Monthly Archives: August 2007

| Humour, Media

How to write a bad letter to the editor

I just needed to get this off my chest.

  1. Start off by guessing that the newspaper won’t run your letter, or “daring” them to do so. Spend at least a few paragraphs discussing the newspaper’s lack of balls and the reasons behind their future decision not to publish your letter.
  2. Insult the newspaper liberally without giving any reasonings behind your blanket statements. Say the paper is stupid and that you’re smarter than them. Conclude that their declining circulation numbers are a direct result of their extreme political views and their decision to silence dissent.
  3. Make liberal use of the cut-and-paste quote. Make sure the quotes are at least 300 words long, that they’re well-known by everyone, that they’re from someone like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy or Mother Theresa. Also be sure they have no direct relevance to the point of your letter.
  4. Use quotes around words with unambiguous definitions.
  5. TWO WORDS: ALL CAPS.
  6. Never actually get to the point of your letter. Instead, repeat steps 1 to 3 for at least 3,000 words and then call it a day.
  7. Demand that the letter be printed as an opinion piece instead of a letter and that no editing be performed on it, even to fix spelling or formatting.
  8. Use thinly-veiled threats of violence to get your point across.
  9. Lace the entire letter with vulgar profanity.
  10. Use excess verbiage like “I’d like to draw you to the fact that” which hike up the word count but add nothing useful.
  11. Use metaphor without making it clear what the metaphor is supposed to represent.
  12. Add in a bunch of paragraphs of PhD thesis-ese that uses words and concepts nobody but people highly-schooled in the subject understand. Assume everyone has spent years studying the issue and does not need to be brought up to speed on the basics.
  13. Make grammatical errors so egregious the sentences lose all meaning. Those that are correct should be run-on sentences which require minutes to parse into something meaningful.
  14. Write the letter in response to someone who was responding to a letter of yours, just to correct minor irrelevant points or make ad hominem attacks instead of dealing with the actual argument.
  15. Abruptly change the subject halfway through and discuss something entirely different.
  16. Invent your own credentials. Make yourself an expert in this field and imply that nobody knows as much as you do.
  17. Invent facts to support your case. Say 99% of people do something based solely on a guess. Use paranoid conspiracy theories as the basis for your arguments.
  18. Use opinion pieces by advocacy groups as if they were objective sources of facts. Take their word for everything they say, even if it’s self-serving and unsourced. Reference it in a way that hides the fact that this is a text from an advocacy group.
  19. Use footnotes with MLA-style references, even if the paper has never used footnotes before.
  20. Say that you’re writing on behalf of a group and add 30 of your friends’ names to the end of the letter. Demand that all the names be published.
  21. After the next issue comes out, even if it’s only hours after you sent your letter, assume they will never print it and start an email campaign accusing the paper of silencing you. Immediately send another letter admonishing them for not printing your previous one as if they’re actually going to print the second and not the first.
  22. Mention that you’re sending the exact same letter to dozens of other newspapers (list them all by name).
  23. Forget to include your name or any other information on who you are or how to contact you.
  24. Send dozens of letters every week. Demand the newspaper publish them all.
  25. BONUS: If the newspaper points out that they don’t have enough space to publish all of your letters, much less your letters and those of everyone like you, suggest they start adding pages or cutting other sections of the paper to make more room for letters.

Just use these simple steps, and you’re guaranteed* to get results.

*Not guaranteed

| Montreal, Public transit

Cash transit refunds this week

From Tuesday to Saturday, cash refunds are being made available at select metro stations for those with May 2007 monthly passes who don’t plan on buying a September pass.

Metro refund stations

Special booths are being setup outside the turnstiles of these stations where special ticket-takers will exchange your May 2007 pass for $3.50 ($2.00 for reduced fare passes) and a receipt for tax purposes (but only from 6am to 7pm).

The STM has a PDF poster online, though curiously that poster isn’t put up at these booths, which means unless you’ve been paying close attention to the newspapers, you probably have no clue what they’re for.

Starting Sunday, when September passes go on sale, May passes can be returned in exchange for a discount on the September pass and the same tax receipt, and this can be done at any location that normally sells transit passes.

| In the news, Video

Protesters gone wild!

The protests in Montebello this week had one major difference from those in Quebec City in 2001: YouTube. Videotape evidence is the great truth-teller in a world where denials are cheap. It’s what turned Rodney King from just another crazy-talking black guy exaggerating a routine police matter into a media sensation and a giant black eye for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Militant protesters who see police brutality as the norm rather than the exception are increasingly using video cameras to safeguard their rights and prove the police are out to get them while they plant flowers peacefully.

One of the videos out of Montebello shows an interesting idea that seems to be gaining popularity: That those violent rock-throwing mask-wearing protesters are actually under-cover police officers and government agents ordered to provoke a violent altercation between police and protesters to give police an excuse to move in and start beating people up.

