New video series! Joining the likes of Best Live Tracks and Best New Music, this series will present what I think are some of the Best Covers Ever.
Credit where credit is due, my friend Brent linked to these guys and it’s only through him that I found them. Nonetheless, this husband and wife YouTube sensation do incredible covers of songs you wouldn’t expect to sound so good. And they just seem so gosh darn happy!
Karmin — Price Tag
Karmin — Lighters
When you combine two of your most favourite things in the world the result is not always what you thought it would be. For example, combining a delicious cheeseburger with an equally delicious piece of chocolate cake probably won’t end well. Chocolate cakeburger, anyone?
How about combining two of my most favourite television shows? Holmes Inspection, the Mike Holmes branded inspection and renovation show, and Ghost Hunters, the SyFy channel’s flagship paranormal investigation franchise. The result, well duh, is Paranormal Home Inspectors and I’m not sure it’s all that much better than a chocolate cake burger.
Paranormal Home Inspectors is new this fall on Discovery Channel Canada. It’s based, as far as I can tell, mainly in and around Toronto and feels very much like Holmes Inspection in terms of production value and quality. But, of course, this show involves ghosts.
Let me take you through a typical episode.
If you do a Google Image Search for Prime Suspect you’ll find that the majority of the pictures are of Helen Mirren, not Maria Bello. That’s because the NBC version of Prime Suspect which premiered last week is a remake of the British version that came before.
Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren, was a watershed police drama which ran from the early 90′s until 2006. Mirren owned the role of Jane Tennison, a female police detective in what was then a highly exclusive boy’s club. Struggling against the rampant sexism, Mirren’s character faced down her own demons in the form of alcoholism and a swath of destructive relationships.
Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect was gritty, violent, and honest taking the characters into the seediest underbelly of London and holding nothing back. Even the camera work felt raw, often finding no qualms with getting right into the actors blemished faces.
Prime Suspect also broke another boundary. Seasons—or series, as they’re called overseas—consisted not of individual episodes and individual cases but each season was a case unto itself. Every 200+ minute season followed Tennison on a single case allowing for a significant amount of time to track down her “prime suspect” and for the case to unfold.
So, how does the NBC remark stack up?
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.caKirstine 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.
Win Win is a movie about a small-town lawyer who coaches a high school wrestling team. It’s about an old man in a retirement home, his grandson, and his wayward mother. It’s about relationships, how they begin and how they end, how they break down and evolve, and the consequences of our actions. It’s a creative and inventive story, full of the same kind of deep humour that packed a movie like Lars and the Real Girl or The Family Stone. It packs a similar moral punch, too.
In this video, our Penelope Lou performs a trick after her own particular fashion.
The dedication is to her dear Aunt Karin who knows a thing or two about dogs.
I’ve written about copyright several times before. Now I write more.
The Harper Government, now in a substantially more powerful majority position in the House of Commons, are poised to reintroduce the copyright legislation that died on the table last May. According to Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law, the bill will be introduced in the exact same form it was left in before the election.
This is a problem.
To be fair, the most recent incarnation of the Conservative’s copyright reform has been, by far, the most balanced we’ve seen out of that government. They’ve tried before, several times, to introduce copyright reform legislation and always met with an enormous backlash of public opinion. After the latest bill was introduced Industry Minister Tony Clement made a concerted and very public effort to consult with groups that had expressed concern and hear them out. He heard them out and it seemed that he was really listening, but then the election was called, the writ dropped, and the bill met an untimely death.
The problem with the bill being reintroduced in the form it was last left in is that there were glaring—enormous(!)—issues with that bill. Through concerted consultation Mr. Clement discovered these issues. But this time around, according to the Harper Government, no consultations will be made.
In other words, they know the bill is broken, their previous consultations told them so, but they aren’t fixing a thing. Not a thing. Nothing changed or reworded or rejigged after all those consultations. Which really makes you wonder if it wasn’t all just window dressing from a government that, as a minority, really didn’t have a choice. They acted to appease; when push comes to shove, they don’t have to act anymore.
So the bill is broken. While it’s protections are, for the most part, fair and reasonable, the “digital locks” provision which has been in the legislation since the beginning is a fatal flaw.
To put it simply, despite any protections and provisions for consumers that exist in the law, if a piece of media is protected by a so-called digital lock, all consumer rights are null and void.
However, it gets much worse. In the midst of the Conservative’s last push for copyright reform cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the Harper Government actually lobbied to be put on a U.S. copyright watch list. Yes, if you can believe that. The Harper Government actually requested that we be put on an American copyright watch list—a list of prolific copyright violaters—that includes countries like China and Russia. We are on that list, at the request of the Harper Government, under the assumption that public pressure from the Americans would perhaps help pass the legislation through to law. Our government, lobbying a foreign government, to put pressure on our citizens. It seems pretty unreal.
So, there is a lot to worry about. We have a bad bill coming down the pipe. One that was introduced before, protested against strongly, and despite consultation was not amended in any form. And we have a government that, if the cables indicate anything, will do whatever it takes to push through this reform into law. For what it’s worth, both the Liberals and the New Democrats were opposed to the legislation the last time around. There’s also an enormous, well-organized protest movement that mobilized in the past and remains very active and energized. So, if nothing else, we can at least hope that the passage of this bill won’t exactly go quietly.
