The showbiz maxim says you want to be the person who follows the person who succeeds a big star. We had a few examples this week that putting on big shoes can be a perilous fate.

Jian Ghomeshi was a sensation at CBC Radio in every way. A musician, a culture junkie and—for CBC the most important element— a man of colour, Ghomeshi raised the Radio branch to its long-desired moment of Zen. No longer was it Michael Enright playing Stan Getz or Stuart McLean ripping off Garrison Keillor. Or the geeks of Quirks & Quarks.

Von Clausewitz might have observed that the Olympics are simply politics pursued by other means.

The value of the Olympics is that they can be made to mean pretty much whatever you want them to mean. Myth making. Policy affirmation. Program shattering. The Rio Summer Olympics— almost a week old by now— have ample political implications for when things go right— and when they go wrong. 

The farewell tour from The Tragically Hip is one of the compelling stories of this summer. Travelling coast-to-coast in the shadow of lead singer Gord Downie’s terminal brain-cancer diagnosis the Hip have been selling out venues across the country. The finale in their hometown of Kingston, Ont., will be a national TV spectacle. Tickets are being sold online for tens of thousands of dollars. 

I loved being a liberal back in the day. Loved the speeches. Loved the passion. Loved the Hollywood A-listers working above their intellectual pay grade. Then, as Irving Kristol said, I got mugged by reality. Talk is cheap. Symbols don’t create prosperity. Hollywood isn’t reality. You only had to look at Philadelphia this week to see why.

Apparently Melania Trump is not going to be winning a scholarship for journalism any time soon. In her much-awaited speed to the Republican convention in Cleveland on Monday, Mrs. Trump blotted her copy with a clumsy plagiarism of a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama.

In a sentence-by-sentence lifting of some boilerplate about her family values, she managed to blunt what had, up till then, been a positive impression on America on behalf of her husband. Innocuous as the Trump campaign tried to make it sound, plagiarism is still unacceptable.

“In the old age black was not counted fair/ but now is black beauty’s successive heir”— Shakespeare Sonnet 127

It took 400 years, but The Bard might well have thrilled to the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. To see blackness counted fair in the land that indulged slavery and its offshoots for so many centuries was drama in the vein of Othello. Even his opponents acknowledged the moment’s significance.

With the Summer Olympics hoving into view, it’s time to ask whether the IOC is missing a big opportunity by not including Grievance as a new medal sport. Just imagine the competitors for the gold this year.

I just finished watching the new O.J. Simpson series produced by ESPN. With all the stunning material available, the only surprise is that there isn’t a TV series done each year. His tragic tale is rife with metaphor. This new series, O.J. In America, decided to dabble in the racial politics of a man who was widely accepted by the white community and shunned by progressive blacks. 

There are two constants in the debate over gun control. First, the people making the loudest noises about guns typically know the least about how they work, what constitutes an automatic weapon and how lethal they are. 

The second constant is the same people decrying guns typically get their legal advice on gun purchasing from experts such as Kirstie Alley or Sean Penn talking to Jimmy Fallon. In short, it’s the bland leading the blind.

Upon the unveiling of his prime ministerial portrait on Parliament Hill, former PM Paul Martin was asked for a few well-chosen words about the role of government in our lives. After all, Martin was the courageous finance minister who got government debt off the backs of Canadians in the 1990s with an austerity program that helped Canada weather the  financial  turmoil of the next decade— a meltdown that almost bankrupted the United States.

But while the painting hanging over his shoulder looked like Martin, the person talking is now a changed man. 

My recent column on the transgendered bathroom debate provoked some predictable liberal outrage. Perhaps most telling: “What are you so worried about? There is no record of the transgendered assaulting people in bathrooms. Don’t transgendered people have rights too? In Europe, public washrooms are often unisex.”

Points of intersection between Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump are few, if any. But those that exist illustrate a singular truth of the current electoral climate: Don’t take the underdog for granted. As Stephen Harper and the Republican Party have learned to their chagrin, if you set your rival’s bar of accomplishment too low, you won’t be in office for long.

In the 1994 film Don Juan DeMarco, Johnny Depp played a young psychiatric patient being treated by a doctor played by Marlon Brando. Depp’s character claims he’s the legendary Don Juan, the world’s greatest lover. He tells Brando a tale of love, heartbreak and longing that includes life in a harem, stranded on a desert island and sword fights galore. 

Here’s where we stand in Einstein’s Relativity Theory. (That would be comedian Bob Einstein, also known as Super Dave.) The theory states that stuff getting shot out of a cannon can go anywhere. To wit, GOP nominee Donald Trump referenced a National Enquirer story linking Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Naturally, legacy media lost their minds. CNN’s Jake Tapper almost blew a fuse box refuting the story. 

The never-ending quest to fulminate outrage in the United States of Bernie Sanders has many iterations. The most baffling, to Canadians at least, is the concept that showing photo ID before voting is all just a racist plot to suppress the black vote.

There are many theories for the success of socialist Bernie Sanders and populist Donald Trump in the current U.S. election cycle. But disgust over the status quo in media is a large part of the appeal. When Trump ballyrags about even FOX TV ignoring the public’s true interests, he’s hitting a nerve in the mainstream population.

Visits to the Holy Land of southern Ontario are always instructive. Having lived there for almost 30 years it’s fun to go visit pals like Steve Paikin, the non-pareil host of TVO’s The Agenda, to take the pulse of Toronto’s pearl-clutching elites. This visit coincided with the funeral for Rob Ford, who was made a non-person for trying to change the narrative as mayor of Hogtown.