...through semi-illicit means. If you're expecting unmitigated fawning because it's a new Studio Ghibli film from Oscar-winner Hayao Miyazaki... well, you haven't been reading this blog that long, have you? Not that I have anything against either Miyazaki or Ghibli in general, and you know that
Kiki's Delivery Service is one of my top two ro three anime films (below Mamoru Oshii's
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer), I just refuse to put them on a pedestal since there are plenty of non-Ghibli anime, and I'm not talking about the straight comedies that are the bulk of my collection, that I think deserve to be recognized just as much as Ghibli but don't get the same level of mainstream critical attention.
I'll start with what I like about the trailer, with names taken from
this synopsis of the book, summarized by Melissa Hyland.
Yes, I do like the look of Calcifer, the fire demon thingie which powers the castle that gets pulled out of a fire, like a cute fat, tubby, glowing ember, and gets dunked in a bucket and becomes a blue blob.
I like the look of the girl with the oversized sleeves who I presume is one of the two step-sisters, either Martha or Lettie, who appears to be a blonde teenage girl older than the girls on the cusp of puberty that Miyazaki usually draws (i.e. Kiki or Satsuki). Miyazaki seems to have gone to extra lengths to make the character prettier than his normal "cute".
There's also a cute bowtied "boy" in turn of the century (20th centurey) street garb (vaguely similar to what Jean wears in
Nadia), though it may be the other stepsister.
There is a character, who I presume is Howl himself, who looks to be a clone, though a bit older, of Haku/Kohaku from
Spirited Away, right down to the haircut. I'm not hairdo-guy; I don't know what you call that sort of medium-length hair on a guy... sort of like a mullet that wraps arond the side of the head with sharp, pointy tips at the sides. Come to think of it, it's very similar to the simplistic-looking haircut Kosuke Fujishima gave Natsumi Tsujimoto in the earliest, unpublished-in-English (but available in French),
You're Under Arrest chapters before he refined her character design. And, as has been widely discussed elsewhere, Sophie, the main character who is the "old woman" in the trailer, looks very much like Yubaba from
Spirited Away, though with less exaggerated, relatively speaking, proportions. Is Hayao Miyazaki on cruise control with his character designs?
Unfortunately, in the case with both Sophie and, especially, the flying fat woman character who I presume is the evil sorceress, Miyazaki increasingly seems to be going for the "grotesque" with his character designs, and I thank Rotten Tomatoes forum poster
Atomic Cow for
giving me the word that was on the tip of my tongue for so long, "grotesque", as to one thing that bothered me about
Spirited Awat that I could not quite verbalize. I know the point with Sophie is that she is supposed to look somewhat grotesque because of something that happened to her early in the story, but, the thing is,
Kiki's Delivery Service and
Laputa: Castle in the Sky had, between them, many "old people" characters, yet I cannot think of one "old person" character in either of those films that I found unpleasant to look at. I'm finding the character designs just disturbing to look at, and, if there are too many characters like that, it can hinder me "connecting" to a film in any great way.
As for the "moving castle" itself; it's like a breathing combination of an oil derrick, a refinery, a factory, and the bathhouse from
Spirited Away on little spindly legs. I don't know if it's just that I've played too many videogames with bio-mechanical machinery and levels, but the way it looks doesn't particularly impress me, like it is something I've seen before. I'm not disappointed by the castle, just indifferent.
One advantage
Howl's Moving Castle may have over
Spirited Away is that it was based on a book by
Diana Wynne Jones, so the animated film adaptation may, hopefully, be a lot more focused and less meandering than was
Spirited Away. Honestly, I don't know if it was that most critics were so caught up being enraptured by Miyazaki's imagination that they failed to notice just how disjointed
Spirited Away was since Miyazaki made it up as he went along scene by scene, storyboarding a new scene only after the previous scene was complete. Also, it would be nice if Miyazaki turned the pretension down a notch. I know a whole lot of people think
Princess Mononoke and
Spirited Away are Miyazaki's best works, but I find them both overlong and lacking the simple charm of Miayzaki's 1980s classics like
Kiki's Delivery Service and
My Neighbour Totoro.
Anyhow, I have to go somewhere, but, if you want to see the trailer yourself, cut and past this URL, 49uper.com/up-test3/key.php?mode=check&no=2409 , to the location bar, and the password ("file key") is "shinraot".
I may add to this entry later.
BLOG QUEST 1: THE DEATH OF SIERRA ON-LINE
>enter rotten tomatoes videogame forum
You spot a thread on the death of Sierra On-Line.
>open thread
People are lamenting or are indifferent about the death of Sierra.
>click on link
It's a DesignTechnica.com article about the death of Sierra which =DeadlyViNYL= linked to because the Gamers.com article to which the DesignTechnica.com article links seems to be down.
>go to blogger.com
You would, but your bladder frequency tells you that you need to make a "pit stop".
>stand up
You stand.
(Stephen walks right (southwards) using arrow keys across the northern half of the family room to the edge of screen.)
(Screen takes 30 seconds to redraw itself.)
(In the southern half of the family room, there are the stairs to go towards the front door and the upper floor, and two doors, to go to the garage and the laundry room. Stephen walks towards the top of the screen, through the open doorway of the laundry room.)
(Screen takes 30 seconds to redraw itself.)
(Stephen walks up and left through the laundry room and approaches the door to the downstairs bathroom.)
>open door
You open the bathroom door.
(Steve walks through the doorway.)
(Screen takes 30 seconds to redraw itself.)
>close door
You close the bathroom door.
>use toilet
(Stephen faces the toilet, reaches for his fly, and a giant "Censored" covers him like Larry Laffer in
Leisure Suit Larry when he had sex.)
>wash hands
Ah, you remembered this time. Good boy!
>open door
You open the bathroom door.
(Stephen walks through the doorway.)
(Screen takes 30 seconds to redraw itself.)
>close door
You close the bathroom door.
(Stephen walks left and down towards the open doorway to the southern part of the family room.)
(Screen takes 30 seconds to redraw itself.)
(Stephen walks down and left towards the northern part of the family room.)
(Screen takes 30 seconds to redraw itself.)
(Stephen walks left towards the computer.)
>sit down
You sit down.
>go to blogger.com
You are at the sign-in page.
>sign-in.
You are at the control page for kiyone.blogspot.com.
>create new entry
You click on the green "plus" and go to the "Create New Post" page.
>cut-and-paste article
Sierra Gets Shutdown
Thursday, June 24 @ 10:30:00 PDT
The lights go out at old-school game company, Sierra, as Vivendi restructures its business.
