Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - 12:36: Toronto Mike'd #551

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Mike chats with Marc Weisblott of 12:36 about the current state of media in Canada and what you oughta know.

Welcome to episode 551 of Toronto Mic'd, a weekly podcast about anything and everything. Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, StickerU.com, Brian Master from KW Realty, Banjo Duncan from Whiskey Jack, and Ridley Funeral Home. I'm Mike from torontomike.com and joining me for his November 2019 recap is the man behind the 1236 curtains, Mark Weisblot.

Welcome back, Mark. and Mark Weisblot. Welcome back, Mark. Back in December, to recap November, because I made an appearance during the month. We did a chat about podcasts, about the state of the industry. And even though I think I made a couple of mistakes in what I was talking about, we did all right for the usual off-the-cuff, rolling-into-Toronto-miked-basement experience. And it was a survey of where we thought things were at

with the podcasting industry. That was our bonus episode in between the two monthly recaps. What's the feedback on that episode? I thought, you know, I think you nailed it. Like, I think at this point we can finish each other's thoughts. We know our rhythm. It's kind of like a well-oiled machine here when you and I get together in the TMDS studio. But what was the feedback for that?

What I thought was that pretty epic podcast episode? Well, it's out there, and you have no plans to delete it, no matter how much I would like a do-over every single time. Nope. Look, just a way of asserting ourselves and where we stand with the podcasting culture. You've got a burgeoning industry here in this country, always like three or four years behind the United States. At least. But like with everything in media, it gives us a chance to get ready for what's on the horizon.

And I listened to one. It was the Broadcast Dialogue podcast tied to the Trade magazine. It was a chat about the Podcast Exchange, a company running out of Toronto. They mentioned the name Joe Rogan about 300 times. And a lot of their business, interesting as it is, it seems to be a bet on the idea that just like the tradition of Canadian television networks, that the real opportunity out there is to take podcasts that are coming from another country, mostly the U.S. of A, and attach advertising that originates in Canada onto those podcasts

where you can do it with geo-targeting and you can get an American host to do a read of a Canadian commercial. And primarily, that seems to be the business they're in. It's not one of their own content creation. It's standing by, waiting to capitalize on an industry making things happen. But at the same time, they're not averse to the idea of people doing more here when it comes to the audio medium. But the business seems to have been established on the basis

that that may never happen. What are you going to do to make it happen, Toronto Mike? Working on it, buddy. We're building something here. We're building it from scratch. All the pieces matter. I'm glad to be along for the ride. Usually as we go through the 1236 topics,

we'll get into radio and talk about some new stuff going on in podcasting. I wanted to establish myself on the authority on this stuff. I was confused. I was trying to do the math on my Pocket Casts app, how much I'd listened to. I think I got it wrong how I stated it. That was a part I wanted you to cut out. But right now, look,

I downloaded this new Pocket Casts for the fall, September 22nd. So in that time, now it's December 3rd, I've now listened to 10 days worth of podcasts. And because of my tactics, speeding up to double speed,

sometimes triple speed if the show can handle it, cutting out silences, I have saved 14 days of listening. The app is telling me then that I have spent 10 days this fall listening to podcasts. Wow. But I've heard 24 days worth of podcast programming. Now, I'm not saying I didn't fall asleep during some of that listening time.

That's good. Usually I set the button that it switches off if I end up snoozing partway through the show. 24 days worth of podcast listening this fall. What do you make of that? What do you think of me? That I can brag that I've had that much content consumption. It's sort of tough to truly appreciate that because it's such a big number,

but you're listening at three times the speed. Well, sometimes double or two and a half. When you listen to an episode, let's say you're listening to three times the speed. Well, sometimes double. Two and a half. When you listen to an episode, let's say you're listening to the Laurie Brown episode. Oh, you queued this one up because it's a song that was mentioned when you had Laurie Brand down here. It was a clip from the Pepsi Power Hour where she mentioned Long Way to Love by Brittany Fox. Right. You never know what references you're going to catch on Toronto Mike.

That was a song I could never have dreamed would have come up, but there you had it in the clip. I thought I would bring it here. Get back to what you were saying. You're asking about my podcast listening, right? When you listened to the Laurie Brown episode of Toronto Mike, what speed were you listening on? I think probably double speed, not just because

it made it easier to get through in less time, but I was enthusiastic about what she was going to say. I had to listen to it faster. I had to get to the best parts and there were lots of great ones. and less time, but I was enthusiastic about what she was going to say. I had to listen to it faster. I had to get to the best parts. And there were lots of great ones in that chat you had with her. What's your review of the episode? I'm aching to know

your thoughts. Because I think since I was last here, that would have been the big get, I think. Somebody who hasn't done this kind of deep dive interview before, who's been around for a long time, has a lot of stories to tell, a lot of history. And she's got the much music pedigree, but also this, oops, sorry about that,

the CBC pedigree. And then she's also a podcaster, so I get to kind of talk much in Power Hour and then, of course, the chump stuff of new music, but then I also get to talk about CBC stuff and her podcast, so I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yeah, it reminded

me of the role that she played in the history of Much Music, the whole idea of having this cerebral grown-up on the nation's music station, somebody who clearly looked like they'd read a book in their life, introducing heavy metal videos like Britney Foxx.

Who would even remember a song like this today? But I was there. I saw this happen. It's a real bad kiss knockoff glam metal hair band. And there it was in that clip on Toronto Mic. And the fact that she talked about how, to this day, 30 years after leaving Much Music, people still remember her from the power hour. Well, a lot of us guys with normal IQs would best relate to her experiences there.

Now, are you okay with the fact I'm now playing a song underneath our chat about the song. And I ask that because at least a couple of people chimed in on the comments for that episode on TorontoMic.com to tell me, I don't know, you read the comments. You're really into customer service here. Not since the late Mayor Rob Ford has somebody been so receptive to everybody contacting them about every little thing. I trust your opinion. It was a Toronto Mic fan, a regular listener, right? It wasn't the first time they were hearing it.

They were griping in your comment section about the fact that here you're playing these songs while people are talking, that it's distracting. I'm telling you, even when you're listening on double or triple speed, it doesn't have an effect that makes it hard to hear the person talking. You can appreciate what's going on, even if you're mainlining the podcast, speeding it up. I don't know, at a slower speed when you hear this effect on your own show. Could you imagine that somebody would have a problem with it? And I will say to listeners that I watch, and I can point to this for Mark.

We're not on periscope but mark can see that i do watch the level of the uh music and make sure that it doesn't overpower our talking like it really is back there and i do listen back to from a listener experience i happen to like it in podcasts if you're going to talk about the sunglasses at night video with cory hart which really makes uh which makes my guest laur Brown's career there. I want to hear that song in the background. That's a personal preference, so I do it. And I just wondered what your feedback was, because there were a couple of people about that. And then, while I'm

doing the customer service portion before we dive in here deep, did you listen to the Kyle Bukowskis episode of Toronto? See, I didn't get around to that one yet, but also people were complaining about what? About your envy of his hairstyle. How old is Kyle?

26. He's half your age, basically, at this point. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's a little more than that. Here you are. You're getting into an older generation here, I guess, where you're fawning over the good looks of your young male guests.

I was hoping you'd heard it, because I don't think I did too much. I mean, I really do. It's only been three people but one person I could tell on Twitter was their first episode of Toronto Mic'd and they weren't sure what this was about so this caught them off guard that I would spend a few minutes talking about Kyle's hair. Someone else on the comments,

a regular listener, just felt like I spent too much time on his hair and then Dale, who's been listening since day one, wanted to concur, like pile on if you will. And I Dale, who's been listening since day one, wanted to concur, like pile on, if you will. And I'm here to say that I think I did 90 minutes with Kyle and I feel like maybe three, three and a half minutes about his hair, which I think was great restraint I showed in that episode. So I can't wait for you to listen and let me know. All right. I'm sorry that I fell

behind, but I figure radical transparency here is what works. So between all the Toronto Mic'd episodes and Hebsey on sports twice a week, the only sports radio that I listen to is from Hebsey. He explains it all for me. And every episode, he works his way up the mountain towards this crescendo. Right? I mean, he's always got like a rant in his back pocket that he comes packing when he comes in here and unleashes it at a certain point.

I'm right about this, correct? Like in the episode, kind of moves in to the chorus of the show. And it took me 18 months to realize that when you sense he's going there to shut up and back off the mic and let the man operate. So it only took me 18 months to realize. And Gallagher and Gross save the world now up to episode, what, 13, 14?

There's 15. 15! And more coming. And here, let me say this now. Peter Gross is 100% confirmed to appear at TMLX5, which is Saturday. So we need to talk about this right now

because when you walked in my door today, I was on the phone with Anthony Petrucci at Palma's Kitchen talking about some details. Great Lakes is sending over beer. So we get beer from Great Lakes Brewery. There's a six-pack for you, by the way, right now. Are you going to pop one open? I think, I think so.

Can I do it too or will you be mad? No, what, for you? Stealing my complimentary DLB. All right, you pop first, I think so. Can I do it too or will you be mad? No, what, for you? Stealing my complimentary GLB. All right, you pop first, you pop first. And what, are we both in octopus mode today? So I was chatting with some people at the retail store at Great Lakes Brewery, really nice people, and I just said,

hey, what is the most popular beer that you sell? Because I figured it's going to be the Canuck Pale Ale. And this gentleman said, the Canuck Pale Ale is the most popular beer sold in like LCBOs. But at the retail store, he thinks Octopus Wants to Fight has surpassed Canuck Pale Ale. And if that is true, I think I'm at least partially responsible. What do you think about that? Electric Circus beer from glb still here still around still selling it or was that limited edition limited edition gone already give me a

few cans uh hung on to one or two of them we always held on to one must remember the electric circus cowboy kenrick pompeii right immortalized on a can of GLB. I figure if somebody is tuning in for the first time and they didn't know that there was a can of beer with the electric circus cowboy, I think their minds would be blown if they know who that is. The fact that his son was on the verge of Major League Baseball. Well, he would know.

Okay, stardom, I thought you were going to say, I was going to remind you that he was 90 feet away from home plate in that game six of the ALCS when we just needed a run to tie. Anyway, I don't want to think about that. It upsets me. But of course, we're talking about Dalton Pompey.

But I was going to say, anyone listening who knows who Kenrick Pompey is in the Cowboy Dancer at Electric Circus, I'm going to bet has already discovered Toronto Mike. I feel like that person is sort of the... Okay, you think so? You can leave a note in the comments section, torontomike.com. If this is your first time hearing a 1236 episode,

if you're new to being an F-O-T-M. Love it. It's catching on. We've got our own language, our own lingo. And now when you have esteemed guests like Andy Kim down here, I notice you have to warm them up a bit to the idea that you're going to be making references to things that the podcast audience will understand. And the guest might be really confused about why you're asking. Why are you asking Andy Kim if he knows Gino Vanelli? Why would that be of interest to anyone? And yet, I think everyone out there, knowing that they were both from Montreal, of a certain generation, a certain age group, that they were working in Los Angeles in a particular era.

Now that I mention it, I can't remember what he said. He said they met briefly at some industry event or something, maybe at a Junos or something. But in my mind, because they're both FOTMs and they're both Montreal. Now, of course, I know Andy Kim's got a few years on Geno here, okay? Well, he doesn't think so. That's right. It depends which number you believe, but they both had hits.

Yeah, but Andy was on top of the church, top of the world, at the same time that Geno Vannelli moved to L.A. and was trying to make it. That would have been the case around 1974. Right. And they've both been down here. Correct. Both been FOTMs, Friends of Toronto Mike. Speaking of FOTMs, Dave Hodge has become quite the FOTM.

He came in recently to kick out his 100 favorite songs of 2019. And he paid tribute to your old buddy, Dave Bookman. Did you listen to this episode? When Bookie was doing his columns in iWeekly, and this goes back to the mid-90s. He would have at the end of every year the top 10 albums from Dave Hodge. And I think most people back then would have done a double take.

Right. Like, is this for real? Is this some kind of joke? Dave Hodge, the pen-flipping guy from Hockey Night in Canada, has a top 10 current album list of the year where his tastes align with that of the downtown Queen Street hipster scene? Where did this come from? There wasn't any context for it.

But it was Bookie, in fact fact who introduced me to the idea that in fact dave hodge was that guy and he's been keeping up on that music ever since mostly classify it one the adult alternative americana genre old country old country would be a big part of it yet way up there one i agreed with him on was Better Oblivion Community Center. That's it. Better Oblivion Community Center, a song called Dylan Thomas, which was his number three pick of the year.

I would have that on such a top 100 list if I was cognitively capable of putting together something like that anymore. I'm too distracted. All over the place. No more top 100 song lists for me. There was a time when I would do them. And I might have them buried in a box somewhere.

Do you want to hear my top 100 songs of 1990, 91, 92? I would make lists. You know I do. Sometimes they'd be printed in places. See, natural born archive. But I can't keep up with Dave Hodge and where he would make lists. You know I do. Sometimes they'd be printed in places. See, Natural Born Archives. But I can't keep up with Dave Hodge. And where is that today? You did. So Dave Hodge down here, and then you met in person a couple days later.

