Personally, this is not exactly the greatest shock ever. Here in Canada, where services like Hulu and Netflix aren’t present, at least competitors like Rogers Video can be propped up by their larger media companies, or appeal to local urban cinephile demographics. Viacom (wisely) spun Blockbuster off on its own in 2004, after the start of its decline.

I’m curious to see who will paint this news as indicative of lax IP regulation and who will view it as merely another casualty of the economy. To me, it’s just one more business model that didn’t adjust quickly enough to technological and social change.

I actually went into a Blockbuster just the other day, but I was checking out the Wind Mobile kiosk. Granted, I’m not much of a movie buff, but it’s hard to see how renting–and returning!–a DVD for $4 is a better deal than buying it for $7…at the grocery store.

Read the article: Blockbuster Will Be Delisted After Proposals Fail (Wall Street Journal)

This particular BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classiest shopping establishment, Kingsgate Mall. Home to the Worst Washroom in Canada,¹ Kingsgate also features stores that sell knockoff swords, hooker boots and hospital scrubs, as well as a Shoppers Drug Mart, which is usually the sole reason I go in there.² Also, sometimes Payless stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.

On a side note, I was just buying a replacement bottle of vodka–my previous one having gone to a good cause: lowering the collective IQ of Vancouver’s Twitter community by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than anything likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.³

Being a smart shopper, I generally avoid buying alcohol in the evening because, well, who wants to be waiting in line for 15 minutes? Exactly: bored people.

While standing there, being told by a variety of drunk, jonesing, toothless and urine-smelling people that my hair, hat, paintbrush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a display in the “impulse purchase” rack promoting Woodbridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this display was not that it was positioned where the gum and Archie comics are supposed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other people in line with me had been given a copy of CorelDraw and hired to make wine ads.

I’m actually not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art director, photographer, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears something happened on the way to the printers’. (“I said ‘creative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)

Possibly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoying ham and pineapple with root beer floats is not the most representative image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?

I do like the fact that the inexplicably wordy “Enter to Win” bubble communicates its relation to the prizes mentioned in the ad’s footer by totally overlapping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effective, right?

In fairness to Woodbridge, Robert Mondavi, and their staff of talented media professionals, the “ENTER TO WIN the following prizes!” bubble does implicate the importer, Vincor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its reputation besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shadows. However, I don’t think I can forgive the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:

6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoying the conversation
1 bottle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI

You know, it’s not terrible. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actually. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bottle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actually comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.

I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a little confused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall sharing a single bottle of wine with only one other person. Maybe I am an alcoholic. Is that one of the definitions?

So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s counterpart to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “standard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bottle as containing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes further, providing a handy “Party Calculator” that estimates a more reasonable volume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoying the conversation for 2 hours” is four bottles.

Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writers: you’re clearly there anyway. Make sure you run your marketing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.

1. During my sole visit, I was able to accurately discern the height of one of the previous visitors to the stall. Think about that.
2. Shoppers Drug Mart is awesome.
3. Intervention averted!

Ultimately, I suspect I’ll roll this site into it.

Anyway, while the art style I’m using is very, very different than this, both use a nice slab serif typeface called Rockwell. While selecting it, I came across this this video I liked from a couple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fiction, in type form.

So… yeah, we’ll see how that goes tonight.

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st century is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards authoritarianism, but rather, intellectual property encumbrances. The idea that VANOC can trademark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclusivity of the brand that they’ve threatened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say nothing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I wholeheartedly support the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trademarked by VANOC.

But I’ve been thinking about situations where The Authorities have confiscated memory cards or deleted photos and so, I’m wondering about technical workarounds to this: I would consider using an EyeFi card in my camera to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jailbroken iPhone or possibly something with reasonable battery life.) to automatically upload my photos to my website or Flickr so that I wasn’t actually storing any pictures, I was posting them live. Short of jamming or Iranian-scale network monitoring and packet inspection, there would really be little anyone could do, assuming the images themselves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is distribution of that photo a trademark or copyright violation? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Winter”, or “Games” in this post actionable? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of something involving one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seriously consider myself at risk for having the last name “Winters”, or for writing under that name, but it’s so important to explicitly affirm that I have the right to do so when proposing –or passing!– any law that purports to restrict speech.

Me: “Hey, a friend of a friend designed the font they’re using in that logo!“
Every single other person I know: “Yeah, that’s super, Catherine.”

As such, I enjoyed this analysis of the fonts and branding featured in Mike Judge’s 2007 eugenicist cult favourite Idiocracy.

“Haulin’ Ass, Getting Paid”: finally, the religious right and “separation of church and state” people can agree on a slogan to print on currency.

