Down the memory hole

I had kind of an odd experience today at work and I'm not exactly sure how I feel  about it. I work for a newspaper (it's not a very big one and unless you live in my area you've probably never heard of it and at any rate, its name and location are irrelevant). To a certain extent, we are the media of record in our little corner of the world, keeping track of the local events and milestones that mark the passage of time. I got a call today from someone who grew up in the area and achieved a certain level of fame for her accomplishments here in her youth, who's gone on to be a great success in the wider world.  She is well-educated, intellectually on the ball, accomplished and energetic. She now works in the TV news media and is an up-and-coming young journalist who has worked on national and international stories. You've probably seen her on television.
So why is she calling me? I mean, aside from my spasticrkling conversation, startling sterling lack of character and stunneding looks?
Why does anyone call the editor of a local newspaper? She wanted a favour.
 Now that she is out in the wider world pursuing the career that she trained and studied so hard for, she is finding out a few simple truths that many of us have known for a while.
First, most real journalists aren't that impressed by a pretty face, in fact they tend to be a bit suspicious of people who are better looking than them. Believe it or not, this is true even in television news. I'm not talking about the on-camera talent - they are blessed and cursed with beauty. Their looks might get them in the door and even get them a job in front of the bright lights reading a script with that killer smile and perfect hair, but even the pretty people get old. If they don't have the talent, skills, brains and training needed to do the actually work of journalism, they don't last long. Eye candy has a very short shelf life if there isn't some nutritional value attached. No, I'm talking about the people who run TV news, the cynical, jaded old producers that hire and fire. They might be willing to hire a hot 20-something to read the entertainment news off a cue card and fire that person when the next cutie comes along, but most of them are not going to assign Ken or Barbie to do hard news.
Second, most people, especially the aforementioned cynical, jaded old producers of hard news programs,  - rightly or wrongly - see pageants as a shallow excercise in sexist objectification, in other words, a T&A show. We don't call them beauty contests for nothing. Yes, the young women who succeed in these competitions are often smart, well-informed, ambitious and talented -- but that is tough to tell from the evening gown or bathing suit portions of the competitions.  Many people buy the stereotypes of the dumb blonde and the brainy nerd, the idea that you can be smart or beautiful, but that you can't be both.
Third, that employers these days, especially the previously discussed cynical, jaded old newmen who work in an industry where credibility is everything, know how to use Google -- something that some people really should keep in mind.
Perhaps you see where this is going?
This accomplished, intelligent and able young woman that called me is also very attractive, in fact she won the Miss Whatever contest locally and went on to compete in the national Whatchamacallit Queen pageant. Half a dozen years ago when she was a beauty queen, the newspaper had naturally done what community newspapers do and published a few stories about her becoming a pageant winner and later a judge and emcee of pageants. In all those stories, she stressed her intellectual accomplishments, but the bottom line is that the stories were about her winning or competing in "Miss Something-or-other" contests.
Now, she is finding that her past has come back to haunt her - not in the sense that she is being teased by the other folks in the newsroom or called Corky Sherwood behind her back, but in the sense that she is pretty sure it has kept people from hiring her for some jobs. All of which is very unfortunate.
Which, to make a short story much longer, brings me to the odd part.
The favour she wanted was for the newspaper to delete the stories about her pageant days that we have archived on our website, or at least to delete her name from the stories.
Now, if someone who had been convicted of some sort of misdeed - something serious like murder or a crime of  blatant stupidity like impaired driving - or even some unfortunate youthful shenanigan that cast them in a bad light - had called and asked me to delete stories about them that had been in paper years ago because the stories were embarassing or had cost them a job, I'd have told them "we all have to take responsibility  for our actions" and that "there are consequences to the things we do" or even "you should have thought of that before you decided to commit a crime -- Karma's a bitch, ain't it?" -- the same thing I would tell anyone who wanted me to suppress a story about some nefarious deed or leave an important, relevant name out of an article about something unfortunate that happened this week -- in essence, that they can go piss up a rope and that I would publish and be damned.
But to have someone ask you to conceal their accomplishments? This was new territory.
Imagine a former jr. hockey star asking the newspaper to delete references to him winning an MVP award or an author begging us not to promote his new book. Will I someday have an entrepreneur come in to my office and beg me not write about the successful business he started a few years ago?
"Hello, is this the editor? I just won a major award - it's very prestigious and a great honour, so please, don't tell anyone!"
So what did I do?
I did what anyone with kids to feed and bills to pay would do if  they were four weeks into a six-month contract.
I gave her the extension number for my boss and went back to figuring out what to put on next week's front page.
Me, Winston Smith and Pontius Pilate -  birds of a feather, I tell ya, birds of a goddamn feather.




