The friendship of Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and St. Louis Jesuit priest Father Ed Dowling, who helped to convert American Newspaper Guild founder and union activist Heywood Broun to Catholicism

Bill Wilson, left, and Father Ed Dowling, right

Dr. Bob Smith, left, and Heywood Broun, right

The entire 12-step movement, which now totals more than 100 self-help fellowships, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.

The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith’s last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.

Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher – or Ebby T. in the preferred anonymous parlance of 12-step programs – a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.

The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, known almost universally by its informal title as simply the Big Book, was published on April 10, 1939. There were 4,730 books printed, with red cloth binding, wide columns, thick paper (which was why it was called the Big Book in the first place), and a red, yellow, black and white dust jacket, which came to be known as the “circus cover.”

Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA as it is also known, has long had an impact on the larger culture and its perhaps most famous slogan, “one day at a time,” long ago entered the public vocabulary as a sentiment to remind people feeling overwhelmed by events to pause for a moment, step back and see their lives in the present moment, not the past or future, which  has made the concept of the current 24 hours – and in a crisis sometimes even smaller units of time – a cornerstone of AA.

Wilson’s spiritual advisor and “sponsor”  for almost 20 years from November 1940 until his death in April 1960 was a Jesuit priest, Father Ed Dowling, from St. Louis.

Dowling was born in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1898. He attended the Baden Public and the Holy Name Parochial School and went on to St. Louis University High School. In 1918, he served as a private in the First World War. In 1919, he began working as a reporter on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that same year, Dowling entered the Order at Florissant and followed the regular course subsequently for philosophy at St. Louis University.

Dowling was a member of the American Newspaper Guild and served as a delegate for the St. Louis local at Guild conventions in Toronto and San Francisco. He was a friend of Heywood Broun, the noted New York columnist, Guild founder and legendary union activist, and helped, along with then Father Fulton J. Sheen, to convert Broun from agnosticism to Catholicism seven months before his death in 1939.

When he decided to become a priest, Dowling reportedly told his newspaper colleagues he was entering the seminary –  the very next morning –  at an all-night cafe frequented by Globe-Democrat reporters.

Dowling’s regency from 1926 to 1929 was spent at Loyola Academy in Chicago. He was ordained in 1931 by Archbishop John Joseph Glennon of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, who was elevated to be a cardinal shortly before his death in 1946.

On a cold and rainy November night in 1940, Dowling showed up at 10 p.m. unannounced at Bill Wilson’s apartment above AA’s Twenty-Fourth Street Club in New York City.

“I’m Father Ed Dowling from St. Louis,” he said. “A Jesuit friend and I have been struck by the similarity of the AA twelve steps and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.”

Dowling would become the first American Catholic clergyman to prominently endorse AA, both in later revised editions of the Big Book, and in 1947 in The Queen’s Work, a magazine published by the Central Office of Sodalities of Our Lady.

When Dowling, as one of the originators, helped start Couples Are Not Alone (CANA), a national Catholic movement for married couples in 1942,  he borrowed heavily, he told Wilson, from AA’s 12 steps to help participants deal with mental difficulties, scruples and sexual compulsions.

As a guest speaker at AA’s St. Louis International Convention in Kiel Auditorium in 1955,  Dowling remarked: “There is a negative approach from agnosticism. This was the approach of Peter the Apostle. ‘Lord, to whom shall we go’?” I doubt if there is anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don’t think we should despise the negative. I have a feeling that if I ever find myself in heaven, it will be from backing away from hell.”

Dowling died peacefully in his sleep in Memphis on April 3, 1960.

It has has been customary across Canada during the third week in November since 1981, which begins Sunday, Nov. 16 this year, to mark National Addictions Awareness Week and all its variants such as National Aboriginal Addictions Awareness Week and Manitoba Addictions Awareness Week (MAAW).

The federal government in 1987 first proclaimed the week. Approximately 600,000 people take part in NAAW activities throughout the country.

Much of the early work was conceptualized and developed in St. Albert, Alberta at the Nechi Training, Research & Health Promotions Institute, which is housed with Poundmaker’s Lodge, known as Canada’s first addictions treatment centre specifically for aboriginal clients.

Damian Thompson, associate editor at The Spectator in London, specializing in religion and classical music, published a book in May 2012 called, The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading our Lives and Taking Over Your World, in which he argues addictions to iPhones, painkillers, cupcakes, alcohol and Internet pornography – to name just a few – are taking over our lives. Our most casual daily habits can quickly become obsessions that move beyond our control, Thompson argued, suggesting that human desire is in the process of being reshaped.

