WHY I SHALL BOYCOTT KILL BILL
I mentioned it in passing last week in
my review of the Sakura Wars movie that I shall be boycotting
Kill Bill, and, apparently, several people are curious as to why. Nice to see that I do have readers... heh. Well, I'm going to tell you.
I'm boycotting
Kill Bill for two different reasons. The main reason is because I find the ending, which I shall discuss later on, rather repulsive.
However, Miramax has given me a convenient excuse not to see it...
they're splitting the film into two, so, basically, I'd have to pay twice, $19 total at the Paramount in Montreal, for a film I wasn't all that interested in seeing in the first place. Why are they splitting it into two? Because the film is over 3 hours long, so the theatres could have only about 2 screenings per screen an evening when they could have three. This makes some degree of sense from a financial perspective, I suppose, but the fact is plenty of R-Rated films,
especially potential "Best Picture" contenders, clock in at over 3 hours, and I do remember this one little film, called
Titanic, that was rather successful despite being 3� hours long. Obviously, I am very much a pro-free market guy, see, and I certainly do not have a problem with a studio wanting to maximize profits, however, by making me pay almost what I'd pay for most DVDs just to see the bloody thing *once* at a decent theatre, they've pretty much ensured that they won't be getting *any* of my money, at least not until I can rent the DVD.
One of the things they're comparing this to in order to justify movie-goers paying twice to see one film is
The Matrix Reloaded and
The Matrix Revolutions, however, the crucial difference is that those were shot as two films, albeit simultaneously, like
Back to the Future: Part II and
Part III, and the fans knew all along that they would be two films and they never ever claimed otherwise, dropping a split on us at the "last minute". Of course, I never actually got around to seeing
The Matrix Reloaded, but I digress.
As for the ending? Well, I must warn you that my understanding of the ending is based on
this copy of the script, and, while it seems legit and while I've seen Tarantino fans quote from this script like it's authentic, ultimately, I can't say whether or not it's bogus. I shall wait and read some discussions about the ending before I ultimately decide whether or not to see it in the theatre. That's only fair.
I also should preclude my discussion of the ending by telling you that I have zero problems with the violence in Quentin Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction, which is, to me, very much like the violence in the fine TV programme
The Sopranos; it's all "bad guys" offing other "bad guys", doing the gene pool a huge favour in the process, and, as long as you aren't identifying with and rooting for the "bad guys", it's fine entertainment.
Now, in the film, an assassin called "The Bride", played by Uma Thurman, is pregnant and she is gunned down at her wedding by her groom, Bill, played by David Carridine, and other members of his gang. She wakes up from her coma 5 years later, assuming her baby is dead, and sets about killing Bill's associates in Asia, leaving Bill the last to die. But, the twist is, when she finds Bill, she discovers that her unborn daughter survived, and Bill's a fine parent. However, she kills him anyway, with a sword on the beach, and she takes her daughter, and there's some crap about a "lioness and her cub" and... THE END.
I don't know, just adding the angle of her daughter still being alive... well, that wouldn't be enough for me to want to boycott the film, because, even if she doesn't have a dead daughter to avenge, Bill still tried to kill her, and, assuming all these characters are "underworld", and, as such, "The Bride" wouldn't go to the authorities to have him arrested and then press charges, that's just the way they operate in their criminal world. What I don't like is Tarantino adding the angle of Bill being a good parent, despite the way he was before, and having "The Bride" kill him regardless. I know Tarantino probably means for this plot twist to be disturbing, and, well, he certainly succeeded there, but it disturbs me to the point of not wanting to pay to see the movie. My logical mind says, "Get over it... it's not anti-male, just anti-Bill, and the way he's acting now doesn't absolve him from what he did before." and I'd be inclined to agree... but, the fact is, the kid is very much attached emotionally to her father now, and, although Bill certainly should be put in jail and the kid would be raised by a foster family, that wouldn't be the same as taking Bill away from her permanently, as her mother does. And then, the ending is that she's going to be raised by her mother, who is just as bad as Bill was before? Just somehting about the twist reeks of "anti-father", and it's a terrible ending for the only innocent person in the story, the daughter. I just can't support that with my money.
