2013 Jewelz & Foolz: The Day After International Women’s Day.

Were you kind to women yesterday?  This being the day after International Women’s Day, this is my fifth annual naming of Jewelz & Foolz.  It has been an extraordinary year for women, both good and bad.  This years blog entry is dedicated to the two girls/women that most inspired me this past year: Malala Yousafzai and Erin Merryn.

My first four Jewelz & Foolz postings can be found here:
2012: Jewelz & Foolz March 2012
2011: Jewelz & Foolz March 2011
2010: Jewelz & Foolz March 2010
2009: Jewelz & Foolz March 2009

So, what are you ask?

Both are groups of men. The former, Jewelz , are men who I would like to share a glass of wine, a beer or a cocktail with today, pick their brains, get to know their hearts and maybe flirt with them, just for one day, on the day after International Women’s Day. 

In honour of my precious very young nephews I have now officially decided to at times include minors as Jewelz Juniors when appropriate.

Then there are Foolz, not the harmless kind, but instead men who’s judgment at the present time makes them not good for womankind.

And yes, for the majority of people, Foolz can become Jewelz and vice versa.

In this fifth annual offering of my Jewelz and Foolz column, I offer 42 Jewelz, 3 Jewelz Juniors, 18 Foolz and 2 Jewelz In Memoriam for your consideration (in no particular order) .

John Herdman

For all he has done so far for Canadian women’s soccer.  I know there will be more great things to come.

 John Oliver

For his field piece on March 15, 2012’s The Daily Show on the absurdity that we/President Obama’s administration have cut off $60 million in funding to UNESCO and all future payments that can do a world of good because UNESCO voted to admit Palestine as a member contrary to a 1990 US law (P.L. 101-246, Title IV), that forbids funding any UN organization that “accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states."  Yo Congress! Overturn the dam law!

  Stephen Starr

For Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising.

Shinya Yamanaka

For discovering that mature cells in mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells capable of developing into all tissues of the body.

Max Sidorov

 For using the internet for good by starting an online fundraising campaign to give 68 year old bus monitor Karen Klein (Greece central school district in suburban Rochestor) a vacation, after a video of her being bullied by the seventh grade kids she was to monitor went public.

Jeff Crewe

 For saving the life of 18-year-old Ajethan Ramachandrana using an onsite defibrillator, while doing his job as Gym teacher at Weston Collegiate Institute, after his student’s heart stopped beating the middle of gym class.

 Joel Ward

For his game winning overtime goal against the Boston Bruins on April 25th, 2012 knocking the defending champions out of the playoffs.

 Tim Brown

For running such a cool company, Ideo.

 

Matt Mernagh

For fighting the medical marijuana battle against Canada’s failed medical marijuana program and ineffective Marijuana Medical Access Regulations which do not adequately help those who are suffering. 

Sanjoy Sachdev

For helping Indian couples who want to marry for love by giving them shelter and protecting them from harassment with his team of volunteer Love Commandos.

Twitter: lovecommandosin
Skype: lovecommandos

 

Roko Belic

For the documentary happy.

Corey Booker

For running into a burning house and saving your neighbour Zina Hodge, 47, from her smoky bedroom. 

I didn't feel bravery, I felt terror.

That is what bravery is.  Feeling scared and doing it anyway.  

Ahmed Sarmast

For empowering children traumatized by war through education and music via his Afghan Youth Orchestra part of The Afghanistan National Institute of Music he founded in Kabul.  Half of the school’s 141 students are former street kids or orphans ages 10 to 22. 

Paul Davison

For the Highlight App.

Mark Mattson

                                                                                                                                                                                               

For fighting for a “swimmable drinkable fishable” future via The Waterkeeper.

Robert Vuksanovic

For using his skills as a flight instructor, getting in a plane and racing to meet 80 year-old Helen Collins in order to talk her down in a twin-engine aircraft after her husband died of a heart attack while flying the plane.

Patrick and Brian Burke

 
For their work (son and father) on the issue of homophobia in sports including through their You Can Play organization.

