OTHER MISERABLE FAILURES
This guy, whose name seems to be "Damon Copeland", is another one whom is suggesting that Hillary Clinton should be the next
"miserable failure".
I'm mentioning him more because I like the suggestions by "cbgaloot" of other things to "Googlebomb".
"Real American Hero" (George W. Bush)
"defeated communism" (Ronald Reagan)
"stealth socialist" (A page called "Friends of Hillary")
"Once and future loser" (Al Gore).
OTHER MISERABLE FAILURES
Spotted
here:
"miserable failure" (Dick Gephardt)
"miserable failure" (Jimmy Carter)
"miserable failure" (Bill Clinton)
"miserable failure" (the Chicago Cubs)
NICE REVIEW, ZAC!
Holy crap! Zac Bertschy pisses all over
Saint Seiya (and the original Japanese version, not
Knights of the Zodiac) in
his review of the first subtitled DVD volume over at Anime News Network. He even calls it a "kid's show", which is, of course, a completely true statement, though a lot of
Saint Seiya fans deny it, as though there's a problem with admitting it's a kid's show, with a few elements (mainly graphic violence) considered "mature" in the west, granted, but still a kid's show. (I certainly don't lose any sleep about liking stuff like
Sailor Moon,
Cardcaptor Sakura, or
Super GALS!, shows which I fully admit were aimed primarily at girls in elementary school and junior high.)
I predict that Zac will soon receive a lot of angry e-mails, since, honestly, a sizable proportion of those
Saint Seya fans are downright fanatical, like
Neon Genesis Evangelion fans circa 1997 (at the height of the hyperbole, when
Evangelion was ridiculously overhyped), except, unlike
Saint Seiya, at least
Evangelion has a bit of substance, whether you like it or not or whether you think it's really deep, or just a facade of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. And, for whatever reason, a disproportionately high portion of these fanatical
Saint Seiya fans seem to be from Spanish (or Portuguese)-speaking countries, where apparently it's their national cartoon in every country, if not officially, in their hearts, at the very least, possibly because bullfighting has been banned in many of said countries, and they burn with fiery Latino passion and rage and indignation lest you admit that you don't personally care for the show, or they admit that the first forty episodes aren't all that hot, but, once the Gold Zodiac Knights appear on the scene, it gets much better, as though whether or not you like the show has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you have a taste for crudely-animated cartoons about tournament fighting and characters with garish-looking armour and bad haircuts. Sorry, like I have said before, if it takes forty episodes just to get enjoyable, the series has serious structural flaws and isn't worth my attention, and, in any event, whatever advantages the Gold Zodiac Knights bring to the show would be just a twist on a concept I don't care for. It's fine if you like it, but it's not a cartoon suited for my tastes, end of conversation.
I should admit, though, that one of my online anime-liking friends is a Mexican-American whom spent much of her childhood in Mexico, and I've never caught her talking about
Saint Seiya, so liking
Saint Seiya isn't universal in Spanish-speaking countries, just disproportionately high.
ALL ABOUT MORMONS QUEBEC UNIONS
(Hmm... I don't feel like giving any opinions, so, for no good reason, I'll add musical accompaniment straight from the
South Park episode
"All About Mormons".)
Quebec public unions made Thursday a
"Day of Disruption" (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB). Montreal bus service was disrupted when garage doors were sealed (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB). This comes less than a month after the STM/MTC's maintenance workers went on strike, reducing bus and Metro service to rush hours and late evenings (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB). Protestors also stopped ships from docking at the ports in Montreal and Trois Rivieres (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB), and some protestors slashed the wheels of trucks at the Port of Montreal (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB). Hospitals had to cancel surgeries (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB) or operate half-staffed (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB).
These protests are against the (Quebec) Liberal government of Jean Charest (THE PUBLIC SERVICE UNIONS ARE PQ SUPPORTERS, DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB. THEY FAVOUR THE SEPARATION OF QUEBEC, DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB.), for his proposed changes to Bill 31, making it easier for private companies and municipalities to contract out work to non-unionized workers (SMART-SMART-SMART-SMART-SMART). Also, Charest wants to privatize some public services (SMART-SMART-SMART-SMART-SMART) and raise the cost of subsidized daycares from $5 a day to $7 a day (SUBSIDIZED DAYCARES ARE OVERCROWDED PLACES/TO-O DUMP YOUR KIDS. MANY PARENTS WOULD FEEL GUILTY IF THEY KNEW/WHAT SHITHOLES DAYCARES ARE. TWO MORE DOLLARS PROBABLY WON'T MAKE MUCH DIFFERENCE, DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB. BUT THE WHOLE THING WAS A PQ IDEA, DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB.).