“Already, the distinction between ‘addicts’ and ordinary people is far less clear than it was even 20 years ago, Thompson wrote in a May 28, 2012 piece for the Daily Telegraph in London, where he was editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist at the time, headlined, “Addiction: the coming epidemic,” with the “line between consumption, habit and addiction is becoming dangerously blurred The difference between old-fashioned porn and Internet porn is a bit like the difference between wine and spirits. After hundreds of years as a mild intoxicant, erotica has undergone a sudden distillation. Digital porn is the equivalent of cheap gin in Georgian England: a reliable if unhygienic hit that relieves misery and boredom. And, unlike the old ‘dirty mags,’ it is available in limitless quantities.”

Whether addiction is a disease, in the true medical sense of the word (Thompson argued it is not), a cognitive behavioural problem, or self-destructive habits borne out of poor choices, but choices nonetheless, is an ongoing debate, and while interesting, is of secondary importance. Whatever addiction is or isn’t, few would argue that it doesn’t affect entire families – and even communities – across all generational, ethnic, racial and class distinctions.

Addiction, be it to alcohol or other drugs, gambling, Internet pornography, etc., is an equal opportunity destroyer of lives. While the addict or the alcoholic may be the most obvious casualty, the collateral damage is all around them.

While it’s impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it’s not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.

Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.

Bill Wilson himself  was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.

‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman

Wendy Northcutt is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology. But what she is best known for since 1993 is being the prime collector and propagator of the stories that make up the annual Darwin Awards, one of the most popular humour pages on the Internet,  as they recognize and catalog individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own very stupic actions. The tongue-in-cheek honour originated as early as 1985 in Usenet newsgroup discussions.

While the Darwin Awards make every attempt to keep the competition for stupidity pristine by acting as gatekeeper and blocking the entry of pranksters with urban legends, some “apocryphal” stories are included on the “Darwin Awards website because they are inspirational narratives of the astounding efforts of legendary Darwin Awards contenders,” Northcutt says.

Case in point: Meet  Mark Boslough, an Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist, member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, who is also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and member of the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, who has Asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) named after him. Boslough is also the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

This invariably led to a ritual debunking on the Urban Legends Reference Pages, better known as Snopes.com , which looks at stories of unknown or questionable origin and is a well-known resource for covering urban legends and Internet rumors, receiving 300,000 visits a day. Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson,  a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. Snopes takes it name from the Snopes trilogy – The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion – written by American novelist William Faulkner between 1940 and 1959 regarding the Snopes family in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

You can read the “Christmas Roast  1998 Urban Legend” on the Darwin Awards website at: http://www.darwinawards.com/legends/legends1998-11.html and the Snopes “Nuke of Earl” account at: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/microwave.asp

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‘Most Read Popular Thompson News’, Bill Comaskey and the Chief, Beer & Skits, and a salute to our favourite curmudgeons, Len Podbisky and Harold Kemp

While I’m still not entirely sure what I think of Glacier’s Oct. 16 redesign of the Thompson Citizen’s website, I can say the “Most Read Popular Thompson News” is an interesting revelation. While most newspaper stories are usually considered the next day’s fish wrap, a few (very few) stand the test of time. So it is we learn that the most read and popular story at the moment in the online edition of the Thompson Citizen, “Vale Inco restructures senior management: Position of Manitoba Operations president abolished” (http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/vale-inco-restructures-senior-management-1.1360946) ran … well, more than five years ago actually on July 22, 2009, the month after the paper first went online. Don’t get me wrong: I think it is a heck of a story; after all I wrote it. Same for the third of the five “Most Read Popular Thompson News”  stories today: “Canada’s most violent crime city: Thompson, Manitoba: Statistics Canada’s new rankings again paint a bleak picture (http://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/canada-s-most-violent-crime-city-thompson-manitoba-1.1368767).  I wrote that one also in July: it ran on July 22, 2011, more than three years ago. Rounding out the top five list in Number 2, 4 and 5 spots  are three stories from last Wednesday’s Oct. 29 paper. Odd but interesting. I suspect the “Most Read Popular Thompson News”  list will very soon undergo some tinkering in terms of algorithms or delivery and my old Vale and Stats Can stories will be relegated to virtual fish wrap. C’est la vie. It was fun to see them again so prominently displayed in a vertical bar on Nov. 3, 2014 down the right hand side of the Thompson Citizen’s home page.

