Okay I don’t watch commercials so much as listen to them. Once you get a laptop, you stop watching commercials. Pretty much I’m playing Text Twist, Cubis 2, mahjong or puzzling at the Jig Zone during the ads. But I hear them. And they still sound stupid. There are some ads that are so stupid sounding that not watching them is not enough. I have to drop what I’m doing, even when I’m lining up the perfect cubis or the clock is running down and I haven’t guessed the six letter word yet, to find the remote and mute the TV.

Because I hate you, world that thinks people watching TV are this stupid! I hate you, people watching TV that are so stupid that someone thinks this is persuasive!

Exhibit A: “WE SLEPT IN!!!”

Seriously, if it gets to the part where she shrieks the tagline and I haven’t muted it… well, nothing actually happens but I do get very irritated. This ad is a perfect follow up to the equally insulting, misogynist and shrill original Tostitos ad, “I GOT CARDED!!!”. I hate you, women who toss back Tostitos with your chardonnay and trade Carrie Bradshaw quips and your favourite mommy bloggers! Shhhhtttt! I have a whole bag of shhhht with your name on it.

Exhibit B: Crazy Train

On paper it seems sort of clever. But the casting of this commercial makes me hate it. These kids who weren’t even born when Ozzy kicked drugs for the 14th time are so frickin blasé, like they’ve been singing this song their whole lives instead of cramming over the weekend before the audition with their dad’s beaten up cassette tape. I mean look at them. So bored. Nothing impresses them, not even breaking into spontaneous song in their gigantic gas-guzzling breedermobile. I pretty much have to mute it before the second kid comes in with her stupid, “Ai, ai, ai”. Shut up, kid.  And what’s with the super-obvious diversity casting? Token is staring out the window, listless and unmoved, hating Theo and Coz for setting him on this course 25 years ago.

The worst is how shitty they sound when they sing the chorus. It doesn’t even sound like the song! Zip! Zippity!

More to come, perhaps.

Heya folks!

I gotta admit, I am fighting off an overwhelming desire to nap. I’m just not all that interested this year. But duty calls. So what do we have this year? Everybody’s fussing over The Artist. Seems it’s the shoo-in odds-on favourite. Is it me or could this be the least-seen Best Picture ever? Allow me to reveal my total lack of cinephile cred in saying I have zero interest in seeing it. Trying to remember which of the hundreds of Best Pic noms I’ve seen this year. Mehdnight in Paris, a nice movie but seriously? Best Picture? Half of Moneyball (flight from Toronto to NY not long enough; entertainment system not working for return flight for last half of flick), which I was truly enjoying. That little Jonah Hill! Will never win opposite Christopher Plummer, but still. I liked him. Just saw Canadian nom for Foreign Language flick, Monsieur Lazhar, which was delightful but not a winner. Don’t understand the lack of acknowledgment for Take Shelter, which I did see. Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, which baffled me. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which entertained me. And seriously, that’s it.

So let’s move on to tonight’s host. Is it exciting that Billy Crystal is back? Is it hilarious that the Academy did a total 180 after their disastrous attempt to court the yoot audience last year with James Franco overcompensating for Anne Hathaway’s pathological perkiness by channeling Perry Como on SCTV? Is it just me or does Billy Crystal’s face look like the Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark after they opened the ark and his face started melting? I feel like it would be best just to let the memory of Billy’s outstanding opening montages live on in our memories. But we shall see.

So who’s a lock tonight? Pretty much just Christopher Plummer, although like I said, looks like The Artist and its charming Frenchy lead actor will probably take their categories. They have the power of Uggie behind them. That little dog has been working the Oscar PR tour harder than Kate Winslet, I swear. Probably Octavia Spencer for The Help. What about actress? Will Viola Davis take it? Michelle Williams? Maybe they’ll split the vote and the Iron Actress herself will steal away with her third statue. Tricky category. Oh, just thought of another lock: A Separation, Iran’s Foreign Language submission. It’s been winning everything.