Besides November's public transit strikes (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB), Quebec public union members have recently
trashed the offices of Quebec Liberal MNAs (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB), as well as breaking into the apartment building where Montreal executive-committee member Georges Boss� lives and
spreading pig manure on the 11th floor carpet carpet (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB). They have also held
rowdy protests at hospitals (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB).
A Montreal
Gazette editorial on Thursday notes that while protesting Quebec union members may not have voted for various elements of Charest's agenda, as their protest signs attest (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB)...
..."many of their fellow Quebecers, however, did choose Jean Charest and a less interventionist style of government. By doing so they endorsed policies that were clearly friendlier to business and less beholden to big labour unions than those of the Parti Qu�b�cois. Others stepped further to the right and chose Mario Dumont and the Action D�mocratique du Qu�bec."
(STEVE BRANDON VOTED FOR THE ADQ, SMART-SMART-SMART-SMART-SMART.)
"After the bullhorns and placards are put away and the effegies returned to the rental shops, the world will go on. Charest and his Liberals will move forward with the legislation they promised.
If this legislation proves to be unpopular and regressive, Quebecers will boot out the Liberals just as they booted out the PQ before them. In the meantime, the labour leaders intent on making today a Day of Disturbance should ask themselves how much disturbances Quebecers really want.
(
GAZETTE EDITORS SMART-SMART-SMART, QUEBEC UNIONS DUMB.)
MEMO TO LISE WEIL
Like I've said a couple of times before, the single most noxious tenet of radical feminism is the notion of the collective responsibility of *all* males, rather than individuals whom happen to be male (when they perpetrators aren't female), for violence against women, which is prima facie false. In any event, I officially absolved all men except those directly responsible for violence against women from all responsibility for violence against women over the past weekend. But Montreal
Gazette letter writer Lise Weil apparently missed my "royal proclamation" somehow. So, as a public service to Ms. Weil, I present these charts to clarify things.
SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE RAPE OF THAT 14-YEAR OLD GIRL IN CANDIAC, BY PERCENT:
The kids whom raped her: 100%
Me: 0%
Men in general: 0%
SHARE OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE MURDER OF TAMMARA SHAIKH, BY PERCENT:
Whomever murdered her (probably Tommy Kane, but jurisprudence, "habeas corpus", and all that): 100%
Me: 0%
Men in general: 0%
By the way, a Google search for
"Lise Weil" seems to indicate that she isn't exactly "Random McAverageWoman" when it comes to the "Third Wave" feminist agenda, though, of course, it might just be someone with the same name.
EDIT: Also, isn't promoting the general idea that the perpetrators of horrible acts are "primarily responsible but not completely responsible" for their actions sort of playing into their twisted worldview about how they're guilty but, in a way, innocent? "Yeah, I did it, but society made me do it!"
ANIME FANDOM, STILL A NICHE...
Hmm... I think I wrote one of my
best ever explanations of how, despite the hyperbole you see on some popular anime sites, anime fandom in North American really still is a small niche interest, and will probably always be a niche interest. Yes, a lot more adults like anime now than did in the mid-90s, but that's relatively speaking. Out of the total population, we're still a small niche. And, yes, I do treat the mainstream popularity of things like
Yu-Gi-Oh as a phenomena completely separate from "anime fandom", which I limit to those older teens and adults whom like anime, since
Yu-Gi-Oh is a kid's cartoon, and plenty of dubbed cartoons from Japan have been popular on North American TV since the 1960s, starting with
Astro Boy and
Speed Racer, yet one would not claim that anime fandom on the whole has been mainstream since the 1960s.
"I really don't care either way, but I think, except for the kiddy franchise stuff (which most adults don't watch anyhow), anime isn't going to get any more "mainstream" with North American adults than it is now. Back when I first started buying subtitled tapes and going to anime clubs in 1994, for the most part, only comic book stores in the Montreal area sold the stuff and there was nothing on television in the United States except the odd anime film on the Sci-Fi Channel, and we here in Canada didn't even get that. (I know things were a bit better for anime fans in Britain at the time, but I'm only talking about North America here.)
