I love watching movies, but I have limited opportunities to do so.
The main culprit is having two kids with unpredictable bedtimes. If they don’t get to sleep until 10 p.m., it’ll be 11 or midnight before I can settle down to watch something.
I’m not about to go out to the video store at that time, particularly not to rent a move that has to be back in 24 hours. Often I’ll only have time to watch half the flick before bed, and watch the rest the next day. Not ideal, but still better than most TV fare.
Anyhow, on the suggestion of a colleague, I recently signed up for Zip.ca, a movie-by-mail service. (Actually it’s RogersVideoDirect.ca, which bought the service from Zip.)
The idea behind Zip is that you create a wish list of movies you’d like to see, and they mail you a DVD of the first available one. You keep it as long as you want, then mail it back in the provided self-addressed, stamped envelope. Once that is received, they send you the next one.
I’m signed up for the lowest level, which is two movies a month for a little over ten bucks. It’s no cheaper than the video store, but I don’t have to drive over there (twice) and there are no late fees. And the selection is incredible - 53,000 titles, at last count.
One enjoyable aspects they don’t talk about much is creating your Ziplist of movies you’d like to see. It’s sort of like making a Christmas wish list for your own entertainment. Whenever a friend tells you about a great movie they’ve seen, or a colleague reminds you of classic you’ve always been meaning to watch, or you read one of those top 100 lists, you can rush to the nearest computer and add it to your list.
And one day it will show up on your doorstep. That part is the best - finding a slim red envelope in your mailbox and tearing it open to see what you get this week. Mini Christmas mornings, twice monthly!
Not a bad little racket. But my brother-in-law had a point when he asked why this service is any better than a download system like Rogers on Demand, where you simply order the movie right through your TV and watch it then and there.
Zip has a few advantages. The selection is extraordinary: 53,000 films eclipses the 3,000 available on demand (and beats the pants off the selection in any video store.) And of course you can keep it as long as you want, whereas most on demand movies self-destruct after 24 hours.
Still, these advantages are temporary. It seems to me just a matter of time before all 53,000 or more are available online - that’s just a matter of storage and bandwidth, and we all know those are advancing to they point where they’re almost free. And the 24 hour window is completely arbitrary.
I think services like Zip.ca have about two more years before they become entirely obsolete. In fact, Zip thinks so too, which is why they’ve recently announced they are pushing into online movie delivery post haste.
After mailing customers a whopping six million DVDs, thus becoming Canada’s busiest online video service in just three years, Zip.ca is about to launch Zip.tv. The goal is to not only bypass Canada Post by enabling downloads of movies and TV shows, but also to offer free hosting of user-generated video content.
DVD-by-mail is, when you think about it, rather ridiculous.
You have digital content, I want digital content to play on my digital device. So let’s make a physical copy of it, and put it in a truck and carry it to my doorstep, and then ship it back again? Absurd.
We’ll no doubt look back at this in a few years and laugh. Actually, some are doing so already. At left is a Zip parody that was included in an entry to the CBC.ca 10th Anniversary contest by Sam Solomon from Montreal. Despite getting my vote, it wasn’t a finalist, which I think is a shame.
Anyhow, for the moment, I’m enjoying a weird little window in between technologies.
Here are the first five movies I received, in order:
A B&W classic, a martial arts flick, a French-Canadian drama, a sports documentary and a zombie movie. A disparate lot, but they suit me just fine (I’ve greedily decided that these are movies for me, not my wife, who is usually too tired to watch movies on a school night.)
I’m taking recommendations… my Ziplist awaits.
For the past couple of days, CBC’s Toronto HQ has been invaded… by the competition.
If you’ve ever seen the Canadian Broadcasting Centre on Front Street (across from the Skydome Rogers Centre) you might have noticed a huge red cube on the roof. That’s Studio 40 (but nowhere near the Sunset Strip.) It’s a 13,000 sq. ft. high-end television studio, which gets rented out to film and TV shoots when CBC isn’t using it.
Of course, you might recall CBC’s desire to ditch in-house production, meaning that CBC won’t be using the Big Red Box much.
