The Euro Slips Below Par. Lithium-ion vs Hydrogen and a Canadian broadcasting Legend.
July 18, 2022 Volume 3 # 6
The Euro at 99 cents US
The Euro traded at 99 cents this week. This was the snapshot on Saturday.
Blame it on the war in Ukraine, says the Wall Street Journal. Germany is trying to hoard energy in preparation for the cold winter without Russian gas. The Euro slump reflects the Eurozone’s weakening economy.
The British Pound isn’t much better: it costs $1.19 to buy a pound. It was $1.70 in 2014.
Battery Electric Vehicles versus Hydrogen
There are only two major companies that produce hydrogen vehicles: Toyota and Hyundai. The Tesla and Nissan Leaf (first two battery vehicles) have huge batteries that store electricity. The hydrogen vehicles produces electricity on the go from hydrogen.
A hydrogen car produces range anxiety on steroids. Very few places to fill up; there is no charging network like Tesla’s, which is now open to all electric vehicles.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are just 48 hydrogen stations across the entire country. 47 are located in California, and 1 is located in Hawaii.
There are 49,210 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States, not counting the ones at people’s houses.
Volkswagen, which is huge in lithium-ion battery-powered cars says hydrogen is a technology that is going nowhere: “Green hydrogen is needed for steel, chemical, aero,… and should not end up in cars. Far too expensive, inefficient, slow and difficult to rollout and transport,” Herbert Diess, CEO Volkswagen Group.
As writer Marcus Lu points out, Toyota appears to be backing a losing technology, odd since it was first into electric hybrids with its top-selling Prius.
“Confronted with a losing hand, Toyota is doing what most large corporations do when they find themselves playing the wrong game—it’s fighting to change the game,” Wired Magazine.
Five Fastest Charging Electric Vehicles.
MPH means miles added per hour. First is home charger then fast charger.
Rank EV Make/Model AC Charge DC Fast Charge Charging Score
1 Porsche Taycan Plus 33 mph 650 mph 8.80/10
2 Kia EV6 Lng Rng 2WD 32 mph 650 mph 8.55/10
3 Mercedes EQS 33 mph 490 mph 8.37/10
4 Tesla Model Y L-Range 34 mph 370 mph 8.25/10
5 Hyundai IONIQ 5 LR 2WD 31 mph 580 mph 8.14/10
Are the following three charts related?
Prudish or Careful? Rich Countries and The Pill
The Rise of Internet Dating
This chart is a few years old, but it shows that meeting on the Internet is an unstoppable trend. It’s especially true for gay couples.
Is it a Peregrine Falcon?
I looked it up and it appears to be a Peregrine Falcon, but I am not sure. I have seen hawks hunting in midtown Toronto but I thought they were the more common Red Tailed Hawks.
Note: Time to renew annual subscription?
Essay of the Week
This is an obit I wrote that appeared in the Globe and Mail this week.
Patrick Watson was perhaps the most famous Canadian broadcaster of the 1960s. He starred in This Hour Has Seven Days, a program so popular that it had a bigger audience than Hockey Night in Canada.
The show explored such topics as the wrongful murder conviction of Steven Truscott and called the minority government of Lester Pearson “scandal ridden.” It proved to be far too edgy for the grey suits of the CBC, who cancelled it a little less than two years after it began.
A quarter of a century later, Mr. Watson was a super-suit himself, named chair of the CBC. It was an appointment celebrated by the creative class at the network, who was ecstatic that one of their own was in charge. But their initial excitement ended in disappointment; by his own admission, Mr. Watson did not achieve what he set out to do and left the job before the end of his tenure.
This Hour Has Seven Days was the brainchild of Mr. Watson and others, such as executive producer Douglas Leiterman. Before it went on the air, they auditioned a Montreal law professor named Pierre Trudeau, but he didn’t work out, so they went with another francophone professor, Laurier LaPierre. It began in 1964.
The show dealt with current events in both a serious and light-hearted way. It was very much a child of the 1960s and had a point of view. There were documentaries and interviews that went on for more than five minutes. Along with The Journal, which went on the air in the 1980s, it was widely considered one the most original public affairs shows ever produced by the CBC.
“Seven Days was one of the great television programs in CBC television history; it was innovative, live and had an extraordinary sense of urgency on Sunday night. It was skillfully antiestablishment. It really shaped my desire to get involved in great television,” said Peter Herrndorf, who watched the show as a young viewer and later became head of Current Affairs and then executive vice-president at the CBC.
Controversy in a conservative country did the program in. One documentary on topless go-go bars in San Francisco shocked prudes in parliament and writers in newspapers. There was outrage when Mr. LaPierre shed a tear on air after his interview with Steven Truscott’s mother.
Alphonse Ouimet, an engineer who knew the physical complexities of broadcasting, was president of the CBC at the time. He led the group that decided to cancel the program. Mr. Ouimet said the CBC should report on issues, not try to lead public opinion.
