Vacancy - Review

Director: Nimrod Antal
Writer: Mark L. Smith
Starring: Luke Wilson/Kate Beckinsale
Runtime: 80 minutes

In Vacancy, Luke Wilson takes a turn away from comedy to try his hand in a horror thriller. The result is a so-so homage to Psycho. Or maybe The Ring. Or perhaps Saw.

Vacancy starts out with Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale driving on a mountain road. They are a husband and wife, and they hate each other. It is night. The road is deserted. They have a map, but they can’t read it properly. They have cell phones, but there’s no signal. They spend a few minutes digging insults at each other as the car winds its way through the mountains. They realize they are lost. Then their car breaks down. The only piece of civilization is a deserted motel with a gas station. What to do?

If you’ve seen enough horror films, you’ll now be screaming "Derivative!" at the top of your lungs. You’d be correct. Yet you also have to feel sorry for the filmmakers.

Horror movies are getting harder and harder to create. GPS systems are making the whole ‘wrong turn’ idea more difficult. Cell phones mean that 911 is only three buttons away. Then there’s the fact that 300 million people live in the US. Just how many empty roads are left for crazy people to hide out in?

As a filmmaker, all you can do is toss it against the wall and hope it sticks: empty road means crazy people means no signal on your cell phone. On with the movie.

Beckinsale and Wilson check into the hotel for the night. The manager is a skinny, creepy fellow, straight out of central casting. He and his motel are such a ripoff of Norman Bates and his establishment that the director throws in the towel and makes it a homage: the motel’s lobby is a replica of Psycho’s, and there’s bird statues on the desk beside the bell, another subtle nod to Norman Bates.

When they check into their motel room, Beckinsale and Wilson are disgusted by the place, but decide to make the best of it. Wilson finds some old VHS tapes beside the TV. He puts one in. It’s a horror scene, with a man and a woman being attacked by a couple of masked men. Wilson puts in another tape. Same thing, people being attacked and stabbed to death. But then Wilson notices that the room in the video tape is the same as the room he is in right now. And when there’s a loud knock on the door, he realizes they are in deep trouble.

I was intrigued. Yes, I’d recently seen most of this (the video in The Ring, the trapped duo in Saw), but I liked the size of Vacancy. Not the length; modern horror films rarely run more than 95 minutes unless they involve an exorcism. In Vacancy, 20 minutes had gone by and we’d only met a few characters. I liked that, because it meant that there might be some solid writing.

With more characters comes more excuses to cheat. If someone’s in trouble, one of a half-dozen people can rush in to save the day in the nick of time. But when the amount of characters are limited, so is the writer’s ability to cheat the audience with a dumb coincidence.

Unfortunately, scribe Mark Smith couldn’t make it the distance. He does a very good job keeping us in the dark for a while, but then he exposes the reason behind these snuff films too early. From then on it is regular run-away-hide-run-away-hide fare, and it's tedious. It is amazing how horror writers and directors don’t trust their instincts, and instead reach for the screenplay manual. In that manual, it says that the lead characters must meet their adversary face to face at the exact mid-point of the movie.

Why, oh why, do they continue to do this? In Vacancy, the knocking on the door, the empty parking lot, the flickering lights, the terrifying videos, all of these things turn the screws. Then the killers are exposed and the suspense is dead. The fear of the unknown is so much more powerful than a man with a knife, and it sickens me when filmmakers have a good thing going and then pull out the cliches.

Luke Wilson does a good job with the role. It takes a few minutes to get his comedic films out of your head, but after that, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Beckinsale is great, but takes a loss when things get physical. The writer turns her into the fraidy-cat girl, and the director lets her act like it, which is a shame.

I know what they were going for. Hollywood is in love with the idea of ‘character arc.’ Even in a horror film, a character must evolve and learn. So this couple starts out hating each other, but by working together to escape psychos, they rekindle their love. Beckinsale learns to cry, Wilson holds her like he did in the old days, bells will ring and birds will chirp. What tripe.

Today’s horror films demand an awful lot of suspension of disbelief. To see if it’s working, I use the audience.

With Vacancy, it was pretty plain they were buying it. They paid to see a run of the mill horror movie, and that’s what they got. The only true groan of disbelief came towards the end. They were right. It was as derivative as it could get, but by then they’d had their fun.

As for me, I was left with those same old words on my lips: “It could have been so much more…”

Curt Schilling - Blogger

I was listening to MLB Homeplate on XM 175 and caught the tail end of host Charley Steiner's interview with a sportscaster. In the interview, Steiner commented on bloggers, and made a point of saying that they don't need any credentials, all they need is a keyboard and a computer.

He was, of course, intimating that bloggers shouldn't be taken seriously when they write about sports. The fact that they don't have any credentials makes them suspect as a source of information.

Fast forward about fifty-five seconds. Steiner moves on to the topic of Curt Schilling's bloody sock. (For those not in the know, broadcaster Gary Thorne reported that Doug Mirabelli said something about the blood on Curt Schilling's sock in the 2004 ALCS being fake. Thorne has since retracted the report, saying he misinterpreted Mirabelli's words). To get Schilling's view, Steiner read out a few words from the Red Sox pitcher. Guess where the words came from?

Curt Schilling's blog.

So which is it, Charley? Are bloggers to be taken seriously, or not? And if you are going to pick and choose your blogs, you'll have to tell your audience what credentials a blogger needs before you'll use his stuff on the air. A journalism degree? A life in politics? A 90-mph fastball?

As Steiner says, all you need to be a blogger is a computer and keyboard. That's true. But tell me, what else do you need to be a journalist? I've published material in various places before, I've cashed the checks, I've written back and forth with editors. There's a degree on my wall, but it isn't in journalism. No editor has ever asked what my degree is in, or if I even have one. In fact, the topic of schooling has never come up.

Why? Because editors couldn't give a damn what degree you hold. Like a GM in baseball, they want one thing and one thing only out of their players: good stuff. They want well-written, topical pieces, that are supported by facts. If you can write an explosive story about the president, supported six ways from Sunday, an editor is not going to toss your stuff in the trash just because you didn't attend Yale.

Let's get one thing straight: if Steiner is talking about bloggers that are writing "Red Sox suck!" on their front pages, then I am on his side entirely. But if he's talking about all bloggers everywhere, then I think he's full of it. And he's also afraid. He's afraid that enough people with a computer and keyboard might find out how to do his job, and they might even take his job away from him.

The internet has blown things wide open on all fronts. Buying a house used to be the domain of the real estate agent. An agent could tell you whatever they wanted, and you more or less had to believe them. "The market's tanking," they could say, and you'd sell early, afraid of taking a loss. That isn't the case now. Today you can go on-line and do a couple of weeks of research before even contacting the real estate agent. If the agent hands you a line of bull, you'll know it, and you'll move on to somebody else. That is, if you think you still need somebody else. Maybe you'll just do it yourself.

Term life insurance, the cost of video games, the stats on a big league pitcher, all of this is the same thing: information. The experts used to hoard this information for themselves, and we would pay them to give it to us. Now we don't have to. I can compare life insurance policies from different companies in the blink of an eye. I can find out that the video game at one store is ten bucks cheaper than the other guy's. I can go online and see for myself how well a pitcher does against right-handed hitting. In the process of looking up that stat, I save myself a dollar on a newspaper.

It is no wonder that Steiner and his brethren are afraid of bloggers. Guys like him used to be able to tell people whatever they wanted. They chose what information we were allowed to hear. It was they alone who decided what was newsworthy, and what was not.

The rules have changed. Ten years ago if he had said something on the air, no one could check it out. Now we can. We can research his research, and we can debate him on any issue that he brings up, short of going into his personal life. Virtually all of the information he has, we have. Even if he has an interview with someone, there is nothing stopping a person from going online, finding that guest's agent, and trying to set up an interview of their own.

What I find disturbing about Steiner's attitude is its conceit. The idea that all of the people out there with keyboards and computers are sheep. If you don't have a newspaper's name on your letterhead, you can't write intelligently about baseball? Ludicrous. Charley Steiner watches a baseball game, reads the newswire, checks the stats, then goes on the air to pontificate about it. Fine. But who can't do that? Nobody. Because we all have Charley's tools.