The reporters at the brand new first ever event at the Paradise Theater. Refurbished after 13 years in mothballs in the Bloor and Ossington area of Toronto. And, by the way, the place, it wasn't even finished yet, but it already looked fantastic, like as a venue. So I think that's going to be a cool place to see shows. And we'll have to talk a bit later about Bruce Arthur, who was in on that show and in on that episode. And he's the one who was stirring it up this week on Twitter

and the latest, I think, ridiculous Toronto Twitter media controversy entirely generated by him. I mean, he initiated it all. We'll put Bruce on trial a little later. Okay, so yeah, so Bruce is coming up later, but also you mentioned iWeekly, and we should let people know we're going to talk about Now. Now is in the news. We should let people know we're going to talk about NOW. NOW is in the news. Yeah, NOW Magazine, which was on some form of life support for the last three years, ever since Michael Hollett, the co-founder, the ex-spouse of the other co-founder, Alice Klein,

who's still there, who still owned it. We find out how much money she was losing in recent years trying to keep this thing afloat and uh the sale of now which has i think a lot of behind the scenes drama which it'll take some time for it to unfold and find out about what's going on there but the purchase price, the published price, the maximum value, $2 million, conditional on certain factors, that was how much NOW Magazine was deemed worth, roughly the price of a semi-detached house in the Ants. That's right. That is right. So, okay, so I gave you your beer. We've already cracked open a couple here. Thank you, Great Lakes Brewery, and thank you for sending over the wonderful holiday gifts to tmlx5 which

again is this coming saturday from noon to 3 p.m at palma's kitchen that's near mavis and burnham thorpe and we're going to get of course free pasta courtesy of palma pasta at this event there's some interesting things happening this event mike Wilner is going to come to pay tribute to his mentor, Peter Gross. Stu Stone is going to drop by. I mean, Gene Belaitis says he's coming by. Larry Fedorek, who's going to come up later in this podcast. A lot of excitement going on. I can't wait for, I would love to see you all there. We're recording live from noon to 3pm this Saturday at Palmer's Kitchen. And I want to, this is not every day I get to do this, but this is my first episode of December 2019, which means...

Hello out there, we're on the air, it's hockey night tonight. Tension grows, the whistle blows, and the puck goes down the ice. I get to introduce a new sponsor. This is exciting. So a new partner of Toronto Mike and helping to fuel the real talk. I mentioned him off the top. His name is Banjo Duncan.

Banjo Duncan is with Whiskey Jack. We're listening to a live version of the hockey song by Stompin' Tom Connors with Whiskey Jack. And there's a Stompin' Tom Connors with Whiskey Jack. And there's a Stompin' Tom Connors Christmas ornament giveaway. This ornament lights up and plays the hockey song. It's very, very cool. I've seen it.

It's a collector's item. And if you would like a chance to win it, all you have to do is go to whiskeyjackmusic.com. You click on Store at the top of the page, and then you can buy either a copy of duncan fremlin's book my good times of stomp and tom or any of the whiskey jack stomp and tom cds listed there these are fantastic one entry per item purchased they'll draw the winner on december 15th 2019 and they'll express post the ornament to you the next day so merry christmas to you

from Banjo Duncan and Whiskey Jack. Were you ever a Stompin' Tom fan? Did you ever find yourself listening? You know, it was FOTM Dave Bedini who gets some credit for finding Stompin' Tom when

he was in hiding back in the mid-1980s. That was in the Toronto Free Alternative Newspaper Nerve magazine where he wrote an article about tracking down Stompin' Tom. Stompin' Tom found alive was a headline on the cover. But Dini gets a lot of credit or blame for the Stompin' Tom renaissance that followed, or blame for the Stompin' Tom renaissance that followed, which was when he got a major record label recording contract with Capitol Records. Right.

Around the turn of the 1990s, they reissued all his old albums, and they put him back out there kind of on the campus scene, that it was this, I guess, somewhat kitschy experience, but at the same time, you know, playing to that deep, latent patriotism that was within all of us at the time that Stompin' Tom was going to drag it back out by stomping on the stage and playing the hockey song. But they would always show the Stompin' Tom movie across this land. It would run a lot on city TV. And I remember a friend at the time, early 90s, who worked in a record store.

He would say, like, every week or so, somebody would come into the store saying that they saw this guy on TV in this movie. I'm not sure what his name was, whatever, thinking that like they discovered something that nobody had ever heard about before. And the question was asked, like, like who who was this stomping Tom character? Do you have any any albums by him is is he even for real right was this some kind of stunt i was watching a parody show and that one after another being exposed to this movie uh that this hipster generation caught on to Stompin' Tom, setting the stage for his comeback, in which he redeemed the Canadian music industry that he felt had turned its back on him by considering him unviable for airplay.

Let's face it, he was a tough sell in the face of the rock and roll scene and yet he felt like he should have gotten respect on the radio once the can-con regulations came in right you would not hear stomping tom on 10 50 chum i will say as much burning up the airwaves in the 1970s that's why i walked away from it all the juno awards now i watched a lot of much music in the 1980s. That's why I walked away from it, all the Juno Awards. Now, I watched a lot of much music in the 1980s, and I distinctly remember the revival of Stompin' Tom, and we would, for example,

regular rotation, we'd see Margo's got the cargo, Reg's got the rig, just Stompin' Tom in there. So welcome to the Toronto Mike family, Banjo Duncan from Whiskey Jack. This is a great guy. I've been hanging out with him,

and his book, again, is called My Good Times of Stompin' Tom. And if you go to whiskeyjackmusic.com and pick one up, you could win the Stompin' Tom Christmas ornament that plays the hockey song. Speaking of hockey. Let's go. Let's go. Listen, listen, never turn. You do that, they'll call you Myrtle. Let's go. Let's go Let's go

Thanks to FOTM Retro Ontario for helping to revive the Don Cherry rave music. I hope I'm not stealing his thunder because you've got Christmas crackers right around the corner. Volume 3. But that one would not be online right now without Ed Conroy putting it up at the time that Don Cherry's job was on the line.

This was a day that he got fired from Rogers Sportsnet Hockey Night in Canada. And I know this because I was helping shine the Retro Ontario newsletter. Retroontario.substack.com JJ was worried that you had stolen Ed from me. Can we put to rest these... Put that conspiracy theory forward. I think I found

an outlet for Retro Ontario that given his lifestyle is a more user-friendly way to do what he does than come down on your podcast every month like I do. But he'll be here, right? Come up.

December. Christmas Crackers Volume 3 is absolutely in the calendar. So Ed found this video. It's Don Cherry, Rock'em Sock'em. What number Rock'em Sock'em? Three, four, five, six. How many did he end up getting up to before the series was over? Who knows?

But you subscribe to the Don Cherry podcast. I do. Somewhere in there. Somewhere amidst my 1,236 feeds. I listen enough to get the sense of what he was doing, sitting at the kitchen table with his son, interviewing him, right? His son playing the role of Ron McClain, of Brian Williams, the new sidekick, keeping it in the family.

It's a little raw. It's a little rough. His grandson hovering around there, working the controls behind the board. But it's a very popular, I mean, of course, it was going to be popular out of the gates. We'll see how it keeps up. Well, I mean, of course, it was going to be popular out of the gates. We'll see how it keeps up. Well, I think, given what happened, the Don Cherry firing,

as far as topics you have discussed in this basement, that's got to be way up there in such a compressed period of time. Guest after guest after guest. Anyone who was in sports media, you had to talk about Don Cherry in November. Jeff Domet, of course, worked at Hockey Night in Canada Radio, so he had some great perspective on that. And then I had Dave Hodge on.

How do I not ask him about it? And I'm pretty sure, yeah, we talked to the Y108 morning show crew, and there might have been another one of them. Oh, yeah, Gallagher and Gross. Yeah, yeah. Hebzy in here twice a week following along and what happened. And the way he was canned canned the way he lost his job for uh refusing to apologize even though he he was expressing regret later about how the comments

came out about the poppies out of his mouth talking about you people that don't wear poppies uh joe warmington of the toronto sun his loyal stenographer, I think with the new podcast, Grapes was able to cut out the middleman. He no longer has to call Joe Warmington anymore to get his message out. He can do it on the podcast. When he put that first episode out, the whole nation was standing by waiting for him to breathe fire into the microphone that you'd have from Don Cherry, the most incendiary episode ever of Coach's Corner. But very quickly, look, he's 85 years old, and what's his expertise? Talking hockey.

That's what he's doing all this time. He only ever got in trouble, didn't he, when he got into these diversions and distractions. I know over the years it was racial or ethnic stuff related to the good old hockey game that that came up from time to time, right? The origin of the players on the ice. He got into some of that. I guess he didn't like the Europeans back in the day. Or the French. Yeah, anything to do with the Soviet Union. He obviously would have taken a stand against as a loyal patriot. But look, for the most part, Don Cherry just hummed along all these years being polite and professional. It wasn't such a big deal that there he was on camera coach's corner every single week.

He wasn't always on the verge of saying something that was going to get him fired. Year after year passed without incident. And the first time in a long time I thought that his name was out there was when Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun, FOTM Steve Simmons, put in his column, in his Sunday ramblings, what does he call them? His notes? Sunday notes. They're talking that he's hearing that Don Cherry is about to retire. His Sunday ramblings, what does he call them? His notes? Sunday notes?

This and that? They're talking that he's hearing that Don Cherry is about to retire. They're going to send him packing right along with Bob McCowan and all the other bad salaries at Sportsnet. I have excellent sources on the inside of Rogers who assure me that wasn't the case, that they never were considering letting him go for this season. But for what it's worth. Now he's not there anymore.

In the end, they let him go for this season. But for what it's worth. Now he's not there anymore. And in the end, they let him go. Don Cherry, Coach's Corner, rest in peace. And Ron McClain with what? The Conversation? It's got like a new hyper woke format that they're going to be doing every week. I was at the Watchmen, I think, at the Danforth Museum. I missed that one, but I've heard about it.

Here's a song. Okay. I've shared this story one too many times, but my wife took a couple of mat leaves over the last several years, which means a year off from working. And that meant I would walk through the living room and hear this song.

But I don't remember this part. I'll tell you the part I remember, okay? It's like PTSD here. Hold on. Oh, maybe we missed it. Okay, anyway, I recognize this. Did you catch on where there was a meme going around? There was a piece on BuzzFeed about it,

how the Generation Y, the post-millennials, the Zoomer generation, as they're called everywhere but Canada, because Zoomer means something else, that they came up with the name Karen as a disparaging term for

members of Generation X. I feel that social theme song is like the Karen National Anthem. It falls in line with the idea that Karen is a name that you throw out there. That's the Gen X, right? Okay, boomer, but for Gen X, calling them a Karen. And that's a theme to the CTV show, The Social. There we have the subplot to the dawn cherry controversy comments from jessica allen

who's uh kind of the fifth wheel on the social on the show she fills in on the panel or she does these roving reports she's like the social media person that uh yeah does fill in work when one of the primary four hosts is on vacation or on location or something. Before that, she worked at McLean's Magazine. So she actually came from that print journalism world and onto television. I don't know if she's been back in the weeks since people were calling for her to be fired

because she got into a rant on camera about how she was exposed to the toxic hockey culture growing up. That there were these privileged white boys all around her with their bad attitudes. And she was exposed to a sensibility that Don Cherry is the elder statesman embodiment of. Right. And that we have to sweep away everything that's terrible about hockey because she had a first-person experience, that she lived through it. The blowback on this was tremendous, even louder in certain circles, weaponized by

sources online telling you to tweet at CTV, write to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, and call for her firing. It was right after Don Cherry. And here, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which I don't think is all that busy anymore these days, because the audiences for the outlets that the CBSC represents are down.

There are fewer people watching shows, listening to radio that they're going to complain about. I think that's a given. Look at the CBSC website. Look at the steep decline in the number of complaints in their process.

They don't police YouTube and they don't police podcasts, right? I mean, I'm sure they field people writing about something they saw on Netflix that offended them, but that's not their jurisdiction. It's run by the broadcasters, not including the CBC. It's their voluntary group, which was set up so that the CRTC would not be involved in policing content, that here we would have like an arm's-length body that would process all of the broadcasting complaints and try and appease whoever was complaining.

If they rule that something was out of bounds, you're supposed to put an apology on the air, negotiate with the person complaining. I mean, if they're really mad about it, if there's something that was illegal, contravention of their license, it would go to the federal commission. But the CBSC was set up to do this stuff.

And Dawn Cherry, Jessica Allen, their two biggest stars of 2019. She ended up apologizing for the statement in kind of a weird way, but I don't know what choice she had, blaming herself and her own privilege for not having called out these teenage boys back in the day for their behavior, that she could have done that that and there she wouldn't have been a woman in her 40s on ctvs the social complaining about them if only she knew as a teenager that the day would come she would have stopped them in their tracks i don't know how

i don't i don't know but why was that in her defense? Again, she shared her experience, her personal experience. And I will say, as a big-time, tragically hip fan, I've seen these people she's referring to at many a hip show. But you know what? It's completely benign. And how did it get out there? People are complaining to the Broadcast Standards Council about a broadcast that aired on CTV, okay?

