Category Archives: In the news

| Business, In the news

Gross negligence is an understatement

Gojit logo

Ever consider using GoJit or Dicom for deliveries? You might want to reconsider, because apparently they don’t keep track of their packages, and won’t reimburse you when gross negligence causes tonnes of merchandise to grow legs and disappear right under their noses.

Last week Quebec Superior Court ruled that the company was liable for $90,000 of boots that were lost in 2004. The company had offered a laughable $6,000 compensation when the 88 cartons over six palettes disappeared, and never called the police to report a theft.

Considering these actions take “gross incompetence” to a new level, the $118,307.65
judgment against them (plus interest retroactive to 2004) seems small.

UPDATE (Aug 8th): Just got off the phone with a VP at GoJIT. Apparently they haven’t received the decision yet from their lawyer, so won’t comment (too much) on the legal case. But apparently the compensation situation is an industry standard, and not just GoJIT policy. Look out for the interview in an upcoming article.

| Business, In the news, Montreal

Cours Mont Royal is watching you pee

Someone complained to the Gazette about video cameras in the men’s room at Cours Mont Royal. Apparently, according to the proprietor, the cameras aren’t running, due to that minor matter of it being illegal to film someone in a bathroom.

But they say it’s working, deterring illegal acts like drug dealing, vandalism, gay sex, peeing on the floor, and, of course, forgetting to wash one’s hands.

I just hope Jeff Goldblum doesn’t get his hands on it.

| In the news, Media

Grow up and stop repeating yourself

Stop me if you’ve seen this one before:

  1. Party A makes a scathing criticism of something, overblowing a legitimate but minor disagreement to turn it into some national crisis.
  2. Party B criticizes Party A for crying wolf and comes to the defence of the person or action being criticized. Uses a history of similar wolf-crying as evidence to bolster the case.
  3. Party A accuses Party B of trying to silence them and take away their right to free expression, repeats arguments of Step 1 in different words.
  4. Party C comes to the defence of Party B, makes the same criticisms of Party A from Step 2, only in different words.
  5. Party D issues an ad hominem attack on Party B for completely personal reasons, and doesn’t deal with the dispute at hand.
  6. The general public gets bored of everyone accusing everyone else of trying to silence them and moves on, while letters to the editor stack up to the ceiling on both sides as everyone wants a chance to repeat arguments already laid out, in their own words.

Everyone needs to just take a deep breath. B’nai Brith criticized Liberal candidate Jocelyn Coulon. Josée Legault came to his defence. It should have ended there.

I was exposed to this same routine many times at Concordia when I ran the student paper there (naturally, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was usually the subject there too). I though that I wouldn’t see that kind of childish back-and-forth when I stepped out into the real world.

I guess I was wrong.

| In the news, Montreal

Rats or humans: Who is stupider?

There’s an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa performs a science experiment comparing the relative intelligence of her brother and a lab rat. The rat learns quickly that the cheese is hooked to electrodes and stops trying to eat it. The brother doesn’t.

You hear stories about things being stolen for their value as scrap metal. Statues, plaques, etc. Some of the really stupid guys go after electrical wire, while it’s still electrified. In all cases I’m aware of, they cause serious injury to themselves, and never succeed in their task. And yet, they keep coming back.

How can humans be that stupid?

| Blogosphere, Slow News Day

I’m a dirt-eater and proud of it

940 News’s Ken Connors talked this morning about the good ol’ days, when children ate lead-encrusted dirt, played with fire, sniffed spraycan propellant and shot each other with BB guns. And somehow they’re still around to whine about all the safety measures society has put in place for children.

Well, there’s a few things wrong with that argument. First of all, we can’t talk to all the people that died from those things since they’re, well, dead. Just because all the people we find now survived those days doesn’t mean the survival rate was 100%.

Secondly, life expectancy at birth has increased by about a decade over the past 50 years. Part of that is due to new medicine and treatments, but increased safety can’t be discounted as a part of it as well.

Finally, if you want to go back to the good ol’ days with none of society’s current overprotections, you’re welcome to emigrate to a developing country and eat their lead-encrusted dirt.

That said, some points are worth considering. It’s becoming common knowledge that the increase in allergies today is due in part to the sterile lifestyle of some children who aren’t exposed to small amounts of toxins at an early age. And the drop in outdoor play activities (has this really occurred among children?) is making us fatter and lazier.

