Local pub succumbs to fire

Pictured here in happier times, the Mirch Masala suffered from a burn out. This used to be the Navaron. It went through owners.

Around 5:30 AM I awoke to the sounds of shattering glass and the smell of burning building. I looked up the street in ponderment. But saw nothing. Nothing I say.

No one got injured. The fire started when the place had been closed for the night.

At 11:00am this morning one of the ragingest piss tanks in the whole city shook his head. "A great tragedy."

Moral of story: Remember coat with camera in vest pocket.

Happy Birthday XX

Halloween emerges tomorrow. The celebration of the perverse and evil explodes into the dear hearts of children baited by the galloons of candy from strangers. People hide their faces. Hide their personalities. They think.

Lets put it this way. I don't like Halloween. It is also the birthday of my ex. ex. girlfriend. I think. Well its when it is celebrated. Here's a picture of downtown Toronto... The horror.

New schools?

Rather than dwell on planes of existence, which can never exist, Canadians encountered the flu season with a new strain of flu, and few new ideas. Schools should have closed for the duration. Since it is senior medical staff and senior executives and their families have access to the first batches of vaccines.

Schools are so scared of shutting their physical doors. In reality, with modern technology schools require much less space than schools thirty years ago. The computers and the internet have permitted the concept of students learning at home.

Schools and the concepts of education appear antiquated. It should be very possible for a student to learn something from miles and miles away without being physically in the room with teacher. The spread of the H1N1 virus was wantonly unnecessary for that very reason.

Yes I believe in having actual schools and classrooms. But mandatory presence of the student is not. School students must access real classes and central services frequently. The schools' systems are the last sector of society to undergo significant technological improvements.

Meowing the yawn

Current with our study of the decline of the media, the day the last part of the study was posted here, here was this on the front page of the Toronto Sun. To make matters worse, the editors of this particular paper like this story.

The editors claim that these sorts of stories spur circulation on the days that they are printed. If true that says a lot for the modern Toronto readers.

Boggle, gobble

Tally this fussifying. Turkeys suffered from H1N1. Yesterday the story led all the television produced news. Its not a big deal. Nor expression of any surprise over this be made.


No turkeys got sick enough to be culled. Frankly, the wrong species is being scrutinized.

Runner's up

Another Toronto Marathon? Having two isn't really all that bad. Driver's appear upset but after all its only a Sunday morning. Still some people complain.

One must ask though. Why the downtown all the time? People should have a change every so often. Can't they run in Etobicoke from North to South? How 'bout Scarborough?

Here's an idea. Run from Etobicoke to West Hill along Lawrence or Eglinton. Maybe run the other way next year. Let's get pumped with a little variety every so often.

Ambling respect

At the first instant, I held off making a blog for several days before tacking this blog into the site. Making a blog every day as I had hoped to do, makes for panic writing sometimes. I am not a professional writer at this moment. There are no absolute publishing deadlines.

I should point out that while making barbs at a persons political stance or viewpoint this means in no way means any rant means entwines a personal distaste for the person. After being on the inside of the political process, I hold a very high level of respect towards those who run for elected political office and those who put their names forth for any elected post. I've appreciated even if the political views of the candidate appear disagreeable.

Even those involved in some sort of discordant political scandal deserve respect. Unlike others who complain from the deep shadows about political scenarios, these people put out beseeching the unwashed masses to select them. One such notorious was Edmonton, Alberta's, the late William Hawrelak, who didn't mind lining his pockets with atypical bonuses and publicly admitted such actions. At least the electorate held him in high esteem because unlike some, he delivered on promises.

In so many ways, I hold a Hawrelak in a far greater esteem than the environmentalist mercenary David Suzuki. The latter preaches but never backs his mouth. For instance, his cross country environmental tour a few years ago was done in a diesel fueled mobile home bus.

After being involved in several political movements where I truly believe he had been mentioned as a candidate, he always reversed himself at the last moment. Suzuki made a commitment to the defunct National Party then backed out in order to continue receiving his annual two hundred thousand dollar CBC salary. He would've easily became a Canadian Prime Minister. In the end, his bank account came before global future.

One key to political impact, is participation. If you want to ingrain your ideas and views into the fabric of a national culture, personal involvement on some level emerges as necessary. Especially in the modern era, this proves true. The internet achieves a wider democracy than ever before. But a democracy only succeeds when all voices sound to the issues and when all stand willingly for that view.

When critical of a politician or political spokesman, express and demonstrate your opposition. Just keep those ideas separate from issues of personality. One only respects an argument when that respect is exchanged.

Decline of the print media ... III

In this final part, economics plays the prime role. In our image is a small bank of street newspaper boxes. Not so long ago there was the regular dailies also in this group. You can see the scratch marks of an absent box on the concrete to the left of the nearest (Now Mag) box.

One of the most important influences on the physical circulation is the increasing use of the internet as the primary source of news information. Most newspapers use revenues from the print media revenues to sustain the online version of their news papers.

The challenge is that most newspapers do not understand or appreciate the power of the internet. First it is growing. Second, it is not going away. Third the revenues of generated by the online is not as lucrative per story as the old style print media was.

News papers and news letters are not going to disappear completely but clearly they are going to have to change their format, their information resources and their revenue models to survive. A lot of papers are contemplating turning their online sites to pay sites. It has been tried before. And it has not worked, nor will it work in the future.

Revenues over the internet can only be generated by the numbers of people seeing their stories. Ad revenues depend on the numbers of hits. This is not all that much different in the print media. Advertising rates depend on the numbers of subscriptions per day. It depends on the numbers of eyes that see the page.

The downside of print media is that circulation is an arbitrary number. While online pages and sites clearly get statistics far more precise. One only has to log the numbers of visits or hits to the page in order to determine a rate.

Another challenge to the print media is the ability to gather content. Good journalistic type of sites or printed publishings depend on content. In recent decades, accountants moved to control media companies and the journalistic side of the control of print media has drastically declined.
Bean counters only envisage the area devoted to commercial ads. Ads have become more important to newspapers than the news content than ever before.

Compounded with this is the price of printing. While paper companies are awash in inventory the price of newsprint has not declined. The solution the paper makers use is to close mills to maintain the price.

If you look at the newspaper like the Toronto Sun over the years, the size of the paper has slowly gotten smaller, the advertising content has shot over 60% ad printing, the vendor price of each copy went up. The latter has shed readership. With the delines in readership, ad revenues decrease. Its a vicious cycle with no upside.

Within the next five years in the City of Toronto, two of the three major daily newspapers will close print production due to the costs of printing. News publishers are locked into a vicious decline into a model. They rarely notice that search engines like Google assemble the stories and gather them into a set of links providing readers with a option of which version to study.

So when the traditional news media tries to impose a subscription price, search engines like Google can provide a choice of sources for the same information. At least one of those sources will provide the same story for free. The free link gets more hits and more ad revenues while the priced links decline and get less ad revenue.

What the traditional news media must return to is what was their strength which was the skill of their reporters and writers. So many of these people got laid off, and now work on the internet. Ouch.

Print media decline... II

In the following images, the symptoms of the print media decline appears.
We photo imaged the front pages of two local sheets, scrutinizing them. The reason to use these images allows an impression of the substantive relevance of each.

In this one, the Sunday feature deals with a pathos photo of a cute dog.

While in this one from the Star's front page, another animal story about naked chickens makes the top. These papers didn't suffer from a lack of print quality. Rather the story content is much weaker than years ago. There is just as much front page material around. Newspapers are in the midst of a transitional change.

Starvation holds the reason for change. There isn't a shortage of story material. Rather the numbers of reporters has declined. The emphasis is on ads, not content. Today stories of chickens and dogs make it because they are easy, and not too controversial.

Vive la resistance

Long lived resistance movements resurrect themselves in the moods of leadership futility. Apparently most of the readership says I have to continue the digital watchers blog.

Which I won't now. Its not a democracy but common sense. Give people what they want, as long as it isn't too expensive. To date though there be no return on investment.

So the digital watchers continue.

Decline of the media

For the next couple of blogs over several days, the topic of the decline of the media will be examined intensely. Well maybe not that intensely. Several causes lead to inescapable conclusions.

Primary to the decline of the print and internet media quality emerges from this image. It is of course a cup of coffee. And it is good coffee.

Yet one must ask oneself in a detached logical accent of a voice, does the increase of good coffee directly effect the sliding quality of the media reportage?

The relationship appears to be yes. In days gone by, reporters and editors could not get quality cups of coffee. Now that they can, coffee breaks are longer. Which means the storytelling around the coffe tables appears so excessive that it diffuses originality and the creativity of any sort of bullshitting.

So a turbid equation emerges. A theory proposed. Increases in the quality of coffee, leads to a comparative and proportional decline of print journalism.

Not what it seems

Beware the Hydra's temple. It seems not to be what you see.

Such are the constructions of a city that is used to building movie facades. Its in the pictures.First we have the mottled patchwork of a building in the throes of renovation.


And later the same building converted into a concrete building appearing like a concrete fortress.

Sports and shit.

Sigh @. The good thing about Toronto and its sports teams is that once the regular season is over... its over.

Balsillie appears to have been shut out from the National Hokey League. Claims that he wasn't qualified, or possessed the moral character to be a league owner. A laugh riot. Guess he had no pending criminal charges.

Chicago got shut out of the Olympics in favor of Rio de Generate. Like who cares. See National Hokey League.

Complaints about Cito Gaston, by the Blue Jay players means a great upheaval over the winter. General Manager of the Blue Jays, J.P. Ricciardi, claimed over the Fan590, a local radio station, that no player approached him with the problem. JP has also acknowledged that he lies.

Sometimes a mess like this is good for a team. It should have happened before. Certainly no one had the courage to approach Cito face to face. That is where the disconnect occurred. I seen it beforehand.

Now for basketball. You think the Jays have problems. Wait for the CRaptors.

Taking a few days off for rebraining.
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