Rose's Cantina

Man, those Ford brothers are an articulate pair. First Rob Ford "allegedly" but most probably called Justin Trudeau a "fag" in the infamous non-video. Now his big bro is calling the media "maggots". The Fords certainly are poets. I have a question. How exactly did the Ford brothers get themselves a talk show? Who is paying for the air time? Nothing in radioland is free, so are they paying for it themselves, being that they are rich and not in need of salaries? If others are paying for their air time on NewsTalk 1010, do they have to file that expense with Elections Canada? Giving a full hour over to a couple of jokesters like the Ford Brothers kind of smacks of Third World despotism, doesn't it? Does NewsTalk1010 allow equal time to others? I found it incredible yesterday that CTV News Channel gave the Ford Brothers whole pieces of their newscast for several hours so they could blorg on about how they were going to take media types behind t...

I read in the Globe and Mail this morning that Doug Ford was a hash dealer back in 1980. A refrain of an old song went through my head. Those were the days my friend, I thought they'd never end. We'd sing and dance for ever and a day. I didn't smoke a lot of hash in 1980 but I did smoke my share. It was during my rock and roll days when I was a music reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen and I was tooling around in my bright white bowling alley car, sometimes ferrying musicians over to Hull where we would get wasted, then roll home to sleep for 12 hours. I only got arrested for drunk driving once -- another story entirely -- and I only snorted cocaine once, but I did do it. I remember vividly being high on coke, sitting on a Go Train and feeling my throat swell up. I also spent six hours at a Tim Horton's. For a time during that period, I might have been fashioned as a drug dealer, though I like to think of it as being a purveyor of organic substances that wer...

“When I was a kid…if you were caught plagiarizing, you got a zero”. Margaret Wente, as quoted in the blog Mea Culpa by the "anonymous blogger" Carol Wainio. See what I did there? It's called attribution. I attributed the quote to the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente, but since I got it from Carol Wainio's blog, I double-attributed it. You can't be too careful these days in journalism. It's easy to get caught. Before I was doing this non-paying gig, I wrote for one of these lifestyles blogs for which I got paid a cent a word. Even in that rinky-dink operation, you found yourself in hot water if you quoted  verbatum a piece that was available on Internet. This happened to me a couple of times, but in my case, I was quoting my own writing. The software picked it up and rejected my work as plagiarism. In this day and age, it's hard not to get caught cribbing from other folks, especially when you are a national columnist for the Globe and Mail and ...