Tag Archives: bad ideas

| Media, Web design

Star PM: Good on paper, but still a failure

Just over a year ago, with much fanfare, the Toronto Star launched a new service called “Star P.M.”, which was a dozen-page letter-sized PDF file that could be downloaded on weekday afternoons.

The idea was simple: Office workers would download the paper, which had afternoon updates of important stories, as well as things like Sudoku puzzles, print it out and take it with them on the ride home. There are certainly lots of people who take public transit to whom this might appeal.

And from some who fit that criteria there was initial praise of the project, which was the first of its kind in North America.

But there was also criticism with what now looks like keen foresight, pointing out that people won’t download as a PDF what they can get faster in HTML. And then there were numbers to back that point up.

And so it was, this week the Star announced it is killing Star P.M. to focus more on its mobile website, which is a format more friendly to the cellphone-toting workforce. The last issue will be Wednesday, October 17.

The format is what ultimately killed Star P.M. The Star underestimated the amount of effort involved in printing such a document every weekday. They overestimated how fast non-junkies need to get their news (busy workers could just wait until the next morning to read stories in the paper). They underestimated how much time news junkies would spend bored at work reading the paper’s website, or getting any news they cared about from their favourite blogs.

The new mobile website (“mobile version” is the new “non-Flash” or “low-bandwidth” — making me wonder why the rest of the website can’t have such a simple design) is a better way for the Star to spend its time. It updates faster and it’s much more interactive.

But what about the other PDF papers out there? The Ottawa Citizen has Rush Hour, which is still running. Other such papers in the U.S. and Europe have quietly shut down. Expect Rush Hour to have a similarly sad end.

You might also see obituaries being written for “Game Day” issues, which are special afternoon before-the-game downloadable PDFs with rosters, last-minute updates and other stuff the newspapers think you’ll want to take with you to the game. The Ottawa Citizen has one for Senators games, the Vancouver Sun just started one for Canucks games, and the Montreal Gazette runs one for Alouettes games. Considering these publications have even stricter audience limitations, I just can’t see them getting popular enough to support the work put into them.

There’s also G24, the PDF paper produced by the Guardian, which has the advantages of being somewhat customizable and more up-to-date because the PDFs are produced automatically. This also means that even if nobody reads it, it doesn’t cost the paper anything. Sure, it doesn’t have the newspaper-like modular layout, but is that really necessary in these kinds of circumstances?

By the end of the year, we’ll probably be able to conclude once and for all that these PDF papers are a failed experiment. But, as one blogger commented, at least it was an experiment. We have to at least give them that.

UPDATE (Jan. 9, 2008): The London Daily Telegraph has killed its “Telegraph PM” PDF paper. So I was off by a few days…

| In the news

Can’t we just agree that the Charter amendment is a stupid idea?

Can we stop with the news stories about the moronic idea from the Quebec Council on the Status of Women to ban hijabs and change the Charter to make gender equality rights trump religious belief?

Apparently not, as more politicians with the foresight of moths are actually getting behind it, already coming up with ways of ranking our fundamental rights.

It goes without saying that experts with brains oppose the amendment, for the simple reason that when we start saying some rights are less important than others, we begin de-valuing them. They also point out that religious rights don’t trump those of gender equality, and changing the Charter in such a way would not fix the problem, but likely have tons of other unintended consequences.

And even if that obvious flaw hadn’t been pointed out, it’s not like making the change would suddenly cause devout Muslim women to run out into the streets in bikinis, thanking us for allowing them the privilege of dressing immodestly.

It’s a horrible solution that fails to solve a non-problem. Let’s just agree to that and move on.

| Media, Montreal

Self-centred drivers have short-sighted views

The Journal has a feature article today about a survey they organized which shows rush-hour drivers want heavy trucks banned from bridges during rush-hour. The article doesn’t include any interviews with truck drivers or transport companies or anyone else who might provide a balanced perspective.

Had they done so, they might have come up with this simple argument: Truck drivers don’t like rush hour any more than office workers do. They try to arrange their schedules, whenever possible, to avoid high-traffic situations which slow them down and eat into their productivity. When they travel during rush-hour it’s because they don’t have a choice.

