washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020403757.html?hpid=newswell

To understand how Paul Pickthorne got cross-wise with Montgomery County’s land-use regulations, you’ll need a glossary:

“R-60″ is a zoning classification for subdivisions of single-family houses where commercial activity generally isn’t permitted. The 6300 block of Tone Drive in Bethesda is such a place, a tidy street of mostly 1950s brick ranchers just across River Road from Walt Whitman High School.

“BDSM” is short for “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.” Velvet whips, leather hoods, six-inch stiletto heels, that kind of thing. If you were into the BDSM scene and periodically threw BDSM parties in your home — as Pickthorne, a burly, jovial Briton, does in the castlelike 3,600-square-foot McMansion he rents at 6304 Tone Dr. — you’d attract quite a crowd.

“Section 59-C-1.31″ is the zoning code provision you’d be violating by having said parties in an R-60 zone if the guests pay to get in, as they do (or used to) at Pickthorne’s nocturnal get-togethers. His events draw dozens of people. The cost: $20 for a basic ticket, $50 for VIP treatment.

“Kinky people” is the accepted term for folks who derive erotic pleasure from BDSM. “An amazing cross-section of humanity,” says Pickthorne’s friend Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. “Men, women, transgender, heterosexuals, gays, bisexuals. Every ethnicity. White-collar and blue-collar. It’s really very, very diverse — though we do have an unusually high percentage of lawyers. I don’t know why.”

Anyway, you can imagine what Pickthorne’s non-kinky neighbors think of all this. Fed up, they convened a meeting in someone’s living room last week, then fired off indignant e-mails to County Council member Roger Berliner (D), whose district includes their Merrimack Park subdivision.

“I share your sense of outrage that a sex club is operating in your lovely neighborhood,” Berliner wrote back. “I want you to know that my office has been advised that our County has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.”

The county moved, all right. Pickthorne received a written warning from a zoning inspector Monday. But hold on. Suppose Pickthorne stops charging admission, as he says he might? Suppose he complies with the regulations and holds all BDSM gatherings as strictly noncommercial functions in accordance with Section 59-C-1.31? What then?

“Well,” Berliner says on the phone, hesitating. “Certainly one has to respect everyone’s constitutional rights.”

In other words, if no money changes hands, and the kinky people don’t cause a noise or traffic nuisance, the First Amendment would ring clear: Party on!

Who goes there?

Knock on the front door of 6304 Tone Dr. If nobody answers right away, knock some more.

It’s a hulking million-dollar stone edifice built in 2007, dwarfing the modest half-century-old houses lining the rest of the block. The door is rock-hard wood that hurts your knuckles. A Union Jack hangs from a pole on the balcony overhead, flapping in the winter breeze. There’s a foot-square spy hatch in the middle of the arched door, protected by ornate wrought-iron bars.

Keep knocking. Eventually the hatch swings open, and this big, round, jowly, grinning face appears, topped by a thatch of unruly orange hair.

“Hel-looo there!” Pickthorne says. He won’t let you in. But soon you’re driving south on River Road with him, headed to a Starbucks. “Vanilla latte’s my usual poison, mate. Forgot my wallet, though.” Over coffee, and chatting again the next afternoon, he fills you in on “the scene.”

It’s adult playtime, is all it is,” he says. He’s 38, an information technology specialist currently at liberty job-wise. He says he began practicing BDSM as a teenager in Britain. “Role-playing,” he says. “It’s naughty schoolgirls and headmasters; it’s cops and robbers; it’s interrogators and prisoners. . . . It’s harmless fun for kinksters who want to escape the everyday.”

The lifestyle: There’s no simple way to sum it up, his friend, Wright, 46, says. Some kinksters enjoy being punished; others want to wield the cat-o’-nine-tails. Some like costuming as micro-skirted nurses in thigh-high boots and tickling their patients with ostrich feathers; others prefer to be gagged and suspended from the ceiling in fur-lined manacles. On the margins of the subculture are folks who crave true, excruciating pain, Wright says. But most kinksters don’t.

“What it’s about is an intense sensation,” she explains. “Some people like rock climbing or jumping out of airplanes or bungee jumping. You’d never catch me doing that. But if you’re talking about a good spanking, then yes, absolutely.”

Pickthorne says he had been active in the Washington area BDSM scene for years before the big stone house came on the rental market last summer.

“A friend of mine was like: ‘You’ve got to come see this place, dude! It’s sweet!’ And it’s funny, being British, and being in the American scene for so long, people love the British thing, my accent, you know? So when my friend saw the castle, he was like: ‘You got to live in a castle, dude!’ “

He and four roommates, all kinksters, moved in and equipped the house with an array of dungeon apparatus, he says. He says he has thrown four or five parties since then, most recently two weeks ago. His guests park their cars in a Unitarian church lot nearby. The guests have included the owner of the house.

Pickthorne’s published rules go on and on: “Street clothing only outside the house. . . . You are welcome to drink but not become drunk. . . . Please have your IDs out when you arrive. . . . No illegal drugs. . . . Do not touch anyone in any way without express permission. . . . Please be conscious of noise levels. . . . No single-tails. The dungeon is too crowded and the cracks sound like gunfire to the neighbors who may call 911.”

As for selling tickets, he says: “It’s so I don’t have to dig into my own pocket personally to buy everything. Whatever’s left, if there is anything left, I just donate to the NCFS,” meaning Wright’s sexual freedom group. She confirmed the contributions.

Back at the house now, at the curb.

“Thanks for coming,” he says.
So any chance of getting a peek inside?

“Oh, no. Sorry.”

Pleeease?

“Afraid not, mate.”

Vice squad visits

Try finding some angry Tone Drive residents willing to voice their gripes publicly. It’s not easy. Tom Adams, a conservation lobbyist who lives with his wife and two children on Marjory Lane, right behind the castle, says neighbors thought Berliner’s office would keep the situation out of the news.

“There are an awful lot of people who are ticked that this got leaked,” says Adams, 46. “The desire was to resolve it quietly and not draw attention. . . . Clearly, anyone thinking about buying a house in the neighborhood will think twice about it now, knowing this is going on.”

Frank De Lange of the Department of Permitting Services and two police officers from the vice squad showed up at Pickthorne’s door last Friday.

“The gentleman just essentially explained that it was consenting adults coming into these parties,” De Lange says. After 31 years as a zoning inspector, he says, he has many “wild stories” to tell about unorthodox land use — but none this strange. “When I asked what he was charging, he said something about asking for donations, and there was some kind of cause that advocated for people’s sexual freedoms or whatever it is.”

The vice officers wanted to take a walk through the house, but Pickthorne said no. (“Just because I’m British doesn’t mean I don’t understand the Fourth Amendment,” he says.) After politely instructing him on prostitution and pandering laws, the officers left, and so did De Lange. “At this point there’s no discernable evidence of any criminal violation,” says Capt. Paul Starks, a county police spokesman. “It appears to be consensual activity between adults.”

After the visit, De Lange says, he looked carefully at Pickthorne’s Web site, which has since been taken down. “I noticed how he put ‘tickets’ in there, that you had to purchase tickets. To me, that was enough to hang my hat on and issue him a notice of violation, Section 59-C-1.31, which I did subsequently on Monday.” The notice is a warning. “I have to follow up and make sure he complies.” If he doesn’t, he could get a citation, which carries a fine.

Follow up how? “We don’t elaborate on investigative procedures,” De Lang says.

“I can assure you,” Berliner says, “our county will be exploring every legal means available to ensure that the activity taking place at this particular residence does not have an adverse impact on the community.”

He says, “I have spoken with the police commander personally with respect to this matter.”

Meanwhile, Pickthorne has a few more weeks to figure out how to abide by Section 59-C-1.31 without going broke.

His next party is later this month. Its theme: “Dark Odyssey Winter Fire.”

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.

Last year, in a series of “town-hall meetings” across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

Anger

Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.

Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?

Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called “the paranoid style” of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

But that would be a mistake.

Gets confused about other female bits also
By John Ozimek

The proposed Australian Government clampdown on smut just got a whole lot broader, as news emerged of a ban on small breasts and female ejaculation in adult material.

The end result of this widening of the censor’s net could be the addition of millions of websites to the internet filter now being proposed.
Click here to find out more!

Breasts came under the spotlight a year ago, as Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett commenced a campaign against publicly available porn. Rounding up magazines from corner shops and filling stations, Senator Joyce claimed that publications featuring small-breasted women were encouraging paedophilia.

The result of this campaign is now visible in the decisions being made by the Australian Classification Board, which is beginning to apply RC (refused classification) categories to such material, as opposed to the previous X-rating. According to Fiona Patten, Convenor of the Australian Sex Party: “We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size.

