I’ve spent the last hour watching Jon Lajoie videos after being reminded of them by The Domster.
I talked about one of his videos in December, but really they’re all good. I hesitate to recommend any specific ones because that would imply others are less good, but Everyday Normal Guy has a sequel for a reason:
Did I mention he’s a Montrealer? You can see some hints of that in some of his videos.
UPDATE (Feb. 22): More info from Cyberpresse.
Montrealer Julien Smith is resuming his In Over Your Head hip hop podcast after an extended absence (and some sponsorship).
So if you like hip hop mixed with a guy talking about himself (and really, isn’t that what hip hop is all about?) go ahead and subscribe to the feed.
In what is clearly the most important vote of our time, Montreal is leading the worldwide online vote for placenames to be featured in a new Monopoly game. This is no doubt due in part to the efforts of people with lots of time on their hands who are making it their life’s mission to put this city on top.
The top 20 cities by vote will be used on the board, along with two “wildcard” cities to be voted on in another round. The top 20 currently include Vancouver and Toronto, the only Canadian cities in the pre-selected list of 68 to vote for. The “wildcard” race includes Quebec City, Winnipeg and Calgary.
For those of you who found my overpass project interesting, MSNBC has taken it a step further in the U.S., mashing bridge inspection data with maps.
CBC sportscaster Don Wittman died last week, ironically on the same day as the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Canadian Football League, for which he was a regular play-by-play commentator (at least until the CBC decided they needed someone younger).
CBC.ca has a feature section on Wittman, including some clips of his more memorable moments (which I think understate how recognizable a voice he was on CBC Sports).
But while the news focuses on his calling Ben Johnson’s track-and-field win, then Donovan Bailey’s world-record-setting 100-metre run at the 1996 Olympics, and his unexpected foray into news reporting at the 1972 Munich games, but my favourite is this bench-clearing brawl during the 1987 world junior hockey championship, which was so out of control that the officials turned the lights out to get everyone to calm down:
Some other videos worth watching:
The Gimli Glider had its last flight yesterday, almost 25 years after a metric conversion error (along with a few other mistakes) caused an Air Canada 767 to run out of fuel in the air and glide powerless onto a runway at an old military base in Gimli, Man. As the final trip to the Mojave, CA airport (the desert airplane graveyard) took off from Montreal, it flew past the Air Canada hangar to salute the employees who gathered to celebrate its retirement.
For those who didn’t read the book or see the made-for-TV movie about the incident, an Air Canada flight from Montreal to Edmonton in 1983 had a malfunctioning fuel gauge, and ground workers fuelling it manually miscalculated the amount needed through a metric conversion error (the plane was among the first all-metric ones to be flown here). The pilots didn’t find out they were low on fuel until just before the engines died, and ended up landing it without engine power, flaps, half their instruments, a locked nose gear and most of the power assistance for flight controls.
This line from the first article linked below sums it up best:
As Pearson began gliding the big bird, Quintal “got busy” in the manuals looking for procedures for dealing with the loss of both engines. There were none. Neither he nor Pearson nor any other 767 pilot had ever been trained on this contingency.
The story goes on to even more craziness: turning the airplane on its side to lose altitude quickly while on final approach; landing on a decommissioned runway with hundreds of people celebrating a family fun day at the other end (the plane stopped just a hundred feet short of spectators), and the maintenance crew driving up from Winnipeg in a van who got lost and ran out of gas along the way.
But other people recount this story much better than I do. Here are some of the better ones:
It’s one of my favourite airplane stories, and definitely my favourite one that hasn’t yet been featured on my favouritest show ever. (Though they’re planning 10 new episodes this year, so maybe it’s time?)
Amazingly enough, it’s not even the longest recorded engineless glide of a commercial airliner. That honour goes to Air Transat Flight 236, which took off from Toronto and lost fuel over the Atlantic due to a fuel leak. The pilots in that flight had a similar crisis to contend with, only the runway they were headed to was on a tiny island in the middle of a very large ocean.
But the Gimli Glider came first. Before then, nobody had even (seriously) conceived of flying a large passenger jet this way. Its crew instantly became test pilots, and the aircraft itself one giant guinea pig pushed to its limits. After what was sure to be a devastating crash, it required only moderate repairs and left the runway on its own power, going back for repairs and continuing as a passenger aircraft for another two decades.
And for that, we salute you.
I hear (via Ingram) about Yet Another Popular Video Clip Show being launched by Digg and Revision3: The Digg Reel.Like TVA’s Vlog (which I wrote about last week in The Gazette), which was the focus of my piece last week, The Digg Reel relies strictly on the Fair Use exception to copyright law, and shows “short” clips of videos with “analysis.” In fact, one of the videos is a clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and bizarrely credited to the Huffington Post.
