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.

I’m sad today. But happy. In a nostalgic-sad-happy kind of hybrid way.

This is in my calendar right now. An event that repeats every 4 years, along with a message from me in 2017. I like leaving myself messages in the calendar to read in the future.

So what’s going on?

We used to live 3 doors down from a little park and one day - specifically, May 28, 1997 - I took this picture of the lads on a bench there.

may 28 1997

I liked that picture a lot. I still do. So 4 years later we strolled down to the park to take the same picture on the same bench.

may 28 2001

The astute viewer will note that child #2 is wearing the shirt that child #1 was wearing in the 1997 picture. That was a complete coincidence, and somehow I forgot to continue this trend. But we kept returning to that bench, and taking the picture again, every four years.

may 28 2005

By this point I’d started putting the series of pictures in a nice frame, and giving a copy to various relatives. And the photos continued.

may 28 2009

Number 1’s in high school now and is wearing his Ursula Franklin Academy shirt. I think they moved the bench in the park by 50 feet so the angle was no longer quite right, but we kept going.

may 28 2013

By this point I’m starting to become exceedingly grateful that they’re still willing to go along with this.

may 28 2017

We’d moved to Oakville, but returned to Beresford Park to take the picture again, and the photographer may have been a little overcome with waves of nostalgia. (Along with regret that we didn’t continue the hand-me-down-shirt routine but these guys are getting all grown up now …)

may 28 2021

Today’s the day.

I have been staring at my calendar all week wondering if we can pull off the “Every Four Years” picture this year.

But I don’t think we can. For one reason - you know, global pandemic, nobody should be travelling, Ontario still in lockdown.

For another - both of the subjects have jobs and are working today and have moved away, one’s a two hour drive, one’s a four hour drive, and the logistics are getting too complicated.

Also it’s raining.

I think we might bend the rules a bit, what with there being a pandemic and all. The next time they’re both in town, I’ll see if they’re willing to take a little drive to Beresford Park and see if the bench is still there, and I’ll bring my camera, and take another 200 pictures in the hopes that 2 or 3 turn out well, and I’ll print Photo #7 and find an even bigger frame to add it to ….

but it won’t be the same somehow.

time marches on. Take lots of pictures of your kids. They grow up awfully fast.

UPDATE

well we managed this on the evening of May 28 2021, at least. In this pandemic year of craziness, it’ll do!

I was a kid during the glory days of the Apollo space program and as you’ve probably heard me say a million times, Dad took us to Florida to see the actual launch of Apollo XI. Like every kid I lived and breathed every aspect of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, and I’ve devoured every book and movie I can find about it. “Apollo 13”? Loved it. “From the Earth to the Moon”? Terrific. “The Right Stuff” ? Fabulous.

That’s a picture I personally took of the Apollo XI launch on July 16, 1969.

But, For All Mankind, WOW.

I need you to watch this too. Sign up for a free trial of Apple TV+ if you have to (i’m biased, but it’s a great service.)

This is a fictional TV series (on Apple TV, about to enter Season 2) from Ronald D. Moore, the creator of “Battlestar Galactica” that’s an alternate-history view of the world, starting in 1969 as the first Apollo missions are set to land on the moon, except … the Russians get there first. All told from the point of view of the NASA astronauts and engineers - and their families! - who are suddenly behind, racing to catch up.

I just love this show. It’s alternate history that feels real. The thing is, I seem to be surrounded by increasing numbers of people younger than me, who weren’t around when this was all happening, and who might be unaware of exactly what went down. I don’t want them to be puzzled by For All Mankind. I want them to revel in it too!

This article’s for you.

Of course the Russians never actually landed on the moon, but as a kid I remember people being worried that they’d do something to upstage the Apollo XI landing. And - that’s what happens in episode 1. The first man lands on the moon, and it’s NOT Neil Armstrong, it’s Alexei Leonov.

This, of course, gets NASA and the American government all riled up, and the space race is ON. The show starts to diverge from reality as the Americans scramble to get Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon, but now shortly thereafter, the Russians have landed their second ship, and - it’s a woman. NASA now scrambles at President Nixon’s direction to recruit and train female astronauts.

I don’t want to give too much away, but the women astronauts and engineers are the true heroes of this alternate version of the space race.

What truly fascinates me about this show is the mixture of fictional and real people and events. For instance, the Russians have never actually landed anybody on the Moon, but Alexei Leonov was a real cosmonaut, the first person to walk in space outside the capsule, and he really had been scheduled to be the first Russian on the moon.

We see a variety of actual people - NASA astronauts, administrators, politicians and so on, in slightly modified roles as the show’s timeline begins to diverge from reality. Here for instance are some notes on a few REAL people or events, what they did in real life, and what happens to them on the show.