Regarding the mainstream media types, Schilling had this to say:

"Does anyone stop reading their newspapers? Watching the shows they appear on? The answer to that is no. Instead of using the forums they participate in to do something truly different, change lives, inspire people, you have an entire subset of media whose sole purpose in life is to actually be the news, instead of report it."

Well put, blogger.

Memory Murmur

John D. MacDonald had an interesting take on life. It went something like this:

You and all of the people you know are on a very small island. That island is your life. The raging waters passing by that island are life itself. On that island you live out your days together. You play, laugh, dance, weep, and smile. But eventually someone steps a little too close to the waterline, and they're gone. You watch them fading into the distance, and perhaps they're not drowning but waving, but in any case, they're gone. A memory. And you go back to being with the people on your island.

As you get older, some people come to the island, and some people are washed away. The older you get, the more people slip into the waters until they are gone. And, if you've lived a long life, eventually you are alone on that island. Maybe one or two other people are with you. Until they too are engulfed. And then it's just you, waiting to go under.

Depressing.

But it makes sense. When you stroll through a cemetery and see a man's grave marker that reads 1902, it doesn't take much imagination to realize that there is not a single person still alive that knew him. He might make for a tall tale around the campfire, but no one misses him. He's just gone.

Not that the dead guy worries about it. The Romans used to put an epitaph on the grave markers of slaves. It got straight to the point:

I was not.
I was.
I am not.
I do not care.

Indeed.

Memories are like grave markers. Every once in a while we smell a cup of coffee, or hear a car horn, and someone's image pops into our minds. I have always been fascinated by that. You do not need to hear a person's name to remember them. Something merely has to happen, and for some reason this triggers a chemical reaction in your brain that says, "Johnny, getting hit in the face by a baseball." Or, "Jennifer, when she laughed at me because I couldn't undo her bra."

It is people, of course, that are the meat of memories. If I say to you, "High school," it's doubtful you'll get too far before picturing a person's face in your mind. If you push that memory a little further, you'll probably remember more about them than you thought possible. And if you keep at it, you might be able to remember the last time you physically saw them. Until they were gone, washed off your island. Not by death (as far as you know), but by time and circumstance.

Memories are a bitch, aren't they? Try as you might, they just don't seem real. When I think back on events five years ago, it's almost like they happened to somebody else. Could I have really felt that way? Did I really say that? Was I really that happy/sad/elated/scared? It felt so real then. Why doesn't it feel real now?

I remember hearing about a friend that died. He wasn't a close friend, but we shared some drinks and jokes together. He was a hell of a guy. He got married, and three years later he dropped dead. I hadn't seen him in a long time. When I got the news, the first thing that popped into my head was him cutting up a salami and asking me if I wanted some. That memory comes from an all-night bender that we'd had. At the end of the night he pulled out some salami, some bread, and a knife. He said, "You want some salami?"

I feel like I cheated him. Nobody's first memory after death should involve a damned salami. I like to think he'll forgive me for that.

For me the hardest part about remembering people that are still alive, and missing them, is not their absence. It is the idea that they are doing things without me. I won't hear their stories, share their joys. They are gone just as if they had been unplugged from life.

Certainly we've all been there. It doesn't take very long to feel like you've been washed off the island. A friend says good-bye, and a short time later you get a mass email. And deep down you realize: "They don't need me anymore." They are busy making more memories, only this time you aren't in them. You do not, as it were, exist.

One time I wrote to an old girlfriend of mine. She lives in London and I was going there for some reason or other. I would only be there for the day. I thought it would be swell if we could hang out down by Piccadilly Circus and have a cup of coffee, share a few laughs. She wrote back to tell me that she was busy that day, but she hoped I would have a great time. And I was momentarily angry with her. Why could she not spare the time? And then it hit me that she's alive and living a life that I haven't been part of in years.

I found out an old friend of mine had a blog. I opened it up. It's a very personal blog, with daily routines and who's doing what to whom. I read it briefly. And I closed it. I'll check in on it from time to time, to see what they're up to, but it is like reading the diary of a stranger. It smacks of research, not reminiscence. Did I know that person the way people know them now? Did I really know them at all?

Casino Royale - Review

Director: Martin Campbell
Writers: Purvis/Wade/Haggis
Starrng: Daniel Craig/Judi Dench
Runtime: 144 minutes

George Lazenby: "I'd loved to have had that time over again and done another one or two (Bond films), it would have worked out great for me."

Lazenby would know. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was a good flick, and Lazenby did a fine job in the lead role. So what did he do with it? He squandered it away and watched his career take a tumble into mediocrity, if not outright obscurity.

There have now been 21 Bond films, with another currently in production. It is without doubt the most successful franchise in film history, and it has catapulted stars to fame and fortune, some of it deserved, some of it not. It made Sean Connery the film star he is, even though he once said he hated the character. The end of Roger Moore’s career, and the bulk of his retirement fund, was built not on the 401K, but the 007.

Timothy Dalton? Please. Without James Bond as his alter-ego in the ‘80s, no one would even know who Timothy Dalton is. Or rather, was.

Pierce Brosnan didn’t seem to need 007, but let’s be frank: before James Bond, he was more or less the guy from Scarecrow and Mrs. King. After James Bond, he is the man who has made a couple of extremely questionable film choices. After the Sunset was a bust, and The Matador, though an interesting character study, didn’t bring in the crowds. In that movie, Brosnan played a lunatic assassin who looked ridiculous in a Speedo. One has to wonder what Brosnan was thinking when his agent pitched him the script: “I just quit being the most popular action hero there ever was. So you want me to sprout a funny moustache, grow a beer gut, and wear skimpy underwear? Where do I sign up?”

All big film stars should have the following note written on their groupies’ foreheads: “Playing against type is how new guys get noticed. Playing against type is also how film stars destroy their careers.”

The fact that James Bond has been played by so many actors without missing a beat is all the evidence you need that the actor playing him doesn’t matter much.

That is why I took no notice of the anti-Craig hype when Daniel Craig decided to come on board as the next incarnation of 007. When I heard his name, I scratched my head, then snapped my fingers and said, “Oh, yeah, that English guy. From…”

“Layer Cake,” my friend said.

Sounds good to me, I thought. In Layer Cake, Daniel Craig was a good looking English guy with a gun. When you get down to it, that’s about all you need to play Bond. Even if an American were cast as Bond, traditionalists would protest vehemently, but they would go and see the movie. Some would like it, some would not, it would turn a profit, and we would await the next one.

Bond movies are Bond vehicles, not star vehicles. The actor is incidental, because you are not going to the movie to see him, you are going to see what he does: say a funny line or two, escape death, screw some women, and save the world.

I finally caught up with Casino Royale and it surprised me. Not because it cut back on the gadgetry, and not because Daniel Craig is a superb actor that brought anything new to the role. What surprised me about Casino Royale is that it had balls.

From the beginning of the film, the writers (Purvis/Wade/Haggis; God knows who wrote or re-wrote what scenes, but such is Hollywood) let you know that this time it is going to be a little bit different. A black and white scene opens the film, a subtle gesture to tell us that this is the first Bond, not the next Bond, just as Casino Royale was the first of the Bond novels.

Inside of three minutes, Craig’s Bond has killed two men. These are apparently Bond’s first ‘hits,’ and he shows no squeamishness about performing them. This is refreshing, in the sense that a hitman wouldn’t be hired as a hitman if he was afraid of killing people. M, played by an underused but always good Judi Dench, reminds us a little further into the film that the double-oh prefix in Bond’s title means he has a license to kill. This is also refreshing, since in past Bond films, the words kill and death were lacking from the script, no matter how many bodies flew through the air.

Bond had become a video game. This time around, the writer and director have the guts to give Bond his balls back and make him what Fleming always said he was: a hitman in a tuxedo.

He still gets the ladies, of course. One fantastic line in the film comes when Bond is talking to a beautiful assistant in the back of a car. He tells her she’s not his type.

“Smart?” she says.

“Single,” he replies.

And that’s about all the dialogue you’re going to get out of Daniel Craig. The writer has parsed his words down to next to nothing, and the film is better for it. Not because Craig can’t deliver dialogue, but because, what’s the point?

