Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - 12:36: Toronto Mike'd #578

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

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

Welcome to episode 578 of Toronto Mic'd, a weekly podcast about anything and everything. Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery who believes in supporting communities, good times, and brewing amazing beer. beer. Palma Pasta. Enjoy the taste of fresh homemade Italian pasta and entrees from Palma Pasta in Mississauga and Oakville. StickerU.com. Create custom stickers, labels, tattoos and decals for your home and your business. The Keitner Group. They love helping buyers find their dream home. And Banjo Dunk from Whiskey Jack. One of the most celebrated roots, country, bluegrass bands in Canadian music history. I'm Mike from TorontoMike.com. And joining me for his monthly recap is Mark Weisblatt from 1236.

It's like an old-fashioned psychiatrist's office down here these days. I came down a couple minutes earlier than usual and got in the way of your previous appointment. I felt like I intruded. I opened the door when you were dealing with another patient. Who did it happen to be? But you did open the door.

Normally people knock and then I open the door. Well, I've been here enough times by now, Mike. What is this? Number 25 down here, finishing up with you, the legendary Peter Gross, who I watched as a child on City TV.

And now we share space in the same basement in New Toronto. I love it when I witness a meeting like that. For example, FOTM Jamar, I was witness to him meeting Chuck D because I had finished with Chuck D and then he was in there because he was DJing for Mishy Mee. And you should, it's amazing to watch. Now, I'm not saying it's the same thing, you meeting Peter Gross.

I am saying it's the same thing. But I love meeting, like watching people kind of meet people. It's exciting to witness that moment. So I'm glad I got to see you and Peter Gross meet. Because you've written about Peter Gross for the Canadian Jewish News. So that's exciting. And then 1236 and other outlets. I was the one on top of the fact that he was gone from 680 News

after so many years because there are no other media columnists out there anymore. Well, I'll repeat Peter's joke, which was he said, when Aaron Davis was fired from CHFI, there was huge outcry. You know, people were rallying at Nathan Phillips Square, bring back Aaron. And eventually they did bring her back. When Peter Gross was fired from 680, the only stitch other than, you know, Toronto Mike tweeting about it was 1236 and Canadian Jewish News.

That was it. That's it. This is where we're at now. And I couldn't be happier. And I think all the activity that's gone on down here in January, you know, I left you on New Year's Eve Eve. We did our last show of the decade of the 2010s,

not knowing what was around the corner. And it was a pretty eventful month, I think, in the whole world of news, but also the world of Toronto Mike. You just, as expected, shot out of a cannon in January. You didn't spend that time doing strategy sessions and plotting out where things were going to go in the quarters ahead. You just get going.

I mean, you work fast and break things and more podcasts than ever. And the fact that I think for the first time I walk in here and you're finishing up with somebody else. This is better than a therapy office. Well, thank you. I think that

there has been a lot of activity here the past month. A lot. It felt very busy. It also felt longer, a lot. It felt very busy. It also felt like longer than a month. Like, it felt like I crammed a good year into a month. So I kind of can't believe it's only the end of January now. But lots of fun things going on.

And most of it, you know, has been publicized. And, you know, what happened this month? Ralph Ben-Murray launched his podcast, I think. And then there's, you know, Larry Fedorik has a podcast. And Gallagher and Gross is still going strong. And I'm now, as you know, this was old news now, but I've been producing the Humble and Fred show. And yeah, lots going on.

And all these people really rely on you, I think. Because a lot of them are old radio professionals. And they're used to having the guy behind the board on the other side of the glass. Psychologically, they need the service that you're providing. They're just,

they could record stuff at home. They could do it on their phone. But I think what you're bringing to them is a special sauce. Oh, don't tell Hebsey you can do it on his phone. You hear it reflected in the shows, in all the episodes. And I thought the episode with Lou Skeezis fighting Ralph Ben-Murgy

might have been the peak as far as TMDS productions go because podcasts are generally friendly affairs. You don't hear a lot of confrontation in content recorded in somebody's basement. Right, Molly Johnson accepted. The whole atmosphere is meant to be convivial. And yet you found this pair, Skeezus and Ben Merge,

who got into a real clash, right? About whether capitalism has a soul. Right. And I thought the results were terrific. I've been recommending that episode to other people. Me too. Different channels. People love a fight.

A great start for Ralph Benberg, not that kind of rabbi. I kind of want to do an episode about that episode because I was sitting here and they're facing each other there. And they only know each other because I'm friends with both of them. And I knew what Ralph was up to. And I think we had a little chat about doing something. Let's talk to a capitalist.

And I said, I know a happy capitalist. And that was Lou Skieses. And I kind of almost felt bad at the end because there was a little bit of tension you might've heard in that episode. Well, Ralph is very sincere about his beliefs, about the spiritual side. You heard that on the episode you did with Kathleen Wynne. Have you heard that one yet? Yeah, I caught that one. That one's fresh out today, right? It was up last night. Did the bulldog edition when you

release a podcast, like how they used to sell the next day's Globe and Mail on the street. release a podcast like how they used to sell the next day's Globe and Mail on the street. Well, you know why? I had an early morning meeting at Humble and Fred Studios. So basically, I was going to wake up, get the kids to school, and then hop on my bike, go to Humble and Fred. And then I didn't get back until... So basically, to drop that this morning, I dropped it last night. But don't tell Ralph, okay?

And with Ralph Ben-Murgy, with Mark Hebbshire, with Peter Gross, Larry Fedorik, John Gallagher. Who am I missing? You've got a whole menu of personalities. You know who might be coming soon to this roster? Coming soon.

No official announcement because he hasn't signed on the dotted line. But Lorne Honickman might be added to the mix. I thought I needed some youth. We'll see where it goes. I put Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins in the playlist there because it's the 40th anniversary

of when that seminal Toronto song came out, inspired by the Sunnyside Beach in Toronto, Toronto song came out, inspired by the sunny side beach in Toronto. But it came out in the UK beforehand, that it was a hit in England before it caught on in this place. And here we are coming into the 1980s, and my own memories, my recollections,

when it comes to music and movies and media, get a little more vivid with time, right? The older you get, I can recall more in real time the things that happened in the 1980s. It's a little bit frightening to think. 40 years ago, I was already passionate about the sorts of things that we talk about here. And that's what we try to get out here every month, right? This is not just what happened in the past month. We're talking about our entire lives. Everything that we've consumed,

just regurgitating it here in the microphones as part of the 1236 monthly recap. Okay, so let's get this out of the way before we rock. What I mean, get out of the way, I don't mean that with any disrespect because I think you're coming every month because you know you get the six-pack from Great Lakes Brewery.

So again, as is my custom now, I'm cracking open a beer here. Most of those are cold because I did put them in the fridge. I think it should be cold. I better get going. I got you to make me a coffee as well. Don't spread that around.

Was that a bit of a diva demand that I would want a cup of coffee to go along with my GLB? It's the third time that request has been made. The first time was Todd Shapiro, a hundred years ago. You wanted a coffee. And he made you cook a whole breakfast.

I don't even want to talk about it. You're bringing back some terrible memories I've been trying to suppress. And then the second person who asked for a coffee, and he asked very politely, and I enjoyed making it for him, was Andy Kim, who loved the French press coffee. It made me feel good.

And now you've asked for a coffee. I haven't been around the world as much as Andy Kim has, but this coffee is okay. It's okay. Give it back. Keep me perked up through everything that we've got to talk about here, including at the end of the episode,

like we now do every month, a review of obituaries of people who died in the time since we did the last episode. Proudly brought to you by Ridley Funeral Home. So Ridley Funeral Home sponsors the Mark Weisblatt appearances on Toronto Mic'd and particularly the memorial section. But we'll talk more about the good people at Ridley Funeral Home later in the episode. So you've got your six-pack of Great Lakes beer.

And I'm drinking some... I'm drinking an Octopus Wants to Fight. You've got a blonde lager there. Thank you, Palma Pasta. They've been fantastic partners. Skipthedishes.com. You can actually get it right now. But if you want to go to one of their retail stores,

they're in Mississauga and Oakville. That seems to be going well because I'm seeing a lot of tweeting from FOTMs who are talking about the fact that they only ate at Palma Pasta because they heard it on the podcast. And thank you, FOTMs. That kind of social media interaction is invaluable

for a fiercely independent podcast like this one. I'm making it go in my basement here. So thank you for that because I want Palma to know that it pays off to partner with a program like this. Great Lakes Brewery, same deal. They're fantastic people anyways, and they're tasty craft beer. Sticker U.

So right as soon as we finish recording, Mark, I'm going to hop on my bike and go to 677 Queen Street West because they're opening the Sticker Museum at Sticker U, and I'm excited to go there. Dr. Draw is going to play some electrical violin, and I'm meeting up with Humble Howard there. It's going to go there. Dr. Draw is going to play some electrical violin and I'm meeting up

with Humble Howard there. It's going to be a good time. Do you think I'll ever find out that I'm here podcasting with you every month? I had a meeting there this morning and you came up because they always ask who's coming over today and I'm like Mark Weisblatt and then I think I mentioned that we're going to do two

and a half hours in which case I got that look from Fred. No human on the planet is going to listen to two and a half hours of anybody. It could be Obama. Nobody wants to hear it. At which point I let him know I do that every single month because it's the greatest content in the city. And he said to me, Mike, why don't you book him on Humble and Fred? So there's a desire from Humble and Fred to have a little wise guy there. We're not there yet.

In the meantime, though, because traditionally I'm into my second can of GLB by the time we get to doing the death list. That's a section of the show where I'm most likely to make a mistake. And in turn, we end up having to get corrections from listeners if it's not me correcting myself or leaving a comment about it. And it's proven to me, see, this is what happens. You only hear from people if you get something wrong sometimes. If you want to know the answer

to something, purposely have the wrong answer and a million people will correct you right away. So as soon as we started getting corrections, the things that we were talking about, like two hours and twenty minutes into an episode, it assured me that we were actually on the right track. There's a

certain subset of the audience that will stick around for that long. Oh, and I know it. I don't think we shouted out JJ last episode, so here it goes. JJ, hello! And because this seems to be the only way to communicate with him right now basement dweller I know you're listening

please come back to the comments on torontomic.com and ignore the ass hats who criticized you for your frequency of comments because I would happily ban them to get your comments back so that's a special message to basement dweller

that you are indeed missed. And here's a book for you, a book for Mark Weisblatt. What's the name of that book, Mark? Oh, My Good Times with Stompin' Tom, written by a guy that I've gotten to know by listening to Toronto Mike. You did an episode with him

at the beginning of the year, right? Was it the first one in January? He kicked out the jams, yeah. Duncan Fremlin, we learned with Erin Davis that her husband Rob was a bandmate of Banjo Dunk. I've got that right? Yeah, he was a bandmate. I guess he played bass, guitar, and he was also on Duncan's hockey

team, I think, as a goaltender. And another long-lost Canadian one-hit wonder, Doug Cameron, who did a song called Mona with the Children. You talked about it with Bernie Finkelstein, not knowing that the same Doug Cameron was now

a sponsor of Toronto Mic'd. Isn't that amazing? And stuff like that happens all the time. In fact, I've had comments about how I've been trying to take this mega city. The GTA's got how many million people in it? And I'm trying to kind of make it feel a little more like a village, if you will.

We're all kind of connected, and it's fun sometimes to pull the thread. Okay, so please forget anything I said ridiculing the contrived Stompin' Tom comeback of about 30 years ago. That's right, that's right. You never know. I didn't mean any of it, okay? I meant to say I'm a fan of the legacy of Stompin' Tom,

and I'll get into what Banjo DunkDunk has to say about the inspiration behind his tribute act. Now, before I play a little, a minute of Dunk here, can I get a review from you, Mark, on the Aaron Davis episode? Because it only happened yesterday, so it's still very fresh, and I know you've already listened, and I want to

know what you thought of it. I would say that with Aaron Davis, when she comes over here, she's in the driver's seat, I think. It was more like the Erin Davis show. No, and Homer's in the driver's seat. Erin Davis lets me drive, doesn't she? Or she just makes me think I'm driving.

I think she was grateful for the context in which you were providing her to tell her story. And I think most of all, when you hear someone like her come on this show, she gets to make little references, talking points, rejoinders that she can't get away with anywhere else because she's a pro. And she knows when she's on a media outlet owned by a major corporation that there's certain things that she cannot say.

And here in the basement, you're bringing a certain freedom to someone like her. And I think she loves it. So the story of Erin Davis and what she went through when her daughter died in her sleep a few years ago and subsequently having to make decisions about her own radio career, having to make decisions about her own radio career, subsequently checking into rehab to deal with her own alcoholism. These were very honest stories, and even some crying,

not from the guests, but from Toronto Mike. Yeah, there was a moment where it just became overwhelming. It's such a sad story. And there was something, I can't remember exactly, there was a sentence she said, or maybe I asked her about what Mother's Day is like. I think, what is it like on Mother's Day? Because not only, you know, is her only child dead,

but that was the date that her only child passed away was Mother's Day, her first Mother's Day, her child's first mother's day so i guess there was something about my own question which you think like you know you know i said the words and then hearing myself say the words and the extreme sadness of it all started to overwhelm me where i actually thought i was gonna like not like what i did was like i suppressed a bit of a cry and i a a little bit come out, but I thought I was going to start bawling. Like it was a moment of like Mike,

you know? And then I was, I have his camera. Was this the first time anything like this ever happened? I don't think I've, well, I don't believe I've had, there's been times of David Schultz and others where I,

my eyes welled up for sure. I don't think I've cried. I don't think I'd call it a cry. Okay. This is real good stuff. I mean, you ever seen the movie Broadcast News from the late 80s?

