John Scully

You've probably heard the story by now of the Winnipeg pizza parlour that delivers pornographic pictures with its pies. All undressed, no doubt. It's a mystery to me how anyone could be so desperate for a slice of action they'd order a porno pizza before taking matters into their own hands. Not a pretty picture. Don't even think about the mess… crumbs and cheese and salami, I mean.

I have some advice for the purveyors to the perverted: however understandably desperate you feel in Winnipeg, do not do this in Baghdad.

The surge is a pullulating, throbbing, testosterone-exploding success. That's the verdict of the U.S. military and mandarin minds who have declared that the temporary addition of thousands of troops to the battle in Iraq has got the enemy on the run. The same dreamboats, or nightmare carriers, attribute the surge to the drops in coalition deaths and violent incidents in Baghdad in particular, and other parts of Iraq. Why, even the nascent golden boy of U.S. politics, the new keeper of the keys to Camelot – or should that be shamalot? — Barack Obama changed his mind, so impressed was he with the surge. If ever you want a reason to doubt his intelligence, using both definitions of the word, this is the issue with which to challenge him and anyone else who is convinced the tactic worked.

"What do you do?" The small, bird-like doctor with a British accent asked me with no apparent interest.

"I'm a journalist. A writer."

No longer a virgin. Yes! This was the very first time I had called myself a writer in public.

"What? So you write for fun?" he asked as though the lump sitting before him in an open-backed hospital gown - I can never figure out how to tie those things up — couldn't even write his own name.

"Well. Not just for fun. I've had a book published and I'm Writer in Residence this month for Open Book Toronto."

The broccoli on his plate almost reached the ceiling. Stir-fried, not shaken. Behind the mountain of greenery was a unique Canadian character, successful multi-media artist – as in paint, pen and song, not Internet, iTunes and iPods – and political shit-disturber, Mendelson Joe, aged 65. We met for lunch at the China House, one of Huntsville (pop. 20,000), Ontario's two ethnic restaurants, both Chinese, both very north-of-Toronto-Canadian.

Joe shovelled in the broccoli by the bucket-load because, nearly twenty years ago, he self-diagnosed diabetes — combined with the knowledge that George Bush hates it – convinced Joe that this was the way to good health in or out of sorts.

"Hey John! There's a guy trying to track you down."

The blue mini-van pulled alongside me outside the small, neat village store. A cheery Peggy, the local librarian, yelled out: "He asked me if I knew you. He wanted to know if you gave talks and things like that."

"Who is he? What did you tell him?"

"I told him you do and he left me his card. Here."

Solzhenitsyn's dead! Solzenitsyn's dead! So f'n what. That seemed to be the attitude of the U.S. and Canadian media who appeared more concerned with Morgan Freeman's car crash than with the death of the man who has been called "The Champion of Freedom and Justice" and "The Keeper of the Russian Conscience."

The old 1930s pop song, "The Lambeth Walk," never took such a pounding as it did at this decade's Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican Bishops in England. (The US prefer to be called Episcopalians). Man, did those heavily mitred big heads ever need a lesson in rhythm and pews.

Ever had your fortune told? The only attempt I made to find out what delights beckoned in my future was to play with a home-made ouija board with a couple of fellow-pimply, pubescent teenagers. We were astounded when the glass bumped its way, driven by a truly mysterious force, to words like "girls" and "bras" and "fu–". It always stopped short of spelling out what really lay, as it were, in our drooling future. Damn! It’s not going to the "ck." Must have been our Catholic schooling and one of the hands of God on the glass that forever pushed it to the final letter-"n". No "cks" for these young Turks- or something that rhymes with it.

Want to know if the media is in a healthy, rigorous state? Can you trust the news you are consuming? The surest way to find out if journalism's pulse is beating strongly is by going to, of all places, the health pages or websites. And a warning: if you believe what you see on TV, especially in those dreadful "Your Health" segments, then I've got millions of bucks in a Nigerian bank that's all yours.

The TV segments are designed simply to grab your attention and hold it for a maximum of two minutes. In than time, flashing by are headlines, impossibly short clips from researchers, doctors and patients and a sign-off from a T'nT (go figure) blond with about as much expertise in medicine as I do in astrophysics. In depth, it ain't. But is it true? Not often.

The last time I was in China they took us to see a duck farm. To this day I don't now why, except that was only thing they would let us a film. Ducks. Cops and goons followed us everywhere and when we weren't under their tender care, we were confined to our hotel.

Now this same country is staging the Olympic Games. They've come a long way… or have they? I guess a flat "no", would be my answer. These games should be boycotted. Just like the IOC should have stopped the games in Munich when 11 Israeli athletes were massacred.

The Internet has won! Newspapers are dead!! (AP. July 24, 2008-U.S.Regional and national newspaper publishers, already staggering with a drop in ad revenue more severe than the industry has seen since the Great Depression, say the second half of 2008 may be even worse. )Well, it's not over quite yet. Sure, the Net has forced fading newspapers to make many changes, few of them good – major lay-offs, less foreign coverage, less analysis, more fears, more tears, more fluff. But there is one space desperately pressured editors dare not touch. And it's a surprising one in the era of chat rooms, text messaging and Facebook -- Letters to the Editor. From the portentous national dailies to the rambling, often silly local rags, Letters to the Editor continue to dominate even the most threatened opinion pages.

It's a powerful piece of writing from the splendid South African newspaper, the Mail and Guardian. In a savage attack on Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe, it makes these disturbing, yet brutally true observations:

He was just another victim of just another war. This time, the Israelis versus the Palestinians. I saw him dead in a ditch in the hills high above Beirut. The scorching sun offered no dignity to the yellowing corpse whose tattered militia uniform became his death shroud. Alone and anonymous. A corpse with no name.

"John! I want you to go to emergency right now! You've got total kidney failure!"

The phone had irritably blasted out its summons. A telemarketer? Screw it. But one of the few manageable gimmicks of on the modern phone, call display, persuaded me to answer. It was only nine on the morning but my family doctor – waiting room time forty-five minutes—was quite a-quiver. He'd just seen my latest blood test results. They indicated high potassium levels and other signs of the further disintegration of an aging buffoon.

"Any emerg.?"

"It doesn't matter. Just go! Now! Tell them your creatinine and potassium levels are way off. Tell them to give you intravenous fluids. Hurry, John, hurry!"