The As It Happens Files

by Mary Lou Finlay

  Here’s a wee complication. Snails are hermaphrodites—that is, they are both male and female at the same time. I don’t really understand how this works, but there you are; the snails must have sorted it out, because they’re not nearing extinction as far as I know.

  We’ve been surprised and delighted and fascinated for more hours than I can count by the many, many scientists—biologists, chemists, oceanographers, astronomers and so on—who have appeared on As It Happens and chatted away about their work and shared their excitement about everything from flying snakes and kangaroo rats to moose noses, whale songs, turquoise skies and the science of throwing a baseball. Their enthusiasm is irresistible. Even when they go astray, they’re interesting—and it happens all the time in science, of course. It happens in other walks of life, too, only scientists are often quicker to admit their errors than other people. I hope Dan Goldston won’t be upset if I remind folk of the time he developed a proof regarding the occurrence of twin primes only to discover, almost as soon as he’d published it, that he’d made a wee mistake somewhere along the way.

  A prime number is one that can be divided evenly only by itself and by one: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 are all prime numbers. Twin primes are close together, like 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19. As the numbers get higher, the pairs get further and further apart. The question that Dr. Goldston was working on was whether you could say with any certainty that prime numbers occurred close together predictably and infinitely often … or something like that.

  “We always thought this was true,” he said, “but we never proved it before.”

  Dr. Goldston teaches mathematics at San José State University in California, and he’d been working on this problem for 20 years, so you can imagine his jubilation when the breakthrough came—as he told us in March 2003. But then the aforementioned disaster struck. It was one Andrew Granville at the University of Montreal who spoiled the party, Dan told us when we spoke again a few weeks later, by demonstrating that the “approximation we were using to detect primes didn’t have all the properties we thought it had.” So it was back to square one for Dan. At least he didn’t have to find a new problem.

  Over the years, As It Happens listeners and I have had a lot of free lessons in math and physics and chemistry, sometimes from scientists as young as 11, who have accomplished things like making crackers stay crisp when dunked, demonstrating that it takes but a nanosecond for a dropped gummi bear to pick dirt up off the floor and using probiotics to treat a crippling gastric disorder. These were school projects carried out by Gina Gallant in Prince George, B.C.; Jillian Clarke in Chicago; and Lindsey Edmunds in Nova Scotia. When she wrote up her probiotic results, 17-year-old Lindsey became the youngest person ever to have an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. I expect to see all their names in the Nobel lists before too long.

  Violet the Very Valuable Chicken also started life as a school project, a classroom lesson on the meaning of life, using chicken hatching as the experiment. When the experiment was over, Violet and her sister Ruby went to live with the Flight family (still not making it up) in Fitchingfield, England. Somehow Violet ran afoul of the parish council there—they wanted to kill her—which was when Paula Flight took out a million-pound insurance policy on her. We’ll let Mrs. Flight pick up the story.

  PF: Violet and her sister Ruby used to roam around the village free till one day parish council received a complaint from a resident in the village that Violet was making a mess around the war memorial.

  ML: What sort of a mess?

  PF: They have tree bark around the bottom of the war memorial to keep down the weeds, and they were accusing Violet of teaching the ducks that live on the pond to go to the war memorial and put this tree bark onto the grass when they were looking for grubs.

  ML: Violet taught the ducks?

  PF: Exactly. That’s how bizarre it got.

  ML: You don’t believe that she was a gang leader.

  PF: I, personally, don’t believe that she was a gang leader; she was doing what comes naturally to chickens, which is to scratch around, looking for worms and grubs and everything. I don’t believe that Violet actually taught the ducks how to do it, but residents in the village did believe that the ducks never ever done it before Violet appeared in the village, and now they done it when she was here.

  ML: So what happened then?

  PF: So they had a big parish council meeting, and I attended. They didn’t know me to look at; they knew my name. And they had this big discussion and read out the letter of complaint and proceeded to discuss how they were going to deal with the complaint. And it was discussed by them how to kill the chicken, which would be the easiest and the cheapest way of removing the problem.

  ML: Kill the chicken.

  PF: Yes. Wring her neck.

  ML: They didn’t ask you to put her in a coop or anything?

  PF: No.

  ML: Oh my.

  PF: So I made it clear that she was my daughter’s pet, and just like anybody has a dog or a cat or a hamster or a goldfish, this was my daughter’s pet and they had no right to kill her. She belonged to us. And the debate just went on. Two weeks after, Violet was in the village and a white transit van was coming along the village and it tried to run her over. It came from its proper side of the road to the other side of the road and ran over her.

  ML: Did you see that?

  PF: Yes, I did.

  ML: Oh dear.

  PF: But luckily, she just went straight underneath the van and the wheels never hit her, and she came out the back of the van, feathers flying everywhere. So it was at that point—after my daughter kept saying, “Why do they want to kill my chicken? Why do they want to kill Violet?”—that I decided to take out the insurance policy.

  ML: But when you went to insure Violet at Lloyd’s, were they not afraid that you—not you but somebody—might just go out and wring the chicken’s neck to collect the insurance?