A quick synopsis of Idiocracy: stupid people outbreed the yuppies and nerds. Consequently, the average IQ drops steadily. 500 years later… FOX News employs sexualized models as anchors, all entertainment is lowest-common denominator, and clothing is covered with corporate logos. Er, wait a minute…

So the joke runs out pretty quickly, but it’s still an entertaining movie, if only for the sets and one-liners: “You went to law school at Costco!?”

Ahh, Starbucks, home of Exotic Coffee for Men.

Anyway, I referenced Vancouver’s own typographer Ray Larabie above because many of the design choices in Idiocracy look like his 1990s free fonts. Which is kinda cool, actually.

You should read the review, Idiocratic Design at UnderConsideration now!

I, on the other hand, share my name with a number of moderately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be serial killers or skinheads or anything terrible like that at all. That said, the most prominent ones tend to be fairly embarassing. So who are they? A couple other Catherine Winters have written embarrassing books, but that’s thankfully a lot better than it could be. No, my fellow Catherine Winters are pretty harmless.

The first Catherine Winters’ story is pretty tragic, however:

Nine-year-old Catherine Winters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A family friend named Dan Monroe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her Newcastle, Indiana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an outbreak of measles and Catherine had spent the morning playing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked gingham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.

They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mystery — was she kidnapped by gypsies? Did she run away? Her disappearance was covered in a 1913 silent newsreel.

Of course today, we can all guess what happened and it’s pretty horrifying. I really can’t fault her for having the same name, particularly when she met such a tragic end.

Second to her is a Catherine Winters who is also pretty hard to be irritated by. Catherine Winters of Lindon, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I figure she doesn’t need crazy people picking at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego linking to any of the sites that list a little too much personal info.

Catherine, if you ever read this:

• Tell your parents to think about password protecting some of those photos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
• Don’t let high school get you down in a couple years. In my experience, Catherine Winterses don’t like high school.

So, with the exception of Catherine Winters who disappeared in 1913 and Catherine Winters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:

There’s Catherine Winters, who in 1983, wrote a single entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Important People. I’ve had people ask me if that one was mine. (“Yes. Yes it was. I was a published author when I was 2 years old.”) I strongly suspect that this is the Catherine Winters who wrote for Young Miss magazine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writing for Health.com and is not as lame as previously asserted. Either way, it’s surprising that someone as prolific as this Catherine Winters could be eclipsed online by a book written 25 years ago.

[Update: May 28, 2009: Catherine Winters good-naturedly confirms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Catherine Winters have worried and doesn’t sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]

There’s a “Katherine Winters Hair Salon” in Irvington, New York. I’m not actually sure of the spelling of her first name, but apparently, the proprietor isn’t actually named Catherine Winters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writing, there’s only one extremely negative review available on Google:

“If she didn’t give me a bunch of attitude for leaving and offered me a discount to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”

Finally, there’s the Catherine Winters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Single and Loving It. In the author’s own words:

I wrote this book because I had experienced some shortcoming also in the area of being single and praying for the right mate to come my way after my journey on being single I am now happily married to a wonderful husband but if I had not stood still just for a second I also would of miss my blessing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to consider while your waiting on God and soul searching for what you want your mate to be.

You know, a lot of people look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legitimate’ or because you don’t have ‘editors’ or ‘proofreading’ and can have ‘problems’ with ‘grammar’, but to them, I say, balderdash! I’m ordering this right now.

So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even counting the myriad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a couple entertaining ones.

• In 2008, New Orleans resident Mary Catherine Winters, a nurse at Omega Hospital, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clinton.
• In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Winter won gold at the inaugural World Junior Figure Skating Championships. At two sentences in length, she has the shortest Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
• Kathy Winters, NASA Shuttle Weather Officer, gets quoted in the press all the time and apparently has the authority to scrub shuttle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
• Dr. Kathryn Winters, a pediatrician from New Mexico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s parent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.

Interestingly, Catherine Winters have a tendency to be fictional!

• “Catherine Winters”, “Cate Winters” and “Kate Winters” are all popular names in a variety of fan fiction: Twilight, (Damn it.) Smallville, Harry Potter, Boy Meets World, Doctor Who, and so on. The most blatant one of these, a Stargate SG-1 Mary Sue seems to have disappeared.
• Hilary Swank played Professor Katherine Winter in the 2007 film The Reaping, which I have not seen. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 9%, I have not made plans to do so. (Seriously, Hilary, who is your agent!? Most. Inconsistent. Career. Ever.)
• Kate Winters is the protagonist of Gerri Hill’s novel Coyote Sky, currently one of the top-ten books on Amazon’s ever-mercurial lesbian romance list. Unlike The Reaping, I have read this, and yeah, I’d say that ranking is fairly well-deserved. If your name is Catherine Winters, it might be weird to read though. I’m just saying.
• One of my personal favourites: “Catherine Winters” is the alias chosen by the protagonist of hetero romance novel Indiscreet by Mary Balogh.
  

