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Never going to live this down

Newly discovered fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex eating an angel complicates Creationism debate

Yes, CBC’s response to a CRTC proceeding vaguely concerning the Internet really is as bad as people say it is.

The overly padded PDF is a testimony to just how ugly and slipshod Windows users’ documents are. (It doesn’t even use Canadian spelling, except when it does: Check ¶15, with its rendering of recognise, personalisation, personalization, and personalize.) It’s barely 2,400 words and could easily have been a Web page.

But what does it say? “New-media broadcasting content is not displacing traditional TV and radio.... New media is not a significant revenue source for broadcasters.”

Shorter CBC: The senior citizens, retirees, and shut-ins who are the incumbent CBC audience are afraid of the Internet.

Well, they are. Half of them type WWW.GOOGLE.COM into Google. The other half don’t know what Google is. These are people who check their E-mail once a week and top-post their replies in ALL CAPS “because it’s easier to read.” They’re never going to watch TV online. And anyway, they’ll all be dead in 15 years, taking the Corporation with it.

Cynical? Accurate.

Let’s fisk this piece of shit

“Professional video content”

This is the part that kills me:

Virtually all of the professional video content that is being consumed on the Internet continues to originate from traditional media. Conventional television broadcasters... have a cornerstone role in creating original Canadian television content for all media platforms.

Only because they’re too incompetent to put anything decent online.

Listen: How many gumtoothed news-parody shows is the CBC running? Two? Down from three?

How many of these shows are so chummy with the power structure that they waltz into offices on Parliament Hill bearing swords and have sleepovers at 24 Sussex?

Creationists must be right after all – Darwinism cannot explain why invertebrates jump the evolutionary queue and get their own TV shows. I certainly didn’t know they could get two more shows, functionally identical to the first and all competing for food in the same ecosystem.

Then what comes out of nowhere? The Onion News Network (also at iTunes). No goddamned captioning, but nothing online has captioning. Except when they do fake captioning.

Fake caption on video has floating astronaut saying TELL MY WIFE I DIED WITH DIGNITY

It’s a news parody, just like the Onion is, but it’s “on TV.” Kind of. It downloads automatically to my (legit) TiVo via wifi. We watch it on a television screen, but it is not “television” in any sense. It arrives on a computer with an attached display exactly the same way it would arrive on a computer with an attached display. And by and large, it’s great.

Even the bad segments aren’t as embarrassing as Rick Mercer (note lack of italics or possessive). One of these was so good I transcribed it. We live for the crawling ticker on news reports.

Another segment: “Historic Blockbuster store offers glimpse of how movies were rented in the past.”

Try this one for CanCon: “Historic Globemedia Temple (formerly Canadian Broadcasting Centre) offers glimpse of ‘television’ of the past.”

The Onion News Network only exists online, you can watch it anywhere there’s a net connection, and it does in three minutes twice a week what 30 minutes three times a week fail to do. The Corpse could have done it. Now it’s obvious why we didn’t.