Category Archives: On the Net

| On the Net, Opinion, TV

CTV’s new Hockey Theme

CTV has released its re-recording (with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) of the Hockey Theme (i.e. the ex-Hockey Night in Canada theme), which will be used on RDS and TSN hockey telecasts starting Oct. 10 and Oct. 14, respectively.

Here it is (MP3). TSN also has a story with video about the new theme.

Perhaps I should wait until it actually goes on air, or maybe it’s just my computer, but it sounds like elevator music compared to the rough-and-tumble CBC version.

The press release, which says it “revisits the original 1968 version” also gives plenty of praise for how awesome they think it is:

We’ve taken great pride in blending the heritage of the song with the best digital technology available, creating a stunning rendition sure to resonate with hockey fans across the country.

Colour me unimpressed.

| Media, Video

Party leaders, only with more hair

CBC’s Archives, which has good stuff but unfortunately encodes it using Windows Media, which I have to play using my choppy, buggy Quicktime plugin instead of a universal Flash player, has found archival footage of the five party leaders. As you can see, they have wacky hairstyles (Duceppe’s mullet being the most awesome) and big glasses and stuff.

Dion, Harper and Duceppe are all from the same turbulent early 90s era. Dion a political scientist commenting on the Charlottetown Accord pre-referendum. Harper from when he was a Reform Party wonk and before he was elected an MP, and Duceppe after he was elected in a by-election as the first Bloc Québécois MP (and the whole he-swore-an-oath-to-the-Queen controversy).

Layton is from a decade earlier, when he was elected in a surprise upset to Toronto City Council.

But the most interesting clip is of Elizabeth May, 30 years ago in 1978. It’s actually a feature piece for The Fifth Estate, about a debate in Nova Scotia on whether to spray the forest with insecticide to fight the spruce budworm which was devastating forests. Forestry executives were for it, wanting to protect their trees and fearing an epidemic. May was against it, saying the spray had health risks associated with it.

Curious, I looked up the Wikipedia article to see what happened with the whole debate. It seems the infestation died out on its own, as May predicted, and an environmentally-friendly insecticide was created to deal with the problem as well.

(via Tea Makers)

| Movies, Opinion, Video

Slacker

I just finished watching Michael Moore’s free-to-web (but only in the U.S. and Canada, wink wink) documentary “Slacker Uprising,” about his tour of swing states just before the 2004 presidential election.

Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Michael Moore’s work. I liked Sicko, The Awful Truth and Bowling for Columbine, and I was ok with Fahrenheit 9/11.

But Slacker Uprising doesn’t explain any issue. It doesn’t argue any point. It doesn’t actually try to change anything, despite Moore’s pleas that the film be screened before the election. It’s just a bunch of videos of stump speeches pieced together with a bunch of videos of artists performing protest songs. This review from the Ann Arbor News explains it pretty well.

There are some interesting parts, about how Republicans attempted to stop the speeches, offered money to get student unions to cancel them, and even showed up, chanted and prayed out loud while Moore was speaking, but there’s already a documentary about that.

For those used to Moore’s passionate, personal arguments about political issues, you’ll be disappointed. He doesn’t even narrate the movie. Instead, you just hear him speaking to the converted, to the point where the hyperpartisanship of those audiences might turn you off from voting for Democrats.

Michael Moore chanting “one more day” isn’t entertaining, moving, inspiring or educational. And it’s not worth watching.

| On the Net, Opinion

Bloc-cast

Last week, the Bloc Québécois started running a minute-or-so-long podcast in which Frédéric Savard gives a fast-talking roundup of political news and ends each item with a pun or other bad joke about other parties in the election.

As a master of punnery and bad jokes myself, I have to say that some of them are funny (black holes and Denis Coderre) and some are beyond groaner territory (Stéphane Dion being “tragically un-hip”).

Still, it’s pretty entertaining as far as party activities online go. The Liberals and Greens don’t have podcasts that I can find. The Tories’ podcast is nothing but stump speeches by Stephen Harper, and the NDP podcast hasn’t been updated since 2005.

| Montreal, On the Net

Montreal’s battleground ridings

DemocraticSPACE has compiled its list of 68 battleground ridings in this election.

Montreal-area ridings on the list include:

  • Jeanne-Le Ber, the southwest/Verdun riding Liberal heritage minister Liza Frulla lost to an unknown Bloc candidate in 2006. (You’ll also notice the Green’s Claude William Genest, currently running in Westmount, came in last place with 5% of the vote)
  • Brossard-La Prairie, another Bloc steal from the Liberals in 2006, formerly Jacques Saada’s riding.
  • Outremont, the Thomas Mulcair NDP by-election win riding, which also covers some of the Plateau and a lot of Côte des Neiges.
  • Vaudreuil Soulanges, the riding Marc Garneau lost in 2006 and is now being contested by Conservative senator-to-get-a-cabinet-post Michael Fortier. Includes Vaudreuil, St. Lazare, Hudson, Rigaud and everything else between the two rivers.

