rants and observations

Paul Godfrey, president and CEO of the National Post. Canwest, which has been operating under court supervision since 2009, struggled since the death of it’s founder Isreal Asper, it’s purchase of expensive acquisitions and the downward spiral in advertising revenues for newspapers and television during the recent global recession. All combined to force David and Gail Asper, the son and daughter of Canwest Global Communications founder Israel Asper, to resign from the media conglomerate’s board of directors and the company to come under control of it’s creditors.

You may have received the ‘prescription drugs’ email from a friend or co-worker that outlines drug price discrepancies from one pharmacy to another. I tend to ignore those type of emails as a general rule but I had occasion to test the accuracy of the viral email’s claims recently and thought I’d post my findings.

The email in question was titled ‘Costco Prescriptions’ and included a variety of prescription drugs with consumer pricing, cost of active ingredient and percentage of markup. Including the ingredient pricing and the markup is actually quite deceiving because drug companies don’t really charge for the drug itself but rather the cost of development and marketing. Big bucks in the drug world and we, the consumer, pay for it. Through the nose and other orifices.

Newspapers have obviously changed in the last 63 years. The print and paper quality, size, typeface and layouts are quite different in The Vancouver Sun but the most glaring difference is the reporting style. The photo above was published Tuesday, September 2, 1947 in the second section, top and centre. It shows the victims and onlookers at a motor vehicle accident on King George Highway, bleeding and battered bodies still in the car. The driver is obviously dead, blood draining from his nose.

If you close to my age you’ll remember those Simpsons-Sears catalogues that were delivered to our doors, full of all that great stuff we loved so much as kids but could never talk our parents into buying for us. Bicycles, transistor radios, record players, board games; all of it was contained within the pages of the Simpsons-Sears catalogue along with those spicy pictures of bras and girdles.