brilliant

just brilliant! go see Basterds already. call moviefone and order tickets today.

taking and talking ownership

Is Rogers going to sell the Jays? It's a steady rumour if you read some of the rumblings from
the Globe's Jeff Blair and the Star's Richard Griffin. If you combine that with this
month's Toronto Life feature on newly-minted Rogers CEO Nadir Mohamed (sorry no link!),
you get the idea that baseball is a distant priority in the Rogers empire.

It's no secret that Ted Rogers was pretty indifferent to the team, but still saw opportunities
to hawk various other Rogers products-particularly wireless-at the stadium and on the Rogers-owned Sportsnet. Mohamed may not share those feelings, and the current fire-sale in
place and unclear leadership situation under interim CEO Paul Beeston and (surely) soon-to-be-displaced J.P. Ricciardi suggest the dents and scratches are trying to be buffed out as quickly as possible.

So Rogers sells...but to whom? MLSE? It's difficult to think of another entity that would be down on splurging what would be a hefty amount of money on a sports franchise and stadium. The Jays and Skydome are the last piece of the puzzle in nailing down a pro-sports monopoly in town, one which could better usher in the Bills (and wipe away the Argos). MLSE has taken plenty of heat over its mis-handling of the Leafs, but now seems to be on a free-r spending autonomous path with more independent management of the club, not unlike the Raptors. Toronto FC remains an ongoing success story, though its more intimate stadium experience has a lot to do with that. Still, would the team be better off?

on reading things (online)

The biggest thing I got out of an interview on (where else?) Charlie Rose with Amazon's Jeff Bezos was Bezos describing reading from a computer as staring directly into a light for extended periods of time-I'm paraphrasing there, but the general idea is really simple and plain as day and right in front of our faces. As such, Amazon's Kindle uses technology different from traditional monitors significantly reducing eye strain etc.

It will be interesting to see if the same technology is later applied to monitors, as I'm sure most of us who spend our days staring into the light might appreciate something better. I personally find white backgrounded sites the worst, naturally, and have taken to switching to a darker gmail theme-though that might be as hard or even worse on my eyes? Just guessin' science here.