“It may be an unintended consequence of the Senator’s actions but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines of late.”

Mainstream companies such as Larry Flint’s Hustler produce some of the publications that have been banned. These companies are regulated by the FBI to ensure that only adult performers are featured in their publications.

At the same time, the Australian Sex Party claims, Federal government censors are directing Customs officials to confiscate depictions of the female orgasm when it is accompanied with an ejaculation, as the Classification Board is also starting to classify films that feature female ejaculation as RC. Films that show both male and female ejaculation have routinely been given an X rating since 1983.

The new ruling follows a boom in the numbers of adult films featuring female ejaculation since the pioneering research of Professor Emeritus Beverly Whipple was published in her book The G Spot.

The films are being banned on one of two grounds:

1) That the depictions are a form of urination which is banned under the label of ‘golden showers’ in the Classification Guidelines or

2) Female ejaculation is an ‘abhorrent’ depiction

However, as Ms Patten points out, one of the objections raised the Board is that film performers have been faking the production of ejaculate: this suggests that they are trying to both have their cake and eat it on this issue, since if the liquid in question is fake, there is no policy requiring the censorship of douching or enemas.

In terms of impact on the net, The Australian Sex Party (ASP) suggests the impact could be enormous, as not only are banned sites to be blocked – but also sites that link to banned sites are also in line for blocking. The ASP argue: “There are over one million sites featuring female ejaculation and for Australia to be banning depictions and discussion of this important issue, takes us back into the Victorian era where they didn’t even believe that women could have orgasms.”

Both issues have featured recently in Europe. Back in November 2008, Hustler Europe filed a constitutional complaint against a section of German law that criminalises sales and distribution of content depicting “adult actors who show a youthful appearance”.

Meanwhile, the question of female ejaculation continues to be hotly debated in the UK, as film director Anna Span claims that the BBFC have now acknowledged its existence, whilst the BBFC continues to deny they have done any such thing.

And back in Australia, so great was the outrage over the Classification Board’s actions that the ASP website went down under the weight of traffic.

IT was on the island of Saipan, in a remote part of the Pacific Rim, that John Bowe, then a 42-year-old writer researching a book on modern-day slavery, fell madly in love for the first time in his adult life.

The romance, which began three years ago, could have resulted in an engagement and maybe even marriage. Instead, it was the latest in a series of fraught relationships, all of which seemed destined to end in failure.

Mr. Bowe, a perpetual bachelor, had been in love twice before — in high school and as a graduate student — but it had been so long and this new feeling was so profound that it shook him to the core. Rather than making him happy, he said, it confused him.

“This facet of experience most people center their lives around came as this alien, funny, unanticipated shock to me,” he said last week, pounding garlic and spices with a mortar and pestle in the kitchen of his West Village studio apartment. He was certain that he was in love, he said, but felt confounded by how to deal with a relationship that “came with so many complications, and a lot of fear, and a lot of pressure.”

Part of the problem, he said, was the distance involved — Saipan is a two-day trip from New York — and the fact that the woman shared custody of her two sons with their father and couldn’t leave the island.

So tormented was Mr. Bowe by his inability to make the relationship work that he set out on a two-year quest to find out why. Not through conventional means, like psychotherapy, but by researching other people’s romantic experiences.

The result is “Us: Americans Talk About Love,” a new collection of first-person accounts of why love succeeds or fails, published by Faber & Faber. No aspect of lust, greed, need or devotion is ignored: The book includes tales of obsession and confusion (from a 17-year-old girl in San Antonio, Tex., who can’t get over an ex-boyfriend and a drug-addled 30-year-old living with his mother in Arizona while following his ex on Facebook); finding bliss (as a 44-year-old lesbian eventually did in Minneapolis, after more than a decade of marriage to a born-again Christian); and acceptance (from a 76-year-old widower in Manhattan who says he dated more than 300 women after his wife died, without ever finding anyone to take her place).

It is as compelling as literary fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine called it a “profound, touching work.” But it also functions as a kind of self-help manual, forcing readers to examine their own longings, failings and assumptions about love.

On the surface, there is little to suggest that Mr. Bowe, who came to New York from Minneapolis in his early 20s “to be a famous musician or filmmaker,” isn’t the last great catch.

On a recent afternoon, he was well groomed and neatly dressed in a pressed oxford and jeans, his bright studio equally tidy: an assortment of cookware carefully arrayed on a kitchen wall, records and files stacked neatly under his bed. In the cotton-candy-colored bathroom, there was none of the hair or dust one might expect to see in a bachelor pad. And nearly every wall of his apartment was decorated with paintings of flowers, a collection he has spent more than two decades amassing.

“When I was a little punk rocker on a motorcycle when I was 18, I went to thrift stores, and I just noticed how many amateur paintings there are out there of either flowers or Jesus. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to collect all the different ones?’ ” he said. “I realized I didn’t want 100 visages of Jesus staring down at me.”

Mr. Bowe’s domestication extends to cooking: even though it was the middle of the day, he had already begun preparing dinner — a pork dish with a homemade spice mix inspired by a jar of crushed sweet peppers brought back from a recent trip to Portugal. Offering his guest some mint tea, he reached into a cupboard and pulled out a bag full of dried mint leaves that he grew over the summer at a friend’s house in Dutchess County.

His résumé would impress any woman with a soft spot for social issues: After graduating from film school at Columbia University and co-writing the movie “Basquiat,” he traveled the world for a decade, working as a cowboy in Argentina and as a bargeman on the Amazon River. Along the way, he wrote a series of magazine articles on modern-day slavery — one of which won a Hillman prize for fostering social and economic justice — and later published a book called “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.”

Ask him about his work as a journalist and he holds forth like a modern-day Marxist, railing against injustice and criticizing the mainstream news media for focusing on the ruling class instead of “regular people.”

“I don’t like experts and authorities, and I don’t like writing about stuff in the normal way they consider news,” he said, explaining his belief that “noncelebrities” and “nonexperts” do a far better job of illuminating the human condition.

“Even thinking you’re the most enlightened, objective person in the world, you could never anticipate” all the points of view you get from ordinary people, he said. “And they end up being smarter than you could ever be.”

Despite his profound feeling for the problems of complete strangers, Mr. Bowe doesn’t seem to have as much awareness when it comes to the difficulties in his own life.

After repeated prodding, he recounted his romantic history, beginning with a high school relationship in which he and a girlfriend broke up and got back together “1,500 times.” During one of the separations, he said, he set her up with one of his best friends, which turned out to be an inspired pairing. (The two were still together when he went off to college.) Later, he said, he fell for a “deeply funny” film school classmate who was smart and creative. But during the year and a half they dated, they discovered that they were “awful at resolving problems.”

In his 30s — when he alternated between “long stretches of being alone” and “one-night stands or lame affairs,” he said — he was focused almost entirely on his career: “I wanted to put writing first, so I could earn a living doing it. I wanted to make sure I could do what I wanted to do.”

Once he fell in love with the woman in Saipan, though, he spent two years traveling back and forth while they hatched a plan for her move to New York. Eventually, it became clear that the plan was unrealistic. “You know that idea that true love conquers all?” he said. “It can conquer a hell of a lot, but it can’t conquer everything.”

As to why his previous relationships didn’t work out, either, he volunteered: “I can be oblivious. I don’t think I’m ever mean or whatever. But I think I can just be thoughtless sometimes. You can’t ever be thoughtful enough.”

What would the women he’s dated say?

“There’s the impotency problem,” he deadpanned. “That’s a joke.”

Pouring mint tea into two glasses, he explained that while he has no regrets about his past, he still wants nothing more than to fall in love and start a family. “At a certain point, one wants it all to stop, and just to settle down and be boring and normal,” he said. “And that’s absolutely who I’ve become now. I will be the happiest person on this planet when I have kids. I do think it’s a bummer to be playing around with your kids in your 50s as opposed to in your 30s, but that’s the way the cookie crumbled.”

Later, in one of several late-night phone calls when Mr. Bowe seemed less guarded, he speculated about his chances of finding love at this point in his life. “I think it’s a very arrogant gamble I made in a way,” he said. “I’ll have time to set up a career that fulfills my spiritual goals and then have time for a relationship afterwards. If I’m right, then I’m the coolest guy in the world. If I’m wrong, I’m a loser.”

Over the years, he admitted, friends have accused him of being afraid of intimacy. “But pretty much all of those friends wanted to be artists or filmmakers or writers, and none of them are,” he said.