More depressing news for the industry, Vivendi Universal Games has cut 350 staff and shut down Seattle-based Sierra. The venerable games company created some of the most popular action and adventure games in the 80's. The Sierra brand will live on in name only and projects tied to the Sierra pipeline, Half-Life 2, Ground Control II and Tribes: Vengeance are already being developed by other teams within Vivendi. Also affected by the restructuring, the Hoyle brand of card and board games have been canceled.
"Restructuring the organization and reducing our cost base are necessary to improve our operating effectiveness and profitability," said VU Games CEO Bruce Hack, in as terse a manner as possible. "This constitutes another important step in our turnaround plan aimed to better position the company for growth."
>type opinion
While you haven't really been into Sierra "adventure" games in over a decade, and while you're somewhat of a pretentious "old school" fanboy who thought that Sierra games were best circa 1989, around the era of Police Quest II, Space Quest III, King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella, The Colonel's Bequest, Quest for Glory II and Leisure Suit Larry III, when the graphics were a bit better than the earliest Sierra games from the mid-80s but still EGA/VGA and not high-resolution and the backgrounds not hand-painted, so you still had to use your imagination to fill in the blanks, and also while you thought that Sierra games were a lot more challenging when they still had the typing interface, before they brought in the point-and-click interface in the early 1990s, and, while the later King's Quest sequels just bored you as they used CD-ROM technology to make the games into cartoons with babyish gameplay, and while you just could never get into their other popular types of games like Half-Life, still, as a connection to your late childhood, you are sad to see Sierra go.
>cry
There, there.... there, there.
>eat thor
Thor eats you.
That's not Sierra; that was Legend's Valhalla for the Sinclair Spectrum system, you dumbass!
HOLY SHIT! ACTUAL LIVE-ACTION DRAGONBALL Z NEWS!
Mostly cutting and pasting my comments from
this thread at AnimeNewsNetwork.com, because I'm too lazy to write this all over.
First post:
Hmmm... an actual piece of news rather than a worthless Internet rumor?
Quote:
From ComingSoon.net.
Ben Ramsey Adapting Dragonball Z for Fox
Source: Variety
Friday, June 25, 2004
Screenwriter Ben Ramsey ("The Big Hit") has signed to adapt Dragonball Z for the big screen for 20th Century Fox, reports Variety. Dragonball Z was adapted from the "Dragonball" manga created by Akira Toriyama and later developed into a Japanese anime series.
"Dragonball Z" follows the adventures of an adult humanoid alien who's just discovered that he was sent to Earth to blend in and destroy our population but instead elects to protect it from an oncoming alien onslaught.
Ramsey recently wrote the adaptation of Marvel's Luke Cage at Sony's Columbia Pictures, as well as Static for Columbia-based producer Neal Moritz.
Of course, writing a screenplay is only a small step, but, still, this is more actual news about the bloody thing than we've heard since... oh, about March 2002.
Someone brought up
Kyle Hebert's web manager Otherworld Steve's phone call to Fox, who told him that Fox isn't making it, so here's my reply to that:
Kyle Hebert (well, Otherworld Steve) told us the truth about what he knew about the project from the best information source he could find, some receptionist at Fox. The receptionist would likely be aware of the status of the projects in active development, but a studio like Fox would have dozens, if not hundreds, of projects on the back-burner, things that aren't in active production but are ready to go into active production should Fox feel that the time is right, and I doubt a receptionist would be aware of the exact status of all back-burner items like the live-action Dragonball Z.
So, while Kyle Hebert has infinitely more credibility than some anonymous guy on a message board somewhere going "ROLAND EMMERICH IS TEH DIRECTOR AND TEH FLIM WAS MADE IN SECRIT IN BRAZIL AND HUGH JACKMAN WAS GOIN TO BE GOKU BUT HE WAS FIRED FOR HOLDIN UP PRODUCTION", he's still, more or less, "some guy" and a serious industry news source like Variety has far more credibility than he does.
But a lot of screenplays studios commission never get produced, so I wouldn't be preordering tickets to the live-action Dragonball Z just quite yet.
Getting a screenplay written is only the first step, so I'm not placing any bets on whether or not the live-action
Dragonball Z will ever see the light of day, though I'd say it's far more likely than the live-action
Evangelion, which doesn't even have a studio.
In other live-action anime news...
Vince Vaughn, currently seen in Dodgeball, has convinced Warner Brothers to greenlight a live-action version of Speed Racer, the 1960s American adaptation of the early colour anime
Mach Go! Go! Go!, which Vaughn will not just be executive producing but also starring in as "Racer X", Speed's older brother.
I
joked about giving away the "spoiler" that "Racer X" (Masked Racer / Kenichi Mifune) is Speed's (Go Mifune) brother yesterday, in the Rotten Tomatoes forum:
OH NOEZ! You didn't put the fact that Racer X is Speed's brother in spoiler text! Now it's ruined... ruined![/sarcasm]
I always loved how they always had to mention it in the voice-over narration every single fricking time Racr X showed up!
From what I've heard about Mach Go! Go! Go!, I don't think the narration was in the Japanese version, but, no, I've never seen it in Japanese either, save for the opening sequence.
MOORE IS A BORE...
Conservative party bad, Moore says
By CP
American filmmaker Michael Moore hopes Canadians don't vote elect a party that supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. The Academy Award winner was reacting to the stance of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and says he is grateful the Liberal government stayed out of Iraq.
Well, of course Michael Moore, that GREAT AMERICAN PATRIOT(TM), is grateful that the Canadian military has stayed on the pussy terrorist-appeasing side of history this time around. Fewer people in the Middle Eastern "theatre" to kill his
terrorist "revolutionary" buddies in
Fallujah and in the
Hezbollah organization.
"Moore -- whose documentaries include Bowling for Columbine and Roger and Me -- warns that if Canadians elect Harper, "then dire consequences will follow.""
Dire consequences like tax cuts and a non-antagonistic relationship with America and blocked-out American channels like Cartoon Network, HBO, and Fox News being permitted in Canada for the first time (to those without a C-band satellite dish) and freedom of choice in medical care. And a Canada willing to confront the terrorist threat head-on.
Come to think of it, didn't Michael Moore himself once spoof how crappy Canadian health care is, at least in terms of waiting time, in
Canadian Bacon? He was right on the mark in that scene in spite of himself, but I'm sure he'd claim that he was spoofing American stereotypes about Canadian health care, however, Denys Arcand had a scene with the same general point, albeit with people dying on gurneys in hospital hallways and without the happy candy stripers telling patients how many months or years they have to wait for treatment, in the Oscar-winning
Barbarian Invasions. But, if I think about it, the Michael Moore of the
TV Nation era in the mid-90s was a bit more politically "even-handed" back then than he is now.