Sure, of course. There's value in having those crying moments that you can't contrive. And I think the fact that you set a precedent, that you did a little weeping yourself. I thought she's holding it together, like a pro, and I'm weeping here, and I'm

like, and I didn't feel embarrassed or or anything but i felt like i should pull it together to continue my conversation like but and also i was very at that moment it was the first time i think i've ever been aware that cameras were on me like i actually and there's no cameras on me right now but i've managed to like ignore the cameras pretty completely and i just record like the cameras aren't here but in that moment as I started to feel it building up you know that feeling where it's coming and it's like I don't think I can stop this and I hope I you know and then you realize oh oh because I have a camera on me hashtag real talk listen talk okay most people who are guests

on programming they wonder if the person interviewing them is even listening to anything that's coming out of their mouth. I did a bit on the John Moore show on News Talk 1010. This is when he was first getting started over there. I was invited on to talk about what was going on

the past year in review. Stuff about media. He had no idea who I was. Okay. He wasn't paying attention to anything that I said. He was completely unprepared, distracted,

muttering something under his breath about how he didn't actually have any listeners under the age of 80. And he just generally seemed disappointed with his circumstances.

Now, this is over 10 years ago. And he was new to the gig of doing the morning show over there. I think since that time they figured out the format. Now they have panel discussions. Notice I've never been invited on. And I don't expect to be based on the way we talk about things down here. I think they're all listening because we do the real talk about what's going on in radio, but I never hear from any of these people.

Speaking about like the, you're right, because we don't play favorites, you know. We might say something negative about a CBC or a Roger. Oh, but I was talked to yesterday about a potential episode of the Front Burner podcast from the CBC. That they were looking to do an episode about these new suggestions from the advisory panel about what to do with Canadian content. And I figure I'm a good guest for those purposes because I'm not connected to any financial interests related to regulated broadcasting. I figured I could bring it.

I talked to a producer on the phone. We brainstormed some ideas, but it turned out they didn't want me. They weren't going to do it. They didn't invite me. Whatever. They called me out of the blue, but then you end up with a feeling of rejection like you weren't good enough. Even though half an hour before you had no idea that they were even thinking about you.

That's funny. By the way, 1236 is still under the St. Joseph's Media umbrella, right? I should hope so. And there's so much going on over there that progress that I hope to make this year is still pending, right? We got through January. I put out a newsletter every day.

But there's still stuff to be done with this concept that I hope to do, different spinoffs. It's in the air. Can I ask? I'm ready to go. When there's a Retro Ontario or a Jody Jumpsuit email, is that under the 1236 umbrella or is that also under St. Joseph's? No, that's

just me trying to get other people going with things. Because you're building a network yourself. I had the liberty and the luxury to tie in other people with what I'm doing and I could lend a hand to make it happen for them this is that that's not a job at least not yet because because for those two examples jody's jumpsuit jump stack right retro ontario ed conroy who you repatriated here for christmas crackers

after i stole him from under you right uh they've? They've got stuff on the go as well. This is kind of a gray area, right, of professional and amateur. That's what it's all about. That's where it's all headed. I mean, in this world of social media, right, I mean, no one gets paid to be on Twitter all day, and yet all these journalists can't unclench themselves from the platform. And I'm grateful to be working for people who recognize that a certain amount of this work is going to be in a monetizable category.

And some of it just won't work out that way. But there's still a rationale to do it. And that's where we've been at with this 1236 newsletter all this time. I come here every single month. I can't believe I'm still doing it. But at the same time, it's led to other projects, things on the go. Some I refer to here. Some I have to keep quiet.

There's been a lot happening. I hardly had time to get down here, Mike! By the way, it was revealed at my son's 18th birthday party. St. Joseph's Media came up. I'm sure in regards to you somehow, it came up at the table, the dinner table. And my mom mentioned that her friends

that she went to high school with, that she was very close with, it's their father that started the place. And then I'm like, okay, well, what's their names? So anyway, the guys who are running the show over there are old time friends of my mom. I just want to throw that out there. Okay, I'm not even going to guess who she's referring to.

I might get in trouble. Well, I'll tell you later. But I want to say that Austin Keitner from the Keitner Group, and the Keitner Group have been fantastic. They're only in the first month, but that's another example. If Austin says to text him, what number does he want you to text? I don't even have the note on that. You don't remember, do you?

559-55, I think, but you text Toronto Mike to that. But Austin Keitner is having a career luncheon. Now, this is for licensed or soon-to-be licensed realtors in Toronto in the GTA. So if you're listening to me right now and you're in the greater Toronto area and you are a licensed realtor or you're going to be a licensed realtor, you're invited to a free luncheon on Thursday, February 6th from noon to 1.30 p.m. at 14630th Street. 14630th Street. Hey, that is a familiar address. I know.

I know. What has been going on at that address all this time? Isn't that the part of town where shit's going down? Adam Groh, look at this guy of the reference. Now, that is also the address where somebody there owes me a lot of money. But we're going to move on from that. It's not Austin. That's what's important here.

You know we're settling into this job here of doing the 1236 episodes when we're redacting things that are on our mind that we're supposed to say that we've built up enough of an audience. We have to be careful about everything that's coming out of our mouth. Here's what I can say. The first 19 episodes of this podcast were recorded at that address. Isn't that amazing? Like what a small world. But this is if you're a realtor or going to be a realtor,

there's a free luncheon with the Keitner Group worth your while and I urge you to go. If you go to the Keitner Group Facebook page under the events, I told them yesterday,

make sure it's there because I'm going to direct people there. So it's a free thing but you should register. So go on Facebook to the Keitner Group and register for this very cool luncheon.

Again, I'm not invited because I'm not a realtor or a future realtor, but if you are, that's the place to be February 6th. Okay, so the realtors keep marching in, right? You've had one after another. You've made a lot of friends in the real estate business. You won't do two of them at a time, right? They have to get in line to partner with you.

This is important to any potential sponsors because there is one opening for February. There's an exclusivity agreement. So, for example, if someone came to me and said, hey, we're an Italian food eatery and we want to sponsor your show, you know what I tell them? I say, sorry, my friend, not right now

because Palma Pasta is a proud sponsor and you are a competitor. So a better example would be if Molson Coors came to the door in a Brink truck and the Brinks truck and they park it in the driveway. I'd be like, Mr. Coors, Mr. Molson, I'm afraid I'm working, proudly working with the fiercely independent Great Lakes Brewery. So, which by the way, this is fantastic so cheers to you Mr. Weissblot clink, and I'm going to play a little banjo dunk and then we're going to get into this

before it becomes a four hour episode so here's Banjo Dunk This is Banjo Dunk and for the last few weeks you've been hearing my ads on Toronto Mic'd about the Big Stompin' Tom show coming up on April 16th, 2020. But there's another Banjo Dunk production that's happening very soon.

My music buddy Douglas John Cameron and I, known internationally as Doogie and Dunn, are going to be performing in Oakville at the Moonshine Cafe on February 27th, not too far from Toronto Mike Head Office. So, if you live in Toronto, Oakville, Mississauga, Burlington, Milton, and surrounding areas, you'll find all the information you need at themoonshinecafe.com. We look forward to seeing you on February 27th.

You work hard for your money. So hard for your money. Hard for your money. So we're gonna treat you right. It takes a Canadian to know how hard Canadians work. That's why Zellers works hard to give you more for your money. Zellers, your truly Canadian store. You work hard for your money.

You work hard for your money, so we're gonna treat you right. Say it ain't so, Mark. Now, that was not a paid commercial, and it wouldn't have been because the store that it's referencing has ceased to exist. And that store was Zellers,

which still existed in Toronto and Ottawa up until this past weekend, January 26, 2020, marked the death of Zeller's. Now, you had been to the zombie Zeller's location that opened here, West End of Toronto. My wife quite liked it because for a long time, she got great deals there. And then apparently she said, I don't know what changed, but something changed.

But the reason I know it is because the MTO I go to is in the same... This strip mall is in a bit of trouble. But I guess it's all gone now because it's all going to be condos. Is this another one of those parts of town where shit's going down? Kipling-Queensway is where you would find the mall that had my MTO and it had the Zellers in it. But he really, it was Zellers in name only.

It was actually like a discount clearance place for the bay. It was still novelty though because Hudson's Bay kept the name alive. They sold all the leases to the old Zellers stores. And that was Target Canada that made a big deal to come to Canada, that they would take over these locations of Zellers and the ones they didn't want, they handed off to Walmart. And of course, we know Target Canada,

one of, if not the biggest retailing disaster in Canadian history, where they retrofit all these old Zellers stores. They even built a brand new Target at the Stockyards Plaza in Toronto that only lasted a matter of weeks before the whole thing went under. More than that, right? I bought a basketball there for my boy. Whatever it was, look, I mean, they were just ruthless. I mean, they just pulled out of the country. It was over. It wasn't happening. and it was a big letdown because Target Canada didn't really deliver anything in the year, year and a half that it was around that people were looking for. It just didn't have the cachet of the American Target stores. But Hudson's Bay, still hung on to the Zellers name, renamed these Bay clearance stores where they had all the leftover merchandise from the hudson's bay

department stores around town and this was a place they could do a discount sell-off right and the people would flock there from around the city looking for bargains yes and the fact they attached the zeller's name to it had a cachet of nostalgia. They already retired Zeddy, the mascot. What, they sent him off into the wild to run free? And so it wasn't marketed in a big way as Zeller's, but the fact the name was still there in Ottawa, in Toronto, meant that there was a little bit of ironic nostalgia surrounding the fact that Zellerers was gone for good this time

seven years after it closed the first time around. Okay, speaking of zombie locations, as you know, you're in the hood that has the Rogue Byway, but there's an update with regards to the real Byway? Oh, the real Byway $10 store. And we went through an experience in the past year where the founder, co-founder of Byway back in 1962, a man named Mal Coven said he had this idea to do.

It was a dollar store, but everything was sold to the power of 10. So it would be the $10 store. Now, this guy's in his 90s. Right. And he maybe figures he has something to prove that he wants to get back into the retailing business. He self-published an autobiography several years ago now where he talks about this concept somewhere,

and they're not quite sure what he was getting at. But I guess when you're that age, you want to follow through on the idea. And he rented a store in a Toronto plaza around the neighborhood of Bathurst and Finch up in North York. And we saw the tweets. I think it was from an FOTM who tweeted a picture of the plaza. Was it Blair? It was Neil, somebody. He had a picture of the new Byway store that was ready to roll,

and they kept delaying the opening date. The Byway $10 store was coming soon to this location next to a Dollarama somewhere up there in the wilds of North York. A few weeks ago, we get another announcement saying, no, the Byway $10 store will not be opening in this location. He's found a bigger store, also North York, the Orifice Road Discount Store neighborhood, twice the size of what he had in mind that he was cutting all kinds of deals that he was ready to roll this thing out nationally again even though he's long

retired into his 90s he made his money sold off by way to dialects store owner you know the whole thing went under in 2001 except for the rogue byway, your friendly neighborhood rogue byway. Which is technically the byway zone. I think the word zone is very important. But he pledges that he's going to reopen this byway again. Now, I think if you're

this kind of guy at that age, I think it's just enough to have paper on the windows saying that the store is coming soon. Because it serves the same purpose to your ego. Let's put it this way. To tell people you've got this idea and it's ready to go. You don't actually have to go through the trouble of stocking the shelves and opening the store.

I think he's satisfied just saying that he's got a store in the works. It's coming soon. When you're that age, you have Ridley Funeral Home on speed dial. Let's just put it that way. Now, tell me, speaking of death, Max Milk is dead? Well, closer to my own neighborhood, around the Yonge and St. Clair area, Max changed its branding to Circle K.

The owner, Couche Tard, had a globalization strategy. A Quebec company, even though they were keeping Couchetard in Quebec, they were going to name all these Max Milk stores they inherited 20 years ago, change the name to Circle K. And there was an outlier. There was one more Max Milk left,

I think in all of Toronto, from what I could tell. Did a little bit of Google research. Might have still been one in the Peanut Plaza, an iconic location in Toronto. I don't know if that changed, had changed its name yet, the Circle K. But here at a prominent place

in Toronto, wealthy neighborhood, young in St. Clair, 78 St. Clair West, there was still a Max Milk stubbornly sticking around. And we found out, thanks to News Talk 1010

producer Ben Harrison, who tweeted at me that he knew I'd be interested. I hadn't seen it myself that the Max store no longer exists. As far as I can tell, that's it. They've closed down. They're stirring fuel in another location. The last Max milk in Toronto appears to be no more.

And that's it for Max. So across from the condo man statue out there at St. Clair between Yonge and Avenue Road, you can pay your respects to the last Max Milk. There is still, however, a Jax Milk. J-A-C-S Milk. Of course. In this neighborhood. Neighbor of yours.

I saw your picture. You're right. We get all the rogue establishments in this place. And you know there's also a convenience store somewhere out there, I think, west of you, and it's still got a sign from the Toronto Telegram on a convenience store. Yes, I've seen this. Yes, yes, yes. Vintage convenience stores of Toronto.

You know, this is not the part of town where shit's going down. This is the part of town that time forgot. If you ever want to film a movie that's supposed to take place in, like, 1960s Toronto, I know the strip on Lakeshore is ideal for you. Now, okay, so we talked Zellers. We talked Max Milk.