“The goal was always to avoid being that surly alcoholic guy who didn’t live up to his dreams and blamed the wife and kids for that,” he added. “So, you make your calculations, you roll the dice and you hope you’re right that there’s time after you make it to then join the human race and have a normal emotional life.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db2b340a-0a1b-11df-8b23-00144feabdc0.html

Canadian facts and figures

• 6 big banks, approximately 73 banking institutions in total
• The big banks are all universal – offering retail, commercial and investment banking services. Some boutique investment and commercial banks exist but they are relatively small
• Banks have minimal off-balance-sheet holdings
• Banks’ return on equity generally 13% to 20%
• Home ownership rate: 68.4% of the population
• Subprime less than 5% of the mortgage market
• Relatively low penetration of derivatives and securitisation
(27% of mortgages repackaged and sold as bonds)
• Mortgage default rate less than 1%

Source: McKinsey
Dates: 2008 & 2009, except Canadian home ownership figures, which come from the 2006 census.

US facts and figures
• 8,021 banks ranging in size from large multinationals to small community banks
• Many independent boutique investment and commercial banks
• Banks have significant off-balance-sheet holdings
• Banks’ return on equity generally -25% to 10%
• Home ownership rate 67.6% of the population
• Subprime approximately 11% of the mortgage market
• Significant penetration of derivatives and securitisation
(67% of mortgages repackaged and sold as bonds)
• Mortgage default rate approx. 10%

There’s something about Canada that inspires gentle mockery from foreigners, especially those who live south of the border. Kelly Ripa, the co-host of a popular US talk show, this month engaged in an extended on-air riff with her husband (don’t ask) about the absurdity of Canadian place names; Regina came in for a particular beating. South Park once invented a ditty – “Blame Canada” – devoted to bashing the Great White North. And at the elite end of the spectrum, Michael Kinsley, then editor of The New Republic, wondered what the most boring possible headline for a news story might be, and determined that “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” was the winner.

This tendency to react to the mere mention of Canada with either yawns or guffaws may be why, as the world struggles to figure out what went wrong in 2007 and 2008, not much international attention is being devoted to figuring out what went right in Canada. Canada is the only G7 country to survive the financial crisis without a state bail-out for its financial sector. Two of the world’s 15 most highly valued financial institutions – a list dominated by China – are Canadian and a recent World Economic Forum report rated the Canadian banking system the world’s soundest. Even Barack Obama, on the eve of a visit last year to Ottawa, the Canadian ­capital, admitted: “In the midst of the enormous economic crisis, I think Canada has shown itself to be a pretty good manager of the financial system and the economy in ways that we haven’t always been.”

One of the most important policy debates today – particularly in countries hardest hit by the crash, such as the US and UK – is what caused the crisis and what should be done to prevent a repetition. Inevitably, the discussion is hypothetical: even if we could agree on exactly what went wrong, no one can prove that any recommended policy changes would have averted the meltdown. That’s where Canada comes in. It is a real-world, real-time example of a banking system in a medium-sized, advanced capitalist economy that worked. Understanding why the Canadian system survived could be a key to making the rest of the west equally robust.

The first argument you are likely to hear when you start asking what made Canada different is cultural. Depending on your degree of fondness for Canucks, this thesis comes down to the notion that Canadians are either too nice or too dull to indulge in the no-holds-barred, plundering capitalism that created such a spectacular boom, and eventual bust, in more aggressive societies. A senior official in Ottawa likes to say that Canadian bankers are “boring, but in a good way. They are more interested in balance sheets than in high society. They don’t go to the opera.” Some of them – including the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest bank – have never even been to Davos. According to Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, “Canadians are like hobbits. They are just not as rapacious as Americans.” And Paul Volcker, the legendary inflation-slaying former head of the US Federal Reserve and an adviser to Obama, told me that Canada’s strength is “partly a cultural thing – they are more conservative”.

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto – I should admit here that not only am I Canadian, but I also serve on Martin’s advisory board – went to Harvard and Harvard Business School and worked as a management consultant in Boston. His professional experience on both sides of the border has convinced him there is a meaningful cultural difference, one which he traces to the founding philosophies of the two north American states: “We are ‘peace, order and good government’. They are into the pursuit of happiness. The US banks were pursuing their own happiness, with sort of an ideological assumption that it would all work out fine.”

The culture of Canada’s bankers also gets high marks from the governor of the Bank of Canada. Born in the Northwest Territories, educated at Harvard and Oxford, and trained in global markets during a 13-year stint at Goldman Sachs, Mark Carney brings an international perspective to his elegant boardroom with its 10ft windows overlooking Parliament Hill. Asked to account for the resilience of his country’s banking system, Carney started with the fact that “Canadian bankers are still bankers. They still – through the organisations and up to the top of the organisation – are proficient at managing credit risk and market risk … they have retained a banking culture through[out] the organisation.”

In the skyscrapers of Toronto’s Bay Street, Canada’s banking hub, with their sweeping views over Lake Ontario, the cultural thesis wins some support, too. Sprawled in an armchair in his eighth-floor office, Gordon Nixon, the lanky, bespectacled chief executive of Royal Bank of Canada, admitted that “the US system is less risk-averse than the Canadian system”.

Ed Clark, CEO of TD, Canada’s second-largest bank, works from a fourth floor office just around the corner from Nixon’s. He told me that “I don’t take myself so seriously. US bankers maybe see themselves as more important than we do.” In Clark’s view, Canadian culture imposes a limit on CEO megalomania: “Canada is a more egalitarian society; Canadians are less hierarchical. In the US, you can tell people to do something. In Canada, you have to ask them to do something – and hope they will do it!”

. . .

The most convincing testimony I heard to Canada’s culturally distinct approach to banking came during an interview at RBC’s offices on the southern tip of Manhattan. There I met Kevin Lewis, a 44-year-old investment banker wearing a navy suit but no tie, with a shaven head. Lewis used to work at Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s most aggressive firms, until it went bankrupt. “I don’t want to sound condescending to Canadians,” he said, “but there is a ‘being nice’ mentality that exists in the institution. There is a priority on decorum, on being friendly, on being collegial. It’s a subtle thing. It is like soft music playing, rather than hard rock.”

The financial crisis has given this sort of argument fresh intellectual respectability. One of the winners in the crash was behavioural economics, with its emphasis on the ways in which individual and group psychology shape financial outcomes. If you buy this approach, Canada’s small “c” conservatism and its egalitarianism may well have served as a check on excessive risk-taking: it is hard to be a shoot-’em-up frontiersman when your cultural hero is the law-enforcing Mountie.

Yet I’m cautious about buying the niceness argument wholesale. What seems prudent in the immediate aftermath of the crisis may well seem dangerously stagnant once we focus again on innovation and growth. Even now, Lewis told me, being nice is not exactly a compliment on Wall Street, and he was anxious to qualify such impressions: “We have all the competitiveness and drive to succeed, we just don’t have some of the hard elbows that characterise it elsewhere.” A friend who runs a hedge fund in Toronto and who conforms to the stereotype of that sub-species – a 51-year-old, loft-living bachelor who runs marathons and cycles competitively – put it more directly. “Please,” he wrote in an e-mail, “don’t say it is just because we Canadian bankers are all so boring!!!”

Moreover, while the Canadian hobbits are to the fore at the moment, the country has had its orcs, too. Indeed, two of America’s most notorious corporate felons were born Canadian: WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Hollinger’s Conrad Black. There are other examples in Canada itself: BreX, one of the mining industry’s great scams, was a Calgary company. Canada even had its own home-grown embarrassment in the financial crisis when, in the summer of 2007, its asset-backed commercial paper market threatened to collapse.

Most important of all, one of the lessons of the global economic transformation of the past 20 years is that when incentives change, cultures can change, too. Two decades ago, selling a pair of jeans was illegal in Russia; now that country is home to some of the most aggressive capitalists on the planet.

If Canadian culture isn’t the key, the alternative explanation must be the country’s rules and institutions. TD’s Ed Clark, who spent a decade in federal government from 1974 to 1984, favours this argument. “There’s probably a range of views, from heroic bankers to heroic regulators,” he told me. “While it might make me unpopular in my industry, I think the key is the structure of the industry.”

. . .

The civil servants who police Canada’s banking system agree. The industry’s senior watchdog is Julie Dickson, a delicate-featured blonde who heads the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI). In person, Dickson is the embodiment of all of those putatively Canadian national virtues – she is quiet, deliberate and so much of a self-effacing team-player that she would not allow a national magazine to illustrate a recent profile of her with a photograph on its cover.