Most of the people complaining were not sitting at home with your wife on maternity leave watching the social. They saw it on clips that circulated on social media. Of course. And they were roused and rallied into the idea that this was something to get outraged about. There's a bigger issue at play here. Right.

And I think the social CTV with Bell and Don Cherry, of course, even though the CBC was implicated, but also cleaning its hands of the whole thing. It's a Rogers Sportsnet production. That's who signs the checks now. CBC made Don Cherry a star. Of course. They had him on the air for all those decades. Almost 40 years that he was there, 35 of those

years were at the CBC. But this gets to a bigger issue, and it relates to what's maybe happening here with Toronto Mic'd, the future of TMDS, which is, should these Canadian telecom companies be in the business of producing media content? in the business of producing media content. They're publicly traded companies. Their main stock in trade are selling these subscription services where people send them a guaranteed amount of money

in the mail every month. A lot of times it's more money than you plan to pay them because you didn't know about that data overage on your phone. I mean, this is an issue that maybe the Canadian government can crack down on because business has been good and profits have been wild and people are invested in the stock and they're banking on their retirement on these companies like Bell and Rogers to bring the goods for them. Should those same companies be doing live broadcasting

where people might go off the cuff and say something that leads to a bunch of complaints? What do you think? Should they even be in this business at all? Well, that's a big one, Mark. That's the big question. I don't know. I'm still upset that they own my baseball team

and all my other teams, but that's the question. What do you think? Well, I think we saw based on the twin experience of Don Cherry and Jessica Allen, maybe it's time for them to start to log off, and then maybe we'll see the day where they're divested of these things. Look, there's thousands of jobs involved here, all big infrastructures that were based on the idea of doing this media content. It's now almost 20 years since Bell Globe Media,

the company where they converged the Globe and Mail newspaper with the telecom operations of Bell. That was their answer to AOL Time Warner in Canada. And Rodgers was always in radio, community cable television, but then they picked up all these other TV stations, got into the sports business, $5.2 billion for 12 years of running NHL hockey. That deal is going to run out someday.

By the time that deal ends, okay, like mid-2020s, will Rodgers even be interested in having a media division anymore? Or is it better off in other people's hands? Not only from the perspective of quality, what it means to be a broadcaster, but the fact they're not getting returns

from these assets anyway. And then in the end, it's better for the sake of their financial performance to move on. Like we will see the sunsetting of this era that we've lived through where Bell Rogers control so much of the Canadian media that I can see it happening now. And I think this incident,

over talking about hockey and poppies and bully boys that harassed Jessica Allen in school, that in fact, this is the tipping point and the beginning of the end of the telecom-owned media era in Canada. But it's not going to happen tomorrow. So we've got to deal with what's out there and kind of untangle everything that we're currently looking at.

Rounds and rounds and rounds of layoffs. Companies trying to find it. We talked here before about Jordan Banks, the Facebook Canada executive who was hired to run Rogers Media, and he's trying to rationalize, well, that hockey deal was actually really great.

Because what else is he going to say? And City TV is a better outlet for local media than Facebook. As if anyone is really going to buy that. But he has an agenda, and he has a point, and he has a job to do, and he better do it because all these things are tangled up in the company.

Look, somebody's got to figure, I mean, they're not going to go out of business. They're not going bankrupt. So what do they do with all these things that they own? Where do they go? Like, what's next? I don't expect you to have an answer because I certainly don't. Maybe we'll figure it out here in the basement, one podcast at a time. We'll do our best. Speaking of logging off and speaking of the beginning of the end,

you would like FOTM Bruce Arthur to log off Twitter for good. This would be your recommendation. Well, I don't want him to because he provides me with endless entertainment. I mean, what's in it for me if he disappears? I don't want him to go. Okay, and can you briefly, I just realized now that I'm trying to make it our first episode where nothing hits the cutting room floor. Well, don't waste time by saying that. So tell me in a nutshell, what is the latest Bruce Arthur controversy?

Okay, so Bruce Arthur is on Twitter all the time. I don't know what else he is doing with his life. I hear he's a sports columnist for the Toronto Star. And based on the episode he did with you down here, he's pretty good at it. And not only that, I mean, based on the years he spent with Dave Hodge on The Reporters, even somebody like me,

who's not much of a sports consumer, is interested in what Bruce Arthur has to say. But then, there's another side to Bruce Arthur. The Bruce Arthur who can't quit Twitter. And this came up even in the comments, I think, to that episode.

One of your commenters, Brandon, I can't remember. Somebody mentioned in the comments, of Toronto Mike Marcosar, it might have been, one of the regulars, that they can't stand the Bruce Arthur who's on Twitter. He's not doing himself any favors. By the way, he performs on Twitter all day.

Part of it is the fact that Bruce Arthur prides himself on the idea that he's not going to stick to sports. He's not falling in line with the same thing that led to the demise of the website Deadspin. That Bruce Arthur has political opinions. They're generally to the left of center. And gosh darn it, he's going to let everybody know what he thinks every single minute of the day. Progressive even though he worked for the National Post for about 15 years. He was happy to build his career there and take their money.

He would say, well, I was just a sports writer. Doesn't mean I agreed with right-wing columnists. Okay, that's fine, Bruce. So I guess you're showing the liberty that you're taking there with the Toronto Star, another media company that's on the brink of some type of extinction. We'll see how that goes. And one of his regular retorts, when he doesn't like an opinion that somebody's espousing,

is to call them garbage. Right, like Joe Warmington, for example. You're garbage. Right. Or trash. So clever, Bruce. You know, that he needs to make his feelings known like a regular anonymous rando Twitter troll.

But this guy is a columnist for the biggest newspaper in Canada. And he's taking the line that as a sports columnist, what he's doing on Twitter this way doesn't interfere with his job. And it could go off with impunity typing your garbage

at random and people look at the responses to a tweet. Who is this blue check with tens of thousands of followers interjecting to call somebody garbage? What's he doing for? Personal branding? Does it make him feel good? Blowing off steam?

Like, why would Bruce Arthur busy himself with this kind of tweeting? But I don't understand the blowback that I've seen from, like, very right-of-center blogs, et cetera, seem to suggest it was misogynist. But don't they know Bruce Cole, Joe Warmington? He leveled it at Candace Malcolm, who's an interesting figure in the Canadian media. She's been a columnist in the Toronto Sun. She had an association with Rebel Media. As a young woman who tried to make it in the world of opinion,

she has applied her talents to a new venture. It's something called True North. It's kind of a think tank, but it's also a registered charity. Do you know what this is? No, but does Bernie Finkelstein know it's called True North? He comes over tomorrow. You'll have to ask him, and he might be mortified. He might not like this. It comes from

that old hippie background. The fact that True North, the name of Canada's record label, now that you mention it, there might be a cease and desist that comes at a tomorrow's episode. I'll bring it up. If I had a rocket launcher, I'm going to bring this up tomorrow. Okay, so True North is headed by Candice Malcolm. She seems pretty well capitalized.

She's got different people involved with her operation. Lindsay Shepard, the famous teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, who was censured, brought to tears because she played a Jordan Peterson episode in her class. She's involved with this thing. And

Andrew Lawton, another writer. Anyway, they're doing journalism, but they're also doing advocacy. So controversy there. Are they a journalism outlet or not? I guess. Because it has a certain slant. And some of these opinions are very right-wing. Bruce Arthur feels that he has to call them garbage.

But anti-anti-immigrant, dare I say? Well, it's not for me to dissect that here. They would say no, okay? I don't know. They're garbage, according to Bruce Arthur. Bruce Arthur falling into a pit of mud. He was the

architect of everything that happened to him here. He's a real masochist, and he loves every moment. I don't know what's happening. I can just as well imagine his bosses at the Star will take him aside and say, Bruce! Time out on the Twitter. Didn't he say down there

he didn't want to be on Twitter anymore? And that was in the background, Baby Yoda played a bit prematurely, but it relates to another Twitter topic. I thought you were winding down. That was in a nutshell. Okay, you want to fire it up again. Fire it up again.

All right. And now the person that doesn't like the music in the background can really get mad. Baby Yoda Floating in the pod Baby Yoda Baby Yoda

Baby Yoda Levitating a horn monster Baby Yoda The world has gone insane And you don't know what is right You've got to keep on keeping on Get on the blurg and hold on tight Baby Yoda, Baby Yoda

Floating in the park Baby Yoda Baby Yoda Co-written by Andy Kim, right? You know who this is? It's a guy named Perry Grip who was the frontman of a band called Nerf Herder. Of course, yes. And they had a song about Van Halen.

Right, and Nerf Herder, yes. And Nerf Herder, of course, named after what Han Solo called Chewbacca in Star Wars. There you go. So before Billie Eilish came along to say she'd never heard of Van Halen. Right. Big controversy of the week. Are people really surprised that a teenager hasn't heard of a band from the 80s?

Well, she's got Wolfie on her side, the son of Eddie Van Halen, the guy in Van Halen, and somebody dug up an interview with Eddie Van Halen where he talked about all the music that he's never heard in his life. Basically, he's never listened to any band ever. He's like, who's Frank Sinatra? Except for Van Halen. Right, right, right.

So Perry Grip from Nerf Herder, who you might remember from the song Van Halen. He did that little ditty, went a little viral about Baby Yoda, all leading up to another great Toronto Twitter story of the month, and it involved a guy named Will Sloan. You know Will Sloan? He has two podcasts. You know, that name sounds familiar, but I don't know for sure who that is.

If you've been on Toronto Twitter, you've seen him. He's focused mostly on movies, fantastic. I am seeing Sloan soon, but that's different. Okay, different guy. Will Sloan, he's done investigative journalism about Frank D'Angelo, about Joe Warmington, all the greats. You've got to follow Will Sloan ESQ on Twitter. Esquire.

But this November, he spent a week not being able to log on and not being able to tweet. How come? Because he tweeted that he hopes that baby Yoda dies a painful death. Maybe someone reported him, our friend Cam Gordon from Twitter Canada, offering the usual quote, we don't comment about individual suspensions,

but we know Cam well enough to say- I think he's coming to tmlx fire and he probably would have enjoyed the idea that this happened or ever it happened but he doesn't have the power to lift the suspension so you can't even threaten a fictional character like that seems bananas to me or there was somebody who was defending the honor of of baby yoda baby yoda is now on disney plus right a new new star wars show i've seen the pictures all over like reddit and twitter like this uh it's got big eyes a beautiful it's a cute little uh yoda baby but i don't know what it's from the mandolin or something like that uh a mandalorian okay so here's what it was, an article from Esquire. Esquire, which is ostensibly a magazine for mature males, right?

Guys who are into high fashion and like looking at scantily clad women. Well, given how the media has been infantilized, because everything else is problematic. You have Esquire writing articles that say things like, the Mandalorian has made Baby Yoda an icon of purity. A rare moment where we cross the internet aisle to simply say, this is good. And Will Sloan reacting to that said, I hope Baby Yoda dies painfully, got kicked off Twitter for a week. I'm shocked by this.

Look, I think all the people out there have been on Twitter agitating all the time about everything that's wrong in pop culture and entertainment. What they want is to go back to childhood, right? They want Mr. Rogers. They want every space to be safe. And I think in the end,

like Baby Yoda represents where this is all headed. Sign up for Disney+. You can watch G-rated content into infinity if you signed up for the kids. Nope. No, Disney+. I mean, they'll get addicted to this thing, right? Well, that's why I haven't signed up.

But every episode of The Simpsons, which seems in your wheelhouse. In SD, what's going on? You know, I'm a Simpsons snob. No, in HD, sorry. But you're right. I would like to see you stream The Simpsons snob. No, in HD. Sorry. But you're right. I would like to see stream The Simpsons, so maybe that'll pull me in at some point. Yeah, I'll get you addicted over Christmas.

So, Will Sloan, he's been freed. He's back on Twitter. That's ridiculous, Mark. I'm pissed off now. That's doing... Suspended for wishing for the death of Baby Yoda. That's insane. Just like a story I read earlier today.

In Chick-fil-A, I've never uh and chick-fil-a i'm no i've never been to chick-fil-a i i will get my chicken elsewhere but they they they had to uh identify a customer via like a couple of words and they said ugly sweater and because he was wearing a very loud and well you know i guess it's subjectively ugly sweater and apparently this went viral as like mean or something and i was thinking like i feel like uh that's funny and fine and if my employee you know identified a customer via their ugly sweater that's fine ugly face not fine ugly sweater a-okay anyway i digress i'm playing wham because maybe if elvis listens to this episode this will make him cry. I don't know, but let's hear it.

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart But the very next day, you give it away This year, to save me from tears I'll give it to someone special Before you go down the radio rabbit hole here and explain why I'm playing Last Christmas, can we give a shout out to a young woman I met when I was speaking to Humber College students

a couple of years back. And she was on the panel with me, like the new media panel, if you will. And her name was Jacqueline. And she had started this email newsletter called Pressed. And I told her all about my buddy Mark Wiseblood, who had started an email newsletter called 1236. And you can go to 1236.ca and subscribe to this fantastic newsletter. I told Larry Fedorek earlier today to subscribe to it. We'll talk about that.