We talked Byway. I don't know what year this is. But to remind us what year it is, this is not the final Chair Girl update. What is this? The penultimate? ultimate? Okay, we thought we were going into 2020 with the end of the chair girl saga,

that there would have been no more Marcella updates to make down here, at least for a little while, because she was heading to prison. She was going to be locked up behind bars for a little while. They would be taking her Instagram away from her, and at least until she got released, we would have been in a Marcella free zone. But there in a court date in mid-January, suddenly a twist. The sentencing was delayed, and the issue at hand was whether or not the infamous video on which Marcella Zoya is photographed, a moving image of her chucking a chair off a condo balcony over the Gardner Expressway in Toronto.

They were disputing whether or not Marcella was the one who posted and promoted the video. I'm not sure why this is relevant, but that has something to do with this idea that she's got, she's facing a sentence of up to six months, and it hinges on whether perhaps this was her own handiwork, that she herself wanted the video to get

out there, or whether it was a malicious effort of somebody else, even though you could still see her do it. And even though she pled guilty, we don't have to use allegedly anymore talking about her. Right, I think the sentence, it would be different if it's just you did this stupid thing versus you did this stupid thing

and tried to somehow benefit from it. Like through... And the fact that she was like a compulsive Instagram user every month in our Marcella updates, trying to encapsulate what she's been up to on Instagram. And back in December, she had a shot on Instagram. One of those Instagram stories disappears after 24 hours. And she seemed to be at some kind of counseling session.

There were all sorts of like index cards with affirmations on the wall. I'm not sure what was going. I mean, it might have been, it might have been some kind of strategy session for an endorsement deal. I couldn't quite make out. I couldn't read the cards in the picture that she posted. But yeah, the issue at hand is,

yeah, whether or not her Instagram use, you know, her typical post-millennial narcissism that she's displayed online that's been the subject of a lot of articles. Whether or not the chair girl video was part of a pattern for which she would be better off incarcerated for a little while and teach her a lesson. Greg Leslie, the lawyer for Chair Girl. You got to admit, he's made a name for himself because he's shown up to court even when she hasn't all these months. This was the first time in a while that Chair Girl got to be in those paparazzi photos that she came into court and left.

I mean, it was her initial appearance almost a year ago that it first happened. And, of course, the reporters got all excited again. They got to shoot Chair Girl coming out of Old City Hall. And this time around, it was a scrum on the steps. Chair Girl herself, Marcella Zoya, didn't speak. But the lawyer said, isn't it interesting that you see the video, and she's not holding a phone? It's not a selfie.

Someone else took the shot of Chair Girl, right? Her hands were busy with the chair. How could she have been holding the camera that took the video? And for this, the justice system is held up another month. And we're going to see in February 2020 if Chair Girl will be serving her time. I remember this cover very well. This is Catherine Wheel with their cover of Spirit of Radio. Tell us, did Q107 have the Spirit of Radio this month? You must have been following that on Twitter

when we heard about the tragic death of Neil Peart, which you might recall was announced several days after he died. And there was kind of a clue in there, an Easter egg, for the mass media. It was a fact that the news was channeled through the spokesman for Rush, a publicist named Elliot Mintz. If you don't know that name, he once hosted a show called The Lost Lennon Tapes, a syndicated radio show where they went through the archives of John Lennon.

Elliot Mintz had a very distinctive voice, kind of legendary New York media personality turned publicist. And his most famous client of the 21st century, none other than Paris Hilton. Wow. And he's all in there with the Kardashian family, with Michael Jackson's kids, with people involved with the O.J. Simpson trial. He's a real old-school pro. But when they throw Elliot Mintz's name into the announcement, they're telegraphing something to the reporters,

which is, we're not going to answer any further questions. You would have to know who this character was and the history behind him, but I thought that was an interesting sidebar to the death of Neil Peart, that his name was in there. Because how hard is it to put out a tweet or something on Facebook or on your own, but that they conspicuously channeled the announcement through the publicist for Rush, Elliot Mintz.

And I guess it's what he does. It's how he makes a living. There would have been a few bucks in it for Rush, Elliot Mintz. And I guess it's what he does, it's how he makes a living, there would have been a few bucks in it for him, but that they deliberately selected him because it was a way of just like, we know this name and he's not going to answer any follow-up questions. We can't call him and badger him. He's just going to shut us down.

You didn't know about this. This is something that would not have come up. And you'd be a real media geek to know all about it. And now with most famous client, Paris Hilton, is back on the comeback trails, right? She's trying to be more sophisticated. She's pushing 40. Right. We might see Elliott Mintz out there again.

But back to Neil Peart. Right. Were you surprised at the amount of mourning that surrounded his death? This was a massive, I thought, celebrity death for Canada. I thought it might have been, it was probably a little bit less than I anticipated. Okay, really? Okay, so here's where we caught Q107 in a lie.

And we always suspected, okay, is this programming on chorus radio pre-recorded? The fact that they've got DJs doing multiple shifts on multiple stations, a lot of voice tracking out there. Wait, may I ask, which show are we talking about? Fearless Fred, Afternoon Drive. It's got to be live. Are you sure? No.

Because the news came over the wire. I think it was CBC that had the first alert about it. It was CBC that had the first alert about it. And it took one hour for Q107 to announce that one of their main guys, a prime mover in the history of the station, Neil Peart, had died. It's like Mick Jagger dying. This is massive for Q107. You know what's a compulsion to tune into a terrestrial radio station?

I've got Twitter. I can fire up the songs if I want to listen to them. I guess we're still in that habit of people gather around the radio to hear about the celebrity death. Alan Cross 25 plus years later, he won't shut up about the fact that he announced the death of Kurt Cobain. That's true. That's true. It was a seminal

moment, but he was there to do it. He was there live in the studio. It didn't take an hour for that information to be relayed to listeners on the radio. So this, to you, Mark, this suggests that Fearless Fred was not live for that hour. Oh, their cover was blown. Absolutely.

And curiously enough, they had Alan Cross and the line after it talk about it with Fearless Fred. Now, these people are just doing their jobs. Right. It's not their decision to have made. But after months and months of coming on here, speculating about how they do this kind of radio chorus these days, you're not actually hearing very much

live anymore. The bits and segments are pre-recorded, they're edited, they're rehearsed. That a spontaneous moment, like the biggest celebrity death, biggest in a while, ever happened for the Q107 audience. Took an hour to be mentioned on those airwaves.

You did catch him red-handed there. Now, I did make a spontaneous visit to the Chorus Key recording studio fairly recently when I was visiting Doug Thompson from Element FM, and he gave me a tour. And I did see Joanne Wilder live on Q107 so definitely there's some live action going on there

from the chorus key during the weekdays anyways but maybe, I don't know. I can only speculate what's going on over there. Okay, but then of course it got into memorial mode. Okay, yeah. After that with Neil Peart, right? And then they played like 18 Rush songs in a row and they modified the algorithm so they had a Rush song every hour all weekend.

You remember when John Mann died? Of course you remember that. That was very recently. It was from Spirit of the West. Spirit of the West. And I had on, coincidentally, the next morning or something, I had on the Y108 morning show team. And I asked them, did you play?

Like, did you play Home for a Rest? Like, the morning after John Mann died. And they said no. And I was personally, like, I grew up loving radio. And the best after John Mann died, and they said no. And I was, personally, I grew up loving radio, and the best part of radio was it was live and local, and they could do, like, if you learn Spirit of the West's lead singer

died, you could break the pre-programmed automated playlist and play something from Spirit of the West, and, because he died, even if it wasn't scheduled, and they didn't, and I thought that was kind of a... I'm not saying this is the most important thing in the world! Look, we're still alive

to talk about it. Poor Neil Peart, right? I mean, here he was for the last couple of years. As far as the reports had gone out, he had a really rough time with his health in the past couple of years, right? He was suffering from the same form of cancer that killed Gord Downie. Yes. And the fact that he was suffering from the same uh form of cancer that killed gourd downey yes

and uh uh the the fact he was grappling with all this they kept a lid on it getty lee did a lot of appearances he put out a book about big beautiful book of bass and he was never really public about what was happening with the band but it turned out that his drummer his songwriter uh was struggling with his health i mean he he was really having a hard time. In the last couple of years, it relates to the privacy that they kept around him. He was a private guy to begin with. Very private. I mean, he wasn't very—there were a lot of interviews.

He would make the rounds on the C&C. Because I understand the meet and greets were always with Alex and Geddy. Yeah, but he would still do his part. I mean, this was his art. He wanted people to know about it. He wanted to be recognized as a songwriter behind Rush. He went through a tragedy before where his daughter and his wife

died within a matter of months. And he laid low after that, and they wondered if Rush had a future. And then they came roaring back with this comeback. I mean, it was really Rush taking advantage of the fact they built up this cult following over the years. And they were touring all the great stadiums all around the world.

Okay, so where to go with this was the fact that people talk about radio as being the place that you can hear about something like a celebrity died. We can commiserate. We can hear somebody talk about it on the radio. Q107 dropped the ball and I think revealed something about how they really do radio chorus. You might have seen a live body there behind the microphone. Doesn't mean that what they were saying into it is being transmitted

over the airwaves at the time that they were saying it. And it's a real letdown for them. Now at the same time that the death was announced I looked at the playlist logs afterwards and saw Spirit of Radio, the original version, got a spin on the radio station it was written about. CFNY, 102.1 The Edge, broke format, there you go, in order to give Rush a little bit of air time for a legendary song that was written about that radio station.

Right, right. Now, speaking of Edge 102, or is it 102.1 The Edge? I'm sure Robbie J will correct me later. I believe it's 102.1 The Edge. Alex, I want to hear your thoughts on the fact that the brother-sister duo that we've talked about quite a bit on this show. We've talked about them more than anyone.

I don't think there was any outlet online that got into this as much as we did. May I confess something to you, Mark? any outlet online that got into this as much as we did. May I confess something to you, Mark? As long as you don't start crying. I didn't hear a minute of this show. Not one minute. I don't know what you missed. Kind of these Letterkenny-style accents.

Really out of place. I don't know. This affect. I mean, who am I to criticize? But they only gave one ear. Talking in these voices that weren't very natural, this brother and sister duo. And even one of their fans, I saw one of the reactions on Twitter, was wondering, they enjoyed their banter back and forth.

Hey, how are you doing this morning? Huh. They were likable enough to make at least one fan out there who was wondering how come their segments, their bits, their breaks were so short because everything was like under control. Right. Everything was grained in to like 60 or 90 seconds at a time. They never talked about anything.

They never really seemed to have anything to say. Did they get enough of an opportunity to gain traction? Like is one year long enough for a new one? Or did they just take the job, kind of assuming that the expectations were pretty low to begin with? And this job wasn't what it used to be. And they were already the fourth

attempt to replace Dean Blundell's show. Can you name them? Five years later. Oh, what were they? There was Josie Dye. There was Josie Dye with the British guy, Dominic Diamond. Right. And Greg B. Harrell was in there with the comic relief. Right.

And, you know, his deadpan style made enough of an impression. He's now in L.A., a KLOS radio. Do you think he's the new morning show? Because they have a plan. I'm going to fill you in on an exclusive in a moment. Well, I don't know. I think he's earning a good living down there. He's also doing the voices.

Again, it's that Jack FM announcing voice style. Him and another guy that used to be on Q107, Howard Kogan. I think they trade off doing those deadpan lineups. Okay, so he was in there with Dominic Diamond. Josie died. Then they had Fearless Fred in there at one point. With Mel? With Mel and Rick the Temp.

I was invited on Saturday night to go to an electric circus event with Monica Diehl, Ed the Sock, and Rick the Temp. My sympathies. But I didn't go because it was my son's 18th birthday party. That was the best excuse ever. Yeah, Rick the Temp. I mean, he's trying to make it now. He's an influencer online

okay he won't come on this show he's doing yeah he's doing talk show appearances you know here's like a Canadian

B, C, D list celebrity oh for like spaghetti sauce right whoever will hire him to do some

earned media advertorial oh I'm so sorry for interrupting, except that just to get the chain right, after Fear the Spread, was it Adam and Mel? Were they mornings?

Is that right? It was, oh, chaos all over the place. Oh, there you're back in. You made me my first coffee and I've spilled my first beer. Mark Weisblatt just spilled some blonde lager on, if it touches this $900 board, I'm going to be very angry. Oh, I'm not going to get out here alive if that happens.

You'll be cutting a check. I'm back in place. I got too excited. Okay, so then Adam and Mel. Mel, Melanie. Right. She's now in Indy 88, along with a bunch of other people who used to work at the Edge.

They try to Adam him in Mel, and I think that was the beginning of their new way of doing things, where, again, the breaks were really short, things sounded rehearsed, pre-taped, edited. I'm not sure what they're doing.

They fired her when she was pregnant, by the way. They were on the air. You could barely tell there was anybody there, and I'm not sure, was it live, was it Memorex,

were they recording at the time? Just, to me, a very unnatural style of radio that seems to have become the standard of chorus. And I've asked on here, I can't quite understand it. I'm sure somebody can scientifically explain it as new with, like, the people, portable people, meters, and how you keep people staying tuned. They've been caught by 88.1. Like, we can see that, right? new with like the the people portable people meters it's not working people paying uh staying tuned they've been caught by 88.1 like we can see that right in the targeted demo the gap is closed

and sort of like when mike richards was on and he talked about how 1050s kind of caught 590 but not because 1050 kicked it up a notch but because uh 590 fell, and that seems to have happened with Indy 88 and 102.1. 102.1 seems to have stalled and gone backwards, and that's allowed 88.1 to catch them. But I have a couple of exclusives here, if I may. So I reached out to Strombo, George Strombolopoulos, because I thought George Strombolopoulos would be a big name. That would be like, I would be excited.