So, if health care is an important issue to you, remember how "true" that scene from that particular Michael Moore movie was and vote for Stephen Harper, the only candidate who can bring real improvement to health care rather than just injecting more cash into an inefficient system.
Hmm... I oughta rent
Canadian Bacon this weekend and see if I can find more pro-Conservative messages in that film. Pretend I liked a Michael Moore film so much that it convinced me to vote for Harper and make things better.
"He predicts U.S. President George W. Bush will "throw a party" if the Conservatives form a government after the June 28 election."
A party? Cool! Can I come? From what I understand, George Bush's parties have the best drinks and the coolest party favours. And I can play "Pin the tail on the Kerry"!
"Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, is an indictment of Bush's handling of the events before and after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
EH, I hear it's just more of the
same old, same old.
"Pro-Republican groups in the United States have already geared up to oppose the film, which could hurt Bush in the November U.S. election, including a massive letter-writing campaign to theatre chains."
About
the boycott from groups like
Move America Forward and
PABAAH (Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood), I don't personally endorse boycotting the film beyond not paying to see it (not that I'm suggesting sneaking in or downloading either), and I certainly won't be seeing it until it hits cable (and I doubt I'm going to break my boycott like I did with my
Kill Bill "boycott") and I think a too active boycott only gives this movie even more free publicity, but I don't have a problem with the concept of boycotts. Boycotts are actually completely libertarian. Michael Moore has every right to make a "documentary" like the one he made but Disney's under no obligation to distribute it, and, even though it found a distributor with Lion's Gate Films, which always distributes the Miramax stuff too controversial for Disney, theatre owners are under no obligation to show the film. If a theatre owner is showing
Fahrenheit 9/11 and it offends you that much, you're under no obligation to spend money at the theatre. That's the magic of the free market at work.
Some people at Rotten Tomatoes unaware of the difference between a libertarian boycott and governmental censorship may be crying foul over the mere concept of a boycott, saying it's anti-free speech, which is a total canard for the reasons I just presented, but, if they're going to condemn the boycott anyway, why aren't they also condemning
Take Back the Media's ongoing boycott of the sponsors of the Rush Limbaugh programme, which is the exact same principle, just applied to a non-leftist target. I guess boycotts are only "evil censorship" when it's right-wingers boycotting leftists. (For the record, even as a Rush Limbaugh fan, I don't have a problem with their boycott; it doesn't seem to be having much of an effect, and, if you disagree with Take Back the Media, you can just buy more from Rush's sponsors and tell them you appreciate their sponsorship of his fine programme.)
I just happen to think a boycott is pointless for a documentary that, outside of the arthouses, will be on the multiplex screens for two or three weeks maximum, and it's not going to make it onto that many screens in "flyover country" outside of the liberal meccas (because, duh, liberals are going to watch it and most conservatives and libertarians aren't, so, in flyover country, it's more profitable just keeping
Shrek 2 or
Harry Potter on any given screen for another week) and I think merely not paying to see the film is sufficient (and paying to see
Michael Wilson's Michael Moore Hates America should that ever get released in Montreal (doubt it) and buying
David T. Hardy's book, Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man). And, even if it's not actual censorship, it still plays into Michael Moore's "Boo hoo hoo, I'm being censored" lie which the Cannes voters ate up like so much falafel.
By the way, for this sort of liberal documentary, you can have an opinion on without seeing it since you can get the gist of every scene from sympathetic media coverage. I already knew
Bowling for Columbine back-to-front before I finally got a chance to see it for myself on cable a few months ago.
As a bonus, I'm pulling a quote from this CBC article that's just a longer version the same thing. This particular line sums up the way I think Michael Moore thinks of most of his fellow Americans far more vividly than I could ever hope to convey.
""The American way is pull yourself up by your bootstraps: 'Me, me, me, me, me. It's mine. It's mine.' You know? Don't go that way. Your Conservatives are trying to take you that way.""
He gets American "rugged individualism" ass backwards in the most condescending way! It's not all about "me, me, me!", it's the ideal of Americans being able to do things by themselves without any sort of assistance, especially from big government. The less people rely on others to get ahead in life, the better. And setting up a capitalist straw man saying "It's mine. It's mine." is implying that there's only a limited amount of money to go around, the classic socialist "zero sum game" when the truth is that economic activity by rugged indivduals acting in their own self-interest increases the size of the economy for everyone, so there's more to go around. Not that I'm suggesting no one ever needs to rely on other people, preferably voluntarily through charity rather than government, at certain tough points in their lives, but I don't think relying on others should ever be promoted as a virtue.
I just seem to have a much higher opinion of the average American than Moore seems to have.
HAPPY SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST DAY TO ALL CANADIANS LIVING IN THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC!
Of course, I really believe the poltically-correct Anglophone media when they claim that the provincial holiday, the so-called "Fête Nationale", is a politics-free holiday for all Quebecers to celebrate and not just an excuse to kiss up to the treasonous separatists and pretend that the fascist, anti-free-market, anti-English language laws are "Great Canadian laws". (Dr. Evil voice) Rrrrrrrrrriiiiigggggggghhhhhtttttt!
Hmm... should "Canada Man" make another appearance downtown this year?
CANADIAN CELIBERALS: "STOP HARPER"!
Yep, Canada has many
"celiberals" (celebrity liberals) too, and you can imagine that, unlike me, they're none too thrilled that kickass Conservative candidate Stephen Harper may be elected prime minister next week,
so they've started a website where you can real Canadian Celiberals' stupid, inconsequential, airhead opinions about Harper, "STOP HARPER". Obviously, they're entitled to their opinions, just as I'm entitled to the opinion that Jack Layton is a terrorist-appeasing pussy, but I'm not sure what, pray tell, they want us to do to "stop" Harper, besides not vote for the Conservatives.
"JOIN Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace), Sum 41, Avril Lavigne, Treble Charger, Sarah Harmer, Sarah Polley and other prominent Canadian artists in opposing Stephen Harper.
As a prominent artist we need your name on this statement of concern!"
That's pretty much a "who's who" of celebrity NDP supporters, but they couldn't get Kiefer Sutherland to sign on board this time?
Also, I think there's a comma missing in the bottom sentence. (For those of you in Rio Linda, there should be a comma after "artist".) While I fully admit that I'm not perfect in this regard either, the "Stop Harper" page is full of missing commas where there should be commas and, the opposite punctuational error, comma splices.
"Canada is sleepwalking into the election of Prime Minister George Bush! He is a Conservative Culture Killer and we need your help to stop Stephen Harper NOW!"
