Isn’t this about the worst time to profile a bar, mentioning how great it is to watch Canadiens hockey games there?
Tag Archives: bad ideas
Who needs rights when press junkets are at stake?
Remember that decision by Warner Brothers to cancel advance screenings of its films this summer? Yeah, Ottawa caved. So now it’ll be illegal to record films, even if you have no intention of doing anything illegal with it.
Guilty until proven innocent, just because it’s so difficult to prove guilt.
I could do without the commemorating
Shortly after the Dawson shootings last September, an unknown local singer (annoying Flash warning) wrote a cheesy pop song about it. Of course, being a cheesy pop song, teenage CEGEP students ate it up, and everyone grieved together supportively.
The song was turned into a fundraising campaign (with its own MySpace page – standard MySpace warnings apply), which unsuccessfully tried to raise serious money for the college.
I wrote about the artist and campaign for The Gazette (no link, since it’s not online anymore). I pointed out that on one hand, this event brought a lot of people together and the song has been getting a lot of support. On the other hand, the song’s creator never attended Dawson, and admitted part of the reason she created the song was to increase her public profile in the hope of being signed.
Well now there’s an official video for the song. Like just about every YouTube video about things like this, it’s a slideshow of (unlicensed) wire service photos of people screaming and crying set to the tune of a song.
Forgive me, because I haven’t been involved in a catastrophic event such as this one, but I fail to see how seeing photos of people crying and running for their lives is supposed to help me emotionally. It seems to me such a thing would only make it worse. The media focused enough on the violence — perhaps we should be focusing on something else?
What’s a student to do?
Now that the minority Quebec government has put power in the hands of whatever two of three parties can agree on, it looks like tuition in this province is finally going to (formally) increase. The Liberals promised a small hike, and the ADQ’s platform is in favour of tuition hikes. Only the PQ is in favour of keeping the freeze intact.
This is, of course, horrible news for student groups, to whom students pay huge amounts of money to represent their interests – chief among them being tuition. ASSÉ, the more militant student group, has already called for yet another unlimited student strike this fall. (I’d link to the English version, but their English site hasn’t been updated in two years.)
Some people are pointing out that the tuition hikes were open platform points for both parties, and the issue was heavily debated before the election. People want to raise tuition (in as much as voters can “want” any single issue in this electoral system).
The problem is that these groups are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can’t do nothing, or else their power to put fear into politicians’ hearts will fade (pressure from these groups is what has kept tuition this low for so long). On the other hand, cry wolf too often and nobody takes you seriously any more. ASSÉ especially has been very quick on the “strike” trigger (which is made worse by the fact that student “strikes” don’t actually cause financial or labour problems for the government), and this has led to many groups (including the Concordia Student Union) dropping ASSÉ in favour of the less militant and more negotiating FEUQ.
So even though ASSÉ is silly to call this strike, they must do so in order to save face.
Airport security to be proud of
According to Robert Fisk (here’s a grain of salt), an expert on the Armenian genocide was delayed at Trudeau airport because he was suspected of being a terrorist. And among the evidence used against him was his Wikipedia biography.
Yeah.
Best of the Free Content
There’s a pattern emerging in the news media nowadays where “journalists” desperate for content and having no original ideas of their own look to blogs and summarize their content.
And then there’s those who simply copy entire blog posts verbatim, and assume that since they’re attributing the content they can do so freely. It’s like if I copied an entire book on my website, but since I credited the author it’s not copyright infringement.
Mama Fagstein (hi mom!) was the first to notice the Toronto Sun “quoting” me in its Best of the Blogs last week. Normally I’m all about being recognized in traditional media, but this one irks me for a few reasons:
- They got the address of the blog wrong. Since they found the post enough to copy it in its entirety, you’d think they got that part right at least.
- Nobody contacted me about it. I’m not saying you need permission to point to a blog post, but sending me an email would have gotten my last name, which they apparently couldn’t find with all their journalistic skills.
- The story doesn’t have a byline. So I have no one to complain to.
- They got my position wrong. I suppose I can forgive them for thinking “flicking brilliant” was praising the Liberal campaign. But nowhere do I say I “stand by” the campaign. The point of the post was to criticize the NDP criticism.
- The one sentence of original content got two things wrong.
Not that I’m complaining or anything.
Here’s a bit of irony for you: An example of how to do things right comes from the blog of Toronto Sun employees, who put up a blog post mentioning my post about the Sun’s national editorial policy. You’ll notice they link directly to the post and quote only a paragraph or so of it. And they also keep it well-formatted.
National wire stories at the West Island Chronicle
Editor Albert Kramberger at the West Island Chronicle announces that the Transcontinental paper’s website will be carrying national news headlines from Canadian Press for the benefit of its readership.
Why bother?
Seriously, there are so many reasons why this is a pointless waste of money that I don’t believe I’ll be able to list them all. But let’s try anyway:
- Canadian Press is everywhere. Metro and 24 Heures rely on it for almost all their content, and established media like the Globe and Mail, CTV and CBC use it to supplement their own online coverage. Even some websites not based here, like Breitbart and Yahoo! News use the service. This is because compared to the cost of actually hiring journalists, CP is crazy cheap, especially online. By now most people have found their preferred source of Canadian news and the last thing we need is another source.
