I just learned the tragic news: Less than 24 hours after I uploaded my previous post about the one-time CBC radio program Disc Drive, the program’s former host, Jürgen Gothe, passed away, after a long battle with cancer.
I am deeply saddened. I secretly hoped that one of these days, we will hear him yet one more time on the radio. But that’s not going to happen… his wonderful voice has been silenced forever.
Jürgen was 71.
What a loss.
I am listening to The Disc Drive Disc.
The Disc Drive Disc is an audio CD. More specifically, it is an audio CD that was released by the CBC 24 years ago, shortly after the fifth anniversary of my all-time favorite radio program, Disc Drive.
Disc Drive went on for another 17 years or so, until it was unceremoniously dropped from the CBC’s schedule as Radio Two was revamped to cater to a broader audience. I am sure that executives at the CBC are still congratulating each other on such a resounding success, even as the station lost nearly 40% of its audience in the past eight years, in their desperate search for the lowest common denominator, an audience that views “classical” as just a minor, unpopular genre.
And most unfortunately, they lost host Jurgen Gothe and Disc Drive: a unique, eclectic program in which it was not uncommon to hear something from Mozart, followed by Ella Fitzgerald. As Jurgen himself put it on The Disc Drive Disc, this program was unique in the English-speaking (or anything-speaking) world. And Jurgen’s whimsical commentary! It was a joy to listen to his stories about music, food, Herbie the cat or the Willis Point Fire Department. I was looking forward every weekday afternoon to 3 PM, when I could turn on my radio and enjoy a productive few hours at my computer while listening to the program.
Alas, this wonderful, unique, joyful program was taken off the air in 2007. If only I had the presence of mind, I would have recorded as many shows as possible. I didn’t. I did record the very last Disc Drive, which was mainly a replay of the very first Disc Drive, but that’s it.
Except that back in 1991, the CBC did issue the aforementioned CD, The Disc Drive Disc. Of course it is not an easy disc to come by 24 years later. When I searched for it online, second-hand copies were offered for hundreds of dollars on Amazon or eBay. But then, I came across a German music store that claimed to have this CD, still available, for the not so princely sum of 9.99 euros.
I picked, I clicked, and a few weeks later, today that is, I found a nice cardboard envelope in the mail, with The Disc Drive Disc inside. So one very last time, I was able to enjoy something new (to me, that is) from Jurgen Gothe and his team (and cats) from subterranean Studio 20.
Thank you, Jurgen, for the memories.
I am still digesting the news, which I received while in Hungary, that Leonard Nimoy, aka. Mr. Spock, is no longer with us.
And now there is breaking news that Harrison Ford, aka. Han Solo, aka. Indiana Jones, crashed while flying solo in a vintage WW2 aircraft in California. The good news: according to the LA Fire Department, his injuries were moderate and he was alert as he was transported to hospital.
I wish him a speedy recovery.
Today, I successfully hacked one of my Rogers cable decoder boxes. No, not to do anything illegal, just to get composite video and demultiplexed stereo audio out of them, to make them more usable with the dual-tuner TV card that is in my desktop workstation.
This is the first time ever that I used the services of a custom printed circuit board manufacturer. My design worked on the first try. I am mighty proud of myself.
Canadian liberals, rejoice: The network often dubbed “Fox News North” is no more. Reportedly, Sun News Network will stop broadcasting as early as 5 AM Eastern time this (Friday) morning.
I am certainly no fan of right-wing ideological propaganda and hatemongering, so it’s not like I will personally miss Sun News. But I still don’t cherish the idea that it was forced to close, after the CRTC denied it a license that would have granted the network a more lucrative spot on the cable dial. A core concept in a democracy is that even voices we despise can be heard. And if your views are based on real values, surely they would not be shaken by the fact that there was a news channel out there that occasionally challenged them.
To be sure, Sun News wasn’t exactly high quality television, but still… I don’t think their demise will make Canada a better place. Not to mention the 200+ jobs that are lost as a result.
The Moroccon-born, Muslim mayor of the city of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, has a message to Muslim extremists:
“But if you don’t like freedom, for heaven’s sake pack your bags and leave. If you do not like it here because some humorists you don’t like are making a newspaper, may I then say you can fuck off.”
He reportedly said this on live TV, and it wasn’t bleeped.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
For years, I’ve been using the online TV guide provided by ZAP2IT to check what’s on TV. Generally speaking, I’ve been satisfied with their service.
