Forget Black Friday and Boxing Day: In the world of POS, the Friday before Christmas is the busiest day of the year

Oh, yes. The Friday before Christmas. That was yesterday.

If you’re in the point-of-sale business, as Moneris Solutions is, the busiest day of the year for transactions is usually going to be the Friday before Christmas – not Black Friday or Boxing Day. The exception might be when Christmas falls on a Saturday and the Friday before Christmas is Christmas Eve, Dec. 24. In that case, the Friday is falling too close to Christmas to be the busiest day of the year for point-of-sale vendors.  While you get last-minute shoppers Christmas Eve, many stores, at least the ones not owned-and-operated by proprietors named Ebenezer, are thinking about closing by mid-afternoon or shortly after Christmas Eve.

The reason the Friday before Christmas is the biggest bonanza of the year for debit and credit processors, is the huge volume of sales, not so much in high-end items such as big screen TV’s, which dominate Black Friday and Boxing Day sales, but rather smaller items such as groceries and liquor, that rack up record numbers for the year.

I worked briefly for Moneris back in 2005 and 2006 and was there for the Friday before Christmas in December 2005, which that year fell on Dec. 23, which while obviously not as late as Christmas Eve the following day, is still pretty late in the festive game for retailers.

In the Maritimes, Moneris Solutions is located in the old red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte St. in Sackville, New Brunswick.  I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick building, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, working in a business that is very much built on proprietary data where you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk,” took some getting used to. Documents had to be turned face down when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift.  Perhaps something like working on Area 51 or at Groom Lake, Nevada, I remember speculating to myself at the time.

My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hot dog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly.

Things like proximity or prox contactless cards with RFID (radio frequency identification) embedded chips, copper antenna coil, and capacitor, with each chip-card storing a unique binary number, were just arriving on the Canadian retail scene, while tokenization, which dated back to 1976 in the payment card industry (PCI), was also starting to make a real mark by 2005.

Tokenization is the concept of using a non-decryptable piece of data to represent, by reference, sensitive or secret data. In the payment card industry context, tokens are used to reference cardholder data that is managed in a tokenization system, application or off-site secure facility.

To protect data over its full life cycle, tokenization is often combined with end-to-end encryption to secure data in transit to the tokenization system or service, with a token replacing the original data on return. For example, to avoid the risks of malware stealing data from low-trust systems such as point of sale (POS) systems, as in the Target breach of 2013, cardholder data encryption must take place prior to card data entering the POS and not after. Encryption takes place within the confines of a security hardened and validated card reading device and data remains encrypted until received by the processing host, an approach pioneered by Heartland Payment Systems as a means to secure payment data from advanced threats, now widely adopted by industry payment processing companies and technology companies. The PCI Council has also specified end-to-end encryption (certified point-to-point encryption—P2PE) for various service implementations in various PCI Council Point-to-point encryption documents. 

Tokenization and “classic” encryption effectively protect data if implemented properly, and an ideal security solution will use both. While similar in certain regards, tokenization and classic encryption differ in a few key aspects. Both are cryptographic data security methods and they essentially have the same function, however they do so with differing processes and have different effects on the data they are protecting. 

Tokenization is a non-mathematical approach that replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive substitutes without altering the type or length of data. This is an important distinction from encryption because changes in data length and type can render information unreadable in intermediate systems such as databases. Tokenized data is secure yet it can still be processed by legacy systems which makes tokenization more flexible than classic encryption.

Another difference is that tokens require significantly less computational resources to process. With tokenization, specific data is kept fully or partially visible for processing and analytics while sensitive information is kept hidden. This allows tokenized data to be processed more quickly and reduces the strain on system resources. This can be a key advantage in systems that rely on high performance.

My old boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, and who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering roll out of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank.

Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

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Football Classics: A pepperoni-and-cheese pizza slice of life

If the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, with apologies to Dr. King for context, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats should dispatch the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at McMahon Stadium in Calgary tomorrow. Kick-off is at 5 p.m. here in the central time zone.

