Muhammad Ali in Esquire (1968)
Ricky Gervais in Esquire (2009)
Darine Stern in Playboy (1971)
Marge Simpson in Playboy (2009)
The Comedic & Cartoon Minority
Category Archives: Media Watch
Hollywood Reporter Reviews in Review
Astro Boy: “among the year’s best”
Fantastic Mr. Fox: “too sly for its own good”
Where the Wild Things Are: “uninvolving adaptation”
So Happy Together
Very often people oddly put books against the internet…I love them. You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.
—Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry: The internet and Me | BBC News
Magazines are my happy place…I think print and the Internet complement each other more than people realize.
— Derek Powazek, From Natural Disaster Comes … an Instant Magazine | Time
Area Woman Found Buying Groceries
[QUEENS COUNTY, NS] Missing Liverpool woman found in Sobeys: Queens RCMP located a missing Liverpool woman in Sobeys grocery store June 4 shortly after 6:30 p.m. Queens detachment NCO Staff Sgt. Bruno Deveau said, “For herself, she was never lost but her family was concerned. She was found in Sobeys in Liverpool after making a phone call to her home.” Family members reported Wilma Karen Labrador missing about 1:15 p.m. that day but the woman didn’t know about their concerns or that she was considered missing. A police dog team, Department of Natural Resources helicopter and Department of Fisheries and Oceans boat crew helped with the search while South Queens County Ground Search and Rescue waited on stand-by. Staff Sgt. Deveau said, “We thank all those agencies and the general public for calling in with some information.” – Mark Roberts, The Advance
Atlantic Crime, Court & Emergencies Report | Daily Business Buzz
Hanging up on the Pom Phone
1
The Pomegranate phone is the thrust of a $300 000 “viral” marketing campaign by the Province of Nova Scotia to lure ex-pats back home. It features a mythical mobile phone that can do all sorts of useful things (that actual cell phones can do nowadays) plus some extra “out there” features like a harmonica and a coffee maker.
It’s slick. I don’t fault the piece on a technical or creative level. It is executed with great care and amazing attention to detail. I surely can’t slag it for using Windom Earle (my brother) as the soundtrack.
The leap the viewer has to make, if you poke around long enough to find out, is that “Having everything you want in a phone may be a stretch, but a place that has everything definitely exists.” I can’t imagine someone being rewarded or swayed by the payoff of returning to Nova Scotia after watching it. Nothing against Nova Scotia, but would it be able to move anyone home?
Lastly, I also understand the name of the faux product is a riff on the Apple iPhone phenomenon…
The pomegranate (Punica granatum) is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub or small tree growing to between five and eight metres tall. The pomegranate is native to the region from Iran to the Himalayas in northern India and has been cultivated and naturalized over the whole Mediterranean region and the Caucasus since ancient times. It is widely cultivated throughout Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, India, Syria, Turkey, the drier parts of southeast Asia, Peninsular Malaysia, the East Indies, and tropical Africa[1]. Introduced into Latin America and California by Spanish settlers in 1769, pomegranate is now cultivated in parts of California and Arizona for juice production
…but I think I can think of a better name which actually has a local connection:
Nova Scotia, also a major producer of wild blueberries, recognizes the blueberry as its official provincial berry.[14] The town of Oxford is known as the Wild Blueberry Capital of Canada.
Grow One
Win a Power Lunch* and a feature story – on you – in Backbone and an iPhone or a Blackberry
*with Dave Chalk, technology expert and our editor, Peter Wolchak
From a recent call from Backbone magazine to get it’s readers to fill out a survey. Very interesting approach, it you expect your readers to understand and appreciate journalistic integrity.
It’s Not Greek To Me
I tend to impervious to advertising in my life but some blogs are a-buzz with a controversial Greek BMW Premium Used Car ad that features a very young looking girl in a very sexually suggestive fashion. I must say the content is offensive to me (and the reason I am not re-posting the image), but what bothers me more is that this really looks like a fake made by someone with a pirated copy of Photoshop and a burning desire to work for a marketing company.
Taking this to the next logical level, which seems to escape most people, I thought I would ask BMW. This is what Corporate Communications at BMW Group Canada had to say:
The ad you were inquiring about is not an official approved BMW campaign. It originated from Greece, but has no approval from BMW Greece. BMW Group does not endorse the content of these advertisement drafts.
At the very worst I could see this being pitched to BMW I believe that this was not part of a real or viral campaign.
Newfie Stroke
This story just disappeared/reappeared on the CBC website:
Ontario woman gains East Coast accent following stroke
Old file name: newfie-stroke.html
New file name: stroke-accent.html
The Horrors of Gambling
Man pushes luck, falls off casino’s parking garage | Chronicle Herald
A man was injured after falling from the third level of the Casino Nova Scotia parkade just before midnight Saturday.
Witnesses told Halifax Regional Police the 23-year-old and another man were “fooling around,” running through the Upper Water Street parking garage.
The man jumped onto a car, lost his footing and fell backwards over the railing.
He landed on his back and was taken to the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre emergency department with non life-threatening injuries.
In Defense of Oprah
Ok, well not exactly. I have accidently caught a few episodes here and there, but I don’t think I will ever really be able to forgive her for The Secret. I just want to apply some credit-where-credit-is-due because quite a few blogs have jumped on The Flip’s success and I just think it becomes less surprising when you realize that Oprah championed it last fall.
Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot | New York Times
The Flip takes 13% of the camcorder market by doing less | 37 Signals
The Surprisingly Thoughtful Design of a Cheap Camcorder | Boing Boing Gadgets
Unsurprisingly, Flip has 13% of Camcorder Mark | Mashable
Pogue on the Flip | Daring Fireball
Your suggestions for video hosts | Kung Fu Grippe
I tried to comment this fact on a couple blogs but none of my posts got approved. I should reiterate that I am not always a fan of the Oprah Effect. It has an ugly side as well. Take Josh Groban, for example. No really…take him.
As for my take on The Flip, I would love to test drive one but the video functions on my Canon Elph 750 and extremely simple and do the trick for me.