The concert and my grandson last week brought me something strange. The whole thing filled me with deep emotion. I tried to hide it as I sat in the back row of the auditorium with my wife and family and craned my neck and saw my young grandson up there on the stage. He was in the front row and was so little and so earnest. He sang with his classmates and performed in all the right ways. It all went perfectly except one of his little classmates started to cry and had to be given an off-stage break. It did not matter, it was all wonderful and, in a way, moving.

The concert was a time of great reflection for me. I waved heartily to my grandson in the middle of it all. He told me after that he knew I was there. That pleased me. I hope I did not embarrass him. Seeing him in his school concert shirt made be think about what I sometimes call “time passages”. One of the great truths of life is that it sure does not take long. I was at my own first school concert back in 1954. I was about seven years old. As I mentioned, we started school later in those days.

This thought occurred to me somewhere between songs in last week’s concert, where did the years go? Can it really have been 70-odd years between hearing two different versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat?  One was in a Conception Bay school auditorium and the other in the Aula Maxima at St. Bon’s. How did that happen?

Somewhere in the gap between the years me are successes and failures, wins and losses, triumphs and tragedies. I wondered to myself what lay ahead for my little grandson. I hope he does well. I am sure he will. It is a great question without answer.

The other event I attended last week was on the same day as the kindergarten concert. It was a funeral in St. John’s. I was out to a funeral home to pay respects to an old friend who had died after what I call “a life well lived”. She was into her 90s and remained active every year of her life. She was part of a wonderful and large family, and they were all there to see her off.

Her husband, also gone to glory, and her sons were like myself – St. Bon’s boys and all, like me, grew up on Pleasant Street. They were up above the Patrick Street intersection. I was below it. There was also a card playing connection between our two families.

The wake was a great send-off if you can say about a funeral but there was still great sadness about it. I looked across the room at the casket and the mourners and my friend’s family and wondered a similar thought to the one I had at my grandson’s kindergarten concert. Where have the years gone?

In the two events I attended, the concert and the funeral, there is connection and meaning. I am not even sure how to express it, but it is there. There is some eternal truth that is, on some important level, part of life. That part I do understand even if I can’t  put it in words. 

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

“Tonight, on The Dukes of Hazzard; Boss Hogg and the Duke boys find that trouble comes in pairs. That’s The Dukes of Hazzard tonight at 9 – only on NTV.”

That is what I was doing during the Ocean Ranger tragedy. I just wasn’t involved in the news aspect of it at NTV. I was doing TV voice-overs. Now to be sure being “the staff announcer “, which is what the position was called, was an honest but unexciting living and I eventually escaped back into the wonderful world that is broadcast television news. While I was staff announcer, though, there was one benefit. There was extra money to be made. Some announce gigs were great, others were just awful.

Once I did a contest for a mainland advertising agency that paid me $1,200 for a single commercial. It was part of a contest called Spin-to-Win, and I was paid for all of the draws and all the wheel spins, but I also was paid for the commercial for the contest. A national agency came in to produce it. The first “take” was the best one but they fiddled with it and worked all day to justify flying to Newfoundland. In the end they used the first take from 8 o’clock that morning. I didn’t care. For $1,200 I would have worked round the clock. This was back in the 1970s when $1,200 could almost get you a new car. It was great. It wasn’t very demanding like news but, I was young and money is money.