And not to carp (well, at least not too much), but are there any readers who actually find the digital ISSUU digital publishing platform edition easier to read online than the old-fashioned Adobe PDF of the weekly paper? Maybe. Let me know if you’re one of them. I’d be interested to know how that’s working for you.

Oh. And that hypertext link at the bottom left of the home page to the Flin Flon Reminder (www.thereminder.ca), as one of the Thompson Citizen’s “sister papers.” Dead (the link, not the Reminder).  Since about 2011 or even longer, if I recall correctly.

As for the main headshot or photo for someone appearing on the home page in the main story now in the new online version of the Thompson Citizen, think big, very big: Hello, Niki! That should make for some interesting pics and story choices to lead the home page as things unfold over on Commercial Place in the weeks ahead.

OK. I’ll stop. And dedicate this post to well-known raconteur Len Podbisky, a former Thompson Citizen reporter and former news director of Arctic Radio CHTM-610 AM, who wrote a very funny column intermittently, as both a staffer and freelancer, aptly named, “Tales from the Grumpy Old Men’s Club,” and the late Harold Everett Esson Kemp, who was the ripe old age of 93 when he died in 2011. Harold used to enrich and enliven the Page 4 editorial page in the Thompson Citizen from time to time with his letters to the editor.

I published Harold last letter to the editor on Dec. 1, 2010, and he was as blunt as ever. “Former Manitoba Operations Vale spokesman David Markham told me last June that the most recent information he had then was the mines here would close in 2028. Of course the life of the mines would be extended if any new discoveries were found. Diamond drilling underground is still being done. So far nothing new.

“Since I came here in 1967, nine mines have closed, some for lack of ore others due to content and prohibitive costs.

“For years now I have had general knowledge as to the life of these mines, maybe because I was a miner one time. When talking to Markham on this subject, I told him I was about to attend a meeting and advise the people the life of this mine is only till the year 2030 to 2035. It was then David corrected me by saying their estimate was 2028. His comment to me was, “Well, Harold, you weren’t out too much.

“Why bring this up! Because the mayor and others like Steve Ashton keeps talking about the great future for Thompson. UCN is a white elephant to begin with. Pick up your paper and you’ll read job ads for both campuses here and in The Pas looking for teachers and instructors. Another thing. Where are we to pick up 500 to 600 students to attend college when we don’t even have an industry here? Where is the tax money to be had? Down the line we’ll be lucky to have 4,000 to 5,000 people here. Looks to me Snow Lake is the place to be.”

Now, true enough, Harold was writing well before Vale’s “Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project,” at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), entered its current Front End Loading (FEL) 3 study stage, which looks at its feasibility, in Vale’s four-stage project development system, and may or may not amount to a big deal some day. But you’ve got to admire Harold’s directness and history may still prove him not far off on at least some of his observations. Time will tell.

As for Podbisky, long before he turned his pen to “Tales from the Grumpy Old Men’s Club,” he along with CBC Radio North Country host Mark Szyszlo, and now Winnipeg-based provincial civil servant Jim Stewart, were members of the boundary-pushing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Low Budget Trash Theatre triumvirate, from the original incarnation of Beer & Skits.

The original Beer & Skits, which had a long run at the Royal Canadian Legion’s Centennial Hall from the 1980s through the mid-1990s, was famous – or perhaps infamous – for taking on any number of sacred cows, including wickedly spot-on mimicking of former mayor Bill Comaskey, God rest his soul, or a monologue by Podbisky on just how aboriginal a certain local First Nations chief really was – while Comaskey and the chief were in the audience.

Unfortunately, it all ended rather badly in a legal debacle in the mid-1990s with a member of council – not Comaskey – among several people threatening defamation lawsuits.

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Newsweek Europe wants me: Why? SocialBro told them they did

I’m not usually a big fan of being arbitrarily joined to lists or groups on social media without being asked if I want in the club. If I want to join, I’ll ask. But, hey, there’s always exceptions, right? Unless, of course, you are a real hardliner like Groucho Marx reportedly was. In his letter of resignation to the Friars’ Club of Beverly Hills he is reputed to have written: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members,” which was first reported on Oct. 20, 1949 by columnist Erskine Johnson in his “Hollywood Notes” column for Hearst Corporation, which was syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association.  However, there are several variations and versions of the oft-repeated quote, so some elements of the story are perhaps a tad apocryphal.

