The Oppenheimer Report 12/6/10

As winter creeps into the Great White North like a thief in the night, its arrival was a little less subtle in other parts of the country. Last week, Buffalo got smacked with a big winter storm and a heavy dose of lake effect snow. Where my mom lives, there was very little of the white stuff, but just south, in a narrow band, they got hammered. The storm even necessitated the closing of a stretch of the NYS Thruway. Out in Western Canada, there’s been plenty of snow already, but up here in the Great White North, we haven’t had all that much. I know it’s coming, and from time to time, I click on my Weather Channel website to check the Doppler radar, anxiously awaiting the streamers heading in from the west. I began writing this report on Saturday, and when I took Jasper out for her morning constitutional, there was a thin band of ice forming on the shores of our little lake. We’re all alone on this lake for most of the winter and it’s absolutely peaceful and beautiful right now. We’ll see how I feel come February.


Chanukah began December 1st and we lit the first candles as my father-in-law recited the prayers over the speaker phone from Toronto. I have always liked that tradition; it‘s even better when he’s in the same room. I don’t speak Hebrew, and when my father-in-law was not available on the second night, I googled “Chanukah prayers” so I could read the prayers phonetically. There is even an audio file available of a man reciting the prayers in Hebrew. Perhaps my laptop should have a bar mitzvah. Speaking of things Jewish, there was a big wildfire in Israel last week, outside Haifa in Northern Israel. My immediate reaction was that it was caused by Arabs playing with matches, but apparently that was not the case. High winds and draught conditions fueled the flames, and there were a surprising number of casualties.

Canadian actor Leslie Nielson died last week. I loved him in “Airport” and the “Naked Gun” movies, but sometimes it’s fun to watch an actor play a role that is completely the antithesis of what I’d expect him to play. There was a movie called “Nuts” starring Barbra Streisand and Richard Dreyfus, in which Nielson played a cameo, and it was entirely different than anything I had ever seen him do. The movie was about a high end prostitute, played by Streisand (a bit of a stretch), who was on trial for murdering one of her Johns. In the scene, Nielson played the John who got a little too frisky, and Streisand bores him to death with her liberal nonsense (just kidding). It must be strange for an actor to become type cast as a comic or a bad guy. For a long time, I had a lot of trouble seeing Henry Winkler as anything but “The Fonz” though he’s certainly a versatile actor in dramatic roles as well. Jack Palance used to play a lot of bad guys when I was a kid, then I saw him in the comedy “City Slickers” and he was pretty funny.

The big news last week was the WikiLeaks exposure of classified information,  likely to embarrass a lot of people worldwide and undermine various diplomatic efforts. Depending on whom you believe, WikiLeaks (which is, by the way, a website) founder Julian Assange is either a demon or an angel. Is he the “Robin Hood of Information” or just some traitor endangering our national security? Does anybody remember when Geraldo got in trouble during the second Gulf War by divulging sensitive logistics information on T.V.? I don’t know enough about Assange to judge him, but I read an article in The Toronto Star that makes him out to be pretty strange. Right now he is holed up in Britain, but he can’t hide there for very long. A lot of high ranking government types want his balls on a platter, if they catch him. One thing this WikiLeaks scandal does is to remind me how uncontrollable the internet really is. Some argue that all information should be public, and we all suspect that some governments abuse or mishandle the information they obtain. What will happen when one of these “liberators” starts working in a country like China? I’m guessing he or she will end up in the Kang Pao Chicken. Assange probably crossed the line, but in this age of information (and misinformation),what would happen if the world had no secrets? Perhaps it’s naïve to assume it would be a better place.

Merry Eighteen -Shopping-Days-To-Go. Ho Figgin’ Ho … and don’t be one (a “ho” that is).


Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED