Last week I warned you that stuff was falling from the skies all over town and that, proof positive that gravity is increasing, it’s time to invest in hard hats.
But would the people who make Toronto tick listen? Noooooo. Instead, they are proceeding to put even more stuff up in the sky, foolishly hoping it’ll stay there.
At lunchtime yesterday, I looked up (bravely) to see several platforms dangling from the top of the World’s Dangliest Dang-doodle – the CN tower.
These appear to be platforms for fixing the tower, or maybe scrubbing off the bird poop, lightning scorches, or graffiti (double dog dare you, Poster Child!)
You couldn’t pay me enough to go up there, though I bet if they could reel ‘em out quickly it’d make a ride that would put the Demon Drop to shame. Anyhow, while I was eating lunch I read that there are big plans for the venerable Pointy Thing – they’re going to light it up like a Christmas tree.
“Like the Shanghai Tower, Empire State Building and London Eye, the CN Tower will also be ablaze at night with light and colour.
“Toronto’s internationally known landmark and the world’s tallest freestanding tower is to be outfitted with 1,330 brilliant LED lights that will shoot up the elevator shaft, over the “bubble” and straight to the mast.”
And you thought the tower’s phallic imagery was in your head.
I guess there’s no harm in adding a little Vegas-on-Front-Street, and officials are quick to point out that the LEDs are more efficient than the washing-machine sized lights they used when the lit it up 10 years ago. Plus, they promise to turn them off during bird migratory season, so nothing gets impaled on the huge pulsing shaft (oh, man…)
Still, does our city really suffer from a lack of light pollution? We’ve got 16,000 streetlights (which are being replaced.) Our skyscrapers blaze through the night, the Air Canada Centre paints the sky with its giant klieg lights, as do those portable kliegs used every time there’s a high school prom or a Winner’s opening. Never mind Symphony of Fire, police helicopters and the Blade Runner monstrosity at Dundas Square.
Once upon a time, I saw a supposedly-funny postcard, all black with the subtitle “Toronto at night.” It was way off the mark then, but now it’s just ridiculous.
It’s been said before that the Toronto skyline has already been turned into a giant screen saver, obliterating the stars and frightening dogs for miles around. I’m not sure that turning the CN Tower into the World’s Largest Thermometer is going to help (though maybe the United Way can put it to use in their next campaign.)
The Star article says the whole thing is going to be controlled by a desktop computer. I really, really hope that guy who hijacked the Go Train pixelboards to make them say “Stephen Harper eats babies” gets his hands on it.
I can look directly up at the tip of the CN Tower from my desk across the road at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre (fun during a lightning storm, unsettling on September 11.) But it’s getting harder to see – the CBC windows are filthy. And now, in another lesson of things going up and falling down, we know why.
Here’s part of a message e-mailed to staff yesterday:
Replacement of Roof Anchors
In recent months, we’ve had regular requests to wash the outside windows of the Broadcasting Centre. We have been unable to do so because the original roof anchors on this building no longer meet approved safety standards, making it legally impossible for window washers to operate here.
After several unexpected delays (including the first strike in 20 years by the union of roof anchor installers), we can now begin the process of removing the existing anchors and installing more than 270 new, government-approved replacements over the next three months. Our goal is to be able to wash the outside of the building in September.
First, did you know there was a union of roof anchor installers, or that they went on strike?
Second, I’ve seen the guys who dangle from the 10th-floor roof to wash our windows, and they are like fearless squeegee gods. Even though the construction site next door has coated the TBC in grime, I can’t begrudge them something safe to tie on to.
And third, I’ve told my wife it’s my goal to wash our home windows by September too.
My monthly jab at the obnoxious wall of CTV billboards outside the CBC offices. The currently advertised oeuvre includes Pirate Master, On The Lot, So You Think You Can Dance and Canadian Idol.
Dirty birdie! If only they had left up the ad for American Idol… then you could have said “Squawk! Pretty Paula!” But nobody would have believed you.
My five year old, looking at the flowers that have already fallen from the forsythia bush in our back yard:
“They look like they fell from a rainbow.”
Daydreaming again today…
(I think that little platform on the top of Roy Thompson Hall is there for window cleaning, but it sure looks like a diving board to me. On a scorcher like today, it’s fun to imagine the whole building full of water… Splash!)
“I’m not here to boost my traffic,” Gorbould tells reporters
Taking his cue from Stephen Harper, Canadian blogger Paul Gorbould touched down unannounced in Afghanistan Tuesday to see first-hand what blogging is like in the war-ravaged country, and to meet with Afghan mommy blogger Habiba Qarqeen.
The surprise two-day visit began Tuesday morning in the capital Kabul, where Gorbould immediately live-blogged a cute anecdote about his children back home, and wrote an item on the state of Afghanistan’s toilets.
