Gabriel Wortman : denturists are few in NS & wear multiple hats and Gabriel was in the thick of it as Director of General Duties for the Denturist Society of NS

I gleamed this from the thank-god-its-public-by-law information on file at the NS Registry of Stocks.

The Denturist Society website itself is shattered slash shuttered : I am thinking since Sunday morning and not by accident either.

(The Denturist Licensing Board of NS is in theory separate from the Society but in practise they share a mostly common membership at the executive level. As I said there aren’t many denturists all together in the whole of NS : a classroom’s worth.)

There are seven directors on file for the Society itself and six of them have further executive committee titles : all pretty conventional titles and roles.

President, VP, secretary, treasurer and then the real important one : Continuing Education Director , important because denturists needed to pass continuing education programs annually or lose their license.

But Gabriel Wortman’s title is weird - as might be expected : Director of General Duties.

That’s a new one on me.

But hey after the ballots were counted, everyone else has got a nice conventional title and a conventional job to do and Gabriel was left out in the cold - again - so they gave him a title.

Any title, pick a title.

But as the Society spent weekend after weekend in close proximity to Wortman, year after year, one wonders if they ever saw the flakes slowly falling off the guy or was he 100% perfectly normal up to last Saturday evening ?

Were there any warning signs that if acted upon, might have saved 24 lives ?

Just wondering ....

Gabriel Wortman had always dreaded mid-April, for that was the anniversary of when UNB students nominated for “The Asshole of the Year” award

UNB has a number of student residences, some famous for being very MALE and very rowdy and some co-ed and much more tame, like MacLeod House.

Bridges House was far and away the most male and the most rowdy : a man’s man sort of place.

The sort of place where a man’s man like 18 year old Gabriel Wortman might feel at home.

But there are limits even for the most macho : so Bridges House residents annually voted an award handed out each mid April to ‘the biggest asshole” in that rowdy residence - and thus over the whole campus generally : the much feared CHUCK COSBY award.

Even to merely nominated for it was enough to make you a social outcast.

The residence student government strongly supported the award as they said the mere fear of receiving the annual award was very usefully in restraining boorish behaviour all year long.

And it was indeed.

But it also scarred the winners, er losers, for life and eventually the Dean Mary Lou-Stirling got rid of it after hearing from some former recipients. (Stirling’s academic career had focussed, in part, on the study of process of victimization.)

Several online sources (people who were residing with him in his dorm at the time) have suggested that Gabriel Wortman won the CHUCK COSBY award.

Both the 1991 savage student riot when the award was cancelled and an obituary I saw online  strongly suggests the Chuck Cosby award process was a very important event in students’ lives in that decade and not easily forgotten : so I am inclined to think their memories are correct.

But in any case, remember even to be nominated for it was bad enough : “Runner-up for Asshole of the Year”.

I went through the student newspaper at UNB for the names of the award winners the years Gabriel Wortman was there but they didnt seem to publish the names and probably didn’t have to : the bush telegraph quickly spread it through the campus, to staff and student alike.

But it seems that the very next year Gabriel was at tame & quiet Macleod House, where CANDY PALMATER said the kids still didn’t like him much. (But they at least didn’t make a big campus-wide announcement about it).

I heard our RCMP Commissioner telling the CBC National that only a deep probe of Wortman’s background is going to give them a profile as to what may have led Gabriel to his murderous end.

Just like the way that the film  “THE GRADUATE” had some pithy advice for Benjamin (“ one word : plastics !”), I too have some pithy advice for the Commissioner and her team : “CHUCK COSBY”.

It might not be ROSEBUD in uncovering the mystery of this man’s life, but it might be very close....

Gabriel Wortman voted the world’s biggest asshole by UNB campus and he goes out and murders 24 people

I know how hard it is to find just the right PhD topic, one that will get you into the tenure track, with a book deal and tv interviews.