In any event, I recently received a somewhat cryptic “notification” on my Twitter account John Barker (@jwbarker22) | Twitter at https://twitter.com/jwbarker22 that “Newsweek Europe added you to list NewsweekEurope/nw-editor-list-76”

Newsweek was launched on Feb. 17, 1933 by Thomas J.C. Martyn, a former foreign-news editor for TIME magazine.  In its day, it at times rivaled TIME for being the American newsmagazine must-read some weeks. Alas, the days of Newsweek rivaling TIME magazine on newsstands are a distant memory. As newsmagazines and newsstands may soon be for that matter. For those who are interested in a detailed account of the long and winding road traveled by Newsweek, especially in more recent years, a trip to Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek, the free online encyclopedia, for a quick wiki is in order.

Newsweek Europe generated the public list using SocialBro, a three-year-old London, UK-based cloud marketing platform for the management, analysis and monetization of Twitter communities, and businesses aiming to use Twitter tactically as a strategic marketing channel and “rapidly build a robust and highly visible social presence. Unlike existing Twitter tools that focus only on tweet content, SocialBro enables brands to target the customer behind the tweet solution.” SocialBro’s co-founder and CEO is Javier Burón, a Spanish technology consultant and programmer, who lives in London.

Still, I see there are currently 3,639 members of this Newsweek Europe public list, of which 3,638 were presumably joined to it before me, so that rather puts things nicely in perspective.

Indeed, you simply can’t make this kind of stuff up. Even if you were inclined to be … shall we say, apocryphal.

And, oh, yes:

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The fine art of cartooning

While I get the appeal of comic books, it really wasn’t my thing as a kid for the most part.

My idea of fun late on a Saturday afternoon at the cottage at Lake Simcoe, near Beaverton, Ontario and down the road a small piece from Orillia and Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s somewhat fictional, somewhat true Mariposa setting for his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, was walking the beach road past the Talbot River and down to the blue Toronto Star “honour” coin box and buying the unbelievably fat Saturday Star.

While I generally didn’t find comic books appealing, I did like some newspaper cartoons, especially editorial page ones. During the week at home, when we read the Oshawa Times, I enjoyed reading the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon, the longest running cartoon in the world, published since 1918, when Robert Ripley himself was the cartoonist. I also liked Gordon Johnston’s single-panel It Happened in Canada. I have the scrapbooks with both pasted in still.

I think I might have liked former Lynn Lake, Manitoba cartoonist Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse, which she started drawing here in Northern Manitoba in 1979, but it didn’t come along until I was in my early 20s doing other things, so I didn’t really get into it too much. Although I managed to chuckle my way, come to think of it now, through quite a few of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons during the same period.

Centennial year was a grand year with the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, or simply Expo ’67. On Saturdays we were all Torontonians and Montréalers and citizens of a larger world for a day a week, reading the Saturday Star with its rotogravure colour-printed Star Weekly magazine insert in 1967, which had lots of comics indeed if that’s what interested you. My interests, however, ran more to the “Insight” section. The cartoons that really interested me were those drawn by the legendary Toronto Star editorial page cartoonist Duncan Macpherson. I’m not sure if that made me a precocious kid or political junkie. Maybe a bit of both.

Last year, after not paying too much attention to cartoons in recent years, I discovered David Wilkie, an Orlando, Florida-based advertising copywriter and artist who creates, with his wife, Katie, and via various media Coffee With Jesus under the banner of a company called Radio Free Babylon. Wilkie grew up Catholic, but is now an evangelical, with the former perhaps explaining that slight tone of cultural irreverence.

I sent a couple of panels on the Rapture and turning water into wine to my friend Pastor Al Bayne, who retired at the end of December as regional director for Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Northwestern Ontario for Alpha Ministries Canada. Alpha was started by Rev. Charles Marnham in 1973 at Holy Trinity Brompton Church, an evangelical Anglican church, in London, England to introduce – or re-introduce – people to Christianity.

“Father Al,” as I sometimes jokingly call him, happens to be a former Catholic (he was a parishioner at St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and is also the retired pastor of St. Pierre Bible Fellowship in St-Pierre-Jolys. “I looked at several of the cartoons – not sure what I think of them – some I found very funny,” Bayne wrote back in an e-mail. “Certainly would be very controversial in evangelical circles – definitely irreverent, but thought provoking. Like they say in their disclaimer, they are not for everyone.”