But Dickson believes it is rules and not individuals that account for her sector’s survival. She points to three specific restrictions: capital requirements, quality of capital and a leverage ratio. “We had a tier one capital target of 7 per cent going back to 1999,” she says, referring to the proportion of the bank’s equity considered to be of the highest grade. “We also paid attention to quality of capital, so 75 per cent of that tier one had to be in common shares [as opposed to preferred stock, which is considered a hybrid of equity and debt]. And our leverage ratio [of debt to equity], of 20 to 1, was very important, we think.”

Mark Carney at the Bank of Canada cited those same three rules, and this nearly word-perfect unanimity between the two speaks to a fourth, structural advantage – Canada’s uncomplicated and well co-ordinated regulatory framework. This consists of the central bank, which is responsible for the stability of the overall system; the superintendent, responsible for the stability of the financial institutions; a consumer protection agency, which looks out for individuals; and the finance ministry which sets the broad rules on ownership of financial institutions and the design of financial products such as mortgages and tax-deferred investment vehicles. The four actors meet regularly. As a result, says Robert Palter, director at ­McKinsey in Toronto, “there are no gaps.”

The way rules are enforced seems to matter, too. The Canadian system is based on principles, rather than rules. It is about the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law. For Dickson, that means “we want to be told everything that is going on. We don’t want to have a list of boxes that we tick because that’s not very effective.” She is particularly disdainful of a legalistic approach. “Having lawyers looking at this line or that clause and debating with you about whether something is do-able or not is not the right conversation to have. The right conversation is the principle. You have to know what risks you are undertaking.”

The bank chiefs seem to get the message. According to Clark, whose TD bank has significant operations in the US: “The message in the US is it’s your responsibility to meet our rules. In Canada, the responsibility is to run the institution right. Julie says [to the CEO]: you are the chief risk officer of the bank.”

Dickson gets executives’ attention in part by attending bank board meetings, including a session with just the non-executive directors. Geoff Beattie, one of Canada’s most influential investors and a member of the RBC board, says Dickson’s reports “have a big impact. It creates a nice check and balance in the boardroom when they are focused on being real risk managers and regulators for Canadian banks”.

With hindsight, all of this seems obvious: lots of quality capital, limits on leverage and a simple and co-ordinated regulatory system that forces bank bosses to take personal responsibility for managing risk. But it didn’t look that way five or 10 years ago when, across the world, financial engineering was in vogue and light-touch regulation seemed a prerequisite for success. The real mystery is why Canadian policy-makers weren’t tempted to get into that race to the bottom, and why their bankers didn’t push them into it.

One reason may be that on his first day as finance minister in 1993, Paul Martin got very scared. Martin, a snowy-haired, charming Anglophone businessman now living in Montreal, who went on to serve as prime minister, remembers that “the first file on my desk was Confederation Life” – an insurance company that eventually failed. “We had gone through a period of failures of trust companies,” Martin recalled. ­“Personally, the ­lessons … were very important.”

Martin decided that his job was to figure out how to make sure “these things never happened again”. David Dodge, who went on to become governor of the Bank of Canada, was deputy minister of finance at the time. He, too, remembers the early 1990s as a formative period. “We were starting out basically not knowing how to deal with this. It prompted a decade of legislative change.”

For Martin and Dodge, there was a shared conviction, as Martin told me, that “we could never afford to go through with our banks what we went through with our trust system. I knew there was going to be a banking crisis and so did everyone else who has read any history. I just wanted to be damn sure that when a crisis occurred it wouldn’t occur in Canada.”

Don Drummond, now the chief economist at TD, was a senior official at the finance ministry in the 1990s. “The perspective of government on the financial sector is: ‘We are the regulator – our job is to tell you what to do, not to help it grow,’” he told me. “The government has always felt its job was to say no.” Because of this, Martin and his team were uninterested in what became the contest to create the most attractive haven for global capital. Canada raised its capital requirements as they were lowered in other parts of the world. “I think one of the things that happened was the great competition between New York and London pushed the two into more of a light touch in terms of regulation,” Martin recalled. “I remember talking to [the regulator] and we agreed that we were not prepared to take that approach. Light-touch regulation in an industry that was totally dependent on solvency didn’t make any sense.”

Again, with hindsight, Canada’s opt-out seems logical. But it wasn’t seen that way at the time. One measure of how powerfully the country was swimming against the tide is that the International Monetary Fund chided Canada for not doing enough to promote securitisation – restructuring debt into tradeable financial instruments – in its mortgage market. Even communist China accused Canadians of being too cautious about capitalism. Jim Flaherty, Canada’s finance minister, recalls that on a visit to Beijing in 2007, “they were suggesting that maybe Canadian banks were too timid.”

Canada’s bright young things were sympathetic to this critique. One newspaper columnist liked to write about “the tale of two Royals”, comparing the stodgy Royal Bank of Canada with its buccaneering, world-beating Edinburgh cousin, the Royal Bank of Scotland. A Canadian finance executive who spent the 1990s in Toronto and now lives in Asia sheepishly recalls thinking: “Come on, guys, get in the game! The world’s changing.”

Although they don’t like to admit to it now, some of Canada’s bankers sang along with this deregulatory chorus. But somehow they failed to effect the kind of change seen elsewhere. One reason is certainly the resolute attitude of the Canadian government – its national-stereotype-busting toughness was most clearly seen when Martin refused to allow the banks to merge. But another reason Canadian banks didn’t persuade the government to loosen up was that they didn’t try very hard. “I received huge pressure on the mergers,” Martin told me. “But when I raised tier one capital I did not receive delegations of bankers to protest. They didn’t raise hell.”

The source of that restraint isn’t that Canadian bankers are culturally cautious or naturally nice. It is that the structure of their business allows them to make very healthy profits without taking extreme risks. As David Dodge puts it, “You had a set of banks that had essentially very profitable domestic commercial banking franchises. They had to be pretty bad in their other businesses to lose money overall.”

The heart of the franchise – and probably the true key to the stability of the Canadian financial sector – is mortgages. Unlike many of the economies that were hardest hit by the crisis, particularly the US and the UK, Canada has a highly restrictive mortgage market. All mortgages with less than a 20 per cent down payment must be insured. Adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages are practically unheard of. One obvious result is a more robust mortgage market: Palter at McKinsey says that less than 1 per cent of Canadian mortgages are currently in default, compared with 10 per cent in the US, with almost no difference in the home ownership rate, around 67 per cent in both countries.

The regulator’s emphasis on quality of capital means that instead of securitising most of their mortgages – according to Palter, in 2007, 27 per cent of Canadian mortgages were securitised, compared with 67 per cent in the US – banks held on to them. According to Carney, the central banker, if you run a Canadian bank, your calculation is that “at the start of the year, I know I have got $1bn net of income, because they are Canadian mortgages. I know I have very low credit risk. Why would I get rid of that earnings base?”

. . .

Palter offers this comparison with the US banking sector: “The big ­Canadian banks typically generate return on equity of between 13 per cent and 20 per cent, and rarely produce negative returns on equity. Comparable US banks earn ROEs that range from negative 25 per cent to 10 per cent over the past 18 months.”

“We are extremely non-capital-intensive,” TD’s Ed Clark told me. “That is because of the regulatory regime. If we were an American bank I couldn’t do it. I would be forced up the yield curve.”

To figure out why Canada survived the banking crisis, I visited Ottawa and Toronto, talking to regulators, central bankers, investment bankers and investors. It turns out that I could have found the answer on the streets of my hometown, asking my father’s neighbours about the terms of their mortgages. For more credit-addicted societies, this may, however, be the hardest part of the Canadian experience to replicate: it is one thing for voters to support tougher rules for banks, it is quite another to agree to tougher rules for themselves.

“At the heart of the problem was the fact that you had this bubble in US residential real estate that was fed by inappropriate lending standards; it was fed by public policy,” RBC’s Gordon Nixon told me. “In Canada, that was the strongest asset class throughout this crisis.”

In my conversations with Canadian bankers, one of the things that struck me was how often they referred to mothers. Nixon mentioned his mother and her good opinion when explaining why he gave back his bonus in 2008; Clark uses the mother-in-law test, as in “Would you sell it to your mother-in-law?” to help TD employees figure out if they should be hawking a product to their customers. In an era when Wall Street investment banks issue notes warning their clients they may be short-selling the investments they are marketing, this sounds like a charmingly Canadian attitude. But it is easier to be nice if you don’t need to be nasty just to make a buck.

With its trysting governor and “you lie!” congressman, South Carolina has suffered more than its share of politician-induced embarrassment. Now Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has topped them, cruelly equating government help for the poor to “feeding stray animals.”

