theMediaman.com

Not that I’ve ever considered the Toronto Sun to be anything more than a cartoon version of a daily newspaper, but the last three days they’ve been running front-page articles on saving reindeer at the Toronto Zoo.

Canada lost another soldier to the war in Afghanistan, the Democratic nomination is coming down to the final stretch, and the Toronto Blue Jays had two players go on the disabled list last night. The Toronto Sun continues to play the holier-than-thou card and insist that the Toronto Zoo not euthanize overpopulated species in the budget-locked zoo.

It’s not a surprise that they could get the public behind this cause. Each day the cover page says “Rudolph” instead of “reindeer”, adding a childhood emotional personification of the young animals.

If they held a charity drive to save the animals, people would donate. If they insisted that people go visit the Toronto Zoo more, they would promise but I don’t think you’d see the turnout necessary once Summer hits. If they insist that the city raise taxes by 10 cents per-person and generating $300,000 so they could afford to keep them, there would be an outrage.

Of course killing reindeer isn’t a good thing, I’m not heartless. However I also have faith that the people who work at the Toronto Zoo are ‘animal-people’. They wouldn’t euthanize an animal unless it was essential… and it is. Reindeer, in spite of their cute, cartoon selves, are highly territorial. Too many males in a group and things get violent as well as dangerous for the animals and staff.

In a similar way, I pulled myself out of the CBC Radio2 protests when the organizers refused to listen to reason and hold protests outside 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. Face it, the kind of person who listens to symphony music tends to have an office job. I wouldn’t generalize, it’s not everyone. However, I’d be willing to bet serious money that the vast majority of listeners do work those hours.

The response from the Facebook branch organizing the cross-country event was that there would be enough “musicians, students and mothers(?)” out to support the group.

It seems that even the sophisticated protest-hippies don’t want anything to do with us ’suits’ who work day jobs. I had first considered switching my stance after reading the point that an in-house orchestra was once a necessity when recording equipment was heavy and expensive. Now a recording studio can be set up wherever a performance is held. The illogical actions of the protest organizers secured my position on the other side of the fence.

This was another situation where the masses want it all, but are not willing to accept that there are real costs involved… often tax-funded costs.

However, in the end, “Rudolph” was saved. This time. So my question is simply this:

For those of us who wish to be logical and reasonable in our efforts to better the world, does aligning ourselves with front-page grabbing, strategy-free neanderthals hurt or help?

During Nuit Blanche, the McLaughlin Planetarium seemed darker than ever while there were crowds of people and activities in the middle of the night throughout Toronto.  Sure it closed 12 years ago, but it just seemed more depressing in such an environment.

So, I’m looking at the possibility of opening it up again, even if it’s for only one night next year at Nuit Blanche.  I’ve been brainstorming some ideas for Physics-as-art. Astronomy has seen many changes in the last 12 years since the Planetarium closed, and is almost unrecognizable. The Perimeter Institute has shown that a public arena for Theoretical Physics is feasible. The Ontario Science Centre is too far away from the Toronto Core to be considered “accessible”, and the new proposed area on the waterfront is unlikely to happen any time soon (and certainly not without better transit).

So here’s the question… who wants to help?

For the record, “eff’ing metal” is a good thing. I’ve encountered more than one person who grew up in the urban center of GTA who didn’t get that. That’s the reason that I’ve thought twice about getting the “Jesus is F’ing Metal” t-shirt. Most people don’t believe me that it has nothing to do with the Revelations ramifications and the fact that I’m a PK.

Yesterday I scored tickets to the second day of this year’s Virgin Music Festival out on Toronto Island.  Saturday’s headliner was Bjork, and I’m always astonished at how I’m the only person who doesn’t like her music (it’s like she records three good songs in different tempos and keys, then plays them all at the same time). Sunday’s headliner was Smashing Pumpkins. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so happy while crammed in with 10,000 people.

When Billy Corgan through a hissy-fit and claimed that he’s tired of fighting the “Britney’s of the world”, I realised that a lot of bands I had never had the chance to see live were fading away.  That’s probably one of the reasons I jumped on the bandwagon when the Sex Pistols played the Molson Amphitheatre.

By definition, watching the Pistols 25-30 years after they were most relevant in a large venue is as punk-poseur as one can get without getting a teardrop tattoo. However, I justified it by saying that I could never see them in their glory days, so now I just want to have the experience of having had seen them. I will also use the excuse that the Dropkick Murphey’s opened, but that was really only a happy coincidence.

While the whole band wasn’t really up on stage last night, the mood definitely was.  The newest Pumpkins album isn’t going to shift the music world into new grounds, but it proved that they are still relevant to the New Rock scene.

Billy Corgan played for an hour and 45 minutes before taking a pre-encore disappearing act behind the stage. During that time, he played the hit singles, some of the new stuff, and several 10-15 minute epic songs. After the fifth such song, there was a bit of a lull in energy. “Yeah, we get it. You can play guitar really fucking well. Get on with it.”

There were also solos from the drummer, but we never got to hear from the other guitarist or the bassist. The bassist was doing her best bass-chick bit. Almost makes me satisfied I’ve never seen Melissa Auf Der Maur play (yet).

However, when they played the high-energy classics (especially “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”), the audience went mental. I was slamming my head while most of the teeners around me were just bopping to the music, but they proved that the band still has what it takes to channel angst.

Other short notes about the festival - we left before the encore started, and waited an hour in line for the ferry. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken had we waited to the very end.

The Merchant’s Row was actually pretty good. There’s one nasty trend I’ve noticed in the years since the “Bubble” burst. Few companies are willing to hand out swag. Concerts, festivals, conferences and conventions have slick sales guys (or student summer staff) in these booths costing several thousand dollars, handing out pamphlets that make it 10-50 feet before being dropped.

People will keep swag! GM had t-shirts, RBC had a whistle with a blinking LED on a lanyard, and Energizer had a stuffed bunny. Half of places appealed to people’s vanity with “let us take your photo and if you don’t win the contest you at least get a photo”. In 2001 I went to one of the very last Comdex’s here in Toronto. That was the last time I got so much cool swag up until this weekend. The Xbox 360 booth was set up for people to come up and play Guitar Hero 2, but it really wasn’t that busy. Why? NO FREE SWAG!

Other bands we saw, in chronological order, include dd/mm/yyyy (pronounced ‘Day, Month, Year), The Cinematics, Tokyo Police Club, Metric (excellent performance, bravo Emily et al.), and The Killers.

dd/mm/yyyy had a great performance, and it was cool to watch four of the five performers switch instruments throughout. I’ve heard them before on various Indie podcasts, but I found them hard to listen to live. It sounds like they’re playing a lot of minor keys and the lyrics are akin to Ross from “Friends” making music on his keyboard while mashing random sound effects. The music is good, so I’ll still listen to their songs on my iPod. I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to see them play again, but that’s just my musical tastes.

My final note is that Virgin Mobile had many tents set up, but no two were the same. That was refreshing since there was no “been there, done that” as you’re wandering around to different areas of the island. One tent was selling all the Virgin line of phones for a full 50% off. I picked up a Samsung phone for only forty bucks. The shape and size are nearly the same as my current phone, except that there’s no protruding antenna. Also, the battery on my current phone barely holds for longer than two days, and the charger has to be positioned just right so that it will work. Basically, within the next year I would have to replace it and this was my opportunity to do so cheaply.

The phone also comes with a cruddy camera and Bluetooth connectivity with nothing I own. I really didn’t want to have to pay for features I don’t want or will never use, and I managed to get away with it in this case.

Plus I got a free case for it. Yay swag!

Scanning through my server logs, I found a few interesting tidbits of information. The first was that a particularly popular album stored on NextDoorNoise.ca in MP3 format had somehow worked its way into Google’s search rankings.  Since there are no direct links to the folder where the files are stored, I have no idea how it happened.  Anyway, searching for the artist and album name brought up the usual ten results, where my site was number 4.

I was getting about 200 people a day downloading the album from my server. I’ve since removed it and won’t mention the artist/album here so that I don’t incriminate myself in another forum that is crawled by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo on an hourly basis.

The bandwidth wasn’t the big issue.  Even with all the downloads, I was only using up a little over 1% of my monthly allotment.  However, if I were to be sued, I would need to live to be older than the Sun in order to pay it off.