Prime Minister George Bush? What a
KICKASS idea! I'll have you know that I'm voting for Stephen Harper (or, technically, Robert Ramage) because he's the next best thing to George W. Bush, the
great president, and I'm in no way sleepwalking about it. In fact, I'm quite energized by Harper's surging support (as are you guys, I know, but, in my case, I mean "energized" in a positive sense).
Anyone coming to the "Stop Harper" site expecting the usual idiotarian celebrity bleatings against the war, well, they're there if you dig hard enough, but the front page shows them to be motivated by an entirely different issue.
"Anyone interested in canadian culture, should read the Globe and Mail article: Tories set to bring CRTC duties in-house - 21st June 2004
"I also don't think this is an issue that people are going to be going to the polls on next Monday," Rhonda Walker, Alliance Conservative spokeswoman, responding to Stephen Harper's plans to eliminate Canadian Content regulations and marginalize the CRTC on CBC Newsworld's "Politics With Don Newman," June 21, 2004."
I already
gave my opinion last week on how I think dismantling the CRTC and deregulating Canadian content is a good thing, since I don't think that "culture" is something that should be imposed by government but rather determined by the free market, but, for anyone that missed my easy-to-understand position:
"To put my own personal situation simply: I wanna watch Cartoon Network. They have a lot of good cartoons I wanna watch, mainly from Japan, that I can't watch on YTV or Teletoon. But the bad bureaucrat men at the CRTC won't let me watch Cartoon Network. The cool superhero with the blue C on his chest, Super Stephen Harper Man, will come and smash the bad men, and use his amazing legislation heat ray vision to dissolve the CRTC and then I can watch all the channels I wanna watch (without a big-ass C-Band satellite dish or an illegal "grey market" DirecTV subscription) and not some inferior versions of the channels watered down with "Canadian Content"."
It's far from the only reason I'm voting for the Conservatives, but "Freedom of Choice" for individual consumers to be able to watch the channels they want to watch without government intereference is something only Stephen Harper is going to protect, so it is *a* reason I'm voting for him.
"Posted here is a STATEMENT about Stephen Harper's policies that began with the signatures of over 80 prominent Canadian women, including Sarah Polley, Sarah Harmer, Naomi Klein, Maude Barlow and the Be Good Tanyas. This statement outlines concerns about Harper's policy on a woman's right to choose, Iraq, military spending and cuts to healthcare amongst other issues."
Ah, they invoke the names of the anti-trade socialists Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow, automatically invalidating any chances that I'll take the "statement" seriously. As for Sarah Polley, well, she's a good actress and I was especially happy that she didn't fuck up the
Dawn of the Dead remake by playing her character as being too much of a "braindead consumerist zombie" like she was threatening to do in interviews, but, politically, the girl is essentially an unofficial spokesgirl for the NDP, so, when she brings up politics, I just force a smile and nod my head and say "That's nice!" in the most condescending tone I can muster.
Let's look at
the celebrities that signed
the statement, keeping in mind that I haven't cared much for most music produced since about 1994, the year I turned 20:
Sarah McLachlan
Eh, my brother, Nick, and my sister, Alison, both liked her for a while, but I don't know if they're still into her. Obviously, I've heard of her, but I can't, for the life of me, hum a single song she's done.
Sum 41
Heard of them, vaguely, but I always get them confused with Blink 182.
Avril Lavigne
My main point of reference with her is that she was born in Napanee, Ontario, and, in 1989, on the way back from a vacation in Toronto, we stopped off at a McDonald's in Napanee, so, if there were any four year old girls in the restaurant at the time... just maybe... who knows?
Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace)
The band with the name that's interchangable with "I Mother Earth".
Chantal Kreviazuk
The name's familiar, but... no.
Tegan and Sara
Drawing a total blank.
Ryan Malcolm
Oh, wow, the
Canadian Idol winner... meh, unlike the
Pop Idol and
American Idol winners, he never had to win the approval of Simon Cowell, so he's only a second-rate winner on a second-rate international version of
Pop Idol. The fuck I care what he thinks!
Kurt Swinghammer
Kate Fenner
Sarah Hayward
Treble Charger
Mia Sheard
Nope... nope... nope... vaguely heard of them... nope.
Scott Thompson
The last season of
Kids in the Hall got a bit too "gay political" for my tastes, but overall, Scott Thompson is a funny guy. Even without seeing his name on this, I could probably guess that he's no fan of Harper, for obvious reasons. All I can say is this bisexual will be quite happily voting for Harper on Monday, but I was never one for identity politics... maybe, instead of walking, I'll skip to the ballot box just for Scott.
Sam Roberts
I almost said that he was the guy from the first
Jurassic Park, but I checked my
Jurassic Park LaserDisc (yes, LaserDisc) and it was "Sam Neill". I'm breaking my undeclared rule and looking him up... oh, he's
just some guy who badly needs a shave.
Hawksley Workman
I wouldn't otherwise know who this guy is, but, last Christmas Eve, we had the radio tuned to the CBC and they were playing Canadian songs that weren't exactly Christmas songs in the general sense but tied into the general concept of families coming together for the holidays, and they almost made me lose my dinner by playing Hawksley Workman's awful, totally atonal, "Three Generations in the Kitchen All at Once".
Steven Page (Barenaked Ladies)
What... they were only able to get one of the Barenaked Ladies, also big NDP guys, to sign this?
Martina Sorbara
Sarah Sheard
Chris Picco
Blair Packham
Patricia O'Callaghan
Kardnal Official
Saukrates
Brassmunk
G Stokes
Metty (Sweatshop Union)
Kyprios
Who x 11? Well, obviously, someone involved with something called "Sweatshop Union", whatever that is, wouldn't be fond of Harper.
Jonathan Watton (Actor/Director)
Who's he? The director of
On the Line and
The Crossing, that's who! And which films are those? Beats the living shit out of me!
Sandra Oh
Yeah, I've seen
Last Night, the movie about the end of the world in Toronto caused by, prsumably, a rogue solar flare, since it's daylight in the evening (no special effects; it's just a character study). I was going to say that my main point of reference for her was that she was on the cover of the
TV Times in the Montreal
Gazette once for
Black Robe, a magazine cover which "brought me great pleasure" several times as a teenager, but I'm getting her confused with the half-Chinese Sandrine Holt, whose real name is Sandrine Ho.
Lorraine Segato
No clue, but her name is an anagram of "Sega Alien Rotor", which sounds like it would make a pretty cool title for a videogame.
I was saving the best for last, even if he was a couple away from being the last on the list.
