A SCREW-UP WITH MULRONEY, WHERE DOUGHNUTS ARE KING, AND PRAISE FOR ‘LETHBRIDGE’
Vol. 1, No. 46
In this edition, your diligent correspondent admits to an encounter with a former prime minister no one is to know about, uncovers AI that is very human, and highlights the advent of Three Stooges TV.
This week: A 6-minute read plus a 4-minute video
WHEN INTERVIEWS GO BAD
This week, I’m going to share with you a story I have not told anyone … ever. You must keep it to yourself. If you do not and it gets back to me, I will deny till the cows come home that it ever happened.
It concerns Brian Mulroney.
The first time I met Canada’s 18th prime minister was at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. I was there with a group of newspaper publishers from across the country. He was there because … well, because he was the prime minister and in those days he could go anywhere he bloody well pleased.
I spotted Joe Clark first. I had met him a few times before and he was kind of hard to miss because he’s so tall. As I was about to go say hi so he could pretend to remember me, Joe was swarmed by the publishers from the West, all of whom he probably did know personally. After all, he was from High River, was once a newspaper publisher himself, and people from High River tend to travel in fast circles. So I turned away, and there stood Brian Mulroney with his wife Mila.
My first thought? He was shorter than I would have expected. Mila seemed taller. Now don’t quote me on that. It was a first impression. We shook hands and moved on.
The next time I saw Brian Mulroney, was maybe 15 years later at the University of Alberta here in Edmonton. Brian was there peddling his memoir (a very good book, all 1,121 pages, though I confess I enjoyed Paul Martin’s book more; it was only 494 pages) and I was there because we needed to talk. This was an easy way to do it.
I bought his book, he signed it and then I asked a favour. I explained I was writing a book myself about Peter Pocklington, former Edmonton Oilers’ owner and one-time candidate for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, and as Brian was the guy who beat him for the job, I asked if I could get an interview. He happily agreed, told me to call his secretary, and gave me the number.
A few days later, when the appointed hour neared, I discovered at the last possible moment the attachment to my phone that allowed me to record phone conversations was broken. Uh oh. This was in the days before smartphones and you needed such things. Moreover, the phone in my home office did not have a speaker. I would need to record our conversation by holding my cassette recorder to the phone’s earpiece. Since that’s where my ear would normally go, I would have to listen at a bit of a distance, my ear and my cassette recorder sharing the same space. Not ideal.
I explained my dilemma and Brian was sympathetic but there was little he could do. He must have thought me a moron. Well, given the evidence, I can’t say he was wrong. I knew what topics I wanted to cover, but not being able to hear the conversation at my end sort of dampens the conversational flow if you know what I mean.
In the end, my book got what it needed from the prime minister who gave us free trade, the GST, the privatizations of Petro-Canada, CN and Air Canada, the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown accords, the acid rain treaty, and the Bloc Quebecois. Yet I can’t help feeling my rep as a journalist and author took a bit of a beating that day.
Brian Mulroney probably didn’t give me a thought after that. I thought of him though, and often. On the day he died, I offered a prayer of thanks.
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SOME PEOPLE’S KIDS
For those of us who consider Artificial Intelligence to be humanity’s greatest existential threat, this recent development is a source of delight. For people who lost millions, maybe not so much.
It comes to us from techspot.com via our daughter Carson’s newsletter ‘Brick Through A Window.’ It concerns a British company called Builder.ai that for eight years promoted its own AI system called Natasha as a “fully autonomous tool that could build software as easily as ordering pizza.” There was some hefty financial muscle behind it, too. It was backed by Microsoft and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and valued in 2023 at $1.5 billion.
Today, Builder.ai is bankrupt, leaving in its wake numerous lawsuits, layoffs and heaps of embarrassment.
So what happened? Well it turns out Natasha’s AI wasn’t artificial at all. It was human, in the form of hundreds of engineers in India whose job was to mimic AI while doing the actual work, manually coding client projects while being instructed to mimic AI-generated responses.
To think: humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans. Tee hee.
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MORE ‘DEAR TERRY’ LETTERS
Re ‘A Whimper, Not a Bang,’ June 8. Terry, you should seriously think of sending your item about press freedom in the States to some major U.S. newspapers, preferably ones that aren’t owned by a company wanting something from the President. If I hear one more American tell me, “Well, I didn’t vote for him,” I want to reply, “You might not have voted for him but you have a moral responsibility to get rid of him.” Sue Prestedge, Hamilton, Ontario
Further to your excellent and excoriating article, Terry, on Trump’s intimidatory and bullying methods to censor just about everything, why didn’t you pose the Big Question? Just when is Donald Trump going to start making America great again? So far, he’s just trashing it. Nicola Stainlay, Boonah, Queensland, Australia
Terry, your article about press freedom brought tears to my eyes. It is wonderful guys like you who never give up telling the truth. You are just like my backyard elm tree, doing what is natural. Adèle Fontaine, Edmonton, Alberta
If you want to drop me a note (and risk me publishing it here), just reply to this email or, if you prefer send it to mysundayreader@gmail.com.
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NYUK NYUK TV
“I just found a cable channel called Jewish Life TV. Channel 469. And you know what they’re showing? Hour after hour of the Three Stooges. This is so great!”
A post of mine on Facebook from our California days, extolling the virtues of American television in the 20-teens.
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ALWAYS TIME IN LLOYD
Canadians love their doughnuts, as all those ubiquitous TV commercials for Tim Hortons can attest, but is there one place where more doughnuts are consumed than any other?
Why, yes. It’s Lloydminster, the city that straddles the boundary between Alberta and Saskatchewan. No matter which side of the line they’re on, Lloyders (I just made that up because I’m not sure what residents of Lloydminster are called) consume more doughnuts per capita than anywhere else in Canada. How many? No one knows, which begs questions for which there are evidently no answers. Still, they like to brag on it, so there must be something to it.
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GODSPEED, BRIAN
“I’ve never felt this kind of pain before.”
Carnie Wilson on the death this week of her father, Beach Boy songwriter Brian Wilson. For a 4-minute glimpse into his musical genius, check out this version of ‘Sloop John B’ with bandmate Al Jardine here.
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THIS WEEK IN THE BOOK CLUB
I’ve written before about my college chum Bruce Lindsay (‘Different Drummer,’ March 30), a retired law enforcement inspector now living in Welland, Ontario. He just finished reading my book Lethbridge, and had this to say:
“I loved it. I have become a bit of an amateur military historian and have acquired a substantial library on the subject. Your attention to detail regarding the structure of the Canadian Corps and the Vimy Ridge story, along with the combat sequences, was spot on. I also identified with the storyline right away. My grandfather on my father’s side was Barnardo Boy, too, who came to Canada from Glasgow around the same time and worked in lumber camps in northern Ontario. He eventually married and settled in Hamilton and so started the Lindsays in Canada. The Winnipeg scenes were pretty familiar. I lived in Tuxedo during my time there. Great book. My wife is reading it now.”
In this week’s Episode 10, titled ‘Death Here is Just Too Random,’ the battle for Vimy Ridge begins. It goes well for the Canadian Corps but not without horrific casualties. Stanley survives the day, then discovers he has one more fight to wage, the battle for Hill 145. Back home in Lethbridge, Hettie buys every newspaper she can find and reads the dispatches from the front to her anxious mother and sister. They hope for the best but fear the worst.
A subscription to our Book Club is just $5 a month and you can sign up anytime and catch up on what you've missed. Any proceeds will help finance my future projects.
Again, many thanks. Ta till next week. And in the words of Edward R. Murrow, repeated this week to me by faithful reader Sue Prestedge, “Good night and good luck.” / T.
Please note: Artificial intelligence was not used in the preparation or writing of any part of this newsletter.