Commercials

Monica: I have big news
Chandler: What, that 5th dentist finally came around?


I worked for 4 different insurance companies from 1986 to 1995. At the third one, I was still a smoker and we had a real ventilated smoking room. First, sometimes my co-workers would mention a person’s name and I would not know who they were talking about. Then, they’d come back with “You don’t know her because she doesn’t smoke”.

Anyway, there were few topics where every person could contribute to the conversation. A certain movie? Some people had seen it. A book? Some people had read it. One topic that was universal was TV commercials. “My husband – some hotshot…”.

So I was drin… thinking about something: What if aliens could see our commercials from North American TV? What would they figure they knew about us? It would be like those archaeological digs where all we decide what we know about a group of people is based on their death and burial rituals.

I think they’d come up with something like this:

1. Women are way smarter than men – men can’t cook, they know nothing about their children, the wife has to tell the idiot how to microwave a burrito over the phone. I think the wives have to dress them and wipe their asses. I can’t imagine most of them are smart enough to get drivers licences.


2. Children are way smarter than adults.


3. Animals are way smarter than people and they can “talk”.


4. Everyone is married and there are no divorces.


5. All couples are heterosexual.


6. Until recently, all people were white.


7. Until even more recently, all couples were of the same race.


8. Life on earth involves a lot of jingoistic background music.


9. People with perfect skin use acne cleanser.


10. Everyone is thin except for those in weight loss commercials.


11. Very few men loose their hair


12. 21 year old gorgeous women (and men) won’t get dates if they use the incorrect shampoo, toothpaste or face soap.


13. Everyone has a good job, except the people in ads for vocational schools.


14. People have beer – they never drink it, they just have it around.


15. You can make fun of people – as long as they are white.

RE: 15. The Scottish: IT’S NO…OATMEAL. Italians: There was a commercial for a pasta sauce that was so authentically Italian that after the people at it, they all started singing opera. Can you imagine a bunch of black people where the fried chicken was so good that they all went out and started playing basketball?
TF

God is a Real Jerk

God? He's my favourite fictional character
-Homer Simpson


The great thing about religion is that no part of it has to make any sense. Being a religious “thinker” or leader, is about the only job where that is true. If you design bridges, and you do it wrong, the bridges will collapse and you’ll never get another bridge gig, will you?

If you are a chef and people die after eating your food, you’re not going to be a chef very long.

Not so for fundamentalists down south – a unique form of asshole.

The Earth is as old as the literal reading of the bible says so men and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Bill Hicks had a good point: Why aren’t there dinosaurs in The Bible?????

Did you folks know just how much of an asshole their god is?

Ok, here goes: God creates men and women. He creates 10-15% of them gay, BUT demands that they pretend to be heterosexual. He prefers that they marry and have children and live a total lie (I guess bearing false witness against thyself is ok). If they do not do this, but live as gays and have a parade, God destroys New Orleans. You see. God is not only a jerk, he sucks at geography: San Francisco would have been a more logical place to send the Hurricane.

Then again, if God created these fundamentalists in his own image, it makes sense that he’d be an asshole.

TF

Earth Speaks

If I were The Earth, I wouldn’t think much of humans – if in fact I gave any thought to them at all.

You can write an opera? Well, here’s a Tsunami! Oh, they were quaint back a thousand years ago and I’d snicker every time they drew me flat with three continents and Jerusalem at the centre.

But, I liked my ozone layer and these bastards blew fucking holes in it. I like that rain forest and I don’t need my oceans warmer and my ice caps smaller.

And some of them are tying to “save” ME. What a joke!! I am in no danger. Humans are messing themselves up – I don’t need an atmosphere to be a planet – Mars gets along just fine and there haven’t been any sentient life forms there since early 20th Century Sci-Fi.

I remember the dinosaurs – I liked them but a big rock hit me and they all died.

These idiots are extincting themselves but they can’t really harm me. Big rocks, now those scare me.

The Earth

Thomas

The Golden Age

I think every major civilization has a “golden age”. It’s already there as far back as Homer (The Greek poet, not Marge’s Husband). In the past, things were better: men were braver, women more beautiful…Maybe it’s because wisdom and stories used to be told by the elders who (inaccurately) remembered being young and how wonderful it all was, all of the time.

I guess for my age group we’d have to pick the 1970s, but, by definition, a golden age cannot contain ABBA and Disco.

I remember being young and a lot of it was good and a lot of it was crap.

I remember a youthful body and if I really strain hard, I can remember having hair on my head. I also remember family members using words like “Nigger”, “Paki” and “fruit” at the dinner table. (I am composing this in Microsoft Word and the first two words pass the spell checker – isn’t that interesting). Some of them still use those words.

When I heard the first “Paki” joke I had to get clarification: “Do you mean people from Pakistan?” I wanted to make sure I was hating the correct people, not that it was difficult – anyone who’s skin tone, religion or sexual orientation differed from my own was on that list anyway. Good thing I never ran into a Chinese Protestant Lesbian – I would have had to stab her on the spot!

We were reading Shakespeare in Grade 9 – the bard used the word “chink” and we asked the teacher, I am not kidding here, what was a Chinese person was doing in a wall in Elizabethan England? Well, it turns out that word could also mean a part of a wall that had a crack in it. Well, that replaced fart and masturbation jokes for a few weeks when we could say “chink” and get away with it!!! “Hey Man do you have a chink in your locker?”

I think some people like their golden age so much they live there forever. What the hell does that mean? I mean, emotionally. So many people who are well into their 30s or older have that same grade 9 sense of humour and have not developed past that point.

I think I had more of a pewter age myself. If we could weed out Disco and ABBA, maybe it could be as good as bronze.

Thomas

Hollywood

Is there a phonier place on earth? Can one even be imagined? How many things can we see get blown up, how many happy endings can we endure?

Since Hollywood only understands money, they had to get hit in the pocketbook this summer to realize they keep putting out the same shit and even once faithful movie goers are staying home. Corporate America has sanitized movies so badly that they have no oomph to them. Maybe the bad result this summer might send some moguls back to the drawing board

I’d put Tarantino in charge of Hollywood, myself. This would mean Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Madsen would be in 237 films each per year (104 of them in the same film).

Kill Shrek.
Star Wars Episode 14: Revenge of Mr Pink.
The Sicilian Patient.
A Beautiful Brain Spread All Over the Sidewalk.
The Godfather IV: The Apology

Yes folks – dialogue and scripts would be back in vogue. Actors would have to act.

But seriously, will this summer’s disaster mean Hollywood will get a lot better?

Fuggetaboutit.

Mr T.

It Got Louder

I grew up in the 1970s in an affluent Country far from genocides and wars and disasters. The World Wars ended almost 2 decades before I was even born (1963).

I did grow up as a citizen of a Cold War country, but long after it’s apex in the early 1960s (also before I was born). There was a scare when Reagan started talking about a “limited” nuclear war after taking office in 1981, but he chilled when Gorby came along.

History, in one way, is a series of wars, genocides and disasters. Starting with the 1990s they began again, or actually, continued. The Gulf War was the first time I remember Canada being at war. Then the Yugoslavian and Rwandan episodes showed that genocide was back.

September 11, 2001 was a shock – not because it was the long expected terrorist attack, but because of the enormity of its success. My money had been down on an attack at LAX. (That attack had indeed been planned but foiled at the BC – Washington border).
I had never imagined suicide bombers in North America – that seemed such a Middle Eastern and far away thing.

The invasion of Iraq showed that America had unlearned all of its lessons from Viet Nam.

The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 has to rank as the biggest cyclical thing in my lifetime. Since I know some history, the last such major one in the Indian Ocean had been after Krakatoa erupted – in 1883 (none of my Grandparents had been born for that one).

I had spent the 1990s studying and even writing about the World Wars as they seemed too far away from the quietness of my times.

Then my times got louder.

TF

The Return of Critical Thinking in The American Media

Jon Stewart, pointed out, once again, something I had noticed myself (we think alike).

After 9/11, the media turned into patriots and stopped judging Bush and the administration critically. The obvious example was the lead-up to the war in Iraq. I have been watching CNN at least as far back as The Gulf War of 1991, although I always have been able to take it for only so long. The so called “liberal” media disappeared and Bush was allowed to invade Iraq with no plan whatsoever. I stopped watching CNN and any American news media for almost 3 years.

With the disaster of Katrina, the media finally regained its teeth and began to question yet another idiotic “planning” of the administration and how they bungled the rescue relief worse than anyone could have imagined.

Bush said nobody could have anticipated the levees breaking. Al Franken, on his radio show, pointed out that MR BILL the play-dough guy from old SNL was featured in a commercial for the Louisiana Wetlands and HE knew the levees might break.

Ted Koppell, to “Brownie” (as Bush called him): Don’t you people watch TV?

In Bush’s Truman Show – no.

Taking a vacation by playing guitar in California? Sounds great to me - unless you are The President when the largest displacement of Americans since The Civil War is taking place.