So, Studio 40 is for rent.
This week, it’s rented out to a very high profile operation: Deal or No Deal Canada.
Which is, of course, not CBC’s show. It belongs to Global TV, our competition, who plan to air the first episode at 10:00 p.m. on Feb. 4, 2007, right after the Super Bowl.
I call that the competition, but it’s not much of a contest really. CBC-TV will presumably be on air then, wowing the post-Super Bowl crowd with CBC News: Sunday Night. But, thanks to our fabulous facilities, Carol and Evan can look forward to an ass-kicking courtesy of Howie and the folks at CanWestGlobalAllianceAtlantisGoldmanSachs.
I know, I know. If we said “No Deal”, they’d have just rented some other studio, and we wouldn’t have all those howiebucks to “put back into high quality Canadian programming.” We know the drill; it’s the same reason we let them remove the cafeteria and outsource the publicity department and “compress” our office space. Who’d say no to programming dollars? (Even if they come via another network’s programming dollars….)
Anyhow, the prospect of 26 semi-clad models showing briefcases to a bald ex-pat has the press drooling on their laptops. They haven’t had this much imported star enjoyment since Conan O’Brien dropped by to insult Quebecers, or Keith Richards was told he couldn’t bring heroin unless he promised to play guitar.
Anyhow, the whole town is atwitter. You can’t escape it, unless your brain is frozen.
And oh, how I’ve tried to escape it. Daily, actually - but the CBC has apparently rented out all the elevators to Deal or No Deal.
The astute reader will recall that the Green Monster, formerly known as the “public access elevator” has been usurped by the International Academy of Design and Technology, and that a quarter of the remaining elevators are offline while Star Fleet Command installs airlocks. (It should be noted that this vast renovation does not include state-of-the-art features like stairs.)
On top of that, union agreements dictate that two elevators must be under repair at all times. That leaves a single elevator shaft for CBC employees to throw themselves into.
Yesterday, while waiting on the second floor as dozens of full elevators passed us by, my coworkers discussed alternative arrangements to reach the atrium below. A fireman’s pole was suggested, as was an inflatable yellow slide like those seen in downed aircraft (remove your shoes first, please.) If it were of sufficient height, we could probably charge a fee for the ride of a lifetime. The Barbara Frum Memorial Waterslide had a certain appeal as well.
Fortunately, we received an e-mail today from the Manger of Independent Productions (huh?) thanking us for our (assumed) patience. Best of all, it gushed, if we remain patient, they may do this to us on a regular basis!
The ability of the Toronto Production Centre to successfully negotiate the production of Deal or No Deal by using our top-notch facilities and experienced, professional personnel has brought us tremendous exposure and high praise. We hope to capitalize on this positive word-of-mouth in order to seek and attract additional television production for our studios. We thank you again for your patience, understanding and cooperation.
Dandy.
Anyhow, since there is no way of escaping the building in the foreseeable future, I thought I’d go exploring the 10th floor, to see if there were any of those briefcases full of money lying around unattended.
No luck there, but I did see several nine-foot-tall supermodels flouncing about in bathrobes, looking cold and resolutely ignoring the lunch table. I heard mobs of people behind a steel door, chanting either “Howie” or “Zowee!”, but they sounded a bit rabid and I ran away.
I did see something of interest as I fled, though. The hallway is lined with pictures of comedians from past CBC shows, and here’s the framed image right outside the Studio 40 control room:
Howie. Back when he had hair. Back when he worked for CBC, not Global. Zowee!
Before Deal or No Deal, before The Howie Mandel Show, before St. Elsewhere and the Muppet Show, there was “Howie Mandel’s Sunny Skies” (CBC, 1994-1996).
Howie used to be ours, freaks. So, cut me a deal on waiting for my own elevator?
Q: Who’s watching the watchers?
A: Nobody, today.
CBC Watch bills itself as an “Independent forum discussing the CBC’s violation of the Broadcasting Act.” And while it sometimes imagines itself to be my employer’s arch enemy, monitoring the crown corporation is not such a bad idea. Everything that gets your dollars, tax or otherwise, should be monitored. And even criticism can be informative, entertaining and even - gasp! - constructive. Plenty of CBCers read it, just like Frank Magazine and the Teamakers blog.