(It’s also fascinating watching the technology slowly get better - very primitive computers and displays at Mission Control in early episodes, much better computers towards the end. That’s a reminder of how much of what NASA did drove advances in civilian technology too. Imagine if we’d kept going to the moon in real life, not just in the show.)

Also somebody gives somebody a slide rule. I liked that.

the actual Apollo missions

Apollo missions used a three-astronaut crew; two would descend to the lunar surface in the Lunar Module, while the third orbited the moon in the Command Module for a few days waiting for the crewmates to return in the (top half of the) Lunar Module. They’d rendesvous, everybody would transfer back into the Command Module, and they’d leave lunar orbit and head back to Earth.

A few missions were just rehearsals for different aspects of the mission.

Mission	Purpose
Apollo 1	A test, on the ground, that tragically ended in a fire, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. This was a major setback to the Apollo program, and NASA had to regroup.

Apollo 2,3|There were a variety of test launches but these names weren’t used.

Apollo 4 | An uncrewed launch, the first est of the Saturn V launch vehicle. 3 earth orbits.

Apollo 5 | An uncrewed launch, the first flight to include a Lunar Module. 7 earth orbits

Apollo 6 | An uncrewed launch. 3 earth orbits.

Apollo 7 | The first Apollo mission to fly with a crew of 3 - but only to earth orbit, testing various systems.

Apollo 8 | The first astronauts to leave Earth’s orbit. Apollo 8 executed the trans-lunar injection burn, and headed for the moon. It orbited the moon several times, took some very famous photographs, and returned to earth. The Lunar Module was not involved this time.

Apollo 9 | Earth orbit, but with the Lunar Module on board and the team practiced docking and undocking manouvres.

Apollo 10 | A full on dress rehearsal for a moon landing. Apollo 10 flew to the moon, where the Lunar Module separated from the Command Module and descended close to the surface - without landing.

Apollo 11 | Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first astronauts to walk on the moon’s surface in July 1969, while Michael Collins orbited above in the command module.

Apollo 12 | Yet another moon landing, a successful mission in the mold of Apollo 11, but to a different part of the moon, which I should really look up.

Apollo 13 | Houston, we have a problem. I hope you’ve seen the movie Apollo 13 which is an excellent dramatization of this real-life accident. The crew went to the moon, orbited a few times but were obviously unable to land due to damage from an explosion in the Service Module, and due to heroic efforts of many at NASA, they returned safely to the earth.

Apollo 14 | A two day visit to the moon, including Alan Shepard, who was already famous as the first American in space on the first Mercury mission.

Apollo 15 | They took a CAR to the moon on this one! The first launch that included the Lunar Roving Vehicle.

Apollo 16 | Three days on the moon, with the LRV. Commanded by John Young, later the commander of the first Space Shuttle launch.

Apollo 17 | In December 1972, Gene Cernan became the last person to walk on the moon.

And that was it. Cernan died in 2017. Only twelve astronauts have ever walked on the moon. As of this writing, only Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16) and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) are still with us. Schmitt is the youngest, at 85.

We haven’t been back. We thought there’d be more - but almost 50 years later, nobody has returned to the moon.

Well, not in real life, anyway.

But on the show ...

Apollo 10

This really was a manned mission to the moon - but without a landing. The plan - which we also see in the show - was to rehearse every step of the Apollo XI mission, EXCEPT the actual landing. In reality, astronauts Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan descended in the Lunar Module to within 8 miles of the moon’s surface, at which point they deliberately “aborted” the landing and returned to join the Command Module (and astronaut John Young) and return to Earth.

In the show, it’s more or less the same except Apollo X is crewed by (fictional) Ed Baldwin and Gordo Stevens, who become major characters throughout the rest of season 1, and the “aborted” landing becomes quite the plot point as people question if they SHOULD have gone ahead and landed, and beaten the Russians.

Apollo 11

Of course this mission actually went to the moon, but on the TV series, they will be the second people to get there. One of my favourite scenes in the show shows a technician crawling into the craft while it’s still on the launchpad, to remove the historic plaque that was attached the leg of the lunar module. You know, the famous REAL plaque that said “Here men from the Planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. We came in peace for all mankind.”

This is the real plaque, still there today on the Sea of Tranquility.

And on the show, well, they’re suddenly not going to be first any more. Better remove the plaque before launch. A great little detail.

Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin

Armstrong and Aldrin are, of course, the first two people to land on the moon. In the show, they’re beaten to the moon by Alexei Leonov, but they still land as scheduled in Apollo XI - with a major twist, that I won’t spoil here.

Michael Collins

In real life, command module pilot on Apollo XI, so he orbited the moon while Armstrong and Alrdin landed. In the show, he returns as the commander of Apollo 23.

Wernher von Braun

von Braun was a major figure in real-NASA - an actual Nazi Germany rocket scientist who moved to the USA and was instrumental as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V rocket. In real life, he was also obviously quite controversial because of his Nazi background. Tom Lehrer wrote a famous song about Von Braun and his controversial past.)

