Welcome Aboard!
Farewell humble penny, you grimy little monster.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved you as a kid (3 black balls per!), but for a long time you’ve been a bit of a pocket destroying burden.
I hope you find a comfortable home in that big arcade in the sky.
RIP.
So the Globe and Mail paywall goes up Monday. Being forward thinkers, they’ve priced it at a rather ripe 20 bucks a month (!) for non print subscribers.
Non payers get a paltry 10 items a month.
Outside of that, it is a virtual Fort Knox. Impenetrable. No where, no how, no way you’re getting access to…wait a second:
‘Opening links to articles posted on Facebook, Twitter, search engines and blogs will not count toward the 10 free items a month.’
I get the sense the entire upper management got dropped on its head at an early age.
The Toronto Star, sensing an opportunity for new readers, launched a new feature with the breezily titled link, ‘Browse our new GTA murder map’.
All in all, a less than stellar day on the media landscape.
Formerly Canada’s preeminent newspaper, the Globe’s been committing some sort of ritual suicide over the last few months.
A mind blowing string of privilege, plagiarism, cover ups and crappy fact checking/editing.
They even replaced Lynn Crosbie with someone less intelligible. I never would have guessed that possible.
Too many instances to reference. For a quick decoder ring, just google:
Privilege = Leah Mclaren + Real Estate
Plagiarism = Margaret Wente
Cover Ups = Newly Minted Globe public editor, whatshername
Garbage Fact Checking/Editing = Anything by Bruce Dowbiggin. Especially nice one today…
Dowbiggin: ‘Remember’s NBC’s Heidi NFL game in the 1960s? NBC bailed on an NFL game for a movie on Heidi and missed an epic comeback by Joe Namath and the New York Jets.’
Yeah, I ‘remember’s’, I ‘remember’s’ it well. Although my spell checker doesn’t, given it’s not a word.
Thank god the facts are right…oh oh…as ‘copyeditor’ points out in the article’s comments section:
‘The Oakland Raiders made the epic comeback in the Heidi game, scoring two TDs in final minute. Jets lost that one 43-32.’
I have no clue what the grand plan is at the G&M. I’ve never seen a company degrade their product so dramatically, so I have no point of reference.
Regardless, good luck with that paywall!
…isn’t based on a Jim Thompson novel.
It is:
Watched it for maybe the 4th time last night and, almost 20 years after the fact, it knocked me out just like the first time.
Lurid, unhinged, thrilling…it is a trip.
Hey, while on the misguided brand topic, youch!
This will go down in the annals of ‘You Don’t Want to be Doing That’.
If you’re stumped
Going, going, gone.
I knew it was coming, but seeing Kodak enter bankruptcy protection was still a shock.
Most Kodak post mortems seem to be couched in a ‘they were dinosaurs’ narrative.
One of the fascinating things about Kodak is they have imaging patents out the wazoo and have had for decades. I was on a VIP tour of their Rochester facility, circa 1985, and it was like visiting NASA. This huge wing devoted to something none of us had ever heard of: digital imaging. It was wild.
I think one of their main stumbling blocks was they were never seen as a credible hardware company, at least in the public eye. The consumer hard goods they made were always sort of junk-y.
The shift to digital brought ergonomics and styling way to the front and they got left behind.
Seriously, this 2010 (!) offering has a face only a mother could love:
More Frozen Planet…
some of the time lapse photography is so extraordinary, you’d swear it had to be the product of cgi/special effects.
I was convinced the segment with the wild phenomenon known as a brinicle had to be faked. Nope. It’s the product of 5-6 hours of time lapse photography.
Just unreal.
I’ve just been watching the BBC series, Frozen Planet.
The most astounding footage from the world’s polar regions and a constant reminder of just how attuned everything that exists there is to the advance and retreat of the sea ice (except for Musk Oxen; they seem to get along fine no matter what’s happening).
Not suggesting they’ve been living in a land frozen in time, but news like this:
that seems relatively definitive on how things are rapidly trending away from the ‘norm’ is sad indeed.
…lots of press on this today, most blithely suggesting it is a good thing.
Not sure homogeneity is ever an overriding good thing, but you go nuts, the facebook.
The day there isn’t the ‘like’ feature we can talk.
Easy Songs for Beginners, the unique lesson stylings by David Hodge of Guitar Noise are making their way back on line.
If you’re an aspiring guitarist, check them out. He’ll have you playing something positively musical in no time.
Welcome back, David! And congrats to Paul Hackett for all the hoop jumping it has taken to hammer out an arrangement on the copyright front.
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DHDI 