They know George had a morning show on 102.1 The Edge. And George has basically, via Twitter, told me that ain't going to happen. So when he was on my show, we talked about how, you know, he was very close with Martin Streak. And he did not like the way Martin Streak was treated by Chorus. And then he pulled his show from Chorus and gave it to CBC Radio 2. And it sounds like he's a man of his word, and he's like an elephant he doesn't forget.

So there's not going to be a George Strombolopoulos. Okay, but he would be like the plug-and-play solution. Right. Because, you know, they just got rid of this sibling duo after a year, and they need a little bit of buzz. I mean, how is this station going to make a comeback? Or are we seeing the end of the line for CF and Y and that whole legacy? I don't know.

We've been saying that for a while though. Well, not, not that long because they kept on hiring new morning shows and you figure, okay, they'll give it, what's next. They'll give it a year.

So they gave it a year. What's next? I think they're, they have afternoon drive. These two younger DJs, Colter and Meredith. Colter is somebody who worked his way up the old-fashioned way through the ranks of radio in the trenches. He was on some AM country station in the BC interior just a few weeks ago, a few years ago. Years ago.

Might as well be weeks ago. Even before that, he was on CKLN, the Ryerson radio station, on its last legs before they lost that license. Right. I remember hearing him there, which is quite a credit to be able to say that. So as far as the trajectory of hitting the big time before you turn 30, he's living the dream. Afternoon drive on CFNY,

and he's there with Meredith Geddes, who got her big break in Vancouver and a great moment in Toronto Mike history, where on the website you were talking about, and this is where we got into this discussion, it's remarkable that here's here's a voice and announcer a dj on these radio stations and yet she's working in multiple cities at the same time right and what's happened to the radio that i grew up with that it's just become this this

hacky sack assembly line of content where yeah you're only coming on and talking again 60, 90 seconds at a time. Why not do multiple shifts at once? It's the only way they can rationalize it as a full-time job anymore. And the technology has made it possible. In the process, it has sucked the soul out of the concept of local radio. And as we saw with Q107, with Neil Peart, the chances of anything spontaneous ever happening,

even the biggest celebrity death ever happened to your radio station, that there's not somebody standing by behind the mic to acknowledge that this happened. And it takes them an hour to reformat the programming to get it on the air. I'm not pretending that this is the worst thing in the world. We make our media choices. I'm just saying that when you see this legacy of these rock radio stations come to an end,

here we are, for the record, we'll remember how it happened just by airing it out here in your basement and who's this rick lee fellow who is now filling in for the uh alex and ruby show that was uh canceled i suppose i saw his name it was attached to like some kind of year-end countdown or it was more like uh the 2010s in review tuned in and they were acting like this guy that people would know who he is that he's been on the air for all this time. These days, no press release, no announcement,

and I don't think too many people out there are paying enough attention. But I did the research to find out that he has worked his way through rock radio stations, new rock, alternative rock radio stations in Western Canada. They love the Western Canadians at Chorus. Well, he was seen as a potential fixer for CFNY,

so they brought him in as a program manager and put him on the air doing this thing for the new year, doing this countdown, doing this style of radio, which seems to involve fake phone callers, because I don't believe these are people really phoning in, chatting with him. And yet, there's a likability there.

It seems like he can turn around a quickie radio bit in a matter of minutes. But he's interim, right? Well, they made him the program manager, not only of 102.1, the EdgeCube, 107, Y108, Energy 95.3, the station that Tucker and Mora are on, all coming out of that chorus key compound. And how is this position?

And this Rick Lee is a name in there in the mix. He's now management. How different is that position from the program director? I have absolutely no idea. All I imagine is they've got to get the ratings of these radio stations up there somewhere. Like I think that Energy 95.3, there they've got a get the ratings of these radio stations up there somewhere. Like, I think that Energy 95.3. There they've got a pretty good signal.

A great dial position. And the Energy name. And I don't know how that's doing. It's in the cellar of the Toronto ratings. What's it going to take for that to catch on? Tucker and Mora hired away from Virgin. And I don't know if a lot of people... They were a free agent.

Unrestricted free agent. Oh, you're right. They had an interim period where they were doing that podcast. Which you love. They were bringing the real talk. They were talking about what Andy Wilson went to Ottawa. What's it like to get fired from a radio station and have Marilyn Dennis' son waiting in the wings

to take over your job? You too would be angry and bitter. Do you have a prediction as to who the next 102.1 morning show will be? Because I want to just really quickly before you can make your prediction, as a bit of sorts I suppose but only half joking Humble and Fred have sent an email to the management at

Edge 102 saying that they would love the gig and get the Gen Xers back on 102.1 Yeah which might not be a bad idea and I think in a different era I might have said okay you could have more of a spontaneous talk show where people got in a room and talked about the news. Not unlike what we do here. So I managed

the Humble and Fred Twitter account. I don't know if people don't know that, but if you see, well, not always because I'm not the only one to log in, but any clever or funny tweet from that account is me, okay? I got this email from Fred to management in my Gmail, because he blind copied me, and I screencapped

it. I just deleted the fact that it was blind copied. That's the only edit I made. And I tweeted it without permission from Humble and Fred. I can't tell the full story right now, but I'm hoping I can tell it next time you're on. It caused quite the kerfuffle with Bell Media.

Okay, so let's see who's still standing. I don't know. They'll just throw this job to this Coulter and Meredith couple because they're ready to go. It's a plug and play answer. Are they well known? I don't think they're known. But neither was Ruby and Alex.

Why not feel this way again? You can thin slice the playlist and what song should be on the radio, and I don't even think that's a proposition of sales pitch anymore. They ran TV commercials for the edge. They were trying to position this as a cool radio station, not like this trap music or this bubblegum pop that the other stations play. It's sort of a very superficial thing if you want a different sound of music on the radio.

They were promoting the music, not the personalities that were on the air. I don't know if that did anything for them. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just saying if you see a migration away, if people's attention has been distracted from these radio stations, we bemoan month after month, nobody pays attention to this stuff anymore. Nobody is talking about it. Well, Mike, there is a reason for that, that it has become obscure, but it's still big corporate media. And, you know, we hope maybe it can be good someday, sometime. Post Malone. Why am I playing circles, Mark Weisbach? You know what?

At the end of the year, I was scanning terrestrial radio stations. That old school listener in me, I wanted to keep up on the year-end countdowns. And it rang with me that this is like a real old-fashioned radio single. This is the kind of song that, you know, going back to the 20th century, that would cross over to every kind of station, every format. You know, you would hear it on the AM Top 40 stations. It would cross over to the adult contemporary side. You could hear it on these stations like CJCL and CKEY,

but then you would also hear it on CKFM and CHFI and maybe 97.3 Easy Rock. And who is it? It's this tattooed Bulgarian, Post Malone, who made, I think, the most accessible crossover folky hip-hop song of 2019, absolutely reviled by all the critics, right up there with Imagine Dragons and 21 Pilots and Panic at the Disco as the future of corporate rock and roll. But look, as I said earlier, now that I can look back on four whole decades

of paying attention to this stuff, it's really the same old song. And I'm glad to be still alive and well and paying attention to it all and being able to come on down here and dunk on it. Last time you were on Toronto Mic'd, we talked about the ownership changes that now... And now,

I would like you to talk about the ownership changes at Georgia Straight. This song is Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats, a new single released in 2020 from their forthcoming reunion album. First album they made since 1984. So it was actually even before Do They Know It's Christmas and Live Aid. That was the last time. There was a Boomtown Rats album. Now we've got this

new one out there. Even if I'm not sure how it finds an audience, how anybody hears something like this or knows about it these days, I caught on to the fact that it was out there at the same time that we learned that the Vancouver Alternative Weekly, which at one point was most famous

for the fact that Bob Geldof used to work there, is now no longer an independently owned publication. So this company, Media Central Communications, which is banking on the idea that cannabis content can be the backbone for writing and reading about the creative class. It's a publicly traded company. I think technically a penny stock on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. They bought the Georgia Strait.

And the last guy standing from the original ownership after all these years, who at one point said it wasn't really worth anything anymore, he mirrored what they said at Now Magazine when it was bought for a million or two bucks, I guess conditional on how things go, that he took a similar kind of cash deal and he said these were the best people to be the custodians

in the future and keep the alternative news weekly press alive. And while I'm a bit suspicious because of the quality of writing in these press releases when you've got this ham-fisted copywriting, that's maybe the first warning sign that they can't follow through.

Now Magazine announced a realignment now. They have a new editor, editor-in-chief, a guy named Kevin Ritchie, who's been there for a number of years. And now he's in charge of figuring out some sort of vision for now. There's still a media outlet with a recognizable name can only wish them the best to make this thing happen. I think the main barrier here is the fact they don't get the pickup anymore, that the physical act of picking up that weekly newspaper

isn't what it used to be. Psychologically, what do you have to put in print that will get people back in the habit of picking it up for free. That's the first factor. And I think that's where free newspapers, we saw the Toronto Star Metro, Star Metro, get shut down across the country. That it's like been devalued. And you're more likely to read something in print if you pay for it

than if it's out there for free. That psychologically, there's more of the fact that if you get a subscription in the mail, you know, to a glossy magazine, maybe you still buy it in a store, that you're more likely to care about what's in the magazine, and that that's where it's kind of, you know, a long road back for free print media. And yet that's what this media central company is banking on. And this absurd goal where they are going to wrap up every failing, struggling, past tense alternative weekly in North America. And they're going to put them all under the same roof, the same banner.

And they're off to an okay start. They got the two biggest ones in Canada. The two with the longest legacy. And they say they're going to break into the United States of America, and there's lots of snap up from there. But I don't know. The Village Voice stopped printing, the granddaddy of them all in New York City. And I don't know if there were a lot of tears flowing from that.

I mean, you get people writing obits after the fact, but does anybody really miss it now that it's gone? And yet there's an informational service. There's a culture of journalism and media out there. I want to be a part of stepping in to save what used to be there before with a voice and the sensibility. I think I'm doing that every day. I agree. 1236.

I'm with you, man. You encapsulate what's happening online. But now magazine is still creating content. They're still printing an issue every week. In fact, at one point they went to every other week, at least for a summer, went back to weekly. We've got to see where it all goes. But this is a form of media, yeah, in a distressed situation

when you see these kinds of deals going on. Although it might be better than some sort of hedge fund getting involved, thinking they can squeeze all kinds of money out of it, that there is still an earnestness alive and well. There are still people involved at the Georgia Straight, now Magazine, believing in the mission. It's a matter of figuring out whether this company is capitalized well enough for them to stick with it because we saw with now when they made the announcement because it was a public company they had to mention

how much money this thing was losing and it was something around $80,000 a week so you better appreciate that now magazine while it lasts because somebody burned $80,000 in cash to get it out to you in the boxes on the corner and that's a wrap with the State of Alternative Media.

Bob Geldof, not available for comment. I think the first I learned about the Georgia Strait, or certainly the fact that Bob Geldof was involved, is when he wrote his memoir after Live Aid, Is That It?, the book that he wrote. And he talked about the fact that he rolled up an Irish hippie in Vancouver and he got a job at this alternative newspaper. And there he was, the music editor.

And it's a great legend, a great legacy. The fact that we can say that, you know, Bob Geldof once walked among us as a Canadian media warrior going on, I don't know, almost 50 years ago. Now, I think we covered Ken Shaw last time you were on, right? Is there anything, there's nothing new to say on the Ken Shaw front. Yeah, well, he, they had a ceremony, right?

It was January 2020. He came back for one day, January 6th. He wanted to be on the air at the anchor desk in six different decades. Wow. That was a milestone.

Five or six? Was it six? Okay, yeah. 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. Handed it off to Nathan Downer. Nathan Downer is, I don't think he got enough credit for this. I think he's a product of the flow 935,

original vision of that radio station, that he was a newscaster on that station, sidekick, did a sports show. He was on their early morning show. They went through a few groin pains trying to figure out what to do with this station. You might remember even David Marsden, not a black man, was hired as the program director to try and clear it up.

There were a lot of expectations pinned on this thing, but they also made a lot of promises about what it would be as far as being Toronto's first black-owned, black music radio station. And not everything came together, maybe, as they thought it would. There was a lot of disaffection, a lot of complaints about where the station was going. At one point later on, it was sold to Chum, now owned by Stingray. They got rid of the Flo name.

They brought it back. I think Nathan Downer is a terrific alumni of that radio station. If it wasn't for that radio station, he would not have gotten that break, as far as I could tell. And that brought him then into television at Global and now CTV. And there he is, the main anchor man with Michelle Dubé as the co-anchor of the main 6pm Toronto newscast. Even if nobody is

really watching that anymore like they used to. It's an older generation. But it is definitely still the highest rated local newscast. Oh, it's a milestone. It's a pinnacle. It's terrific. And TV news in

Toronto, you know, not to diminish the accomplishments of those people who have made it, following somebody like Nathan Danner as he rose up through the ranks at CP24, that legendary interview. With Stephanie Smythe they were together. And with Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson. It went viral.