- For some inexplicable reason, they’re providing national news but not international news. Does Chronicle readers’ interest stop at the border?
- Who goes to their local weekly paper’s website for national news? The website doesn’t even try to make itself into a portal for daily information, so it boggles the mind why anyone would use it as such.
- Most Chronicle subscribers, if they’re even remotely interested in news from outside their community, also subscribe to The Gazette, The Globe and Mail or The National Post which provides these stories in their papers.
- Further reasons are left as an exercise to the reader (read: I’m too lazy to think of more)
By the way, who the heck is this girl, and why must I see her on every page?
Prochaine station … oh who cares?
With the Laval metro stations up and running, some young angryphones are griping about the lack of metro service in the West Island. Having spent 20 years of my life in Pierrefonds, and five of those regularly commuting downtown, I sympathize.
But there’s a good reason why the metro won’t be extended West from where it is now:
That’s 10 km of mostly wasted tunnel travelling under uninhabited areas including the Taschereau rail yards, two highways, the Lachine industrial park and an airport runway.
At a cost of $150,000,000 per kilometre, the price of this extension to the airport terminal would cost about $1.5 billion.
Okay, you say, that’s big, but we can afford it, right?
Well, do you have $6,000 to spare? That’s how much each West Islander would have to pay the government to make this a reality.
Consider some alternatives, if you will, for that $1.5 billion:
- Add 100 buses to the STM’s network for shuttle service to downtown points from various locations (Dorval, Fairview, Roxboro), and keep them running seven days a week for 40 years.
- Create a high-speed rail link to Dorval airport and increase commuter train service on the Dorion-Rigaud line.
- Multiply existing commuter train service 100-fold for 100 years.
My solution to this problem? Unsurprisingly, it involves increased commuter train and bus service to the West Island.
The 211 bus running along Lakeshore is insanely popular among southern West Islanders, because it’s a 7-day regular service bus that’s an express shuttle downtown. On the northern West Island, which is much worse served (except for commuter trains to Roxboro), the 470 Express Pierrefonds provides shuttle service from Fairview to Côte-Vertu, but only during rush-hour. Having an all-day shuttle from Fairview to the metro would save commuters as much as 20 minutes per trip.
I’m sure you can think of other express shuttle services that would serve the West Island well. And all of them put together would cost much less than extending metro service here.
UPDATE: More metro dreaming in this post, with maps.
Concordia’s new logo rules
And by “rules”, I’m referring to the noun, not the verb. The university recently released a “standards manual” (PDF) for how to properly use its new logo. The one everyone hates. Among the “don’ts” are tilting the logo or using the crest alone. We’ll see how long before various departments start ignoring those rules.
Flicking brilliant
So apparently the NDP in Ontario is all lit up about the provincial government’s light use campaign called “flick off”, in which a Richard Branson campaign uses a rounded font and tight tracking to encourage teenagers’ dirty minds (kind of like what FCUK has been doing since … well, ever). This is their logo:
Tabs on the website include “Who needs to flick off?” and “Go flick yourself”.
Here’s the NDP’s response to the juvenile innuendo of the campaign:
The slogan’s font is clearly designed to make flick look like a four-letter-word. New Democrat Peter Kormos reacted by saying it “blows his flicking mind” how Broten could be involved with the campaign, which includes stickers and T-shirts. “I think it’s a flicking embarrassment.”
Maybe I’m being silly about this, but does it make sense to criticize juvenile wordplay with the same juvenile wordplay?
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?
Hot chicks sucking fags
There are a lot of interesting pornographic websites out there (don’t ask me how I know this): porn involving pregnant women, porn involving books, glasses and all sorts of other inanimate objects you wouldn’t consider sexual.
Now a Quebec entrepreneur is filling the gap of smoking porn. It’s not actually porn, since the girls aren’t naked or anything. They’re just smoking suggestively. And you have to pay to see it.
Dominic Arpin asks the obvious question: What are they smoking? And how smoke-deprived do you have to be to pay to watch other people smoke?
Crest this!
Despite it being a done deal, and the $30,000 already paid to the “generous” company that created Concordia University’s new logo, some people are still demanding they scrap it and go back to the old one. Now they’ve created a Facebook group to that end. It has 136 members so far.
Stoves shouldn’t be used to light cigarettes
and this is a perfectly good example why.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s kinda stupid to use a stove to light a cigarette, especially a gas one. But the fact that gas stoves run on fire bothers me still.
OK, so it wasn’t a gas stove, it was an electric one. Stupid me not reading the story properly.
I know, let’s make it even worse for traffic
Kristian Gravenor, the city’s foremost expert on lower NDG, predicts the city will announce the tearing up of green space on lower Prudhomme Ave. so that traffic can get even more ridiculous near the new superhospital at Vendome.