Live Free or Die Hard - Review

Slight spoiler warning: the ending isn't blown, but a secondary character's demise is talked about. Still, if you've seen more than one movie in your life, you'll know it's coming a mile away.

Director: Len Wiseman
Writer: Mark Bomback
Starring: Bruce Willis
Runtime: 2 hr 10 minutes

Die Hard in its first version changed the landscape for action movies in Hollywood. It still remains the quintessential film of the genre. Live Free or Die Hard undermines all of the work the franchise has done since, and comes out as a regular ho-hum actioner, complete with terrible clichés, bad dialogue, and a cowardly plot.

One line from the latest instalment completely sums up how tired the Die Hard franchise has become: “They’ve got my daughter.”

And that is all you need to hear from the film to know that it is a complete waste of time. They’ve got my daughter? You can’t get more tired than that, unless you use such lines as, “They killed my partner.” Or perhaps, “This time it’s personal.”

Though it appears a good 70 minutes into the film, I don’t think I’m giving much away with the “They’ve got my daughter” line. We meet John McClane’s daughter in the first five minutes. Surprise, surprise, she hates her father. He catches her making out with a teenage boy, there’s a father/daughter argument, and she walks off in a huff, disappearing from the movie. Any thinking audience member has got to be groaning at this point, because we know that we’ll see her again, only it won’t be at a birthday party. It will be in the hands of some maniac, whom McClane will kill, saving the world and his familial relationship with one quick bullet.

I was hoping that Live Free would be the first movie to take on Al Queda. Hollywood is so politically correct that not one film has been made where the hero is specifically trying to outwit and outfight America’s arch enemy: militant Islam. Hollywood’s aversion to calling Al Queda and militant Islam an ‘enemy’ is beginning to border on the pathological, if not the downright obscene.

Since the 90’s, Islamic terrorists have bombed the World Trade Center, blown up two US embassies in Africa, killed American sailors aboard the USS Cole, knocked down the World Trade Center, flown a plane into the Pentagon, crashed another in Pennsylvania, killed scores of civilians in Madrid and London, and most recently tried to detonate another couple of carbombs in Piccadilly Circus. Nevermind the havoc they’ve played in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Far East.

What does Hollywood have to show for it? A play-by-play of Flight 93 with no moral judgement in it whatsoever. A film about two firefighters trapped under the rubble of the Trade Center and keeping each other company until help arrives. A movie about the bad boy history of the CIA which ends in the 60’s. One movie about Iraq where the soldiers delight in masturbation, sit around in the desert, but don’t shoot anyone. A story about a US sniper who is framed by a US Senator for trying to kill the President. A release coming out later this month about a pilot shot down and taken prisoner in Vietnam.

Gutsy stuff.

The amount of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam movies prove that Hollywood could talk about America and its enemies at length. So why does militant Islam get a free pass, especially when they are the only enemy to have ever specifically targeted and killed US civilians, the same civilians that buy movie tickets? Vietnam movies and history lessons about the 1950’s CIA are not exactly ripped-from-the-headlines stories that we should expect from filmmakers.

With a title like Live Free or Die Hard, one would think that it would be a story about defeating today’s enemy that is opposed to freedom. Instead, the title is merely a pun taken from a New Hampshire license plate.

In the first Die Hard, the robbers posed as terrorists. In Live Free, the robbers…pose as terrorists. But these terrorists are not Islamic. The head honcho, Thomas Gabriel (played Timothy Olyphant), is as WASP as the character's name suggests, and guess what? He has a beef with the US because he used to work for the Pentagon. They fired him for saying that their security was lax. Now he’s out to prove it. In other words, it’s all America’s fault. Again. If they had only listened to him, they wouldn’t be in this fix right now (he messes up the communications systems, gas pipelines, and generally throws a monkey wrench into the infrastructure of the country, all with a few handy laptops and some computer-geek American cronies).

Not once in the film are the words Al Queda, Islamic terror, or bin Laden mentioned, if only to lead the audience down the wrong track. The words are ridiculously conspicuous by their absence, since you have to believe that at least one person working for the FBI might casually say, “Hmmm. Maybe this is an Al Queda attack.” In the world of Live Free, as in the world of Hollywood, Al Queda and Islamic terrorists do not exist.

The robber/terrorist’s girlfriend is an Asian woman. Willis as McClane reminds us of this on several occasions, by calling her an “Asian bitch.” Indeed, one of the biggest fight scenes in the movie is where Willis and the woman beat the crap out of each other, and Willis delights in telling her boyfriend that his “Asian” girlfriend is dead.

Well. What are we to make of all this? It would seem Hollywood is afraid of being called racist by showing terrorists as they are today (Islamic fundamentalists), but they aren’t afraid to be racist against Asian people. Imagine “black bitch” or “Mexican bitch.” Even “black girlfriend.” The hue and cry from the media would be appropriately loud, yet Asians can take it on the chin.

This is not new. I was in an LA comedy club some years back, where three comics in a row had all kinds of jokes about Asians. One talked about what bad drivers they were, and made slant-eye gags and jokes about how Asian people can’t see properly. The audience chortled and giggled, while a friend and I blanched. I am not surprised to see that the LA anti-Asian culture has seeped it’s way into a summer release with nary a whisper from the Hollywood media.

The filming of Live Free as a high flying actioner is so-so at best. You don’t need the credits to tell you that John McTiernan didn’t direct it, as he did two of the others. The effects are fairly lame, especially a sequence involving a fighter plane that is pure fantasy (a cross between a Harrier jet and an F-15). The banter between McClane and his sidekick buddy doesn’t remotely come close to the dialogue and chemistry between Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in Die Hard: With A Vengeance.

The Die Hard franchise has indeed died hard, and not with a bang, but a whimper.

All Of Us: Strangers

The other day I was on a flight from Washington DC to Toronto. It was a puddle jumper of an airplane, but it had jets, so it was noisy as hell in the cabin and the seats were too close together.

A little girl was across the aisle from me, looking out the window, and she turned to me and asked me how long the flight was going to last.

And I didn't know if I should say anything.

Such are the times we live in today, where speaking to a lone child is not something to cherish (the child might learn something; for that matter, so might you). Rather, speaking to a child makes you look over your shoulder, to see if anyone thinks you're some sicko who's trying to take advantage of a young innocent.

Poor kid. I told her that the flight was about an hour long and that we would be there in no time. And I went back to my book.

"Do you live in Toronto?" she asked.

I looked at her and she wasn't smiling or frowning, she was just doing what kids have always done: saying what was on her mind. She hasn't learned how to bullshit beyond I-didn't-hit-him in the playground. She wasn't making small talk. She just wanted to know if I lived in Toronto.

"No," I said. "But my family does. I'm there a lot." I couldn't help myself, so I said, "Where are you from?"

"New Orleans," she said.

"Cool," I said. Cool? Whatever. Back to the book.

The flight went on for a while and my mind was bouncing with questions. I never learned not to talk to strangers, and maybe this kid hadn't either. I wanted to asking how New Orleans was doing these days, and if she was there during Katrina. I wanted to ask her what she thought about all that, and if she'd been scared, or if she even remembered it.

"I'm Whitney," the kid said.

I already knew that, because it was hanging from her knapsack in the form of a plastic nametag, roughly the size of a credit card. It was the same knapsack that the plastic stewardess had rifled through. She was making sure the kid wasn't bringing fruit or meat across the border, lest the customs officials put the kid against the wall and arrest her for an agriculture infraction.