Today I received an email from a group which includes Jaggi Singh (who himself has been quietly accused by some paranoid crazy-thinking friends of mine of being an undercover cop), and it links to the video with some conjecture:

Is there a cover-up of the police agents that are revealed in the above video? Were the police trying to create divisions between protesters by provoking an incident?

The video itself shows three such protesters, one holding a rock, provoking the police. What’s interesting is that they’re being stopped by other protesters — some normal-looking suit-wearing Council of Canadians/union leftists, others peacenik hippie mask-wearing-but-not-rock-throwing chant-yellers — and both groups are accusing them of being police officers.

Some other Montebello videos:

| In the news, Media, On the Net, Technology

Journalists, wikiscan thyself

It seems a little online tool called Wikiscanner is generating a lot of media attention. It searches through anonymous edits by IP or IP range, a simple enough concept that in itself would not be worthy of attention (in fact, Wikipedia already allows you to list the edits made by a particular IP address anonymously). What has gotten the media all riled up is the application of this: tying those IP ranges to recognized organizations like the New York Times or the White House.

It’s even got some local attention after a computer from City Hall was fingered as being behind a defacing of executive committee president Frank Zampino — though it turns out that apparently wasn’t the case.
One thing that isn’t really made clear in these reports is that the edits are being made by people who work within the organization, but not necessarily management. In fact, it’s more likely to be some schmuck working a boring office job than a high-level executive wanting to control public opinion.

And like most edits in general on Wikipedia, most of these edits are pretty benign. Fixing spelling mistakes and correcting minor facts on articles about sports teams and musicians.

But some are embarrassing, or just plain silly.

So I’ve applied the Wikiscanner to some Canadian media IPs I know. (Know any not listed here? Let me know.) Here’s some edits I found that were made from within these organizations:

CBC:

Toronto Star (and related organizations like the Kitchener-Waterloo Record):

La Presse:

The Gazette/CanWest:

| In the news, Media

Montebello, welcome to your 15 minutes

The press is all over the summit at Montebello, partly because George W. Bush seldom visits this country, and partly because the protest is expected to be on a scale similar to what happened at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001.

So far the protests have been peaceful. Things like a caravan starting here at 8:30 this morning are well-planned photo ops to get the media on-side. And left-wing papers like Hour have been supportive, writing about them in a good light. The Globe, meanwhile, has a piece from Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, denouncing the meeting’s lack of transparency. Le Devoir is also on their side, suggesting that three conservative leaders (even by their countries’ standards), combined with executives of the largest corporations in North America might not have everyone’s interests at heart.

And there’s always the NDP. And The Dominion.

Of course, not everyone’s a hippie or hippie ally. The Gazette has a long editorial accusing the left of being paranoid, and trusting that the three amigos are not made of pure evil. It (only half-fairly) paints the environmental and labour lobby as obstructionists who oppose all progress just for its own sake. While it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see that happening, I’m not one for believing that these corporate leaders wouldn’t similarly object strenuously if a policy being considered hurt their bottom line in even the most minute way.

The editorial then curiously uses the example of the harmonization of pesticide regulations to make the point that being screwed over by the U.S. is good because it raises awareness about how we’re being screwed over by the U.S.

Antagoniste also wonders what everyone’s complaining about.

Other Montebello-related tidbits from the papers this weekend:

Finally, La Presse’s André Noël gets the award for lamest story lead related to this issue:

Connaissez-vous le PSP? Oui, bien sûr, il y a la PlayStation Portable de Sony. Mais soyez francs: connaissez-vous le Partenariat nord-américain pour la sécurité et la prospérité?

| Uncategorized

Tuition increase just the tip of the iceberg

As the fall semester fast approaches from the horizon for students, some will be getting a wake-up call when they go to pay their tuition.

You see, in addition to the $100 a year tuition increase (which works out to $50 a semester, $10 a course or $3 a credit), universities are continuing to pack on administrative fees — taxes on tuition to pay for things that used to be included free.

At my alma mater, Concordia University, some of the new fees include a “Copyright fee” and a “Technology Infrastructure Fee”, even though the latter, at $4 per credit or $60 a semester, doesn’t include access to things like the formerly-free campus-wide wireless network — now they make you pay for that, which is pissing off some students.

Concordia’s list of “miscellaneous fees” is always good for a laugh, and was the butt of jokes at the Concordia Student Union back when it was controlled by the radical left. There’s a fee to apply, a fee to confirm attendance, a fee for the required student ID card, a fee to graduate, and a fee to mail your degree, among many others.

