Drag Me To Hell - Review

Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Sam Raimi/Ivan Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman/Justin Long
Runtime: 1 hr 39 minutes

This is the horror movie I've been waiting for. Funny. Silly. Moderately gross. Fun. Fun. Fun.

In this flick, Sam Raimi shucks his Spider-Man cloak and goes old school, back to his early days of directing spooky horror flicks that contain enough thrills and gags to put the girlfriend in your lap and laughter in your mouth.

It's been a long time since I clapped during a movie. I probably clapped a half-dozen times during this one: "I can't believe he just did that." Hilarious.

The movie's about Christine Brown, a loan officer at a small bank. A gypsy woman comes in and wants an extension on her loan before she loses her house. Christine, bucking for a promotion, decides to prove she's a hardball banker. She turns the gypsy woman down. So the gypsy woman curses her to three days of torment before a demon will come and drag her into a pit of eternal fire and damnation.

Wow. Maybe Raimi was looking to give homeowners some catharsis in tough economic times. "Take my house? Burn in hell. Literally." Take that, AIG.

The movie's story is as thin as paper, but it doesn't matter. It's all been done before. Why anyone would anger a gypsy woman is beyond me, because we all know that anyone with a glass eye and missing teeth is in league with the devil. The devil, of course, must be short of cash because gypsy women can't afford anything better than a rundown fixer upper from hell. But just try to take that fixer upper away...

There's a number of great scenes in this movie. The fight scene (yes, fight scene) between Christine and the gypsy woman is an insta-classic. It reminded me of how fun Sam Raimi used to make his horror flicks. Another scene where a tormented Christine visits her fiance's parents is a beauty.

When Raimi can't scare you, he goes for the gross out. Watch out for a few scenes involving maggots, worms, a decidedly unappetizing cake, and a kitten. A kitten? "I can't believe he just did that." The movie even has a seance and a talking goat. A talking goat? Come on, you know it's gotta be a good scene (Raimi fans will like the sound effects in the scene; the voice sounds a lot like the voices from Evil Dead).

For a modern day horror flick, the body count in this movie is ridiculously low. Raimi proves you don't need ten teenagers and a machete to scare people. The cast is small and all of them are good actors. The lighting is sparse. The visual effects are good. This is a stripped down flick that moves along so quickly you could be forgiven for thinking it's one of the previews.

This is a good, fun horror movie. See it.

The Thinker

I waited for it, and it came.

Peggy Noonan: Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Does anyone believe that? He should rest his dancing thumbs, stop trying to position himself as the choice and voice of the base in 2012, and think.

I suppose I'm in danger of being labelled "anti-intellectual," but that's all right. Really I am just amused at the amount of times words like "think" and "thought" and "intellectual" are appearing in columns coast to coast nowadays.

Take Noonan's piece above. It takes about four or five paragraphs to make an entrance, but it finally shows up: Peggy thinks. Peggy's friends think. People that disagree with Peggy? They don't think (or live in the "world of thought," if you hang out with Chris Mooney, or embody "Spock's passion for reason," if you're a chum of Jeff Greenwald, or do the "work of thought," if you're related to Joe Klein, or practice "intellectual honesty," if you break bread with Krauthammer, or have "intellectual force and energy," a la Rahm Emanuel, or act "intellectually serious," like David Brooks - funny, when you add them all up like that, it starts to look like a trend).

The condescension doesn't drip from Peggy's pen. She isn't using the "think" word as derogatory. Hell, she doesn't even use italics to show she really means it. Instead, her snobbish "intellectualism" is en passant. And that's the point: Peggy and her ilk are good thinkers. They aren't angered by people that disagree with them, they pity them. If someone doesn't see eye to eye with Pegs, it's not because the person is wrong, it's because the person just doesn't know how to think properly.

This trend started when Obama got elected. We are constantly told that he was a university professor and an expert on the US Constitution (by no less an authority than Barack Obama himself, who constantly reminds us that he got a degree and read the Constitution a bunch of times; me too, but his views on the document differ from mine. There I go not thinking again). After his election, "brain power" became all the rage. Everyone wants to point out who is brilliant and who is not. Obama tops the list. University professors come shortly thereafter. Writers for big (but going bankrupt) publications come in third. Then there's...everyone else. You and me. The dummies (unless you agree with them, in which case you're called an "informed voter" or a "base.")

A question: when is the last time you talked to a university professor and thought anything they had to say mattered worth a damn? For that matter, when's the last time you talked to a university professor? I was on a college campus the other day and it reminded me just what a cloistered life it is. Old buildings, faculty lounges, residences, classrooms, restaurants, bars, you name it. When I was in school, I rarely left the grounds. There could have been a hundred angry lions at the gate and I wouldn't have known it until summer. I might as well have been on the moon.

University professors only leave their sanctuaries when they interview on Charlie Rose, lecture at another university, or run for office. Out of touch? Sure. Out to lunch? You bet. You never see these people because they're about as far from real life as you can get. But they think, damnit. How do they do that? How can I learn it? What is this "think" of which they speak?

When I disagree with political orthodoxy today, it's not because I'm wrong, or crazy, or even stupid. I'm just not thinking. If I just sit down and think for a while, I'll be all right. I'll learn to see it the good way. The proper way. When will I ever learn to think?

Bending to Vick

The sports shows are slowly leaning towards a reinstatement of Michael Vick.

He was released from prison a couple of weeks ago and has given no press appearances, but the sycophants that make up the sports media are already bending. Funny, that. He doesn't even have to say "whoops" or "prison sucks," and already they're kneeling.

On Fan 590 I heard a DJ say, "I'm a dog lover, but..." He went on to ask his listeners if they didn't think that everyone deserved a second chance. A man called in to say Vick should be banned from life let alone football. The DJ repeated that he was a dog lover - "I've had my dog for 17 years and I'm quite attached to him" - and then used the old magic word: "but."

Vick's a scumbag, but...Vick's a criminal, but...

This afternoon on another radio show, I head two DJs interviewing a guy from Sports Illustrated. They asked him if Vick might find a place in the NFL. The SI guy demurred, unsure of anything, but then asked if Vick might find a place in the CFL. The DJs told him that it depended if Vick was suspended from the NFL, since the CFL now recognizes suspensions in any other football league (read: the NFL). So the CFL gambit is a non-starter as far as Vick is concerned, but doesn't it speak volumes that the three men were even discussing it?

Sports "journalists" have no shame. None. They'll forgive anything, no matter how immoral, to kiss a professional athlete's ass. Here's what I had to say about the Vick dog killings a while back. It pertains to the asinine "second chance" comments that sports "journalists" trot out whenever they need to give an athlete a moral makeover:

Remember that this was going on at his kennel, not in some parking lot on the outskirts of town. Vick wasn’t "caught up" in anything. He was chiefly responsible for it. The dead dogs are buried on his property. The kennel, incidentally, was bought by Vick in 2001 for a little over $34000. With a flair for prophesy, these clowns named it Bad Newz Kennels.

The sycophantic sports writers are in quite a dilemma over this. Dog beats athlete for America’s heart every time, and the sports writers are in a pickle. They are, after all, writers, not reporters. There is no such thing as a sports reporter. Like me, emotions run their version of typing. They have steadfastly refused to investigate steroids in baseball (have you seen Jason Grimsley’s name lately?), or football. While Barry Bonds cheats his way past Henry Aaron, the sports writers go whistling through the locker room as if nothing’s amiss. Now they have a problem: America likes dogs.

But sports journalists like players.

Let's read again what Michael Vick did to wind up in the joint:

In the most disturbing account yet of Michael Vick's dogfighting operation, a federal investigative report details how the disgraced athlete killed pit bulls by hanging them from a nylon cord nailed to a tree and drowned others in a five gallon bucket of water...Purnell Peace, who was convicted along with Vick, told federal agents how he, Vick, and a third man had to drown one dog after it did not die when they tried to hang the animal. After Vick agreed last year to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge, he was interviewed by federal agents and claimed that he "never actually killed a dog," though he admitted watching his friends hang, shoot, and electrocute pit bulls. But after failing an October 2007 FBI polygraph test "as it related to the killings of the dogs," Vick recanted his denial and "admitted taking part in the actual hanging of the dogs."

The "second chance" philosophy as it applies to Vick is an obscene lie. Second chances are reserved for people who do something once, regret it, pay for it, and get on with their lives. If Vick had wandered into a room, seen a dog fight for the first time in his life, and been caught there, I would be all in favour of a second chance. But that's not what happened. Instead, he bought a kennel for the purpose of setting these dogs on each other. He watched them be electrocuted. He saw others shot. Some he hanged with a nylon cord. One that we know of he helped drown in a barrel. He watched small dogs get used as "practice" for the fight dogs. Then he and his friends buried the bodies on his property.

Vick has had a hundred chances to change his ways. The only reason he didn't get to 101 is because he got caught and put in prison.

Former QB Jim Kelly was on the radio the other day and said that he would leave it up to the NFL to decide Vick's fate, but in no way would Kelly want Vick to be a member of the Buffalo Bills. Other teams should feel the same way and say so.

The NFL needs to decide if it is a truly a "league," and what kind of league it wants to be. If they allow Vick back onto an NFL football field, they will truly be the National Felony League. Their reputation won't be fit for dogs.

Fade to Black - Peter Zezel

I was watching Zezel last year when he was filling in as a co-host for the Hockey Central show on Sportsnet. I remember thinking that he sounded like a gentleman.

I don't know if I ever heard a bad word about Zezel from anybody. He was a good player (underused as a Leaf, but I'm not a Leafs fan, so what did I care?), and a class act. After retirement he ran a hockey camp for teens and he did a lot of charity work. The only knock I had on him back in the day was the hockey hair mullet he carried around.