"I'm Sean," I said. And, not knowing any better, "Do you have family in Toronto?"

She smiled. "Yes," she said, "My cousins live there. I go every summer for two weeks."

Every summer. To a kid, that must sound like a lot.

"How old are you?" I said. And I looked around, trying to see if anyone thought I was some lecherous bastard.

"Nine," she said.

So every summer for maybe the past two summers, her family has put her on a plane to see her extended family in another country, and little Whitney thinks two summers is 'every summer.' Which I thought was the best news I'd heard in ages. Nowadays there's a virtual traffic jam in front of the elementary schools, or even high schools, because parents won't let their offspring walk five feet without them, nevermind sending them 2000 miles to a different city. But maybe after Katrina, the parents of New Orleans are thinking, "Screw it. Let the kid live a little."

The flight continued. It crossed my mind to ask Whitney if the stews were going to make sure she got to the customs terminal all right, or if she wanted me to show her there myself. And I thought, what a crazy question. You simply do not accompany children anywhere today. If you look cross-eyed at a kid in a restaurant to make them laugh, the mother will cluck her tongue and turn the kid around.

I wonder how many lost children are completely ignored on streetcorners and in malls because people are afraid to touch them? To help them? I bet it's a lot. Help a kid find their mother in a mall parking lot and they'll have an Amber Alert on CNN with your face plastered to it in no time.

We started our descent. The kid pointed out the window and asked me, "Is that Toronto?"

I wanted to say, "You come here every year, shouldn't you know?" but I decided to cool the smartass stuff. So I pointed out the window and showed her the CN Tower ("I've been there," she said), Rogers Centre ("I saw a game there," she said) and Lake Ontario, to which the kid said nothing, reminding me that kids couldn't care less about geography.

The flight landed. I pulled out the customs card and then reached into my pocket. Damnit. I searched in my bag. Damnit. I looked to the kid.

"You got a pen?" I asked.

She did. More responsible than me. More helpful than me, too.

When the plane got to the jetway, I stood up and told the kid to have a nice time with her cousins. She smiled from ear to ear, and it was a great smile. Then I left her standing there in the aisle, without once asking if she was going to be all right, or making sure that the stews hadn't forgotten her. I still feel bad about that.

The modern world is beating us down slowly but surely. No vices, no passions, no joys, no humanity. Making us into insular automatons, where the environment in Brazil is worth more than a human anywhere. Mind your business, and for God's sake don't reach out to anyone. Why, just this month in Kansas, a store video showed people walking over a woman who'd been stabbed. She was lying on her stomach and no one asked her if she was all right. They just walked over her and into the store to buy their beer, Coca-Cola, and tampons. And she bled to death.

I don't like kids. I don't get along with them very well. But I miss them sometimes.

Lift the Lid

I was talking to a girl the other night, and she told me that "all good things end, so what's the point?" She was talking about some relationship that had blown up in her face.

I felt sorry for her. She's twenty-five years old, cute as a button, funny, and has a butt like an East German gymnast. For someone like that, life should be all sunshine and roses. But of course it isn't.

When I visited Henley-on-Thames last year, I was confronted by a storybook English town, complete with quaint bridges and people that said good morning to strangers. After staying there a week, I'd seen drunken debauchery, a fight, adultery, mudslinging at a wedding, and a dude whose doctor told him to quit the sauce or he'd die drunk.

Both of these are examples of looks being deceiving. Nothing new there. But it still surprises me what can happen if you lift the lid off something and peer underneath. You might like what you find. Then again, you might not.

Life is funny like that. Take the Austrian girl, the one with the glorious butt. I was sure that she was a hell of a nice person, with a gracious smile and a quick laugh. And I was right. Yet she doesn't see herself that way. She told me that she is 'angry.' When I told her that I saw no anger in her whatsoever, she replied that I didn't know her well enough. It's been another couple of weeks, and I still haven't seen it. I've talked to her about all kinds of stuff, and there's no cynicism there, just a touch of sadness.

Mmmm.

I've heard this story before, and it came from me. And I can tell you now that this young lady is not angry, no matter what she thinks of herself. I used to think I was an angry young man, but on the whole I would say I am happy about 90% of the time. Yet sometimes I want to be angry. I think she does too, but she can't pull it off because hers is not an angry soul.

The truth will out. We may see ourselves as something (a quaint town, an angry person), but that doesn't make it true. Our own conceit can get in the way time and again, blinding us to the simple fact that we are who we are, if we're brave enough to admit it. We were formed sometime in our childhood, and we more or less carried on from there.

Yes, you can change, at least a little bit. When I was a kid I was brought up to believe that fighting was bad and that violence didn't solve anything. I got pushed around. Sometime around the age of 18, I punched somebody in the face and haven't look back since. It was a life-changing moment, and a good one. I'm not recommending it to everybody, and I certainly didn't become a bully, but I did learn that you have to stand up for yourself. That was a good thing.

But on the whole, I'm more or less the same person I was back then. Older, maybe a bit smarter, but not altogether different. If I look under the hood, the same engine fires. Maybe yours does, too.

I'm not talking about maturity. Saying that I am the same person as I was in University does not mean I still like sleeping on a lawn while covered in beer, or that I like to pull on someone's brastraps. But the desire to seek out the world and the willingness to laugh at it hasn't left me. And okay, sure, I still like a good party now and then. All right, all right, mostly now.

The trouble with looking at yourself is the looking. Being bold enough to examine yourself, to be honest about what you see, is tough. I think it was Freud that said no one can psychoanalyse themselves (he also said the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis, so I guess they can forget my whole point), but it's worth giving it a shot now and then.

Scary proposition. Along with the old line of looks being deceiving, don't forget its partner, "Truth hurts."

Spare Some Change?

Gay marriage is good; anyone against it is a homophobe. I'm not sure how to talk about this subject, lest I get accused of being homophobic. I still don't know what that is, since in Latin it would means something like hating myself, but I get their drift: if you don't think gays should e allowed a marriage or an adoption, it means you hate them.

Accusing people of being homophobic simply because they wish to discuss one of the biggest possible changes in our cultural history is irresponsible. It is no different than the women that declare you're a pig if you want to discuss another massive change that's already happened: women not being at home raising children.

Change for change's sake, or change simply to appease the feelings of a minority should not be taken lightly. Because really, that's what this is all about. It is certainly not about rights. When people think of gay marriage, they aren't thinking about taxation laws, inheritance tax, welfare, life insurance, etc. They're thinking about the love felt between two of their gay friends. And they think it is unfair that those friends and others like them can't declare that love publicly, and have it sanctioned by the state.

People that get upset when someone wants to talk about such a big issue, and have a good debate about it, aren't worth my time. When feelings drive laws, you should be very nervous. Today's good feelings about gay marriage could be tomorrow's bad feelings about not having Jews own supermarkets, blacks teach school, whites swim in pools. Seem ludicrous? 30 years ago, so did the very idea of gay marriage.

Maybe the bogus climate change subject got me thinking about change in general. You often hear people say that "change is good," but this is usually said by someone when a friend tells them, "Becky dumped me," or "I just lost my job." When we say, "Change is good," it's because we don't want to say, "Damn, your life's going to be a mess for the next month. Call me then."

