Tag Archives: language

| My articles, Navel-gazing, TV

Couch potato journalism

So The Gazette has been running this Made For TV series since Saturday, with five of their writers describing what they watched on TV for a week.

We’ll set aside the inherent valuelessness of such fluff journotainment. What really sucks about Made For TV is the writing. Today, for example, they have this unknown freelance hack talk about watching Family Guy and the Discovery channel while surfing the net on his laptop. I’m sure this guy thinks he’s very funny. A look at his TV-watching diary shows he has plenty of free time being a couch-potato loser to cultivate that wit, watching Star Trek reruns until 3 a.m.

I for one have never heard of this guy before, though he seems to think he’s hot stuff talking about himself on his blog. What do I care what he’s watching on TV? Should I be pitying him? It’s just so sad.

But man is he really hot.

Continue reading →

| Media, Video

Oh the poor oppressed Quebec white man

Did you know we live in a plutocracy?

Michel Brûlé knows it. He knows the big Quebec media is out to get real Quebecers. La Presse is friends with Jean Charest, Radio-Canada is “radio propaganda”, CBC has Don Cherry.

And more importantly, English Canadians are in bed with U.S. Americans because we watch their TV shows and we’re pro-war or something.

Oh, and we’re under control of “U.S. feminists”, who have convinced Quebec’s women that they have to go after all men, when in fact it’s just the English-speaking ones who are oppressing them. (He insists, meanwhile, that objectifying women is OK because he finds them very pretty — but only in ads for sex shops, not beer.) He also says Quebec women are too stupid to realize the need for Quebec independence to free it from the English Canadians, because they only voted 45% yes in the 1995 referendum while men voted 55% yes.

This is what he explains, in his opening videos (which I can’t link to*) to Les Dents du Québec.TV, his new citizen media website.

His thesis: (French) Quebec men and women must band together and end the battle of the sexes so they can fight their real enemy: the English language.

I’m all for citizen media, and giving people the right to express the opinion that the French language is endangered in this province. And his point about how much American TV we watch concerns me as well.

But I’d take him a bit more seriously if most of his ideas didn’t make him look like the other side of the Reform Party coin.

* Seriously folks, what’s with all these video sites that don’t allow people to link directly to the videos? That’s not even Web 2.0, it’s the kind of bone-headedly simple hyperlink technology that gave birth to the Internet in the first place.

| 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, My articles, Technology

TWIM: Parking and Wi-Fi

This week on This Week in Me:

I speak to Ville-Marie’s Jacques-Alain Lavallée about how complicated on-street parking restriction signs are in Montreal. I’d been bounced around through about four or five people talking about this subject, but settled on the borough since boroughs set the policies for on-street parking. He notes that a lot of the restrictions come by request from residents and businesses who want space for deliveries, diplomatic vehicles, etc.

Perhaps the only controversial statement was his answer to why the signs are unilingual French:

The city of Montreal is a French organization. The signs are pretty visual and easy to understand, but as a French organization, the law allows us to have a French-only policy. All the signage on autoroutes is French (except on bridges, which are federal jurisdiction).

I’m sure that’ll satisfy the tourists who are trying to figure out what “MAR-JEU” means.

Also this week, I have a bluffer’s guide on the health risks involved with Wi-Fi. (No link because it’s not online — Page B5 of Saturday’s paper). I’ll post it in a week when the copyright clears, but in a nutshell there’s no proof that electromagnetic radiation causes cancer. The only thing it can do to human tissue is heat it up a bit. Whether that may cause long-term health effects is up for debate, but I find it unlikely to have a statistically significant impact.

| Business, In the news, Technology

Language police do good for a change

The Office québécois de la langue française has recently announced a deal with video game manufacturers concerning providing French-language games in Quebec. It will require, as of April 2009, that all games with a French equivalent sell that version here if it wants to sell and English version.

The deal, reached after months of discussions, is fair, reasonable, practical, and common-sense. It protects the rights of French consumers while limiting inconvenience to anglophone ones.

The OLF did this.

No kidding.

Hopefully this is just a first step in a change toward positive, realistic actions designed to promote the French language instead of restricting the rights of non-francophones.

| Blogosphere

Jack Todd doesn’t like blogs

Jack Todd, bl0g d00d

Jack Todd doesn’t like blogs.

I suppose it’s somewhat ironic that the Monday Morning Quarterback column, which prides itself on using as many consecutive ampersands, question marks and exclamation points as possible (33 exclamation points in a row this week) makes fun of the grammar of some teen blogs. (The fact that Todd’s entire exposure to blogs seems to be reading the grammatically-challenged rantings of immature teens might also be cause for concern.)

I think Mr. Todd just isn’t reading the right blogs. May I suggest this one? I use l33t only in jest.

UPDATE: Totally missed this post from Mike Boone defending bloggers’ honour. The comments attached to it are typical anti-Todd trolling.

| Media

Stop inventing anglicized names

A disturbing trend (well, disturbing to anal-retentive copy editors anyway) has been developing in the anglophone media, of directly translating the names of Quebec-based organizations whose names have no English translation, and treating those translations as proper names. The Gazette invented the “Montreal Transit Commission” as its name for the Société de transport de Montréal (STM). The Chronicle calls it the “Montreal Transport Society“. Canadian Press calls the Sûreté du Québec the “Quebec Provincial Police” or “QPP”.

Most anglophone media in Quebec tend to use the French names, since their viewers and readers tend to be at least functionally bilingual. For media outside Quebec who must translate into English, please use a generic name for the organization (meaning lowercase) so people don’t get the mistaken impression that you’re using their actual name.

Let’s end the confusion. Stop playing Language God.