And, pray tell, good reader, what were you doing, during the memorable week that these five freakish fellers became household names?

As for our kinky quintet, there is a precise record, formed from media reports, concerning the exact brand of mischief they were up to.

Well done, Mao: Chef preparing self for hungry diners

Mao, who is a performance artist from Tokyo, kicked things off by posting this hard-to-ignore Twitter message: “I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen… Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” He then proceeded to deliver exactly as promised, providing his unique interpretation of the phrase “self-catering,” for a party of five. A hundred-thousand yen, by the way, works out to $250.

Next, Rudy, 31, was spotted sans garde robe by Miami Beach police, busily eating the face of a disobliging homeless man, Mr. Ronald Poppo. Rudy ignored the urgent objections of Mr. Poppo and the investigating officers, and was consequently shot and killed by a policeman.

Much closer to home, Luka was suspected of having mailed the severed foot of Mr. Lin Jun, a Concordia University student, to the headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada, and, in a true bipartisan act, his detached hand to the Liberals. Luka, 29, posted an edited video of Mr. Lin’s butchering on the Internet.

Wayne, a 43-year-old from Hackensack, N.J., was the subject of a police intervention, when he was observed using a sharp instrument to go hackin’ into his own abdominal sac. He encouraged the constables to go away, by flinging his intestines in their direction. Then, to round out the week, Alex, a 21-year-old undergrad at Baltimore’s Morgan State University, confessed to eating his roommate, a student with the impressive, if unappetizing, name of Mr. Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie.

Alexander Kinyua, misunderstood Morgan State U underclassman

Normally these commentaries wouldn’t delve into the macabre areas concerning the mutilation of one’s self and others, or the still entirely taboo subject of cannibalism. However, there is little to be described as normal about events that took place in the week just past.

One, perhaps two, developments of this type in a given week may be registered in the News-of-the-Weird feature of your local media outlet. Three to four might constitute a trend. But, incontrovertibly, five qualifies as statistically significant. It may now be said that there are the beginnings of a societal fashion of separating bits of one’s own anatomy, or that of others, along with the potential emerging fad of consuming those body parts, or flinging them at disconcerted law-enforcement workers.

Medical and sociological authorities have not yet weighed in on this trend, but we wish to go on record as voicing our concern. We characterize these behaviors as inconsistent with the traditional ethical values and standards of a decent civilization. A decade ago, Rodney King famously asked, “Can’t we all just get along?” It may not have occurred to him to add, “… and while you’re at it, please don’t even think about removing your genitals and serving them with mushrooms and parsley to hungry strangers,” but Mr. King’s principles endure all the same.

Or do they? Perhaps, this week in May 2012, we have arrived at what has been termed a “tipping point.” Perhaps our species has become measurably discombobulated by commonly experienced factors. These will include: constant stimulation from rapidly viewed images, simulated reality, social networking, virtual role-playing, access to non-contextual information, and so on, that a permanent anomie has set in, leading to growing numbers of citizens making the unenlightened decision to slice up and/or gobble down their corporeal body – or, even more alarmingly, yours.

In a polarized political atmosphere, this is bound to become one more so-called wedge issue. Tea-party activists will insist that cannibalism, while doubtlessly undesirable and non-hygienic, should not become a pretext for one more deterrence mission by the ever-expanding federal government. On the opposite side of the fence, liberals are predictably bound to plea for understanding on the part of any boulevardier who may find his or her face masticated by a disadvantaged party, “and we recognize that you may find certain aspects of being eaten to be inconvenient, and we thank you for your assistance.”

So, is this the coming crisis? Is it possible that, as a result of embracing and elevating sedentary digital lifestyles, the enervated human body has become devalued and debased — to the extent that mutilation and consumption of self, or countrymen, is well on the way to becoming a tolerated form of expression, just another fringe lifestyle choice inching along  toward mainstream acceptance?

Five flesh-shredding incidents in seven days suggests that this stage may have already been reached, and passed.

An example would be the astounding kitsch architecture that rose in mid-century Seattle — but the locals may not have appreciated the design-triumph while slurping milkshakes in a so-called googie diner, before rolling down Denny Way to the 1962 World’s Fair. So, too, if you step back a few more centuries and hop over a continent, it seems likely that the enduring output of the Flemish Masters could only have been denigrated at inception by inappreciative or jealous art dealers.

You might not think the same principles would apply to U.S. TV situation comedies, especially those from the fallow period of the early 1980s. When revisiting the network skeds for the ‘82-’83 season, you instinctively want to firmly grab hold of your brow and yank it back up several notches higher.

It was a year of revolting old formulaic pigswill (“Diff’rent Strokes,” “Happy Days,” “Archie Bunker’s Place”), diluted leftover servings of the preceding (“The Facts of Life,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Joanie Loves Chachi,” “Gloria,” “The Jeffersons”), re-imagined Hollywood films stretched into episodic half-hours (“Alice,” “Fame,” “9 to 5,” “Private Benjamin,” “The New Odd Couple,” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”), and doddering male leads cast in unlikely roles. I refer here to Jack Klugman as keen-eyed coroner “Quincy, M.E.,” and William Shatner as stalwart street-cop “T.J. Hooker.” Subtract from this the N.F.L. players’ strike that shortened the football season by around half – we plan on returning to that subject another time – and it’s safe to say there wasn’t a whole lot to remember on the boob tube that year.

Except for Buffalo Bill, which slipped into NBC’s Wednesday-at-9:30 p.m. slot as a summer-of-‘82 replacement for the quintessential Reagan Era sitcom, “Family Ties.” The premise of the new program seemed tolerable, offering up Dabney Coleman as the caustic host of a lackluster local afternoon chat-show in Buffalo, New York.  Despite positive critical response and several Emmy nominations, Buffalo Bill failed to find an audience, and the series was canned after 26 episodes, which were shown over the course of two seasons.  The shows were gathered for a DVD box-set in 2005, which I bought off some guy in Minnesota for five bucks, a couple of weeks back.

A fiver well spent. As much as the series enjoys a fair afterlife reputation, and is vaguely remembered approvingly up here in the Buffalo/Toronto metroplex, Buffalo Bill after 30 years of steeping and mellowing comes as something unexpected (but let’s be clear, it’s the film-stock and its contents that have steeped and mellowed; never me, your reviewer.)

I certainly don’t mean to proclaim the show was years ahead of its time. In fact, today Bill seems outdated in most respects. However, its nuanced storytelling comes across as surprisingly deep, vivid and rewarding. The effect of watching the 26 parts sequentially, on a 50-inch screen without station breaks and commercial interruptions, allows you to see Bill for what it was and is: something akin to a distinguished mid-century novel as set down by, say, late-life Joseph Heller.

The eponymous “Buffalo” Bill Bittinger – the ironic use of quotation marks represents one more of the producers’ bemused in-jokes – is a bitter prick. Each installment begins with him sitting alone on the city’s Inner Harbor, skimming a rock across a body of water, with the burg’s grey skyline looming. Then, as the opening credits are screened, we see our man, a local broadcast legend, driving a boxy 1980s sedan with his name emblazoned on the doors, on his way to appear at a series of civic events.