The survey, with 71% in favour of creating such a restriction, is also misleading. All drivers want less rush hour traffic. If they could, they’d have everyone but them banned from the road. But if you explain the economic consequences of unnecessary regulation of truck traffic (like higher retail prices), you might start seeing those numbers change.

| Uncategorized

Kill the penny, but round it up

The issue of eliminating the penny from circulation has come up again, thanks to CanWest getting some Access to Information documents from the Royal Canadian Mint. The documents show the results of a study into the elimination of the penny.

The arguments (summarized in this Wikipedia article about the now-similarly-valued U.S. penny) are as follows:

Keeping the penny (also summarized in this page from Americans for Common Cents):

  • Public support. A majority in the U.S. still support keeping the penny, while Canadians are mostly unsure. I would argue that this is more about resistance to change and emotional attachment to the penny (how will we buy people’s thoughts? Will we have to put our five cents in?) than it is about any economic or practical reason. (The fact that the penny celebrates its 100th birthday next year may also have something to do with it)
  • Ever-so-slightly higher prices. Though this is technically true, it only works if you end up using the pennies you get at the register, either by rolling them up and bringing them to the bank or by giving them to cashiers as much as you get them.
  • Charities take pennies. But even they’re finding pennies tedious. UNICEF stopped distributing those boxes for kids at Halloween because the cost of transporting and counting them took away too much from their face value.
  • Profit for mints. This one is debatable. Both mints in Canada and the U.S. say they make money off pennies, producing them for less than their face value, and selling them at one cent each. But others argue that indirect costs (like transportation) aren’t calculated in this equation, and that they’re actually losing money.

Eliminating the penny:

  • They’re not accepted in vending machines. This is a big one for me, even though I don’t use them much. It’s how a lot of people get rid of their change. If vending machines don’t take them, then they become worthless… which brings me to my next point:
  • They’re worthless. Society has already spoken in its habits on this. Nobody bends over to pick up a penny. Stores have “take a penny leave a penny” trays where people recycle them. Pennies are hoarded with no second thought.
  • They’re a pain. You can’t use them in bulk to make purchases, you can’t use them in vending machines, so the only way to get rid of them is to use up to four at a time when paying cash or roll them up and bring them to the bank (waiting half an hour in line between 10am and 3pm when they’re open). Another increasingly popular method is these new coin-counting machines they’ve installed in grocery stores (the Metro on Queen Mary has one). They automatically sort your change and give you higher denomination currency in exchange for 10% of its worth. (I don’t know about you, but I’m not crazy about giving a machine 10% of my money just to count it)
  • I say so. Dammit.

I won’t get into these multimillion-dollar out-of-their-asses projections by economists on “lost productivity” because of the time it takes to count pennies and such, because they’re absolutely meaningless. The practical reasons above speak for themselves.

But while I’m in favour of eliminating the penny, I’m not crazy about the proposed solution at the cash register: Swedish rounding. It means prices (when paid in cash) will be rounded to the nearest 5-cent value. So $10.01 would be $10, and $10.07 would be $10.10.

My problem is two-fold:

  1. This rounding method presents problems at the midpoint. It’s not an issue with five-cent intervals, but if you have to round to the nearest dime, what do you do with $1.05? The method suggests flipping a coin to decide, which is silly. Others arbitrarily round up, or arbitrarily round down.
  2. Put simply, anything that costs $0.02 is now free. Perhaps it’s just an academic issue since you can’t buy anything for just a penny anymore, but it just kind of bothers me. What if someone just decided to buy a penny of gas at a time? They could go on forever and never have to pay anything. (I’m sure there are laws about this, but it’s just tinkering with a broken system.)

We already round values up to the next penny, when we apply taxes. $0.80 plus tax in Quebec is $0.9116, which is rounded up to $0.92 instead of down. Why not just apply this up to the next level? Yes, you pay more, but it eliminates the problem of being able to pay someone less than what your purchase is worth.

| Humour, TV

Air Farce Live: A gimmick won’t magically increase ratings

I just finished watching the premiere of Air Farce Live on CBC. The umpteen-year-old show, which has been sagging in the ratings these past few years because it’s a Friday-night show and it’s not funny, came up with the idea of doing it live as a gimmick. It worked for me, at least this first night.

The first episode had a bit too much “hey look at us we’re live now!” moments, which should hopefully disappear by next week. There were also three pre-packaged segments, which is a lot for a supposedly live half-hour show. And it became clear through the first few sketches that actors wouldn’t appear in consecutive segments, which will mean fewer actors in each.

