Category Archives: In the news

| In the news

Swift move, captain

There was a letter in yesterday’s Gazette from a “retired captain” (one assumes a captain involved in air travel of some sort) complaining that the Supreme Court’s decision to release cockpit voice recordings from Swissair Flight 111 was “unproductive”.

Except the Supreme Court did no such thing. First of all, the Supreme Court wasn’t the body that issued the ruling. It was the Federal Court of Appeal that did. The Supreme Court merely decided not to hear the government’s appeal of the case, which led to the Transportation Safety Board releasing the tapes (you can hear them here), which provided some nuance to the already released report on the accident.

The more egregious error is that the cockpit voice recordings were not what were released. Though the cockpit voice recorder was eventually found and studied, it was determined that the recorder failed six minutes before the plane crashed. And in Canada, CVR transcripts and audio are not made public.

What was released were the air-traffic-control tapes, which contain transmissions between ATC and the aircraft. Besides the fact that anyone with a scanner on that night could have easily recorded the transmissions, and that anything transmitted via radio signals in Canada can by definition not be considered private, the transcript of the ATC tapes had already been released quite a while ago. There really wasn’t anything new here, which makes the government’s reluctance to publish the tapes even more curious.

Far from unproductive or irresponsible, the courts’ decisions made perfect sense.

| In the news

Hail to thee, Anglophonia

A brilliant new plan: Since the Quebec Liberal Party takes federalist West Island anglophones for granted (and who wouldn’t? Why pay for oxygen when you get it free?), why not setup an alternative political party for this minority group and take the anglophone Montreal seats by a landslide?

A Westmount entrepreneur (who else?) is doing exactly that. He’s starting a party called the Equality Party … Unity Party … Democratic Alliance … Alliance Quebec … Affiliation Quebec! Their first meeting is Sunday afternoon.

Good luck with that.

| In the news, Montreal

Three deaths for $40

I don’t know what’s saddest about this story (The Gazette has a less-conclusionary article):

  • That an ethnic cabbie’s fear of being racially profiled led to him keeping information about (apparently) accidental deaths to himself
  • That guilt from this led to him committing suicide
  • That the lack of any family or friends in the city led to him not being discovered for months after his death
  • That just about every story mentions that the two dead Americans were “adult” “models” as if that mitigates matters at all
  • That a $40 unpaid cab fare led to a chase through a field late at night and eventually three deaths
  • That this story makes sense at all, and the actions, while perhaps not all justified, seem understandable
  • That the first question that comes to mind about this is “who takes a $40 cab ride to Laval to go to an after-hours club?”
| In the news, Montreal

OMG brrn bok sooooo colllllll!!!1111oneone

So the paper is aflutter about the “St. Thomas Burn Book” on Facebook, which apparently contained some unflattering comments about teachers at this Pointe-Claire high school. (It originally broke two weeks ago, but it’s still news now, right?)

Students with atrocious spelling making libelous comments  about teachers is hardly anything new. I’m sure we’ve all said things about (or even to) teachers that we’ve later regretted.

What I find interesting is that, while the original group has been taken offline, at least two others have sprung up in its place to debate the issue further. One says the entire issue has been overblown (true) and the other says the reaction was justified (also true).

| In the news

The bar mitzvah from hell

I was wondering why this short, confusingly-written and apparently factually incorrect 940 News story was getting posted to local blogs, until I noticed someone posted it to Fark. CBC has a better story here.

The original story from three years ago isn’t online anymore, but apparently Mr. Neumann, a pediatrician, sued the city for $70,000 (the city settled for $20,000 — the estimated cost of the party was $30,000, which is about what the judge awarded him) after the ruined party, which included these highlights (according to the lawsuit, since the janitor hasn’t come forward with his side of the story):

  • The janitor (who for some reason the English media refuses to name) arrived in the afternoon and started helping himself to the open bar.
  • Having a few drinks in him, and for reasons we can only guess, he took all the ice prepared for the party and stashed it in a locked freezer, offering to sell it back to them. Instead, the grandfather sent his son out to deps to get bags of ice.
  • His brilliant plan foiled, the janitor took out all the toilet paper and paper towels and disappeared (or simply refused to restock the bathroom, depending on what news report you believe).
  • People got stuck in an elevator, with the janitor still missing (CBC says the janitor refused to call 911). They called the fire dept., who freed the trapped people, and then a firefighter got stuck in the elevator himself.
  • Janitor comes back later and announces that the party ends at midnight (though the hall was reserved until 2am).
  • Piano player collapses from a heart attack. The janitor “seemed confused” about finding a phone or first aid kit. The Neumanns, being rich West Island doctors, successfully revive the heart attack victim. (The 940 story erroneously says that lawyer Jordan Charness was performing CPR instead of the doctors).
  • Everyone leaves, disgusted.
  • The city sends an insurance adjuster to take a claim, then promptly ignore the entire matter send a letter accusing the Neumann boy of not being Jewish, causing Neumann to file suit.
  • The janitor, who had been disciplined before, is fired.

Interesting trivia here: Jordan Charness, the Neumann’s lawyer, is a driving columnist for The Gazette.

UPDATE: The Gazette finally got its own story on the bar mitzvah from hell this morning, and it includes our fourth figure to date: $27,000. Fortunately they explain that it’s $22,000 plus interest, which makes the most sense out of the figures given so far. It also includes such contradictory information as suggesting the janitor threatened to lock everyone out at midnight (instead of locking them in as previous stories said), and adds that:

  • The city offered an apology a month before the case was heard — four years after the incident. Neumann would have none of it.
  • Neumann says he’s donating the money to charity, because it was the principle that mattered.
| Humour, In the news, Media, Movies, Slow News Day

Today in “who cares?” news

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.

| Media, Slow News Day, Video

It’s YouTube, therefore it’s news

I’m sorry, maybe my mad newz ski11z are lacking, but how is this newsworthy? A guy puts a video on YouTube inviting people to call him, yak and run up his cellphone minutes. The point? Who knows! The impact on society? None! The news value? Tremendous!

The thing that gets me about these stories is that they aren’t interesting, but because aging baby-boomer editors are too scared to admit they don’t understand blogging and the Internet, they jump at these non-stories to hide their online illiteracy. Nobody wants to be the one news outlet not to cover the story, so it spreads like crazy, and suddenly everyone is talking about this guy like he’s doing something important.

He’s not. In fact, what he’s doing isn’t even new. Someone else did the exact same thing last fall.

So why all the attention?

| Blogosphere, In the news, My articles

Ségolène who?

I admit it, I haven’t been following the French presidential election as closely as I should be. Replacing Jacques Chirac after 12 years is a tall order, especially after all the country has been through recently.

So yesterday, as I followed a group of local French ex-pat bloggers (who knew there were so many of them here?) for a story in today’s Gazette (Page A3), I had to quickly familiarize myself with the playing field: Royal, Sarkozy, Le Pen, Bayrou.

The result came in the moment the polls closed. An online stream from France 24 (they had originally planned to watch it on TV5, but Café Méliès had cable problems) showed a countdown to polls closing, and they immediately called the election for the two expected front-runners.

Making the situation even more anti-climactic was that non-French news sources (Belgian and Swiss news websites and blogs) were posting exit polls hours earlier (and seeing their servers melt with the traffic). Everyone knew the result before the TV announced it.

So without anything interesting happening, I had to come up with a story. I talked to Laurent and Philippe, both of whom voted despite not having lived in France for quite a while, and both of whom had plenty to say about the election. (One thing I like about interviewing bloggers is they always have something to say.)

At 4 p.m. Montreal time, two hours after everything was decided, the group began packing it in, only to get a waiter walking over to say CTV was on its way to interview them. They stuck around for another 15 minutes while reporter Tania Krywiak asked them what they thought of the election.

Consensus seems to be that Sarkozy will take a narrow victory on May 6. But some (like Philippe) think Royal can take enough of centrist Bayrou’s supporters to steal the election, if Bayrou decides to support her.

In 15 days, we’ll know who was right.

| Media, Slow News Day, TV

Has this happened? No? Pretend it did

As I catch up on news I missed recovering from dental surgery this week, I come across an L.A. Times story about failed TV pilots being leaked to YouTube, in order to drum up fan support and try to Family-Guy them back on the air.

The telling line comes up about halfway through: “So far, none of this Internet buzz has saved a pilot from extinction”.

Yes, that’s right. There isn’t a single case of a failed pilot leaked to YouTube convincing a network to put the show on the air.

So why is it being written about, then? Why aren’t they talkinng about all the supermodels I’ll be dating soon?

| Business, Media, Montreal, Slow News Day

Newspaper takes Grocery Store Economics 101

Apparently, they needed a study to show that buying from big grocery stores like Loblaws is cheaper than smaller ones like the dep across the street.

Really? What will civilization do once this news gets out? How will we live with this new reality? How will we raise our children? Do I have to accept a new religion because of this?

Yeah, yeah, the study also says, perhaps more significantly, that food in poorer places isn’t cheaper or more expensive, but that’s not what the headline focuses on.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Montreal, Slow News Day, Video

Since when is a vigilante a hero?

I was thinking today about an episode of Frasier, where our lovable Dr. Crane is annoyed by being the butt of repeated impoliteness. The last straw breaks the camel’s back as a table he had been waiting for at a café is taken by a man who just arrived. Frasier loses it, decides to give him an “etiquette lesson” and physically throws him out.

The moral of the story becomes clear later, as his show’s listeners hear of his “heroic” act and teach others “etiquette lessons” of their own, answering inconsiderateness with more and more violent acts. Frasier appeals for calm, having learned his lesson that fighting fire with fire doesn’t work.

Claude Landry clearly hasn’t seen that episode, or he wouldn’t be whoring this YouTube video to the media. In it, he spots a man emptying his car’s ashtray onto the sidewalk, grabs a handful of it and throws it in the driver’s lap.

Now, the story has been picked up by CTV, CBC and The Gazette (who are still unable to link to YouTube videos in their stories), skyrocketing its exposure to over 35,000 views. According to CTV, the video even got the mayor’s blessing (this according to his brother Marcel — I guess CTV is unable to get quotes from the mayor himself). Since when is assault something that is encouraged by politicians? Did it come in a package deal with the new pro-racist agenda of the Quebec election campaign?

I’m not saying I’m perfect. Just yesterday on my way home, I got one of my buttons pushed as some inconsiderate kid tried to get on the bus without waiting in line. I nudged my way in front of him, pushing him back lightly in the process. I thought it was a bad-ass move, but I don’t consider myself a hero for it.

None of the mainstream press is making this point yet, and the blogosphere (well, the four posts I’ve found so far) is split. Basil is on my side. Dave is not. Neither is Mark. Or Grame. What’s your take?

UPDATE: Dave has a lengthy reply to my post on his blog.