Now the dark side of the moon of the staff announcer job happened when a firm came to Newfoundland with a new brand of Vienna sausages to hawk. This wasn’t like Maple Leaf sausages. This was a lesser new brand unknown until that time in Newfoundland. They wanted to crack the local market, confident there was room enough here for both Maple Leaf and them. I won’t name the brand, but you probably wouldn’t recognize the name anyway. It was something like Acme Sausages or Eddies A-1 Vienna Sausages. I’m not even sure they are still in business. Anyway, they got me to do their television commercials. The fee for me as staff announcer was supposed to be a flat $350. It wasn’t a big pay day like Spin-to-Win, but it was still money and, like I said, money is money. The problem was the distributor didn’t actually have much money. He did have plenty of product. He asked if I might consider taking the $350 fee in kind. In other words, this guy wanted to pay me in sausages. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time so I said yes. A few tins of Vienna sausages would never go astray, even if they weren’t Maple Leaf. I obviously forgot to do the math because these tins of Vienna sausages in the late 1970s were retailing for about 30 cents a tin. That means that in one afternoon, for about four hours work, I became the proud owner of roughly 1,250 tins of Vienna Sausages. With 48 tins to a case I had more than 26 cases to get home to my house. It took two trips in a small four-cylinder car. Taking them all in one all would have ripped the guts out of the vehicle. Well, I had no children at the time, but me and wife Judy were eating those Vienna Sausages for a year. We had them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had them on toast, and for snacks and right out of the tin… We fried them with eggs. We baked them into casseroles. We may have had them for Christmas dinner, but I guess that’s a stretch.

You know, strangely enough, it was about five or six years later that I ran into a couple of tins of them that had showed up in an old leather camera bag in our hall closet. I didn’t open them and I didn’t keep them as souvenirs. I just threw them out. The sausages do live on in memory. Once in a while, if I’m out somewhere and I am offered a Vienna sausage, or something like it, I’ll take it. It’s a great memory trigger and with the first bite wherever I am I’ll think of the Duke boys, Boss Hogg, Spin-to –Win and the year I hit the Vienna sausage jackpot.

Such is the world of broadcasting.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

That is right word for online versions of ourselves. It is an “edited” depiction. For instance, all the photographs I use are carefully chosen. You won’t see shots of me fighting a cold with a runny nose and uncombed hair and there won’t be pictures of me spilling gravy on my shirt. There will certainly be no moments of quarrels between me and the missus on-line. They won’t see the light of day. My achievements, such as they are, are presented for your consideration. My failures, well they aren’t presented at all.

The world in which I live is chronicled as a place of great order and happiness where there are no beer tins in the woods and no pieces of old lumber lying around my garden. That garden I show in the pictures always is neatly mowed in summer. No signs of the millions of dandelions that actually thrive there every spring will appear. You won’t see our old rusty barbeque left out uncovered through the winter. I will spare you that. Nor will you find any picture of last December’s Christmas tree that was shoved up behind our shed in mid-January. It is still there this May with bits of tinsel still clinging bravely to now bare branches.

This is not said that “my page” is a complete fiction but if you think you might know me from reading my on-line presence you will be led astray. It is me putting my best foot forward. It is like those profiles that have been done that ask what books you are reading. People will answer War and Peace or some Churchill biography when the real answer is probably something like Resort Tarts or Nuns on Wheels Gone Wild. A couple of decades ago I did one of the “Twenty Questions” things for the Telegram. I look at it now and I seem really interesting because they sent me the questions in advance, so I had a chance to edit myself. That is where Facebook is today. The edited self.

My page online makes me appear “interesting” as a person. I am far more interesting there then I am in the real world. That isn’t a sin or anything like it, but I do remind myself that everything I post to Facebook adds to a view of me that in the end isn’t really me at all.

Having said all of that, I am still a pretty good guy, I think. At least that is my hope.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

In the course of that lunch last week, I spoke at some length with a classmate of mine now retired from the legal system. Our “class of 53” still living are all retired now. My discussion with my old classmate was on the nature of justice and whether or not justice is achieved here in Newfoundland and Labrador. We were both in agreement that “justice” here got a passing grade. It wasn’t perfect here and there were flaws but it wasn’t bad.

That discussion have me pause, as they say, because it took me back to a story from thirty years ago. By way of explanation, my background in broadcast news includes a stint as a justice reporter and a regular stint in the court rooms of the old courthouse on Duckworth Street. Now back in the 1990’s my son and I were walking around downtown on a nice sunny Saturday morning. I showed him the courthouse where I sometimes worked. He was about ten years old at the time. As we walked by out on the steps of the courthouse was a Commissionaire. He was enjoying a smoke. I knew him so I stopped and said hello and asked if he might indulge me and let me show my son Supreme Courtroom Number 1. He said I certainly could and he unlocked the door to the most important courtroom in our province.

If you haven’t been there, it is magnificent. There are big fourteen-foot ceilings in Courtroom number 1 and lots of old wood fixtures and a great austere feeling to the room. I told my boy where the reporter’s desk was and showed him that Newfoundland’s first premier Joey Smallwood had his initials carved in that desk. I showed him also the big high bench where the robed judge sat and over- looked proceedings. I pointed out the jury box as well where men and women sat in judgement in the legal process and I showed him where lawyers for the defence and for the crown sat as they argued their cases. I indicated the raised witness box as well where people swore on the Bible to tell the truth and then and gave their testimony.

Now I thought I had all the bases covered when my son asked me a very probing question. He said “Daddy, where do the poor people sit”. My reply was to the effect of “who are the poor people?’’ I didn’t get what he was saying at all until he clarified it with; “You know the people who do all the crimes; the poor people”.

His answer made me shudder. Here was my ten-year-old son, who had been exposed to justice in his young life only through broadcast news, coming to the odd conclusion that it was poor people who committed crimes and poor people who ended to in court. My mind was drawn a long way back then to my first year at Memorial University and a moral philosophy course taught by Dr. Peter Dawson. The book we were learning at the time was The Republic of Plato. I still have my copy. The Republic floated the notion, expressed in the book by Thrasymachus, that “justice was the interest of the stronger”.

Surely, I thought “justice” in Newfoundland had not become “the interest of the richer”. That is what my ten-year-old was expressing. I didn’t quite know what to say to him at the time. What is really interesting is that when I think back now after all these years, I am still not sure as to what I said to him and what the correct answer to the question might have been.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Later our family shifted over to Witless Bay which is just the next town up the shore. Our extended family rented a property there that included an old house we knew as “The Alders”. It was a pretentious sounding way of naming our property which, by the way, had neither running water nor electricity but did have alder trees and a clear path to the ocean. The alders are still there. This was way back in the early 1960s. Now in that same area these days there is the retirement home. A new modern home now sits on the exact location where we used to stay. The land hasn’t changed. The shoreline is the same and the same still big rocks are there. This week I did note that the meadow I knew so well as a boy is all tore up by an ATV track.

In Witless Bay, summer fun included among other things cutting out tongues down at the Newfoundland Quick Freeze fish plant; catching tomcods or sculpins off the wharf; and wandering around the landwash. In case you didn’t know the landwash is that area between high tide and low tide on the beach. It was so interesting because it was filled with the flotsam of a whole ocean. You could find anything down at the landwash at low tide. Things from nearby harbours and things from halfway round the world. In the interest of full disclosure – now lest you get too wrapped up in a romantic notion of things washed ashore – the landwash was also a place where all the garbage was thrown. Mercifully that is no longer true but back in 1960 all our leftovers were hauled down to the landwash. We thought that the ocean could handle anything. We have found over the last half century that simply isn’t true. It is hoped that it wasn’t “a lesson too late in the learning.”

The landwash was a place to look for stuff and there was lots to find. There were old pieces of nets to be found there and old floats off cod-traps. Glass was used for some of those floats in those days. Sometimes cork was used because plastic was just arriving on the scene. It would arrive though and we would be the poorer for it. You know cork was great. You know for what? For making hockey pucks. We used to play hockey in the fish store where salt cod was cured. Up on the second floor you could find space for a hockey game with a hunk of cork shaped round for a puck. I have a clear memory of an early fall game when the wind was blowing hard and rain was landing loudly on the clapboards of the fish store where we played. It all felt so wonderful to be inside and dry. You could even pick away at a little piece of salted fish. It wasn’t great for your health but certainly did wonders for the soul. The fish store was a place of leisure and of safety and of refuge. It had an “other worldly quality” to it.

