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Anyone who is willing to spend $200 million to invigorate a daily newspaper is a friend of mine.

This is what publishers need to do. Make it better. Now, not everyone has $200 million to throw around but  Mort Zuckerman has two things going for him: One he is passionate about newspapers and two, he has a net worth of about $8 billion.

His plans for the New York Daily News got me excited. Too bad a certain publisher in Canada who has a chain of tabloid newspapers does feel the same way.

Read all about Mort’s Great Plan! 

Wanna know what pisses professional writers off?

Check out the ads on Craigslist.com for writers and editors. They want 1,000 word articles for $12.

That’s absolute crap. Unless I cut and paste from the web it would take four hours research and write the article. Adding in interviews and that goes to a at least a full day.

But wait. This is what you get for crap. It’s shit writing, unsourced, dubious information and clumsy. Here’s a sample of what they said was an approved piece and something I should shoot for. HAAAAAAAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHA:

Yes – You Should Take a Good Quality Multivitamin 

Multivitamins have long been referred to as a cheap insurance policy for safeguarding health and well-being. In recent years, however, some in the medical and nutrition industry have created doubt in this long-standing belief, suggesting that taking a multivitamin is not necessary to obtain optimal health. Some even suggest that taking multivitamins can be harmful to one’s health.

The facts, however, tell a different story. In order to get at the truth, it’s helpful to look at the big picture.

Typical Diets

Use of multivitamins is widespread, partly due to the fact that people are becoming increasingly aware of the dangers posed by an unhealthy diet. A recent survey by the trade association Council for Responsible Nutrition found that while 80% of respondents believe a healthy diet to be important, only 20% actually adhere to one. This indicates that many people acknowledge the need to improve their eating habits. 

Quality Multivitamins - Bridging the Gap

Since eating healthy foods has become a challenge in today’s society, many of these same people turn to vitamin and mineral supplements. In the CRN survey, 41% of respondents said that they take a multivitamin every day. While there is no substitute for eating healthy foods, a quality multivitamin offers a way to fill in the nutritional gaps created by a less than optimal diet.

Even with the best of intentions, the average consumer often finds it difficult to live a healthy lifestyle.  Healthy food options are hard to come by for people in some areas of the world.  Also, the high cost of many organic and whole foods and the convenience of packaged, processed, low-nutrient foods make good eating habits harder to establish and maintain.  Multivitamins provide some of the micronutrients necessary for optimal health, while offering the convenience that busy people are looking for.

So, how important is vitamin supplementation? On an individual basis, the answer depends on one’s level of health and well-being. However, the perfect diet is an elusive goal, and there are several nutrients that are hard to obtain by diet alone.  In order for the body to function properly, for example, it needs at least 40 essential micronutrients, including vitamins, minerals and other bio-nutrients. When the body lacks these nutrients at the necessary levels, serious health consequences can occur.

Disease Prevention

Some of these consequences can be seen in the epidemics of disease that have plagued humankind for centuries. While scurvy and rickets (caused by vitamin C & D deficiency, respectively) are no longer a threat in developed areas of the world, other, even more devastating diseases have been linked to poor diet.  Modern society in particular has fallen victim to these conditions, as processed foods have replaced whole foods on an almost wholesale basis.

Heart disease, cancer and certain birth defects have all been attributed to the simple lack of proper nutrients. For example, studies since the mid-1990s have indicated that the lack of folic acid in women’s diets contributes to the incidence of Spina Bifida and other neural tube defects in their babies. 

Three new studies from the Archives of Internal Medicine, published by Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), reinforce the evidence that multivitamins play an important role in maintaining health and preventing disease.  One suggests that women with higher intakes of calcium have fewer incidences of cancer overall, and both men and women with higher calcium intakes have lower incidences of colon and digestive cancer.

The role of quality multivitamin and mineral supplements in preventing infection in diabetics has also been established by a variety of studies. A 2003 trial, conducted by researchers at the

What Do Quality Multivitamins Do for the Body?

