By the way, for those of you that want the first two seasons (except for episode 67) of
Sailor Moon uncut and subtitled, get those boxes soon as
ADV's license for Sailor Moon expires at the end of March, and, for whatever reason, Toei doesn't want to renew it. (The third and fourth seasons of
Sailor Moon are available on bilingual DVDs from Geneon (formerly Pioneer), whom seems to have the license for some time yet, whilst the fifth season,
Sailor Stars, Toei is notorious for having refused to license it to the North American market in any form because of the gender-bending "Three Stars" characters.)
Because they're going out of print, DeepDiscountDVD.com is selling the
season one and
season two sets for an incredible $39.95 U.S., though I have no money nor a credit card, so I can't take advantage of this offer, even though I never got the season two set. Yes, even though those prices sound like bootleg prices, coming to less than one American dollar an episode, these sets are the real deal, folks.
I would imagine that
Metro Video in Montreal will still have them in stock until they sell out.
DRAGONBALL Z LIVE-ACTION MOVIE A NO-GO? (UPDATE)
Can't say that I didn't see this coming from a mile away, since there's been NO solid information about the live-action
Dragonball Z movie since Fox announced that they had optioned the rights at the beginning of 2002, but now
Kyle Hebert, voice actor for Son Gohan (as a teenager) on the FUNimation dub of
Dragonball Z which would make him a rather credible source on the subject of
DBZ with no reason to lie to
DBZ fans, has
talked directly to a contact at Fox, whom confirmed that Fox won't be making that movie, so, if that project ever had any life in it, it's dead now.
Of course, that hasn't stopped
some DBZ fans from denouncing Hebert's comments as being untrue, and, obviously, while I doubt Kyle Hebert would lie, he's not a Fox employee so this shouldn't be considered the absolute final word, but, umm, where were your critical thinking faculties a couple of weeks ago
when you guys were peddling an anonymous, poorly-written obviously fake interview from Brazilian TV with Roland Emmerich, saying that he had *completed* the
Dragonball Z film? (Emmerich was in Montreal last year shooting
The Day After Tomorrow, and studios do not shoot big budget movies in total secrecy as to the fact they are being filmed.)
UPDATE: Kyle Hebert wrote the
following reply to some of the questions in the AnimeNewsNetwork.com forum:
"My web adminstrator did make the call to Fox, and quoted their representative. That's all. He never demanded to speak to anybody. (Why would he in the first place? Don't you love how people make conclusions without knowing the facts?) He simply called them up and asked what the status was. There is no motive for him to lie about this. Now, is Fox lying? Who knows? Fox's response was quoted. Period. Make of that as you will.
Yes, it was widely announced that Fox had the rights and would be working with Akira Toriyama. However....that was, what, like two years ago? Nothing BUT rumors have been floating about. My opinion (mind you, OPINION, as an anime fan, NOT a representative of Funimation) is that the project is dead in the water. This happens all the time in Hollywood. Deals and contracts are signed, then for whatever reason, the film doesn't get made. Case and point: Halle Barry signed to make a spinoff movie from her character in a James Bond film. It recently got canned. Has anybody heard anything definitive about the supposed live action Akira since Warner Bros. announced its intentions long ago? Nope. See a pattern here?
Could someone still breathe life into it? Of course they can! Its Hollywood and anything is possible. Whether it eventually gets made or not can be considered as a blessing or a curse, depending on your own personal point of view. I am here merely to state that my site ran that story simply quoting Fox. A call was made the next day to ILM, and they also confirmed that they ARE NOT contracted to do special effects work on that project and as far as they know its dead. He figured the fans would like to know what he was told. If they end up announcing the project is a go-ahead with a director, cast, and crew at some point, then so be it. As for now, we're merely messengers."
Sincerely,
Kyle Hebert
www.kylehebert.com
TENCHI MUYO! GXP (NO, I DON'T HAVE IT YET, AND THIS IS NOT A REVIEW...)