Problem is (as the aforementioned Teamaker has pointed out - twice) CBC Watch usually sucks. It promises to “expose the bias”, but ends up delivering obscenity-laden, ideologically-driven rants and flame wars.
And when someone points that out, here’s the sort of response that gets posted:
Obviously the cbc sucks! So does the moron who posted the comment about cbc watch sucks. Another liberal moron from the east. The CBC is so pathetically left wing biased it’s really quite amazing. It’s a billion dollar a year infomercial for a way of thinking. A rediculously left wing idiotic way of thinking I might add. NDPers only make up 7 or 8 percent of our population, how rediculous is it that our national broadcaster pushes the views of 8 percent of the population? It’s absurd of course! The anti-Bush propaganda that the CBC (communist broadcasting corporation) pushed for a week or two before the US election was outrageous…might as well call it the Micheal Moore network. After the Democrats lost the people on the CBC were literally having to hold back tears. It was really incredible to watch. Despite the best efforts of the liberal media and Hollywood Americans were smart enough to see past the propaganda and elect the RIGHT guy…unlike the moronic voters of Canada. What a rediculous country we live in. I’m ashamed to be a Canadian!
Get the picture?
I only mention this because I keep coming back to CBC Watch hoping for better. But today I get nothing at all.
Then again, as a colleague pointed out, perhaps “Bandwidth exceeded” means the site is so insanely popular that they can’t possibly keep up with demand. What do I know?
Five years ago today, Peter Gzowski died. Gzowski was, and probably still is, the most-loved radio broadcaster in Canadian history.
Most of my childhood memories have Gzowski’s dulcet tones in the background. I’m pretty sure our kitchen radio couldn’t pick up anything other than Morningside, and their bookshelf contained seemingly endless copies of the Morningside Letters books.
Later, he became a bit of a role model for me, the “dream job” I held in the back of my mind as I worked through journalism school. And then, lo and behold, I landed a job at CBC Radio.
I must confess that I only sighted Peter Gzowski a few times during the years where his tenure at the Toronto Broadcasting Centre overlapped with mine. I’d see him shuffling through the atrium wearing a stained sweater and looking forlorn about the world’s conspiracy against smoking.
Peter Gzowski signed off from Morningside in 1997, the year I landed my first full contract at CBC. And in a switch that only increased my fondness for him, Gzowski then went to my alma mater, Trent University, to become its eight chancellor. (It has since built a massive new college in his honour.)
Peter Gzowski died in 2002 of pulmonary disease due to emphysema.
The CBC Archives site has a nice collection of Peter Gzowski clips, and today Tod Maffin posted a nice tribute called Peter Gzowski Remembered.
And now, I’m going to go and ruin it all by posting a frivolous addition to my Identical Twins series.
A colleague noticed that one of our early images of Peter Gzowski bears a startling resemblance to Jason Lee’s lead character Earl Hickey in My Name is Earl.
Not what I intended to post today, but yeah, I see it. Gzowski always maintained his sense of humour, so I doubt he’d mind. Besides, there are worse things than being loveable and rumpled. Among them, the moustache.
One of the great advantages of having an uncommon surname is that it’s pretty simple to promote yourself.
I’ve been blogging for seven months now, and I own all but two of the first 20 Google search results for “Gorbould”.
Yay me. But now I’ve discovered there’s someone with almost my name, who is way, way cooler than I’ll ever be. In fact, Paul Corbould is living the life of my dreams.
Turns out that Paul Corbould is the special effects supervisor for the film Children of Men, as well as just about everything else that is awesome about Hollywood [hat tip to Sue, who highly recommends the movie.] Corbould also did V for Vendetta, King Arthur, Saving Private Ryan, and Amadeus. (Well… he also did a Superman movie, but it was the dreaded #3. Making Richard Pryor fly isn’t nearly as cool as doing General Zod’s laser eyes!)
