Now look at them losers, that’s the way you do it
They ban a song and say it’s good for me
Now that’s just stupid. That’s a load of bullshit
Banning some music – next they’ll come for me
Now that’s just senseless. Still they’re gonna do it.
Lemme tell ya: they’re just plain dumb
Maybe save a sister from some hurting feelings
Maybe save a sister from some bum
A lotta pissed off radio DJ’s
Can’t play that music any more
Gotta groove on shit like Patio Lanterns
That kinda music make you wanna just heave
That little redneck with the earring and the make-up
Yeah buddy, that’s what he wears
That little redneck’s got his own pickup truck
That little redneck he’s been puttin’ on airs
Canada should learn to drop the PC
They shoulda learned that songs don’t kill
Look at that loser, he’s gotta whine to some bureaucrat, man
And we all pay the bill
And he’s up there. What’s that? More whining noises?
They say it’s to protect sensibilities
Now that’s just stupid. That’s a load of bullshit
Banning some music – next they’ll come for me
Exactly 10 years ago today I boarded a plane at Hamburg airport on a one-day all-expenses-paid trip to London for a job interview with CNBC, the financial news lies and bullshit channel.
I didn’t get the job, but that’s a good thing. It’s good to know what you don’t want as much as what you do.
Here’s how that day one decade ago went.
05:05. Get up, drink coffee, kiss wife, kiss little red-haired-girl, walk to taxi stand, taxi to airport.
06:45: Flight to London Heathrow. CNBC could have flown me to City Airport, but I guess they were counting their shekels.
07:20 Arrival Heathrow. The arrival hall / cattle holding pen is already crammed with a party of Japanese when I get to the back of the line, soon to be joined at the rear by a 747 load of chatty Indonesian tourists from Jakarta.
07:35 A previously unnoticed man in uniform stands up on a chair, points excitedly at one of the Indonesians and screams at the top of his lungs YOU THERE! YOU! Put that camera down or it will be confiscated! THERE IS NO FILMING ALLOWED IN THE ARRIVAL AREA!
07:35:10 Silence.
07:50 You know how when you just get past the customs doors you’re suddenly faced with a wad of people, some of whom are dorks holding signs? This is the one and only time a dork was holding a sign with my name on it.
08:25 It’s years before the congestion charge, and London traffic is going nowhere. The interview is at 10, I’ve been sitting in the back of this crushed-velvet barge for a half-hour but we’re barely out of the first roundabout heading from Heathrow to the City.
10:15 About an hour after I could have arrived had I schlepped with the plebes on the tube, I arrive at their offices near St. Paul’s and shake hands all around. They have no time for me, so they say I should just go wander about the newsroom a bit and chat with the people on the desk.
10:30 I discover they’re friendly enough, but my tongue has grown thick in the throat, so I blurt out some inane questions to those gracious enough to pry themselves away from their monitors to pay attention to the guy who’s obviously there for an interview. I silently pray to be plucked as soon as possible from awkward small-talk hell.
10:40 Prayers answered. The boss has arrives and we settle into a three-on-one in his office.
10:44 It becomes apparent that my hopes of working for a big-league news organisation in London based on a show reel of my work I’d sent them a few weeks before is not going to come off.
“We’re looking for someone to report live from the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Do you have any experience doing live reporting?”
The honest answer would have been, “Yes, but I really suck at it.” Instead I tell them I’ve done lives mostly on radio, but that the switch to TV shouldn’t be much of a problem.
The interview is fast-paced and covers a variety of topics. They would have me being the boss of the Frankfurt bureau, I’d be interviewing people in German but reporting in English and for one brief moment it sounds so appealing, especially to someone who’s been out of a job for a couple of years.
But at the same time, I’m thinking: no. This isn’t for me. I would have been willing to uproot the family for London, but Bankfurt? We were already living in Hamburg. Frankfurt in comparison has about as much to offer as a Gulag sentence, and besides, I couldn’t stand the idea of living away from my family just for the sake of work should we opt for me working down there while they stayed in Hamburg.
12:30 I am so dying to take a piss my back teeth are floating, but we keep it going for at least another half-hour before breaking for lunch at a nearby eatery.
14:15: Alone in the elevator after lunch with a man who’s attended the interview but not said much looks at me out of the corner of his eye and asks softly in kind of a sly tone, “Do you play the market much?”
Again, the honest answer would have been, “Yes, and I’m dying to pad my retirement account with all the insider trading shit that guys like you have a direct line to every day,” but this time I’m even more honest.