Masterfile (Rights Reserved photos) once spotted one of their copyrighted graphics in my 30-second Photoshop Fun folder. I wasn’t making profit off it, but they sent me a warning anyway. I removed the graphic immediately, and emailed back confirming that I had done so. The tone in the response was actually quite pleasant; thanking me for my prompt action! Copyright owners aren’t all ogres. However, I get the impression that the majority of the lawyers who work for the RIAA are.  Mean, stinky ogres. But that’s just opinion.

So imagine my surprise when I found another interesting treat in my server logs… a link from RottenTomatoes.com (a film review site). It seems that someone in the forums syndicated my review for WAR (aka “Rogue” in other countries). There was a reference link back to my site, so I get the credit I deserve.  However, there is the point of contention that my content is being reused by other people on the Internet.

Simone told me I should just be proud that someone thought my review was good enough to syndicate and to stop whining like a Geoff Pevere.

I don’t have anything against Geoff Pevere. I really don’t trust anyone who reviews movies as a career. After enough years you forget to assess exactly what a movie is trying to accomplish and start to compare Alien vs. Predator against Citizen Kane.

For the record, the worst review I have ever read in Toronto Newspapers is Katrina Onstad who wrote what is probably the stupidest review, when she reviewed The Last Samurai. What stays with me to this day are the three times she mentions how cute Tom Cruise is, and the statement, “just like its dumber twin, Dances With Wolves…”.

Forgive me if I misquote a little, but that is very nearly what she wrote. “Dumber twin”?!? As in, the “Multiple-Academy-Award-Winning-Including-Best-Picture-Dumber-Twin”?

It is one of many times when I have become more emotionally involved with a review than I did with a movie.

In conclusion, other than Siskel and Ebert (not including Roeper), no one should be allowed to review movies professionally.  That probably goes for any art-slash-entertainment form.

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert could appreciate a movie for what it was. While Gene isn’t with us anymore, I’m glad that Roger managed to make it to the Toronto Film Fest this year. I doubt I’ll get to see him in person since the TIFF website crashed this morning as tickets went on sale, so now I’m committed to the Rush lines for any of the movies I want to see.

In my entire life I’ve only seen one movie at TIFF. Every year I forget why so few.

The theatres are mostly filled with pompous film critics and arthouse nerds.

Not to mention the TIFF website has had server issues, and some of the worst usability I’ve seen in years, especially on the Ticket Order page. It makes TIFF 2007 look like an inaugural year with all the amature mistakes.

Maybe I’ll skip this year again.

Back when I was looking for a job (and eventually landed at Livewire), one resource I used to find the best and brightest companies to work for was the list of nominees on the CNMA web site. Ever since the first year, I’ve wanted to attend.  So it was a huge deal for me when the company Simone works for, Delvinia, turns out to be the company that runs the show!

 I kept bugging Simone to get me into this year’s festivities, and I’m glad she did. It was really as awesome as I had imagined. Formal attire, young crowd, freaky-artsie types mingling with the bankers. I should also mention the awesome, awesome, awesome food. The nibbles were better than the meals at most fancy restaurants.

Even the beers were poured properly… sometimes. About half the time the barkeep would just pour like he/she was at a local tavern. If you got them in the right mood, they’d spritz the glass, start pouring before putting the glass under the stream, then use a knife to cut off the head before cleaning the glass and serving. Unfortunately there were only three taps at each bar and they were serving Keith’s, Stella and… more Stella. Sometimes I hate how bourgeoisie Toronto can be, at the expense of real quality. On the bright side, I learned that - when poured properly - even Keiths can taste like liquid perfection.

Most of the evening I hung around the Delvinia crowd, but occasionally strayed to meet other people. I’d love to learn how to network well. One of my only real conversations with someone-I’ve-never-met was with a New Media Financier from RBC with an unusual name. I think one of the keys to networking is going to be remembering people’s names. I’m just really terrible at it.

Hopefully I’ll be ready to strike up conversations with attendees at FOOA… there are some really innovative minds there I want to chat with.

Unfortunately at FOOA I won’t have access to unlimited drink tickets.