Now you can get anime at pretty much any place that sells DVDs and even many Blockbusters have more than a handful of titles. (My own local Blockbuster just got some DVDs from fricking AnimEigo... I never thought I'd ever see AnimEigo stuff at the Pincourt Blockbuster.) And Americans (though not Canadians so much, for various stupid reasons) can watch a diverse selection of nearly or completely uncut non-kiddy anime programmes on several cable outlets.
However, I find too many anime fans fall into the "Disco Stu" fallacy, that anime is always going to get bigger at the same rate, as though there isn't a saturation point, and I think North America is either near or at the saturation point for non-kiddy anime penetration, where most of the adults whom would be to anime if they were exposed to it have been exposed to it, and, for the most part, the domestic anime market will either plateau or contract (with minor fluctuations, naturally). The fact is that North American adults, aside from a small niche of us, aren't into cartoons in any big way, with the exception of a narrow range of animated comedies specifically engineered to appeal to North American tastes, and even of those, The Simpsons (which hasn't been too funny in years) is the only one which appears in the Nielsen top 20 TV shows with any regularity. I think that if there was a huge, untapped adult market for animation much larger than the current anime fandom niche, we wouldn't have to import most of our cartoons as the American studios would be cranking out "adult" animated films more than two or three times a decade (and those experiments are almost universally flops) and cartoons of all genres, including action and drama, would be all over prime-time network TV instead of a single Sunday night comedy ghetto on Fox. There's a reason that the "popular" (relatively speaking) anime shows are on Cartoon Network and TechTV, and that's because they don't need to get remotely as high ratings as on broadcast TV to be considered successful. As for the Anime Network, I hope for the best, but, at some point, if they want to make a profit, it's no longer going to be "free" video on demand, it'll be pay-per-view.
As for video sales, they aren't as high as some people think. Read some relevant comments I made in the "Ask John" forum here."
And, at the end of that post, I linked to
this one, where I have some fun with numbers based on claims that
Spirited Away and some other anime titles sold over a million DVDs.
"This ICv2 article from June estimates that 400 000 copies of Spirited Away were sold in North America. Assuming the bulk of the sales of the DVD were in the first month it was available, I could see it having easily broken 500 000 copies by now, but not a million.
The article does have one glaring inaccuracy about the box office results for Spirited Away: "While the post-Oscar theatrical release of Spirited Away has run out of steam at around $10 million in gross box office revenues (according to Box Office Mojo)". $10 million was the total combined box office revenue for the fall release (which was about 170 screens at its widest) and the post-Oscar re-release (which made it to around 800 screens), with the bulk of the domestic box office, around 80%, from the original fall release. The post-Oscar re-release in "limited wide" release was actually quite a flop, with Bend It Like Beckham making slightly more than Spirited Away on the first two weekends of the re-release, even though Bend It Like Beckham was playing on only 1/6th the number of screens.
Spirited Away just got more exposure, relatively speaking, in the U.K.
EDIT: Actually, I'm not even sure about Animatrix... it started out strong for the week of June 7th, reaching #2 on DVDFile.com's DVD sales charts, though with only 28.1% of whatever number of DVDs were sold of Die Another Day that week, but then, for the week of June 14th, it fell to #7, with just 10.5% compared to the unrated version of Old School for that week, and June 21st, it was at #10, with 17.7% of whatever the number of copies of Deliver Us From Eva sold, and on June 28th, it was at #17, with 9.6% of the sales of Kangaroo Jack (Cowboy Bebop: the Movie was at #10, with 20.4% of the sales of Kangaroo Jack), and after that, it fell off the charts completely.
EDIT II: In other words, for the week of June 28th, for every one person that bought the DVD of the Cowboy Bebop movie, there were five proud owners of a Kangaroo Jack DVD. I SAAA-LUTE them! (Okay, I've never seen Kangaroo Jack, so I probably shouldn't have an opinion of that film...)"
Even if
The Animatrix did sell over a million copies, and I don't know that it did or didn't, being unable to get exact numbers (the DVDFile.com charts only give you how much, in percent, any DVD below number one sold compared to the week's number one DVD), it's not exactly a typical anime, being tied in with a popular film series. In fact, one could call it a singularity.
By the way, the "Disco Stu Fallacy" is what I call it when someone assumes the popularity of something will always expand at the same rate. It's a reference to a scene in the
Simpsons episode
"The Twisted World of Marge Simpson".
