If young Canadians were polled about which single person they felt was the biggest threat to their future in this country, they’d likely provide a range of answers that was heavy on federal Conservative politicians along with a spattering of provincial premiers, a certain corpulent Toronto mayor and perhaps a few oil and gas industry executives. It’s unlikely that anybody would mention Susan Eng’s name. That’s an oversight.

Susan Eng is, for those who don’t know – that is to say, almost everyone under 40 – the leading spokesperson for Canada’s senior citizens as the vice president for advocacy at CARP, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (which has been re-branded as “Canada’s Association for the Fifty-Plus”). The former lawyer, politician and community activist now appears regularly on television and radio on behalf of CARP (has there ever been a more appropriate acronym?) in order to make the case that Canada’s seniors deserve more – more money, more attention, more protection, more of everything, really.

Twenty years ago Eng would just be a minor threat, a spokesperson on behalf of one interest group among many. In 2012, with a tidal wave of almost 10 million self-indulgent, Cialis-popping Baby Boomers on the verge of retirement, she might be the most dangerous person in Canada – at least, when it comes to the interests of those under 40. But because most of us love our grandparents, or at the very least indulge their eccentricities, we don’t really perceive Eng’s long campaign as a threat to our own interests the way we might a Conservative government’s plan to build new prisons or cut funding to the CBC. What’s wrong with passing a law that discourages elder abuse or adding a few bucks to the Canada Pension Plan, right?

But that’s what Susan Eng wants you to think. She wants you to believe that the elderly are coupon-clipping widowers on fixed pensions, despite the fact that Canadians over the age of 65 have the lowest rate of poverty of any group in Canada. She wants you to believe that the elderly are regularly subjected to abuse and discrimination, and that they ought to be perceived as victims despite the fact that there is precious little evidence to support this claim. Yes, there are exceptions, but those exceptions do not mitigate the rule. Nevertheless, she trades in these tired and guilt-laden stereotypes because she knows that they work.

The truth of the matter is that the table is already slanted in the direction of the elderly in Canada, as it is in most western democracies. Politicians are largely deaf to the concerns of younger people because they don’t vote, which in turn discourages them even further from voting and creates a negative feedback loop of democratic disengagement. Tuition rates have been climbing for years in Canada, despite ongoing political agitation and advocacy campaigns on the part of – and behalf of – younger Canadians.

Senior citizens, on the other hand, vote regularly and predictably, and so if they want something – a tax credit, perhaps, or more funding for a particular program – they tend to get it more often than not.  One need only look at the way politicians of every partisan stripe fall over each other to guarantee more money for the healthcare system, while at the same time starving the education system of funding, to understand the toxic effect of the influence that elderly Canadians exert on our political process. Education, after all, is a productive investment that over time produces citizens who are both more likely to earn higher incomes (and therefore are capable of paying more in taxes) and less likely to engage in a whole range of anti-social activities. Healthcare, on the other hand, appears to be nothing more than a gaping hole that burns up cash more efficiently than a Kardashian at a plastic surgery clinic. And yet Canada continues to feed one and starve the other, in large part because older Canadians need one and not the other.

Eng isn’t afraid to remind politicians of this reality, either. When the federal government’s recent budget increased the eligibility age for the Old Age Supplement – an income supplement that, unlike the CPP, isn’t paid into by taxpayers over the course of a lifetime but instead is paid out of current tax receipts – Eng suggested that they could pay for it at the polls. “They might want to first consult Brian Mulroney who brought in the claw back in 1989 and resigned in 1993 as one of the most unpopular prime ministers since opinion polling began,” she wrote in a piece for the Huffington Post. “Maybe it was the GST – or the clawback – I’m just saying.”

And lest any young ingrate suggest that the Baby Boomers haven’t exactly earned the esteem they are apparently now entitled to as senior citizens, well, think again. “Perhaps they recall how we all sat around waiting for our parents to fill our world with their industry,” she wrote. “Boomers have done just that for their children while paying the lion’s share of taxes to fund schools, universities, hospitals and yes, nursing homes. So to expect some modest income support as they approach retirement is not a lot to ask.”

