At the beginning and end of any Paramount Pictures film from 1966 to 1989 you see the image here, with the text Paramount - A Gulf + Western Company. Indeed Andy Warhol imortalized the image in his work Paramount.

But what was Gulf + Western?

The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us the company was a corporation that was founded in 1958 by Charles Bluhdorn and became one of the most highly diversified conglomerates in the United States. Gulf + Western took control of the Paramount Pictures Corporation in 1966. Gulf + Western changed its name to Paramount Communications Inc. in 1989 and was acquired by the media conglomerate Viacom Inc. in 1994.

Amazingly, there seems to be almost no memory left of Charles Bluhdorn nor Gulf + Western. Do a Google search for Charles Bluhdorn and you get only 87 hits (Henry Ford returns 235,000).

Perhaps we are too embarassed to remember. In Michael Eisner’s autobiography Work in Progress we learn:

…Eisner’s boss was the irrepressible Charles Bluhdorn, the chief executive of Gulf and Western. During one afternoon of hot tub schmooze at Bluhdorn’s home in the Dominican Republic, Bluhdorn proposed a film “in which Sitting Bull meets Hitler. We ought to get Dustin Hoffman involved.” Then, Eisner reports, “he suggested a ‘Bad News Bears’ sequel set in Cuba, in which Castro hits the winning home run.” Ever the diplomat, Eisner made but one suggestion: the Americans ought to win.

In the few web pages where Bludhorn is mentioned, he is described with terms like manic and autocratic, the most rapacious and ruthless of conglomerateurs and a coarse boob with funny accent. There are no biographies of Charles Bluhdorn. Business case studies don’t seem to mention Gulf + Western. They have been erased from our collective memory.

From this page we learn the details of his death: Charles Bluhdorn… died of a heart attack on a corporate jet flying from the Dominican Republic to New York in February 1983…. Among those who attended the private funeral services at St. Mary’s Church was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Think of Charles Bluhdorn every time you watch Heaven Can Wait or Chinatown or The Godfather and see Gulf + Western on the screen.

I learned this morning, by listening to CBC’s Off the Cuff, that Sharon, Lois and Bram have become Sharon, Bram and Friends (this page would suggest that and Friends is the weird elephant). According to an undated Sid Adilman article:

Lois is taking an indefinite leave of absence from Sharon, Lois & Bram, Canada’s most popular children’s music group, which she co-founded in 1978.

Grieving over the sudden death last year of her husband Ernest, a retired York University sociology professor, Lois Lillienstein no longer wants to tour or perform on a regular basis.

“Happiness always bubbled up naturally; it’s not any more,” she said yesterday.

There’s interesting video [RealVideo] of Noel moderating a panel at PopTech conference in Camden.

When I lived in the cosmopolitan city of Peterborough, Ontario back in the mid- to late 1980s, there came a time when they ran out of good old solid telephone numbers in the 743 and 748 telephone exchanges, and anyone who signed up for new telephone service received a number in the dreaded 741 exchange (a plot that later played out on Seinfeld when Elaine was assigned a 646 exchange number instead of a 212).

This situation is playing itself out again, this time here in grand old Charlottetown: new provincial public servants are marked by their presence in the dreaded 569 exchange.

They might as well make them wear special boots!

Glitzy brother Steve gives us an insider’s look at hosting the afternoon edition at CBC Saskatchewan.

At CBC Saskatchewan they don’t use up a lot of their creativity naming their radio shows. These shows are named, The Morning Edition, The Noon Edition and The Afternoon Edition.

One wonders why they just don’t call them The First Show, The Second Show and The Third Show (or even better, The Show after the First Show and so forth).

These names pale in comparision to the various jaunty names given to the afternoon show at CBC Toronto which have included Here & Now, Later the Same Day and, my personal favourite, 4 to 6 (which, admitedly, does have a Saskatchewan-like ring of the obvious to it).

In any case, this is all a backwards way of alerting the listening public that my gregarious brother Steve is filling in as host of The Afternoon Edition for the next several weeks, starting today.

You can listen to him live [using RealAudio] from 4 to 6 (!) Central Standard Time (aka wacky “no daylight savings time” time in the Central time zone).

Our migration to a new data centre (aka our 175 year old basement) is complete, and www.reinvented.net and related websites are now hosted 7 feet below where I type this. As this move entailed a change in DNS, you may not be reading this until up to 24 hours after this move; apologies for any frustration.

