Will Europeans freeze? Fools at Facebook and a Steinway story.
September 19, 2022 Volume 3 # 14
Energy Shortage in Europe
From Germany to Britain, governments are hustling to make sure people can afford to heat their homes this winter. The Economist says the price of natural gas is the equivalent of oil being at $400 a barrel.
Norway might cut prices. Azerbaijan will increase natural gas exports to Europe this year by 30 percent. Still it might not be enough. Governments will have to subsidize households so people don’t freeze or starve. All courtesy of Russia in Ukraine and weaponizing energy exports to Europe.
Car nuts ignore the crisis.
The Goodwood Revival is going on right now. It is the number one showcase for antique racers, including the old E-type you see in the picture below. If you want to see more, just click on the You Tube video. You’ll notice a presenter wearing a black armband in memory of the Queen. The show went on anyway.
Where the rich live in Africa
Interesting that most of the rich people in Africa live on the coasts. There are 21 billionaires in Africa, with South Africa and Nigeria in top spots. Odd that Algeria doesn’t rate, given its oil wealth. But I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this post.
Who they are (A Nigerian is number one)
Rant Section
Dumb as a bag of hammers at Facebook
Facebook has banned any advertising mention of a film that deals with the Holocaust. Beautiful Blue Eyes. The title refers to a child murdered by the Nazis. The film is about a Jewish New York City cop, played by the late Roy Scheider, who is haunted by the murder of his Jewish family by the nazis. The film first came out in 2009; Scheider died in 2008
.Facebook ruled the title violated its race policy. The main shareholder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has to be embarrassed. He is Jewish, and has hazel eyes, as do I, which are rarer than blue eyes.
Not sure if Zuckerberg got involved, but Facebook, known in the corporate world as Meta, lifted the ban after the Rolling Stone story. “We reviewed the ads and page in question and determined that the enforcement was made in error, so we lifted the restriction,” said Meta on Friday.
Why does the New York Times Hate Britain?
The New York Times seems to specialize in getting fairly unknown writers to bash Britain, especially England. WIth the death of the Queen they had a field day.
Less than three hours after the Queen died the NYT posted a piece by a Maya Jasanoff, a professor of history at Harvard University wrote: “…the Queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”
Earlier this year, Richard Seymour, an obscure Marxist from Northern Ireland, who writes a blog called Lenin’s Tomb, wrote piece called: The Fantasy of Brexit Britain is Over.
This started a TransAtlantic pissing match with Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail the next day writing: “Why do the useful idiots at the New York Times keep putting the boot into Brexit Britain when it's America that's a crime-ravaged basket case being torn apart by wokery.”
Since many television networks take their ideas from the New York Times — as we used to do at the CBC, often matching print stories from The Globe and Mail or Toronto Star— this week Ali Velshi of MSNBC said the Queen: "represented an institution that had a long and ugly history of brutalism, violence, theft and slavery."
Velshi, who is Canadian, was on with the rather learned conservative British Historian Andrew Roberts who shot back: "I'm certainly taking issue with your remarks about slavery which we abolished 32 years before you did and we didn't have to kill 600,000 people in a civil war over it."
If you have the time, Google the You Tube Velshi vs Roberts exchange. Velshi is a bully who usually has people melt when he harrangues them. Not this time.
As one Brit said, with allies and friends like this who needs enemies?
My own theory is the New York Times hates Trump, they equate Boris Johnson with Trump and Boris with Brexit, which they thought was dumb.
Andrew Neil rebuttal in the Daily Mail
Essay of the Week
On October 3, 2008, I wrote this story for the Globe and Mail. It was about Paul Hahn, a man who ran a piano store in Toronto. On Saturday night I went to a concert by a Quebec concert pianist, Charles Richard-Hamelin, who played Chopin from memory. Impressive for a person like me who knows little about music. Charles played on a Steinway, a specialty of the Hahn store. I interviewed Henry Steinway, the last member of the piano family, a few weeks before this obituary appeared. He died on September 18, 2008, in New York. I was probably the last reporter to speak with him.
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His Toronto piano store prospered while the competition faded away
Founded by his cellist father in 1913, Paul Hahn & Co. lost ground to radio, movies and TV until he quit new pianos and turned exclusively to restoring and selling older instruments
TORONTO — The piano has been in decline since 1911. First the gramophone, then the radio, movies and television distracted people from playing. Paul Hahn of Toronto battled the trend and built a successful business by restoring, tuning and selling old pianos. New pianos might not be hot sellers, but put a vintage $60,000 Steinway in the window and people will snap it up. For more than 40 years, he prospered while many of his competitors went out of business.
The showroom of Paul Hahn & Co is filled with more than a dozen pianos, a mixture of uprights and grand pianos, some grander than others. He said one of the reasons for the success of his business was the number of spectacular pianos bought by people who could afford them in the early 20th century.
"There's a Steinway concert grand in our workshops now that would sell today for about $130,000," Mr. Hahn told a reporter two years ago. "That same piano could be bought in Toronto in 1910 for $900."
Many of those pianos fill the two floors of workshops in the Paul Hahn store, which is now run by his daughter Alex Hahn. They are there to be tuned or restored. And the phone rings often with people wanting to know if Paul Hahn & Co. would like to buy the family piano.