Change is just change, but our perception of it is on a pendulum. If the change is good for us as an individual, or matches our ideals, then it is good. If it doesn't, it's bad. The collateral damage of change (other people) usually doesn't enter into it until much later, and then only philosophically. When change occurs, the first person we naturally think of is ourselves because human beings are at root an animal, and all animals are selfish. Call it a survival instinct or whatever you want, but the most important person in our lives is us, with the exception of our children, who are an extension of us. Spouses, to judge by divorce proceedings and the myriad ways that parents fight for child custody, are a lot more expendable than children.

Even so, child custody cases can be seen as selfish acts: only I can raise this child properly, I can't live without the child, the child would be better off with me, he/she doesn't deserve the child as much as I do. All of these are subjective statements, provided the other parent isn't abusive or negligent. A man or a woman that cheats on their spouse is simply a bad spouse; it doesn't necessarily make them a bad caretaker of children.

Change is unsettling only if it means something bad for us. Rarely do we argue against change if it means we're going to be happier. When it is change of the happy sort, we're also the first to take credit for it. This amuses me. Our successes are claimed as victories, while our defeats are usually somebody else's fault.

Think back to school, when people received their marked essay papers . You'd ask a friend how they did and they'd say, "I aced it," or "The bastard flunked me." Notice the difference. Very rarely did you hear somebody say, "I wrote a total piece of crap and he recognized it." Nor did they say, "I've been kissing his ass all year. He knows I'm an A-student, so he passed me without looking at it."

School is where we first learned how to deal with change. Receiving good marks and pats on the back taught us that good change (graduating from one class to the next; receiving an award; winning popularity through a touchdown pass; getting put in the 'good books') was done through our own achievements. We never questioned this, and took it as only right. Bad change, of course, was something to be protested. A failing grade meant a trip to the teacher's desk to ask for a re-test, or a grade bump, or anything, as long as we didn't fail. When we didn't receive it, we called them a bitch. Their fault, not ours. "I'm a starter on the basketball team because I'm a good player." Versus: "The coach benched me, the jerk."

Yet good change may not have been our doing. Some years ago in Chicago, more than a few teachers were caught cheating on tests. Not their own tests, but their students' tests. They were rubbing out the wrong answers and putting in the right ones, to bump the test scores and make the teachers look like better teachers.

These cheating teachers were caught and they were punished. But I wonder how many students today, if reading that, would feel bad if they were one of the assisted students. Would they return to school to re-write the test? If you were in a similar situation, would you?

The effects of change are all in our perceptions of it. Winning the lottery: good change for you, bad for the jealous neighbour. Losing an election: bad change for you, good for the people that voted for the other guy.

This next example of change gives you some food for thought. In recent years, there have been a few high profile cases of husbands killing pregnant wives, and mothers killing their own children. Now think of a traffic accident, where only one family member is left. Maybe the father. He loved them, and now his life is a living hell. That auto accident is a bad change.

But take the wife-killer. Let's say the day before he plans to do her in, his wife is killed by a drunk driver. Suddenly, in his mind, that auto accident is an excellent change. And we'd never know it.

That's what scares me not about change, but in people's reaction to it. If perception decides whether it's good or bad, we have to take people's word for how they feel about it. They could be lying. It's doubtful that a hateful mother whose children die in an accidental fire is going to turn around the next day and say, "Well, it's for the best, because I wanted to drown them, anyway."

Cultural change is the same as individual change. That is, when a change happens in our lives, we are very selfish about whether it is positive or negative to us as individuals. Cultural change has the same dynamic.

I had an argument with a friend some time back about gay marriage. No matter how many times I said I wasn't against it, the friend was still upset with me for saying that we shouldn't just run it into the legal books overnight. I said there needed to be a good, open debate about changing one of our fundamental institutions so drastically.

No matter. The friend has a personal stake in seeing gay marriage happen (she is not gay, but some of her good friends are), and that was that: from cultural to personal, a good change all the way around.

I don't see it that way. I'm as opinionated as anyone else, but it doesn't mean that I think my beliefs should hold true for all people, even if my beliefs happen to be a political hot topic at the time. The trouble with massive change is that once you change it, it's extremely hard to change it back if you think you've made an error.

Imagine talking to a child some years from now, after gay marriage has been passed nationwide. In a conversation with the child you say something like, "Back when Elvis was the king of rock," but instead you say, "Well, only men and women could get married in those days."

The implied logic for the child is that marriage is malleable. Divorce laws may have hurt the idea of marriage for everyone in my generation, but make no mistake that gay marriage will completely change (destroy?) its meaning for the next one. When something is malleable and ever-changing, it loses its sanctity. It becomes just another bit of politics.

Gay marriage troubles me because it will change the very meaning, the essence, of a cultural institution. Once that has been done, it is easy to tweak it just a little more, and a little more, and a little more.

When a bigamist shows up at the door from name-a-religion and says you're discriminating against him, will you let him marry three wives?

Let's discuss.

Chilling

I was reading this article by R. Timothy Patterson a few minutes ago and thought some enviro-boobs would enjoy it, too. Not because it backs up their claims that mankind is killing the planet (how do you, for instance, "murder" a rock?), but because it gives them more ammunition for their fear-mongering fundraisers.

In this piece, the professor is trying to say that climate change has happened throughout history, and will continue to happen long after we're gone. In fact, he says, things in the short term are probably going to get cooler, though through no fault of our own.

Poor guy. He's sane, but he doesn't get it: it no longer matters if the air gets cooler or warmer. All that matters is that it changes. Now that 'global warming' is called 'climate change,' the enviro-boobs and others of their mindless ilk can point at a thermometer or a thunderstorm any day of the week and say, "See?"

Personally, I can't decide which is better: global warming, so the babes are in bikinis throughout the year; or global cooling, so the babes want to spend more time cuddling in the Jacuzzi.

Anyway, interesting piece. Give it a read, and I'll see you on the beach. Or in the hottub.

Some from France

Stained glass - Honfleur.

Dodge the tourists.

In Bordeaux.

Angry horses.

Going places.

Friends in Honfleur.

Fountain - Bordeaux.

Dog in a basket.

Bordeaux.

Rolling

I was online with a buddy of mine a couple of weeks ago, and I was telling him that everyone we knew back in high school has kids. I'd received one of those invitations from a reunion site, and on a whim I went on there and dug around.

From the jocks to the nerds to the snobs to the saints, practically all of the old faces are married and have kids. I also noticed an interesting phenomenon: you don't have to look at a woman's bio to see if she's married with children. If she's got short hair, she's married. If she's got long hair, she's not. Works about 9 out of ten times. For men, it's weight: a few extra pounds means he's recently tied the knot, and a spare tire indicates a fifth anniversary.

Anyway, I was telling my buddy this news, and I thought he would come back with some deep thoughts on life. Something like, Well, we all get older, or, Yeah, I've been thinking of settling down myself.

What I got instead was: Losers! Ha!

I busted a gut at that one. God knows what I'll do if he ever ties the knot. Me and my buddy are diametrically opposed when it comes to politics, eating habits, and how to pick up women (he's Mr. Nice Guy; I, to your probable surprise, am not), but we've more or less used each other as validation for not giving a damn about backyards and potato salad.

Seeing all of these long-gone faces with kids gave me an interesting thought. Back in high school, I'm pretty sure we all wanted to get laid, but it rarely happened. Now, everybody's getting laid and they can't wait to post photos of the evidence all over the internet. It only took sex ten years to go from being the aw-shucks-red-in-the-face-sweaty-palms act it was, to a humdrum event you can now discuss over dinner.