Meanwhile, at Disco Stu's "Can't Stop the Learnin' Disco Academies"...
Disco Stu: [making indescribable body motions] Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue... A-y-y-y!
[kicks his feet up on his desk wearing see-through platforms with water and fish inside]
Homer: Uh, your fish are dead.
Disco Stu: Yeah, I know. I... can't get them out of there.
DON'T GET MAD, GET EVEN...
Two can play the
Google bombing game.
MISERABLE FAILURE.
SAME-SEX MARRIAGE (of poltical parties)
(No, I didn't make that joke up... I stole it from a
National Post editorial.)
So, some of you might be wondering, if I always vote for the right-wing-iest party available (of mainstream parties; I'm not talking about that neo-Nazi crap, which isn't exactly "right wing" anyhow), why the Hell haven't I talked about
the merger between the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance into a single "new" Conservative party? Certainly I support the move, and I think it's about bloody time, but the honest answer as to why I never discuss it is that it's as boring as Hell, at least the process of reuniting. It's as boring as watching paint dry. It's as boring as watching grass grow. It's as boring as being snowed in at church, listening to a six-hour sermon on the Book of Numbers. It's as boring as enduring a marathon of the first forty episodes
Saint Seiya, before those gold Zodiac Knights appear on the scene**. Hey, neither Mark Steyn nor David Frum were talking about it all that much, so why the fuck should I?
I'm fully intending on voting Conservative next time around in the federal elections next year, but, while the two conservative parties were merging, I was quite content to ignore it and let the leaders do whatever needed to be done. I was actually a member of Reform/Canadian Alliance from 1997 to 2001, but I let my membership lapse because I knew this was coming sooner or later and I let the cards fall as they may.
Of course
Joe Clark's in a pissy mood about all this and resigned from the party, to sit by himself
in a corner and sulk in the House of Commons under the "Progressive Conservative" moniker.
""I will not be sitting as a member of the caucus of the new party. What's happened to us has been hard for me, obviously."
"Some equate it to a death in the family, I regard it rather as the death of the family," Mr. Clark told reporters Monday."
I don't see it as a death at all, but more like a resurrection of the original Conservative party (okay, originally the "Liberal-Conservative", then "Conservative") of John A. Macdonald. There's nothing wrong with welcoming a mainly western party back into the fold, because, let us not forget, the Conservatives only became the "Progressive Conservatives" in 1942, to attract supporters of the defunct Progressive party, a western protest party, just as the Reform was originally. And, of course, I knew all that from memory and didn't just look it up in the
Wikipedia, ;-).
In other words, the situation of the conservatives in Canada was like... umm... that episode of
Urusei Yatsura, "Duel! Ataru vs. Ataru", wherein Ataru eats Lum's magical lolipop and splits into two Atarus, one serious, polite and well-mannered, perfect for Shinobu, and one casual, uncouth, and fun-loving, perfect for Lum. The exasperation Canadian conservatives grew to feel over the split vote is represented by Ataru's father, Mr. Moroboshi, unable to deal with having two versions of his son, and the remedy is the process of reunification, as represented by the tincture Cherry gives Mrs. Moroboshi to feed to her "sons" hidden in the food during the uncouth Ataru's celebratory "final meal on Earth", the dinner representing the long, boring process of votes and deliberation I didn't feel like writing about, or paying attention to all that much. The bleatings of unreformed leftist Tory David Orchard against the merger are represented by the fingers of the two Atarus digging into the carpet to try and resist, rather futilely, the magnetic pull of reattraction towards each other, and the final vote this past weekend was the two Atarus forming into a ball and reuniting. Yes, that's all that happened in that
Urusei Yatsura story, nothing else, really. (That's the ticket...) Okay, Lum zapped the ball with her electric powers to keep her version of her "Darling" for reuniting, and the result was two identical versions of the original Ataru before he split. But they eventually merged, in an unexplained manner, after the story was over but before the next story in the episode.
Anyhow, the Reform/Canadian Alliance served a useful purpose for a while, to keep the interests of the west and social conservatives addressed in Parliament since these positions were being ignored by the political mainstreams of all parties in favour of a focus on central Canada and endless constitutional prattle, but now even
Preston Manning admits the time for regional parties has come and gone and, if we don't want continued Liberal hegemony in the PMO for decades to come, to paraphrase the Spice Girls, "This month is the time when 2 become 1". There will be plenty of internacene battles between westerners and "economic conservatives but social liberals" and social conservatives, but, right now, "big tent" is the only way to go.