It went viral. And, you know, people talk about diversity in the media. We need a range of different faces. They're fixated upon the op-ed pages of daily newspapers. I mean, come on. I think the face of multicultural Toronto is alive and well, and it's evident in TV newscasts. So when different researchers get into the fact, okay,

like there's white supremacy in the media, I can kind of see the point. They're counting. They're looking at who's getting on the opinion pages, and people argue there is also still influence there too. But CTV, CFTO News, would have once been seen as the old-school Canadian style of newscasting. At the same time, Moses Neimer, City TV was a bastion of multiculturalism. People wondered,

why is everybody on the CFTO TV world beat news white? And I think the appointment of Nathan Downer should be celebrated as part of the progress that's been made. A lot of people get sort of snarky about the state of media that

we're not seeing. Toronto and Canada reflected in the people and the personalities. There was some study from Ryerson that came out, I think, right around the same time, maybe the same day, that Nathan Downer was announced as having the job. Come on! Celebrate the guy that he made it. And he did it on his own terms, in his own way,

with his own style, his own fashion. Get Nathan Downer down here on Toronto Mike. That's all I'm trying to say. I will do my very best, I promise. I do want him on the show. Now, speaking of news, and speaking of non-white men, the National had the four anchor, right?

The four anchors, which I did tune in to. I mean, I'm kind of a CBC guy. I watch a lot of CBC, and I did tune into it. But it was always kind of a surprising move that they went with the four anchors. But it sounds like they've cut it down to two anchors. Where are we at now? The guy that kept to the curb here was Ian Hannah-Mansing.

Who I thought was the best, by the way. In a previous paradigm, he would have been the successor to Peter Mansbridge. Yes. They just would have announced him as a successor. He just would have been the dude. Yes. But instead, I don't know, they went for this equality, equity, diversity strategy. Well, he's diversity. He's not, diversity strategy. Okay, we'll have four names. But he's diversity.

He's not a white guy. Well, I realize that. But it's not enough that they wanted to have two different women. Just like, what was he named? I don't know. They were projecting that Peter Manzberg is the old white man. And we're hiring four people, none of whom are old white men. Correct.

Now, once you start playing this game, I don't think you could ever win, okay? But are you suggesting... And you can't win because they just demoted two of the four anchors. For a moment, I thought you might be suggesting Ian Hanelman Singh wasn't diverse enough, but he's...

I mean, I don't understand. I'm very confused. I'm saying they went for the quantity over quality, and their thought process was, well, if we have four people, then nobody's going to give us any grief. Wow. I would think.

Is it not safe to say that played into the thinking? Do you know what I think they should have done as a viewer of The National, and I thought Peter Mansbridge was great, but if he was going to step aside, I thought Ian Hannah Mansing was the heir apparent, and I thought Peter Mansbridge was great, but if he was going to step aside, I thought Ian Hannah-Mansing was the heir apparent, and I thought they should have just slid him into the spot. Oh, for years and years and years.

He was standing by for decades. But he's excellent. He's excellent. Okay, well, now you can see him on Friday and Sunday nights. That sounds like a demotion to me. Maybe he'd fill in during the week. Andrew Chang was a young upstart who moved to Toronto. Was he in Vancouver?

Oh, Vancouver. Somewhere, I don't know, somewhere west. Okay. He served with Adrian Arsenault, who kind of introduced a serious foreign correspondent. Right. And I noticed while they're making that transition, the National, it kind of was like a Soviet Union newscast.

Like it was very intense. It didn't seem to have much levity to it as before. You know, you have a new FOTM in Laurie Brown. Yes. And she spent a few years working for the Journal, and that was a way of bringing arts coverage, right, onto Canada's national newscast on the CBC. At one point, Gomeshi, Jean Gomeshi,

was showing up on there a lot. They were giving him air time. I think if it wasn't for circumstances, you wouldhi, Jean Gomeshi was showing up on there a lot. They were giving him air time. I think if it wasn't for circumstances, you would have had Jean Gomeshi. For sure. Amanda Lang, who ended up leaving the CBC under some cloudy circumstances about her extracurricular speaking activities. And Evan Solomon, who got in trouble because of his art dealing. So Solomon, Lang, and Gomeschi, all gone from the CBC

under complicated circumstances. Those were the talent that they had in line. I don't know, Strombo on the sports desk, offering the scores every night. Why not? But he was also out of the loop, wasn't there anymore. So here we ended up with these characters at the CBC. Andrew Chang, you know, someone had a real

scathing tweet about him. That he's a good newscaster if you want the news explained to you as if you are in kindergarten. And the audience for the National these days would be very mature. I don't think they're looking for, you know,

CBC Kids News to do a cross-pollination with the national newscast. What I saw, what I watched one night, I was all, it was a little glum and grim, but hey, that's the state of the world, whatever was going on, Flight 752 at the time, coronavirus, this was an intense month in the history of news. Yes, indeed. Is it the job of the newscaster reflected? I guess. It's not a sitcom.

It's not a comedy show. You want good times? Watch Family Feud Canada. And Rosemary Barton, who was known as a political correspondent, they gave her Evan Solomon's job. Kind of unpolished, too. Like, she seems kind of real, I find.

Yeah, okay. Well, you're saying it's positive to be unpolished. Yeah. She's genuine. I'm not a big fan of too much polish, you know? Okay, well, she's on there with the at-issue panel, and they change her job title. It might be a better job for her. It might be what she wants to do.

Less teleprompter reading, more time for tweeting. less teleprompter reading, more time for tweeting. And she came out with an opinion piece about why she thinks the next conservative federal party leader should be bilingual and speak French. Doesn't look like it's going in that direction right now. And she was assailed for this because isn't she an anchor? Isn't she supposed to be unbiased? It's an opinion piece. And she said, well, it's analysis. And they clarified

the headline. I mean, look, everybody has an ego. And she wants to be known for being opinionated and having her own voice and not being just another robot on TV. But they did make her the anchor. And they positioned her as one of the four

voices of God replacing Pastor Mansbridge, our new deity of Canada's national news. So already, just a week or two after they announced that she wasn't going to be one of the main anchors anymore, already she's gotten in trouble. She has to navigate this positioning. Like, what exactly is her job there?

What's her role in it all? Because she likes having an opinion. That's been part of the Twitter thing. And they gave her a job that, you know, actually was forcing her to at least pretend that she was neutral. Okay, three quick hits before we get to the memorial section here.

I want to ask you about the highly anticipated documentary about SCTV that Martin Scorsese recorded at the Winter Elgin Theater. Yeah, they started asking around because there was a Schitt's Creek press conference, media day, the Television Critics Association, I guess FOTM, Bill Brio still attends these events in Pasadena where they bring out all the stars

of American shows. They're promoting Schitt's Creek. It's the biggest show on this channel called Pop TV, owned by CBS, a real obscure cable channel. But it was a guy who used to work with Bell Media, with Dan Levy in Toronto. He ended up getting his job, and he cut a deal to make Schitt's Creek, and it looks like it was a lucky break. Been on the right horse, at least.

Have you ever watched it? Not really. Me neither. Even if people are just tuning in through Netflix. It's a fact. They have this show on. It's a tentpole show. Okay, so Eugene Levy,

before the critics asked about what's happening in this documentary, made such a big deal. SCTV reunion. An afternoon with SCTV. And Rick Moranis showed up. Taped at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto or the Winter Garden, somewhere in that building.

And that was on Mother's Day 2018. Where is the documentary? It was going to run on Netflix and CTV in Canada. And it was Eugene Levy had to break the news that Martin Scorsese has kind of ghosted them. That he got busy

with the Irishman. Now nominated for Academy Awards, and he hasn't actually had time to get back to his SCTV documentary. I don't know when we're going to see that because I thought it was going to come with a Netflix restoration of all the old lost SCTV episodes, which you can really only find these days through YouTube uploads. Well, here it'll end up being a Crave show here probably, right? It'll be like a U.S. Netflix. Okay, one way or the other. And so with Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, part of the SCTV reunion,

and their guy Scorsese, he's dragging his heels on this thing. I don't know what's involved, this documentary that he was going to make. Can he delegate that to, I don't know. I feel like, let's get this done. Now, Mark, do you know, I'm going to ask you some Toronto Mike trivia, do you know my most popular tweet of all time? Oh, well, I know it because you did a chat

with Cam Gordon of Twitter Canada, one of the best FOTMs out there. Yeah, who I might see tonight. He said he's going to try to drop by the Sticker U Museum opening tonight. And you made a video with him where you talked about your most popular tweet of that year. What year was that? 2017?

2018? Okay, Kathleen Wynne's government did it. So I'm going to say... By the way, Kathleen Wynne wrote me the nicest note last week. About what? About showing up at her door and seeing, uh, your wife,

Monica wearing her, her robe. I don't know whether she, I don't know how she listened, but she listened to the entire episode of Sean McAuliffe. And in the, at the beginning of this episode, I tell a story about Kathleen Wynn and about how she showed up here.

And Ralph wanted her to thought she shouldn't slum it in my basement and everything. And Kathleen Wynn wrote me the nicest note about how she would have been happy to do it here, and she talked, she said she's happy to come on Toronto Mic, which, by the way, violates one of my few rules, which is I don't have active politicians on this show. But she got knocked down a peg.

But she's still an MPP. She doesn't have the same glory that she used to. She's an MPP. But at some point, she's not going to be an MPP anymore. And the day after she announces... She's winding towards some kind of retirement. And then she'll be on Toronto Mic'd because she seemed very happy with what she heard

and she seemed to really like it. But it was a nice-as-no. We went back and forth a few times. She actually emailed me and DM'd me on Twitter. She double-pronged approach, but it was a really nice exchange. Okay, so what was the issue? Ralph Ben-Murgy, not that kind of rabbi.

He didn't feel that it was appropriate to have the former premier of Ontario sit down for an interview in your basement. That's the crux of it. And doing it in Humble Howard's house, which is an old flower shop on the Queensway, Humble and Fred Radio headquarters. Where I was this morning, yeah.

That would be more... So I said, hey, do you mind if Ralph and I come over there at 10 a.m. to record with Kathleen Wynne, which was quite amusing because Fred Patterson despises Kathleen Wynne. But Howard said, yeah, for sure, man. You're in the family.

So thank you, Howard, for that. And we did record there, but it wasn't my gear and my stuff. No, I won't say anything further on that subject, actually. What I'm just going to say is that I had a great interaction with Kathleen Wynne.

But what were we talking about? We were talking about the world's largest rubber duck. Okay, so that was three summers ago that it was docked there, the Red Path Sugar Festival. Where was that? The Sugar Beach part of Toronto, right?

Overlooking the Chorus Entertainment Radio Complex, that area. Close enough. The Queens Quay East. I didn't see it with my own eyes. Why not? Because I saw your tweet. Did we learn nothing from the trojan war and it was because you biked over there right the the second i bike to unveiling

the rubber duck hto park i think it's called it's not a very great name is it but i believe hto park is where i actually biked to and took that photo and then yeah it wasn't anything i planned i was at the spot i took the photo and i just typed something top of mind like just you know and it was my most popular tweet of all time. Okay, so the duck is coming back. It was a big boost to the economy. Everybody loved the giant yellow rubber duck in Toronto. It was one of those boondoggles, and it was funded with Kathleen Wynne herself

was accused of signing up on this frivolous expense, but it seemed it was all worth it this time around. From what I could tell, there was no government money going to pay for the rubber duck. And so all you right-wingers, you libertarian people out there who would not have wanted to burn your eyes with the vision of the taxpayer-funded giant rubber duck. Can look at it again at some point this summer, early in the summer in Toronto. Thank you to private sponsors for making it happen. And I'm principled enough that maybe even I will make an effort to go down.

Let's go together. I'll meet you there. Just let me know. I'll bike over. That's not Alanis Morissette. But I'm overwhelmed I'm lost but I'm hopeful Baby And what it all comes down to

Who's covering this show? Everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine Version of Hand in My Pocket by Alanis Morissette. What am I listening to here? It sounds like it might be an episode of Glee or something. I think it might be worse than Glee, because at least with Glee, you know what you're signing up for. When something is promoted as a Broadway musical,

you expect something a little more substantial to come out of it. But as John Semley, Toronto writer, said on Twitter, theater kids, they ruin everything. And that includes covering Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album as part of a new Broadway musical. I did see American Idiot when it came to that North York theater. And I enjoyed it for what it's worth. It was a bunch of Green Day songs.

But this sounds like this will be like that. Look, you've got to hand it on one hand to Alanis. And it's a fact that so many people have like that one successful product that they put out there. And then they spend the rest of their career disavowing it or trying to come up with something better. And I think it was only a matter of time before Alanis realized that this is the best it's ever going to get for her. And you have to milk this thing for all it's worth for the rest of her life. So we had Jagged Little Pill acoustic remake version in its 10th anniversary and the 20th anniversary reissue of the album. And here we are coming around to year number 25 in the Jagged Little Pill tour.

All those teenagers who got their first taste of corporately sanctioned angst through Alanis Morissette, former Canadian teen idol singer, laying it all out there, and that they will converge upon the amphitheaters of North America this summer to see her do it all over again, at the same time that this new musical is playing songs like Hand in My Pocket. Now, back when she was Atlantis, of course, one of her big Much Music hits had a video featuring Matt LeBlanc pre-Friends fame.

So it's all going back to the 90s here. But let's get serious for a moment, Mark. And let's pay tribute. Let's talk about Ridley Funeral Home. Now, Ridley Funeral Home is at 3080 Lakeshore. That's at 14th Street and Lakeshore. And Brad Jones has been a tremendous FOTM. Speaking of FOTMs,

there's a number of fantastic FOTMs, you know, from Al Grego to Michael Lang to Levi Fumka, and I could keep going. But Brad Jones is right up there. He only buys his beers at Great Lakes. He's just been a tremendous listener, and of course he stepped up to sponsor the 1236 episodes of Toronto Mic'd.