That really is what separates the married people from the single people (besides the empty pizza boxes, cheap scotch, and strangers' underwear found under the cushions). Married people can talk about screwing all the time, while single people are supposed to be discreet. Which is to say, don't tell your friend about the bimbo you shacked up with at the last office party; wait till his wife is out of the room so you can tell it in detail.

Now before the ladies write in telling me how uncouth I'm being, give me a break. I learned more about sex by eavesdropping on girls in the cafeteria than I ever did in a classroom. Tuesday morning at Starbucks might as well be an adult Sex Ed class. One look at the cover of Cosmo will tell you how much women think about sex, and according to the women I know (married and single), the ladies can really go into detail when in a locker room mood.

Sex and age. Depending on what you mean by that, it can be an interesting discussion, or an unsettling image. Let's go with the first one.

I feel sorry for the women that hear it from their parents and grannies all the time, that the clock is ticking and they need to have kids. Personally, I regard it as rude. Whose life is it, anyway? It ain't yours, ma, or aunt, or grandma. You told your daughters to go out into the world, be who they wanted to be, dream big dreams, and get a fulfilling career. And now you want her to get on her back and do the one thing that you told her not to do when she was growing up? Not only is it rude, it's hypocritical.

Leave your daughters alone. Telling someone to have free will, and then blackmailing them for it, isn't love and it isn't guidance. It certainly isn't cute over Christmas dinners. It's disrespectful. Further, it's pathetic, wanting to live your life through that of your offspring. I find it odd, and a little frightening, when women tell me that their parents and grandparents still do this sort of thing. Not one woman is telling me about a parent saying that they want them to find love. It's all about the kids. Well, if it was all about that, why didn't they let daughter stay out all night with Johnny when she was 17?

Oh, I forgot: because then maybe you, dear grandmother, might have had to help out with the child. It seems that overbearing parents don't talk about sex with 17-year-olds because at that age, sex is about pleasure. They do talk about it with 30-year-olds because by then it's merely procreation.

Since when? Last time I checked, a 30-year-old woman liked sex as much, if not more, than she did when she was younger. Is she now supposed to feel bad about the act itself because it isn't leading to mobiles and Pampers on special?

Still, for those that go down that road, motherhood seems to be quite enjoyable. Flipping through the bios of old friends and enemies, I saw a lot of, "I love being a mom." I bet that's true. The pictures show smiling faces, on mother and child both. And that's great. But you've got to admit, it's kind of creepy seeing a woman with a child and knowing that not too long ago, you threw her down a snowbank. Back then it was funny. Doing the same thing to the same person years later, nobody would laugh and you'd probably get arrested.

My friend and I don't have any kind of a pact against marriage and parenthood. I read once that George Clooney and his modern Rat Pack had something like that going on, where they swore to just hang out, party, and be men's men for the rest of their lives. That smacks of phoniness and protesting too much, and besides, being a man's man is a hell of a lot easier with George Clooney's bankroll. The financial costs of marriage might be high, but being single isn't exactly a road to early retirement, either. If you've been on a first date lately, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Fact is, me and my friend have been busy. I don't see him very often, but that's the whole point: we've been moving around a lot. The rolling stone gathers no moss deal is a very true expression. Anyone who sees that as a shallow point of view doesn't get it: you're not necessarily rolling to avoid things, you're rolling because you're busy doing something. A by-product of that is not being in one place long enough to meet someone special and think, "You know, I'd be all right with building a swing set and arguing about where to put it."

So yes, my friend is wrong, though I know he was just kidding around. The married with kids folk are not losers. They went their road and gathered some moss. If the evidence is correct, they're glad they did. As a live and let live kind of person (as long as I get an opinion on it, naturally), I am fine with that.

But for the women out there that aren't ready yet, and who are listening to a clock ticking in the form of some bigshot family member's pacemaker, my advice is this: keep rolling.

You've got company.

Happiness Murmur

Aristotle thought it was the goal of life. George Harrison believed it was a warm gun. The framers of the US Constitution thought it was something worth pursuing, and the large woman driving too slow in the fast lane with the bumper sticker thinks it is yelling, "Bingo!"

I'm referring to happiness. It's an elusive and very elastic word, and as the examples above show, anyone can use it any way that they want. When I first read Aristotle's deal on happiness, I more or less got the point. It was only after I'd read a bunch of other guys analyzing Aristotle's thesis that I became confused.

I Googled Aristotle this morning just to brush up, and I was confronted by a bunch of know-it-all's telling me that this is what Aristotle meant, not that, and "of course Aristotle didn't mean what we mean today," and on and on and on. Which I think is a load. When I read his discussion on happiness years ago, I thought it was a little windy, but I got the gist: people want to be happy. Happiness is not a state of being, it is an activity of the soul. There was some more stuff in there about not disgracing your ancestors, but by that point I had achieved true happiness: I'd found something else to do besides read more Aristotle.

Not that Aristotle's message isn't uplifting. Nietzsche's version of life's main pursuit (power), reads a lot more depressing than Aristotle's does. Problem is, Nietzsche's sounds more true, because happiness is such a subjective idea.

When I say, "happy," you could envision all kinds of things. Maybe it's the wife and kids. The new job. A nice car. A long vacation with a supermodel. Whatever, they are all symbols of a state of being (at the time you drive the car, sleep with the model, so forth) you could call "happiness." But the dictator has his choice words, too: torture, death, mayhem. Brutal power. And it makes him "happy."

The more I look at it, the more I think that life's pursuit is a combination of the two, with a little more of the pie belonging on power's side. It is possible to have power without happiness, but not the other way around. Though Orwell said that a boot in the face (forever) is the ultimate symbol of power, one could disagree with that. Power doesn't always have to be something evil or distasteful. Power is simply power. Power over one's life, or what we might call freedom.

It depends which person's life we're talking about, and what they perceive as happiness. Hitler's quest for happiness as an activity of the soul couldn't be further from Mother Teresa's, but at one time or another I bet they were both truly happy.

Bordeaux

I've found a new favorite city in Europe.

It surprised me. Travelling to a lot of places makes you somewhat jaded and hard to impress. You get blase about statues, waterfalls, street mimes, "authentic" this, and "genuine" that.

But Bordeaux impressed me. It's a beautiful place, where every building looks as old as Louis XIV. Most ancient cities have a bogus 'old town' which is surrounded by skyscrapers. Bordeaux is all old town. The streets are wide and the monuments aren't covered in graffiti. It's very busy and noisy one minute, and dead-quiet the moment you turn a corner.

Bordeaux has an atmosphere of urban adventure to it. You can wander the streets for hours, some of them only a few yards long. There was one street, Rue Ste. Catherine, that was maybe twenty feet long and seemed to serve no other purpose than to provide space for a sign that says Rue Ste. Catherine.

The shopping district would have North American ladies in stitches. I must have walked the main shopping avenue for fifteen minutes before stopping for a coffee. I still couldn't see the end of it, and I didn't much care to. Fifteen minutes of walking had taught me that Bordeaux has everything a man or woman could ask for, especially if you're a fan of shoes. If you're a Converse All-Star fanatic, then you're in luck: I haven't seen that many pairs of All-Stars in the windows since I was in fifth grade. I didn't even know they made them anymore.