“No,” I tell him. ” I sold everything before leaving Hong Kong, and haven’t looked back. I sleep easier that way.”
A curious exchange. Was that a test? Was he trying to see whether I was financially interested in anything I might be reporting on, and therefore in a potential conflict of interest? Who’s he kidding? Or was he just asking innocently whether I had any personal experience in markets at all? But wasn’t the latter already apparent on my resume and show reel?
14:30 Relieved it’s finally over, I shake a few hands and am out the door into a sticky London summer. Three hours to kill before heading to the airport, I head straight to bookstores to load up, grab a beer in SoHo, then the train to Heathrow and home.
21:00 Back in Hamburg. Did it even happen? Yes, it did.
And because it had to do with journalism, money and farce, it reminded me of this:
No, I’m not looking for a new job, a new life or a new wife. Just something I’ve never done before, something I know I’m not good at, something I hope will really help me in some areas I really need improving, and maybe have some fun to boot.
Actually, the fun part has already been happening on Tuesday night for the past couple of months.
Not those sweaty Republicans in loud suits! Those used car and life insurance salesmen! Run away! Run away!!!!!
Seriously, if you’d have mentioned Toastmasters to me up until the first night I actually showed up for a meeting, my out-dated, pre-conceived notions of who shows up and what goes on there would have kicked right in.
But as I’ve come to realise over the first half dozen two-hour sessions, the people who show up to the Hamburg chapter from vastly different backgrounds and walks of life, all with one goal in mind: to feel confident while delivering an engaging speech before a live audience.
Not a bad skill to acquire.
I used to speak to a live audience estimated at one million every single workday, but I was sitting all alone in a tiny studio in front of a TV camera with the aid of a teleprompter. Having had no formal television training, all I had to rely on was what I could glean from watching those broadcasters I admired, but I soon realised after a few weeks on air that after overcoming the idea that you’re actually being watched, reading the words as naturally as you can pull it off is not that big a deal.
Public speaking at a podium before an audience, however, is so different. For one thing, you have all those faces staring back at you, and you alone. What’s good about Toastmasters, though, is the feedback you get. Your speech is evaluated on several levels the night you give it, so you always know what you’ve done right and what you still need to work on. My colleagues in television usually stopped at ‘nice hair’ or ‘you picked your nose again – did you notice?’
So Toastmasters International will officially have its 230,001st member in August when the new session gets underway. I will keep going as a guest until the summer break, and then formally join up. Until then I can participate in the meetings by speaking up in the two-minute improv rounds they call “table topics,” but I’ll have to wait until I’m officially a member before actually getting up there for the real thing.
And since I’ve already been out for a few beers with most of the faces staring back at me, the first time I get up there to give ice-breaker Speech Number One will feel less like being thrust in front of a roomful of strangers and more like saying a longer hello to new friends.
You know, I really wanted to write something about Winnenden the day it happened, but I just couldn’t.
It was just so senseless, so incredibly mindless, and too close to home somehow.
I was working that day – I work in TV news – and as the wires in their ceaseless, droning regularity upped the numbers over six hours first from two, then to five, to nine, to 11, to 14, to 15, to 16, to 17, then back down to 16, I remained, as usual and as is expected, cooly distant to it all. Doing my job without thinking about the people involved, whether it’s a school shooting or another boiler-plate Baghdad bombing, plane crash or 100-storey buildings collapsing into smoke and ash: just chasing after pictures, relaying info to colleagues and staying on top of it all to help make sure our shows were getting out OK.
Until exactly 1455, when about 20 seconds of video came across of a woman – maybe 50, 55 – seen from a long shot, her hands on her face as she’s breaking down in tears, buckling at the knees as a man turns to support her, another beside her at a cellphone perhaps trying to get information, then the next shot from another angle a little later of paramedics escorting the distraught woman to a safe area.
We’re all supposed to remain so professional. So on the job. We have to treat the pictures for their value and their content without being affected by them, but as I was phoning to offer them to the editor of the news exchanges as is my job, for the first time in nine years on the desk my voice was actually breaking.
As I saw those pictures come in I was suddenly flooded with thoughts that I could very easily have been the one standing there, that it could have been my kid in that school, that my wife as a high school teacher could just as easily have been one of the teachers there, that I could one day be the one to get the call that would pretty much destroy the foundation of my life in this foreign outpost.
This in a work culture of passionate indifference, where maintaining a balance between commitment and dedication to the timely distribution of the facts must be balanced by a cool disengagement to their enormity.
I wasn’t the only one to have trouble keeping an iron gaze.
The chief of police talking to reporters in Winnenden that day stood and gave his statements in measured tones, but his eyes flooded wet when he said, “…we’re naturally doing everything we can to support the parents at this time, but I’ve been over there among them and I have to tell you, it’s damn hard to look them straight in the eye.”
I allowed myself to imagine how the parents must be feeling. It was fleeting, but it caught me off guard. We’re all human, we can’t stop feelings, but like a surgeon with Tourette’s Syndrome, we have to be able to keep them switched off or be unable to function.
In the end I posted something frivolous about Obama chicken fingers which received dozens of comments, but somehow regret it.
With unemployment in what’s left of the world’s leading economy rising to its highest level in 25 years today, a lot of people are going to suffer as the tidal wave aftermath of Wall Street’s latest greed bubble washes over the rest of the world.
But losing your job isn’t bad news for everyone.
Take the case of my friend and fellow Canadian Douglas in London. We met in Hong Kong in late 1995 when he was being hired for a new weekly show at the station where I was working. Because they the management twits picked Douglas instead of me to host the new programme, I first saw him as a rival, but after a couple of days on the desk with him I soon got over myself, and we’ve been tight ever since.
Douglas has had a real Hong Kong career. He first worked in radio, then TV, then switched for the big bucks of public relations ’til he – quite understandably – couldn’t stand the stench of all the bullshit any longer, then went back to TV.
About two years ago, he got a job producing for a world-famous provider of television business news in London. I remember how excited he sounded on the phone from Hong Kong about landing the position, how he was finally getting out of this “small town” and hitting the big leagues to work on what’s happening in the heart of old world finance.
But like all expats who’ve already paid the price once for leaving home and establishing another one overseas, in moving to London he had to pay all over again, because in the meantime he’d built up such a good life over a dozen years in Hong Kong.
Douglas had good friends, a loving, long-term partner, a comfortable home, even a rag-top car in a city where driving is a luxury often associated with the very wealthy. And let’s face it: as a successful, white, middle-aged gay man in Hong Kong he was still a hot commodity. In London he’s as common as the man on the platform waiting for the 8:15.
So when Douglas told me yesterday that a show he’d been working on had been cancelled and he’d taken the buy-out they were offering him and his colleagues, I said to him: Fantastic!
Getting bought out is the best news he’s had to deal with in ages. Wu Hu! He can now take the cash, travel a bit, visit family back in Canada for a while before taking up a standing offer to return to the station where we met way back in the mid-nineties.
It’ll be the third time in a decade he’s gone back to them, but that’s OK. It not only demonstrates how highly they value his skills, it shows all of us how important it is never to burn your bridges and to remember who your friends are.
And instead of moaning about another dreary London morning, he’ll once again be able to enjoy breakfast on the terrace in the middle of February amid lush greenery, warm breezes and maybe even the sight of a passing cockatoo before heading out into the sunshine.
5. So relaxed, you can plainly see a man’s butt and a woman’s cooter in an advertisement for gasoline on free-to-air public television at five in the afternoon, and nobody bats an eyelash.
(Best observed in HQ. Believe me, I’ve tested it. Looks like a cooter to me.)
Disclaimer: Any complaints as to difficulty in hitting the pause button at just the right spot as well as the humorous quality or political correctness of this post can be addressed to Angela Merkel, The Chancellery, Berlin.
In a way I’m sorry we missed all the snow in London, but at least we made it back home before the storm hit. On the bus back out to that horrible trash-heap called Luton airport late Sunday afternoon it was snowing like a bastard. I said to K: if this keeps up, there’s going to be a real blizzard. Seeing as how the whole country was shut down by a snowfall that would barely rate a shoulder-shrug back home, we’d probably still be stranded there had it started falling only three hours earlier.
We stayed the weekend with our friend Douglas. As the snow was still coming down Monday he took this shot of dear ol’ Alfred, whose immense, rusting bust dominates his building’s courtyard.
I like how Hitchcock’s wintry cloak brings out the details.
So when the political crisis gripping my home and ignored land started to make the papers over here this week, I knew something big must be going on, especially because friends and family sent me emails the same day with links to petitions they wanted me to sign.
Just six weeks after a federal election, the country’s Prime Minister was being threatened with the axe. He didn’t have a majority in Parliament, but was acting as if he did. The opposition parties didn’t like that, so were threatening to band together to form a majority of their own. The coalition would pit the centrist Liberals and the left-wing New Democrats in alliance with the separatist Bloc Québécois.
