Editorially speaking...
Towards the end of my accompanying post on cigarettes I note the multi-billion-dollar cash settlement between the tobacco companies and 46 American states, to be paid over 25 years.
In 2015 JTI Macdonald Corp., Imperial Tobacco and Rothmans-Benson and Hedges were ordered to pay $15 billion to Quebec smokers in the biggest class action suit in Canadian history.
In March, JTI Macdonald filed for creditor protection.
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This update from VibrantVictoria:
Royal BC Museum visits plummet following controversial exhibit closures
An attempt to re-contextualize multiple cherished exhibits at the Royal BC Museum lead to an implosion of visitor numbers following their sudden closure, the organization admits.
So far this year and with only one month of summer vacation to go, 250,000 people have passed through the museum, compared to an annual headcount of nearly 900,000.
This weekend, the RBCM partially re-opened exhibits it closed in 2022 under the guise of re-contextualizing the displays while providing no re-opening timeline, only telling the public it would seek feedback from British Columbians. Last year, the Province even floated the idea of redeveloping the entire museum campus, before walking back those plans due to a public outcry over costs. In the spring the museum announced it would re-open several closed exhibits in response to public criticism in summer of 2023.
Our tax dollars at work—TWP.
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YTV’s hit Hardy Boys series reminds me of my introduction to these youth who-dun-it books that I first encountered in junior high school. I think I read every one of them. To quote Wikipedia:
“The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens. The series revolves around teenagers who are amateur sleuths, solving cases that stumped their adult counterparts. The characters were created by American writer Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of book-packaging firm Stratemeyer Syndicate.”
They’ve been in continuous print, written by a series of authors, since 1927!
Originally sanitary and tame by today’s standards, especially for today’s youth, they’ve since been modernized to include murder, violence and international espionage.
Progress, sigh..........
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One of the true joys of writing for an audience is the feedback. Sometimes it’s a correction, a suggested revision, or more information, but mostly it’s complimentary and goes a long, long way towards validating what has become for me a lifelong career.
One of the most pleasing of these communications came several days ago. A reader who identified himself (I believe it’s a he) as Casey, wrote to say that he’d never finished reading a book until, at age 35, he found one of my earliest efforts, Murder, in a used book store.
From that day on he has “fallen down the B.C. history hole!” (His exclamation point.) At the time of writing he was reading another of my old classics, Shipwrecks of British Columbia.
I might become a successful author yet.