Until last year, when they introduced a whole new layout. Which, in my considered opinion, was a significant downgrade (makes me wonder if they were perhaps inspired by Windows 8).
Today I noticed, to my considerable pleasure, that the old layout is back. I now have the option to “Switch to Classic View”. Which I promptly did, without hesitation and with no plans to change my mind.
Now I am no usability or ergonomics expert, but I do have 30-odd years of experience in IT, and I know a thing or two about user interface design. Here are two illustrations that show why, in my considered opinion, the old format is far superior to the new one. First, the new version, with some of its shortcomings highlighted:
And now here are the same shows, in the old format:
So much easier to view! So much easier to find things of interest!
When they switched to the new format, I wrote an e-mail to complain. I did not expect a meaningful response. Noticing the link today, inviting me to switch back to the old format, was a most pleasant New Year’s surprise. I wrote to them again, thanking them for making the old format available. I hope it stays that way.
I know, I know, let this be the biggest problem in my life, when people are suffering and dying in various corners of the world. For what it’s worth, I never for one moment forget how lucky I am to be able to enjoy the luxury of life in a country like Canada. But this stupid TV guide still bugged me :-)
Something happened to me this morning that I have not experienced in ages. Probably not in the 21st century.
I learned about a breaking news event from a newspaper.
That is to say, this morning after I woke up, I happened to glance at the cover of The Globe and Mail before checking the state of the world on any electronic device. And the cover informed me about a massive fire and power outage in downtown Calgary.
I like The Globe and Mail. It is a fine newspaper, and sometimes, it informes me about things that I would not otherwise come across. And there is something to be said about reading a physical newspaper; I am certainly reading it differently, perhaps a tad more attentively, than I read online news sources.
But I long became accustomed to the idea that whatever is in the newspaper will be old news. Stuff I already know about, saw reports about on CNN or the CBC, read about on Google News.
This is why this moment this morning was so striking: like our forefathers in the past century, I learned about a breaking news story from an old-fashioned, paper newspaper.
Dear CRTC: Please stop trying to protect us poor Canadians from evil companies like Netflix.
Video-on-demand is not broadcasting. The Internet is not the public airwaves. You have no business trying to bully companies just because they threaten the livelihood of lumbering, decrepit behemoths like Rogers.
I am a Rogers Cable subscriber. I have been a Rogers Cable subscriber ever since they purchased Ottawa Cablevision more than two decades ago.
What am I getting from Rogers? Here are a few examples:
And you wonder why I am contemplating “cutting the cord”?
Instead of blaming Netflix, perhaps you can have a conversation with Rogers about addressing issues that alienate their customers. If you are not willing to do that, fine, then let the free market do its thing. But take your dirty regulatory paws off the Canadian Internet, please.
Last night, as I was watching the latest episode of Tyrant (itself an excellent show about a fictitious Middle Eastern dictatorship and its ruling family), I happened to glance at the TV during a commercial break just at the right split second to see this:
This was part of an ad, a Subway sandwich commercial, with an animated monkey handing this exam sheet back to a student (also a monkey). What caught my eye was the equation on this sheet. What??? Einstein’s field equations?
Yup, that’s exactly what I saw there, the equation \(G_{\alpha\beta}=\dfrac{8\pi G}{c^4}T_{\alpha\beta}\). General relativity.
Other, easily recognizable equations on the sheet included an equation of the electrostatic Coulomb force, the definition of the quantum mechanical probability amplitude, and the continuity equation.
What struck me was that all these are legitimate equations from physics, not gibberish. And all that in a silly Subway commercial. Wow.
For the past week or so, CNN has been blabbering about the presumed fact that the pilots of the vanished flight, MH370, programmed a new route into the flight computer at some time between 1:07 and 1:19 AM.
This was, even according to one of their own experts, blatant nonsense. Wherever this information came from, it did not jive with the known facts. Namely that the ACARS system in board would not transmit a yet-to-be-executed flight plan to the ground even if they subscribed to the transmission of navigational data (which they didn’t.) And that the ACARS system on board was not scheduled to make another transmission until 1:37 AM, at which time it was no longer functional.
It became kind of obvious from sporadic comments that this “fact” was nothing but speculation, based on the presumed smooth turn the aircraft executed shortly after the last voice transmission; someone must have concluded that such a smooth turn was done by the flight computer, and thus it had to be entered into the flight computer, presumably after the last (1:07 AM) ACARS transmission.