I was up to the Witless Bay plant last week. It is still a fish plant but now the stock in trade is shrimp or crab. It used to be cod with salted cod giving way to flash frozen fillets for the Boston market. I worked there for several summers on a skinning machine. I took cod fillets from the line and fed them into the skinning machine. It was no fun. I also worked on the boning line. Also, not much fun. What was fun was the landwash. There under rocks you could find mussels. You could find old longers, the cross pieces from fish stages washed away. There were all kinds of wood on the beach from God knows where. Not a lot of things came in tins in those days but there were lots of sturdy bottles. Lots of ointment jars and lemon crystal jars down at the landwash. Noxema had very durable glass containers.

What has changed now on the beaches? You probably can guess. It is the abundance of plastics, and it isn’t just bottles. Down near Marystown, a few years ago, I wandered a beach and what stood the most were all the used shotgun shells. Those shell cases were made of plastic and they never rot away. They are all over the place.

In Witless Bay the smell of the landwash has changed. It is still one-part Atlantic Ocean, but the other part is the left-over smell of a crab plant. It is not a bad smell, just not the same as a cod plant. Not worse nor better. Just different. No more smell of cod offal. No more smell of cod liver oil cooking. No more smell of salt fish drying in the sun. I loved those heady aromas of summer and fall. I do miss them but the landwash and all it holds is still there. It is glorious.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

My first radio job was with VOCM in the newsroom, and I worked the late shift there at first finishing up my day at midnight. It was there I got my first hosting gig reading the midnight news. “The last news of the day, the first news of tomorrow” is what the promo said. That is where the door opened even further to other spots on-air. I did some hockey “colour” with George McLaren and Rod French – Newfoundland senior hockey and the Allan Cup. I did some games of the infamous Barrie Flyers- St. John’s Capitals series. That was great. I also did some late night and early morning DJ work. Announcers is what we called ourselves. I would get off the news desk at midnight on a Friday night and walk around to the other studio and sit into the big audio board and start the All-Night Show. That ran until six in the morning. Playing music for people was really cool.

How much did I love DJ work? When I moved to CJON a couple of years later, part of that opportunity I asked for was a chance to keep my hand in and do some CJON on-air TV reading AND some AM radio work as well. Geez, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. I did TV news and radio news and other stuff. I did a Canada-Honduras soccer game once with Carl Lake. I hosted the Little Miss Mount Pearl Pageant, and I did a few CJON radio shifts including some Saturday night rock shifts. I have tapes but you can’t hear them. It was like I had won the lottery. I read TV news and radio news with John Nolan and Bob Lewis and Vince Gallant. Eventually I moved on to FM radio when OZ started but that didn’t last long although I had fun there too.

Eventually I became exclusively a television person, but I can tell you there is part of my heart that will always remember AM radio. It was another world. That was a place where you were really part of the community working in a universe that was filled with opportunity. Now radio in the 1970s was a place filled with odd characters. Some were gifted and some were not. They all shared a trait though and that is they wanted to be on-air. They craved attention like it was a drug. Radio was one of those places where you could start at the bottom and get to the top if your worked hard and hung in there. There was certainly less structure in those days and a better chance to play whatever you wanted. Certainly, that was true in the Midnight to 6 a.m. shift because even program directors, station managers and other bosses have to sleep too so overnight you had a longer leash. That situation had to change. I understand that because it was too free- form in those early days, but it was such fun.

Just so you know at three in the morning you are the only person in the building, but you can go the washroom or make a cup of noodles if you play The Wreck of the Edmund FitzGerald or MacArthur Park. You will have time.

It was a different world. Someone in the radio business said correctly it was a little unhinged. It was all of that. TV News is where I eventually found home, but I tried to keep my hand in the strange world of AM radio. Thirty years ago, it was a magical world of music and program logs and sponsor carts and public service announcements. I learned it all and drank it all in. Then the formula for success could be reduced to a simple command. Identify the station with the call letters as in CJON 930; give the time; give the temperature; identify yourself and roll the next record.