In reality, though, the Baby Boomers have enjoyed the longest string of uninterrupted luck in human history. They went to university when classes were small, fees were minimal and expectations were modest, and those that didn’t weren’t automatically resigned to being part of an economic underclass. They bought their homes at a time when real-estate prices were actually realistic, and watched those houses transform into personal ATMs. They reached their peak earning years right as global equity markets started in on the longest bull market in history, one that made even the most incompetent investor look savvy.

Their children, by comparison, have struggled to find jobs, paid thousands of dollars for post-secondary degrees of dubious utility, mortgaged their futures in order to put a down payment on a crummy 1950 bungalow in a decent neighbourhood and faced an investment landscape defined by two massive stock market crashes and near-zero interest rates that has made earning a positive return a very difficult task.

And yet, those Baby Boomers are woefully unprepared for their retirement. According to the BMO Retirement Institute, only 54 per cent of Canadians over the age of 55 have ever tried calculating a financial goal for retirement, while less than half (45 per cent) have consulted with a financial planner. The average amount saved in an RRSP is well under $80,000, and that’s an average – a figure that’s distorted by high net-worth individuals who have far more saved up in their accounts. Many have nothing saved at all.

That’s why Susan Eng is so dangerous – not because she’s a bad person or because she has bad intentions, but because she’s stumping on behalf of a generation that is effectively asking to borrow from the future in order to subsidize their fecklessness. Today’s senior citizens are not, by and large, the hard-pressed, poverty-stricken abuse victims she’d like to have you believe. Canada’s seniors do not need any more help than they’ve already received. But they’ll get it all the same, and they’ll have Susan Eng to thank for that.

She is, in a sense, the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. The crucial difference is that this particular wolf has no interest in eating the elderly – she only has eyes for Little Red Riding Hood, and doesn’t much care about the optics of devouring her in public. On the CARP website, it says that “With a successful track record in securing public policy change, a remarkable ability to build consensus among diverse parties and profound experience in ensuring that public institutions fully address the real needs of a modern diverse society, Susan will continue to give CARP a stronger voice and a broader reach.” For the sake of this country’s future, not to mention our own, let’s hope that’s not the case.

How many times has your family name appeared on the Stanley Cup? If your last name is either Roy or Lafleur, the answer is five. Sorry Leafs fans, Horton only appears four times. If your last name is Morgan, like me, then the answer is zero.

The “name awesomeness finder,” which also shows that 17.5 kilometres of Quebec streets are named Morgan, is an online tool created by a team of journalists and technologists at OpenFile in Montreal. OpenFile editorial advisor Craig Silverman says he found related data on family names in Quebec and was looking for a way to bring the information to life. At a traditional newspaper, the data would have been presented in an article or a small infographic which outlined the trends in the information. Silverman says that method is not always effective. “What it comes down to is story telling,” he says, “and technology can help tell stories.” And so his team created the name awesomeness finder.

The idea for the finder first surfaced in late 2011, when OpenFile and the Montreal Gazette sponsored a Hackathon which brought reporters and editors (hacks) together with computer programmers and coders (hackers).

The pairing of journalists and technologists was intentional.  “We wanted to get these people in a room together talking,” Silverman says. The event in Montreal is part of a wider pairing of Hacks/Hackers that is beginning to change the way news is gathered and delivered. Hacks/Hackers is now a 10,000-member global organization which plans hackathons from Buenos Aires to Vancouver in the belief that connecting reporters and programmers can produce new and useful information for the general public. In fact, Burt Herman co-founded Hacks/Hackers in the United States with exactly that intention.

Herman’s own experience in journalism exemplifies what Hacks/Hackers attempts to accomplish. Herman was a journalist with the Associated Press who partnered with a computer scientist to create Storify, which builds news stories out of Twitter interactions. Storify is one of the more obvious examples of how the marriage of hacks and hackers is changing the news business: prolific tweeters, like Calgary’s mayor Naheed Nenshi, frequently end up the subject of storified news articles.