Mr. Bauer, who is running for governor, told a conservative political crowd about his grandmother’s warning against feeding strays. “You know why? Because they breed!” boomed the popular Republican. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

He eschewed what he described as political correctness and sternly called for the state to “curtail that type of behavior” by taking away assistance if the parents of children receiving subsidized lunches don’t show up for school conferences. “You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks,” said Mr. Bauer.

In casting himself as the candidate of heartless civics, if not nitwit eugenics, Mr. Bauer at least stirred an encouraging furor. Outraged residents point out that South Carolina has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, with unemployment rising to 12.6 percent in a Great Recession the poor hardly caused. Fifty-eight percent of the state’s students receive subsidized lunches.

Now watch Mr. Bauer backpedal. He insists he was a victim of the media, not his own overreach in the politics of class resentment. But his words are out there. With a lieutenant governor like Mr. Bauer in the wings, it’s become clearer why the South Carolina Legislature declined to impeach Gov. Mark Sanford for going AWOL at taxpayers’ expense in pursuit of his mistress. Voters should make Mr. Bauer eat his words.

Reading Seth Godin’s new book called Linchpin, I had some lingering questions on behalf of all the musicians I know.

So I asked him. Here are my questions and his answers:

You say, “the winners are the artists who give gifts”, but many artists I know are feeling like the losers. How would you explain your philosophy of the linchpin economy to a musician who’s making great music, giving it away online, but getting only apathy in return?

Feeling like a loser is part of being an artist, but I want to challenge the notion of “great music.” Sure, some music that’s great is great for the ages and it’s okay that’s it’s not being heard, but so much of what people call great art (whether it’s a book or a song or a way of doing customer service) isn’t actually great, it’s merely “very good.” Very good music is unheard every day, because very good music is not in short supply. There’s a huge surplus of it.

I’m not equating “great” with “commercial.” I have no doubt that there’s great art that doesn’t sell. But most musicians you and I know are TRYING to be commercial, if commercial means successful, heard, lots of stuff sold, lots of people at the concerts. And in the rush to be successful, sometimes great gets pushed out the window. I’ve sampled hundreds of songs on CDBaby and I can say that almost all of it is very good. And virtually none of it is great, if we define great to mean music I need to buy, to give away, to talk about to everyone I know. Almost none of it changed my life, and that’s what great music does.

Great means unsettling. Great means open to criticism. Great means booed off stage. And great music, like a great idea, spreads. Ideas that spread, win, and so the goal today is not to make great music for 1970 or 1990, but great music for today, for a market that’s super picky and selfish and has ADD. Great is in the ear of the listener, of course, and the definition is simple: if it spreads, then for this market, it’s great.

By definition, Great cannot create widespread apathy.

People often use price as an indicator of quality. Even connoisseurs rate wine higher if told the price is higher. So many artists are averse to sharing their work online for free, because it might be seen as valueless. Since I’ve heard you argue both sides of this, how do you reconcile it in the case of an artist choosing how to share their work?

This is a conundrum, and probably worth thinking about a bit. Paintings, for example, have been free to experience as long as there have been art galleries. The difference today with music is that there’s a mammoth change going on – and it’s about control. Music has always been free on the radio (in fact, record companies PAID to get it on the radio). Now, though, every song is on the “radio” all the time, because the radio is Pandora and Limewire and the rest.

So, if the radio is already there, and music is free-er than ever, it’s not clear that music is valueless. There’s more music being listened to (not just played, but being listened to) than ever before in history, and that listening is proof that people value it. At least they value it enough to spend their time.

Get over the idea that your success is equated with selling the right to listen, or selling control over when people listen. Relinquish the opportunity to make money by controlling who can listen and when. That’s gone. It’s over. It would be like a bakery selling the right to sniff the fresh bread or a wine maker selling the right to look at the cool label. It’s now a public good, something you see as you walk by.

What you can sell, what you better be able to sell, is intimacy. It’s interactions in public. Souvenirs. Limited things of value. Experiences. Memories. People will pay for those things, IF: your art is actually great and if you make it possible for them to buy them.

If it’s great, let it go. You’ll do fine. If it’s not great, figure out what great is and do that.

A tall order, but a huge opportunit

“This upsets the apple cart,” admits Dr. Per Ahlberg, lead author of the report in the current Nature in an interview with the Star. “These are some of the most exciting fossils I have ever encountered.

Ahlberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Uppsala, and his Polish colleagues uncovered secure — meaning clearly evident — footprints of a trackway, or walking stride, of tetrapods, four-legged animals with obvious legs and feet. That means we crawled out of the water and started walking 397 million years ago, 18 million years before the previous best evidence.

“I sat there and in the course of a single afternoon found myself revising my entire understanding of my own field of research,” said Ahlberg. He told the rest of the team: “This is going to be in the textbooks.”

“These were tetrapods with real limbs with digits. I hit the roof when I saw what they found.” Ahlberg had been called in by his former graduate student, Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, now scientific director of the Polish Geological Institute in Warsaw.

“I don’t think he could quite believe it. I mean, it’s not even his subject and he’s found the equivalent of Tutankhamun’s tomb.”

Maybe, but not so fast, said Dr. Edward Daeschler, an evolutionary biologist with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Daeschler, Dr. Neil Shubin and Farish Jenkins discovered skeletons in Nunavut of Tiktaalik roseae, the link between fish and animals that walked on four legs. Tiktaalik, called the most exciting find in a decade, was a transitional creature – but it was still a fish.

“The shine on Tiktaalik has not been diminished at all,” Daeschler said Tuesday from his office. “It’s still the best example.” Their discovery was published in Nature in 2006.

By “best” he means the Nunavut discovery included a skeleton; the Polish one does not.

“The race is on to find skeletons,” said Ahlberg. “But I think it is a mistake to regard footprints as less secure than a skeleton. When you drop dead, you will leave one skeleton but millions of footprints.”

Ahlberg said their evidence, uncovered between 2002 and 2008, proves “without any question, this was a walking trackway. We can see where the sediment oozed from the side of their feet when they stepped down. We can see the anatomical details of their feet.”

Daechler doesn’t see it. “These are isolated footprints, not in trackways. They’re very large. This would be an animal that was 10-foot long. This doesn’t fit my image of the way this would work. There is room for error here.”

He objects to the “definitive tone” Ahlberg and his colleagues take in their research paper, but admits the discovery of a tetrapod skeleton as old as the footprints would convince him.

“Who could argue?” He’s prepared to hedge his bets. “This may be the beginning of a new paradigm. The rocks are firmly dated.”

While Nature has been “very supportive,” launching its first issue of the year with the Polish discovery and an accompanying video, Ahlberg understands his colleagues’ skepticism. “They don’t know what to make of this because it changes everything.”

Bones, he knows, will shut them up. “There’s not much to argue about when you have the footprints and the skeleton. There they are. They existed.”

But not yet. Daeschler isn’t ready to concede. “These look like toes, but you can come up with other explanations. They are notoriously difficult to interpret.”

Tiktaalik is derived from the Inuktitut, the name for a large, freshwater fish seen in the shallows that were related to the cod.

The Polish discovery doesn’t just rewrite the history of evolution. It also challenges why we first slunk out of the sea.

“This is about more than just footprints. We’re taking about moving from one living environment to another,” said Ahlberg.

“We’ve argued until now that tetrapods were linked to the ecosystem, which was a seriously barren mud bank. This means they had nothing to do with the terrestrial ecosystem. They were not herbivores. They had vicious, nasty looking teeth and were carnivores.”

Poland itself was nearly tropical, sitting in the Southern Hemisphere on a land mass that included present day Europe, North America and Greenland wedged together.

While these crocodile-sized animals were devouring fish and jellyfish that washed up from the sea “nothing was in the sky. There were no birds yet, no winged insects, no reptiles,” said Ahlberg.

“There was only the sound of wind.”

thestar.com/news/sciencetech/science/article/749674–we-re-18-million-years-older-than-we-thought-footprints-reveal

by Tom Matthews, illustration by Gluekit

The movie for that Saturday afternoon was 1967’s Journey to the Center of Time, a leaden hunk of sci-fi schlock. The show was WISN’s “Shock Theater,” hosted by Toulouse No-Neck, your typical horror movie host whose schtick included throwing a dummy of himself off the Sky Ride at Summerfest. It would have been a less-than-ideal setting for a performance by any rock band, much less one with the international recognition of Badfinger. This was the British band once hailed as the successor to The Beatles, a classic power-pop group that had several big hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s. True, the band’s fortunes had declined in the intervening years, but it still seemed inconceivable that Badfinger was reduced to performing on “Shock Theater.”

