The Walrus lets you unsub from the magazine... but not their mailings

I actually like The Walrus much of the time. But I got fed up after reading one too many too-clever-by-half stories. And one too many of those second-person features.

Here, I write to the the magazine in my umpteenth attempt to be removed from their monthly subscription reminder list.

Dear Matthew,

I cancelled my Walrus subscription about 18 months ago.

Since then, I receive monthly reminders that it is time to renew. I have unsubscribed from these emails, but to no avail. Why? Because your list is set up as a monthly mailing -- meaning that when I am unsubscribing, I'm actually just removing my name from the current monthly list. Since that mailing has already gone out, unsubscribing is futile. Next month, I will receive another mailing and another futile opportunity to unsubscribe.

It would be great if you could either a) reform your system so that when you offer people the opportunity to unsubscribe they can actually do so, and b) barring that, if you could at least manually (and permanently) delete my address.

Many thanks.

A fun time at the Econo Lodge -- in person and online

Coming back from a recent trip to Montreal, we stayed at the Econo Lodge in Woodstock, New Brunswick. (If you've clicked that link you'll have seen that it goes to a "coming soon" page and my bet would be that it's been up there for years.)

I have to confess that we were warned off the place by friends -- but they said they'd stayed there five years ago and we thought a) how bad could it be? and b) maybe it's changed since then.

It was an all-around awful experience, made worse when I came home and tried to complain via the Choice Hotels website. After filling in all the form fields and hitting "Submit" I got a message that I needed to fix the errors in red. I looked as closely as I could at the page and saw no errors in red. I double-checked all the required fields and saw they had been filled in. I switched browsers in case Choice Hotels does not play nice with Firefox, but I had the same difficulty with Explorer.

Finally, I gave up. I emailed a complaint about my inability to complain (via a different web form) and thought I would share the complaint with all of you, since Choice Hotels doesn't seem to want it. (Maybe they are embarrassed by the hotel; I tried to look it up on their website, but they say it does not exist.)

I would have gone on longer (and have, at TripAdvisor), but Choice limits you to 1,024 characters (which, apparently, you're not allowed to submit anyway). So here's what I had to say:

The room toilet had a very poor flush and the bowl almost immediately became blocked. I called the desk, and the person on duty (Joey, I think) said he would find me a plunger and would call back soon.

He never called back.

Later, I went down to the desk and found somebody new on duty. He said the previous person had not said anything about the problem, and he hadn't left any notes either.

The man working the desk then offered to help, walked past a family who had just arrived at the desk (without acknowledging them at all) and disappeared. A few minutes later, he came back and walked across the lobby with a plunger in hand. He then proceeded to hand it to me.

The night was marred by rowdy youths who spent hours yelling, shouting, running around and tapping on other patrons' windows. The staff seemed unconcerned. (At one point I called the desk to complain, and the noise level went down very briefly.)

Staff seemed not very competent, and our stay was not worth anywhere near the cost of the room.

Apparently the Best Western five minutes away is quite nice.

My favourite iPad comment

The ever-interesting Steven Morris guest blogs on the iPad.

For immediate release

Today Steven Morris launched a new hi-tech product called the "i've had."

As in, "I have had e-fucking-nough of Steve Jobs and his endless greed and attempts to corner Apple's share of the market.

Just what the world needs: one more silly gadget- the iPad - which upon reflection for all of a nanosecond, one realizes one can do without. Not to mention all the African nations that have their economies undermined, no pun intended, because of the race to extract elements from the ground required to fabricate the things.

Write me and I'll send you a copy of the "i've had."

It is just like a business card, and on it is printed: "Steve Jobs is a greedy *&^hole."

(Let us not go into the subject of all the people who will now be acting like they invented the iPad because they forked over $500 for the thing. We'll save that for next month, when I launch the "iMad.")

