out of control and people are getting poorer. Investment guru Barry Ritholtz say none of those things are true, but “…people sentiment readings say people are angrier, believe they are less well off, and say they are more unhappy than ever before.”
You can read the whole article by clicking the link here: Barry Ritholtz column
People in the United States get wound up because of what they watch on TV, listen to on the radio or read on the Internet and in newspaper. Judging from what I read in Canadian and British newspapers, I think it is true across the Anglosphere.
Ritholtz says markets should not be so negative. “People’s perceptions do not match the data,” he says.
I have to say that I feel pretty negative these days. War, and the prospect of more of it, is depressing. The collapse of the American political system is also unnerving.
Risk Overload
This chart is relatively new, but one would have to say that risk seems to rise by the hour. Interesting that China is listed as being as safe as Japan. The Middle Eastern countries should probably be listed as even riskier than this map shows.
Singapore is the safest place to invest in the world. Will risk in Argentina rise or fall with the election of a Libertarian president? Western media is betting against him.
Water Overload
Many of the places that are politically risky are also short of water. Probably a cultural prejudice— from what I read— but the southwestern US and especially California is not on this list. Mexico is and the red dot in the Caribbean must be Haiti.
Mortgage Overload
Housing prices have not collapsed yet, in spite of endless predictions— including from me— that it is only a matter of time. Mortgage rates in the United States mean people have to be really rich to live on either coast, but especially California. The same could be said of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal in Canada.
Euro Overload
Is Europe really the most interesting place in the world? The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization— UNESCO, obviously thinks so. I had to look up what the acronym meant, but everyone knows what it does.
UNESCO’s headquarters are in Paris. Its Director General is Audrey Azoulay, a French woman who graduated from all the best French universities, the guaranteed way to the top in France. Looks like the choices reflect a Eurocentric mindset.
High Speed Overload
Theory
This is a graph about world Internet speeds. Mbps is megabits per second. It is for download speed, the one that counts if you want to capture a large file or stream a movie. Canada comes way down on the list of mostly rich countries.
.
Reality
The reality is my Internet speed is faster than them all, measured on a random evening by an App called SpeedTest. And this is in Canada, in a small town, population 6,000, in rural Quebec. It includes TV and Phone and costs C$179 a month.
Nostalgia Overload
This Volkswagen is listed on Hemmings Motors News at more than US$13,500. And the auction isn’t over. I have had two Beetles. They are not great cars. Hit anything at speed and the front end will crumple and you’re dead. They are cold in the winter, super slow on the highway not that roomy. The convertible might be fun, but this? The price is over the top. I once bought a red Volkswagen from my brother for $50, but that was probably in 1973.
Essay of the Week
Canadians from Newfoundland are natural masters of the English language, much like the Irish, who they sometimes sound like. Some of the great, witty broadcasters on the CBC come from Newfoundland. David Candow, whose obit I wrote in 2014, trained many who did not have the benefit of the natural Newfoundland wit.
David Candow trained thousands of radio reporters and announcers in eight countries how to sound more natural on the air. His formula was simple enough: speak on radio the same way you would in a conversation and keep your sentences short and to the point.
He started working with announcers and program hosts at the CBC. For many years one of his courses was often the first thing a new hire would go through.
Shelagh Rogers said when she started at the CBC in 1980 one of the first things she did was attend a course given by three people. One of them, Gloria Bishop, who went on to be her producer at Morningside, suggested she might do better as a researcher than an announcer. David Candow was kinder.
“He told me to stop trying to sound like Barbara Frum (the host of As it Happens at the time). He put an arm around my shoulder and said “Look, what I’m telling you is just be yourself. You don’t have to sound like everyone else or anyone else.”
David Winston Candow was born in the small town of Curling just outside Corner Brook Newfoundland in July of 1940. He was the ninth, and last, child of James and Annie Candow and was 20 years younger than his oldest sibling. Two of his brothers went off to war and he didn’t meet them until he was six years old. David’s middle name was in honour of Winston Churchill, the British wartime prime minister.
His father joined the U.S. Army corps of Engineers during the First World War, building timber bridges in the Pacific Northwest. In 1928 he started working as a master carpenter at Bowater’s paper mill at Corner Brook and worked there until his retirement at 65 in 1957.