(Aww... are you upset that I didn't put a "spoiler warning"? Well... T.S.! I gave adequate warning several times that I was going to discuss the ending, I just didn't formalize it with the word "spoiler", knowing any reader with a tiny bit of common sense would be aware that details about the ending were forthcoming and, as such, they had ample opportunity to choose whether or not to read on. I have made my
anti-excessive spoiler warning philosophy well-known in the past, for faithful readers of this blog, and, for those of you that chose to read on yet didn't want to know, well, this was an object lesson that will, hopefully, lead you to develop a better sense of discernment, so that this doesn't happen again in the future. Any complaints about a lack of spoiler warnings in this piece shall be ignored, or laughed at.)
(And, if I add another sentence here, it should make it enough "padding", on the odd chance I get someone with a really lazy eye who had enough common sense to skip ahead to the previous article, about the loser begging for money every day on the Dorval Circle, but who might bitch to me about glimpsing it by accident.)
But, as I said, that is just the ending as I understand it, and it's entirely possible that the screenplay I've read is completely bogus, or that Tarantino made innumerable changes to it as he was filming, and, yes, I will give Tarantino the benefit of the doubt until I read some threads reacting to the ending, so see if it's different from what I read... yes, I know that means I would have to wait until the second half was out before I could even see the first half, but I'm holding out for a double feature presentation of the two halves of the single movie, because, what's important is that it interests me enough for me to pay $9.50 to see it once, but not $19. But if the ending in the final cut is as I understand it to be now, and there aren't any things leading up to the ending that I failed to take into consideration before making the moral conclusion that I find the ending repulsive, I probably will refuse to pay to see it.
Not that I'd ever want the American government to stop Tarantino from making whatever sort of movie he pleases, assuming he does nothing illegal in the process of making the film, nor would I ever want the Canadian government to legislate against Canadians seeing shocking Tarantino films, nor would I try to stop anyone else from seeing
Kill Bill with anything other than my arguments here, but, in the free market, the consumer should reign supreme, and, just because Q.T. has a "kewl" new film that "everyone" shall be discussing for the next year or so in no way obligates me to spend money to support films I find objectionable.
Anyhow, that shall be all I have to say about that, unless I change my mind and see it anyway...
TRAFFIC ADVISORY
If you're driving through the former suburb, now Montreal borough, of Dorval, and you're getting off the 20 to use the Dorval Circle (traffic circle) to get to Montreal International Airport (Dorval) or the commuter train or Via Rail stations or to get onto C�te-de-Liesse or Dorval Avenue, be advised to roll up your windows, lock the doors, and have the handgun or pepper-spray at hand before you get to the traffic lights, as there's this young, clearly able-bodied ne'er-do-well stationed there every day now with a stupid cardboard sign begging for money... that's gotta be against the traffic code or some sort of former city of Dorval civic ordinance. Also, if you are said ne'er-do-well and you're reading this, please note that, for you, the headline shouldn't read "
TRAFFIC ADVISORY", it should read "
GET-A-JOB ADVISORY", and, if you have any objections, you can address them to either one of my raised middle fingers.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT DENOUNCEMENT
Hey, Ontarians! Do you like air conditioning in summer as much as I do? Well, now you can turn down your thermosats even cooler! Why? Because I've been seeing these annoying PSAs on Ontario stations like "The New VR" during
Deep Space Nine re-runs telling you to turn up your thermostats two degrees (and I mean two big fat Canadian "Celsius/Centigrade" degrees, not that wussy "Farenheit" shit) to save energy. Bah, I say! You might have your air conditioning on, but you don't truly have it "on" until it's so cold that you have to put on a sweater! So, since all the do-gooders are turning up their thermostats two degrees, that means there's all the more energy for you to use! Hell, get
mini-Skuld to fix your air conditioner and have your living room resemble a scene from the snowy mountaintops in
Cliffhanger!
MEGADITTOS!
Well, today is
Rush Limbaugh's 15 year anniversary of the day he went "national". He's playing all sorts of tributes sent to him from people in the media... well, I'm a person in the media... sorta... barely... and I say "congratulations", not that he cares but nevermind, and what he does on his show is the main inspiration for how I write this blog, at least the political side of it. Not that it's too easy for a guy in Montreal to listen, but I have been listening, for almost 11 years... well, actually, I got hooked on his TV programme in the autumn of 1992, and, despite Montreal
Gazette TV columnist (at the time) Mike Boone's fearless prediciton, it lasted long beyond the Christmas of 1992, running until 1996, though WPTZ 5, the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh NY, stopped running it on August 28th, 1995 (an easy day for me to remember since it was coincidentally the day
Sailor Moon premiered on YTV). His radio show went on shortwave on WRNO Worldwide 15.420 MHz in the spring of 1993, and I was able to listen to it that way for a couple of years, until WRNO got transmitter problems around 1997, and went off the air during the daytime, and, when they got back on the air, they had changed formats and dropped Limbaugh. So, I had to listen to him on weak border stations like WYBG 1050 AM out of Massena NY, which I can hear in Pincourt but not downtown Montreal... I listened to this station in Burlington too, 1390, but they seem to have abandoned the talk format entirely. The last resort was listening to rebroadcasts from far and wide at night. Fortunately, around 1999 or so, he put his show on the Internet, and, when he started charging to listen, I gladly became a
Rush 24/7 member. Of course, some Canadians wonder why I would choose to be "brainwashed" by the evil American arch-conservative commentator that they have never listened to but hear so many bad things about from liberals... because I enjoy it, and agree with most of what he says, hahahahahahahaha! Really, would I have listened to him for 11 years if I thought he was just some cog in the Republican party publicity machine and didn't truly believe what he was saying? (Number one reason I will never, ever become a Chomskyite... the basic condescending assumption that anyone that watches or listens to anything not always critical of American foreign policy is too stupid to know that they're being lied to.)
THE MIDDLE EAST NEEDS AN ENEMA UPDATE
Hmm... at a protest on the
"bad" Palestinian side of the Israel wall, 11 Palestinian
terrorists, or their supporters, demonstrators, demanding that Israel dismantle the wall
so that Hamas can be given free reign to carry out its "missions" unimpeded since it represents a new form of "Apartheid", were
slightly grazed, barely a flesh wound, injured by rubber bullets.
"Jewish Pigs, Jewish Pigs, let us come in!" the demonstrators cried.
"Not by the hairs on our chinny-chin-chins!" replied the completely accurate caricature of the typical Israeli Jew that you find in left-wing propaganda all over campuses like Concordia or on
Nazimedia with the beard and the long, curly sideburns, clutching bags of money with dollar signs drawn on them, eating Passover matzos made with the blood of Arab and Christian children (as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion claims).
"Then we'll huff and we'll puff (through sympathetic media outlets, campus protests held by
the International Solidarity Movement, and, of course,
Nazimedia) and we'll blow your buses/univerities/pizzerias/Passover gatherings up!"
Well, *I* think it's funny...
By the way...
Little Green Footballs has an amusing-yet-sad
"Slideshow" of photos of "Palestinian Child Abuse" (kids dressed up like homicide bombers by their parents at demonstrations).
Hmm... interesting... once the entries I wrote on Wednesday are in the Google search database (which has been much better lately, taking one to two days at most for my new writings to appear in searches), apparently, I shall be about the only Rush Limbaugh-friendly site out there that mentions both
"Rush Limbaugh" and "Klaus Nomi" on the same page. So, I guess, the next time Rush does a "Gay Community Update", the number of hits to my 'blog will skyrocket... maybe I should put in a counter of some sort?
CUE THE KLAUS NOMI!
