photo credit: Mark Donovan

Last night the inevitable happened. My Vancouver Canucks (of whom I’ve been a fan for over 15 years) lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. I say inevitable because a storybook ending to a storybook season would have been too good to be true. When the Canucks finally win a Cup, it will be in a year that they finish seventh or eighth in the Western Conference.

Something else inevitable happened last night. Riots. I’ll get to why the rioting was inevitable in a second, but first I want to address the reporting. The headlines seem to universally use some variation of “Canuck fans riot in downtown Vancouver.” I must say that I object to the use of the term fan here. I have a hard time believing that most of those folks in the streets last night could have named more than four Vancouver players before the second round of the playoffs.

It was not the hockey fans who were rioting last night. The true hockey fans recognized that the Sedins, et al, were quite simply out-played last night and, really, throughout the series. The true hockey fans, in the Rogers Arena and elsewhere, gave Tim Thomas, the brilliant Boston Bruins goalie, a standing ovation as he accepted the Conn Smythe trophy as playoff MVP. The true hockey fans also quite appropriately drowned out NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman with boos as he tried to sound like a hockey person.

I said earlier that the riots were inevitable and they were. Anytime a large group of people are gathered in city streets with alcohol and you give them three hours of bad news, things will go poorly. It happened in Vancouver in 1994 and Montreal in 1993. More recently it happened in Edmonton in 2006 and again in Montreal in 2008 and 2010. What happened last night should have come as no surprise to anyone.

Is it just “part of hockey”? No, and it shouldn’t be. In my opinion, these things happen when hockey hysteria crosses from the actual fans to the crowd “looking for an excuse to be stupid.” The City of Vancouver takes some responsibility for not being better prepared – especially after 1994.

Beyond the actual hooligans, I lay most of the blame at whoever had the brilliant idea to setup the big screens downtown. We invented sports bars for a reason – they keep people nicely contained in relatively small groups and they keep suburbanites watching the game from the suburbs. Encouraging 100,000 people (most of whom probably hadn’t even watched an entire hockey game before May) to descend on the downtown to receive what had a 50/50 chance of being bad news is just stupid.

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Well, here’s just a sampling of what happened in Buffalo yesterday:

• Man robbed, pistol-whipped on East Ferry
• Man accused of choking dog in dispute with woman
• Albion man gets prison for molesting boy, 15
• Body of missing man found hanging from tree
• Man stabbed in the cheek in 200 block of Allen Street

How could things go so wrong and what are we going to do about it?

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photo credit: How can I recycle this

I was recently reminded of this little story and thought I’d share.

I was at a “local search” conference and one of the keynote speakers was the owner of an upstart yellow pages publisher that was taking a huge chunk of the market share in a major Metro.

In the Q&A, the guy was asked: How did you erode the incumbent’s market-share so quickly?

His answer went something like this:

“Ma’am, what do you do with your old yellowpages book as soon as the new one shows up?”

Her answer was, predictably, “Get rid of it.”

He continued: “Of course! Which is precisely why we publish our book three months after the other guys.”

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Michigan Central Station - Marchand and Meffre Photography

I have no idea why I’m subscribed to the RSS feed io9.com… I’m sure I had a reason. But when these photos popped into Google Reader this morning, I was awestruck. Dumbfounded. Speechless.

As a guy with strong ties to Michigan, I have a soft spot for Detroit. I think it may be one of the most interesting cities I’ve experienced – but folks rarely get past the “Motor City” moniker to see the beauty of Detroit.

This collection of photos by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture an unusual beauty – the beauty of decay. It is not really beautiful, of course, but heart-breaking to see these architectural masterpieces crumbling. Michigan Central Station has always intrigued me as it is plainly visible from the interstate feeding the Ambassador Bridge and I have stared at its broken windows many times over the years wondering what would become of it.

Marchand and Meffre’s photographs make me a little sad – but I’m glad that they’ve been able to create some beautiful art from such miserable circumstances.

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The future is what is important! And the future of this blog is looking much brighter today. Today I have resolved (albeit a few weeks early) to re-energize and re-invigorate this blog. I will be posting more often, and on a wider variety of topics. This blog will be me – in all the various places my brain takes me.

So with that promise to you, dear reader, let wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and I will see you in 2010 – renewed and refreshed!

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1. from a 12 year old girl

hi i think canada should stay as one country.if my teacher was writing this she would say that the political leaders of Canada have poor problem solving skills.You probably think i’m too young to have a say in this but just because i am young dosen’t mean that i don’t care

bye from amy nevins

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Well, pleased to be a guest here! I’ve been catching up on some of my reading, and the most recent piece by British journalist George Monbiot got me worked up again. Here is a journalist who is completely open about his position, and is never afraid to write from that premise, comprehensively and critically.

I think it’s true that journalism would be better if there were more openness about political positions.. or perhaps a two-pronged approach of laying out the facts and competing positions, as well as the opinion of the journalist.. balance, in this sense, would mean a balanced presentation of two arguments, which the public/reader can pick through, disagree with, etc. This is part of the power of the web – print media would likely balk at this kind of task, because of space issues. Incidentally, a reporter at the Waterloo Record confided in me that many of her colleagues share a displeasure that the paper has been thinned out beyond belief (she reacted when I made a comment to this effect).. the web is democratizing media, in a de facto, automatic kind of way.

I wonder how many students here at Queen’s (was in Kitchener-Waterloo until awhile ago) actually read broadsheets? Or do they get their news, as I now do, online from rss feeds and the like? Well, there’s a couple of cents for you.. in the meantime, I continue to be stunned and outraged by the politics of food and hunger, which Monbiot explicates well (along with Raj Patel in his book Stuffed and Starved).

To be further incited on the politics of exploitation of Africa, see Patrick Bond’s book Looting Africa…pleasure blogging here, my friend!

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Here’s what I said, more or less:

No-one is truly objective. I’d rather know where my media talking heads are coming from than to try to decipher disingenuous attempts at sounding un-biased. In other words, journalists should wear their opinions, political and otherwise, on their sleeves in the interest of transparency and fairness. I also said that I’d rather have Bill O’Reilly anchor the nightly news on Fox and Keith Olbermann anchor the news on NBC because at least then I know how much salt to apply and where. Williams, Kouric, etc, have zero credibility for me because I don’t know where they stand.

In the Canadian context, there are no O’Reillys or Olbermanns that I’m aware of because even our commentators bend over backwards to apply criticism evenly. Rex Murphy would be so much more credible, for example, if he was open about his true opinion – not to mention Peter Mansbridge and Lloyd Robertson.

When I watch Steve Paikin on The Agenda with reps from each party – I constantly wonder – who’s he secretly rooting for here? Because he is – he’s human.

Why is it that Jon Stewart is increasingly becoming the primary source of political news for my demographic? Part of it is his humour to be sure – but part of it also is that he’s not afraid to let his guests and his audiences know where he’s coming from. He’s not bound by archaic and deceptive ‘code of journalism’ that expects the press to pretend they are doing the impossible – be objective.

I remember watching the 1995 Quebec Referendum through the national media because, though a Montrealer by birth, I had since moved to central Ontario. I distinctly remember watching Quebecois journalists on CBC and CTV reporting on the campaigns in their diluted, objective way and screaming at them in my head to “Please just tell me what you think! I’m not there – you are!”

Chantal Hebert is well respected journalist in Quebec – but I can’t trust a single thing she says about the Bloc Quebecois because I have no idea where she stands on the sovereignty issue. I’ve heard her both praise and criticize the BQ on tactics but those are delivered through a Quebecoise filter that either agrees or disagrees with the Bloc in principle. So which is it? Are they right or wrong? I can’t trust you, Chantal, if I don’t know you.

So that was a little more than what I said the other night, but you get the idea.

My question to you, then, is this:

Should we allow and encourage the members of the press to shed their artificial objectivity in the interest of transparency and full reporting?

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The Presidential election is decided by Electoral College votes which are distributed among the fifty states roughly by population – California gets lots, Delaware not so much. There are 538 electoral college votes up for grabs – and they way they are distributed makes it entirely possible that the election could end in a tie! Using the LA Times interactive Electoral College map (hat tip) it’s clear that not only is it possible – it’s really not much of a stretch.

What are the odds of this happening?

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If you’ve tried to send me a message using the contact form and I didn’t respond it’s not because I’m rude, it’s because I never got it because, well, I’m a moron.

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