TF

The Guns of Summer

The recent gang murders in Toronto have been a disgrace. But it cannot be blamed solely, or even primarily, on the cut to social programs. No amount of poverty puts a gun in someone's hand, nor does it force anyone to shoot a peace activist in a courtyard, or spray bullets hitting a 4 year old child. Anything short of absolute self-defense is simply not acceptable.

Racial profiling is certainly not the answer - this would make things worse and be about as effective as profiling blondes who speak really bad french as possibl schoolgirl killers.

The social cuts by Harris did a lot of harm. But it is not an excuse for violence.

Thomas.

This Will Help?

Hurakan was a Mayan god (an evil one). This is why we call storms like Katrina "Hurricanes". Since modern people are way past that mythological stuff, that's where the religous part ends.

Well, no. Wednesday (Sept 1, 2005) has been declared a day of prayer by the Governor of Louisiana. Of course in and of itself I don't have a problem with this.

I wonder about the god they're praying to . If it is Hurakan, that would make sense: "Oh mighty one -please stop this!".

No - their god is a god of love and benevolance. But, he either causes hurricanes or at least allows them to happen. After this I guess you can pray to him to stop sending them...except he never does....

I wonder what the dinosaurs did to the Judaeo-Christian god, Hurakan or someone else to really piss him off.

Thomas.

Six Feet Over (RIP)

There is nothing much good on TV - and even less that has any depth to it.

24 is a good rough-em up shoot 'em show. I don't watch "reality TV" -I watch 24 because it is unreality at it's best.

Six Feet Under is up there with I, Claudius and Hill Street Blues as TV about as good as it can get. Since it was HBO, they can swear and show peckers and boobies and talk about things that the corporate right wing sponsers of traditional American network television would never allow. There is a gay couple in the middle of it all, tons of drugs and booze, and abortions - all the things that bible-thumpers hate.

The Fishers and the supporting characters run a funeral home, so death is foremost a topic. What impresses me most about the series is when the characters react to something - and of course, do so in a really poor way - you know, just like real people often do. Or, they make great changes in their lives only to see this has no effect on their lives at all, or, even makes things worse. Tolstoy comes to mind as a great author who created characters and let them live on their own without his interference.

The writing was great and the acting was amazing.

Brenda is the character you hate loving to hate. Until you get to know her family and then you wonder how she managed not to be even more messed up than she is.

There are no white or black hats. Even sweet little Quaker Maggie has to deal with the fact that she fucked Nate to death.

The "guest" list of actors was none too shabby: "Ileana Douglas, Mena Suvari, Kathy Bates, James Cromwell, John Billingsley and Patricia Clarkson to name a few.

In this 24 world where flash is valued over substance, to have a series where plot was minimal and character was king was an achievement.

TF

What might qualify as the stupidest thing ever said?

Today I heard a CNN report on some church group that said... No kidding... Really I am not: America has failed in Iraq because America "allows" homosexuals and the dead soldiers are a punishment from god.

Even in the old testament God was not this much of an asshole.

Remember the "AIDS" arguments from the 80s that it was a scourge from God?.....well, I guess all those dead women and babies took the wind out of that argument.

America "allows" gays, you know, just like it "allows" gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, water freezing at zero degrees celsius....

Wouldn't it be nice if God sent a scourge that only killed stupid people?

TF

Americans..Yet Again

I don't know much about trade agreements like FTA, NAFTA or the workings of the WTO. What many are arguing now is that The Americans are screwing us through NAFTA in a way that they could never do under WTO rules. This seems true enough to me - the zenophobia of the American Right has rarely been allowed to exercise it's "fuck the rest of the world" attitudes as it has under Dubya - in regards to soft lumber trade as well as to war.

I'm getting sicker and sicker of Dubyaism each day. He ducks Cindy Sheehan - won't even talk to her. Clinton would have...well there's an obvious joke here...well, he would have talked to her, that's for sure. The Bush party twins live a Hiltonic existence (as in Paris) while small town men and women are coming home in body bags.

As Jon Stewart said, Bush lives in "The Truman Show" - in another era he'd be shooting messengers all over the place, I'm sure. He can't take the world he's making based on Cheney's bald world order (could not resist).

While I'm casting slings and arrows, only in America would "Intellegant Design" (aka "Creationism") be considered as a "rival theory" to biological evolution. Rubbish. Only in America, amongst "first world" nations, is religion on the rise as a front and centre political force - witness Pat Robertson's "fatwa" issued on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

Then again, only 51% of The Yankees are dumb-ass, bible-thumping, war-mongering isolationiasts. 49% are just like us.

TF.