Oh, the wacky links I find in the BlogSpot ad bar at the top of the page sometimes! Apparently, since I addressed the controversy regarding the Harvey Milk high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered youths in New York City, and how it's basically segregation in a politically correct wrapper, the search spider algorithms and whatnot BlogSpot sends through my 'blog in order to match my page to advertisers determined this is a gay blog, so now I have an invitation to join the
Freedom Forum's Lesbian and Gay Blog List. And, you know, I'm in quite an evil mood tonight. I may actually take them up on their offer. I mean, we all know how "GLBT" activists are the self-proclaimed guardians of tolerance and diversity... can they tolerate a little diversity in opinions from a guy that is admittedly still a bit bi-curious (but, lately, to be perfectly honest, I'm feeling much straighter than I did when I first started this blog in January). I mean, I don't really have any moral objections to the lifestyle and I'm certainly no gay basher, but, well, on the origin of homosexuality, as a "constructionist" and not an "essentialist", and, as such, I find myself agreeing far more with
NARTH than I do with
GLAAD on that issue, as well as whether sexual orientation is fixed or fluid and malleable. Well, I'm certainly fluid... I like to recommend that everyone read
this essay, which makes the point that different people will have different levels of fluidity in their sexual orientation as well as differing levels of responsiveness should they ever seek treatment (not that anyone should ever be forced to change their orientation, just, if someone wants to change, I don't think he or she should be prevented from seeking treatment)... it's exactly what I think. I'm extremely skeptical of biological explanations for homosexuality... or do all fetishes have genes? Yes, you see plenty of homosexuality among animals, but animals just follow their base instincts and do whatever feels good at the time, and they'll go for whichever warm hole is closest. And, meh... also, I'm not fond of Gay Pride events... I went to the first
Divers/Cit� parade here in Montreal 10 years ago... and... um... one was enough for me. (More like "Pervers/Cit�".) Well, it's probably gotten more tamer now that it's more corporate, just, you know, I just don't have any desire to go to parades celebrating activities one does in the bedroom. Where's the masturbators parade?
Well, I'll think about it before submitting my blog... I'll see if I can find some other blog lists I can join as well, since, well, I don't want 90% of my readers to be from... what? 3 or 4% of the population at most. (Oh, yes, I don't believe the 10% myth either, though even many gays and lesbians these days admit that statistic is phony.)
By the way, the title is a reference to
Rush Limbaugh's radio programme. When he does a "Gay Community Update", the official "Gay Community Update" theme is "You Don't Own Me" by the (late?)
Klaus Nomi. Rush 24/7 members can listen to
a sound clip of Rush throwing to Klaus Nomi here.
ABOUT BLOODY TIME!!!
Hmm... Jesse Betteridge of
Zannen, Canada is reporting that the popular anime series
Inu-Yasha, which has been shown on Cartoon Network's
Adult Swim for the past year, has finally been picked up by YTV as part of its fall schedule, the first non-kiddy anime series to make it to Canadian TV since
Gundam Wing and
Vision of Escaflowne 3 years ago. (I said "series", so no one e-mail me saying about how they showed a lot of one shot anime during a recent marathon on the Canadian version of IFC, because, yes, I do remember that.)
Inu-Yasha is a cartoon based on the popular manga (comic) series by Rumiko Takahashi, the world's most popular female cartoonist, who also created about my overall favourite manga/anime series of all,
Urusei Yatsura (though I'm never expecting that one to show up on Canadian TV, at least not in English) as well as the more popular (at least within North American anime fandom)
Ranma �, though it's more action-oriented and not really a comedy. It's one of those (shounen) series that was intended for a male audience but which has just as many, if not more, female fans because of the cute guys. (Well, it was created by a woman.)
Now if I could just get Teletoon to pick up
Fruits Basket and
Outlaw Star...
OUT RUN FANS REJOICE!
Hmm... I have another cool link...
Outrun.org, for all fans of the "most 80s-style infused" of all driving games, Sega's
Out Run. I am overjoyed to learn that there is finally a full-fledged update to
Out Run coming,
Out Run 2, that takes the style of the original 1986 arcade game but re-does it with modern 3D graphics and adds more types of Ferraris, like the supersweet F-50 and the Enzo, though it still has the Testarossa, for all old school
Out Run purists. See, I thought the closest thing we'd ever get to a modern version of
Out Run from Sega's licensing deals with Ferrari was the late-90s arcade and Dreamcast game
Ferrari F-355 Challenge, which is a fine game in and of itself, but it's more of a pure racing simulator (and pretty bloody difficult) instead of an arcade driving experience, though I think the X-Box version will have a more realistic simulation mode. Is this game going to be an X-Box exclusive, though? If it were, that would be a pretty big ball in X-Box's court, since I don't have any of the 3 current consoles (PlayStation 2, X-Box and Nintendo GameCube).