I like how
National Post refugee Roy MacGregor ended his
his Globe and Mail column today.
"And that is what makes this Monday morning so unique. A country where the leaders have yet to find their own feet. A party in power, waiting for its prime minister.
An opposition finally formed, but with no leader at all.
And a third party with a leader, but no seat.
Finally, reason to pay attention again."
**Or so people, mainly from Spanish-speaking countries for some reason, like to claim, that I only find the Japanese cartoon series
Saint Seiya (renamed
Knights of the Zodiac for North American kiddy TV) boring because I haven't watched the "right" episodes, and it gets "good" around 40 episodes in, when those Gold Knights show up, but I doubt it. While I'm sure whatever it is that those Gold Knights bring to the show would make the show more exciting, if you're into that dead serious armored warrior animated
sentai stuff, for someone like me whom isn't into that sort of thing, it would just be a more advanced variation of the sort of action which bored me earlier in the series. Plus, if it takes 40 episodes for a series to get "good", that's a sign of a show with serious structural problems. Yes, I saw bits n' pieces of the uncut
Saint Seiya at my club years before
Knights of the Zodiac started airing on YTV, so the kiddy version has nothing to do with my boredom. Just accept that the show "isn't my bag", okay?
2004 MOVIES WHICH I'M MOST PUMPED TO SEE
Just felt like doing a list of some sort:
1) The Life Aquatic: Well, I've talked about The Life Aquatic several times in this blog, so this should be no surprise. It's the fourth film from director Wes Anderson, who has done no wrong with Bottle Rocket, Rushmore (which I saw first and loved), and The Royal Tenenbaums (which I loved even more than Rushmore and which was easily my favourite film of 2001), and I loved the pics I've seen thus far and finding out that The Nightmare Before Christmas's Henry Selick will contribute a few scenes of stop-motion animation was an unexpected bonus. But, while Owen Wilson is co-starring as some sort of sea captain in this film, unlike the previous three Wes Anderson films, he didn't co-write this one. I'm looking for the script... seen a few reviews of it, but they don't seem to have gotten it off the web. This is one of two upcoming movies starring Bill Murray in one form or another on this list.
2) The Polar Express: In, all honesty, I've never encountered the Polar Express children's book, by Chris Van Allsburg, but the trailer is just beautiful. This will likely be the most "naturalistic" computer animated film yet, with soft lighting exactly like a storybook. Back to the Future's Robert Zemeckis is credited as the director somehow... I guess he directed Tom Hanks and the other actors whilst they acted on the motion capture stage. I think the faces of both the conductor and the main boy are based on Tom Hanks's face which, I guess, had to be scanned. (I did like the original Jumanji book, also by Allsburg.)
3) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Also another case of "I've never read the book" (well, I've skimmed it), but this looks to be much better than the previous two Harry Potter films, which were decent, don't get me wrong, but The Prisoner of Azkaban looks to be less claustrophobic, since you get to see more outside of Hogwarts and Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson are wearing normal kids clothes in a lot of the pictures I've seen, and the triple-decker Knight Bus is too cool for words.
4) Garfield: "It's all about me-ow!" Okay, I admit, I was, and still am, skeptical as to whether or not the Garfield movie will be any good, but I actually like the way the CG Garfield looks. Yes, his eyes look like breast implants, but that's how they're *supposed* to look... well, aside from the first few months of the strip in 1978 when a small-eyed Garfield looked freakish compared to now. I don't have any strong feelings either way about Peter Hewitt directing (though I did like Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) or Breckin Meyer starring as Jon Arbuckle, but what convinced me that the film was on the right track was when I found out that the voice of Garfield would be provided by none other than Bill Murray. (Yes, this is the other Bill Murray film I alluded to.) Not only is Bill Murray's voice a perfect match for Garfield's lazy, sardonic, and cynical attitude, but Bill Murray is the only person whom should do the voice. Why? The "Venkman Factor": Bill Murray portrayed Dr. Peter Venkman in both Ghostbusters films, and, in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, Venkman's voice was provided by Lorenzo Music, whom is probably best known for providing the voice... well, audible thoughts... of Garfield in specials, commercials, and the Garfield & Friends series for over a decade (he was also the voice of Carlton the doorman on Rhoda). Unfortunately, Music died in August, 2001, of lung and bone cancer, so it's only a fitting tribute that "Peter Venkman" himself, Bill Murray, perform his most famous role in the film. Anyhow, the movie sounds like it will be a feature length version of the first Garfield special, 1982's Here Comes Garfield, with Garfield having to free himself and Odie from the pound, with a sub-plotline about Jon trying to date Liz, the veterinarian. The only thing I can see wrong is that there's no Lyman, for those of us purists, but I guess I can't have everything.