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Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased

That's the most important lesson I've learned from the work of Spider Robinson, but its hardly the only one. For his Callahan's Bar stories alone, I owe the man - never mind all the excellent novels he's written and the great music he's turned me on to or his excellent podcast. He made me realize that punning was not a criminal offense and he introduced me to Bushmills  (okay, so maybe he owes everyone who's ever met me an apology - but not me, I owe him BIG).

And so, I wanna tug on your coatsleeve for a minute.

First, for those of you not in the know, let me say that the man is a national treasure. As a writer, he's won most of the major awards they give out in science fiction and with good reason. He's also a regular writer for the Mop&Pail though they foolishly discontinued his regular column a few years back. We won't even get into the massive runaway thing that Callahan's has become on the internet. Suffice to say that at one point the Callahan's bulletin board forum was just about the biggest non-porn site there was back in the days of usenet. Furthermore, he's a natural storyteller and ten minutes listening to his podcast will make you wonder why the CBC hasn't signed this guy as the second coming of Peter Gzowski or at least a summer replacement for Stuart McLean. 

Second, let me say that his wife, Jeanne, is also a national treasure as one of the country's foremost choreographers and former modern dancers. She is currently engaged in bringing to life an idea that was the foundation of a trilogy of great science fiction novels Spider and Jeanne co-wrote called Stardance that won a hatful of awards. That idea is dancing in zero gravity and you can see the early experiments here and follow the project here.

So, Spider and Jeanne Robinson are some of my favorite people and their presence their alone is enough to make me consider moving to Bowen Island, BC, when we do move back to Canada.

 

Kumbayah, hugs and shots of Bushmills all 'round.

Now we get to the harder part. 

I learned last week from Spider's podcast that bad things happen to good people. Jeanne went into the hospital for what was supposed to be minor surgery a couple of months ago and it was discovered she had a very nasty case of cancer. She starts radiation treatments this week. Spider's been lucky enough to have her sisters fly in from the east coast to help care for her over the last month or so and apparently has lots of good friends and neighbors to help out too. But I suspect, no, I know, it isn't going to be easy for him to write the new series of books he just signed up to do or any other paying copy while his  mind is occupied with trying to help his wife and obviously Jeanne is going to be doing any work for awhile either. Unless someone is making a multimillion dollar movie of your novel, science fiction writing does not pay that well, no matter how good you are and their home is not called "Tottering on the Brink" for nothing. 

So if you could drop a few bucks in the hat for them, it would be very, very much appreciated.

 

Karma's a bitch - Payback edition
Once upon a time, I worked here. I didn't like it much, mostly because the people I worked for were, not to put too fine a point on it, dishonest pricks. Naturally, I was very upset last fall when all these bad things happened to worse people. Imagine how I feel today.

Police to arrest ex-president of Nova over embezzlement
The Yomiuri Shimbun
OSAKA--Osaka prefectural police plan to arrest on Tuesday former President Nozomu Sahashi of the failed language school chain Nova Corp. on suspicion of instructing the firm's accountants to misappropriate the reserve funds of the firm's employees, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday.
Regarding "Ochanoma Ryugaku," a system through which Nova students could take lessons from home, the police have learned a large amount of money was sent from Nova to a communications firm owned by Sahashi.
According to sources close to the investigation and others, Sahashi instructed employees in late July to transfer 320 million yen from the reserve fund to Nova's bank account through a Nova Kikaku account he once managed.
Meanwhile, the Osaka Labor Bureau will send papers to prosecutors by the end of the week on Nova and Sahashi, over failing to pay its workers about 105 million yen, equivalent to salaries for about 400 Japanese employees and foreign instructors.