Julio Montaner

For his work in HIV/AIDS research and for fighting for an AIDS-free generation.

W. P. Andrew Lee

For leading the team at John Hopkins that performed a  bilateral arm transplant on 26 year old Brendan Marrocco, who lost all four limbs in a bomb attack in Iraq.  The surgery was combined with an innovative treatment of infusing the deceased donor’s bone marrow cells to prevent rejection of the new limbs and was the most extensive and complicated limb transplant procedure performed so far in the United States.

Jay-Z

For making me laugh and for his comedic timing when he interrupted Kanye at the BET Awards – Funny!

 

Sanjeev Kaila

For helping ten-year-old Ganesh Yadav.  Ganesh was born with a facial deformity and his family wouldn’t have been able to afford the cost of surgery.

Salman Khan

For the Khan Academy.

William Gahl

 
For his work as head of the Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National Institutes of Health.

What price do you put on the new discovery that one makes for a new disease that now has applicability to other patients unknown, untold, not seen yet?

Alex Haney

For practicing bad things DONT happen when good men do SOMETHING and contacting the Toronto Police so they could call the Arizona Police, after reading the following threat on YouTube:

I now literally have a plan of seriously hurting… killing… murdering people in my high school… I WORK at the high school as a student teacher basically… which is why no one can find out about me somewhat accidentally planning to blow up the school… (and yes… it would be super easy.)

The teen writer of the post was arrested.

 

Alex Levesque

For mentoring over 300 people in five years, almost all of whom have records and gang ties, via his Automotive Mentoring Group in his body shop on Chicago's tough southwest side.
With money from his own pocket and some donations, Levesque gives them a chance to restore their lives along with the cars. Profits go back to the shop.

I'm looking for the disenfranchised.  The gang members running around aimlessly doing crimes because they don't feel they have any other options to be successful…When you're able to put some tools in a young man's hands and he's able to learn how to use ratchets and cutting tools and a torch, there's something magical about that.  When that happens, it turns boys into men.

 

Abdul Kader Haidara

For saving priceless Arabic manuscripts from Islamic Terrorists who invaded Timbuktu Mali.

I bought every tin box I could find, the kind we store household goods in, and my staff and I filled them with manuscripts until the library was empty.

Haidara, Director of the Mamma Haidera Manuscript Library in Timbuktu, distributed the boxes to local families who hid them in their homes. Pictures emerged of Timbuktu manuscripts burned to ashes but all 30,000 documents hidden in the boxes were saved.

Chris Fisher

For working to protect sharks, which are disappearing at a rate of millions a year.

If you put shark populations at risk, you put the entire ocean at risk—it's that simple.

Fischer and his team capture, GPS tag and release 2-ton great white sharks and other large marine species on the 126-foot vessel MV OCEARCH with the goal of identifying where the sharks breed and feed in order to protect those habitats.
You can find Chris Fisher’s Global Shark Tracker here.

Oscar Lopez

 
For protecting a child from further physical and emotional abuse. 
Oscar Lopez (photo not available) was outraged when he saw his neighbour, Anthony Sanchez, belting a boy for not catching a ball so he videotaped it.

That’s enough. I’m having a (expletive) problem with you for beating the (expletive) out of him because he won’t catch the damn ball.

Sanchez responded by asking if Lopez knew his son.

I don’t know your son but I’m watching you. I’m a (expletive) father too.

Sanchez replies:

Why don’t you come over here and teach me?

Anthony Sanchez, 34, was arrested on suspicion of felony child abuse.
In the beautiful words of Oscar Lopez:

You don’t have to be a police officer to stop something.  Just speak up.

Dani Zapata

For cutting free a 9 metre pregnant female whale shark from rope cutting into the whale shark’s flesh and creating a hindrance that could have potentially become life-threatening for the animal. 

Daniel Day Lewis

For the beauty that is excellence, in Lincoln.

 

 

 

 

Jesus

For whatever you did to make Florida irrelevant to the outcome of the the most recent presidential election.  Merci!

Kevin Cook

For committing to build a $50,000 playground in Joshua Smith’s honour after Joshua raised $3000 for his cash strapped city of Detroit with a lemonade stand.