With that caution in mind, you can check out Coffee With Jesus for yourself, should you feel so inclined, at: http://www.radiofreebabylon.com/Comics/CoffeeWithJesus.php

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Origins: How ‘Soundings’ came to be

Almost 12 years ago – on Thanksgiving weekend 2002 – asked by my immediate supervisor, Terry Kruger, then co-ordinating editor for Northern News Services Limited (NNSL) in Yellowknife, who has been manager of communications there for De Beers Canada Inc (DBCI) since January 2010, to come up with a concept and a name for a new column to showcase our staff writers, I chose “Soundings” as both the idea and name. I was a news editor at NNSL at the time. For those not familiar with the name Northern News Services Limited or NNSL, let it be said that publisher Jack Sigvaldason, known simply as “Sig” by everyone who knows him, runs the finest group of fiercely independent community newspapers North of 60 in Canada and perhaps anywhere in the Circumpolar Arctic for that matter.

Sig is originally from Winnipeg. He joined the Winnipeg Free Press in 1952, working in advertising and editorial, then with Stovel Advocate publications working on their business publications. He started his own advertising agency, Sigvaldason & Associates, in 1957 where he worked in advertising and public relations, which included a daily radio show and writing newspaper features. Then from 1963 to 1969, Sig worked for the Baker Lovick ad agency as an art director, copy chief, radio and television director, creative director and a columnist for an agricultural paper.

In 1969, Sig moved north with his family to Yellowknife to be editor of News of the North. The Northwest Territories has never been the same since. Established in 1945, News of the North covered the 61 communities in the Northwest Territories, a 1,4-milion square mile region North of the 60th parallel.

Two years after he arrived, Sig was fired from News of the North in 1971 for antagonizing the territorial government (GNWT), the federal government, city council, the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories and Inuit Tapirisat of Canada. Oh, yes, and the majority of advertisers also. There is an old truism in journalism that if a journalist hasn’t been sued and fired, they’re not doing their job. Sig has always done his job.

Within 90 days of his firing as editor of News of the North, Sig  had started the Yellowknifer, still the must-read paper of the territorial capital, with Jack Adderley, who had been fired also from News of the North. The Yellowknifer’s mission statement, according to the first editorial, was to combine “having a ball with making a buck by providing a local fun paper crammed with news and pictures concerning Yellowknife personalities and events at least once a week.”

In March 1972, they started Northern News Services, which now publishes the Yellowknifer, two editions of News/North, a western edition for the NWT, and an eastern edition for Nunavut, where stories are also translated into Inuktitut syllabics, and the weekly Deh Cho Drum, from Fort Simpson, Inuvik Drum in Inuvik, and Kivalliq News from Rankin Inlet, with all the papers going through final editing and production in Yellowknife before being printed there.

There are now more than 100 NNSL staff working in six locations in three time zones.  As a news editor, it wasn’t unusual to find myself calling the Mackenzie Delta bureau of News/North in Inuvik or the South Slave bureau in Hay River, both located in the same Mountain Time (MT) zone as me in Yellowknife, and then making a call to Darrell Greer, editor of the “Kiv” in Rankin, where it was an hour ahead in the Central Time (CT) zone. While my job responsibilities didn’t require me to have to call the Iqaluit bureau of News North as often, I quickly learned that calling the bureau at 4 p.m. there was a hit-or-miss proposition since it was 6 p.m. for them in the Eastern Time (ET) zone. Geographically, simply as a matter of longitude, the Nunavut communities of Qikiqtarjuaq, Pangnirtung, Clyde River – and Iqaluit – should all be in the Atlantic Time (AT) zone anyway, but for general convenience, they’re not.

Seven years after Sig was fired from News of the North, he bought the paper, kept the staff and changed the name to News/North.

As for Soundings, as I wrote in a first anniversary column in October 2003, “I borrowed a Maritime oceanic term, Soundings, to name the weekly column because we wanted our diverse group of staff writers — reporters and editors — to find their depth and have a space to muse on things that mattered to them, but they may not otherwise get to write about.

“The words you read here do not necessarily reflect the corporate opinion of this newspaper as the editorial does. These words are the writer’s opinion. Getting personal has not merely been tolerated; it’s been actively encouraged.

“A year later,” I wrote in 2003, “both the name and purpose of the column have stuck. And giving voices to otherwise anonymous news editors has sometimes struck a chord with readers … This is a sometimes cantankerous cohort of reporters and editors who are passionate about journalism under a unique, iconoclastic proprietor. In other words, it’s a journalist’s newsroom and hence a pretty good place to work. ”

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Following the Davies’ newspaper legacy

In largely unplanned and unforeseen ways, I found myself spending some of my earlier years in the newspaper business in the 1980s and 1990s, working in the shadow of Canadian journalism greatness at two of what had been the Davies’ family flagship Ontario daily newspapers.