But I learned from you that P Prest has sent their final email. Is that what happened there? Yes, she did an interesting job for the past three years. Jacqueline Lung, she was from a background where she had worked at Rogers in the media division,

behind the scenes, working on spreadsheets or something. And she had the notion that there was no outlet for Canadian news that was appealing to her. She was not from that deep, cynical media background. She was just looking at, like, what was the gateway? What was the way in for her to catch up and keep up, find out what was going on in the news?

Yeah, what is this Brexit thing? There was an election in Canada, 2015. She felt misinformed about it now partly inspired by the skim which has been a success stateside it's been one of those things back with a lot of venture capital eventually they're you know looking to cash out right playing that whole game but you know canadian equivalent of that that she would start on her own not not really knowing who the audience would be like not having that that that level would start on her own, not really knowing who the audience would be. Like, not having that level

of news media literacy, how could she create something that would appeal to her? She saw that there was a gap in the marketplace and proceeded to start this thing called Pressed. Pressed? Yeah, P-R-E-S-S-E-D. Pressed News. Which you can no longer subscribe

to because it sent its last email. Well, it's that for now. For now. She did it for three years. Oh, I wrote her. What do you think I told her? I said, this is a podcast. Okay, well, she's done podcasts before and told an interesting story.

Oh, I mean, but not as a guest. Trying to find her way in the whole thing. I mean, a daily pressed podcast. Well, she tried that too. Oh, did she? Oh, I missed that one. I'll have to talk to you about that later. You know, I chatted with her a bit along the way. She was looking to know what I thought,

and I thought, be the cheerful person in the media business. It's full of cynical old grumps like me. Right. You can bring the ray of sunshine, do something different here. And I think it was good advice. I think she tried really hard, but something like that bootstrapped on her own. Cheers to Jacqueline. I'm tipping my octopus wants to fight IPA to you because you gave it a go. I'm a big fan of people who give it a go. Oh, it's much better than complaining on Twitter all day and night that you can't get a job being a columnist at the Globe and Mail

that she saw a different way of doing it and I hope things work out that at least she's able to bounce back from making this decision to shut this thing down but find another outlet, whether it's again continuing the email newsletter thing

that another media company would want to adopt it. Like St. Joseph Media? Well, I'm working with St. Joseph Media. We've got things in the works. But you're the cynical bastard

and she's the optimist light in the room. I know, but listen, man. It's hard to make it happen and put all the pieces in place. How are, like, my friend Jody Jumpsuit and Ed Retro Ontario Conroy?

Yeah, terrific, terrific. We got the Retro Ontario newsletter. Let's put it this way. I helped to engineer what initially was four different newsletters using the Substack platform from different people, encouraging them, plugging them, pushing them. That was, for me, a bit of a demo, skunk works of foreshadowing what I hope to be able to do in 2020.

We'll see if it can happen, launching more newsletters in different ways. And we'll see where it goes. I could go over here. We could talk endlessly about what's hypothetical and what could be. Still very happy to be working to be this little part of the publisher, St. Joseph Media,

as they adopt other magazines, and eventually they will be the dominant magazine publisher in Canada. They already are with everything they own. For sure. But you've got to secure this domination now that it's Rogers Media does not see a future in print magazines. And, you know, here's a company that's getting the muscle and putting it all together.

It's kind of waiting for them to do, like, the full adoption because the other magazines are still tied to Rogers. They're still working out of Rogers. Like Chatelaine and McLean. Things will evolve in 2020 as the merger takes place. But yes, to clarify, St. Joseph's already owns them. We had Last Christmas by Wham! Playing in the background, again,

sorry to anybody that doesn't like this stuff. Ideally, we're having problems here today. The music is playing in the background while I'm discussing the topic. But this is just to introduce our radio segment because, of course, CHFI is playing all Christmas music. It's that time of year, huh? It's with the parade, right?

It coincides with the parade? Yeah, after Remembrance Day. That's a big no-no in Canada. Do not play Christmas music on or before November 11th. That's like the no-go zone. When you would have like a Rexall store or something by accident, maybe not by accident, they would be caught playing Christmas music, and people complain on the grounds that this is a somber time of year, the poppies are out, people don't want to hear jingle bells while they're shopping in a store

in the days leading up to November 11th. American radio stations that have gone all Christmas, they do it right after Halloween. So it's a two-month festivity down there. There's a game called Whamageddon. I don't think I even absorbed what the rules were, just some meme that somebody made up. Where the game Whamageddon. I don't think I even absorbed what the rules were. Just some meme that somebody made up.

Where the game Whamageddon, the objective is to spend the entire holiday season not hearing Last Christmas. And if you make it to the end, you win. I would have been able to do so if you didn't put it

on the list to play. It would be effortless because I never listen to these like CHFI old Christmas songs. And you know what? Listen, Last Christmas by Wham is an awesome song. And I fire it up, usually around this time every year,

over and over again. And you don't even celebrate Christmas. Is that right? That's not the point. There are nuances in Last Christmas, which I notice anew every single year. Just the whole George Michael performance. Here was a song that came to him,

like channeled through some supernatural force that he wrote this Christmas song. And now it's outlived George Michael himself. Who passed away on Christmas Day. And you hear last Christmas, you just notice all these little flourishes

in there, things that you don't expect, that you don't remember because it's maybe been melted down to this kind of jingle, like they covered it on the show Glee, or you just associate with hearing it faintly while you're in the supermarket. But if you listen closely

to Last Christmas by Wham!, a lot of pop brilliance in there which might have been heaven sent. And the George Michael presented this song to Andrew Ridgely, fully formed. This is when he realized he didn't need Andrew Ridgely anymore. Right, his buddy. Who wrote a memoir this year about his life with George Michael.

He basically wrote like two of the songs on the first album, and he helped him with Careless Whisper, and then he was out, he was done. His whole job was to be window dressing there in the duo. One foot out the door, but financially secure for the rest of his life, thanks to his royalties from whatever songs he wrote. But by last Christmas, it was George Michael's song, Alone. And that is every year my biggest Christmas hit. I remember

hearing it via CFNY 35 years ago when it would have been an import single. And I would say way more like in the last days of being cool enough to hang with all the other British new wavers.

A little tiny bit of that cachet laugh. Is this when they would play like the waitress's Christmas wrapping? Yeah, that would have been up there. But like Wham were, you know, they'd not yet completely sold out. Did they still fit that category of exotic

British imports? Right. And at the time, CFNY might have only been playing a song once per day that they had. The no-repeat guarantee won't play a song twice in 24 hours. I sat by the radio, and this song came on last Christmas by Wham. I heard it. I remember it when it first was around 35 years ago.

Still listening to it to this day. Less likely to voluntarily tune in to all Christmas radio. Ask me why I'm playing Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song. And so I'm offering the simple phrase. Brian Master was in recently to kick out the jams and it was, to be honest,

it was amazing. That's why I love kicking out the jams to hear Brian Master tell us why he loves these songs he loves and he kicked, his final jam

was this song because he, and as he sat where you're sitting right now, I could see him tearing up. He was remembering, you know, his mom playing that song when he was a young man,

a young, young, young, uh, Brian Master. And it was really an emotional, like time machine moment for, for Brian. And, uh, I thought I'd play this for him. Uh, we hope, I believe he'll be at TMLX5 and I know you love his dulcet tones, Mark. So here is Brian Master. Hi, it's Brian Master master sales representative with keller williams to realty solutions brokerage i like working by referral i love working with people finding out what they need and where they want to go so every month i put out an item of value called the client appreciation program and this is really great material it's all about well one for one thing the way the real estate market is, but other things like, well, this month is how to turn your home into a smart home. We've also

had things about how to throw a party on a budget, some travel tips. It's really great stuff and it comes out once a month called the Client Appreciation Program. I'd love to get you on it. It's easy to do. Send me an email to letsgetyouhomeatk kw.com. And I'll send that out once a month via snail mail and follow it up with an email that's something related to the item of value. You can't miss. It's great information. It's something you can share with your friends.

I'm Brian Master, sales representative with Keller Williams Realty Solutions Brokerage, thrilled to be on Toronto Mic'd. Thank you, Brian. I think on a previous episode, I misspoke about which Ozzy Osbourne album led Brian Master

to quit rock radio. Is it Blizzard of Oz? I said Blizzard of Oz. No, it was, I now have to look up the Ozzy discography. It wasn't Blizzard of Oz. It was the album

where he's got like fake blood or real blood coming out of his mouth. It was that live album where Sharon Osbourne got him to remake all the old Black Sabbath songs. Huh. Are you familiar with this? Does this ring a bell at all? No, now I'm thinking of No Rest for the Wicked. It was called Speak of the Devil.

Right. That was it. So not only did you have fake blood coming out of his mouth, but you also had like this demonic, satanic imagery that Ozzy was trading in. I just wanted to correct the record that going back to that Toronto Star article, which Brian Master thought we were inventing. Right. That was fictionalized, fake news.

He does not recall that. That, in fact fact i want to correct it here that speak of the devil would have been the aussie osborne album that sent brian master packing from hanging out rock radio chum fm right where he has a famous picture with frank zappa of course yeah we talked about that becoming the middle of the road d DJ we know and love still to this day on 88.5 The Jewel. It's all coming full circle because you mentioned that picture of Frank Zappa and Brian Master. We on the last episode you were on a month ago, I believe it was Halloween. And you talked about how Chum FM,

which now calls themselves Chum, but 104.5, was not playing Lizzo. And I got a note from FOTM Lucas Iannetta, who, by the way, when I listened to the Rogers podcast about Rob Ford, at the very end, I heard some,

I don't know, he did some production assistance or something. Yeah, yeah, I heard that too. I heard that. And I thought, that's Lucas. That is F-O-T-M Lucas.

Right. And I remembered him at TMLX4 and his enthusiasm and his buddies. Hello to Neil and to Jay Miller. And I'm told all three

are returning to TMLX5 at Palma's Kitchen. So get ready, Palma. But I play Lizzo because Lucas let us know that Chum is now playing this Lizzo song. And the point of curiosity a month ago was the fact that the number one Hot 100 hit by Lizzo, Truth Hurts, was not being played on Chum and not being played on CHFI. And I figured there was some kind of standoff to see if one station would add it before the other and then the two competitors would follow.

Because this was a legitimate adult contemporary hit song in the United States. And maybe it was deemed still to this day a little too urban. Too aggressive, maybe? For the Toronto mainstream audience. But this song they've deemed is appropriate. Well, CHFI is in Christmas mode,

so they're not playing any Lizzo unless she has a Christmas record. And one of my go-to stations is 89.3, The Current from Minneapolis. Still, to me, to this day, it's exotic. But where do you find the time? I can tune into a station from anywhere. Where do you find the time?

Well, this is more like a background thing. 89.3 The Current from Minneapolis, where I think that is the radio station that broke Lizzo. So I knew who Lizzo was. This is all news to me. Five years ago, she had the number one song on that station five years ago. 2014. And now she's a big star and safe for work at 104.5 Chum FM.

Now, so thank you, Lucas. See you on Saturday. Now, we will be doing our normal memorial. Of course, we now have a uh a sponsor for the memorial section which we'll get to but these let's talk about some people who did not pass away thankfully but they did get uh they were victims of the bell media cuts and radio uh do you want to run down that list including somebody who i spent the morning with today oh oh you mentioned uh lar Larry Fedorek,

who spent the past, what, 20 years, even though he was living in Toronto for the 21st century, he was working out of CKTB in St. Catharines. You had Larry down here, what? He made his first Toronto Mic'd appearance. He was back in record time. Well, Humble beat the record by coming in the week after the infamous Humble and Fred appearance. But yes, he was back in record time. Well, Humble beat the record by coming in the week after

the infamous Humble and Fred appearance. But yes, it was at the time the record for the shortest gap between visits. And Larry came and kicked out the jams. It was fantastic. And Larry and I have been friendly ever since. He's a definite FOTM. I'm sorry to learn that 610 cut him as they seek to cut costs at Bell Media. But I was over there at Larry's home today,

helping him because he's been writing what I think will be an absolutely fantastic podcast. So, you know, the Larry Fedorik podcast launch is imminent. And you're involved with that, TMDS. Yeah, I don't want to say anything too specific about this, except to say I was there today, and he has a podcast coming out, and I can't

wait to see Larry at TMLX 5 on Saturday. I would say in Toronto radio circles, Larry became a bit of a cult figure, because there he was at 680 CFTR. You might remember his resume better than I can. That's where I first was introduced to Larry.

He was involved with Tom River's morning show, right? He was a sidekick. He was the gag man. He was there in the trenches with Tom. Do you want a fun piece of trivia? When Humble Howard left Humble and Fred in 1990 to go to CKFM to launch Mix 99.9, the first co-host, same kind of position you mentioned for Tom Rivers, Larry Fedorek was the guy who was on that morning show with Humble Howard.