The first volume of
FUNimation's North American release of the 2002 Tenchi Muyo! GXP TV cartoon series from Japan was released on March 9th. (Yes, "cartoon"; I'm not one of those anime fans whom is too pussy to admit it.) Now, as is obvious from my URL, I am a big
Tenchi Muyo fan, though I'm one of the few whom prefer the
Tenchi Universe/
Tenchi Muyo in Love/
Tenchi Forever continuity over the original
Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki OVA series continutity, mainly because I like the supporting character (Galaxy Police Detective First Class)
Kiyone Makibi* a lot more than the main women in the series, because she's serious, sober, and balanced in her personality qualities, and Kiyone appears in the
Universe (the first TV series) continuity but not the OVA continuity. (Well, a "Kiyone" is now appearing in the OVA continuity in the new episodes, but it's Tenchi's mother, and it's a completely different character whom is neither like the GP Officer Kiyone nor like Achika, Tenchi's mother in the TV series continuity.)
I love the "Flash" picture FUNi has put on the main page of
the TM!GXP site... hold your cursor over the picture for a revealing surprise. Obviously, if you're not into
"fan service", do NOT watch
Tenchi Muyo! GXP!
Some
Tenchi fans
didn't care too much for GXP!, since, while it takes place in the original OVA continuity, which the majority of fans like best, it's more of a new series with original characters which just uses the
Tenchi Muyo! name, and the original
Tenchi characters don't appear aside from one cameo episode. However, the Galaxy Police grew to be my favourite plot element in the show over time and I admit I like goofy comedy better than the "wafer-thin space opera plotlines"** which seem, from the detailed spoilers I have read, to be out-of-balance to the way things were before. (As much as I want the new
Tenchi Muyo OVA episodes to be great, they seem to be taking the plot far-too-seriously, when
Tenchi Muyo! was meant to be sort of a spoof of space operas, showing the mundane aspects of life when the characters aren't zooming around the galaxy in spaceships.)
Unfortunately, I won't be getting
GXP! any time soon, for the following reasons:
- I don't have any money right now, and what little money I can scrape together for anime is currently going to Super GALS!.
- For whatever reason, FUNimation DVDs which aren't Dragonball Z/GT or Yuu Yuu Hakusho aren't easy to find in Montreal at all. I hope FUNi can get better distribution in Canada (where a lot of their properties are dubbed) soon. In fact, the reason I'm buying Super GALS!, distributed by ADV, is that I couldn't find the Fruits Basket anime, distributed by FUNi, anywhere in Montreal (though, ironically, I can get up to volume 9 of Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket shoujo manga in French at any bookstore in town).
- I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older, but, while I haven't gone off "harem anime" (one guy, many girls) completely, it no longer is quite the draw for me it once was. I still like Tenchi Muyo!, but a part of that is nostalgia, and an anime I first watched at a mega-comic book convention in 1994 at age 19 no longer has quite the same... umm... "effect"*** on me in 2004 at age 29. I never got into the similar (but Earth-based) Love Hina either, though that's partially because I thought I might just find myself agreeing with David Smith's damn hilarious, largely tongue-in-cheek review of Love Hina at IGN.com, which some anime fans took far too seriously as an insult. Maybe I need a "harem anime" with a twist... the idea of a gay yaoi "harem anime", with one timid guy being sought after by many sexy guys, packed with male "fan service" (as long as the guys are hairless and not too brawny), would kind of intrigue me. Too bad such a thing doesn't exist.
Also, some
Tenchi fans have
expressed concern that FUNi's dub of
GXP! will not feature the original
Tenchi Muyo! dub actors, which Pioneer (now Geneon) used in their dubs of the older stuff from 1993-1999, when they make their cameo appearances in episode 17. (I'm
Tenchi in that ANN thread I linked to in the previous sentence.) I can take FUNi's word that they tried in good faith to get the original dub cast, but they were mostly either unavailable, busy, or uninterested (they haven't worked together since
Tenchi Forever five years ago), but one guy is saying that he knows Debbie Derryberry ("Ryo-Ohki"... now she's best known as the voice of Jimmy Neutron) and Petrea Burchard never heard from FUNi (maybe their agents heard but didn't pass it on), but until I see some solid proof, that's just "hearsay".