None of this made any sense to me, and today, CNN confirmed my suspicions: Malaysian authorities assert that no air-to-ground transmission indicated a route change.
In response to this, CNN quickly presented the straight facts. Or they tried, anyway:
But… exactly where did they get the idea from that the last transmission showed normal routing all the way to Beijing? According to their own words, what Malaysian authorities said was that the last transmission did not show a preprogrammed turn. From this, you cannot conclude anything as to what it did show, especially given the fact, reported earlier, that the airline’s ACARS subscription did not cover navigational data in the first place.
Exactly what would it take for CNN to present the facts correctly, just once, without adding their own bits of creative fiction?
Update (2014/03/23): It appears that CNN is blameless at this point. The piece of creative fiction (if that’s what it is) apparently comes directly from Malaysia’s transportation ministry. That does not make it more believable, though, in my opinion.
There are few things (OK, well, apart from most sports) that interest me less than Hollywood awards.
Nonetheless, tonight I was rooting for Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany, who pulled off an incredible feat in this remarkable sci-fi series, playing as many as seven (eight, by some count) totally different, fully developed characters.
At least she lost to an actress that I also like and respect, Robin Wright, known as Jenny from Forrest Gump, among other roles.
Still… I am upset.
Damn it’s cold this morning. Negative 26 Centigrade. Or 27 if I believe the local news. And it’s not even winter yet!
To be sure, I still prefer to live in the Great White North instead of any of the numerous southerly climates full of crazy people, but sometimes, it’s a bit too much. Like, when you feel like you need to put on a spacesuit just to step outside to grab your newspaper from your doorstep.
Yes, I still subscribe to a newspaper. Or rather, I again subscribe to a paper after canceling my Globe and Mail subscription more than a decade ago. I accepted their offer for a free three-month subscription back in the summer, and I became used to it. More importantly, I realized that there are things I’d never even read or hear about had they not been in the paper. Electronic media is great, but it tends to deliver the news that you actually want to hear. Especially as services like Google News or Facebook employ sophisticated algorithms that try to predict what you’re most likely to read based on your past behavior. So if you wish to step outside of your comfort zone, to have your views challenged, not simply confirmed… well, a newspaper helps.
Besides… as a last resort, you can also use a newspaper to start a fire to keep warm.
One of my favorite programs on CNN is Reliable Sources, the channel’s press/media backgrounder. It used to be hosted by Washington journalist Howard Kurtz, who recently moved to Fox News, however, to host a similar program (Mediabuzz) there.
Since then, CNN has been using invited guest hosts to host the program. One of those guest hosts, Brian Stelter, appeared for the second time this past Sunday.
Near the end of his program, he delivered a scathing (well-deserved, but scathing) criticism of CNN itself, about the way the channel bent disclosure rules to accommodate hosts and guests on the new program Crossfire.
I wonder if they will invite him back. (Or maybe he doesn’t want to be invited back?)
I am reading a letter of resignation, written by a journalist who worked for the newsroom of Hungary’s public radio network until July this year. Unlike many of his colleagues who began their carriers in communist Hungary, Montreal-born Janos F. Antal was a Radio Free Europe correspondent. Here are some experts from this disturbing letter, in my rough translation:
“I was already working on the restoration of national sovereignty when many of you were still standing at stiff attention, listening to the Internationale […] At the time of ‘regime change’ I did not need to switch sides or become a turncoat, I just continued what I began much earlier, at Radio Free Europe…
“I am a spectator, not a participant; a chronicler, not an evangelist. A journalist – not a politician.
“All came to a head, however, when one day someone appeared behind my back and over my shoulder, staring at my monitor, began giving instructions to move this news item up, leave that one out, insert thit one, rewrite that – just like that, in such a tone.
“Moreover, this censorship brings about the growth of manipulative, propagandistic content. Once again the ‘repertoire’ includes production news of the type for which real demand existed only in the Kadar era.”
Yup, that’s Hungary’s national broadcaster in 2013.
I grumbled once in this blog already about the incessant Marineland commercials on most Canadian channels this time of the year.
I still hate (desperately hate! As in, hate more than the sound of a hundred piecees of chalk screeching on a hundred chalkboards) the song, but I was hesitant to give them more publicity in my blog.