He is Dabney Coleman, familiar filmdom heel, foil to movie good guys from Elvis on down. But within the sitcom, Dabney is Buffalo Bill, egocentric host of an hour of mundane teevee chatter on an unexceptional program in Nowheresville, USA.  Bill works with a spirited support team, each of whom may be taken as a recognizable type: the driven career-gal, the meek middle-aged gofer, the eager researcher, a pair of sassy African-American technicians, a well-intentioned boob of an executive who is in way over his head. They are bound by their contempt of their unpleasant local celeb, which in turn stems from his resentment of their casual acceptance of mediocrity.

This is old sitcom terrain, trod bare from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “WKRP in Cincinnati,” with many stops between. Or is it? Bill is no simpleton, no Ted Baxter manqué, and none of the characters emerge as they first present themselves. In fact, nothing in this Buffalo-of-the-mind is what it seems. The kick-off episode sees a simmering Bill convinced that he is about to be hired to replace a just-deceased on-air personality on 60 Minutes. He is a middle-aged man about to fulfill his longtime dream of attaining a national stage. Twenty-six chapters later, at the series conclusion, he is out of control, having burned through what he would consider to be his talent, along with his youth, his ambition, and even his hairline, in obscurity – all made worse by the realization that he’s a mere eight-hour drive from the Manhattan limelight.

Bill, vengeful ex-husband, deadbeat dad, and subversive employee, is the essential ingrate. He values nothing except his own right to dominate, and refuses to take any heed of his milieu, convinced, as he is, that it’s only a temporary detour on the route to greatness. That’s the motif common to each episode, but the inflections, and what is revealed in the margins, can be incendiary.

Pan, instructing Daphnis in pipe-playing

Actor John Fiedler, who portrayed Buffalo Bill’s Woody

It emerges, for example, that Woody, Bill’s gormless factotum, leads a parallel life as a self-made entrepreneur who runs a string of successful local businesses, and even owns the swinging bachelor pad in the luxury apartment building where Bill paces the floor and snaps gum nightly. Woody has taken it upon himself to cultivate the worthwhile inner-Bill, an obscured figure of decency that only Woody cares to see. It’s a preposterous notion — except in the mythic sense. This view would cast Woody in the role of Pan, the Greek wood-god. Pan is the son of Hermes, who was messenger to all the gods: exactly how the delusional Bill might regard himself. (Adding some further resonance to the Woody-as-Pan construct is the high, piping voice of actor John Fiedler, who also spoke as Piglet in the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons.)

Similarly, each minor character is an ornament to the story, acted by rising stars such as Academy Award winner Geena Davis in her breakout role, with other parts undertaken by multiple-Oscar nominees Martin Landau and James Cromwell.

In the series wrap-up, Bill vents every one of his bottomless frustrations on a visiting Catholic priest, during an unforgettable interview-gone-bad. He gratuitously accuses the man-of-the-cloth of molesting orphans. Bad call. The priest is first baffled and then outraged, and the predominantly Catholic community of Buffalo comes together to demand the firing of the blasphemous TV host.

This would count as edgy stuff, back in 1983. However, in light of what we now know occurred in church-administered orphanages throughout North America and around the world, it must be seen as Bittinger’s prescient send-off, foreshadowing a much more complicated tomorrow, in which bitter backbiting would become common coin.

The decision by the show’s creators to make light of the unspeakable topic of child abuse, 30 long years ago, in some way may be in keeping with the term Buffalonians use to describe their region: the Niagara Frontier. It’s no coincidence that the character of Buffalo Bill was a kind of frontiersman of the eighties, a comedic advance-scout blazing a trail for a coming generation, which came in the form of toxic broadcasters such as Glenn Beck, a new crew who failed to understand Bill’s premise, that outrage is supposed to be mined for yuks. Consequently, the series’ one last laugh lodged in your throat is Bill’s signature sign-off line: “Be good to yourselves, and be good to Buffalo.”

If only.

Who you calling ‘ungainly,’ sucker?

What does it mean that Pfizer—which is either the number one or two drugmaker, depending on ranking criteria—is paring back to its core, and anxiously ditching peripheral units such nutrition and animal health (said to be worth a combined $30 billion?)

Or, to raise what is perhaps a more ominous question: Why is Abbott, the eighth-largest drugmaker, cutting itself in half, and allowing the vivisectionists who ordered the procedure to retain the half that has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals?

These recent occurrences depict the uncertain footing of Big Pharma, that enormously successful old 20th century enterprise, as it slowly comes to terms with the discovery that the young 21st century is already one-eighth concluded.

“Slowly” being the operative term. Mention the word to your kid, or any kid (you’ll need to text them), and they are bound to respond: LMAO! SLOWLY DON’T CUT IT, H8R! LOL!!!

The young world now moves at the speed of thought. And yet, we old pharma-folk are compelled to wobble cautiously—not just by our industry’s traditions and culture, but by antiquated outside forces: the nation’s slow-to-evolve laws and regulations, and your company’s timorous policies toward stakeholders. We are compelled to be deliberative, to be process-driven, to measure progress in decades, not days. To be, forevermore, a weird curiosity from the past, the trained bear perched on the unicycle at the sparsely attended circus.

Indeed, investors have lost interest in the Big Pharma story, and sector analysts describe their job as tantamount to watching paint dry. Ask Wall Street what it thinks of the drugbiz, and this is what you will hear: “Nothing ever moves the needle.”

There was a time, very recently, when it seemed as if the fast people might be able to teach the slow people how to be fast people. Didn’t work. The principals behind Google, the dominant IT group, jumped into the healthcare sector with great enthusiasm, thinking there was much they could contribute to the Life Sciences. And then they quickly jumped back out again, shaking their heads in disbelief at what they witnessed. Officially, the decision to back away from healthcare was based on “too much exposure to litigation,” which is no doubt true. But you can easily imagine the culture clash that occurred when Google met Big Pharma.

“What are you talking about, ‘late Phase III?’ Why would you need three phases for anything? In fact, why would you need one phase? And what the hell is a phase, anyway?”

The twains just don’t meet. The differences between the fast guys (ie, the IT sector, or “them”) and the slow guys (ie, Pharma, or “you and me and Clive there in the next cubicle”) seem insurmountable.

We develop a product, spend an eternity bringing it to market—and rely on legislation and patent attorneys in order to allow us to maintain making exactly the same product in precisely the same version, for the next 14 years.

The fast guys, on the other hand, simply throw their products out, label them “beta version,” and then begin a lifetime-long process of offering continual improvements and refinements, known as upgrades. They never, never, never stop tweaking their stuff.

What about us, the slow guys? We innovate, to one degree or another, right up to the point where we get the green light from regulators. Then we set loose the field force… and prepare to start the generation-long process all over again in exactly the same fashion, back to square one and around again.

Fact: All slow businesses die, regardless of how well entrenched, or how highly regarded, they once were.

Three words prove the point: passenger railroad transportation. Every undergraduate business student grows sick of hearing case studies about the old Pennsylvania Central, whose executives continued to manage by the grand old methods of the insular, time-honored Railroad Industry—which the marketplace reviled. Customers, investors and regulators each wanted faster, cheaper, point-to-point transportation, and had no interest in hearing about the problems and limitations one faced operating switching yards on an aging rail network.

The railroad industry went from heroes to zero in 25 years. Pharma doesn’t have that long

However (as your B-school prof probably liked to babble), that became the sole focus of the Penn Central brain trust. We are unique, they told themselves. The travelling public needs us. You can’t compare what we do to what any other group does. We’re the railroad industry, for crying out loud. The world depends on us!