In the show, von Braun is played by noted Canadian actor Colm Feore and … well, his Nazi background is still a problem, and that affects the arc of the show.

The Mercury 13

In the show, President Nixon angrily orders NASA to recruit some female astronauts to help win the PR war - and many of those astronauts have spectacular roles later in the show.

In reality, a group of women known as the Mercury 13 were recruited and went through the same training as the actual Mercury astronauts, although they weren’t formally part of the space program. One of them was an accomplished pilot named Jerrie Cobb. In the show, this group is brought back into the space program and somewhat controversially brought up to speed - and one of the successful astronauts and a major character from this group is named Mollie Cobb, no doubt as an homage of sorts. (and now that I’ve done a little more googling, the producers agree that they named Mollie as a tribute to Jerrie Cobb who died during the production of Season 1.)

Deke Slayton

Real Donald K. “Deke” Slayton was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, whose career was derailed by a heart issue that meant he couldn’t fly in the Mercury program, and he became a senior NASA administrator and manager of the astronaut office. He was eventually cleared to fly, and flew on the Apollo-Soyuz mission (a joint earth orbit thing between American and Russian spacecraft) and here he is, whaddya know, with cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. (See above! In the show Leonov is the first man on the moon.)

Deke Slayton is a major character in the show too, with a gritty performance by actor Chris Bauer. He’s in the same role as manager of the Astronaut office, selecting crews and … whaddya know, he manages to insert himself into the crew on one of the moon missions later in the show.

Real Deke Slayton passed away in 1993. I am very curious to know what his family thinks of his portrayal on the show.

Gene Kranz

Real NASA flight director. If you saw the movie Apollo 13, you saw a gritty portrayal of him by Ed Harris, chewing the scenery, and barking out the famous line Failure is not an option.. He never actually used that term but he was still a heroic real NASA character.

In the show, he’s played by actor Eric Ladin in the same gritty style. You’ll want to watch carefully as he inspects the (mythical) Apollo 23 pre-launch. It doesn’t end well.

President Kennedy

Lots of fun historical tidbits are dropped in the show. You hear that Senator Ted Kennedy has postponed a vacation on Chappaquiddick to deal with some crisis or other - of course, in reality, he really did go to Chappaquiddick and an incident there derailed his political career.

On the show however - no incident! And he’s President by the end of the season, although we never really see him in the show.

Moon Missions

The actual Apollo program landed Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 on the moon between 1969 and 1972, with a famous accident on Apollo 13. Future missions, including Apollos 18 and 19, were scrapped, and today you can see some of that actual launch-ready hardware on display at the Kennedy Space Station.

Here’s some of the remains of the unused Apollo 18, 19 and other hardware on display today - we visited the Kennedy Space Center in 2015 and I highly recommend this tour. These aren’t museum mockups - this is actual launch-ready hardware that was built and never used. You can’t help but feel embarrassed that this magnificent vehicle is on display in a museum and never launched.

For All Mankind is moving at a much faster pace, due to competition with the Russians. At one point it abruptly fast-forwards by two years, to keep the plot moving along, and by the mid-1970s, NASA has an actual permanent base on the moon (and, minor spoiler, so do the Russians.) By the end of Season one, Apollos 24 and 25 are launched. And, NASA has modified the moon landing hardware so that the lunar module isn’t a single use land-once take-off-once thing as it was in reality, but a reusable vehicle to take people from lunar orbit to the surface. The tech still seems very believable and the Jamestown moon base is really fun to see, imagining that you’re still in 1975.

There is one hell of a cliffhanger involving an accident between fictional Apollos 24 and 25 at the end of episode 9, which turned out to be one of the most gripping things I’ve ever seen on TV.

And watch the final episode right past the credits. There’s a post-credit flash-forward to 1983, where we see NASA launching the Sea Dragon, a massive rocket launched from the middle of the ocean. Of course we’re now solidly in the fiction realm, but the Sea Dragon was an actual idea NASA was kicking around in the early 1960s (and one you briefly hear Von Braun mention on the show.)

What's up in Season 2?

A first look is out. We see modified space shuttles heading towards the moon.
We see a disturbing escalation of military action on the moon’s surface - astronauts with weapons.

And, I hear we’re going to see the Buran, the fabled Russian shuttle. In reality, the Russians were copying the overall design of the US shuttle but theirs never made it to space, and the remains of the only two Buran vehicles are actually rusting away today in a warehouse in Kazakhstan. Here’s an amazing picture of the abandoned Buran at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Fantastic photo by urban explorer David de Rueda, of https://davidderueda.com, shared by permission with thanks.

Read more about the Buran here.

But in Season 2, they’re up in the air.

I can’t wait.