Canadian? Catch “The Take” Next Week

I love the CBC. I subscribe to their excellent documentary mailing list and if you live in Canada, you owe it to yourself to watch or tape Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’s excellent film The Take, which is airing on Thursday March 24 at 8:00pm.

I saw the film last year at Hot Docs, and called it “a fascinating look at what happens when the unemployed decide to take matters into their own hands“.

Here’s the official film site.

The Origin of “Consolation Champs”

Michael has encouraged us to tell the “backstory” of how we named our weblogs, so here is the tale of how Consolation Champs came to be:

My web presence began in 1997 after I took a course in multimedia development. The course was 16 weeks long. 15 weeks on Macromedia Director and a week tacked on the end about “web page design”. After fiddling with hosted services like Rogers (my ISP), Tripod, and even Manila (remember editthispage.com?), I finally registered a domain in 2000. It wasn’t hard to come up with a name.

For years, my friends and I would sit around and come up with crazy band names. Some of my favourites were stuff like Carcinogenic Houseboat, Bonfire of Baby Heads, The Y-Fronts, Robot Pope, Black Jello. Silly stuff like that. But I had one name that I really wanted to use. I had played drums poorly in a semi-band called The Gitch Band when I was a teenager, but it was doubtful that I’d ever be in a real band. So I used the name for my new web site.

I’ve always been fascinated by non-winners. Silver medallists, nominees, also-rans, runners-up and has-beens are all close to my heart and so that’s where Consolation Champs was born.

A year ago, I began a related weblog called Runner-Up where I try to find and tell some of those non-winner stories (and I’m looking for co-contributors!).

Here are some other stories.