So if you wish to pay tribute without paying a fortune, learn more about Ridley Funeral Home at ridleyfuneralhome.com. He's a rebel and a runner He's a signal of terminary He's a restless young romantic wants to run the big machine He's got a problem with his poisons

But you know he'll find a cure He's cleaning up his systems To keep his nature pure Learning to match the feet of the old world man Learning to catch the heat of the third world man He's got to make his own mistakes And learn to mend them as he makes He's old enough to know what's right

But young enough not to choose it He's noble enough to win the world But weak enough to lose it He's a blue world man. Listen to those drums, Mark. Neil Peart. Colby Kosh of the National Post. You ever read Colby Kosh?

He's one of the greatest libertarian voices in all of Canada. A big prog rock kind of guy. I think it's on brand. Suits his personality. He wrote a terrific column, a tribute to Neil Peart in the op-ed pages of the Post. And he cited this song

as the one that he kept coming back to, listening to over and over again when he heard about the death of Neil Peart. Because this was a song when, like the rush that that that we all knew about i'm not saying they were everybody's idea of what to love a polarizing rock band for sure but this song on the uh signals album was the one that said that they were arriving into a new age, and it really reflected in the fact that the drums were in the center of the band, that Neil Peart, musically speaking, defined himself as the leader on this song, which turned out to be their biggest American Billboard Hot 100 chart hit of all.

I did not know that. I think this is a game of chance. It came along at a certain point in time. It wasn't Roll the Bones? No, no did not know that. I think this is a game of chance. It came along at a certain point. It wasn't roll the bones? No, no, nothing like that. It was only around that time. And look, the whole thing when people would talk about the death of Neil Peart, they would always

augment it by saying, well, you know what? I couldn't really get into the music of Rush, but I still have a lot of respect for them. A lot of it came out of this period of time. These three albums that they put out in the early 1980s. One with Spirit of Radio, Permanent Waves, the

Moving Pictures album, which had Limelight on it. I remember buying the 45 RPM single, Anthem Records. Right. I thought, who's this cool chick singing this song?

The voice of Geddy Lee, how does it get so high? That lyric, immortalized by the band Pavement so many years later, I had that experience myself as a young kid learning about Rush. And then the album after that, which was Signals and New World Man, the album after that, which was Signals and New World Man, and a legendary song in the history of Toronto Mike, Subdivisions, featuring what is presumed to be a primitive sample of the voice of Mark Daly. Because once again, I mentioned this on a recent podcast. I guess right after Neil Peart died, I mentioned, I can't remember who it was with.

Maybe you remember, but somebody guessed it correctly, who I was talking about, whose voice it might have been. And I wonder who it was with. Maybe you remember, but somebody guessed it correctly that who I was talking about, whose voice it might have been. And I wonder who that was. Now, was it Sean by some chance? Sean McAuliffe? I can't remember. You had so many guests. I know, it's all there.

And I think Neil Peart kept coming up over and over again. Right. Through the month. A couple episodes anyways. You do enough episodes now, I think, that a lot of current events ended up getting filtered through the show, right?

Because you'll bring up stuff off the top wherever the guest is. But somebody in the comments chastised me because on Wikipedia, they say Neil is saying subdivisions. And meanwhile, we had this discussion with Ed Conroy from Retro Ontario. And Ed and I are of the belief that Wikipedia is wrong and that it is actually Mark Daly. Well, I defer to Ed Conroy on this more than anybody else

because I don't know anybody who's listened to more recordings of Mark Daly after his early death than Ed Conroy. He knows the cadence of Mark Daly. This guy was a god in the world inhabited by Ed Conroy. And maybe it was a secret that Neil Peart took to the grave along with Mark Daly or at some point in time, you know, somebody will corner Geddy Lee about it and wonder what the hell are you talking about?

Of all the questions you see, I could imagine if you had Geddy Lee down here, the first thing you would ask about would be that. He would immediately dart out of your house because he would wonder

what kind of hellscape has he walked into that of every question you can ask about Rush, that would be the one. I need to give it some time, obviously. They suffered a great loss. He has been extremely amiable over the years. He did an interview at his house with Dan Rather a couple years ago once Rush ended up on hiatus. And he wrote that foreword for the Flyer Vault.

And he did an appearance at the Cosmo Music Store. I'm going to give it six months. A book signing. He went up there and it was Dave Grohl who gave him a lift, gave him a ride up there. Wow. Dave Grohl. Getty's a fellow Jays fan. I want to talk baseball. He's all around. I think the day will come you can get Getty down here.

With Neil Peart, part of the legacy is the fact that in his early work, he pledged allegiance to the beliefs of Ayn Rand, these libertarian ways of thinking that informed his early lyrics, including Limelight, most of all. Those are real resonant writing there, where he writes about individualism. And the fact that he mentioned that he was an Ayn Rand fan was something that hovered over him for all these years.

Because I think once the fountainhead and everything was cited more and more as an influence on a certain kind of conservative politics, that Neil Peart got categorized as that kind of guy on the wrong side of history. And one of the obits about him was that maybe in the New Republic or Reason magazine, these publications that hold to that libertarian way of thinking that somebody asked him about the fact

that he was living in California, the height of the Ronald Reagan administration, and that they figured he would start spouting off whatever sort of talking points against Republicans and that he was, in fact, level-headed and pragmatic about it all. But later on, he said, no, I don't really think that way, or at one point it was an influence,

and these are not my beliefs. What could you do? He could never shake it off that Rush were seen as a libertarian rock band. That's where my pal Colby writing about them was perfectly appropriate because he's also in that line of thinking. But I don't know. Did people listen to Rush thinking of one sort of political belief or another? No. They were a unifying force.

Do you want to hear a tribute to Neil Peart by Lawrence Gowen? Oh yeah, bring it on. This was in fact on the same weekend that we learned that he died. All the world's indeed a stage We are many players For us and for our friends Each another's audience

Outside the gilded cage Living in the lifeline The new anniversary For those who wish to see And those who wish to be Must hold inside the alienation. Get on with the fascination. The real Malaysian under life theme. Okay, there you go.

Those were the libertarian lyrics that I was talking about. And that was Lawrence Gowan now with Styx. Also someone I think is a potential future guest on Toronto Mike. For sure. He would be amazing. And I think he brings it every night there with Styx. It's kind of a joke that they called in Lawrence Gowan, emergency replacement for Dennis DeYoung. And he does a few songs that Dennis DeYoung wrote.

He's a fill-in keyboardist, but he's already been doing it for the past 20 years working with Sticks. And he does a little tribute segment there to a recent rock star that died. And, of course, he was also an anthem records recording artist. He had that legacy with Neil Peart. And Neil Peart's own words in that song, I

think, do a better job than any other rambling that we can do in talking about him. Amnesia, I need ya, I need a woman like you. record ever attached to the name Kobe Bryant. Do you know this song? Ever heard it before? I must plead ignorance. I don't know this song.

It's a singer named Brian McKnight, who was a kind of 1990s neo soul man. Yeah, I know Brian. Brian McKnight. You would have heard his songs in the supermarket, right? Back at one, were you working at Food City when you heard some of Brian McKnight's songs? Probably. In the mid-1990s, Love Is with Vanessa Williams.

Oh, rest in peace, my Galleria Mall. I think it's been destroyed. So Kobe Bryant was not only a teenage basketball player, he was also a budding rapper. And guess which career won out for him after he was 17 years old. At one point, he tried to follow the footsteps of Shaquille O'Neal. He had a record deal. I don't think it got beyond trying out one single in the marketplace.

Kind of a little bit laughed off. We already have Shaq. Why do we have to listen to Kobe Bryant rapping? That Fushtakin project that actually I quite enjoyed. So unlike Kobe, where as a rapper, I think I luckily missed it all. He's a hell of a basketball player and not a very good rapper. Okay, but it was only one part on one song. It's coming up in a bit.

So here was Kobe Bryant, the rapper. A song called Hold Me. As he ascended through the ranks, and I guess now he's going to go down in history, I think, as the most famous NBA player of all time due to his tragic death here in the helicopter crash. What do you think? Not the greatest rapper, but a hell of a ball player. The death of Kobe Bryant seemed to cause more grief for the living than any

other celebrity death we heard of before thanks to people drawing attention to the 2003 sexual assault allegations against him for which he was never convicted

but a financial settlement was reached. And here we had a reporter from the Washington Post who fell into the routine of feeling that she had to let her Twitter followers know that this had happened to Kobe Bryant, as you're remembering him, and this terrible tragedy. Let's not forget that he had this history behind him, predating the Me Too movement. And you can look at it from any perspective about, you know, why would somebody feel a need to put this on Twitter while people are grieving? What is it about when you hear this kind of news? As a serious reporter,

this woman, Felicia Sonmez from the Washington Post, that she just had to like put this link out there, just remember the fact that this happened. You've been on Twitter a long time. Link out there. Just remember the fact that this happened. You've been on Twitter a long time. You know what happens if you get attention for a tweet like this at the wrong point in time. We've seen this movie before, and it was followed by wave after wave of harassment, people drawing attention to her home address. She had to check into a hotel.

And the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, Marty Baron, got in touch with her and said, your conduct is unbecoming. You're going to be suspended for what you did. This is the modern media age. This is what it's all about. This is how it works. And it seems like, is there a lesson to learn here?

Did she do something good for the world by drawing attention to the dark side of Kobe Bryant just a couple hours after he died, after the news broke? Where do you stand on this? I mean, is this part of journalism here in 2020 that, like, you feel a need? You have to get this side of the story out there that is part of your responsibility as a reporter. Democracy dies in darkness.

That's the slogan of the Washington Post. She thought she was doing her job. Ended up being suspended, at least for a little while. To borrow a line from Mark Zuckerberg, it's complicated, Mark. It's complicated. Now, I think that's a fair tweet. I think we have a tendency as a society

that if you die young and leave a good-looking corpse, we whitewash and sanitize everything, and you're sort of martyrized. And I think it's fair to remember that he was not perfect and not without flaws. There's so many good things. One thing that came out of this, of course, is the girls dad hashtag. And I saw a reporter's video that made me feel quite emotional as the father of two bright young girls. So there's a father of two bright young girls. So there's a lot of good you can take,

and I've heard a lot of great stories about Colby, but of course it's not all good, and I think it's okay to remind people of that when somebody passes. Ari Shafir, a comedian, a close friend of Joe Rogan. He's moved through the ranks. Comedic stardom, has enough followers. Though the fact that at this point, he also made a comment, something like, liberals care more about the Lakers than they do about rape.

And for this, he ended up losing his deal with his agent. The agency dropped him. He got canceled by a comedy club. Maybe they were getting threatening phone calls and he gives a statement. Well, I dunk on celebrities that die. It's a thing that I do. Right. None of this needed to happen. These comments from whatever angle didn't really contribute anything to anybody. But you got to say in the end, this side of Kobe Bryant, a story that had mostly been forgotten,

A.J. Benza, the celebrity gossip columnist, podcaster, he was also in on this story. So it wasn't really like a left or right thing. It was just saying, like, look, here was an event in history that at this point in time with the Me Too movement

would have not been so easily brushed under the rug if it happened today but 17 years ago the world was a little bit different and maybe through kobe bryant's uh conduct and how he kind of wiggled wiggled out of this the repercussions uh there's there's a story to tell and something to reflect upon. It took him dying to do it. Right, and of course, you're allowed to evolve and learn from your mistakes and become a better person. I think it's important to note that

it sounds by all indications that Kobe improved his character, his moral conduct as a person greatly improved through the years, and that's also kind of an important detail here. Okay, let's step it up.

Step it up here. Now, from Kobe Bryant, who died at the age of 41 and is maybe an internationally known name, talk to me about Mike Sloan. Oh, Mike Sloan is someone we got to know on Twitter in the past year in particular, and it was a fact that he found out through his doctor, his diagnosis, that he was dying of cancer and he was going to die within a matter of months. This was a guy in London, Ontario, who was doing the thing on Twitter

just where he was agitating everyone. He described himself as an Archie Bunker-type character, even though he was pretty left-wing. And he was kind of chirping at all kinds of people, media personalities and politicians and stuff like that. But as soon as he found out that it was only a matter of time until he was going to die, that he changed his tone on Twitter and he found himself with a whole bunch of followers, people that were riveted by the story of here was a guy bringing the real talk, being honest

about the fact that he only had so many months left to live. And he caught all kinds of people up, politicians and media personalities, influencers everywhere, that they were rooting for Mike Sloan to stay alive, stay well and stay snarky, and that he built up enough of a following that when he died on January 20th, it became national news. And, you know, it was the best exit that he could have hoped for because he was brutally honest about the fact that no one was really interested in what he had to say about anything

until he got this death sentence. Let's hear a clip from him. Like I said to my friend this morning, I would not be here talking to you on this set in this famous building, but for the fact that I'm dying of cancer.

So you have to, you can find something positive out of everything. You really can. And that was him, Ben Mulroney had him on, the Your Morning CTV show on January 2nd. And he had already bought a boulder. He had a plaque on a boulder in London, Ontario, where he lived. Mike Sloan, 1969 to 2019.

You might remember me from social media platforms like Twitter and Grindr, revealing a little bit about himself. And he made it a little bit into 2020, a medical-assisted death. And look, sad for everyone, because he managed to compel so many people with his story, but he also brought attention to this medically-assisted way of dying to end your life with a minimal amount of pain. And he will be missed.

And he was also big, like, in the media world. I think it was Mike Stafford described him as a radio pest. That he was, you know, always conversant with the people that he would hear on talk radio. That was, like, part of what he was up to on Twitter. the people that he would hear on talk radio. That was part of what he was up to on Twitter. This is interesting is that Ralph Ben-Murgy and I came this close to making a road trip to London

to setting up the studio and talking to Mike Sloan, but he was just too weak at that point. Sad it didn't happen. So we had Mike. I think you would count him as an FOTM. He was definitely out there on the radar with Twitter, with everything. Didn't have the easiest life, right?

Childhood, sexual abuse, and went through a lot, and a kind of estrangement with his family, a weird relationship that he talked about. They weren't even that interested in him, the fact that he was dying, and that he found some compassion in all these strangers on Twitter. And he was straight shooter. They became his family. I mean, he was straight shooter and open book on Twitter about all this.

So yeah, Mike is going to be missed. And I think a reminder to live for today. Enjoy every sandwich. You got to. So that was Mike's contribution, I felt, to me. And, yeah, I mean, look, it's the irony. We were wrapped up in this guy because we knew he was dying. That was why he was getting all this attention.

That's the only reason people cared is because he was dying. But he acknowledged it and he was dying. That was why he was getting all this attention. That's the only reason people cared, is because he was dying. But he acknowledged it and he admitted it, and he said taking this attitude on social media changed his life, and that he had a good ride for those last few months thanks to the fact that he was up front about what was happening to him. Now, Mike Sloan was 50.

Elizabeth Wurzel was 52. Okay, this replacement, I Will Dare, from the soundtrack of a movie that I don't think I've ever seen, but I looked it up. Prozac Nation, which is a book Elizabeth Wurzel wrote, published in 1994. A memoir. It was the definitive

Generation X memoir. Did you know about Prozac Nation? I've heard the name before, but I never read it. What I remember about Prozac Nation? I've heard the name before, but I never read it. What I remember about Prozac Nation, okay, relating it to Alanis Morissette. I wrote a record review of Jagged Little Pill, 1995, and I made a reference to Prozac Nation. I'm really aging myself here. Well, we're about the same age. 25 years ago now, that Jagged Little Pill was kind of following in this confessional style that Wurzel invented.

She was the original over Cheryl. And a lot of it had to do with, you know, different levels of addiction and things that she was going through that she wrote honestly about them all. As a Persec Nation movie was coming out, they premiered it at the Toronto International Film Festival. It had Christina Ricci playing her part, and Michelle Williams was in there, and Jason Biggs in the movie again.

I never got around to seeing it. I don't even know if I even want to see it, but I do remember the book. And promoting movie, Wartell did an interview with Jan Wong, and she talked about 9-11, right around the time her movie was premiering in Toronto, which she said,

everybody was being irrational. Everybody was losing their mind. I didn't understand why. And they ended up burying the movie after that, that she was on the side of the Taliban. I don't know. This was the time of the Dixie Chicks and everything else, and that she didn't get the movie she was looking for.

Ended up enrolling in law school, got a law degree, practiced for a little while, but still a lot of very confessional writing. She was the original. She set the template for a certain style of writing, a definitive figure in Generation X. Let's get a little older here. Too many before-their-time deaths. But Buck Henry was 89. Did you watch those early episodes of Saturday Night Live from the original incarnation of the show? 75 to 1980.

At one point, they would run on the Comedy Network in Canada. Wasn't it A&E where I saw it? A&E might have also had it. At some point. So Buck Henry was a seminal figure in the original five years of SNL. Certainly was the first I ever heard about him, heard the name. There he was, this kind of elder statesman of a certain kind of subversive comedy, right? Here he was in his mid-40s.

He was like the older guy hanging around all these hippie comedians and hosted SNL in those initial five years 12 different times. Like he would do multiple hosting gigs within a season and left a lot of that legendary comedy stuff behind. But he had a career before that. One of those pioneering stand-up comedy kind of characters with the Steve Allen show, and then ended up finding work as a screenwriter.

And the first successful movie he had was The Graduate with Dustin Hoff. Plastics. And other credits, The Owl and the Pussycat and What's Up, Doc? Into the 1980s, there was one with Goldie Hawn, Protocol, a comedy movie he made, The First Family, that Gilda Radner was in. In between there, he worked with Warren Beatty in the movie Heaven Can Wait,

and he's also in that movie. And then we're playing this Don Henley dirty laundry because of a movie made in Toronto written by Buck Henry. A dark sort of comedy psycho drama called To Die For. Do you remember that

one from 1995? No, I remember a Nicole Kidman movie called To Die For. That was a movie! Oh, I'm sorry. So he was in that film, and he had a little supporting role with Nicole Kidman

and Joaquin Phoenix and Matt Dillon. It was a big deal, To Die For. David Cronenberg. Has a cameo in there, too. And that was, I think, the last big hit movie that he has name attached to, but he was, was later did a cameo. He played Liz Lemon's dad on 30 Rock.

So here was a character that, you know, if you're a real comedy nerd, the death of Buck Henry was a big deal. Like, here was a player in the great history of Saturday Night Live and beyond. Now, Mark, because I have to get to sticker you, do you think we could do two-minute cap on all the remakes? I refuse to cut the memorial section. Well, this is a theme from the McNeil-Lair report. A groovy instrumental piece.

Kind of outdoing Retro Ontario in this one, I feel. You're on his turf. Oh, this is the stuff we love. And it switched channels because somebody had to reconstitute the theme on YouTube. Okay, so PBS, Public Broadcasting System, developed a daily newscast in the mid-70s with two guys. One was

Canadian, Robert McNeil, and the other one, Jim Lehrer. The McNeil Lehrer Report. Of course, yeah. If you ever stumbled upon PBS, you would be familiar with this show, if you're our age, at least.

It was modified into the McNeil Lehrer News Hour into the McNeil-Lairer News Hour. Robert McNeil, who is still alive as far as I can tell. He retired and Jim Lairer stuck around and he died here in January

2020 at age 85 and if he leaves nothing else behind, this awesome guitar solo on the theme of the newscast. Don't you know Why people love one another It's so they can Feel their hearts beat together

I'm not afraid If it is Another head trip Don't you know Should I feel great shame I'm unfamiliar with this band? What's the name of the band? The Diableros. This is some real Torontopia indie rock stuff. From what era?

Mid-2000s, around 2004. How did I miss this? And a guy named Pete Carmichael was the frontman, singer-songwriter for this band that played around Toronto. By that time, you had kids. Maybe. You were working into the domestic life. You needed to earn a living. You weren't too likely to be hanging around the indie rock clubs of the city.

At that point, I was only listening, going back to my legacy bands from the 90s I enjoyed as a teenager. Can you pinpoint? Was it when you turned 30? Was that because? Well, I was really into the White Stripes. Okay, real quick aside, because then we don't have time for this, but I was really into White Stripes and Arcade Fire. Real quick aside, because then we don't have time for this,

but I'm really into White Stripes and Arcade Fire. Shortly thereafter, I decided I'm done. I'm pretty much done with the new music. I already got enough stuff I love. I'll just stick with that. That's terrible. I'll edit that out. A lot of tributes to this Pete Carmichael. In fact, he got a whole page in Now Magazine

because he was a legend of that scene at that point in time. With young people that were exploring the indie rock scene. Maybe it was the last wave of these types of bands. Like a Strokes type, I guess. Is that the kind of, we're talking about the Hives, the Strokes? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Maybe a Little White Stripes.

Maybe not a lot of airplay or anything that came close to commercial success. That horse had left the barn when it came to rock music, but definitely a believer. Pete Carmichael, as far as I knew, a lot of struggles there with a mental illness. Not exactly sure of the cause of death, but we lost him around age 42, early 40s in January 2020.

Here's a jam that takes me back, Wiseblood. Holy smokes. Modern English. Don't tell me somebody from this band passed away. There's nothing you and I won't do I'll stop the world I'm left with you Just a shout out here to a graphic designer named Vaughn Oliver. Died at the very end of December 2019.

And he was the one responsible for the visual look, the identity of 4AD, the British record label, which brought us the Cocteau Twins and the Pixies and the Breeders. Wow. But the earliest band on there to have a hit was this one, Modern English. I'll melt with you. Just a memorial shout-out there, Vaughn Oliver. As you know, Mark, I like to kick out the jams with return guests.

And a couple of jam kickings where I heard this song, Walk Away Renee, Gare Joyce, and Jim Slotek. And I once met them both at a Gare Joyce's book launch. He wrote a book about Sidney Crosby and Jim Slotek was there and I brought them together and I said, you guys have something in common of the Left Bank.

And then I witnessed this, like they both, I guess they were the right age at the right time and they were both madly in love with the Left Bank, a band which, dare I say, I was, again,

not that I'm a cool guy, I'm not, but unfamiliar with until Gare Joyce kicked out this song. And I'm like, who the hell are these guys? Well, the voice of this song, a guy named Steve Martin. Not to be confused with the wild and crazy guy. His actual last name was Caro.

Steve Martin Caro. Died at 71 at the beginning of 2020. And this was his band, The Left Bank. Walk away, Renee. This is a beautiful song and I feel like this song might be in the zeitgeist and as we you know the

classic rock world that it's been overlooked. Well Billy Bragg did a cover version of it somewhere. Speaking of overlooked I feel big of Billy Bragg. Unless you're Dave Hodge in the gang there.

Okay. A member of the Left Bank went on to be even more famous. Michael McKean from Spinal Tap. Of course. All related projects. Laverne and Shirley. Better Call Saul. He's Saul's brother.

He was briefly in that band. Lenny and Squiggy. He was Lenny. Or was he Squiggy? He was Lenny. Yeah. Sun burned hot, it burned my eyes. Burned so hot I thought I'd died.

Thought I'd died and gone to hell. Looking for the water from a deeper well Right. Now, Emmylou Harris is still with us, thankfully, but who passed away that's related to this jam? Well, proof that sometimes you have to die for anybody to know your name, let's face it. And this was a singer-songwriter named David Oldney. Not to be confused with Toronto broadcaster

turned Ontario lieutenant governor David Olney. And FOTM. And in fact, if you look at the Wikipedia page for David Olney, it says at the top that it's not to be confused with David Olney. Yeah, there's a lot of people who suffer from dyslexia, and they could get confused there for sure. What happened with David Olney? It turned out that he was in a songwriters festival,

a workshop in Florida in January 2020. And he was doing a little performance in the round just for a few people showing off his stuff. And he was playing a song and he said, I'm sorry, and his chin fell to his chest, and he died on stage, or at least in a room where people were watching him. And I think a lot of people are captivated by this story.

Someone... Doesn't happen very often. People wouldn't have really heard of this guy, but I think enough that. NPR, World Cafe, Raina Duras. Her show was doing a tribute to the legacy of David Olney. So if you look back in his history, this might have been his most successful song. A song he co-wrote with Daniel Lanois and worked on for Emmylou Harris on her

one of her comeback albums. And this ties in with another FOTM, right? Mark Howard, right? He was down here talking about his book and talking about working with Daniel N. Waugh over the years. And this was the music that

David Olney was known for. This intense singer,songwriter style. Linda Ronstad was a big fan. She did one of his songs with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle. And we remember David Olney, who we lost in January. David Olney was 71. I'm a big, like a big WWF fan from like the mid eighties.

I'd say the mid eight, but you know, I start up at around 84, 85. I feel I missed this guy. I don't remember him. I know his son, but we're hearing the theme song for Rocky Johnson.

His son's nickname is named after his dad, Rocky, because, of course, his son is The Rock. It's a funky jam, though. Well, you're always referencing that wrestling album that the WWF put out. Rocky Johnson, he kind of missed that boat, didn't he? He's not in that. Junkyard Dog got a jam. Okay, but there he was on the sidelines, a native of Amherst, Nova Scotia.

Rocky Johnson, I guess he was, you know, he paid his dues there in the various wrestling associations. The thing was, he originally was an NWA guy, National Wrestling Alliance. I followed wrestling enough at the time to know that the WWF wasn't everything, right? That you had these other leagues out there that were also doing pro wrestling stuff.

And they ended up merging over time that they would recruit different people. And as far as wrestlers were concerned, not a lot of them were black. And Rocky Johnson ended up being a pioneer in those circles as far as being brought in a kind of second-tier guy in the WWF. Like a SD Jones.

Yeah, not very well-known, but he would show up at the Brockville Civic Arena to tape Maple Leaf Wrestling. Someone had to lose to you name it. Yeah, Mr. Wonderful or something like that. And the soul man also brought the CanCon, the Canadian angle, because there was a lot of Canadian content

in WWF Wrestling. Of course, because the Hart family is in Calgary. To Toronto, yeah. Calgary, all across Canada. Rocky Johnson was there. Okay, so, a few decades later, it turns out, Rocky Johnson was there. Okay, so a few decades later, it turns out that Rocky Johnson birthed a son who took on his name.

Dwayne Johnson became The Rock. Now, the legend of The Rock, he worked his way up from being, what, a CFL player? He was, I don't know if he played a regular season game, but he definitely played an exhibition game. He posed as a sunshine boy. What was he wearing? A fanny pack or something.

A fanny pack. That was it. Legendary picture published in the Sun newspapers across Canada. Still shows up on Reddit every day. And Dwayne, Dwayne the Rock Johnson. A bit of controversy because last year, Rocky Johnson wrote a memoir. It was called Soul Man, published by a Canadian publisher that does a lot of wrestling books, ECW Press.

He had some kind of dispute with his ghost writer, and it turned out that the fact they were advertising the foreword of the book was written by The Rock might have been not completely true. That it was a fraudulent foreword attributed to this big celebrity that he may actually not have been the writer of. And that this got caught up in some kind of legal drama

that Rocky ended up breaking up with his ghost writer. Whatever is happening, they pulled the book from sale. You can't find it anymore. It's a memoir that just came out last year. They got copies out there, but they had to unpublish it. And a few articles have discussed that this happened, but they're not exactly clear why this happened. I'm just putting the pieces together based on what i know for a canadian publisher to have to like pulp a book that they might have taken a financial hit

maybe they can get it out there again i don't know soul man rocky johnson a canadian sports legend um dead at 75 in january 2020 the rock lives on at 75 in January 2020. The Rock lives on. I'm searching for a place where I'll fit in. There's a way if I look then I can win. Yeah, I can see I'm not alone. I can face the unknown. Everybody can succeed. In yourself you must believe. Give it a try.

That's Degrassi. Kit Hood was one of the creators of Degrassi, the Degrassi franchise, Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, the School's Out movie, and then the reboot that followed, which I guess provided him with some sort of income because there he was out of the scene. him with some sort of income because there he was out of the scene. He was living in Lawrence Town, Nova Scotia when he died

in January at age 76. The Retro Ontario brought up a kind of cinema verite documentary called Degrassi Talks where the stars of Degrassi did some real discussion about the teenage issues of the early 1990s. Neil Hope. No broadcaster

wanted to touch it, but you can find it on YouTube. So that was Kid Hood, death announced by Joey Jeremiah. Pat Mastriani was so close with him, brought him to the Degrassi Palooza Convention for one last raw in Toronto before we lost him here in January. RIP Kid Hood.

Now, I mentioned the megacity, but the first mayor of the megacity was Mel Lastman, and Mel's wife, Marilyn, passed away. Oh, what a legend, huh? I mean, the stories about Marilyn Lastman going down in history, including the fact that she was part of a very suspicious kidnapping.

Okay, I have a clip. Okay, run the clip. How much should I play? Tap your head when I should fade it down. Oh, here is Jack Dennett. Well, from Metro Police Chief Harold Adamson right down the line to the man on the beat the Metro Police force is working diligently

but in complete silence this morning on the kidnapping yesterday of Marilyn Lastman the wife of the North York Mayor who obviously was spirited away by persons unknown but who returned home late last night about 10 hours after her departure unharmed but certainly emotionally shattered and shaken.

To this point, the police have withheld much of what they might know about this, preferring to go about their business with certain angles better kept to themselves. This much, however, is known. The police regard the case as a kidnapping or an abduction, worked through a telephone call yesterday afternoon, which told Mrs. Lastman of her husband having a heart attack. She was told that she'd be picked up at her home by a police official and taken to the Mount Sinai Hospital. After that, she called a friend, Paul Gastman, to drop over to the

house to look after one of the Lastman boys who was ill. That was Jack Dennis, legendary CFRB newscaster, reporting on the quote-unquote kidnapping of Marilyn Lastman, 1973. Her bad boy furniture husband had just started his job as mayor of North York, and there was a situation where there was some kind of alleged kidnapping, but no one really knows what happened, and the presumption is it was kind of swept under the rug.

That maybe she was trying to make a statement because we learned years later that mel lastman had a couple of kids some sons that were born to a woman that wasn't maryland right and they came looking for money and he showed off a piece of paper that they had signed saying that uh you know he it gave the mother of these kids, I don't know, $27,500 in exchange for never mentioning it again. You put the pieces together. Years later, after Mel Lastman became mayor of Toronto when the megacity happened,

she was nabbed at the Promenade Mall shoplifting a pair of jeans. They let her go under the circumstances because of her age, circumstances, and everything. Adam Vaughn, then a reporter for CBC News, brought it up to Mel Lastman, and Mel Lastman responded by threatening to kill him. Right. And these are some of the great legends of Marilyn Lastman. Where would we be without characters like these

at one point she even ran herself to be a North York city councilor but the name wasn't enough to carry her I have a lot of work to do. I'm not stepping down. I guarantee you're going to see a change. I guarantee. I'm working out every day. Folks, I went into Walmart the other day, and it was just nonstop. We support you.

Ignore the media. I was okay with the Rob part, but I got to bring down this Doug part. I can't stomach it right now. Oh, well, you're all sweet on Kathleen Wynne now that she's an FOTM. Bring her back. Remember this video that somebody made at the height of the Rob Ford crack video mania?

They produced a song, a viral video called Ford Nation. It was kind of nice. It was sympathetic towards Rob Ford. This was all the rage for a while, right? To do the auto-tuning on these. Yeah, auto-tune the news. Do you believe Rob Ford still has a good chance of being re-elected? Yeah, I think he absolutely can.

People who say he can't have not been paying attention. If he drops 60 pounds, he says he's too. A clever bit of media criticism. And the Rob Ford story will be resurrected in a movie called Run This Town, which is getting, as far as I can tell, like a proper theatrical release. Well, a real actor's in it, right?

Oh, yeah. He's the real deal. Ben Platt from Dear Evan Hansen. But I'm thinking of the guy playing Rob is the guy from... He didn't ask the correct question. ...is fantastic actor from... From Billions.

Billions. Oh, yeah, but I was... See, I'm thinking of the Tom hanks world war ii movie which band of brothers he was amazing in band of brothers and he's in of course that uh my so-called life spinoff uh what's it called homeland but rob ford and doug ford's uh and i guess there's other Fords, but their mother passed away. In early 2020, we lost Diane Ford, one of the great matriarchs of Canadian politics. And speaking of how people react to Kobe Bryant, you know, someone dies, you have to bring up their dark side.

I guess it was wondered, is it appropriate when someone dies to talk about maybe their malevolent contributions to society? I mean, this was the mother of Rob Ford. She defended him as a good boy who was fit to be mayor. At the time, there was all this chaos at City Hall. It all depends, right? When Bill Cosby dies, the first line will not be,

this is a great comedian who did all these good things. So it really depends on what you did. But! you know, did all these good things. So it really depends on, you know, what you did, but always look on the light side of life. If life seems jolly rotten, there's something you forgot. And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing. When you're feeling in the dumps, ah, be silly chumps. Just purse your lips and whistle.

That's the thing. Hey. Always look on the bright side of life. Really, we should open every memorial section with this song, I think. But who did we lose from Monty Python in January? I saw the tweet from John Cleese. Two down, four to go. The second member of Monty Python to die after Graham Chapman, but also the man who is credited as the seventh Python, Neil Innes.

We mentioned him in the December recap when he died just at the end of the year And shortly thereafter, Terry Jones Who was struggling the past few years with dementia And he died in January at age 77 And I was reminded of the fact that even after the whole Monty Python thing ran its course, just like Buck Henry, he was doing screenwriting more behind the scenes. A movie with Steve Martin called L.A. Story. Which, of course, was good, yeah.

That was written by Terry Jones. And another movie that was less successful at the time, but the fact that David Bowie starred in Labyrinth. Loved Labyrinth. From around 1986. Jennifer Connelly, I believe, is the young girl. And that was a writing credit for Terry Jones. And so we've got, what,

four members of Monty Python left to go, four more opportunities to play Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. I'll keep it on standby. Singing all the people down. Talking around. Talking around.

Me and my cat named dog. Walking high against the fog. Singing the song. Singing the song. Singing the song. Who's walking their cat named dog here? Last month in the death section, we talked about Allie Willis and how she wrote, What Have I Done to Deserve This for Dusty Springfield. The Dusty Springfield parts of that song, along with the Pet Shop Boys,

credited to a songwriter we lost in December. And here Dusty Springfield comes up again. The secret lesbian lover of Dusty Springfield in the 1960s, this woman named Norma Tanega, who died in January. Sorry, end of December. December 29th at age 80. Walkin' My Cat Named Dog,

sort of a novelty song that fits that category of songs that were bigger in Canada than anywhere else in the world, that it got way up there on the Canadian pop chart. At the time later, covered by the band,

They Might Be Giants. So this is a real music geek cult hit, Walking My Cat Named Dog and the woman behind it. At the very end of 2019, we lost Norma Tanega. Cookie, cookie, lend me your comb.

Cookie, cookie. Well now, let's take it from the top, I like how you group the novelty jams together here. This is kooky kooky. This one is way before my time, but I would have first known a little bit of who Ed Burns was because he was in the movie Grease, where he played like a Dick Clark kind of character, the host of like an American bandstand knockoff, and the character's name was Vince Fontaine

in Greece, if you remember any of that. But by that point, he was known as the star of 77 Sunset Strip. Kooky was the character, like the fawns that he could never really break out of the shadow of. I guess all these years

later, Henry Winkler's doing all right. Like a Sean Arnott kind of, what are we talking here? Yeah, one of these 1950s kind of guys, teen idols. And later on, he wrote the whole nostalgia circuit. But since we're in novelty song mode, we might as well mention who died in January, age 87. There's only one guy in the world named Ed Cookie Burns. Conjunction, junction, what's your function?

Hooking up words and phrases and clauses Conjunction, junction, how's that function? I got three favorite cars that get most of my job done Conjunction, junction, what's their function? I got and, but, and, or, they'll get you pretty far And, that's an additive, but, and, or. They'll get you pretty far. And, that's an additive, like this and that. But, that's sort of the opposite.

Not this, but that. And then there's or, O-R. When you have a choice like this or that. And, but, and, or. Get you pretty far. Conjunction, junction. We're getting closer here to our childhood. You remember Schoolhouse Rock? Of course. Conjunction Junction. We're getting closer here to our childhood. You remember Schoolhouse Rock? Of course.

Conjunction Junction. What's your function? And I'm just a bill from Schoolhouse Rock, later parodied on The Simpsons with the original voice of Jack Sheldon, who is a music director of the Merv Griffin Show, one of those Hollywood jazz trumpeters, characters all around L.A. at the time. One of those groovy cats

who we, I think, got to know most of all from doing this Schoolhouse Rock children's song. Family Guy, also at a Schoolhouse Rock parody. Of course they did. Well, if Simpsons did it, then Family Guy won't be far behind. And he died at the very end of December 2019 at age 88. Jack Sheldon.

It began with a nut and a bolt that shook his top hat with a jolt. Pee-pee crisp an idea for a munch, but with graham cookie outside for crunch. Inside the center so sweet, peanut butter cream, oh, a treat. A taste so enormously grand, made to fit in the palm of your hand. Pee-Bee Crisp, Pee-Bee Crisp, Pee-Bee Crisp. Peanut butter cream is the name of the dream. Pee-Bee Crisp, Pee-Bee Crisp, Pee-Bee Crisp. The sweet taste that is destined for fame.

Pee-pee crisps and new chocolate, yes, chocolate crisps from Planters. Can you believe that in January 2020, we marked the death of Mr. Peanut?

And you would think that a social media campaign that was based on the idea of a familiar corporate mascot dying at an old age. What could go wrong? Well, you know what went wrong. A celebrity, the most famous basketball player of all, perished in a helicopter crash.

And leading up to the Super Bowl, where they were going to do a thing where Mr. Peanut dies and have the funeral of Mr. Peanut. Right. We had a situation where the advertising agency behind Planters had to announce they were pausing the campaign because it was maybe going to seem a little inappropriate to do RIP Mr. Peanut online

at the same time that we were mourning Kobe Bryant. This is going to go down as one of the great brand debacles in all history. I don't think Mr. Peanut ever recorded an album, but there was a Mr. Peanut performance artist that ran for mayor of Vancouver, and that was the closest thing we could get. It was Mr. Peanut, like a Mr. Peanut snack. Did you ever try this thing? Brand extension of Mr. Peanut?

Maybe. How's that for a non-committal? From what we know, as we wind down this episode, they are going ahead with the death of Mr. Peanut. They're running those commercials on the Super Bowl. Mr. Peanut will be laid to rest. RIP Mr. Peanut. I don't think Ridley Funeral Home will take a corporate

mascot as a client there. But that's... I don't know. Do we allow the mascots like that and characters like that in the memorial section here on Toronto Mic Drop? Well, you like ending with somebody who died really old. And Mr.

Peanut made it to 104. Wow. I don't know why they're killing him off. And Mr. Peanut made it to 104. Wow. I don't know why they're killing him off. Let Mr. Peanut live. Like, maybe let him retire or something. He's a peanut. You know what, Mike? We left so much stuff on the cutting room floor

that I'm ready to record a two-and-a-half-hour episode all over again. But February is a shorter month, and I know we'll get back here even sooner. I was going to say come by tomorrow. We'll do part two. And that brings us to the end of our 578th show. You can follow me on Twitter.

I'm at Toronto Mike. Mark is at 1236. That's 1236. And you should subscribe to his excellent daily newsletter at 1236.ca. Our friends at Great Lakes Brewery are at Great Lakes Beer. I see a few empty cans on the table here. It's so tasty and fresh.

Palma Pasta is at Palma Pasta. Sticker U is at Sticker U. I'm on my way to the museum right now. The Keitner Group are at keitnergroup.com. Banjo Dunk is at Banjo Dunk with a C. And of course, Ridley Funeral Home are at RidleyFH. See you all next week. This podcast has been produced by TMDS and accelerated by Roam Phone.

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