  PF: They were, but they had clauses in the insurance policy: one was very bizarre, and the other one was the protection for Violet.

  ML: What do you mean, “One was very bizarre”?

  PF: We would only receive the million pounds if she was abducted and eaten by an alien. That was their policy.

  ML: By an alien?

  PF: By an alien; that’s what they put in. And the second clause, which was meant more for us, was that she was never murdered or killed by a parish council member, which was what I wanted.

  ML: Does that mean you can’t collect?

  PF: I don’t know. It’s with the insurance company at the moment; they’re investigating the whole situation.

  ML: I see. So … Violet did come to a sad end?

  PF: She did.

  ML: What happened?

  PF: Well, when we moved two miles away from the village in July last year, we took Violet’s pen with us. We moved back into our house with a large garden—and every night when the sun went down, I used to put Violet away, and every morning at six o’clock, I used to get Violet out. And at the beginning of December, I went out there before my children went to school and found Violet outside her pen, dead.

  ML: Aw.

  PF: I didn’t tell the children before they went to school; I told them when they returned from school. And my daughter said, “Look, I don’t want any publicity about Violet, Mom. Can we keep this quiet?”

  And we kept it quiet, but it was the local police that found out. Then they told the insurance company, and now the insurance company are investigating it and it’s all got out to the media again—so that’s how it all came out again.

  ML: Do you have any idea who did the foul deed? Sorry; I guess you’ve heard a lot of bad puns.

  PF: I have, but it sounds nicer with a Canadian accent. Um, I haven’t got any idea. The only thing that I’m suspicious about is the fact that she was outside of her pen. It would have taken somebody to actually open the pen, unlock it, lift her out and—that’s where I found her,
outside.

  ML: Oh, that’s terrible. Was your daughter very upset?

  PF: Very distraught she was, yeah. I mean, especially with all the publicity gained in her short life—that people did want to kill her [chicken]. She was very upset.

  ML: How’s Ruby?

  PF: Ruby died. Ruby got run over.

  ML: By a hit-and-run?

  PF: By a hit-and-run, yes.

  Not a happy ending for poor Violet or Ruby, but at least the Flight family had their cat, hamster, goldfish and two dogs to keep them company.

  My own house has provided shelter over the years for two cats, a rabbit, a turtle, some fish, numerous budgies and a blue-crowned conure. This last, named Zak, I regarded as the bane of our existence, eating us out of house and home—I mean literally eating the house, along with the picture frames, the chairs and a shelf of cherished antique books, all the while making a fearsome racket and pooping on our shoulders at every opportunity. He, or more likely she—you can’t tell about conures—was my son’s bird, and like many parrots, he/she was fiercely devoted to his/her chosen human and had only disdain for everyone else. For some reason, I was fond of him. Her. Have you seen the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill? If so, perhaps you can understand how easy it is to fall in love with parrots in spite of their obnoxious habits.

  What I’m building up to here is that my friends at As It Happens knew about my love-hate relationship with parrots, and they rarely missed a chance to get a parrot story on the air. Over the years we talked to many people who had gripping stories to tell: their parrots had been lost or stolen, recovered, arrested by customs officials, subpoenaed to give testimony in court. One parrot (English, naturally) had taken up sewing, and more than one had been sent up for using inappropriate language in public places. There was even a parrot named Zak who liked to whistle the 1812 Overture. Allegedly.

  The thing is, no matter how clever and talented these parrots were or how well they talked, sang, whistled or swore off the air, the minute we put them on the radio, they clammed up (so to speak). I was getting a reputation as the interviewer who couldn’t coax a sound out of one of the most notoriously chatty creatures on the planet.

  Until November 2003. When we were preparing a special 35th anniversary programme in the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, Executive Producer Lynn Munkley and the rest of the staff decided to spring a parrot on me as a surprise. I’m not sure whether they’d taken pity on me or they wanted to demonstrate to our “live” audience just how inept I was when it came to interviewing guests of avian persuasion—a bit of both maybe—but right at the end of the programme, Barbara introduced Susan Sherman and her friend Jingle Bell, a magnificent double yellow-headed Amazon parrot (who had only one head, actually).

  I said, “Does he talk, Susan?”

  “No. Did somebody say he talks?”

  Very funny, I thought.

  Anyway, Jingle Bell was a real trouper. His best trick was if he (Susan claimed Jingle Bell was a “he”) did something wrong, you pointed your finger at him and said BANG! and he flipped right over and hung upside down from his perch. It was very cute.

  But the best thing Jingle Bell did for me was this: he actually said something on the radio. He said, “Hi.”

  When I—so grateful to him—followed this up with “You’re a beautiful parrot,” he said, “Beautiful” right back. I have witnesses.

  SEVENTEEN

  War and Pax

  The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun.

