Video game takes satirical aim at tasteless listeriosis jokes

Linda Nguyen , Canwest News Service
Published: Saturday, September 20, 2008
OTTAWA - A new website that allows people to shoot down pictures of Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz with a cannon firing cold cuts has surfaced on the Internet, as calls for his resignation continue to grow over jokes he made during the deadly listeriosis outbreak.

Set against a backdrop of Parliament Hill, the satirical website - www.deathby1000coldcuts.info - invites participants to "fire salami slices from your cold cut cannon over the skies of Parliament to defend the honour of Canada and the sensibilities of your fellow citizens!"

The site was created Thursday by a group of employees at Guru Dynamics, a Toronto-based web design and hosting company.

"Gerry Ritz made his comments and we were outraged," co-creator Roger Grant told Canwest News Service Saturday. "We feel that he should've been fired."

Grant said he and four other employees decided to make "collective effort" to satirize Ritz's comments.

"We believe political satire plays an important role in voter involvement. We didn't want to make it a serious game or a serious site. We made light of it," he said. "We wanted to draw attention to it and that's why we put it the way we did it so people would look at it."

The game, which urged visitors to play "Cold Cut Cannon," claims it is non-partisan.

"By the way this is a political satire. We in no way support hate, violence or terrorism of any sort. Nor do we support any particular party. In fact, we're so confused we don't know who to vote for this October 14th," the website reads.

Grant said that the company has not received any reaction from any of the political parties.

Since it was put online early Friday, there have been 100,000 visits to the site, he claimed.

Ritz has been at the centre of controversy after he made jokes about the deadly listeriosis outbreak, which has since claimed the lives of 18 people across the country.

The jokes were made during a conference call with bureaucrats held at the end of August to review progress dealing with the listeria crisis.

During the phone conversation, Ritz said that, for the government, "it was like death by a thousand cuts - or, should I say, 'cold cuts?'"

Later, when told about another listeriosis case in P.E.I., he said, "Please tell me it's (Liberal agriculture critic) Wayne Easter."

Ritz apologized for the comments when the news about the comments surfaced.

The Conservatives' political opponents and a number of groups and individuals - including family members of those who died from the outbreak - continue to call on Harper to fire the minister. Harper refused to dump Ritz, saying it was gallows humour in the heat of the crisis and did not reflect on his good work.

The web billionaires

The Internet boom put these 34 innovators on our list of the world's richest. Total worth: $109.7 billion.


In 1999, Marc Benioff was a high-paid executive at Oracle and ready to move on. He explained to a reporter he would rather work for himself than another "billionaire S.O.B." Now he is one.


A billionaire, that is. He spotted an opportunity in the business of managing customer relationships. At the time, a business that wanted a computer application to manage customers faced a long and expensive ordeal. The business needed buy customized software, pay for hardware to run the programs, and then shell out even more money to the software company for installation and maintenance.
Fine for a mega-cap company that could drop a few million dollars without blinking, but it shut out small businesses. So he built Salesforce.com, which offered a new way to manage customer relationships. Its product was simpler and cheaper than tailored software. By providing the service over the Web--eschewing installation and maintenance fees--Salesforce could charge as little as $50 per month.


"Salesforce took off with largely smaller businesses," says Andrew Waldeck, a partner at the Innosight, a consulting firm specializing in innovation. "Those customers weren't attractive to the incumbent, because they couldn't service them profitably. Salesforce could."


Feeding off its bases of small businesses, Salesforce was able to continue improving its product and capabilities. Soon, the firm was grabbing the coveted mid- and large-size customers. By 2004, it boasted clients like Cisco, Staples and Advanced Micro Devices.


Forbes valued Benioff's net worth at $1.2 billion in March. He joins 33 other men and women on our list of the world's richest who owe much of their success to Web sites or online services, to the tune of $109.7 billion in total net worth. Most have products that were highly disruptive to the marketplace.


A common element among disruptive innovations is that they satisfy a group of overlooked consumers. To find one of these groups, Pierre Omidyar didn't need to look any further than his fiancée: She was an avid Pez-dispenser collector who couldn't find a place to buy or sell pieces for her collection.


Omidyar, a computer programmer, built a Web page called eBay that could do that job for her. He charged a quarter per listing to other hobbyists, and soon needed to hire somebody to open up all the checks piling up at his home.


"EBay figured out way to reduce transaction costs and create a market around low-cost collectibles that people previously didn't have the opportunity to trade," says Waldeck.


Millions of Beanie Babies and baseball-card auctions later, Omidyar is another Web billionaire. Forbes valued his net worth at $7.7 billion in March. He's joined on the list by a couple of his hired hands: The company's first full-time employee, Jeffrey Skoll, has a fortune Forbes estimated at $3.6 billion in March; former Chief Executive Meg Whitman has $1.3 billion.


Professor John Sperling spotted an underserved crowd in who was missing his classes. While teaching humanities at San José State, he concluded traditional schools of higher learning neglected non-traditional students. There were few classes that jived with the busy schedules of adults with jobs and families.


Sperling took the idea of his school for these non-traditional students to his employer. They weren't interested, so in 1976, Sperling founded the University of Phoenix, which is now a subsidiary of Apollo Group.


The first class had eight students. During its latest quarter this year, Apollo announced it had 345,000 students seeking degrees at its institutions. Much of the growth has come through the Web, where Apollo has been hosting classes online since 1999. Jeff Silber, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, estimates that around 75% of Apollo's University of Phoenix students are enrolled in online courses.


We estimated John Sperling's net worth at $1.7 billion in March. Like father, like son: John's son Peter also works at Apollo, and is on our list of Web billionaires with an estimated net worth equal to his father's.

Seed Salon: Jill Tarter + Will Wright

Will Wright's lifelong interest in astrobiology deepened during his numerous visits to the SETI Institute over the evolution of the computer game Spore, released September 7. There he became familiar with the work of Jill Tarter and her colleagues whose mission to explore the universe for signs of life inspired Wright's development of the game. Their recent conversation in Manhattan was characteristically ambitious, raising such questions as, Can we model reality? How do we quantify scientific revolutions? And is the singularity inevitable?