Last April, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a well-funded pro-CBC lobbying group, published the following graph of government funding for the CBC:

The graph has come up again because CBC’s licence is being renewed (CRTC consultation). Nonetheless, Friends’ depiction is deceptive.

• The scale chosen makes tiny differences in value – never more than 5.2% above average or 4.79% below it, i.e., a difference of ten percentage points at the most – seem huge.

  Let’s look at the values on a large scale (from $1.000 to $1.500 billion), putting in the same effort Friends did to make the type reasonable:

  

  The trend doesn’t look so dire there, does it?

• CBC funding has remained in the vicinity of $1.192 billion (the average value) for the entire time depicted on the graph.

• Funding has gone up five times and down six times. Eight of twelve years show funding values clustering around the average.

• The last three years on the graph (which include funding not actually finalized) are clearly intended to make the sitting government look like it is taking a hatchet to CBC’s funding. It is indeed reducing funding, but the endpoint shown there ($1.1343 billion) is almost equivalent to the startpoint under a previous government from the other party ($1.1353 billion).

• The difference between minimum and maximum values is $120,200,000. That is a lot of money. You can run a dozen specialty channels on that kind of funding. But it’s a difference of about 10% of both the maximum and the minimum funding.

• The true volatility of government funding to the CBC is ≈±10%. But the chart does not show variation in funding from other sources, including advertising, subscriber fees, program licensing, funding and production bodies, tax credits, and everything else. Nor does the chart show expenditures.

When asked for comment on all these concerns, Friends’ media contacts said nothing.

Because they’ll use the wrong quotation marks, but put periods inside them as though they were as American as the subject.

We enjoyed the highly unorthodox outdoor presentation at Yonge–Dundas Square – on a crappy pixelboard, which worked quite well for the material, actually – of Paris Is Burning.

Not the sort of thing we would usually do. A great reason to do it.

“O‑P‑U‑L‑E‑N‑C‑E. Op·u·lence. You own everything”

While the credits rolled, one of the crew of batty boys conspicuosly seated up front appeared on the riser with mic in hand. We were then informed that Canada has but one drag/vogue house and here it is! even though no way are these guys even as old as the movie.

The House of Monroe gave us a full-on runway and vogue performance that instantly attracted a standing crowd of hundreds. We were out of our minds with joy.

They’ve got a whole thing choreographed where a dancer does a move on the floor (or, apparently, the ground) and the whole rest of the crew jumps up and dips down a pointed index finger: BOOM! A minute and a half in and I was doing the same thing. Yes, me.

Why do we love this so much, we wonder and still can’t figure out?

I know I’m not the first one to address this (and now I can’t find the other writer who did so before me), but let’s consider the arrangement of names on the 9/11 memorial.

• The media narrative imparts the expected lesson that it’s just natural to be baffled by a difficult task. But since the experts are baffled too, that really proves how hard the task is.

  1. The project is so enormous any reasonable person would be shocked and awed.

     [Michael] Arad arranged the requests using index cards. Each pairing set off a chain reaction, the strings of connection growing ever more tangled and frayed. There were 2,982 names. The deeper he and his staff got into this puzzle, the more complex it became, especially in light of the æsthetic requirements: For example, he didn’t want names lining up evenly atop each other, lest there be gutters between them. He had to factor in the number of letters in each name. He had to consider the leading.

     At a certain point, the foundation recognized that this job could use the assistance of a computer.

     How in God’s name would anyone born after 1970 think for a moment that 2,982 names could be arranged on index cards? I asked Michael Arad and his company’s designated PR contact that exact question, and of course got no response.

  2. The project is so big that computer scientists deemed the project impossible .

• How must a story like this end? With a lone genius, Jer Thorp, saving the day.

Pop quiz

Who designed the custom font for the 9/11 memorial?