I remember the controversy surrounding his retirement. His niece was dying of cancer and he asked to be traded from Vancouver to an eastern team so he could be closer to her. Instead, the Canucks traded him to Anaheim, as far west as the NHL can get. So he retired. I like that story.

It's hard to believe that the disease he was diagnosed with was still with him. Last year on the TV shows he looked healthy, with the post-retirement fat of an athlete that's found the joy of not working out three hours a day. Alas, hemolytic anemia had kept its grip on him for a decade. Recently it took a turn for the worse. He had surgery a few days ago and ended up on life support. He died on Tuesday, aged 44.

More here.

Hey, Would You Like To Talk About Singing For Our Legendary Rock Band?

“Amongst all that furor, there wasn’t really a quiet moment to talk,” May tells Rolling Stone in an e-mail interview. “But [drummer Roger Taylor] and I are definitely hoping to have a meaningful conversation with him at some point. It’s not like we, as Queen, would rush into coalescing with another singer just like that. It isn’t that easy. But I’d certainly like to work with Adam. That is one amazing instrument he has there.”

That's Brian May, Queen guitarist and frontman, talking about American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert.

Let's say you're sitting around in your living room one day and say, "You know, I think I'll try out for this American Idol thing." Six months later the guitarist of Queen is pondering whether or not to give you a job?

Not bad, buddy.

Water Bored

I've seen a lot of these videos over the years, but there's more of them appearing seemingly every week. This is another clip of a moderately famous person being waterboarded. In this case it's the radio DJ named Mancow.

He has the water poured on his face and gives up after a few seconds, proving how discomforting waterboarding is. Immediately after he surrenders, his co-host endlessly repeats "You're soaked." And that, it appears, is the extent of the lasting damage of waterboarding.



So, is waterboarding "torture?" I guess it is, because it would be "torturous" to go through it. But surely the fact that so many celebrities line up to be waterboarded proves how safe and untorture-like it is. In a strange way, these endless You Tube waterboarding clips show that waterboarding is like some kind of a goofy party trick: "Hey, Bob, how long can you balance a beer bottle on your head? Hey, Lou, can you drink beer while doing a headstand? Hey, Tony, how long can you last with water being poured on your face?"

US agents have never been accused of pulling out fingernails or electrocuting genitals. If they had, it's doubtful that Mancow and Christopher Hitchens would drop trow and say, "Light me up."

It's water. Being poured on your face. It sucks, and then it's over. So no one's afraid to try it. Then they thank their co-host and carry on with their day.

I doubt it's the effect these guys are going for, but they're pretty much proving that it's no big deal. Mark my words: you're going to hear about it taking place at a frat initiation very soon. Kids, schools, and waterboarding? CNN will have a field day.

Inglourious Basterds

Vis-a-vis Tarantino's new war-shoot-'em-up, Reuters has this to say:

Most of the dialogue is in German and French and translated with subtitles, possibly limiting the film's box office potential in the United States.

Sigh.

I hear that all the time from my film buddies in LA: subtitles are bad. Don't have a female lead. Black and white sucks.

All of these rules are a sham. All that matters is a good story, and that Holy Grail of film success: for some reason, people that want to see the movie.

Let's face it. Subtitles on a Tarantino movie will only make it seem more cool. Tarantino's fans will flock to see it. They'll stay up late, break out the French-German-English dictionary, and pore over every word to see if Big T is sending them a hidden message.

To Mel Gibson's credit, two of his last movies were done entirely in foreign languages and he won huge. The languages in his movies were so foreign that some of them haven't been spoken in hundreds of years. Here's his returns for the effort:

The Passion of the Christ: Budget: $30 million. Worldwide gross: $611,899,420
Apocalypto: Budget: $40 million. Worldwide gross: $117,785,051

So far, so good.

Bedside Manners

New York Times: That’s what Janice Langbehn, a social worker in Lacey, Wash., says she experienced when her partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond, collapsed with an aneurysm during a Florida vacation and was taken to a Miami trauma center. She died there, at age 39, as Ms. Langbehn tried in vain to persuade hospital officials to let her visit, along with the couple’s adopted children.

“I have this deep sense of failure for not being at Lisa’s bedside when she died,” Ms. Langbehn said. “How I get over that I don’t know, or if I ever do.”

The case, now the subject of a federal lawsuit in Florida, is being watched by gay rights groups, which say same-sex partners often report being excluded from a patient’s room because they aren’t “real” family members.

I don't look at this as a gay rights story. I look at it as a hospital-staffs-are-stupid story.

Hospitals are like any other bureaucracy. If you've been in one lately, then you know that it isn't a place where the sick are cared for. They're processed.

TV shows like Grey's Anatomy and House have greatly reinforced the idea that once you become injured or ill, you are a piece of meat with no rights. You will be tended to by wise cracking doctors who discuss their sex lives while your heart is exposed to the open air. Worrying thought: is it all bogus, or have the writers done their homework and art is imitating life?

