I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Month: September 2005
Definitely not the CBC
To those who say that other Canadian broadcasters are just as good at independently covering the same wide range of issues and topics that the CBC does, I present Exhibit A: CTV’s so-called current affairs program W5‘s hour-long self-promotional puff piece on the network’s sitcom Corner Gas, featuring (among other things) a look at their website—WIN BIG PRIZES!—and last year’s contest winner (who spent 300 hours playing a program-related game to win).
Don’t get me wrong, I think Corner Gas itself is a good show, and yes, I watched the documentary (which was interesting, and will probably show up as an extra on the third season DVD). But when’s the last time that the fifth estate (the closest analogue to W5 that I can think of offhand) took an hour to go behind the scenes of (i.e. advertise) Da Vinci’s Inquest, This is Wonderland or Royal Canadian Air Farce, hmm?
Just a quick followup to an in-person conversation today: if Beyond Corner Gas had been aired as a special hour-long program rather than as an episode of W5—renowned for almost 40 years of award-winning investigative journalism—I wouldn’t have an issue with it or CTV at all. It’s a decision that wouldn’t even be a question at the CBC, and that’s what sets the independent national public broadcaster apart from (and, in my opinion, above) the other ratings- and sponsor-driven private networks.
Aux cadenassés
Quand tu n’es plus là
Moi, je n’ suis jamais pleine
Et il n’y a pas d’étoiles
Parce que le ciel est trop sombreJe n’ serais pas contente
Jusqu’ ce que je [t’écoute] encore
Ms A-Z
If there’s one good thing about the CBC lockout, it’s that early on one of the bloggers pointed to azerbic, Toronto Star media columnist Antonia Zerbisias’s weblog. It’s become one of my must-reads each day.
CBC blog cleanup
A bit of unsolicited advice to all the new bloggers from the CBC, union and management alike: you can remove those spam comments that get attached to your posts.
Semicolonic
If I were linguistic emperor, not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we’d all be writing like [Thomas] Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides.
via Tim Bray
Another pet peeve
To Yahoo!, Google, and all of the other web crawlers out there: http://www.example.org/foo and http://www.example.org/foo/ are not the same URI! If you get a 301 Moved Permanently response from your HTTP request, the target is the URI to save in your database and to check in the future.
68.142.249.111 - - [11/Sep/2005:19:23:23 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [07/Sep/2005:19:01:43 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [29/Aug/2005:22:01:45 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [22/Aug/2005:03:42:29 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [11/Aug/2005:06:46:15 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [03/Aug/2005:18:45:41 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [27/Jul/2005:02:45:05 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [19/Jul/2005:09:40:07 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
68.142.249.111 - - [11/Jul/2005:14:02:58 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.0" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"66.249.65.234 - - [17/Sep/2005:01:39:47 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.1" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.66.172 - - [04/Sep/2005:04:43:58 -0400] "GET /pix HTTP/1.1" 301 321 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"Break the silence
They shut me up but they can’t shut you up. Support the people who make your CBC work. Click for details.Darling heart
I’ve written before about how huge a fan I am of Lenni Jabour‘s, but I don’t think I’ve ever said how personally kind she’s been to this guy who keeps showing up at her gigs. I’m not going to go into detail; instead, I’m just going to say that she’s one of the sweetest nicest people I know, and she’s taken me by surprise again and again in many different, thoughtful ways. I’m lucky, proud and happy to consider her a dear friend.
The future of the CBC
Tod Maffin’s podcast on the future of the CBC should be required listening (and reading; remember those that can’t hear, Tod!) for management—and employees, and future employees—at the CBC. He’s got that vision thing, and the part that’s encouraging and frustrating at the same time is that it’s within reach. People like Tessa Sproule, Tod himself, and a host of others are the vanguard of the new CBC… and they’ve been locked out.