La Presse’s investigative reporting team is at it again, researching how ice cream tastes.
I know summer is the time for lots and lots of filler (ahem), but I was considering making fun of the West Island Chonicle for doing the exact same thing. At least they have “we have no budget” as an excuse.
Besides, everyone knows Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough is the only ice cream worth having.
Speaking of ridiculous things to be outraged about, the Globe and Mail apparently found it necessary to assign a reporter to write a story about how there was no Canada Day Google Doodle this year.
The Canadian embassy in Washington is apologizing to Impératif français, among others, after it used a photoshopped picture of Samuel de Champlain holding a poutine on invites (now scrubbed of the poutine offensiveness) to Canada Day celebrations. IF reacted to the image with their usual measured response.
Perhaps I missed something in Political Correctness 101, but what’s so offensive about this again? Is it some stereotype that we eat poutine? Is it because the image of Champlain was sullied in some way?
Frankly, I think the fact that Canadian Press had to explain what poutine was is offensive to me.
Richard Martineau goes on one of his usual rants, this time about what he considers racism.
The first part of his rant is against a lame This Hour Has 22 Minutes sketch that makes fun of Quebecers. Since Martin Patriquin already has a response to that one, I won’t bother here.
The second part attacks my newspaper for the most curious of reasons:
On faisait un appel à tous pour savoir si une famille du West Island pouvait accueillir une petite fille de 13 ans un week-end par mois, histoire de laisser sa mère souffler un peu.
«La jeune fille est très active, elle garde sa chambre propre et respecte les règlements de la maison, pouvait-on lire. Idéalement, la famille d’accueil serait noire…»
Imaginez comment The Gazette réagirait si le Journal se mettait à la recherche d’une famille d’accueil BLANCHE pour une jeune fille. On crierait au racisme !
The Gazette has regular columns in its arts and life section which profile kids looking for foster homes and organizations in need of volunteers. It’s about a step and a half below actually rescuing orphans from a burning building.
But Martineau takes issue with the fact that it’s suggested a black kid would ideally (but necessarily) best be placed with a black family.
To answer his straw-man hypothetical, if the Journal was trying more to place troubled children with foster parents, I would certainly welcome it. And if an ad requested white parents, I’d probably be more confused than offended. Statistically there are always more black kids in these situations and fewer black parents in a position to adopt.
But even if I grant that this is racism at its core, is this really the biggest injustice he could find?
The Gazette can be criticized for a lot of things (ask me, I’ll write you up a list), but in 1,000 years this would not have stricken me as one of them.
Editorial staff at the West Island Chronicle, apparently running out of grandmothers, high school sports teams and stop sign campaigns to talk about, has moved on to eating pizza.
You’ll be pleased to know that bleeding penises are valid excuses for speeding. Even if they’re not yours.
(There Jeff, I posted one of your stories. Happy now?)
UPDATE: Farked.
In addition to being mocked on the Colbert Report, the Hockey Night in Canada theme situation has also made the New York Times.
As a side note, I’ve noticed that mainstream media websites, when talking about the Hockey Night theme, have been linking to a version of it on YouTube which was clearly infringing on copyright. Later, when some of these same media websites talked about the Colbert Report talking about the Hockey Night in Canada theme, they linked to another YouTube video, which was also infringing on copyright. (Both those videos have since been taken down.) Is it appropriate for media websites to be promoting content they know to be infringing on other people’s copyright?
UPDATE: Scott Moore, the executive director of CBC TV sports, has a post up about the HNIC theme and the responses he’s gotten about it.
xkcd has gone mainstream. Now I need something else to like that’s cool and ensures my geek cred. The Daily WTF isn’t enough.
(And yeah, you’re damn right I’m going to use this as an excuse to post a comic)
From Associated Press’s YouTube channel (which doesn’t use the pretentious “The” in its username), a clip on the deep family histories of the presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton is linked with some Canadian superstars (Alanis, Trudeau, Celine, Kerouac) through her French-Canadian background.
According to Canadian Press, “big-name” Canadian actors don’t get the same amount of pay as A-list American actors.
The word “duh” comes to mind.
I just got alerted to this OMG EXCLUSIVE OMG story at Branchez-Vous, which claims that 1 in 4 francophone Quebecers over 18 is on Facebook, and that number goes up to 54% when you limit it to adults 18-24.
Those numbers seemed suspiciously high to me, especially since before this week Facebook was an English website and therefore its reach in Quebec was lower than the rest of Canada.
Then I came across this:
Ce sondage a été effectué en ligne auprès de 1257 répondants du 11 au 15 février 2008. Sa marge d’erreur est de 2,8%.
So this was an online survey. Not only does that outright dismiss the non-trivial (albeit dwindling) portion of Quebecers without regular Internet access, but online surveys are notoriously unreliable. More importantly, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that those willing to take online surveys are more likely to have the kind of free time to waste online that would make them more likely to be members of Facebook in the first place.
So take those results with a grain of salt.
Because they have nothing better to do, Mike Citrome’s band of history-rewriters are to descend on the Sud-Ouest borough council meeting tonight to demand they change the name of Lionel-Groulx metro to Oscar Peterson, a campaign that has already gained national attention because it’s being organized on (gasp) Facebook.
Date: Tuesday, March 4
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Sud-Ouest borough hall
815 rue Bel-Air, about three blocks west of the station
And if you can’t come up with an opinion on your own, feel free to check out what other random uninformed people think.
No word yet on whether there will be a counter-protest from the anti-name-change group.
Previously: Oscar Peterson metro won’t be easy to accomplish
The Journal de Montréal’s Benoît Aubin took a shot at my dear Gazette last week for its big feature taste test between Hamilton and Montreal bagels. (Via Steve Proulx)
The Gazette, you’ll recall, had taken the Journal to task for its “exposé” on businesses that dare to hire anglophones, calling it bad journalism. (I still think the fast food thing was worse.)
Needless to say, the dual-blind taste tests (which involved flying bagels from one city to the other to maintain freshness) ended in Montreal’s favour, and the city is now 3-0 in Gazette bagel taste tests. Hamilton is licking its wounds, or at least it will be once its Chamber of Commerce CEO realizes that coming in second in a two-man race isn’t “like getting the silver medal in the Olympics.”
Of course, I might point out that this had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with naming. But trademark lawyer battles aren’t as interesting as blind taste tests I guess.
So now you can sleep tight, confident in the fact that the best place to get a Montreal-style bagel is Montreal.
Now what about this “Montreal-style” steak spice mix?
Oh, and if you’re captivated by pointless newspaper gimmicks like I am, be sure to check out the most boring video ever made, featuring the Hamilton Spectator’s taste test and some bad pronunciations of “assuage” and “St. Viateur”.
The local media have been all over plagiarizing The Gazette reporting on a Facebook group that advocates renaming the Lionel-Groulx metro station after Oscar Peterson. Groulx was a racist, the suggestion goes, and Peterson would be much more befitting of a metro station name.
The group has exploded in popularity, due to both the media coverage and regular word-of-mouth. It has over 1,000 members now.
The idea isn’t new, actually. It’s been going around for quite some time. Other proposed new names for Lionel-Groulx include Yitzhak-Rabin and Gabrielle-Roy.
Unfortunately, it’s somewhat of a non-starter for two reasons:
And that doesn’t get into the whole mess about renaming something from a francophone name to an anglophone one.
Personally, I think it should be renamed The-Jackal.
UPDATE (Feb. 28): The inevitable backlash group has already been formed.
UPDATE: Elsewhere in the blogosphere: