My apologies for the lack of posting this week, but it’s been kind of busy up here, just North of Hollywood North. First of all, my dog’s in-laws dropped over for the week.

That’s my friend, Dusty, on the Left, her Mom on the right and Grandma sandwiched in the middle.

Anybody who owns a dog knows they don’t really require that much work. Maybe less than an hour a day to do the actual feeding, watering and maintenance part. Walk and play time additional and often non-negotiable, of course.

Add two more dogs and the time consumption increases exponentially, especially the navigating of three extremely happy to be outside animals on three leashes.

Our lives were complicated on day one of the visit when they suddenly stopped galloping around the wilderness that backs onto our home, freezing stock still and then converging on a grove of trees. I thought they’d sensed the arrival of some local wildlife, maybe a deer or racoon, hopefully not a skunk or the pack of coyotes that had already been howling at that night’s full moon.

It turned out they’d found a couple of kittens shivering in the bushes. They were about a week old, according to the emergency clinic vet, and not likely to pull through without a lot of care. I bought a can of Kitty formula, willing to give it a shot. He told me that I also had to make them urinate and defecate, something the mother cat accomplishes by licking their butts. I said I wasn’t quite that committed to saving them. He told me a damp cloth would work as well.

Turns out I didn’t need a damp cloth. I also didn’t need to keep watch to make sure they were comfortable or warm enough. The makeshift kitty box in the kitchen was immediately surrounded by three large female sheepdogs, all making sure these tiny members of a completely different species got the care and attention they needed.

Butts were licked. Sleeping forms gently nuzzled. Bodies groomed and guarded. Sometimes they took turns. Sometimes all three silently hovered in case they were needed. Even though I did the feeding, I did it with an attentive audience that wasn’t above nuzzling my arm into a better position or nosing away the bottle so nobody was overfed.

By the time the in-laws went home, the new arrivals had clearly weathered the worst of their storm and the neighborhood kids had delivered the addresses of good homes nearby willing to take in a new addition to the family.

It’s funny how this all works. Dogs normally loving to chase cats and neighbors who suggest a pet’s too much trouble suddenly showing a side of themselves you never expected.

But then, we all tend to do what’s unexpected sometimes and it often leads to further unexpected results. You go somewhere you would never be caught dead and discover how much fun it is. You taste something you’ve always turned up your nose at and realize what you’ve been missing. You talk to somebody you really have no interest in, soon you’re friends and sometimes you’re more than that.

I think in the end, we’re all lost kittens or those who know it’s not really going to kill us to help. And we all take away more from the experience than we had or were before.

Everybody needs a good friend --- or another one.

Enjoy your Sunday.

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“Now if you run into a tough situation, it’s very tempting to say, ‘Well let’s just not do this or let’s take the easy path’. But when all you have is the hard path, you just keep going.”

Looking around at the current state of the world, the economy, the future, it’s fairly clear that there are some hard paths ahead. Indeed, taking one hard path or another may be all that we have to choose between.

Certainly, that’s the case for those of us working in film and television. Distribution models are collapsing, pools of development money are shrinking, license fees from broadcasters cover what was once the budget line item for feeding the crew.

The money we used to depend on hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it’s primarily being used to finance the debt most main stream media conglomerates took on to buy up their competition. One rogue moment in the economy and suddenly they’re strapped.

And then they get further strapped by having to hire people who don’t know their business but get paid a whole lot of money to manage debt.

Think of it as getting a job, using your new found salary to lease a car and then getting fired. Life isn’t over and you’ve got some savings. But you’ve also got these car payments. Instead of employees living two pay checks away from being on the street, the companies they work for are now in the same situation.

In days like these, a lot of well-meaning politicians and self-help gurus come along with platitudes like, “When you’re in a hole – stop digging” and “tighten your belts" until we can get “shovels in the ground” --- which sounds a lot like continuing to dig a deeper hole.

Maybe we need to put our shovels down and start looking around for a different tool.

If there are going to be fewer outlets for our work, even fewer places to pitch our ideas and nothing to live on while creating and crafting what will finally get you out of this mess, then some new approach has to be found.

But how do you find it?

At Honda, one of the few car makers not asking for a government hand-out or facing imminent failure because of current realities, and always one of the most innovative at making cars better, the engineers have a philosophy called “kicking out the ladder”.

What that means is --- you climb a ladder to the second floor. Somebody takes away the ladder that provided your support and a way of escape. Now what do you do? The idea is that giving you no options creates new thinking and new solutions.

“Kicking out the ladder” is one of a series Honda has placed on a new video site, http://dreams.honda.com designed to teach you new ways of problem solving so you can realize your own dreams.

And these are far from boring corporate videos.

Watching a Honda executive with a decided Bushido streak describe what “Kick out the ladder” really means is the kind of delicious moment that makes you want to learn everything these guys have to offer about thinking outside the box.

So, kick out the ladder.

Find a new path to realizing your dreams.

And enjoy your Sunday.

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Sometime tonight, CKX-TV in Brandon, Manitoba will stop transmitting.

The sale of the local CTV affiliate to Bluepoint Investments fell through yesterday. The new buyer, who was acquiring the operation lock, stock and barrel for $1.00, couldn’t reach an agreement with Canadian Satellite providers to carry its signal.

In a communication, CTV President Ivan Fecan said, "Brandon, like many of our smaller stations, is not carried by satellite companies, who say they don't have room for all of Canada's local TV stations, while finding plenty of room for foreign channels."

More on the delicious irony of that in a moment.

For now, the sad reality is that a station that has served its 124,000, mostly rural, customers for 54 years and employs 39 people will be no more.

A brand new $150 million fund to support local programming won’t help.

