The absolutely last place I ever expected to learn anything important was sitting in front of the television watching the Academy Awards.

I gave up watching the annual awards show years ago, finding it silly and boring. Hollywood and its elites at their worst.

I’m not the only one. Viewership of the awards show has declined over the past decade with the 2021 show seeing a 56-per-cent drop in viewership from the previous year.

But there I was Sunday night, sprawled in my TV chair, watching unkempt and badly dressed men (and very loosely clad women) movie stars smirking at badly told jokes.I ended up in front of the TV because it was a bitterly cold night (well into the minus 20s considering the wind chill) and I needed to stay up late feeding the woodstove so it would build good coals for overnight.

And that’s when I learned just what an angry and violent place our world has become.

My eyelids were starting to droop when Will Smith, who won the best actor Oscar, jumped from his seat in the audience, strode to the stage and slapped show host Chris Rock in the face. 

At first, I thought it was a pre-planned piece of awards show silliness, but it was a real slap, delivered with real anger. Smith returned to his seat, and shouted “keep my wife’s name out of your (expletive) mouth.”

Rock, a stand-up comedian, had made a very stupid attempted joke about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith, who appeared at the show with a shaved head look.

“Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait to see it . . . ,”  Rock cracked to Pinkett Smith. 

It was a reference to the 1997 GI Jane movie in which Demi Moore shaved her head to portray a Navy Seal recruit. Pinkett Smith shaved her head because she has been diagnosed with alopecia, a hair loss condition.

Not very funny and easy to understand why Smith was upset, although his reaction surely would have been calmer and more reasonable in a less angry world.

It was a scene that supports a 2020 – 21 Gallup poll finding that the world is becoming more unhappy and angrier.

The poll, called the Global Emotions Report, surveyed 160,000 people in 116 countries and found the world a sadder, angrier, more worried and stressed-out place than any time in the last 15 years.

We read, hear and view stories about how angry and intolerant the world has become. But when actors start assaulting each other live on international television you know that intolerance and anger is out of control.

The Academy Awards show was followed by late night television news reporting more doses of anger and intolerance. The lead item was angry reaction to U.S, President Biden saying Russian president Putin “cannot remain in power.”

The media and others made this into the U.S. president calling for regime change in Russia. It wasn’t. It was simply Biden’s opinion that Putin is a brutal butcher who should not have power over anything. 

That’s what he thinks, that’s what he said out loud. So, what’s to be shocked or angry about?

However, in an angry and intolerant world there is no time nor patience for thinking things through and trying to understand what someone has said or done. Contradiction and yelling are quicker and easier.

What’s interesting – and hopeful – about Sunday’s Academy Awards is the contradiction between the show itself and the movies nominated for awards.

The show participants appeared to be a stressed, unhappy bunch – angry and violent in the case of Will Smith; uninformed or intolerant in the case of Chris Rock.

Many of the movies being celebrated, however, were about how understanding and love can overcome anger, intolerance and tribalism to make for a better world.

CODA, King William and West Side Story are movies with sadness, anger and violence but they give viewers a sense of hope for a better future. Even The Power of the Dog, which I thought was a bad film while others loved it, shows us that accepting and struggling to overcome our problems can make the world a less angry and better place for all. 

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There are a couple dozen versions of Psalm 22:20, depending on what Bible you read.

After watching the Oscar-nominated movie The Power of the Dog, I have a version of my own: 

“Deliver me from bad storytelling, and my precious time from pretentious filmmakers.”

Netflix’s much-ballyhooed movie about toxic masculinity is pretentious and really bad storytelling. Thomas Savage, author of the 1967 novel, must be squirming in his grave over how director Jane Campion fuzzified his story.

The Power of the Dog is expected to win big Sunday night at the annual Academy Awards. It has been nominated for 12 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. 

If it does, we’ll have yet another example of a world that has lost focus.

This movie has no focus. It’s based on a good story told so vaguely that it is hard to figure out. 

Many movie goers like a movie that has them a bit befuddled and trying to figure it out. The good movies leave some clues that help solve the puzzle and make us proud at doing so. This one leaves us so few clues that we walk away frustrated.

Campion has chosen to satisfy herself instead of her audience. She made a pseudo-intellectual film designed to gather prestige, critical acclaim and awards. The audience gets a collection of underdeveloped pieces that never come together to tell a powerfully interesting story. 

The greatest fault of The Power of the Dog is its lack of energy. It’s like looking into a bowl of freshly-cooked spaghetti. 

It is sort of a western that has been criticized as a slow horseback ride. The opening 45 minutes would cure the worst cases of insomnia.