In a direct comparison with a traditional hard-news article, family names on the Stanley Cup and angry tweets between politicians might seem trivial. But Hacks/Hackers organizers believe there are important news stories that come out of the pairing between journalists and technologists. Silverman says that shortly after the most recent Montreal hackathon, the City of Montreal agreed to open up city-owned data for analysis by journalists. Silverman also points to an OpenFile Toronto project which was released on Remembrance Day. Poppy File mapped out Canadian soldiers who were killed in WWII and placed poppies over their homes in Toronto. The data, Silverman says, showed which Toronto neighbourhoods were most affected by the war. It also showed which households lost multiple family members in the war and which months of the war had the highest number of Toronto casualties. Poppy File won gold in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.

Phillip Smith (whose family name appears on the Stanley Cup 31 times) helped organize the first Hacks/Hackers event in Toronto. As a digital media consultant, he is among the technologists of the Hacks/Hackers group. Smith has consulted for numerous publications in Canada including This Magazine in Toronto, and right now, with The Tyee in Vancouver.

He says that journalists have been using technology for years and computer-assisted reporting is nothing new. Today however, journalists have far more tools – from Google Fusion Tables to data maps – at their disposal. “I can’t imagine what a curriculum in computer-assisted reporting would look like now,” he says, “the range of tools that you could use is growing every day.” To that end, Smith invited a mix of high-tech startup company founders and journalists from the Globe and Mail, The National Post, and the CBC to the early meetings of Hacks/Hackers, which he says were evenly split. “Part of the role that Hacks/Hackers set out to play is to introduce journalists to various tools and give them an idea of what they do best,” Smith says.

Both Smith and Silverman believe technologists are well-matched with journalists, in part because technologists are surprisingly media savvy. “The hackers are pretty voracious consumers of news, they’re often very well read and they have an interest in the media,” Silverman says. Moreover, “They love to tinker and they love to solve problems.” That’s a blessing. Traditional journalists have a lot of problems with data and technology.

Dean Vitisin is president of Triple-i Tracking Technologies Inc., an Edmonton-based startup that helps companies keep track of their equipment through ID tags that use radio frequencies.

It’s not the simplest business to summarize – Triple-i’s tracking systems are technology-intensive and use Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) and GPS for a variety of applications in industrial and automotive industries. Managing the business requires an understanding of such technology plus, as with any company, leadership skills.

Vitisin has both, and he’s just 24. His combination of technology and management experience is typical of the next generation of business leaders. It’s a skill set that Vitisin, and many others across the country, honed at a post-secondary institution with a program tailored to preparing graduates for managerial roles in technology sectors.

A variety of schools are teaching tech geeks how to be managers, including Wilfrid Laurier University, which launched a year-long executive master’s degree in technology management in 2011, and Ryerson University, with its business technology management program.

Laurier’s executive master’s in technology management degree, or EMTM, is a part-time program where students specialize in one of three fields, including technology management. Laurier – which is located in Waterloo, along with more than 800 tech companies – also launched a bachelor of business technology management undergraduate degree at its Brantford campus.

In B.C., Simon Fraser University’s business school offers a MBA in management of technology, a program designed for people who have engineering, technology or scientific undergrads. While these tech/management hybrid programs come in many forms, they all serve the technology sector and are designed to transition students from science or technology roles into managerial positions.

For Vitisin, Edmonton polytechnic institute NAIT’s bachelor of technology in technology management degree (BTech) allowed him to take his mechanical engineering technology diploma and add leadership skills. “I was impressed with the diversity of the offerings, as we went from business ethics to project management to accounting and HR,” Vitisin says.

Vitisin graduated from the BTech program in April 2010 and that same month he incorporated his business, Triple-i, which was inspired by a school project. The business received a boost when it took first place in the school’s capstone symposium, as well as a business plan competition that came with a $20,000 prize and one year of office space.

Now Vitisin says Triple-i has secured two contracts, including a project for NAIT’s Boreal Research Institute to collect data at well pad reclamation sites, and the young leader says business is “going good.”

Vitisin credits the combination of skills he gained at NAIT for where he’s at today. “I think it’s really important to have a balance of those two things, the technical and business skills, because it’s a foundation to success,” Vitisin says.

NAIT’s first intake of students in the BTech program was in the fall of 2007. Students from the subsequent graduating classes are filling management roles in a variety of industries, says David Schmaus, associate chair of the program.