“Our father worked in Argentia during World War Two in the 1940's building the U.S. Naval Base,” said Mr. Candow’s older sister Dorothy.
David grew up in the house his father built and went to high school in Corner Brook and then to Memorial University in St. John’s. He stumbled into broadcasting because of his hobby, performing in amateur theatre productions. The regional director of the CBC at the time was also chairman of the local drama society. He was looking for an assistant program organizer for the Schools and Youth department and Mr. Candow fit the bill. That was 1964 and David Candow would work at the CBC for more than 30 years.
When David Candow started at the CBC there was a style guide that gave those types of hints about how to write for broadcast and how to speak on air. There were certain sentences that read like chalk scratching on a blackboard. “Harry and Mary went to Barrie in a car,” was not to be said on air as “Herrie and Merry went to Berry in a kar.”
Chief announcers weren’t always right, but they did try to correct such clangers as `pitcher’ for picture, and `meer’ for mirror. David Candow taught more subtle skills, the art of being yourself on radio.
For a man who taught on air performance, David Candow never worked on air. But he knew how he wanted the program he produced to sound. Scripts should be written in short declarative sentences; words should be spoken as they are in real life conversations. Here are some of his guidelines for broadcasters:
Write for the ear, not the page.
You’re not an actor. Try to improve on the real you.
Forget the audience might be millions, imagine you’re speaking to a
friend.
Use plain words; avoid long pretentious words that appear in print and never in conversation.
Mr. Candow first took up training part time while he worked as a producer and program executive in CBC Radio in various parts of the country, finally settling in Toronto. In the mid 80s he took up training full time. The CBC had relationships with other broadcasters and he taught broadcast skills to the English language service of Dutch and German radio.
“He went to South Africa just before Nelson Mandela was released,” recalled his wife Catharine Haynes. “His job was to teach them how to broadcast in a post apartheid world.”
He also worked training broadcasters in Indonesia and Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Africa. But it was after he retired from the CBC that picked up one of his biggest training assignments at National Public Radio in the United States.
Jeffrey Dvorkin, who had run CBC Radio News, was hired as vice-president of News at National Public Radio in 1997. He was surprised that there was no training program to polish the skills of the hosts, reporters and writers on the national NPR network. He knew David Candow had left the CBC and he decided to bring him down to Washington.
“There was a lot of resistance. The announcers were nervous and insulted. Some hosts were furious. Like a lot of on air people they thought that everything that came out of their mouths was golden,” said Mr. Dvorkin, who now teaches journalism at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.
David Candow knew he was entering an ego charged atmosphere when he arrived at NPR’s offices in Washington. He had seen it all before at CBC training sessions across Canada. It took him just a morning to win over almost all of the on air staff he met.
“One of them came out and said `Why didn’t you tell us he was so brilliant?’” remembered Mr. Dvorkin.
David Candow’s nickname at NPR was the Host Whisperer. It described what the Canadian broadcaster did: train the on-air hosts to speak and write in plain, conversational English. Linda Wertheimer, co-host of All Things Considered, gave him the name Host Whisperer. She admitted she and her fellow host, Bob Edwards, were irked at being sent to training school.
“We were very annoyed that anyone would think we were not perfect,” said Ms Wertheimer from NPR’s studio in Washington. “The people David really helped were those making the transition from radio reporters working in the field to being on air hosts.”
She pointed out the technique for a long radio interview is much different from looking for clips for a short news item.
David Candow spoke with the Newfoundland accent of his birth. He had nothing against accents, as long as the speech was natural. When the Washington Post wrote a piece about him in 2008, the writer mistook his Newfoundland accent for what he described as “ the blunt working-class Canadian accent,, with its elongated and flattened o’s, and d’s that stand in for `th’ (“dare” for “there”).” Obviously a man who had never visited Newfoundland.
It was in his post retirement period that he picked up one of the oddest assignments. The BBC asked him to go to the United States to train one of its broadcasters stationed there. That was the eighth national broadcaster on his list.
David Candow was born on July 17, 1940. He died of a massive heart attack on September 18, 2014. He was scheduled to do a training session in Washington DC in late September, helping a bright political journalist who was starting in an air job on National Public Radio.