Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

It’s worth the 15 minutes of “TV” time to hear what this guy has to say about new media.

I think it was a couple years ago that people started asking me “where do you get the time”, in reference to my blogging. Then I started thinking, and realized it was from the time I used to spend reading, or watching TV. I now watch about as much TV in a month as I used to watch in a day. I had the same decrease in my first months away from home, and at university about a decade ago.

My realization is part of why I formed The Teleban.

The last couple mornings I’ve tried two different radio stations to wake up to. The first one, Z99, was rambling about Miley Cyrus (the pseudonymously famous daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, I later learned) who apparently set off some controversy for posing partly nude for a trashy [are there any other kinds?] checkout magazine. She’s only 15 years old.

Tuesday morning I switched to the new Astral Media country station “Big Dog”, and they were talking about guess who? Miley Cyrus is the correct answer. They mentioned how former Rosanne child actor M. Fishman (or someone anyway) was on The View (the trashy media just keeps on rollin’) and his comment on the Miley story was that it was “great”. It must mean the Iraq War is over if that’s what the news is now. Zing!

I can’t wait to hear what station number 3 presents on Wednesday morning. :-\

UPDATE: Country 100 in Moose Jaw didn’t talk about Miley, yay! Here’s another blogger’s take on the controversy.

Is $700 a meal out to lunch? I think so, since many Canadians can pay rent with what one meal cost Richard Portelance. Restaurant = lucky. Taxpayers = duped. Richard Portelance = too brazen for polite language to describe.

It is bad, but it comes from “bubble living”. Each of us on a computer here in Canada has our own bubble we live in, where daily Internet use is commonplace to the point where we’re offended if it goes away without us wanting it to, even for a few hours. Yet the standard for most of the world is no daily Internet, and at best an Internet cafe or library providing access a few minutes at a time.

It’s the same thing as buying a $700 meal. If you routinely spend more than $100 on a meal (good golly that’s pricey) then $700 isn’t unusual for a “special occasion”. Yet in reality, a special occasion meal for most Canadians would cost $100 or much less. I’d say “different strokes for different folks”, except that’s our tax money we’re talking about. It’s obscene whether Shell Oil, or the CBC does it. Not much can justify that much spent on one person, on one meal. It almost makes me feel ridiculous over being concerned about the exorbitant $14/day I’d get to cover lunches when I was on the road for my previous provincial government-affiliated jobs.

Yet, I suppose it should make me feel proud that I was concerned enough to feel concerned. Apparently, CBC execs feel nothing; How else could you not stop yourself from paying “$717 for a single dinner”? Ryan points out that pricey meals may be simply the cost of doing business to compete with moneybags like Shell Oil who no doubt help set the tone for not-affordable dinner meetings. I’d like to see not only taxpayers punishing government and CBC execs who abuse meal allowances, but shareholders punishing CEOs who are so brazen as to waste company money on corporate culture extravagance.

A zinger for all you “Reality TV” fans out there:

The most ridiculous television show on the tube right now is The Bachelor. I’m forced to watch it on Monday nights because it’s Cindy’s favourite (along with The Apprentice).

So a guy sucks face with 30 different women and goes on private dates and meets the parents of four of them and at the end chooses the winner?

I’ve seen it before. It’s called T-R-E-V-I-S S-M-I-T-H ! It doesn’t end well.

How can women watch this and think it’s so romantic when he’s groping and fondling all these different females, and then at the end punts them 40 yards downfield?

Mystifying.

Reality TV, to me, is sports.

Life, imitating art, imitating sports. Trevis Smith is the former Rider convicted of having sex without notifying partners of his HIV positive status.

I found this pretty surprising. Americans applying for Canadian tax money to make TV or films are not subject to the Minister’s censor hammer (should Bill C-10 pass). It makes me wonder if it was sloppiness, or something sinister. Given the actions of the Conservatives, it really could be either, but my bet is on sinister.

I guess the Globe is covering the protest because if CTV can’t stop this, then they’ll be out money while their American competitors can pick up the slack on our dime. Our culture and heritage sure is safe in Conservative hands.

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If at first you don’t distract — stall, stall, stall.

Stephen Harper - Getting Things Done for Canadians, very, very, slowly, when the politics suit him. Especially interesting in that article is that the Cadman bribery scandal investigation is being held up by a Conservative Chair.

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Hat tip to Cathie

Air Farce has set a date on pulling the plug on itself. It’s been on radio and/or TV for quite a while, and I stopped watching it years ago when it was surpassed by 22 Minutes and The Daily Show for political snark. It’s always been good for a chuckle, but it’s hard to do side splitting humour and keep up with a daily show. The market is saturated. Blogs have pounded every joke for a situation into the ground by the time a weekly show rolls around.

Steve, and many, many other bloggers are renewing my interest in either an Olympic boycott, or a large blog oriented protest action against the IOC.

Anonymous: “I’m not downsizing what is happening in China. I would never agree with such acts of violence.
However, the only people your affecting when boycotting the games are the athletes.”

It isn’t only the athletes affected, however. The people who have been displaced from their homes have been forever affected in a negative way. The people who have been killed by a corrupt and anti-freedom government have been affected. Canada has to at least consider that we should put life before games. It’s our fault that athletes have put their lives into games that we did not keep pure. But the Olympics are now more about sponsorship and “partners” than they are about the true Olympic spirit. Protecting the Olympic “brand” is what VANOC is concerned with, not protecting the dignity and life work of athletes and the Olympic spirit!

Harper screws my province out of hundreds of millions of dollars in natural resource revenue which is Saskatchewan’s by right of the Canadian Constitution, and DMCR rewards him with another MP. This is why he knew he could cheat us with a lie - Conservative voters seem willing to bend over (backwards) for him, so he can take our money and plug it into low support areas of Quebec to buy votes there. What I can’t see, is why so many Conservatives here dislike Quebec so much. They seem willing to suspend their dislike enough just to dig up a handful of seats more for a majority Parliament. Hypocrites.

When resource markets take a turn for the worse (and history shows that they will) we’ll all be in deep doo-doo for not having put our resource money back into our province. Instead it will go to the already well off people of Quebec and Ontario, while they continue to reap the refining rewards of our uranium, and other raw resources. Nothing against Upper and Lower Canada, honestly. It’s just that they’ve had a lot longer to build up their infrastructure, and don’t depend so heavily on fickle resource markets to build their capital investments. We’re peeing it away on vote buying out east.

Huffb1 links to some other coverage.
Elections Canada.

John Murney has DMCR coverage too. The Green Party’s phone poll was not surprisingly, full of poop. I’d like to see how badly off the other party’s polls were too. A phone poll in a northern riding, may not be the way to go.

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Also cringe worthy was an ad I saw on TV last night just before Medium. Saskdentists had an ad trying to encourage people about the safety of dentists. There’s “pain free” techniques they said. Maybe it was by accident, but the show on right after the ad, Medium, was all about a dentist who murdered people. Good bit of congruency there I thought.