It was a time of bigger media payrolls because that was a real job out there to be the guy who was hovering around on the radio morning show. It was a guy named Larry McInnes who did it for all the years with Roger Ashby. His nickname was the gag man. A lot of these quips that came out of Roger's mouth were in fact scripted by Larry.

Like this was a job. Barely ever spoke on the air. His job was just to sit there and watch the proceedings and keep things snappy. And you'd have Roger Ashby himself saying, I'm not really a funny person, but I'm capable of delivering the lines. So for all those years, not up until the end. They got rid of that Larry a little bit sooner. The other Larry, when we're talking about Larry Fedorik,

went from being this radio morning show sidekick, did it at CFTR, he did it at The Mix, later with Tom Rivers again, and then Carla Collins. Carla Collins, yep. And then off to Kiss FM, the country music radio station. And he told a famous story where he accidentally groped Shania Twain, which is kind of an infamous Toronto Mike story.

He ended up doing the job that he was meant to do, and it involved talk radio on CK, out of St. Catharines. Audible across Toronto on AM radio, even though he lived in Toronto, he made a point, right? Even though technology was there for him to do the show at home, he wanted to go to the studio.

He found that an essential part of his creative process, do this style of talk radio, which was not based on having callers. Talk radio traditionally was about people phoning in. Now, a lot of the stations have pulled back on that in favor of panel discussions because of the nature of who's listening

and how they're tuned in. The radio stations also don't want to put elderly people on the air. It's bad for their imaging to make it sound like the only people who can be bothered to call are senior citizens. That's why when you listen to News Talk

1010, when they do a phoning segment, you might notice that the callers are not necessarily as old as who you imagine being the listeners. Have you ever picked up on this? I've never listened. Well, you call in and maybe they're nice to you.

They don't want to lose a fan. They tell you stay on the line and they keep you on hold, but you never make it onto the screen that they're looking at in the studio. And then when the segment is over i'm sorry we couldn't get to you please try again fascinating hoping perhaps that the person will pass away before they they ever bother to call those numbers now okay so larry fedorik unfortunately on the wrong end of the cost right into the cost cutting look, an innovative style of talk radio that was clearly ahead of the curve, closer to podcasting than the traditional cranky talk radio format. He did it out of St. Catharines, somewhat under the radar, through different ownerships,

eventually landing with Bell Media as the owner. When they bought Astral, they bought Standard, and they owned all these radio stations. And again, we get back to the fact that Bell Media is the owner of the station. They snapped it up, the assets they wanted. I mean, really, with Astral, they wanted the movie network, they wanted HBO, they wanted the rights to this stuff. But it came with the radio stations. Same thing happened when they bought Chum.

They wanted the TV stations. They wanted the specialty channels, which aren't worth as much as they were a decade ago. But they got a whole bunch of radio stations with them. I don't know that there was anything in the Bell Canada DNA that said they had to be operating radio stations. But they've been operating radio stations.

And they're in control of a lot of people's careers. And we've had casualty after casualty, layoff after layoff. I mean, how many times has there been the report about layoffs are currently in the air at Bell Media? They do them secretly. Twice a year. Well, maybe a union puts out a press release. Right. Unifor announcing, mentioning.

Who was it? The sportscasters at CTV Toronto. Joe Tilly. Joe Tilly, Lance Brown. Lance Brown. That was one that got a lot of attention because, you know, they eliminated those positions. And they were there decades.

But for the most part, they don't announce that people are leaving. It's up to those sleuths on Twitter that are paying attention. You need to listen to these episodes of Toronto Mike. You put the pieces together, okay, there's layoffs all around or somebody mentions whatever. Fagstein out of Montreal, he's usually on top of it.

People will DM Toronto Mike, tell him what's going on. I'm not saying that I ever get any backhanded tips about what's happening. Every once in a while, you find out that it's another round of layoffs at Bell Media. Well, I've never... And should Bell Media even be in...

I mean, should they even be in... Should they even be in the radio business? We don't have time for that one. Do they want to be in the radio business? No, but seriously. But it makes money, right? What's the point? I don't...

I mean, does it mean anything to the bottom line of the telecom behemoth that is Bell Canada? Like, does Larry Fedorik's salary really mean anything one way or the other to the stock price of BCE? Yet at the same time, it's this guy's job. It's his career.

It's the effort that he put into connecting with these people from the radio station out at St. Catharines, and that microphone was taken away from him. He doesn't have the audience anymore. Well, we look forward to Larry's podcast, and of course,

I'll have more news on that before it drops, but I just want to- I got to get another GLB because I'm having problems stringing sentences together. That's going to help. And I wonder, yes, will the beer help?

This is real talk, okay? Another FOTM lost his job because of these Bell Media cuts, and that's Scott Turner, who I was chatting with this week. He's coming in early February. Scott Turner is coming back to kick out the jams on Toronto Mike. Oh, well, that will be one of the best kick out the jams episodes because Scott Turner has an amazing legacy, really, when it comes to threading together

the history of music on radio in Toronto, Southern Ontario, all across the world. And he did it first with CFNY. It was one of those that landed there on FM after starting on the AM side out of Brampton and moved over to FM when he was pretty young.

Lost his job there, moved to Energy 108, and he was the architect of that format that everybody remembers with Euro trash, Euro dance music bringing chris shepherd on board that that became the the sound the sensibility of that era and since then he's gone from one programming job to another and his latest one was in kitchener kitchener waterloo

and they cut him loose and it sounds like one of those things where maybe he was making a little too much money or things were consolidating and whatever job he was doing could have been done by somebody else. It's not like it's Toronto. It's Kitchener and Waterloo.

You go where the work is but Bell Media didn't need him anymore. Right. And I don't know why they decided that he was expendable but if you are trying to run a radio company

he would be the kind of person every city every station every format that you would want to bring like four decades of expertise into the role instead he's cooling his heels yeah in a medium small market he's got a job But he was at the move. And what happened there? I don't know. But I'm going to find out when he kicks out the jam. He lost that job. The move, the flow. Maybe he quit.

I don't know. I can't keep track. Whatever it is, look. Okay, another radio genius out of a job, and he's down here kicking out the jams because he has time to spare. I hope that is some severance well spent, and I look forward to hearing him on Toronto Mic'd. Now, one of Larry Fedorek's favorite colleagues,

he was telling me this morning, was at CFTR when he worked with Evelyn Macko and Wacko Macko, who is an FOTM. In fact, she's the one who recommended to the journalism professor or teacher at Humber College that if you want to have somebody come in and talk podcasting, you need Toronto Mic Mike in here. So thank you, Evelyn, for that.

But Evelyn Macko is now back on the air in Collingwood, but not doing news, but Wacko Macko is a music DJ at Max FM. And she does what? Weekend mornings, Evelyn Macko. So I'll have to catch up on

this and hear a veteran Toronto radio voice in a new phase in her career on a music radio station. That's different. It's owned by Bayshore Broadcasting, so an independent owner, I guess willing to let somebody who's been around for so many years put on a different voice behind the microphone.

That's great for Evelyn Macko. I was going to say, speaking of Radio in the Hinterlands, there was another Bell Media story. It involved morning show hosts. I'm not going to pretend I ever heard of them before. Their names, Dave and Julie, and did the morning show many years on Bob FM in Lindsay, Ontario. I guess that would also be the Peterborough Market.

Is that where it would have connected to? The Kawarthas, maybe? Kawarthas. They let them go in mid-November. A morning duo with some experience. Seemed to be a cost-cutting move. And they ended up with protesters on the street outside the radio station, sleepy small-town radio station, a protest against Bell Media.

And you would not have seen this in a previous era where people would have conflated the price of their cell phone service to how their local radio personalities were being treated. But they didn't want them anymore. Maybe it was two salaries. They could have replaced them with one person. They brought somebody in, Vanessa Murphy, a DJ who'd been in Toronto. Boom.

And The Rock out of Oshawa. So, you know, she's worked her way up to get that kind of job. But why did they get rid of Dave and Julie? And when a newspaper, a small-time newspaper, will write to the Bell Media Promotions Department, Communications, they'll give back these stock responses, these form letters, right, saying like we're retooling based on the current economic state of the media industry while continuing to invest in new platforms. Well, that's a terrific answer for the sake of the shareholders. But if you've been listening to Dave and Julie for all

these years on Bob FM, how is that a satisfying response? Like, what do you care about the bigger picture, right? When it comes to who you've been waking up with listening to on the radio. So much like the Don Cherry and Jess Allen debacles, I think what happened there in this small-town radio station, out there in the co-orthas, was indicative of maybe where it's all going and how we can see the day where these telecom companies aren't in media anymore.

We're feeling the effects of rapid industry change in many parts of our business, including local radio. To ensure we remain competitive, we're managing the impact on our bottom line while also investing in content and platforms. Eek. We thank, fill in the name here, for his slash her slash their contributions and wish him slash her slash them the best.

There is my dramatic reading of what you get from Bell Media. If you're working for a newspaper and ask them, why did you get rid of Larry Fedoruk? That's what they will tell you. It's ready to go. And there is not a complete heartlessness involved, but they got to play along. This is the game. This is the answer they have to give Bell and Rogers. Unless you're Don Cherry, you have to give a more elaborate apology explaining

how you let this guy on the air for decades. For the most part, when you're swept under the rug, that's the answer you get. You know you have this toronto mike.com ever since the era where humble howard uh was ditched by the mix you see an uptick right every time somebody is dismissed from a radio station you've probably got their name somewhere on your website or not even dismissed because it happened with bigs and bar and they quit so it was yeah it's when there's changes uh for sure for sure and this is no way yeah, it's when there's changes. For sure, for sure. And this is no way to run the media business. I'm trying to be part of a new one.

And we'll figure out what form it takes. We better get there soon. Every month I'm here, I'm procrastinating. And we'll get beyond these tactics. And at the same time, I don't know. I mean, Bell Media's all right. I don't mean to dump on what these people are doing.

They're launching all sorts of podcasts. Here we are rallying them that they should get involved in media in a different way. It's a Jan Arden podcast. There's a Monk Debates podcast. We'll see what the reaction is when they have the Steve Bannon episode

of that one. Bell Media believe, like Rogers, they can leverage the platforms that they have. We also see it at Chorus. Go on the AM radio, tell people download a podcast. Get a national newscaster, the national. Lisa Laflamme on CTV, promote a podcast. I don't know if these things relate to one another.

If you hear on the CTV National News at 11 o'clock, download this podcast. Kevin Newman has got a podcast. Then they stand by and they wait for the clicks to come in, and they never happen. It's oil and water, don't you think? Would it really matter if you got plugged for your podcasts on CTV National News? Let's find out.

Would that do anything for the audience? Yeah, but you've been here now, like with Hebsey, with Gallagher and Gross, doing these shows all this time. In a previous era not too long ago, you would have stood by and you would have waited for the local newspaper to come call. There would have been an article, right? Right. You know, you thought John Gallagher and Peter Gross were unemployed has-beens from City TV.

No. They come to Toronto Mike's basement every few weeks and they record these bizarre 22-minute episodes. But no one is called, right? No one has inquired about that kind of coverage. So what do you think? Were you expecting it? No, not anymore. Of course not.

But you would have expected it a few years ago. People wrote about you in that light. Yeah, maybe. You got mentioned in articles. Absolutely. But those writers aren't there anymore, and those stories aren't being written, and does it even matter?

Would it make a difference to anything at this point in time? It's a new landscape. Look, it was David Marsden who I think 2000, 2001, somewhere he wrote something, I don't know, radio message board. We're approaching now a period of transition, disruption, adjustment, and this is going to take 20 years. Remember reading that around that time,

pushing 30, whatever. I was thinking, I got to wait 20 more years to get my opportunity in the media? Well, guess what? Time is almost up. If Marsden was right, it's just about to happen. You got to check in with Marsden when you have him down here when he turns

80 and see what he thinks about his prognostication around the year 2000. You know, that we had to strap in and get ready for 20 years to wait to see what was on the other end. I'm grateful that I've lived that long. Okay, people

are waiting to hear a particular Beach Boys song and they've been very, very, very patient. But before we close out the radio we gotta do that before we play what else was happening before we uh close out the radio section i just want to uh say congrats to melanie mariani who we know as uh was part of the adam and mel was it fearless fred and mel and then adam and mel but she was part of the 102.1 i don't know she did afterno Mel and then Adam and Mel, but she was part of the 102.1. I don't know. She did afternoons and then mornings, and she's been hired by Indie 88. Is she taking over the old bookie stuff?

