Monthly Archives: November 2005

CBC and Sirius do satellite radio: the easy and the queasy

Like everyone else, I love satellite radio. Of course, I haven’t heard it yet, but on paper these are the greatest radio stations in history. My American friends and colleagues have been going on and on about them for years now, I’ve been following the plannings and hearings and discussions here in Canada, waiting and […]

Ratings are for pussies

As we all know, Nielsen TV ratings are for sycophants. They are also unreliable. And fascinating. The good news is the overnights are now posted on the CBC intranet for all to see. Brought about by Richard Stursberg, I have no idea why this bit of openness has taken so long, but I am glad […]

US TV + Canadian ads = $$$$

The Tournament is a mockumentary about hockey on the CBC. It’s sponsored by Kia, and part of the deal is that a few of the characters on the show work at the fictional Ryckman Kia dealership. Another part of the deal was putting “mock ads” like the one above on the cbc.ca website. In marketing […]

This is Wonderland Spam

According to internet lawyer Alan Gahtan, someone from This is Wonderland is spamming lawyers through the Globe and Mail’s servers, urging them to “Tell your clients. They might learn something.” Here’s what I’d like to learn: do lawyers watch tv shows about other lawyers? Is tv the best way to learn about the law? Do […]

Would it kill us to have a hit?

You know we turned down Canadian Idol. When I heard it, I thought: “Rightly so. That crappy pap doesn’t belong on the CBC.” The Toronto Metro Convention Centre, where they tape the show live, is across from the CBC in Toronto. And when I left work on certain days I could see and hear the […]

CBC captioning falls short

Joe Clark released the results of a three-year study on captioning at the CBC today. We should be leading on this. We brag about how we are in leading in this. But we are, unfortunately, failing. Even given some leeway for typos and whatnot, the captioning gets screwed up every 12 days, according to Joe. […]

Gnome exposed

Funny, well-written, and amusing, Pedro the Locked Out Gnome always made me uneasy. Isn’t the most insidious propaganda that which is the most enjoyable? It seemed to me that the veil had been lifted and we were getting, amazingly, both a literal and figurative CMG puppet. Or perhaps it was just a locked-out lad having […]

Click Here! to download the CBC

I’ve always been a fan of the CBC Archives web site. Well-written, well-designed, impeccably researched, thoughtfully curated, technologically nearperfect, and truly bilingual (not just translated) it’s easy to spend hours there. But as much as there is to see, I wish I could see the rest of it. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we have […]

Write for us