Culture & Sports

Home Field Woes for the U of O

From The CIS Blog – August 23, 2012

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With Ottawa’s historic Lansdowne Park under construction in preparation for future CFL and NASL teams, the Gee-Gees football program will have to say so long to their home stadium for the upcoming season.

While the closure of the stadium for the upcoming year was no surprise, it was just announced in the past week where the Gee-Gees will host their OUA opponents. And it’s been called out-of-the-box and out-of-the-city thinking.

Yes, the Gee-Gees will spend 2012 playing their home games at (drumroll, please) Beckwith Park, just outside the town of Carleton Place. The field, technically located in the hamlet of Black’s Corners, is located approximately 50 kilometres from the campus, and translates into about a 40-minute drive.

While the university is offering shuttles to and from games, the idea of riding a bus for 40 minutes to the middle of nowhere may not have the same allure as the usual university football experience — and when I say the middle of nowhere, I do mean it.

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Brantford Roller Girls Ready for First Year

From The Sputnik – March 30, 2011

“Do you believe it is time for Brantford women to represent sisterhood, strength and sport with passion and commitment?”

For Tasha Buscombe, that time has come.

Buscombe, also known as Stella Flash, is the co-chair of a new local roller derby league that started with a Facebook campaign that asked women in the Brantford area if any interest existed in bringing the sport to the city.

Now, in the spring of 2011, the Belle City Roller Girls are recruiting players and practicing in preparation of the upcoming summer schedule that will see Belle City travel across Ontario for competition.

Roller derby is a sport that has taken off in recent years, which Buscombe feels could be a result of an increase in movies about the sport.

One example of this is the Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page hit derby movie “Whip It,” which helped bring international attention to the sport. It seems to have worked. Buscombe says that the past two years have seen new leagues pop up across southern Ontario, from Guelph all the way down to London. In fact, the league out of Hamilton which was just established in 2006, is Canada’s oldest.

Buscombe says that the idea to bring a team to Brantford started at the grassroots level, where she just went to members of the community to see if interest existed.

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Forever Remembered

My apologies for the long delay in getting another post up. It’s been a rather busy last two months.

The following is a piece that I wrote for a course last year. Given the assignment to write about a certain place in Brantford (however, restaurants, bars & stores were excluded) I decided to take on a rather challenging subject – the historic, beautiful, and tragic war memorial.

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A Canadian flag atop a long silver pole whips in the wind, blocking out all noise from the traffic on the busy intersection behind me.

Flowerbeds line the interlocked path that I am descending, though today they are empty and covered in a thin white sheet, evidence of the Canadian winter that just ended.

As I get closer, the eyes of the four women and three men standing tall in front of me seem fixed on me, or perhaps the armouries across the street.

Of course, that’s impossible. The lifelike and life-sized bronze statues–four of which signify the importance of women during the war, while the other three are replicas of soldiers from the army, the navy and the air force–have been frozen in these spots since being unveiled 18 years ago.

Between them, engraved into the towering grey structure, read the words: “They Lost Their Lives For Humanity.” Along the ground below the statues lies another flowerbed, which on Remembrance Day is filled with wreaths of all colours paying tribute to fallen soldiers; but on this February day, it sits empty.

Atop this foundation stands the focal point of the memorial: a towering slab of grey limestone rising upward, cutting into the clear blue sky.

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Bill C-11 Threatens Canadian Digital Consumer

From The Sputnik – February 15, 2012

Despite the recent defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, its sister bill is creeping its way through the Canadian House of Commons.

Bill C-11, better known as the Copyright Act, is a federal bill that would change the way that consumers can interact with digital media.

One of the main provisions of the bill surrounds digital locks, which could restrict a customers access to DVDs, CDs and e-books.

The bill is being lobbied by companies associated with the entertainment industry, which has drawn numerous critics who argue the federal government is playing to appease corporations rather than citizens.

While those in the music industry claim that digital locks are necessary for the economic stability of the industry, Michael Geist has spoken out against the validity of these claims.

Geist, a law professor and chair of Canada Research in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has been rallying against the bill through his blog since it came back in front of Parliament.

He argues that Canada is one of the leaders in music sales, ranking sixth in the world in digital music sales.

Essentially, digital locks are a tool which prevent consumers from using purchased media across different forums.