Adam Reid (Actor/Director)
I'm probably one of the few people who know exactly who this guy is without looking him up. He's
Adam from the middle years of
You Can't Do That on Television. For those of you Canadians voting for the first or second time who were too young to remember much of
You Can't Do That on Television and who wants to know the earth-shattering implications of Adam Reid endorsing the anti-Harper statement, let me put it this way:
The clerk from the Future Shop commercials doesn't want you to vote for Stephen Harper.
I know, that news is tough to handle. For those of you just joining us now, let me repeat this breaking news item:
THE CLERK FROM THE FUTURE SHOP COMMERCIALS DOESN'T WANT YOU TO VOTE FOR STEPHEN HARPER!
The implications of this might be tough for some of you to digest, but us Harper voters will persevere somehow. Certainly, this alone is not causing me to think twice about who I'm voting for; for that to happen, I'd also have to hear anti-Harper opinions from both the bearded guy who can't stop himself from bringing up various fine products on sale at Canadian Tire in any conversation, and the shrunken, angry, yelling, Scottish guy who thinks Kellogg's is lying about some of its products being mini-sized "because they're huge!"
YOU CAN DO IT, CONSERVATIVE BOY!
I was walking along de Maisonneuve near Concordia today (well, Monday), and I found a whole bunch of these little ads for the youthful-looking (I think he's about 37)
Conservative Party candidate
Robert Gervais (
Robert Gervais' official site), who is running in the Westmount/Ville-Marie riding, comprising the western part of downtown Montreal and Westmount.
Hmm... Am I the only person out there who can't help but notice a remarkable resemblance between Robert Gervais and actor-comedian
Adam Sandler, from
Saturday Night Live and movies including
Billy Madison,
Happy Gilmore,
The Waterboy, and
Anger Management.
Not that I'm voting for him, since I'm not in his riding*, natch, but I'm tempted to go to one of his local campaign rallies just to see if Rob Schneider shows up as the "Townie" character just to cheer Gervais on!
* Though I will be voting for his Conservative slate-mate Robert Ramage, who my mother says is sometimes called plain "Bert Ramage", not that I'm too sure how she knows that.
I LOVE DiC!!! NOW I CAN LOOK AT STREAMING DiC VIDEO OVER THE INTERNET!!!
Oh cool! Kidvid syndicator
DiC Entertainment has licensed several of their shows to be streamed online for free at
Yahoo Yahooligans TV, and the quality of the streaming video is remarkable. Plus, there are several episodes of each on the site. I'm honestly very impressed there. Nothing like the time in 1998 that
Animerica mentioned that one Japanese site that was streaming episodes of the, at the time, unlicensed
Fushigi Yuugi, and I tried watching it in Real Player, and, depending on how much was happening on the screen at a time, I got, at best, around 2 frames a second, but, sometimes, it was more like one frame every five seconds, and these frames were blocky and tiny.
The ones of most interest to "kids" my age, 29, would be:
The Super Mario Brothers Super Show, which I watched way too much as a 15 year old. It's got Captain Lou Albano from the WWF as Mario and... umm... Danny Wells as Luigi. (Wow, Danny Wells played a bum street person in the Montreal-shot Growing Pains reunion movie. Because they really had to bring in an actor from the States to play a bum, as though we don't have enough along here, especially on Sainte Catherine's between Fort and Atwater.) Ah, the three different versions of the rap song that they played every episode... "Do the Mario! Swing your arms from side to side..." And the great guest stars, like Scott Baio and Magic Johnson. To quote a Super Mario Bros. Super Show article from back when Matt Caracappa used to be much meaner:
Magic Johnson: Hey guys...mind if I come in?
Luigi: Why sure!
Mario: Yeah Magic, it's only 1989. No one's scared that you'll spill blood on them yet!
By the way, is it just me, or is the background music during the live-action scenes in the default episode "Fortune Teller"/"Mario Meets Koopzilla" very reminiscent of parts of Joe Hisaishi's score for the greatest Hayao Miyazaki film of all, Oscar be damned, Kiki's Delivery Service? But, since both productions date back from 1989, this can only be purely coincidental, probably both inspired by a third piece of music.
The Legend of Zelda, which showed up on the aforementioned Super Mario Brothers Super Show every Friday, if I remember correctly, and is worth watching if just to make a drinking game out of every time Link said "Well, excuse me, princess!", which he pronounced, "Well, ex-cyuuuuuuuu-ssseeee me, princess!" I like how, in the default episode, Link gets out of bed, not wearing pants, and he does a pretty little curtsy, and then his weapon grows powerful, and he starts shooting stuff out of his sword in three big spurts, and says, "That's how I like to start a morning!" Umm-hmm, I'm sure it is! I don't think that's a bad way to start a morning either!
The Littles, which is a good cartoon to show to any anime fanboy who is whining about how "American" cartoons like The Teen Titans or Totally Spies (which isn't even American but French) are "ripping-off" the anime style, OH NOEZ! Well, The Littles looks very anime-ish and was on the air way back in 1983, so this phenomena is nothing new. Of course, I think the main reason that The Littles looks so much like anime is because it was animated by, if I remember correctly, Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS), so the reason it looks like it was drawn by Japanese people is because it was drawn by Japanese people, but it counts as an "American" cartoon. Or maybe "French".
I grew to love DiC in 1982 when I was around 8 or 9, round about the same time when Jean Chalopin and Andy Heyward were first expanding their operation from France to North America, and a lot of other boys in my grade liked DiC too back then, trying out many new DiC-related things for a little while to see if they liked it, but, a few years later, most boys' tastes changed and they grew to like girls and they rejected DiC as something they were into when they were younger but outgrew, and I liked girls too, but, secretly, I also still liked DiC. And, in 1995, they brought over
Sailor Moon, which I had already seen in Japanese, but, still, as a 21 year old who adored
Sailor Moon, I don't think there was any doubt in anyone else's mind that I was a man who loved DiC. The only problem with DiC is that not enough men my age like it, so DiC should make a cartoon aimed at an adult male audience, perhaps based on the popular Sammy/ArcSystem Works game
Guilty Gear X2, because I think
Bridget would be the ideal character with which to re-introduce young-ish men to "The Incredible World of DiC".
And by "DiC", I mean "all cartoons including those produced by companies which aren't DiC".
INDIAN SPIDER-MAN? HOLY COW!
(Oh, "holy cow", bad Steve, very, very bad.)
Check this out, Spider-Man India!
SPIDER-MAN INDIA – SPIDER-MAN EXTENDS FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD TO STREETS OF BOMBAY!
Bangalore, India (June 14, 2004) — Marvel Comics & Gotham Entertainment Group – Indian publishing licensee of Marvel Comics and the leading publisher of international comic magazines in South Asia – announces the launch of Spider-Man India.
Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Man’s mythology more relevant to this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new hero – a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar. As Spider-Man, Pavitr leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian streets, while swinging from monuments such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal.
Mumbai’s (Bombay’s) first web-swinging superhero will be joined by a reinterpretation of the classic Spider-Man villain, the Green Goblin -- reinvented as a Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon.
“We feel this is one of the most exciting and unique projects in comic history,” said Gotham Entertainment Group CEO Sharad Devarajan. “Unlike traditional translations of American comics, Spider-Man India will become the first-ever ‘transcreation,’ where we reinvent the origin of a Western property like Spider-Man so that he is an Indian boy in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges.”
You know, I haven't read Marvel on a regular basis in over a decade, save for picking up a few issues of the
Power Pack revival a couple of years back, and I have no interest in reading manga-fied versions of American comic book characters as is the current fad*, but I would pick this one up if they translated it to English just out of pure curiousity and to see American comic book characters re-imagined in a style that isn't Japanese. I'd claim that the style seen in the link still looks more "American" than "Indian", but I'd be talking out of my ass because I really don't know what Indian comics look like, or whether they even have a characteristic "style" like Japan does.
* Yes, I am aware that the Spider-Man manga that Marvel published in English a few years back was an honest-to-God Japanese manga published in Japan a couple of decades ago and not just American artists drawing their characters with bigger eyes, triangular smiles, and two-tone shading.
FAREWELL, MONTREAL MEGACITY.
As expected,
the bulk of those former Montreal suburbs which went to the polls on Sunday in the demerger referendum voted to demerge.
"The Yes side swept across the Island of Montreal in demerger votes on Sunday winning in 15 municipalities including Westmount and several West Island communities, including Pointe-Claire, Dorval, Kirkland and Baie d'Urfé.
In Westmount over 92 per cent of ballots cast were for demerger.
To be able to demerge, the Yes side needed a simple majority, 50 per cent plus one vote, and the number of Yes votes had to represent at least 35 per cent of the eligible voters in a suburb.
Here is a list of Montreal municipalities that are demerging: Westmount, Mont-Royal, Kirkland, Dorval Island, Dorval, Ste-Anne de Bellevue, Montreal East, Beaconsfield, Senneville, Montreal West, Hampstead, Cote-St-Luc, Baie d'Urfé, Pointe-Claire and Dollard-des-Ormeaux.
Anjou, Sainte-Geneviève, Roxboro, LaSalle, St-Laurent had a majority for the Yes side, but they didn't get above the 35 per cent threshold.
Voters in 22 of the 28 former municipalities that make up the Montreal megacity went to the polls."
So the new map of the city of Montreal will have a thin arm sticking out of the borough of Saint Laurent all of the way along the north coast of the island of Montreal, consisting of Roxboro, Pierrefonds, and the former tiny little itty bitty suburb of Saint Genvieve, and, if the
Cap St. Jacques Nature Park in the western limits of the former suburb of Pierrefonds can be pictured as the "hand" at the end of the arm, the former island suburb of Île Bizard is the baseball bouncing in the hand of the arm. Hmm... I can vividly picture the new western limits of the city of Montreal... the intersection of Gouin Boulevard and the Anse de l'Orme Road (which leads down to the Timberlea area of Kirkland), just before Gouin turns into Senneville Road. Montreal West, Hampstead, Cote-St-Luc, Westmount, and Mont-Royal, are the new Swiss cheese holes in the bulky central bit of the Island of Montreal, and... umm... Montreal East is a large bite taken out of the easternmost part of the island, along the Saint Lawrence river. (I don't know that part of Montreal that well, to be perfectly honest. There be dragons, sea serpents, and a lot of
poutine restaurants, ahrrrrrr!) Well, if Montreal East, or, as it prefers to be known, Montréal-Est, voted to demerge, that does destroy the myth that it was only suburbs with a sizeable English population that wanted out.
I'll come out of the closet though. Throughout my adult life, which is a little more than a decade now, I have always liked the idea of "One Island, One City", and, in fact, I wouldn't even stop there. I'd make most of the Monteregie region the city of Montreal, including Laval and Longueuil, much of the North Shore, the South Shore all of the way to Chateauguay, and the Vaudreuil area. However, this has crap all to do with former Montreal mayor Pierre Borque's little pet project, which the then-governing Parti Quebecois railroaded through. I like the bigness of the general concept, how it seems like a very
Jean Drapeau idea. I'm not content to have Montreal be the "Canadian Boston", with a core city of around a million and a hundred little suburbs, I am convinced that Montreal should rightfully be a city of four or five million and growing at this point and the reason it's not is that three decades of uncertainty over the separation question coupled with a massive anglophone exodus after Bill 101, the fascist anti-English language law, moved the economic heart of Canada and most of the head offices down the 401 to Toronto.
I'd have Montreal run very much like the
Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which is a prefecture that is just one large city, Tokyo-to, however with many semi-autonomous cities, towns, and villages running most of their own affairs outside the central city but within the city limits. Cities like
Machida-shi, where Tatsuki "Machida Black" Kuroi lives in
Super GALS!.* Or, I'd run it like
Greater London. Pretty much the same thing as Tokyo, really. Same general idea. I don't think it's really all that different from the way the boroughs operated (or will still operate, in many cases) in Montreal, but with greater autonomy on a much larger scale.
I also think a united Montreal, even as it was up until Sunday, possessed some advantages to federalist Anglophones.
- In the event of a "Yes" vote in a Quebec sovereignty referendum, which they will have to do even if both sides deny it and even if "partition" is a politically incorrect word around these parts, considering that the majority of residents of the island of Montreal would vote "No", a united Montreal stands a much better chance of staying within Canada, presumably forming the capital of the new Canadian province of West Quebec, which would have, at the very least, Montreal, the Vaudreuil area all of the way to the border for continuity's sake, the Gatineau area, the Pontiac area, and the Eastern Townships, and probably some land link around Maine to New Brunswick. A patchwork Montreal could lead to messier borders and more border disputes than there would otherwise be.
- Even if there won't be another sovereignty referendum during my lifetime, I'm not totally unconvinced that a united Montreal wouldn't lead to greater anglophone influence in Quebec City, as anglophone voters would have much more clout in a united Montreal, and more anglophone representatives would be elected to City Hall.
In the real world, the Quebec public service unions are terrible (and, in some cases, literal) shit disturbers and there are all sorts of messy issues over bilingual status, but, hopefully, that would be resolved over time with "work to rule" legislation and the abolishment of the language laws.
