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.