House in particular is teaching aspiring physicians that their problems are far more pressing than a patient's. If you watch an episode of House (and I often do; I like the show) then you will see that every episode is simply a lengthy experiment on a hapless extra. Patient ill? Try this drug. Still ill? Open up his brain. Still ill? Try another drug. Dying? Zap him with the paddles. Still ill? Give him yet another drug, until, ta-da! He's all better. The show never goes into the pain of the patient. In fact, the stars rarely speak the patient's name. The patient only survives because House and his team have stumbled upon the right drug to cure him before their previous fifteen treatments did him in.

I remember watching one Grey's Anatomy episode that really drove the point home: the interns were delighted to find a bunch of dead bodies in the morgue so they could practice on them in every Dr. Mengele way possible. After two episodes of chopping dead people to bits, one of the stars finally caught them and gave a short speech on how upset she was. These were people, didn't they see? Nice try. The next episode, back to yukking it up over a man's squashed face.

I've probably channelled him too often, but Warhol was right: celebrities not only teach us how to behave, but more importantly how to look while behaving. When I split my finger open a few weeks ago, I went to get stitches. They broke out the ampules of freezing liquid, the needles, and the thread. Then the nurse told me that Grey's Anatomy was her favorite TV show.

It was not a comforting statement.

The Passion of the Lemur

I was reading a story about the new - well, old - fossil that somebody found in Germany. I studied anthropology back in school, so I was mildly curious to check it out. Sure enough, another old primate skeleton. It's being heralded as "the missing link" between humans and lemur-like tree dwellers.

Color me unimpressed. Every once in a while a fossil turns up and somebody says that we're descended from apes. But I bought that a long time ago, so new skeletons are only of vague interest to me. Evolution? No argument here. Missing link? Umm...no. One skeleton out of the 4.5 billion years of Earth history won't convince me of much except that a monkey-like creature once drowned in the mud of what we now call "Germany." Using that skeleton as Man's "Start Here" square doesn't square with me.

I feel about evolution the way I did about Pangaea. I was in grammar school looking at the world map that hung over my boring teacher's shoulder. I found it cool that Africa fit into the Caribbean, England into France, Greenland-into-Baffin-Island-into-Quebec. A few years later a high school geography teacher told us about this Pangaea theory, about how the Earth's landmasses were once attached. I thought, "Gee, what a revelation." I wasn't being a know-it-all, and my grades proved I wasn't the brightest kid in class, but honestly: anybody over the age of 12 should be able to look at a map and go, "Huh. Funny how they all fit together."

Same thing with evolution. When I was kid, I saw moneys and gorillas and thought, "Wow. They really look like us." I don't know if I consciously thought that we were related, but somehow it just made sense: they look like us. We're...similar. Come to that, why does everything on land have two eyes? Why do most animals have five toes, just like me?

I was really taken with the skeletons of whales. I remember the book, a big tome in the school library with lots of bright pictures, and in there they showed what whales looked like. And underneath those flippers - wouldn't you know it? - there were five fingers. Big fingers, but fingers nonetheless. That struck me as very, very cool.

Eventually I read that some people today are born with tails, and somehow this made sense, too. In the end, I believed in evolution before I knew what it was. When I learned about Darwin, I was flabbergasted that it took thousands of years for someone to come up with the idea. Were my ancestors really that dumb? Couldn't they see?

Some of these thoughts led me to major in anthropology. Indiana Jones it wasn't. Professors would unload a ton of bones onto a table and we had to classify them and put them into their proper boxes, then graph the results. Took eons. I hated bones after that.

Anyway, evolution seemed very elementary to me. The evolution debate has never been that big a deal. For me, it wasn't a debate at all.

What I find much more interesting these days are the Atheists that jump on new fossil discoveries in order to celebrate their faith. When a fossil is discovered purporting to be the beginnings of Man, five minutes won't go by before an Atheist celebrates the news. As the self-proclaimed preening Atheist on Hot Air put it: I love the smell of fossilized monkeys in the morning. Smells like … victory.

Victory? What exactly have you won?

I'm not one way or the other about religion. I know for a fact that if I was in a bunker, out of ammunition, and the enemy was closing in, I would pray. If me, a friend, or a family member was told they had a couple of weeks to live, I would pray. I don't pray now, but there is no doubt in my mind that I would pray then. To believe otherwise would be foolish. Way too many hardcore Atheists have written books and articles about how they "found God" after being told they were goners. To think that I would be any different than them when the crap hits the fan is fantasy.

Human beings are a praying animal. We may not all believe in God - or a god - but all of us eventually pray when the going gets tough enough. All we need is time. If a bus runs you over, you may not have time to pray. But if the bus runs over your kid and she's on life support in the ICU, I'll bet you anything that you'll pray. Hard.

