After spending several calls and an hour on the phone Rogers provided me with a different Rogers DNS server that you can add to your System Preferences, under Network, under TCP/IP which eliminates Rogers interference.  The DNS is 64.71.255.202

Apparantly this number is only available to “Tier 2″ agents at Rogers which is why the first 45 minutesof phone conversation were wasted.

Unfortunately it does not explain why the Rogers Supported Search Results page comes up when you have entered the correct web site information. That part they are having a more difficult time explaining.

This death was wrapped in the positive spin that Transcontinental  were enlarging Saturday’s and Monday’s offerings.  It is only the Saturday Telegram that is pulling in the money and the other editions are simply a financial drain. A drain that is awkward for the owners to escape and maintain even a semblance of journalistic credibility.

With the Independent’s demise the road is clear for the Tely to cut their losses by decreasing their editions and (in time) increasing their ad rates. The latter is necessary as ads and readership are declining in lock step with most of the North American paid circulation papers. Classified ads decreased 17% last year.

The segment of the newspaper business that continues to grow are the papers that have adapted the web model of – free. Handing out their papers and paying the cost with advertising.

That is the business model that Current has been using for ten years and that is finally coming into its own in St. John’s.

Shortly Current will be announcing that it will be going weekly as of October 3rd. Current will also be changing its distribution day to every Friday.

Current will continue to concentrate on arts and entertainment but will expand into politics, social commentary and film reviews from Brian Callahan, Noreen Golfman and Tim Conway, all ex of The Independent.

Current hopes to continue to build its readership while working with its supporters to deliver effect promotion for their businesses. The print medium can be very effective in communicating to the elite of marketplace. This is especially true when ones advertisements are not swamped by other ads or buried in regurgitated pap. Rather when it jumps off the page sandwiched  between provocative and interesting content.

For almost twenty years this retail business has been operating and profitable, what has changed is my interest in it. It was located in downtown St. John’s but is relocatable to anywhere in the metro area. It comes complete with inventory, shelving, computer system etc., everything you need to get up and running quickly before Christmas.

All that it needs is someone with a small amount of cash and a love of reading and a love of books.

You rent a location and I will supply the means to get started from day one, we can work out a deal where you pay for everything over time on a monthy basis on which I am prepared to be very flexible.

Interested?

Email me for a chat.

Must ado has been made about Danny William’s ABC campaign by the mainland media including our own darling Rex Murphy with his illusions to Joey’s dictatorship in last Saturday’s Globe & Mail. Personally I do not see what the fuss is about. If Danny was cheering for Harper it would just be politics as usual.

The Canadian federation has not worked in Newfoundland’s interest for the simple reason that we have no leverage in Ottawa because of our lack of population (read votes). In the US small Rhode Island is balanced against huge California in the Senate, but no one gives up power willingly so that is not going to happen in Canada.

Danny realizes that nothing is going to change whomever we send to Ottawa so he has little to lose. There will be a confrontation regardless of  who occupies the Prime Minister’s Office. And if you were lied to then you would be pissed off too. Yes I believe Danny because it is true Harper does not need us and is intemperate enough to say so.

The premier’s (and our) best bet is a minority federal government and anything Danny can do to further that is good for the province if he can succeed. Whether his strong voice has any effect beyond our shores is debatable but the racket gets attention and that alone might convince a few people.

The secondary fact that Danny has been particularly ham handed of late with the mess at MUN and the letter to MHA’s does have shades of latter-day Joey.  His use of blunt instruments rather than finesse are early evidence of his decline. A temperate telephone call or a caucus meeting would have had the same or better result with none of the fallout.
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Why Buy?  When you can get it for free? That is the problem paid circulation papers
and magazines are having locally and nationally. It has certainly caused a huge and continuing drop in the circulation of the Newfoundland Herald whose readership
was historically based on providing complete tv listings which you can now get elsewhere for free.

The same problem exists for Buy and Sell Magazine which has been charging for their magazine which consists principally of advertisements. Buy and Sell have built a successful business convincing people that they were the go to place for classified ads.

Times change quickly and you have Craigslist and Kidji have worldwide free classifieds but neither have made the dent in this market as our own Newfoundland based solution NLClassifieds.com which has made significant inroads over the past year by providing those same ads free on line.

Now Current and NLClassifieds are teaming up so that people posting their ads on the
NL Classifieds site will be able to have them printed in the next issue of Current for the same low price of free!

It will take some time to build the printable database and work out the bugs but Kirby Jacobs the owner of NLClassifieds believes in adding value for his existing customers by increasing the number of people who see their ads.

So if you have something to sell or are looking for something you wish to buy go to NLClassifieds.com and get it posted for your beta test run next issue.

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Also on Current’s horizon, we are a few short weeks away from the our new web site designed by the wonderful Julie Whalen of Sassy Tuna after a summer of hard work.

The new design is simple elegant and familiar to any user of itunes or an ipod as it uses a coverflow-like interface. For another web site using that format check out searchme.com
or have an advanced seek peek at sassytuna.com/current and let us know what you think.

A newspaper is only a free press if it can continue to publish, and a free paper can only publish when it is supported by its advertisers through the provision of increased visibility for their wares. In a small city that also means you cannot bite the hand that feeds you.

NTV on the other hand is a government licensed body that through its local monopoly throws off mountains of cash and is charged under its license with providing something approaching the pretense of local coverage and perhaps a modicum of journalism mixed in with their
continuous and overwhelming tide of self-promotion.