During an unattended news conference at the Kabul Circuit City, Gorbould reaffirmed his commitment to posting meaningless polls and pontificating on the minutia of CBC policies. He called the mission, “Canada’s least important foreign policy endeavour… but still.”
He also reiterated his belief that Canadian blogging was “of universal interest, and might inspire the people of Afghanistan to… um, improve.”
Motives questioned
Gorbould dismissed suggestions that his trip was a response to waning site traffic, telling the empty room: “I’m not here because of Sitemeter. I’m here because it’s the right thing to do.”
Gorbould’s message won him accolades from all three of Afghanistan’s civilian bloggers: Qarqeen, whose 11-month old son Ahman has recently learned to walk; university student and Battlestar Galactica afficionado Farooq Fahim, and British hostage Wesley Anderton Jr.
“We appreciate this show of support from the Canadian blogging community,” Fahim said. “We’re just not sure why he’s here. I mean, he seemed nice on the internet, but we really could have done all this on MSN.”
Qarqeen was more optimistic. “By tomorrow, or the next day, there will be some pictures of Paul and Ahman and me on my Flickr,” Qarqeen said. “And I’ve friended him on Facebook.”
“Get me the hell out before I’m beheaded on YouTube,” added Anderton.
Gorbould has committed to blogging until at least the summer holidays. The visit follows a week of heavy criticism about his sporadic and uninteresting blog entries. A key theme of opposition attacks is that, in terms of his subject matter, nobody gives a shit.
Trip shrouded in secrecy
In the 11 months he has been blogging, Gorbould has never been to Afghanistan, nor has he in fact mentioned the troubled nation. He did write an item about Kazakhstan once, in response to seeing the movie Borat.
Although Gorbould has given few travel details “for security reasons”, he wife has said she expects him back “pronto, or I’m taking the kids.” She later added, “He’s such an ass.”
Gorbould spared no effort to keep his surprise two-day trip shrouded in secrecy. His wife says she found out when she found the box labelled “summer sandals” open on the basement floor, and noticed the lack of dishes in the sink. She says she’s still not sure how to explain his absence to his three-year-old daughter, who has begun asking where “the tall grown-up” is.
CBC coworkers similarly had no idea he was overseas. At 11:15 Tuesday morning, his boss wandered by his desk and looked puzzled. By 3 p.m., his new office chair had been “claimed” by another writer.
Messages to Gorbould’s Hotmail account were not immediately answered.
Cute alert!
This is what my brother-in-law Rob found under a pile of leaves in his Markham backyard. Actually, when he first found them they looked like little pink balls - eyes shut, ears pinned back - but a week later, they are full on, cute-as-a-bunny bunnies.
Rob was worried that he’d disturbed their nest, which was up against his townhouse wall beside the garden hose. But it turns out that mother rabbits only return once or twice a day to quickly nurse and then scoot off so as not to call attention to them. She’s doing a good job - two weeks later, Rob’s bearded collie Hoover has yet to notice the nest right outside his door. I don’t know what’s funnier - the idea of a great big dog taking a whiz five feet from the nest, or his great big master scouring the internet for bunny care tips.
I don’t think of Markham as much of a wild kingdom, but you can catch the birds and bees doing their thing right downtown at this time of year. My perennial favourite is at this pond outside Roy Thompson Hall:
If you pass through the walkway seen at bottom right, you’ll see a family of ducklings learning to swim right beside the glass.
They’ve been returning here for seven years now, despite efforts to discourage them - at various points, staff have fenced in the pillars where they built their nests, removed the pillars entirely, and asked wildlife experts to relocate them to more appropriate grounds - all without luck. So now, they’ve put out a ramp and a bowl of food, and you can watch them do their ducky thing any business day.
Even more fun is watching the business people watching the ducks, and cooing and making those “Awwwww! Nature!” faces so out of place in the city’s business hub. Like Rob, they sometimes go back to their office computers to look up duck nesting habits.
I know this because I’ve encouraged it in the past. In June 2000, my sister Alison wrote a feature on these very ducks for the CBC4Kids website. You can still find it online via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. It included a Duck Journal on how the little ducklings grew, and a feature on duck nesting habits.
Those of you reading from rural locations will likely - and should - scoff at the urban fascination with any remnant of the natural world. But I still think it’s a tiny miracle, and how many of those do you see at work?
Did someone adjust gravity without telling me?
On Sunday, a half-metre chunk of concrete fell from a Montreal overpass (initial reports said it was a piece of the roof of the Lafontaine tunnel, which runs under the St. Lawrence River.)
On Monday, a concrete gutter fell off a Montreal highway overpass, reminiscent of the Concorde overpass collapse that killed five people last September. (It’s not just Montreal - two weeks ago, chunks of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway fell - again. And who could forget March’s CN Tower icefall?)