And what about the Screenplay prize, Oscar’s traditional nod to the movie it was too chicken to give more substantial recognition to? I, like everyone else I know, am pulling for Bridesmaids for original. Adapted could very well go to Hugo. I keep hearing how great that flick is.

A’ight, the E! Red Carpet Bullshit has started, so I’ll start my snarking below, in the comments. Feel free to co-snark at any time!

The ingredients:

Friday night television is a barren wasteland. Even more than other nights. It’s like a post-apocalyptic sort of barren. So last night I was flipping around the dial and read the program description for 20/20: “HollyWed: Inside Celebrity Marriages”. Is it me or was the evening starting to look up? The program started off typically and topically, by rehashing Demi Moore’s divorce-inspired retro-partying with whipped cream nitrous and moved on to Katy Perry’s lack of a pre-nup, Kim K’s lack of an anniversary, a really uncalled for extension of the 15 mins for the guy who married Britney in Vegas and so on.

Eventually they moved on to the 1%, i.e. happy marriages. They settled on the Hanson brothers (the musicians, not the hockey players), who hand-picked their wives from their screaming throngs of fans (seriously, all three of them) and lived happily ever after. I don’t know what religion, if any, these guys subscribe to; 20/20 just said they were “home schooled”. But there was something sort of creepy and quasi-religious about the whole thing. I wondered if, when not touring, they all live on a compound together in a sort of fraternal Sister Wives kind of set up.

Next, I went to bed and, as is my custom, surfed the net a bit on my iPod Touch. I happened upon a Gawker post about how Mitt Romney and his family performed some sort of posthumous ceremony on his deceased father-in-law, who had disavowed organized religion his entire life, that would allow him to embrace the Mormon faith in the afterlife, just in case he had a change of heart. Dang, that’s kinda weird, but okay.

With these two pieces in play, I laid me down to sleep. I proceeded to have a long, detailed and fairly lucid dream in which Mittens invited me to a family dinner, knowing full well that we were ideologically divergent. I think it was sort of a campaign ploy to humanize himself to a representative of the (Canadian, non-voting) electorate. And you know, the dream Romneys were charming folk. Like their corporeal counterparts, there were a spagillion of them, and they all got along, and they lived in a fairly modest house, not a mansion by any means. Nobody told me their names. Probably they figured I’d never remember them all anyway. I made little jokes with them about our political differences, and everyone laughed jovially and changed the subject. I sat down after dinner with Mrs Romney and asked her how she felt about potentially becoming the First Lady. We had a very nice chat, as you would expect to have with a First Lady.

Unfortunately, I noticed at one point that I was naked, save for a bathrobe (provided by Mitt) that wouldn’t stay shut. The Romneys were very good about it, though, and acted as if nothing was amiss. Good people. Except there was this one kid, about 14, who showed up at one point, also naked, and started grinding against me, which was pretty weird and uncomfortable. I moved on.

Eventually I discovered that 2 or 3 of the Romney wives were actually the MMMBop wives, which surprised me. I mentioned that I’d seen them profiled earlier that evening on TV and they hadn’t realized the show was airing that night. Nobody mentioned the Hanson connection.

Mitt and I chatted several times throughout the evening – he was ever the genteel host, ensuring my comfort (except for the bathrobe that wouldn’t close). We all went out for a walk, down to the water, where we were greeted by the press, which really freaked me out. I found out later that this was a nightly ritual. Sort of a campaign check-in. The press would wait patiently, on the other side of the lake, and when the family emerged from a stone arch walkway, they would accelerate on their jet skis over to our side of the lake, to get the shot of the Romneys waving cheerfully to America.

I gotta say after all that, I still wouldn’t vote for him. But it’s nice we’re all friends now.

Feb 6 UPDATE: I remembered last night that at one point, we looked up in the tree next to the house and there was a CHEETAH up there! I was like, damn, they have cheetahs in Arizona? So I guess that’s where we were.

 

In early December, I let the seasonal, heady glee of impulsive spending gone wild get the better of me and bought a Groupon for a goofy weight loss product called Zaggora Hot Pants. The Groupon page described the pants thusly:

Comfy hot pants in sizes S–XL boast slimming technology that works while active or asleep & helps drop up to two dress sizes in two weeks

I figured I could always use another pair of workout shorts, and hellz, if these ones had “slimming technology”, well what did I have to lose, except inches? They were selling for half price! Only $30. (In the grey light of January I no longer choose to describe that price as “only”, but at the time it seemed like 5 bucks.)

So a week later, I went online to redeem the voucher and learned there would be an additional charge of £9 (the company is based in the UK) for shipping. Sigh. Extra charges. I went back to the Groupon page and sure enough, the charge was listed there. So, my bad. Fine. My Mastercard can take it. Weeks pass. I finally get the Canada Post delivery card and… AAAAHHH SHIT. Come on! I have to pay $32.21 in taxes, duty, processing, and what-the-eff-ever. All you math savants out there already know that this means my Zaggora Hot Pants have now cost me in the neighbourhood of $75, which is actually more than the listed value on the website. And I went back to the Groupon page again and guess what. No mention. Because nobody would buy the stupid things if they knew. ARG. What it does say is that the deal is valid only in Canada. So they knew they were marketing to a Canadian audience. Ostensibly they knew there would be a massive additional cost to get the damn things into the country.

I thought about writing a bitchy e-mail to Groupon, but knew they’d just blow me off with fine print or whatever. So I shelled out the cash and took them home. Opened them up and found that these exercise shorts with anti-fat technology are basically wetsuit cutoffs, designed to make you sweat your balls off, if you had any (I don’t see this being a big seller with the menfolk). I might as well have just gone out for a jog wrapped in Saran Wrap.

Okay, well, I haven’t really given my Hot Pants a proper go yet – just did one workout on the weekend and laughed at the river of sweat that emerged when I peeled them off. I haaaate sweating, and I am a sweat machine, so I’m not sure I’ll have the patience to wear these things enough to be able to report back on their efficacy. My colleague and friend, L-Mac, saw them on my desk at work and just laughed at me for being such a sucker. Well I’ll be laughing at her when my legs are two dress sizes smaller than the rest of me! Bitch!

 

I like how Facebook has little advertisements from your past on the right nav. Every once in awhile you’ll see a link to an update you posted ages ago. No one knows where they come from, or why Facebook decides to show them to you, which I think kind of adds to the unpredictable and magical nature of the little notes, like if TARDIS ran Facebook.

Well anyhoo, I came across this thing I posted on April 12, 2009. I thought it was funny, maybe you will too. You can always post your own version in the comments.

Instructions: Finish the sentences. Then re-post it as “Finish the sentences” (in your NOTES section) when you’re done! If you want to, of course. No biggie.

1. I’ve come to realize that my last kiss. . . was affectionate and sweet.

2. I am listening to. . . the gentle snore of the Miaouw, and some crappy noisy chase scene on AMC.

3. I talk. . . a good game.

4. I love. . . California.

5. My best friends. . . don’t hold it against me.

6. My first real kiss. . . was slobbery.

7. Love is. . . higher than a mountain, thicker than water.

8. Marriage is. . .  a beautiful idea.

9. Somewhere, someone is thinking. . . “should I get a Twitter account?”.

10. I’ll always remember. . . the lyrics to “Who Am I?” from Les Miserables (for the record: 2460wooooooooooooooooonnnnn!!).