I used to be a big fan of the Royal Canadian Air Farce as a kid. I had fond memories of the Chicken Cannon, which now seems to have been retired. But the jokes were too obvious, too immature, compared to the more nuanced ones of shows like This Hour Has 22 Minutes. By the time I got a high-school diploma, I stopped watching.

After a few years away, not much has changed. There’s new faces, and the old faces are a bit greyer (and in the case of Don Ferguson, balder), but the jokes are still the same. I laughed only a couple of times, mostly during a strange, Weekend-Updateish rapid-fire news segment with some guy in front of a laptop. (The joke, after one about Brian Mulroney’s massive book of memoirs: “Kim Campbell is planning to release her memoirs in a pamphlet later this year.”)

The Air Farce will always have its audience. And even if it doesn’t, the CBC’s commitment to Canadian content will probably keep it on life support for many years. But the idea of making it “live” seems like little more than a gimmick shark-jump to try and jump-start sagging ratings. Unless it’s matched by better writing (or some unpredictability that you can only get when live) it’s just not going to work.

| Uncategorized

More xenophobia at the Bouchard-Taylor commission

The expressions of blatant xenophobia at the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accomodation is continuing with no end in sight:

  • The Quebec council on the status of women seeks to impose a dress code on all public employees, preventing them from wearing “visible religious symbols” like a scarf over their head or a little hat. Of course, it goes without saying that Catholics wearing crosses around their necks are specifically exempt. They get special treatment because they believe in the correct God.
  • The group also wants the Quebec charter amended to make sure that gender equality usurps religious freedom. This makes sense, but does that mean that women could sue for the right to become priests? If they’re for gender equality in all religions, then they must be in favour of that as well.
  • Pauline Marois is opining that the solution to reasonable accommodation is … wait for it … Quebec independence. In a statement that sounds almost Third Reich-ish, she suggests that independence would remove “ambiguity” concerning what Quebec is. Instead, immigrants would see it as the racist, intolerant, French-only haven of backwards ideas we all know and love. And if these ethnics want to join us, all they have to do is rid themselves of their religion, their culture, their language and anything else that makes them different.
| Media

Newspapers don’t need to advertise in newspapers

The Canadian Newspaper Association is planning a media campaign to remind people who read newspapers that they should be reading newspapers.

Aside from the redundant stupidity of putting ads promoting newspapers in newspapers, is this really necessary? Newspapers aren’t like toilet paper, you don’t go into a grocery store and pick out a newspaper subscription because you recognize the brand. People subscribe or unsubscribe based on the quality over a long period of time.

Instead of spending money to advertise in your own papers, maybe you should spend it hiring journalists to find good stories and editors to collect them and present them without all those glaring typos.

UPDATE (Oct. 9): Transmission Marketing agrees with me that this is preaching to the converted.

| Media

Even student politics should be open

A mini storm is brewing at Concordia University over a subject so stupid I can’t believe there are actually two sides to it: student union councillors don’t want their public meetings videotaped for public broadcast, despite mandating it at the previous meeting.

A little history here. Many moons ago, Concordia University Television was founded as Canada’s first university-based television station. It doesn’t have a television broadcasting license, nor is it on cable anywhere. Instead, it has monitors on a closed-circuit system throughout the university, mainly in the downtown Hall Building.

Somewhere in the 1990s, the Concordia Student Union (which was still concerned with that “democracy” thing and hadn’t yet been taken over by the moderate/radical or Israeli/Palestinian political divides, each bent on using political corruption to eliminate the other and stay in power at any cost) had the bright idea that, because nobody cared about what they did, they should get the word out more. So they mandated (read: required) CUTV to film their meetings and “broadcast” them to students. But because of technical limitations at CUTV, this never happened. And with the inevitable turnover on both sides, this rule was eventually forgotten.

Fast-forward to this spring. CUTV station manager Jason Gondziola wins a seat on the CSU Council of Representatives, somehow believing that being a student politician and running a student media outlet does not present an inherent conflict of interest. He immediately starts lobbying for permission for CUTV to start filming meetings. Over the past few years, the station has been using student money to buy lots of new equipment and is distributing some videos via its website.

