Update: Linda, pre-organized as always, set up a bequest at the University of Waterloo to establish two new student awards. Learn more or join me in donating here. Let me tell you about my friend Linda Carson, who tragically passed away last week from ALS. She was known for an astounding variety of creative endeavours, but I want to mention one in particular - the University of Waterloo Varsity Briefcase Drill Team.

there's video proof!

My thanks to VBDT member Ken Jones for hanging on to this video, which was shot by the basketball team’s videographer in 1987. Here are two performances from 1987 - the inaugural, with six VBDT members and the UW Warriors Band, and a repeat engagement where the team had expanded to 10 and added a second number to the show.

Here’s the original team in 1987

and a revival of the team in 1999 - with Linda in the middle and the Warriors Band scattered around the edges.

Linda’s passing comes far too soon, and it’s not fair, but I hope I can face a challenge like that with the humour she showed. Check out this Twitter thread where she announced the ALS news to us all - here’s the first part (but you should read the whole thing.)

It’s also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. So I’ve got a disease (boo), named after a baseball player (yay?), but he was a Yankee (BOO!).

2/🧵

— Linda Carson (@lccarson) May 3, 2021

I knew Linda multiple different ways at Waterloo. We were both Mathies, although she moved on to fine arts, which kind of left me agog. You can be good at math AND at painting and sculpturing and drawing? I had no idea.

FASS

We both wound up involved in FASS, too, Waterloo’s annual Faculty, Administration, Staff and Students show. This was a big original show, supposedly a musical “comedy” although I think a lot of the jokes were way more fun for the participants than they were for the audience. Linda was a theatrical jack of all trades. Actor, choreographer, director - and complete amateurs like myself were always welcomed into the production and somehow I even became Musical Director for the 1985 and 1987 shows. Wait, what? I get to conduct the band? in the orchestra pit? And it moves up and down hydraulically? COOOL.

I couldn’t believe that I got to hang around with actual creative and talented people like this! Surely there must be some mistake… but that’s one of the great things about university, how you can become friends with people with wildly different backgrounds and ideas and it’s all very welcoming and fun and somehow we all learned a little bit about math at the same time.

But anyway.

So one night, Linda, and Paul McKone, and I were hanging around in the University of Waterloo Grad Club - an old farmhouse on the middle of campus - and somehow a tremendously silly and amazing idea was born there.

the Varsity Briefcase Drill Team

Let me quote from the June 2 1997 issue of the UW Daily Bulletin, a decade after the birth of the VBDT when it was prepping for a repeat performance -

Hot dog! The faculty, staff and retiree "birthday party" for UW is set for tomorrow at Federation Hall, running from 12 noon to 2 p.m. The barbecues will be hot, the music will be cool, and the return of the Varsity Briefcase Drill Team is promised -- what more could anyone ask? Well, maybe an explanation of the Varsity Briefcase Drill Team wouldn't be out of place. Linda Carson was in its founding "in 1987 or thereabouts", and does her best to blame Paul McKone:

“We were sitting in the Grad Club,” Carson says, “Having a refreshing lemonade – as I recall – and bemoaning the dreadful conformity of the whole notion of cheerleaders. It just didn’t seem to represent the true spirit of the University of Waterloo. Paul said something flip about how the true UW spirit would be represented by a bunch of people in suits throwing briefcases about. “It sounded like a great stunt,” Carson continues. “I’d done a lot of goofy choreography for FASS over the years. I got a few people together and we started working on weird stuff you could do with a briefcase. Paul was a member of the Warriors Band so he arranged to have them play for us. Steve Hayman came up with a musical arrangement and everybody got to work.

"The team rehearsed on the pavement outside the Math building. We had a rotten little tape deck and an atrocious recording of the Warriors Band. The team -- all six of them -- never heard the Band play live until they actually performed the number."

The UW Varsity Briefcase Drill Team made its debut, unannounced and unauthorized, at halftime at a basketball game, November 1987, in the PAC. Nobody knew they were coming but the Warriors Band. They marched onto the court in suits and sneakers, and performed their signature piece: Nine to Five. "The crowd had never seen anything like it, but from the moment those six people entered that huge gym in formation, everybody got it. I think that's still the greatest thing about it. UW knew right away what the team represented: ourselves," Carson remembers today. "I'm very proud of that moment, when the University of Waterloo proved it can laugh at itself."