Smokes are cheaper in Bordeaux even after taking the Euro into account, and the beer is reasonable. Unless you order Guinness. I don't know what the Irish did to piss off the people of Bordeaux, but a pint of Guinness will run you 8 Euros, while a pint of Stella is half that. I bought one anyway, just for the hell of it, because I was in an Irish bar. It turned out the lady behind the bar was from England. She'd come to France years ago, married a Frenchman, and spent the rest of her life living in various French-speaking countries. She said she liked Bordeaux, but then again, she pretty much liked them all.

That's a good attitude, and I can agree with that. I've liked most places for one reason or another. What I dig about Bordeaux is that it is beautiful, and it takes care of itself. Venice, no matter what the postcards say, is more or less a craphole. Graffiti all over the place, people chucking cigarette wrappers into canals which smell like a sewer. I heard once that Venice is sinking, and I couldn't help but be grateful. It needs a bath.

In Bordeaux I saw not less than three street sweepers in the space of five hours. They're a lot smaller than the ones they use in the big American cities, but they get the job done. They drive down the streets, walkways, pathways, and they gobble up garbage and sweep up filth in no time. Moments later, they're gone, and so is the day's trash. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Just as people generally act the way they dress, I firmly believe that a city's people will reflect their environment, and vice versa. It's an endless cycle. Let a city go to hell, and the people will, too.

And that's what makes a place: the people. The first time I stayed in France some years ago, I was struck by how much I liked the French. Previous experience with French culture involved reading about Napoleon, learning about the Luftwaffe pounding French cities to rubble, and dealing with assholes from Quebec.

I stayed in St. Nazaire and Pornichet for a few months, and I loved the place. Loved the people. I often tell this story of what happened to me one day while in St. Nazaire:

I had to go to the pharmacy to pick up some drugs. I had the address, but I didn't know where the place was, and France is low-low on taxis. I wandered into a bar and show the bartender the address. He started pointing and jabbering, but he knew I couldn't understand him.

Just then a guy at the bar gets up and motions me to follow him. I thought he was going to take me into the street for more jabbering and pointing. Instead, he walks to his car and points to the passenger seat. I demure, saying no, you don't have to do that. He keeps pointing, shrugging his shoulders, not understanding why I won't get in. So I get in.

He looks at the address on the paper and drives me there. My French then was awful, and we don't say a word the whole time. We arrive at the pharmacy and I get out of the car, waving good-bye and saying "Merci," about five times. I go inside and it takes the lady about ten minutes to put the prescription together. I walk outside, and there the guy is, still sitting there. He waves.

I get in, saying "Merci," another five times. He just shrugs. We get back to the bar. I go inside and buy the guy a beer. He looks happy as hell. The bartender raises his eyebrows to ask if we found the place. I hold up my little baggy of drugs, and the bartender nods in satisfaction.

That's France.

I've met some damned kind people in France. The hype about France being an anti-American (and they all think I'm American when I talk) stronghold is merely that: hype. It stems from the people in Paris whom the French don't even like, and from past nonsensical French politicians. The French people, to my mind, are some of the most generous and gregarious people you will ever meet.

I don't think that merely from that one episode. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have never felt shunned because I can't speak French or because they think I'm a Yankee. In Quebec City, you get treated like a jerkoff if you can't speak French. In France, they either try to use some English, or they use a lot of sign language. Either way, they don't make you feel like you're in Hull. I was out on the town in Quebec City one night with a French dude, and I asked him why people around the coat check were pointing and laughing at me. He said, "Because you're speaking English." Just like that. And in a nice gesture he said, "Losers."

Anyway, Bordeaux. I went to a couple of clubs there and struck up some pigeon-French conversations with the locals. Like all people, they want to know what you think of their city. And I was being quite honest when I told them that it was a great city and that they should be proud of it. My French has improved, but it doesn't really matter. The people in Bordeaux switch to bad English to compete with my bad French, and generally you can get the point across. And the point is the same the world over: people are people. Nevermind the politicians and the movie stars and the terrorists and the maniacs. The vast majority of people are just people. They want to be happy, and they want you to be happy, too.

It was nice to come back. Years ago, I had written down somewhere that I would have no problem living in France if it came down to it. Bordeaux reminded me why.

Some Spain and Portugal

Here's a few pics from Spain and Portugal. Click to enlarge. I'll try to type up a few articles in the coming days, but things have been busy.


Friends on the beach.

Triumph. Barcelona, Spain.

Busker Rehearsing.

Balance.

On the rocks - Spain.

Starting line.

Trampled Under Foot. Statue, Malaga.

Waiting. Lisbon, Portugal.

What's The Matter - La Coruna, Spain.

Crab. La Coruna, Spain.

Laura on the beach. Cadiz, Spain.

Laura - B&W.

Church. Spain.

Woman with dog. Cadiz, Spain.

The Med

A few shots from the last couple of weeks in the Mediterranean. Click to enlarge.

Big beers. I love the look on Tony's face (at right) in this photo.

Leaning.

Jodi and Laura, hanging out.

A few buddies in Sorrento.

Scooter walk.

St. Tropez.

Unplugged

From One News (New Zealand):

Mercury Energy sent a technician to Folole Muliaga's home to disconnect the power as the family was behind on their power bill.

Folole, 44, was suffering from a cardio-respiratory complaint and needed oxygen from a breathing support machine to survive.

Family spokesman Brendan Sheehan says the technician who arrived at the house to disconnect the power supply spoke to Folole and she told him she needed electricity to operate the machinery. Sheehan says the technician said he was just doing his job, turned the power off and left.

The woman died a few hours after the power was disconnected.

That has got to go down as one of the biggest "oops" moments in electrical technician history. For its part, Mercury Energy says that no one told the tech that the woman needed electricity to stay alive. The real story will probably never be known, as it is a he said/she said affair, and the she in this case is dead.

How much did the woman owe Mercury Energy? $170.

There's two ways we can look at a story like this. The first one that everyone seems to be taking is to say that big business and big government are a bunch of jerks that don't care about their customers/citizens. Killing a woman that owes you $170 dollars when you make millions a year in profit is not exactly looking out for anyone's best interests. Except your own.

But there's another way to look at this case. If you're on an oxygen machine that requires electricity to keep you alive, do you pay the bill on time, or not? And if some guy comes over and unplugs the juice, do you just sit there and die? What about picking up the phone and telling someone, anyone, that you need to borrow their power outlet or you are going to bite the dust in a few short hours?

People need to stand up for themselves. This case will have all kinds of trials and recriminations, all of them saying that the power company was evil and at fault. Who knows, maybe they were. But the woman would still be alive today if she had taken things into her own hands. First by paying the bill, second by getting help when things turned soured.

Don't sit. Stand up. Act.

A Few Pics

A fountain in Genoa's town center.

These three dogs spent the evening cruising around Sorrento's town square. They either own the place, or think they do.

Me trying for a James Dean in Monte Carlo.

These dudes woke up Sorrento one morning by roaring through.

This Italian woman stopped for a smoke and a chat in Sorrento.

Rosie O'Donnell - Artist

I was never a big fan of The View. Four rich ladies sitting around telling unemployed women what to think about life is not my idea of good television, but what do I know?

Rosie. Ah, Rosie. The big, round, mound of sound finally decided to pack it in. She was due to resign from The View in a few weeks, but after her latest tiff with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, she punched the clock early. Or as Rosie wrote on her blog: "When painting there is a point u must step away from the canvas as the work is done."

True. Or as I like to put it, "When done taking dump, there is point u must flush."