My dad was once reading a book written by an Atheist about Atheism (random aside: I capitalize "Atheist" and "Atheism" because they are no different than "Christian" and "Christianity," or "Muslim" and "Islam." All have their religious observers, zealots, priests, gospels, prophets and sacred artifacts - er, fossils). I leafed through the book for a little while, but I couldn't get into it. It smacked of phoniness. No doubt the author believed what he was saying. I didn't fault him for it. But it was phony: if a doctor told him his daughter was going to die next month, his Atheism would go out the window in a heartbeat, royalty checks be damned. I know that.

You might be curious to know that I never heard one religious conversation in all the time I studied anthropology. Not one. Sure, we talked about the religions of various cultures, and we debated whether or not a certain artifact showed the presence of religion in an ancient society. But not once did an atheism/religion/evolution debate break out. I think we all took it for granted that evolution was a fact, but it never occurred to us that this should start a debate over the existence of God, or that Creationists were foolish for not agreeing with us. It just never came up. That seems stunning to me now. It would have seemed equally stunning then to have Atheists celebrate an anthropological discovery as proof of their beliefs. We would have thought they were weirdos.

I still do.

Thank you...Sir?

I was watching the highlights of the Memorial Cup's opening game and saw an interview with the kid that scored the OT game-winner. His name's Maxime Frenette, a fresh faced kid who probably couldn't grow a decent beard if he tried (and he's trying). Here's TSN's take:

The 18-year-old from Boisbriand, Que. was only in the lineup because star forward Chris DiDomenico was injured, but he backhanded in the game-winner 8:56 into overtime to lift the Voltigeurs to a 3-2 victory over the Windsor Spitfires on Saturday at the MasterCard Memorial Cup.

At the end of the TV interview, the interviewer wished Frenette luck the rest of the way. Frenette replied with a sincere, "Thank you, sir."

Refreshing. Cool to see. A couple of years of pro hockey and a free agent contract will knock that kind of talk out of him in no time, but for now we can enjoy it.

Wings Win Round 2

It was a close one. I know my Wings well, so when they were up 2-0 over the Ducks in the second period, I thought, "This is going to overtime."

The Wings often have trouble maintaining a lead against tenacious teams. I can see what mood they're in from the TV screen. Some nights they feel like keeping their foot on the gas. Others, they get lazy and allow a team back in. Sure enough, it was 3-3 late in the 3rd, until Dan Cleary sewed it up in the last three minutes to make it 4-3.

Now, it's Chicago's turn. They're infamous for coming back when down two or three goals, so the Wings will have to be merciless.

Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Star Trek - Review

Director: JJ Abrams
Writers: Alex Kurtzman/Roberto Orci
Starring: Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto
Runtime: 2 hours 7 minutes

With the exception of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the new Star Trek movie is the most fun movie in the franchise. It has taken a tired, old clunker of a ship and turned it back into something that can run at warp speed.

The movie is a prequel - of sorts. We see the moment that James T. Kirk is born, and we see a young Spock decide to forgo a life of science on Vulcan to join Star Fleet. The bad guys are the Romulans, there's plenty of "Fire phasers!" and "Incoming photon torpedo!" Kirk sleeps with a green skinned girl, he beats the hell out several people and aliens (but no, doesn't get his shirt ripped open), and a young Bones is along for the ride with lines like, "Damnit, man, I'm a doctor not a physicist!"

The movie's plot is preposterous, but it doesn't matter. Star Trek was always preposterous. Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, you name it, they all still speak fluent English and in fact speak it better than Chekhov.

The one moment in this film that made me worry was the appearance of a "time-travel-made-easy" plot device involving black holes. I needn't have worried. Though the science is completely out of whack, it's used for a good purpose: adventure and thrills. This far surpasses the other Star Trek movie, where time travel was used to...save whales.

This film takes Star Trek back to its roots. Kirk and Spock don't sit around wondering about the meaning of life. There are no aliens that need to be "understood." There isn't a wimpy Jean Luc Picard in sight. Shockingly, there are only two references of, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if there was peace all over the universe?" One of these references comes from Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who says that Star Fleet is a humanitarian fleet. That has always made me wonder: if humanity has become a load of peaceniks before taking to space, how did they develop phasers, photon torpedoes, and ships loaded for galactic bear?

The other reference to peace in our time comes near the end of the film. Kirk says a line so completely at odds with his character and the scene that it's ridiculous. It provides a big "Gimme a break" moment.

In any case, what you have here is a good, old fashioned science fiction opera. It's stripped down to the essentials of fun and gun. The filmmakers were smart in throwing a few bones to the Trekkie crowd (Scotty with the one-liners, a cameo by Leonard Nimoy) while keeping it fresh enough for new viewers. In essence, they made a movie that can please both camps.

See it.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

Another Gotcha Moment, Suckers

AP: The Obama administration says it will use bailout money repaid by large U.S. banks to support additional capital infusions for smaller banks.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the repayment proceeds expected from some of the largest banks will be used "to reopen the application window" for banks with total assets under $500 million.

