The following is the CBC's capsule summary of Tigana from its list of 100 great Canadian novels from last July (they had a list of nonfiction this year, about which the less said the better):

Peninsula of the Palm is a cursed country. Warrior sorcerers have taken control of most of it, destroying as much culture and infrastructure as they can in ( Read more... )

It is starting to look as though one of the basic elements of functional internet literacy is awareness of power law distributionsThese show up frequently in social patterns involving either markets with immiscible goods or social networks of any significant size, and the Internet frequently involves the intersection of both. (The "Long Tail" of ( Read more... )

Metro Morning was talking today, as they sometimes do, about "Latin" music.

Look, CBC, I like Latin music. I have a copy of the Graduale Romanum. I can sing along to the Lauda Sion. I even have some secular Goliardic music on disc.

But you never play any. You play only music in one language descended from one dialect of late vulgar Latin, with ( Read more... )

...that it ought to disturb me that CBC is reportedly planning to make Radio 2 internet-only.

However, since they lost all my sympathy when they gutted it years ago, I cannot find it in myself to be too upset about it.

Last night there were two closely following occurrences on CBC Radio One which really had me shaking my head.

The first was the weather after 10:00, which was a forecast for Friday night.  Last Friday night ( Read more... )

This morning there was an interview on Metro Morning with Ken Lewenza, the outgoing head of the CAW, who is stepping down because he feels that someone with more energy and time to go before retirement should be the head of the new uion created by the merger of the CAW and the CEP.  The discussion turned to the issues confronting the union movement ( Read more... )

1) This Wired article on The Avengers Homework Assignments has several questions along the lines of:
In case you don't recall, S.H.I.E.L.D. built a special container for The Hulk. The idea was that no one could break through the glass (it was probably transparent aluminum) - but if someone DID, they could just drop the whole thing out of the ( Read more... )

This morning on Metro Morning, CBC once again (they've done this before, many times) seriously misused the term "alleged".  They were dealing with a criminal case and made reference not only to the "alleged perpetrator" but to "the alleged victim".

Now, I understand why they want to use "alleged" for the accused: if he's not found guilty, it would ( Read more... )

So I was listening to CBC (my first mistake) and heard a gushing interview by the host of the program (cannot remember which) with someone else (another CBC staffer, naturally -- inbreeding is part of the CBC mystique) who had a project to read a book a week this year. The interview was along the lines of "Be careful, don't rupture yourself" and ( Read more... )

I have heard/seen (once heard, once seen) media writers/readers use the form "big of a" today -- once on the CBC's Metro Morning (Matt Galloway) and once in a Globe and Mail article.

When I was growing up this formation was not possible. Now I seem to run into it in supposedly non-slangy contexts all over the place. It grates really seriously.

The ( Read more... )