So, please, look hard and long and deep at  UNB’s infamous Chuck Cosby riots of April 11 1991 as a potential subject. I think it is a story with legs, as they say in the J-trade.

Canadians tend to think of the people of New Brunswick as an un-demonstrative sort (when they bother to think of them at all) —- sort of like the Swiss or Belgians, except less exciting.

But on this date, a vast crowd of very angry UNB students in residences stormed across the campus, smashing windows, tearing everything valuable off walls that was permanently attached : pure destructive anger.

They were very very upset that the administration had dared to ban the awarding of the Chuck Cosby Day award at the annual student awards do.

The award, voted upon by students in residence, went to one who among them was voted the biggest pain in the ass/asshole in the residences.

The administration though had just heard from victims of past awards who spoke up about the shame, pain and hurt experienced from having to live on a campus after the award while 15,000 students and staff knew all about all of your failings.

A cross between living in a fishbowl and awaiting the arrival of a lynch mob to drag you out to the nearest tree.

But the equally angry residences students said that is exactly how they felt — living for three or four years in a big fish bowl where silly incidents and irritants that might be shrugged off once grew into festering sore points after a year or two.

They needed the fear of being awarded the Chuck Cosby Award to act as a form of restraint upon those residents who might be tempted to go into major asshole territory during their time at UNB.

It is easy to feel sympathy for both those awarded the notorious mark of ignominy and those who had to suffer at their antics all year.

Who doesn’t fear having ‘the roommate from hell’ ?

Who doesn't want to be  avoid being publicly bullied and ostracized by an entire quasi-gated community of 15,000 ?

People who attended UNB in the late 1980s are now coming forward and remembering their fellow classmate/roommate Gabriel Wortman - the New Brunswicker who went on a murderous rampage across Nova Scotia in April 2020 , for more than 12 hours killing whoever he came across, leaving 24 dead in Canada’s worst ever mass shooting, only stopping when he himself was shot dead by the police.

They say that Gabriel himself got a Chuck Cosby Award and that more generally people didn’t like his manner and treated him badly (in response ?)

Now Wortman was almost 52 when he went on his rampage of death, not 18.

But if confirmed about receiving the award for the biggest campus asshole, it suggests a pattern we are familiar with from many school shootings : people who, for what ever reason are odd or judged odd, get a bad reaction back from the majority, and this cycles ever upward in a ratchet pattern of dislike and distrust, until for some, it all explodes in a murderous ‘revenge on my oppressors’ fantasy.

Wortman’s eventual trade was as a denturist and he was very good at it - in general he was very good with his hands at anything he turned to.

 However, he choose not to practise in his small hometown of Moncton where he might be thought to have a built-in pool of potential clients already (but where everybody also knows a little bit of everybody) but rather in metro Halifax-Dartmouth where  he had to build up his client pool from scratch, but where his former life on campus remained mostly unknown.

Clearly, one response we gather from people who knew him was that Wortman, from being a little odd and being seen as a little odd, developed a thick skin or mask of being the guy who was always smiling and who was always joking about.

But sometimes the mask slipped and people saw flashes of extremely over the top anger.

But more often the perceptive saw  that beneath the mask were the signs of the inner sadness and depression that drove him to be a heavy drinker and eventually a mass killer seeking revenge and a final sort of fame.

And then ending it all by suicide : death by cop.

Dear friends tell me not to talk about Gabriel Wortman and to honour his victims by forgetting about him.

Sorry but I do not want to HONOUR his victims, I want there to be no victims at all.

Only by seeking explanations can we spot future mass killers in waiting and get them whatever best treatment we can create to reduce their anger and hate.

Not easy, because I suspect some are born with altered brain chemistry who then, in addition, go on to experience trauma of violence or abandonment that leaves their plastic young minds scarred for life.

For a very few, a further trigger put them into high murderous rage.

Still even one or two mass killers stopped and fifty lives saved and hundreds of  family members saved the grief, seems worth it.

So, please please, write the PhD and write that book...