While getting the facts right is always a problem when you are unwilling to fund researchers and deadlines are pressing but if NTV were willing to go to the expense to send a talking head all the way to Pouch Cove to report on a citizen’s nebulous compliant they might have come away with more interesting stories with even the slightest effort.

How about this for a story: Mayor’s son charged with uttering death threats to a CBC reporter. While I was traveling this story played out in court with a restraining order being issued against the Mayor’s son. Apparently the death threats stem from a libel lawsuit against the Mayor Sarah Patten which claims that she or her agents defamed the unsuccessful mayoral candidate in a mailing prior to the last election. Where is NTV?

Or here is another story: Given that the citizen’s complaint was a quasi-environmental one. Why is it that the Town of Pouch Cove (with the assistance of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador) insists on increasing the amount of raw sewage it pumps into the North Atlantic. Try explaining to the tourists what the froth on the ocean is chocolate brown.

In a rural environment of larger building lots it would seem to take only a modicum of intelligence that all rural communities should be insisting on wells and septic systems as a far better environmental and financial alternative than funding water and sewer lines which it can ill afford.  Where is NTV?

Anyone interested in buying used book at a steep discount or trading their old books for some of mine, please get in touch with me as I really have to make an effort to clear out some of the tens of thousands I have, and burning them is taking too much time and burying them is so unappealling.

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Should you be interested in the form, I have started a blog of these columns and (in time) other musings and perhaps some of the drafts of More Joy, the working title of a book that I have been farting around with for a number of years or maybe of more interest to the extended family that have been able to partake in her cooking, a collection of my Mother’s receipes. It is available at whathaveyou.wordpress.com

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It is winter again in Pouch Cove. It is snowing and there are icebergs. Your house has detached itself from its foundation and is leaving town.
These are elements in the exhibition, States of Migration, currently on view at James Baird>Pouch Cove. Artists Don Maynard and Colm MacCool, both from Ontario— Maynard from Kingston, MacCool from Prince Edward County — are showing work in the main gallery space. These works were created during the artists’ month-long residency at the Pouch Cove Foundation.
In the Stage Gallery Maynard has created a snowstorm by using masking tape, wind and about 2,000 watts of light. Maynard says, “the work references the experience of driving through a heavy snowstorm at night, entering into a vortex of light with snowflakes zooming at you in these impossible curves.” Snowstorm is a meditative piece, its light draws us like moths to the flame.
MacCool’s piece, Cold Comfort, is three icebergs carved out of framing lumber and supported by furniture legs. MacCool’s work explores the uneasy relationship between commodification and environment. Taking one of the archetypal  images of both wildness and environmental changes and referencing furniture is a darkly humorous examination of  our consumer ways.
The selection of icebergs also relates to the transient nature of artist residency’s. Exploring ideas and experiences as an outsider. Taking influence from but not being part of.Icebergs are the ultimate migrants. Images of simultaneous power and fragility.

Maynard’s piece, Absence of Gravity, is a house made from lace, and illuminated from within. The house floats aloft, thirteen feet above the gallery floor, and appears to be struggling to escape gravity. It is connected to the earth by mooring lines. Maintaining Gravity explores the idea of home as a sense of place anchored to a specific physical location. This idea of home is central to many people’s sense of self, it is how they define themselves; it persists even when people are removed from, or leave, that specific location; it travels with them wherever they go.
Don Maynard works in encaustic and multi-media installations he has exhibited internationally at galleries in Boston and New York. He has upcoming solo shows
at the MacLaren in Barrie, the McIntosh in London and a touring exhibition curated by Jan Allen  and Linda Jasmine organized by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and Agnes Etherington in Kingston.  This is Maynard’s third residency at the Pouch Cove Foundation.
Colm MacCool is a sculptor who works primarily in wood and found materials.
After lost years in the film industry he evolved into cabinetry, antique restoration and architectural salvage in eastern Ontario. MacCool revels in the futility of carving in a modern world, exhibiting his work thoroughout Ontario and at the Viridian Gallery in New York City.

This exhibition will also showcase some of his past projects, ‘eyes of a child’, and ‘ Everybody Loves You’, which have led to this project.

Daisuke Takeya is an artist who broadens the possibilities of social context in realistic painting using portraits and urban motifs. The primary characteristic of Takeya’s work is that he sees production as a process of putting himself in a particular place and then understanding it.

This was our culture, the isolation and privation that marked much of ourselves to the outside world as represented in our cultural output. It was, as the photographs themselves a black and white existence. Townies vs Baymen, Catholics vs Protestants, Merchants vs Fishermen, Liberals vs Tories. The stark divide with its many fault lines made for great storytelling and comedy, and it also framed our claim as a distinct society. The Quebecois had their language, but we could advance the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.

The way forward holds the siren’s song of prosperity long thought to forever to remain just beyond our grasp. Within that future though is the dissolution of our “pureness”, we are now rapidly evolving into simply another tiny market segment content in our economic future and the pleasures of consumerism.

We are increasingly urban society and continue to repeat the follies made forty years ago by cities across Canada.  Just as Andy Wells and his cronies gutted the downtown with the misery that was and is Atlantic Place. The current council promotes the duplication of faceless sprawl that mainland cities are now attempting to halt and reverse.

As the province embarks on the expensive Torbay by-pass road to alleviate traffic the towns just beyond are repeating the problem by allowing ribbon development on the subsequent stretch of highway.

The character of Newfoundland as evidenced in Cochrane’s book is gone. Do we have anything to replace it other than the pale reflection of the tourist department’s version?

Rather it is the hubris that all the educated talent at Memorial University together with the vast experience of its govenors and committees specifically charged with the task are unable to find a new president without Danny’s assistance.