I remember that first performance well! Six VBDT members marched out onto the floor as the Warriors Band played my arrangement of Dolly Parton's 9 to 5. It brought the house down. And the VBDT was invited to return - only bigger!

Something possessed me, a two-left-feet uncoordinated klutzomatron, to join. The team expanded to about 16 people and returned to another basketball game for the same schtick, again, that you can see in the picture at the top.

There’s the band behind the VBDT. I recall the game was telecast, and the cameraman was given instructions to film the shenanigans but he wound up filming the Warriors Band the entire time, oblivious to the synchronized briefcase drill going on behind him.

So there might be video out there somewhere. i’m still looking.

actual rehearsals

And I remember another writeup of a VBDT rehearsal, which was about the only time I was ever actually spotted in the UW’s dance studio. Oooh, this floor is bouncy. Hey, look at all the mirrors! What is this ‘bar’ for?

Linda sent me this photo from a 1987 rehearsal -

Back row, L to R: Ken Jones, Dave Till? Heidi Leblanc? Peter Houston? And somebody of whom I can only see a shoe. John Sellens maybe?

Front row, L to R: Angela Yeates, Me, Chris Kitowski, Brian Dickson, Suzanne Langdon

and Waterloo’s Imprint student paper wrote things up -

Photo from the UW Imprint, January 22 1988. Captioned: Waterloo’s varsity Briefcase Drill Team, fresh from its triumphant debut at the Naismith tournament, will perform again at halftime during the Warriors basketball game against Laurier January 30 at 2 p.m. in the PAC. Shown here in a recent practice, the Varsity Briefcase Drill Team provides a brand of entertainment and team support uniquely suited to UW.

The Varsity Briefcase Drill Team encourages you to support Warriors basketball, and looks forward to seeing everyone at the game. Linda Carson is the team’s choreographer.”

Front to back, right to left, that’d be Angela Yeates, Ken Jones, me, Dave Till, Chris Kitowski, possibly Suzanne, Brian Dickson, Peter Houston, Heidi Leblanc?, John Sellens.

A photographer for the UW Gazette took what was probably the least flattering photo of me ever - not the one above, one even worse - for another writeup - and in that story, Linda mentioned that all the VBDT moves were named after computers on campus and the photo showed us `practicing the bruising wateerc manoeuvre'.

Gotta dig that article up.

Perhaps my strongest memory is that Chris Kitowski, who’s in the center in the light gray jacket in the photo, had a briefcase with a latch that would always pop open at the exact same point in the routine. Always. Every time. And Chris would click it back shut, on tempo, right on the beat, at the same point every time. Every. Single. Time. It was hard not to laugh.

successful dumb ideas cannot be stopped

I moved away from Waterloo, to Indiana for a few years, but the VBDT kept going, and appeared in a Santa Claus parade, and then, to my great delight, reformed and performed at my (first) wedding reception! (That particular marriage did not last; I don’t think it was the Varsity Briefcase Drill Team’s fault though.) And the team reformed for UW’s 40th anniversary in 1997.

I know many of us in the VBDT held on to our decorated briefcases for years, just in case we were called on to serve our university again.

That was just one thing Linda did for us all. We can argue about who actually came up with the idea, but Linda made it happen. So many great endeavours are all due to someone who took the time to implement a silly idea, rather than just laughing it off and saying “yeah, that would be cool.” It was cool. And Linda is why.

Linda even had a law.

Carson's Law: There are fewer rules than you think.

— Linda Carson (@lccarson) May 12, 2019

“There are fewer rules than you think.”

Thanks, Linda, for proving that.

We’ll all miss you, Linda.

Yesterday: achievement unlocked. I was personally corrected (on Twitter) by Ken Jennings.

What an incredible honour!

Well, I’d always hoped to be corrected by Ken on the set of Jeopardy! itself, but still, a twitter interaction is a pretty cool alternative.

I mentioned to my brilliant colleague Tom that I’d been corrected by Ken Jennings, and Tom replied “Did he find a way to spell handyman without Hayman?" (good one, Tom.)

But…

I have reviewed yesterday’s Final Jeopardy answer and … Well, I’m not sure Ken Jennings was right to correct me after all. And what fun would the Internet be if we didn’t argue about minutia?