The stage is set for the CFL’s 107th Grey Cup, which Hamilton last won in 1999 and Winnipeg in 1990.

With their franchise-best 15-3 record, the Ticats topped the CFL’s regular-season standing. The Ticats were also 2-0 this season against the Bombers. The Ticats are currently 3½-point favorites to win the Grey Cup.

Although the Bombers finished third in the West Division, they posted an 11-7 record before registering road playoff wins over the defending-champion Calgary Stampeders and Saskatchewan Roughriders.

I’ve lived in Manitoba for the last 12½ years. During that time, I can’t say I have been a big follower of either the CFL or NFL. But I did grow up in Oshawa, Ontario and remember Grade 9 tryouts for Tom Chase’s Oshawa Catholic High School (O.C.H.S. ) Saints well enough. The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago. Think of football as a pepperoni-and-cheese pizza slice of life.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams in the U.S. south usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most American high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Given the unsurprising, I suppose, apparent dearth of Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans here in Manitoba, I’m told I’ll be treated to my own special “chair” at friends’ tomorrow watching the game on TV. Mind you, geography and just plain contrariness are also factors when it comes to me cheering on the Ticats tomorrow. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of hometown “homers” and their boosterism. Unless, of course, the concept was applied to me growing up in Oshawa, Ontario and cheering for the adjacent Toronto Argonauts, not the Steeltown Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Angelo Mosca-era in CFL football and pro wrestling, or the Toronto Maple Leafs in NHL hockey. That was different. And BTW. Angelo is now 82 and lives in nearby St. Catharines. As for cheering for the Leafs, well, there’s been no harm in that since 1967.

No word yet on if I’ll be sharing my signature homemade cream cheese and crabmeat cracker dip, or consuming that solo, like my seating.

It takes a while to figure out CFL  football loyalties in Manitoba. Who knew there was such a thing as the “Banjo Bowl” annual rematch game after the Sunday before “Labour Day Classic” in Regina between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Saskatchewan Roughriders and then back in Winnipeg the following weekend? Not me. At least not until I moved here in 2007, and learned you either supported the blue-and-gold or green-and-white in the CFL. A bit more latitude seemed possible in terms of NFL fan support choices, but it still struck me there were a lot … a lot … of Green Bay Packers fans up here in Northern Manitoba. While I’m not really a cheesehead myself (being more partial to the Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns), I get their appeal. Based in Green Bay, 140 kilometres northeast of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I get it here in Thompson, Manitoba.

The Green Bay Packers are the third-oldest franchise in the NFL, dating back to 1919, and is the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team based in the United States. In 1923, four years after the team was founded, the fledgling Packers found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, so they sold shares to the community to keep the lights on. Home games have been played at Lambeau Field since 1957.

The Packers are the last of the “small town teams,” which were common in the NFL during the league’s early days of the 1920s and 1930s. Founded in 1919 by Earl “Curly” Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun, the franchise traces its lineage to other semi-professional teams in Green Bay dating back to 1896. Between 1919 and 1920, the Packers competed against other semi-pro clubs from around Wisconsin and the Midwest, before joining the American Professional Football Association (APFA), the forerunner of today’s NFL, in 1921. Although Green Bay is by far the smallest major league professional sports market in North America, Forbes magazine ranked the Packers as the world’s 26th most valuable sports franchise in 2016, with a value of $2.35 billion.

But speaking of the Bears … the Bears. They are at Ford Field in Detroit this coming Thursday for a U.S. Thanksgiving Day match-up with the hometown Detroit Lions. Kick-off is at 11:30 a.m. here in the central time zone.

The franchises first met in 1930 when the Lions were known as the Portsmouth Spartans and based in Portsmouth, Ohio. They moved to Detroit for the 1934 season. The Bears and Lions have been division rivals since 1933 and have usually met twice a season since the Lions franchise began. The two teams play in the two largest metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Chicago and Detroit’s home stadiums, Soldier Field and Ford Field, are 450 kilometres apart and both are easily accessible from I-94.

This rivalry is the longest-running annual series in the NFL as both teams have met at least once a season since 1930.

