Ah, the 2011 list. For a hack of a blogger like myself it’s my once-a-year bread and butter. This year instead of separating music, movies, and television I’ve decided to produce a comprehensive list and lump it all together. Hold onto your hats, and enjoy.

Favourite Films of 2011

I had a quick look around because I was curious and it seems like Tree of Life is topping everyone’s lists this year. We have it in the queue but haven’t got around to watching it yet. I’m curious now though and I wonder if it would change things if I were to watch it first.

The curious bit, however, about the two films that did make my list is that both feature the unmatched Paul Giamatti as the leading actor. This wasn’t intentional but when I looked at everything I’d watched this year and boiled it down to just a couple of my favourites… Do I have a particular bias towards anything that Paul Giamatti does? Perhaps. Is he undoubtedly the best actor working in Hollywood right now? Yes, sir.

Barney’s Version

Barney’s Version is a brilliant take on the novel by Canadian literary heavyweight Mordecai Richler. I remembering having to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in my O.A.C. (Grade 13) English class. I probably only understood about a third of what I read at the time but I can certainly appreciate a heavily nuanced and deeply moving plot a lot more now that I’m older. Barney’s Version is a movie about love, marriage, family, and memory. It’s wonderfully-acted (duh), well-written (duh), and unfolds itself in a fantastically pleasing fashion distilling all the very best parts of a well-developed Woody Allen movie. Complicated, comedic, and charming sums it up pretty well too.

Win Win

Win Win follows in the same genre of comedy as another of my all-time favourite movies Lars and the Real Girl. I’ll sum it up like this: Small town, quirky characters, social conundrums, and the kind of plot that sometimes seems like something you couldn’t make up if you tried. Like Lars, we’re treated to ninety minutes of some truly great and wholly surreal story-telling about people, a place, and a number of situations we’d never even thought about before. In this film, Giamatti plays and small-time lawyer and high-school wrestling coach as if he were born for the role.

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I remember an announcement on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning sometime over a year ago. Back then Kirstine Stewart, CBC’s Executive Vice-President of English Services, announced that the corporation would be rolling out local radio programming, beginning with Kitchener-Waterloo. At that time my wife and I lived in a rented apartment in Kitchener and we were thrilled. As avid CBC Radio listeners we were excited about the prospect of getting a local CBC station. No more traffic out of Toronto and news updates that had little impact on our daily lives here in southwestern Ontario.

Today, the creation of a local station came one step closer to becoming a reality, but it’s a bit of a bitter one.

About a year later, my wife and I have bought a house and are now living a mere five minute walk from the Grand River in beautiful Cambridge. We love it here. But we’re disappointed with today’s announcement: that a new CBC station for Kitchener-Waterloo won’t include Cambridge or the townships.

Disappointed because if we were to take a breezy five minute drive we would be in Kitchener. Disappointed because we share a bus service, a mutually-accessible library system, a government, and two rivers. Disappointed because we’re all part of the same region and many of us identify as such. Disappointed because the University of Waterloo, arguably the hub for our region’s intelligentsia, now has affiliated campuses in both Cambridge and Stratford.

With transit initiatives bringing the whole region closer together, one has to wonder why a new CBC station would service only Kitchener-Waterloo.

But there is still time for a rethink. With a station launch proposed for the fall of 2012 there is plenty of opportunity for those outside of the official coverage area to have a say. I suggest getting in touch with Kirstine Stewart, Executive Vice-President of English Services or Susan Marjetti, the managing director of CBC’s Toronto and Ontario regions. I will be doing the same!

Susan Marjetti
Telephone: (416) 205-5791
Susan.Marjetti@cbc.ca

Kirstine Stewart
Kirstine.Stewart@cbc.ca

Don’t get me wrong, a local CBC station is great news for Kitchener-Waterloo but it could be greater! Those of us who feel a little left out in the cold need to have our say, so speak up! An expansion of the station’s mandate to the whole of Waterloo Region only makes sense.

Yesterday morning I received a strange e-mail. It was welcoming me to Groupon. Thing is, I already have a Groupon account, I’ve had it for a while, and I was welcomed a year ago when I first got it. Why another welcome?

I thought, first of all, that it must be some kind of phishing scam but after checking the e-mail headers (you can do this in Gmail, to a limited degree, by clicking on “more details”) I realized that this e-mail had actually, really, come from Groupon.

I didn’t have a lot of time to wonder why I’d received a random welcome e-mail when I received another, this one was an actual coupon. A coupon for a gym membership in Virginia. Now I was completely puzzled.

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In 1982, the brilliantly-named Institute for the Future, an agency under America’s National Science Foundation, published a study that was written about in the New York Times. The aim of the study was to predict what the North American household might look like in the future. Like most attempts to see the future, the predictions run the gamut from hilarious to naive to, in one particular case, down-right accurate.

For the most part, the article deals with some technologies that never really made it out of the starting gate back in the 1980′s: Teletext and Videotex. From what I can understand, this technology allowed a television screen to act as a kind of web browser, retrieving different “pages” that were broadcast by cable companies. In some cases, these pages could be stored and read later, in other cases it was up to the provider to decide what to show and when. It sounds like one of many precursors to the Internet. It also sounds an awful lot like 1984.

But, it’s the predictions that we’re concerned with, not necessarily the technology.

What the Institute for the Future predicted a society using Teletext and Videotex would look like is, in the end, a lot like what our society looks like today.

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As I sit down the write this article I have a whole bunch of tabs open on my shiny new installation of Firefox 4. A couple of national newspapers, a local one, the CBC, and Twitter. It’s a regular political war room and, in my opinion, without the last site on my list it would be embarrassingly incomplete.

Twitter matters this election, and for you naysayers, buckle up.

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I was fairly dumbfounded after reading the latest article on Usage-Based Billing in Maclean’s Magazine. So dumbfounded, that I’ve found myself having to weigh in, if nothing else to correct some pretty audacious myths that they’re continuing to perpetuate.

First of all, Maclean’s Magazine is owned by Rogers, one of the heavyweights in the UBB discussion. To their credit, the magazine discloses this in their article but it clearly colours their commentary pretty heavily—I can’t imagine why else they’d resort to such mythologizing.

To summarize, Maclean’s editors are towing the familiar party line that UBB is necessary to prevent the heavy Internet users (e.g., geeks, nerds, gamers, etc.) from congesting the lines for regular users. People should pay for what they use, Maclean’s says, in order for the Internet to be fair for everyone.

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TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin recently aired a great piece of the whole usage-based billing fiasco that’s sweeping across this great nation.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the big Internet providers forcing the smaller ones to adopt their pricing structures and to charge users based on how much Internet they consume, I wrote a piece about it here that you might like to read.

Below, though, is a great clip from The Agenda contributor Tony Keller, who compares usage-based billing (UBB) to fast food restaurants. It’s a great explanation of what UBB means for the Internet industry and for ordinary Canadians:

For those looking for more techno-political drama, The Agenda also assembled a panel debate on the issue. As a way of cliffnotes, it’s 37 minutes long, altogether pretty interesting (if you’re into this kind of stuff), and in the end the Bell representative winds up coming across as an greasy snake oil salesman.