Started December, December 2nd. Today's the 3rd. She's now the 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. announcer in Indie 88, effectively replacing Dave Bookman, even though it's irreplaceable. And look, the station did not really do anything to replace Booky's programming. He did the Sunday morning rock show, freeform experiment, that was more along the lines of, let's say,

the kind of music that Dave Hodge would be into. Not to mention me, always listening. Even though it was pre-taped voice track, you never knew what was going to come up next. This is the kind of thing that keeps me tuned in on a Sunday morning. And the show did not survive. I mean, they didn't continue it in any way

after the tragic death of Bookie. And I guess, I don't know, they didn't call me, they didn't call me they didn't call dave badini there was you know no other aging gen xer waiting in the wings uh to fill that role of of dave bookman at the station which on one hand it affirms that he was one of a kind there was a charity sale for music counts the charity they did did sold off Bookie's vinyl album collection. People getting very sentimental about owning these beaten and battered copies of Pet Sounds or Blood on the Tracks,

albums that Bookie would have cherished. They were sold at Rotate This benefit the charity. And that was a symbolic gesture that he was beloved. But Indie 88, programming has shifted a bit. They're also not playing Lizzo,

and I think they would have in a previous era. What are they going for? I mean, this company got this signal. They got a power boost, and they want to take down 102.1 The Edge. I think the odds are good that they will stick it out and they will actually outlive that radio station to the right of the dial.

The chorus, for different reasons, will sunset CFNY. We talked here speculating about what that would sound like. Would they even bother to invite all the old alumni back to do one last tour? You don't think so? I don't think so. I mean, we just had the Breakfast Television 30th anniversary

and there was no sign of bringing back the previous host. Okay, so we're standing by for the Toronto Mic'd episode, but I don't know. Maybe it's holding itself corporately. But I think, for the most part, they're hedging this idea with a little more power for the FM listeners

in the 88, more advertising of Josie Dye. By the way, I'm going to the Josie Dye and Friends, there's a Christmas show, and the headliner is Sloan, and I've got a ticket to that, which is pretty cool. So that's going on, I think, on the 18th. You might be a bigger star there than any of the on-air people. Josie's a BFD.

With Josie and Lana and Melanie, and look, a female fronted radio station. Oh, yeah. I mean, Chum 104.5 is mostly women announcers. Indie 88, seeing that they can distinguish themselves that way. It's a palate cleanser from the very male environment of modern rock radio. I don't hear one thing about the siblings on the edge at Morning Show. Only I hear stuff from you.

What happened over there? Colter and Meredith is the other one, but as we talk about month after month, this is a world where you go in and do a live show, but then you also record stuff for other markets. So they've got people working more than ever. There aren't as many of them, but it's no longer about coming in to do your three, four-hour shift live on the station.

You're doing that, but then you're also recording for like two or three other stations. They figured out a way, maybe to make it more of a sustainable full-time job. These CFNY DJs don't have to do club gigs anymore at night to pay the rent. Well, there are no club gigs anymore. Well, you punch in and you punch out and you're doing radio and you're making it happen.

Indie88, I think, is betting on the idea that we will see the demise of CFNY. And here, this smaller company from Barrie, Ontario, will end up prevailing with the format in the market, and they're lining up for that. How are they doing it? It's with people that have a history with 102.1. The best of the bunch, Reina Douris, is now in full flight in the land of the Philadelphia Eagles.

The city of brotherly love. It's interesting to watch. Somebody with roots in this city who's on Twitter all the time talking about Toronto, but is actually in Philadelphia and working her way up to be a nationally known NPR radio personality.

Good for her. Beyond the CBC, something the CBC could not do because I don't think that CBC music programming is up to snuff. It's got somebody like me barely ever tuning into it, even when Laurie Brown was on the signal on CBC. I didn't get it. I don't understand. It seemed like she would not maybe get into this or argue.

Playing it safe, too safe. It was not a fulfillment of what somebody like that could do. Because you liked Brand New Waves. Brave New Waves. I'm Paul Jackson. Listen, I like the found moments. Just like down here, the real talk. The idea that you stay tuned because you don't know what's going to happen next.

And as soon as it becomes humdrum, it's a tune-out. Okay, speaking of being down here, the great news is that concussions in the city have plummeted since StickerU sent over the Check Your Head sticker. And is this your first or second visit since the Check Your Head sticker? Second and third? You're losing track, my man.

I'm sorry. Time flies when you're having a good time. Now, thank you, StickerU. And also, I want to say thank you to StickerU because they have produced christmas or a holiday gifts for all attendees of tmlx uh five on saturday so if you're coming out to palma's kitchen to to watch this record live and hopefully be a part of the program you're going to receive a wonderful magnet badge from sticker you and again mark this is probably your fifth or sixth Toronto Mike sticker,

courtesy of StickerU. Might be the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth. I still am reminded I have to get around to putting all my Toronto Mike stickers on one laptop computer that I can show my loyalty to this podcast. The blog, the enterprise, the man, the myth, Toronto Mike will be the only sticker that I'm willing to put on my beat-up old computer

that I don't really use very much anyway. But it'll be good for the stickers. So thank you, sticker you. Thank you. Hey, Marcella. Hey, Marcella. She's a friend. Hey, Marcella. Hey, Marcella. This was a big Marcella month.

Fill us in. What happened with Cheer Girl in November 2019? If I've got this right, November was the biggest news-making month in the history of Cheer Girl since we first met her back in mid-February. Mike, there comes a time in every story that involves some sort of antiisocial behavior caught on tape.

Where you no longer have to say the word allegedly. Mm-hmm. On November 15th, we reach that apex with Chair Girl, where she was in court at Old City Hall, and she pled guilty to a charge of mischief endangering life. I don't know how it works exactly, but there seems to be some incentive to keep dragging it along because it seems to have been dragged out a long time just for her to plead guilty. Oh, well, appearance after appearance, where the media was standing by waiting for Chair Girl and she wouldn't show up.

And there would be Marcella Zoya's lawyer, Greg Leslie. And look, this guy was good for soundbites. And look, this guy was good for soundbites. He introduced us to the idea that Marcella was enrolled in dental hygienist school. That because of the original chair girl video, we no longer have to say allegedly of her chucking a chair off a 45th floor condo balcony over the Gardner Expressway. That, you know, she wasn't able to continue her education. That she was there only 19 years old.

That she made a mistake. That he was encouraging her not to post so much on social media. What's with the Instagram? And in the time that Chair Girl was supposedly being advised by her lawyer not to be on Instagram all the time, we ended up with image after image, post after post of chair girl living the high life, having a good time. The party never seemed to stop for her. One of the court appearances, she wasn't able to make it. The lawyer explained she was off in Miami doing some modeling.

Now, not to pass judgment on what exactly that entails, we'll have to take his word for it. In the appearance where Chairgirl pled guilty, the

cameras weren't on in the courtroom, of course, and she was chased out of the steps of Old City Hall by all the reporters. Didn't say anything, but made sure to look at the camera on the right angle to make it to the front page of the Toronto Sun. She knew to do that much. And we learned from Chairgirl's lawyer that she suffers from anxiety. Well, the number of selfies that Chair Girl took in nightclub bathrooms would indicate that she was working very hard to clear up whatever anxious feeling that she had.

And she just turned 20. And, you know, I went to bed knowing that Chair Girl's 20th birthday was upon us. I woke up to a whole bunch of Instagram stories of Chair Girl partying the night away, turning 20. She's in a world where, I guess, there are not a lot of celebrities hanging around. And this has been Chair Girl's role.

But seriously, for what she did, she faces up to six months behind bars. And we'll see where this goes in mid-January. More Marcella updates to come. We'll find out the fate of Chair Girl. Hey, Marcella. Thank you for 2019. Fate of Chair Girl. Hey, Marcella. Thank you for 2019.

This was your year, whether you liked it or not. Jerry Sprunger. Who am I listening to here? Tory Lanez? We dedicating this to Norm Kelly, whose comeback was thwarted. Yeah, I wanted to mention that thanks to the fact that Norm Kelly is no longer tweeting, I can't keep up on what's happening anymore in hip-hop in Toronto. The at Norm account was really like my main source for knowing, you know, what was going on with some of these characters out there who were involved in the world of Drake, October's very own. And one of those people that Norm used to tweet about was that singer, Tory Lanez from Toronto with that song, Jerry Sprunger, which he did with T-Pain. But I'm telling you the truth

because I just found out belatedly that Party Next Door is making a comeback. He was busted at one point for drugs at the Buffalo Border. You know Party Next Door? Another Drake protege? Kind of, yeah. Maybe from you.

Working his way back. You learn your stuff from Norm, and then I learn my stuff from you. Okay, Norm Kelly and his Twitter account used to keep me posted. What happened in November was a possibility that Norm Kelly was going to return to Toronto City Council. Why? Because Jim Karagiannis, who beat him in the municipal election, it was a showdown between two city councillors in Scarborough Agent Court. The two of them were both on council. Doug Ford's government cut the size of Toronto City Hall.

It was a showdown. Karygiannis came out triumphant. He lost his seat because it was ruled by the integrity commissioner that he violated the campaign spending rules because he was using the funds that he raised for the election on an extravagant victory party. He appealed, and he got his job back, and went through this absurd situation at City Hall, where they took his nameplate off the office, and they terminated him on every level, like anything you looked up about the names of Toronto City Councillors. He was gone.

Right. Vanished. Canceled. He went to court, and he got his job right back. And there he goes. He was at the next city council meeting like nothing ever happened. And I don't know. He was trying to get something passed and involved,

doing a favor for some developer that donated to his campaign. This guy is not a political newbie. He was a liberal MP in Ottawa for so many years. So he wanted to do municipal politics to, I don't know, be closer to home. He's getting older, spend time with his family, easier job for him, not as much travel. And, you know, here we had the fever dream for a few minutes that some sort of acclimation or something, or maybe there would even be another by-election, that Norm Kelly would be returning to City Hall. Imagine that, that at Norm would be reactivated again. It wasn't meant to be. We've got Jim Carreganis back.

And now there's some sort of appeal put forward to try and get this reconsidered, that he should once again lose his job, like this wasn't right, this wasn't fair. You've got Jim here telling you that it was just some sort of clerical error, that he didn't mean to submit a form saying that he splurged all this money on the party. Do you believe him or what? I mean, he was trying to get away with crediting this expense, you know, an excessive amount compared to what he was supposed to. This guy's been in government a long time.

Maybe give him some credit that he wouldn't cancel himself. They wouldn't kibosh his own career. They wouldn't do this sort of self-own and make himself unemployed. And on the other hand, you have people that assume this sort of corruption is par for the course in local government. Norm Kelly, now working as a consultant for Hill & Knowlton, and like so many ex-city councillors, moving to the lobbyist side.

At least he's advising, suggesting, how do you win over a Toronto City Councillor? How do you catch your ear to get them to vote in your favour? That's where Norm is today. No more Norm on Twitter. I never followed Norm on Twitter. I found it all very annoying, actually. And I felt bad for his constituents

who might want to tweet at him for, I don't know, maybe there's a bike lane issue or maybe a civic issue that they need him to address, and they couldn't really do that because he was at Norm. His Twitter guy went to work for Arlene Dickinson, best known from Dragon's Den. If you see some memes from her, some LinkedIn wisdom,

I think you can trace that to the mind behind the Norm Kelly account. All this, a very long way of saying that I sort of wish that Norm was still around Twitter. You might be the only one, though. Because I would have found out faster about that great song,

Jerry Sprunger, by Tory Lanez, featuring T-Pain. A big thank you to Ridley Funeral Home. And why? Because they are proudly sponsoring the memorial section, the memorial segment, if you will, of the 1236 episodes of Toronto Mike.

And that's where we are right now. And you cleared this with them. Of course. They were into this. It was okay. A hundred percent. Brad. Because you realize that this is not always the most reverent review of people's lives.

That sometimes we go down the course of ridiculing their accomplishments a little bit. But primarily we are giving some dues and some attention to some people who passed in the last month who aren't necessarily going to be written up about in the Toronto Star or the New York Times or even the Post or the Globe or the Sun. And this is kind of our opportunity

to just pay tribute to those individuals. And what is happening at Ridley Funeral Home? Well, this is a Tuesday and tomorrow, if you're quick, we got to hope you quickly listen to this episode and didn't sleep on it because tomorrow,

which is December 4th at 7 p.m., I'm actually attending this. This is the Holidays in Hope Candlelight Service at the Assembly Hall. And Brad and the good people at Ridley Funeral Home, it's their annual free memorial service in honor of those loved ones who have passed away and cannot be with us this holiday season.

If you'd like more information, please visit RidleyFuneralHome.com or call 416-259-3705. I was tired of being put right down by myself And not being what you thought you had found Pulled hard in two directions By your desire to learn and my old affections When I tried to share my world with you You could not seem to tolerate

The people I had grown to love. They shrank under your scrutiny, became the ones you hate. Why did everything, everything, everything with you and me have to be so political? Everything, everything, everything with you and me had to be so political. John Mann was only 57 years old. A Spirit of the West was a pretty big band with a specific type of audience at a certain kind of time. We were talking before about Stompin' Tom Connors.

And I think the Stompin' Tom renaissance owed a little bit to Spirit of the West. That it was a band from Vancouver that developed a certain kind of music and I think made it popular with audiences, younger audiences, right? College audiences that would have never imagined hearing something before in this style,

but brought enough of that rock energy to it in a way that it connected. I mean, these songs became anthems with that audience around that time. Home for a Rest, right? That was a big song when you were in university, I guess. Monster. That would have been a big one.