But CSU councillors, specifically John Molson School of Business councillor Catherine Côté, who apparently have no idea what politics mean, are concerned about their privacy. In some cases in the past, it’s been Muslim women on Council who didn’t want their faces exposed. Ditto some paranoid anarchists. I’m not sure who it is now, but I’m certain it’s either an idiot or someone who is trying to hide from constituents.

Student politicians are almost by definition stupid. It’s not their fault. They’re learning how to become real politicians. This means that, for example, their political dirty tricks are a lot more transparent (illegally paying campaign workers, bribing, appointing partisan hacks to electoral and judicial positions, etc.).

But it boggles the mind that a student politician, who has run in an election and appeared on hundreds of posters and thousands of ballots, would cite privacy concerns as a reason to prevent journalists from recording the public proceedings of the most important student-run body at Concordia, responsible for a budget of over a million dollars. The fact that Councillor Côté did so after the fact, using the excuse that the issue should be revisited because she couldn’t be bothered to show up to the previous meeting and should be given a chance to express her views, is the height of arrogance.

The Link agrees, calling her an “enemy of transparency”.

She, and the entire CSU Council, should be ashamed.

| Media

Too much A-section planning never works

The Hamilton Spectator is “going local”. I’m not quite sure what that means exactly, but good for them.

One of the plans as part of its “going local” strategy is remaking its A2 and A3 pages. In most newspapers, these are the continuations of major stories off the front page. But the Spectator is going to make them into local news pages, probably with some sort of fixed layout.

Lots of newspapers make plans like these. A2 will always look like this, A3 will always look like this, the front page will always have this kind of layout.

The problem is that as soon as a huge story happens (say, an election or a local school shooting), about half the A section gets turned into coverage of that story, and these rules start flying out the window. Eventually, the first few pages start reverting to their previous habits: turns of unrelated front-page stories jammed in together with second-rate top news stories that didn’t make the cover.

Why bother fighting it? The A section is about news. Almost by definition it’s the section that you can plan the least in advance because you won’t know what kind of news you have until you have it. Give it the fluidity it needs, because otherwise it’s going to find a way to sneak in.

| Media

Howard Galganov is still an idiot

Hey, remember Howard Galganov? He’s that anglo-rights crusader who was popular back in the 90s, ran for office a bunch of times (and lost) and eventually gave up on our province and moved to Ontario.

Well, Howard doesn’t let silly provincial boundaries stop him from opining, which he does now through his website. His latest diatribe talks about the declining anglophone population in Quebec, and he blames it on what’s clearly the most logical source: the anglophone media. (Except The Suburban and CIQC.)

His diatribe is long and venom-filled with overuse of the words “sell-out”, “racist” and other insults, so I’ll boil down his arguments:

  1. They wanted to be nice. Their refusal to let slip the dogs of war and stab at government with their pens was surely a missed opportunity.
  2. They didn’t support “anglo rights leaders”. Translation: They didn’t support me. As if the leaders deserve support regardless of whether their positions are sound.
  3. They’re like Jews who supported the Nazis. Nothing quite like a Holocaust simile to get a point across when everything else fails.
  4. Some say we should celebrate Bill 101’s anniversary. That’s simplifying the issue a bit. The Gazette’s opinion, for example, is that Bill 101 was a compromise that ensured linguistic peace. And even then, it also carried an opinion piece from Robert Libman saying it was devastating to the anglo community. CFCF’s Barry Wilson certainly hasn’t strayed from the anglo rights beat, and CBC doesn’t really have an opinion section.
  5. They called me “Angryphone”. That’s because you’re always angry.
  6. They equated me with francophone terrorists. Really? Has anyone called you a terrorist? You’re a radical on one side, just like Impératif Français are radicals on the other side. You may disagree with where the middle is supposed to be, but that’s something you have to live with.
  7. They didn’t sponsor rallies to raise money for lawsuits against the government. Is that really the role of the media? They raise money for literacy, but they tend to take a back seat to, you know, actually trying to change the law.
  8. They never said ethnocentric nationalism is wrong. I don’t see it that way. They routinely make the point of saying that the anglo and immigrant communities are important to Quebec. They were pretty united against the stupidity in Herouxville.

Galganov’s solution to the problem is simple and stupid: Have all the anglos and immigrants leave, shut down tourism and watch as their economy self-destructs.

Howard doesn’t seem to understand the problem. It’s not that Quebec doesn’t understand the value of its English-speaking citizens, though they do take us for granted. It’s that many anglophones are leaving the province because they can’t be bothered to learn some French.