Actually, I think the original arcade game still holds up pretty well today, at least as an artifact of state-of-the-art arcade technology from the pre-3D era (it used scaling, not true 3D graphics). It's not near photo-realistic like the new
Out Run game looks to be, but it's still very pretty to look at, with bright and pastel colours. It was one of the first arcade games to give a convincing sensation of speed, with the alternating light-and-dark road below and parallax-scrolling backgrounds. It's not the same as having your own
Out Run cabinet at home, but an otherwise arcade-perfect version of the original is now on the Game Boy Advance as part of the
Sega Arcade Gallery, along with
After Burner,
Space Harrier and
Super Hang-On.
"Passing Breeze" (a Midi of which can be found on the
dowload page) is still one of my all-time favourite pieces of video game music, at least for synthesized instrumental music.
Also, speaking of IKEA, we got the IKEA Catalogue in the mail today, about a week or so earlier than usual! Well, it's the French language version, but we can go to any of the IKEAs in the Montreal area and get one in English. I love the IKEA catalogue... it's a wonderful dream book, written in Futura font (
The Royal Tenenbaums co-writer/director Wes Anderson's favourite font; he even directed a couple of IKEA commercials, "Kitchen" and "Living Room", which can be seen at the
IKEA Unboring web site), full of magical pictures of tidy rooms filled with beautiful but simple furniture, with shelves full of Swedish language versions of books by Tom Clancy and Stephen King and Swedish language Heinz Ketchup bottles... except, this year, the photography leaves a bit to be desired. It seems a little out-of-focus and some photos are a tad overexposed, so it's difficult to read the titles on the shelves. And the kitchen has no familiar brand names this time... I guess it's so people can't tell that the photos were taken in Sweden, but that's the main appeal. Also, this year, there are hideous floating heads of kids against flat-colour backdrops saying cute things... not a motif I care for, and I hope this doesn't carry over into next year's catalogue. Plus, I think they got every visible minority family in Sweden to pose for the catalogue this time... though that's not a negative, by any means, just something I thought I'd point out.
Hmm... the IKEA catalogue was always one of two catalogues I would look forward to reading in August; the other was for Consumers Distributing, a terrible store we had in Canada exactly like Argos in England where you had to fill out a slip of paper and hand it in at the counter just to be able to see the merchandise, but, the plus side of the catalogue was that it was my book of Birthday (October 2nd for me) and Christmas wishes, and the toy section of the catalogue alone was usually at least 40 or 50 pages long, so every major toy line got at least a 2 page spread... god, how I loved looking at the Hot Wheels, and, later, Transformers pages... damn, that must have been a great job if you were a photographer for the Consumers Distributing catalogue... getting to see all the latest toys months early. But, Consumers Distributing went belly-up around 1996, so it's been almost a decade since the last "Book".
"SMITHERS, HAVE THE ROLLING STONES KILLED!"
Yeah. so my brother Nick's having a pretty good day in Toronto today. It's his birthday today, which he shares with Arnold Schwarzenegger (ha! I checked and I spelled it correctly the first time!), and, today, also, a new
IKEA store in Vaughan, near Toronto, and, to celebrate, the first 30 customers in line who could prove their birthday was July 30th got a gift certificate for $100... not too shabby. So, Nick got the, if I remember correctly, 26th birthday gift certificate and got a bookshelf, a CD rack, a harmonica and some other things.
Also today in Toronto, there's the
big-ass outdoor benefit concert to help repair Toronto's SARS-ravaged tourism industry with headliners the Rolling Stones, though I think my brother is mainly going to see some of the supporting acts like AC/DC and... umm... whichever other musical acts are playing there that he likes (not the Blues Brothers, I don't think...). Well, the whole thing does reek of "bad sweeps month episode of
the Simpsons with no real plot, just a bunch of stupid celebrities", but it's for a good cause (the profits go to aid Toronto health care workers) and they get to see a whole bunch of acts that usually charge more like $100 up Canadian a ticket for just $30 Canadian total.
...OR MAYBE HE WENT TO HELL...
Hmm... I mean absolutely no disrespect to Bob Hope here, just, I have always found the editorial cartoons you often see, like the one in today's
National Post, of a revered celebrity, politician, or local figure arriving in Heaven, and having Saint Peter acting like he is a fan of said celebrity, just to be ridiculously maudlin, for some reason.