The A-bombs of 1945

World War II is slowly fading into history. The leaders of that era have been dead for decades. You have to pretty much be over 80 to have been a combatant. Even those who were children during the war are in their late 60s and 70s.

I can't stand up and say something about The 1991 Gulf War or the Bosnian civil war without people who were a part of it standing up and reacting to what I might say.

But, Hitler and Stalin are close to joining Napolean and Ceasar as the number of people who lived when they did gets smaller and smaller and soon becomes zero.

When no living witnesses are left, historians can operate with more speculation.

Which brings me to the 2 Atomic bombs that hit Japan in 1945. WW II was such a massive thing, decisions were sometimes made based on numbers of projected deaths. Oh yes, very heartless indeed, but how the hell else could it have been done? It is easy to look back 60 years and condemn The Americans for dropping those bombs, but I understand why they did it.

As an aside, they have not been used in any war since, by anyone, have they?

Maybe we've seen too many WW II movies where The Japanese are depicted as fools, perhaps even less than human. NONSENSE. They were a formibable foe. A conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland would have gone on for years and have entailed even more deaths of Japanese civilians than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (not to mention the deaths of American servicemen).

Nobody likes to see those films about the radiation in those cities but you cannot light up a doob, crank up the U2, yell "No nukes" and rip those events of 1945 out of their context.

TF

What People Say When a Plane Crashes

It was wonderful news that everyone survived the Air France crash at Pearson. When I first heard that a plane had crashed, I assumed there would be a lot of dead people.

As is often the case, Jon Stewart made a lot of the comments I had thought about myself and are now writing after I heard his.

First, "miracle"? No. I am with Stewart that we applaud the rescue workers that did an amazing job. "Miracles" are events that happen that can't ever happen - if the plane had been struck by lightning in order TO MAKE IT CRASH that would have been a miracle (Stewart's joke).

A cartoon in The Toronto Star showed an angel overlooking the plane wreckage. In a way, a lovely sentiment. Unless you think about such things a wee bit deeper.

Have you ever seen a plane crash on TV and 200 people die, and 41 people live, and the fact that 41 people live means, as the media would say, something like "God was watching over them - it was a miracle they survived".

Poppycock - if God was really watching over them - THE PLANE WOULD NOT HAVE CRASHED AT ALL.

Now, back to the angel at Pearson. I am not "up" on my 21st century theology, so I don't know if each airline trip is assigned an individual angel. If so, THAT ONE SHOULD BE FIRED for doing such a lousy job.

Maybe I am being too harsh - maybe there have been cut-backs in Heaven and each angel has 3 or 4 planes each to look over - in that case, I must concur that this angel WAS doing a great job.

Now those psunami angels?..fire their asses. Demote them to..um..Limbo?

TF

"Good Speech"

"Euphemism" is derived from two Greek Words "eu" (good) and "pheme" (speech).

As far as I can tell, we use them in several ways:

1. To soften a word or phrase where a harsher word or phrase would be, well, too harsh. "Passed Away" is a common one for this example, as we use it when people are at a vulnerable point in their life, having lost a loved one.

2. To lie to people about what you are doing by calling it exactly the opposite of what it is. Bush must have 5 or more people working on his euphemisms full-time "Operation Iraqi Freedom" means the opposite of what it is: "Kill as many Iraqis as we have to, to achieve our goals". Orwell called this "double-speak".

3. To soften a condition so as to pretend a person does not have that condition. "diferrently abled" means if you cannot walk and are chairbound, we do not have to talk about it and we can pretend that you are not.

4. To out-an-out go so far with positive thinking that it becomes a total farce. Today's Toronto Star quotes one from the British Teachers' Association. No more will children fail - they will simply be in a state of "deferred success". That beats out the best (worst) one ever, that was pointed out by George Carlin: Not "learning disabled" but "minimally exceptional". On my list for sometime, also British, is "positive disrimination" (that's always been right up there with "reverse sexism" or "white slavery"). Well the dear old Brits call garbage "dust" and reffered to the carnage of The Great War as "the unpleasantness".

Tom.

Another Hit

Anyone who's talked / e-mailed / messaged with me for more than 3o seconds over the past few years has heard me rave about The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. A new show that began in April is Pop-Cultured with Elvira Kurt (comedy channel) and anyone who loves Stewart will like this too. It's funny and delivers the same punches as Stewart, but from a Canadian perspective. She uses other performers, like Stewart, and, also like Stewart has a daily guest. (Also like Stewart I FF past the guest quite often).

Finally, I guess we all realized that sometimes the only thing worth watching on Saturday Night Live was "Weekend Update".