11. The last time I really cried was …  a week ago Friday.

12. My cell phone. . . is an idea whose time has not yet come.

13. When I wake up in the morning. . . I fall back asleep, at least twice.

14. Before I go to bed. . . I sometimes brush my teeth.

15. Right now I am thinking about. . . waking up the Miaouw, getting in the car, and driving to Wing Time.

16. Babies are. . . pedestrians waiting to grow up and piss me off.

17. I get on Myspace. . . and then I quickly get off Myspace.

18. Today I. ..  had a lovely afternoon with southbaycookie in euphorbita’s back yard.

19. Tomorrow I will be. . . still on vacation.

20. I really want to be. . . thin.

21. I am allergic to. . . effort.

22. I am annoyed by. . . pretty much everything.

23. One food I refuse to eat is. . . brussel sprouts.

24. The most recent thing I’ve learned is. . . that Adam Smith also advised that everyone should pay into the social safety net. (Um, not sure if I got that right.)

25. The number one thing on my bucket list is. . . to eradicate all references to The Bucket List.

26. Something I’ve always wanted to learn to do is. . . speak French.

27. I have a high tolerance for. . . ketchup.

28. I have a low tolerance for. . . “Papa Oom Mow Mow” by The Rivingtons.

29. My wish. . . is your command.

30. One person I would happily make a fool out of myself if I ever saw in person. . . Jon Stewart.

A friend of mine posted a video on Facebook this morning, in which Bill O’Reilly sets his homeboy Bernie Goldberg straight about the difference between Ice-T and Ice Cube:

 Okay so that’s hilarious, natch. (Updated to add: Ice-T was not amused.) But then I started thinking about Ice Cube and white people, as one does, and I remembered this gem from the internet that I came across some years ago. The guy is British comedian Adam Buxton, and this short was created for the BBC’s comedy show, Rush Hour. I wasn’t able to discern when it came out, but I know it’s at least 4 years old. Anyway, enjoy. (If you’re like me, you’ll be hearing “Help the police! Help, help, help the police!” in your head for the rest of the day.)

So that was pretty boring. Who here is feeling totally ripped off that Ricky Gervais didn’t do stuff like congratulate Claire Danes for finally marrying one of the boyfriends she’s stolen over the years, or arrange to have the orchestra play “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?” when Christopher Plummer went to accept his statue? After getting over their utter horror, shock and dismay at his ruthless skewering of Hollywood last year (“so mean! poor Tim Allen!!), everyone was settling in, waiting for him to make Baked Alaska out of the audience of frosty self-important celebrities-I-mean-actors. Other than the odd softball (referring to Jodie Foster’s beaver and its mysterious lack of male witnesses – TMZ was soooo shocked by this), his performance was pretty tame. The Hollywood Reporter is saying we got punk’d. Maybe a bit much, but yeah.

Well, I liked his tux, anyway!

Okay some other stuff I liked:

• Matt Leblanc‘s genuine acceptance speech for his surprise (to me, anyway) win as Best Actor in a TV Comedy. You might think that a guy who’s been really famous for a couple decades with no accolades to show for it might have a toilet paper roll full of people to thank upon finally grabbing a major prize like this, but Matt kept it real, and better, real brief. Seemed like a humble guy. Also diggin the silver fox do.
• The bilingual acceptance speech offered up by Modern Family‘s Sofia Vergara and Stephen Levinson.
• The little ditty by Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy when presenting… whatever it was they presented, who really cares. Also, I really hope Bill’s hair is for a movie. Yeesh.
• Acceptance speeches from non-famous people, especially anyone who was French.

Stuff I disliked:

• Claire Danes.
• Kate Winslet – I used to really dig her until two years ago when her Oscar lust got the better of her. What is with the breathy acceptance speeches? Are you winded from the brief walk to the podium? Or are you just SO! EXCITED! that you can’t catch your breath? FFS get a grip and some perspective. (I thought you had both.)
• Meryl Streep – normally reliably self-deprecating and funny, this year she just went on and on. “Oh my god I’m going to have to remember my speech!” - that would have been forgivable(ish), if it seemed like she’d written one to begin with. And okay, what the fizzUCKY was she wearing? Does she have low self esteem or something? Why does she allow herself to be frumpedified every time she goes to one of these awards shows, which is often? I mean she is a beautiful woman! Get a stylist! YIKES!
• Endless parades of entire casts filing onto the stage for acceptance speeches. Okay, so, when you watch the Oscars, you can kind of understand when everyone gets on the stage at the very end of the telecast for the big Best Movie prize. Same with the Emmys, although they have to do this twice with the comedy and drama categories. But this year on the GGs, I swear we got the entire cast of best foreign friggin film up there, to say nothing of TV-comedy, TV-drama, movie-comedy, movie-drama, proably miniseries or movie, and god knows what else. Just sit in your seat, drink your wine, and quit trying to take credit for every tangential thing that happens to your life.

So Jan 18, the best part of the Golden Globes: watching Joan Rivers et al tear them apart seam by seam on the Fashion Police! (By the way, what the hell is going on with Kelly Osbourne’s blue/grey hair? I thought it was some bizarre stunt she pulled to match her dress last night but I’m told by a friend she’s been sporting this icky look for some time on Fashion Police. Who polices the police?)

So this is pretty cool. Depending on how closely you follow this sort of thing, you may have heard about this new scam where regular people post videos to YouTube, pleading with celebrities to go on dates with him. I don’t know how often it happens, but last July, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis both agreed to dates with marine soldiers to some swishy prom for marines in November. I’m assuming there was a large influx of desperate pleas from a wide representation on the obsessive spectrum being posted to YouTube after that.

Well 11 days ago, a woman named Chelsea Gill posted a video of her being totally irresistible in a sort of Zooey Deschanel “adorkable” fashion, but nowhere near as irritating because she’s not famous. She sang a song asking Jason Segel out on a date. (Seriously, you don’t know who Jason Segel is? Not you, I know you know him. He’s Marshall on TV’s How I Met Your Mother, which I didn’t get into until they started syndicating it like mental – you can pretty much watch an episode at any given time on basic cable these days). He also wrote and starred in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which first introduced us to his strange fixation on muppets. Little did we know he’d been working on a script for the glorious return of The Muppets, not that I saw it or intend to. What’s the point with Jim Henson dead? Kermit has never sounded the same since.

The other thing Jason Segel did, which surpasses everything else in my opinion, is the classic bromance, I Love You Man. In fact it may be the only bromance. Certainly its appearance was the genesis of the term bromance. Point is, Jason Segel is a pretty awesome guy. He is also, though I cringe to say it, the epitome of male “adorkable”. God what a stupid word. So when this adorkable girl sings him this song in which she opines, “Oh Jason Segel/You are the ring to my Smeagol“, well, I mean, he didn’t stand a chance! I’m sure this woman has received hundreds of date proposals in the interim, from hopeful dorky guys that are not famous. Check it out:

How did Jason Segel respond? First, he tweeted this:

And then he took Chelsea and her twin sister as his dates to the Chicago Film Critic Awards show! Super cool. So, fledgling dorkabees, get out your guitar or your Casio keyboard and your rhyming thesaurus and get to work! You could be next.

I find American politics mystifying in general – the whole deal where a majority isn’t really a majority unless it’s a super majority, PACs and superPACs, bills being introduced by Congress or the Senate as opposed to a nice orderly progression like we do it in parliament… I’ve been trying to get a handle on it for the past 5 years, mostly just by watching political shows on CNN and reading HuffPo. A cursory stab at comprehension, to be sure, but I don’t want to turn into a total dweeb.

Anyway. The most confounding aspect of American politics has got to be the interminable process of electing a president. It boggles the mind, how long it takes, how much money it costs, how it always seems to be in process. Truly bizarre. Take the primaries. (Please.) Why are they spread out over months and months? Why doesn’t everybody just vote on one day? Just have a leadership convention over a couple of days and let the delegates do their influence trading with other delegates from across the country instead of from across the county. I mean, the results of the Iowa caucus (aside: caucus vs. primary? big picture speaking, is there really a difference? can’t all the states just use the same damn system?), which represents 1% of the nation’s delegates, can have a huge impact on the race, right? Didn’t Michelle Bachmann drop out after her poor showing last week? Why does this teensy group of people wield so much power in the decision of who will run for president? What if there are people in Florida, like members of the Florida Family Association for example, who really wanted to support her? I don’t get how democracy is served by this process.