Rest assured that, unlike some other sites, I'm not going to present hearsay about FUNi as fact, nor will I ever publish any whiny, petulant 4000 word rants against FUNi president Gen Fukunaga.
*Okay, I admit that Kiyone's surname is "Makibi" and not "Mabi", unlike what I stated in a review of the Tenchi Muyo! Ultimate Edition set I wrote for AnimeOnDVD.com 5 years ago (an honest error based on the most reliable information I had available at the time), but it's a non-standard reading of the two kanji, and the name of the town in Okayama prefecture from whence her surname was derived is "Mabi(-cho)", not "Makibi" as the Tenchi Encyclopedia Vol. 3 claims.
**Thank you, AnimeNewsNetwork.com poster M_Lileks, for that apt five-word description of the way the series seems to be headed in the new episodes.
***Hint: take out the "ff" and add an "r" and maybe an "ion" to get some idea of what I'm talking about.
NOTE TO THE CONCORDIANS IN ACTION PEOPLE...
Honestly, I don't like that this blog is currently the Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" page for
"Concordians in Action" any more than you do, but, what can I do? (Besides Googlebombing
"Concordians in Action" in you guys's favour.) If no one else is willing to discuss you guys, you get my views, okay? I won't pretend to be neutral (and I like exaggerating for comic effect). I'm sure that my ranking is going to change when
The Link and
The Concordian discuss the positions of the three serious parties and this blog will be off the first page of search results (well, for those people whom have their Google set to 10 results per page; I have it on 100).
No, I don't think the
Paul Champagne whom is the former Department of National Defence employee whom made only around $70 000 a year yet lived in an Ottawa mansion assessed at $1.1 million Canadian (and whom has moved to the Turks and Caicos) that, allegedly, signed contracts worth $152 million with Hewlett-Packard without permission of the department is the same Paul Champagne, whom, if you're a big-spending anime fan, makes those
custom DVD boxes, but I can't prove that it isn't. Probably just a co-inky-dink, though.
SORRY, ERAMELINDA BOQUER...
Sorry,
Eramelinda Boquer, but it's not just that one music critic whom hates John Lennon's insipid dirge "Imagine". I hate that anthem to athiesm and socialism too, and I'm not even a music critic. ("Imagine there's no possessions..." the hypocrite was living in
the Dakota apartment building when he was killed!) And I'm not the only person whom hates "Imagine" either:
So does this guy.
And this guy.
And this guy.
And this guy.
And this guy.
And this guy.
And this guy.
Well, you get the idea. Google "John Lennon", "Imagine", and "Dirge", and there are plenty of others.
Also, while I'm apologizing to CJAD people, sorry,
Kevin Holden, you're free not to like it but I think
Freddy Got Fingered is an absurdist gem. It's not in my all time top ten along with
Rushmore,
The Royal Tenenbaums,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and others, but, still, I did love it enough to buy the DVD the first day it came out. It only got
10% on the RottenTomatoes.com Tomatometer, but that still means 9 out of 90 critics listed on that site liked it. I especially agree with
A.O. Scott's review of Freddy Got Fingered in The New York Times, which got reprinted in the
Freddy Got Fingered DVD insert.
I do agree with you on
Metro Video, though, and I wish I could get paid to endorse them. Or, at least, get free anime DVDs. Or maybe I should make an offer to
DVD Passion? (Eh, maybe if I had more than a couple of dozen readers a day this would be more than a pipedream, but the direct, non-search engine hits are increasing.)
"THE MIDDLE EAST NEEDS AN ENEMA" UPDATE
Yeah, like
Sari Stein, I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog about
the train bombings in Madrid, Spain, which I suspect is more likely than not the work of Islamofascist savages. As someone whom takes the commuter trains in Montreal many times a week, yeah, I have to admit it makes me a little nervous, and I may well be taking a look under the seats around me before I sit down for the next little while.
One thing I haven't really seen noted is that March 11th, 2004, is exactly two and a half years after September 11th, 2001, so was Al Qaida commemorating a quarter-decade since they started the war? I think it's probably Al Qaida, since
ETA, the Basque separatist group, has denied responsibility, even if they've always claimed responsibility before for SPanish terrorist attacks (link spotted on
Little Green Footballs), though
Damian Penny notes that
"John", of Iberian Notes remains convinced that this is still the ETA.
