test blog 8

If you stream movies and TV series, you know that the proliferation of streaming channels has had mixed results for consumers. Many shows that were formerly on Netflix have been pulled by their media parents, and are now found on different streaming apps. At the same time, Netflix's monthly price has increased -- so you're paying more for less. Those who still want access to the shows no longer on Netflix need to subscribe to an additional streaming service; Disney (which has all the Marvel properties) and Britbox are two big culprits. Two other very popular streaming services, Crave (owned by Bell Media) and Prime (owned by Amazon), have exclusive rights to many enticing shows, including all the HBO and Showtime series. Recently Bell Media made an annoying cash-grab by offering a first season of a given show on Crave, then requiring an additional subscription to Movies+HBO or Starz to watch the rest. Many people have observed that if you want a few of these services, the pric...

I've never reviewed a cookbook before, but then I've never been this enthusiastic about a cookbook before: The Instant Pot Bible by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough . Why I love this book Before I bury the lede with a lot of explanation, I'll tell you why I find The Instant Pot Bible so appealing. -- The design. When you're using a book for information, design and layout are very important. Someone (or someones) really nailed it with this one. I find it incredibly clear and easy to use. -- The formatting. Ingredient list on the left, step-by-step instructions, IP times and settings highlighted in a chart. And so on. Not only a great format, but more consistent than many other cookbooks I've used. -- One specific bit of formatting that I find super useful is a gray box called "Beyond". Here, the authors put all the substitutions, extras, and equivalences. I appreciate not having to sort through those to read a basic recipe. -- Road maps! The Instant P...

I stopped following this baseball season a while back. The 2019 Red Sox are not very good, and I'm perfectly happy to enjoy my first summer on beautiful Vancouver Island without them. But it's not just the lackluster Red Sox that are keeping me away. I'm disgusted and deeply saddened by the rule changes that MLB instituted in 2017, and even more by those coming in the 2020 season. These changes damage the very foundation of the sport. And, worst of all, they are completely unnecessary. Baseball America says the changes will " fundamentally alter  the way teams construct their rosters , as well as change the roles players may be groomed for in player development". (I've listed most of the changes below, excluding how players are compensated for the All Star Game.) Games are too long! Games are too long! (If we keep repeating it, we will make it so!) Supposedly baseball games are too long. Supposedly baseball games are too slow. "Young people" aren...

When I watch baseball, I always watch the Red Sox broadcast, and almost always choose local radio for the audio feed. (Hooray for MLB streaming on Roku!) And while I always mute the ads between innings, hundreds of ads are stuffed into the broadcast itself , so it's impossible not to hear and see a lot of advertising. One advertising staple is something called "Cars for Kids". The ad exhorts you to make a cash donation or to donate your used car, and tells you how Cars for Kids makes it very simple. I've been hearing this for years, but only recently wondered, what is Cars for Kids? Who are the kids, and how are cars helping them? I assumed it had something to do with fundraising for children with a serious illness. The Red Sox are linked to an organization called The Jimmy Fund , which supports the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is also a Red Sox sponsor. So I assumed that Cars for Kids was something simi...

Everywhere we look, every available space is filled with advertising. The Toronto skyline is a sea corporate logos. The due-date receipt from my library book features an ad on the back. I once tracked all the ads shown during a major league baseball game -- during play , not between innings -- and the results were startling, even to me. And, of course, our entire experience on the internet -- especially on our personal mobile devices -- is tracked and used by corporations with only our dimmest awareness and nominal consent. It wasn't always like this. How did we arrive at this current state? The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads  by Tim Wu answers this question. The answer is fascinating and entertaining, and -- if you dislike the constant and ever-increasing commodification of our lives, as I do -- more than a little frustrating. In the first part of the book, Wu presents a capsule history of the "attention capture industry" -- what this rev...

