Day Job Plug

I haven't talked much about my day job on the podcast yet, even though it influenced the podcast's name. Description (audio description, video description, descriptive video, described video - we can't even settle on a damn term, but we call it described video around here) is hard to explain without playing examples, and it's a bit trickier dancing around matters of copyright when it involves the company who pays you money (and the companies whose material we describe). Hopefully someday I can find a way to make it work. But for the moment, as our company continues to work on a new website, I can direct you to a project running via streaming tonight and tomorrow. (Yeah, great notice, huh? Sorry. I have the Canadian inept-promotion gene.)

Now the CBC has settled and all is back to abnormal, they're premiering the two-part miniseries Trudeau II: Maverick In the Making, which is a prequel to the brilliant Trudeau miniseries we did a couple years ago (available now with our DV on DVD, ahem). It's on CBC-TV tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm eastern each night, and the DV is on the SAP (Secondary Audio Program) on regular and digital cable, and on its own channel on Bell ExpressVu.

Whether you get the SAP in Canada depends on your region, cable system, and a bunch of crap I haven't figured out yet. It's a total pain in the ass. And of course, other countries have their own setups. But this airing cuts through all that, because the DV audio is also running on our sister station VoicePrint Canada, which streams online. It's an .asx thing, but it's something. So wherever you are in this big ol' world, if you have a chance, duck in and catch a minute of it and go "ooooh, so THAT's what she does. That's kinda cool."

Description 07 - The Last 6 Ross Party

An era ends as a house gets condemned and a pack of musicians and ne'er-do-wells grow up in spite of ourselves. Includes music by Galore, Brian Dennehy's deep fried PB&J and someone throwing a mixing board at a television.

This is what you use to subscribe.
This is where you go if you couldn't give a rat's ass about anyone's bandwidth and just want the thing now.

Associated links:
National Anthem
Galore @ MySpace
Memory Bank (and @ MySpace)
The Ladies and Gentlemen
Crash Test Dummies
Tom Rivers Obituary
White Cowbell Oklahoma (had a housewarming party the same night, and THEY know how to use a dang fog machine)

Much of this podcast sounds particularly weird, especially the host stuff in the apartment. It's like all the creepy, tinny sounds we hate about noise-reduction without the actual noise-reduction. Oh, well. C'est le podcast.

So many more beautiful people could've been mentioned on this 6 Ross episode: Stewart Whitehead (ex-Grace Babies, now Talladega) had a story about Kevin burning something in the kitchen because he was in the shower "multitasking". Ron Koop of Tim Mech's Peep Show was a core 6 Ross-er (with Kev and Gooch and the Doctor) who didn't make it to the party, but you heard him talking CFL on Description 05. And Moe Berg (who you heard on Description 01 and produced the Galore track in this episode) would've been around except for the fact he was DJ'ing as usual at The Tap, which is where you're most likely to see the guys on any other Saturday night around last call. It's because of Moe I know any of these people (and many others I'm leaving out), and I may be more indebted to him for that than anything else.

I don't care what Kevin says: I watched Craig trying to take down the huge model of the Enterprise that used to hang from the centre room while Bonnie was crushing beer cans. That was so not like them, and I can't make shit like that up.

Your hostess with the most-ess

So there I was, minding my own business going through my Bloglines, and I check out the rss feed on paved.ca: your GTA roadmap, an excellent daily blog about stuff happening around T.O. There's some mention about Toronto podcasts, so I follow the link to the post. And there's a plug for Description! Holy crap! To the best of my knowledge (I'm too used to using that phrase at work), I've never had the podcast plugged by a site to whom I haven't contributed something. And the man behind paved is Marc Weisblott, who has been a ubiquitous media guy in this town as long as I can remember. (eye Magazine? Radio? Forums? Who's surprised he has a blog?) Evidently, I'm a "hostess," to use his terminology, which makes me feel like I should be wearing black slacks and blouse and should wear my hair in a sleek ponytail. (Fine, picture in your head what you want. Saves me the trouble of grooming.)

The show was grouped with an very interesting and much better-looking diary-type thing called Quirky Nomads because it's maintained by a person who's also from the States. The big quote from that one is "The story of a family that said, 'If the Republicans get any worse, we're moving to Canada.' And then? They really did." The Reagan-era Republicans of the time I first left were pretty bad, but they didn't really send me screaming to the Peace Bridge. Maybe if I'd stuck around, they would've.

It seems we were grouped together in this paved post because, as Marc writes, "Given how the overhyped medium has been slower to ignite in Canada than the U.S., maybe it's not a coincidence that both [podcasts linked] are from Americans who've taken up residence here." I don't know. As explained too often here, I found out about podcasting from a Canadian on a Canadian radio show, and was ultimately inspired by a Dutch/American guy, a British guy and a New Zealander. So go figure. Maybe there's something to be said for the American propensity to just say shit without considering any consequences, leaning on the notion that to have just said something was noble enough. I don't actually believe that, but perhaps it's in my DNA somewhere. Maybe it's my ebonics? Yeesh...

Now I sort of know what it feels like when, say, Indian actors are grouped together in some sort of comparison just because they happen to be of Indian descent. US people will become an "ethnic" group yet, dang it.

Sorry, this all sounds like I didn't appreciate the link. I often sound like that. But I completely appreciated it. It's just that this was the first time I've looked at the podcast from another perspective, and it was interesting. So thanks, Marc. Keep on paving.

Description 06 - CBC Time

I dig deep into our public broadcaster as it faces its biggest crossroads ever. Why should I care? You'll find out, and hear from a Nobel laureate, a former Prime Minister and Canadians who spearheaded the latest podcasting revolution.

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Associated links (deep breath...):
CBC on Wikipedia
CBC Unplugged
(Jeff Allen just told me that in the podcast, I referred to this site as CBC Unlocked. D'oh! Sorry. Thanks, Jeff - who also encouraged me to go to the second meetup. CBC Unlocked is the one below...)
CBC Unlocked (locked-out CBC'ers writing news stories they should've been writing for cbc.ca if they weren't locked out.)
The Caravan Unlocked (Shelagh Rogers' cross-country blog/podcasts)
King of Kensington on Wikipedia
Great Ottawa Citizen article on The Beachcombers (Strangely, on a site about the great Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood, who evidently guest-starred)
Massey Hall
R.H. Thomson's ShakespeareWorks
Alice Munro in the Canadian Encyclopedia
Royal Canadian Air Farce
The Right Honourable Joe Clark on about.com
June Callwood in the CBC archives
Jian Ghomeshi (or, as we called him when he was CYSF President at York U., "Jean Ghomeshi")
Dr. John C. Polanyi
Parachute Club

Dang, that's a lot of links. There are even more blogs and such, but you can go to the huge list of links to them on CBC Unplugged while they all remain or mutate into what they will become.

This podcast has the maximum edits I will EVER do for a podcast EVER! So many people doing so much different cool stuff. This whole CBC Lockout thing, while an event that shouldn't have happened in the first place, gave a lot of people's heads a shake, including mine. And it gave me some amazing new experiences. (Yes, it's all about me...)

Once of the cool things that happened is I met Justin Beach, another US expat who married a nice Canadian girl and found himself in the middle of this lockout thing. He's smarter than me, and just about as nuts. I met him at Tod Maffin's first meetup I mentioned a while ago. At the second one last Thursday, he generously offered to host the podcast files, so I'm taking him up on it in the next couple weeks. You may have noticed I've taken the first step and moved the feed to feedburner. Again, it's a process, so bear with me.