Dog of Flanders links to
this disgusting cartoon, on the Belgian Indymedia (a.k.a. Nazimedia) site, by the
Über-Idiotarian Brazilian communist cartoonist Latuff, which is almost implying that Spanish Prime Minister Aznar had the bombs planted himself, as Hitler burned the Reichstag to benefit in the election, just as Latuff believes Bush is the one behind the attacks on the World Trade Center. What a fucking moron. (And the moron that posted the cartoon at Nazimedia (dunno whether it was Latuff or not) says that the September 11th attacks benefitted Bush just days before the elections... umm... those were a year earlier.)
By the way, I heard someone on the BBC News comment that these attacks are evidence that Bush'es War on Terror were a failure. Umm... no... America has been so successful in the War on Terror on its own soil that the terrorists have to attack softer targets like Spain and Al Qaida is reduced to making vague promises of more attacks against America like this new "Black Wind" thing. Unfortunately, yes, the war on terror will continue for many, many more years, but, as the Spanish bombings attest, it's a war the civilized world can't afford to lose.
"DOGS" IS WORSE THAN "FROGS"?
From
CBC Montreal:
Tyler in dog house over comments
MONTREAL - The former head of Alliance Quebec is sparring once again with his longtime foe, Quebec's l'Office de la Langue Francaise, over a comment he made in which he referred to them as "dogs".
It all started last month, after Brent Tyler won a case against l'Office de la Langue Francaise involving a businesswoman in Shawville who had been accused of refusing to speak to an inspector.
At the time, Tyler told reporters the victory was a sign the government and the language police were wrong.
"I said Premier Charest, call off your dogs," he said.
Gerald Paquette, the head of communications for the government agency, said that calling someone a dog is more than an insult.
"We think it's vindictive," he said. "Hate emails came to our office."
Paquette has asked Quebec's Bar Association to look into the incident.
He said that because Tyler is a lawyer, his language could be seen as "unethical."
Tyler said he'll consider the actions necessary to protect his language and his name.
Why did Brent Tyler apologize?
"Call off your dogs" is an "idiomatic phrase" meaning "to restrain or recall", he wasn't calling the language police "dogs". But, while I prefer calling the OLF "the language Gestapo", "fascists", "totally against all libertarian principles", and, especially, "a total waste of taxpayer money", if it's "dogs" that bother them the most, then, OLF, you are all a bunch of dogs.
Nah, on second thought, calling them "dogs" is an insult to dogs, especially
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Robert Smigel), a
personal hero of mine. So, OLF, you are a fine group of people... for me to poop on!
WASHROOM ADS AT CONCORDIA ARE BACK!
From
an article by Patrick Lavery in The Link:
"Much like the cat from that old children's song, the ads came back. They didn't come back the very next day; it took a few years, but advertising panels have been discovered in bathrooms around Loyola.
Concordia student Jonathan Woodworth said he noticed the ads in the basement of the CC building last Tuesday morning. He checked other bathrooms around the campus and found ads in almost each one.
"There weren't any in the AD building," he said. "There are panels in every other building I looked in. There are five panels in the first one I looked in."
Woodworth wasn't happy to see the ads. "It's intrusive," he said. "The nature of the medium is very invasive. When I go to the bathroom, I go there for something else, I'm not just passing by. The part that makes me feel really uncomfortable is I'm there and I'm peeing, and I'm forced to look at these ads."
Woodworth said he was angered by the ads enough to circulate a petition, calling for a general assembly to look into the matter. "I asked for the general assembly instead of a referendum because it will let people discuss the issue," he said. "I think people making a stir about it, talking about, will get the administration to act.""
(I think that's about as much as I can get away with quoting as "fair use", heh heh. You get the gist.)
