Some Montreal-based anglo writers have put together an online magazine called Rover, which bills itself as an “independent review of the arts.” You might recognize some names if you obsess over freelance bylines in the Gazette (and we all know you do).
So far, everything is free, though the plan is to eventually support the site through advertising.
Considering that Maisonneuve magazine is almost perpetually starving for cash and subsidies, don’t expect much of a financial windfall here.
There are now just a few hours left to vote for one of the five semifinalists in the CBC Hockey Anthem Challenge. Sadly, Hockey Scores is not one of them.
In order to help you visualize them, CBC has set the songs to video of the HNIC opening (even including the “Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland” voice intro). In all of them, the absence of the old theme is jarring, especially next to familiar video.
Here are some thoughts of mine off the top of my head for the five semifinalists. I’m not a music expert (but I know a few who will no doubt chip in), so don’t take these as gospel because I have no clue what I’m talking about.
(Warning: CBC forces you to watch the same stupid Bell ad before each video. Sorry.)
1. Ice Warriors (by Gerry Mosby): A complicated melody, but without any climax. It sounds like a good part of a song, but it’s missing the rest. Even as a fan of rock music, the guitar really threw me off. It belongs in a 70s album, not on the Hockey Night theme.
2. Sticks to the Ice (by Robert Fraser Burke): This one builds energy, and the professional arrangement is a huge improvement over a 13-year-old on a piano. But it’s still lacking. Just when you think it’s going to hit you hard, it sulks back into a melody that doesn’t seem to go anywhere.
3. Eleventh Hour (by Graham McRae): McRae is a skilled composer, and this one doesn’t lack for energy. He seems to really get the point. CBC’s orchestral recording of it seems a bit muted though, especially compared to McRae’s original. The melody in this one is my favourite, but that doesn’t necessarily seal the deal.
4. Let the Game Begin (by Christian St. Roch & Jimmy Tanaka): This contribution from two Montrealers echoes the original in a non-copyright-infringing way. Similar use of instruments. It is very successful at building energy and anticipation, and best of all it doesn’t waste any time getting there (this is, after all, a minute-long intro, not a three-minute song). It has punch, but the theme gets a bit repetitive. Still, if your goal is to find as close to the original as possible, this is probably the one for you.
5. Canadian Gold (by Colin Oberst): I like this one, not so much because I think it’s better than the rest but mainly because it’s so different. It’s the only one I think that comes out swinging after it gets going, and has that feeling of raising an army to defeat the enemy. It doesn’t sound like it’s holding anything back, and it’s not as repetitive as the others. It’s also more upbeat, almost to the point of cliché, which I think will appeal to less hard-edged hockey fans. But I could do without the bagpipes.
All five are works worthy of praise, and the CBC chose well. I don’t think any of them nail it 100%, but they surprise me with their quality (I had earlier suggested the contest might not be worth it). The fact that there were close to 15,000 entries is kind of astonishing.
Voting closes at 11:59pm Tuesday. Two finalists will be announced Thursday, and then the winner will be on the Hockey Night in Canada premiere on Saturday.
For those of us who look down upon Americans, thinking how stupid they are based on cherry-picking the worst responses to simple trivia questions, well, turnabout is fair play:
Dominic Arpin, the former TVA journalist, popular blogger and now host (again) of his own TV show about videos on the web, has finally launched a project called WebTVHebdo, which is a guide to web-based television shows. It’s a project he started a while ago with lackey Patrick Dion.
It covers international sensations like Ask a Ninja, but focuses on Quebec-based series like Le Cas Roberge and Les Recycleurs.
In a world where these things are popping up all over the place, a need quickly emerges to provide a reference, and Arpin and Dion have jumped on that void decisively.
Take your pick, everyone’s doing it:
The debate itself is an unintelligible shouting match, so I don’t think there’s much analysis to get out of it.
But feel free to analyze the liveblogs themselves below. Which is funniest? Most astute? Quickest?
UPDATE: My initial reactions: most of these liveblogs sound more like transcripts. Are these for people who can’t access TV? They seem to think that knee-jerk snark can replace rapid analysis. As the king of knee-jerk snark, I wonder why I’m not being paid to liveblog this.
My winner is the National Post, which has special software which works properly, has comments from a team of writers instead of one personality, and includes (moderated) comments from visitors with the liveblog comments. Losers include Le Devoir and Canoe, which didn’t have liveblogging at all.
UPDATE 2: Paul Wells has a franco blogger roundup of debate analysis.
UPDATE 3: Regan Ray at J-Source has a taste of the liveblogging action.
Dear FinallyFast.com,
I understand computers are hard, and that filming a commercial with people you found off the street can be difficult.
FinallyFast.com is for PC Computers Only
But when you say your product is for PCs only,
This iMac is apparently supposed to be a PC in the magic fairytale land of FinallyFast.com commercials
perhaps you shouldn’t show people using what are obviously Macs (albeit with the logos covered up).
