Jeez, a guy goes away to his sister’s for her wedding/convocation and all hell breaks loose.
Screen capture of my feed aggregator
Author:
Advice from the Minbari ambassador
Here’s something for CBC employees—freelancers, temporary, part-time, full-time, and management alike—to think about, particularly those few (anonymous, naturally) that need to get some serious anger-management therapy, and soon:
Fighting a war is easy. Destroying is easy. Building a new world out of what’s left of the old, that is what’s hard.
The people I’ve talked to on the line here in London understand this, and I know there are a lot of others in the corporation that do too: just read their weblogs. They understand the purpose of public broadcasting, and they know it needs to be strong in the face of opposition so that all Canadian voices continue to be heard by all other Canadians.
The vocal minority mentioned above, however, seem bent on destroying this communication by razing the organization they purport to defend. They’re a sect of fervent, crazed individuals who twist the meaning of the union and the CBC as a whole with every word; in another situation, these people are the ones who would become suicide bombers.
DM @ Tango
She, with her guitar,
tie-dyed dress and winter boots,
sings of what she wants.
Serenity
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
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)"