Strong criticism has come from American western actor Sam Elliott who described it in words that cannot be used here. He also said the cowboys in the film are like Chippendales dancers who “wear bow ties and not much else.”

“They’re running around in chaps and no shirts.” 

Good stories become great stories when left alone to tell themselves. They become lesser stories when self-centred filmmakers try to manipulate them into something that they are not.

Some folks who liked The Power of Dog tell me I need to watch it again to better understand it. Sorry, but once is enough. It has great cinematography and some decent acting, but wet noodle story treatment.

The only other Oscar-nominated film I’ve seen this year is West Side Story, the recent adaptation of the 1961 musical classic that won 10 Oscars. This new one, done by Steven Spielberg, is nominated for seven.

It is a great movie because Spielberg and company have not tried to turn the basic story into something it isn’t. They’ve let it tell itself, making changes needed to put it into the 21st century, but the basic story, and its important messages, are the same.

One brilliant change was the replacement of drugstore owner Doc with his widow, Valentina, played by 90-year-old Rita Moreno, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as the fiery Anita in the 1961 version. 

In the new version Moreno sings (in her own voice) “Somewhere,” the iconic ballad that yearns for “a new way of living . . . a way of forgiving.” In the original movie, it was a duet by star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria.

Unlike The Power of the Dog, West Side Story leaves no audience puzzled. Its themes of tribalism and bigotry are crystal clear. It is a well told story of a world torn apart by racism, poverty and lack of hope. 

It is, however, a story in which leave opens the possibility that love can prevail and make the world a better place.

I won’t guess which movies will take away Oscars Sunday night. It doesn’t really matter to me. Awards are simply awards based on someone’s feelings.

As my mother use to say about such things:

“Everyone to their own taste, said the old lady as she kissed the cow!”

What really matters is that great movies are being made from great stories. The Power of the Dog, in my view, is not one of them.

 By Jim Poling Sr.

From Shaman’s Rock

“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” American baseball star Yogi Berra was famous for saying.

Yogi has been gone for a while now, but his words live on and have never rang truer than during the continuing Russian bombardment of Ukraine and slaughter and displacement of its people.

This week is the 82nd anniversary of another Russian attempt to invade and enslave a neighbour. That invasion, a mirror image of what Mad Vlad is attempting in Ukraine, became known as the Winter War.

The news media, certainly the sites that I follow, have not mentioned the Winter War and its similarities to what is happening now in Ukraine. However, John Ward, a journalism colleague with a sharp mind for history honed through 46 years at The Canadian Press, reminded some of us.

The Winter War began on Nov. 30, 1939 when Russia (then the Soviet Union) did some false flag shelling as a pretext for invading Finland. The Soviets said they needed some Finnish territory to secure their northern borders, but research has indicated the plan was to capture all Finland and install a Communist puppet government.

Often fought in minus 40 to minus 45 Celsius temperatures the war lasted only 105 days, ending March 13, 1940. The Soviets suffered heavy losses and worldwide disdain before withdrawing, while agreeing to a peace treaty that gave them nine per cent of Finnish territory.

The poor performance of the  Red Army  encouraged Adolf Hitler  to launch Operation Barbarossa, code name for an invasion of the Soviet Union. The invasion was not successful but the Soviets suffered more than two million casualties.

If you held a mirror to the Finland invasion, you would see Ukraine today – bombed residences, dead women and children and a cruel Russian leader lying through his teeth to justify the horror.

The Soviets sent 450,000 troops against Finland but Finnish guerrilla warfare held them back. Like in Ukraine, the Soviets had air superiority, dropping 12,000 bombs on one city alone. 

Helsinki, Finland’s capital, was bombed eight times during the Winter War. The Soviets dropped 350 bombs on the city, killing 97 people and wounding 260. Fifty-five buildings were destroyed.

The Soviets lied about the bombing. They said they bombed airfields only, just like today when the Russians say they bomb only military targets. We all have seen the television footage of the bombed apartment buildings and hospitals in Ukraine.

Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet propaganda minister back in 1940, said his airplanes were not dropping bombs; they were dropping bread baskets to feed hungry Finns.

The Finns returned the favour. They lured Soviet equipment into range where they hit them with petrol bombs – glass bottles filled with flammable liquids. 

It was the Finns who gave petrol bombs the name Molotov cocktail, which Ukrainians are making today in large quantities. One Ukraine brewery now has stopped producing beer and put its people to work turning out Molotov cocktails.

