Category Archives: Navel-gazing

| Fun, Navel-gazing

A Wii console-ation prize

The film(s) I wanted to see last night were sold out. Dang. Hope everyone else enjoyed themselves. As I stood near the Fantasia ticket booth wondering what to do, I noticed some Wii promotional stations. Nintendo’s doing some marketing at one of the biggest geek events of the year. It was the first time I ever used a Wii, and though I played some silly kids game instead of using the wiimote for the cool stuff that it was designed for (the tennis game was busy), I still got to enjoy myself trying to move a pointer on a screen by moving the remote itself.

For my trouble, I got a white promotional Wii lanyard, to which I’m going to attach my MP3 player.

Now I’m cool. Yay!

| Blogosphere, My articles

OMG. Puppy!

This week’s blog is Christelle FV, whom I emailed almost six months ago. So long, in fact, that the primary focus of her blog, Happy the Most Adorable Puppy in the World, wasn’t even a factor back then.

For those who don’t know, Happy is a Mira dog, part of the foundation’s Foster Families program, where you get to take in a puppy, do basic training and then give it back so it can get specialized training to be a guide dog or service dog.

Imagine: taking in a puppy, and exchanging it for a new puppy when it gets old. All for a good cause!

| Blogosphere, My articles, Navel-gazing

Looking for me? I’m hiding in the dark

No blog this week from me. Instead, Gazette intern and guest blogospherophile Jasmin Legatos has a profile of MTL Street. Don’t worry, I’ve got some more in the pipeline.

For those of you who desperately need a Fagstein Fix (and really, who doesn’t?), you can find me a couple of pages down as I present a Bluffer’s Guide to the new NASA Beyond Einstein program.

Funny story about that piece: Editor Peter Cooney (also the paper’s soccer blogger) called me up on Thursday and asked me to put together a Bluffer’s Guide for him. I’ve developed a reputation as someone who can be counted on to file last-minute, due to a combination of my lust for money and having no life. He suggested one about NASA, and I agreed, and started putting one together.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening properly, and wrote about the wrong mission. Instead of Einstein probes and dark matter, I wrote about the Dawn mission, exploring the two largest asteroids in the asteroid belt.

Oops.

I ended up getting a call at 9:30 Friday morning. Fortunately I didn’t have anything to do (except sleep) that morning, so I put together the one you see here.

Let that be a lesson folks: NASA’s up to a lot of stuff, and you shouldn’t get your deep space probe missions confused.

| Navel-gazing, TV

It’s not just sports, Jack

Jack Todd has a column in the Sunday Sports section about how our national sports networks, while covering the U20 World Cup, baseball, NHL free agency, Wimbledon tennis, PGA golf, CFL football, auto racing, and all the other major sports going on this summer, are missing something important: Water polo in Montreal.

It’s not just water polo, he continues. The networks aren’t covering amateur sports at all, really, preferring to sign up to simulcast an American feed rather than spend money sending their own reporters and camera crew to events happening here.

While I agree with the sentiment (and more on that below), I should probably add that frankly, I’ve always found it odd how few television channels are devoted to sports. Here, we have TSN, Rogers Sportsnet (with its four regional channels) and The Score showing general sports for 24 hours a day. Considering how many sports they should be covering, that doesn’t seem like enough. It’s not even enough to show all the baseball games that play on a given regular season night. So why don’t we have more channels? They could be owned by the same network, just show different sports.

Money, of course, is the answer, which is sad. And unfortunately it’s also the reason we’re not going to have major networks covering unpopular amateur sport until a fundamental shift happens in the sports media industry.

Of course, this problem, of Canadian cable channels repackaging American content instead of producing their own, is hardly new. Unlike broadcast channels, which have more stringent CRTC guidelines about locally-produced and Canadian-produced content, cable specialty channels don’t have to produce much of their own, and depending on how they’re licensed, don’t have to carry much Canadian content.

I would suggest regulation as a potential solution to that problem, but digital TV regulations in Canada are already far too complicated. Besides, many channels are meeting their CanCon requirements by playing reruns of 80s CBC shows or crappy CTV ripoffs of popular U.S. programs. And they’re meeting their original programming requirements (assuming there are any) with “news” shows, produced on a shoestring budget, effectively giving up on that timeslot and waiting until they can throw up another CSI rerun and soak up the ad money.

We have to vote ourselves, with our wallets. Channels that regurgitate crap and expect us to take it will see themselves disappear from my channel lineup. Spike TV is already on the chopping block. Star Trek was the only thing on there I watched, and they’ve removed DS9 from their lineup. Global-owned Mystery Channel is also going once I’ve caught up on my weekend House reruns. SUN TV (holy crap what an awful excuse for a channel) is going, since the only thing I’ve ever watched on there was Scrubs. G4TechTV Canada is headed out the door, Beat The Geeks notwithstanding.

This is the YouTube age. Making original television should be much easier than it was four decades ago. Television series make it to DVD within months. Why don’t we have more original programming?

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what to replace these channels with. Those same regulations prevent my cable company from treating all channels equally, and prevent me from selecting what I want à la carte.

Shame.

| Media, Navel-gazing

This post is 174% accurate

Back when I was in high school, I didn’t read books. Not because I couldn’t, I just didn’t like them. Even now I don’t own any novels, rarely read biographies, and my bookshelf consists of Star Trek technical manuals, old Garfield books, and some computer science and philosophy textbooks I still think are interesting.

So the library wasn’t exactly my place to be. I still went there for the computer books and other non-fiction instruction books, but you’d never find me in the fiction section.

One day, I was researching a school paper in the local library (Shout-out Pierrefonds/Dollard-des-Ormeaux Intermunicipal Library! Yeah!). These were the days before Google, so I actually had to look at books to find information. I was walking down the aisle and I happened on this book about statistics. I couldn’t remember what the title is, though it was a play on “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics”. I flipped through the pages and started reading.

I read the entire book cover to cover. It was fascinating (well, fascinating for a teenager who didn’t have access to Wikipedia, anyway). It talked about advertisers using bad statistical math saying things like “200% off” and how that makes no sense.

I credit my high-school English teacher for getting me to read more. She was a forest’s worst enemy, photocopying Shakespeare, Chaucer, and mythology texts from all over the place. We needed three-inch D-ring binders just to hold them all. I still have mine at home, and will probably read it one day when I can finally understand it.

When my mother told her I went into journalism and became a writer/editor, she apparently laughed. I don’t blame her. I was a mathematician who had no room for English back then, and the English teacher was always my worst enemy. She turned out to be one of my favourite teachers.

Anyway, getting back on track, the Canadian Freelance Union, a new group trying to secure rights for freelancers with big media corporations (a long battle if there ever was one) released its first newsletter. In it (and on its website), it says freelancers’ real income has dropped by 163%, taking inflation into account, over the past three decades.

The number, of course, makes no sense. Unless we’re paying publishers to use our content (I wouldn’t put it past some aspiring writers to make that offer, mind you), income cannot be below zero. In reality, the average freelancer income has stayed constant, while inflation has made everything else 163% more expensive. That means buying power has decreased 62%, not 163%.

I know journalists aren’t supposed to be good at math, but numbers like this should at least be put through a sanity check before they’re published.

| Blogosphere, My articles

A missing voice

This week’s blog profile is une vie en musique, whose author René Lapalme died June 9 of cancer. It was written before the latest post went up. Normally blogs and other websites of the deceased stay frozen forever. This one, it turned out, was an exception.

Reading René’s blog gives a timeline of his declining health. His increased fatigue causing him to take a break and slowly return to work a month later not knowing the cause, the decision to finally see a doctor, the battery of tests eventually leading to the discovery of cancer, his tearful video thank-you to his readers for their support, and eventually his last post, a self-portrait of a man half his previous weight and without his long curly hair, where those who heard of his death added comments to say their final goodbyes.

The blogosphere response to news of his death was huge. I won’t try to summarize the dozens of blog posts about him from his readers, but it was clear he had a lot of them. A few to point out though:

  • Guy Verville, who first broke the news.
  • Martine, from whom many learned of René’s passing.
  • Andre, of Metroblogging Montreal, among many with brief stories of their encounters with René.
  • A special video tribute, feating one of René’s songs.

Radio Centre-Ville had a special show the Tuesday after his death (where he volunteered his time on a radio show) devoted to him. It’s no longer online, but if someone saved a copy I’d be glad to point to it.
The official obit is here. His self-written biography is better. Though to truly understand his character, I would recommend taking a look at his photo comics, or listen to his music.

I’m not normally an emotional person. I don’t like writing sad things. Hopefully I won’t have to write another blogger obit for a while longer.

| Blogosphere, My articles

Blork Blork Blork

Ed Hawco’s Blork Blog (coolest name ever!) is the subject of this week’s blog profile. I figured it was about time since the interview I had with him via email happened way back in January.

There’s also an article on the same page (B2, no link because apparently nobody uploaded it to their website) about art in the metro from Expo 67. It features a picture of Metrodemontreal.com’s Matthew McLauchlin (and trust me, he looks absolutely adorable in that picture) in front of paintings at Berri-UQAM that were featured at Expo’s opening.

| Blogosphere, My articles

Never trust a student politician

I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for the fact that I have two more articles in the paper today, as neither is online (If you have the newsprint version, they’re on Page B2).

The first is a Justify Your Existence piece on Concordia Student Union president-elect Angelica Novoa, who has been under attack by her political opponents for being incompetent. Anyone want to take a wager on which side of this political magnet will be outraged with it first?

The other is the third in my series on Quebec bloggers-turned-authors: Mère Indigne, who unfortunately put her blog on hiatus mere days after I interviewed her. On the plus side, this means starting next week I can go back to featuring English blogs, some of which have been in my bank ready-to-write for four months now.

I should be ok for the next few weeks, but if anyone has suggestions for interesting local blogs that are updated regularly, let me know.

| Blogosphere, Business, My articles, Technology

Bark bark. Bark bark bark. Growl.

In today’s paper comes the second in my three-part blogger-author series, about Lucie le chien (which is on hiatus in blog form) and its author Sophie Bienvenu (whose personal blog is still running).

Meanwhile, please don’t blame me for this laudatory piece about Geek Squad. I know all about Geek Squad’s many many many many many (alleged) problems, including this piece I read last night.

| 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.

| Humour, Media, Montreal, My articles, Video

Tivijournal – Ça manque de rigueur, rigueur, rigueur!

(WARNING: French content ahead)

There’s a story in The Gazette today by me (you’ll have to take my word for that, since my byline accidentally disappeared during editing — my editor has promised alcohol as compensation).

Tivijournal

It’s about Tivijournal, a group of young journalists who poke fun at Quebec media and politicians in a monthly satire show. I interviewed them last month as they were preparing their March episode of post-election humour. Pictured above is Félix B. Desfossés, the charismatic host who looks far more confident than he is in his trademark pink shirt and exposed chest hair.

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