Remember that decision by Warner Brothers to cancel advance screenings of its films this summer? Yeah, Ottawa caved. So now it’ll be illegal to record films, even if you have no intention of doing anything illegal with it.
Guilty until proven innocent, just because it’s so difficult to prove guilt.
Shortly after the Dawson shootings last September, an unknown local singer (annoying Flash warning) wrote a cheesy pop song about it. Of course, being a cheesy pop song, teenage CEGEP students ate it up, and everyone grieved together supportively.
The song was turned into a fundraising campaign (with its own MySpace page – standard MySpace warnings apply), which unsuccessfully tried to raise serious money for the college.
I wrote about the artist and campaign for The Gazette (no link, since it’s not online anymore). I pointed out that on one hand, this event brought a lot of people together and the song has been getting a lot of support. On the other hand, the song’s creator never attended Dawson, and admitted part of the reason she created the song was to increase her public profile in the hope of being signed.
Well now there’s an official video for the song. Like just about every YouTube video about things like this, it’s a slideshow of (unlicensed) wire service photos of people screaming and crying set to the tune of a song.
Forgive me, because I haven’t been involved in a catastrophic event such as this one, but I fail to see how seeing photos of people crying and running for their lives is supposed to help me emotionally. It seems to me such a thing would only make it worse. The media focused enough on the violence — perhaps we should be focusing on something else?
Pillow fight Saturday (Facebook link). 3pm at Ste-Catherine and Jeanne Mance.
Some bloggers are discovering some interesting and eyebrow-raising posts on Montreal Craigslist (whose best-of listing leaves a little to be desired).
Ashley Watson in Quebec City says that most Quebecers favour separation, despite the horrible showing of the PQ in the last election.
I don’t think we’ll ever get the issue of public support for separation settled until we put it to some sort of province-wide vote. Have everyone weigh in on that issue and only that issue. And then do it again 15 years later just to confirm the results.
If only we did that, then the issue would be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.
Warner Bros. is cancelling advance screenings of its blockbuster summer films in order to combat rampant camcording piracy in Canada, and especially Montreal. So we won’t be able to see Harry Potter and Emma’s enhanced breasts before it’s actually released. Who cares? Well, the papers do, since they won’t be able to review films in advance of opening weekend. Instead, they’ll have to do what they did with Snakes on a Plane, and review it with real people sitting in the theatre with them.
I suppose I should mention that the claims — that people camcording films in Montreal’s movie theatres is the biggest source of pirated movies — have already been debunked, and that Latin America is more of a problem than Canada. But if I did that then we wouldn’t be able to write big feature stories about Canada’s rampant piracy problem.
In other non-news, the Eastern Townships School Board is in “trouble” because it spent $38,000 sending 34 people to Texas for a conference on integrating computers into the classroom. Who cares? If you ask me, getting people to a conference like this for about $1,000 a person is a pretty good deal, and considering their laptop program costs something like $15 million, spending a tiny fraction of that on proper training seems to me to be a good use of money.
The Justiciers Masqués fooled Nicolas Sarkozy, pretending to be Stephen Harper with his bad French, and inviting Sarkozy to a “diner des cons” with George W. Bush. Listen to it here. Who cares? They did the same thing to Jacques Chirac last year.
Manhunt, which was profiled last week in the Mirror, returns to Old Montreal this Saturday (5pm), and are meeting outside the Centaur Theatre.
Hey, did ya hear? André Boisclair quit today. I won’t bore you by talking about the cliché-ridden farewell speech, or analyze what this means for the PQ, but point to some interesting commentary online. Some say he was arrogant. Some say he was very very arrogant to the point of being cartoonishly evil (and therefore a gift to Anglophonia).
Some say it was his soft stance on separation that made the PQ hard-liners abandon him for the ADQ. One suggests that the PQ needs to disband, and a tougher, fresher independence-centred party needs to be formed that’s sole purpose is separation. A Parti de Libération du Québec, if you will (though its three-letter abbreviation would be unfortunately confusing).
The Antagoniste asks a good question: How is a party who can’t decide on its own leader supposed to properly negotiate independence?
And then there’s Paul Wells, who had the most poignant reaction and analysis of this turn of events.
Let us laugh…
UPDATE: It wasn’t because he was gay, says Montreal gays who are about the last people who are qualified to say so. After all, he didn’t lose votes on St. Catherine Street, he lost them in the Laurentians and the Beauce and in Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!
Actually, not Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! That’s in Kamouraska-Temiswhatever, and it’s still Liberal, but you get my point.