Happy Feet - Penguin Dance - The top video clips of the week are here

Anyone else for champagne?

Denied!

A little music for our special friend His Lordship Conrad, Baron Black of Crossharbour

I love the smell of justice in the morning, it smell like...schadenfreude.

New Fish
Let's hope his lardship looks good in stripes. Ex-Canadian and media baron Conrad "Lord Tubby" Black has been sentenced to six and a half years in a low security Florida prison, proving that no one is above the law. Of course, it is the minimum possible sentence he could have received and he will be serving it in a low security prison, where he is more likely to get tennis elbow than be shanked in the yard, so William Zanzinger Conrad Black is being dealt with in the way we have come to expect from the justice system in "class free" America. Thank Jebus he didn't do anything really bad like get a consensual drunken blow job from a fellow teenager or get caught with drugs while brown.
No confirmation yet on when Lady Barbarella Amiel is buying him cartons of cigarettes or soap on a rope for Christmas.

Ding, Dong the Wicked Witch Pink Bunny is Dead

Well, it has finally happened - the crooked, exploitive, madhouse I spent my first four years in Japan working at has finally come crashing down.

The place has been run like a mob-owned whorehouse pretty much since day one, but karma finally caught up with them this spring when a bunch of students complained to the government that the company was not living up to its promise that they could book lesson "anytime" and that when they tried to get a refund for their prepaid lessons, the company refused to give them a full refund. The trade ministry made them offer full refunds and forbid them to sell certain types of lesson contracts for a period. Since the company - the McDonalds of the language school industry in Japan - has been trying to triple its number of school over the last couple of years and has been spending money as fast as it came in the door on a variety of ill-advised projects and company jets for the president, this basically buggered the company's cash flow. Salaries were late in July, August and September for teachers and there was no pay in October. Many of the Japanese staff haven't been paid since mid summer.

The founder has been involved in a number of very dodgy stock deals to try to drum up enough cash to keep the wheels turning and aside from a bunch of really stupid faxes, has dropped out of sight since August. As more and more teachers stopped coming to work since they weren't getting paid, it became harder for students to book lessons and more and more asked for refunds.

Not that most of them have seen a single yen in refunds yet. Nova quit paying its bills months ago. Many of the teachers rent apartments from Nova, which sublets the units from landlords. The company has been deducting the rent from teachers paycheques, but hasn't been paying the landlords and as a result several hundred teachers have been turfed out of their homes in the last two months.

Nova employees glad to be off hot seat

The Yomiuri Shimbun

In the wake of Nova Corp.'s filing for court protection Friday, employees said that although they were anxious over their livelihoods, they were relieved to no longer have to cope with a barrage of complaints from students and teachers.

Nova, the nation's largest English-language school chain, applied for protection under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law with the Osaka District Court with debt of about 50 billion yen and suspended operations of all its schools.

Employees, mainly in their 20s, remained at their workplaces until the last moment, while many teachers had already stopped reporting to work over delays in salary payments. Lesson fees were also refunded to students who canceled their contracts with Nova. An employee in her 20s, who was manager of a branch in an office district in the Tokyo metropolitan area, said she began working for Nova after graduating from university as she wished to help people who wanted to learn English.

But she soon became dissatisfied with her position when she was instructed by the headquarters to try to get prospective students to sign lesson contracts.

As the number of branches increased around 2004 to 2005, more emphasis was placed on getting prospective students to sign contracts. In one case, one of the woman's colleagues was reprimanded for opposing a superior over the policy.

In June, when Nova was punished by the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry over lesson contracts and cancellation problems, she believed that Nova would recover.

She heard that the police had to be called to another branch because a student had become angry to the point of violence, apparently over a lesson contract dispute, but the headquarters offered no assistance in the matter. "I still told myself that I should hang on as long as I was getting paid," she said.