So I’m looking for a lawyer whose last known location was in New Mexico. I track down his brother’s wife, who tells me that the lawyer now lives in Ireland. So I think “maybe he’s working as a lawyer in Ireland” and naively go to Google and enter irish bar as my search term. Only to find 382,000 results returned.

Friday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. I got a hankering to go to the drive-in. I checked the Brackley Drive-in website and found, to my dismay, that their first show was Jurassic Park III, a movie my brother Mike recommended against seeing. So I decided it was finally time to take the long drive up to West Prince to visit the Princess Pat Drive-in. The drive was so long (in Island terms) that we decided to drive up, watch the movie, and stay overnight in a campground. Wee Oliver’s first campout. This is our story:

3:15 p.m. - Find tent and sleeping bags in back room. Tent is musty smelling. Resolve to buy a new tent. Gather things needed for the trip; find that wee Oliver’s size to things ratio is still way out of proportion to a normal human being.
4:30 p.m. - Car loading, email checking, phone calls, all take too long. Finally load the car and head off.
4:45 p.m. - Buy a new tent at Canadian Tire (a very nice 4-person hexagon-shaped Woods dome tent). Get an air mattress too (debate merits of foot pumped vs. self-inflating vs. new-fangled Coleman ‘one use pump’ models; Catherine agrees to be the foot behind the pump).
5:00 p.m. - Start to leave Charlottetown. Realize we are hungry. Stop at Tim Hortons for drive-thru dinner of sandwiches and ice cappuccinos.
5:10 p.m. - Finally heading west. Smooth drive with the exception of some road construction on Rte. 2 near Emerald.
6:00 p.m. - Stop in Kensington at Malpeque Bay Credit Union to get cash (and see weird sign in parking lot: “Wheelchair ramp is not accessible.”).
7:00 p.m. - Arrive at Green Park Provincial Park to set up camp. Staff at the front gate are very friendly and helpful, and tell of secret back-way to drive-in. Get lost trying to find campsite. Finally locate campsite. Tent goes up easily on the first time (although I am wary of “before you use this tent the first time” directions, which we must ignore).

7:30 p.m. - Leave park for drive-in. Drive through beautiful Tyne Valley.
7:32 p.m. - Just outside of Tyne Valley see man in ditch waving hand back and forth. Stop. Man seems weak, but not dying. Asks if we can drive him home. Let man into car.
7:34 p.m. - Man seems to have little idea where he lives. Asks if I believe in God. Asks where we are from. Asks if I believe in God. And so on. Drive along Rte. 12 towards main highway. Try to extract from man where it is that he lives.
7:45 p.m. - Man mentions, in casual conversation, that he lives on Lennox Island. Realize that we passed turn-off to Lennox Island 10 minutes ago. Turn around. Drive to Lennox Island.
8:00 p.m. - Arrive Lennox Island. Man waves vague directions as to location of his house. Arrive man’s house. Help him to front door and up stairs. Ensure he’s okay. He tells me that good luck will come my way. Asks me if I believe in God. Etc. Say our good-byes.
8:05 p.m. - Back on the road to the drive-in. Think that we should call someone to see if they can look in on man. Try 411 for on the cell phone Lennox Island Police, but they have no listing for this (doesn’t inspire confidence in 411). Finally get through to Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley. Cell phone breaks up. They cannot hear me. Drive further. Call again. Give details and they say they will take it from there. Think Island Tel should improve cell service in West Prince.
8:45 p.m. - Arrive Princess Pat Drive-in. Beautiful location right on the water. Wait 5 minutes at booth as owners are on phone trying to locate source of CO2 for the pop dispenser. Pay. Enter.

9:10 p.m. - Go to canteen. Impressed by dizzying array of food available. Pop dispenser still broken. Remark to Catherine that all employees seem to use crutches; Catherine assures me that there is only one employee, she just moves around a lot. Children running canteen are very efficient and friendly. We all have a good laugh when cash register totals $350 for popcorn and drink.

9:15 p.m. - First movie, Along Came a Spider starts. No trailers. Wrong lens on the projector makes everyone appear squished and tall. Cannot make sense of first 10 minutes of the movie. Second reel corrects problem. Enjoy the movie. Don’t see the surprise plot twist coming. Movie ends, or rather peters out. Seems to short. Should have been one more surprise plot twist?
11:00 p.m. - One trailer (for Down to Earth), then blam, second movie (Save the Last Dance) starts. Remark to Catherine that they don’t fool around at this drive-in, timing wise.
11:20 p.m. - Although movie looks promising, general consensus is that we are too tired to watch entire thing. Resolve to rent at a later date. Return to campsite. Sleep.

Night passes.

8:30 a.m. - Awaken at campsite. Shower, etc. Realize that this isn’t much of a bona fide first camping experience for wee Oliver. Resolve quietly that next experience will involve fire, stories, toast cooked on special grill, etc.

10:15 a.m. - Check out from campground (check out time given last night by staff: “no need to hurry”). Arrive Tyne Valley looking for food. Find that The Landing restaurant serves breakfast.
10:30 a.m. - Find that The Landing started serving breakfast today and we are their first breakfast customers, ever. Find also that The Landing is in a building formerly occupied by a coffee shop and laundromat, which we visited 5 years ago. The Landing is much, much nicer than the laundry coffee place: solid wood interior, friendly staff, interesting menu, live entertainment at nights. Good meal. Recommended!

11:00 a.m. - Return to car to find that temperature has risen to 40 degrees. Or at least what seems like 40 degrees. Go insane with heat in no-AC car, and end up driving straight back to Charlottetown, aborting plans to take in local colour for early afternoon, swim, etc.
1:00 p.m. - Find that home alarm system had gone off in our absence. Look for results of break-in. Find none. Call alarm company; they detected break-in, but have flaky notes about what happened. Confused.
1:05 p.m. - Fall fast asleep. Wake up 2 hours later and realize that, despite new tent and cushy air mattress, I didn’t get any sleep at all previous night. Probably worried about rolling over wee Oliver in the tent. Resolve that we must buy wee Oliver his own wee tent.

What’s going on at Island Tel? I’ve made three calls, on different matters, to various toll-free numbers for various departments of the Company this week, and all calls have been answered on the first ring, and the person who’s answered has had been able to provide me with all the information I need. This is a good sign.

Regular readers will recall that in this space over the past year I’ve related a series of frustrations with various aspects of Island Tel, culminating in an Open Letter to Island Tel.

Based on those experiences, I had pretty well made up my mind to switch my Internet connectivity from Island Tel to Eastlink, and, indeed, had begun discussions with their sales people about pricing and timing.

All of which might make it seem a little surprising that, at least for the time being, I’ve decided to stick with Island Tel and, indeed, to upgrade my service with them and consolidate all of Reinvented’s equipment here in the World HQ on Prince St.

How did Island Tel win me back? Here’s what they did:

1. Ron Waite, Regional Vice-President, (PEI), and Vice-President Carrier Services, Aliant Telecom, responded to my open letter. His response didn’t knock me over with its eloquence or attitude, but he did respond, knowing full well that his response would appear online, at that’s something.
2. An emissary from Island Tel’s sales force took me out for a COWS mocha iced cowpuccinno and, in a no-bullshit, frank and honest exchange, listened to what I had to say, and tried to explain the Island Tel side of the story.
3. A side-by-side comparison of Island Tel and Eastlink’s low-end dedicated IP products reveals that they offer about the same bandwidth for the same price. All things being equal, I’d rather be close (in IP terms) to my major PEI client, and Island Tel’s network gets me that.
4. Further experience with Eastlink’s customer service suggested that it wasn’t as different from Island Tel’s as it would appear: there proved to be just as many long telephone trees, unreturned phone calls, etc. at Eastlink as at Island Tel. My last call to Island Tel was answered, by a real person, on the first ring; this is a quick way to my heart.
5. I’d been promised a meeting with the Eastlink “Internet expert” for several weeks, but this was never arranged; and Island Tel sales rep was at my door within 20 minutes of an initial call to his cell phone, and he knew his stuff.

I am under few illusions that Island Tel has changed substantially as a company in the last two months, and a good number of the major items raised in my Open Letter are still not resolved. However they’ve done enough (and Eastlink has failed to sufficiently impress enough) to tip the scales in their favour.

I will continue to be their most challenging and demanding client, will continue to report on my challenges here; for now, however, they continue to have my business. Let’s see how it goes…