But there it was: Badfinger taping several songs for this low-rent show, including its first hit single, “Come and Get It,” written and produced for the band in 1969 by Paul McCartney. Tom Evans, one of two remaining original members, sang the song with the same youthful spirit of the recording, but behind glassy eyes that seemed haunted by the reality of what his career had come to. Toulouse No-Neck barged onto the set to sing along in an obnoxious cackle. A rubber chicken attached to Evans’ mic stand completed the degradation.

If the episode seemed bizarre, it was merely one incident in a dark two-month period when Badfinger was marooned in Milwaukee. Lured into signing a questionable contract with a shadowy Milwaukee manager, the once-elite band was stuck here with little money and shabby accommodations while performing infrequently for miniscule fees at low-down venues. Badfinger’s nightmarish experience in Milwaukee set off forces that would ultimately finish off the band.

It all began so promisingly. It was London, 1968, and Badfinger was freshly signed to Apple Records, the new company launched by The Beatles. Bandmates Pete Ham, Tom Evans, Joey Molland and Mike Gibbins were brought under the tutelage of the Fab Four, and the relationship quickly bore creative fruit. McCartney’s songwriting and production skills sent “Come and Get It” to No. 7 on the charts in 1970. George Harrison co-produced Badfinger’s first album, and they later performed with him at the groundbreaking Concert for Bangladesh and on his solo debut, All Things Must Pass. John Lennon used them on Imagine and gave them their name, supposedly in reference to his clumsy piano skills.

There were three more hit Badfinger singles – “No Matter What,” “Day After Day” and “Baby Blue” – which stand today as perfect displays of power-pop, a minor rock genre Badfinger is credited with innovating. A fourth song – “Without You” – went unnoticed when recorded by the band, but went to No. 1 when Harry Nilsson covered it in 1972, hitting the jackpot for Tom Evans and Pete Ham, who composed it.

That same year, the last of the band’s hits, “Baby Blue,” was released. Things would never be as good again for Badfinger.

The Beatles turned out to be shoddy stewards of their career. The bitter infighting at the end of The Beatles’ reign – combined with the chaotic, dope-addled mess of Apple Records – left Badfinger adrift. Desperate for guidance, they made the mistake of signing with manager Stan Polley, a New York music figure who turned out to be spectacularly corrupt. He created the kind of shell companies and private corporations that make artists blink dimly while signing contracts they don’t understand, and magically made much of the Badfinger fortune disappear. When Polley forced a battle between Apple and Warner Bros. Records, the rights to Badfinger songs (and rich royalty payments from “Without You” and its other hits) were tied into a legal knot that would not be untangled for a decade.

By 1975, the band was floundering. Worthy Badfinger albums went unreleased, while lousy ones – issued quickly to meet contractual demands – turned off record buyers. Ham, the primary songwriter and an emotionally fragile man, was devastated.

On the night of April 23, 1975, Ham and Evans had drinks at a pub while bemoaning their fate, then went back to Ham’s house to work on some songs. Sometime after Evans left, Pete Ham went to the music space he kept in his garage and hanged himself at the age of 27.

The next morning, Tom Evans would cut him down.

By all rights, that should have been it for Badfinger. Completely soured on the music business and nearly destitute, Molland worked for a time laying carpet in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Evans toiled as a pipefitter in England. But in time, music pulled them back in. For the rest of the ’70s and into the early ’80s, various combinations of Evans, Molland and Gibbins – along with Bob Jackson, who had joined the band while Ham was still alive – toured and recorded as Badfinger. New albums were poorly produced and generally ignored. Those joyous hit singles, their author dead by his own hand, were performed for small crowds in smaller and smaller venues. Fewer and fewer people cared about Badfinger.

But John Cass cared. Thirty years old and a lifelong Milwaukeean, Cass was eking out a living selling restaurant coupon books. And he was a huge Badfinger fan. He had somehow gotten his hands on Evans’ phone number in England, and was certain he was the man to get the band’s career back on track. He would later claim in a legal deposition that he had been involved in booking concerts for Journey, Little Feat and other big-name acts in Wisconsin. He told Evans he had a way to get his songs to Frank Sinatra. When Evans insisted Cass travel to England as a show of seriousness, he complied. Impressed, Evans figured there might be a use one day for this John Cass.

By the late spring of 1982, Evans and drummer Mike Gibbins were stranded in Detroit after yet another attempt to revive Badfinger. Evans reached out to Cass from across Lake Michigan, and Cass made his move: If the band could get themselves to Milwaukee, Cass would put together a proper tour and restore Badfinger to its past glory.

The first call Evans made was to Bob Jackson back in England. Jackson was suspicious of the deal.

“I was very dubious,” Jackson says, recalling when Evans put Cass on the phone to discuss it. “But the thing that drew me to it was Tom. He had been a mate and a good friend, and the idea of getting back together to move Badfinger forward was a labor of love. So I went because of Tom, not because it was a great money deal.”

Cass said something about $500 a week for each band member and a full slate of gigs, the details of which had yet to be worked out. A journeyman musician, Jackson was compelled to leave behind his wife and newborn daughter. But he insisted Cass pay for a roundtrip plane ticket.

“The idea was that I was just going over for two or three weeks to see if there was really work for us,” Jackson says. “That’s what I left telling my wife.”

Jackson met up with his bandmates and Cass in Detroit, and complications immediately arose. Cass insisted on separate work contracts with each band member; it would later come out that he had already signed Evans to a far more extensive agreement. Cass demanded an eight-week commitment, with an optional 10-week extension. Suddenly Jackson’s few weeks away from home were threatening to turn into four months.

Desperate, disoriented and eager to revive a band he truly believed in, Jackson signed the papers along with everyone else. And then Tom Evans, Bob Jackson, Mike Gibbins, a pickup guitar player and two roadies crawled into a van and headed for Milwaukee.

Cass was required by the contract to provide the band lodging. To that end, he dropped off the band in Hales Corners, where he had access to an empty house. The problem was that it was a show home for a development complex. And it had almost no furniture.

“There was no place for all of us to sleep,” Jackson says. “I think there was one double bed. There were four of us plus the road crew. A big alarm bell rang, but by this point, we were locked into this work contract.”

But the work didn’t seem to be coming. While the band waited for gigs to be scheduled, it spent more time with its new benefactor. Jackson recalls one moment vividly.

“Tommy and I went ’round to see Cass and we were talking about this, that and the other, and then he started all this quasi-religious talk about The Beatles. He said The Beatles were like gods or spiritual leaders to him. And he said he was writing a book about them, which he kept in his refrigerator.

“Tommy and I were like, ‘O-o-o-kay. So why is it in the fridge, then?’ And he said, very seriously, that if the house burned down, he wouldn’t want the world to lose this important thing he had written.”

Cass did manage to book rehearsal space for Badfinger at a warehouse at Second and National, which was home base to numerous Milwaukee bands in the early ’80s. One of them was The Wigs, whose own brand of power-pop would soon take them to Los Angeles for their shot at the Big Time. Bandleader Jim Cushinery, who still works in the L.A. music industry, had been a hardcore Badfinger fan in his youth. He was astonished to find himself sharing a space with them.

“They were direct descendants of The Beatles, for God’s sake,” Cushinery says. “They created some of the most perfect pop melodies of the very early ’70s.”

Aghast at the level to which his heroes had fallen, Cushinery socialized briefly with Evans in the rehearsal hall’s communal kitchen. He saw firsthand the pain the musician was in. “I brought in my copy of their album Straight Up, intending to have him sign it. I said, ‘Hey, look what I’ve got,’ and the life drained out of his face. He just said, ‘Oh, that.’ I sheepishly put it away.

“My impression was that he seemed beaten. It was easy to understand why.”

Cushinery says some of Evans’ distress was caused by local musicians, who were pretty nasty to the band. “Badfinger had one of their posters hanging in the rehearsal space, and someone from one of the other bands scrawled on it that Pete Ham was spinning in his grave.” Someone else hung a doll to mock Ham’s suicide. “It was pretty awful,” Cushinery says with a grimace all these years later.

Soon, Cass was able to cobble together some dates, but the bookings were slapdash. They were squeezed into a midday slot at Summerfest, without billing or pay (no record exists of this, but Jackson swears they were there). They played to a puny outdoor crowd at an oldies show at Little Switzerland in Slinger, where the highlight for the audience was watching security guards chase off a couple having sex on the ski hill. They played tiny clubs like Judges and the Peppermint Lounge, where Mike Shumway – who ironically would grow up to perform as John Lennon in Milwaukee’s venerable Beatles tribute band, The BriTins – was just out of high school and could not believe his good luck.

“The Peppermint Lounge was where local bands played. It was kind of a dump; it held maybe 150 people,” Shumway says. “My friend and I must’ve heard about the show on WEMP or WOKY. But the tickets were only five bucks! We thought it had to be some kind of farce.

