TorontoStar-TheCityMag-Apr.1978 LIGHTFOOT article

[charlene]

TorontoStar-TheCityMag-Apr.1978 LIGHTFOOT article (2 posts)

[charlene]

part 2

[Sydney Steve]

A very interesting read. Not a doting fan piece like some that offer not a jot of insight into the frailties that we all have - and that Gordon must have to write with the insight he does.
It doesn't diminish him though - just gives a few clues about the man behind that genius output.

[David]

Good point, Steve. The article did an appropriate job of showing several sides of a human being. And it's all perfectly "normal" (for lack of a better word). After all, we all wear different hats. I have my various family hats, my work hat, and my public hat. They are all me, and the core remains the same, but the extremities are a little different, depending on the setting I'm in.

[bjm7777]

Thanks for posting this - never read this one before...

[johnfowles]

Kudos to CHar for taking the trouble to make such excellent scans of those old magazine pages.I decided to save them for my computer based lightfoot collection but ran into an immediate problem.If you hover your mouse's cursor over each of the attached thumbnails a popup will reveal the filename that CHar gave each one
Thus the first one's logically includes (front) "cover" and moreover shows that it was in the compressed jpeg image format
http://johnfowles.org.uk/LIGHTFOOT/images/1978_Toronto_City_Magazine/front_cover_popop.jpg
the problem arose when having opened a thumb to its maximium size I tried to save it to my hard drive
http://johnfowles.org.uk/LIGHTFOOT/images/1978_Toronto_City_Magazine/save_picture_as.jpg
then the saving dialog box shows that the bulletin board unhelpfully provides you with its default saving setting of untitled.png and the only and silly choice is between untitled .png or untitled.bmp
http://johnfowles.org.uk/LIGHTFOOT/images/1978_Toronto_City_Magazine/saving_untitled.jpg
you can call me old fashioned or reactionary but personally I take a dim view of being dictated to in that way as I strongly prefer saving all images as jpegs rather than confuse myself later with pngs, and never ever as raw bitmaps thanks all the same
to do so therefore in this case I had to save each scan as the demanded untitled .png then open that in an image editing program (or the simple Microsoft Paint) then enter a more suitable filename and change the format to JPEG.Noting that I could not just simply save each full sized image directly as they would all stoopidly by default be named untitled.png and cleverly overwrite each other.
I therefore had to rename the saved files first and this is where I discovered that CHar simply cannot count. hover over the first four thumbs and you will find that Char has named them "front">"p1">"p2">"p4"!!!
Perhaps she is aware of the naughty connotation that Page 3 has in the UK!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_three_girl
then the next 3 on her part2 are "p5>"p6">"p7"
I only realised this after I had already logically and unwittingly named them in strict numerical order as front>p1>p2>p3>p4>p5>p6
it took much head scratching and double checking before I realised Char's set had no p3
Fortunately when I looked in the box of Lightfoot treasures bequeathed to me by Ron Jones a few years back I found as I hoped that it included the set of pages and could verify that despite the evidence to the contrary CHar's scans are a complete set with her page 1 actually being magazine page 14 , her page 2 is 15. her page 4 is 16 and the final three are pages 17,18 and 19
The magazine's contents are listed on page 3 and around a picture of Gord it says
PLAYING IT SAFE
PAGE 14
Gordon Lightfoot is one of the world's best -known singer/songwriters.Here's a rare look at what makes Gordie run- and what makes him stand still ByLarry LeBlanc
and that as Forrest Gump memoriably said is all I am going to say about that

[charlene]

Sir John, when will we see some scans of those treasures that Ron gave you a few years ago? I'm sure there's some that I don't have and Ron would like for them to be shared with everyone.
The time it took to analyse my numbering system could have been spent on scanning something in that collection of Ron's...
get to it!
;)

[MaryO]

Thanks for this Char. Again, sooooooooo aweesommee!

[johnfowles]

Sir John, when will we see some scans of those treasures that Ron gave you a few years ago? I'm sure there's some that I don't have and Ron would like for them to be shared with everyone.
The time it took to analyse my numbering system could have been spent on scanning something in that collection of Ron's...
get to it!
;)
Yes well.point taken I had predicted that CHar would not take my admonition lying down, but I
have to say that I expected something in the way of an excuse such as for example the fact that she always counts by holding up the relevant finger but that there is a problem with three because her mother had told her that putting up finger three (the middle one) was usually taken as a rude gesture and she should therfore never use it.
Anyway I felt strongly about the problem of how the bulletin board cocks up attempts to save attachments and I probably misguidedly thought I would share this detail with other fans.
I appreciate the dig about my sharing Ron's other treasures following CHar's own good example and as soon as I can get my computer to resume talking to my scanner I will dig out a few.
i will probably start with the 1968 Macleans article which nicely mentioned a Lightfoot "groupie" the late Lynne Ackerman and which IIRC young Mr Stinson had problems scanning a while ago and I said at the time that I would scan my own Montreal bought copy of that issue. Unfortunately my better half put it somewhere "safe" a few years ago and we cannot refind it but I found copies of the relevant pages in Ron's box so will scan them