Naturally, I had to verify this. So I tuned to the WWV 10 MHz time signal on my amateur rig, tuned a portable radio to CBC Radio 1 FM, which broadcasts on 99.1 MHz in Toronto and recorded them together:
Noisy recording of two radios. The WWV 13:00:00 EDT tone is at roughly 9 seconds, and the NRC tone broadcast by CBC is at 19 seconds
Yup: Rob’s right – CBC is broadcasting the NRC 13:00:00 signal at 13:00:10, which for time nerds might as well be the change from Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
Annotated waveform: the CBC long beep is ten seconds after the WWV tone
This recording was made directly from the airwaves. There should be effectively no difference between the signal broadcast times, but here we are with the “National Research Council official time signal” going out at a very wrong time indeed.
Richard “Friendly Rich” Marsella noted that CBC Radio’s Vinyl Tap with Randy Bachman features a lot of music by … Randy Bachman. If you’ve got your own radio show “to play [your] favourite songs and tell stories from [your] life on the road and in the studio“, you might want to be a bunch heavier on your influences than your own actual work. It doesn’t seem that way with Randy Bachman, though.
In the 49 unique editions of Vinyl Tap broadcast in the last year, 27 of them feature his own music and/or performances. So in addition to his CBC pay for the show, he’s getting royalties, too. Rich puts it a little better, if a lot more invective filled:
Bring back quality broadcasting from people behind the scenes who are hard-working and informed…not merely has-been rock stars with egos larger than Winnipeg.
Given that Mr. Bachman constantly plays his own music on this show, receives royalties for the theme song, and might also be receiving ACTRA payments for incessantly wanking on his guitar between songs, CBC should consider whether or not this is a conflict of interest, as a public broadcaster.
I ran some stats on the show’s playlists (thanks, CBC!), and Richard sure has a point. Here’s a list of all the shows from the last year, showing just the first Bachman-item on the show:
Of course, when anyone mentions BTO, I can’t help but think of
… which is a whole heaping helping of morissettian irony unto itself. The whole Smashie and Nicey thing was supposedly a factor in Matthew Bannister’s decision to fire the ageing and irrelevant DJs from BBC Radio 1 in the 1990s. I wouldn’t dream of making any inference from that …
CBC Bandwidth had a good show yesterday on the many banjo players and styles in Ontario. It features, amongst others: Jayme Stone, Jeff Menzies, Chris Coole, Chris Quinn, the Foggy Hogtown Boys, Andrea Simms-Karp, the Barmitzvah Brothers, Jenny Whiteley, Sheesham and Lotus, Feist and Elliott Brood.
Following a safety review that led to the replacement of many end-of-driveway mailboxes, the P.E.I. Department of Transportation is setting its own guidelines for the safety of the new super mailboxes.
I know I shouldn’t, but every time I see the name of Fijian military coup leader Frank Bainimarama, the songs of this eighties girl group come to mind.
[Rick Ciarnello, president of the Vancouver Hells Angels chapter] claims he has been treated rudely by his local supermarket staff, and he says many people are no longer friendly toward him, and instead fear him or avoid him altogether.
I reckon that if I took a random street poll anywhere (anywhere outside Canada, that is), no more than 3 out of 10 people would consider Canada as having a leadership role. I do not wish to make light of the soldiers’ plight; I just don’t want them there in my name.
(I was going to make a comment about the nearest thing to a role to most Canadians would be a Swiss Chalet 1/4 chicken dinner, but that doesn’t work in a written context, and barely works when spoken.)
This isn’t perfect (seems to fail on some feeds), but mostly works for me:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# cdf2rss - converts CBC KlipFarm CDF to crude RSS
# created by scruss on 02004/11/12
# RCS/CVS: $Id: cdf2rss,v 1.3 2004/11/13 03:59:21 scruss Exp $
# takes one argument, a stream name. Currently known streams are:
#
# Arts Business Calgary Canada
# Edmonton Montreal Ottawa
# Science Sports Toronto
# Vancouver Winnipeg World
#
# returns a crude RSS 1.0 stream fashioned from the CBC CDF output.
use strict;
use integer;
use XML::Simple;
use XML::RSS;
use LWP::Simple;
use constant CDFURL => 'http://www.cbc.ca/cdf/servlet/getCDF';
my $cdf = get( join( '?lineup=', CDFURL, $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} ) );
my $xs = new XML::Simple;
my $ref = $xs->XMLin($cdf);
my $rss = new XML::RSS( version => '1.0' );
$rss->channel(
title => join( ' ', 'CBC', $ref->{category} ),
description => join( ' ', 'CBC', $ref->{category} ),
link => $ref->{href}
);
foreach my $cdf_item ( @{ $ref->{item} } ) {
my $tmp_abstract = $cdf_item->{abstract};
$tmp_abstract =~ s/\s+/ /g;
$tmp_abstract =~ s/^ //;
$tmp_abstract =~ s/ $//;
$rss->add_item(
title => $cdf_item->{title},
link => $cdf_item->{href},
description => $tmp_abstract
);
}
print "Content-type: application/xml+rss\n\n", $rss->as_string;
exit;