5) Sweating Bullets Home on the Range: See, I doubt this will be the best animated film of 2004, with heavy competition from Dreamworks' Sharkslayer and Shrek II (though I wasn't the biggest fan of the first one), Pixar's The Incredibles, Studio Ghibli's Howl's Moving Castle directed by Hayao Miyazaki, and, of course, the aforementioned Polar Express, but the Disney studio put together a damn amusing trailer which promises lots of Looney Tunes-esque wackiness, and a perfectly-cast Roseanne Barr/Arnold/no surname/whatever as the voice of the cow. Don't get me wrong, despite the fact I was underwhelmed, relatively-speaking, by Spirited Away, I am still very much looking forward to Howl's Moving Castle, since, hey, it's from Hayao Miyazaki, director of the severely underrated Kiki's Delivery Service after all, but the Howl's Moving Castle teaser trailer is just a shot of the castle, which is, unlike for some people, not enough to get me too interested as of yet.
Hmm... I may add a supplemental list of a couple of other things I'm looking forward to, with some reservations, at some other point.
WEIRD SEARCH REQUESTS
"hikaru no go ytv 2003"
Hikaru no Go on YTV? I think someone's been listening to their friend whom likes passing on worthless rumours and taking him seriously. I mean, a cartoon about Go tournaments on YTV? While I'm sure it will sell well with the anime fandom niche, it's not the sort of thing which would catch on with the mainstream Canadian public.
I seriously doubt
Hikaru no Go will be the next
Yu-Gi-Oh, since the merchandising potential, of the sort of merchandising which would sell in North America, is extremely small. I know they sell all sorts of crazy, esoteric merchandise for pretty much every anime in Japan, even the sorts of anime which would seem un-merchandisable to us, but merchandising is fairly tame, relatively speaking, in North America, besides DVDs, is limited to "just" things like toys, games, books, t-shirts and other apparel, party supplies and such. Such an anime *might* do okay on something like
Adult Swim, though I get the idea it might not be consider mature enough for that programming block, but the amount of merchandise the
Adult Swim series sells is a small drop in the bucket compared to
Pok�mon or
Yu-Gi-Oh. And, as we know,
only a fraction of what's on Adult Swim makes it to Canadian TV, at least in the anime department.
HMM... WEIRD
I have Bell ExpressVu satellite TV, and the station they carry as their east coast NBC affiliate is
WHDH 7 in Boston, but, when an American programme is being simulcast on Canadian TV, retarded CRTC rules force Bell ExpressVu to carry a Canadian signal in the American channel slot. So, anyhow, I tuned in to the NBC position at 11:30 p.m. to watch the new episode of
Saturday Night Live hosted by
the Reverend Al Sharpton (a.k.a.
"Super Processed Hair Bullhorn Man"), and, sure enough, it switched over to the Global signal, and I watched a sketch with Jimmy Fallon as one of the NBC Programming executives explaining that, since Sharpton was hosting, they'd do episodes of other NBC series featuring other Democratic presidential candidates for "equal time". But, just a couple of minutes in, Bell ExpressVu abruptly switched back to the NBC signal, since the Boston NBC station was showing a
Saturday Night Live rerun from the mid-90s, the one from 1991 hosted by Steve Martin where he sings the
"Not Going to Phone It In Tonight" song with the late Chris Farley and the late Phil Hartman during the monologue.
So I had to switch to one of the many Global stations on ExpressVu, and, sure enough, they were still showing the Sharpton
SNL live. Tina Fey and Chris Fallon cleared up what was going on during
Weekend Update, apparently, a lot of NBC stations are refusing to air the Sharpton
SNL for the reason alluded to in the opening sketch, that they're afraid that they'd have to give an hour and a half to each of the Democratic candidates, so they did a bit wherein Fey and Fallon and the Don Pardo impersonator who is the announcer made fun of each city where the episode isn't shown.