I’ve been following the 09 F9 thing (or as Wikipedia calls it, the “AACS encryption key controversy“) for a while now, but haven’t seen much local commentary about it (other than people posting the illegal number to their blogs).
But Galacticast, the Montreal-based sci-fi parody show, put together a brilliant parody of LOST incorporating the number. It’s worth taking a look. (They’re also shilling for charity, so check that out too.)
My take? Well, it’s not like we haven’t seen this before. It’s almost like that whole DeCSS thing. No, wait, it’s exactly like the DeCSS thing. So we’ll probably see a similar end result. The keys have already been changed, and new movies won’t be decodable with this number, so damage will be minimal. Besides, simply knowing the number won’t help the layman copy his HD-DVD and distribute it online.
But the damage to DRM’s reputation is clear, and irreversible.
If you’ve never experienced student politics at Concordia University, you’ll never understand it. It’s cold, calculating, ruthless, predictable, and it consumes would-be student politicians, infusing them with the worst that partisan politics have to offer.
The Concordia Student Union obsession began six years ago, when two nerds ran against each other. Not content to simply win or lose, both amassed an army of blind followers who would suspend their own moral compass in order to achieve the greater good. People refused to talk to each other, convinced that every minor misunderstanding was a huge conspiracy against them. Yearly elections were planned months in advance, with every underhanded trick under the book considered fair game.
Now, with those early nerds gone and the radical extreme sides of half a decade ago replaced with moderate parties whose politics aren’t all that different, some of those minions are finally coming to realize this, and they’ve created a Facebook support group (64 members and growing):
Now that the minority Quebec government has put power in the hands of whatever two of three parties can agree on, it looks like tuition in this province is finally going to (formally) increase. The Liberals promised a small hike, and the ADQ’s platform is in favour of tuition hikes. Only the PQ is in favour of keeping the freeze intact.
This is, of course, horrible news for student groups, to whom students pay huge amounts of money to represent their interests – chief among them being tuition. ASSÉ, the more militant student group, has already called for yet another unlimited student strike this fall. (I’d link to the English version, but their English site hasn’t been updated in two years.)
Some people are pointing out that the tuition hikes were open platform points for both parties, and the issue was heavily debated before the election. People want to raise tuition (in as much as voters can “want” any single issue in this electoral system).
The problem is that these groups are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can’t do nothing, or else their power to put fear into politicians’ hearts will fade (pressure from these groups is what has kept tuition this low for so long). On the other hand, cry wolf too often and nobody takes you seriously any more. ASSÉ especially has been very quick on the “strike” trigger (which is made worse by the fact that student “strikes” don’t actually cause financial or labour problems for the government), and this has led to many groups (including the Concordia Student Union) dropping ASSÉ in favour of the less militant and more negotiating FEUQ.
So even though ASSÉ is silly to call this strike, they must do so in order to save face.
Yesterday I stopped by the H-110 auditorium at Concordia University’s Hall Building, a room I haven’t been to in a few years, to see the local premiere of Helvetica, the movie. It’s a surprisingly fascinating and well-done documentary about one of the world’s most prolific fonts, with tons of pictures of signs and logos that use it and conversations with type designers (like Hermann Zapf of Zapf Dingbats fame and Matthew Carter, who created Verdana and my personal favourite Georgia).
The surprising thing about both the movie and its presentation was how funny it was (granted, the room was filled with geeks so it might not be so universally funny). The designers (type and otherwise) all had differing opinions on Helvetica, calling it ubiquitous, genius and boring. You couldn’t help but laugh at how absolute they were about their opinions.
To add to the fun, the screening staff had t-shirts that read “Helveticrew” and there was a small group of Arial enthusiasts in the crowd (they were playfully booed as they were announced and again as one of them won the first door prize – a Helvetica movie poster).
What got much fervent applause was the line right after the Arial introduction:
“We’ve stopped the Comic Sans people at the door.”
P.S. There really were a librarian, an archivist and a graphic designer among the people I knew at the screening. The librarian and designer are sisters, for what it’s worth.
In today’s paper comes the second in my three-part blogger-author series, about Lucie le chien (which is on hiatus in blog form) and its author Sophie Bienvenu (whose personal blog is still running).
Meanwhile, please don’t blame me for this laudatory piece about Geek Squad. I know all about Geek Squad’s many many many many many (alleged) problems, including this piece I read last night.
According to Robert Fisk (here’s a grain of salt), an expert on the Armenian genocide was delayed at Trudeau airport because he was suspected of being a terrorist. And among the evidence used against him was his Wikipedia biography.
Yeah.
Apparently Chroniques d’une mère indigne is so popular it’s going into reprints. Something else I’ll have to mention in an upcoming article about it.