A sudden doubling and tripling of ratings for the new CTV season won’t help.

A CRTC ruling allowing CTV to fit even more commercials into those awesomely successful new shows won’t help.

Even Jim Shaw, a man with far deeper pockets than Bluepoint, couldn’t help --- and he was the first to back out of a similar dollar sale last June.

Despite his massive cable empire, Jim knew the economic reality of Brandon and all our other struggling local markets. Most of the customers are rural. And the only way to get a package of TV channels to them is via satellite.

Soooooo….

What satellite company serves Brandon?

Expressvu.

Who owns Expressvu?

Why its the same company, CTV-Bell-GlobeMedia-Teachers-Pension-Plan-Whatever-Else, that owns CTV.

What?

Wait a minute!?!

Am I telling you that while CTV is leading the Canadian broadcaster charge for more Public funding and carriage fees from each and every television watching household to “Save Local Television”, one of its own stations is going under because another division of the self same company doesn’t care if it goes broke, and the guys who run the whole operation don’t care either because they’re still making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit?

Apparently.

But wait. There’s more. There’ll be blood shooting out of your eyes before I’m done here!

God, I feel so Glenn Beck right now!

Last month, Expressvu began charging its customers another $1.50 a month to cover its contribution to that aforementioned fund to save local television. Even though they don’t carry most of the stations that are in trouble, and their non-carriage is one of the major reasons why those stations are struggling.

Ergo, their customers are paying for services they don’t get and couldn’t if they wanted to!

And the ones who live in Brandon are being charged for services that aren’t even there!

Since I used to subscribe to Expressvu, I happen to know that they have room for several VOD Porn channels. And apparently those are of more value than the 10 or 20 that would keep hundreds of local Canadian TV employees working and hundreds of thousands of Canadians informed with regard to what is going on in their small cities and towns.

I guess it’s better that Canadian Tax dollars and subscriber fees be paid to purchase Quaaludes and Champagne in Woodland Hills, California than to inform a Manitoba farmer that they’ll be frost on Saturday night so you better get the crops in.

But Expressvu makes way too much money selling Porn to bother with the needs of Brandon or any other Canadian city. And since Ivan Fecan shares in some of that money, he’d obviously rather the folks in Brandon were jerking off instead of knowing what went on in City Council.

And seriously, if you were running the company and wanted to depict yourself as the saviour of Canadian TV, wouldn’t you argue for the replacement of one  Anal Intruders channel to make room for your own affiliate before blaming phantom outside agitators?

But Mr. Fecan didn’t. That’s why  he said, “Foreign channels” and not “Masturbation movies”.

And what he meant was “American channels” not Al-Jazeera, Telemundo or the BBC.

Mr. Fecan has a way with words, or at least fuzzing any mention that his channels carry the exact same stuff as those bad-for-Canada “foreign channels”.

 

By happenstance, I made a gas and burger stop in Brandon on the day Blueprint bought CKX. It was headline news in the local paper, with quotes from the mayor, local business people and the new owners about how great this was for the city. Not only had jobs and local pride been rescued, but Blueprint was promising it would follow the “Go Local” mantra that has been the philosophy of successful small TV stations around the world.

They were promising many hours of local news, locally produced programming to serve the agricultural base of nearby communities and maybe even broadcast home games of the city’s beloved hockey team, the Brandon Wheat Kings.

These were all things CTV had the money to do, but had decided to squeeze in some more “CSI” clones from one of those foreign devils channels instead. Clones which CTV could then second and third window throughout their conglomerate owned specialty channels to maximize profits and reduce the need to produce any local content --- funny how the black line items in that CTV conglomerate’s budget get shared around the company while the red line ones don’t.

But then, they’ve got you paying for those, don’t they?

As usual, the jobs lost in Brandon, and Red Deer earlier this summer, plus the personal indebtedness of everybody who kicked in to save their jobs at the local Global affiliate in Victoria, can be laid directly at the feet of the CRTC.

The Federal Government’s very own Heritage Committee, after hearing from the very same group of Usual Suspects who had pleaded the very same “Save Local TV” case before the CRTC many times, specifically asked the CRTC to take the profits and losses of the ENTIRE holdings of the broadcasters into account when devising a solution.

Later, the Heritage Minister himself publicly reminded them that their job was to look after the needs of the Canadian Public – which would include the 124,000 people about to be without a local TV station in Brandon.

But the CRTC ignored all that and did what they always do. Only this time, they just didn’t bend over for the Broadcasters, they showed them where to put the umbrella.

So tons more money was earmarked to be taken from satellite companies and cablecos with no guarantees from broadcasters that they’d keep local stations open in return or create one more minute of local programming or news.

And the broadcasters took that money without mentioning that the real problem wasn’t that people weren’t watching or were watching something else, it was that they couldn’t see local programming even if they wanted to.

Would it be too hard to tell Expressvu that if they want a semi-monopoly on Satellite TV in this country, they have to serve the whole country?

We do that with Air Canada, requiring them to provide feeder service from smaller spots on the map for the protective perks they’re given. We require people to pay for Public schools even if they don’t have kids, and to support health care even if they never get sick.

For all the breaks we give broadcasters and those operating our Broadcast Delivery systems, is it to much to expect access to local television in return?

And maybe some honesty from everybody instead of all the corporate games.

One last thought for Ivan Fecan.

Replace some of that speech of yours a little and you’d get…

"This Canadian TV show, like many of our series, is not carried by CTV, who say they don't have room for all of Canada's local production, while finding plenty of room for foreign product."

Now you know how the creatives in this country feel.

Not nice when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it?

You think you, us and the BDU guys might all be further ahead if we worked on that?

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