TF

Celliquette

What :so now it's cellphones he's pissed with?


When I bought my first ever cell phone in 2004, I vowed to not do some things that I have seen others do with their cell phone. I won't even get into driving while chatting on one that isn't "hands free".

Some absurvations:

1. Why is it that the less interesting a conversation a person is having on a cell on a bus or in another enclosed public space, the longer it lasts. Also the louder it is. Polite people who take calls like "I'm on the train we're passing Mimico....6:20..ok.on the shelf above the fridge..k.bye" are wonderful people. Ones who "do business" on the train should all die miserable deaths...well not on the train right there....later..when they're alone.

2. I have seen teenage girls talk to each other on their phones when they are IN THE SAME PLACE - hope Mom and Dad have one of those unlimited plans or a second job (or a sound heart when they get open the bill).

3. A ringer does not need a sub-woofer. I'm not kidding: I've heard them that loud and with that much bass so you think some jackass is driving by in his car whose entire trunk is a subwoofer blaring hip hop.

4. If you are standing behind me and you start talking on your phone (with no ringer going off) out of the blue don't be suprised and give me a dirty look when I turn around and wonder, for all of a second and a half, if you are talking to me. I don't care if you are a gorgeous young woman and I am an old goat: This is a reflex developed over 3 and a half decades of life where nobody had cellphones and only insane people talked in public.

5. So your phone has an MP3 player? Excellent, my friend. But use the HEADPHONE JACK - I don't share my MP3s with you, show me the same fucking courtesty.

Men are from Omacron Theta 8, Women are from Omacron Theta 7

It's friday so who wants to be stir things up? I'll look at a topic that inspires very little debate: how men and women differ.

OK, I am more curious as to how we think they are differrent and how we used think they were different, in a different way.

What are the early 21st century sterotypes: Women are more artistic, care more for fashion and cosmetics (they have more of a flare for it), are much deeper thinkers than men and see life more as a whole. Women can have children and take care of them. Men make good worker bees, have tin ears and wooden eyes when it comes to art, and dress like they don't care, see things in simple terms and can never see "the big picture".

Go back to the late 18th century, and here is what you get: Men are great artists and novelists - women? Why, what a silly idea - they are good at pushing out babies, but men are much better at raising them. Women do not have a good enough grasp of the world the way men do that is required to create great works of art - they are simplistic. Only men can deal with emotions because men are simply more emotional, and feel things deeper.

The 18th Century European Nobleman wore powder and rouge on his face, a wig, and hose on his legs. Today, he'd better do that in the gay part of town or he'll be arriving home with less teeth than when he set out.

I wonder how men and women will differ in another 200 years.

Tom.

By the People, Adjacent to The People, At the People...

Sometime in the 1980s, in the US of A, it became not only a popular idea, but very close to dogma that governments need to be run "like a business". Since Canadians are independent thinkers we did not follow this course.....until a bit later in the 1980s. "Taxation" became a dirty word and raising taxes became as acceptable as B.O.

We have taxes for a reason - we need things done by governments such as defense, water, roads, education and (In Canadian provinces not named "Alberta") health care. Taxes are not wonderful things - if you wished to pick a single reason the Roman Empire isn't there any more, taxation could easily be that reason.

So we play a game when governments switch to the right and then to the left and then the centre and then the.....

The "tight is right" rightests slash taxes, and of course, Ontario under Harrissment is the obvious example, services have to be cut. Then taxes, evil, evil taxes, must be cut so far that a large deficit is run (see: Bush's America; again: Harris and Eves in Ontario).

Then, when the centre or left get in they have to raise taxes to a level higher than before the cuts just to get back to the pre-cut era, or call them something other than a tax. (Witness McGuity's health care "premium").

Can't we follow a more European model and stress not how much we pay in taxes - but more that we worry about what we are getting for our tax dollars?

In this sense, at least, "like a business" can be a good thing.

TF

Progress

Cellphone features are getting more and more elaborate. In Fact, there is a way that, if I am not near a computer but have my cellphone with me, if I am suddenly inspired with something I must share here, I can do it with my phone.

Of course, with my wide fingers that a jazz bassist would envy, that little keypad, and the invisibility of the screen in sunlight , I'd have to say that by the time I managed to get the message typed, I would probably already be home in front of my computer anyway.

Back when Edison was inventing half of the modern world, one of his inventions was the electric pen. It's always been my favourite "why" invention of all time (OK "Hip Hop" comes close...).

There is a word in German for this vyzehellvouldievaneedtodozis" - ok maybe it's old low German.....would you believe Assyrian???


Thomas