Monster song, yeah. What were the other ones you remember from Spirit of the West? The five free minutes for myself, I remember. And of course, another big one around that era, And of course, another big one around that era, which of course off the top of my head after a few Great Lakes,

I can't remember now. But this one here, I will say, was covered beautifully by the Watchmen on Saturday night at the Danforth Music Hall to pay tribute to John Mann. And Danny Graves nailed it. And it was quite the moment. Quite the moment.

Venice is sinking. That nailed it. And it was quite the moment. Quite the moment. I first knew a little bit of Venice. Venice is sinking. Venice is sinking. That was it. John Mann, who died at age 57 after a struggle with Alzheimer's at a really young age to have to deal with that terrible affliction.

And Venice is sinking was kind of their mainstream hit at the time. They had a big major label record deal with Warner. Warner Music Canada. After starting out with the Stony Plain record label from Edmonton. So they did the crossover from the folk music, folk festival scene. FOTM Michael Barclay is a big authority on this whole world and how it evolved.

And a video that would have gotten a lot of airplay on much music. And that was An Offendance is Sinking, which John Mann wrote, inspired by going to Venice on his honeymoon. So that was part of his history as well with Home for Arrest. And political, this song, which I think we can blame Moxie Fruvis on this song.

The whole musical origin of Moxie Fruvis and Gian Gomeschi, I think they were mostly just trying to rip this thing off. Don't you think? That was like politics combined with folk music and a bit of the alternative rock angle. Oh, like my girlfriend loves a bunch of authors or whatever? I kind of hear it now. It was a lame parody of the whole thing.

Spirit of the West were the real deal. And we got to learn, I think, a lot about this early onset Alzheimer's through the struggle of John Mann. There was a documentary. We did all sorts of benefit concerts. Now, remember, this was happening at the same time as we were sort of saying goodbye to Gore Downey, who was also suffering from a different illness, of course.

And it's possible, I believe, in hindsight, that the John Mann farewell concerts and tributes as he got sicker was, I would say, lost in the noise of the country kind of preparing for the loss of the tragically hip score Downey, I would say. Okay, but based on the social media reaction, touched a lot of people with those Spirit of the West songs and the credit there. He was the front man of the group. That was John Mann who made it all happen and to the point where I'd imagine it was pretty emotional because if someone is into the Watchmen,

they would also have known a lot about Spirit of the West. They would have bought the albums. They would have heard it at the campus pub. You know me and my affinity for what I call 90s CanCon alt rock. Like I'm the guy who thinks that the Great Cup halftime show should be rusty. So, and my next two shows I'm going to

is The Lowest of the Low. By the way, I have two tickets to see The Lowest of the Low coming up like on the 14th, think it's a saturday night at lee's palace uh you can win those tickets if you tweet at me why you want to see the lowest of the low at lee's palace that saturday night but i got two tickets that i'll be at that show and then again i'm gonna see sloan like a few days later uh at the phoenix so like i'm still kind of living in that 90s uh uh, Cancun alt rock.

So this, the death of John Mann really hit me because it's all from that same era. And, you know, home for arrest again, uh, is like literally like what I would say, a frosh anthem,

if you will, like inescapable. Yeah. Real quirky Canadiana, right? I mean, no other country would have produced this kind of act. And I,

I think in the, in the same spirit of Gordani and the tragically hip could not have made it in any other nation. Like this was very much confined to Canada. I'm rocking tonight I'm walking all day Gonna find me some trouble Gonna grab my share I want you tonight I want you with me

I'm really guilty of love To the first degree Yeah the first degree. That's some Billy Squire, Rock Me Tonight. Who did we lose that appears on this song? A whole history that I did not know until I read some obituaries for a guy named Doug

Lubon. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. L-U-B-H-A-N. Doug Lubon? What do we settle on? Lubon? Lubon is my guess. Lubon.

That's my guess. But I'm the wrong guy to ask. Doug Lubon. Let's go with Lubon. I never knew the guy's name, let alone how to pronounce it, until I found out that he died. The Doors were legendary for not having a bass player.

The most awful band to ever achieve any level of popularity in America. Is that a fact? I think that is generally a consensus. I mean, were you old enough to remember when there was a whole Jim Morrison renaissance? Oh, with the movie? He's hot, he's sexy, and he's dead. Ten years before that.

Oliver Stone? There was a Doors greatest hits album. And that was the whole idea of marketing, right? The myth, the legend of Jim Morrison. There was a book, No One Gets Out Here Alive, about his life story, and it was accompanied by this album, and it was inescapable. Radio stations like Q107, it was doors all the time, abetted by the movie Apocalypse Now.

The end. Ford Coppola using the doors on the soundtrack. Which is great. They could never get enough of the doors. And anyone that I ever met who said that they liked the doors, they were no friend of mine. And that was a sign. That was a signal.

What about the tea party? Something's wrong with this person. Can I like the tea party? If they're saying theors is their favorite band, let alone only figuring out who they were a decade after the fact, a decade after we lost Jim Morrison. Okay, so Ray Manzarek, who's also dead, he was a keyboard player of The Doors,

and he also served the role of a bass player. Like, he used the keyboards to play the parts that in a typical rock band would have been played by a bassist. But there was a bassist in the Doors, and his name was Doug Lubon. And he died this month, November 2019, at age 71. Played in a bunch of bands after that. Journeyman bassist, I guess.

His main gig didn't work out, The Doors. He refused to join the band, and they figured they could do without a guy there plucking away on the four strings, and Jim Morrison died anyway. The whole thing went to hell. And he landed in with another rock and roll success story, and that was Billy Squire.

And here he is playing bass on Rock Me Tonight, one of the most infamous songs in MTV history because of its video. Do you know this story? Did he... Billy Squire dancing with himself. Not as a woman. Not as a woman.

Choreographed dance. The whole idea. You're in your bedroom. You're dressing up in these flash dance inspired clothes getting ready for a night on the town. As the legend goes, the video for this song killed Billy Squire's career.

There's a book about MTV that came out a few years ago, I Want My MTV, Oral History. There's a whole chapter about this video, and Billy Squire blames the video, which was out of his hands, out of his control, with ruining a whole thing for him. I don't know if that's true. This is disputed that his career was kind of on the wane anyway. He was just looking for a scapegoat. He had a few good years,

right? Well, the stroke. I will say, the stroke has that line, let your backbone slide, which of course is the line that Maestro Fresh Wes took to name his biggest hit,

let your backbone slide. I guess Billy Squire hanging around waiting for some jukebox musical to be written using his songs. I interviewed him back in, I think 1996. He was kind of like, I'm washed up. My best moments

are behind me and I blame that video. Eminem did give the stroke a bit of a resurgence of course with a fairly recent Eminem hit based on that song. Okay, so who knew the bass player Doug Lubon? So if you look in my direction

and we don't see eye to eye My heart needs protection And so do I This is a song I know from my youth and heard all over the place and knew, but I never ever knew what artist recorded this song.

Like I'm seeing now that it's Nicolette Larson. And I don't believe I ever knew that for what it's worth. But Nicolette Larson is not the person we mourn today. Oh no, she died a long time ago. Tragically at like age ago, tragically, at like age 45, I think, back around 1997. But yeah, a lot of love by Nicolette Larson on

The Sound of Our Toronto 99.9 CKFN. Who passed away that played on this song? Well again, it took the obituaries to illuminate a connection I never knew about before and it was a guitarist named Paul Barrere, he died also at age 71

and he's a guitarist, he's in the video for this song for Nicolette Larson, Lotta Love. Written by Neil Young, right? That's why you heard it on the radio all the time. I didn't know. Canadian content.

See, I'm learning this now. There was an album by Nicolette Larson. It had Lotta Love written by Neil Young and Rumba Girl written by Jesse Winchester, a draft dodger to Montreal who also would have qualified for Canadian content. Jesse Winchester, a draft dodger to Montreal, who also would have qualified for Canadian content. Okay, because this was a fixture, and that explains it.

A big Canadian album that wasn't actually from Canada. And there was a lot of love. Yeah, I heard this one endlessly. Stations like CKFM and 590. C-K-E-Y. C-K-E-Y. How come this song gets to be CanCon and Brian Adams' Everything I Do, I Do It For You doesn't get to be CanCon?

Also, in the last day that CFRB played music with Wally Crowder, they played this one, I think, every single day. You would hear a lot of love on CFRB. Okay, so Paul Barrere, before this studio work and Nicolette Larson, or concurrent with that, he was in a band called Little Feet. And Little Feet relates to Dave Bookman.

Because when we did that Dave Bookman tribute back in the spring, we touched on a song that they played on Indie 88.1 as soon as they read the news that Bookie had died. And it was a song that I'm not pretending that I ever knew before called Fool Yourself, which is by Little Feet. It's from the 1973 album Dixie Chicken. And that has become one of my default songs, one of my favorites.

Very touched. They announced that we lost the great Dave Bookman, and I'm not sure how that happened or who chose it or who knew he had an association with this song, but it's really touching then and it's still touching now. Good on Indie88 for doing that. Yeah, don't know much about Little Feet, really. I mean, Lowell George was the leader of that band, touching now and good on nd88 yeah i don't know much about little feet really i mean lowell george

was the leader of that uh of that band and uh now the guitarist is gone as well paul barrer and that was like 40 years after lowell george died and the legacy of little feet so again just like i didn't know much about the connection between the Doors and Billy Squire, Nicolette Larson, this unavoidable CanCon radio song, had a connection to Little Feet. Did you hear my episode with the Y108 morning show? Yeah, yeah, I was up on that one.

So how, I asked them the question and I hear you tell that story about when they announced dave bookman's uh passing on 88.1 that they could play a a fairly obscure little feat song that bookie loved and i asked the question which is the the day after john man passed away from spirit of the west why couldn't somebody somewhere at y108, I don't know, play something that would fit, like Home for a Rest, for example? Like, you'd think that even in this day of automation

and preloaded music and everything, that somebody could, you know, could make that call. I don't know if you agree with me, but I think it's a damn shame that they could go the entire day after John Mann passed and not commemorate it with a Spirit of the West song on the Y108

morning show. Yeah, you would think. But maybe that's not the radio's job anymore when you can fire up any song that you've ever wanted. Then what is, why not? I think that's, anyway, we're done with it. Well, that's right, we do the obituary segment. And look, what started here is focusing, I think, on the 1236 obituaries,

ones with specific ties to Toronto, through the year that we've been doing this segment, kind of expanded to anything that might ring a bell, right? For you or me, just something, some link, some association with our pop culture history. Got a few more to go before we're done. Let's go. The light shines down the valley, the wind blows up the alley, oh, and I wish I was lying in the arms of Mary. And turned them in to feel good Oh, and I wish I was lying in the arms of Mary

Mary was the girl that taught me all I had to know She put me right on the first stage Summer wasn't gone and I learned all she had to show She really gave all a boy could take Speaking of CanCon, some Chilliwack, Arms of Mary. Yeah, this is kind of the third year of a troika, a trinity of music trivia deaths that happened in November. All the same age, too. 71, 71, 71.

How long have I got to live before I'm 71? In the meantime, there's Ian Sutherland. And he was part of a duo called the Sutherland Brothers. Their backing band was called Quiver, a British band that went by the name Sutherland Brothers and Quiver. Middling success as

folk rockers in the early 70s, but they managed to score two hit songs. Arms of Mary was a hit for them across the pond. Covered in Canada by Chilliwack. Whenever I hear Chilliwack, I think of FOTM Blair,

who has this compulsive, chronic hate on for Chilliwack. Even Rayno, which is a fantastic jam. I guess he's got an issue with Chilliwack. Can you name the FOTM who was once crowned Miss Chilliwack? No. Who? Diana Swain. Okay, Miss Chilliwack.

And I think I knew, thanks to that song, My Girl Gone, Gone, Gone, that there was a band called Chilliwack before I knew that there was a city called Chilliwack. Arms of Mary, a song played in Canadian content perpetuity. It was actually written by Ian Sutherland, who died in the past month, and he wrote another song,

covered by Rod Stewart, called Sailing. And those are the two songs he's most remembered for. I'm up at midnight, I'm dipping off in my kniz-eye It's a gun and a metal piss-eye, been kniz-eye, fist to my wrist-eye I'm lurking, serving all pussies who lack a purpose I got them filled up with frizz-eye, like miz-eye, get you all wrist-eye I'm lurking, lurking on bitches, twerking for service The bitches back as a burger, I'm yelling, screaming and cursing I'm putting pistols and faces at random places Like, bitch, give it up.

I stand adjacent to Satan. Bad man chilling, I'm killing to kill. No Jesus is here. I hear the demons in my ear. With all due respect to the recently departed, what the hell is this? A song by Run the Jewels, which they wrote in honor of a cat

who we lost on December 1st, 2019. A legendary internet cat named Lil Bub. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are we allowed to do animals in this segment? I guess we can do whatever we want. We can memorialize animals. There are so many animals that were famous enough to get obituaries in the news. Secretariat, Man O' War, and Little Bub.