That internal monologue began right after World War II, and ended in federal bankruptcy court in 1970. That was only 25 years of reading consultant reports, fiddling with management structures, occasionally cutting a whistle-stop or two, and constantly changing the decor, while the business model ground to a complete halt.

The railways were lucky to exist in an age when companies were given such a generous amount of time to fail. Our companies certainly don’t have 25 years to figure out what the healthcare market currently expects from its therapy developers and providers.

We should consider that we’d be fortunate to have four or five years left to finally come to terms with the question of what Big Pharma needs to be now.

That should be more than enough time, if we begin by accepting the main point: that it’s not about pharmaceuticals any more. We’re in the business of helping people. Start by understanding how that’s different from peddling pills, and we might just begin to figure out a path forward.

Impresario Clark displays plasticware

All these elderly no-talent money-grubbing showbiz pimps and swinish 10-per-centers, along with a few of the grateful little people they helped out along the route to riches, were blinking back tears as they recalled the many things for which Dick Clark stood. They lined up to pay tribute to Dick Clark — or more accurately to Dick Clark’s giant accumulation of cash, which will live on proudly, even as Dick’s corpus is fogotten (at least until his children’s children find a way to blow through it all.)

Because Dick, visionary and moldbreaker par excellence, made it possible to take pride in being an impresario to the lowest common denominator, without ever having to learn how to pronounce either of the words, impresario or denominator. Some say he socked away a billion dollars, and in the current climate that alone will buy you three nights of consecutive eulogizing on every cable news channel, with scads left over.

He earned his cash not by telling off-color jokes in smoky nightclubs, or imitating Nixon, or arhythmically singing Fats Domino songs to middle-class white kids, or dancing unsteadily with the stars, but by creating opportunities related to the galaxy of entertainment. He was a capitalist with a thin veneer of charm and a decent haircut, just like the rest of us, only far more successful.

He gave the world not the first televised teenaged dance party, nor the best, only the most profitable. The same held true of his game show and his beauty pageant and his awards specials and his New Years Rockin’ Eve extravaganza. You’d have thought America and the World might have had enough of that schlock long before Dick Clark dealt himself in on the game. That’s why Dick Clark was able to mint all the world’s dough, while you keep loading up on lottery tickets, each week trudging your way to check-cashing parlors.

Figures such as Bill Graham, and venues such as the Fillmore East, and acts such as the Mothers of Invention rose as a welcome alternative to Clark and Kirschner and the corporatist mogels who offered the first generation of entertainment for teenagers. But in the end all the wrinkled, disillusioned hippies and the just-woke-up collectivists went pleading to Mr. Clark’s team to kindly spin their records on the radio (“Records on the radio,” the team would laugh into their sleeves), while Clarkie was slipping into his ninth decade still looking fresh as a daisy, “America’s Oldest Teenager.”

Clark had a difficult-to-define quality that set him apart from the other seminal rock ‘n’ roll disc jockeys of his era: the disgraced Alan Freed, the survivor Cousin Brucie Morrow, or the late hipster saint, Wolfman Jack. Clark, unlike the others, never gave a shit about the art, not anyone else’s, nor certainly his own. Clark was all about the money, only the money.

When filmmakers sympathetically depicted Wolfman Jack as a powerful but lonely cult figure, sucking Popsicles and howling lupine nonsense through the Mexican night (George Lucas’ “American Graffiti”), Clark was always shown as a smooth composite of all the non-charismatic whitebread local and national radio announcers of his era. Director John Waters, in his classic film “Hairspray,” featured a Clark-like dance show host he disguised by the fictitious-but-telling name “Corny Cornelius”: After all, why risk drawing the wrath of Dick Clark’s giant bag of money, and potentially ruining your entire career?

Clark paved the way for today’s new crop of exploiters and soul-crushers, exemplified by Simon Cowell, who thrives by taking the eager old hustler’s Eisenhower Era grin and enhancing it with a new-millenium gash of unadorned cruelty.

The torch is passed. So, don’t burn down the studio, asshole

And then you have Clark’s chosen successor, Ryan Seacrest, to whom the torch of smarmy bastardism was passed some miles back down the road. Seacrest is just the right sort of chap to inherit the Dick Clark mantle, and, very quickly, the mazuma, as well. Seacrest is an outright nullity, beaming phony goodwill, and radiating cheesy country-club bonhomie, oblivious that the home audience for the events he hosts is strung out on E, and twitching to trance music. He will pick up exactly where good old Dick Clark left off, because the suckers he is destined to pluck clean won’t even be aware of his presense.

The audience will be bobbing each afternoon to the numb beat, not feeling the deft hand that is right now manipulating wallet from jeans-pocket. Indeed, the shuffling hoardes don’t even seem to care. That is no small talent, and that is the remarkable gift Dick Clark was able to bestow upon the world of show business.

—

Beat the New Meatles: James, Sean, Dhani, Zak.

Flashing gang signs, and in the '80s, yet: the New Monkees

It can’t be easy to try to follow in your ole pappy’s footsteps, as some big thinker, possibly Edgar Bronfman, Jnr., must have opined. That said, someone really needs to take charge and explain to the sons of John, Paul, Ringo and George what a alarmingly idiotic notion it is to consider forming a band called the New Beatles.

I’ve known a few scions of Great Men, here and there. True to the cliche, they have all had their issues. Even when the Austin Powers films, one after another, made devastating mockery of the next gen’s predictable insecurities (“Got issues? Here’s tissues!”), they pretended not to notice. They thought the planet would quite naturally take interest in their I-got-an-intimidating-daddy predicament. And then the planet was supposed to volunteer to help out, by going out of its planetary way to offer assistance. But the planet turns out to be not that much unlike me, which is to say, coldly indifferent to the imagined problems of rich, privileged whelps.

James McCartney, Sean Lennon, Dhani Harrison and Zak Starkey should know this. And yet, here is master James, settling into middle age at 34, telling the BBC: “I’d be up for [forming the New Beatles]… Sean seemed to be into it; Dhani seemed to be into it.”

Here’s who is not into it: anyone who wishes to avoid humiliation. “Beatles & Sons, Since 1962?” An abasement waiting to happen.

Honestly, if heredity counted for anything meaningful, George W. Bush would be something other than the chortling numbskull who spent eight years in the Oval Office repeatedly jabbing pushpins into light sockets, because he liked the bad smell and sizzling noises that followed.

These New Beatles are predestined to elicit the same response as Volkswagen’s New Beetle. That is, an initial cry of, “Aw, ain’t that cute?,” followed by the sound of no customers rushing to the dealership to demand a test-drive.

A new generation of rock stars, touring under a hallowed name: It isn’t as if this is anything other than a tried-and-failed formula, illustrated by two cautionary words. New Monkees.

The New Monkees were a footnote to a footnote. Twenty years after the formation of the original Monkees — and, yes, it is odd to use the words “original” and “Monkees” concurrently — Columbia Pictures thought they could get away with re-stocking the franchise with a quartet from central boy-band casting, and thus recapture the old magic. It probably made some economic sense when the idea occurred to the studio, in 1986. Pop music had eaten itself, MTV was beginning its long fade, MP3s were waiting to be born, and the iPod was still a loose brain-cell floating in Steve Jobs’ cranium. Colpix, the owners of the Monkees’ copyright and, ahem, intellectual property, saw a chance to snare a few loose coins from a nostalgia boomlet, while revivifying a once-profitable line item.