Since its inception in 1920, the National Football League has played games on Thanksgiving Day, patterned upon the historic playing of college football games on and around the Thanksgiving holiday, a tradition that dates back to 1876, shortly after the game had been invented, as it was a day that most people had off from work.

The football-on-Thanksgiving Thursday game tradition is firmly established in Detroit. With the exception of a six-season gap from 1939 to 1944, the Thanksgiving Day game has been played with no interruptions.

The Detroit Lions Thanksgiving Day heritage gained national attention with the very first game in 1934. Knowing the publicity potential of radio, NBC Radio, set up a 94-station network to broadcast the Lions-Bears showdown. The famous announcing team of Graham McNamee and Don Wilson described the action. The Chicago Bears took that one in a 19-16 victory over the Detroit Lions on Nov. 29, 1934.

In 1876, the college football teams at Yale and Princeton began an annual tradition of playing each other on Thanksgiving Day. The University of Michigan also made it a tradition to play annual Thanksgiving games, holding 19 such games from 1885 to 1905. The Thanksgiving Day games between Michigan and the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s have been cited as “The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football.” In some areas, most commonly in New England, high-school teams play on Thanksgiving, usually to wrap-up the regular-season.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

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Left Behind and the Canadian boys from North Bay, Ontario, brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde

 

Sometimes it’s a “special feature” embedded deep on the DVD off the “main menu” that is the real nugget.  After not finding enough bandwidth to watch a Netflix offering, I dug deep into my DVD collection last night to pull out the first Left Behind movie by North Bay, Ontario brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde, filmed in 2000, and which made its theatrical premiere on Jan. 26, 2001 at a star-studded red carpet event at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theatre on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The DVD special feature, “Seeing is Believing,” has interviews with some of those on hand for that theatrical premiere, including the redoubtable Tom Selleck.

At the time almost 16 years ago, Left Behind: The Movie was the biggest and most ambitious Christian genre movie ever made, and it was hoped by many in the evangelical community to be the big crossover movie that would appeal also to the general public – read the “unsaved” or “non-believers,” as well as those already preaching in the choir. Left Behind: The Movie was an unusual release  because it went to video first in October 2000, then theatres in January 2001.  It opened in 800 theatres and grossed $4.2 million.  It won “Bestselling Title of the Year from an Independent Studio” and “Sell-through Title of the Year by an Independent Studio” from the Video Software Dealer’s Association.

Alas, Left Behind has never quite realized that early promise and the franchise has been beset by problems of various kinds over the last decade.

For the uninitiated, Left Behind started out as a a series of 16 best-selling novels by Americans Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist End Times view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows.  The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

LaHaye, now 89, is a sometimes controversial evangelical minister, who conceived the Left Behind books, although Jerry B. Jenkins, 66, a  sports-oriented biographical writer, did the actual writing of the books from LaHaye’s notes.

LaHaye was inspired to write the books in part by the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

Jenkins, on the other hand, has said, “I write the best I can. I know I’m never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don’t claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that’s hard to read, you know?” Having read all 16 books in the series –  from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides;  Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed;  Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The  Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007, I can only say, “true that Jerry.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That is very much an evangelical Protestant rather than Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians,  as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. Catholics do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

The Left Behind movie franchise, which is now up to four movies with a fifth possible, is perhaps surprisingly, a Canadian phenomenon, spearheaded by two brothers from North Bay Ontario, Peter and Paul Lalonde, who first came to wide notice on television in 1989 with their weekly half-hour show This Week in Bible Prophecy, before going onto form Cloud Ten Pictures in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1995. Paul Lalonde worked as social worker at various group homes in North Bay before attaining his televised pulpit, while Peter Lalonde was a good enough goalie he might had a shot at playing NHL hockey had he wanted to.

Peter Lalonde has said he became a “Christian as a result of seeing The Prodigal in 1983 in a church.  I went back on Sunday, then again, and several weeks later I became a believer.”