Students – some 300 of them – enter the program with a two-year diploma from NAIT in any of the school’s science and engineering technology programs. Some students have just graduated from a diploma program, like Vitisin, while others are already working in industry and now study at NAIT part-time.

“These students are looking at the management and leadership roles that exist in the industries they’ve trained for. They may be involved in productivity enhancement, information technology, project management, or sustainability, to name a few. There are a huge variety of opportunities for them out there,” Schmaus says.

A capstone applied research project symposium wraps up the course, with students using the skills and knowledge they learned in class in a year-long project with industry (that capstone project is where the idea for Vitisin’s business began).

“It’s been fantastic so far,” Schmaus says of the program. He speaks of the capstone symposium as a highlight; for the class of 2012, the winning group teamed up with a local manufacturing plant where one of the group members works.

“They used lean manufacturing procedures to have a pretty huge impact on the local company and the sponsor was so impressed that they implemented the change in February, before the project was even finished,” Schmaus says. And as more schools respond to industry’s need for managers with tech skills, it’s likely such stories will continue.

THE ERROR UP THERE
In August 2010, a 10-year-old Canadian boy with muscular dystrophy arrived at La Guardia airport in New York safely, but his $15,000 electric wheelchair didn’t. He was in New York for a fund raising event, but without his chair, the boy was immobile. A replacement was slow to materialize, so the boy’s aunt and a number of people on Twitter got the attention of the airline, as well as an immediate replacement.

SENDING OUT AN SOS
In the fall of 2002 and in less than one season, the television show Firefly created a loyal and dedicated fan base. Known as Browncoats, fans of the show were disappointed when it was revealed Fox wasn’t going to keep airing the sci-fi drama. A campaign was organized to send thousands of postcards to Fox in support of the show, but it didn’t sway the network to keep the show. Another network was rumoured to be interested, so fans mailed about 8,000 postcards to encourage the network to pick up Firefly. The television show never did find a new home, but a movie based on the show, Serenity, hit theatres in 2005.

IT WAS NUTS, BUT EFFECTIVE
Unlike the postcard campaign to Fox to save Firefly, fans of the television show Jericho had success with their campaign to save the sci-fi show from the chopping block at CBS. Fans of the show signed up to a website and paid to have peanuts sent to the network’s offices in New York and Los Angeles. It was a reference to a line spoken by one of the main characters and the order totalled $54,820. The network received 40,000 pounds – roughly equal to the weight of three or four elephants – of peanuts. As a result of the campaign, CBS ordered seven more episodes of Jericho in 2007. The show’s two-year run came to an end in 2008.

WRONG ADDRESS
When an unarmed teenager was shot and killed in Florida, the shooter said he was acting in self defense. The incident brought about a series of protests across the U.S. and movie director Spike Lee sent the address of the shooter out to his Twitter followers in March 2012. The only problem, it was the wrong address. Instead of the 28-year-old questioned in the shooting, an elderly couple in their 70s lived at the address. Lee called the couple to apologize for retweeting their address and the two sides reached a settlement.

NO LAUGHING MATTER
When comedian Doug Stanhope found some of his material on the internet being passed off as original works by someone else, he was not happy and he let his fans know what was going on. A facebook page was soon created to chastise the joke stealer and not long after his blog and Twitter account were down.

Maybe it’s my mother’s frequent talks about how “I know you’re only 24 and it seems like you have all the time in the world, but you really need to save for retirement,” or just the climate of working at a business magazine, or possibly the growing suspicion that Canada’s Old Age Security program is going to be in no position to help me out 41 — I mean, 43 — years from now. But I’m determined not to end up like some of the Baby Boomers I know, who have nothing saved and no idea what they’re going to do aside from just working forever. That means I need to make some kind of a plan — and right now, the plan mostly consists of learning.

Royal Bank Direct Investing offers free practice accounts that mirror the real thing, with “for educational purposes only” disclaimers on every page. There are also a plethora of stock market simulators on the net  – Investopedia’s simulator is one of the most popular. Most of these programs give new investors $100,000 in fake money to invest with, using real-time data to track how well you’re doing.

