Kennedy Gordon

I am not very bright. This is no secret, because I tell people this all the time, and they laugh because they think I’m joking. But I learned, many years ago, the Dave Foley trick that involves sounding like I know what I’m talking about. Arching one eyebrow works, too. Wait, Dave Foley was pretending to not speak English. I got mixed up there.

Lately, my mental misfiring has been brought to the fore thanks to the recent change in our area code to 10-digit dialling. Now we have to dial the area code before the number, even if we’re calling next door. This has presented some challenges for me.

• I don’t know anyone’s phone number. I don’t even know my own. I keep a little card on my work phone with my office and cell numbers on it so I can rhyme them off confidently while playing phone tag, but ask me on the street and I have no clue.
• The only way I get a number into my phone is to save it when someone calls me. Now I have to get those people to call me again so I can save their numbers wth the “705″ in front, but I can’t, because when I press the button for their name, it doesn’t work, because I didn’t dial the area code, and I can’t dial the area code because I don’t know the number.
• For some reason, I remember my childhood phone number, but none of my adulthood home phone numbers.
• This is because of speed dialling, which has been around for about as long as I have been a grownup. My home number is “1.” Work is “6.” My mother is “2.” The pizza place is “3.” On my cell phone, I just click on the name of the person I want to call.
• I do know a few numbers by heart, but I know them only as patterns to hit. Ask me what they are, and I couldn’t tell you. Now that there’s an extra three digits to type, my rhythm is off.
• We are hardwired to type a “1″ before an area code, so that has been a tough habit to break. The other day, I was working away in my home office, so I used my cell to call upstairs to the living room from my studio to get someone to bring me a coffee, and I hit the “1″ first, and no coffee appeared, which I found confusing. I ended up having to put The Bionic Woman on pause and go get it myself.

Anyway, my significant other recently gave up her cell phone, preferring to go without, which had nothing to do with the thing about the coffee, I think. I myself am on my dozenth or so phone since the mid-90s, a list that has included that big chunky Motorola brick, but I am considering following her lead. Dialling is just too hard now.

Here’s my younger son, Tarzan, reminding the world how he got that nickname. Fifteen feet up, people. “I guess I’ll be Robin for a while,” he once told me, “but only until I get my drivers’ licence. Then I’ll be Batman.”

One of the most well-known Christian apologists of the 20^th century was an Irish-born British writer named Clive Staples Lewis, better known as CS Lewis. From his Screwtape Letters to his manifesto, Mere Christianity, from Earth to Mars to Venus to Narnia to Charn, Lewis explored the way humans deal with good and evil, faith and redemption, in accessible ways that sold millions of copies and, in many cases, slipped under the postwar atheistic radar and taught people about faith processes before they even realized it. Join us on the podcast as Josh explores the work of Lewis and Laura talks about one of his heirs apparent, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, as we cast a spell or two at Books You Should Read.

Why am I a journalist? Really, folks, I ask myself that all the time. Growing up, I had no ambition to sign on with an industry that guarantees an amazing combination of low pay, terrible hours and the potential for relocation to rural Saskatchewan. I wanted to be a detective, or a cartoonist, or possibly Batman. Becoming a journalist? It just happened, mostly because it’s the family business, and I grew up surrounded by media types and just slowly drifted into the trade everyone around me did so well.

Here I am, 25 years later, still doing it. And I find myself thinking, almost daily, how lucky I am: I earn a living by learning about things, talking to people, and writing about them. With occasional video, audio and photography. I am one of those lucky people who is paid to be creative.

But the industry is changing. You know this. We know this. Newspapers are drying up far faster than any of us expected, but that’s okay; information is information, and whether we get it to you on a piece of newsprint or on an iPad, the same rules apply. This is why real actual journalists will always be needed, and bloggers will always come in at a distant second, except for me, because my blog is mighty cool.

A friend and fellow ink-stained wretch with the epic name Johnny Size posted this link on Facebook today, and I had to share it with you. It’s a basic breakdown of rules for journalists, some common sense writing that explains how we approach our work. Yes, we are writers — but having seen many “writers” flee the business after attempting to become journalists, it’s clear that what we do is its own animal.

