Want to see the feature film based on the online hit Le Cas Roberge? Well, tough. It's been pulled from theatres after a disastrous $40,000 over two weeks in cinemas. The problem, apparently, is that it sucks and the few people watching it fall asleep halfway through. They're keeping their chins up, saying it's "not a disaster," but it's hard to quantify it as much else.
Maybe you can catch it in a few weeks at Dollar Cinema, where screening in front of three people isn't considered strange.
After recent injuries to pedestrians due to rear-view mirrors on STM buses, some are asking why these predatory reflective objects are allowed to keep recklessly and deliberately attacking poor bystanders whose only crime was standing less than four inches from the driver's side of a moving bus.
The STM has refused to retrofit their buses in order to remove these threats to our (taller) children, even after discovering that people can get hit with them.
This is about safety. The ability of a bus driver to look at himself or look back at roads he's already driven through should not get in the way of keeping our streets safe for pedestrians.
We must not rest until our buses are mirror-free.
Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you've noticed Loblaw's's new ad campaign promoting locally-grown fruits as part of a green strategy. I applaud Loblaw for embracing greener policies, but there's still a way to go.
Take, for example, this bike rack outside the Loblaws at Jean-Talon and Park. Notice anything odd about it? The fact that no bikes are attached to it? The fact that it's at an odd angle? Well, that's because there's nothing anchoring this bike rack to the ground. Seriously. Go there right now and just walk off with it.
Instead, everyone hooks their bikes up to the solid railings nearby. Although that keeps the bikes relatively secure, it also interferes with anyone wanting to use the railings to help them up the stairs.
This has been going on for weeks now, which means Loblaws is either lazy or just doesn't care.
Underground, meanwhile, is a large parking lot that can hold over 250 cars. It's free for shoppers up to two hours.
I was surprised to find, at the far end, parking spaces for bicycles. No signage exists anywhere else to point cyclists here, which is probably why it's empty in the middle of the day (while bikes are locked to railings outside).
For a store so close to Park Extension, Villeray, Rosemont, Mile End and the Plateau, areas where bicycles are perhaps the most popular in Montreal, this store could make even a small effort to make cyclists feel more welcome.
Which of the following green-coloured products are made using recycled paper or make any other claims toward environmental sustainability?
The answer, of course, is none. They're just green-coloured.
That's the problem with greenwashing. There is no standard body to say what environmentally-friendly claims can be made and which ones can't. And even if there were such a body with strictly-enforced rules, nothing prevents a company from simply using green-coloured packaging to subtly fool consumers into thinking that there is an environmental benefit to choosing a green product over a non-green version.
What's the difference between these two products? They're both from the same company, both weigh the same and are made from the same material. The difference, if you look at the numbers at the bottom, is that the green-coloured package has sheets that are half the size as those the blue-coloured package, and offsets that by having twice as many sheets.
In other words, the only difference between the two is that the one on the left has twice as many perforations. And yet there's a sense that, because it's green, it's better for the environment somehow.
The one product on the shelves that does make green claims is this jumbo package of paper towels from President's Choice. The paper towels here are printed on made using recycled paper, and I believe once you throw them away will explode into butterflies or something.
Whose bright idea was it to associate such a complicated, easily-abused marketing concept with little more than a colour?
Apparently, the city council in Westmount isn't keen on the idea of a high-speed rail link between downtown and the airport going through their little town on the lines currently used by the AMT commuter trains going to Windsor Station. Instead, they'd prefer if the route used tracks further south in St. Henri.
The reasoning is somewhat complicated, and has to do with some very technical aspects of the two tracks. In order to better explain it, I've created a diagram of the situation below:
As you can see, it's better for everyone involved if the train uses the lower tracks.
(I realize this is classic NIMBYism and not specific to Westmount, but you'd think it would occur to them that such a suggestion without any reasons behind it would lead to this kind of impression.)
UPDATE: Aww Pat, I'm touched (again). Your kickback will be in the mail shortly. Pour vos lecteurs, vous pouvez lire mes billets sur les médias, Montréal et, surtout, sur Patrick Lagacé.
Patrick Lagacé's Facebook friends (names blurred to protect the innocent)
Someone's been busy on Facebook.
Monday's paper contained a couple of first-person pieces from reporters who were a bit closer to the action than they normally are. In the first, Gazette reporter Jason Magder recounts walking by a relative's place whose burglar alarm had just gone off. Nothing happened, but he got scared when he thought there might be nefarious burglars nearby. He later learns that police recommend always calling them first, even if it's more than likely a false alarm and will result in a fine, because (and this is pretty good logic here) a fine is worth less than your life.
The other, a few pages down, comes from Canwest's Scott Deveau, who is a reporter in Afghanistan and came face-to-face with a roadside bomb. Again, no serious repercussions, but a pretty huge scare.
So what should we learn from this encounter? Simple: Jason Magder and Scott Deveau are pussies.
But perhaps we can look into this a bit deeper. What purpose do these first-person articles serve? There have been other home break-ins and other roadside bombings that have been worse but gotten less coverage. Is a reporter's first-person account better than a second-hand version given by a witness? Is this a this-happens-every-day story? Or is it just a way for reporters to placate their enormous egos, a preview into their future memoirs, and an indication that things are more significant when they happen to people we know?
Discuss. Please include unnecessarily personal references in your comments.
Bruno Guglielminetti, seen above giving a video update from what appears to be an airport bathroom stall, has become the latest journalist to discover that it's easier to simply upload videos to YouTube than deal with his company's complicated proprietary system.
The advantages of YouTube are pretty astounding:
Given that, why don't more non-television media outlets mothball their video systems and just switch to YouTube?
The main reason is control: They want 100% of all that ad revenue they're not getting. They think they can do everything because they did everything in print. They don't trust some outside company to handle this for them. And they don't want to throw away something they spent thousands of dollars getting the CEO's nephew to develop over the weekend.
On the other hand, many of these same websites use Google Ads, Google Analytics and Feedburner.
When it comes to video, I think they've hit the wrong side of this equation.
The evidence can be seen on their own blogs. Look at how many of them embed YouTube videos, or even unofficially upload their own videos to YouTube because they can't figure out their company's proprietary system.
Bruno's step makes sense. Let's hope others follow. And not just with YouTube. They should have channels on Vimeo, Blip.tv, Metacafe and others. Their business shouldn't be in distribution, it should be in content.
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