(For a title, I wanted to quote something hilarious Norm Macdonald said on
Saturday Night Live's
Weekend Update once, I think it was on the death of pool hustler "Minnesota Fats", saying he was in Heaven, shooting pool with Saint Peter... or maybe he's in Hell... then Norm went on to describe the agony he'd be facing in Hell... damn, I whish I could find that quote somewhere...)
Why is "spong" the number one search query for this site according to my PicoSearch stats? It doesn't even appear once in my archives, not even as a misspelling of "sponge"... weird.
Yeah, so I want to talk about
this new high school for "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered" teens in San Francisco before I go to bed, but I'm in somewhat of a lazy mood, so I'll cut-and-paste things I wrote through the day in
this thread at Anime Nation .
The first thing I wrote was in the afternoon soon after hearing Rush Limbaugh talk about it on his show. I was in the mood to make a bad joke, but I framed it in a way as to make it a bit more "politically correct".
Now, see, Rush Limbaugh was complaining on his show that 100 students isn't even enough to have a football team AND a cheerleading squad. I was half-expecting him to make the extremely politically incorrect joke which, of course, I would never make but will write as an example of something I thought Rush Limbaugh would say but didn't: "Who's to say the cheerleaders and football players have to be different people? Why not just dress the football team up in poodle skirts and pom-poms during half-time?"
But then, I decided I should talk about it a bit more seriously, so people wouldn't think I was "homophobic".
But, seriously, though... what about students that were like me during high school... when I was often convinced I was gay, but then would fall in love with girls again? Truth be told, I am, or at least was, a bisexual with a very fluid orientation. A lot of the activist types, though, deny that there is any degree of fluidity of sexual orientation, and, yes, I do still get people telling me I'm gay but in denial if I tell the truth about how I felt in high school (and for many years after). Umm... no. I think the feelings I get for women are very real.
Would I have gone to gay school some weeks and normal school the rest of the time?
I should add here that the more I read about the research into looking for genetic causes of homosexuality, the more I come to the conclusion that homosexuality is more due to nurture than nature (not that I'm saying it's a conscious choice... that's a red herring the "essentialists" try to get us "constructionists" to say in an attempt to discredit our position... it's about influences, not choices), or, at the very least, a certain percentage of gays and lesbians weren't born "that way" but came to be that way because of influences and events during their upbringing plus environmental circumstances (like my friend who went to an all-girls school, where an awful lot of girls were experimenting). Also, I think for a lot of us, our sexuality is fluid and not fixed. So, given how I feel, one of my primary concerns with a gay school is that kids that are like I was at that age (and still am, to some degree) and are either uncertain about or fluid with their sexuality will encounter the activist types that undoubtably will comprise most if not all of the faculty that pretty much will do their darndest to install a more binary view of sexuality in the students (straight or gay, no in between and no crossing over) and convince them that if they have pretty much exclusively gay feelings now, they will be that way for life and, if they ever get feelings for the opposite sex, it will be their internalized homophobia creating denial and fooling them into thinking they are attracted to girls (if they're guys).
Also, one of my problem with a certain vocal portion of the gay activist movement (and I'm not saying the majority) is blatant "biphobia". A bisexual girl on the AN board suggested that it would be nice to go to a school where she wouldn't face discrimination. I was skeptical, as I explain in this post.
Oh, don't be so certain you wouldn't be discriminated against at a school like that. I find no one's more biphobic than certain strains of gay and lesbian activists that push the line that bisexuality is a myth and that bisexuals are really just gays and lesbians with internalized homophobia who view the bisexual label as an acceptable alternative to coming completely "out".
Indeed, since I think there would still be some discrimination against bisexuals by people who are "gayer than thou", as someone else on the AN board summarized my post, really, the only way to eliminate discrimination there would be to open a separate school just for bisexuals.
But this is all really just segregation in a shiny, new wrapper. And, as someone who thinks "straight", "bisexual" and "gay/lesbian" are labels and not absolutes, unlike skin colour or gender, I think this is a quite terrible idea.
NEW SITE LINK
Zannen, Canada, bemoaning the lack of anime, except for the kiddie stuff, on Canadian TV due to archiac CRTC regulations keeping Cartoon Network off Canadian cable and satellite TV services entirely and keeping the Canadian version of Tech TV from running the anime programming block, combined with Teletoon and YTV's lack of interest in showing the Japanese
Adult Swim fare like
Cowboy Bebop,
Inu Yasha and
Lupin III.