Another similarity between the Finland and Ukraine invasions is the large numbers of volunteers wanting to fight the invaders. An estimated 12,000 foreign volunteer fighters signed up to help the Finns repel the Soviets

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said recently that more than 16,000 foreigners had volunteered to help his people this time. He did not say how many actually have arrived in the country.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry estimates that 20,000 people from 52 countries volunteered to fight in Ukraine during the first week of the Russian invasion.  

Numbers like that indicate that while the Russians may win the war, they’ll not win a peace to go with it.

It is doubtful that tens of thousands of volunteers can stop the Russians from taking Ukraine, or other countries that once were part of the Soviet bloc. Which raises the spectre of a wider war in Europe and the possibility of a Third World War. The second ended with nuclear bombs.

There also is the question about whether the 2.7 million displaced Ukrainians will ever return home. And, if they can’t, where will they live?

The future does not hold any really hopeful scenarios. As Yogi also said: 

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

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I’m told that music is good for the soul. As someone with little interest and zero ability in music, I’ve never really got into that. Until last week.

I was doing my thrice-daily news read, an addiction I can’t shake even though the news reports become bleaker and darker by the day. 

Unrelenting slaughter in Ukraine, yet another refugee crisis, increasing food shortages, urban violence, political polarization. The list gets longer, and older.

It’s depressing. The world seems on a collision course with Hell. There is no hope.

Then I hear a beautifully hopeful voice coming from a television set in another room.  It is the voice of a sightless man who has experienced misfortune and misery, but sings with hope and belief.

It is Andrea Bocelli, the classical-contemporary superstar tenor, singing songs from his latest album Believe – (I Believe, Gratia Plena, Hallelujah, You’ll Never Walk Alone). The album has been marketed as a celebration of the power of music to soothe the soul.

I turned off the news and went to watch the broadcast of Bocelli singing from spectacular settings in Malta and Tuscany. The more he sang, the more comforted I felt and the anger that has built inside me against a world gone mad began to dissipate.

“Good music brings with it a powerful message of peace and fellowship, teaching us about beauty, and helping us to open our hearts and minds,” Bocelli has said.

Bocelli, now 63, was diagnosed with congenital glaucoma when he was an infant. He lost all vision at age 12 following a soccer accident. 

Doctors had warned his pregnant mother that he likely would be born with a disability and suggested she abort him. 

She didn’t, of course, and he became a talented musician at an early age, learning to play the piano, flute and saxophone. He might have been expected to study music in university but studied law instead, singing in piano bars to help finance his education.

A sightless man who learns to play three musical instruments, earns a law degree and becomes a world-renowned professional singer has got to make anyone have hope.

The Believe concert that I watched was a repeat of the original broadcast last summer. However, the timing of the replay was perfect, coming as the Russian slaughter of Ukraine became more depressing.

The concert song with the most powerful message was You’ll Never Walk Alone. In tones sometimes soft, sometimes soaring, Bocelli delivered a clearly inspirational message for Ukrainians and the millions who support them. 

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone

The Ukrainians have been walking on through the shooting and bombings, fighting against the most hateful savagery since Hitler. 

Songs and words will never save the world from the savagery of the Russians. However, they do provide some comfort from the distress. Like physical exercise, music has been shown to increase oxytocin and serotonin levels in the brain, both of which can be mood boosters. 

No amount of oxytocin and serotonin will ever be enough to soothe the anger of Vladimir Putin, the former KBG spy and feral beast intent on eliminating Ukraine and its people.

There is increasing speculation that nothing will change Putin because he is physically ill. British newspapers have reported that photos show his face ashen and puffy, possibly from drugs taken for a serious illness – 

Parkinson’s or even cancer.

Researchers studying film of Putin say he walks with his left arm not moving and when sitting, his fingers are twitching. His face and neck appear bloated.

The bloating has led to speculation that he is being treated with steroids, which can cause facial swelling, plus mood and behavioural changes.

There has been much speculation over the years about Putin’s health. It possibly is just hopeful speculation, or outright propaganda.

There was similar speculation about Donald Trump’s health when he was U.S. president. There were reports that he was suffering from Parkinson’s. 

Turns out he wasn’t. The only thing unhealthy about Trump was a severely twisted personality.

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 By Jim Poling Sr.

From Shaman’s Rock

I yearned recently for a dose of nostalgia so I bought Carl Bernstein’s memoir Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom.

Bernstein and I had much in common as kids entering the newspaper business. (That changed as he became famous and rich. I’m still working on it).

Neither of us had much education, we started at roughly the same time and the editors who hired us did so with skepticism. We both had to find dress suits to start work in.

The newsrooms we entered as googly-eyed youngsters were similar. They were jammed with gunmetal grey desks groaning beneath stacks of old newspapers, newsroom library files, stenographer notebooks and Underwood 5 and Royal typewriters.