“We showed up and there wasn’t much of a crowd. We went right to the front of the stage and figured this was going to be a joke. But over the course of the show, we were like, ‘Wow!’ They were really good.”

Indeed, recollections found on the Internet and through interviews with those who caught Badfinger in the area over the summer of ’82 are almost universal: Fans couldn’t believe how good the band was, and couldn’t believe it was playing such lousy places.

“Can I second that opinion?” Jackson asks with a wounded laugh 27 years later. “We went to Cass and said, ‘What else do you have lined up, because these gigs are hopeless.’ He’d just put us off: ‘It’s all just around the corner, these things take time.’ ”

As the band became more obstinate, Cass became menacing. A secretive figure with unknown sources of income (“He never seemed to have to go to a job,” Jackson recalls), it eventually came out

that Cass lived in Milwaukee under an entirely different name: Greg Dell’Aringa. And when the band started to rebel, Jackson says Cass/Dell’Aringa would drop hints that he had mob connections they didn’t want to provoke.
“We were very concerned about it, particularly Tom. He had signed a lot more documents than I had,” says Jackson. “You wonder if you’re being paranoid, but then you worry, maybe it’s for real.”

The threats were subtle, but as Evans would later dryly observe of underworld figures: “Those types of people don’t give specifics, do they?”

A handful of gigs followed, including “Shock Theater.” According to Rick Felski, who played Toulouse No-Neck on the show from 1979-84, Cass (known to him as Dell’Aringa) had earlier been hawking his restaurant coupon books on WISN. When he subsequently turned up with the once-renowned Badfinger, now scrounging for exposure, Felski eagerly brought them onto the soundstage where WISN also produced “Dialing For Dollars with Howard & Rosemary.”

“We couldn’t quite believe what was happening,” Jackson says of the gig, which is on YouTube. “We didn’t know what this show was or what the tone was until we saw the guy in full makeup. We didn’t know that Toulouse No-Neck was going to jump on stage to sing ‘Come and Get It’ with us, or that there’d be dancing girls.”

The band hadn’t been in Milwaukee a month, and it had been reduced to a laughingstock. “I got terribly depressed,” Jackson recalls. “I remember calling my wife in England from some supermarket in Milwaukee and just crying. I felt awful that I had been away all this while and was going to come back with nothing.”

Nearing the end of the original eight-week commitment and with the gigs and money dwindled to nothing, there was no more reason to stick around. The problem was that, while Jackson had been smart enough to demand a return ticket to England from Cass, Evans – co-author of a No. 1 song 10 years earlier – didn’t have the money to leave town. “I could have gone home to my wife and kiddie and just left Tom to fend for himself. I had my Get Out of Jail Free card. But I couldn’t do that.”

Salvation would come from an unlikely source. The band’s imprisonment in its empty Hales Corners house had become unbearable. When they complained to Cass that they were starving from lack of funds, he mocked their desperation by sending over a case of dog food. To escape such indignities, Jackson and Evans started frequenting Poppers, a bar down the street at Highway 100 and Janesville Road. There they befriended an Iranian émigré named Alex Shlimanoff, who owned a TV repair shop nearby. Seeing how the band was suffering, Shlimanoff began inviting the musicians to his home. Badfinger may have encountered the worst that Milwaukee had to offer in Cass, but they also found the best, some old-fashioned Midwestern hospitality, in Alex Shlimanoff.

“I can remember sitting at a barbecue with Alex and his wife and their kiddie, playing guitars and singing and just being happy,” Jackson recalls fondly. “We had escaped that horrible show home for a night or two. We were really indebted to him for giving us that.” (Shlimanoff declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Shlimanoff’s generosity grew to finally loaning Evans the money he needed for a plane ticket home. Still fearful of Cass’ threats, Jackson says he and Evans slunk down in the car to the airport to avoid detection and didn’t feel safe until the plane left the ground. “It was like a bad movie: Escape From Milwaukee,” he says with a laugh.

And yet, just two months later, they were back in Milwaukee to try it all again. Tending bar at Poppers over that past summer had been Jack Koshick, a fledgling manager and promoter. Somehow Koshick convinced Evans, Jackson and Mike Gibbins that he was the under- credentialed Milwaukeean to bring them back to musical relevance. By October of ’82 they had returned, this time sleeping on Koshick’s floor and steering clear of his furious wife, as Jackson recalls it.

They assembled yet another version of Badfinger, which for a time included Mequon’s Reed Kailing. Kailing had enjoyed some local Beatles-era glory of his own with the Destinations in the ’60s, and went on to play with the Grass Roots and – again, ironically – as Paul McCartney in early stagings of Beatlemania in Los Angeles and New York.

This new Badfinger at least broke free of metro Milwaukee and toured the Midwest and East Coast. Money was tight and touring conditions often abysmal, but in the final quarter of ’82, Badfinger played nearly 50 dates.

According to Kailing, this Badfinger really could have gone places. “Tommy and I became very tight right off the bat, like brothers. We both had the same musical interests. It was just one of those magical things. But Jack really bungled up the tour. He had good intentions. … He would deliver something good, but then there was a lot of bad.”

Whatever prospects Badfinger might’ve had took a major hit in mid-December 1982. Hanging out in a dressing room at a club in Alton, Ill., Evans and Jackson were approached by someone they thought was a fan, but turned out to be a process server: The two of them – along with Gibbins – were being sued by Cass for breaking the contracts they had signed in June.

Jackson and Gibbins were on the hook for sums that could have been crippling for musicians in their position. “I called home to tell my wife I’d been sued, and she told me the bailiff had already been around our house,” Jackson says. “He was looking at the furniture and taking notes, possibly to turn it all over to Cass. We could have lost everything.”

But for Evans, who had signed a separate agreement with Cass, the financial stakes were beyond belief. Cass had to have known Evans was a pauper with a small fortune pending. Despite the fact that Evans’ home in England was nearly foreclosed upon while he toured the states, despite the fact that he was fielding calls on the road from his wife, who despaired that she couldn’t afford new shoes for their son, on ledger books at Apple Records, Evans was a wealthy man. More than $1 million from the early Badfinger records remained locked up at Apple, just waiting for lawyers to sort it out. Royalties from “Without You” and the band’s other hits would continue to pay dividends for decades.

In his suit against Evans, Cass claimed the loss of profits, remunerations, royalties and business opportunities as a result of Evans breaking their deal. The amount that would make the former coupon book mogul whole again? Five million dollars.

In a deposition taken in Milwaukee in September 1983, Evans’ lack of legal savvy is heartbreaking and exasperating. Pressed by Cass’ lawyers to explain the deal he had signed with Cass and his justification for breaking it, Evans floundered. (“I’m no lawyer, I’m a musician,” he pleads at one point.) Also evident in Evans’ testimony is the argument his lawyers would make – that Cass may have secured Evans’ signature while plying him with alcohol and drugs. Evans’ supporters admit he frequently abused both.

As the case dragged on, yet another version of Badfinger – no longer including Reed Kailing – kept trudging to bars and small clubs in the eastern U.S. With Koshick still scrambling to hold things together, money and tour logistics remained slipshod. Koshick later won infamy for running the Odd Rock Café and a 1989 performance there by gross-out rocker G.G. Allin, who defecated on stage as part of his act (Koshick would sue Allin for $2 million). Koshick more recently managed TV has-been and Milwaukee-area resident Dustin Diamond (“Saved By the Bell”), and looks destined to forever toil at the hind end of the entertainment industry.

“The thing with Jack was that he did try,” Jackson says generously of Koshick. “But he either didn’t have the skills or the contacts to see it through properly. Every tour we did with him just crumbled and went wrong.” Koshick insists the tour was as well run as circumstances allowed.

With the Cass suit still hanging over its head, Badfinger played its final U.S. date in Florida in late September 1983, and Evans and Jackson returned to England, dejected. Evans, by this point, was at his emotional depths. He was getting harangued by original Badfinger manager Bill Collins and former bandmates Gibbins and Molland for a bigger share of the Apple Records funds. Despite the fact that none of them had anything to do with Harry Nilsson’s recording of “Without You,” they were pressuring Evans for a cut. The money would not be released until he acquiesced.

Then there was the $5 million John Cass was demanding. In Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger, Tom’s brother David Evans says that Cass was never far from his sibling’s mind. “Tom talked a lot about this John Cass thing. He’d been trying to laugh it off, but [Cass] was persistent. Tom was worried. … He said he wanted a lot of money.”