BSOD on an iBook.. err, PC laptop
I can’t tell you how often I’ve gotten a blue screen of death on my iBook. Oh wait, yes I can. It’s never.
La Presse’s Émilie Côté has put together an interesting little project, Michel Dumais points out: an audio guide to St. Laurent Blvd. The idea is that you download the “podcast” (media outlets need to learn what “podcast” means: putting audio or video online doesn’t automatically make it a podast - a podcast is something you subscribe to which doesn’t apply here), and listen to it as you follow its instructions and walk slowly up the Main from La Presse’s office to the Plateau.
The audio is very professionally done, and it shows that La Presse got professionals to produce and narrate this project instead of having some clueless in-house person to muddle their way through. I haven’t listened to the whole thing (I don’t have an hour and a half to spare), but it seems to work.
There is one nagging problem though: I can’t for the life of me find an MP3 download link, even in the extended user’s guide. You can listen to it live on the site (which is completely useless if you’re intending to listen to it while following its instructions), and you can click on a link to download it through iTunes, but if you don’t have iTunes you’re screwed. I don’t see the point in having website visitors forced to use a particular piece of software. Is Apple paying them or something?
UPDATE (Sept. 30): They’ve added a link to an RSS feed that has links to the MP3 files.
That said, if you don’t mind jumping through that unnecessary hoop, and you have a couple of hours to kill, it’s something to do.
CTV has released its re-recording (with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) of the Hockey Theme (i.e. the ex-Hockey Night in Canada theme), which will be used on RDS and TSN hockey telecasts starting Oct. 10 and Oct. 14, respectively.
Here it is (MP3). TSN also has a story with video about the new theme.
Perhaps I should wait until it actually goes on air, or maybe it’s just my computer, but it sounds like elevator music compared to the rough-and-tumble CBC version.
The press release, which says it “revisits the original 1968 version” also gives plenty of praise for how awesome they think it is:
We’ve taken great pride in blending the heritage of the song with the best digital technology available, creating a stunning rendition sure to resonate with hockey fans across the country.
Colour me unimpressed.
Dailymotion has launched in Canada with both English and French versions. Which is better than YouTube did. Among the featured videos is this roundup of what happened at Podcamp Montreal from VideoPresse.
CBC’s Archives, which has good stuff but unfortunately encodes it using Windows Media, which I have to play using my choppy, buggy Quicktime plugin instead of a universal Flash player, has found archival footage of the five party leaders. As you can see, they have wacky hairstyles (Duceppe’s mullet being the most awesome) and big glasses and stuff.
Dion, Harper and Duceppe are all from the same turbulent early 90s era. Dion a political scientist commenting on the Charlottetown Accord pre-referendum. Harper from when he was a Reform Party wonk and before he was elected an MP, and Duceppe after he was elected in a by-election as the first Bloc Québécois MP (and the whole he-swore-an-oath-to-the-Queen controversy).
Layton is from a decade earlier, when he was elected in a surprise upset to Toronto City Council.
But the most interesting clip is of Elizabeth May, 30 years ago in 1978. It’s actually a feature piece for The Fifth Estate, about a debate in Nova Scotia on whether to spray the forest with insecticide to fight the spruce budworm which was devastating forests. Forestry executives were for it, wanting to protect their trees and fearing an epidemic. May was against it, saying the spray had health risks associated with it.
Curious, I looked up the Wikipedia article to see what happened with the whole debate. It seems the infestation died out on its own, as May predicted, and an environmentally-friendly insecticide was created to deal with the problem as well.
I just finished watching Michael Moore’s free-to-web (but only in the U.S. and Canada, wink wink) documentary “Slacker Uprising,” about his tour of swing states just before the 2004 presidential election.
Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about Michael Moore’s work. I liked Sicko, The Awful Truth and Bowling for Columbine, and I was ok with Fahrenheit 9/11.
But Slacker Uprising doesn’t explain any issue. It doesn’t argue any point. It doesn’t actually try to change anything, despite Moore’s pleas that the film be screened before the election. It’s just a bunch of videos of stump speeches pieced together with a bunch of videos of artists performing protest songs. This review from the Ann Arbor News explains it pretty well.
There are some interesting parts, about how Republicans attempted to stop the speeches, offered money to get student unions to cancel them, and even showed up, chanted and prayed out loud while Moore was speaking, but there’s already a documentary about that.
For those used to Moore’s passionate, personal arguments about political issues, you’ll be disappointed. He doesn’t even narrate the movie. Instead, you just hear him speaking to the converted, to the point where the hyperpartisanship of those audiences might turn you off from voting for Democrats.
Michael Moore chanting “one more day” isn’t entertaining, moving, inspiring or educational. And it’s not worth watching.