Hence: hey, hey, here come Jared, Dino, Marty and Larry in a New Monkees weekly TV show, accompanied by an exhilarating new album of sensational new material. Mighta worked, but didn’t. The old Monkees reappeared from obscurity, represented by legal counsel. Much more to the point, audiences paid no attention whatsoever to the new crew, and the New Monkees’ boob-tube extravaganza was euthanized 13 weeks into a planned 22-episode season. Don’t bother looking for a boxed set of DVDs, or a re-released CD to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 20th anniversary. Sony, the inheritor of the Colpix catalog, wants to bury this artifact alongside a case of Mr. Pibb, your mother’s orange Saturn, and other embarrassments of the period.

Not that the studios have entirely given up on turning old show-biz acts into the lumbering dead. Finally coming this week to a theatre near you: The Three Stooges, The Movie. The film-making Farrelly Brothers (“Dumb and Dumber”) have been trying for years, without success, to get this project lensed. A version starring Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Jim Carrey (as Curly) moved toward production until saner minds prevailed. The edition due for imminent release features B-listers Will Sasso, Sean Hayes, and Chris Diamantopoulos, and I’m not ashamed to tell you that I have no clue if those individuals are professional actors, or talent-show contestants, or were previously employed as car-jockeys and lawn-boys by Brian Grazer. But the show goes on, alas. The movie also features Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino, from the “Jersey Shore” television program, starring as himself. Obviously, it takes a stooge to play a stooge-to-a-Stooge.

I’ve always maintained that you can tell a good deal about an individual by inquiring about the identity of their favorite Stooge: whether it is the sadistic and domineering Moe Howard, the damaged and oblivious Curly Howard, the lost and sweet-tempered Larry Fine. Personally, I’ve always been partial to Shemp Howard, the temporary Stooge, which places me in a minority. Shemp’s physical resemblance to the essayist H.L. Mencken has often been commented upon, and it’s true that he often came across as an ordinary citizen of his time who was pressed into service as a Stooge, potentially against his will, as a result of the incapacity of his brother, Jerome (Curly.)

Shemp was the epitome of Modern Stooge, a Howard who looked like a math teacher, literary agent, or police desk-sergeant. Jim Carrey reportedly shaved his head and gained 40 pounds in preparation for the role of Curly, which he ultimately abandoned — but the tragedy is that he might have played Shemp convincingly, without a schmear of makeup.

Shemp remains the thinking man’s Curly. He dared to be different, in the context of Stooge-dom, by appearing to be near-normal. He coined the Hee-bee-bee ululation, a tactful counterpoint to Curly’s “Woob-woob-woob.” When he died instantly in 1955 of a myocardial infarction (I am reminded through an e-mail from David Perry), it was in a cab, while lighting a cigar, after having just told a joke to a crony.

However, Columbia Pictures (yes, those swine, again) refused to allow Shemp to schlump off into that good night. Production had already begun on four more Stooges vehicles, and Shemp’s contract specifically called for four more appearances. This precedent of contractual law led to the phenomenon known as the “Fake Shemp,” whereby body-doubles, artful dialogue and other devices were utilized as Shemp-extenders, to ensure completion of the projects, despite the absence of one of the principals.

Moe: “I wonder what became of that Shemp?”
Larry: “You know, he went on deck to scout out some food.”

That is the inherent curse of the Fake Shemp — and you would have assumed that the sons of the Beatles would be more naturally attuned to the condition. Because from the very moment James, Sean, Dhani and Zak skip onstage in their collarless sport-coats, until the last, brisk Beatle-bow, every member of the pay-per-view audience will be thinking the same thought: “Those guys were okay. Say, I wonder what became of The Beatles?”

As the sly screenwriter suggests, it seemed far-fetched at that point to consider that the Fab Four’s output of 45 rpm vinyl might endure past a single summer, let alone a half-century. Their style of Teenage Music, as it was known, was meant to be regarded as outsider art. The idea that the larger culture might open the doors to this deviant sound was just plain preposterous.

Yet, here we are, as the doctor says, 50 years into the future, with fully one-half of The Beatles still shaking their shaggy heads and issuing forth new product. Ringo’s 17th solo CD has just been unleashed, to the usual mildly affectionate reviews of elderly rock critics, and accompanying sales of several dozen copies, mainly vended at his seasonal tours of Native American casino ballrooms. Meanwhile, Beatle Paul’s new collection of jazz standards, Kisses on the Bottom, sits atop the iTunes sales charts, and is being spun round-the-clock on the radio stations favored by non-teenagers.

I’ve played it. I hate it.

This is how the world has turned: We have Macca, the Fab Four’s alleged creative fountainhead, reduced to ripping off his band-mate, the supposed plodder Ringo. Or are we supposed to pretend not to remember that Ringo recorded his solo collection of standards from the ‘30s and ‘40s back in the autumn of 1969 – beating Paul to the punch by a mere 43 years?

Ringo’s “Sentimental Journey” nostalgia project is itself now dusty nostalgia. However, a quick inspection demonstrates that it is everything Paul’s “Kisses” is not, offering cleverly chosen material, briskly arranged and enthusiastically performed.  It was a vaguely audacious undertaking for Ringo, who at the time explained his shift to a pre-war sound after the Beatles’ long stretch of musical experimentation, as something he did to please his old mum. McCartney, following Ringo’s four-decade lead, has been claiming he was inspired to record his “Kisses” CD by the music his father used to enjoy.

For these similarities, there’s one big difference. Macca has seldom sounded as lost and befuddled as he does on his current record. He comes across as a man forced against his better judgment to fulfill an unpleasant contractual obligation, or else have his Ford Cortina repossessed. When he trills Uncle Arvide’s big number from “Guys and Dolls,” the excruciating “More I Cannot Wish You,” you experience a wish of your own: that some essential entertainment figure of the ‘40s, say, Jimmy Durante, will happen along and demand, “Stop the music!”

All the same, here we are 50 years into the future, and for better or worse, still listening to The Beatles. What is even more surprising is that we’re also still listening to the knock-off Beatles, the Pre-Fab Four known as the Monkees. Since the death last week of tambourine-shaker David Jones at age 66, there has been widespread reassessment of the Monkees. It was fashionable to deride the group as the no-talent assemblage of pop music huckster Don Kirschner, but it’s now mostly accepted that the Monkees had considerable merit, notwithstanding their made-for-TV origin.

How much merit? That remains an issue of some contention. It’s ceded that Michael Nesmith was a bona fide force in the country-pop movement, and Mickey Dolenz is acknowledged as one of the notable rock ‘n’ roll voices of the 20^th century. Some evaluators will grow quite animated in describing the subtle pleasures of the Monkees television show, as directed by acclaimed cinema auteur Bob Rafelson. Others assert that the Pre-Fab Four began and continue as actors impersonating rock musicians, and evidently this insistence has kept the group from being inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

My position is that the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame should be regarded as the most dubious among a roster of dubious attractions offered to a credulous public, far exceeding the Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum in Clifton Hill, Niagara Falls, Canada. I have nothing against yokels handing their lunch money over to the operators of these places, but neither can I guess why anyone might wish to have their likeness displayed in such surroundings. Rock ‘n’ roll was fashioned as rebel art, intended to smash taboos — and there is something pitiable about the impulse to preserve its disposable prizes within a grandiose cliché.