It was an odd place to be situated historically, as both papers were during my stays with them one corporate owner removed from their Davies’ days, and to some degree still basking – deservedly or not – in some residual reflected glory from that earlier era, an era now sadly long dissipated many more corporate owners removed from either my time or the Davies’ time with them.

From 1992 to 1996, I worked part-time, mainly on weekends, as a reporter and copy editor at The Kingston Whig-Standard while I worked on a master’s degree in 20th century United States history at Queen’s University. Queen’s, founded in 1841 by Royal Charter issued by Queen Victoria, declaring the new school would both train students as Presbyterian ministers and instruct youth “in the various branches in Science and Literature,” remained 150 or so years later one of Canada’s Crown jewels of higher learning.

The Kingston Whig-Standard, Canada’s oldest continuously published daily newspaper, for a time had been a gem of its own as Canada’s best medium-size daily newspaper. The illustrious ownership of the British Whig had included Edward John Barker, and later his grandson, Edward John Barker Pense (both no relation to me), and then the Davies family – first Rupert, and later his sons, Robertson (yes, the iconic Canadian writer) and Arthur. Rupert Davies had purchased the British Whig in Kingston in 1925 and merged it the following year with the Kingston Daily Standard.

By 1942, Robertson Davies was editing another Davies’ family-owned daily newspaper, the Peterborough Examiner, where he remained as editor until 1955. I also worked at the Peterborough Examiner – twice – the first time from 1985 to 1989 – and again from 1997 to 1999. It was while editing the Peterborough Examiner, that Robertson Davies, considered by townspeople as an eccentric bearded figure in the small-town world of Peterborough in the 1940s, would establish himself as one of Canada’s most important 20th century literary figures with the creation and development of his Samuel Marchbanks character, mining his daily newspaper experiences in the Queen of the Kawarthas for many of the characters and situations, which would appear in his novels and plays.

Meanwhile, back in the Limestone City, from 1978 to 1990, under Arthur’s son, Michael Davies, The Kingston Whig-Standard won eight National Newspaper Awards, four National Magazine Awards, three Nathan Cohen Awards for dramatic criticism and two Michener Awards for public service journalism.

While I loved being immersed in the Davies’ family newspaper history as a young reporter, spending hours reading dusty old microfilm in the Peterborough Examiner “morgue” anytime I find myself in danger of waxing too nostalgically, I recall the date of Dec. 3, 1995. That was the day after Robertson Davies died at the age of 82. It was a Sunday night and I was ending my weekend reporting shift at the Whig.

I had written what I thought was a pretty fine obituary piece on Canadian fiction writer and legend Robertson Davies for the next morning’s front page but I still had to call Arthur Llewellyn Davies, who had been publisher of The Kingston Whig-Standard until 1969, and at the age of 92, was 10 years older than his more famous younger literary icon brother, Robertson, and still lived in Kingston.

I wish I could say Arthur Davies gave his old newspaper, The Kingston Whig-Standard, a quote for posterity on the life and times of his more famous younger brother. He did give us a quote. But not one that could be printed. And then he hung up.

Newspapers turn to Augmented Reality (AR)

Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”

Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.

Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.

Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”

While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But they do have something new now called Augmented Reality (AR). And it’s not science fiction. The technology makes use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.

Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, year, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) last September with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.

“Western Canada’s  largest local media company is pleased to announce the enterprise wide launch of augmented reality throughout its Lower Mainland, British Columbia properties,” Glacier said on Feb. 7, 2013, adding it was the “First company worldwide to build augmented reality into its digital sales platform.”

Layar, with over 35 million downloads worldwide, is the world’s most downloaded AR app, and continues to grow at an average of almost a million downloads per month. It operates as image recognition software invisibly tagging images, logos and icons with codes to allow the augmented reality components to appear instantly on a reader’s smartphone or tablet while scanning the AR content.

The Toronto Star and Bermuda Sun are among other publishers and newspaper using Layar.

Rather than a Quick Response Code (QR) matrix barcode in print, Layar provides the ability to link to multiple assets; watch video/listen to audio/share the content on social networks and even buy a product – right from the page, eliminating the gap between print and digital.

Maybe we won’t have to wait until the late 24th century after all for the Holographic Environment Simulator.

Studies: Journalists love them

If you want to understand the mindset of most journalists (a scary proposition methinks having just started that sentence) you could do worse for an inside-the-ballpark look, as it were, than going to a website called “Stuff Journalists Like” started by two former Colorado newspaper reporters, Christopher Ortiz and David Young.

