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Jul 20

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Two Sides of Walter Cronkite

I wasn’t going to post anything about Walter Cronkite as I don’t have any really interesting oversight – but I’ve ironically found some of the “official” reportage shallow.

Instead I urge you to do the following:

1. Read Howard Bernstein‘s remembrance – it covers not just Cronkite, but sets the stage for what the television news was during the 60s and 70s. What it meant and to how many (Bernstein doesn’t point out this is a double-edged sword – while the modern news landscape is absolutely harder for the production of quality television journalism, it’s also a system with fewer individual egos and opinions as choking points).

2. Watch the following five minute clip of the newscast of the JFK assisnation. Not just the bullet points or the catch-phrases that modern audiences are used to seeing julianned up in documentaries or television specials – but of what news was like at the time. When I think of Walter Cronkite I always think of those few seconds around 5:18 (after he announces the time) where for a few moments you get the sense of the burden on a single man tasked with interpreting a nonsensical world for a nation.

Imagine if all the favourite journalists, columnists, editorialists, bloggers, and talking heads of everyone you know was the same person. That person was Walter Cronkite. Godspeed.

Jul 18

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A Modest Proposal for Waste Management

As Toronto’s garbage strike enters it’s 27th day, might I suggest we look to the 1970s for bold leadership on how to dispose of refuse?

(H/T to Roderto for the e-mail)

Jul 17

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Canadian Comedy Awards (2009 Edition)!

The Violator is nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award - Vote Here!
Mushmouth is nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award - Vote Here!
Basement Accident is nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award - Vote Here!

Great Caesars Ghost! The Rocket Ace Moving Pictures / Imponderables superteam just keeps on trucking. We’re very happy to announce that three of our silly viral videos have been nominated for Canadian Comedy Awards in the “Pretty Funny Web-Video” category. That’s absolutely amazing and it’s great to see short-form-new-media-comedy get recognized at the venerable awards.

“Web-Video” is one of the categories that’s open for public voting, if you’re a Canadian citizen or resident (and are inclined to do so) head over to the CCAvoting.com website to vote for your favourite clip. If you’d like to support one of ours – we’re encouraging RocketAce/Imps fans to vote for “The Violator” so as not to split our vote. We love all the nominees equally (this is a lie – I, personally, have a favourite, but I’m not saying which) – but “Violator” has been, by quite a bit, the best performing piece with audiences this year… plus, how can you say no to a film that won us a fez?!

Jul 16

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YOU SHALL NOT… charge completion bonds multiple times?

When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that only 20% of home video revenue was being counted as revenue...

When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that only 20% of home video revenue was being counted as revenue...

It looks like “Lord of the Rings” accounting will be back in the news as the Estate of JRR Tolkien is suing New Line over their calculation of profits from the three blockbuster films. You may recall that Peter Jackson and Saul Zaentz have sued New Line as well claiming they saw no royalties on the film either (although both those cases were settled out of court).

I get asked a lot how studios and distributors can get away with claiming that films never turn a profit, especially on fare that clearly has… say Return of the Jedi. The short answer is that when studios have huge slates of films (many of which, aren’t successful) it’s difficult to track what bona-fide operating expenses should be allocated to a well-performing film versus the dozens of films in a slate that have recouped no money. It gets equally complex when there are many deals through many different layers of companies – each of which is entitled to their own share of revenue before it gets to the producer.

For a great example of this from a different field, and it’s been ages since I’ve talked comics (which is odd given that there’s great stuff out there right now), I highly recommend Colleen Doran’s blog series “The Perils of Colleen” wherein she recounts her relationship with the “second-worst” publisher she has ever dealt with. It’s a doozy of a story, and should be required reading for any independent contractor in any artistic field, but it also goes into detail (especially in part III) how her contract was structured to ensure she never saw a royalty nickel, no matter the sales of her books. Thankfully Colleen’s story has a reasonably happy ending (although with some bizarre twists you wouldn’t believe if I told you) – but it does a very nice job of showing a case study of the myriad ways a distributor/publisher/studio relationship can go south in a big way.

