2009 hasn’t been the worst year of my life by any measure, but it’s been filled with enough disappointment, frustration and petty annoyances to cover an entire decade. I’m tellin’ ya, I already have a couple bottles of Baby Duck on ice to boot this puppy out the door with all the ceremony it deserves. But there were some high points, even the worst years have ‘em, and I thought I’d share those as my final post of the decade....

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Andrew Klavan is an American novelist and screenwriter. Among his screen credits are Clint Eastwood’s “True Crime”, based on his own novel, and the adaptation of Simon Brett’s “A Shock to the System”. He’s been nominated five times for a Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allen Poe Award, winning twice. Andrew has also achieved a certain amount of notoriety in his personal life. He blogs. He writes...

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Last Christmas, I posted some memories of the Christmas concerts I was part of as a kid, appending it with some of my favorite songs of the season. This year, I thought it would be fun to offer Christmas music from the bloggers and online sites I frequent. Down one side or the other of virtually every web presence is a list of links to other places the sites creator(s) think you might like. You,...

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Two subjects which have recurred during the past year on this blog are the “Save Local TV” campaign and “Climate Change”. Regular readers will know that both give rise to a great deal of scepticism on my part. So I wanted to pass on a couple of news items that crossed my desk today which seem to indicate that solutions to both are at hand. First, according to the Wall Street Journal, CBS and Disney are both close to final...

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This is the season of Christmas concerts and all around the world every church and choral group prepares an evening of music to celebrate the holidays. Among these are many Gay Men’s Choirs not normally associated with religious music or even welcome in a lot of churches. We Christians can drift a long way from our Messiah’s teaching sometimes. That sort of supposedly faith based behavior always...

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Imagine that you’re a screenwriter who has just written the biggest blockbuster hit of the summer. Across the country, there are line-ups at every theatre it plays for every showing. Critics are saying you have completely re-invented your genre and every studio in town is offering you rich contracts to fix or rewrite their next big thing as well as wanting to know how much you want for your next idea. Where are you? On a beach...

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This is the first time I’ve opened the site to a guest poster, so I figured I’d make it a good one. Deborah Nathan is a well known Canadian screenwriter, story consultant and producer whose writing credits include most of the significant series that have been produced in this country. We first met when she took over the story department helm on “War of the Worlds” for Paramount and not long after, she was the first story editor...

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Long before I ever heard Heavy Metal music, I was taking a drawing class from Ted Godwin, an artist whose work now hangs in the National Gallery as well as some of the most prestigious homes and boardrooms of the country. It was a freezing cold Monday morning and most of us hadn’t dedicated much time to the still lifes we were supposed to have accomplished over the weekend. Ted moved from one flimsy sheaf of half-hearted attempts...

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It’s not often you get the chance to tie Tiger Woods, Global Warming, Canadian journalism and the current CRTC Hearings into Canadian Television together. So, of course, I can’t let the opportunity go to waste. Those of you with access to tinfoil may wish to begin fashioning hats. Let me say at the beginning, that I’ve always considered myself to be environmentally friendly. Anything we can do to make the planet cleaner and...

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I did a little bit of community service last night. Across the country, various police organizations, insurance bureaus and local businesses come together this time of year to sponsor a program to keep impaired drivers off our streets called “Operation Red Nose”. Notices are placed in bars and party locations letting people know that if they’ve been drinking, they only need to call a local number and somebody will arrive...

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How about we talk to the people we’re supposed to be representing instead? Interesting initiative from the CRTC this morning. After two weeks of entertaining the hopes and dreams of government-made Billionaires and realizing that those who want to “Save Local TV” won’t guarantee that any of the money they get will actually go toward doing that while those who seek to “Stop The TV Tax” are only...

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Some wrestle with how to tell stories in a world of multiple platforms. Some simply do it. My own theory is that those who struggle are thinking backwards, assessing what the market might want first, measuring the profit margins of the available platforms, risk averse to any content that can’t be exploited universally and determining what might be worth pursuing and what will make cost recovery...

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It’s Grey Cup Weekend in Canada. And for the second time in three years, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, my home town team, Saskatchewan’s team and (to the eternal chagrin of the Toronto Maple Leaf’s marketing machine) Canada’s team is vying for football supremacy. We won in 2007. Last year we don’t talk about. And this year, the prevailing wisdom is that we’ll have our asses handed to us by the grid-iron juggernaut known as the...

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The CRTC hearings on Canadian television are mercifully drawing to a close. 10 solid days of one group or another whining about a broadcast system that doesn’t work, can’t make money and somehow isn’t able to support home grown content. Most of the people testifying have said the same things they did last year, which was pretty much exactly what they said two years ago. Two years… How much could have been accomplished in two...

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