It’s so deliciously meta: viral videos about viral videos. First there was Internet People, and now The Internet Stars are Viral:
Not quite as original as Internet People, but good for a laugh for anyone who’s seen enough videos to get the references.
Apparently realizing that there are no real issues in this school board election, Commission scolaire de Montréal candidate Michel Bédard has decided to invent a scandal. Bédard is running as an independent against incumbent Paul Trottier of the establishment party MEMO in Division 15, which is the area around the Gay Village in southeast downtown.
Bédard is complaining that the school board had Canada Post print some of its election material, and they did so in Toronto. Apparently this blatant outsourcing is taking jobs away from Montrealers willing to print flyers.
Yeah.
Scandal.
About two and a half years ago, the STM introduced a new rush-hour bus route to the West Island. The 470 Express Pierrefonds was a strange beast, running limited-stop along the western half of Pierrefonds Blvd., then travelling up St. John’s Blvd. on regular-stop duty to Fairview. From there it would run non-stop straight to the Côte-Vertu metro station where most people would get off. The route ran, in both directions, during both rush hours.
The route turned out to be a big success, particularly for its non-stop shuttle service between Côte-Vertu and Fairview, which was the first of its kind. (The closest thing they had to it before then was the 216 Transcanadienne, which took the service road of Highway 40 and was designed to serve the industrial buildings in that corridor.)
But the bus was still rush-hour only, much to the annoyance of students, stay-at-home parents or anyone else without a car who wanted to do something during the day, at night or on the weekend. Some people (like me) have suggested over and over and over that the service be extended to become a regular 7-day route, just like the 211 Bord-du-Lac, which is non-stop between the Lionel-Groulx metro and Dorval train station, and then continues westbound to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue. Because it’s so fast and frequent, it’s the most popular bus route serving the West Island.
Starting Monday, the STM will be taking the first (small) step in that direction. They’ve announced that the 470 will fill the gap between morning and afternoon rush-hours and run “all day” (see the schedule in PDF) on weekdays. (A similar announcement was made about the 194 Métrobus Rivière-des-Prairies on the other side of the island, just to make sure us anglos aren’t getting special treatment.)
That’s great news, unless you plan on staying downtown past 7 p.m. or want to go downtown on the weekend. And really, how many kids in the West Island would want to do that?
Another problem is with the schedule. About half the people who use the bus (based on my oh-so-scientific anecdotal guesstimation) use it solely for its metro shuttle part, and use another bus to get between home and Fairview. Most of those buses run every half hour on the half-hour, so they’re timed to arrive at the terminus and drop off their arriving passengers a few minutes before the half-hour mark.
Thing is, all but two of the eastbound departures from Fairview take place six minutes before the half-hour mark, about the same time as these buses are arriving. It’s a schedule that seems almost designed to make people miss connections from about a dozen different bus routes, and I can’t seem to find any reason why the schedule as a whole can’t be delayed by six minutes to make the transfers easier.
Hopefully these things will become very apparent to the STM very shortly after the additional service is launched on Monday.
Concordia Reports, the TV news show created by Concordia journalism students, has started its third season since the shows started being uploaded to YouTube.
Though it’s a low-budget show, its journalists are untrained and nobody involved is going to win any awards for smooth acting, the show provides a chance to watch some interesting stories about Concordia and Montreal.
The second episode of the season includes a story on CJLO, the Concordia student radio station that’s still, after a gabillion years, trying to get its transmitter setup to broadcast on AM. It also features a lengthy interview with Mike Boone (starting about the 12-minute mark) about HabsInsideOut.com.
So far they have 32 shows uploaded, between 15 and 25 minutes in length.
Despite promising in July, when he left journalism to create this new show Vlog, that his blog would continu despite the career change, he’s come to realize, only a month after the show’s launch, that he doesn’t have enough time to keep it updated and he’s calling it quits.
Put aside for a moment his broken promise, as well as how much these kinds of posts annoy me. I think it’s a mistake.
Arpin’s blog is one of the most popular in this city, perhaps second only to Patrick Lagacé, who mourns his friend’s passing. Other media outlets would kill for blogs with that kind of traffic (especially since most media have no idea what blogs are for or how to make money off of them).