Therefore, I’ll declare that the greatest and most appropriate commemoration of the legacy of David Jones and the Monkees is in a seldom-seen TV ad for Pizza Hut, made in the early ‘90s. In this strikingly clever 30-second spot, Ringo is inspired by a new menu item at Pizza Hut to reassemble “the lads.” He looks high and low for his band-mates, mumbling that he “must tell the lads.” Instead, he manages to corral three of the four Monkees, who enthusiastically agree that the Pizza Hut offering hits the spot. Ringo looks at the camera, and appears to be accepting, as he observes, “Wrong lads.”

Wrong lads at the time, perhaps. But not nearly so bad in hindsight, particularly when we regard the sorry assortment of schlock ‘n’ roll that followed the Monkees: callow boy bands, mincing talent-contest runners-up, inexpert lip-synchers, and drug-addled divas.

***

Speaking of the latter: Look, I’m ever so sorry whenever anyone drowns in a Hilton bathtub, no less so when that person is Whitney Houston. But we need a bit of clarity, amid this current outpouring of mawkish folly. Whitney Houston was a pleasure to gaze upon, but her music was much worse than not-good. The phrase “insidious crap” springs to mind, and we’ll just go with that.

Which is a pity — because could there ever have been a figure more ideally created to become the greatest soul singer of her generation? Daughter of Cissy Houston (of the Sweet Inspirations), first cousin to the Warwick girls, Dionne and Dee Dee, godchild of the almighty Aretha, toured the land from swaddled-infancy with Sweet Inspiration Doris “Just One Look” Troy — Doris, whose career was promoted by the Beatles, and was known as Mama Soul.

Not to disparage the recently deceased, but you’d snort to think of calling Whitney Houston “Mama Soul,” or even “Niece of Soul,” or practically any other blood-relation. Whitney’s music was a vast soul-free corpus, not necessarily always painful to endure, but setting the numb, dumb soundtrack for the Reagan Era, and the many worse days that would follow.

I do not, and would not, postulate that any person must declare their cultural heritage, and speak only to that experience. It was Whitney’s artistic and commercial choice to record a quarter-century of bombastic pop nonsense, rather than something that might be termed real, or true, or authentically soulful. If her mainstream audience happened to enthusiastically eat up her product, just like the family-cartons of Hostess Twinkies you buy at Costco, that is not a bad thing, and it is not suitable for music snobs to tell her fans that they are wrong.

But, you know, those audiences were wrong. Just as the great R&B recording artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s (James Brown, Sam Cooke, Otis, Mavis and Pops, Chicago’s mighty, mighty O’Jays) may have been viewed as diminished versions of the blues progenitors of the first half of the 20^th century, Whitney happened along after the party had ended and the room had emptied. Clive Davis, the legendary head of the Columbia and Arista recording labels, caught a load of the comely teenager – perhaps, you might imagine, heard her warbling Aunt Doris’s “Just One Look” – and what he observed was a giant bag of money gesturing wildly in his direction. She resembled Leslie Uggams, rising young star of the old “Sing Along With Mitch” TV show! And just as Ms. Uggams was a perfect de-ethnicized entertainer for her newly-integrated era, all about perkiness and not feeling threatened in the malt shop, Clive could only have seen Cissy’s little girl as his budding princess o’ power pop, destined to be the next big thing, if only (and here’s a fitting challenge for the old music biz puppet-master) he could keep her appeal strictly mainstream.

Bombast and histrionics were the twin potions that Clive formulated and force-fed his protégé. If Sade exemplified grrl-cool, the Nigerian second coming of detached jazz chanteuse Astrid Gilberto, Whitney was the anti-Sade. Not merely a younger, slimmer, non-sweaty version of the Aunt Aretha, Whitney’s vocals were Teflon-coated feats of precision-engineering targeted squarely at the transitional phase of entertainment industry technology. The accoutrements of post-war soul, hand claps, honking saxophones, shouts and smashing drums were suited to low-wattage AM radio stations. The post-disco late ‘80s and the ‘90s were the time of FM and CDs, giant orchestras, synthesizers, multi-tracking – and big-screen 27-inch television machines to show the world what the artist looked like, on MTV, in low-definition. Whitney slipped into this niche, and was squarely in the right place to trill her inspirational ditty as our brave coalition troops went off to the Gulf Region the first time around. That made her the slacker version of Vera Lynn, in case anyone was looking for one.

But those carefree days of G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the first baby-boom president, were soon to end, and with that came the digital instruments of democratization in the entertainment world — Napster, and American Idol, the Pirate Bay, Rapidshare — and since that upheaval, the direction has just been down, down, down, down, down. If Whitney was the over-bowdlerized version of Aretha, now there were too many Whitney wannabes squealing their way through the nightly talent competition on television. Some were better than others, but they all emoted like R2D2, and sang like rabid coyotes, and you felt silly even pausing to take note of their names. This was the music business after the iPod, after the millennium, après-9/11, and it all sounded the same, and it all sucked.  Whitney’s music never mattered for even a nanosecond, but in this new scheme of things, music itself just didn’t matter anymore, either. The talent shows were over-producing lesser Whitneys by the busload, without the spice, but with added grams of preserving agents. We had Asian Whitneys, tattooed Whitneys, over-sufficient quantities of shemale Whitneys and a full stable of equine Whitneys, whinnying and cantering their way through horsey versions of her repertoire.

That left very little for the Original Whitney to accomplish. Eventually, she might have been cast in the role of the wise, long-suffering mother to a houseful of rascally teenagers, on a Fox TV sitcom depicting the warm home life of a washed-up former singing sensation. America and the world surely would have re-embraced her as Bill Cosby for a generation that doesn’t recall the Huxstables. As executive producer of the theoretical “Whitney!” show, Clive Davis might have demanded that she be allowed to sing a number in every 4th or 5^th episode, and there’s little doubt that she would have clawed her way back to the top, using qualities previously not required, such as heart and gumption.

Instead of which, there were pills and alcohol, which is the other, arguably less demeaning, alternative to starring in a smash hit sitcom on Fox.  Junk-abuse was the proscribed exit route for the original wild outsiders, the bluesmen and jazzbo’s, the crowd that country-club America never fully embraced. We didn’t expect to see America’s Sweetheart nodded out with the water running, like Lenny and Elvis and all the other worn-out showbiz schleppers. Nonetheless: there she is, and here we are. And if you don’t like the picture, just stay tuned for “The XYZ Factor,” followed later tonight by “Ain’t You Got Any Talent?”

As a less-depressing viewing option, you may prefer to check out the first season of “The Indian Doctor,” providing you can figure out how to view the episodes from the BBC online, wherever you may be.

The factually based yarn about a New Delhi GP who is recruited by the NHS to hang his shingle in a mining village in South Wales is one of the best things shown on television in the past several years. Heartwarming without being cloying, accessible without being mindless, the program is instructive on matters involving racism, without being preachy, treacly, or otherwise off-putting. The second season of this excellent series began airing this week.

Don’t so much as even attempt

You or I would describe these fiendish candidates with their underworld nicknames such as Mitts and Neutron and Doctor Paws and whatnot, and their supporters, as a revolting pack of ass-wipes, but that’s only because we lack B-C’s grasp of how the old noggin functions. He is a clinical psychologist and professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University, who has published extensively on the subjects of autism and Asperger Syndrome. (You may not require those exact credentials to fathom the twisted carnival of the GOP debates, but it surely can’t hurt.)

“Mean people suck,” is the assessment of a popular T-shirt slogan, but the scholar from Cambridge has many more valid insights to add, as you would expect of a scientist who has spent 30 years researching the medical underpinnings of empathy. (Here is where the terminology gets a bit dodgy. The author is able to make clear the abstruse scientific jargon – you know, the role played by your adrenocorticotropic hormones [ACTH] and what-have-you – but his effort to define the term “evil” as an absence of empathy may not seem entirely persuasive to the lay reader, especially those with spiritual leanings.)

Regions in the "Empathy Circuit"

Baron-Cohen confesses there is more, and less, to being a heartless bastard than simply lacking a quart of this neurological empathy juice. He charts the predictable course of the well-read, well-reasoned behavioral specialist, in presenting philosophical considerations such as Martin Buber’s familiar “I and Thou” construction. But this leads the reader toward the tricky business of measuring Empathy Quotient (EQ), and that’s where scientific rigor seems misapplied. It’s all very well for your company’s human resources director to babble on about EQ, as if it requires a corporate policy not to assign client-relationship responsibilities to the biggest jerks in your organization. On the other hand, do you really want job applicants to submit to MRI testing, to determine whether they have the neurological wherewithal to sell recycled ink-jet cartridges at Best Buy? That is where this science may be leading.

It seems your brain’s medial prefrontal cortex divides into dorsal (dMPFC) and ventral (vMPFC) segments, with the dorsal normally assigned the task of thinking about other people, while the ventral dwells more on the self. Baron-Cohen illustrates how the vMPFC often is determined to be defective or damaged in those who exhibit what he calls low empathy (but which others are bound to quickly recognize without the benefit of an MRI scan, as the actions of a self-centered putz.)

Intersections of Zero Negative types

It’s easy to see how this realization might cut either way. Rather than invoking a mushy outpouring of empathy toward the empathy-impaired, as they wheel their shopping cart over your toe in angry pursuit of the last box of marked-down Tide, one might conclude that nothing says, “I recognize that damage to your anterior insula may be the biological foundation of your behavior,” as plainly a sharp smack across the oblivious one’s face.

Intriguingly, Baron-Cohen outlines as many kinds and gradations of non-empathy as there are Tim Horton’s baked-good varieties. Even within the most extreme manifestations – “Zero Negative” cases, in his term – there are three sub-sets, including his Type B, which is what psychiatrists know as the Borderline Personality Disorder crowd. He helpfully provides case studies to illustrate the condition, but his depictions of these patients’ behavior are so vivid and so off-putting that you rather wish he hadn’t. Obviously, persistent acts of casual cruelty can’t hold a candle to a psychotic in full serial-killing swing, but there does seem to be something about habitual nastiness to one’s children or parents or co-workers that causes the reader to consider that the behavior of all assholes may originate in a common place.

On the other hand, he also clarifies that there is a useful side of the Zero Negative state, explaining that, damaged or otherwise, you really do need to be something of a jerk in order to thrive at certain tasks. This information leads us straight back to the remaining field in the Republican primaries.

It is good to know that some of the more bizarre positions taken by the candidates may be rationally explained. For former Senator Sick Rantorum, who counsels rape victims against thinking about aborting their unwanted child; for Eye-of-Newt Gangrene, who thinks poor children should work as janitors serving their better-off classmates; for Dr. Ron Appalling, who says the Hippocratic Oath must be secondary to the free-market economy; and for ex-governor Mittens Unraveling, who began to regard his own healthcare legislation as a poor idea, after it was adopted by President Obama: If you are diffident about characterizing these four empathy-free specimens as “evil,” on the basis of the criteria charted by Dr. Baron-Cohen, you can go ahead and call them biologically broken, marred, or Zero Negative. Doubtless that Rush Limbaugh will offer another way to put it, but to a clinical psychologist, ultimately, all these foul traits may come from the same source.

It’s his brain, Jim.

Not, however, all of the time, and the fails, when they occur, tend to be doozies. The most recent example concerns the Ontario entity improbably named ORNGE. ORNGE is one, among several, new curiosities that have sprung up routinely in Canadian medicine during the 21st Century. These novel agencies are created within our already byzantine network of health ministries, regional authorities, and other governing bodies—which are themselves often hastily constructed institutions.

These innovative undertakings are devised with laudable motives, with the aim of delivering care more efficiently and rationally, with fewer of the impediments associated with the worn-out ways of yore.

Corresponding to their newness, the incipient healthcare bodies tend to embrace the visible mannerisms of the fast-paced, lavishly financed IT sector—the high-minded mission statements, the extravagant use of consultants, the palatial headquarters, the grandiose management compensation—with only one exclusion. Unlike the IT model, these entities, owing to the Canada Health Act, are funded not with Bay Street capital, but with a portion of your income and ours. It is public dough at risk in these half-formed ventures: money that might otherwise be used, perhaps less imaginatively, for the improvement of care provided to patients, through better conditions for low-wage caregivers, or, dare we imagine, by adding efficacious new pharmaceutical agents to formularies.

But those essentials are regarded in the new climate as passé, if not part of the problem. Somehow our scarce public resources seem not to find their way to exhausted workers, or to breakthrough therapies, but land somewhere deep within the business plan of a dubious new experiment. In this giddy atmosphere, with no oversight from a bedazzled or disengaged governing authority, it is possible for irresponsible or unscrupulous managers of these new entities to quickly burn through a billion dollars of cash with no tangible outcome. That point was illustrated, infuriatingly, through Ontario’s recent, and reprehensible, “e-Health” scandal. And now it is retold, involving several of the same protagonists, through the ORNGE fiasco.

The evidence behind this scandal continues to unfold, with breaking details available online here.

Smitherman, Ontario's ex-health minister

ORNGE is a “non-profit” transport-medicine agency created in 2005 under then-Health Minister George Smitherman. Mr. Smitherman consented to transfer the province’s assets to the startup for the sum of one dollar. According to the group’s website, the chief task of ORNGE is to “link hospitals together enabling access to specialized care for the people of Ontario.” If that sounds a tad non-specific, that’s only the beginning of the problem. As was the earlier case regarding the now-notorious agency e-Health Ontario, ORNGE instantly became affected by a severe case of mission-creep, and the inevitable accompanying symptom, secretiveness.

Ontario taxpayers sank $150 million annually into the operations of this service, only to discover that the air-ambulance operation had altered its intended course. Reportedly, management had quietly established a web of private businesses vaguely affiliated with the non-profit entity, outrageously including a scheme to sell international health insurance to Saudi billionaires. Investigative reporting by Kevin Donovan of the Toronto Star suggests that the province was to receive a three per cent share of the profits of these non-core ventures, while the privately held operation would retain the remaining 97 per cent. The venture has also been marked by stupefying levels of management compensation, with founder Dr. Chris Mazza pocketing $1.4 million as his annual stipend. There are reports of systemic improprieties involving Dr. Mazza and his team, which are now under investigation by forensic accountants.

Ironically, Dr. Mazza, a go-getting former ER physician, is now on medical leave, presumably receiving the full attention of Ontario’s publicly funded healthcare system.

If the ORNGE cock-up can be said to represent anything, it underlines the extent to which the delivery of services has become an unwieldy—bordering on unsteady—mission. It is one thing for the operators of the privately owned HMOs in the United States to rapaciously reward themselves at the same time as denying patients access to medical services. Canadian are continuously reminded by politicians, during elections, that we are better than that. But, are we? For, what does it mean when the Canada Health Act is invoked to dissuade potentially worthwhile private-sector initiatives—only to find that the Act opens the door to allow gross malfeasance by scavenging insiders? You ask: If healthcare is a sacred trust, where is the oversight? Where is the vigilance?

Where, indeed? With operating funds casually depleted by billions, and virtually nothing to show for it, all that’s left now is the 50-year-old dogma of Medicare. For millions of Canadians who are disgusted by the plundering of our healthcare system, and outraged by an absence of accountability at the highest levels of government, pieties and doctrine are no substitute for managerial competence.

Get ready to take them away, Rusty

By “bad,” we are not referring to routinely mediocre, ineffective, uninspiring or non-creative advertising; rather, we aim to draw attention to campaigns that are egregiously insulting to consumers, to the culture, and to human civilization.

To qualify for an Amphon, an ad must invoke a reaction from the viewer that would result in any logical and reasonable person demanding a lengthy jail sentence for the parties responsible. (The legal justification for insisting upon incarceration comes under the French lèse-majesté precedent, whereby it is a offence punishable by a jail term to offer an insult to the state. Thus, the Amphon is named to honor Mr. Amphon Tangnoppaku, a 61-year-old resident of Thailand who this year was convicted under a lèse-majesté provision, after sending offensive text messages to Queen Sirikit, the Thai monarch. Amphon is currently serving a 20-year stretch. That seems about right.)

So. Mr. Bailiff? Please stand by, as we are about to announce the three Canadian winners of Amphon Awards, for the year 2011. And here they are:

•  The BRONZE AMPHON goes to the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, for their campaign known as “Dalton McGuinty is the Taxman.” Proverbially snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory, these ads miraculously turned Ontario’s widely unpopular two-term Premier from a reviled lame-duck identified with eight years of unremittant scandals and ineptitude, to something very different and unexpected: the pitiable target of a bully’s taunts. The creators of this disastrous campaign didn’t bother to articulate the vision or policy ideas of the sponsor, PC leader Tim Hudak, likely because they miscalculated public sentiment, and deduced the province was crying out for anyone-but-McG. Which, arguably, they were — up to the precise point when Mr. Hudak’s people unleashed these uncalled-for TV spots, laden with sarcasm and negativity. Political attack-ads seldom backfire, but these did, allowing the Premier to crawl back into office and improbably form a minority government.

•  The winner of the SILVER AMPHON is a familiar name to those who follow the Bad Ad scene. It’s Rogers Communications, with their late-2011 campaign called “Free Tablet Offer.” Rogers, by word and deed, have maintained a longstanding habit of openly insulting their mobile-phone customers. Rogers has become famous for their usual practice of dangling a so-called “free” gee-gaw, contingent upon the client entering into an expensive long-term contract (which always contains convoluted terms, disguised service fees and onerous early-exit penalties.) It is a fact that these dodgy practices by Rogers, along with those undertaken by their few competitors, have spawned the creation of an entire federal agency, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS.) It is also true that the number of complaints to CCTS rose by 115 per cent in 2011, over the preceding year. Additionally, there are numerous web sites and forums devoted to discussing the dubious tactics of Canadian mobile phone providers: A Google search of the phrase “I hate Rogers” returns a remarkable 7.6 million results. That number is roughly equal to the number of the company’s Canadian customers.

The contempt may be mutual. Rogers’ TV advertising has been distinctively snide in tone, often to the point of appearing openly contemptuous of its customers. The spots airing in Q4 of this year represented a new level of belligerence (watch one here.) The spokesman for the offer is an unpleasant young man who seems to have deluded himself into thinking, thanks to the current promotion, that he’s gotten the better of Rogers. This leads him to boast insufferably, in his wife’s presence, that he plans to purchase phones as presents for his children, simply so that he can obtain a “free” tablet. She makes a mild, passing suggestion that they share use of the tablet, at which point he conveys to the camera his open disdain for his spouse, and her wifely entreaties. This is how Rogers sees its customers: Vain, stupid, self-absorbed, easily duped. The same actor-portraying-weasel makes his unwelcome return appearance in a second spot, where he continues to bask in his ability to get one past his phone company, at which point he flamboyantly rejects the friendship of the cohort with whom he is watching a football game on television. Welcome to Rogers World, where there is no virtue or verity — no regard for truth, beauty, love, fellowship, or family — that counts for more than the vague promise of getting another crappy new toy for “free.”

• With that, we can now reveal the recipient of this year’s GOLD AMPHON. For several years now, the financial institution, TD Canada Trust, has been consistently waging its “Grumpy Old Men” campaign, which depicts the elderly in a mocking light. You know how the contemporary image of the senior Canadian is that of a vigorous, energetic, engaged citizen still active and happily making valuable contributions to our evolving society? In the vision presented by this big bank, you can forget all that. TD deploys two decrepit oldies as figures of ridicule, who have been trotted out for the sole purpose of standing in contrast with their dynamic, au courant money-lending operation.

On one level, this might be considered an audacious creative approach. After all, how many hundreds of billions of dollars have Canadian seniors placed in low-yield accounts in TD Canada Trust, and how badly does the bank want to risk pissing them off by portraying them as laughing-stocks — dehumanized props, unable to do anything, except kvetch into the camera? But, that’s just it. It’s as though, in the mind of TD, it’s not even worthwhile to imagine the consequences of offending that segment of the population. Aging Canadians, according to this view, are nothing more than the lumpen bodies you step around, on your way to conduct your important banking affairs. The two clueless fuddy-duds in the TD spots seem to play no role other than as objects. They are not fellow-citizens, neighbors, relatives, retired ex-colleagues, war-veterans, or your future self. They are caricatures, cynically objectified for the potential profit of someone trying to sell you a term-deposit, mortgage or car loan. And, make no mistake, these ads proclaim that by the time you’ve finished repaying your bank debts, the only interest TD will ever take in you is as something to point at, and laugh.

It’s stunning that any major institution would insult a segment of its depositors, with such casual cruelty, for so long a period, without resulting in a long series of complaints to a provincial Human Rights Commission. But, that is the Canadian way, to shrug in response to aggrievement. In many countries, those who give offense to such an extraordinary degree would answer not to a mere human rights tribunal, but to the criminal courts.

You may disagree with such draconian measures. You may feel that when a company insults its constituency with Bad Ads, it is sufficient punishment to avoid doing business with that organization. However, we say to you bleeding hearts: Nuts to that. Put the offenders behind bars.

That is the essential thinking behind the lèse-majesté legislation, and that is why these awards are named after Mr. Amphon Tangnoppaku. In a truly just world, the recipients of the 2011 Amphons, those parties responsible for perpetuating the year’s most outrageous Bad Ads, would have already been photographed and finger-printed, have completed the perp-walk, and would right now be taking their place alongside the unhappy Amphon, in detention, where for the next 20 years, the only audience for their disrespectful utterances will be… each other.