All that being said, I think the way that the merger legislation was undemocratically railroaded through by the PQ government was abhorrent, and, while I think that the general idea of a merger was a perfectly defensible idea, the Quebec government should have taken years advertising the benefits of a merged city and consulted the suburbs as to how things should be run and what powers they should retain in a merged city, and then the residents of these suburbs should have been given a chance to vote on the idea. Unfortunately, the way their towns and cities were stolen from them was not the way to go about things, and I understand the emotional appeal of wanting their suburbs back, and their joy that they have them back at last, even if they're not quite the same as before. Unfortunately, the way the merger was totally botched by Borque and the P.Q. will sour the suburbs on the idea of a megacity for decades to come.
Of course, I live in Pincourt, which was never part of the Montreal Urban Community and is outside the city limits, so, if you're an Anglophone Montrealer offended that I probably would have voted no, just remember that I didn't vote at all and my opinion is moot. I don't expect to make you think that you made a bad choice, I just wanted to put my point of view forward now that it's moot twice over (since it's over and since I couldn't vote). Since the way the merger was handled was so poor, I'm not upset that many of the former suburbs have been restored.
Anyhow, to commemorate people getting their towns back, enjoy this undoctored photo of me with formerly "former", now current, Westmount Mayor Peter Trent.
That was at my Dawson College convocation in 1999, and Dawson is mostly within Westmount, with a few classrooms on the Atwater side just within Montreal city limits, so Peter Trent was presiding over the ceremony. I forget why I'm hesitant to shake his hand, but I think that the Rector (or Dean or Principal or whatever) of Dawson College was standing just outside the frame and I was feeling some confusion as to whom to approach. I still get a chuckle out of this picture. I think I had a few more pounds back then, though I could still stand to lose a few.
* Machida is also, coincidentally, where my first Japanese pen pal, A____, lived, so I got the "Machida Black" reference in Mihona Fujii's GALS! manga right away.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TERMINAL?
In regards to
the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks film The Terminal not opening in Montreal this weekend just past, I started a thread at Rotten Tomatoes called
"Why is Quebec waiting for THE TERMINAL?", and I got this response from
"Dancing Potato", a guy who I believe lives in
Ren & Stimpy creator
John Kricfalusi's hometown. (Huh? Shit, it's no longer called "Chicoutimi", now it's just plain
Ville du Saguenay. I did not know that.)
"I answered this somewhere else, but anyway, the distributor made some last minute changes to the English print, which meant the French print needed to be re-dubbed. In order to have both versions released simultaneously, they skipped a week."
Ah, I thought it probably had something to do with the dub. It's a bother for someone who only wants to see the English version, but such is the price of living in the province of Quebec, so I understand.
Speaking of
The Terminal, it
only came in second this weekend with a disappointing take of $18.7 million, behind the new comedy
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn (which I may also see this coming week). Well, it will be getting my $10.50 Canadian this coming week. At least it didn't flop big like Disney's
Around the World in 80 Days with Jackie Chan and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (before he was elected, duh), which opened at 9th with just $6.8 million. I may see that out of pity, since billionaire
Philip Anschutz sank a lot of investment project into that project hoping to make more family friendly films. Of course, the anti-Eisner ideologues will make great hay about that, as though most families stayed away due to their personal opinions on Michael Eisner, which I don't think is terribly likely...
OH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, AOL INSTANT MESSENGER POP-UP WINDOW HEADLINE-ACCOMPANYING PICTURE CHOOSER GUY:
For the Father's Day headline "Which TV Dad is Yours?", you just had to choose a picture of
Homer Simpson to represent the general concept of "Dad". Well, let me tell you, nearly every mainstream media source everywhere chooses him every single fricking year. It's getting old, really old. Maybe, if you chose Homer in the mid-90s, it would have represented how cutting edge, unconventional, non-conformist thinkers you guys* in the AIM Pop-Up Window Content Industry are. Using Homer as the proto-Dad today, it reveals you all to be followers of what's safe, conventional, and very conformist, stale thinkers.
I never actually believed the
pseudo-academic position that Homer was the most best father on television, thinking they ignored a heckuva lot of episodes where he was very negligent, but, at least in the mid-90s, I understood where those people were coming from. But Homer went from being semi-intelligent in the "good" years of
The Simpsons (defined as everything up to and including the 1995-96 season) to a sweet, loving dumb guy in the mediocre years (1996-97 season to 1999-2000 season) to a total buffoon over the past four crap seasons (2000-01 to 2003-04, and probably every season to come). He totally ignores his kids, except when it's convenient to the plot, and irresponsibly changes his job every other episode**, still maintaining employment at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant due to Charles Montgomery Burns's short memory, presumably.
Hank Hill is an all-around much better father. He's very attentive to and concerned by the needs, problems, relationships, habits, social status, development, entertainment choices, bedroom decor, weight, and hobbies of his son,
Bobby. In return, Bobby gives his father a great deal of honour and respect, something
Bart Simpson has never done without snickering.
Hank has a stable job which he loves, selling propane and propane-related accessories, and, the handful of time he dipped his toe into the possibility of exploring other vocations, they were only side-endeavours he was pursuing for episode-specific reason, like the time he became a "pimp" in "Ho, Yeah!". The
King of the Hill writers wisely use
Dale Gribble as the character who can change vocational (and literal) hats on a whim, but, since Dale runs his own unlicensed extermination business, Dale's Dead Bug, he's self-employed and doesn't have to worry about any boss. And, even then, Dale Gribble is still a much better father to Joseph*** They also use Hank's wife
Peggy Hill, who's only works a couple of days a week as a subsitute teacher at Tom Landry elementary, so she has a lot of spare time for side pursuits too.
Hank also shows a lot of self-restraint, avoiding pornography and the temptation of other women, even his live-in niece,
Luann Platter (who has a tendency to dress skimpy), which demonstrates his respect of a healthy marriage, providing a stable environment with which to raise Bobby. And Hank doesn't care too much for walking on the wild side of life, preferring the homeostasis of his stable small town life, resisting anything that might endanger his own personal status quo, to the point of wanting to turn himself in the one time he accidentally tried marijuana. He even dresses modestly, always double-knotting his dressing gown if he thinks there's any chance Luann is around.
Hank has his faults, usually relating to his being too conservative (in life, I mean, not politically) and his stubborness against bending in situations where he ought to bend, like his difficulty accepting his mother's new Jewish "boyfriend", and his strained relationship with his father, Cotton Hill (though that's more Cotton's fault than it is Hank's), but, overall, I think he's a far better example of television fatherhood than is Homer Simpson and I'm mystified as to how Homer's picture keeps on popping up on Father's Day year after year. I know it's not exactly an endorsement from the AOL Instant Messenger Pop-Up Window Content Industry people of the way fathers should raise their children, but, considering the way Homer is
now, it's almost an insult against fathers to feature him as the proto-image of TV fathers. I could, if I tried, quite easily make a case for even fricking Tony Soprano being a better TV father than is Homer Simpson, if you ignore Tony's day job.