I was surprised by the balls of the writers, as well as those on director Martin Campbell. He keeps the focus on the violence of Bond, the subtleties of the character. This is courageous, considering what has come before. Laser beams, rockets, explosions, they are done away with. Bullets are about as sophisticated as it gets, and when Bond is tortured, it’s done the old fashioned way: he’s tied to a chair and receives a vicious beating. In the balls.

Though taken from the first Bond novel, the film is updated. Cell phones and laptops are put to use, and the baccarat game is replaced by Texas Hold ‘Em poker. This is a smart move by the filmmakers. American audiences would have been lost by baccarat, and the popularity of Texas Hold ‘Em on ESPN makes it the obvious choice.

The guts of the director come out again in the poker scenes. They take a good twenty minutes of screentime to develop, and it would have been very easy for him to skim it. He doesn’t. The game is played as if the audience knows what is happening. You can almost hear the director saying, “Don’t know the game? Lean over and ask your neighbour, because I’m taking this to to the limit. The movie’s called Casino Royale for God’s sake.”

The film is long, but not drawn out. I enjoyed watching the director take Bond through some water that hasn’t been charted in years. Bond, physically disabled. Bond, in love. Bond, truly enraged. Bond, out for vengeance and enjoying that vengeance. Bond, touchingly emotional. Yes, for the first time in ages, Bond actually strikes an emotional chord. It borders on melodrama, and isn’t as poignant as when Bond’s wife died (it has been a long time since you saw George Lazenby, hasn’t it?), but it is a quality scene.

But how was Daniel Craig, you might ask?

He was fine. As with all the other Bonds, he did a good job with the material and he didn’t try to play Hamlet. Like a smart actor with a smart director, he knew to keep his Laurence Olivier in check and let the character’s mystique cloud our vision of the actor beneath.

For his sake, I'm glad he's following what would be Lazenby’s advice: “Do two.”

Happy Birthday, Bill

Today is Shakespeare's birthday. Here is what I had to say about the state of English letters 443 years after the Bard arrived on the scene.

Communication Breakdown

Have you called a friend and left a message lately? I haven't. I fell asleep halfway through the exercise, banged my head, and forgot what I wanted to say.

The answering machine was invented in 1904, but didn't reach wide-scale use until the '50s. They were mostly used for office work, and it wasn't until the 80's that they became a convenient way to avoid colleagues and dodge ex-girlfriends.

Not so long ago, they seemed like a great idea. After the fourth ring, a tape would roll. A friend's voice would say, "We're not available to take your call. Please leave a message after the beep." Had they foolishly said "We're not home right now," you would have run over and robbed their house. But since they were mysteriously 'unavailable,' you said you'd meet them at the restaurant for six o'clock. Simple.

People no longer have answering machines, they have an answering service. And whenever you add 'service' to anything, you know you're going to get the exact opposite of it. These days, leaving a message for people takes forever.

My friend's phone is a great example. Calling her is like trying to get through to the President of Argentina. She's one of those people that thinks you actually care what her opening message says. I quote:

"Hi everybody, this is me! [no kidding] I am currently unavailable [obviously] because I am on a cruise around South America [swell]. So please leave your name and a message [darn, I was all set to sing Oklahoma]. I will be periodically checking my messages [That's good. I usually leave mine until Christmas]. However, if you want to get in touch with me right away [now you tell me], my email..."

That thud you hear is me, slipping into a coma and falling off the chair.

Her greeting amuses me for two reasons. One, her cruise around South America ended last month. If you're going to tell your life story over the phone, at least make it a recent chapter. Two, how many strangers are calling that need to hear this stuff? Zero. Like you, she has the same half-dozen people dialing her number day in and day out. They know what hemisphere she is in, and they know her email address. They use it because they don't want to go through the hassle of phoning her.

A buddy of mine also has a long-winded speech. Like most guys, he adopts a tone usually reserved for morticians and airline pilots. Then he makes room for the Phone Lady. I hate that woman. When my friend finishes talking, she takes the floor: "After the tone, leave a message. When you are done leaving a message, you may press pound for more options. Press 1 to replay your message, press 2..."

That sound you hear is my phone, being thrown through the window.

The worst greeting I ever heard comes from a friend's mother. She changed it every day. I'm fairly certain that my friend moved out of the house not because she didn't want to live there anymore, but because people kept making fun of her mom: "Hey, it's me. Tell your mom I'm not enjoying this gift of a sunny, glorious day anymore, because it just started to piss rain."

Right now I need to make a phone call. I will try my best to get through the rings, the greetings, and the button pushing. Just please, wake me when it's over.

Another Chapter in the History of Violence

I didn't want to weigh in on the Virginia Tech killings mainly because an idiot headcase like that didn't need any more press. Alas, CNN, NBC, et al, have given the idiot headcase all the press he will ever need. He'll be on the internet forever, and his words will have the longevity of Churchill, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is sobering to think that we will know more about his words than we will about Abraham Lincoln's. Lincoln's words were only recorded by the pen. We know how boring that is compared to the flash and dash of the TV screen, so we're lucky that some students might even know who Lincoln was, let alone what he said at Gettysburg.

But that is not the fate of the idiot headcase. Before murdering 32 people, he dropped a tape of himself into the mailbox. He posted it to NBC. Yesterday, NBC promptly played the piece. It shows the idiot headcase brandishing firearms, ranting about the world in general, and now and then pointing a gun at his own head. It is a shame that he was more headcase than idiot. He might have pulled the trigger and splashed his idiot mind all over the wall. But he didn't.

The television media that aired this piece should be deeply ashamed of themselves. I don't mean professionally ashamed, as in, "Did we make the right call?" I mean ashamed in the way that you can't look your mother in the eye.

This is a disgrace. To give a subhuman like that a platform to 'air his views' before murdering 32 people is a travesty. It accomplishes three things: it gives the idiot headcase exactly (and I do mean exactly) what he wanted. 2) it destroys the remaining members of the families that he already destroyed. He killed some with the gun, and he now kills the rest with anger and humiliation. Until the end of their lives, these families have a chance of running into the idiot headcase on the internet and hearing his crap. He will never leave their lives. He will always remind them of what he did, what he took away. And he always wins. Remember: he got exactly what he wanted, at their sons' and daughters' expense. 3) any other idiot headcase out there now knows that he will win, too.

This is not a first amendment issue. If CNN or any other organization had transcribed some of his words and put them on a screen, I would have had no problem with that: it's news. It might (though this is extremely dubious) help point out other headcases in the future. But to play the tape in its entirety is pure sensationalism at best.

By the by, when are we going to hear from the victims? The answer, of course, is never. Unlike the idiot headcase (and if you're looking for his name, go look somewhere else; it won't be mentioned here) the victims of this crime did not get a chance to sit down and tape their last words. That was for the idiot headcase alone. The victims were busy going about their day. Maybe they were thinking about exams. Maybe they were thinking about the next kegger, or getting laid, or going home on the weekend to see mom and dad. Whatever. They didn't get a chance to say anything to anybody, except perhaps to beg for mercy.

They got none. Neither from the killer, nor the media.

I'm sick of the news networks. I want them to go to the families with hat in hand, get down on their knees, and ask forgiveness. I want them to ask for any and all family videos they can get their hands on. Then I want them to run these tapes back to their offices as fast as they ran the idiot headcase's tape to their broadcast studios. I want them to sit down with an editor and make a 10-hour movie about these kids. I want the birthdays, the smiles, the touchdowns, the first steps, the graduations, and the love. I want them to cut that as fast as they can, and I want it on the air for tomorrow. In its entirety. And everytime they show even one second of that idiot headcase's footage, I want them to show that 10-hour movie again. In its entirety.

Think it will happen?

Fat chance. About as much chance as the police doing anything to stop idiot headcases like this from killing people.

No, I don't think the police are responsible. At least, not for the first five deaths. Or ten. Or maybe even fifteen.

But 32? What the hell were the cops doing while this creep was executing people?