To wit “CJON radio … 2.35 on a Saturday morning ….20 degrees in the capital city under cloudy skies with sunshine later in the day…. my name is Jim Furlong, and these are the Beatles.” That’s all there is to it.

As an old program director said to me on time; “Always remember, Jim, nobody cares what YOU actually think about anything!” They listen to the station for the time, the temperature, and the music. Do I miss those days? Yes, of course. They were filled with an innocence but also with a bunch of stuff mostly of excesses bad for me. It was a world of poor diet, long hours with not enough sleep, and tension by the truckload. It was also a wonderful way to make a living. People listened to be entertained. Hopefully you made them feel better in some way. You connected. I used to tell people that of you listen to enough songs on the radio you will eventually hear YOUR story being told. Guaranteed.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

They were quite different times. In those days you could smoke in the workplace and smoking and being on the phone looked pretty cool to my very cloudy way of thinking. If co-workers didn’t like the smell of smoke or had health concerns, then to Hell with them. A smoker knew his rights back in those days by God! It was all about MY rights and freedom of choice and things like that. It was long before the days when such vague notions as second-hand smoke, cancer, emphysema, and the health of others became an issue. It was the time of those heady days when the paid shills of the tobacco industry like announcer Joel Aldred talked about “personal choice” and “individual rights”. Aldred, who was a broadcaster of some renown, a media spokesman for Rothman’s of Canada, and the executor of the estate of the late John Diefenbaker, was a great smoker. Smoke on.

I stopped smoking because of money. The health of my wife or my sons was NEVER a factor. Smokers are too far selfish for that. My dad died of lung cancer, but I didn’t care about that either. He was a two pack of Camels a day guy, but I didn’t see any lesson to be learned there either. Camels are Camels and Rothmans are Rothmans and in the seriously flawed logic of smokers that means there is NO connection, so the “Grim Reaper” wasn’t coming for me. It was FINANCIAL guilt that made me stop. Cigarettes were gone to nearly $5 a pack and I was smoking a pack and a half a day and more on the weekends. You can tell a smoker because he always has money on him. A smoker, like me, had to know where his next $5 was coming from. There might not be a tin of Carnation or a box of Pampers in the house but the $5 in your pocket was still going to Mr. Rothman. Sure, you went out to work in the morning you had to have cigarettes with you and when you came home at night you made sure you had enough cigarettes to get you through to morning.

When you are a smoker, you also spend a lot of time at the bank machine. One night coming home late from work I was supposed to pick up some dish detergent. When I got to the store, I didn’t have enough money for both the detergent and the Rothmans so, you guessed it, I bought a pack of Rothman’s. No dishes were washed in Casa Furlong that night. Somewhere in the darkness of that evening, I understood the complete absurdity of what I was doing. The next day I went to the doctor and got a prescription for the Nicotine Patch. They were prescription only back then. I didn’t use it right away. That weekend I went to bed early on Friday night. It had been a tough week and after work myself and me missus had had a couple of drinks. I smoked like a tilt, as the expression goes, and dozed off to sleep watching television. When I woke up it was about 4:14 on Saturday morning. I made a cup of tea with lots of sugar and smoked a cigarette. Then I smoked another one and had another cup of tea. I turned on the TV and watched a couple of those odd programs that used to haunt the morning airwaves. Ron Popeil and his “Showtime Rotisserie” was on. Somewhere in there I had another cup of tea and a few more cigarettes. It was 7 a.m. when the rest of the house began to wake up. I put a Nicotine Patch on my arm and went to bed. I never smoked another cigarette. It was the most important day of my life. Every time I see the “Showtime Rotisserie” commercials now I smile and feel good about myself. I can’t belief I did it, but I did. By the way I celebrated by 80th birthday. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in 40 years.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

I had flippers for lunch on an April day a couple of years ago. It was flipper pie. It was the first time in more than 50 years since I tasted them. Grandmother Malone used to cook them as a regular part of that Newfoundland rite of spring that is the annual seal hunt or what is left of it. Grandfather had been for many years “at the ice” for Bowring Brothers. As it turns out Grandfather wasn’t a sealer. He was a carpenter and there was lots of carpentry to be done on Bowring’s S.S. Eagle.