The Women’s News and Sports Departments were tucked into corners, away from the newsroom’s central core, where the “real important news” was collected, written and edited.

Every newsroom core held a desk – often U-shaped – where enthusiastic young reporters received lessons in humility. There sat stern, sharp-eyed editors with midnight black or blood red lead pencils poised to carve flowery writing into straight forward English, free of bloat and cliches.

A lifetime later I vividly recall approaching the editing desk with a brilliantly written story about a fatal car crash. It sang with pungent words and descriptive phrases worthy of the literary giants.

I watched horrified as the red pencil slashed and carved, leaving red blotches that looked like blood having dripped from a cut throat. My literary masterpiece was reduced to simple facts: Two people died this morning in a two-car collision on Highway 17 North . . . 

Such editing scenes seldom occur in newsrooms these days. Newsroom staffs across North America have been slashed by thousands. Copy editors have been the hardest hit.

The result is stories lacking the depth, accuracy and clarity that come from the sober second look of editing.

Television news, which never had much professional editing, has become a playground for language misuse, cliches and misinformation.

TV news’ absolute favourite cliché these days is “on the ground.” Reporters are ‘on the ground,” wherever that is or whatever it means.

Another is “reached out.” A reporter “reached out” to someone, which I assume means they asked someone a question.

Reached out makes me think of decomposing arms reaching out from the ground to pull someone into the grave.

Another is “Needless to say.” If it is needless to say, then don’t say it.

Some will accuse me of being petty and whiney. There are more important things to think about.

Indeed, there are, but being careful with words is important. What’s seen and heard in print and on screens spreads and starts to become standard.

Politicians and other authority figures regularly utter useless phrases like “reaching out,” “on the ground” and “thinking outside the box.” Most worrisome, however, is that politicians, in particular, misuse language to blur clarity and accuracy, and to create misinformation and disinformation.

An example: Ted Cruz, the extreme right-wing U.S. senator from Texas, said participants in the anti-everything insurrection that paralyzed Canada’s capital city are heroes.

They were not heroes. They were protesters demanding that government make changes that they felt were needed. They had every right to do that, of course, until they began breaking laws and trampling other people’s rights.

Heroes are people who do brave acts, often at risk to themselves. Heroes are people like Adam Attalla, the 18-year-old who risked his life in January to rescue three children from a burning home in Mississauga.

Calling protesters heroes is misinformation designed to further a political agenda. It also shows that even attending private schools and elite universities does not make a person like Cruz immune to stupidity.

It was fun for me to read Bernstein’s book and remember “the good old days.” But it’s sad to realize that many of the checks and balances that kept news and information honest and factual no longer exist. Anyone gets to write or say anything they want without editing, notably on unedited social media platforms.

The good old days are gone, along with the thick lead editing pencils. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, provided we find other ways to ensure that what we write and say is accurate, honest, fair and clear.

The first sounds of winter’s retreat come from snow melting off the metal sheets covering my woodpile.

Plink . . . plink . . . plink. 

Slow, almost imperceptible. 

Then faster and louder as the morning sun grows more ravenous. Individual drips joining others in a widening pool at the woodpile’s base.

My woodpile looks sadly diminished today, its early autumn bulk considerably reduced. It’s like looking at a good friend wasting away.

Wasting is a wrong word. My woodpile’s bulk has been reduced as it gave up a large part of itself to keep me warm this winter. Given, not wasted. 

My woodpile is a good friend who gives me much. It was once a living tree offering beauty, shade and oxygen while providing protection for small animals, insects and birds.  When it died, as all living things must, it fell to the forest floor for me to find.

My woodpile brings me more than winter heat. It gives me the joy of being in the woods, and the physical exercise of cutting, splitting and stacking it. 

It also gives me mental workouts. I come here occasionally to lean against it and think about life and how complicated it can be.

In the woodpile I see a different world. A world of trees. Also a complicated place, but a place managed far more successfully than ours.

Some Indigenous people believe that trees and other plants are living beings somewhat similar to human beings. Scientific studies have been supporting this, finding that trees, through their roots and leaves, sense and comprehend their environment and communicate information with fellow trees and other plants.

Trees avoid many of the problems that complicate our human world. One reason they do is that trees are patient beings, never rushing to make change.

Trees don’t get angry or yell at each other. They don’t waste time and energy whining about their situations or controls on their lives. They work together to help each other.

Most importantly, they respect and appreciate diversity. 

Their skins are different colours, different textures. Their leaves are different shapes and different sizes. But they live side by side, not discriminating. There is no racism nor social inequality in the world of trees.

The mightiest oak is no more important than the weakest willow. 

Unlike us, they live sustainable lives. They take and use only what is needed, understanding that conserving energy and resources makes life better for all.

We humans are beginning to understand that we are living an unsustainable way of life. Some research indicates that 87 per cent of all our economic activity is unsustainable – in other words not supported by renewable resources.

Understanding that problem is one thing. Solving it is another.

We deal with the symptoms of our unsustainable way of life – plastics congesting the oceans, carbon emissions changing climate, landfills choking with waste. We haven’t yet seriously addressed the root cause of the symptoms, which is consuming much more than we really need.

Nature has dealt with the root cause of unsustainability since the beginning of time. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here. It understands the difference between simply wanting and truly needing. 

We humans see Nature as something nice, but separate from ourselves. We don’t see ourselves as part of it and certainly don’t see that there is much that it can teach us.

When I lean against my woodpile contemplating the world, I often wonder whether the answers to our problems are right here in Nature. Can Nature show us how to live without the anger, hatred and wars we experience now? How to live without discrimination and social inequality? How to fight the diseases that continue to infect us?

It will take people a lot smarter than me to find the answers to those questions.

The positive news is that those people – members of the scientific community – are out there working steadily to unlock the secrets of Nature. As they share what they learn from Nature, it is possible that we all will become as smart as the trees that surround us and the world will be a better place. 

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 It’s February! Time for happy dancing and thumbing noses at the month just expired.

January was wretched. A coronavirus that would not go away. Threats of war between the U.S. and Russia. Continuing ethnic cleansings and other human tragedies in places like Afghanistan.

Then there was the bizarre weather. Unprecedented winter storms, including tornadoes, in parts of the world. Midwinter forest fires in California and Siberia.

There were no forest fires here at home. Just cold and snow. Brutal Arctic-style cold. 

It was the coldest January in recent memory. 

The average high temperature for the month was a chilly minus 6.3. The average low was minus 22.2. The normal January daily high for the Haliburton area is minus 3.8, and the normal low minus 15.9.

Twenty of this past January’s 31 days saw lows of minus 20 or colder. On seven of those days county thermometers dived below minus 30. On the morning of January 21 furnaces and wood stoves worked overtime against a low of minus 38.

All those temperatures were recorded by an Environment Canada co-operating private site at Haliburton Village.

The cold seemed to keep heavy snowfalls away. There were no large snowstorms in January and when the month ended there were only 36 centimetres (14 inches) on the ground in most places.

There was no January thaw this year. Usually we see one – a day or two above freezing – in the last half of January.

All this was much different from January last year. The average daytime high temperature in January 2021 was minus 2.7 and the average low for the month minus 12.3 – much warmer than the month just passed.

And in January 2021 there were no days minus 30 or colder and only seven of 30 days in which the thermometer fell to minus 20 or a bit lower. The coldest day in January 2021 was minus 28.

But all that is history. The main interest now is what weather we can expect in coming weeks, and whether we will be treated to an early spring.

Things aren’t looking good so far. January’s cold continued into early February with signs of some slight warming this week. Most of the morning lows in the first week were in the minus 20 range.

A variety of weather sources are predicting day and night temperatures below freezing for the first three weeks of the month. Nighttime lows are forecast to be in the minus double digits for much of the month.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac forecasts more cold followed by snow storms – some of them heavy – for later in the month. That almanac has been around for 230 years and claims an 80 per cent accuracy rate for its weather predictions. 

Some people question that percentage, but the almanac was accurate in its forecast for this winter. It predicted the winter of 2021 – 2022 would be “a season of shivers.”

“This coming winter could well be one of the longest and coldest that we’ve seen in years,” the publication’s editor Janice Stillman said last fall.

At any rate, none of the forecasters are predicting spring-like weather for the rest of February. They seem to agree that the first three weeks of this month will see constant below freezing weather, plus snowfalls pretty much every day.

The better news is that most forecasts predict settled, warmer weather in late February and early March. Long-range forecasts for spring and summer see warmer weather with above normal rainfall.

Who knows? Someone once said the most accurate weather forecast is obtained by looking out the window.

And, whatever we get, we get. Despite all our advances in science there is nothing we can do to change the weather, at least in the short term. We can, however, start living in ways that reduce global warming and climate change.

Besides, there really is no bad weather. Sunshine is great, Snow can be pretty and provide fun. Rain is refreshing and wind can be bracing. 

Or, as Alfred Wainwright, the famous British walker and author, wrote in one of his books:

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”