Foreign teachers started not showing up for lessons in mid-September when their salary payments were delayed. Consequently, dozens of complaints poured in, creating chaos for the company's inexperienced receptionists. One staff member complained of not being able to afford food, while another had been reduced to tears every day before she finally collapsed and stopped coming to the office.

===

Stock speculators involved

OSAKA--A group of stock speculators charged by the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of violating the Securities and Exchange Law, had been involved in a Nova capital expansion plan, the Yomiuri has learned.

The plan had been promoted by former Nova President Nozomu Sahashi, who was dismissed Thursday. Sahashi's financial problems may have led him to contact the group, as such groups control stock prices to gain illegal profits. Nova's court-appointed administrators stated that the move was grounds for Sahashi's dismissal.

According to sources, Sahashi had contacted the group led by Haruo Nishida, 57, an investment adviser who was arrested by the prosecutors on Oct. 12 on suspicion of manipulating the price of a construction company stock.

Nova announced on Oct. 9 it would issue stock warrants facilitating the purchase of 200 million new stocks, nearly three times the stock that had been issued, to two investment funds, with a view to securing about 6.4 billion yen. The funds are located in the Virgin Islands.

Nishida is said to have known people related to the investment funds and invited investors to Nova's plan before it was announced.

(Oct. 28, 2007)

The story above is very much the sanitized version of NOVA's flat out evil nature. Imagine the Bush administration running a chain of language schools in which people like Mike "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown were the branch managers and Dick Cheney was in charge of the education department. Only with more evil, incompetence and general skullduggery and staffed by a lot of semi-literate Australians on working holidays.



For the real skinny on the whole sordid tale, the best "teachers gone wild" and "Freaky Student Stories" the best place to look is the forums at Lets Japan. Which is where I found all this art.

Listen and repeat: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?

Branch closings dim Nova's future
The Yomiuri Shimbun
English-conversation school operator Nova Corp.'s planned closure of about 50 branches at the end of this month is indicative of the severe business climate the company faces, following a number of student contract cancellations and an order from the government in June to partially suspend its operations.
The firm, the largest of its kind in the nation, has delayed paying some foreign teachers' salaries.
Nova plans to reduce costs by cutting personnel after the branch closures are completed. However, Nova's prospects remain uncertain.
According to the company, Nova had 418,000 students as of March 31, a more than 10 percent drop from the same time last year, due to former students filing a series of high-profile suits demanding the firm refund their tuition fees after they canceled lesson contracts.
Nova has also been hampered by a decline in the number of new students, following the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's order in June to partially suspend its operations.
Nova listed revenues of 9.2 billion yen from April to June in fiscal
2007, a 31.9 percent drop from the same period last year. The firm had an after-tax deficit during the same period of 2.4 billion yen.
The firm's delay in salary payments to some foreign teachers has caused a great deal of anxiety. "I'm worried about what's going on," a foreign Nova teacher in Osaka said.

Lesson plan for level four advanced students
Target Language: Use of tags for emphasis and as interogatives.
Intro: Discuss students' past experience with renewing lesson packages and using all point before contract expiration. (Alternative: Speculation "What would you do if this school closed?" "What would you do if your company failed to pay your salary?"
Drills: Listen and repeat - Nova has had some problems lately, haven't they?
Nova has been cheating its students, haven't they?
Nova hasn't paid its teachers this month, have they?
Substitution drill: This school is in a fiery tailspin/up shit creek without a paddle/ neck deep in the big muddy, isn't it? (explain idioms as needed, get students to speculate on possible meanings or supply own metaphors)
This was only a matter of time/bound to happen/simple karma wasn't it?
This school is run by thieves/wankers/the yakuza, isn' t it?
Role play: A Nova teacher has not been paid and has no money. They are complaining to a Nova manager and demanding their money. The manager must come up with excuses not to pay (ie: the ministry of consumer affairs ate our account books, didn't they? The corporate jet needed repairs, didn't it?) and the teacher must come up with examples of what will happen to them or to the manager if they aren't paid. (ie: I'll be thrown out of my apartment, won't I? You don't think you'll get away with this, do you?)

(see if you can guess where I used to work and how I liked it)