At least the
AIM Today page has a picture of Bill Cosby as Cliff Huxtable as the "everydad", a much better choice, even if a lot of radicals hated
The Cosby Show for presenting a too positive view of the "black experience", as though blacks are some sort of "Borg collective" with one communistic shared experience. But I digress.
End of where I'm trying to make a coherent point. Now for the aimless, tangential, ranting.
To be somewhat fair to
The Simpsons, I guess it's also an indictment of how crappy most television is these days that they can't find another TV dad quite as iconic as Homer that has come on the air in the nearly 15 years since
The Simpsons premiered as a regular series in December 1989. Hank is a better father, but
King of the Hill in general is just not as recognized as
The Simpsons, because
King of the Hill is much slower-paced and not quite as focused on visual gags and pop culture in-jokes, not counting dream sequences, choosing instead to focus on solid writing and character development, and, as a result, many people are just bored by
King of the Hill since it's not what they're looking for in a cartoon, and that's fine. (If I'm going to criticize them for being bored by
King of the Hill, then I'd be a hypocrite since I've complained about people complaining about my own being bored at
Lord of the Rings and
Jin-Roh. Those things aren't my bag, and
King of the Hill isn't their bag and that is that.) At least enough people watch
King of the Hill to warrant it getting renewed season after season, and it hasn't reached the point where I think it should come to a creative end, where guest stars appear as themselves on the show, to show the audience that they don't take themselves too seriously (or so their agent wants you to believe) more often than they ar they're used as the voices of one-episode characters and
K,ing of the Hill has had high-wattage stars like Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt over the past season, though you'd be forgiven if you didn't know it was them since, while they do mention in the promos that a certain star will be appearing as the voice of the character, they don't milk every guest appearance for all it's worth, like how you saw all those newspaper articles about Tony Blair and J.K. Rowling and Ian McKellan appearing as themselves on that "Simpsons go to England" episode of
The Simpsons last November. Yippee! That episode turned out to be total shit! But it had celebrities... playing themselves... in really forced cameos!
Ah, this is already much too long. I'll stop.
* When I say "guys", I mean, including girls.
** By the way, to any Late Night with Conan O'Brien staffers who might be reading this: "Marge vs. the Monorail", which Conan wrote shortly before leaving for NBC, is one of the best episodes overall for humour, make no mistake about it, but I trace the seeds of The Simpsons current malaise to that very episode, even if it's seen as a classic, perhaps only because every other "Homer gets a crazy new vocation" episode is an inferior copy of Conan's finest hour as a Simpsons writer... well, "finest hour" of the three-and-a-bit episodes that Conan actually got the writing credit for.
*** Who is his son in every way except biologically, not that either Dale or Joseph is aware that John Redcorn is Joseph's real father.
PFK: Poutine? Francophone Kibble...
For Father's Day, my sister and her boyfriend got my parents tickets to see tonight's Montreal Expos game against the Chicago White Sox, since tonight was a special evening wherein
Tim Raines' #30 was retired. Evidently,
the pitching was shit tonight, on both sides, as there was a real home run rally which the Expos won 17-14.
I stayed home, to take care of the dogs, and I wanted to get some image captures of
Super GALS! using the DVD-ROM drive on my father's computer, so I didn't mind staying home.
I ordered my usual Spicy Big Crunch combo from KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), or, as it's called in the province of Quebec, PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky), and, about an hour later, I received my order, with one thing I wasn't quite inspecting: my fries had been replaced by
poutine!!! I most certainly didn't order that!
What is poutine? It's french fries, which would be fine "as is". But those Francophone Quebecers have iron stomachs, so they don't leave well-enough alone and they soak them in gravy... and then put cheese on top, and not even good tasting cheese, but, rather, cheese curds. I like french fries, just fine; I don't like them in a mixture that has the same rough constituency and viscosity as dog vomit.
But, there was nothing I could do about it, so I had to force myself to eat the mixture, since I hadn't even tried poutine in well over a decade, and I was hoping to have an experience like the protagonist at the end of Dr. Seuss's
Green Eggs and Ham, seeing if my tastes have changed. Nope, it's still disgusting, but, at least now it's an "informed disgust".
:P
I had to slather the fries with Heinz ketchup, or Ms. John Kerry-brand ketchup if you prefer, to drown out the taste,
ignoring Louie the Lifeguard's timeless advice from ABC Saturday mornings in the late 1970s and early 1980s*, though some of the fries towards the bottom weren't soggy with gravy and were semi-salvagable.
I sure hope this was an honest mistake and that poutine isn't the new "default" chicken-product compliment. So, to anyone at the KFC/PFK telephone dispatch at (514) 364-4444, here's a fun little tip for you to help you better serve your customers.
Q: How can I tell if a customer doesn't want poutine?
A: If he's making the order in English, he wants french fries!
Actually, my ethnically British (though born in Malta) mother sometimes orders poutine, so some anglophones actually like it.
In closing, some lyrics from
Bowser and Blue.
The Night They Invented Poutine
The night they invented poutine.
It was a most peculiar scene.
Ginette Reno was shy and thin.
The Nordiques began to win.
Jacques Parizeau sang "God save the Queen!"
The night they invented poutine...
The night they invented poutine...
Bowser: No one knows the precise origin,
Where or when this food did begin.
Everybody in Québec will tell you with a grin,
It was their little village that invented the poutine.
Blue: To be really authentic the potatoes must be old,
The gravy must be hot and the cheese must be cold,
With a Journal de Montréal wherever it is sold,
Served with a roll in a bowl by a troll.
Bowser: You put some potatoes and some cheese in a tin,
But the cheese won't melt till you put the gravy in,
Then it sticks to your fork and dribbles down your chin,
And that's how you know that you're eating a poutine.
Blue: If the French fries are greasy and the gravy's nice and hot,
The cheese curds melt as they come out of the pot,
But once in your stomach they congeal into a knot,
If your food does that then poutine is what you've got.
Bowser: Some use mozzarella but that isn't really it.
And they serve it at McDonalds but the French fries are shit!
And I hate to be picky but I have to admit,
It's hard to eat when the cook has a zit!
Blue: There's no way anyone would call it haute cuisine,
But it's not really junk food it's something in between,
But it's better than a burger or a Mike's submarine,
A balanced diet is a beer and a poutine!
*In the "Don't Drown Your Food" PSA.