In other words, the problem is people like Howard Galganov.

| Montreal

Balcony BBQ taboo

Did you know it’s illegal to barbecue on a balcony in Côte-Saint-Luc?

Apparently the law isn’t really enforced, and politicians are looking at ways to change it, according to The Chronicle’s Martin Barry (who uses three different spellings for “barbecue”).

What’s interesting about the law is its motivation. It’s not the act of barbecuing on balconies that’s dangerous, it’s taking propane tanks up elevators. So now they’re considering allowing people to take propane tanks up elevators if they’re alone.

If propane tanks on elevators are the problem, why not just restrict propane tanks on elevators?

(There’s also the point that fire truck ladders only go so high — which worries me because even propane-less apartments may need them someday — and that tanks are necessarily stored too close to the building’s doors and windows.)

Even if the laws are meant to stop real dangers, can’t we make them a bit more common-sense?

| TV, Video

Emmy “Interactive TV” award just a gimmick

Al Gore was just on stage at the Emmys to receive an award for “outstanding achievement for interactive television” on behalf of his broadband “TV” network Current.tv (Gore actually got the website’s name wrong, calling it “current.com”. That website quickly crashed under the load of Emmy-watching visitors.) The presentation of this inaugural award came complete with a lame live video feed from MySpace’s Tom Anderson (is he too good for the Emmys already to be there in person?).

The show wasn’t clear on what exactly “interactive television” is. Its call for entries for the award is somewhat more specific, but still leaves a lot of questions. Here’s their explanation for the three categories they have in this area:

  • Interactive television “Program” is defined as a single show, originally aired or transmitted during the eligibility year that is delivered via broadcast, cable, satellite, broadband, or mobile networks, and that incorporates one or more participatory interactive features that enhance the viewing experience.
  • Interactive Television “Series” is defined as episodic programming that has been or continues to be available during the eligibility year and delivered via broadcast, cable, satellite, broadband, or mobile networks, incorporating participatory interactive features that enhance the viewing experience.
  • Interactive television “Service” is defined as a television network or other distributor of programming offering one or more participatory interactive features that enhance the viewing experience across a range of programs or series, and that have been or continues to be available during the eligibility year and delivered via broadcast, cable, satellite, broadband, or mobile networks.

So an interactive show is defined as a “show” (how specific), delivered by just about any medium, with “participatory interactive features” which are also not explained.

If the Emmys want to get into online videos, that’s one thing. Then everything original uploaded to YouTube could be eligible for an Emmy.

But that doesn’t seem to be what they’re doing here. Instead, they go after the mainstream web publishers like Current, have them pay the $600 entry fee, and then explain to the judges what’s so great about their “interactive” programming:

(Entries must include) A linear / non-interactive video recording that demonstrates the viewer experience and highlights the features and functionality of the interactive television program, series, or service. The video recording must not exceed 6 minutes in length and must be submitted on Beta SP or Digi Beta tape format. It must provide a minimum of either two minutes of, OR the combined total running time of, the interactive elements in the program, series, or service, whichever is shorter, and must include the interactive feature(s), either contiguous or edited, in an order that is closely representative of the actual viewer experience.

The academy needs to decide if it wants to include online-produced video in its eligibility criteria (fortunately, it’s at a point now where there’s still a dividing line between television and online video). If it does, then why not include DVDs, advertisements, wedding videos, or any other form of video? If not, then it needs to stick to television as we know it and stop with the stupid gimmicks.

| Blogosphere, TV

The right way and wrong way to blog the Emmys

There’s nothing better on tonight (except re-runs of Family Guy/American Dad on Global, Anchorman on ABC, the NFL’s New England Patriots on NBC/TSN, and the Weather Network’s long-term forecasts), so I’m watching the Emmys.

Of course, it’s not enough to be watching the Emmys, you have to read someone liveblogging it too. Something to keep you entertained during Ray Romano’s monologue. (It’s clear why some of the awards were previously presented, because they needed more time for long, unfunny monologues and skits.)

There’s a few options for Emmy liveblogging, but I’ll point to two with opposite mentalities:

FOX has five people you’ve never heard of sitting in the audience with blackberries in their hands, contributing to a blog on its website. The blackberries apparently prevent them from using punctuation, capital letters, or from spelling anyone’s name right. Here’s a sampling of some of the comments:

  • “ray remono is a comedic genious he had the audience in tears”
  • “I’m quick like a squirrell.”
  • “whod of thought eva l could get any hotter”
  • “hahaha yay justin!”
  • “queeny is in the house”

Most of the other posts have about the same level of insight and grammar.