Rosie O'Donnell comparing herself to an artist is a pretty good laugh. I'm glad she was talking about art of the paint variety, and not art a la William Faulkner. Here's another great piece of art from the woman that said Christianity is as much of threat to the world as militant Islam:

"On the view u have seen my last hasselbeck spat 2 day was it no more -- its done."

Rosie O'Donnell is a great American story. Only in America can you get rich and famous by ceaselessly bashing your own country, and doing it with a poor vocabulary and bad sentence structure to boot. Rosie's art is loudmouth stupidity, verbal or written, and she deserves some credit for that. Her conceit is evident in every wild charge she makes, and in the fact that she doesn't bother to use a spell check. Through her website, you can see how much thought she puts into her arguments and how much respect she has for her fans. She has paved the way for a whole new artform: graffiti journalism.

Here's a transcript from The View's March 26th broadcast, as recorded by World Net Daily, regarding the British sailors taken hostage in Iran:

BARBARA WALTERS: It could be a decision-making time. It's a very difficult situation. It's at the United Nations. It's being examined now. Should there be sanctions? Militarily, we certainly don't seem to be in the position to do something militarily. But it is a decision-making time.

O'DONNELL: Yes, but it's very interesting too that, you know, these guys, they went into the water by mistake right at a time when British and American, you know, they're two, they're pretty much our biggest ally and we're considering whether or not we should go into war with Iran.

BEHAR: But the U.N. was about to sanction them, also have an embargo against Iran. And the, and the timing [unintelligible] so they distracted the whole world with this.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK: Right and they may be about to expel the inspectors right now, too, which could be considered [unintelligible]

O'DONNELL: Right or it could be just the Gulf of Tonkin, which you should all Google.

O'Donnell's lousy theory about the British hostages being a ruse by the US government to start a war with Iran turned out - surprise - not to be true. But where did she get off saying this stuff in the first place? If The View is a popular show and reaches millions of homes, it owes its audience some integrity. O'Donnell had not one shred of evidence for comparing Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin to the Iran hostages. But that doesn't stop someone like O'Donnell. She spews, she takes a commercial, and she spews again. There's no follow-up, no correction, only an audience of seals that applauds and waits for the next pile of verbal vomit to hit the floor.

Another interesting bit from O'Donnell: ""655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?"

Let me guess, Rosie. The United States? This was the statement that apparently led to the confrontation where Rosie called Hasselbeck a coward, and Hasselbeck looked like she wanted to jump across the table. Hasselbeck was asking Rosie to clarify the statement, wanting to put her on the record as to whether or not Rosie was calling US armed forces "terrorists." Rosie ran away from the question by calling Hasselbeck a chicken.

Can you imagine being called a coward by Rosie O'Donnell? This is a person who champions gay rights and same-sex marriage, but does everything in her power to make the US look like the bad guys in the Middle East. News for Rosie: if you lived in Iran and told people you were gay and proud, they would kill you. That simple. They hang people all the time for the outrage of being a homosexual. So who's the coward? Hasselbeck for calling your bluff, or you, for toeing the politically correct line even when it means standing up for people that, by their own admission, want you and your girlfriend dead?

The numbers, by the way, don't point in O'Donnell's favor. In 2006 alone, over 16 000 Iraqi civilians were killed by terrorists, while a little over two hundred were killed in circumstances involving US forces.

O'Donnell shouldn't have a problem with terrorists, anyway. While berating Hasselbeck (who must have the patience of a saint) in a 2006 broadcast, O'Donnell told her, "Don't fear the terrorists. They're mothers and fathers."

I would love to comment on that with something smart, but all I can come up with is, "What an idiot."

And that's Rosie O'Donnell. An idiot. And yet a genius. She has done extraordinarily well for herself. She's gotten rich off her schtick, and there's no reason to think that she won't continue to be successful.

I doubt she'd be able to pull it off in primetime. That's when the educated, working people are watching. It's also when the professional news people are ready to hit her with a tough question or two, not liking a daytime upstart who thinks she can say whatever she wants on their show.

Unlike the graffiti artists of the subway, O'Donnell hides in broad daylight. With what's-your-favorite-color Babs Walters running The View, she had nothing to fear, until Hasselbeck decided to pick a real fight. That's when O'Donnell did what she does best. Spew and run.

Unfortunately, all the way to the bank.

Photo: Retna

Café Marseille

I was having a beer in Marseilles with a friend of mine. It took us a while to a find a place which served stout, the French not being known for their love of beer. While sitting on the patio enjoying a Guinness, my buddy remarked that the women in France all look like women.

It took me a second to get his drift, but then I nodded in agreement. Both of us are originally from Canada (he blathers on about having English parents and a UK passport, but he's about as English as a beaver), and we're used to seeing North American women. When travelling to Europe, you're struck by just how different the women are.

I know, I know, of late I have become the anti-woman bore, or many of you seem to think so, judging by the letters that I get. I'm not anti-women at all, and really can't explain why I've been thinking about the fairer sex so much. Maybe I've just got women on the brain. It would be nice if they were on something else, but the brain will have to do, and I guess you're going to have to put up with it.

In any event, my friend is correct. French women dress like women, walk like women, and act like women. In short, they know they are women. They don't act, swear, and dress like men, knowing full well that true power lies in their their femininity.

They carry themselves in what an American would consider a snobbish manner, but they aren't snobs at all. They're just women. They know the men are watching, and want the men to watch, but God help you if you get caught up in their trappings. Behind those tight pants, flowing skirts, and Armani sunglasses, you will find a calculating creature that will love you to death if she is pleased, or stab you to death with her eyes if, to borrow from Queen Vicky, she is not amused.

I've had girlfriends tell me that they hate European women. They dislike the way they flaunt their sex, using it to their advantage, using it as a weapon. As if this were something unnatural?

Women north of the Rio Grande are a terrible disappointment when it comes to the mystery and the allure of woman. Yes, the French chick at the bar in the black turtleneck smoking the long cigarette might be a snob. But there is something sexy as hell about women that can stand alone at a bar and not once - not once - look around the room. Sheer confidence. Like a cat. Utterly disinterested in what you have to say or who you are...or might she be?

This as opposed to, say, the sexy allure of a chick from Kamloops wearing droopy denims when she shouts, "Canada kicks ass. Whoooo!" and then punches you in the arm harder than a lumberjack.

Don't get me wrong. Partying with Canadian and American women is fun as hell at the nightclub, but they just look wrong at the cafe. It's not their fault. That's North American culture. Sometimes you see women trying to ape it (NY, LA, Toronto), but they can't bring it off with the same panache. You can't fake being who you are for very long before smart people see right through you. LA women might try to act aloof, but that's the whole point: they're acting. French women are aloof because that is what they were the day they were born.

Getting by that is the adventure, the rest, gravy.

Monte Carlo Midnight

Monte Carlo is one of those places you like visiting if you have a lot of cash. If you don't have a lot of cash, you enjoy visiting it until you look at your bar bill the next day and realize that the kids can't go to college.

I went for a night on the town with a few buddies of mine. It had been years since the place saw my shadow, and back then I was only there during the day to take photographs and wonder what it would be like to be rich and famous. Years have passed and I am still not rich, nor am I famous, but I am a much wiser man: in a place as expensive as Monte Carlo, you need to take at least five friends with you wherever you go. That way, you buy a round of drinks and scream when you get the bill, but you only have to do it about once an hour. When you're on your own, you have a minor heart attack with every beer that lands in front of you.

