This year the CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author, essayist, cultural observer, and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik.
His subject is
winter - the season, the space, the cycle. Gopnik takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter.
Listen to Winter: Five Windows on the Season Streaming files for this years lecture will be available until Friday, November 18. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation
on Nov 14, 2011 -
11 comments
Book rescue turns nightmarish. A Saskatchewan couple saved 350,000 books from being burned by a neighbor, but now the house they bought just to store the collection is collapsing from the weight. What to do?
posted by Tsuga
on Jun 8, 2011 -
113 comments
What does it mean to be Canadian? It isn't about an ethnicity, a religion, a language, or a shared heritage or history. From
CBC's Ideas comes the two-part radio documentary,
Being Canadian. "From east to west, public intellectuals and private citizens (both new and old Canadians), tell film-maker Sun-Kyung (Sunny) Yi about the concerns, the questions, and the challenges of living together in a multicultural and diverse society." It is also the story of how and why a Korean family became Canadian, first in the law, and then in their hearts.
posted by Hildegarde
on Dec 29, 2010 -
120 comments
"
It would have been quite a news conference, and it very nearly happened. Last fall, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, after months of intense, private talks, agreed to face the media together to declare their agreement that research shows
the 'benefits' and 'positive impacts' of supervised injection sites for intravenous drug users. For the RCMP, making such a statement would have been a turning point: the Mounties would have had to distance themselves from
dubious studies, commissioned by the force itself, that were critical of
Insite, Vancouver’s
pioneering safe
injection facility."
But it didn't happen.
posted by Alvy Ampersand
on Aug 23, 2010 -
50 comments
Out of Control is a 45 minute documentary that was recently broadcast on
The Fifth Estate program on Canadian TV. It is the story of "Ashley Smith . . . a troubled 19-year-old [who] choked herself to death with a strip of cloth at Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ontario." The documentary features video shot inside Ashley Smith’s cell. It is a sad and at times disturbing look at the difficulties of dealing with a prisoner with mental illness. [Language and some images are NSFW].
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Jan 9, 2010 -
5 comments
On December 24
th, 1979, radio personality Alan Maitland started a tradition on the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program
As It Happens. That Christmas Eve, Maitland read a Frederick Forsyth story that featured the unlikely meeting of a
Vampire and a
Mosquito. His telling has been re-aired every year since.
[more inside]
posted by Decimask
on Dec 25, 2009 -
7 comments
Something awful in a new CBC anthem. The CBC's Hockey Night in Canada is one of the highest-rated programs on Canadian television. It's something of a national shrine to our beloved sport. For the past 40-odd years, it's had a distinctive theme which most Canadians could hum. After
something of a fiasco, the CBC lost the rights to the theme. They're running a contest to replace the venerated theme.
A Something Awful forum user composed
a truly dreadful entry ("mostly comprised of cat and sheep sounds, baby cries, and gunshots/explosions"), and got the community to 'vote it up' on the Anthem contest site. You really need to hear the awfulness to truly appreciate it.
[more inside]
posted by dbarefoot
on Jul 18, 2008 -
69 comments
Hydrogen fuel has been
discussed many times on MeFi, but I wasn't able to find a previous link to this
video clip (Google Video warning) showing Jack Nicholson, circa
1978, showing off his hydrogen powered car. The accents of the broadcasters, in case you're wondering, are east coast Canadian, possibly
Newfoundland.
posted by Zinger
on Aug 24, 2006 -
21 comments
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is pumping out a pile of podcasts that have covered
the importance of offensive comics to Art Spiegelman,
600 bands over 54 shows,
Captain America versus the American government,
Amy Sedaris and geekdom,
the journey of young immigrants,
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and Harper's publisher John MacArthur discussing Europe and America perspectives since 9/11,
the after life,
sex with monkeys,
what radio producers do,
the french word "corps",
Bonnie Fuller's "The Joys of Much Too Much: Go For the Big Life — The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You've Ever Wanted (Even If You're Afraid You Don't Have What It Takes)",
Veteran Washington reporter Helen Thomas and some other bits & bobs [Breakdown inside]
posted by boost ventilator
on Jun 5, 2006 -
25 comments
First World AIDS Day: CBC archive A short clip from December 1st, 1988, the first World AIDS Day (with a Canadian focus). Also of interest from the CBC archives are
two pages of radio and video clips (21 in all) on the early years of the disease.
posted by livii
on Dec 1, 2005 -
18 comments
Elections BC (Source: CBC) is having a tough time keeping up with all the bloggers "
publishing partisan messages during the current election campaign.". Under current law they are asking all bloggers to register as advertisers, while also going on record as being open to changing the law.
posted by futureproof
on May 15, 2005 -
14 comments
Not guilty. It's been nearly 20 years since
Air India Flight 182 crashed into the ocean off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard, after a bomb went off in the luggage compartment. Today, the two main suspects in the case were acquitted.
Families of the victims are upset,
disgusted. Of the 329
victims, 82 of them were under the age of 12. Let's take a moment to remember them; victims of one of the worst terrorist acts prior to September 11th, 2001.
posted by juliebug
on Mar 16, 2005 -
53 comments
Screw The Vote! The CBC is taking an unusual approach to the looming Canadian election. Follow host Jian Ghomeshi as he travels around the country encouraging not to vote, in a fascinating attempt at reverse psychology.
Comes with its very own
propaganda kit, too!
[more inside]
posted by krunk
on May 2, 2004 -
16 comments
Halifax under curfew. The Globe and Mail and
the CBC are reporting that the Province of Nova Scotia has placed Halifax, Canada, under a curfew tonight. The city has taken this unprecedented peacetime action to allow the snow plows to deal with the 100cm (~50 inches) of snow that has fallen in the last 24 hours. Anyone caught on the streets between 11pm and 7am faces a CDN$1000 fine.
posted by tiamat
on Feb 20, 2004 -
35 comments
Roots Music Canada (warnings: music, mucho flash) gives you access to independent Canadian folk/country/world/etc music for free. It's fairly new, so there's not a ton of stuff there yet, but Canadians are free to submit their music (it's run by the CBC). A good application of publicly-owned media, no?
(Eh, and for the more electronically-minded, there's also a New Music Canada.)
posted by transient
on Jun 18, 2003 -
5 comments
The Massey Lectures are the CBC's annual effort to give exposure to eminent minds working on 'big ideas' in the realm of social criticism. This year's lecturer, Margaret Visser, undertakes a very engaging attempt to explain and undermine fatalism. The site links to transcripts and audio files of some past lectures. Some Canadian book-learnin' for those of you who aren't sleepily digesting your Thanksgiving turkey!
posted by stonerose
on Nov 28, 2002 -
3 comments
Public Broadcasting Gets Funky The CBC (sort of like NPR, but Canadian, federally-funded and with TV too) has a stealth project, 120seconds. They are planning to embrace new media in a big way and this is their start: stories, music, film, experiments. Not bad.
posted by sylloge
on Aug 11, 2000 -
3 comments