On Tuesday, I got stuck on the King St. streetcar for about half an hour. Eventually, a bus came along to get us, and when I got home I found out what the holdup was: one block ahead, a 250-pound slab of concrete had fallen 50 storeys and crashed onto a rooftop.
On Wednesday, Satan rested.
On Thursday, it was pipes. A two-tonne pipe rolled off a truck on a Montreal overpass, killing two construction workers. And in New York City, a 15-foot pipe fell from a skyscraper near the World Trade Center site, plunging through the roof of a firehouse.
On Friday, I learned that Toronto’s new soccer stadium is raining bolts and fasteners during games. “We have found a total of six objects which fans have turned in to stadium staff,” Bob Hunter says. See, no need to worry. It’s only six measly bits of metal stuff that stop you from falling to your doom. And nothing ever really goes wrong with soccer stadiums, right?
I think I’m going to wear my bike helmet all day today.
Psst. Vote on my new Sky Is Falling poll in the sidebar over there and down a bit –>
Over the past few months, I’ve finally got on the Battlestar Galactica train. I watched the original series when I was a kid, and even owned those Viper and Cylon Raider toys with Super Child-Choking Plastic Bullets™. I was excited to hear about the new series, but I didn’t get the Space Network so I sort of let it slide. Finally, a friend gave me seasons 1 & 2 on DVD, swearing up and down that I’d love it, and he was right. Fantastic show, as everyone knows.
But I didn’t realize its influence until yesterday, when I read this post on Collision Detection. Someone at NASA apparently likes Battlestar Galactica so much that they’re styling the next moon mission after it.
Check out this animated video pimping NASA’s project to return to the moon:
The newest NASA animation about the constellation program
Doesn’t that look (and sound) just a little like the BSG opening? At first I thought this was a clever joke, posted on YouTube by someone who had recut the animation to look like BSG. But no, it’s right there on NASA’s site, on a page called A Vision for Space Exploration. You can find it on the right, under “Return to the Moon: The Journey Begins Now“.
As a reference, here’s the opening to Battlestar Galactica’s second season:
Battlestar Galactica - Opening Credits (2nd season) - sybockvulcan
Second season opening credits for the 21st century SciFi Channel series “Battlestar Galactica”
00:41 - December 18, 2006
Look familiar?
The similarity is particularly noticeable when the music changes to the drumming bit at the end. And at around 1:00 into the NASA video, there’s a fake camera movement exactly like they use on BSG. Clive Thompson hits the nail on the head with his assessment of the similarities:
Actually, what really cracked me up was how strangely threatening the video seemed. There’s all this creepy, minor-key horror-movie music, combined with bleed-in text that ominously proclaims: “We took a giant leap … we stopped … we’re going back.” Then there’s a shot of a lunar vessel approaching and impassively snapping pix through its single HAL-like eye. Then boom! It’s all action, with a bunch of rovers thundering across the lunar surface like beetles while launch-ships swirl overhead, all set to unsettlingly thumpy action music. It feels precisely like the trailer to the upcoming Transformers movie … except in this case the invading, marauding aliens are us. Why, yes, we humans are returning to the moon — because we’re gonna dismantle it and SLAUGHTER ANYTHING IN OUR PATH.
“And they have a plan.” Perhaps we now know where the 13th Colony is going?
I’m proud to say I’ve received my first blog award, such as it is.
Matthew Caverhill of the wonderful pop culture blog Culture Kills… wait, I mean cutlery has awarded me the Thinking Blogger Award, and I couldn’t be more grateful, even with this accompanying text:
Gor[b]: Paul Gorbould is a digital archivist for the CBC, and having access to that much information warps a brain. That warping has resulted in an entertaining and thought-provoking blog.
I’ll take warped and entertaining any day! Here are the rules for the Thinking Blogger Award:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.
I’m all for shiny badges, but the best part of this award is the opportunity to recognize five other bloggers who make me think. In the words of the meme’s creator, “Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking!”
I’m adding my own stipulation, that I’d like to avoid tagging anyone already tagged, nor mention those all-star mega blogs that everyone knows about anyways. And I’ve resisted the urge to choose the people I’m most fond of, or the blogs I read most often - though all five are tied to the Canadian media.
Denis McGrath’s Dead Things on Sticks
Denis is a Toronto-based TV writer who writes not only for TV, but about TV. He gives an insider’s view of the industry without being insiderish; his posts are long without being ponderous – and he’s damned funny. Plus, the dude wrote Top Gun! The Musical. Now that’s gotta be thought-provoking. I was late to discover Denis – he seemed to be on everyone else’s blogroll, but I never got around to seeing what the fuss was about. Now I know. Nobody writes so effortlessly about Canada’s role in the flood of American media… I sort of think that if he had been named the next chairman of the CBC, everything would be OK.