And it’s not just Paul… Corbould’s whole family is cooler than mine. His brothers both do SFX too: Chris Corbould does all the Bond flicks, and Neil Corbould won an Oscar for Gladiator.
I suppose I can take some consolation in the fact that some genealogy sites say that Gorbould (and Gorbold) are related to Corbould.
Records of that name dates back to 1395 in Suffolk, England. Best I can find of Gorbould is bloke named Ebenezer, who ran a pub in Roydon.
And I thought I was uncool.
Just a quick note to say that I’m not dead, I’m just upgrading.
After a few days off, I was going to post something clever tonight (delusions!) but I got sidetracked, in a good way. WordPress has just released version 2.1, codenamed “Ella” (yep, after Ella Fitzgerald.) I had neglected any upgrades thus far, and it was long overdue… so I spent the night with Ella. And here she is.
It was a rather pleasant night, all things considered. One of those things to consider was how hellishly awful my upgrade from Blogger to Wordpress was. By comparison, this was a snap.
To make a long story short, Ella is designed to make my life easier, not yours. You won’t notice any of the major changes, but they include:
- Autosaving
- Tabs between WYSIWYG and HTML views
- spell checker
- faster interface
- an upload manager
- blogroll subcategories
- a new antispam plugin
So far my site seems to be working just fine. I haven’t been able to get a couple of the new features to work yet, but they aren’t essential, and it’s probably just a matter of doing some reading.
[EDIT: Ooops, just noticed that there’s a problem with my recent posts plugin… seems to have the same cutline for everything. Have to fix that…]
Anyhow, this is mostly a test post. There are a bunch of new image management features I should try too. So, er, um… here’s a picture of some bears my daughter drew.
Grrrrr!
An update on my story Infamous last words:
Seems that the ghost of Percy Saltzman - or more likely, someone from his estate - has been blogging again.
Or, un-blogging. Saltzman’s final post, Nudies and Me (Dec. 6, 2006), which I found both shocking and endearing, has been removed.
His blog now shows a new (?) final entry, posted December 9 (?) called Einstein, Chaplin, Tolstoy & Me?!.
It’s also clever, and perhaps more fitting - a summary of all the wonderful things people have said about him but were insufficient to win him the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award.
So…. how did this appear, and how did Nudies and Me disappear?
My best guess is that his heir (or his agent) thought a different legacy was in order, and rewrote the book blog.
Well, OK. If this was a grieving relative who thought Mr. Saltzman would have wanted different lasts words, who am I to argue. I don’t want to make their pain any worse.
On the other hand, as a journalist, archivist and internet user, this doesn’t sit right.
You can’t rewrite history. When something gets published, it stays published.
I occasionally run up against this in my job at the CBC Archives website. Guests look back at things they once said on camera and now regret. Reporters look back at their bumbling early reports and wish they could be expunged from the record. But it doesn’t work that way. Archives, like libraries and newspapers and magazines, don’t remove items because you (or someone else) change your mind. There is no un-publish.
People sometimes think the internet is an exception, but it isn’t. E-mail stays sent. Forum comments stay online. Web pages get copied.
Blogging is the ultimate proof of this. As I learned in my first week of blogging, when you blog something it not only stays blogged, but people will know about it, and you had better be prepared to defend it.
In fact, you can go ahead and read Nudies and Me (for the moment) using Google’s cache.
I figured Archive.org would also have it, but their Wayback Machine came up short. There are probably other blogging resources out there that have kept it.
(It’s certainly possible that I’m missing something, that there’s another explanation for the blog changes. Maybe it’s not really his own site. Maybe he programmed it to republish, or self-destruct. If anyone can enlighten me, please do.)
Anyhow, Nudies and Me still exists. I saved it. I’d repost it here, but I won’t, out of respect for those mourning Mr. Saltzman. You can always e-mail me.
Most of all, I hope that those who made it disappear know for certain that Saltzman wouldn’t have wanted it to stay online. From reading his work, it sounds like he stood behind what he wrote, this included.
Others agree - the only other blogger I found to reference Nudies had this to say:
Read it. It’s witty and intelligent and a great way to remember a Canadian icon. We’ll miss you Percy.
