Monthly Archives: March 2007

| Media

Indistinct society

The Other Bloke’s Blog has an interesting comment on the recent Society for News Design awards haul (23 total) by The Gazette: shouldn’t usability (both online and off) be taken into account as well?

The National Post (38 awards) also felt the need to toot its horn.

La Presse was best in Canada with 43.

Meanwhile at least one person is pointing out that giving out over 1,000 design awards a year kinda dilutes their value.

| Media, Montreal

Journalist, diss thyself (now with video)

So Concordia journalism prof Ross Perigoe was all like “hey Gazoo, you be all racist, mofo!”

And Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips was all like “oh no you didn’t!”

And Ross was like “yuh-uh, I looked at 362 articles you done published just after 9/11 and you be all negative ‘gainst Muslims, biatch!”

And Andrew was like “why you be all up in our journalists’ face man?”

And Ross was like “hey man, hate the game, not the playah, yous peeps be cool, yo, they’s just part of the oppressive system.”

Ross be all done write a thesis ’bout this cuz he got no life.

And so Ross was like “you didn’t do enough to fight back against racist tendencies, you white-ass crackah”

And Andrew was like “dude, it was right after frickin’ 9/11! What are you, brain damaged or somethin’?”

And then this guy Rachad was like “Ross dude, you need to review your methodology.”

And Andrew was like “oh snap! Pwned!”

And there was a Gazette journalist right there and he wrote about the whole thing. Dude.

UPDATE: YouTube has video of the question period. Perigoe’s speech and Phillips’s rebuttal are on Google Video.

The Concordian covers it here.

| Media, Movies

How can it still be before time?

Remember The Land Before Time? I do. It was a well-regarded 1988 animated movie about tiny dinosaurs separated from their parents. It had a happy ending (sorry if I spoiled it for you) but for a young kid watching it, there were some tense emotional moments there.

For some reason (greed), its makers decided to turn this story into an industry.  They produced 11 sequels, about one every year and a half. Instead of a well-written, gritty adventure story that can be enjoyed by young and old alike, they turned it into a musical farce that a four-year-old would quickly find boring.

Their latest outing comes out on DVD this week. I just saw a commercial for it on TV. I know all movies pick and choose what critics they’ll quote, but in this case the only two quotes were from a parenting magazine. In fact, it was Parenting Magazine. This magazine. Somehow I don’t think their movie critics are as harsh as the L.A. Times or Roger Ebert.

This spring, they’re adding a Cartoon Network TV series to the empire.
God help us all.

| Business, Media, Montreal

This hour has 26 minutes

I glanced at this ad in the West Island section of today’s Gazette. It’s for commercial real estate for rent.

Under “public transportation” it lists two things: the 210 bus from Fairview and “minutes from P.E.T. international airport”. First of all, I don’t know how appealing it is to have a rush-hour school-days only bus that’s filled to the brim with CEGEP students being your only source of public transit. Secondly, this building is more than 20 km from the airport. Google calculates the travel time as 26 minutes, which is clearly when there’s no traffic. Does that qualify as “minutes from the airport?” If so, isn’t the entire island minutes from the airport?