In the now-infamous memo, Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse complains about duplication of effort: “We lack decisiveness…. We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company[, like] Flickr vs. Photos.”

Flickr people are not Yahoo Photos people and don’t want to be. Flickr people wouldn’t want to share an elevator with Yahoo Photos people, despite the fact that the code for Flickr is an embarrassment and that of Yahoo Photos is modern and clever in the extreme.

Flickr vs. Y<bang>P is a case of movies vs. cinema or homosexual agenda vs. queer politics.

CBC president Robert Rabinovitch (q.v.), apparently misunderstanding a question from an industry Web site, stated the following about downloading CBC TV shows:

The answer to that is that it’s going to be “soon.” It’s going to be like [ABC has shown] Desperate Housewives, literally the next morning.

I doubt the original question asked about the time delay between TV broadcast and downloadability. Nonetheless, can we all assume that CBC will eventually get with the program and offer TV shows for download, whether for free or at a price? (CBC already podcasts, though a single American public-radio station offers about as many podcasts as CBC does.) [continue with: CBC online video: Shall we do this properly? →]

“If you’ve got a hi-’n’-tite haircut,” I asked the youngest of the five firemens at the Woody’s launch of the new calendar, “does that make you a probie?” After repeating the question, he finally understood and admitted he was new. Joe 1, probie 0.

“Is Keith Maidment here?” I asked him, pushing my luck. “Who?” “The only openly gay fireman. He’s an acting captain.” “Where?” he asked, meaning “Which station?” “I dunno.” Joe 1, probie 1. (Neither the tall blond overachiever nor his almost-as-tall Italianate overachiever husband was in attendance. I checked – thoroughly.)

The queue to have one’s calendar inscribed was oversubscribed by old guys and one middle-aged mom. The fellas onstage look less like firemen than second-string high-school football players who have been working on their bench press since they were 16. At least we’ve given up the conceit that firegrrlz should get one of the monthly photos. We signed up for fake soot and suspenders with no shirt, not a plain girl in a ponytail covered head to calf in a bathrobe as she sips wine by fireside.

From the arse end of the most enduring automotive silhouette.

accessibility theatre

conspicuous but ineffective or counterproductive measures giving the appearance of responsible attention to accessibility

(Cf. security theatre.)

“Official” CBC blogger Tod Maffin was granted an audience with CBC president Robert Rabinovitch. Maffin, a noted technology columnist, should know better than to publish plain-text documents as PDFs, particularly with such atrocious typography. (It’s the idea of graphic design rather than the real thing.) I produced an HTML version, at enormous effort, for review and criticism. So let’s!

Now, the key thing everybody has, they talk about an alert system. We talk about, yes, the alert tells you there’s a crisis coming. But we wanted to go a bit further: How does society communicate with the citizens when the towers have burned down, or when the power is out? […] The citizen would learn to have a battery- powered radio, or – I have one of these up in the country – a crank radio. So, at least you could talk to citizens about what’s happening.

He means at least you could talk to citizens who aren’t deaf about what’s happening. Surely Rabinovitch knows that emergency alerts were the subject of an entire CRTC process in 2005–2006.

A couple of examples from the film world: The Rocket, Maurice Richard. Bombed in French. It did fabulously well in English. It’s a great movie, it really is. But it didn’t work because it was a movie about a working-class kid who became one of the dominant nationalist figures. To me, in Montreal? Wow. I understood it. In Toronto? Didn’t work.

Did it “bomb” or did it do “fabulously well”?

Rumours was shot as two separate things. We did do one like that – oh, it’s about the biker gangs, I forget the name.

Rabinovitch is constantly forgetting “names,” like the names of the reality shows CBC had aired before he told a Commons committee that CBC doesn’t do reality TV.

Oh, and hint: The Last Chapter. It was on TV just the other week.

As the people come up, sometimes they find themselves being stymied in terms of promotion and there’s real opportunities to work somewhere else.

The president of the CBC admits that his staff feel “stymied.”

Q. One of the things with PVRs as well which struck me: it would seem promotion is going to be ever so much more important, the publicity of our programming. […] I’m programming it for programming I already know about. I’m zapping through the traditional promotions, the publicity that usually goes through.

A. Even without PVRs, that’s one of CBC Television’s single biggest problems. How do you get to the audience? How are you going to have an audience if they don’t know what you’re showing?

How are you going to have an audience when the CBC outsourced its own publicity department and has reportedly threatened independent producers who try to promote their own shows?

Q. When I was in J-school, what they taught me to do at the end of an interview was to ask an easy question. […] What are you planning to do after you leave?

A. That’s a very good question.

Q. But is it an easy or hard question?

Who the fuck cares, Tod?

One’s esteemed colleague Grant Barrett, the professionally-employed hunter of slang (American) English, has a book out, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. I’m not crazy about the type, and neither is he, but this is the first dictionary of any kind I have read that treats online sources as sources. I’m pretty sure I am not cited (why would I be?), but I was surprised to find a number of terms I use or have used listed as bona fide slang (not an oxymoron).

chocolate foot

Your strong foot, as in biketrials

respeaker

“a person who renarrates, summarizes, or describes a television program for recording in preparation for subtitling” (sic – it’s scarcely ever used for “subtitling,” almost always for captioning)

bouma (shape)

Papazianism for a thing that doesn’t exist, the outline of printed words that determines readability

roadblock

What I did for micropatronage: Occupying multiple competing media with the same message at the same time so it becomes inescapable

i18n

internationalization

Door prize (Toronto-specific: To get hit while riding your bike past a suddenly-opened car door) is in there. However, I doubt that any of the following are really “slang” anymore:

1. bedhead (I really don’t think it’s two words)
2. blue-sky (v.)
3. brownfield
4. chippy (hockey)
5. discordant couple (more commonly serodiscordant)
6. DNF
7. dry drunk
8. freeball/go commando
9. granny flat (accepted Canadian English; it’s in the Canadian Oxford)
10. handbags at ten paces (also at dawn, uncited)
11. lesbian bed death
12. The much-unloved acronym LGBT(TQQI2S★)
13. magalog
14. mouth-breather
15. phish
16. plyometrics
17. puck bunny
18. security theatre
19. tuner (car; he doesn’t list rice or ricing)

Don Norman will be pleased at JND. Femtosecond absolutely isn’t “slang” any more than kilojoule is. Fragged in a sense other than “blown up in a video game” seems rather obscure at this point (Grant’s published sense is U.S. military “outlined in fragmented order”).

My fave is of course unass, and dedicated readers will be relieved to learn I have no intention of faux-anglicizing that to unarse.