In addition to their role in preventing disease, vitamins and minerals each have their own specific roles in the human body. Vitamins can be defined as a group of organic substances essential to normal metabolism.They are needed only in small amounts, but they each need to be present in adequate quantities in order for the body to function properly.  A quality multivitamin can provide these essential nutrients.

·        Vitamin A - essential to vision and growth.

·        Vitamin C -protects the immune system, forms tissue and heals wounds.

·        Vitamin D- essential for bone development and immunity, and has been recently linked to the prevention of breast cancer and respiratory infections.

·        Vitamin E - a powerful antioxidant that protects cell membranes from free radical damage, and is also essential for healthy skin.

Other vitamins also fulfill crucial roles for the body. Vitamin K assists with blood clotting, and thus the prevention of hemorrhage after an injury.  The B vitamins are responsible for a host of functions. They help form new red blood cells, protect the immune system and maintain energy levels.     

The Role of Minerals

Minerals are present in the human body in varying amounts. They all play an important role in keeping the body in balance. Minerals are classified as either microminerals or macrominerals. Microminerals are present in trace amounts. These include: copper, selenium, iodine, chromium, iron, fluorine, tin, zinc, nickel, vanadium, manganese, silicon and molybdenum. Macrominerals are present in larger amounts.  These include magnesium, phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, potassium and chlorine.

Some of the more common minerals and their functions are:

·        Copper- used by enzymes for proper metabolism, helps red blood cell formation

·        Zinc- helps metabolize carbohydrates and proteins, essential to enzyme function

·        Iodine- essential to thyroid function

·        Calcium – builds bone and may prevent some forms of cancer

·        Phosphorus- when in proper balance with calcium, builds bone and strengthens            cell walls

·        Iron- produces hemoglobin which delivers oxygen to the cells. Helps white blood cells produce compounds necessary in fighting bacteria

·        Potassium- assists the body’s electrical transmissions, keeps kidneys and heart working properly.

Multivitamins - A Long Term Investment   

By combining the power of essential vitamins and minerals, both working together to optimize overall health, a quality multivitamin packs a powerful nutritional punch.  The investment that

The same study reports that, of these sales, multivitamins were the leading item purchased. Access to information about nutrition, growing awareness of the importance of supplementation and concern about the lack of affordable, nutritious foods have fueled a steady market for quality multivitamin and mineral supplements.  They are an investment in one’s health that pays big dividends.

Someone wrote this for between $12 and $37.50. What a joke. You can see the construction is clumsy and the facts are unsourced and shakey. I sent back an edited version to the originator and told them to fuck off. If they’re not interested in quality, I won’t fucking work for 1.2-cents a word. Keerist on a bicyle people like this piss me off. They’ve devalued my industry and me in the process.

Here’s what they said in the offer:

We have a client who needs SEO articles written on the topic of health and nutrition.  These articles must be 1000 words each.   This client has offered us the opportunity to write hundreds of these articles for her.  If she’s happy with the content, this will mean a lot of potential work for our writers.  So it is important for the quality of this work to be very high.   I’m asking you to please write one article based on the topic/keyword and title listed below.  The client has provided us with some reference URLs that contain information you can use to help write your content. I have also attached a sample article that the client has already approved.  

We need you to submit this article no later than Thursday.  If the client approves it, we will assign you more articles, which you will access by logging into the system.  Please contact me with any questions.  Thank you!

Here’s what they said when I questioned the rate:

Senior Editor
Interact Media 
beth@interactmedia.com

Topic/Keyword - cold and fever

Title -  Exercise a Cold, Rest a Fever? Reference URLs – http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/exercise/AN01097http://www.quantumhealth.com/news/exercise_with_cold_or_flu.htmlhttp://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/01/10/don-t-starve-a-cold-of-exercise.aspxhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/health/nutrition/25best.html?em

A trained monkey could do better. And that my friends is why writers can’t make money on the Internet. Some idiio

J Students? Are you listening. Get out now. Become stockbrokers or Bankers. Even if you go to jail for fraud you will have lived a richer life.