The beer test is the way single guys sum up how expensive a place is. Some people go online and research a country's GDP. Women take the exchange rate into account, or what a leather bag costs at the mall. Single guys ask for a Budweiser and then say something like, "Well, that's about what it is at home," or "Holy shit, this place is dirt cheap, let's open a bar," or, "Jesus Christ, who ordered the tequila at 12 dollars an ounce?"

The beers in Monte Carlo cost 8 Euro for a draft, and ten or more for a premium bottle. At today's exchange rate, that's about 10 dollars for a lousy draft of suds, about triple what you'd pay if you're from some Northern Quebec craphole, or four bucks more than LA. Hard liquor is pricier still, with a martini running 10 to 12 Euro depending what you put in it. As a general rule of thumb, drinking with men is cheaper than drinking with women. Women order such new fangled, odd sounding, and awful tasting chick drinks that the bartenders up the price simply out of spite. When it takes ten minutes for them to prepare the thing, I don't blame them.

The beer test is the ultimate indicator of how expensive a city is, because you can be sure that a city charging 1o dollars for a draft beer is not going to sell you a house for under a couple of million. To make a two million dollar house sound reasonable, just tell yourself that it's only worth two hundred thousand beers. Besides, what do you expect in a place like Monte Carlo, where Grace Kelly was a Princess and their Grand Prix has the Mediterranean for a backdrop?

Monte Carlo is not for regular folk, though you wouldn't know it to look at the locals. I didn't see any rich people, I only saw people that had a lot of cash. There's a difference. The people in Monte Carlo are so used to having money that they don't give a shit about it. I met an Australian expat living in Monte Carlo, and while he bought us a round of shots, he told us that when he first moved here, he spent 1.5 million Euro on his new apartment. He said it like a man telling me about the new handsaw he bought at Home Hardware.

The locals in Monte Carlo don't dress the part. They have a ton of bread, but they don't spend it on clothing. They wear jeans, shorts, flip-flops. The Aussie expat told me that anyone who dresses too well in Monte Carlo sticks out as a snob. When everyone around you can buy and sell everyone else, what is the point of trying to go them one better in the shoe store?

It occurred to me that this meant me and my buddies could fit in. All we had to do is pretend to have a lot of cash because we already looked like locals. A friend of mine suggested we go hunting for sugar mommas to take care of us for life, but were disappointed to find that most of the chicks in one jazz club were themselves looking for sugar daddies. The rich stay at the bar and drink their faces off, while the wanna-be's like us are on the dance floor, entertaining them with our antics.

And we're more than happy to oblige, too, so long as they don't look down their noses too much when we blanche at the sight of a hundred Euro check for four beers and a couple of whisky chasers. But the people in Monaco's bars don't look down their noses at anybody, at least as far as I could tell. Nobody was rude, not even the bartenders. That is a miracle in itself. Even the doorman said good evening, if you can believe it.

The locals I met at one club were telling. It was a bar located on the last turn of the Grand Prix, the home stretch. Nearby, massive yachts bobbed in the harbor. In the bar, a rock band was playing, and I was struck again at the absolute dominance of American music culture around the world. From Tianjin to Monte Carlo to Singapore, you don't have to go very far before hearing Elvis Presley and Springsteen.

The bar was packed with locals on a Tuesday night, and not one of them was an asshole. No smugness, no attitude. With a lot of real money comes a lot of real confidence. The people that live in Monte Carlo have nothing to prove to anyone, because they've already proven it. They know they're rich, but it doesn't mean much in their scheme of things. When money has ceased to matter, you have to find other things that do. I don't know what they do in their downtime, but I'd like to find out.

Would I go back to Monte Carlo? Bet your ass I would. Just lend me a few bucks, won't you?

Euro Tripping

I was thinking this morning that it has been at least 2 or 3 years since I've walked the streets of Europe. That's too long. I don't have a massive love for all things European, but I know that Europe is an ever-changing place, so you have to catch it while you can. Demographic shift, politics, and even the currency are turning Europe into, well, Europe.

I don't think I'm alone in thinking of France and Germany as merely European provinces nowadays. That's good and bad. Good, because it means Germany might not invade France for a third time. Bad, because European culture is becoming purely European, and not French, German, Polish, Italian, so forth.

Europe is not the Europe of yesterday. To be a good European, you must merely hate the United States, and not wish to work more than 35 hours a week. Sad.

The last time I went to geographical Europe was in August of last year. I went to England. I'm in agreement with my English buddies that the UK is part of the European continent, but isn't "European." Still, I'm starting to wonder about that, too. The more I see and hear about Europe, I can't tell the difference between many of the countries and their peoples' views. England is now falling into that same 'European' category. That's a shame, because I love England, and I love the English people. But all it will take to put the fork in England's Englishness is a switch from the pound to the Euro. That last gesture will seal its cultural fate.

In any event, click here to see what I thought of my last trip to one of the spots in the geographical place we call Europe.

Big Bucks - Small Times

AP Photo/Bill Kostroun
Some random musings on a late Tuesday night got me thinking about athletes and money. Roger Clemens is back pitching for the Yankees, and they said that his contract for the rest of this year is a prorated 28 millions dollars.

That’s a lot of cash. You’d think Christ Himself had come down for the final judgement, decided instead to work on his curveball, and Steinbrenner gave him a spot on the roster.

This season is a month over. The Rocket won’t be ready to play for another few weeks. That means he won’t appear until June. That gives him a four month season. With baseball’s five-man pitching rotation, this means he’ll probably play in no more than 24 games.

Let’s be generous and say that Clemens will average 7 innings per game (he’s already stated that he won’t go more than 3 or 4 innings in the first couple of games in order to build up his arm). That makes for 168 innings of baseball. A wildly inflated number, but again, I’m being generous. Now let’s say that he averages a very good 15 pitches per inning. That comes to 2520 total pitches.

So this season, every time Roger Clemens puts his hand past his ear, he will earn roughly 9500 dollars. And change.

Imagine that. Go out in your backyard and pick up a rock. Throw it at the fence 10 times. Now pretend you just made a hundred grand.

When we pay to watch a sporting event, what we are really doing is paying to watch millionaires play a leisure activity. There’s no denying that. I love baseball, football, and hockey, but be real: they’re games. Leisure activities. And the people playing them are rich. We simply pay for the right to watch them play these games. Once in a while, we yell at them, and it feels good, or we get drunk at the bar with our buddies, and that feels good, too. But they’re games.

Not a new argument, and it’s not really my point. What struck me about the Clemens deal is that he brought up his family as part of his decision-making process. And I thought to myself, is he nuts?

Any sports star that gets married and has kids before he retires is an idiot. I really believe that. Because man, if I was making ten thousand dollars every time I threw a ball or passed a puck, the last thing I’d want to do is go home to a bunch of screaming kids.

What the hell are they thinking? Getting a five million dollar-a-year contract at the age of 25 is a license to party your ever-loving brains out. You’d own any club you walked into. You’d be the life of the party, chicks all around. Never mind the Chivas, hand me the bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue so I can bathe in it.

Presidents invite these people over to dinner. Mayors hand them keys to the city. Hell, you can walk out on that field, throw a ball, complain of “elbow stiffness” and go on the 60-day disabled list. Screw working. For the next two months you can rehab that elbow with a bottle of Heineken in one hand, and a blonde in the other for ballast.