And so we pay tribute to Little Bub who died. And this is the thing with cats, right? If we talked about a person that died at the age of eight, this would be the saddest thing ever. Right. But when

you're a quirky cat who was born with conditions that were unique enough to make you famous on the Internet, chances are you're not going to live for very long. And so we celebrate the eight and a half years of Lil Bub. Now tell me about Toronto filmmaker John Kastner. Interesting obituary. Got a full-length treatment in the Globe and Mail. John Kastner was part of a family in Toronto. The Kastner last name became pretty well known

as far as Canadian media and entertainment and filmmaking was concerned. He had a brother named Peter Kastner who was in an NFB movie called Nobody Waved Goodbye from 1964. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. And it was kind of like a reality show, a precursor to something like The Hills, in the sense that the people were acting, but they also were not. They were drawing from their own experiences, doing these improvised scenes about what it was like to have that late teenage angst in the 60s, but that was his brother, Peter Kastner. John Kastner was also a child actor who managed to make his name in his own right. And the first press you see about him is the fact that he did these candid camera segments that ran on the CBC's original late night show, 90 Minutes Live.

So before David Letterman came along, he was the first one to kind of revive this idea of doing taped bits filmed across Canada, for which he got a lot of acclaim. Kind of a candid camera thing where he's playing a certain kind of character and watching the reactions of the people in there. And he got some recognition for that, along with the fact that his brother was known. He had two sisters. One was a columnist in the Toronto Star. The other one, entertainment reporter on CBC. The cast and her name got out there.

So after he made a bit of a splash, it was a smaller city back then, the path to stardom in the world of the CBC, it was clear for somebody like him. He turned to a more serious sort of documentary filmmaking. And I dug up an article from 1981 where he did a documentary with his mother, Rose, 1981, where he did a documentary with his mother, Rose, and they ventured into the mysterious world of homosexuality. It's fascinating how far we've come,

that at the time it was like this weird anthropological world, like we're going to take my mom into a gay bar and show you what goes on in there. But at the time, you wouldn't see something like that on conventional television. And it was one of the ideas that he had. And later in his career, he got into doing documentaries that touch on more serious subjects, some stuff talking to people that were battling cancer, and then eventually went behind the scenes into the mental health system. And a film that got a lot of acclaim was called Not Criminally Responsible.

Looking at those whose mental health was such that they were, you know, given, let's say, lesser charges for crimes that under certain circumstances might have gotten stiffer sentences, but instead people that were put through the mental health system. His nephew followed in his footsteps the documentary filmmaker Jamie Kastner.

You might have seen his work over time. I know him a little bit. Made documentaries on a bunch of subjects, most recently with Barenaked Ladies keyboardist Kevin Hearn and about the fact that Kevin Hearn bought a piece of art that turned out to be a fake and made a documentary about that. The whole filmography from Jamie Kastner credits his uncle, John Kastnerner as lighting a spark

that made him a documentary filmmaker. So hopefully his nephew will continue his legacy. I was going to say the original thing with Kevin Hearn of Barenaked Ladies

is a real tangent here. Sure. Is that Jamie Castner wanted to do a movie about what it was like to be a friend of the biggest misanthrope in America.

Lou Reed. A guy who did everything possible not to have any friends even laurie brown did you get into talking about lou reed here uh she talked about how difficult he was to interview that was the lou reed stick sure and i still want to see that film made where Kevin Hearn talks about what was it like to break through with this guy? What was it like to be Lou Reed's only friend? I want to see that movie made. We'll see if it can happen based on my entreaty here.

What, like two hours and 20 minutes into an episode of Toronto Mic'd? Now tell me about Terry O'Neill. Oh, a rock and roll photographer, Terry O'Neill, who was connected to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. He photographed the Beatles in their most debauched era, late 60s, early 70s, and he was married to Faye Dunaway. He had a signature style.

There was a situation where three celebrated rock photographers from the 60s and 70s died within a few days of each other. And the more famous one of the bunch was a guy named Robert Freeman. And he was best known for photographing a bunch of album covers for the Beatles. I gave you Norwegian Wood from the Beatles, which was written for, written about the wife of Robert Freeman, even though that was never confirmed,

who was having an affair with John Lennon. And it turned out that the guy that photographed the first number of Beatles albums, the album covers with the Beatles and Hard Day's Night, Beatles for Sale, Help, and Rubber Soul, the most famous of all, on Rubber Soul, there was this song that John Lennon wrote about having an affair with their photographer's wife. I wanted a girl, or should I say she wanted me. She's shown me her room Isn't it good, Norwegian?

She asked me to stay And she told me to sit anywhere So I looked around And I noticed there wasn't a chair. There you go, Marcella Zoya, Chair Girl. Decades before she was born. A tribute by John Lennon in Norwegian wood. Now you mentioned a trifecta, so the third person in the trifecta is Michael Putland.

Michael Putland. Yeah, another rock photographer who was there and photographed all the greats in rock history. And it was just fascinating. Three of them died all within a week of one another. And he was 72, Michael. A week of one another. Michael was 72.

Robert was 82. And I guess we're not too sure of Terry's age. Terry O'Neill. Oh, it's somewhere. It's somewhere. Here, why don't you take that up? He was married to Faye Dunaway, right? Who later married Peter Wolfe of the Jay Goss Band.

So she liked the rock and roll world. She was part of it all. And the movie Mummy Dearest, he had a role in that as well. He died at 81, Terry O'Reilly. 81, okay, he wins. Tell me about Gahan Wilson. Oh! Look, there's a whole social media thing

that's shown up from Cole's bookstore. You might have noticed me linking to it somewhere. An archive about the history of Cole's, the bookstore chain in Toronto. And, you know, I think of Gahan Wilson because he was one of those cartoonists. When I used to linger

around and browse through the comics and cartoons section of a Kohl's bookstore, there would always be illustrations by Gail Wilson. Different collections, like a kind of horror

fantasy style that he was responsible for, showed up in a lot of different magazines. He was associated with the Glory Days of Playboy magazine and the New Yorker. And you would maybe recognize this guy's style if you saw it. And it was a name I knew because, again,

like I would just be brassing through the bookstore and the mall and I would see this brassing through the bookstore in the mall and I would see this stuff that would scare me a little bit because it wasn't really my style. I didn't see the humor in it, but I understood the magnitude of his influence and the fact that we lost him at age 89. Good for him.

In November 2019, Gay and Wilson, look him up. You have probably seen his stuff in all of the decades that he was involved doing this style of illustration. A podcast is not the best medium to talk about what an illustrator's work looks like. Now, there's three more to go,

and I'm happy, pleased to report that every single one of these final three people we're going to commemorate today all lived beyond 89. So let's get this going. Now the world don't move To the beat of just one drum What might be right for you

May not be right for some A man is born He's a man of means. Let alone come to, they got nothing but the genes. They got different strokes and takes, different strokes and takes, different strokes to move the world. Different strokes and takes, different strokes and takes, different strokes to move the world different strokes to taste different strokes to taste different strokes

to move the world everybody's got a special kind of story everybody finds a way to shine it don't matter that you got

not a lot so what I'll have theirs and you'll have yours and I'll have mine and together we have yours and I'll have mine. And together we'll be fine. Because it takes different strokes to move the world. Yes, it does. It takes different strokes to move the world.

Albertan. Albertan. Albertan. That was the name of the guy who died at age 91. This was back in late October. of the guy who died at age 91. This was back in late October. But only from the New York Times obituary did I tune in to the fact that he was the co-writer with Alan Thicke.

And along with Alan Thicke, he sang the theme song there to Different Strokes. Which, by the way, one of my very favorite sitcoms as a boy was Different Strokes. I thought Gary Coleman was the bomb, as they say. Do you remember Different Strokes ran on NBC for a bunch of years? It's like seven seasons. It was canceled, and then ABC picked up the show.

No, because I was like a syndication watcher, so it all bleeded together, I suppose, in syndication. I do know that Janet Jackson played Todd Bridge's girlfriend on Different Strokes, and I can tell you Edna Garrett was their housekeeper before she went off to run Facts of Life. Well, they went through three different housekeepers and two different actresses playing the wife of Mr. Drummond. Wife?

I remember the lady who's no longer... Dixie Carter from Designing Woman at the end was playing his girlfriend, I thought. But I mean, this is a long time ago since I watched Different Strokes. Al Burton, as far as I can tell, Different Strokes

was pretty much his idea. And he got the job after being an associate of norman lear who's a few years older than 91 right and still at it still around they're doing another doing another reenactment of good times and on the family they did one earlier in the year the jeffersons uh yeah so this one will be on the family and and Good Times. Dynamite. Al Burton was the one that came up with Different Strokes following his time working with Norman Lear on The Jeffersons, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Fernwood Tonight.

Right. Different Strokes was also a Norman Lear show, but he branded it without his own name. He didn't want his name on the thing. It was a sellout. It was too corporate, too commercial. It didn't fit in line with his social cause agenda that he was trying on these other shows.

But there he dispatched Al Burton to come up with this idea that there you would have Mr. Drummond who would adopt the two children of what? His former housekeeper? It went so much on that show with housekeepers. Right. I guess he was a real rich guy. Park Avenue penthouse, as I recall.

The Facts of Life, which we've talked about here in different iterations over the years, which was a spinoff of the show, also involved with Albertan. So the last year that Different Strokes ran, it changed networks. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a more recent example

of that kind of thing, right? Where it shows on one network and they cancel it, another one picks it up. And the last season of Different Strokes, they changed the singing on the theme song. They got rid of Al Burton, and it was just Alan Thicke singing the theme song. You hear that in hindsight, something sounds wrong.

You needed that version with Al Burton and Alan Thicke doing the backing vocals. Al Burton's good buddy was Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Bueller. And they came up with, I think, one of the most ridiculous ideas for a show that turned out to exist,

win Ben Stein's money. Right. And again, we're back to that Jimmy Kimmel connection. By the way, different strokes now that we've lost Albert, and really the only person left that I can think of really connected strongly to that show of the main characters and producers, et cetera,

is of course, I mean, Norman Lear's alive, but is Todd Bridges. Todd Bridges, who did his own punk rock cover of the Different Strokes theme on an album somewhere in the mid-90s when people would put out CDs of this stuff. That's on YouTube. Somewhere. A couple more deaths, right? Gerald Regan?

Did you want to talk about him? Yeah, talk to me about Gerald Regan. I don't know what to say. Maybe he's better off being forgotten, being cancelled. He was once a premier of Nova Scotia. He was a federal MP before and after, and then he ended up being accused and charged with all sorts of sex crimes. And he fought them, and he was acquitted in one of the original, let's say, Me Too stories in Canada.

So when he died, even though he had this legendary political career, I think people were reticent about remembering him too fondly. Work all night and drink a rum. Daylight come and me wan go home. Stock banana till the morning come. Daylight come and me wan go home. Come Mr. Tallyman, tally me banana. Harry Belafonte doing Deo. Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch. The real Canadian national anthem of 2019.

Thanks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confessing to a bus full of reporters that he dressed in blackface and he performed this song at a school talent show. I wonder if Irving Bergey, who died at the end of November, December 1st, it made news, died in the last days of February at age 95. Died in the last days of February at age 95 I wonder if he got to learn that Justin Trudeau Once performed his most famous composition The lyrics to Deo the Banana Boat Song

That's forever part of Canadian political history. On that note, another fantastic sermon delivered by our pastor Mark Weisblot from 1236. Subscribe to the newsletter and we have to make sure you get back here

late December because we're going 12 episodes in 2019. Let's see how that goes. I got some personal business ahead of me. As well as figuring out what's ahead with St. Joseph Media which has backed the

1236.ca project all this time. Tremendous company simply for the sake of believing in me, allowing me to come here every month and talk about what's going on in Canadian media and what you ought to know. I realize we didn't talk about the sale of NOW magazine enough. Is that right? We barely got to it.

But that might be another month away until we find out where that thing is going. Okay, do you want to do a quick two-minute recap? Okay, but now it's sold. We're going to tune in next time. My apologies. We'll talk about what might be going on with Toronto's last surviving alternative weekly. Let's save that one for next time. Let's do a cliffhanger.

Attention it deserves. Tune in to the 1236 newsletter. And if anything is up with that, you'll read about it there. You can find the archives on the internet. And we'll try to move this thing forward and get it in other directions for next year. Lots to look forward to with TMDS and podcasting. If anything happens that can involve me,

you know my number. Absolutely, my friend. Thanks again for doing this. And I'm sorry we'll miss you at TMLX 5, but I hope everybody else has a chance to come out 12 to 3 p.m.

this coming Saturday at Palma's Kitchen. And that brings us to the end of our 551st show. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Toronto Mike. Mark is, of course, at at 1236. Our friends at Great Lakes Brewery are at Great Lakes Beer. Palma Pasta is at Palma Pasta.

Sticker U is at Sticker U. Brian Master, if you want to get on his fantastic snail mail newsletter list, write him at letsgetyouhome at kw.com. Banjo Duncan, welcome to the Toronto Mike family. This is a great guy. I can't wait to tell you all about him. He is at BanjoDunk, D-U-N-C. And Ridley Funeral Home is at Ridley F-H.

See you all tomorrow. And my special guest is Bernie Finkelstein. Because I know that's true, yes I do. I know it's true, yeah. I know it's true. How about you? I've been picking up trash and then putting down rules.