Trust me on this. The rest of you writers go spam her and her evil company. They deserve all the abuse we can throw at them.

.

Well forgive me for being nostalgic. Maybe it’s a function of age; maybe it’s the time of year but watching the rerun of the 1969 Moon Landing is bringing tears to my eyes.

I was 13 years old and my mum woke me in the dead of night. Dad was on the road and we huddled inthe darkness around the single black and white TV in the living room to watch it live from America…or I suppose, from the moon.

It was timed for American audiences….we were five hours ahead…so it was the dead of night to me…..but what a magical world!

See, that’s where my love of technology was born. The idea that with enough computers and programs and all that stuff we could do anything. I didn’t know what a computer was or what software was but I knew Mission Control and I knew the Space Program like very kid my age. Years later while working in Houston, I went to the Space Centre and saw the rockets. It was a true Geek moment.

I never questioned that we’d have Space Stations or travel to other Galaxies. Star Trek  - which came to England around the same time as the Moon Landing seems so logical.

Of course! It was only natural that there were other galaxies, other life. Wireless communications - when it finally arrived in the 80s was just late. I’d seen it on the screen for years.

I watched the future unfold on TV just as I watch the Discovery Channel today and I still stand in wonder and awe.

Inside, I’m still that 13-year-old kid who thinks that anything is possible if you can just devote enough resources to the problem.

Walk  on the Moon? Pshaw! Done that. Saw it on TV. Space Station? Watched Star Trek? Time Travel? Dr. Who.

Then of course the pragmatic me kicks in. Yes, it costs billions and it takes forever. In my grand kids’ lifetime (Megs, Jon, don’t get any ideas) we’ll travel beyond our own galaxy. I already have with World Wide Telescope, Microsoft’s application which stiches together all the images of space from all those telescopes around th world in the same way we can look at Earth through Google Earth or Microsoft’s version of that app - or indeed the oceans.

The only question will be: why did it take so long.

Which only really underlines how much we really don’t know. 

Well, one man’s bitter pill is another’s revenue stream….or something like that.

Take the city strike. No sooner was it underway than some young bucks were out to make a buck, hauling trash for $4 a bag. Even the Granite Club got in on the act, taking members’ trash for free until the city got wise and stepped in to slap them with cease and decist orders.

Some folks are making a killing though. Today I was the provincial offences court at Sheppard and Markham which is a a half hour haul there and a half hour back.

The purpose of my visit was to request a court date for trial because on June 26 this year I was slapped with a $385 ticket for noise under the city bylaw 591-2.

My asshole neighbour John Horton and I have had a long running battle over his assertion that his rights to peace and quiet mean I can’t sneeze on my deck without the police arriving.

Of course, what’s truly amazing is that the police arrive within minutes of the complaint which is all the more curious because most people in Scarborough complain they could be assaulted in their beds and the police would still take half an hour to get there. Amazing service I must say. Perhaps there’s an inside connection there to the police radio room? Who knows but they do seem to attend very quickly in my experience and that of my other neighbour who as also run into Horton’s ire.

Anyway, I’m gearing up to take this ticket to court and fight it with gusto. I’m actually looking forward to it because the officer who issued it got me out of bed to come to the door after they arrived at about 11:30 that night. I went to bed about 11:15 or so, which begs the question, how loud was the music and how long and what time was it playing since the house was dark when the cops arrived.

More on that on a later day.

So I arrive at Markham and Sheppard to find City strikers picketing the parking lot. The parking lot for god’s sake!

It was a ten minute wait and there was already a car in front of me. Meanwhile uniformed cops milled around writing tickets for cars that parked on the street.