Vlog, though promising, is entirely untested. It’s only been a month, and the show is still working to build an audience. (And their website is still unworkable, its developpers having ignored all of my suggestions to fix it.)
Here’s hoping that the Domster reconsiders, like so many other bloggers have before.
The CRTC has approved a specialty TV service for Rogers called Rogers Sportsnet 2 (really? Couldn’t come up with anything better than that?), which is focused exclusively (90%) on soccer, cricket and rugby (also known as “the lesser team sports that only old British people watch). In fact, the license specifically prohibits the channel from carrying anything related to men’s ice hockey, basketball, U.S. and Canadian football and baseball (in other words, NHL, NBA, NFL, CFL, MLB, their minor leagues, junior leagues, amateur leagues, pee-wee leagues, street leagues or any other versions of these sports where the players have penises). This is to prevent competition with existing networks like TSN and RDS.
The application got two interventions, one from CTVglobemedia (which owns TSN), asking for a tougher restriction (Rogers initially offered a prohibition only on the major leagues, but agreed to the change), and the other from the Asian Television Network, which has its own cricket channel called Cricket Plus.
The latter got a funny-sounding response from Rogers, who said that because their channel focuses also on soccer and rugby, “the proposed service would not serve the interests of the cricket enthusiast as effectively as Cricket Plus.” Which is kind of like saying that because RDS carries baseball and football, it won’t serve the interests of hockey enthusiasts as well as the NHL Network. The idea of national exclusivity contracts (which is why NHL Network doesn’t carry any Canadian games) wasn’t brought up.
But that’s neither here nor there, since Cricket Plus doesn’t enjoy any guarantee from competition. What is interesting however, is that Cricket Plus is carried by Rogers cable, and so if the channels do end up competing with each other, it might be in Rogers’s interest to either remove Cricket Plus from its cable lineup or otherwise make it fail.
But perhaps I’m just being paranoid.
Just when you thought concentration of media ownership wasn’t such a bad thing, CTVglobemediaempire is asking the CRTC for the power to threaten to pull its cable channels off the air as a negotiating tactic with cable and satellite providers. This includes channels like Bravo!, the Comedy Network, CTV NewsNet, Discovery, MuchMusic (and the entire Much family), Space and TSN/RDS.
Aside from the outrageousness of punishing viewers as a negotiating tactic (as well as the legal ramifications of not giving us something we’ve paid for), most of these channels are licensed in a way that prohibits direct competition from other specialty channels.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If CTV wants to treat these channels like they’re private property to do with as it pleases, then the CRTC should allow free competition from other services.
I’ve always been skeptical of the official explanation of 9/11. I mean, fire causing a building to collapse? When has that ever happened? And the official explanation that the towers fell so fast because the lower floors provided minimal resistance to all the higher floors falling down on them at once doesn’t make any sense either. It’s obvious that the government secretly put explosives in the buildings, detonating them after planes had crashed into them, then later secretly removed all traces of evidence from the rubble, so that the casualties could be limited to a magic number between 2,500 and 3,000. Obviously.
Well now, a local group called Montreal 9/11 Truth has proved once and for all that the World Trade Centre collapse was deliberate using the best scientific means available: asking a bunch of laypeople at a metro station what they think.
George W. Bush’s resignation in disgrace can be expected within the hour.
LCN has a report on the Journal de Québec strike/lockout, which is now 6 months old. Naturally, the union-says-this/employer-says-that news package doesn’t disclose the fact that TVA/LCN and the Journal are owned by the same company.
Meanwhile, workers on the picket lines were warmly received by union leaders across the country, and their strike paper MédiaMatinQuébec is still going strong with the help of enthusiastic advertising from local businesses.
UPDATE (Oct. 26): I totally missed this feature by The Gazette’s David Johnston on the lockout/strike, as well as an accompanying analysis piece on crossover reporting. Both concentrate on journalists being asked to take photos or video in addition to writing articles, which saves money but produces crappy quality of both.
If you’ve been wondering what those election-style signs are doing up around town, you’ve missed the fact that there’s a school board election going on. Four boards on the Island of Montreal (two English, two French) are electing 54 of 86 commissioners on Nov. 4 to vote on important school board matters, not that I have any idea what important school board matters are.