I got thinking about their blog again when I read some coverage of a study, “The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations” by Miron Zuckerman, Jordan Silberman and Judith A. Hall, published last year in the academic journal, Personality and Social Psychology Review.

Journalists love studies. So I was curious to see if Ortiz and Young had ever noted that on their list to date of stuff journalists like (you can read the list at: http://www.stuffjournalistslike.com/list-.html studies or reports. While I found such staples as free food, procrastinating, sarcasm and weather stories, alas, no mention of academic studies.

The study in question, a new review of 63 scientific studies stretching back to 1928, concludes that religious people are less intelligent than non-believers. Zuckerman, a professor from the University of Rochester’s Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, led the analysis, which found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity” in 53 out of 63 studies.

Even during early years the more intelligent a child is the more likely it would be to turn away from religion, while in old age, above average intelligence people are less likely to believe, the researchers also found. Even in extreme old age the subjects had much lower levels of religious belief than the average population.

The review, which is the first systematic meta-analysis of the 63 studies conducted in between 1928 and 2012, showed that of the 63 studies, 53 showed a negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity, while 10 showed a positive one. Only two studies showed significant positive correlations and significant negative correlations were seen in a total of 35 studies.

Journalists eat this stuff up. We know there are myriad stories and spin-offs to be mined here. The “pan-denominational” Christian Post in Washington, D.C. headlined its Aug. 13, 2013 story, “Study Draws Skepticism After Concluding Atheists ‘More Intelligent’ Than Their Religious Counterparts.” How predictable was that?

Less predictable perhaps was the blog Atheist Revolution (http://www.atheistrev.com/2013/08/before-we-make-too-much-of-intelligence.html), which interestingly had among the fairest of caveats and explanations for the limitations of the study, including:

• studies relying on large sets of aggregate data are informative in understanding group trends but tell us next to nothing about individuals. That is, the results of such a study – no matter how big or how well done – cannot reasonably be interpreted as suggesting that a particular religious person is any less intelligent than a particular atheist;
• intelligence, as assessed by modern intelligence tests, appears to be normally distributed throughout the population. Using the mean and standard deviation from modern IQ tests (typically 100 and 15, respectively), we can calculate the portion of the population, which will obtain IQ scores in various ranges. Most people (68 per cent to be precise) will fall within one standard deviation of the mean (i.e., they will have IQ scores between 85 and 115). Another way to frame this would be to point out that most people are, by definition, of average intelligence;
• very small differences become statistically significant when the sample size gets large. This is important because these some differences, while statistically significant, are too small to have much practical importance;
• finding a negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity is certainly interesting, but is a far cry from indicating that religious belief somehow causes people to be less intelligent.

Who’d have thought? Studies. We love them.

Retroactively spiked: The post-publication killing of Msgr. Charles Pope’s blog post on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time “kill” a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.

The church press, in this case the Catholic Church, is admittedly a different kettle of fish than secular for-profit publications. Archdioceses and dioceses, archbishops and bishops, often hold the purse strings and are the de facto publishers whether or not they are listed as such on the masthead. While Catholic church press articles may not quite require a nihil obstat imprimatur from the censor librorum in the 21st century, censorship remains. And sometimes it is apparently self-censorship, albeit applied retroactively post-publication in this case in an online blog post on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade by Msgr. Charles Pope, a popular and high-profile Conservative Catholic blogger who is pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Roman Catholic Church on East Capitol Street, S.E. in Washington, D.C. where mass attendance is recorded at the parish’s four weekend masses (a total of 514 last weekend: 39 at the 4:30 p.m. Saturday mass; 114 at 8 a.m. mass Sunday morning; 310 at 11 a.m. mass and 51 at 7 p.m. mass Sunday). A native of Chicago with a bachelor degree in computer science, Msgr.  Pope’s interest in the priesthood stemmed from his experience as a church musician. He attended Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland and was ordained in 1989.

Unlike some other high-profile and popular conservative Catholic bloggers, including Fr. John Zuhlsdorf in Madison, Wisconsin (Fr. Z’s Blog – What Does The Prayer Really Say?) and Fr. Dwight Longenecker Greenville, South Carolina (Standing on my Head on Patheos), Msgr.  Pope is simply one of several bloggers found on the Archdiocese of Washington’s designated blog on their website. On Sept. 3, New York City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade Committee said that OUT@NBCUniversal, an LGBT resource group at the company that broadcasts the parade, would be marching up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue next March 17 under an identifying banner.  On Sept. 4, Pope blogged a post headlined, “Time to End the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the Al Smith Dinner?” Wrote Pope:

“The time for happy-clappy, lighthearted engagement of our culture may be nearing an end. Sometimes it takes a while to understand that what used to work no longer works. Let me get more specific.