The alternative was to go across the street and park at a privte lot, a banquet hall, where the beared guy with a money pouch was raking in the dough. There must have been 200 cars on the lot at $5 a pop and I figured he turned the spots over three times a day.

Doo the math folks. That’s up to $3,000 cash a day. How much is he kicking back to those city workers I wondered? He wouldn’t say.

Then there’s the police. It’s a cash bonanza for them since they’re writing tickets non stop. But, oh, not one cop lifts a finger to point out that the strikers aren’t picketing, that is walking across the entrance of the Green P lot, but actually clustered and stationary.

And they make no attempt to explain their cause to those waiting to get in. It’s a deliberate time waster.

“This is what we’ve negotiated with the city,” the picket captain says.

Really? The city is willing to bargain away citizen’s rights to enter public property for lawful means while illegal tactics get police protection?

Next, try and get in the court house. For a simple matter of filling out a form requesting trial there’s a 40 minute to one hour line up just to get in the building.

Inside, the waiting times drag on and on.

Why can’t the Province declare a moratorium on the 15 day wait for POA offenses until the strike is over? That would make more sense than have people waste their time and simply generate funds for the already swollen City of Toronto coffers.

Even more aggravating, when I took a picture of a cop writing a ticket his partner got all snotty. He even suggested I could be charged with assaulting police or causing a disturbance.

“Did you get his consent,” the cop demanded.

“Don’t need it,” sez I. “It’s a public event at a public place.”

“Where’s your media ID?”

“At home but will this do?
I shot him my middle finger with my Toronto Sun 20 year ring.

Whoops.

I’ve always gotten on with the police. I know they do a difficult job and sometimes they get crapped on for no good reason.

But lately, and it is just lately, in my dealings with the rank and file I have increasingly found them to have attitude, be overly aggressive, contemptuous and all too ready to make threats about charges that have no merit in fact at all.

And that’s a sad statement because my son, 19, says this is the way his dealings with police go and have gone since he was 16.

Citizens of Toronto have rights too and its about time our rights were up held a little more than those damn strikers who have deprived kids of daycare, sports teams of park and homes of garbage pick up, just to mention the most aggravating points.

Good day!  Why? Any day we get to help less fortunate kids is a good day so forgive the massive missive.  As freelancers you know how important it is to network and get out to industry events. That’s why you are getting this fabulous invite to this extra-special, funkadelic fund raiser at which fun, frivolity and some kick ass rock and roll bands will make you stomp, cheer, wiggle, warble, tap your feet and do things you’d thought you’d forgotten how to do  - and that will just be in the line up for the washrooms. On Friday June 5^th the News Media in Toronto with some assistance from some Hunky Firefighters, will crank it up for the Children’s Aid Foundation.Newzapalooza V - the Media Battle of the Bands - is a night of laughs, music and a cash bar at the Opera House on Queen St. E near Broadview.

Appearing on stage for their 15 minutes of fame (and not one nanosecond more) will be a selection of bands whose musicians are drawn from the ranks of the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, CP, Reuters/Thomson, and Toronto Sun along with Backdraft, the unofficial band of the TFD.(Ladies, the inside scoop says these boys are hot, hard-bodied, manly men so, if you’re single, or want to be for the night, don’t delay. Heck, I might even try and date one of them.) 

After each performance, we will be critiqued and pilloried by a panel of celebrity judges, a la Media Idol, and the band with the most points gets bragging rights for a year.  Judges at this juncture are, comic impresario Mark Breslin, Canadian Idol and music maestro Farley Fox and This Hour Has 22 Minutes and all around laugh mistress Geri Hall. MC for the event is the irrepressible Jaymz Bee whom I’ve known since he was the kid working at the corner video store and telling me how much better Betamax was than VHS.  Tickets are a mere $20 and, of course, all proceeds go to the Children’s Aid Foundation. To get your tickets for this must attend event and for more details, please go to http://www.newzapalooza.ca. This event draws about 500 to 600 people and you may know some of them so come mingle, mince about, make nice, network, drink (but don’t drive) and bring your dancing slippers (You’ll need them for that line up at the washroom). And if you can’t attend buy a ticket anyway! Ian Harvey 

David Simon was a reporter for 18 years at Baltimore Sun who took a buy out in 1995 and went on to Hollywood to create The Wire.