I'm fed up with the cops, too. We've got America's Most Wanted, COPS, SWAT, Protect and Serve, and all kinds of tough-guy cop garbage on TV. When a drunk driver gets pulled over, the police have no problem throwing him to the ground or using a Taser to zap him into submission. On the SWAT programs, fifteen guys get out of a van all dressed in black body armor. They look ridiculous, like schoolboys at Hallowe'en. When they kick in the drug lord's slum door, they find the 17-year-old menace to society passed out on the couch in his underwear.

When they shackle the drug kid and put him in the back of the van, they usually bring on a sergeant to make some remarks. "Nobody got hurt," he says. "Successful day."

No kidding, pal. You stormed a suburban home as if you were the Marines. The kid didn't even know you were coming. The chances of somebody getting hurt were pretty damn small. Where are these tough guys when somebody is shooting cheerleaders and university professors in the back?

These SWAT guys really take the cake. In almost every instance that one of these rampage shootings happen, the killer ends up taking his own life. Why? Because the police were outside 'securing the building,' and 'waiting for back-up,' and calling in the 'SWAT team.'

I've got news for you, guys: the building is already insecure. The only people that are going to run out of the building are victims and civilians. The killer is inside. Right where you should be.

CNN broadcast a tape that some kid took with his cell phone at Virginia Tech. The kid was outside in the parking lot. In front of the kid were at least three cops, guns drawn towards the building. The cops were behind their cars, in the classic, 'cop with gun drawn over the hood' look. In the background, you heard, "Bang...bang...bang..."

The shots were evenly spaced, and all of the same calibre. There was about five seconds between each shot. It wasn't a shoot out. It was the idiot headcase strolling down the hall executing unarmed men and women.

What heroes the police are. What great training they have. To protect and serve? Get off the damn hood of your car, into the building, find the sonofabitch (just follow the gunshots and the screams of teenage girls), and shoot him, for God's sake.

Don't hand me this 'waiting for back-up', or 'securing the building' crap. We've seen these rampages before. At the Amish school, at Columbine, and in Minnesota. We've seen it happen in Germany, and we've seen in it Scotland. Every time it happens, the cops secure the building so that the killer can get on with his rampage without being interrupted. When he runs out of bullets or get tired of the whole thing, he kills himself. He isn't going to scramble out the front door and start blazing away at the parking lot (where the police are hiding behind their cars), he's going to stay inside where the victims are.

I guarantee you this: if the police had gone inside earlier, less than 32 people would have died. I really have no doubt of that. Every eyewitness report we hear tells us that these headcases do not hide behind desks or slink around corners. They walk very deliberately down the hall, intoxicated with power, and shoot what they see. Bang...bang...bang. Any cop following that noise could peek around a corner and let the headcase have it.

"But what if the cops shoot an innocent victim?" comes the reply. My answer: shoot the guy standing in the middle of the hall, as opposed to the girl cowering in the corner. In other words, shoot the guy with the damned gun. And if there's two or three of them, keep looking until you can shoot them, too.

I fear we will learn nothing from this. An idiot headcase will do something like this again. The TV news will make sure he gets his day in the sun. And the cops will stand back and let it happen. Again.

One thing is certain: if you are ever caught in a situation such as this, remember Todd Beemer: "Let's roll." Do it yourself. Go down with a fight. Because no one is going to save you, and the idiot headcases certainly won't spare you.

Remember that.

Global Warming Is A Harsh Mistress

More geniuses from the global warming movement took to the snow to protest...global warming.

But they weren't alone. Down in Reno, a few other brainiacs were disappointed when their global warming rally was cut short by rain, cold, and sleet.

I love these guys. Whenever I'm having a bad day, they never fail to lift my spirits with a good laugh at their expense.

CN Tower - Middle Finger to the Nation

There's a documentary coming out at the Hot Docs film festival called, "Let's All Hate Toronto." Reuters (Apr. 13) did a write-up on it and quoted co-director Albert Nerenberg as saying, "There is something different (about hating Toronto). People are more passionate about it."

Jennifer Forhan, who wrote the piece, kicked off her report with, "The dislike of Canada's biggest city, Toronto, in the rest of the country runs so deep that a filmmaker has made a documentary about it."

To which I say, well, Toronto must be doing something right. Just ask the United States. When you're the big boy on the block, everybody wants to take a shot at you.

People hate what they envy. And, if you have toured Canada coast to coast, you've seen plenty of reasons why people might envy Toronto.

Size, for one. As an honest woman will tell you, size really does matter. Not only does Toronto have the largest population in Canada, it also has the CN Tower, North America's homage to masculinity. The CN Tower gives the rest of the nation's capitals skyline-envy. Show someone a postcard of Toronto, and they will know exactly what city they're looking at. Show them a picture of Halifax, and they could be forgiven for thinking it is a fishing village in Oregon.

People in Vancouver hate Toronto? What a shocker. They'd love to be known as Canada's city, if only they could muster up a better style than a Roots sweatshirt and a monogrammed umbrella. If you've been there lately, you'll see that Vancouver has gone downhill faster than a snowboard flunky on dope. Their nightclubs are overpriced and under-hip. The rising number of downtown beggars is astounding. A good day is the one in forty that it doesn't rain. You lost a basketball team but got the Olympics, Vancouver. Sit down.

Montreal has a beef with Toronto? That isn't news. Don Cherry said it all last week. When asked during the intermission if Toronto was going to beat Montreal, he said, "Toronto's going to win, don't worry about it."

Think about that statement. This was on Hockey Night in Canada. He could have said Montreal, but it seemed natural not to. I laughed out loud, thinking of all that Montreal blood boiling over. Not exactly the ‘Yankees of hockey’ anymore, are you, boys?

Saskatoon, Ottawa, Winnipeg, St. John's (or is it John?), Calgary, I guess they all have something going for them. With the exception of Regina -- whose name alone makes schoolchildren giggle -- they may even have their pride.

Yet Toronto beats them all. Not because of a strong economy, a better nightlife, or prettier girls (though it has these, too). No, the reason Toronto is hated is no different than the reason that people hated someone in high school: Toronto's cool.

It's so cool, guess where the filmmakers have to crawl in order to screen their insult?

Toronto's Hot Docs film festival starts next week.

Disposable You

I remember reading a story about Lewis and Clark, where the writer said that their names were so commonly put together that they should be spelled Lewisandclark. You can’t think of one without the other.

The other day I was over at friend’s place, and he and his wife are like that. Steveandjanet is their name, and I like to think of them that way. There is something special about it. In the modern era of Disposable You, it is nice to have touchstone people in your life, where you can think of them as an example for the rest of us. Steveandjanet would probably hate that idea if they thought about it long enough, because in the end they would realise that I see them as quaint. They’d be right. And no one wants to be quaint. It’s not sexy. But it is to me.

Disposable You began back when divorce became the norm. Henry VIII started the ball rolling (not to mention the heads) on that account, but it took the 20th Century to turn divorce into the relationship crematorium that is has become.

Divorce did not increase because it became more ‘acceptable.’ Acceptable is an effect, not a cause of divorce. Anyone who has been through a bad break-up of any kind will tell you that they felt like a failure, and that it was probably the worst thing that ever happened in their life. Just because something is acceptable to society does not mean that is acceptable to the heart or the soul.

No, divorce became prevalent, and acceptable, because the reasons for divorce went up. After all, people don’t wake up one morning and decide on a whim that this is the day they are going to dump their husband or wife. There needs to be a reason behind that decision. And the 20th Century was more than happy to oblige.

The leading cause of divorce was the women's liberation movement. Now hang on, before you reach for the gun and come looking for me, hear me out. This isn't a rant against women. Far from it. It's more a discussion of demographics.

Giving women the right to choose their own destiny did just that: it allowed them to make more choices than they ever had before. The right to vote could not have been very far from the question, “Well, if I am voting, why should I not run? And if I can run for office, what can I not do?”

The answer over the years was: nothing. There is nothing you cannot do. And so women set out to do it.

It gave women a glimpse at what life would be like without a husband. Women never had careers before, but now that they did, the word career was at least as important as the word married, and perhaps more so.

With careers comes cheating. This shouldn’t be a surprise. In the past, most women were at home during the day. The chances of them running into a man to cheat with were quite slim (there’s a reason the mailman cliché is such a cliché: he was virtually the only man that women saw between the hours of 9-5).