Now Grandmother Malone used to cook flippers, or “fippers” as she called them in the ancient way, with a hard pastry and vegetables and slices of lemon cooked right into the hard crust pie. Anyway, I had flipper pie a few springs ago because I wanted to see if the taste would remind me of Grandmother’s house which it did. Taste and smell are very strong memory triggers and for a brief moment I was back in a basement kitchen on Pleasant Street in a long-ago spring where it was nice and warm and where there was a flipper dinner steaming in the oven.

Now I need to tell you that the flipper pie I had last time wasn’t in anyone’s kitchen. It was down at a chic hotel in St. John’s where flippers on the menu attracts the patriotic crowd like me. When you eat flippers these days it’s like you are somehow contributing to our struggle against the world by eating them. I also have to tell you that I didn’t really finish that meal but that too reminded me that back at Grandmother’s is where I ALSO didn’t really finish them. I ate the vegetables and the pastry and the slices of lemon but stayed away from the seal itself. Now there is some risk in telling this little story because it is a still an embattled seal hunt in which we are involved. We have reacted as we should react by defending, what is for us, part of the way of life that helped us cling to this rock in the first place. That is why to say that I don’t really like seal is something said only under my breath because I might be seen as either a traitorous wretch or a fool.

Some years ago, however I was able to shed myself of some of this “I don’t like flipper” angst because of something that happened in the NTV Newsroom. Usually on Fridays, every couple of weeks or so, we had pizza for the staff. We worked like dogs and after a good hard week of work we sent out for something to eat. It’s a nice tradition. On that Friday, though, fresh from my flipper dinner at the hotel I thought it would be a brilliant idea if we brought in some flipper pies instead of pizza. The near universal reply from the newsroom when I mentioned it was a resounding; “Thanks Jim, but no thanks!” Everybody wanted pizza or fish and chips.

I tried playing the patriotic card then although I had no right to but that failed. Nobody wanted anything to do with “fippers” – so I asked them all about there own flipper experiences. One of them put the whole thing about flippers into a perspective I could finally understand. He said every family seems to have a recipe whereby the seal meat is judged by how little it tastes like what it actually is which is seal. “The way Mom cooks it you would never know but that it’s roast beef.” That, of course, begs the question that if that is where the bar is set why don’t you just run down to Sobey’s or Dominion and get some roast beef instead of trimming endless fat and firing on baking soda and throwing in slices of lemon all in the aid of keeping seal from tasting like, well, seal?

Another good point that was made is why do so many people qualify their love of seal by saying that one good meal a year is enough. If it is so great, why don’t they eat it four times a week in the spring? Riddle me that why don’t you. Anyway, that’s it. I am confessing as “a dirty auld St. Johnsman” as Grandmother Malone, who was from Bay Bulls, used to call the townies. This spring it’s steak and kidney pie for me again. Don’t hate me.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

The internal decision in my head to not participate this time around in politics was swung partly by the fact that the meeting to which I was invited was a virtual meeting. That meant, among other things, no hotels, no beer by the barrel, no late nights or free stuff of any kind. I mentioned all this to someone I knew that I had considered it, and she said, “You just want to BELONG to something.” You know, upon further review as they say in sports, she was right. We all want to be part of something. We want to belong.

The opening to the TV series Cheers always struck an emotional chord in my heart. The setting was a place in which individuals were finding relief from some awful emptiness of the world by being in a bar sipping beer. The benefits were spelled out. Cheers was a bar where “everybody knows your name.” That defines a kind of salvation from the realization that on some important level; you are alone in the world and the path you walk is often walked by yourself.