Honestly, who gives a flying fuck about advertising panels in washrooms, really, aside from a small cabal of vocal leftists with a general Naomi Klein
"The logos are attacking! The logos are attacking! We need to stop the logos! We need to stop the logos! The corporate logos! The logos are attacking!"*anti-capitalist agenda? For them, advertising on campus is the most visible manifestation of the privatization bogeyman, but these same people don't want the universities to raise tuition (and a lot of them buy into the "zero tuition" pipedream), so, umm, assuming you don't want to pay more, and assuming the Quebec taxpayers aren't going to take it anymore up the rear than they already do, what's wrong with the university making some money off the sale of advertising space? Does this affect the artistic integrity of the washroom stall somehow? What's better to look at on a washroom wall... a bunch of graffiti telling the world how much you hate Jews or what time to meet up for homosexual sex (both of which you can get in abundance on the walls of stalls in washrooms at Concordia)?
Honestly, I don't think it's any coincidence that the best maintained and brightest lit washrooms in Concordia are the ones with advertising... sponsorshhip gives them an incentive to keep the washrooms from degenerating into a dimly-lit stinkhole like some of the washrooms in the Hall Building.
Opponents of washroom advertising at Concordia point out that there was a vote on the issue in 2000 where students voted to ban all advertising from washrooms, but that was during the Comrade Rob Green "Communists' Student Union" regime when the only people that ever bothered showed up to CSU meetings were like-minded people (since anyone that disagreed would have been "Mau Mau-ed"), and these things were so poorly-attended that they represent maybe 1% of the total student body, which I think is far too few students to remove a legitimate source of income for teh school. And, you're not going to get all that many people whom would vote in favour of advertising, just the vast, vast majority of people would be completely indifferent. It's only the people that think too much that get annoyed at such things.
*Say it like Tom Green in that one segment where he went into a supermarket and started building barricades in the aisles using boxes and cans, claiming that "The aliens are attacking! We need to stop the aliens!" I'm not 100% sure it was aliens, though, since they don't have that particular sketch on any of my DVDs.
IT'S ELECTION TIME AT CONCORDIA!
The Link has published
the list of the slates and candidates for executive positions for the upcoming Concordia Student Union election.
The three serious parties seem to be Concordians in Action, the incumbent New Evolution (formerly "Evolution, Not Revolution") and Renaissance Concordia.
The first slate is
Concordians In Action, which seem to be a bunch of fresh faces but the "same old same old" Marxist politics straight from
Guelph.
(Guelph is where the ultra-Marxist Canadian Federation of Students is located, for those of you in Rio Linda.) Their posters promote them as the
"C.I.A.", which, obviously, really stands for
"Communists, Idiotarians, and Arafat-groupies"... however, one of the joke parties in this election calls themselves "Communists in Action", pre-emptively stealing one third of my joke.
New Evolution is the incumbent executive, headed by Brent Farrington. I thought I was going to write a lot about them this past year, but, eh... nothing much happened, just a lot of internacene bickering between the level-headed Evolution guys and the old guard Communist Students' Union apparatchiks too mundane for me to talk about, at least when I could be out doing something more productive like
writing a review of Super GALS!. But, still, when it comes to student unions, no news is good news, so I intend on voting for Evolution... well, for the first time, since I wasn't at Concordia last year.
I don't know much about
Renaissance Concordia, however they are the only one of the three parties with an election platform website that shows up on Google. They seem to be a bit less radical version of Concordians In Action but still more "activist" than Evolution. A glance at their page on
"Sustainability" reveals that they"will lobby
for the full implementation of the environmental recommendations of the Sustainable Concordia audit." (Emphasis theirs.) Eh... I've looked at the
Sustainable Concordia webiste, and they have a few alright ideas but mostly bad ones, which I really hope to discuss sometime when I'm feeling a bit less lazy
(such as, my "favourite", getting rid of the evil, American, corporate, capitalist, food service provider Chartwells and turning all the food concessions on campus over to the People's Potato vegan food collective, which would mean no meat for us Concordia meat-eaters, whom would then just hop down Mackay to McDonald's, and no milk nor cheese nor food made from eggs either, if they want to impose their vegan diet upon us all), and the audit was backed by
the Quebec Public Research Interest Group (Q-PIRG), which alone is reason enough to oppose it,
campus PIRGs being front groups that are clearinghouses for people with all sorts of wacky statist, anti-capitalist, anti-"imperialism" agendas.
So, for now at least, this blog endorses Brent Farrington's New Evolution slate.
EDIT: Added link to Concordians in Action site: http://www.cia4csu.net/
WHAT'S UP WITH THE MIYAZAKI MAILING LIST?
About once a week, I like browsing the
Miyazaki Mailing List on
Nausicaa.net, the definitive English-language resource about the films of Hayao Miyazaki and the other Studio Ghibli directors.
However, I tried
browsing the archives today, only to find out that I now need to be an actual member of the MML in order to read the messages. So, I joined.
In the event anyone from the MML reads this blog on a regular basis and noticed that I'm now a member, please be aware that I only joined so I could continue lurking the messages; I have no plans on posting anything anytime soon. And rest assured that, if I did post, I don't think I would talk about how I think Miyazaki's two most famous films, relatively speaking, in North America,
Princess Mononoke and
Spirited Away, are quite overrated compared to the earlier Ghibli films, especially
Kiki's Delivery Service which usually gets short shrift. Now that
Spirited Away has been released and reviewed pretty much everywhere in the English-speaking world, I'm not anticipating writing any more installments of
THE "SPIRITED AWAY IS OVERRATED" WORLD REPORT, unless
Mark Morford writes something else as nutty and drug-induced as his
infamous column on Spirited Away which turned, somehow, into an attack on Bush and the sort of middle Americans that vote Republican... okay, every Morford column is nutty and drug-induced, but, fortunately, only one thus far was about
Spirited Away. (Damn, even if my reaction to that film was relatively lukewarm, still, as an anime fan, that column was embarassing to me in that I could be associated with that guy in any way, even if it's just because we both like cartoons from Japan.)
INTERNATIONAL LIBERAL WOMEN'S DAY
I think I'll make
this article about a protest in Montreal better, and more factually accurate.
Quebec women hold anti-gov't protest march
Canadian Press, with additional files from Steve Brandon.
QUEBEC — Thousands of communist Quebecers jumped the gun (Doesn't that expression promote gun violence?) on International Liberal, in the "small L" sense, Women's Day events by marching to Premier Jean Charest's office Sunday to protest government policies they say are hurting women and sending families into poverty attempt to overturn the platform upon which the Charest Liberals were successfully elected last spring, these sort of protestors being the sort of people whom give a lot of lip service to "democracy", except when the population votes against their party, which means, of course, that the Quebec people were duped into wanting lower taxes and more privatization.
"On social issues, the government is backwards and all the changes women have made for decades are threatened today," said Jennie Skene, president of the Quebec Federation of Nurses, whom, for some reason, uses the word "backwards" to mean "doing exactly what they should be doing, though probably not going far enough".
She was among several prominent annoying Quebec labour leaders (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB) who led a demonstration that snaked along downtown streets to the premier's office. These people chose Sunday to march as it is the day of the week when most of the productive people, excluding those whom work in stores over the weekend, are at home away from downtown, and, as such, can't make fun of the welfare leeches.
A sea of union signs (DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB) were hoisted by several thousand, at most, a few hundred women and men, the men in the crowd being the sort of guy whose wives have their testicles in a Hillary Clinton-brand Lockbox, as loudspeakers played French music and a marching contingent of drummers revved the crowd.
The rally took place a day before communities communists around the world mark International Women's Day.
Busloads of protesters arrived from Trois-Rivieres, Suroit and other municipalities. Smaller protests also took place in the Eastern Townships and Gaspe.
Residents in Quebec City and other communities across the country will hold rallies on Monday, while the productive people are at work.
Participants in Montreal said they felt compelled to protest Charest government policies that raised day-care fees by 40 per cent, permitted contracting out of services, temporary "contract" work being an anathema to Quebec unions, and failed to adequately tackle poverty, their definition of "adequately tackling poverty" being "making Quebec even more of a communist state than it is already, spreading the misery evenly".
With the increase, provincially run shithole day-care fees increased to $7 a day from $5 a day, not that the modest increase in the price really would make all that much difference in the abyssmal overcrowded and chronically understaffed government-run daycare system; if parents knew how bad conditions in those places are, they'd feel guilty as heck for dumping their kids there. Of course, if the "progressive forces" hadn't raised taxes so high in this province in the first place, maybe the non-breadwinner parent in the family would be able to afford taking a few years off work to raise the kids.
"There is a movement of protest now in Quebec and today is part of that movement against the new policies of the Charest government," said Danielle Hebert, co-ordinator of the Quebec Marxist Women's Federation. "Now, please excuse me, I have to go to the little ladies' room to make a movement, otherwise, I shall have a movement in my panties."
While women have made many advances over the past 30 years, Charest said his government will continue to work to fight poverty facing female-headed families and domestic violence.
"Each advance on the road to equality - in addition to giving women access to life's best conditions - represents a victory for the entire Quebec society," the premier said in a news release.
Sunday's protest, which organizers said attracted 10,000 people, organizer crowd size estimates being, of course, the most reliable estimates in the world... at least if you divide by ten, follows several broader union rallies last fall and is a precursor to several more protests planned in the coming months.
"It's the whole socialist movement in Quebec coming together to denounce Charest," said Barbara Legault, a spokeswoman for the federation.
She said Quebec women don't support the government's pledge to reduce taxes if it forces the gutting of social services, except, of course, for the Quebec women whom aren't parasites and are successful achievers whom can make it on their own two feet without sucking off the taxpayers.
"I think the priority is clearly on fighting poverty and not impoverishing the middle class," she said. "So, in order to not impoverish the middle class, we must tax more and more money away from them and send it to Paul and Rita Bougon, whom obviously deserve the money more than the people whom actually earned it."
"Lowering the taxes has proven not to increase the wealth and the well-being of the middle class, either. At least tax cuts didn't increase the wealth and the well-being of the middle class on Bizarro world from Superman comics... I haven't seen statistics for the real world. I don't think this is what the women workers want."
Traffic along Montreal's main downtown streets was disrupted for a couple of hours while Sunday shoppers stopped to take in and make fun of the Communist party-like atmosphere.
Cornelia Brandt, a German teacher living in Montreal, said she supports this type of rally even though she's not sure how much it achieves.
"The Quebec government is cutting services that women need," she said as the throng of protesters passed by.
Among the protesters were parents pushing strollers, a woman dressed in a blue burka to protest the plight of Afghani women, which they probably blame all on Americans and not the Taliban and other Islamofascist regimes, and a group of gay activists known as the Pink Panthers, whom, heterosexuals take note, only want Quebec taxpayers to take it up the rear figuratively speaking.
Members sported pink balaclavas, balaclavas being the international symbol of Marxist cowardice, to symbolically shield their faces because homosexual struggles are never seen even though gay people are everywhere, said Andrea Langlois. Also, if this had turned into one of those protests where they smash up a few McDonald's, they'd be difficult to identify.
Bernadette Diochon, 68, said she had to join the march in an attempt to maintain hard-fought gains on issues like alimony that were won over years of struggle.
She hoped the government would listen to the concerns raised (and they should listen to their cluckings... and then do the exact opposite of what these communists suggest) or risk losing office in four years, which would suck, unless the Liberals lost to the kickass Action Democratique, of course.
But she conceded that few protesters likely voted for the Liberals in last April's provincial election so their stupid, worthless concerns should be irrelevant to Charest.
"I think most of them voted for the other side," she said of the left-leaning Parti Quebecois , the "Well, duh!" statement of the day.
To celebrate International Women's Day, I think I'll honor my favourite woman in the whole wide world, Taiwanese model-actress
Shu Qi. That's right, Shu Qi is more than just a
pretty face, albeit one attatched to a
great, great body, she can act too! As long as the role doesn't require too much talking... or convincing facial expressions. She can kick butt without messing up her hair, though! Because of Shu Qi's many talents, and looks,
So Close (
Chik yeung tin sai) was
my favourite movie that I saw at FantAsia last year.