But not anymore. Entering the workforce gave women a chance to meet a vast number of men, whether they be single or otherwise. It gave them a chance to fall for each other. At meetings, at conferences, at luncheons, by the water cooler, beside the coffee machine, on the subway, so forth. Further to that, this gave men and women a chance to meet people that had similar qualities, dreams, aspirations, and goals to theirs. Stock brokers with stock brokers, educators with educators, tradesmen with tradeswomen. And further to that, people generally look good when they are at work, or at least attempt to. Men shave, wear cologne, put on suits, women do their hair, wear perfume, and apply lipstick. In short, women at work gave both sexes a chance to meet people that they saw as both mentally and physically attractive. Five days a week.

If one were to surf the internet dating sites, you would see that women place an extreme importance on what they call ‘chemistry’ and having ‘something in common.’ So now you must ask yourself where women would find men like that, and it’s pretty plain that they would find them at work. If a woman is married to a plumber, she may love him to death. But if she’s a stock broker, there is a good chance that she would enjoy spending time with other stock brokers. And if one of those other stock brokers happens to be handsome and (the ultimate deal-clincher in women’s eyes) funny, then the plumber could be in for some bad news.

Too simple?

I don’t think so. First, let me say straight off that I think infidelity is a two-way street. I don’t think all women are harlots, nor do I think all men are cads. But it is ludicrous to argue that women in the workforce has nothing to do with the rate of break-ups in our society. Women in the workforce is a wonderful thing for empowering women, giving their life meaning and value, and giving them money. With money comes more empowerment, and more choice over their own destiny. But with that package comes a rising chance of bumping into a man that they can develop romantic feelings towards, and vice versa. To argue otherwise is silly.

I feel for the people that make the following statement: “I love my career, and my life is great, but I want someone to share it with.”

Alarm bells should be ringing all over the place when you hear that. Because the person isn’t thinking clearly. Let’s dissect it for a moment.

“I love my career.”

Why? Why do you love your career?

There is a very good chance that the person loves their career because they built it. They struggled, they learned, they overcame. They have realized a dream, and it is of their making. The key word being ‘their.’

Now they wish to share it? Nothing could be further from the truth. They had to cut throats, dodge bullets, avoid backstabbers, put up with backbiting, break the glass ceiling, get cut off at the knees, put out fires, and beat out the competition. There’s a reason why the language of workplace politics is loaded with violence: it’s rough business. A tough game. And to get to the top of that, to get past the gopher stage and reach the plateau of loving your career, you have to be unsharing. And now you want to share it?

Love itself is work. A partner is not someone to be brought in to share something. Love is a second career, to be worked on just as hard as the other one. If not, it’s doomed.

Doom, of course, means a break-up. But have you noticed how the age of instant gratification has now become the age of Disposable You? Have you noticed how easy it is to throw something away?

No? Really. All right, when is the last time you heard about a divorce and were ashamed of one of the people involved? I mean truly ashamed, like you would never speak to the other person ever again, not even to say hello in the street?

Disposable You is the new headline of our generation because we have so many choices. Careers take up our time, and there’s always a new job to apply for, a new promotion to get. It’s been years since I heard a friend worry about work. There’s tons of jobs out there, all of them a mouse click away.

The variety of people we meet subliminally convinces us that people are not inherently special. ‘There’s more fish in the sea.’ There sure are. Look at them all: at work, at the clubs, on the internet, on the beach in Cancun. Whether you have a spouse or not, logging into Hotmail or Yahoo will show you ads for dating sites. MSN and Yahoo run their own services. They announce how many thousands of people are online at that very moment. You can’t turn the ads off, and they are always there. If you’ve had a fight with the wife or boyfriend, how tempted would you be to click on it? A little tempted? Just one little click, if only for the hell of it? And if you did, would you tell your spouse? And so the lying begins.

The world got small in a hurry. The days of meeting a girl at the town church and thinking that she is the only one for you are history. Perhaps that is what frightens me most. The idea that deep down, we are all being trained to think of everything, from jobs to spouses, as easily replaceable. Disposable.

Here’s a question for the men and ladies both. When is the last time you were out with friends, and you saw a spoken-for girlfriend of yours flirt with another man? I’ll bet it was recently. And when someone said, “Oh, it’s harmless, she’s just a flirt,” what did you do? My money’s on nothing. I’ll bet you didn’t do or say anything to the girlfriend in order to make her feel shame.

Shame is one thing that is slipping ever further away from us. Without shame, we lose its powerful partner: guilt. No one bats an eye at divorce anymore. In fact, it’s become a running joke. Hearing about a man or a woman’s fourth marriage may draw exclamations of surprise, or head shakes of embarrassment, but it certainly doesn’t seem to reflect upon a person’s character the way it used to. More often than not, people talk about the amount of alimony the crazy bastard must be paying, rather than the hearts he stepped on along the way. (Incidentally, I call the man a ‘crazy bastard,’ because like you, I would think he’s crazy for getting re-married; funny how none of us immediately think he’s crazy for dumping three wives, hmm?)

Without shame, society loses its most potent weapon. Without that weapon pointed at us, we feel free to do as we please with the limitless choices placed on our plate. Blend that with the increased chances of meeting someone to do those things with, and it should be no wonder that marriages and relationships fall apart with such regularity.

By the by, my life is fine. In case you think I’ve just gone through some break-up and I’m bitter about it, rest easy. Not the case. I was simply thinking about Lewisandclark, and Steveandjanet. You can think about your own version, if you have one.

If not, well, that’s a shame.

The Best Game

Opening Day arrived and it was good to see the greatest game take to the field again.

I know, I know, football fans wouldn't agree with that statement. I feel for them. I love football (and by football, I mean football, not soccer. You can look at what I thought of the difference between football and soccer here.)

So yes, I love football. But baseball is the best game. Earl Weaver summed it up like this:

"You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all."

I like that, and he's right. Baseball is the only game where you can't screw around in order to win. You can't kick a ball back and forth, can't ice a puck, can't kneel down and kill the clock. In baseball, you've always got to give the other guy his shot. Sooner or later, like it or not, you've got to face him. And you can never tie. Someone's going home a loser, and someone else is going home with the hot chick in row 8.

Isn't that what competition is all about?

Netspeak

When did it become acceptable for educated adults to write like eight-year-olds?

It took me a long time to get hip to the Netspeak that is floating around, and it looks like it is here to stay. I have yet to use it myself, but it doesn’t stop any of my friends from coughing up a potpourri of colons, brackets, and letters every time I open an email.

I remember the first time I saw ‘lol’ in response to a funny story. I stared at those three letters and had no idea what they meant. I thought they might symbolize a touchdown, the letter L being an arm, an O the ref's head. When I asked my friend for clarification, he wrote back, “Laughing out loud.”

Ah. This is as opposed to writing, “IDTTWVF,” which would be, “I didn’t think that was very funny.”

LOL eventually morphed into LMAO, which is laughing my ass off, which morphed into LMFAO, which is laughing my ass off but not in front of mom. Now whenever I tell a friend a story and I get LOL, I wonder why they didn’t LTAO. Wasn’t it funny enough? Could I have told it better?

Netspeak threatens to ruin the entire English language. Sarcasm is dead. When a friend says, “You moron,” I’m fairly certain they don’t really think I’m a moron. But, just in case, they throw in :) to make me feel better.

The smiley face is as interesting as it is irritating. Apparently you can say whatever you want if you follow it up with colon-bracket. When you tell a friend that you’re sleeping with his wife, he will be upset. If you tell him that you are sleeping with his wife :), he’s expected to take it in stride because you’re such a kidder.

I have a friend that is the master of Netspeak. She loves it. When something special happens in her life, she types :P. This means she is sticking out her tongue. When she types ;), she’s winking. When she types :O, she’s surprised.

What people like her don’t understand is that I already know all this stuff because it’s implied in the language. When I write to say that I fell down a flight of stairs, they don’t need to type colon-capital-oh to say they are shocked. When they tell me they won free tickets to the playoffs, they don’t have to stick out their tongue. I know they’re a braggart and a blowhard. No emphasis needed.