Are there bag signs where you live? In Mississauga and perhaps most suburban places, people put up bag signs advertising services. The signs are cheap to buy and easy to post. They are also illegal. To me, they are the Nexus of Evil: advertising plus visual pollution plus polyethylene waste. I have called 311 to complain about these signs in my neighbourhood, and if the City has someone available, they will sometimes dispatch a crew to remove the signs. Presumably this crew is also doing other outdoor maintenance, or perhaps they are driving around removing bag signs, which would be awesome. Allan and I also remove these signs ourselves. When we lived in a house, we would throw the signs in the garage until enough had collected, then bundle up the vinyl for trash and the metal frames for recycling. Now, while we're out with our dogs, we'll just put the whole thing in a public trash barrel. This morning while I was out with Diego, I slipped the vinyl off a bag sign, crumbled it ...

A thriller about public relations? And for teens? It sounds improbable, and The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi is an improbably terrific book. Marrying a somersaulting plot with heart-pounding suspense to an unabashed political agenda and a hot love story, Bacigalupi has delivered a stunning youth read. On the political front, we contemplate "the place where big companies go when they need the truth confused. . . . when they need science to say what’s profitable, instead of what’s true.” All the tricks of the trade - astroturfing , fronts , false flags , sock puppets , money funnelling , stealth marketing , planted news, and outright false data - are touched on, along with the human damage they cause. And the political is nothing if not personal. Alix leads the good life of a private school girl in Connecticut, and is forced to confront the possibility that her privilege is built on other people's pain. That pain is impossible to miss, when she meets a group of homeless ki...

There's a new bully in town, and he's not going after fat kids in the school cafeteria. He's a corporate bully, and he's gunning for you , his dissatisfied customer. An increasing number of companies are threatening lawsuits against customers who post negative online reviews about their products or services. At least one company has actually sued  a former customer for defamation, based on negative reviews - and won. This is a chilling development for anyone who cares about free speech, a free internet, and consumer advocacy. But it may not be as dire as it sounds. A slightly more level playing field We are bombarded with advertising at every turn. Everywhere we look, companies are claiming that their products will make us beautiful, cooler, more connected. That we'll look smarter, live longer, enjoy our lives more... if only we buy their products. Our world is filled with false advertising, if not by explicit claim, then certainly by implicit suggestion. If these c...

Today I saw a bag of high-end cheese puffs, made with organic corn and real cheese. WHEAT FREE and GLUTEN FREE, the package boasted, which made me chuckle. Yup, just like all cheese puffs for all time. Like most snack food, cheese puffs are made of corn, and corn does not contain gluten. Marketing old products with a new twist to take advantage of a nutrition craze is nothing new, of course. I remember when  fat-free  and  low-fat  labels were slapped on everything. (This craze happened to coincide with some of my worst dieting addiction.) In those days, supermarket shelves were laden with fat-free cookies and other snack food, all of which were loaded with white sugar and other empty calories. Candy that is little more than sugar cubes with artificial colouring and flavouring would be advertised as fat-free. About a decade later, globules of saturated fat, salt, and nitrates were hawked as zero grams of carbs per serving . I've wondered what the next craze of nutrit...

I've recently returned from a lovely trip to Boston, filled with so many of my favourite things: friends, family, books , and baseball. I love Fenway Park, and I'm always happy to be there. On this trip, we saw three great games, two of them wins, so I was thrilled. The games were marred by only one thing: nearly constant propaganda for the US military. This is not an exaggeration. Throughout Fenway Park, as in many sports venues, monitors show a TV feed of the action on the field. Right now, between innings, the Fenway Park monitors show a continuous feed of advertising for the United States Army. During the game, the ads continue on a sidebar beside the action. Let that sink in a moment. The constant advertising crammed into every moment of the ballgame , and the constant linking of sports and the military , are now joined in this doubly offensive development. There is something particularly Orwellian about watching a baseball game while a constant stream of silent images of ...