Here he addresses Congress about the demise of the once proud newspaper industry.

It brought a lump to my throat. 

You know what I hate?

Money grabs.

First Rogers jacks up my Internet rate by 10% and then gives me LESS service by throttling or  traffic shaping.

Then the bastards tell me that instead of a 15% discount on bundled services I’m only going to get 10% unless I sign up for another service…like what? Their crappy home phone service which isn’t really VoIP?

Oh, but I have call and beg them for the 10% and commit to a two year deal.

Bastards.

Then here comes CIBC quietly jacking up my Line of Credit rate by a percentage point so I now pay 5.5% instead of 4.5% - geez, you’d think they’d be thrilled to have a customer that not only pays their bills on time and always has done but responsibly manages credit. Which is more than can say about the CIBC who got their fingers caught in the derivatives cookie jar.

And you wonder why the general public are more cynical than ever about corporations and banks?

Screw the bail out…let them all burn in hell. 
 

This guy says it all. We freelancers are smart!

Last Thursday the Globe and Mail’s life section led with a story by Zosia Bielski about online dating sites.

There was the usual blather from sociologists about the break down of morality because some of the sites promote promescuity.

Shocking!

 What was more curious though, was that Lavalife.com was listed as one of those sites which encourages “raunchy” behaviour.

Bullshit. Utter bullshit.

Yes, there’s an intimate encounters section on LL - or Liar’s Lilfe as I often call it (Plentyoffish.com is often called Plenty of Freaks but in the interests of full disclosure I have a profile on both sites) and it about getting laid.

But the truth is few people ever do. For the most part Intimate encounters is set up for women who need to feel they are still desirable sexually and for the most part have no intention of following through.

(BTW I learned that from a NYT magazine article a couple of month back and from Oprah, that what women really, want, what they really, really want, is to be desired.)

It is also set up as a way to trap men who list their profiles in the two other sections, Dating and Relationships, and allows women to say “aha!” in catching a prospective suitor cruising the cheap seats looking for a quick fling.

The majority of members, in my experience and from the stories others have told me, are simply looking to date and fall in love.

The reason I bring this up, of course, is that as an online dater (what, you think I hang out in bars to meet women?) it upsets me when I introduce a lady to friends or at an event and somwhere along the line it comes up that we met online.

Those smug long-time married always seem to have a little smile on their faces but the truth is far from their imaginations.

Yes, people meet and have sex. People meet and have sex at the office too but you don’t see section leads suggesting the office is a hotbed of sexual liasons. Well, you do, but again, it’s blown out of proportion. Okay, pun intended.

But Lavalife as the centre of a plot to degrade the moral fabric of society?

Gimme a break. Online dating is just life facebook.com and there are many many sites dedicated to sexual encounters, Lavalife.com just doesn’t happen to be one of the prime leaders, though I suppose it doesn’t hurt their marketing efforts.

If you want sex online try fetlife.com, alt.com, ashleymadison, sugardaddy.com and adultfriendfinder.com.

But again, be prepared for the usual collection of teases and wankers. And more to the point, if you’re married or in a relationship, be aware that your partner may be setting a honey trap for you.

Oh, yeah, that happens more than you think and I know two or three examples first hand.

Not that I’ve ever been caught!

LOL 

You can push and shove us only so far.

Today, a light of hope that the industry which has fed, sheltered and raised me and my family for 33 years is finally getting serious.

AP is going to go after those who cut and paste their copy.

 Hooray…I might just start doing the same thing.