It’ll be interesting to follow the LOTR case going forward, especially if the Estate gets any leverage with their claim that they have the ability to revoke the rights for the upcoming “Hobbit” prequels.

Jul 16

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Five Things I Know (But Have No Idea How I Learned Them)

This was a tough post to find a photo for

This was a tough post to find a photo for

Time for a break from all this serious internet business. One of my real-life superpowers (I have many) is the inability to forget absolutely trivial minutia I’ve been exposed to – but frequently forget how I was exposed to it. This will serve me well should they ever finally produce “the most random gameshow in the world”.

Here are five facts I’ve trotted out this month that, while true, I have absolutely no idea how I came to be aware of them. I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader trying to figure out how each of these could have possibly come up in conversation in the past month. For bonus points deduce which one played a pivotal part at a Toronto International Film Festival lunch a few weeks back.

  1. The mother in “The Family Circus” is named Thel
  2. Lewis Carrol was the first person to use the word “portmanteau” in it’s current, English, idiomatic definition. Prior to that it was a French term for a two-chambered suitcase
  3. The longest golf drive on Earth was on an airstrip in Fairmont, British Columbia. Prior to that it was on an ice field in the Arctic
  4. Two of the four members of Boney-M just lip-synced to prerecorded vocals. Their producer used this trick again with his other manufactured super-group – Milli Vanilli
  5. The combined sound energy from yelling for nine years straight would only be enough to re-heat one cup of coffee

    6. There is absolutely no moral to this post. I just needed to recalibrate this blogs silliness quotient before it became “all net neutrality, all the time”.

Jul 10

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Mark Goldberg Raises Questions about the Couchathon – I Attempt to Answer Them

Mark Golgberg has asked some fair questions of me over at his blog regarding last year’s couchathon and the throttling difficulties we had. As I posted yesterday, am convinced those issues were due to misapplied BitTorrent throttling.

I’ve responded directly on Mark’s blog – but he moderates his comments so I’m not sure when they’ll show up there. In the meantime I thought it would be worthwhile to cross-post my response here – especially as I see some traffic coming through from his site.

Incidentally, Mark’s post flagged that I never updated the Couchathon website with the final totals from the event. With late donations, and some very kind post-event sponsor contributions we were able to raise over $10,000 dollars for Sick Kids Foundation and Child’s Play – not the $5,500 posted on the couchathon site. I must go amend that at once!

My response to Mark below the cut.
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Jul 10

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Five Arguments in Favour of Throttling – And Why They’re Wrong

Tell me folks are you sufferin' from the

Tell me folks are you sufferin' from the congestion?

Yes I know this is turning quickly into a net-neutrality blog – but since net-neutrality traffic is up at the moment, I figured I should strike while the iron is hot.

While I thought the CRTC presentation was quite strong, you’re always left with regrets about the questions that didn’t come up. There was a couple of points I was really hoping would be raised, since they are popular talking points of the major ISP’s and it would have been nice to offer a counter-point. So while they’re still fresh, here’s five ISP arguments in favour of traffic throttling, that I just don’t think hold much water:

1. Increasing capacity is prohibitively expensive.
Regardless of my prior post on why building additional capacity is likely far more fiscally responsible than throttling BitTorrent – total smarty-pants Jason Roks made a compelling calculation on Tuesday at the CRTC hearing that a certain national network could likely more than double it’s capacity at the most likely congestion spots for less than $2 per user per month. Of course it’s hard to offer more concrete suggestions when we have no idea of what the profit margins of the major ISP corporate units are (or what portion of their network is devoted to functions other than the Internet – like television, phone, and video-on-demand).
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Jul 9

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Medium Close-Up

Howard Bernstein is a Canadian news and television über-producer who has worked for pretty much every major network in the country.

Now retired, his hard hitting, no b.s. blog Medium Close Up is compelling, thought-provoking reading.

Good, good, stuff – and I hope he keeps it up.

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