Left Behind: The Movie was quickly followed by Left Behind II: Tribulation Force in 2002 and Left Behind: World at War in 2005, all starring Kirk Cameron, 45, still perhaps best known to the larger public as a  teenage actor for his role as Mike Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains between 1985 and 1992, and Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie,  Janaya Stephens, and Cameron’s real-life wife, Chelsea Noble.

But none of them would be back by the time the fourth movie, simply called  Left Behind, was finally released nine years later in October 2014.

The most recent Left Behind movie was produced by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, a company he formed in 2012, and released through Cloud Ten Pictures, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, Johnson’s former role as an airline pilot, with Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer and movie.

The choice of Cage caused some quiet murmurs in certain evangelical circles, although not particularly loud ones for the most part, as Cage, a bankable box office star, is rumored to be Roman Catholic.

Why the long delay? Some nasty litigation is one explanation.  LaHaye, who had sold the film rights for Left Behind to Joe Goodman, Bobby Neutz and Ralph Winter, owners of Namesake Entertainment in April 1997, before the End Times novels became a publishing phenomenon, hated the film. Namesake Entertainment had sold the rights to make the film to Cloud Ten Pictures in 1999. Left Behind: The Movie  was privately financed and cost $17.4 million to make, including production, post-production, publicity, marketing, and distribution costs.Its theological consultants included John Hagee, author of Four Blood Moons: Something is About to Change, published in October 2013, from Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and Michigan televangelist Jack Van Impe.

Widely known as “The Walking Bible” for spending about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 Bible verses, Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to 97-year-old Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching, was hospitalized in early April with serious cardiac problems, missing taping almost six months worth of half hour episodes for his long-running TV show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, which he normally co-hosts with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, while a number of guest co-hosts stepped in during his long convalescence in hospital and at a Michinga nursing home before his return to the airwaves in early October. The Van Impes have been married since 1954.

Sharp-eyed observers in Left Behind: The Movie could get a quick glimpse of Jack Van Impe as one of the passengers caught up in the Rapture mid-transatlantic flight. The Lalondes and Cloud Ten Pictures discovered early on theological consultants, musicians and all kinds of normally behind-the-scenes folk, like most everyone, enjoy the chance to have their 15 seconds of fame on the silver screen, too, which is also good for holding the line on production costs from the filmmakers’ perspective.

LaHaye, however, was not so easily charmed. He sued both Namesake Entertainment and Cloud Ten Pictures in July 1999, claiming the the producers told him that the movie’s production budget would exceed $40 million, although there was no language in the contract to that effect. LaHaye also claimed that he had sold the film rights on the condition that the picture be produced by a major studio with big-name Hollywood box office stars, and released to theaters in late 1999 so as to capitalize on the Y2K phenomenon.

LaHaye’s lawsuit was thrown out of U.S. federal district court in 2003, but by that point Cloud Ten Pictures and Namesake Entertainment had filed a countersuit against LaHaye for breach of contract, among other allegations.

Ultimately, in August 2008, the two sides settled their legal differences out of court, and LaHaye reportedly liked a rough cut he saw of the new Left Behind movie.

Unfortunately for Cloud Ten Pictures, Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, LaHaye, if he did in fact like the finished final cut as well, was pretty much alone in that opinion. To say the film was savaged by critics in both the serious religious and secular press would be a charitable understatement. Two examples, one from the religious press, one from the secular, pretty much illustrate the debacle

Jackson Cuidon, writing in Christianity Today, said, “[t]he Left Behind movie is just a disaster flick injected with the slightest, most infinitesimal amount of Christianity possible. This is, in one way, good – no one needs to be upset, or get angry, or be offended, or question their beliefs, or the beliefs of those around them, or anything, because the film takes no stance on anything. The film is so inept, confused, and involuted that there’s no danger of even accidentally cobbling together something that could necessitate a defense of Christianity.”

That was the mild criticism. Andrew Barker (no relation), senior features writer for Variety, penned this piece published Oct. 2, 2014, the day before the film opened in theaters:  “In what was surely a first in the annals of motion-picture marketing, an early ad for Left Behind featured a quote taken not from a film critic, but rather from Satan himself, who allegedly quipped, ‘Please do not bring unbelievers to this movie,’” Barker wrote.