You can read the article here.

That says it all. Clarity, brevity and simplicity, combined with respect and a genuine desire to inform. Pure and simple, folks. That’s journalism.

Johnny Size wears shorts and sandals all winter long, but that’s another story.

More than a week after our brand-new super-high-powered industrial-strength snowblower was delivered, it still hasn’t snowed enough for me to use it. And this, I can tell you, is offending me as a Canadian.

For the first three winters that we lived in this house, with our 100-foot driveway, I made good use of our third-hand 10 hp snowblower, a banged-up machine with suspiciously spray-painted parts. It took me weeks to get it running in the first place, cleaning a decade of gunk out of the motor, replacing the blackened spark plug and, in general, pretending to know what I was doing. Eventually, the ancient electric starter fired up the guts of the thing, and I was able to battle Old Man Winter with super machine power:

Last year was different: I used the thing twice, because there wasn’t any snow. You probably noticed this, too, but let me tell you, for a boy from Lake Superior country, a winter like that is like something from a science fiction movie. So when that ancient green machine suddenly self-destructed in February (it came apart like my ’86 K-Car, all at once, and in grand style), it really didn’t matter.

So we have a new snowblower, a bigger, much more powerful model … and no snow. It all melted. We had robins in our yard on Monday, for pete’s sake.

Enough of my whining. I really wanted to tell you a good-news story about all this. Remember that big storm we had a few Sundays ago? We were snowed in, our vehicles buried at the end of 100 feet of two-foot-deep drifts. Remembering a flyer we had received from a neighbourhood teen offering his services, and snowblower, we called him up. At this point, we did the math, called David Phillips, and concluded that it would be cheaper to pay this kid $15 a plow over the winter than it would be to buy a new snowblower. So we called him. And he showed up. With a shovel.

“Are you a little nuts?” I asked him.

“My snowblower broke,” he said.

“You can’t shovel this by hand,” I said, which actually means I can’t shovel it by hand, but then again, I am old and rickety. He proved me wrong, neatly clearing our driveway in about 90 minutes.

And he would not accept anything more than the $15 he had initially proposed, back when he had a working snowblower. “I said $15, so that’s what it is,” he said, also mentioning that he had four more driveways to do. I figure this kid earned less than $100 for a day of hard physical labour, moving a few tons of wet, heavy snow.

We need more teenagers like that kid. I felt kind of bad letting him know that we ended up buying a snowblower — but we did pay him more than the $15 in the end.

Anyway, it’s snowing now, and I don’t care if it’s an inch of dust in the morning. I’m firing up Big Red.

• Note: I offered the old one for sale on Kijiji, describing its faults in full and suggesting it as a potential battleship anchor, and got 32 offers to buy it. I just don’t understand people.

I’ll tell you whether I kept the moustache or not. Tomorrow. Maybe.

We’re down to the last few days here, folks, which means my new moustache is not long for this earth. Elizabeth has Dec. 1 circled on the calendar, and she has already bought me a fresh new razor. It has a ribbon on it and is sitting beside the sink. However, I am leaning toward keeping my moustache; please don’t tell her.

• Reason to keep it: A TV reporter told me I was “rockin’ the ‘stache!”
• Reason to shave it: A different TV reporter told me I “look like a terrorist.”
• Reason to keep it: I am told I finally look my age.
• Reason to shave it: I am told I finally look my age.
• Reason to keep it: “You look like Tom Selleck.”
• Reason to shave it: “You look like Mario.”

I’ll probably shave it. But if I don’t, my next step will be the purchase of a Detroit Tigers cap. In the meantime, we could use a few final donations here. Remember, every cent goes to help fight prostate cancer.

No, not that one. This is something I wrote back in the early 2000s; it was serialized in The Sudbury Star, the paper I worked for at the time.

It’s a story about a kid, Santa, Christmas, elves and an accountant I knew in real life.

This comes from The Daily Bark, and is an interesting look at how classified advertising has evolved. This is something we in the newspaper business watch closely.

Someone called me “Cheech” the other day. This is not good. But it’s for an important cause, so I can live with it. Remember, you can make a donation here to help fight prostate cancer.