  With these words, shortly after nine-thirty EST on the evening of March 19, 2003, White House Press Spokesman Ari Fleischer announced to the world that the war to topple Saddam Hussein had begun. This time CBC Radio was ready. How could we not have been after the months of sabre rattling and the ultimatums? Radio meetings had been held, tasks assigned, hotels booked and an around-the-clock call list drawn up. Fleischer’s announcement occurred on my watch; minutes later I was taking my place in the news studio alongside Barbara Smith, and our own small army of news and current affairs producers had started churning out scripts and updates and dialling up people to talk to: American military experts, Canadian military experts, Iraqis, experts on Iraq, diplomatic and political voices from all over, our own reporters on the ground in Washington, London, Amman, Kuwait City and Doha, and in Iraq.

  My fellow current affairs host Bernard St-Laurent joined us, Jill Dempsey took over the news updates and the lot of us held the fort until we were relieved in the wee hours of the morning. The worst part of that night was staggering to the hotel across the street around 4:00 a.m. only to find that I couldn’t check in to my room, because I couldn’t find the reception desk, which had disappeared in the chaos of a major renovation.

  It’s hard to get a sense of how things are going when you’re in the eye of the hurricane, which is how it felt. I think we did a fair job of reporting the scraps of news we got hold of, filling in with some of the background material that we’d all been sucking up for months. But if the first casualty of war is truth, a corollary of that might be: the first people to forget this are journalists. Remember the first Gulf War? All those great videos of—well, they could have been of anything, really—shown to us by the American military in their briefings? All those “smart bombs” zeroing in on their targets? There were no reporters on the ground for that one, not in the beginning anyway. The U.S. Department of Defense had decided after the Vietnam War that reporters were a major pain in the butt and very likely the reason they’d lost that war; they didn’t want the Press getting in the way of “Desert Storm.”

  Eventually, reporters were allowed in to see what was going on in Kuwait in 1991, and a few of them became quite famous as a result—among them, Canadians Bob McKeown, who arrived in Kuwait City with a CBS crew a day before the allied forces did, and Arthur Kent, whose reporting of Scud missile attacks from his base in Dhahram, Saudi Arabia, earned him the moniker Scud Stud—and a lot of marriage proposals, too, it was rumoured. But until the Press were allowed to see things with their own eyes, we had no idea what was really going on. After they arrived, you still couldn’t be sure what was being struck out of their reports by military censors or what they were holding back. I’m not saying you don’t need to control information if you’re fighting a war, but it would be best if we could all remember that, until the war is finished, a good deal of what gets told about it, from all sources, is likely to be fiction.

  The lack of actual reporting on the Gulf War of 1991 was controversial enough that the Pentagon were persuaded to take the Press along on their next outing. In Iraq in 2003, the media were invited to have their people “embedded” with American divisions as they marched toward Baghdad, filing reports as they went. There was a debate about this, too; some people felt the reporters would be compromised by getting too close to the military. My own feeling was that it was better to get the story from a reporter—even an embedded one—than from a general, or in addition to the general’s.

  Anyway, there were other stories being filed by reporters who weren’t embedded, so the “embedded story” would be just one piece of the greater picture. The main problem with the embedded reports, as I saw it, was that the dramatic visual material they contained would probably get more play on TV than other material, which could in turn give them more weight than they merited. The pictures certainly were dramatic at times—no doubt about that—and in that sense, the Iraq War of 2003 was the first war the world watched live on TV.

  Radio, as usual, would provide the context. Or so I hoped. But in the beginning, we in radio were as hungry for the drama of unfolding events as our sisters and brothers in television. And, as usual, hard facts were scarce. So what did we tell people on that first night of the war? We told them that there were about three hundred thousand troops at the ready for operation “Shock and Awe.” That the U.S. 101st Airborne and the 82nd Airborne were set to land not only troops but also trucks, tanks and heavy artillery wherever they were ne
eded. We told them that the opening salvo apparently had been directed at a “target of opportunity.” We told them that the Kurds could hardly wait for the war to get under way and were hoping to join the fight, and that the Turks were warning the coalition not to arm the Kurds.

  Beyond that, we speculated. We speculated about whether the ground war had started yet, whether the paratroopers had landed, how the weather would affect things, why the attack had begun at dawn instead of at night, who or what the so-called target of opportunity might be. Was it Saddam? Did they get him? What would happen to Iraqi resistance if they had got him? What kind of resistance were the coalition forces likely to meet anyway? Would Saddam use chemical or biological weapons? Did he have any?

  We talked about how some Iraqi soldiers were said to have defected and how Iraqi State Radio was said to have been jammed or even taken over.

  It was CBC reporter Frank Koller who reminded us that night on air that almost everything we were able to report at that point was suspect since we simply did not have enough good information yet, but that hardly gave us pause. This, of course, is the really bad side of 24-hour “news”, be it on TV or radio: you have to fill the air with something. I wouldn’t say we actually got anything wrong that night, but much of the time we were just flapping our jaws.

  In reviewing the tape of that evening, I was struck by one comment in particular and who it was that made it: Laurie Milroy, a member of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, predicted that the war to topple Saddam would be a short war and that most of the Iraqi public were either in favour of the invasion or, at worst, neutral, but when I asked her about the post-war plan, Dr. Milroy said, “That’s an unfortunate question, because it’s not as far along as it should be.”

  As history would soon show us, no truer words were spoken that night.