A friend (thanks Michelle!) sent me these links to an earlier incarnation of myself. Or maybe it was my doppelgänger. Back in July, 1980, a future unlicensed amateur blogger hit the front page of The Citizen

and the morning radio news with this story:

Notice that the story begins on the front page of the daily, and continues on page 77. Imagine 77 pages of Citizen today! The rising mortgage interest rates mentioned in the story were 12.5% when I bought, and quickly soared to 21% within fifteen months. It really made a big I in PIT.

Another story, this time from 1983:

What is most noticeable is that the issues don’t change, and Eric still sounds like a broken record defective MP3.    BTW, the Citizen had ninety-something pages in that issue!

Neither of those stories do I remember particularly proudly. My understanding was shallow then (some may argue …) The best performance was on TV.

The City proposed building a new incinerator on LeBreton Flats to burn all the region’s garbage. After an endless drone of speakers opposed to it, who preferred giving everyone new-fangled black boxes to keep their old newspapers in and sending around a special fleet of trucks to pick up the fish wrappers, I finally got the microphone. This was at the old regional government HQ at 222 Queen Street.

I started out by complaining that the TV crews were putting away their equipment, and would miss the only interesting and exciting presentation that afternoon, because I was going to speak IN FAVOUR of the incinerator! They started to madly unpack their video junk:

Why, there were lots of reasons to like it. I pointed out that the 25-storey high chimney could be used as a post for an aerial tramway that would whisk civil servants from downtown to Tunney’s, with a transfer point at the top of the chimney to a cable strung over to those new offices in Hull, Quebec. We could put a revolving restaurant there, and charge admission to tourists. And all the garbage trucks roaring down Preston might hit kids playing on the street in front of the slums, in which case the truck could stop, pick up the franco- or italio-corpsette, and incinerate it nearby! Population control, slum control, tourism, a cheaper transitway, no need for another bridge to Hull, cheap electricity, all could be solved instantly by one incinerator, and wouldn’t people just flock to buy homes in LeBreton Flats.

And they are still flocking there today.