Absent from the list is Westmount-Ville-Marie, which it expects to go to the Liberals’ Garneau; Papineau, which it expects will be an easy steal for Justin Trudeau; and adjacent Ahuntsic, which Liberal Eleni Bakopanos is expected to take back from Bloquiste Maria Mourani.

| Blogosphere, Navel-gazing, Public transit, Radio, Video

Welcome Daybreak listeners

(or, at least, those who hear about a website in the morning and make a note to visit a half hour later)

In case you missed it, I was invited by CBC Daybreak to come in and give them an analysis of blog coverage of the federal election campaign (my super-secret project). I was originally supposed to go on yesterday, but with the debate going long I was bumped to today.

Unfortunately, in the first time in months (years?) that I’ve taken a metro train during morning rush hour, I experienced four separate delays (one of which had me stuck in the tunnel). I practically had a heart attack, knowing full well that radio deadlines aren’t flexible by even a second.

I gave up at Laurier metro as the lights went out in the train, and hurried outside to let the producer know I wasn’t there. They quickly decided to do the interview by (pay)phone. (One thing payphones still have over cellphones is that, because they don’t have to compress their data into compact wireless streams, the sound is much clearer and more radio-friendly. Not as good as in-studio, but desperate times…)

As I told host Mike Finnerty, I don’t blame the STM for the delays, which were due in part to technical problems and because of the traffic tie-ups those problems create. But I wasn’t thrilled with the transit corporation this morning, that’s for sure. (And, of course, the trip back home was entirely uneventful)

Anyway, we talked about this blog (it’s really a place for any opinions I like to give on anything, though I focus specifically on the media, public transit, stuff going on in the news, blogs, and of course myself. You can also read what I’ve written about the federal election so far.

We also got into the meat of the matter (though six minutes goes by so fast when you’re talking about stuff), discussing blogosphere reaction to Elizabeth May in the debates, as well as a video by Justin Trudeau (and the parody of that video by Prenez Garde Aux Chiens, whose season premiere is tonight at 10pm on Canal Vox) that has been making the rounds in the blogosphere recently.

I’ll try to get a clip of the segment up soon.

| In the news, On the Net

CHP wants in on debates

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the Christian Heritage Party, which describes itself as the next-most-popular party after the Greens, wants into the leaders’ debates. The party had 45 candidates in the last election, and seems to think 70% of the country supports it. Yeah.

Their platform includes:

  • Spending more money on infrastructure (through enormous interest-free loans which they guess will be repaid in full) and paying off the debt without raising taxes
  • Eliminate income tax and replace it with a sales tax that will make people yearn for the GST
  • Eliminate the Canada Pension Plan and privatize social security
  • Introduce private health care delivery services
  • Outlaw abortion
  • Call a royal commission so they can find a way to get rid of gay marriage without seeming bigoted.
  • Forget about Kyoto, carbon taxes or any other economy-hurting way of dealing with the global warming fraud, but somehow do something “real” for the environment (the platform gives no details on this)
  • Allow doctors and pharmacists to deny care for any reason
  • Educate people about the “health risks” of “sexual promiscuity” and end government funding for a life-saving vaccine because Big Pharma supports it (oh, and it’s for a disease that’s sexually transmitted)
  • Stop human rights commissions from attacking “free speech”

In other words, it’s the platform of the Christian conservative end of the Republican Party.

That might make the debates more entertaining.

UPDATE (Sept. 23): They’re suing.

| On the Net

DemocraticSPACE launches for 2008 campaign

The riding-by-riding election prediction machine DemocraticSPACE has launched its 2008 campaign website. It currently predicts the following seat makeup:

  • CON: 146 (up from 124 in 2006 and 99 in 2004, but just shy of the 155 needed for a majority government)
  • LIB: 91 (down from 103 in 2006 and 135 in 2004)
  • NDP: 30 (same as at dissolution: 29 in 2006 plus Thomas Mulcair in Outremont)
  • BQ: 39 (down from 51)
  • GRN: 0
  • IND: 2 (André Arthur in Quebec and ex-Tory Bill Casey in Nova Scotia)

In Quebec:

  • BQ: 39 (down from 51)
  • CON: 18 (up from 10)
  • LIB: 16 (up from 13)
  • NDP: 1 (Mulcair)
  • GRN: 0
  • IND: 1 (Arthur)

If these results hold, it would be bad for the Liberals nationally, bad for the Bloc, bad for the Greens (Vancouver Liberal-turned-Green MP Blair Wilson, they predict, will lose to the Tories), status quo for the NDP and, of course, good for the Conservatives, but still short of their goal.

The website will keep updating its predictions, based in part from comments left by constituents in those ridings, before taking a wild guess on too-close-to-call races just before the vote. In the 2006 election, the website was 94% accurate at predicting which party would win any given riding, underestimating the number of Liberal seats and overestimating the number of Conservative and Bloc seats.

| Media, On the Net, Technology

Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph archives on Google

As part of a big announcement this week that Google would be offering to digitize newspapers’ archives (with their permission) and put them online for free, the Quebec Chonicle-Telegraph, North America’s oldest newspaper and the only anglo paper in Quebec City, has jumped on board and some of its archives are already available on Google’s site, mainly from the 50s and 60s. (The QCT even got some link love on the Google Blog.)

(via Le Devoir)