The Toronto Maple Leaf experience is like that. It is the failure of a team over decades. The edge of that failure becomes blunted in some way and a salve applied to the wound by making it a shared experience. The approach is given life by an expression that I love, and it is “Leaf Nation.” That expression could bring tears to my eyes. So many people brought together a great tsunami of lost hope and disappointment somehow made at least bearable by it being a shared experience and a confirmation of the truth that each year when an NHL team wins a championship, 31 teams lose.

In the middle of that emotional angst, you are at least not alone. You belong to something. You are part of Leafs Nation. There is a religious aspect to it. A shared set of beliefs and someone to stand with you. 

A quick sidebar story. I am a rabid Manchester United soccer fan. Not just a recent one but I go back to the days before Georgie Best and all the way back to the Munich plane crash disaster that destroyed half the club. In 1980 going through a long, twisting boarding lineup at De Gaulle airport in Paris I passed a young man in a Manchester United shirt. I was wearing a Manchester United hat. He looked at me directly and spoke.

There is only ONE United. That was a reference to the fact there were many soccer teams that carried the name “United”, but the real one was Manchester United. I nodded and tipped my cap to the young man and said, “ONE United!”. He smiled.

Consider now a line from Leonard Cohen. It is to me one of his very best lines. It is from Dress Rehearsal Rag and references a 17th Century metaphysical mystical group still active in the 21st Century called the Rosicrucians. To wit: “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians they will give you back your hope”. It refers to that of which I speak. It is the idea of finding meaning in something larger than yourself.

It is in the end all about belonging. The Rosicrucians, the Leafs, Cheers, or the Avalon District Liberal Association. They are all places to go. It is the great struggle to belong to something and avoid the great consequence of being in the universe on your own.

I know there is only “ONE United.”

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

It is a fact of history that the United States controlled the vast majority of oil production. Both Germany and Japan suffered throughout the war from fuel shortages. That made oil infrastructure a target for strategic bombing and that is what happened.

Fast forward to 2026 and we see all the issues in the Iran-United States conflict being reduced into controlling the flow of tankers and oil through the Straits of Hermuz. As we know here in Canada there is extreme upward pressure on the price of gasoline these days. It is driven by conflict and uncertainty right now and we see the price of gas moving quickly upward. The question to be answered is where does this all lead.

I am luckier than most people because I am old and mostly retired from the daily workforce. I live about 20 kilometres from my office here at NTV. It is nearly a 50-kilometre round trip, but I don’t have to come every day. I cut down on my trips but stay longer when I am here. That makes sense. I am usually in three or four days a week, but when the price of gas goes up well, I don’t drive so much. I cut down the number of visits because gas is bloody expensive.

Until recently I drove an eight-cylinder pickup truck. It was great. I could carry a pretty fair load on board from a snowblower to birch junks, but it cost money. Even an empty eight-cylinder pickup was a $15 to $20 round trip to St. John’s and that is only if I stayed on the highway and didn’t wander around downtown. I sold the truck and now I have a little four-cylinder car with not much power, but it just sips gas. It works.

Gas was always an issue ever since I was a young man which was an exceptionally long time ago. The cheapest I remember gas prices was at a time when in Toronto it was 25 cents a gallon. That was around 1961. My first car was a 1952 Chev, and someone asked me how many miles I got to the gallon. I answered that I never actually ever had a WHOLE gallon. It was a funny line.

The latest oil crisis is going to change the world. Consider the airlines. The price of jet fuel is up but the problem is airlines can’t do much in terms of raising prices in some areas. For instance, the tickets for this summer’s vacations are already sold. They are bought and paid for. I don’t have to tell you that food costs are up. If it isn’t just the product themselves, it is the cost of getting those items to market and the cost of running the stores that sell those goods to you. Look at the price of a two piece fish and chips. Look at the cost of any and all foods.

Where is the good news? Well, we are in the oil business, Canada in the broad sense but in the narrower sense Newfoundland and Labrador. We have oil and the world very desperately needs oil. That is critical to decisions on new offshore projects like the Bay Du Nord in the Flemish Pass. and whether or not they move forward. Our long-term prospects are quite good.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca