Late Night Programming

Yawn.  Stretch.  Man!  These weekend nights can be a grind, especially when there's nothing going on the great province of...

o/`  Our home and native land...  o/`

There's a TV back here at the dispatcher's desk and I flip through once in a while.  By and large the selection is crap.  Sometimes there's the odd movie on, but it's usually not very good - hence why I opt to write at night a bunch of the time.  However, there are a few gems out there and I'd like to share them with my fellow night owls.  Well, I'm only a part-time night owl, really.  I'm in bed by 10:30 during the week, and this is all kind of a moot point because I'm dialing up Humber's perfect game and listening to that tonight instead of the tube.  Nevertheless, here we go!


JUDGE JOE BROWN

SOLD!  *WHACK!*  ...  I mean, GUILTY!  *WHACK!*  ...  Can I unwhack something after it's been whacked?

I must confess: I never had the time to watch court TV.  It always seems so...  I dunno...  It seems like something that should be private.  You get a couple of slobs up there arguing their case and how they done been wronged and my conscience says that, hey, this is really something that's none of my business.  In fact, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it if all court cases were kept firmly behind closed doors.  But if they really feel compelled to be on camera and the courts are O.k. with it then go ahead and fill your boots.
Now before I start talking about the actual show, I'd like to start with the parody of the show, and a particularly biting parody if I must say.  The best parodies are the ones that seem the closest to the truth, and this one cuts pretty close to the bone.  I speak, of course, of Just or Unjust, the fictional, satirical courtroom (or rather "courtroom" as it apparently doubles as a...

See that guy on the left?  With the wolf helmet?  Ronald Kuby.

...where they battle to the death) on WKTT, a fictional radio station in the game Grand Theft Auto IV.  The judge, the star of the show, is misogynistic, inept, black, and just a little bit right of Papa Doc on the political spectrum.  Now where have I seen this before?

I'm a judge.  What exactly did you expect?  This isn't a courtroom!  It's a studio!

Well, it's not that bad.  I can see where the satire is coming from (especially perhaps the inept part - video editing can sure help anyone look smart), but really he doesn't seem all that bad.  In fact, I find the show somewhat entertaining.  He really doesn't screw around at all and seems rather open-minded, in spite of how he's lampooned.  And, generally, the more smug the defendant, the better the show.  So, good stuff.  I didn't anticipate this being as good as it is.  Way to go, Joe!


STORAGE WARS / PAWN STARS

I could do entries for both of these shows separately, but then I thought nah, we'll just lump them together.  Yeah, they both fit into the category of shows that I like to call...

Oh please, please tell me how much this piece of crap is worth!

It's getting to be a sickness, I think.  First there was Antiques Roadshow...

Not to be confused with the crooks at Artiques Roadshow.  I've actually (or rather, artctually) spoken with the bozo on the right.

And that was fine and quaint and British and whatever.  Invariably old people would take dusty old relics down to this meeting hall where some dusty old expert would let them know that they'd either discovered Oliver Cromwell's walnut chiffonier, which could fetch upwards of £750.00 at auction, or a collection of wood scraps (a "reproduction") that would find peak resale value as campfire fuel.  And that show was fine.  It had all of us thinking that if you dug through the basement hard enough you might uncover something that was at one time owned by Harthacnut.  But then there's this nonsense.

Ooo!  What could it be?  I think I see St. Cyril's long lost Loving Spoonful albums!

Gimme a break.  That might be interesting for a show or two, but it gets real old real quick.  Granted...

This guy's pretty cool and gives me fantasies of what Dustin Hoffman does in his spare time.

...and...

I do love a good villain, and this jerk's up there with Ebeneezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve.

...but...

Presenting Phillip Seymour Hoffman and woman-who-holds-clipboard.

...and the rest of the crew are just so...  Well, I think of it like this.  Do I really want to look over everyone's shoulder as they go to work?  Loggers, truckers, fishermen - those are all fine and well and may by exciting from time to time, but this is just getting silly now.  Who cares what the hell they find in an old storage container?  It's getting to the point where I'm concerned that one day I'll walk into work and cameras will start following me around for a new A&E series, "THE PROPERTY GUYS" chronicling our *yawn* trials and tribulations as we *yawn* attempt to manage parking lots in...  *snore*


MTV LIVE

I must confess, I...  I, uh...  I don't get it.  Well, O.k.  Let me see if I can put myself back into the right frame of mind.  I was a kid once, after all, and these guys are really quite popular...

read: poo-poo-lar

...amongst the kids.  But I don't get it.  Mind you, there are a few things that I don't get that I once got that I watch late at night on MuchMusic that now just mystify me how I ever thought they were cool in the first place.

I liked this crap?!  What was I thinking..?

So with this in mind I've stuck it out and watched a few episodes.  You really have to take the little dial deep inside of you labelled "maturity" and dial it down a ways, pretty much to the low end of the scale.  There are a lot of jokes, gags, and pop culture references that kinda go over my head, but by and large I can see what they're doing, but I don't fully get it.  The show's not really all that live, either.  Especially not at 5 a.m.  Now fortunately...

I just tune the other hosts out, really...

Sheena's really cute!  I get that part!  She's cute, but unfortunately AB-SO-LUTE-LY-FROOT-LOOPS.  So I guess you can't have everything in life.  Oh well.  Keep fishing.


THE DUDESONS

Mm.  I didn't know if I should include this one or not, but I thought ah, what the hell?  Why not?

A quartet of charming rogues ready, willing, and able to injure themselves for your enjoyment.

The Dudesons are this gang of kids (well, not really kids as they're all my age now) from this town in Finland and they do the whole snowboard, dirt bike, stupid stunt crap that the good ole boys at Jackass made their living off of.  Only the Dudesons, I believe, were doing it first in the 90's, whereas Jackass only went on the air first in 2000.  The really amazing thing here to figure is that they've been doing this more or less for twenty years now and they can still actually move.  Amazing!  Oh, and you have to find that little "maturity" dial again and dial it all the way down again for this.

Anyway, for my money, far and away their best work is the Mr. Hitler sketches, especially #2.

Yeah!  That guy!

So this guy, this poor unlucky guy, just so happens to be the Dudesons' neighbour.  For all of the nasty things that they allege "Mr. Hitler" is guilty of, if I was the Dudesons' neighbour I'd probably slam the door in their face if they wanted a cup of sugar, too.  I won't go into detail about sketch #1.  Suffice to say they take a shit in mailbox.  Yeah.  Classy.  You were warned.  Watch at your own peril with that one.  #2 though is way better!  They put on these furry costumes and call themselves...

If I didn't know any better, I'd guess that this was a Beastie Boys video.

Then they wait until Mr. Hitler leaves, dig out his driveway with a backhoe (in costume!) and wait for him to drive home.  Hilarity ensues.  As mean and stupid as this is, I have to admit that it's rather inspired.  Credit where credit is due I always say.


INFOMERCIALS

They're not all bad.  Actually, they're not all bad, but they do mostly follow the same format: the pitch guy...

This ain't no ordinary tea towel!

...and the stooge...

OHMYGODREGULARTEATOWELSAREDISGUSTING!!!

I often find that the pitchman and the stooge really have to work in conjunction to make a great team.

Liquified canaries you say Billy?

I do say, Janet.

Celebrity endorsements help.

Well...  To an extent, anyway.

Of course, you need a dynamite product, too.

Introducing: THE VESSEL!  Ideal for storing olive oil, shampoo, sodium pentathol, liquified canaries, and much, much more!

And a creative design will ensure that your product gets noticed.

Hm.  A vacuum.  How novel.  Sure can't get that at Zellers.

Follow these simple rules and you too will have a product that will be impossible to keep on the shelves.
And that's all the time we have for today.  I hope you enjoyed this guide to late night programming, but please don't stay up late on my account.  Good night!

Rêver

Good evening!  Thank you all for coming.  It's Saturday night and it looks like it's going to be an awfully slow one at this rate, so time to perform some writing and some thinking and then slather it all over the internet for everyone to gawk at.  Tonight's topic, for anyone who cannot or will not read French is to dream.  Follow along with me as we take a look down memory lane and see what dreams may come.


Explorer

Now, if you take a look around the mess of my upstairs office, you'll notice that I have more than a few books on exploration and cartography, including, I might add, the only biography of Mercator written in English.  To my knowledge, anyway.  Jealous?  Maybe, maybe not, but I read it all cover to cover while I was having this done to my left foot.

Well, there's your problem!  Hard to believe that those are medicinal in any way by just looking at it.

Jealous?  Oh, and my Mom was amazing, too, while I was in the hospital that weekend!  Thanks, Mom!  Anyway, I loved the book.  It was just amazing that someone who could and did map the entire world without traveling more than, say, 500 km his entire life.  It's just mind blowing.  Such a cool guy.

Anyway, back to me and the encyclopedias.  I would sift through the encyclopedias and look at all of these countries (circa. 1979, by the way) and read about all of these far away lands and look at all these amazing maps.  Places like the splendor of Machu Pichu, the venerability of Stonehenge, the vastness of Siberia captured my imagination.  More than that, I'd look at the little maps and see that there was oil in Romania, and that people mined this stuff called bauxite, and that hey!  This book knows there's potash here!  How cool is that?!  There were these trains that you could get on and sit down and drive around in - not just freight trains, but people trains, and that they went really fast in Japan!  And Japan had their own Eiffel Tower and it was red.  And the Romans and Greeks and Chinese of old built all kinds of cool stuff that's all broken these days.  It was all truly awesome in the real sense of the world for someone that thought that...

It looked a lot bigger when I was a kid.  I mean, it had stop and go lights!

...was the biggest place in the world.  And so I read about everything in the world and was amazed.

And then something dawned on me.

Come in Pelham 123.  What do you mean the train has been taken?

