Monthly Archive: August 2012

The long good-bye

For the life of me I can’t figure out why all the fuss about the death of Jack Layton. A year ago, the entire country seemed to be riveted to the event. Citizens flocked to the Parliament Buildings where he lay in state and descended upon Toronto City Hall to make chalk drawings that glorified his memory. I couldn’t understand the outpourings at the time. After all, he appeared to be a happy political warrior who’d been elected city councillor and then leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition but he didn’t really achieve much of anything that was very lasting...

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Slowpoke service

Well, I spoke too soon about the great service from Bell. Not only do I not yet have my promised new modem and higher-speed service, my Internet download speed has dropped to 3 megabits per second even though I am paying for 12 Mbps. I guess my current situation is better than dial-up, but not much. Turns out my neighbourhood is not wired for the higher speed of 15 Mbps I was promised. When I last talked to Bell on Monday, they said work was going on in the area and would be completed that day. They expected my speed...

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Saved by the Bell

Cogeco Cable, Eastlink and Quebecor Inc. are complaining about Bell Canada’s planned purchase of Astral Media. In full-page ads appearing in yesterday’s paper they claimed that, if approved, Bell’s TV viewing audience (they already own HBO Canada, The Movie Network, and Family among others) will be twice as large as the nearest competitor. Is the ginger group saying this is unfair? A monoply? If so, that’s a strange allegation given that the complainers have community cable licences that could also be called monopolies since any consumer on any given street who wants cable TV can only buy from the one...

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Zip your lip

The sight of Boris Johnson, Lord Mayor of London, stranded on a zip line yesterday did my heart good, I have to admit. He was inert, dangling, and could do no harm high above the ground. My real beef with Johnson is not that he’s a clown, on par with Rob Ford, but that he wrote a book last year in which he purports to be an expert on everything. Called Johnson’s Life of London, the book traces that city’s history through a personally skewed list that includes Geoffrey Chaucer but not Charles Dickens. His efforts at interviewing people for...

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