CBC.ca has a feature section on Wittman, including some clips of his more memorable moments (which I think understate how recognizable a voice he was on CBC Sports).
The article (which Kate thinks has an editorializing headline but I think is a legitimate question, even though I didn’t write it) is cut off online. Here’s the missing text:
Alerts are given to drivers by text message on their cellphones. Doesn’t that encourage dangerous cellphone use while driving?
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. It takes a second to read, and you can hold the cellphone in front of you as you read it, to keep your eyes on the road. It doesn’t worry me. We’ve studied this. Ads on the side of the road or drinking a coffee are more of a distraction than a text message.
I talked with Munoz last week in the small company’s log-cabin-like offices in Old Montreal, around the corner from the municipal courthouse. He sat me down on his expensive-looking leather couch and we talked for a while about the ethics of his service and tickets in general.
Munoz, a young technically-proficient businessman, not only didn’t agree that what he was doing was morally questionable. He feels he’s helping society through this service:
It keeps the idea of speed traps in drivers’ heads, so they’re conscious that they need to slow down
Because it relies on members reporting speed traps, it’s not 100% and won’t encourage people to drive faster because they can never be sure a cop isn’t there
Everyone speeds anyway. It isn’t less safe
Speeding tickets don’t make highways safer, they just bring in more money to the police
Dangerous driving is caused by 16-18-year-olds who are taught about signage and the highway code but not how to drive safely or keep a car under control in an emergency
Munoz sees S.O.S. Ticket as the only true force representing regular car drivers. He philosophizes that nobody has ever changed the world by being liked by everyone.
Whether he does more good than harm is something for you to decide.
This ad ran in the paper last week from the Insurance Bureau of Canada. It talks of the 10th anniversary of the ice storm, and the recovery efforts that brought everyone together. It also notes how proud the insurance industry is of the “vital role” it played in that recovery.
It’s along similar lines to this letter from a couple of weeks ago, talking about the heroic insurance adjusters who processed hundreds of thousands of claims in the weeks that followed.
OK sure, it was a lot of work and I’m sure those insurance people had to work overtime. And unlike airline pilots or police officers, insurance adjusters rarely have moments of great triumph in their profession. But this ad makes them out to be heroes, just for processing some forms and cutting some cheques.
Had the insurance companies gone out of their way, above and beyond in compensating policy holders, I might have let them shamelessly suck in the pats on the back. But they didn’t. Instead, they warned people without power not to leave their homes unless they were forced to by the government, saying they wouldn’t be compensated for additional living expenses. A class-action lawsuit is still being fought to get policy holders compensated.
Perhaps instead of spending so much money on advertising masturbation they could settle the lawsuit and give their clients the money they’re owed.
For those who didn’t read the book or see the made-for-TV movie about the incident, an Air Canada flight from Montreal to Edmonton in 1983 had a malfunctioning fuel gauge, and ground workers fuelling it manually miscalculated the amount needed through a metric conversion error (the plane was among the first all-metric ones to be flown here). The pilots didn’t find out they were low on fuel until just before the engines died, and ended up landing it without engine power, flaps, half their instruments, a locked nose gear and most of the power assistance for flight controls.
This line from the first article linked below sums it up best:
As Pearson began gliding the big bird, Quintal “got busy” in the manuals looking for procedures for dealing with the loss of both engines. There were none. Neither he nor Pearson nor any other 767 pilot had ever been trained on this contingency.
The story goes on to even more craziness: turning the airplane on its side to lose altitude quickly while on final approach; landing on a decommissioned runway with hundreds of people celebrating a family fun day at the other end (the plane stopped just a hundred feet short of spectators), and the maintenance crew driving up from Winnipeg in a van who got lost and ran out of gas along the way.
But other people recount this story much better than I do. Here are some of the better ones:
Soaring Magazine, 1997 (a good telling of the story with technical background)
It’s one of my favourite airplane stories, and definitely my favourite one that hasn’t yet been featured on my favouritest show ever. (Though they’re planning 10 new episodes this year, so maybe it’s time?)
Amazingly enough, it’s not even the longest recorded engineless glide of a commercial airliner. That honour goes to Air Transat Flight 236, which took off from Toronto and lost fuel over the Atlantic due to a fuel leak. The pilots in that flight had a similar crisis to contend with, only the runway they were headed to was on a tiny island in the middle of a very large ocean.
But the Gimli Glider came first. Before then, nobody had even (seriously) conceived of flying a large passenger jet this way. Its crew instantly became test pilots, and the aircraft itself one giant guinea pig pushed to its limits. After what was sure to be a devastating crash, it required only moderate repairs and left the runway on its own power, going back for repairs and continuing as a passenger aircraft for another two decades.
J’ai jamais pensé que le Courrier international à décidé que je suis un “ailleurs” ici. (En regardant le blogue encore, c’est plutôt parce que je suis anglophone, et il aime mon blogue alors j’ai rien contre lui)
Ma mère n’est pas fâché contre moi pour le truc “Jim FM” (je savais pas qu’ils lisait mon blogue en direct!). Mais elle pense que j’étais un peu nerveux. C’est vrai, mais j’étais plutôt fatigué!
Ma carte n’est pas à 100%, ça prend un autre mise-à-jour fini!
Je retourne à mon lit maintenant.
(Voici un enregistrement “rush” de baisse qualité de l’entrevue. Je vais le remplacer par un plus meilleur: .mp3, .ogg)
Those of you willing to wake up early enough to listen to it will not only listen to my embarrassingly awful French being broadcasted to a huge audience, but that same awful French made awfuler by the fact that I’ll be low on sleep.
My dad’s a devout CHOM listener. The remaining stations he knows only by their callsign.
Let’s hope the station understands me better through my cellphone.
UPDATE (After the interview): Here’s a rush recording of the interview from my not-designed-for-broadcast digital recorder. I’ll replace it with a better version later: .mp3, .ogg
One of the things that surprised me talking to people about newspapers is how many of them see the crossword as its most important part. Take out the news, sports, classified, even the front page flag and they’ll live with it. But touch their New York Times crossword and there’s hell to pay.
The Gazette is considering adding Deducto to its puzzles page. Deducto is a symbol-based deductive reasoning puzzle much like Sudoku, but its rules make little sense and there’s no challenge to it.
Initial response from select readers about the idea has so far been skewed negative. They’re happy with their crossword (or their Sudoku), and this puzzle’s instructions seem too complicated and uninteresting to bother learning.
Feel free to make your jokes here: Gazette readers can’t do deductive reasoning; Gazette readers can’t read; Gazette readers are allergic to new ideas.
Would you like to see this game added to your newspaper? It’s a moot point with me since I get my paper electronically and I’m not about to write on my screen.
On one hand, many non-journalists might argue that it’s obvious such user-generated sites should not be considered authoritative.
But this story exposes one of journalism’s Achilles heels: In general, we take people at their word that they are who they say they are. Unless there is something suspicious that would lead us to believe otherwise (like someone giving their name as Hugh Jass), we ask people for their names and we trust that they’re not fooling us.
Is this wrong? No matter how good we get at our jobs, journalists will always be vulnerable to pranksters and others who intentionally try to mislead us. (Insert Iraq war comparison here.)
Should we just accept that as an occupational hazard, or should we start checking ID whenever we want to quote someone by name?
