1 THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSITY I had to send away my watch for repairs a short while back, and I just got it back a couple of days ago; one of the things that had changed, besides the fact that it now worked, was that the time was slightly out. This morning, when I put it on my wrist, I thought to myself that it might be a good idea to tune into CBC around noon and set my watch to their clock, since it’s nice to have a timepiece on you that’s totally accurate down to the second and instantly accessible. Then I went on the Internet and immediately set my watch to the correct atomic time simply by seeing that more bad news about mishandled spending has emerged in the sordid story of the University of Regina and its embattled, now-shuttered University-Industry Liason Office. Because this kind of news about this specific story has recently been reported with a startling regularity, you see.
2 STREAMAGEDDON! Netflix is going to lose about 2,000 videos, but it’s okay because apparently most of them are trash and they’re moving over to the bizarrely bad idea that is Warner Archive (“Yes, I’ll pay ten bucks a month for as much of the Best Of 77 Sunset Strip that I can watch!” -literally no human ever) and the money train may just keep rolling in unabated for Netflix. Can someone who genuinely cares about tech industry stuff maybe confirm or deny that pulling out of Netflix is sort of like record labels deciding to just sell their own proprietary music format from their own proprietary player and ditching iTunes? Because that’s sorta what it feels like. (And for a glimpse at what we may now be missing, while the Twitter search algorithm still lets us see the tweets, here’s music writer Ned Raggett livetweeting 1974 Joe Don Baker vehicle Golden Needles.)
3 SWEEPING IMMIGRATION REFORM IT IS! Unless you’re gay married, apparently.
4 A POUND OF CURE Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland – one of the best magazine writers going, no doubt – has an incredible piece up that is in theory about her cousin, a parricidal schizophrenic, but is in reality about the sorry state of mental health support systems in America. Of course, that’s America, and Canada’s different, right? And even if Canada were to make moves away from having strong mental health support, they wouldn’t be part of a long-term trend, right?
5 THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT BANGLADESH “The problem is the browns” -Jonathan Kay, basically. “There are problems in Bangladesh but the conditions global capitalism has either created or tacitly encouraged in the country are partially to blame, and more specifically the failure to date of organized labour to win better conditions for hazardous manufacturing jobs outside of the Global Northwest has created an economy where situations like this are to be expected” -Gawker’s Max Read, sorta. “How can we use this to sell more Gildan ads” -the Globe & Mail
6 PALATE CLEANSER Jason Collins, an NBA center and longtime free agent, came out of the closet recently in an article he wrote for the upcoming issue of Sports Illustrated. The Nation’s Dave Zirin – maybe the single most essential sportswriter working right now – explains why it matters: “More people will explore the parameters of the possible because Jason Collins chose to be a pioneer.”