Gabriel Wortman & his brother Jeff : the CANADIAN Cain & the AMERICAN Abel

If you are thoroughly depressed thinking about all the BAD things that Gabriel Wortman did on his last day on Earth (killing twenty innocent people here in Nova Scotia), you might want to have your soul uplifted by viewing films about the GOOD things his brother Jeff is doing.

When Gabriel Wortman was twenty months old, his parents were then living in Fitchburg Mass USA  (he might have even been born there) and felt for financial reasons they would have to put their soon-to-be-born second child up for adoption. A while later they returned to Moncton New Brunswick where they raised Gabriel.

(Fitchburg was the original headquarters for Assumption Life, one of Moncton’s biggest employers.)

The other little boy, Jeff, was raised by his American adoptive parents and only re-connected to his Canadian birth parents ten years ago.

He is a carpenter by trade and several literally “uplifting” films have been made detailing his work in restoring and raising up a bell tower in the historical district of his hometown North Brookfield Mass.

They are on Youtube for all to view, just type into Youtube’s search tab these words :

Jeff Samuelson, a New Hope

another film :  Jeff Samuelson, A Second Chapter

These are great, professional made, informative and uplifting films.

Americans and Canadians alike tend to think of places like New York City (where Dr Martin Henry Dawson worked) as a location where extreme gun violence is likely to happen and that by pointed contrast, Colchester County Nova Scotia (Martin Henry Dawson’s birthplace and where most of Wortman’s victims were murdered) as a place of tranquil peace.

Impossible to uphold those simple pieties now.

I am still dealing with all this, in regards to my ongoing book on Dr Dawson.

In fact, this whole story, of two boys about the same age, from the same birth parents but separated at birth and raised in two very different countries with two very different outcomes , can not help but remind me of the biblical story of Cain and his brother Abel.

The CANADIAN Cain and the AMERICAN Abel...

“Music Videothon” my portmanteau word for my work WEE

Easy enough to see that if we started with radiothons and then moved quickly to telethons, then YouTube global fund-raising concerts from the living rooms of covid-quarantined superstars will inevitably come to be called videothons.

But featuring lots & lots of music with each and every telethons have long been just taken for granted :  so why gild the lily by then adding the redundant word music to the term ?

Because the ‘music video’ really is sui generis : it takes the 1920s feature film with silent action from the stars and music underscore from invisible musicians & singers and flips the whole concept.

Suddenly the musicians and the singers are the (highly visible) stars and the shadowy-silent moving images of humans merely amplify (underscore) the lyrics and music : the silent but active moving images are literally on a backscreen while the front of the stage is reserved for the audible but motionless singer and musicians.

As a now traditional vehicle for promoting a four minute single, this reversal has been rather taken for granted.

But lengthened into a 120 minute long movie or stage musical  it really is something totally new with no precedents everywhere no matter how far back you go in history......

40 IMPERIAL (aka ‘Canadian’) gallons : 50 in American

Back in the Forties, Canadians felt so insignificant and small against the huge thrusting American culture than any Canadian who won any sort of renown, above all with Americans, could literally do no wrong.

Doctors Banting and Dafoe spring immediately to mind.

But Canadian film-goers had only to hear the Texas cowboy exclaim that he had drunk a gallon of beer and so was ready and able to lick the villain to begin snickering.

A small (American) gallon of weak (American) beer was enough to give one Dutch Courage ?

Is to laugh !

A big (Canadian) gallon of strong (Canadian) beer more likely.

So to Canadian doctor Martin Henry Dawson, a pilot-plant sized penicillin factory producing 50 US gallons of weak (2 units per ml) of penicillin was just not on.

His would be 40 Canadian gallons in size, producing hi test (8 units per ml) penicillin.

Dr Dawson was dying, almost as much from the stress of fighting off all his own bosses as from fighting off his own body’s auto-immune system, but he was stubborn.

Stubborn as hell.

A real mule, in fact ...