Whoa. Let Berry the Sceptic dust off his economics degree and ask a question. To whit: isn't this what Bernie Madoff is in jail for?

All right, it may not be the exact definition of a Ponzi scheme, but it's as close as you can get. Let's say a buddy of yours lends your money to another guy. He tells you, "Don't worry. He'll pay it back in a couple of months. It's something I like to call 'repayment.'"

A couple of months go by and the guy shows up with your money. He hands it to your friend and your friend turns around and gives it to another guy. You're standing there empty handed and say, "Wait a sec. I thought that was my money. What happened to the 'repay' part of 'repayment?'"

To which your buddy says, "Oh. You thought you would get the money back."

"Yeah," you say. "You told me I'd be 'repaid.'"

"Since when? I said they'd repay the money. I never said they'd repay it to you."

"But it's my money."

"No it isn't," he says. "It's mine now. You gave it to me."

"But--"

"Listen man, I hate to break it to you but somebody's gotta say it: it's not my fault you're a sucker."

And he's right.

The Bus Arrives - Man Ram

It looks like Ramirez is going on a 50-game road trip. Solo:

Manny Ramirez was suspended for 50 games by Major League Baseball on Thursday, becoming the latest high-profile player ensnared in the sport’s drug scandals.

The Los Angeles Dodgers star said he did not take steroids and was given medication by a doctor that contained a banned substance. The commissioner’s office didn’t announce the specific violation by the 36-year-old outfielder, who apologized to the Dodgers and fans for “this whole situation.”

Strangely enough, "this whole situation" helps highlight how much players like Ramirez are paid. Since players aren't paid while on suspension over drug use, Ramirez will lose a little over $7 million. What's astounding about that number is not how much money it is, but how little. $7 million is only a third of his salary. He'll still come out of the 2009 season roughly $17 million richer than he went in.

If Ramirez is crying, then he's crying himself to sleep in a big bed full of money.

"Intellectual" Alert - Mark Steyn

This one's a bummer. I dig Steyn and I like his stuff. Unfortunately he decided to break out the boffo intellectual label, just to let us know that somebody can really think (unlike, say, me and you - the people that haven't been hit with the Magic Wand of Public Wisdom):

Others may find Germany in the ‘30s the more instructive comparison. “It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities,” the Canadian public intellectual George Jonas recently wrote.

True. But what's with this "public intellectual" stuff?

There's no need to elevate writers you agree with by giving them a phony label. "Writer" is enough. Leave the "public intellectual" nonsense to somebody else.

Just a note from your gregarious private moron.

Robbed? Sure. But What's New?

Were the Red Wings robbed of a chance to win the game in overtime?

Sure, but what's new? I don't mean for the Wings, but for teams everywhere. Officiating in most sports is terrible, and bad calls happen on a regular basis (this is the negative side effect of Super-Duper-All-Sports-All-The-Time packages: you get to see a ton of games but also get to see a ton of bad officiating).

In The Red Wings' case, a loose puck was inches from the goal line, sitting there like a big black pancake. Marian Hossa reached out and knocked the tying goal into the - tweet - net. Oops. The ref "lost sight of the puck." No goal. A minute later the game was over.

It was a terrible call with a terrible excuse. Refs lose sight of the puck all the time. Show me a scrum in front of the net and I'll show you an "out of sight" puck. Refs usually wait about two seconds before killing the play. In this case, the ref lost sight of the puck for maybe a millisecond before blowing the play dead. Even so, the video shows the puck over the line before the sound of the whistle.

Or does it? And here's another funny rule in the NHL: the sound of the whistle doesn't matter. It is the referee's intention to blow the whistle that counts. So if his hand is halfway to his mouth, and he's a little late in tweeting his little toy, the play might still be dead. And it's not reviewable.

So robbed, yes. But bad officiating in the NHL is a proverb. You have to play through it. Every team in any sport is playing against two teams: their opponent, and the officials. Both must be overcome in order to win a game. Maxim: officials are not unbiased - they just want all teams to lose.

I thought the Wings looked flat out of the gate. The Ducks wanted it more. But around the halfway mark the Wings picked up their game and skated with it. They outclassed the Ducks at every turn in the 3rd period and doubled the Ducks' shot production. Hiller was on his game and made some good saves, but the Wings - and this is worrisome - had a lot of trouble giving puck support in the offensive end.

Still, the Wings looked good in the third period and should be able to carry that over into game 4. Whether an official feels like deciding the outcome of that game as well is, of course, up to him. To overcome that, the Wings have to do what you're supposed to do to win games: score more.

Photo: The Freep

Mike Brophy - Hockey "Insider"

I'm not sure if there's anyone as stupid as a Toronto sportscaster. I've tried hard to think of somebody and I've come up with squat.

Granted, I'm a Detroit Red Wing fan, so I'm biased. Then again, I'm partial to the Blue Jays, so I should be on board the Toronto sportscaster bandwagon. But I'm not. I've lived in too many places and listened to too much radio. Final result: knowledge that every sportcaster in Toronto is a wannabe twit. Bad analysis, idiotic theories, you name it.

Case in point: I was listening to the Hockey Central show on the Sportsnet channel. There's Mike Brophy, the hockey "insider," asking Blues coach Andy Murray how devastating Detroit's third overtime period loss must have been for the team. Can they recover? It's just a killer, isn't it? Devastating, right?

Bonehead.

Let us hearken back to the dark, ancient days of...2008. Less than 11 months ago, Detroit played a game against the Pittsburgh Penguins that went into triple overtime. It was the Stanley Cup finals. Detroit lost.

The loss was so devastating that the Red Wings went on to win the Stanley Cup a couple of days later.

I'm not saying Detroit will win another Cup this year. What makes me laugh is a hockey "insider" who can't remember what he had for dinner last night.

Name Game

This story caught my eye:

Quebec's civil registrar wants a Montreal couple to explain why they want to give their baby boy the middle name "Avalanche."

It's the latest hurdle for the family, who were originally told - because of a translation error in a letter - that the registrar had rejected the baby's first name of Logan.

Man, they're getting pretty strict about names up in Quebec. "Avalanche" seems pretty tame to me. I remember a story about the guy who named his two kids "Winner" and "Loser." Later in life Winner became a criminal while Loser became a successful police officer. Loser said that he didn't mind his name, though others did: they pronounced it the French way - Loosay - or they just called him "Lou."

Here's a post I wrote about my own name a long time back. This was back in my major league travelling days, when my name mutated wherever I went:

I've heard that to rouse a slumbering person from across a room, you simply have to whisper their name a few times. I tried it on a sleeping girlfriend, she woke up, and I told her that I was conducting an experiment. She called me something else - not my name - and went back to sleep. But she proved the point.

The point of that article, and another one I read about names, is that our name is the most beautiful sound we will ever hear. All of us are narcissists.

I was leafing through one of those 'How to Win Friends'-type books, and it told me to say a person's name as often as I could when talking to them. As in, "That's a great idea, Bob." Or, "I'll tell you something, Sid..." Or, "You have fantastic breasts, Janet."

I don't know how scientific all this is, but it would seem to make sense. Hearing our name means someone is listening to us and might even be paying attention to what we're saying. As long as the person saying your name isn't your wife banging on the motel room door, it's probably a good thing.

If you have a good name.

My name is not good. Not because I don't like the name 'Sean,' which is said to be an Irish version of John, but because no two people seem to say it the same way. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but after three decades on the planet, it gets a bit old.

When I was a kid, I had no problem with the idea that S-E-A-N was pronounced 'Sh-awn.' The kindergarten teacher didn't tell me that I was spelling it wrong when I signed my finger paintings, so it never entered my head that there was anything wrong with my name.

It was in third grade that funny things started happening. My mom or my dad bought me one of those iron-on shirts, the ones where people would put their names on the back in case they forgot who the shirt belonged to when they pulled it out of the drawer. On the back of that shirt was written SEAN. So it was my shirt with my name. I can't remember what was on the front, but it was probably an iron-on Twisted Sister logo or something.

Anyway, I put on that shirt and went to school. All day long people called me 'Seen,' as in, "I have seen the light." I had no idea why they were calling me this, until I realized that they were ripping on my name. Since that day, I have probably been called 'Seen' about ten thousand times.

It isn't always the smart-asses that call me Seen. People from east of the Rhine and into Asia also call me Seen, because they think that's how it's pronounced. Filipinos especially have a tough time with it. They see my name on a Hello My Name Is tag or on a piece of paper, and they say, "Hello, Seen."

Non-English speaking people always screw up my name. To the Chinese, I am "See-Awn" or "See-Ann." To the Japanese, I am "Sen." The Greeks and Indians make me feel like I'm back in third grade, because they call me "Seen." To some some guy from the Czech Republic, I was "Soon." How the hell he got Soon out of S-E-A-N, I have no idea.

It isn't just the foreigners, either. My name is extremely vulnerable to accents, unlike say, Ken. Pretty hard to screw up Ken. A Ken by any accent is still a Ken. But not Sean.

To the English and South Africans, I am 'Shown.' To someone from the deep South, I am still Sh-awn, but with a bizarre twist on the last syllable. The fact that my name doesn't have more than one syllable doesn't matter. They put one in anyway.

Sean is a bummer name on two counts: people can't say it, and people constantly need to be told how to spell it.

Here's a typical phone call when I'm calling an airline or a hotel desk (granted, these are not Mensa candidates).

"Yes, I have a few questions."
"What's your name?"
"Sean."
"John?"
"Sean, S-E-A-N."
"S...Sean?"
"Yes, Sean. Like 'Sean Connery.'"
"Oh, Sean Connery! Right!"
"Yeah. I just wish I had his money."
"Ha-ha-ha."

Mine is one of those names that you say and spell in the same breath. I learned long ago not to wait for someone to ask how it's spelled, because they always ask how it's spelled. So if I am talking to someone for the first time, my name is always, "Sean-S-E-A-N." I knew a girl whose last name was Grey. She told me that she had the same problem, and that her name was always "Grey-with-an-E."

I only use the same-breath-spelling-routine when I know I will have to see the person again. If not, I use "Steve." This is very useful at a fast food restaurant, or a Starbucks, where they ask your name and write it on your cup. Rather than go through the "Sean...Not John, Sean...Like 'Sean Connery'..." stuff, I just say Steve and save myself thirty seconds.

Poor Sean Connery. I've used his handle so many times, I should be paying him residuals. His name comes in especially handy when dealing with foreigners. They struggle over my name, trying to pronounce it five ways from Sunday, until I say, "Sean Connery."

Their faces immediately light up with recognition. They say "Sean Connery! James Bond!" And we have a great big laugh as I dream about them drowning in the Danube. I wonder what Sean Connery does when he calls a hotel to make a reservation. "Sean. As in Sean Connery. As in me, you damn fool."

"Sean" causes trouble around St. Patrick's Day, too. Suddenly everyone thinks I know the history of St. Patrick's Day, and they take for granted that I'll wear an Ireland soccer shirt and drink green beer until I turn green and barf same.

Not true. I have been to Ireland once. I played golf, and I liked it. But I do not know any Irish folk songs, nor do I enjoy drinking green beer. Unlike the Irish, I enjoy Budweiser as much as I enjoy Guinness. Makes no difference to me, either what beer I drink, or what color it comes back up in.

My family came to Canada sometime in the 1700's, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes me Canadian. If a person's grandparents were born in Canada or the States, then that grandchild has no right to call themselves Italian, or Irish, or German, or whatever. Done deal. The so-called "Irish" people in Boston are full of crap, likewise the "Italians" in New York City. You're American. If you can't give me directions from Genoa to Rome without consulting a map, then you aren't Italian. Get over it.

So this is me, Sean the Canadian. A Sean by any other name is still a Sean. Unless he's a Soon. Or a See-Awn. Or a whatever the hell.

Pleased to meet you.

Buckley the Sap

This is what passes for informed commentary these days:

I’m no strategist or political thinker, and I voted Democrat in the last presidential election—but since everyone else is weighing in, what the hell.

One of the oldest rules in politics is: If your opponent is committing suicide, don’t interfere. So were I in charge of the Republican Party, I would send out a coded text message saying: REMAIN CALM. SHUT UP. THIS IS GOING TO BLOW UP IN THEIR FACES.

Much as I admire President Obama, I believe with something approaching certainty that his spending will bring this country to its knees.

Let me get this straight. This Buckley character (who often manages to inform you that he had a famous dad, as if we didn't get it already) says he's a conservative, voted for Obama, is almost certain Obama's going to ruin the country, admires Obama, says the Republican party is dead, advises the Republican party to shut up because Obama will flunk and the Republican party will be just fine.

It takes a particular brand of sap to use the same sentence declaring admiration for a man that he's almost certain will tank his country.

I wonder if this Buckley clown reads his own stuff after he types it. Earlier in the column he quotes Keats: "Negative capability,” the term coined by Keats, was interpreted by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

"Negative capability." I like that. It sounds so much better than "doublethink," which is exactly what Buckley practices when he tries to come off as Mr. Centrist.

One last thing: what's the deal with Buckley's hat, anyway? I think it's called a fedora, but I'm not sure because no one's worn one in fifty years.

The Drudge Pandemic II

Vis-a-vis my post that Drudge got bored and drove the flu pandemic story. He was the story's Patient Zero and he played it for all he was worth.

He's now grown bored with it, as I knew he would. Last night he flipped his bright red headlines to the US Supreme Court vacancy. His flu pandemic? It's been relegated to a couple of small headlines further down the page, beside a story on Michelle Obama's shoes.

In his wake he's left a WHO on high alert, Dr. Phil telling people not to worry about eating pork, a Vice President telling his family not to ride the subway, a President answering questions at news conferences, Tamiflu rich, schools closed, parents freaked out, Mexican tourism in the toilet, the Egyptian government ordering a swine cull, the EU considering a ban on flights from Mexico, and paranoid people all over the world wearing surgical masks.

This is essentially the biggest hoax in years, perpetrated by a reclusive man with a keyboard and time on his hands.

And you know what? I have to admire him for it.

"After Thoughtful Consideration..." Ka-Boom.

When you can't move something, you might as well blow it sky high. At least, that's the logic in this clip from the '70s.

I was tooling around on YouTube and got into "Next hell." That's where one clip ends and some key word or other matches the next clip. Curious, you click Next. And Next. And Next. Before you know it, an hour's gone by and you've gone from Aerosmith Live in Concert to Pool Cue Smacks Drunk Guy In Groin.

Dead whale + TNT = flattened Cadillac. Huh?

The '70s, baby: