Daniel Richler, as you might already have heard, is moving to England. That is a shame. At the risk of relating everything to a television cartoon, the first thing I thought of was this:
Deprogrammer: Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, your son has clearly been brainwashed by the evil and charismatic Mr. Burns.
Marge: Are you sure you can get him back for us?
Deprogrammer: Absolutely. I'm the one who successfully deprogrammed Jane Fonda, you know.
Marge: What about Peter Fonda?
Deprogrammer: Oh, that was a heartbreaker. But I did get Paul McCartney out of Wings.
Homer: You idiot! He was the most talented one.
In other news, Michael Kinsley, ex of Slate, wrote in the Los Angeles Times (where he is an editor) about his idea for CNN: "Cease-Fire" instead of Crossfire. But world where nobody is nobody else’s monkey might be too much to ask, methinks.
I’m sure I’m the 97th person to think of this, but isn’t the word TORSO a great way to parody TORO magazine? Then I stuck TORSO into google. Nevermind.
Finally, I began with a Richler, so it seems only fair to conclude with one. My good close personal friend Noah recently had an article in
Now weekly?
A seasoned veteran like Richler does not strike me as Now material. But even stranger than Noah slumming around in a poorly paying alt-weekly is the fact that his article defending the Walrus refers extensively to a Robert Fulford article that ran in the July issue of Toronto Life. Noah’s article was published at the end of October. For those without a calendar handy, that was four months ago.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this article was his final dispatch for the Toronto Star books section. Richler was a replacement columnist for Philip Marchand during the spring and summer, and it strikes me that Richler’s final column would have synchronized with Fulford’s Toronto Life article about how the Walrus is tuskless. Did Richler get his Toronto Star column spiked for blatant toadying and conflict of interest (i.e. Noah has been published by the Walrus and not Toronto Life?) We may never know. But I was thinking that if blogger Christopher Allbritton can raise money so as to fly to Iraq to cover the war, why can’t the Toronto blogosphere try and scrape up enough money to send Noah to the UK? The only, er, problem is that with finances being as they are, we might only be able to buy him a one-way ticket.