  Lady Catherine Winsmore, a heroine of quiet courage, refused a forced marriage when rape left her with an illegitimate child. Exiled by her family, she poses as a young widow, Mrs. Catherine Winters. An innocent smile brings the unwelcome advances of another rake, the Viscount Rawleigh, Rex Adams.

  That’s super. Not only do I apparently have a name that makes me sound like a character from a romance novel, I have a name that sounds like a character from a romance novel made it up. Awesome.

Who shares your name?

So, my first Amazon sale completed, I was feeling pretty positive about them. Until yesterday.

Sunday morning, I was alerted to news of a somewhat poorly-planned decision at Amazon: to better cater to America’s “moral majority”, Amazon decided to excise the popularity rankings of LGBT books, delisting them from search results. Some authors’ books can only be found by searching for an unrelated title and clicking on the author’s name. Other authors’ entire selections have been delisted.

According to a thread on Livejournal’s Meta Writer community, Amazon has de-ranked such titles as Brokeback Mountain, Tipping the Velvet and Stone Butch Blues. This  begs the question: what on earth are these sheltered, bigoted Amazon customers searching for that is going to make them get all red-faced and choke down vomit upon discovering those books in their search results?

“Well, I never!” they’ll exclaim, spittle flying forth, “I wanted to read about the non-gay history of Brokeback Mountain! How was I to know it was fictional?”

In his blog post on the subject, Raul (Hummingbird604) compares the move by Amazon to last year’s “Motrin Moms” debacle. He also raises the question, is Easter Sunday a good time to be organizing a protest? Absolutely. Is Easter Sunday an okay time for Amazon PR to take the day off? Obviously not.

Worse, Amazon’s responses have ranged from “yes, we de-rank adult content” to “uh, it’s a glitch?” They haven’t demonstrated any cohesive strategy to managing their response, and continue to look worse and worse, the longer this goes on.

Since breaking Sunday morning, the #amazonfail and #glitchmyass hashtags on Twitter continue to trend highly a day later, inviting responses from Amazon’s competitors.

Amidst a flurry of suggestions that they hold a sale on LGBT books, Powells Books’ Twittter account notes that they will definitely not censor the presence of LGBT material on their site.

@cinemaestro That certainly is disturbing. Fortunately, Powell’s will never censor this material #amazonfail http://bit.ly/3Me5Un

about 7 hours ago in reply to cinemaestro

@zentinal A GLBT sale sounds like a great idea to me. I will check to see if this is something we can get going #amazonfail

about 6 hours ago in reply to zentinal

By Monday morning, the mainstream media was already reporting on the issue:

• Amazon blames ‘glitch’ for removal of gay titles from sales rankings, CBC
• ‘Gay writing’ falls foul of Amazon sales ranking system, Guardian.co.uk
• Amazon website censorship row, Channel 4

Oh, and per Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ advice: Amazon Rank

Update, April 13, 2:50pm:
An email from an Amazon.com spokesman, reproduced by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, describes #Amazonfail as “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.”

The email goes on to say that a total of 57,310 books outside of the Gay & Lesbian categories were deranked and that they’re in the process of reinstating them.

So what happened? Did some mid-level manager enact some crazy new policy? Can Amazon’s ranking and reporting mechanisms be gamed?

Apparently, it’s Rosebud. I find that a little weird on its own, but particularly so in light of the others assigned to the Obamas, Bidens and Bushes. According to the Chicago Tribune:

President-elect Barack Obama: Renegade
Michelle Obama: Renaissance
Malia Obama: Radiance
Sasha Obama: Rosebud
Vice President-elect Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri
President George W. Bush: Tumbler
First Lady Laura Bush: Tempo

Aside from Bush’s codename, which I assume means that someone has a sense of humour, these all sound like cars. Crappy, marketer-named cars.

“This fall, test-drive the 2009 Chrysler Capri and discover an automotive experience that demonstrates why no one wants to buy Chrysler. Act now before the recall!”

Also, as an aside, I love the names-that-start-with-the-same-letter bit and all, but seriously, you guys are positive everyone can hear the difference between “Radiance” and “Renaissance” over an earpiece, right? I ask because the sitcom viewer in me thinks this is going to end with someone getting fired by an enraged President Obama.