Then there’s the money. There’s a rumour going around that President Obama wants to raise a BILLION dollars for his re-election campaign. They deny it, but really, once you’ve broken previous records by raising $750 MILLION, what’s another quarter of a bill? And that’s just for one candidate, from one party. I mean you could make three Avatars for that! You could rebuild Haiti! You could buy an island and make it entirely solar powered! (Maybe. Probably.) The political industrial complex in the US employs hundreds of thousands of people, from pundit hacks to campaign hacks to advertising hacks and every hack in between.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a chicken-egg thing. Did the process become this bloated because of the way it’s set up (dragging on for literally years for some candidates), or did the system evolve over time to accommodate a uniquely American mentality that over-identifies with idealized notions of democracy and freedom?

So some of you may have seen my review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. If you didn’t, suffice it to say, I was too feeble-minded to follow the plot, which was mostly talked about as opposed to a more visual presentation, e.g. the fourth installment of Mission Impossible that’s currently playing. In a movie like that, you can forgive what you don’t understand because, hello, gadgets and explosions!

Well anyway, I asked Rhymes With Mate (RWM), the friend I saw TTSS with, to read my review. This led to the following e-mail exchange:

RWM: Ha, judging from some of your plot synopsis it’s like we saw a different movie.

Linny: oh dear. What did I get wrong???

RWM: Control arranges the Hungarian deal, when it goes bad they need a fall guy, so he’s forced out, along with his BFF Smiley (Gary Oldman), but at the same time, the minister or whatever he is, realizes that Control may be right and there could be a mole. So, the minister asks Smiley to investigate, because he is no longer inside the family. I think Control is either dead or on a remote island with no phone access at this point. You said that Control asks Smiley to investigate. He doesn’t, also Smiley (SPY) is one of the people Control suspects may be the mole.

Linny: Dang you’re good at this. I got the sense that Smiley had been out for awhile. But the botched defection seems to have been the impetus to find the mole – like this is what convinced the minister that Control was right? But this was also the impetus to fire Smiley’s ass? So how long was he really out of the Circus before they brought him back in?

RWM: Not sure of the timing, I don’t think he was out for that long (weeks/months), but Ricky is also a reason for why they asked Smiley to investigate when they did, I think Ricky’s thing happened after the Hungarian business. They really had to take the mole thing seriously after that. [Linny thought: who is Ricky again? vague recollection]

Linny: Also, it seemed like, chronologically as the film played out, like Control was still in charge, sitting around the table with the others. Unless those were flashbacks. From what you’re saying, both Control and Smiley were ousted at the same time? Wasn’t there a conversation at the beginning between those two, discussing the mole?

Okay. I realize I am asking you to explain a movie I will never fully understand.

RWM: Those were flashbacks. When Control was ousted one of the other guys asked what about Smiley and Control said, he comes with me. They left together. I think they had a discussion at the beginning about some evidence they had being “too convenient”, something along those lines, not sure if it was mole specific or not.

Linny: Holy fuck you are impressive.

Linny: I am doing a follow-up post entitled “Rhymes With Mate explains Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. For reals!

RWM: Haha, people will be so confused. We were sitting right next to each other. Also, your post implied that I was fronting like I got it, but didn’t. I will be vindicated…

So there you have it, folks. Vindication for Rhymes With Mate, who shall hitherto be referred to as Rhymes With Great, in honour of her Great Brain. I also feel vindicated, as I’m sure just this brief conversation illustrates my point about the movie too, i.e. WTF.