On the night of Nov. 18, 1983 – two months after he was in Milwaukee giving his deposition – Evans had a furious phone conversation with Molland about the Apple stalemate. He slammed down the phone and told his wife, Marianne, “I’ll be dead before I get the money!”

The next morning, Evans’ 6-year-old son woke his mother, saying a man was standing in their garden. Drawing near, she saw it was her husband’s body. Tom Evans had hanged himself from a backyard tree. He was 36.

In September 1985, almost two years after Evans died, funds being held by Apple Records were finally released and royalties began to flow. In 1994, when “Without You” became a hit yet again – this time for Mariah Carey – the estates of Pete Ham and Tom Evans prospered, as did Molland, Gibbins and Collins, who grabbed their share of a hit they neither wrote nor recorded. Molland – the last surviving original member – is still out hustling for work with a band prominently billed as Joey Molland’s Badfinger.

In October 1985, a settlement in the John Cass suit was reached in Milwaukee. The cases against Jackson and the others were dismissed. In the separate suit against Evans, Evans’ estate was ordered to grant Cass publishing rights to albums and songs recorded well after Badfinger’s heyday that are essentially worthless. However, something in the settlement apparently keeps Cass hopeful there is still a big score to be had from his brush with Badfinger. Court documents show that as recently as January 2002, he was seeking a new judgment against the widow of Evans, claiming to be owed more money. (Cass, who still lives in Milwaukee under the name Gregory Dell’Aringa, refused interview requests.)

“Cass was a con man,” says Jackson. “He was a factor in Tommy’s death. He wasn’t the only thing, but he was definitely a factor. He certainly caused me a great deal of mental anguish and worry.”

At 61, Jackson is still a working musician in his native Coventry, England, touring with the Beatles-era band The Fortunes, writing songs and trying to find an audience for his solo material. Having never scored a hit of his own, the highs were never as high as they were for Evans and Ham. But all these years later, Jackson’s the one still around to make music.

“So many times over the years, people have learned I’m a musician and they say, ‘What a life you have. You go on stage for an hour and that’s it.’ They think we’re just sitting around twiddling our thumbs and having a great time, and it’s never been like that,” he says. “The good times are on the stage, but there have been so many business problems over the years. It’s just the musician’s life.”

And yet it never stops attracting starry-eyed newcomers: The infant daughter Jackson left behind to come to Milwaukee 27 years ago is now a musician herself, looking for a break in The Beatles’ Liverpool. Jackson hopes she won’t repeat his mistakes.

“Coming to Milwaukee was not the best thing,” Jackson says, his endearing British understatement not disguising the pain still felt. “If only we hadn’t gotten trapped over there. If only we’d taken a bit more stock of what would be best for the band. But we were a bit naïve and desperate, and desperate people do desperate things.”

milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=25096

iPark
No wandering around the mall parking lot looking like a fool. iPark uses the iPhone’s GPS locator and Googlemaps to mark your parked car’s location and lead you back.

iPray
Popular among Toronto’s Muslims, iPray gives the five daily prayer times, which vary slightly from day to day. The pro addition also shows the Qibla prayer direction.

Nike + iPod
While you run, this tracks your time, pace, distance and the number of calories you’ve burned. It requires a $29 (U.S.) kit and, unless you want to slip the accelerometer in your sock, Nike+ shoes.

Eaton Centre
Launched in November, the Eaton Centre app helps shoppers find their way around the crowded mall with an interactive map and gives them access to store promotions and information about individual stores and services.

APPS FOR THE DISABLED

The term “cognitive prosthetics” comes to Steve Joordens’ mind when he ponders the role of memory in the era of (very) smart phones. The psychology professor at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus is interested in what the devices can do to give people with disabilities more autonomy.

He wants to use the smartphone’s GPS capabilities to develop an app for Alzheimer’s patients, who forget where they’re going or what they’re doing and then feel too embarrassed to ask for help. He would call it the “guardian angel.”

“The device could literally call them and say, `You could be lost,’” Joordens explains. It could then ask, “Would you like to go home or continue what you were doing?”

Rhonda McEwen, an assistant professor in U of T’s faculty of information, is very optimistic about the potential of hand-held devices.
McEwen is working on a research project with speech-delayed students at a Toronto school, developing what is essentially a speech-support system using iPod touch devices with an application called Proloquo2Go.
“There are huge opportunities here for learning environments – just the ability to interact with technology in a way we probably never had,” she says.

Five times a day, Umair Vanthaliwala’s iPhone calls him to prayer. With a flick of a finger, the iPhone’s compass points him northeast toward Mecca.

Every morning, the 23-year-old uses the WeatherEye application to decide if he needs to wear long johns under his thin dress pants. In the evening, he slips a tiny accelerometer into his sock before running on the treadmill and his phone tracks his kilometres run and calories burned.

With more than 100,000 applications for iPhone and the iPod touch now available through the Apple App Store and many more to come, it’s clear that Vanthaliwala and his sleek black phone are the future.

“Before, a phone was just for calling purposes,” says Vanthaliwala, a product developer at Bell Canada who once developed his own app called iCarLibrary.

“Now, I’m using a phone for everything.”

Portable, online and able to remember loads of information, smartphones are changing the way we live and work. But with their calendars, reminders and myriad apps, do they help us to remember or allow us to forget?

For Luddites, a brief explanation: owners of smartphones like the iPhone or the BlackBerry are inclined to download “apps,” often free, sometimes for a small fee, that aid them in everything from entertainment to social networking to mundane tasks like finding a car in a crowded parking lot or remembering that, yes, you did lock the front door.

“It’s almost a cliché but there is an app for everything,” says Steve Sorge, CEO of Mobile Fringe, a boutique app development company that launched just over a year ago, and developed an Eaton Centre app. “You can get access to this information no matter where you are, because it’s on your phone. And nobody leaves their house without their phone.”

Research released this week suggests that 55 per cent of Canadians are expected to buy a new handset, likely a smartphone, in the next six months.

As smartphone aficionados like Vanthaliwala become more common, researchers ponder the meaning of the all-knowing gadget. Greg Elmer, director of Ryerson University’s Infoscape Research Lab, says the discussion began with the launch of personal computers in the ’70s and ’80s, when some people were concerned that having external hard drives filled with information could make society lazier.

What happened instead, he says, is that life got more complicated.

“Part of the rationale for the expansion of computers into the personal space, or the advent of personal computers, is that there was an exponential growth in the amount of information that we all had to deal with,” Elmer says.

Today, he observes his friends and colleagues using their phones to take photos of things they want to remember, like a piece of furniture or a book they might want to buy later.

With the job market demanding that we increase our productivity, Elmer says hand-held devices can be very useful aids.

“That’s an important component of these technological adjuncts to our daily lives, to be able to simply structure our time, our family time, our work time, our downtime, our social time…and to have all these things in one place, in addition to our brains.”

Psychology professor Steve Joordens says smartphones can make up for a natural deficit.

Joordens, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, expects the average person is using these devices to aid their “prospective memory,” which helps you remember to do something in the future, like go to an appointment or pick up milk on the way home from work.

Prospective memory, Joordens says, is notoriously poor in humans to begin with, “so it’s probably not a huge worry that it would become worse through using these.”

But it is true that if our GPS device quickly guides us on a new route through the city, rather than leaving us to figure it out the hard way, we are less likely to remember that route in the future. Joordens, however, isn’t sure there is anything wrong with that.

“To an extent, these devices are less fallible, more accurate (than we are),” Joordens says. “Confidence can be unrelated to memory very often. So we can feel very confident in incorrect memories, and that can lead us astray.”

Of course, there have been instances where GPS devices have led people very much astray – like the couple stranded on a snowy, remote Oregon road on Christmas Day or the Swedish pair who misspelled “Capri” and instead drove to the Italian town of Carpi, 660 kilometres away from their destination.

Joordens says your human memory might tell you to go left when you should go right, but it won’t, typically, push you in completely unreasonable directions, as technology potentially can.

In other words, some independent thinking is required.

“If the algorithm says that answer is X, it says X,” he says. “If X is dumb, it’s up to the human to figure that out.”

Something else that will trip us up: losing or breaking our new favourite toys or just forgetting to take them with us.

Loss of information is not a problem – most people have their phones synced to a computer as a backup – but even a day without a beloved device is enough to make some frantic. “It was like a little part of me had died,” says Trevor Thomas, 29, a Toronto entrepreneur who dropped his phone in a puddle on moving day.

He quickly found a replacement on Craigslist and drove from Toronto to Brampton to pick it up, and synced the new device on his computer.

“Desperation kicked in,” he says, “so I managed to make it work.”

thestar.com/living/article/750941–are-apps-stealing-our-minds?bn=1