Judging from their first episode, I can’t imagine sitting through it on a regular basis, for the following reasons that seem to be part of some formula for all such shows:
But the most important objection I have to this show is that, like Vlog and all the others, it blatantly tries to profit off other people’s work. Permission is not sought before these videos are aired. No payment goes out to their creators for a license to rebroadcast. Profits from the show aren’t shared.
And in my opinion, that’s copyright infringement. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.
According to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback and his lawyers, it’s fair use (though he’ll gladly take down the Daily Show clip if Viacom asks) because they analyze it and provide short clips.
The problem is that these producers (and, I suspect, their lawyers) aren’t familiar enough with fair use (U.S.) and fair dealing (Canada) copyright exceptions. Yes, news and commentary are covered under these provisions, however they only do so under certain conditions:
There’s this mindset among some producers that there’s a magic 30-second or 45-second rule that simply doesn’t exist in law. That as long as video clips are shorter than this length, that as long as they’re credited, and as long as there’s some random chatter about the videos, that their show is news and the use of videos qualifies as fair use.
It doesn’t.
And even if it did, it’s morally wrong to profit off other peoples’ work like this. Simply offering to remove videos after the fact is both ridiculous (what are they going to do, black out portions of existing episodes?) and shows a blatant lack of respect for people’s rights.
I expect this kind of thing from big media. I don’t expect it from Digg.
Thursday’s Gazette features some letters to the business editor responding to last week’s inaugural Business Observer section, and particularly my opinion piece about independent video producers being exploited by big media.
One of those letters asks an interesting question (which I jokingly alluded to last week): Should letter writers be paid for their opinions?
You are asking us for our opinion on using Web content with no payment to the producer. Well, how about you guys at the Gazette? Why don’t you pay the author when you publish his opinion, or even a letter to the editor? Writing something for publication doesn’t exactly take only a few minutes of his time. An opinion piece, or letter to the editor can take the author hours of his time.
So let’s be upright about this. When The Gazette (or any publication) publishes anything, there should be automatic payment for the author.
Martin Plant, Montreal
At some point, we have to have a discussion as a society over what line exists between freelance journalism (which should be paid for) and reader interaction (which shouldn’t).
LCN’s Mathieu Belhumeur has exclusive video that cellphone service providers allow their customers to purchase images of scantily-clad women.
The video report is, of course, filled with examples of such images, just in case you’ve forgotten what a scantily-clad woman looks like.
The real scandal here is that people are expected to pay $2 to download a thumbnail-sized image of anything.
In one of those moments that marketing geeks wet their pants over, RDS apparently agreed in December to cut out the visual feed for 10 seconds of its Sports 30 recap of a Canadiens game, replacing it with an ad for the Quebec Foundation for the Blind which was mostly a black screen. The audio feed was left as is.
I can find no news coverage of this feat, nor anything from RDS, so I’ll just have to take the word of the marketing agency that this actually happened.
I suppose with all the product placement, pop-up ads and other junk that increasingly attacks our television viewing experience, something like this is inevitable. Let’s just hope this idea isn’t expanded to commercial advertising.
(via iPub)
Gerard Deltel Radio Canada Hors Mandat Nuit aTQS
Uploaded by mediawatchqc
Not that we mean to imply that people at TQS are raving lunatics or anything, but it’s clear they’re a bit frustrated at constantly losing money.
I don’t think even the Tories hate Radio-Canada that much.
The AMT has quietly become the first transit agency in Quebec (and only the third in Canada behind Vancouver’s TransLink and Fredericton Transit) to add its routes and schedules to Google Transit.
Now, people using Google Maps to plan trips in Montreal will be given the option of using the train. Schedules for all five lines are included, but no buses so far. Google has some examples, like St. Jerome to Lucien-L’Allier station at 7pm (where the first available train is more than 12 hours later, assuming the next day is a weekday).
The search is still a bit clunky (it refuses to calculate routes from some general locations, and while it accepts “Gare Lucien L’Allier” as a location it doesn’t recognize “Gare Vendome” or “Gare Parc” or “Gare de la Concorde”), but it’s still pretty cool.
The next step is to see the STM, STL and RTL (as well as all the smaller AMT-run agencies) add their route information to the service. The STM already has a similar service with its clunky Tous Azimuts interface (which was nevertheless a technological breakthrough when it first came out). Hopefully converting data used in that service to Google’s Transit Feed Specification won’t be too difficult.
From the website for an awesome-sounding new movie:
Dear Newline Cinema,
I’m available to proofread your websites in the future.
I can watch the same theme music from Mega Man II performed on piano, guitar and Mario Paint. Or I could just see it in its original game form, performed flawlessly.
There are no words to describe how awesome that is.
From Cracked.com, a list of 10 “laughably misleading” ads, which I would say is more like “top 10 commercials for laughably unnecessary or overpriced products”
A little place to get your revenge for My Lil’ Reminder and its ilk.