The situation:

Final Jeopardy Category: World Capitals

The answer is:

AN ANNUAL EVENT CALLED WINTERLUDE INCLUDES SKATING ON THE RIDEAU CANAL, A UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE IN THIS CITY.

(Of course every Canadian immediately shouts “What is Ottawa?")

what is Paris?

Ken gets to the 2nd place contestant. She has written: “What is Paris?”

here's what Ken says

Ken says, and I quote:

"Jennifer, you were in second place, which world capital did you write down? 'What is Paris?'

“No, the name is French, but it’s not Paris, so that will cost you something.”

(Remainder of Final Jeopardy unimportant at this point, although Amy Schneider (who also got it wrong, with ‘What is Amsterdam?') won anyway, her fifth win, congratulations!)

wait, what did he say?

So Cathy and I immediately started debating. When Ken said ‘the name is French, but it’s not Paris’… what did he mean? Does he think “Ottawa” is a French name?

It isn’t, of course, “Ottawa” comes from the Algonquin word ‘adawe’, meaning ‘to trade.’

Now what do you do when somebody is wrong? You tweet about it, of course. I immediately composed a tweet, saying

<cough> um @KenJennings “Ottawa” is not a French word. It’s from the Algonquin word “adawe”, meaning "to trade".

— Steve Hayman 💉 💉 💉 (@shayman) November 24, 2021

And, a few minutes later - oh my god, I got a reply from Ken Jennings himself!

“no, but it (Rideau) IS a French word”

— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) November 24, 2021

(Saving a screen shot for posterity in case either of us deletes something in the future)

I better apologize

Suitably chastened - who am I to argue with Ken Jennings - I apologized.

Aha. You are right, there. Thanks for the clarification.

— Steve Hayman 💉 💉 💉 (@shayman) November 24, 2021

And I then had to wade through multiple tweets from other people. Ken got way more likes on his reply than I got on my original. Apparently a lot of people read all of Ken’s tweets and some feel obliged to reply to me. This one was good.

pic.twitter.com/t0omP6WIty

— Victor Puente (@thevictorpuente) November 24, 2021

Along with other tweets from Ken’s army of followers reminding me that he meant that ‘Rideau’ was a French word. And a few helpful but off topic responses -

Rideau Hall is in Ottawa and it is the Governor General's residence.

— Calli (@DemoneLinda) November 24, 2021

but

This has been nagging at me.

It’s an honour to be corrected by the legend Ken Jennings.

But what actually did he say?

The contestant writes What is Paris? and Ken responds

No, the name is French, but it's not Paris

I think I know what he meant but …. can you not argue that the name and it both refer to the same thing, the correct response (Ottawa) here, not another word in the clue (Rideau)?

It is possible that I actually am right here. Or that we both are.

Not sure I want to risk another Twitter firestorm though!

Ken, if you're reading this

I’ve taken the Jeopardy! test multiple times. Why don’t you call?

Here’s a collection of some of my favourite commercials where they sing the phone number. Have been meaning to collect this for a while. Enjoy. If possible.

Poison Control, 1 800 222-1222

On a work trip I was driving through upstate New York and this jingle came on the radio and I thought - wait - did I just hear that correctly?

Stompin' Tom, PEI Tourism. 800 565-7421

Stompin' Tom was a songwriting genius who could seemingly turn out a catchy tune on virtually any topic. Phone numbers? Sure!

Alfie Zappacosta and Syd Kessler for Pizza Nova, 439-0000

This one is epic. EPIC! Especially the bridge where they start singing not just the phone number, but singing ABOUT the phone number! Four Three Nine. Lots of Zeroes.

ITravel2000.com . 1 866 WOW DEAL

The IT Crowd, the new Emergency Number

just dial 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

speaking of emergency services

There seems to be a whole genre of emergency service commercials where they sing the phone number.

1 800 267 2001 Alarm Force

1 866 247 4999 The Monitoring Center

Clever phone number. I think the schtick was that you got 24*7 monitoring for $9.99 /month.

Geez I’m having trouble finding this one. Ah here we go. Skip ahead to about 1:50 in this informercial. Catchy!

And in Canada at least, the granddaddy of them all, a commercial that’s been around possibly 50 years (and which they’ve re-recorded as new area codes came online)

Pizza Pizza 967-1111

A phone number jingle so popular that they actually made commercials about how popular the jingle was.