“The CBC and the men who run it are deeply and persistently afraid of success,” wrote a bitter Mr. Watson in the Star Weekly in November of 1966, just after the program had been cancelled. “Ouimet simply does not understand the nature of public opinion or what it means to Canada.”
Patrick Watson was born in Toronto two days before Christmas in 1929. His mother, Lucy Bates, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Stanley, a school principal. Young Patrick went to Oakwood Collegiate, then to the University of Toronto, where he earned an MA in English. He was working on a Doctorate at the University of Michigan when he was lured back to Toronto to work for the CBC. He was 26 years old.
It wasn’t his first kick at the can. Mr. Watson was a teenage radio actor in 1943 on a children’s dramatic series on the CBC called The Kootenay Kid.
Mr. Watson was a natural broadcaster, with a voice that put him in demand. At Expo ‘67, he did the voiceover for a film in the Man and the Oceans Pavilion as part of his collaboration with the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Later he produced, directed and wrote programs for Mr. Cousteau. Mr. Watson produced and hosted thousands of television programs over a career that spanned more than 75 years.
“He had this terrific voice, and he was relaxed, witty and eloquent as a host, but the biggest thing that Patrick had going was that he was completely comfortable in front of the camera,” said Mr. Herrndorf. “The audience understood that instinctively and felt good about sharing this time and space with him. That combination of voice, comfort in front of a camera and being comfortable in his own skin, it just made him an absolutely irresistible television performer.”
The Mulroney government appointed Mr. Watson Chair of the CBC in 1989. Until then, the president of the CBC also had the title of Chairman of the Board. The president of the CBC then was Gérard Veilleux, who had moved over from being deputy minister of the Treasury Board. Mr. Veilleux may not have known much about radio and television production, but he was a master bureaucrat. Mr. Watson was an actor, journalist, novelist, freelance producer and a charismatic on-air personality, but he was out of his depth in the world of Ottawa mandarins.
Almost right away, Mr. Watson and Mr. Veilleux had to implement the orders from the government to cut back the CBC budget. In his autobiography, This Hour has Seven Decades, he describes how he started, by wandering around the CBC’s Ottawa head office, a place that didn’t produce a minute of radio or television.
“We had found a corporate bureaucracy that was grievously obese. During my initial walk-around of the head office at 1500 Bronson in the fall of 1989, I went into one department of fifty people, not one of them could give me a clear description of what role he or she or the department played in the Corporation,” wrote Mr. Watson.
Soon that department was closed. The budget cuts then spread to the production side of the CBC. It was then that the employees who had welcomed Mr. Watson’s appointment turned on him.
“When Patrick Watson came in, he was known as a tough advocate, that was his on-air persona,” says Lise Lareau, who worked at CBC News at the time and later became president of the Media Guild. “But that persona didn’t show itself when the CBC cut local news in 1991. That really stung.”
It stung him too. “It hasn’t been an entirely happy time,” he told the Globe’s Christopher Harris in 1994, shortly after leaving as CBC Chair. “Because of my prominence as a media person…I think some of my colleagues expected me to reverse the laws of gravity.” He said some people were pretty direct in telling him they were disappointed. “And that was a bit tough to take,” said Mr. Watson.
Away from work, he had a happy family life. His family members said he enjoyed the Canadian wilderness. “He was happiest in the bush,” said his son, Chris. “My father would say the greatest success he had was the relationship with his wife, Caroline, the love of his life.”
When he was 30 years old, Mr. Watson fell off a ladder and injured his leg. It became infected, and it had to be amputated from above the knee. He said he was depressed by phantom limb pain in the first year and even considered suicide. But he snapped out of it and learned to live with what he referred to as his wooden leg. True to his television instincts, he preferred tight and honest language, so he shunned the word “prosthesis,” a term he felt softened the seriousness of his condition.
Mr. Watson drove a Volvo P-1800 sports car with a stick shift and found a way to adapt to doing things with one leg. Same for flying. At first, he was told he couldn’t get a pilot’s licence, but he changed flight schools and got a private pilot’s licence. With a special leg, he windsurfed at the family cottage on Go Home Lake in Georgian Bay.
Mr. Watson was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and promoted to a Companion—the highest level—in 2002. He had often assisted the Canadian disabled community, including serving as honorary chair of the Canadian Amputee Sports Association and chairman emeritus of the Canadian Abilities Foundation. He had honorary doctorates from Memorial University in Newfoundland, Mount Alison University and the University of Toronto.
Mr. Watson died at age 92 in Toronto on July 4, 2022. He is survived by his wife, the Irish writer and scholar Caroline Bamford, whom he met during a documentary production in Belfast in 1977; his sister, Mary Green, his son Chris, daughter Boo, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He is predeceased by his son, Greg.