CBC Lockout Watch, Day 23

I went down to the picket line outside the Toronto Broadcast Centre today to find that the prevailing mood of the picketers might best be described as defiant boredom.

Walking around a building wearing a sandwich board has got to be one of the most mind-numbing tasks a human being can carry out. Small talk and picket line chants can only go so far to pass the time. Man was not made to go around in circles like a hamster on its wheel.

If the locked-out workers didn't have to do it to collect their strike pay, they wouldn't. At least the podcasts and campus radio shows give some of them something else to do to collect it.

Tomorrow is costume day on the Toronto picket line. Since Mardi Gras will likely be cancelled this year in New Orleans, come early to watch a parade of motley fools in gaudy outfits.

Andy Barrie is slumming it in the mornings at CIUT, wowing the campus radio crew with the sheer brilliance of his star power:

After Mr. Barrie and his crew paid their $5 volunteer fee, Toronto Unlocked was graciously accommodated by the campus station, staff of which looked on in amazement as their incense-scented space was taken over by some of the city's most notable radio personalities.

''Some people are like, 'It's so hard having all these CBC people asking me for things,' and I'm like 'You love it,''' said Cristine Paglialunga, a U of T politics student and the assistant to CIUT's program director.

She was one of about 20 people watching Mr. Barrie and co-host Kevin Sylvester yesterday from a control room where sound-proofing cork board peeled from the walls and the doors were covered with stickers for the Wu Tang Klan, Gravediggaz and The Littlecocks, bands that get little play on CBC airwaves.

Others, though, were less impressed:

But Shooks' co-host, a young man called Jahmin, could not identify the applauding crowd of radio personalities assembled in his space. ''I don't listen to CBC,'' he said. ''What station is it on?''

As the lockout drags on, there are rumblings of mutiny against the captain of the Good Ship CBC; even the officers are starting to side with the crew against Robert Rabinovich. To quote the mystery managerette Ouimet:

There is nothing necessarily wrong with a bureaucrat. As long as he does his job. But this one is so creatively bankrupt, so mistrusted, so disconnected, and so discounted by his own people that he is dead weight. We needed a leader, but they gave us luggage.

The results of the reader survey at CBC Unplugged show that 90% of respondents are listening less to the CBC, and that 30% of them expect the lockout to last another month, with another 30% predicting it'll go on anywhere from another six weeks to three months.

Even hard-core CBCphobes like me are getting fed up with the lockout. It's getting more difficult to find original news about it or interesting angles to blog about. Like the picketers, I'm getting sick of going around in circles.

If I can't have the CBC's bloated, putrefying corpse dead at my feet, then send them back to work, so I can get back to hating the regularly scheduled programming that I almost never watch.