Pennsylvania 6-5000

Actually I suppose the REAL Granddaddy of them all has to be Glenn Miller’s **Pennsylvania 6-5000", the number of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City, where the band frequently performed.

I’ll have to dig out the video from Waterloo’s FASS 1985 show where I was the pit band leader, and we warmed up the crowd by playing Pennsylvania 6-5000 except we altered the lyrics to include the university phone number, 885-1211, and of course. 967-1111. At the time it was hilarious. (Although if I watch that video again now, I realize the show was a lot more hilarious for the performers than the audience.)

Finally, I wonder

Back in Alexander Graham Bell’s time frame, I wonder if you’d go to a live performance by John Philip Sousa’s band at the bandshell, and some singers would come out, advertising a nearby restaurant and they’d sing the number…. “Four!”

Bobby Orr and me. An incomplete story.

50 years ago I - seen here, green striped shirt - got Bobby Orr to autograph his O-Pee-Chee hockey card.

49 years ago I misplaced the card. Somehow.

Just bought a replacement off of eBay. Now, to find Bobby and get it re-autographed. Also need to find a green striped shirt.

so how'd that happen?

Someone told me in grade 7 that if you bought an entire carton of hockey cards, you’d get one of everything. I saved up $10, and bought the carton at the variety store. Richard and Kevin and I then opened them all up, and ate all the gum. And yes you do get one of each.

the gum, you’ll remember, tastes basically the same as the cards.

In the early 1970s, the Boston Bruins would hold their annual training camp in my home town of London, and in 1971 they were all playing at a golf tournament at the Highland Golf Club.

Back then, students in London got a half day off to visit the cows at the Western Fair. So… Richard and Kevin and I hatched a plan. We’d blow off the entire day of Grade 8 and take all our hockey cards - our complete set, wait, MY complete set, out and see if we could get any of them signed. Or maybe we could be caddies. We didn’t know how anything worked.

We got out there and somehow positioned ourselves at the 18th green, and all the Bruins eventually came by, and were mobbed by a small handful of 12 year olds. Esposito. Orr. Cashman. Cheevers. Sanderson. The defending Stanley Cup champs.

I had my cards ready. And a pen, I think. Really planning ahead there. Oh, and my camera, the same Kodak Instamatic 126 that took that Apollo XI picture that I won’t shut up about.

Like for instance here’s me and Derek Sanderson. Thanks Richard or Kevin or whoever took this.

look! it's bobby orr! and phil esposito!

And the final foursome comes over. Bobby Orr. Phil Esposito. Wow. What are they doing here in my town?

here I am apparently ignoring Phil Esposito.

So - those trees in the background? One of them was an apple tree. Phil Esposito goes over to the apple tree to pick up a post-golf snack. Picks a couple of apples.

the apple

Phil Esposito hands one of these apples to Bobby Orr, who is in the middle of autographing my hockey card, as seen here in this not exactly perfectly composed photo.

Bobby Orr, the greatest hockey player of all time, then

• takes a bite out of the apple • doesn’t like it • turns to me • hands me the apple core and says • “Here, kid, would you throw this out for me?”

huuuuuh yes sir oooooh yes i will huuuuh

No, I didn’t keep the apple. I should have. Imagine what it’d be worth on eBay now. But I threw it out, because when Bobby Orr asks you to do something, you do it, no questions asked.

(Let me add that about 20 years ago I was in Tampa for work, and actually ran in to Phil Esposito at the airport, and told him this story about the apple, and he couldn’t have been less interested in it, which is something you and he probably have in common)

So anyways I got my hockey cards autographed by all the greats. And carefully set them aside, in the torn remains of the original carton from the variety store.

so what happened to the autographed cards?

ok I might not have ‘carefully’ stored them away.

I heard of a sports memorabilia store with a sign behind the counter saying “We charge $50 to listen to the story of how your parents threw them all away.”

i am not blaming anybody

i could have stored them better

i could have been more clear about what exactly was in the box

I still have most of that set. Somehow I set the Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins autographed ones aside, intending, I’m sure, to store or display them properly.