Joe Clark’s Fawny.org
It’s probably not easy sharing the name of a former (and brief) Canadian prime minister. But accessibility advocate Joe Clark has been so vocal online that he’s managed to surpass his political namesake in Google rank. That’s saying something. And Joe has a lot to say – from web accessibility to public spaces to architecture to the over-use of Arial, Joe is Toronto’s harshest critic on… well, almost everything. He can be condescending, irascible, and sometimes downright irritating, but he’s usually right. And he fights the good fight, for a more aesthetic and equitable environment, real and online.
Alphonse Ouimet’s The Tea Makers
Ouimet – not his or her real name – became the stuff of legend during the 2005 CBC lockout. While management battened down the hatches in the PR war against its employees, one mystery manager broke the silence and blogged it like they saw it. Equally critical of management and unions, it became required reading for everyone even remotely interested in the CBC, and still is. It’s always “an exercise in tough love”, and speaking frankly about your employer can be a challenge. But there’s no questioning the fact that The Teamakers is about making CBC better.
Dan Misener’s DanMisener.com
Dan is a producer for CBC radio who makes podcasts and satellite radio, plays in a band and started a local reading series called Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids. He doesn’t blog terribly often, but when he does it’s usually thoughtful and forward thinking. I’m not sure why we don’t know each other.
John Gushue’s John Gushue…Dot Dot Dot
John works for CBC in Newfoundland, and his blog deserves a lot more recognition than it gets. When I started blogging, this was the blog I considered “best of show” for the crowd I run with. His quick and frequent updates suit the medium much better than the infrequent and overwrought style I developed; though his entries are not long, I always learn something new. Or something old – John shares my interest in history, as seen in his “Daily Dot” quick hits of today in history. Plus, he has a whole series of “A thought on”, so I think it counts as thought provoking.
Congratulations to all five of you!
CNN may claim to be “The Most Trusted Name In News”, but they aren’t above the occasional slip up, such as publishing their editing notes, or “borrowing” rather heavily from their competitors… or both.
Check out paragraph #8 in this story from today’s World Business section of CNN.com:
An editor’s note has been inserted in the text, and published in the story: “Well, at least she’s giving credit where credit is due… but she’s sourced the FT three times in this story… I think we need to remove one or two of them just to make it look like we didn’t just rewrite their article.”
Yikes.
My boss showed me this error an hour ago, and as of this writing it’s still online. (UPDATE: The offending graf was removed by 4 p.m. the next day - online for about 24 hours.)
News on the web may be fast paced, but it doesn’t have to be hasty. About a year and a half ago, CBC.ca introduced something we had wanted for years: a universal copy desk to check and edit stories before they are published online.
Getting funding for this was harder than you’d think. For the corporation’s first 60 years, we simply weren’t a print operation. With the exception of the odd TV caption or graphic, spelling didn’t count for much on TV, and it meant even less on radio - phonetics were more important than accuracy.
Then we started a website, and tried porting radio scripts directly to the web. Ugh. Never mind the uppercase typing, the bizarre punctuation, the spelled-out acronyms and phonetic last names… the grammar and spelling were atrocious. For more on these growing pains, see the excellent CBC.ca 10th anniversary item “CBC Learns to Spell” by Blair Shewchuk.
I was around for a few momentous typos and spellos (a term my friend uses for words that are misspelled not by accident, but because you really didn’t know the right spelling and didn’t check.) I got to witness e-mail pouring in about the giant 1997 CBC.ca headline “Death of Diana, Princess of Whales”. And I was able to save our Archives site from a reference to “no holes barred wrestling” (ouch.) But I’ve probably perpetrated a few doozies myself.
At least, I would have, if not for having a diligent editor and proofreader.
Most CBC news, arts and sports stories are now filed to a copy desk that is staffed (almost) around the clock. This team of editors is wonderful - they have to know their Gretzkys from their Gzowskis, and turn stories around in no time flat. (We don’t use them for the Archives site, but we have a freelance copyeditor who is diligent beyond reproach.) To keep up with breaking news, hot stories are sometimes published directly and edited on the fly, but for the most part a second set of eyeballs sees things before the public does. When we slip up, there’s a link on each news story for users to Report a Typo.
You might think that means we’ve finally got things figured out, but amazingly, copyediting is a hot topic once again. As CBC prepares to roll out the “myCBC” project in Vancouver, we’re faced with new (to CBC) concepts like citizen input, user-generated content and TV and radio reporters filing directly to the web. I certainly hope that all these things go through an editor, but it’s by no means certain.
Perhaps I’ll print out that CNN page and post it on a few strategic walls….
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