Q: What do you think?
CBC Radio One’s new daily afternoon show, Q, is now on the air.
Have you had a chance to listen to Q?
What do you think?
(Note: This is a forum for comments about Q, not Freestyle, which Q replaced.)
|
Email This Post |
| Q |
|
||
 |
CBC Radio One’s new daily afternoon show, Q, is now on the air.
Have you had a chance to listen to Q?
What do you think?
(Note: This is a forum for comments about Q, not Freestyle, which Q replaced.)
|
|
Email This Post |
| Q |
CBC Twitter Feed
I think it is GREAT to have Jian Ghomeshi back on the airwaves, I really felt a massive hole after SLC In The Summer ended. I can not think of a better host for a show about Canadian Arts and Entertainment, I mean, think about his history. Moxy Fruvous was THE Canadian band of the 90′s, he was a board member of the Stratford Theatre Festival, writes for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and the Washington Post to name a few. He’s been on television with hosting The End, which was a three part investigation into the end of conventional media formats, along with >Play and contributing to The Hour!
The show started with typical Jian humour and his style is clear and alive across Canada. I seriously think that the CBC has found a hit!
Only been able to catch the last half of both the first two shows. But it sounds like vintage Ghomeshi…intimate, fun, and informative. I’m hoping that it’ll soon be a podcast so that I can hear all of it more regularly, but I expect the music content will put the cabosh on that plan. Still…off to a good start.
A good start. Particularly the Loreena McKennitt piano solo!
I am listening to it online each evening and enjoying Jian back on the radio….
Q? Oh I thought you meant Star Trek Q…..
Here’s a “Q” for ya, what does it stand for anyway?
I like Jian Gomeshi’s smiley voice, but hated his hosting of Sounds Like Canada last summer — couldn’t really put my finger on why, but guessed maybe he’s just not cut out to be a radio interviewer; maybe he doesn’t ask the right questions; maybe he doesn’t go deep enough; maybe he’s a bit “surface” and giggly, a lightweight? — I usually listen to SLC at my desk as I work, but last summer I actually gave it up after a while as I found it too irritating, too disappointing. When Shelagh Rogers came back, so did I.
So I was not pleased to hear that Jian was hosting a new show replacing Freestyle, whose hosts I found witty and entertaining.
The topics to be covered on Q are those I need to stay on top of for my work, so I will be listening, anyway. All I’ve had a chance to hear so far was yesterday’s item about a videogame. No comment. I’ll cross my fingers and hope for something more interesting today. I assume we can’t blame Jian for the choice of subject matter. He seems to be a lovely person and I’d like to see him succeed at this. I just hope CBC will get some sense and stop trying to appear “hip” to the under-30 set by going meatless, which is what SLC appeared to do last summer. Even younger listeners surely want to hear interviews with some gristle. I started listening to CBC when I was in my early twenties and I would have been disappointed with some of the stuff we’re getting lately.
I can understand, at least in theory, why someone from southern Ontario might like Jian and this show, because Jian is a southern Ontario guy and all of his shows have been hugely weighted toward southern Ontario content and done from a southern Ontario perspective. As someone who grew up and has lived in several major cities in western Canada, as well as living for several years in Ottawa, and who has paid fairly close attention to the national pop culture scene for the last decade or so, I have a quite different opinion. (I see you’re from Norther Ontario Dean, and I also see that we like a lot of the same things, but I’m afraid that Jian and CBC’s pop culture programming are not among those things. For the record, I remember Moxy Fruvus as largely a southern Ontario band and I don’t remember it having much of a following anywhere outside of southern Ontario.)
From my point of view I think this program is about what you would expect it to be. There have only been two shows, but so far it is also hugely skewed toward Toronto and southern Ontario content, and it comes from an almost exclusively Toronto perspective. That’s really the only perspective a show hosted by Jian could come from because that’s the only part of Canada he has had any significant exposure to or familiarity with. Jian does seem to have broadened his perspective for this show from strictly a Queen Street West one to more of a general Toronto perspective, or possibly even a southern Ontario one (but I’ll let others be the judge of that), but after that he’s really reached the limit of his own understanding of Canada and Canadian culture. To give him credit for a few things, he has made a much better start of it than he did with SLC, where in the first two days he introduced a song by a New York band as his theme song for a show called Sounds like Canada, and he made ignorant and offensive comments about Saskatoon and Newfoundland on successive days, offending the people he was speaking to as well as his listeners. He’s also improved his delivery by not gasping and stammering for effect quite as much, which is a very good thing. In the things that don’t seem to have changed category, by his choice of music it doesn’t appear that he’s been keeping any more up to date with current Canadian pop culture trends, at least the ones outside of Toronto. In case anyone mistakenly believed otherwise, Jian is no hipster. He hasn’t updated his sense of humour either. He still has quite noticeably regional and dated pop culture sensibilities overall.
