An Inconvenient Convenience

As longtime readers will know, I look forward each summer to the three major cycling road races: the Giro D’Itali, the Tour de France and the Vuelta Espana.  Each of them gives me three weeks of excellent racing between now and September, and they each are perfectly timed for an early riser like me.  TV coverage usally covers the last 90 minutes of each day’s racing starting at 6:30am.  This morning, I got up before six and was comfortably esconced on my sofa with a steaming cup of tea when the broadcast began and I thoroughly enjoyed the first quarter hour or so.

And then it hit me: an ad for a Toronto radio station. It hit me several times over the next hour and annoyed me more and more on each hearing.  The problem?  The whole point of the commercial was to say that their morning commute programme was as full and complete and interesting as the daily newspaper — but without the inconvenience of actually having to read.

Good God!  Are we really selling stuff on the basis that reading is inconvenient?  Come on!  What a terrible, terrible message to send. Radio and advertizing and the listening public deserve better than that.  And yes, you can say that I’m making a mountain out of the molehill of some clever ad copy. But if these kind of things are not picked up and talked about then what they say becomes normalized, acceptable.  And that is not acceptable to me.

The American Taliban Redux

A few years ago in an earlier version of my blog I wrote a long essay called The American Taliban: The Closing Down of America. I had hoped that things had improved since then. However, with a centre-right administration in power producing desperate disappointments on a weekly basis, and with the rise of the Tea-baggers, it is hard to see any progress.

This week we had a fine example of what the Taliban essay was talking about. Mississippi has banned NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” because someone talked about sex on the air. This apparently meets the criteria of “inappropriate content.”

If only these morons would simply give up sex entirely, we could just wait for them to fade out.

Odds and Sods #3

• Robert Fulford has a lively review of a three-CD collection of spoken word by British authors:  Joyce, Woolf, Conan Doyle, Wodehouse and other.  As Fulford says: “Hearing the voice of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader’s connection with an author’s work, not profound, but intimate.”
• Specialists have confirmed that the human ability to attach stone blades to wooden handles by use of adhesive tars goes back at least 70,000 years, almost double the age of previous finds.  Isolated examples even suggest dates back to 100,000 years ago.
• Some good folks are working on producing professionally made DIY glasses that do not need an optician.   The lens shape is controlled by adjusting the amount of water in the lens.  The target is to distribute up to 100 million pairs of glasses to the poor around the world every year.  A worthy aim, and I wish them all success.

Seven Words We Can Now Say On Radio

George Carlin is dead.  Rest in Peace.

I Got Caught

I don’t recall ever being caught by an April Fool’s prank or hoax.  But I was yesterday.

As a regular listener to CBC Radio’s local “Early Edition” show, I heard former Mayor and now-Senator Larry Campbell announce his intention to run for Mayor of Vancouver again this winter.  I was completely taken in.

Well done the team that pulled it off!