Monday, September 02, 2013

Great Labour Day parades and fall fairs

Desboro Fall Fair to start off the weekend and Labour Day Parade in Port Elgin to end it out.

These annual events fit into the cultural fabric of one’s life when involved with the populist farmer-labour movement.

Since last year, have been glad to finally be home to celebrate them, instead of being at university on campus getting ready for a frosh week that never seems to end until convocation.

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Television Ontario's Saturday Night at the Movies final curtain night

Wonderfully classic triple feature series involving War Time Germany themed films, delivered by Thom Ernst, and an epic episode of the Interviews, being a years of conversation special sharing some memorable and never-before-seen memorable movie moments from its archives to its loyal viewers, was the way Television Ontario's Saturday Night at the Movies drew its final curtain night for its fans across the province and beyond. Having a look back at the originally hosted Elwy Yost program, which showing the Swedish three chambered Through a Glass Darkly of Ingmar Bergman as its first film on March 30, 1974, the episode made it clear that independent foreign, like their Hollywood domestic counterparts, would be treated justly under the same critical eye. I, like many of its followers in Cottage Country, rural and northern Ontario, watched the show, for the past year at least, from off of the internet, after the network was pulled out from the conventional analog over the air transmitter signals and into the digital world by broadcasting with a direct to cable high definition feed.

That change I believe lead to the boldness of the government to make more unpopular changes, such as cutbacks at current affairs that downsized Studio 2 to The Agenda, eventually cutting out SNATM, quite like the equivalent of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC, ending Hockey Night in Canada, or HNIC.

For what it is worth, this is just another one of those symbolic changes we see politically by those pointed little heads, or Spitzköpfe, at Queen's Park in Toronto, who care not for the high quality and way of life of those in Cottage Country, rural and northern Ontario, ones that create a lower standard of living and cost us culture whose currency we cannot replace. Education, was the key element in films shown by Yost, who also once hosted Passport to Adventure on CBC, about 1,500 in a span of almost 40 years, thanks to various producers, researchers, writers and educators through York University's Film 101 segment, involved the knowledge and understanding of characters and situations to educate its viewers on numerous issues of societal importance, for Yost especially being spiritual. When those of us, young and old, who still had free time to pop some corn, comfortably sit down, take Yost's advice of "Now it's time to turn those lights down a wee bit low." and let the movie move us beyond the backyard and outback to another time, place and community to learn about others elsewhere, those were the days we remember best which are now and for the rest of your life memories.