Last week, the Bloc Québécois started running a minute-or-so-long podcast in which Frédéric Savard gives a fast-talking roundup of political news and ends each item with a pun or other bad joke about other parties in the election.
As a master of punnery and bad jokes myself, I have to say that some of them are funny (black holes and Denis Coderre) and some are beyond groaner territory (Stéphane Dion being “tragically un-hip”).
Still, it’s pretty entertaining as far as party activities online go. The Liberals and Greens don’t have podcasts that I can find. The Tories’ podcast is nothing but stump speeches by Stephen Harper, and the NDP podcast hasn’t been updated since 2005.
This music video from Fluid Rouge featuring Jon Lajoie gives me an excuse not only to point to Dominic Arpin’s new Vlog blog (where I found it), but also the fact that Lajoie will be performing at Le National next weekend.
I’m informed by email that electopinion.ca, the five-party Twitter snapshot site, has tweaked its automated search terms so it stops showing stuff unrelated to the Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Bloc and Green parties.
Still no RSS feeds, though. Not to mention my general distaste for things Twitter.
Discovery Channel Canada has started airing its version of the adorably awesome 60-second “Boom de ah dah” commercial developed by its American counterpart. See if you can spot the lame Canadian insertions.
DemocraticSPACE has compiled its list of 68 battleground ridings in this election.
Montreal-area ridings on the list include:
Absent from the list is Westmount-Ville-Marie, which it expects to go to the Liberals’ Garneau; Papineau, which it expects will be an easy steal for Justin Trudeau; and adjacent Ahuntsic, which Liberal Eleni Bakopanos is expected to take back from Bloquiste Maria Mourani.
(or, at least, those who hear about a website in the morning and make a note to visit a half hour later)
In case you missed it, I was invited by CBC Daybreak to come in and give them an analysis of blog coverage of the federal election campaign (my super-secret project). I was originally supposed to go on yesterday, but with the debate going long I was bumped to today.
Unfortunately, in the first time in months (years?) that I’ve taken a metro train during morning rush hour, I experienced four separate delays (one of which had me stuck in the tunnel). I practically had a heart attack, knowing full well that radio deadlines aren’t flexible by even a second.
I gave up at Laurier metro as the lights went out in the train, and hurried outside to let the producer know I wasn’t there. They quickly decided to do the interview by (pay)phone. (One thing payphones still have over cellphones is that, because they don’t have to compress their data into compact wireless streams, the sound is much clearer and more radio-friendly. Not as good as in-studio, but desperate times…)
As I told host Mike Finnerty, I don’t blame the STM for the delays, which were due in part to technical problems and because of the traffic tie-ups those problems create. But I wasn’t thrilled with the transit corporation this morning, that’s for sure. (And, of course, the trip back home was entirely uneventful)
Anyway, we talked about this blog (it’s really a place for any opinions I like to give on anything, though I focus specifically on the media, public transit, stuff going on in the news, blogs, and of course myself. You can also read what I’ve written about the federal election so far.
We also got into the meat of the matter (though six minutes goes by so fast when you’re talking about stuff), discussing blogosphere reaction to Elizabeth May in the debates, as well as a video by Justin Trudeau (and the parody of that video by Prenez Garde Aux Chiens, whose season premiere is tonight at 10pm on Canal Vox) that has been making the rounds in the blogosphere recently.
I’ll try to get a clip of the segment up soon.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the Christian Heritage Party, which describes itself as the next-most-popular party after the Greens, wants into the leaders’ debates. The party had 45 candidates in the last election, and seems to think 70% of the country supports it. Yeah.
Their platform includes:
In other words, it’s the platform of the Christian conservative end of the Republican Party.
That might make the debates more entertaining.
UPDATE (Sept. 23): They’re suing.
The riding-by-riding election prediction machine DemocraticSPACE has launched its 2008 campaign website. It currently predicts the following seat makeup:
If these results hold, it would be bad for the Liberals nationally, bad for the Bloc, bad for the Greens (Vancouver Liberal-turned-Green MP Blair Wilson, they predict, will lose to the Tories), status quo for the NDP and, of course, good for the Conservatives, but still short of their goal.
The website will keep updating its predictions, based in part from comments left by constituents in those ridings, before taking a wild guess on too-close-to-call races just before the vote. In the 2006 election, the website was 94% accurate at predicting which party would win any given riding, underestimating the number of Liberal seats and overestimating the number of Conservative and Bloc seats.
As part of a big announcement this week that Google would be offering to digitize newspapers’ archives (with their permission) and put them online for free, the Quebec Chonicle-Telegraph, North America’s oldest newspaper and the only anglo paper in Quebec City, has jumped on board and some of its archives are already available on Google’s site, mainly from the 50s and 60s. (The QCT even got some link love on the Google Blog.)
(via Le Devoir)
Recent bookmarks