“This presents a rare scenario in which Christian moviegoers ought to feel perfectly secure heeding the advice of the Devil, as this faith-based thriller is likely to inspire far more dorm-room drinking games than religious conversions. With a Sharknado-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order, its eschatological bent representing its only real shot at box office redemption.”

OK, for the record, eh. I’m a big fan of the Sharknado franchise, too, so find your analogical comparisons elsewhere, and for God’s sake, if no other, lighten up namesake Barker! Cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics.

I haven’t seen the most recent Left Behind movie yet (although I have seen the first three). Will I? Quite probably should the opportunity present itself. Why?  I’ve been a writer long enough to know critics like to hear the sound of their own voices above all else and if purple prose and hyperbole serve the day’s writing purpose, so be it. Most film critics are about as qualified to write about religion and especially eschatology as I am to perform neurosurgery.

Besides I have something of a soft spot admittedly for the Lalonde brothers, the boys from North Bay. Way back in 1993 and 1994, when I was a first-year graduate student in 2oth century American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and was contemplating what thesis topic I might pursue for my master’s degree, one of my possibilities under consideration was premillennial dispensationalism and the Rapture, which made watching This Week in Bible Prophecy something of a guilty pleasure. But in fairness, much of what I first learned about the “cashless” society and biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning, all of which came true in the years that followed, so much so they’re almost commonplaces today, I first learned more than 20 years ago watching Peter and Paul Lalonde.

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Who suggests to their online readers they remember to log-off from time to time and bake some chocolate chip cookies IRL (à la Clifford Stoll) or maybe head down to the arena for a kids’ hockey game? Mea culpa

Every now and then over the years I’ve mentioned the pioneering effort in online journalism I was involved in briefly as managing editor from November 1996 to February 1997 in Kingston, Ontario. The Kingston Net-Times was an online-only newspaper going head-to-head with the Kingston Whig-Standard before even the Whig was online (which made competing online kind of easy for the brief time that lasted).

Everyone knows by now the fixed costs of online publications are a fraction that of bricks-and-mortar newspapers, some now with their high-end Goss 96pp Sunday 5000 presses, which weigh in as a total equipment package at about 1,371 tons, with the single heaviest piece of equipment weighing in at 43 tons. That’s bigger than the Goss press out back at the Thompson Citizen, which hasn’t printed a newspaper since January 2007 (but school kids invariably asked more questions about it on class visits to the newspaper than any other aspect of the operation during my seven or so years there).

But there is still a cost to producing an online paper, even if it is from your computer at your kitchen table, which was pretty close to how the Kingston Net-Times was cobbled together. By any measure it was pioneering but also under capitalized. So – and this is often how things go in the newspaper industry – while I was having great fun during an Ottawa CBC Radio Noon interview tweaking the nose of Goliath, in this case the Kingston Whig-Standard, where I had worked as a reporter and copy editor from 1993 through June 1996, when I left to work briefly as a copy editor at the Ottawa Sun, and making some sport of Conrad Black and Hollinger, the newspaper company he built with David Radler, I was also aware the publisher was having some, shall we say challenges, making payroll at the Kingston Net-Times. Ever the pragmatist or mercenary, take your pick, the CBC interview hadn’t aired more than a few weeks earlier when I decamped for a second stint at the Peterborough Examiner, which was not online then and producing old-fashioned ink-on-print newspapers. Oh. Did I mention the Peterborough Examiner was, of course, at that point a Hollinger paper?  Actually, I believe by then it was our sister paper, The Intelligencer, down the road in Belleville, Ontario, that was printing the paper for us, and it was trucked back to Peterborough overnight. The Peterborough Examiner press, too, had been silenced by economics when I returned in April 1997, if memory serves me correctly, although I stand to be corrected on the date, as I’ve been at several papers over the last 20 years, where silenced presses still sit physically in the building as some sort of behemoth over-sized metal museum pieces.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m a bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he  discusses his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kid’s hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

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