Evans Above

It’s finally here. Today, WINDmobile will be launching its Canadian wireless service and I, for one, can’t wait to see how its plans rate against the established players like Rogers, Telus and Bell.

We’re at the point where even a slight improvement in pricing, plans and service will drive many people to check out this new carrier. Frankly, the wireless situation in Canada sucks right now.

The official launch is later this morning, so we’ll have to wait until then to see the pricing and available phones at WINDmobile.ca

When Paul McCartney was in The Beatles, the four lads from Liverpool played one of the most iconic concerts ever to rock Shea Stadium. When Shea was replaced by Citi Field, it only made sense that the legendary rocker opened it.

And open it he did. Three historic nights rocking a sold out crowd. Songs from The Beatles, Wings and his current works too. And it was all captured on an amazing 2 CD/2 DVD set that I received the other day called Good Evening New York City: Deluxe Edition. If you have anyone on you Xmas list who’s a McCartney fan…or who should be a McCartney fan, you need to get them this present. If you’re a McCartney fan, you need to buy this or leave big hints about it NOW.

The set contains two CDs chock full of Macca’s music. The first DVD contains concert footage shot over the three nights at Citi Field, while the bonus DVD contains the mini-concert from Paul’s performance atop David Letterman’s Marquee and a documentary on Paul’s fans. For me the Letterman mini-concert is worth the price of admission alone. The Citi shows are obviously fantastic, but Paul and the boys just seem so loose and the music so intimate as they perform for people on the streets below.

This CD/DVD combo set is a worthy addition to any music library.

Okay, so Tiger Woods is taking an “indefinite break from professional golf” because after all, there’s a lot of women he hasn’t slept with yet. Or he needs time to find women that won’t talk to the media.

Anyway, what really makes me chuckle is that one of the hottest searches right now according to Google Trends is for the definition of the word “indefinite”. I guess concerned fans with poor vocabularies need to know how long he’ll be gone from the sport.

According to the good folks at Merriam-Webster, indefinite means “not precise, vague, having no exact limits”. So now you know.

The media frenzy around golfer Tiger Woods continues to grow as the number of women claimed — or claiming — to be mistresses has grown to nine.

For those of you keeping track there’s Mindy Lawton, who told her story to the British tabloid News of The World, Rachel Uchitel, the first woman named, Kalika Moquin, a Vegas club manager who denies the allegations, Jaimee Grubbs, from VH1’s Tool Academy, who took her story to Us Weekly, Jamie Jungers, whose mother said she was linked to Tiger, Cori Rist, who’s saying “no comment” after a New York Daily News column. There’s also buzz surrounding porn star Holly Sampson and two as yet unnamed women.

I’m waiting for the headlines that claim Tareq and Michaele Salahi have crashed Tiger Woods bedroom.

Sometimes a news story can have the worst timing. The Zhu Zhu pet hamster, a sort of robotic toy that kids are going crazy for this year, has been faced with safety concerns raised by a San Francisco-based consumer’s group called Good Guide. They contend that one of the toys, Mr. Squiggles to be exact, has higher than acceptable levels of the chemical antimony, which can lead to health problems.

Zhu Zhu’s manufacturer, Cepia LLC, has responded to the allegations saying, in part, that “We are disputing the findings of Good Guide and we are 100% confident that Mr. Squiggles, and all other Zhu Zhu Toys, are safe and compliant with all U.S. and European standards for consumer health and safety in toys.”

Let’s hope this situation is resolved so that the robotic hamsters Pipsqueak, NumNums, Chunk, Squiggles and Patches can be played with this year and then join Cabbage Patch Dolls and Beanie Babies in the land of forgotten fads.

The world “twilf” has been in the urbandictionary for a little while, but it really started to catch people’s interest after the Current TV cartoon show A Stupid Virus referred to former veep candidate Sarah Palin as a TWILF.

What does it mean. Well in polite Twitter company it would probably refer to Tweep I’d Like to Follow. Though “follow” might not be the word we’re looking for. Of course, for Democrats (or thinkers) the “F” might stand for forget.

Gary Hayes has developed an interesting look at some social media statistics.

[The graph once referenced by this article is now gone. So this page is here as a placeholder. Oh well. :-)]

Lisa Ling co-hosted on The View this morning and the ladies (or “girls” as Kate Gosselin kept calling them) took a phone call from the opportunistic TV mom.

The call was about her estranged husband Jon taking over $200,000 from their joint account. Kate also commented on how the show’s legally issue hiatus was upsetting her eight children as they were now missing out on yet another all expenses paid trip to New York.

Apparently Ling hadn’t had a sip of the Gosselin Kool-Aid — Kate recently co-hosted The View — and said twice that there must be other ways for Kate to make money without putting her children on TV, even if it was just during the time of the divorce.

Barbara Walters abruptly thanked Kate and ended the call, derailing Ling’s criticism of the show. Perhaps while dealing with her sister’s imprisonment in North Korea, Lisa forgot how to kiss the backsides of people famous for nothing.

Fashion house Emanuel Ungaro recently unveiled their spring 2010 collection which was co-designed by Lindsay Lohan.

Strangely a Toronto paper’s story on the situation referred to Lohan as an “Hollywood A-lister”. Are they publishing in some bizarre reverse alphabet world where children learn their ZYX’s?

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted. I’ve been busy getting ready for the 34th Toronto International Film Festival and doing some backend work on the site. My post TIFF goal is to post here more frequently.

I believe that a swift kick in the rear should be followed by a pat on the back if the person or company involved has learned something.

After being made aware of my previous Pizza Pizza article, I received a phone call from a customer service manager. He had been unaware of the situation and had not received any paperwork on it despite the fact that I had spoken to several reps who said they would boost it up the chain.

What I appreciated was his candor. He didn’t try to hide behind computer failures or “Bob was on vacation” or any of the other 1,000 excuses you hear these days. He simply stated that they dropped the ball on this one and he’d be talking to the reps to make sure that a situation like this was handled better in future. There was no corporate speak. Just a guy apologizing to a customer and promising that they’d do their best to learn from this and improve. He took my info and personally followed up to make sure the refund actually came through.

Many companies get to a size where they see themselves as some sort of individual entity. The Borg versus all of their customers. It was nice to hear one person accept that mistakes were made and take responsibility for trying to fix it.

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