Flashback: Smart sipping
Drinks that purport to do more than refresh are nothing new
CBC's Flashback newsletter looks inside the CBC archives with inspiration from recent news headlines and what's happening at CBC. Subscribe to get it delivered straight to your inbox.
The eternal Joyce Wieland
In its exhibition Joyce Wieland: Heart On, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has put together an artist retrospective that "feels like an uncanny take on today's breaking news," wrote Eve Thomas for CBC Arts in February.
Wieland spoke about her life and work with arts journalist Daniel Richler in a 1987 profile on CBC's The Journal. (The piece is also loaded with glimpses of the artist's many films, paintings and quilts.) Richler asked Wieland, who died in 1998, if she was concerned about her place in the history of Canadian art.
"As I get older, I think of [B.C. painter] Emily Carr … and her retrospective coming after her death," Wieland said. "These are the things I've thought about — that I could be completely passed by and I wouldn't be remembered. I know that's extreme, but it's a possibility."
Smart serving
What's in the fridge? According to CBC News, the Coca-Cola Company is making its own prebiotic soda with fibre and less sugar than regular sodas, similar to brands like Olipop and Poppi, which call their drinks "functional" and sell them as wellness products.
Beverages with purported benefits were making the news in 1997 too. The CBC show Future World reported on the trend for non-alcoholic "smart" drinks and learned how they got their name.
"They're really called smart drinks because they're supposed to be good for you," said Fernando Mateos of The Smart Bar in Toronto, before he blended one for a customer. "And in fact they are good for you in terms of ingesting natural vitamins as opposed to synthetic vitamins, and you get real minerals as opposed to synthetic minerals."
Tracks to the future
In February, the federal government announced the first phase of a plan to build a high-speed rail network from Toronto to Quebec City. But a CBC News story notes that a future government could modify or cancel the project.
Still, it's more certain than another transit project in 1958 in Toronto. At the very least, scenes of a monorail in action made for captivating images on the CBC current affairs show Close-Up.
Host Rex Loring, seen above, said Close-Up producer Douglas Leiterman had asked the most intriguing question about the monorail: "if it's as good as it claims, why has nobody bought it?"
The Rocket revisited
The new documentary Maurice is as much a cultural history of Quebec as it is about hockey star Maurice (The Rocket) Richard, according to CBC Arts contributor Justine Smith. But does it mention that time he officially opened the Hockey Hall of Fame with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.
Snow mobility
In a recent look at how Montreal has removed snow in years past, CBC News said it once involved horse-drawn plows and, often, solely "people and their shovels." After a big March storm in 1971, at least one Montrealer preferred snowmobiling to shovelling.
Not their first rodeo
Blue Rodeo: Lost Together, a new documentary on CBC Gem, looks at the friendship between the band's founders, Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor. In 1988, the pair caught the notice of CBC's Midday, where they spoke about finding their niche playing country-inflected music.
Wayne's world
"It's just confusing what side he's on," a Wayne Gretzky fan told CBC News last month amid scrutiny over Gretzky's loyalties. In a 1988 dispatch from Gretzky's wedding to American actress Janet Jones, reporter Susan Bonner called him "Canada's favourite hockey hero."