It amuses me to hear people place such importance on education during election time. When their parents are writing emails to each other at a grade 5 level, why should the kids care about learning Shakespeare?

Speaking of Shakespeare, one shudders to think of his works had he been a blogger:

Or, if thou wilt needs marry :), marry a fool :(
for wise men know well enough ;) what monsters :O you make of them,
To a nunnery, go, and quickly too :P
Farewell. LOL.

I look forward to hearing from my friends every day. I love reading their emails, even if they do require an Enigma machine. But once in a while, I just wish they’d GTH. While they figure that out, I’ll sit back in my BVDs on the QT and LMAO.

:)

Blog This

My friends have a fear of what they call “being blogged.”

I heard it again the other night, and not for the first time. We were sitting around having a couple of drinks and one of them said, “I want to say something, but I’m not going to because I don’t want to get blogged.”

By me, that is. And I understand their fear. They’ll be talking to me one minute, chatting away about this that and the other, and the next day they see it in quotation marks.

I need to put their minds at ease. There’s certain rules in regards to writing, whether in blog form or the old fashioned way. The first rule is: don’t lie. Don’t make something up out of whole cloth and pretend that somebody said it. You can paraphrase all you want, but never lie.

Second, don’t bother with their names. Even if the thing gets into print, a name isn’t usually necessary.

So my friends can rest easy. I won’t lie about what you say. And if I happen to mention the time you got drunk and slept with five Thai hookers while on a weekend bender, I won’t mention your name, either.

I notice Al Gore managed to make the news this week. He went before Congress and talked about global warming and made himself look like a condescending know-it-all. Again.

Al Gore: “The Earth has a fever.”

Really, Al? A fever you say? Well kindly hand me that super sized bottle of aspirin so we can help bring its temperature down. Have mom make a cold compress to put on its forehead, and fire up the stove so we can make some hearty chicken noodle soup. While you’re at it, would you mind running the kettle so the Earth can dip its feet in warm water? Oh, and put a towel over its head, lest it catches chill. It’s awfully drafty in outer space. Tuck it in before bedtime, wipe its nose, read Where the Wild Things Are, and ask if Al can kiss it all better. Then call it “Earthy,” pinch its cheek, and shut out the light, making sure to tell Neptune and Venus to keep it down, because Earth is trying to sleep.

“The Earth has a fever.” What kind of an arrogant ass goes before Congress (and the TV cameras; let’s not forget why he was there in the first place) and talks to senators as if they are three years old? This man is quoted as saying that global warming is going to be the end of civilization as we know it, and he uses “The Earth has a fever,” to describe this scientific catastrophe.

I would love to hear Al Gore describe other problems using his condescending, talk-down-to-children-tone.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa: “The marble feels dizzy.”

9/11: “The birdies hit your Leggo set.”

Oil spill: “Exxon made a boo-boo.”

Hurricane Katrina: “Someone pulled the Caribbean’s finger.”

Apartment suicide: “Little man fall down, go boom.”

Assault and battery: “The bullies played a mean game of tag.”

Nothing will make this man keep his trap shut, especially after having his butt kissed at the Oscars.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Al Gore. Okay, yes I do. But what bothers me about him is that I have to look out the window at snow and ice, listen to him say that the Earth is getting too hot to bear and that I shouldn’t drive an SUV, then watch him hop a gas guzzling jet plane back to his estate.

Civilization as we know it, Al? What’s this we crap?

It Takes a Blizzard

This piece caught my eye, about the people who braved a blizzard in order to march against global warming. What can you possibly say about that and make them sound remotely intelligent?

Photo by AP

Sean in the Sun

Here's a look at a piece that went into the Toronto Sun.

Places Past

I just got home from five months out in the world. I rolled in at around midnight on a cold Toronto night and I stood at the same back door that I stood at five months earlier, and the old, profound thought went through my head: “Well, that was a long trip.”

I always liked Jimmy Buffett’s deal: “I took off for a weekend last month just to try and recall the whole year.”

I can relate. When you’re on road and sea every day for months at a time it is easy to fall into Jimmy’s next line: “All of the places, all of the faces, wondering where they all disappeared.”

Yes, I have a thing for the song Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. There’s another line in that song that goes, “Reading departure signs in some big airport reminds me of the places I’ve been. Visions of good times that brought so much pleasure makes me want to go back again.”

Maybe. If you’ve had a really good time you shouldn’t want to go back because it means the police have a warrant out for your arrest. But I get Jimmy’s drift, and every time I’m at an airport, I look at the departures sign and count the places I’ve been to. By now, though, it has gotten easier to count the places I haven’t. There aren’t a lot left. That isn’t to say that I’ve been everywhere, it just means I’ve been everywhere that has an airport.

It’s easy to get blasé about it. Have you heard that Johnny Cash song, I’ve Been Everywhere? It made a comeback on some commercial or other. It’s a foot-tapping tune, and Johnny goes on an on in machinegun style, reeling off all the places he’s been. It sounds like a lot, and it sounds pretty cool, but me and my friends laugh ourselves silly listening to that song.

You’ve been everywhere, have you, Johnny? Oooo! Texas and California. Calgary. Washington? Wow!

Gimme a break. The Man in Black may have been everywhere, but only everywhere that a tour bus can go. After that, nada. And that’s not everywhere.

The sea has always had the mystique of travel about it, and it still does to some degree. Business travellers might think they’ve been everywhere, but catching the redeye to London so you can have a 9AM meeting and be back on the plane after lunch doesn’t mean jack. Me and a girlfriend once took an 11 tour into the Andes. It was a long ass trip to the top of a mountain and the bus was crammed with tourists. At the top of the mountain, we had lunch and the tourists took a few pictures. After an hour of that, we drove 5 hours back down that damn mountain. So basically it was an 11 hour lunch break. I wouldn’t call that an “Andes Adventure” anymore than I would call the redeye flight to London an “English Excursion.”

In the spirit of Johnny Cash, I will now go machinegun-style through the places that I’ve been to in the past five months. I probably should have blogged about them ad nauseum, but the truth is this: I forgot, or I was hungover, or I was working, or I forgot. See, if you’re having a good time someplace, you don’t think about blogging, you think about having the next good time. People that write too much about what they’re doing every day worry me as much as the people in a group picture that say cheese, then ask to look at the LCD screen. It just happened. Move on. The point of photographs is not, “So that’s what I look like at this very moment.” Their point is, “So that’s how bad my hair was five years ago.” With writing, same thing. You need to digest an experience before blathering on about it.

Anyway, an homage to Johnny:

I’ve been to Tokyo, Hiroshima, Dalian, Tianjin, Great Wall, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hanoi (Hong Gai for the Commies), Hue (same), Saigon (Ho Chi Minh is a sonofabitch), Laem Chabang, Singapore, Bali, Komoldo Island, Darwin, Cairns, Hamilton (Australia; not steeltown Canada), Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania (no devils, they killed them all a long time ago), Dunedin, Christchurch, Picton, Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, Bay of Islands, Rarotonga, Bora Bora, Moorea, Papeete, Rangiroa, Nuku Hiva, Los Angeles, San Diego, Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Ft. Lauderdale, Princess Cays, San Juan, Dominica, Barbados, Devil’s Island, Alter do Chao, Parintins, Manaus, Boca de Valeria, Santarem, Fortaleza, Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Punta del Este, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Cape Horn, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, Valparaiso, Fuerte Amador, Lima, Panama Canal, Key West.

And back to Canada. Right about now someone is calling me an asshole, which is why I don’t talk about vacations with people. When I go to a party, I have to be extremely careful not to yawn when some couple tells me that they’re taking a honeymoon to Hawaii or Tahiti. To me and my friends, that is no different than saying, “I’m stepping out for some milk.”

I often have to remind myself that I am lucky. Most men will never see the Great Wall of China, and not many women will take photographs of where the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy. Before I started travelling, Australia seemed like the moon. Now it doesn’t. The more you travel, the smaller the world gets.

That isn’t to say that I really know all of the places I’ve been to. I mean know them in my bones. You need to live in a place for a while to truly know it. I’ve done that in several places, but most of the others have been a sampling, a taste. But it was a damn good lick, I can tell you that.

Besides, it isn’t really about the places. Let’s say some guy comes up with a project for me that involves the geography of Alaska. Now let’s say that all of my Alaska footage has gone down the toilet or been lost by the idiots at Air France. No problem. I’ll pull out my stock footage from Chile, or Norway, or New Zealand, cut it together with some dumb classical music, and give it to you as an Alaskan souvenir. And you’d never know the difference.

Need a picture of northern Ontario? I’m here to help. I’ll give you some shots of the Canadian wilderness, beaver dams and all. You’ll show your friends, you’ll be happy, and you’ll have not the slightest idea that all of those pictures were taken at a national park in Argentina.

Do you want to go to New Zealand? It’s easy. Take a half hour drive up the coast from Vancouver. Pitch a tent. Stay there for a week and take a bunch of pictures. When you get home, enlarge the prints, put them on your wall, and label them ‘New Zealand.’ Anyone from Auckland that sees the photos will say, “Isn’t my home the most beautiful place?”

The world is funny that way. I mean the way it mirrors itself, not the way everyone thinks their home is the most beautiful place (that’s another thing about travelling; you get pretty tired of hearing ‘this is the most beautiful country in the world.’)

For the Earth, north is south and south is north. The geography is a mirror image, like when you were a kid and stood to the side of mirror. Lift your left leg and ta-da, the right leg goes up too, making it appear as if you’re floating.

Tahiti is Hawaii, Southern Chile is Canada, Norway is New Zealand, the Andes are the Rockies….oops.

No they’re not. Say whatever you want about the Andes, they don’t hold a candle to the Rocky Mountains. On that I can assure you. The Alps might. I’ve never seen them, so I can’t say. However, the Alps are crawling with Germans, Italians, and Swiss, so who the hell would want to find out?

See, it’s about the people. People are what make travelling interesting. A photo of Hawaii might look like a photo of Tahiti, and you’d get away with that charade for a while. But then I’d ask you about the transvestites, and your eyes would go blank. Because in Tahiti, being a transvestite is no big deal. There’s tons of them there. I once asked a Papeete local how to tell which women were actually men. He said, “The good looking ones.”

He was right. Tahiti has a load of good looking women. All of them are the height of runway models. They have amazing cheekbones, great tits, and legs to die for. Problem is, the lazy ones also have a patch of dark hair on the small of their back.

I have often said that it is not where you are, it is who you are with. I stand by that. If I am with my buddies Dave and Pete in some craphole, I will have a great time. If I am at the best nightclub in Berlin with some loser who complains all the time, I will hate life. This is why I despise going out with a group of people that cannot make up their minds on where they want to go. You’d figure they’d have learned it by now: if you’re truly friends, then it truly doesn’t matter. If the location matters so much, I have bad news for you: you aren’t friends.

This ties in with another Coyote Law. If someone tells me, “Ah, that town sucks. Nothing to do,” then I know I am in for the night of my life. This happens at least 9 times out of 10. No different than the people that say, “It’s a Tuesday [or Wednedsay, or Monday, or Sunday] and there’s nothing going on.”

Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. The words, “This place sucks,” or “There’s nothing going on,” are reserved for the losers of society. These statements are tailor-made for the guys that think backyards and BBQs are the meaning of life, or for the broads that don’t want their boyfriends to drink too much at a wedding reception.

If travelling is about people, then travelling has taught me that people are the same the world over. There’s a segment of every society that wants to have fun, and there’s a segment of every society that doesn’t know how.

Case in point: Lima, Peru last month. Sunday night. I was working, so I couldn’t hit the city until close to midnight. Before heading out, all of the people I knew told me, “Nothing’s going on, this place sucks.” I’m instantly looking forward to a blow out. One of the locals told me, “It’s a Sunday, so nothing’s happening.” Now I’m licking my chops with delight. And guess what? It was a blast.

In life, in the world, there is always something going on. In every city with a population over a few thousand, there’s always a few dozen people that want to do something. It is up to you to go out and find them.

It’s nice to be back in Canada. This is the time where I hang up my shoes and barely see the light of day. Doing nothing for a couple of weeks is a great form of therapy. Call it decompression, like coming up from a dive before you get the bends.

Problem is, I can’t get it out of my head: all of the faces, all of the places, wondering when they’ll all appear. Not the old faces, but the new ones. The old ones I miss, and I pine for, but that is my private affair. But the new ones belong to all of us. The ones I haven’t met yet. The people that make my life (and yours, should you bump into them) more interesting.

What's In My Name?

I've heard that to rouse a slumbering person from across a room, you simply have to whisper their name a few times. I tried it on a sleeping girlfriend, she woke up, and I told her that I was conducting an experiment. She was pissed, but she proved the point.

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

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

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

If you have a good name.

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

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

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

Anyway, I put on that shirt and went to school. All day long people called me 'Seen,' as in, "I have seen the light." I had no idea why they were calling me this, until I realized that they were ripping on my name. Since that day, I have probably been called 'Seen' about 5, 342 times.

It isn't always the smart-asses that call me Seen. People from east of the Rhine and into Asia also call me Seen, because they think that's how it's pronounced. Filipinos especially have a tough time with it. They see my name on a Hello My Name Is tag or on a piece of paper, and they say, "Hello, Seen." They're just trying to be friendly, and I smile and nod all the same, but in reality I want to punch them in the face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleased to meet you.

Getting On

"Seventeen months after Katrina, nearly 200 people uprooted by a hurricane still live in Mt. Olive Gardens, whole families packed into 200 square-foot FEMA trailers they now call home....There were 5,596 words in the President’s speech last night, and reaction to the fact that not a single one was either Katrina or Louisiana was felt not only here in tiny Mt. Olive Gardens, but all across the Gulf.... Words like ‘relief’ and ‘recovery’ now seem as empty to them as last night’s presidential address."

— CBS’s investigative reporter Armen Keteyian, January 24 newscast.

I was taking a turn around the internet horn this morning when I found this quotation on Brent Bozell's site. I guess Keteyian wanted to tug at the heartstrings with this piece, and it could have worked, had he not mentioned that it's been 17 months since Katrina.

17 months?

I may be a hardhearted SOB when it comes to some things, but I am not hardhearted at all when it comes to people that have lost everything. I feel for people like that, and I want them to do well. I don't like hearing about people that lose their house to a fire, or their lifesavings to some corrupt Wall Street scumbag.

But 17 months? That is a hell of a long time. I can't remember where I was 17 months ago (eighteen, now; that news report was filed in January), but I know that I worked for a different company. Last year -- for a couple of different reasons -- I decided to move on and get another job. So I quit the one company, looked around for a couple of weeks, and latched on to something else.

I am not trying to compare my professional life with a family that has lost everything. However, the line that struck me most in the piece above was this one (emphasis mine):

"Nearly 200 people uprooted by a hurricane still live in Mt. Olive Gardens, whole families packed into 200 square-foot FEMA trailers they now call home..."

I hope that is just the reporter laying it on a bit thick. If the heads of these families are seriously calling a FEMA trailer home, then these families are in serious trouble.

The idea of the hardworking family man is not what it used to be. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath had images of men hunkered down in the dust, worrying about their families ('figuring,' Steinbeck called it), and struggling to find a way to put food on the table. They'd pick oranges for next to nothing, and they'd drive thousands of miles in old jalopies to find work.

Work is all they wanted, however they could get it. They weren't too proud to do anything that would help their children, and they didn't apply to anybody for an assistance program. Assistance programs didn't exist anyway, so they had to roll up their sleeves and get things done themselves, as best they could.

That doesn't seem to be the case today. I didn't see the CBS broadcast, but I will bet millions that Keteyian didn't ask any of these family's adults, "Have you thought of just striking out on you own and not asking for another year's worth of 'relief?'"

Doesn't seem a proper question, nowadays. But honestly, 17 months of sitting in a FEMA trailer is not exactly a portrait by Norman Rockwell. Besides, what is more relief going to bring? It is not going to rewind the clock and make Katrina die in the Gulf without ever reaching the shore. The very definition of relief is that it is temporary. Immediate pain is done away with, so that you can get on with your life. So relief for the victims of Katrina is not the problem. It's the 'getting on' that's in short supply.