I think we have an easier time finding most anime, except for AnimEigo stuff and the subtitled
Cardcaptor Sakura DVDs, on store shelves in Montreal than the guy that did the site does in British Columbia, for some reason, though.
Ah... more Idiotarians on
Late Pulse the late
CFCF News. There was this very silly young woman calling herself a "dissident"... um, no, honey, if you were a dissident, you would not be talking to the nice reporters in broad daylight on a busy city street without looking over your shoulders to see if the secret police are going to come make you "disappear" for speaking to reporters without supervision.
Also, something was especially bothering me, besides the usual reasons, about the low-grade terrorists smashing that poor guy's Porsche. It occurred to me over dinner what it was... these are the guys that are trying to get us to believe that trade with second tier ("third world" is a left wing term) countries leads to a "giant sucking sound" where all manufacturing jobs leave the first tier just to be given to the exploited masses (like the smiling, happy Nike workers in Vietnam now able to afford motorscooters and cell phones and pagers and air conditioners). But, aren't Porsches made in Germany, where there's tonnes of unions and socialized health care and month-long vacations and such. So... basically... we shouldn't buy cheap goods from second tier nations, but we shouldn't buy nice, quality goods from first tier nations either? I think this is a good object lesson to what these people really represent... they're just Economic "flat-earthers" against ALL international trade.
Ooh... neat! AnimeNewsNetwork.com now has a
"My Anime" and "My Manga" list-making feature that lets you make an online catalogue of anime and manga in your own collection... and not just that, but you can rate them and add, best of all, add comments. If anyone cares, you can see my list (as
Tenchi), complete with comments for some things I cut-and-pasted from various things I wrote elsewhere,
here. (Not a complete list of everything I've seen or everything in my collection.)
The manga side of the ANN Encyclopedia has a lot of missing titles, but I guess they mainly list titles which have appeared in English, and a good percentage of the manga I have are in French...
FIFTH COLUMN UPDATE
Ooh, goody... been a while since I've done one of these!
As was completely predictable, since they've been sticking their stupid "protest" posters all over the place, even here in Pincourt for some reason (and the posters are mostly in English, even though this town is a lot less English than it was 20 years ago), idiot leftist, so-called-"Anarchist" (really Communist- they want government intrusion into all aspects of our lives) thugs practiced their usual form of
low-grade terrorism, smashing windows along Saint Catherine street, west of Stanley, in downtown Montreal, smashing windows at, in order if they're going west, a Gap, a Burger King, the Canadian Forces Recruitment office, and a Bank of Montreal. What, you guys didn't touch McDonald's? It's soon after the Canadian Forces Recruitment office.
What I find particularly noxious is that they were smashing up people's cars, including one guys' Porsche. I also am hearing rumours that they were attempting to beat up the driver. (Too bad the Porsche owner didn't have a gun with him... I say anything he would do to protect his property from worthless ne'er-do-wells should be nice n' legal "self defence".) But they weren't just picking on luxury cars... they spray-painted dollar signs and the anarchy symbol on a boring minivan as well, not to mention media vans. (Oh... "R�seau De Dis-Information", adding the "Dis" to the name of the French-language version of CBC Newsworld... how clever! I bet it took you all week to think of that one!)
And, yep, they're blaming the police as usual for the violence... well, it's their usual script when they're feigning surprise that their "completely intended to be peaceful" protest degenerates into smashing shit up. Awww.... and the police were well-organized and completely prepared because they've only been advertising this stupid protest with posters and on the local
Nazimedia site for weeks. And smug, self-serving, self-righteous bastard Jaggi Singh got arrested, again. Aw... shucks... Hasn't he been arrested enough times? How many times does he have to be arrested before they put him in a cell with a hundred horny rapists and molesters and a big tube of KY-brand Ass Lube and throw away the key?
Once again, your worthless politics are discredited by your actions. Congrats! Worthless Black Bloc and CLAC-types win the prize!
Oh yeah, they were protesting against a WTO meeting or something... not that what they're protesting against is really of any importance... it's just the pretext that gives them an excuse to be violent.