The current New Yorker stories by Joseph Mitchell  has given me an opportunity to post something I've been meaning to share for ages. Last September, Jill Lepore unearthed an incredible bit of history, a piece of the American past that is  alive with us today, and more dangerous than ever. (I am generally interested in anything Lepore writes; last year I gushed over her reviews of books about Clarence Darrow , one of my abiding heroes.) In this piece, Lepore writes about the roots of political advertising - the falsehoods and trickery, the lies and slander, the deception and distortion, the swiftboating and smearing that make us grit our teeth in frustration. The advertising firms that design and disseminate those orchestrated lies can be traced back to one company, an operation called Campaigns Inc. Its first victim was Upton Sinclair, the writer and socialist and one-time candidate for Governor of California. He called it The Lie Factory. In 1934, Sinclair explained what d...

Robert Fisk has a good piece in The Independent about the incivility (to put it mildly!) that is endemic in the comment sections of online news stories: "Anonymous trolls are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate the gutless journalism of the New York Times, BBC, and CNN" . Fisk wonders why newspapers that will not publish an anonymous letter to the editor will allow anonymous lies and hateful screed in comments. Surely he knows the simple answer: money. Advertisers are paying for clicks, and the idiots in the comments section are increasing the clickage. Why should we help them by reading those comments? Consider this. We know that governments pay people to troll the comments section with disinformation and misinformation, just like they hire fake journalists and bribe working columnists to influence public opinion. We know that the number of comments in any one direction cannot be taken as a gauge of public opinion. When Common Dreams respond...

Company abuses animals/the environment/labour. Employee comes forward to make the abuse public. Company tries to silence employee. It's an old story, and it repeats itself again and again, in many different contexts. You've seen it dramatized in movies like Silkwood and Erin Brockovich. It's what Bradley Manning is going through on a grand scale. Whistleblowers risk their jobs, and in some cases their lives, to stand up for others. Often, without whistleblowers, we would never know the truth. That's why we have an obligation to stand up for whistleblowers. If you live in Ontario and watch any television, you've seen the ads for Marineland, with that cloying song: They come from a land of ice and snow, now belugas have a home in On-tar-ee-o... Everyone loves Marineland... Everyone loves Marineland... That chorus is bitterly ironic. If the residents of Marineland could speak, I doubt those marine mammals would say they love living in unhealthy water that causes const...

Naomi Wolf, in The Guardian : Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race – something that has historical precedent. Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program". This is an excellent and important piece. I hope you will go here to read it .

Apparently this is not a story from The Onion. From Reproductive Health Reality Check : There is a branch of anti-choice activists that will use pretty much anything as a medium for their message : newspaper ads, graphic signs displayed in front of schools, bus stop benches. You would think they would know well enough to leave one place untouched, though. Wire coat hangers. You would be wrong. Springdale Drycleaners of Cincinnati, Ohio, has been etching "Choose Life" ads on wire coat hangers used to hang dry-cleaning. What's worse is that this seems to be an ongoing effort. Reports of the "choose life" coat hangers already were on the internet back in March of 2011, when Joe.My.God posted a picture of the hanger then. And before that on Regretsy in 2010. So despite over two years of attention, the business continues to think this is an excellent cross-advertising campaign. In fact, the practice was losing them customers as far back as August of 2010, but still t...

What's wrong with this picture? Lori Waters knew what was wrong. Waters, who lives in BC and designs scientific graphics, recognized that 1,000 kilometres of island coastline was missing from the map, giving the appearance of a broad, clear channel - one that might accommodate oil supertankers with a degree of safety that does not exist. Waters' media release: Enbridge Pipeline and Tankers: Competition Bureau Asked to Investigate Deceptive Northern Gateway Marketing by Enbridge Company Quickly Alters Widely Distributed Ads That Show Hundreds of Kilometres of BC Islands Missing From Tanker Route A BC woman who designs scientific graphics for a living today filed a formal complaint with the federal Competition Bureau claiming Enbridge is misleading the public with promotional videos that have erased the numerous and intricate web of more than 1000 square kilometres of islands along the proposed Northern Gateway tanker route. Since the Vancouver Island resident made a corrected gr...