Since opening my account early last week, I’ve lost $10.95 on the 10 ETF shares I bought as a trial run to see how ordering worked — and that’s both what makes practice accounts so great and what makes them slightly less effective than the real deal. It’s not real money, and I have another $99,800 in my account just waiting to be invested. And should I somehow lose everything, I can simply open a new account with another $100,000 in it. It’s completely risk-free, so it doesn’t provide me with an idea of how well I keep my cool while investing. There’s not the same emotional reaction as there would be if I were investing my own hard-earned money.

That said, it’s a good way to get acquainted with how the system works, and provides an opportunity to make mistakes without losing the nest-egg I’m trying to build. When my savings grow enough — my shiny new savings account currently has a balance of $0.00 — I’ll hopefully have the confidence to start putting money in the real markets.

It’s not just declining sales though demographics are at play, with boomers all stocked up and the youngs unable to buy much of anything  one analyst calls it a trough for big box retails.

These chains are adding smaller stores and doing more to integrate their online stores with their brick and mortar locations. Still, is anyone going to mourn the loss of these retailers? Let me know in the comments.

That was the idea behind her now quite popular travelling show called Blind Date. She boned up on on her clowning skills (that’s the only time boning and clowning will be in the same sentence at Unlimited ever again) and discovered that clowning isn’t the creepy, weird sub-culture you thought it was. It’s a legitimate form of physical theatre. Read the article and tell me if you think clowning is still creepy.

We explore three terrible version of office pranks in comic form done by the very talented designer Ryan Girard and Cailynn Klingbeil explores the best pranks of ALL TIME. All caps is needed as these are some truly legendary pranks.

Geoffrey Morgan writes on how stand-up comedians actually make money telling jokes from the perspective of an old pro and from someone just starting out while Max Fawcett has a hilarious piece on leadership tips from Rob Anders.

I write about how (don’t laugh) clowning is an actual serious thing, that serious people do while Alix Kemp tracks down some of the funniest and most effective ads… ever.

Jesse Snyder rounds us out with a story on how laughter really is good medicine.

When it comes to branding and marketing, humour sells. What makes it remarkable as an advertising method is that humour essentially sells itself. Think about the number of hilarious cat videos you’ve passed along to friends, or received in your e-mail from co-workers – or how many hits viral stars like Maru receive on their videos. Of course, adorable and amusing cats aren’t the only way to use humour in branding and advertising. Here’s a few examples of humour done right – and a few of how it can go awry.

Honesty

A lot of good humour is based in truth. Of course, truth in advertising seems like a joke in itself. However, some brands have set themselves apart by being honest, often with comedic effect.

In 2010, Kotex launched a new brand of tampons and pads called U by Kotex, and received attention from major media outlets like the New York Times for daring to buck the conventions of marketing “feminine care” products. The tagline of the ads for U by Kotex was “Break the cycle,” and they featured cheeky actresses who poked fun at the typically evasive advertising for pads and tampons that features beaches, fields of flowers or women wearing white.

Gross-Out

The gross-out genre is a staple of comedy films, but one that hasn’t always translated terribly well to advertising or branding. Generally speaking, disgusting your potential consumers won’t convince them to buy your product.

Case in point: Quizno’s 2004 “spongmonkeys” campaign. This wasn’t an intentional gross-out, but instead an attempt to be cheeky on a budget. However, singing rodents don’t have much to do with sub sandwiches – they’re primarily successful in putting viewers off their lunch.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to use gross-out comedy effectively in marketing – it’s just more difficult. This ad for Perth’s Central Institute of Technology manages to be both gross – it features a gory bit of human dismemberment – and profoundly funny. The ad features Australian comedy duo Henry & Aaron, stars of the online television show Henry & Aaron’s 7 Steps to Superstardom.

Sex & Gender

It’s common knowledge that sex sells, but in funny advertising, that doesn’t always work out. While sex appeal and humour was hugely successful for well-known advertising hits like the Old Spice Guy and Flo, the Progressive Insurance girl, it’s not a guaranteed home-run.

PETA attempted to convince people to go vegan with their “Boyfriend Went Vegan” campaign, which claims that vegan men are better lovers.