Until I came across a story from last August about animal suffering at the park.
Not exactly unexpected, to be honest, though even the singer who sings that horrendous jingle found the accusations shocking. She’d now prefer to see the jingle’s tag line replaced with “All the whales haaaate Marineland!”.
And I do, too, now for more than one reason.
The destruction of public radio in Canada continues: Our beloved bureaucrats at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission decided to allow the CBC to air commercials on Radio 2.
Dear CRTC: the CBC is not a private company. It is partially funded by the Canadian public. Its mandate is not to make money but to promote Canadian culture. Instead of allowing this travesty, how about holding them to account for the on-going destruction of a national treasure?
As I was watching the news unfold about the gruesome court case of an Ottawa husband who is accused of first abusing and then torturing his wife to death by scalding her and then denying her medical treatment, I was reminded of an award-winning Hungarian commercial about spousal abuse.
There are uncanny similarities between some of the details of the Hutt case and this commercial.
When I decided to visit London, I secretly hoped that if I am lucky, I’d spot the TARDIS, Dr. Who’s infamous “bigger on the inside than on the outside” time machine.
Thanks to Richard Bartle, my quest was not in vain. The TARDIS, as it turns out, is sitting quietly just outside one of the exits of the Earl’s Court Underground station.
Except that… well, it’s not the real TARDIS. Instead, it’s just an ordinary blue police box, just like the one the TARDIS mimics, but unlike the TARDIS, this one is decidedly not bigger on the inside than on the outside. Still, it was fun to find.
Chances are that if you tuned your television to a news channel these past couple of days, it was news from the skies that filled the screen. First, it was about asteroid 2012DA14, which flew by the planet at a relatively safe distance of some 28,000 kilometers. But even before this asteroid reached its point of closest approach, there was the striking and alarming news from the Russian city of Chelyabinsk: widespread damage and about a thousand people injured as a result of a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere above the city.
What I found rather distressing is just how scientifically illiterate the talking heads proved to be on television. First, it was CNN’s turn to be ridiculed after their anchor, Deborah Feyerick, actually asked the astonishing question, “Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming, or is this just some meteoric occasion?”
But then came the rest. I think it was on the Canadian network CTV (but I might be misremembering) where an anchor announced that an asteroid “the size of Texas” is about to fly by the Earth. Well… 2012DA14 is not the size of Texas, not unless Texas has shrunk a great deal since the last time I visited the Lone Star State (which was just a few weeks ago); the asteroid was only about 50 meters across.
And then the impact event in Russia. Initial estimates that I heard indicated an object weighing a few tons, traveling perhaps at 30 km/s; that’s still a significant amount of kinetic energy, maybe about a quarter or half of a kiloton if I am not mistaken. But then, a later and apparently more reliable estimate said that the object was perhaps 15 meters in diameter, traveling at 18 km/s. That, depending on the density of the object, is consistent with another estimate that I heard, 300 kilotons of energy released. If this latter estimate is valid, this means the biggest event since the Tunguska impact of 1908.
So where does the illiteracy come in?
One CNN anchor, describing the event, mentioned that thankfully, it occurred over a sparsely populated area, and the outcome would have been much worse had it occurred over a major population center. I wonder if residents of Chelyabinsk, a city of well over a million people, are aware that they qualify as a “sparsely populated area”.
And then there were the completely inconsistent size and mass estimates. A release by The Planetary Society spoke of an object 15 meters in diameter and weighing 8 tons. Say what? That’s just four times the density of air. The object in question actually weighed more like 8,000 metric tons.
Another CNN anchor was interrogating a physicist, wondering what causes these meteors to explode. The physicist was unable to explain coherently, and the anchor was unable to comprehend, the concept that it is just the kinetic energy of a very rapidly moving object that gets converted into heat pretty much instantaneously, heating up the air, which then rapidly expands and creates a shock wave. Come on guys, this is really not that hard!
Later in the afternoon, 2012DA14 finally did make its closest approach, as harmlessly as predicted, but there was obvious confusion in the news media about its visibility; yes, it was over the Indian Ocean at the time, but no, even there nobody could see it with the naked eye, much less find it “spectacular”.
I don’t think I am needlessly pedantic, by the way. On the contrary, I find it alarming that in our world which relies on increasingly sophisticated technology, people who are entrusted with the task of keeping us informed are this illiterate on matters of science and technology. Or even geography.