Perhaps it’s because I’m a non-parent, and/or because I’m the child of an immigrant mother so enthralled by her chosen home of Canada that she believed Canadians incapable of all ill, leaving her kids to fend for themselves on buses, subways, and trans-border flights to grandparents in the statistically more perilous 70s, but shouldn’t thecontinue reading
December 2007 Archives
It takes a village
Hats off to Hearst
Someone gets smart: Instead of dropping its Canadian prices, a U.S. magazine publisher has quietly removed the American price for its magazines — leaving only the Canadian price on the cover. You go, Hearst Magazines! What the market will bear! The hyperbolic reaction ranges from calling the move a “shell game” (The Star headline) tocontinue reading
Fun with numbers
Pace the Globe and Mail’s John Partridge, a lovely man, a lede like this always makes me question whatever follows: You should probably ignore all the headlines you have seen shrieking about the vast amount of cross-border shopping — physical and online — triggered by the soaring Canadian dollar. Really? Why? Because Stats Can sayscontinue reading
Streetcars, redux
The Queen’s Quay East streetcar plan, discussed earlier is taking shape, at least the north-south link toward Queen’s Quay (link; link). Hopefully it’s completed fairly promptly (I know, I know) – the Cherry St. streetcar loop by itself is just silly. I assume, though this isn’t directly stated, that this will be a version ofcontinue reading
RSS, Mr. Bean!
Environment Canada hurtles rashly into the 21st century:
Watching ducks walk
A story in the Globe today reports on a study of how consumers make decisions about what to buy. The study posits that consumers choose products they identify with — the “in” group — and shun ones in the “out” group. In one experiment, the group of Canadian: study subjects used and graded identical penscontinue reading
Chanukah Sameach!
… from the folks at New York’s Balducci’s.
Ah yes, Canada’s huge movie piracy problem…
Five months after the law came into effect, after “weeks of private investigation,” Canada has arrested exactly one person for videotaping a movie in a theatre. One arrest. One. If the cinema owner in that story is correct that it’s put a major dent in the level of piracy in Montreal, and the movie distributors’continue reading
For all your bludgeoning needs
From CBS Marketwatch: World of Warcraft Visa. This comes from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft and gives cardholders points toward free game time. For every 1,500 points earned, the cardholders gets one free month of play time.