I think we can find some middle ground between sterility and Darwinism.

| In the news, Media, Montreal

Pedophilia: the new gay? I hope not

Montreal is in the news again for being a pedophilia haven. First we had a website hosted here, now another site based on it is promoting an upcoming children’s festival at Maisonneuve Park.

The website, which nobody wants to link to (what are they afraid of exactly? Their readers suddenly turning into pedophiles? Or those who are already pedophiles getting access to like-minded websites?), and I won’t either just to avoid sending traffic their way (if you want to find it, you can do like I did and Google-search the direct quote from it used in the article), defends its stance saying that pedophilia is a “sexual orientation” and not a crime. It’s OK if you’re just looking at girls and fantasizing, as long as you don’t touch them, I guess.

The website has guides that sound a bit like what gay support websites might have looked like 50 years ago if the Internet existed back then. There’s talk about the law, about living with a pedophile, about how pedophilia doesn’t necessarily lead to child molestation, and how to “come out” as a pedophile to your family. Some parts suggest the website is trying to ride the line between legal and illegal, while others make it seem like pedophilia is entirely platonic – and can be satisfied by donating money to UNICEF.

According to the SQ (or “Sret du Qubec” according to the accent-phobic Gazette), the websites aren’t illegal but are pretty close to the line.

Let’s hope that line is bulletproof.

| In the news, Montreal

Do gays have to be so … gay?

Every year after the Gay Pride Parade, some prude writes in to the newspaper complaining that the sexual flamboyancy is offensive and shoving the thick, throbbing gayness down everyone’s throats is obscene.

This year is no exception. The token prude is Shamus Birch (the same Shamus Birch who’s “every mother’s dream for a son-in-law” and found Jesus after he was stupid with his virginity? Nah, that guy’s in Britain), who is totally not a homophobe, but says gays “should stick to the old-fashioned way: Earn the respect and recognition on a person-to-person basis, not as an overdone circus demonstration.”

(UPDATE: A brief but well-thought-out response in Wednesday’s paper, and another one in Friday’s)

Ah, remember the good old-fashioned days? When gays were shunned, blacks were slaves, and everyone died of tuberculosis by the age of 40? Why can’t we have those back?

Well, blame Theo Wouters and Roger Thibault. Remember them? They’re the old gay couple in Pointe-Claire who were harassed by their neighbours for being gay. This was back in 2002 when gayness wasn’t as cool as it is now.

The Quebec Human Rights Commission has awarded them $10,000 from the kids who teased them.

Quote Wouters:

“I don’t think that a bunch of morons can chase us out. I mean, the black people, if they hadn’t stood up, they’d still be in the same position, and we feel for us, it’s the same way.”

Oh gay. It’s the new black. A flamboyantly-coloured new black. And apparently it’s distracting to some people.

| In the news, Montreal

More overpasses to be afraid of

Following Quebec’s discovery that the inspection system for the province’s bridges and overpasses is in complete chaos, the City of Montreal has created its own list of nine municipally-controlled overpasses that will get special attention (the city is “determined not to take any chances“).

Montreal’s at-risk overpasses

I’ve updated my map on Google Maps to reflect the new additions. Combined with the 135 on the Quebec Transport Department’s list, the number is so high Google Maps will only allow half of them to be displayed at one time.

Of note in this list of nine is one (actually a pair) on Nuns’ Island that was mentioned in a Gazette feature last month which invited a local structural engineer to take a look at some cracked structures. Whether the tiny overpass over a pedestrian walkway would have gotten the city’s attention without the Gazette piece is anyone’s guess.

| Business, Slow News Day, Technology

Mike Boone now has home laptop location freedom

So Mike Boone had his wireless problems solved. (I guess it wasn’t his laptop after all) As you might expect, he got the gold-plated service after news of his problems with Sympatico hit the news stands. A personal call from the vice-president of customer relations (after numerous calls to regular tech support got him nowhere), no-questions-asked delivery of a new modem, and when that didn’t work, same-day on-site tech support.

When was the last time you called Bell and the guy said “Hold on, I’ll be right over”?

Naturally, the guy was clueless about Macs (been there). But the problem was solved.

To Boone’s credit, of course, he freely admits the obvious: that he got special treatment because he’s a newspaper columnist. And he’s going to use the regular-people method next time, to show he’s still Mikey from the Block and hasn’t sold out to The Man.

| Media, Slow News Day

Just because it’s Facebook doesn’t make it news

Why is “someone expresses opinion about recent events on Facebook” always considered news? Yeah, there are Facebook groups (actually I found only one that has more than a few members) denouncing the rumoured Immigration Canada decision to discourage the traditional Sikh family names Singh and Kaur for new immigrants (a decision which the government clarified later wasn’t actually the case). But there are more members in the group demanding that the Spice Girls do a show in Montreal.

When was the last time a paper petition with 500 signatures got this much attention?

| Blogosphere, Business, In the news, Technology

Mark Goldberg: clueless about cluelessness of cluelessness

Patrick points us to a blog post from Alec Saunders refuting another blog post from Mark Goldberg which criticized a Gazette editorial based on an op-ed from Michael Geist on wireless rate plans in Canada. (Phew.)

The argument is over the inflated prices of data rate plans in Canada. The U.S., home to the iPhone, offers crazy-cheap plans for both voice and data, while here we have three wireless providers who offer expensive daytime service and through-the-roof prices for data transfer. (This is why I never surf the Internet from my phone.)

I won’t add comments, since they’re already criticizing each other. Suffice it to say Geist’s point still stands, and the blogs are debating irrelevant minutiae.

| Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Are you my ticket to media stardom?

Let’s give a round of applause to Montrealer Allan Wills. He’s managed to exploit two vulnerabilities of the media: their desperation for stories in the summer and their cluelessness about the Internet, to grab his 15 minutes by the gonads. A long package on yesterday’s CTV News, and a Page A3 article in this morning’s Gazette.

His story, basically, is that he put up a website (actually a blog) asking for a wife, and this not-unattractive British girl answered him. Now they’re dating.

Yeah, stop the presses.

Now, if I were a cynic, I might point out that they’re not married, and the focus of the blog has changed from finding a wife to finding an “ultimate date”, and that finding dates online is nothing new (in fact, there’s an entire bloody industry for it), and that quitting your job to go searching for dates is kind of a boneheaded thing to do.

But instead, I will applaud Mr. Wills’s media savvy, wringing his 15 minutes from an uninteresting story about a waste of his time.

(I will also applaud him for his babe of a girlfriend. And with an accent to boot!)

UPDATE July 31: A spot on Canada AM, just in case there were doubts about the non-newsiness. And check out the Daily Mail article on him for more, including pictures of his other hot dates (a redhead!).

| In the news, TV

“Pilot-reporter” says it all

When news of a mid-air collision between two news helicopters hit the news forums (read: Fark), the immediate reaction was “it was just a matter of time”. While mainstream media is slashing real reporters, they’re shelling out more and more for gimmicks like police-chase news helicopters, so viewers can get real-time updates on how some idiot is trying to get away from police.

The problem isn’t that there are too many helicopters trying to cover the same thing. It’s not that air traffic controllers are failing to separate low-flying aircraft. It’s one, simple phrase:

“Pilot-reporter”

These news choppers have two people on board: A camera operator, who focuses the video camera on what’s being covered, and the reporter, who describes what’s going on while, you know, piloting a low-flying aircraft in heavy traffic.

The fact that this is common doesn’t make it any less ludicrous. A pilot’s sole mission should be to fly an aircraft. So many aircraft crashes and near-crashes have taken place because pilots become distracted. To have a pilot in a dual-role which requires him to concentrate on some non-flying activity is just asking for trouble.

It’ll be a while before we find out what exactly led to this crash. Perhaps it was something out of both pilots’ control. But either way, I can’t imagine how separating the duties of reporter and pilot can’t lead to safer flights.

| In the news

Can you get aroused with probes on your penis?

All sorts of medical studies ask strange things of their guinea pigs. Taking new pills, sleeping, not sleeping, changing their eating habits.

But I hope the compensatory indemnity was high for the group who volunteered to have their sexual arousal monitored by taking readings of their penises, in a study to show whether circumsized men are less sensitive. The conclusion: they’re not.