The result is that this show, along with CBC’s near full roster of Torontonians hosting “national” pop culture shows out of Toronto, all of which have the same kinds of problems to one degree or another, is not representing Canadian pop culture very well at all, and it is giving Canadians a very skewed and very misleading perspective on Canadian pop culture, and this is a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a number of years now at the CBC in the face of its claims to be trying to fairly represent all Canadians. Just to be clear, Jian and George and Sook-Yin do not represent Canadian youth culture. They represent Queen Street West culture, and not necessarily the culture of the youth there either. Jian is 40 years old and obviously hasn’t been keeping up on recent Canadian trends, as anyone who only follows the Canadian College Radio Charts will know.
The program is spectacular! Lovely to have an arts show as wide-ranging as Q already is and promises to continue to be. JG sounds cool, calm, and collected and it is wonderful to have a forum in which he can truly display his multifaceted talents. And kudos, of course, to the whole Q-team for all their hard work, too. Behind every great host is a wealth of equally as great producers.
I haven’t heard it yet, but I’ve been meaning to. Will try this aft.
I suspect that “Q” is a play on “Cue.” As in, “cue the song,” “cue the actor,” etc.
….all I can say is, “Thank God Freestyle is gone”. Q is actually quite good and you can see it will have legs……..
love it but the q micsite needs more features
I’ve been listening to it online, on thunder bay station which airs at the same time as toronto but is one hour and a half long.
I like it very much so far, glad jian is back.
Or “Cue” as in “Cue up the next program, because this one is a snore.”
So far so good, an no one is more surprised by this assessment than me.
After the hipper-than-thou “Jian Like Canada” (SLC) of last summer I almost gave up on CBC Radio forever.
But Q seems to be more content-driven than personality driven. Admittedly anything would be an improvement on the hollow Lifestyle, but Q really does have legs.
Now Q, use those legs and get out of Southern Ontario. There’s plenty of good culture beyond your borders. Milk it, and you will get national buy-in.
Why do CBC hosts have to dip into that jar of silly pills before they go on the air? Relatively normal intelligent people suddenly lose all sense of reality and start thinking they’re funny. Gomeshi is just the latest in a series. Cut the stupid
openings: not funny, not witty, not enlightening, just dumb. Show seems to go along ok once that first excruciating two minutes is over. Make no mistake, it’s a turnoff not a hook.
As much as I can appreciate the comments about Q being Southern based, but let’s be fair people. I mean, if you are a new show on CBC Radio and you want to come in with a bang to prove yourself, are you going to take that week paying homage to Saskatchewan or Alberta? HELL NO! No offence, but the Toronto, GTA, S. ON, markets are where a large chunk of the listneners come from. So, I’d take that week and do as much as I can to sell myself there and THEN start focussing on other major populated regions of the country.
PS: Was that Beyonce interp today just radio drama, or was that guy serious? If he was, Jian handled it somewhat well, but basically laughed at the guy on national radio.
I was able to listen to most of the first show. I thought it way better than that celebrity driven, lightweight, Free Style. The first show had some BC content, a Joni Mitchell song, performed in Vancouver. For the record I think the show to date with the most regional Canadian content is still Peter Gzowski’s Morning Side. I think Jian and the Q team will be able to measure up and I’m looking forward to being able to listen to more shows in the future.
I’ve listened two days in a row and I’m not a fan so far. I preferred freestyle. Having no prior Jian experience I won’t be too hard on him…maybe he grows on you? But I will say that playing video games on the radio is a no-no. I also thought that his interview with the art auctioneer was terrible. Lame questions, overdoing the humor (esp. asking for the names of bidders over and over again). I think he has some work to do.
Is it just me, or does Jian sound strangely like Bill Richardson? Is Bill mascarading as Jian?