I have no right to tell these people what to do, and they would be completely within theirs if they told me where to go. But people must learn to carry on with their lives if they expect to have a life worth living. Starting over is tough, and leaving behind fond memories can be a killer. One shouldn't compound it by reliving the worst memories over and over again every time they fill out another piece of government paper (in triplicate, no doubt).

The one thing that will make bad times disappear is to get your ass in gear. Keeping busy and looking for something new will cure almost every ill that can affect the soul. Sitting and waiting is not the answer to any problem. The longer you wait, the closer it is to the time you are forgotten.

Once you're forgotten, you've only got yourself. Oddly enough, this is what you had in the first place. So you might as well get on with getting on. The sooner the better.

Courtesy Flush, Please

Oops. My mistake. I didn't do enough research into the whole 'in case you need to pray while taking a dump' thing.

Check out the link above (click the title) and you'll see that the Brits are also worried about their number 1's and 2's. Apparently you have to face Mecca while sitting on the john. Makes sense. To steal from Britain's own Monty Python, I suppose you would have to face Mecca while on the can, lest you fart in its general direction.

If one sentence can sum up how ludicrous this stuff is getting, it must be the following one from Fox News, talking about Ibrahim Ramey, director of human and civil rights work from the Muslim America Society:

"Ramey said he was unaware of any specific complaints regarding the direction of toilets in U.S. prisons."

Roses All the Way

I went out for a night on the town in Buenos Aires and got a look at what the city has to offer these days. I haven't tooled around in Buenos Aires in a couple of years and it's good to see that things haven't changed much.

The booze is still relatively cheap, the ladies look fine, and the locals are as gregarious as ever. As one buddy of mine said, "People here just seem to age well." He's right. There aren't that many old-looking people in Buenos Aires. I'm not sure if that's because the plastic surgeons are working overtime, or if people just die a hell of lot earlier around here, but my friend has a point. People dress well, eat well, and look well in these parts, and the obesity rate is to be envied because you can't find any fat people.

I did, however, run into a couple of little girls at 3AM. One of them was trying to sell a crummy looking rose, and the other was trying to sell a crummy looking arts and crafts project. I don't know what the thing was, but the kid seemed to think that I would want it if she said "Por favor," fifteen times in twenty seconds.

Those two kids got me thinking about where their parents might be. It's not often that you find two eight-year-olds hawking stuff at three in the morning. I took it for granted that these children are probably on that same street corner every night, because they knew the nightclub bouncer's name, and he didn't try to shoo them away unless they were being a pain in the ass to the customers trying to get in the club.

After asking me a hundred times if I wanted to buy their stuff, they sat down on a bench in front of the bar. It was mildly depressing to see that they were actually about fifty years old. Ten seconds before, they'd been plying me with the cute faces and the sing-song voices. As soon as they sat on the bench to take a load off, they looked like any construction workers during a lunch break: tired, bitching about a long night, shaking their heads and muttering to each other. Through their body language, I could almost translate the conversation:

"Cheap gringo won't buy a damn rose," says one.
"Roses don't sell anymore," says the other.
"Better than that cardboard crap you've got."
"Cut me some slack, it's all I could find."
"You think that lady's got money?"
"With those shoes? No way. Let's keep working the drunks that come out of the club. They always have spare change."
"All right, but gimme a minute, my feet are killing me."

They didn't look poor. They had well-combed hair and they looked as if they'd had three squares that day. Yet here they were, life's little lost ones. Their eyes darted from tourist to tourist and drunk to drunk, looking for a sucker or someone that wasn't paying enough attention to their wallet. They knew more about the street than I ever would, and they weren't old enough to enter high school.

And that's the way it's going to go for them. Roses, to heroin, to jail, to infection, to death in no time at all, and we'll still be going to the clubs and telling the next generation that we don't want their crummy flowers.

Headlines

From Breitbart.com:

Muslim chief slams 'police state' Britain, like Nazi Germany

Speaking outside the mosque shortly before the prayer session began, [Mohammad Naseem, chairman of Birmingham's Central Mosque] compared the current situation, and anti-terrorism legislation introduced in Britain in recent years, to Nazi Germany.

"The German people were told the Jews were a threat. The same thing is happening here. The Muslims are now the bogey people," he said. "It's a small community. It's easy to pick on them. That's what's being done."

A chairman of a mosque hiding behind the Jews. Interesting. I'll bet he doesn't have much to say when Ahmandinejad says Israel should be wiped off the map and all Jews should be exported to Europe.

As for what Naseem says about Muslims now being Jews in a Nazified Great Britain. Um, no.

I read a very good book last week by Richard J. Evans called The Third Reich in Power. It's the second in Evans' trilogy about the Reich, and it's the best book written about the Nazis since Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's chock full of info that nobody mentions anymore, and it shows just how evil the Nazis were, should we care to remember it.

Great Britain's anti-terror laws are not comparable to Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. Nobody's laws are, except Sharia Law itself, and the call to jihad for global domination and the destruction of the infidel.

Here's a small sample from Evans regarding Nazi Germany's laws vis a vis their own perceived infidels:

- people with two Jewish grandparents had to get permission from the Committee for the Protection of the German Blood if they wanted to marry a non-Jew.

- Jews were not citizens, but rather subjects of the state. They had no rights, including the right to free speech.

- the Law of 7 April 1933 banned Jews from the civil service, universities, teaching professions, and the judiciary.

- in 1935, a law was passed that declared Jewish and non-Aryan foreigners could not receive German citizenship.

- Jewish businesses were not allowed to advertise in the press from 1933 onwards.

- by the end of 1936, laws were passed that banned overseas transfers of Jewish-owned funds.

- Jews were banned from sports fields, public baths, and outdoor swimming pools.

- municipalities were authorized to ban Jews from streets and districts.

- Jews were banned from carrying firearms and offensive weapons.

- The Reich Chamber of Culture banned all Jews from cinemas, theaters, concerts, and exhibitions.

- Jews were stripped of their rights as tenants. They could now be evicted at any time.

- Municipalities could order Jews to sublet parts of their houses to other Jews.

- by 1939, all tax concessions were removed from Jews, including child benefits. Jews were now taxed at a single rate, the highest one in the Reich.

- all insurance payments owed to Jews after the 1938 pogrom were confiscated by the government; Jews had to pay for and clean up the mess left by the rioting.

- on February 21, 1939, all Jewish cash, securities and valuables (except wedding rings) were ordered to be put in blocked accounts; the Reich eventually seized these accounts.

And then, once the war started, the Nazis murdered millions of them. Great Britain like Nazi Germany? I think not.

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 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.

From the Herald Sun (Australia):

Row Over Washrooms

A ROW has erupted over Muslim-only washrooms at La Trobe University that can be accessed only with a secret push-button code.

Muslim students have exclusive access to male and female washrooms on campus, sparking claims of bias and discrimination. The university and Islamic leaders have defended the washrooms as vital to Muslim students' prayer rituals.

Yes, if you like to pray while taking a dump, I suppose.

There is no doubt in my mind these days that Islamic fascists were wildly successful on 9/11. Lenin once said that the purpose of terrorism is terror. That's true, but it runs deeper than that. There was a Palestinian terrorist who said that before terrorism and plane hijackings became the norm, the Palestinian cause got nowhere. Once they started shooting people and blowing things up, the UN listened and they got their concessions.

The above example adds weight to the insipid idea that terrorism works. It puts a people's cause on the front page, and we weaklings bend before it.

Think back to before 9/11. You didn't see Islam in the news every day. I bet you didn't once think about 'people of cover.' You wouldn't have known about Ramadan as a religious holiday, and there's no chance you contemplated giving Muslims separate bathrooms at universities.

Then 9/11 happened. For the first few months, the story was about us, and the pain we suffered. But slowly and surely, the headlines changed. Now the story is about what we can do for them, and how we are a discriminatory people that must make allowances for people that want nothing to do with our culture and our way of life.

And with each concession, the divide deepens. When strung together in the past, separate washroom were two vile words. Now they are 'vital.'

Welcome to the new world order.