I still have the Sheldon Kannegiesser card for instance, sadly, unautographed.

anyway it’s been bugging me for almost 50 years. In a sort of circle-of-life moment, one of the things I demo at work these days is an Augmented Reality app I wrote where I can point the camera at a hockey card, and it overlays some statistics on top. That’s kind of cool.

so … this week, I spent significantly more than that entire set cost me, just to get one slightly used 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee Bobby Orr card, as seen here. Now I just need to track down Bobby and the circle will be complete.

I hope he remembers the part about the apple.

update

Update: Bobby’s team replies that he will happily autograph this card for US$100.

I don’t remember autographs costing quite that much back in 1971.

update January 26 2022

The board decided to go with “Old North Public School.” Here’s the London Free Press article.

original post below.

I went to Ryerson Public School (kindergarten through grade 3), two blocks from home in London, Ontario. So did my siblings. And my mom. And many others in our Old North London family.

That’s not the only connection - my great-grandfather led the John Hayman and Sons Construction Company, who built Ryerson in 1916.

I didn’t know who “Ryerson” was at the time. It never came up. Nobody said anything about it that I can remember.

Now we all know a little more about Egerton Ryerson, who not only lobbied for public education in Ontario, but also was involved in the shameful legacy of the Residential School system.

It’s time to rename the school. You know what would be a perfect choice?

How about naming it after a young boy who

• lived in London with his family during World War II;
• was - probably - a classmate of my mother's at the time;
• learned basic arithmetic there
• became one of the most famous mathematicians of the past 100 years, and
• won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics (for "the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity".)

Wait, what? A kid from Ryerson won the Nobel Prize in Physics?

How could you NOT rename it after someone like that?

Let’s call it Roger Penrose Elementary School. Let’s tile the floor with Penrose tiles - one of his discoveries of two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically. (Us mathies get excited about things like that.) Here’s an example of a Penrose Tiling

And here’s Roger Penrose at Texas A&M where they’ve done the floor that way!

Those oddly patterned tiles might be tricky, but I know a construction company that would rise to the challenge.

p.s. I know you’ll all see it when your copy arrives on the doorstep, but I wrote a Letter to the Editor of my hometown paper, the London Free Press, about this. I would have written more, but their web form only allowed 500 characters.

The border between Ontario and the USA is 2,760 km long, from the Ontario/Quebec/New York end in the east to the Ontario/Manitoba/Minnesota end in the west.

2,760 km.

How much of that is over water, and how much over land? Well, let’s see. from East to West we’ve got

• the St. Lawrence River
• Lake Ontario
• the Niagara River
• Lake Erie
• the Detroit River
• Lake St. Clair
• the St. Clair River
• Lake Huron
• the Whatever it is River in Sault Ste. Marie - excuse me, that'd be the "Saint Mary River"
• Lake Superior ...

And then an amazingly convoluted 880 km route, initially following the Pigeon River between Ontario and Minnesota, extends all the way to the Northwest Angle.

Seriously you should look at how convoluted that route is. The 1789 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, defined the border.

The St. Lawrence/Great Lakes part was pretty easy - let’s just go right up the middle, let’s give all of Lake Michigan to the Americans but we only get half of Lake Ontario for some reason - but the route westward from Lake Superior must have been harder to define. Fortunately there were well-known routes that the voyageurs in their canoes had previously established.

But is it really all water?

Amazingly, no, it isn’t all water.

land borders between Ontario and Minnesota

I know of at least three spots where Ontario and the USA share a land border. Two of them are in northwest Ontario, where there is a brief portage between one lake and another. Here’s one.

There’s another one up there. Go find it.

But how about this third one

land border between Ontario and New York State

I suspect most people think the border at Niagara Falls zips right down the middle of the Horseshoe Falls - but it doesn’t. It cuts REALLY close to Goat Island on the American side. 99% of the Horseshoe Falls is in Canada but if you look really closely at the border line itself …

See it? Right there at the base of the falls on the US side? The border cuts through a few of the rocks piled at the bottom of the falls, and assuming those are dry, THAT is a land border between Ontario and New York.

Good luck crossing at that point though.

while we're at it

Everybody knows that if you go south out of Detroit, you get to Windsor.

Fewer people realize just how far Ontario stretches in a North - South direction.

There are places in Southern Ontario that are south of places in California, and there are places in Northern Ontario that are north of places in Alaska.