For example, someone buying an e-book for an e-reader would be limited to using solely that e-reader to read it. Digital locks would prevent the consumer from shifting that content onto a computer or different e-reader, and Bill C-11 would actually make doing so a criminal offence.

The same situation applies to transferring downloaded music from a computer to a MP3 player.

Marc Laferriere, the federal NDP candidate for Brant in the 2011 election, spoke out about this exploitation of consumers.

“Anytime we update our platform device, we’re looking at having to buy content again,” Laferriere said. “I don’t think that’s the interconnectivity, or the multi-use way that technology should be going. I think that if I buy something on my iPad, I want it to play on my computer, I want it to play on my TV, and if I update my iPad to an iZad or whatever is the next reiteration, having to buy Ghostbusters 2 seven times is not my ideal way of going through life as a consumer.”

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New WLUSU Structure Threatens Brantford’s Voice

From The Sputnik – January 19, 2012

For the first time in seven years, Brantford students will not be guaranteed a voice in the Wilfrid Laurier University Students Union.

A new structure released yesterday from the office of WLUSU President Nicholas Gibson threatens to eliminate any student voice from Brantford in the coming year.

The major change to the structure that will affect Brantford is the dissolving of the Executive Vice President: Brantford position, which Holly Kaiser currently sits as.

Currently, the Executive Vice-President role has the privilege of speaking with the university and sitting on some thirty campus committees, however that WLUSU Brantford voice will disappear

The Brantford Operations Team, which is the EVP position along with the three associate vice-presidents, will be replaced by a new position known as Vice President: Campus Experience Brantford.

The decision has left some WLUSU Brantford coordinators scratching their heads.

“It’s a lot for one person to take on, I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it’s going to be a lot of hard work, a lot for them to do,” says Jordan Copeland, a fourth-year student who works at the PeerConnect Desk. “I didn’t see any problems with the system, so it’s kind of the if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

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Putting the “Fun” Back in Fundamentals

From The Sputnik – February 16, 2011. Also ran on the CUPWire.

It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday and AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is reverberating through the dressing room while the players discuss their Saturday nights.

Head coach Andrew Francella, a third-year concurrent education student, finishes filling up the team’s water bottles and comes out of the bathroom to try to motivate the 11 smiling faces waiting for him.

“Alright, guys, bring it in,” Francella says to his team, the Brantford Avengers. “We’ve been in the last few games we played and if we play hard and hustle, I think we can win this one.”

This morning, he’s wearing a navy hoodie, a pair of faded blue jeans and flashy grey Nikes as he lays out the strategy for the morning’s contest. He emphasizes that the team must continue working on clearing the puck off the boards in the defensive zone and setting up plays from the point on offence.

“But the most important thing today is what, guys?” Francella asks. “I’ll give you a hint: It starts with an ‘F.’”

“Fun!” shouts back one enthusiastic player.

Francella asks again, louder this time, and the whole team screams the answer back this time.

“You have to keep it light-hearted because when you’re learning you want to emphasize, ‘Yeah, you’re still learning, you’re not going to get everything right away,’” Francella said in an interview later. “That’s why making sure they’re having fun is the biggest thing so that when they make mistakes, they don’t get down on themselves.”

While most students are sleeping in, sometimes in an effort to get rid of a hangover, Francella has spent each Saturday and Sunday morning this year, waking up early to coach his team of eight- and nine-year-olds.

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The Newspaper That Almost Seized The Future

An amazing piece here – albeit very very long (took me about four sittings to get through it) – by the Columbia Journalism Review that looks into the San Jose Mercury, a newspaper that had a headstart on the electronic wave that has shaken the journalism industry.

The main character in the piece, Bob Ingle, was an absolute visionary for what the web could do for newspapers in bolstering content. Following a failed attempt at something called Viewtron, Ingle launced the Mercury Center, a home for extra content, online classifieds, and other important features.

Though it started out as something small in terms of extra content (transcript, press releases, etc.), Ingle grew the project over years, moving it to become one of the first on the World Wide Web, where they were then able to expand into a terrain now necessary, though not all that beneficial, to newspapers. These are things like adding audio content to accompany stories, running online classifieds (especially important in the booming Silicon Valley region at the time), and adding features that allowed the reader to have fast access to stories of interest to them.

Everything that we are still talking about newspapers having to do today – though today we talk about it on iPads and Tablets instead of on PCs – Ingle had the upper-hand on. That is the story of how the Merc almost seized the future, but ultimately, was unable to.