Too bad so many Americans can't see Al Sharpton on
Saturday Night Live... I make absolutely no secret of the fact that I'd vote Republican if I was American, but, damn, I like seeing Democrats making asses of themselves on television. But, sadly, it's only been an average episode of
SNL, not the train wreck I was hoping for. They didn't even do a single joke about the
Tawana Brawley hoax, let alone Sharpton's racial hucksterism. :'(
In other Sharpton news, apparently,
John Derbyshire thinks that, while he doesn't agree with his politics,
Al Sharpton is America's most gifted public speaker. Maybe he is, I don't have an opinion either way. I really just linked to that column because I liked Mr. Derbyshire's little primer on the Northamptonshite accent.
"The main thing to be said here is that nobody has to speak like that, certainly nobody of Sharpton's intelligence. Don't tell me it's his background and he can't help it. I myself started out in life speaking mid-Northamptonshire dialect, an odd blend of Cockney (dropped h's and glottal stops) and East Anglian. Main features of the latter are: total confusion of the verbs "to have" and "to be" in auxiliary usages, so that "have you been?" becomes "are yer bin?"; weird vowel transpositions (the long "i" becomes short "o," so that "I'm" comes out as "om," and the short "a" becomes short "e," so that "have" is pronounced "hev," etc. etc.); and some eccentric verb participles, e.g. "boughten" as the perfect tense of "buy." Along with all this mangled phonetics and grammar, we had a raft of dialect words that no-one else used: an alley was a "jitty," a pond was a "wair," a ditch was a "sike," ill-tempered was "mardy," etc."
Since I have an uncle and several cousins in Northampton, for several summers, my parents rented very nice country cottages over at
Rye Hill Cottages in the village of East Haddon in Northamptonshire, about 10 minutes from central Northampton by train, though you had to drive to
Long Buckby to get to the nearest station. Also, the
Althorp estate, the ancestral home of the Spencers, is in the next village over. (We started going to Rye Hill's before Diana's accident, though.) Not that I was personally affected by the death of Princess Diana, which I think was an accident and not a conspiracy, but I did visit Althorp myself with my parents and grandmother in the summer of 2000 and, if you ever get the chance, go, since the Spencer mansion is a bloody marvellous house to see from the inside. Anyhow, I guess I heard a little of what Derbyshire is describing, but not quite as exaggerated as he's making it out to be.
Not that this has anything whatsoever to do with Al Sharpton, but I stopped wanting to talk about him several paragraphs ago, and I like my stories.
"REVEREND" FRED PHELPS UPDATE
Hmm... I've made no secret of
my own suspicions regarding the "Reverend" Fred Phelps, of
God Hates Fags infamy. Honestly, the more I hear from him the more I believe he's some sort of stooge paid off by some fringe self-described "Queer" lobby group in order to tar-and-feather any non-hateful people who have sincere disagreements with any gay activists as bigots by association. He's just too conveniently "over-the-top" with his hate to be believable, like he's the villain in an extremely politically-correct cartoon series scripted by political gay lobby groups. In other words, to put it as a [i]Late Night with Conan O'Brien[/i] "S.A.T. Analogy", "Fred Phelps" is to "People whom disagree with gay activists" as
"Cyril Sneer" is to "capitalists in general", though that's not a perfect analogy since I think I recall, on a couple of occasions, Cyril Sneer showing a softer side on
The Raccoons, as polemic as that cartoon was.
Anyhow, I can't believe it... while, to the best of my knowledge at least, I don't think he's ever seen this blog, a reputable blogger, none other than
the Instapundit.com guy, Glenn Reynolds, is himself wondering if Phelps is indeed a
paid agent provocateur (he linked to that MSNBC.com blog post from
this one on his own page). Well, to be more precise, Reynolds is only saying that Phelps is *acting like* a paid provocateur, not that Phelps *is* a paid provocateur, but, still, nice to see that someone well-known is giving a bit of credence to my own theory, even if he started getting that idea quite independently.
By the way, in regards to my earlier comments on Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia would be welcome back into the British Commonwealth once a more responsible government assumes power somehow, but I'm getting the idea it's going to be a rather bloody affair getting a responsible government in place, though more people will die there if we do nothing. I'd rather they try the assassination route first, and not just Mugabe but also anyone like-minded whom would assume power and rule in a similar fashion to Mugabe, and only if that route is a failure should they send in the tanks and bombers.
