As I suspected, the letter below is not a super-special-just-for-me e-mail. Nicholas Packwood over at Ghost of a Flea--who brought the original interview to everyone's attention--comments on the boilerplate, excerpts some Reader Mail on the subject, and offers to show up at the CBC to have a look at either a transcript or a tape of the interview, neither of which seems to be forthcoming. Go, Nick!
And, in the interests of full disclosure, here is the letter I sent off to the CBC's Om Bud Fellow:
To whom it may concern:
Perhaps you can send the interviewer you sent to speak with Robert Sawyer to interview the families of the seven astronauts, and ask them how 'American arrogance' might have contributed to their loved ones' deaths.
I do wish I had managed to get the name of your organization's interviewer, so that I could track down her e-mail address and publish it on my website. It would be interesting to see how well she could defend her contemptibly small opinion without the benefit of hiding behind a so-called 'broadcasting corporation.'
Sincerely,
Ian Wood
Now, I call this full disclosure because I didn't actually hear the interview in question, which was made painfully obvious by the now-corrected gender of the pronouns in the mail I sent. This, to be honest, makes me feel a tad disingenuous...normally I don't take pokes at folks based on second-hand information. But I wrote that note at 12:32PM on February 1st, after spending some hours watching the television, reading the blogs, and so forth. So I'll cut myself some slack, because this is my site and I can.
What I find most entertaining about this particular stormy teapot is that Mssr. Bazay (the CBC Om Bud Fellow) has probably been deluged with criticism about this interview...much of it, perhaps, from people who haven't heard the CBC in their entire lives (like me). 'Tis indeed a Brave New Information Age we arrogant Americans have created. Pea had the Good Analogy in the car on the way home this evening: it's like living in a small town. If you get drunk at the pub and shoot your mouth off like an asshole, everybody knows about it the next day.
Highly amusing!
