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Reviews

This section contains reviews of various items.

The New Moon where I hope they serve beer in Hell to the Forth Kind!

Nov 23rd
Movie Reviews

Yes once again the post with a really long esoteric name is a movie reviw post for the following 3 movies I have seen (at least once) over the past week.

Lets start with the biggest New Moon the continuation of the Twilight Saga. I never left a theatre before so wanting to read a book then with this most epic cliff hanger of an ending. The first movie introduces the love story, where the second explains the relationship between the native’s haterid towards the vampires and introduces the senero to be portrade in the final two incarnations, and then stop abruptly that the story is not complete, and disappointment that you must wait for the next one.

The next movie is “I hope they serve beer in hell” for such a long title this is one of the best comedies fo the year, based off a true story, up along the same genre as the Hangover. It crosses elements between Weading Crashers and The Hangover. This is most definately a must see.

The last movie is the Fourth Kind. This is a really bad movie a slight thriller based of a (possibly) true story about abductions across Alaska. It blew, not worth even renting.

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Arriving to Victoria BC

Nov 13th
Events, Movie Reviews, Travel

At long last I have finally arrived in Victoria. Five hours on a plane is really long much longer that I had really imagined. During the longest lag of the journey I got to see “My Sister’s Keeper” for the first time. I found it to be really an enjoyable movie, in the respect that you did not know who to feel sad for. Then it throws a huge twist that make the plot even more intriguing.

Upon first impression of Victoria is that it has an appearance of a fairy tile that has come to life especially now that its the holidays and the lights of colour in and on everything.

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Barron writer does not understand nature of Saint John

Sep 8th
News, Reviews
A real breakdown of Saint John

A real breakdown of Saint John

Today I picked up a copy of The Barron, UNB Saint John’s student produced paper. I came across the article “Travelling around Saint John: what you need to know” by staff writer Simon Jack. It does not take long for one to realize the writer did not understand the history of Saint John or the Transit system.

The first point so a can move on was the reason he did not find information on the “Night Owl” run was that it was canceled in Spring 2008.

Now to the areas of Saint John, to refer to drawing a random line to determine the limits of both Millidgeville and South End is vastly poor research. The boundary for Millidgeville dates back to the 1950′s era boundary of city limits. Basically the official boundary is if a line was drawn from Somerset Street and Sandy Point Road westward to Pokiok Point that was the city limits pre-amalgamation in Saint John.

To define the South End one has to go much further back in time, back to 1785 (the beginning.) In the Royal Charter that created Saint John defined the 4 wards of the “South Central” peninsula was split into quarters at Duke and Sydney Streets. The upper class mostly lived in the west side of the harbour, or northern two central wards. The poor (very broke poor) lived to the southern wards of Duke Street making the “South End” boundary Duke Street. Through the next 20-30 years the South-enders made money suing the rich for literally everything. Leading to the creation of New Brunswick’s first Law School, that lead to UNB’s School of Law, as there were not enough lawyers to handle the workload.

In conclusion, it also needs to be pointed out the reasoning for the layouts of the streets have much to do with them being planned before those areas were part of Saint John in many cases.

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King’s Landing and Fredericton Market

Jul 30th
Reviews
Dripping Water at King's Landing.

Dripping Water at King's Landing.

Over the weekend I rented a car and took my aunt Rena out to King’s Landing. While I was there I took this picture of the water pouring from a horse water feeder. This has got to be one of the best depth of field close-up pictures I have ever taken.

I really like King’s Landing there is gust something about history, especcial social history that just totally fascinates me.

Again on the way we stopped at the Boyce Market in Fredericton. The absolute best feature of the market is the German bakers. There is absolutely not a better makers of really good foods then the Germans.

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Why not to “Save Local”

May 18th
News, Rants

Today I seem ads on CTVGlobeMedia stations that are urging the government to require cable/satellite distributors to pay for distributing the signal. I think this is just plain wrong. Here in Saint John there are 4 broadcast stations CBAT (CBC Fredericton but licensed and has its main transmitter in Saint John), CKLT (Has no programming differences from CJCH (CTV Atlantic) in Halifax, NS), CIHF-TV-2 (a semi satellite of CIHF-TV known as Global Maritimes from Halifax.), and CBAFT-1 which is a re-transmitter of CBAFT the Radio-Canada Moncton feed.
When it comes to local programming CTV is the absolute worst, as I have noted before at most has 2 stories from the Saint John area and 4-5 total from the entire Province of New Brunswick on a good day. Global TV despite their severe cut backs have managed to keep their news stories basically equal per province.
The basics is that all 4 of these broadcasters offer their signals for free over-the-air (a.k.a. poverty-vision). The cable company simply re-transmits the feed via an antenna to cables to the subscribers. Why should we pay to have something that we get for free anyway? In fact this even benefits the TV stations by making it more convenient to watch the stations resulting in more viewers rather than switching over to better content from away. Thus removing ad dollars.

In less dense markets like the Maritimes TV must come up with a different model in order to survive. Depending on a single news program is clearly not the way to go, but neither is alienating the viewers by making some pay, while others do not. Do we consider a TV tax like the United Kingdom? I don’t thinks so either but fees must not be duel standard. The CRTC recently made a decision that requires distributors to no longer require a bundle of channels. In this schema you can choose to not purchase stations, adding fees will just doom local programming to certain failures.

If you want to see more about this CTV is promoting the site http://www.ctv.ca/savelocal/.

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