The Gazette seems to have quietly started up a column on astronomy by local science writer Andrew Fazekas. It’s in the West Island section, which I guess means that stars aren’t visible from downtown, or that we don’t care about them.
Tag Archives: The Gazette
Which Canadian journalists, after having invented, over 25 years ago, a board game which features confusingly-long trivia questions, have just successfully defended a lawsuit against them that was launched in 1994?
The case of David H. Wall vs. Christopher Haney and Scott Abbott may finally be settled.
For those who need a refresher, Wall sued Haney and Abbott, the creators of the Trivial Pursuit board game, in 1994, claiming Haney stole the idea for the game from Wall. Wall was hitchhiking one day when Haney picked him up (or so Wall says) and that’s when Wall apparently laid out in explicit detail how the game would work, enough that Haney stole his idea. Right.
A Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge dismissed Wall’s case, pointing out that Wall doesn’t have a single shred of evidence beyond his self-serving testimony to support his claim.
This isn’t the first lawsuit Trivial Pursuit’s creators have faced. In 1984 they were sued by the creator of the Trivia Encyclopedia for copying their questions and answers. They admitted to it (they were caught red-handed copying a made-up question), but argued that facts cannot be copyrighted. A judge agreed and dismissed that case too.
The Trivial Pursuit origin story always interests me because it was created by a CP sports editor and a Gazette photo editor. According to Gazette lore (read: old-timers’ occasional rants), the two went around seeking investors from among their journalistic buddies, and most chose to hold on to their money. The phrase “I could be retired by now” would inevitably follow, along with wet grunts and smoke-filled phlegm.
Now they can go on to regretting the past two and a half decades of their lives.
CanWest changing the rules for freelancers
Remember way back when, when freelancers were up in arms over a new CanWest contract that demanded all rights “in perpetuity throughout the universe?”
After the uproar that caused, CanWest quietly backed down and started using its previous contract.
Now, apparently, they’re at it again, and some people are taking notice.
GPS doesn’t solve common-sense confusion
UPI has plagiarized referenced a Gazette cover story about Quebec’s law against screens in the driver’s seat. As if it’s bad enough that they can’t do any reporting on their own, they seem to misunderstand the very story they’re copying. The headline is “Canadian province turns OnStar off”, which doesn’t make any sense. Quebec hasn’t passed a law against OnStar, it’s an existing law which GPS systems may prompt an amendment to.
For those curious, the applicable section is article 439 of the Quebec Highway Safety Code:
439. No person may drive a road vehicle in which a television set or a display screen is so placed that the image broadcast on the screen is directly or indirectly visible to the driver, except in the case of a closed circuit system used by the driver to operate the vehicle, or a system used by a peace officer or the driver of a road vehicle used as an ambulance, in accordance with the Act respecting pre-hospital emergency services (chapter S-6.2), in the performance of their duties.
The intent of the law is very clear: No TV sets visible to the driver. It’s a common-sense safety law that is hardly “idiotic”. But it is in need of updating, considering an apparent study that suggests drivers consulting navigation systems are less distracted because they have a better idea of where they’re going.
Considering they’ve already given a free pass to emergency vehicles, it’s a common-sense amendment to a common-sense law.
But please, let’s make a big deal out of it.
Holy pixellation Batman!
The Gazette today launched their “new and improved” Alouettes coverage. This includes a special Alouettes section to their website, a new blog by football writer Herb Zurkowsky, and a special downloadable newsletter called Game Day (direct PDF link).
If this sounds familiar, you might be from Ottawa. The Citizen has been doing the same thing for Senators games since January. This is also similar to afternoon news editions like the Citizen’s Rush Hour or the Star’s Star P.M.
How successful these PDF papers are is a mystery. I don’t have access to the Citizen’s or the Star’s website stats. But they’re easy to produce and can be distributed instantaneously for free. So it’s certainly worth a try.
The Gazette’s first foray into this new system has hit a few snags though:
Pixellation: Don’t adjust your monitors, this is how the text (and everything else) appears, which makes you wonder why it’s not just a giant JPEG instead of a PDF. Normally things like this are done when font problems appear, so hopefully they’ll have that figured out by next time (UPDATE: Nope.). Not only is the text unreadable, but giant images like this require larger PDFs than vectorized text.
Font problems: You’d think they’d be solved by the rasterization of the entire document, but apparently not. “n” in one of the dingbat fonts makes a bullet, and it’s replaced here with a red Courier New letter.
Headshot: This shot of the lovable Herb Zurkowsky appears everywhere: in the paper, on the blog, in the Game Day special. And I’m afraid to look at it. Let this be a warning folks, HERB ZURKOWSKY WILL MURDER YOUR FAMILY.
Oh, and in case you’re curious, we won: 34-26 against the Toronto Argonauts.
Just call me Paula
PQ leader-in-waiting Pauline Marois has a campaign press release opinion piece in today’s Gazette, which I’m sure she wrote herself. In English.
How exactly is this not a waste of time and space? Does Marois really think Gazette readers will vote for the PQ in a general election, to say nothing about supporting her in a party leadership “race”?
Nevertheless, she makes her point:
First of all, the population isn’t ready to reopen a debate on the whole issue of Quebec sovereignty, nor does it want to get locked in a sterile discussion concerning the date, time, hour or mechanics of a referendum.
Holy crap. You mean voting against separation in two massive referendums has actually sunk in?
Marois goes on to make two demands recommendations for the future: promote sovereignty like it’s a Virgin Mobile cellphone plan to gain popular support before putting it to another vote, and start updating their social democratic platform (read: swing more toward the centre-right like the Liberals and ADQ).
Well, good luck with that.
Bah. Who needs search? (UPDATED)
There are five things wrong with this “Search Results” page. Think you can spot them all?
UPDATE: My readers are quick:
- It says there are four results but shows only three
- It says “Displaying 1-10 of 4 results” which makes no sense
- “List of the 30 days Archived & Search” makes no grammatical sense
- None of the search results contain the search terms or have anything to do with them
- The stories that contain the search terms don’t show up in the search results
Consumer reporting: finally
The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha (who is now giving free publicity to reviewing gadgets sent to him) made a vague statement about getting people involved in his reporting. Apparently the result is a new consumer rights segment called “Your Call Is Important To Us”.
It’s about time the Gazette gets back to reporting on customer service disasters. For that at least they deserve credit.
But his description of its innovativeness has me worried:
We say it’s innovative because it breaks the traditional paradigm of reporting. Rather than it being an in-house production of a reporter’s own research, it invites readers to take part in its creation.
His next paragraph basically sums up what this means:
We want you to help us write this series.
Perhaps I missed something in reading the blog post, but I don’t see anything innovative here. People providing newspapers with stories about how they got screwed over by The Man is hardly new. In fact, it’s how this stuff has been done for decades. There’s nothing “wiki” about it.
Unless the plan involves readers editing the stories collaboratively, I think it comes down to someone either misunderstanding what wiki is all about or overhyping a simple newspaper series by employing Web 2.0 buzzwords.
We’ll see which when the series is launched on Saturday.
Don Macpherson advocates MURDER
From Mike Boone’s column:
News item: The new Paul McCartney album is being sold at Starbucks.
“Have you noticed,” asks my favourite Gazette columnist, Don Macpherson, “that the Beatles are dying in exactly the wrong order?”
UPDATE: Andy Riga thinks this is funny. Therefore he also advocates MURDER.
Teacher is a poo-poo head
Freda Lewkowicz has some thoughts in today’s paper about the St. Thomas Burn Book situation, and rightly points out that the problem is not with Facebook or the Internet, but with students’ attitudes toward teachers.
She theorizes about some of the causes of this behaviour. One potential cause, the negative impression teachers give by striking, should be discounted entirely. While I never experienced a teacher strike, I and my fellow students were actually largely supportive of teachers’ salary and other demands. At least, those of us mature enough to understand labour politics beyond “Yay! A strike! No school today!”
The problem is that elementary and high schools have become more and more like mommy. It makes sense: during the school year, teachers see students more than their parents do. So that natural teenage rebellion that is usually aimed at their parents also portions out some of its rage toward authority figures such as teachers.
But that’s not the end of the story. Students are not sufficiently disciplined today. Part of it is because of the stereotypical overbearing parent blaming the school for everything that goes wrong. Part of it is the schools’ “boys will be boys” attitude that condones bullying, vandalism, rudeness and other anti-social behaviour. And part of it is just that some kids out there are stupid and mean.
Everyone, teachers and parents, need to make it clear that this type of behaviour is not tolerated.
It’s F1 time again
Like the other media, The Gazette is pulling out all the stops:
- Special F1 section online
- Eight days of special F1 sections in the paper
- A Grand Prix blog (still being setup)
- A badly-formatted list of F1 drivers’ scores cut-and-pasted from TSN
Doug Camilli advocates MURDER
From today’s column:
A way to get the ratings for American Idol up again: In Manila, Romy Baligula was singing in a karaoke bar when another customer, Robilito Ortega, yelled that Romy was out of tune. Romy kept singing, so Robilito pulled out his gun and shot him dead.
Oh Doug, just be glad they don’t do that when newspaper columnists miss their funny mark.
… and I’ll be glad that self-important bloggers are also exempt, for now.
Save the park! Keep the rubber off! Let it go bareback!
The Save Westmount Park group got an opinion in the Gazette today. Their cause is keeping artificial turf out of the park, due to the artificial surfaces’ perceived risks to health and the environment.
Wikipedia has a good roundup of the pros and cons of artificial versus natural grass:
- PRO: It’s easier to maintain
- CON: It’s made of old tires and heavy metals which are poisonous
The things we do just to make our lives a bit easier and our grasses a bit greener…
More Gazette blogs
The Gazette launched two new blogs today: G.I. Joey is the (now much thinner) comedian Joey Elias’s blog about performing for troops in Afghanistan. More interesting is Journey to Canada, by a Rwandan journalism student here to cover the war-crimes trial of Désiré Munyaneza. Imagine someone eating pork for the first time, or being amazed by how cold it is here … in May!
Meanwhile, Roberto Rocha has returned from vacation and his Technocité blog is back up, and Peter Cooney’s Goal Posts soccer blog is the only one actually getting comments.
Newspaper takes Grocery Store Economics 101
Apparently, they needed a study to show that buying from big grocery stores like Loblaws is cheaper than smaller ones like the dep across the street.
Really? What will civilization do once this news gets out? How will we live with this new reality? How will we raise our children? Do I have to accept a new religion because of this?
Yeah, yeah, the study also says, perhaps more significantly, that food in poorer places isn’t cheaper or more expensive, but that’s not what the headline focuses on.