Despite the news of Terminal City’s demise, not all of the media headlines are gloomy on this Hallowe’en Monday.

From the Comedy Network, news that the Colbert Report will soon be part of our late-night lives:

The most compelling fake news timeslot on TV is expanding to 60 minutes. CTV announced today that it has reached a deal with MTV Networks International (MTVI) to bring the critically-acclaimed Daily Show spin-off The Colbert Report to Canada….

What The Daily Show is to news, The Colbert Report is to the smorgasbord of personality-driven, pundit programming – except intentionally funny. Colbert may have the same arrogance, self-reverence and tunnel vision as Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Geraldo Rivera, Joe Scarborough and Aaron Brown – but on purpose.

What’s the only news that could make this even better? How about the fact that the very next night, Rick Mercer returns to the CBC? Tuesday, November 8 at 8:00 p.m., the Rick Mercer Report (I guess keeping the name “Monday Report” would have been confusing given the shift to Tuesdays, but somehow that appeals to me) launches its latest season.

Well, damn. One less alternative to the Sovince/Prun:

Vancouver alternative newsweekly Terminal City is suspending publication effective immediately publisher John Kay announced today. Kay said the October 27 edition, which hit the streets last Thursday, will “probably” be the paper’s final edition.

It’s hard to make a go of it in the indie media business, and apparently harder still to do it in Vancouver. TC is going out with a bang, including Nathan Allen’s highly partisan but passionate (and persuasive) call for Jim Green’s election as mayor. You can download the farewell edition in glorious PDF format.

From WorldChanging:

I don’t want to be a big cynic about this, but really, at this point, who WANTS George W Bush to get all interested in climate change? Sooner or later, that guy poisons everything he touches. He’d probably start a highly secretive and utterly disorganized “Department of Greenhouse Security,” where Bechtel apparatchiks took over abandoned army bases to install leaky nuclear power plants in dead of night with extraordinarily-rendered, off-the-books, union-busting labor. Would that help? If he fought the Greenhouse in utter sincerity and with all his might, would he win?

He forgot to mention that Karl Rove would be running a covert smear campaign against Michael Crichton, but otherwise I think he nailed it.

When The Karasik Conspiracy hits bookshelves this September, the plot may sound just a wee bit familiar:

a group of shadowy terrorists conspires to murder thousands of Americans by poisoning the medicine they’re importing from Canada to beat U.S. drug prices.

It sounds uncannily like the warnings giant pharmaceutical companies were sounding not long ago over Americans buying cheap generic drugs from Canada. Weird coincidence, huh?

Well, not so weird. The plotline was actually dictated by the pharmaceutical industry’s chief lobbying body, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which went shopping — armed with a six-figure offer — for writers and a publisher willing to create just such a book.

They connected with two writers and a publisher who agreed both to the plot and a 45-day writing deadline. Things were going swimmingly… apart from the writers’ bristling over the notes they were receiving from the PhRMA marketing exec in charge of the project.

But then PhRMA backed out, and — according to the writers — offered them $100,000 to never reveal the arrangement. No dice, said the writers, and rewrote the book to their own preferences.

Meanwhile, PhRMA now says the entire project was the brainchild of a junior marketing functionary and never authorized by management. Which echoes the words made famous in a (non-bought-and-paid-for) thriller series in another genre: should you be caught or killed, “the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions.”

Over on UIE Brain Sparks, Jared Spool weighs in on the civil war over whether web navigation bars should be on the left or right side of the page:

having tested a ton of users on bundles of sites, we’ve learned over the years that navigation placement doesn’t matter one whit. Put the navigation practically anywhere on the page and users will find it when they need it.

While I suspect Jared’s right (and his folks certainly have the experience to back him up), it won’t do anything to quell the partisans.

Here’s what I propose: run the nav bar down the centre of your page. Have it take up 70, 80% of the page width. Run the content down either side of the nav bar. I guarantee they’ll find your menu.

True, if you want the page to look remotely balanced, you’ll need to either bump the size of the nav bar type way up (a victory for the elderly, for mobile device users and for the visually impaired) or have one hell of a lot of links in your nav bar (which would encourage you to create more content, which Google loves, so your pagerank will rise).

It’s win-win, people.

Someone else go first, though.

I came into work this morning to learn that our faces had been plastered all over last night’s broadcast of Survivor, as Global promotes tonight’s 5:30 newscast and their featured story, “Will the VCR get the heave-ho in favour of TiVo?”

Global’s reporter, the charming and talented Nathan, came by the other night to tape us with TiVo and capture our pontifications on the future of pop culture in an on-demand era. There was something disquieting about TV coming over to watch us watching TV. But we set that aside in favour of the glories of ersatz celebrity.

Your reviews will be welcome in the comments area…

Any major shift in communication technology goes through these stages:

1. Experimentation
2. Early narrow implementation
3. Establishment of community
4. Enhancement of solidarity in face of establishment backlash
5. Giving awards to ourselves

Gosh, is it time for step five again?

Yep. The Canadian Blog Awards have opened nominations for 2005, celebrating the Canadian blogospheriverse’s capacity for creating provocative, insightful commentary and engaging, ground-breaking citizen journalism. (Or, failing that, our ability to game the system, rig the vote and make off with a boatload of ill-gotten virtual booty.)

You can nominate any Canadian blog you like (including blogs by expats living abroad and visitors living in Canada). Modesty forbids one from suggesting that one nominate one’s blog… but you know, if you felt so inclined…

Meanwhile, beyond shameless self-promotion (suggested categories: humour, personal, “liberal”, best blog by a practising metrosexual), there’s a little something in all of this for folks who just want to find a few more good blogs to read: the list of nominations. If you’ve been looking to expand your daily intake of bloggy goodness, it’s a terrific starting point.

Sometimes, an event evokes an idea so compelling that
everyone
thinks
of it.

(Rest in peace, Rosa Parks. And thank you for your courage.)