On the other side of the spectrum, The Gazette’s Basem Boshra is sitting in front of a TV liveblogging the Emmys for the Inside the Box blog. A sampling:

  • 8:47: Biggest upset of the night so far as Late Night with Conan O’Brien snags the writing in a variety, comedy or music series trophy over heavyweights such as the Daily Show, Colbert Report and Late Show with David Letterman. (Although the winner for best goofy video to accompany the list of nominees – always one of the high points of any Emmy broadcast – goes to the team from Bill Maher, for their priceless send-up of the Sen. Larry Craig mess,)
  • 8:59 p.m.: A grizzled-as-ever Robert Duvall spends a little too long extolling the virtues of the western after winning the award for best actor in a minseries or movie for Broken Trail, presented to him by Heroes’ Ali Larter and 24’s Kiefer Sutherland, the latter who was in full-on Sutherland-gravitas mode.

It’s not like the latter tells me much I couldn’t tell from simply watching the show. But at least it doesn’t treat me like an idiot.

UPDATE: From Sunday’s Gazette:

Jon Stewart

Sacrilege! How could they get the name of his show wrong?

| Media, Web design

UR abdicating ur responsibilities

The Sudbury Star (an Osprey Quebecor paper) is launching a new user-generated web portal, lamely called “UR Sudbury“. As they describe it, it’s a “supernova” of journalism, taking advantage of “citizen media” to expand the newspapers’ coverage and bring the community together.

But to media critics, it sounds like the Star is telling the community to “do it yourself.”

It’s another example of what happens when media managers read about “Web 2.0” from marketing books and fail to get what it’s all about. They miss that whole part about building a community and get right to the part about “crowdsourcing” and how that’s going to save them money.

But crowdsourcing journalism abandons the very strengths mainstream media have: fairness, reliability, fact-checking, sound news judgment and professionalism. It’s not so much a problem with community event listings or stories about grandma’s 100th birthday, but once it starts moving into the area of real news — even local news — then it’s attaching the paper’s name to anonymous postings on a web forum.

Right now, UR Sudbury isn’t a “supernova” or a revolution. It’s a badly-designed Craigslist.

| In the news, Montreal

I did it… wait! I’m suing!

It looks like Larry Craig isn’t the only person in the world trying to rewrite history by appealing his own admission of guilt.

Here in Montreal, former Concordia student Ashraf Azar is suing Concordia for the ludicrously high sum of $16 million $13.5 million after he admitted to “tampering with other students’ exams and assignments” and got expelled in 2004.

Azar, a recently engaged (congrats) biochemistry student who ran for student council twice and lost both times, wrote the lawsuit himself without legal aid, which probably accounts for the huge figure.

His argument is that he was pressured into admitting guilt by his CSU university-appointed (see below) advocate, who suggested that doing so would result in a lesser punishment. The fact he got expelled, which is the most serious punishment, suggests that didn’t happen.

Though the lawsuit is ridiculous and will probably be laughed out of court, there is a grain of real concern here. The obvious conflict of interest in a university both appointing advocates for students while simultaneously seeking to punish them is what led to the creation of the Concordia Student Union’s Advocacy Centre. The centre quickly got a lot of traffic, especially from international students who are highly pressured to succeed, have English as a second or third language, and are brought up on different rules when it comes to things like citing academic content.

Much like defence lawyers, CSU student advocates admit they’ve gotten guilty people off on technicalities, or at least had their punishments reduced. So I suppose that despite being guilty, Azar might have a point if he argued that having a student advocate from the student union would have resulted in a lesser punishment.

But he still admitted guilt, and he was punished for it. He doesn’t deserve to have a degree handed to him, nor does he deserve any money for his mistake, to say nothing of millions of dollars.

UPDATE (Sept. 19): The Link has an interview with more details on the story. Apparently the advocate was appointed by the CSU advocacy centre (which if true, means they have a lot of ‘splainin to do), and (see comment below) lawyers wouldn’t take his case because it’s “unwinnable”. Oh yeah, he also says he didn’t do it, and he’s being discriminated against.