Preparing for life with Alzheimer's

I seem to be doing a lot of stories related to mental health lately. Alzheimer's is not exactly a mental health issue, but there are some similarities -- and it's good to see that people are more willing to discuss the disease openly, rather than trying to hide it.

Yesterday, I was in the studio at Maritime Noon to talk about how patients and their loved ones can prepare for life with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. You can listen to the conversation here.

The NFB's upcoming online releases

The National Film Board of Canada just released its list of films that will be put online free over the next three months. And it contains some real gems.

A pair of animated films, including one by Richard Condie. should be high on your must-watch list. Condie's The Apprentice is one of the weirdest pieces of animation I've ever seen. It's not so much the technique -- which features Condie's typical wavy-lined, buck-toothed characters, but the bizarreness of the story, such as it is. As a former NFB colleague (I don't work there now, but I used to) once said to me, "If you can figure out what the hell it's about, let me know."

The other animation classic here is What on Earth? It's done newsreel-style, as Martians study our planet and conclude that it is ruled by the automobile. Still as funny today as when it was released in 1966.

Oscar-winner Terre Nash's Who's Counting: Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics is one of those Film Board perennials. Well over a decade after its release, I run into people who have seen it and for whom Marilin Waring's message resonates. That message is that there has to be a better way to measure economic progress than GDP -- one that takes into account benefits that are not currently measured.

The Devil You Know: Inside the Mind of Todd McFarlane, directed by Kenton Vaughan, is a portrait of one weird dude. You may know Todd McFarlane as the creator of Spawn -- but did you know he was a minor-league ballplayer who says he would have gladly given up his comics career for a chance to play baseball in the Major Leagues?

Passchendaele, Paul Gross's monumental First World War labour of love, is also going online. Haven't seen this one, so I can't comment -- but clearly the NFB was smart to get these digital rights in exchange for their participation in the film.

RIP a Remix Manifesto is already available free online, but chopped up into chapters. I'm assuming the upcoming nfb.ca release will let us Canadians watch the whole thing in one piece. (It's already available in the US as a pay-what-you-want download.) RIP is a good intro to the copyright wars, even though it conflates a couple of different issues: file sharing and use of original works in remixes, and seems to treat them as though they're the same thing.

For teachers, the Science, Please! series (Une minute de science, in French) offers funny little videos on basic science subjects. This is the perfect format for them, as long as a class is outfitted with wireless access, computer and projector.

Finally, there's an irony in the fact that Colin Low's The Children of Fogo Island is near the top of this list. The irony doesn't have to do with the film -- a simple, beautiful evocation of childhood -- but with the format. Colin once told me that he would rather have a church basement full of people engaged in watching a film than a national broadcast that was seen by far more people, but had far less impact on each individual. I'm not sure what he thinks of digital media and viewing phones solo at your computer, or on your phone.

Some good viewing, and if you download the NFB iPhone app, you can take it with you.

Friends of Redtail

My half-hour documentary on the Friends of Redtail is online here.

This may seem like a story you've heard before: local group bands together to try and protect forest from clear-cutting.

But there is more to it than that. The Friends of Redtail don't want to create what they call "a tree museum" -- and they are looking to create a new model of local ownership and control of resources.

There are some great characters in this piece, including Billy MacDonald, who runs the nature camp from which the Friends take their name, and who is one of the only people in Canada to have successfully fought the National Energy Board; and Bernadette Romanowsky, a retired lawyer and mother of (I believe) 10.

Time to bare arms

Orly Taitz (sorry, Dr. Orly Taitz, Esquire), writes:

Seeing targeted destruction of our economy, our security, dissipation of American jobs, massive corruption in the Government, Congress Department of Justice and Judiciary, it might be time to start rallies and protests using our second amendment right to bear arms and organise in militias.

This appears to be a corrected version. The first version I saw called for

rallies and protests using our second amendment right to bare arms and organise in militias. (Emphasis added.)

Certainly, if you live in any part of the country where the winter weather is making itself felt, this is not the time to bare arms.