My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, read the article about SlutWalk, if only for the inevitable “look I’m not defending rapists, but you ladies really shouldn’t encourage those rapists” comments.

Over at Torontoist, I take a strong stance in favour of naming rights.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I was going to do another answering-questions post last night but then some news happened and Torontoist asked me to write about it so I did.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

But for now my weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

The CRTC did something bad, but not quite as bad as the other bad things they’ve done recently, so a lot of people didn’t hear about it. I have attempted to correct that at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Over at Balloon Juice, Mistermix has a complaint about somebody waxing poetic about the virtues of Groupon:

Groupon sells coupons, not invisible condoms or no-hangover martinis. I have no doubt that Groupon can be quite profitable, but coupons have been around for a hundred years. Groupon competitors will spring up, just as they have in the real world. Retailers are going to get skeptical about whether coupon shoppers are potential return buyers or actual skinflint cheapskates, just as they have in the real world.

That’s not really a fair comparison. Traditional coupons are valued and printed on the basis that a certain percentage of them (I remember reading a while back that it was less than one in four) will be used, but have to account for the possibility that they will all be used, which is why most of them offer a relatively low rate of savings (usually about 12-20% of retail cost, although occasionally you get lucky and get a coupon for 20-30%).

Groupon, however, values its discounts on the basis that everyone who buys into it will use it and pays in advance for the privilege; it’s not a coupon so much as it is a floating group purchase rate in which anybody can participate, and most sellers working through Groupon are lowering their profit rate but not eliminating it entirely on the basis that selling more stuff to more people for less profit individually means more profit overall, especially if even a small fraction of them become return customers.

Groupon is simply more efficient than coupons for all parties involved, which is why the speaker’s sentiment – while florid – is reasonably accurate.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist, and I just want to say that Brett Lamb’s cartoon this week is one of my favorites of all he’s ever done. The happy werewolf cracks me up every time.

This video:

Now, predictably there has been the sort of “oh god those kids don’t know what an eight-track is I’m so old” commentary from around the internets, and that’s… predictable, I guess. But I don’t really see it that way, because other than that one kid who thought the 3.5″ floppy disk was a camera, the kids mostly were dead-on about what these things were. They identified storage media as storage media, the telephone as a telephone – hell, they mostly even figured out what the eight-track was, and honestly I didn’t recognize it as an eight-track until I saw the cassette. (Sure, the one kid thought it was a movie rather than an album, but so what? You can’t tell what’s stored on a piece of storage media until you play it. And anybody laughing at the kids trying to operate the rotary dial phone should think about how much work it took their most tech-unsavvy friend to master their cellphone.)

Hell, when the one kid started turntabling on the kiddie record player that made me feel the opposite of old. Not young, but rather… timeless. Give someone a record player, and they will start scratching with it. We don’t change as much as we think we do, and there’s good in that.

My weekly tv column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.