“If Justin Bieber is Coming To Rosedale, Then Let’s See Him Play ‘Giant Steps’“ is the name of a Facebook group started over the weekend — not referring to Rosedale the high-class neighbourhood, where the 16-year-old pop star and his 35-year-old mom can afford real estate until his belated puberty kicks in, but Rosedale Heights School of the Arts. Suggesting that their potential celebrity classmate needs to show off his John Coltrane chops as part of a hazing ritual to prove he can transcend Auto-Tune sounds like a script ready to be written by a 21st century John Hughes. But those writing on the group’s wall are generally put off by the snobbery, like this recent graduate: “The fact that not only is it believed he must meet a standard, but that the standard set by this group is one of the most difficult jazz standards ever written is an act of such snobbery that I have to consciously restrain myself from pressing capslock and virtually screaming for a page and a half. If this is how you believe Rosedale students SHOULD be judged, then let’s see you play ‘Giant Steps’.” Continue Reading

Rocco Rossi ignited his campaign on Wednesday with his speech to the Toronto Board of Trade, taking shots at rival mayoral candidate George Smitherman for keeping a low profile and flip-flopping on the view of selling off city assets, and generally fighting fury with fury. Ten years ago this week, though, Rossi was pitching a different product: the StellaCam. Installed in bars in Brussels, Manhattan and Vancouver, the trial involved setting up webcams that would allow shut-in web surfers to buy the person on the other side a Stella Artois, using a coupon dispensed through a machine, and type-chat for 15 minutes. Total cost of the experience: $10, including the unshared drink. “Where else does the guy in Timmins have an opportunity to meet a beautiful woman in New York?” Rossi rhetorically asked in the National Post on March 10, 2000 — incidentally, the day that the NASDAQ peaked at its all-time high, precipitating the colossal crash of the dot-com industry. Beer.com, the portal he was tapped to run, was a well-funded latecomer: Interbrew, then the Belgian owner of Labatt, teamed with Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Heineken to create a website about the stuff that people who liked beer might like to look at in those dial-up days. Rossi was recruited from Torstar, where his role in starting Toronto.com established what counted for an industry reputation at the time — the ability to concoct an entire website with nothing to work with but a coveted domain name. And, on October 12, 1999, he was confident enough in the content on Beer.com to throw a launch party, with beer caps spelling out the website address on the artificial field of SkyDome. Continue Reading

Last time the official nightly dispatch from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation met with such scrutiny, they changed the name to Prime Time News, with Pamela Wallin joining Peter Mansbridge in a 9 p.m. effort to parallel the successfully cheap Dateline and 20/20 shows multiplying like rabbits back in the day: November 1992. Time, it flies — yet, 17 years later, there’s more inspiration to be found in the Kraftwerk-inspired opening of The National from three decades ago. An idiosyncratic time, when what the man in the newspaper thought of the show passed for influential: “What The National has gained in speed and visual wallop seems to be at the expense of the appearance of reality,” writes Greg Quill in the Toronto Star after too many words spent trying to describe it. “It was all a little, sad to say, self-satisfied and contrived.” But who needs such a tired lament when Ian Morrison of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is a phone call away to lament the influence of American consultants: “I see it as a triumph of style over substance. It’s moving in the direction of the private sector.” Again, they’ve been playing this same tune for seventeen years. Continue Reading