Not surprisingly, PETA was bashed by commentators on the web who felt the ad was sexist. That’s always the risk when you bring sex or gender into advertising.

Internet memes & cats

Maru the cat who loves boxes might be adorable and funny, but he’s not a great advertisement. But the love of cat videos has spawned a few advertisements, like this ad for the Nexus S and Sprint.

Even better, though, is this parody video on the virtues of “catvertising,” which spawned over a million hits.

What viewers might not immediately realize is that John St. is a real advertising agency based in Toronto. With their humorous parody, the firm establishes their brand of unconventional advertising, gaining both a cult following and demonstrating their ability to produce viral-worthy advertisements. They followed up with catvertisements for clients Mitsubishi and Tetley.

“Jason: Remember in the 90s when they encouraged you to be weird? It was just an amazing time where people would go see something like the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus and watch someone hang something from their penis. You could grow up to wanna be a clown. Like people went to clown school.

Melanie: I gave up clowning years ago.

Jason: Well in Portland you don’t have to.”

The deadpan delivery of “I gave up clowing years ago” was one of the funniest things in the very first skit for the TV show, Portlandia.

You know, clowning isn’t something that is typically at the top of my mind but when I went to see a bit of live theatre called Blind Date I became intrigued, or at least more inquisitive about the subject than norm. In the show the character Mimi is stood up by her date and randomly selects a man from the audience to be her romantic stand-in. Mimi, as played by ultra-talented improver Rebecca Northan, is a saucy French lady who is alternatively innocent and experienced, strong but vulnerable, hilarious and heartbroken. And oh yeah, Mimi has a bright red clown nose.

That little clown nose gave her permission to do all sorts of awesome and hilarious things that a non-clown nosed performer would never get away with. You combine this show and Portlandia and it got me thinking, is clowning all that bad?

While it’s easy to deride clowns as creepy, weird or out-of-date, is clowning still a real thing that real people do? How do you get into it? Who would you learn from?

Northan didn’t know a thing about clowning before she put a red nose on her face and did a primordial 10-minute version of her show at the Spiegelshow in Toronto in 2007. After that she developed the character further and learned a lot about clowning from Michael Kennard and John Turner of Mump and Smoot fame at the Clown Farm.

“It’s to help people, not just performers, break out of being stuck creatively. To say that you have a universe of creativity and material inside of you but for the most part we’re not encouraged to go there,” says Northan.

As Northan puts it, to think outside the box still acknowledges the existence of the box. “Clown training takes a samurai sword and cuts through all of your fears and phobias to get to the heart of who you are creatively.”

Still, she wasn’t as high on clowns before her experience as you might think.

“I think the word clown has a lot of baggage attached to it and perhaps rightfully so, there are a lot of bad birthday clowns in the world, but when clowning is done well it is one of the most profound theatrical experiences you can have.”

Clown training exists all over Canada, not just at the Clown Farm. David MacMurray Smith has been teaching clown for the past 30 years in Vancouver for personal and professional development.

He approaches clowning from a pretty heady, intellectual level.

“The core of the work is an appreciation of how we as human beings perform for each other,” says MacMurray. “The clown is the part of us that can articulate movement and create new possibilities amongst old patterns and out of our programmed identity.”

While we might have this relationship with the red nosed clown the history of the prankster, of releasing our inner infant through a mask, has a long cultural history.

After training everyone from trained theatre professionals to housewives and lawyers the reactions he gets are what keep him working in this strange little field. “They get a sense of freedom, an increased appreciation of life.”

Which echoes what Northan says when she’s playing the Mimi character.

“When I put the clown nose on and I go out to do my show I am a better version of myself. I walk out there and I can see something adorable and loveable in every single person that’s there. I look with different eyes and I come from a place where “oh my god I’m in love with all of you.”

And is that really such a bad thing?

___________________________

PS: The oldest professional clown organization in the world, Clowns International in England, keeps a touching, weird and awesome Clown Egg Registry (photo gallery). Any clown that joins the society gets a chance to have their painted face registered on an egg. It acts as a kind of clown makeup copyright as well as being one of the biggest attractions in Wookey Hole, apparently a small town near Somerset, England. (I can’t tell you how pleased I am that a place named the Wookey Holey exists).