A wife and kids when you can own Broadway? Where’s the fun in that? Besides, you’re taking one hell of a risk getting hitched. The groupie you married knows damn well what you’re up to on the road, because that’s how she met you in the first place. Whenever she feels like it she can sic a photographer on your ass and the next thing you know, your contract is chopped in half.

Where did Joe “I like my Johnnie Walker Red and my women blonde” Namath go? Where’s Mickey Mantle lying in the gutter? Sure, their biographies read all sad and sappy later on, but even when you’re reading about their ‘downfall’ you’d cut off your left ear to have the wild times they did.

Watching the baseball All-Star Game is a drag. All of the players in the dugout are holding their children by the hand, pinching their cheeks, tickling their little bellies. Boooooring. Bring on the beer bongs and the dancing girls. I’ll take Babe Ruth over Peyton Manning any day of the week. And sure, twice on Sundays, come to think of it.

I think it was Shaw that said youth is wasted on the young.

The big bucks are wasted on the morons.

Where Have You Gone, Juan Valdez?

If you're feeling masochistic, you may want to step into the nearest Starbucks and buy yourself a cup of joe. It's not that the coffee is bad. It's the new age coffee culture that kills.

Has anyone else noticed how difficult it is to get a plain cup of coffee these days? While standing in the caffeinated purgatory that is a Starbucks line-up, I recently went through the following hell:

"Grande non-fat 190-degree machioto." Shuffle forward, as Starbucks becomes a WWII submarine and every order is repeated twice.

"Grande non-fat green tea latte." Shuffle forward.
"De-caf grande caramel latte." You want strawberries with that? Shuffle forward.
"Tall extra hot, extra pumped chai with whipped cream." Picky, picky. Shuffle forward.
"Grande de-caf, non-fat latte…with a sweetener."

You know you could never like a guy that orders non-fat anything, let alone someone that throws a sweetener in it when he's done.

The language of Starbucks amuses me. There is not a chance that any of these people knew what "grande" was ten years ago. Likewise chai, latte, or machioto. How did they learn the lingo? They must have been nervous the first time they used ten words to order a cup of coffee, some in a different language to boot. Or perhaps it just comes naturally to people that think there's no easier way to sound sanctimonious than to specify that their coffee be served at exactly 190-degrees. And what about the prices they pay? When a large (pardon me - venti) latte costs almost as much as a six pack of beer, you know things are seriously out of whack.

Coffee shops used to be for smokers and cops. No longer. Now they are reserved for the SUV crowd, the kind of people that would be aghast if someone ordered the same beverage as them. They don't seem to realize how comedic this all is. "Extra hot, extra pumped" sounds more like an order you'd hear in a Panama City cathouse than a suburban coffee shop.

The days of the old boys sitting around the coffee shop are long gone. This worries me. They have nowhere left to go. My last visit to Starbucks gave me an image that made me cringe. Say what you want, but there is something depressing about watching an old man read his morning paper while he drinks iced frappuccino through a straw.

Still, I have my fun. There is no better sight in the morning than the Starbucks Frown. That's what you receive when you tell the Starbucks flunky that you want a "medium coffee." My inner voice screams with delight when the high school girl or aged retiree frowns in disapproval, then says, "A grande Breakfast Blend?"

Whatever. Just make it to go.

Polar Bears? Save the Ice - I'm Having Margaritas

I was goofing off on one one of those Facebook sites when I came across a group dedicated to saving the planet. A woman with an infant in her arms left the following message: "Oh, my heart aches for the polar bears." Actually, she put it in capital letters. I can't figure out if that is because the baby in the picture was screaming and so she shouted to be heard, or if she's just a regular enviro-boob. They seem to be shouting all the time, anyway. The only pollution they don't seem to care about is of the noise variety.

I could go on a long-winded rant about this woman's priorities, but instead I'll pull a cheap move and re-print something from February 2nd. I can't bring myself to write too much more about the environment right now, and my mind hasn't changed much since then, so here goes. Enjoy.

From the Daily Mail (UK):
Global Warming Sees Polar Bears Stranded On Melting Ice

They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.

Captured on film by Canadian environmentalists, the pair of polar bears look stranded on chunks of broken ice. Although the magnificent creatures are well adapted to the water, and can swim scores of miles to solid land, the distance is getting ever greater as the Arctic ice diminishes.

"Swimming 100 miles is not a big deal for a polar bear, especially a fat one," said Dr Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service. "They just kind of float along and kick. But as the ice gets farther out from shore because of warming, it’s a longer swim that costs more energy and makes them more vulnerable."

Bummer.

I don't know what to say about this global warming thing anymore. In the 70's it was global cooling. In the 80's it was warming. Then in the 90's it became 'climate change,' which was a great turn of phrase for the enviro-boobs and unemployed people that wanted to yell at lumberjacks. With the words 'climate change,' bitching about mankind's sins became an all-season sport, snow or shine, blizzard or heatwave.

I studied anthropology in school. That's what the degree says on my wall, anyway (both the degree and the wall are made from tree products. Apologies all around). During those classes we had to look back at history and count the number of ice ages and such. The theory then was that there were three big ones and a bunch of smaller ones.

Not so long ago, Toronto was under a mile of ice and the Great Lakes didn't exist. The ice had to recede in order to leave those puddles behind. So I guess one would have to say that global warming is a damn good thing. Without it, there would be no shopping on Yonge Street, and there would be no forests for the enviro-weenies to run around in.

The conceit of human beings is astounding. The idea that we parasites could affect this planet in any major way is a laugh. It's also a great chuckle watching the National Geographic specials and hearing the narrator give the Obligatory Guilt Trip. At the end of every episode, they always manage to say that such-and-such a thing will cease to exist if Man doesn't change his evil ways. Why? Because the ecosystem is fragile.

Fragile? Tell that to the people in central Florida. A fragile tornado dropped out of the sky the other day and obliterated a town, killing 20 people in the time it takes to make toast.

Katrina, she didn't look too fragile, did she? We stewards of the Earth gaped in slack-jawed wonder at her power, cowered beneath concrete, and watched as she kicked over levees as if they were anthills.

Or the tsunami (Random Aside: can someone tell me where tidal wave went?) That surfer's wetdream wiped out thousands of people and destroyed entire villages and towns in less than ten minutes.

We're supposed to protect the environment from us? Please. More like the other way around. We're as nothing on this spinning globe. Anytime it feels like it, it can give one big belch and we're history.

The Earth is not fragile, and to refute the article above, neither is a bear's grip. Timothy Treadwell could tell us that, were he still around. He's the guy who took his girlfriend up north to live with his furry friends. Treadwell's method of approaching bears was to slowly slink up to them while singing "I love you" in a high-pitched voice. He and his girlfriend are now bear shit.

Our conceit is limitless. The Earth has been through ice ages, massive earthquakes, hurricanes, innumerable volcanoes spitting sulphur into the sky, catastrophic meteorite impacts, so forth. But hairspray and unleaded gas will be the planet's demise?

Ours, maybe. But the Earth doesn't give a damn about us. Ask the next skydiver whose chute doesn't open how fragile the Earth is, and how much it cares. You'll get two four letter words in response. The first is shit!, the other is thud.

Eavesdrop

I overheard a woman talking to her friend outside a mall last night:

"You know Angela. If it doesn't involve manicures, pedicures, martinis, or jogging, she doesn't give a shit."

Such is the epitaph over many a woman's thirties.