All this without an election. Even though it was perfectly legal, it sounded to me like a bloodless coup, and with the help of the dreaded Quebec souverainistes, to boot!
Even though the Bloc Québécois hasn’t done anything to work toward separation for several years, in a televised speech to the country the Prime Minister invoked the threat of separation should the coalition succeed in forming a government with the help of separatists.
That smacked of the scare-mongering “terrorists” mantra you hear from politicians south of the Canadian border, but for once we’re not even going to mention that country.
This is huge stuff to Canadians. I’ve not seen the country this polarised since an election 20 years ago which led to Brian Mulroney signing a Free Trade Agreement with the other two countries Canada shares with North America.
Another thing you have to get used to as a Canadian expat is giving up your right to vote. I can’t vote in Germany because you have to be a citizen, and I can’t vote in Canada because you have to be a resident.
That’s my choice, though.
Unfortunately, the millions of Canadians who DO have the right to vote haven’t been given the chance. Considering that the crisis was based on actions on both sides I doubt anyone would have voted for, the only fair thing to do is for Parliament to reconvene long enough to call for a new election. Sure, it might result in a new minority government, but at least the people will have been given a chance to have their say.
What’s going on now looks just too much like the Simpsons.
I heard a vicious rumour that Henry Kissinger was there, but since the crush of people was so great in the room he was supposed to be found, I never got a chance to even get close.
Had to leave shortly after midnight before the first results came it, not long after having to hear Wolf Blitzer on big screen throw over to CNN Washington reporter Dana Bash with some bone-headed pun along the lines of, “well you’re going to be attending quite a bash yourself, Dana.”
Google image and text searches that coughed up this blog:
dead headless python; easyjet crashing in to big ben; man ice skating on a canal; derbyshire nude grannies; horse brushes; "little red book" mao 1968; panty dresden zwinger; disneyfication; hot air balloon cappadocia göreme; ancient ice hockey; all about camel penis; pictures of a girl brushing a horse; skating on canals in holland; dutch canal winter skating; panties bicycle; naked girls from squamish; cave dwellings of cappadocia; quitting blogging; dangers of ipods in saunas; im so british i shit the queen; landscape artist crack london; charlotte roach author of wetlands; elvis nude; make bike look crappy; angela merkel naked in the sauna; nude olive run video clip; the voice of the dead sheep; the queen; paris german occupation diary girl; hagenbeck; chess and hitler; crack tate; nacked pictures of girls with tube breasts; garbage in rivers; wooden chests turkey; greenland girls nude blogs; queen elizabeth queen of fucking everything; the self you have to live with, winfred; Prince Rupert BC recipe sex in a pan; In Sauna Hall I must married from women nude beautiful,and living inside; hazing nude olive run buttocks; nude klingons; canada most toxic waste dump flute player; gary giggles fall in camel poop; make your own shank out of a toothbrush; the day my bum exploded; ryanair naked crew; how do i make my tamagotchi have sex; canadian skier ian; the meat of the gorilla; putrid paranoia; why canadian are idiot; greenland copulating; I am a Swedish woman in sauna; sauna Americans uptight; Skunk families in Montreal; my wife has me whipped; second-life spanking; things to alleviate cramp; Angela Merkels butt; photos of naked ladies; 12 year-old buying condoms; jobless bum; how do you get this damn thing to stop blinking; amsterdam red light ex porn berth fuck; what if the world stops spinning; mausi naked; total shaved in German saunas?; camel dung hash; cuddly butt; whip me bloody; spanking ham; think spain oliver shanti; zoo animals with buggy eyes; monocle magazine is shit; goon gut babies; sex in a wheelchair pictures; her oldest got sprayed by a skunk; Pictures of Zoo animals copulating; screaming granny sound; photos of spanking all over europe; is nine too young to have a baby?; american females in german saunas; my wife has histrionic personality disorder; my wife whips me when i disobey
Nine out of 10 dentists recommend flossing with the following posts:
10:15 About an hour after I could have arrived had I schlepped with the plebes on the tube, I arrive at their offices near St. Paul’s and shake hands all around. They have no time for me, so they say I should just go wander about the newsroom a bit and chat with the people on the desk.
Take the case of my friend and fellow Canadian Douglas in London. We met in Hong Kong in late 1995 when he was being hired for a new weekly show at the station where I was working. Because they 
And instead of moaning about another dreary London morning, he’ll once again be able to enjoy breakfast on the terrace in the middle of February amid lush greenery, warm breezes and maybe even the sight of a passing 
nal
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
Have your say. The comments box is always open.