Richard Henegar

For standing up against a homophobic hate crime and spending (along with his staff) over a hundred hours of volunteer time giving Jordan Addison’s car a new paint job, stereo, tires, tinted windows, and a good security system after bullies vandalized it four times by bashing in his windows, slashing his tires and keying homophobic slurs and “die” on it. Jordan Addison, a student at Radford, did not have the minimum $2,500 needed to repair the damage so just kept driving the car as it was until Richard Henegar stepped up.  Richard’s shop is Quality Auto Paint and Body in Roanoke Virginia.  Tel: 540.354.2961.

Jesse Chaffer the 3rd and 4th

For rescuing and saving some 120 people using boats, in Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana after Hurricane Isaac burst over the Mississippi River levee and covered their town, leaving thousands trapped in attics and on roofs.

 

David Farrell

For using your pilot skills for good and rescuing a mother deer and her baby fawn after they became trapped on the frozen waters of Antigonish Harbour. Mr. Farrell used the downdraft from the helicopter’s rotor to push the deer off the ice to safety.

Rebekah Simpson’s Grandfather

For teaching his granddaughter about 911. 
Rebekah, age five found herself alone with her three and one-year-old brothers after her mom suffered an epileptic seizure.
She called 911.

My mommy fell down in the backyard and she wouldn’t get up… you think you can come here.

“We’re coming and we’re going to be coming fast,” the 911 operator replied.
Rebekah said she was scared and crying, but able to act quickly thanks to advice she received from her grandfather.  If you are a grandfather and reading this, go teach your grandchild how to dial 911...today!

Sanjay Gupta

                                                                                                                                                                                                
For making me laugh when you punked Jeff Probst on his February 11, 2013 show.  Maybe you should give Ashton a call?

 

Michael Bloomberg

For trying, despite ridicule, to do something about how fat and unhealthy we are.  We need to return to the serving sizes of decades ago.  Soda is a start, in a long ugly war toward health and away from an obesity epidemic.

Elon Musk

For making me believe that humanity will one day live beyond earth.

J.J. Abrams

For Fringe.  My gran is a trekkie.  Yes, my gran.  Maybe that kinda stuff is in the genes?
  

Jewelz Juniors

(Icon to come after consultation with a nephew)

Eddie Hanzelin

For, at the precious age of seven years old, using tech and social media to reunite siblings Clifford Boyson, of Davenport, Iowa  and Betty Billadeau, of St Louis, Missouri, who were separated in foster care as very young children 65yrs earlier in 1948.

Felix Finkbeiner

For Plant for the Planet - Trees For Climate Justice.

Jack Andraka

For at the age of fifteen creating a pancreatic cancer test that is 26,000 times less expensive than the current pancreatic test, takes five minutes and appears to have close to 100% accuracy.  Jack Andraka may just save many lives.  You rock…BIG TIME!
 

And then there were:

Denis Rodman

 
For his wilful ignorance of his “friend” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. 

 

 

 

Justice Scalia

For believing that the Voting Rights Act, the right to vote without discrimination, is a racial entitlement. 

 

Donald Trump

For commenting on transgender Miss Universe hopeful Jenna Talackova’s name and saying:

I looked at her name and someone brought this up to me Genital and those are the first letters of her name and it is Jennital and I am saying to myself hhmm that’s strange could there be an ulterior motive?

Eric Holder

 
For not prosecuting senior bank officials who participated in manipulating Libor
and
For not prosecuting HSBC bankers after they enabled Mexican drug gangs to launder money and helped Iranian interests evade U.S. sanctions.
If we are not going to put bankers in jail for rigging Libor why are we wasting tax payer dollars on white collar crime at all?!?

 

Joe Rickey Hundley

For slapping 19 month old baby Jonah Bennett on a Delta flight from Minneapolis to Atlanta scratching the boy below his right eye and saying:

Shut that nigger baby up!

Jonah’s mother Jessica responded:

What did you say?