The business began just before the First World War, but it wasn't until Mr. Hahn took over that the business prospered. Although blessed with scant musical talent, he was a friendly man whose charm allowed him to make friends with talents from singer Gordon Lightfoot to Henry Steinway of the New York piano-making family.
Raised in Toronto in a musical family, his father, Paul Hahn Sr., was 60 when his son was born. His father was a cellist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra who had decided to go into the piano business. Young Paul went to Brown Junior Public School on Avenue Road in Toronto. By the time he was 10, the Second World War was raging and he found he always played the Luftwaffe pilot in schoolyard games. "And of course, I always lost," he recalled years later.
He was a poor student and preferred hockey to books but did learn to play the violin moderately well. He could always fake it on the piano, albeit with short, showoff bursts in the showroom.
The family's summers were spent on an island in Lake Balsam, north of Peterborough, Ont. Family legend had it that the land was given to one of his mother's ancestors, Harry Delamare, as a reward for fighting in the Fenian raids that followed the U.S. Civil War.
At 13, Paul was sent to boarding school at Lakefield, Ont. Again, he wasn't a star student and left in the last year of high school without having graduated. He worked for a summer picking tobacco and used the money to buy his first car, a Model A Ford. After that, he was always an automobile nut. For a time, he worked on the assembly line at the Massey-Harris tractor factory on the edge of downtown Toronto.
It was probably inevitable that he would work at his father's shop. While he wasn't a musician like his father, he was a good salesman who loved the world of music and musicians. Over the years, he built a strong loyalty among his customers.
"I bought my first grand piano, a Steinway, from Paul Hahn when I was a young producer. It was $40,000, the second-biggest purchase of my life," said Bob Ezrin, who went on to fame producing such recordings as The Wall by Pink Floyd. "Hahn pianos was a place musicians would drop in. I liked Paul and we stayed friends. He was a salty guy, the kind you wanted to go drinking and fishing with."
For many years, the Hahn piano store was located at Yonge and Bloor, backing onto Britnell Books, another Toronto institution. After almost running over owner Roy Britnell with his car in the lane behind the stores, Mr. Hahn apologized and the two men became friends.
"He was like a second father to me, and he gave me business advice I lived with it all my life," Mr. Hahn once said.
The advice was duly passed on to his daughter Alex. "The advice was avoid going into debt, own the building you work from and always rent the upstairs to a hairdresser," said Ms. Hahn, who took over her father's business in 1997, owns the building and rents the upper floor to a hairdresser. "They do well, no matter how bad the economy."
In 1952, the Paul Hahn store was expropriated to make way for the Toronto subway. Britnell's, the book store, survived for a few more decades, although the building is now occupied by a Starbucks. The piano store moved to two other locations before settling in at its current location on Yonge Street, a block north of the Rosedale subway station.
It was around then that Mr. Hahn took over the business full-time. He was gregarious and eccentric man all his life and he enjoyed a party and having a good time. It was not unusual to find the likes of concert pianist Andre Watts playing a piano in the window of the store at 4 a.m.
On one occasion, Mr. Hahn had to deliver an upright piano from his shop to a client several blocks away. It was a rush. They couldn't find a truck, so they put the piano on a dolly and towed it several blocks through midtown Toronto behind Mr. Hahn's Austin-Healey sports car. The piano arrived in one piece.
In its early years, the store was the Toronto agent for Steinway pianos, but lost that franchise to Eaton's because the department store had national coverage. Years later, Mr. Hahn said that was a good thing because it got the company out of the business of selling new pianos.
"It's odd, but if we had stuck with new Steinways, we would have gone broke. The Japanese came in and sold pianos for $1,400 with Heintzman at $2,800 and the Steinway at $3,000," Mr. Hahn said. He also said he was happy he never branched out into manufacturing the instruments.
Hahn does continue to restore and tune older Steinways, however. Paul Hahn always kept in touch with Henry Steinway and often visited him in New York - sometimes just to make a social call and other times to consider pianos he might want to buy.
"I knew his father, of course, and he taught the son how to work with pianos," Mr. Steinway said last month. "Paul Hahn was very knowledgeable about pianos and was an expert mechanic. The trick with good used pianos is to know how to do it right. So many people mess them up.
"He was also a good salesman and I enjoyed having lunch with him here in New York," added Mr. Steinway, who died Sept 18.
One by one, piano makers and piano stores went out of business, but Mr. Hahn prospered. He expanded his store, digging out a second basement for his workshops and adding a third floor on the building. Tuning and restoring pianos was a better business than making or selling new ones.
In 1997, he finally retired. Although he lived across the street from the store, he seldom visited, leaving his daughter to run the business as she saw fit. However, that was not to say that he lost interest. "Every Saturday morning at 9:30, he would call the store to make sure I was at work," she said.
Mr. Hahn was a fixture in the neighbourhood, and could often be seen having a smoke while walking Tarry, his Bouvier dog, in nearby Ramsden Park. He spent a lot of time at his cottage at the French River, near Sudbury, and at another rustic property he owned on the north shore of Lake Superior, near Terrace Bay.
PAUL HAHN
Paul Delamere Hahn was born in Toronto on June 16, 1932. He died of a heart attack at his cottage at the French River on Aug. 1, 2008. He was 76. He is survived by his wife, Gail, and by daughters Jennifer, Janet, Alex and Laura. He also leaves his sister, Mary.