And now we miss some of your work.
[Story update: The day after I blogged this, it made the front page of the Globe. The full text of Nudies and Me has been posted on FRANKsters.]
Today is Mark Messier’s birthday. So, here:
As one website said, how many ways does this picture make you want to die?
On Monday, Canada’s first TV weatherman died at age 91. Percy Saltzman was the very first person to appear on CBC-TV when it signed on in 1952. He pretty much invented the industry: the first road and forest fire reports, the first use of radar and satellite, and the first signature bit - a flip of the chalk at the end of his reports.
When news of his death broke, I posted his obit on the CBC Archives site, and wrote a short piece for Inside the CBC, which I’ll be assisting with this week.
Then, a comment on that piece absolutely blew my mind: Percy Saltzman had a blog!
Actually, he had a rather decent website, percysaltzman.com.
But the blog is a real eye-opener. Here’s an old guy - a nonagenerian, to be precise - who started a blog in May 2006. Of interest, his first entry was about the death of another famous Canadian, John Kenneth Galbraith.
But it’s his last blog entry that has me reeling. On Dec. 6, 2006, he posted his final piece, entitled Nudies and Me. Here’s how it begins.
All my long life I have doted on the female form divine. It’s a sort of madness, an all-consuming passion, persisting now into my tenth decade.
I welcome the frenzy. It maketh the juices to flow, the mouth to salivate, the throat to tickle and tighten, the eyes to glitter and bulge, the crotch also, the pulse to race, the heart to drum like an all-steel band.
Racy stuff! And it gets racer, with a discussion of catching his parents “in flagrante delicto making the beast with two backs”, lonely adolescent moments when “hormonal surges drove me into an unremitting sexual frenzy, and with no natural female outlet handy, I took myself in hand”, and deflowering his wife on his wedding night:
She was a virgin with as it happened a case-hardened maidenhead made of solid steel. There was no way I could penetrate despite urgent and repeated thrustings.
Avast! Too much! Where’s WebSense when I need it?
That was posted Dec. 6th, and quite possibly the last thing he ever wrote. If you want to get creeped out even further, here’s how his CBC.ca/Arts obit describes his demise:
About six weeks ago, the iconic TV pioneer suffered a seemingly minor injury and his health began deteriorating rapidly, his family said.
I almost expect that last post to trail off with, “and then… I… Arrghhhhhh……………………”
Sorry, that’s a bit harsh. I have great respect for Saltzman and don’t wish to speak ill of him. And I’m not, actually - his blog is extremely well-written, amusing and edgy. If anything, I think even more highly of this pioneer. To be that frank at age 91, to unabashedly post intimate information for the whole world (and even his great granddaughter) to one day read - that’s ballsy. I can only hope to have as much vim at the end of my days.
But it also gets me thinking: what will my last blog post be?
Surely there are others, but Saltzman is the first blogger I’ve encountered to have passed away at the height of his blogging career. Nudies and Me will, presumably, stay online his last chapter. A strange legacy, but something tells me the man wouldn’t object.
Should you treat each post as if it’s your last? There’s a daunting thought.
[Update to this story!]
My kids built this paltry little snowman yesterday, scraping together the first few soggy flakes of what has turned into the first real storm of this winter. It’s not much of a snowman - at least not in the Calvin & Hobbes sense, but it’s a good reminder not to grumble about shoveling the sidewalk.
I got another reminder after finishing the shoveling this morning. As my two girls were kicking the snow around and marvelling at the piles of ice pellets, I put the shovel away and got out the ice melter to put on our steps.
“What’s that stuff?” they asked.
“It’s snow and ice melter,” I said.
“What’s it do?” they asked.
“It melts snow and ice,” I said.
“WHAAAAT!?!?,” they screamed in horror, shooting me the look you’d give if I sprinkled PCBs on your flowerbed.
“Why would anyone want to do THAT? Put it away, Daddy! Put it away!”
Away it went. And away they went, toddling down the sidewalk side by side, thoroughly enjoying the “slush, ice pellets and freezing rain” that had the rest of the city in a tizzy.
« Previous Entries
Loading ...
