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
"Flight into Danger" invented the cliches of the disaster film genre, invigorated the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and changed the life of its author, tractor-trailer company advertising executive Arthur Hailey.
posted by sevenyearlurk
on Aug 15, 2011 -
16 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
Stealth social marketing: CBC’s
Spark radio show and podcast interviews a social marketer who describes the lengths to which advertisers will go to make you believe the “friends” who mention a product really are your friends. Includes everything from use of regional slang to hiring a stripper. (Bonus points for the segment’s Deep Throat–style concealment of the identity of the source.)
Spark blog with Flash audio player;
direct MP3 download.
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on May 16, 2011 -
17 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
Karen, Rick, Luke and Rachel are four people marooned in an airport lounge sometime in the very near future. The price of oil goes through the roof, and a kind of apocalypse takes over the world- or at least the world that they can see through the windows of the bar and on the crackling, intermittent news reports. Thick ash falls from the sky. The taps are dry. Cellphones don't work. Sealed in, the four can only talk to each other, examine their lives and the meaning of love, and try to confront their own demons. There is no turning back, they realise. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation
on Nov 9, 2010 -
21 comments
Pornland. At the beginnings of the 1950s, porn was something boys indulged in behind the barn and creeps enjoyed in dingy little movie theatres. 60 years later, porn is everywhere. Michael Enright recently interviewed academic
Gail Dines on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition. Listen to the interview
here.
[more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Sep 27, 2010 -
75 comments
“
We strive for a future that we cannot touch, and memories of our life’s past leave traces that form a road behind us.
When we stop, there are no traffic lights and no give way signs; only ourselves in the here and now.” -
Here and Now:
Sonia Yee [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation
on Sep 9, 2010 -
2 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
The Kids in The Hall are returning to CBC tonight with an 8-part murder mystery miniseries,
"Death Comes To Town." Trailer.
Death hops off a bus in the small town of Shuckton, Ontario, wearing a codpiece and a
vest once worn by
The Friendly Giant. Murder, mayhem, and hilarity are sure to ensue.
Excellent interview with Scott Thompson on the history of the group, Buddy Cole (
Previously on Mefi), and dealing with his own mortality while undergoing chemotherapy during the writing and production of the series.
Sorry, non-Canadians, although negotiations are said to be underway, there are no known plans to broadcast the series outside the country.
posted by yellowbinder
on Jan 12, 2010 -
66 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
31 years ago today, 918 people died in the
Jonestown Mass Murder-Suicide. One week later, CBC Radio aired
this comprehensive examination[MP3] of the events leading up the tragedy, including cult leader Jim Jones' rise to power, the founding of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana, and the ill-fated investigative delegation headed by Congressman Leo Ryan which precipitated the tragic event.
posted by Alvy Ampersand
on Nov 17, 2009 -
51 comments
Funkytown: The Montreal Disco Era. Studio 54?
Qu’est-ce que c’est? By the late 1970s, “Montreal had platinum-status admission to the VIP lounge of coolest-of-the-cool disco cities.” An oral history of the city where no one bats an eye at going out to dance at 1:30 AM in –20°C weather. (Contains links to MP3 of CBC Radio documentary.)
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Oct 21, 2009 -
14 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
“Just put your feet up here and let your legs go all floppy. Just flop your knees apart. OK, just relax.” On this week’s episode of CBC Radio's
“White Coat, Black Art” [mp3], Dr. Brian Goldman talks to both patients and doctors about that important, intimate, yet often alienating experience called the pelvic exam. In case you’ve ever wondered, “How
DO male doctors feel when they do a pelvic exam?”, this show may provide some interesting answers.
[more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl
on Mar 4, 2008 -
32 comments
The Denial Machine. A 40-min Canadian (CBC) documentary about the "denial industry" - think tanks, scientists, PR firms, focus groups, lawyers, etc.. the issue?
Tobacco.
Global Warming. It doesn't matter - different issues but
the same people. How to be a professional denier and profit.
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 9, 2006 -
46 comments
I Know I'm Not Alone: 10 minute embedded video interview of Michael Franti regarding his jaunt to Iraq (and Palestine/Israel), originally broadcast on CBC's The Hour.
posted by edgeways
on Nov 20, 2006 -
16 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
Street Cents, a staple on The
CBC for 17 years, has been
canceled. The Emmy award-winning show focused on consumer and media awareness for teens and pre-teens.
Street Cents is filmed in
Halifax, NS and airs without commercial interruption in order to avoid potential conflict with advertisers who were regularly taken to task on the show. The last episode will air on October 1st, 2006.
posted by purephase
on Aug 18, 2006 -
33 comments