Exposing his money to Canada still nags at Naguib Sawiris

I’m shaking my head in wonderment over the international telecom mogul who proudly goes by the imposing handle of Mr. Naguib Sawiris. I’ve devoted much serious effort to analyzing his name, using state-of-the-art anagram-finding technology, and I am now able to report that there are many revealing phrases concealed therein. By far my favorite is: “I saw gab-is-ruin.”

So true, so true. “Gab is ruin,” and it has been ever thus for consumers, as we regard the monthly bills from our mobile telephone carriers.

Mr. Sawiris saw this, and did more than merely observe. Two years ago he acted upon his vision by investing a half-billion dollars in a Canadian mobile telecom startup known as Wind Mobile. (If only Mr. Sawiris had performed the due diligence of seeking out anagrams within that brand, he would have found “I’d blow mine,” which, regrettably, appears to have foretold how his investment would perform.)

Last week Mr. Sawiris offered this forthright comment to the Toronto Star regarding his decision to sink dough into a Canadian business proposition: “In retrospect, it was a mistake.”

Mr. Sawiris flew in from Egypt, filled with big plans for his service, which operates in two dozen countries. But what Naguib Sawiris could not have understood is that Canada is not a country in the same sense as other countries, such as, say, Luxembourg or Slovakia.

Similar to those other jurisdictions, we issue currency, and passports, and maintain a state broadcasting service, display a smartly designed flag over courts and post-offices, and, all in all, evince a fairly presentable citizenry. But, to a greater extent than certain other nations, Canada has only ever been about one thing, and that is protecting the interests of its business establishment.

That’s the singular, overarching principle that forged this great nation out of disparate territories, built the railroads, tamed the wilderness to harvest and ship the natural resources, settled the Golden West and the uninviting lands north of the 55th parallel, established the Wheat Board and the Dairy Board, left the banks and underwriters alone to do their thing, created and perpetuated our unique culture. And, to enable the preceding accomplishments, Canadians devised the protective tariffs that kept the foreign robber-barons from acquiring and defiling our great commercial institutions; that is, until recently.

When Canada became a signatory to the supranational trading bodies created at the tail-end of the 20th century — your NAFTA, your GATT — it was suddenly a requirement that we become less obvious in using regulations to prop up the tiny number of groups that had thrived under our traditional mercantile system. And so we complied, but only to the extent of making it less obvious. The revised regulations seemed cleverly inspired by Barry Levinson’s great movie “Avalon,” especially the comment made by the teacher, after a student imploringly asks if he can go to the bathroom: “Yes, you can. But, no, you may not.”

That is essentially what Canada’s telecommunications regulators told poor Naguib Sawiris: Yes, indeed, foreign man, you can compete with our fat, sassy domestic suppliers, and certainly we wish you loads of luck. But, at the end of the day, no, you may not.

And so Wind Mobile, along with Mobilicity, and Public Mobile, and the other newcomers to the Canadian cellular scene, find themselves blocked by arcane stipulations that somehow seem not to pose much of an impediment to the three established providers, which in this case are Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

If you are used to this kind of distinctively Canadian situation, and it exists in absolutely every sector, you learn to merely shrug and mutter about it over your Tim Horton’s bagel. But, it will go without saying, that is not Naguib Sawiris’ way.

He calls Bell, Rogers, and Telus “pampered” – bound to be regarded as a hurtful descriptive — and demands to know, “Why would an Egyptian like me be in 25 countries, and a big company [like Bell, Rogers, and Telus stay] here? Because they’re pampered. How can you create innovation if you close up yourself like that? Why don’t we have Rogers in the U.K. or Germany? Why is Vodafone everywhere? Why is France Telecom everywhere? What’s the argument? I don’t see it.”

Of course, he doesn’t see it. That’s because, unlike Bell, Rogers, and Telus, he isn’t entirely fixated on cheesy little acts of prestidigitation intended to short-change the local yokels. Wind Mobile is so clueless to the ways of Canadian telecom that they don’t even charge the infamous monthly “system access fee” that Ted Rogers fabricated, and his heirs are still slapping on my monthly invoice. (Learning of Mr. Sawiris’ travails made me curious enough to contact Rogers to ask about the additional seven bucks I’m still required to fork over each month simply because Ted could never resist the urge to spearhead any small-scale swindle. “I thought Ottawa told you to stop billing these bogus charges,” I told the service representative. “That won’t apply to you,” was the response. “You’re still on a three-year contract.” You see? Sad, sorry Wind Mobile is ill-equipped to even think of keeping its customers captive through long-term contracts. Their middle-eastern philosophy of unaffected plain-dealing may suit a transaction in a Cairo bazaar, but in Calgary it will be regarded as something worse than merely suspicious.)

Naturally, the Rogers group didn’t need to respond to Mr. Sawiris’ criticisms about remaining parochial and cloistered; but they did, through Ken Engelhart, a regulatory affairs vee-pee. The Globe & Mail reports Mr. Engelhart’s comment that his company “once operated a U.S. cable business, but sold it in 1989 to invest further in Canada’s wireless sector.” Well, actually, that’s not the whole story. As part of its rationale for seeking permission to acquire Maclean Hunter, which owned cable systems in the New York City suburbs, Rogers persuaded Ottawa regulators that Canada needed a national “champion” to compete on a worldwide basis with global media giants such as News Corporation, and the like. Shortly after getting regulatory assent, Rogers decided they didn’t need to take on the entire world after all, or even take on Fort Lee, New Jersey. They ditched the Maclean Hunter asset, and concentrated on noodling out penny-ante schemes to squeeze a few extra nickels out of the domestic Canadian market, where the tough boys and bad girls they encountered in the vicinity of New York City were always turned back at the border.

Handed the chance to compete against the world’s best, Ted Rogers and his cadre did not much care for the odds, and high-tailed it back to their well-appointed club on a leafy street in Toronto, where Gus the barman never fails to make solicitous small talk about your children, doesn’t waste precious moments asking if you’d care for your usual order, and never bothers to ask you to sign a chit. We all know each other here. It’s true that occasionally one of the members will run afoul of some out-of-town chancers, or encounter some bad luck in any of its various forms, or fall victim to unforeseen circumstance. Pity about the Eaton family, wasn’t it? Always sad to see those you know so well ripped to small pieces by sharks.

But, you know, there’s nothing at all wrong with liking things the way they are. And one other lovely thing about being here is that there’s never a problem locating a parking spot not too far from the canopy that leads to the front door entrance, where the door is held open for those who belong. That’s what makes this our home, all the expected little niceties. The very word “home” will convey an exact meaning. Home should always be – homey.  Comfortable.

This is the mind-set of the very business class that Naguib Sawiris so horridly calls “pampered.” Well, how would the man from the land of the pyramids ever understand us? He’s not in the club, and he will probably continue to expose his resentment and frustration, even after Ken Engelhart thoughtfully has taken the time to sum it all up for him, as he did for the Globe & Mail reporter. “The fact that we are very efficient,” said Engelhart, “is one reason why I think [Wind] and the other new entrants are finding it so difficult to compete in Canada.”