But while students make fun of these fees and protest against them, the number of student association fees (which the students themselves approve) has gone up considerably in the past few years. In 2000, there were 10 of these fees. Now the number has doubled. The newest fee, to be added in the winter, will support the “Sustainability Action Fund”. This isn’t to be confused with the entirely separate fee to run Sustainable Concordia, or for groups like the CSU or the Quebec Public Interest Research Group. In all, these student-managed fees account for between $8 and $12 per credit, which works out to $240 to $360 per year. (And that doesn’t include the student-managed health and dental plan, which is another $200 per year)

While some of these fees are opt-outable (most notably the health plan), most aren’t.

So before student groups start complaining about how their constituents are being nickel-and-dimed to death, perhaps they should start looking in their own backyard.

| My articles

Hell no, we will go

This Week in Me is a Justify-Your-Existence interview with Mandeep Dhillon, a rabble-rouser with No One Is Illegal who’s among the busloads headed to Montebello (map) this weekend to protest the Three Amigos and their Security and Prosperity Partnership, an area Stephen Harper is gung-ho about.

I’ll remember it more as the first interview I conducted that my batteries in the voice recorder actually lasted through. I interviewed her just after Tuesday’s CN protest, after the cameras had left and everyone was about to head home.

I’m sympathetic to many of the arguments about public transparency and native rights and police brutality. Unfortunately I find the language used by Jaggi Singh and his ilk to be off-putting at best.

We’ll see on Monday whether the fears of Montebello’s residents — that protesters who can’t get near the fortress of doom resort where leaders are staying will instead just smash windows of local businesses — are justified.

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Beyoncé has too much power over the media

Remember when Le Devoir was banninated from a Police concert because they wouldn’t play ball with promoters? (And other Montreal media stayed mostly silent on the subject?)

Well, in the continuing saga of mainstream publications whining about the crappy treatment they receive when trying to treat concerts as news, some members of the media are saying they weren’t given enough time to shoot photos during the Beyoncé concert this week.

Maybe newspapers should consider not going to big-time Bell Centre concerts altogether. I, for one, don’t care what the song order and costume choices were for some big-time musician’s sold-out show that I couldn’t see if I wanted to.

| Business, Montreal, Technology

Videotron puts limits on “unlimited”

Videotron sent a letter to its Extreme High-Speed Internet customers this week saying their previously unlimited bandwidth was now going to be capped at 100 GB a month, effective October 1. After that, it’ll cost $1.50 per GB for downloading.

Some people are complaining about the change, which doesn’t come with a reduction in price.

Although not many residential customers use more than 3 GB per day, it’s the principle. It’s a substantive negative change which Videotron is trying to obfuscate by using confusing language. Their website still lists the service as “unlimited”, and there’s no trace of any notice on their website of this change in policy.

The silver lining for anyone that has Extreme High-Speed Internet with Videotron is that they can cancel their contract without penalty before paying their next bill by citing this change.

Section 3.9 of their service contract:

3.9 Modifications – Videotron may, upon at least thirty (30) days’ prior notice to the customer’s Videotron Messaging Address or by mail, modify the Services or any other provision of this agreement, including the charges and rates stipulated in subsection 3.1 . However, no prior notice shall be required with regard to a modification of Services if Videotron’s service offerings remain similar and have no impact on the charges payable by the customer. By settling the account statement accompanying any notice of modification to this agreement, the customer shall be irrevocably deemed to have accepted the modification. However, the customer may, within thirty such (30) days delay, cancel this agreement or request that it be modified in the manner provided in subsection 11.4 below, failing which the customer shall irrevocably be deemed to have accepted the modifications covered by the notice.

If any of you plan on doing that, let me know how the conversation with customer service goes.

| Montreal, Radio

Some retirement, Dennis

Dennis Trudeau on 940 News

Remember Dennis Trudeau? He used to be the anchor of CBC Newswatch (that was before CBC gutted local TV news — a decision they’ve thankfully begun to reverse). Two years ago he decided to retire, though he left the door open to other projects, saying he had “lots of ideas” he wanted to work on:

“In this wired world of 500 television channels, opportunities are limitless. I might like to be a commentator. I might like to write. But I do want to try something different from the daily news grind.”

Today comes the news that Trudeau will be joining 940 News as the new morning man, starting Sept. 3, along with Aphrodite Salas (who will move from her current late-morning show on the same station).

Trudeau is no stranger to radio. He’s hosted Daybreak, As it Happens and Cross-Country checkup. I’m sure he’ll do well in front of a microphone. But why oh why would someone who’s tired of the daily news grind agree to host a weekday morning radio show from 5:30 to 10 a.m.?

As for Ken Connors, who currently hosts the show, he’ll move to a “new” afternoon drive-time show on Q92.

UPDATE (Aug. 29): Two weeks later, Mike Boone adds his take with some words from Mr. Trudeau, who insists he’s never retired. It also adds a clarification: that it was Ken Connors moving to Q92 that prompted the station to seek Trudeau, rather than the other way around.