“Decades ago the “Al Smith Dinner” was a time for Republicans and Democrats to bury the hatchet (even if only temporarily) and come together to raise money for the poor and to emphasize what unites us rather than what divides us. But in the old days the death of 50 million infants was not what divided us. We were divided about lesser things such as how much of the budget should go to defense and how much to social spending. Reasonable men might differ over that.

“But now we are being asked to raise toasts and to enjoy a night of frivolity with those who think it is acceptable to abort children by the millions each year, with those who think anal sex is to be celebrated as an expression of love and that LGBTQIA… (I=intersexual, A= Asexual) is actually a form of sanity to which we should tip our hat, and with those who stand four-square against us over religious liberty.

“Now the St. Patrick’s Parade is becoming of parade of disorder, chaos, and fake unity. Let’s be honest: St. Patrick’s Day nationally has become a disgraceful display of drunkenness and foolishness in the middle of Lent that more often embarrasses the memory of Patrick than honors it.

“In New York City in particular, the “parade” is devolving into a farcical and hateful ridicule of the faith that St. Patrick preached.

“It’s time to cancel the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the Al Smith Dinner and all the other “Catholic” traditions that have been hijacked by the world. Better for Catholics to enter their churches and get down on their knees on St. Patrick’s Day to pray in reparation for the foolishness, and to pray for this confused world to return to its senses. Let’s do adoration and pray the rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet unceasingly for this poor old world.

“But don’t go to the parade; stay away from the Al Smith Dinner and all that “old school” stuff that hangs on in a darkened world. And as for St Patrick’s Day, it’s time to stop wearin’ the green and instead take up the purple of Lent and mean it. Enough of the celebration of stupidity, frivolity, and drunkenness that St Paddy’s day has become. We need penance now, not foolishness. We don’t need parades and dinner with people who scoff at our teachings, insist we compromise, use us for publicity, and make money off of us. We’re being played for (and are?) fools.

“End the St Patrick’s parade. End the Al Smith Dinner and all other such compromised events. Enough now, back to Church! Wear the purple of Lent and if there is going to be a procession, let it be Eucharistic and penitential for the sins of this age.

“For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world!

“How say you?”

Later the same day, Msgr. Pope’s post was removed from the Archdiocese of Washington’s blog.

Tony Merevick, a BuzzFeed staff writer who reports on national  lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) news, wrote a story posted at 3:20 p.m. EDT Sept. 4 claiming, “The statements were published on Pope’s designated blog on the Archdiocese of Washington’s website, but the post was apparently removed from the site shortly after BuzzFeed inquired about the post to a spokesperson. The original link to the post now leads to an error page.” The URL http://blog.adw.org/2014/09/time-to-end-the-st-patricks-parade-and-the-al-smith-dinners/ gives you the message, “Error 404 – Not Found: Sorry, that pages doesn’t exist. Please use the search or the navigation links to the right to find the page you were looking for.”

End of story? Not quite.

Writing again on the Archdiocese of Washington’s blog the following day on Sept. 5, in a post that remains online at URL http://blog.adw.org/2014/09/what-happened-to-the-st-patricks-parade-post/,  Msgr. Pope, in a post headlined, “What happened to the St. Patrick’s Parade Post?” wrote:

“Many of you have expressed concern about a blog post I wrote on the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which was removed. I am grateful for your concern about this and all the issues we discuss here. I removed the post upon further reflection due to the strong nature of the language I had used in parts of it. I apologize if the language I used caused offense.

“I remain concerned about the central point of the article, namely, how we as Catholics can effectively engage a culture that increasingly requires us to affirm what we cannot reasonably affirm. There are many prudential decisions involved in the answer to this question, and my intent is not to directly criticize any bishop or diocese. But this is an issue we must all collectively wrestle with as our culture and our faith reach deeper differences.

“I am grateful to the Archdiocese of Washington, which has generously sponsored our conversation on this site for five years. I am also grateful to all of you who read and comment. I ask mutual charity and understanding for all parties involved. The beautiful motto of James Cardinal Hickey, who ordained me, rings just now in my heart: Veritatem in Caritate (the truth in charity).”