Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

Saturday 100,000 People Watch and Take To Toronto Caribbean Carnival's Virtual Road  By Stephen Weir:  It was the perfect parade that the world will never see live.  Beautiful people in costumes, soaring pan, word perfect Calypso. No gaps on Lakeshore Blvd. No arguments amongst the  Mas Men.   No stormers.  No rain, thunder or lightning.  Perfect, but,  sigh,  the city really misses you  Toronto Caribbean Carnival. “When you total up the viewers on all the different platforms from Twitch to Instagram to Facebook, we had 100,000 watching the  Virtual Road Carnival  on Saturday alone,” said  Aneesa Oumarally ,  Chief Executive Officer  of the  Festival Management Committee.  “The whole world did watch. We heard from (happy fans) in Atlanta, Cleveland and other great American cities who told us they are coming to Toronto next summer to be with us live.” Ourmarally’s viewership numbers have been confirmed b...

Josef Karl Dietrich Josef Karl Dietrich When I worked in the PR department for Litton Systems Canada I often had to take military leaders on plant tours. They wanted to see the company's expertise in making navigation systems for commercial aircraft, war planes and cruise missiles. With a background in Journalism and zero understanding of anything to do with precision engineering, I soon memorized a mostly-true patter that I could deliver while walking backwards down the production lines. Of course, when dealing with people who actually knew something of what they were looking at, I was hopelessly over my head.  No one knew this more than the men and women who spent their working lives at LSL (what we called Litton Systems Canada). Some let me drown, others, like Joe Dietrich always threw me a lifeline - he was always willing to address our guests and explain in detail while Litton was the best. He did in English or in German  and he was always the hit of the tou...