Mr. Hundley then fell onto her face and with his mouth in her ear said it AGAIN but even more hateful the second time.
You must be an all round charmer Mr. Hundley.

Charles Taylor

For war crimes and crimes against humanity.  For acts of terrorism, murder, sexual violence, sexual slavery, the use of child soldiers, abductions, forced labor and enslavement. 

Stephen Harper

For the 2012 Budget Implementation Bill which would repeal the CEAA (Canadian Environmental Assessment Act) in its entirety and replace it with a new piece of legislation, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 a federal
assessment law that is profoundly weaker than its predecessor.

 John Williamson

For speaking, as MP for New Brunswick South West, on the demise of the Canadian long-gun registry by borrowing from Martin Luther King’s "I Have A Dream" speech.

Free at last! Free at last! Law abiding Canadians are free at last!

Comparing the long-gun registry and slavery?!? 
You do know that Martin Luther King was shot by a long gun and preached non violence, eh?

 

Kingsley Brown

For saying that women are a threat to military cohesiveness and for saying:

Girls become women by getting older.  Boys become men by accomplishing something, by proving something.

Please tell me you do not have daughters?!?

Hank Greenberg

For reminding us that narcissism will stop at nothing unless we stop it, in his $25 billion lawsuit against the federal government.

Vladimir Putin

For the Russian law banning the adoption of Russian children by Americans as payback for foreign criticism of Mr. Putin's regime and as an attempt to strengthen his own legitimacy in Russia. 

Mohammed Morsi

For denying Egyptians what they deserve, democracy, by putting himself above judicial review. 
The political course you are choosing is not sustainable Mr. Morsi and it is going to come back and bite you in the you-know-what!

Charles Payne

For your comments as a Fox Business host on the plight of garment workers in Bangladesh, after 112 workers were killed in a factory fire and Mr. Payne felt it was unfairly being pinned on Wal-Mart.

It is tragic.  I don’t think something like this will happen again. Don’t think that the people in Bangladesh who perished didn’t want or need those jobs, as well.

Mr. Payne, more than 700 people have died in Bangladesh garment factory fires since 2005 and those people who perished were human beings with children who took the jobs they could get but would have preferred to work somewhere without lax safety conditions, non-working fire extinguishers and a lack of emergency exits.

Llias Kasidiaris

For his physical assaults on fellow Greek politicians Ms Liana Kanelli and Ms Rena Dourou, during a live TV debate of politicians representing the seven parties that won seats in the country's inconclusive May 2012 election.
 

Jason Kenney

For responding to Olivier De Schutter’s, the UN Right To Food envoy, report concluding that there is unequal access to nutritious food in Canada and that close to 900,000 Canadians were turning to food banks each month:

It would be our hope that the contributions we make to the United Nations are used to help starving people in developing countries, not to give lectures to wealthy and developed countries like Canada.  I think this is a discredit to the United Nations.

Your disconnect about hunger Mr. Kenney is shocking.

Pascal Rostain

For his words and perhaps deeds in relation to the invasion of privacy photos taken of Princess Kate:

Its so stupid.  She’s a young lady.  She’s nice. She’s not fat.  She’s beautiful so you have to show them.

 

Tom Vilsack

For when our Secretary of Agriculture was asked:

Is it time we stopped doing oil portraits of former secretaries? (because they cost $20,000)

Secretary Vilsack answered (after nervous laughter):

There are so many questions I would be happy to answer about our budget.  I just think that’s a really small ball kinda question.

Maybe… but as my great gran always says…if you take care of the pennies the dollars take care of themselves.  Maybe if we take care of the $2oKs, the budget will take care of itself?

Todd Akin

For this Missouri Congressman’s comments on abortion:

If it is a legitimate rape, the body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down. 

Grade six health classes now to include rape sperm.
 

 

Satwant Singh Kaleka

For your bravery when you physically fought back against gunman and white supremacist Wade Michael Page who rampaged Kaleka’s Sikh temple in Oak Creek.  Doing so delayed Page’s violence against others and likely saved lives.
 

Maurice Sendak

For Where the Wild Things Are.
 

Who are presently your ?

Sage Spencer

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