So far, I am not disappointed with Q…probably because I had such low expectations in the first place! As a replacement for Freestyle it is probably ok (though at least Freestyle came from Vancouver and not Toronto). However as a replacement for The Arts Tonight it is VERY inferior. Consider the last few evenings…This is supposed to be a show about the Arts…not just about music. So far we have had just a couple of stories not about music (the Disney exhibit in France is the only one I can actually remember). The Arts Tonight, in the 40 minutes or so alloted to it had 2 in-depth stories – stories about music, yes, but also stories about movies, theatre, architecture, and all aspects of the arts. This hour long show has too many trivial interviews. Consider, for example, the bit last night with Harry Connick Jr, who was talking about New Orleans after the hurricane…not too long ago, the ARts tonight had an interview with Winton Marsalis which covered the same topic. It was a much better interview. And the segment with Measha Bruegergossman (probably misspelled, sorry)…what was that anyway? A real bit of fluff…all giggly from both Jian and Measha. I suspect that, in more competent hands, she could contribute something really wonderful. Sorry, I don’t really want to hear that…I want substance! But then I am a person with a reasonable attention span! Maybe the CBC could try to continue to appeal to those of us who are older and have been listening for 30 or 40 years or more (radio 4, codger radio???). I have committed to listening to this show for the first week to give it a chance, but strongly suspect that next week I will be looking for something else.
All I can say is thank goodness Freestyle is gone! Between the inane bumbling banter and lame humor content made me want to scream. I literally stopped listening to CBC in the afternoons. Now at last I can switch the radio back on! Enjoying it so far… but at this point anything is better than Freestyle so I am easy to please!
Gotta agree totally with David and especially Kate J.
Something about Jian just turns me off, despite his obvious credentials. I’m sure he is a great guy; perhaps it really is this “Central Canada” thing, which from out here on the Left Coast means “The Eastern Mafia”. We never heard of Moxie Fruvus here and I’m guessing that we won’t find many of the topics on “Q” very accessable.
Much of this is the fault of the long-standing CBC obsession with “Easterner” culture, especially in music, that deified people like Stan Rogers and jumps behind every new folkie that comes out of Ontario.
Lately we have been hearing a constant hyping of the latest batch of groaning, whining, angst-dripping male singers of the likes of Ron Sexsmith, Rufus wainwright, Joel Plasket, Adam Nation,Tommy Swick?, Patrick Watson (although I like the band’s instumentals) and Rene Thomas. Has anyone but me noticed that these guys all sound the same? And they are all Jian’s buddies I’m sure.
The best part about “Q”? Topical artscene docs.
The worst thing about “Q”? Sound just like “Sounds Like Canada”.
Bring back Elenor Wachtel, Nora Young and the real thing.
I’m pretty much consuming CBC 100% via podcasts these days — so, where is the Q podcast? It would have been great to see it launch along with the show.
“Just to be clear, Jian and George and Sook-Yin do not represent Canadian youth culture.”
I’ve noticed this point being flogged around the internet. I can’t speak for The Hour or Q, but DNTO has a notably geographically diverse group of contributors, which anyone could find out for themselves if they chose to chase this information down. Sook-Yin hosts, yes (and does a bang-up job, in my opinion), but in every show she talks to a huge range of contributors and musicians. Such is the magic of telephonic communication.
I should know: I’m a semi-regular contributor myself, and last time I checked, I still lived in western Canada.
Time will tell, but I don’t think this show will have legs. More accurately, I think it will have the same legs that The Hour and the Gill Deacon show have had, and for essentially the same reasons. Whether or not CBC chooses to try to prop it up for other reasons is another question entirely. I think this show is too regional in style and content and won’t attract a broad national audience. It’s also from a region that produces at least 5 other major pop culture shows for CBC, so it’s far beyond redundant from that perspective. If it was the only show with a predominantly Toronto/southern Ontario flavour to it and other parts of the country were covered by other shows produced from their regions with, for example, a BC flavour, a prairie flavour, a Quebec flavour and a maritime flavour, then it might provide some interest and value because of its unique perspective. But that is far from the case. The Hour, DNTO, GO, The Gill Deacon Show, and The Signal are all also hosted by Torontonians out of Toronto. The Hour, like this show, is hosted by someone who has never spent any significant amount of time anywhere in Canada other than Toronto, and who likewise doesn’t have enough national perceptive to even be minimally qualified to host a national pop culture show. We know from recent reports that The Hour and The Gill Deacon show are drawing much lower numbers than the CBC expected, (although why it expected shows as regional as these two to draw any significant national numbers is the real mystery), and yet the CBC has chosen to continue them for reasons that fairly clearly don’t involve a desire to provide a national audience with good, relevant, programming.
For me, however, this new show is very likely to be the tipping point in my relationship with the CBC. From my perspective Ghomeshi has always come across as a very regional individual who is trying to be young and hip but whose hip days have long since passed him by. As a CBC host he’s never been in touch with the current pop culture trends, and given that Canadian music is leading edge music globally these days for to him not to even be able to grasp that is really saying something. In the first few days of this show he’s played new music by two British artists, Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, neither of whom have made any kind of impact on the top 50 Canadian university and college charts. These are not necessarily bad albums, but this is not what the young Canadian demographic is listening to these days, neither these artists nor their kinds of music. He noted that both of these individuals are hard drinking and partying types, and that seemed to be something that appeals to him. That level of, I’ll call it teenage deviance, is very much at his level of analysis, but that’s a Queen Street West thing, isn’t it? That’s about the level that MuchMusic works on, a channel based on the QSW pop culture scene, and Jian seems to have largely formed himself in the image of a MuchMusic VJ. (Note also that George S., Sook-Yin and even Laurie Brown are all former MuchMusic VJs and very much moulded by the QSW scene). In the top 10 of the Canadian university and college charts this very week, however, are no less than 7 Canadian bands. They are:
1. You Say Party! We Say Die! – A Vancouver band that has interestingly has been banned from entering the US for 5 years.
2. Arcade Fire – a Montreal band with two core members from Houston Texas
4. Julie Doiron – from Montreal and origianlly from New Brunswick. A former member of Eric’s Trip who also plays in a couple of other major indie bands.
5. Besnard Lakes – from Montreal but both core members went to art school in Vancouver and one at least is originally from Regina. Besnard Lake is on the Churchill river system in northern Saskatchewan.
6. Do Make Say Think – a post rock band from Toronto whose last album gained a large amount of international attention and was one of the top rated albums in the world on the 2003 year end lists.
9. Lesbian On Ecstasy – a Montreal electronic band that I don’t know much about.
10. A Northern Chorus – a shoegaze type band from Hamilton.
There are many much more interesting stories and much more relevant artists from this list alone. Arcade Fire and Besnard Lakes are getting a HUGE amount of international attention right now and are currently two of the most critically albums in the world, and the new DMST album is getting some international attention too. With perhaps the exception of the Doiron album, this is all quite cutting edge music. It’s new and it’s hip, but it’s not pretentious. Much of it is complex and multi-instrumental, but it has great flow. This is the kind of music that is defining Canada, and that has made Canada a world leader, in the indie music scene in recent years, and it’s what young Canadians, as well as young people from around the world, are listening to, and yet the new artists Ghomeshi chose to feature on is first two days were Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, two British artists who are doing older forms of music and getting only moderate levels of international attention, but who party hard.
And this is not atypical Ghomeshi content. On one of his list shows he admitted that he was introduced to Sufjan Stevens by a listener, but that was two years after Stevens had become the buzz of the indie world. He also didn’t seem to know very much about the New Pornographers in spite of the fact that they are easily the most successful band on the Canadian college charts over the last 7 years, and they are one of the top few most critically acclaimed bands in the world over that time as well producing 3 albums that were all amongst the top rated albums on year end lists. They didn’t put out an album last year, but two of their members had solo albums which both were amongst the top rated albums in the world last year, Dan Bejar’s Destroyer’s Rubies and Neko Case’s Fox Confessor. This is a hugely important and influential Canadian band, and yet Ghomeshi has barely paid any attention to them in any of his shows. They are also from Vancouver, however, and Ghomeshi is a very, very, narrow Toronto guy. How much have any readers here heard about the New Pornographers on any of CBC’s Toronto based shows, for that matter? NPR, otoh, has done features on the band and on Case, Bejar, and Carl Newman individually, as I recall. When NPR does a better job of covering a major current Canadian band than the CBC does, then there is a serious problem with the CBC.
I’m being long winded again, but I won’t be posting much after this thread so please bear with me. Back to the tipping point. The CBC hasn’t been covering Canadian pop culture very well at all for a number of years at least. I had assumed that budget cuts had a lot to do with that and that the mistake they made was to try to cheap-out by hiring a bunch of unqualified Torontonians who were close at hand, and presumably very inexpensive, and making them hosts of almost all of their pop culture shows which they decided to produce out of Toronto. I no longer believe that this was just bad judgement. These shows have been failing and the problems have been clear for some time, and yet the CBC just keeps giving us Cable Toronto shows and trying to pass them off as national shows. With this show they now have two of their major daily “national” pop culture shows hosted out of Toronto by two people who have virtually no national perceptive at all. They both grew up in Toronto, went to school in Toronto, and have spent essentially their whole working lives in Toronto. I just can’t make excuses for this kind of decision making anymore. What I now see is a corrupt organization that is doing nothing more than hiring all its Toronto friends and neighbours to host these shows without any consideration at all for their qualifications or whether these shows even come close to fairly representing Canadian pop culture. There are some exceptions, of course. Grant Lawrence’s Radio 3 podcast is outstanding, as is some regional programming like The Key of A in Alberta, but overall I no longer believe that the CBC is even interested in reforming itself to better serve Canada and Canadians, and I think it’s time to start thinking about alternatives.
Here’s a fairly simple question that I think illustrates the problem fairly well. Can you come up with any rationale consistent with CBC’s mandate that could justify the hiring of someone like Jian Ghomeshi as a host of a prominent national pop culture show like this? If you can’t do this then maybe you were just assuming that the CBC always pursued the best interests of Canadians, and this should be a wake up call to alert you to the fact that the CBC has gone very much astray.
I find the problem with trying to attack the CBC about appealing to the youth culture is that CBC Radio does have three formats that they (by mandate) have to maintain seperate. So, the Premier Arts show on CBC Radio One that is supposed to be aimed at gaining youth listeners while still maintaining it’s traditional audience while not stepping on the toes of CBC Radio Two (who would want to?) and the hipster success from Vancouver CBC Radio 3.
Jian Ghomeshi and Q, in the whole seven shows they have had, have had interviews with Loreena McKennit and Joel Plaskett, (who I can guarantee you will be on the University charts in coming weeks with his new album, becuase I work for University radio) two very prominent Canadian musicians. Doing interviews with new R3 bands is a little risque for CBC R1 becuase these bands haven’t fully proven themselves yet on a national scale beyond R3. We can all list bands Q should interview like The New Pornographers (one of my favourite bands right now), but you have to take what you can get while maintaining a theme for each show.
I am really sad that Canada has let regional disputes and petty complaints about Jian (like his hair, as mentioned in letters from Fridays show). Jian is an amazing radio personality and I am SO HAPPY that we have him back. Sure, I will admit, Q was somewhat disappointing, but you have to understand that Q isn’t just Jian…becuase if it was I am pretty sure there would be many things done this week that he’d never do on radio. Just let the many producers and contributors of Q find their legs in the next few weeks before judging them too much.
@Melanie Watts – Wow. Didn’t take long for someone to mention Morningside.
Face it folks, CBC music programming is DEAD for the under-40 crowd who didn’t attend a college/university arts program.
For those over 40, come on. Enough with the Joni Mitchell.
Oh, wait. I should add something constructive.
Go! is fun and just right for my Saturday mornings. Brent knows how to take it to the street. Sook-yin does an OK job in the afternoon.
George S is from QSW but now looks does from an ivory tower . Does he share an office with Jian or is he too anGGGGRRRRRy?
Podcasts, Podcasts and more Podcasts. I repeat (loudly) from earlier posts. NO ONE SCHEDULES THEIR LIFE AROUND RADIO PROGRAMS IN THE 21st CENTURY!
Stick the music on FM. At leasts it sounds better when you have to listen on radio.
Also, put more TV programming, especially Canadian dramas, on podcasts or online viewing. You can even DRM it. I don’t mind.
Regarding the content of Q, I’ve already mentioned that Jian introduced both Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse as hard drinkers and partiers, not really a quality you would expect to be a major attraction to most of his Radio 1 listeners. Amy Winehouse is a young artist and this is her second album. Lily Allen’s album is a debut album, so it is also not an album from an established artist, and it was described by the BBC reviewer like this:
“Lyrically, Allen spins the street-slang tales of blowjobs and booze told with varying success by everyone from The Streets to Shampoo. And though self-conscious references to “the filth”, “pimps” and “crack whores” begin to grate, you wouldn’t get Sandi Thom opening her album with, “When you first left me I was wanting more, but you were ****ing that girl next door.” [link]
I think this kind of subject matter has pretty well been done, and I think the shock value has largely worn off and it has largely become dated and tedious even for most younger Canadians, which may be why this album didn’t even crack the top 50 on the Canadian university and college charts, and I certainly don’t think that it’s going to appeal to the traditional Radio 1 crowd. I do think it tells us again what level Ghomeshi operates at, however.
What I think the Radio 1 audience would like is an introduction of good quality, new, relevant, Canadian and global pop culture. In spite of the fact that Jian is not young, he is very sophomoric and not very socially educated, (again, he is product of QSW and almost a MuchMusic VJ clone), and he doesn’t understand or respect the broader CBC audience very well at all, let alone the national CBC audience, and if you look at his past shows you’ll see that this is not something new with Q. He may well have other people behind him helping him to screw these shows up, but if so I would say that that shows just how out of touch the Toronto based pop culture production group is, and it may well suggest that the questionable hiring practices go deeper than just the host. If they were hired for the same reasons Jian was with the same disregard for their qualifications for putting together a national show, then it isn’t much of a surprise that they put out the product that they do, and it would shed some extra light on why the CBC’s Toronto based pop cultures shows are failing the way they are in general.
Further to Jian being out of touch with young people, if you check the message board on his web site you’ll see that it’s absolutely dead. If you do a blog search you’ll find that almost nobody is talking about him. I think you’ll find that Jian does not generally appeal to the younger demographic in Canada, and maybe not even in Toronto where I had been assuming that he had some kind of fan base. He had barely a handful of fans who were calling for more of him after his awful and even offensive stint on SLC in the summer, and he seems to have barely a handful now. He is a good friend of Shelagh Rodgers, however, and perhaps other CBC insiders, and that seems to be how the CBC is hiring its pop culture people these days, at least the ones in Toronto.
I’ll find a new name to post under.
For now, I’m the Michael who finds Q to be too Easten-centred and not the Michael who wants more podcasts and under-40 music.
And don’t tell me about Sook-Yin hosting a Winnipeg “central oriented” show. She’s in Toronto with Gian and the boys and has forgotten her North-Van roots.
With yet another Q under our belts, I’m still waiting to be convinced. But still listening.
Unlike MichaelBob, I am NOT still listening. I guess Q is ok for the afternoon slot, where people are probably doing something else while they listen to the radio. But it is just so wrong for the 10 PM slot! I like to listen to the radio before I turn off the light at night (while I am doing my Sudoku). I like something to help me relax at the end of the day. Q doesn’t do it…all the short bits punctuated by loud music does NOT relax me. I switched to Radio 2 and listened to Laurie Brown’s show (Tonic?…what is with all these weird names, CBC? What happened to meaningful names that describe the show?). So far, I like it.
I like the show so far. I’m from SW Ontario, went to York U, I work in Toronto, so Jian seems like someone from my neighborhood. Also he’s around my age, so many of his cultural references are things that I understand.
I’m glad Freestyle is gone because I wasn’t a fan of the awkward cheesy humour… I love puns, but not in public. I did like their music choices, but not the banter.
David, I am sure Q will have on those artists you mentioned… it seems that they are interviewing people who currently have shows and albums and books to promote. Their turn will come, I’m sure. Oh and though there is little activity on the jian.ca messageboard, there are 2 Jian communities on Facebook that have people commenting regularly.
I like it so far. Waaaaaaaay better than Freestyle! It took me all of last summer to get used to Jian’s cheesy radio ways, and when SLC in the Summer ended, I actually missed him! Glad to have him back. I’m turning my radio on an hour earlier now. (have to say, I turn it off at 10am and now, back on at 2pm)
I agree with other posters – I’m hoping Jian will get out of the Toronto studio and visit a few other spots in the country. So far so good though! (did I say how much better Q is than Freestyle?)