Satellites.  Once I realized that Galaxy and Anik and Telstar existed and that what they could do was they could take TV in some far off place and beam it over to somewheres else and BAM! you're watching Disney Channel, the world got a lot smaller.  Then it dawned on me that those same things, those satellites, had cameras and could take pictures of the whole world, wherever they wanted to, the world didn't just get smaller, it got solved.  There would be no more Bartolomeu Dias sailing beyond where anyone had thought possible or Abel Tasman finding things off the grid and beyond belief, or Samuel Fritz charting some of the most wicked, anti-human places on earth.  There wouldn't need to be cause there were now planes and satellites and all kinds of inventions which pretty much said "Congratulations, humanity!  You win!  There earth has now been fully explored.  Take a bow."  So that kinda dashed my dreams of being an explorer.  Sure, there's underwater exploration and space exploration, but it's just not the same, you know?  Not near as romantic or as cool.

And a dream of mine was dashed, but something good did come of it.  When the 1994 Great Canadian Geography Challenge came by and I took the test, I got first place in the school.  Then I got 3rd place in the province and got a sweet ass trip to Ottawa to take part in the Nationals and shake hands with this guy.

That's Alex Trebek - with mustache, as it should be.

This wasn't the first time that I actually, you know, won at something.  For that we have to take a look at the next dream.  Oh, and I finished in the middle of the pack in Ottawa, so whatever.  But it was awesome!


Musician

Well, I couldn't be an explorer - that much was established.  So it was to be a few years later that I discovered that, hey, I'm pretty gifted musically.  I picked up a trumpet and took organ lessons.  Know what the first cassette tape I can remember owning was?

Here's a hint: it wasn't Glass Tiger.

God, I remember listening to this album on my little cassette deck with these little metal banded headphones at night in my bed with the lights out  under the covers with my eyes closed just letting my mind drift and wander.  I had no idea no idea who this guy Coltrane was, whether he was living or dead or what.  My Uncle Dale got me this for Christmas one year and I listened to it and it was like my world was changed!  I grew up in a world of AM country music, Beavis and Butthead, and church hymns, and that was about it for music.  Oh, and Mom's Culture Club cassette.  But this Coltrane was unlike anything I had ever heard before because there were no words!  No words!  It was all just instruments playing, in sync with each other, fighting with each other, raging and screaming and silky smooth.  I listened to that tape over and over again and I embraced it, and I will tell you this: after listening to Coltrane my mind would not be blown again until 1998 when I first heard...

Little known fact: they're not actually brothers.

...and all of a sudden my mind is blown again because they're making music without instruments at all!

But now I'm getting sidetracked.  So in early 1994 I was given my first trumpet solo and I will never, ever forget it.  Shorty George.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I borrowed the cassette one of the recording of the song for a while so I could listen to it and get a feel to it and I fell in love with the pride of Redbank, NJ.  As far as I'm concerned, he was the embodiment of minimalist piano playing.  And the music just swung.  It just broke later, glided smoother, and hung out further than anything I heard before.  The best way that I can think of to describe Basie's style is like this: get up, get outta bed, have a shower, get yourself looking and smelling real nice, put on your nicest suit, take a walk downtown, sit down on a bench in an area with heavy foot traffic, lean back, relax, smile, and watch the world go by.  That's Basie.  And I loved it.  So, I did my solo, and it was great.  I was in band, jazz band, and choir and I loved music, and gee whiz if I didn't get the shock of my life.  I'm sitting at another boring assembly in the gym, minding my own business when all of a sudden my name is called.  My name was called.  I was the Jr. Musician of the Year.  I'd never won anything in my life before and all of a sudden there it was.  There were others that I thought were better than me, sure, but I won.  Wow...  It was a shock and a true,  deep joy that I still carry with me - literally, since I still have the little trophy.

So then later on we packed up and moved to Estevan and I went to band again, but it was all new people.  And they were rich!  And snooty!  And they went to band camp!  Horrors!  And they had silver trumpets!  And I had by dented $50 trumpet that Mom got for me at MacLarens in...

It really does look a lot smaller from the air...  The Parkland Mall's there somewhere and I swear it's huge!

 ...and so I didn't have a chance.  It took me three years to, you know, get over it and start re-asserting myself, and it felt good to, you know, be good at it cause I had a lot of pride in it.  It was one of my best classes and the one that I looked forward to most every day.  But then when my teacher said that I should try out for a scholarship for musical education at Minot State University, I got vetoed.  Mom said no.  That was kind of a heart-breaker, but I now appreciate her reasoning.  The ratty old trumpet, which the teacher wouldn't even let me play for my last major performance cause it was so decrepit...  Well, I abandoned that old trumpet one day.  I just left it in the band room on the last day of school and along with it the dream.

I still played some piano, though, and I bought a mandolin later.  Lost the mandolin to the flood last year, though.  The piano may be beyond my capabilities, but there's just something about playing Strange Meadow Lark...  The F# that you hit there - if you know the song, you'll know what I mean - the one most poignant note I've ever heard or played.  And if I could sum up how I feel about the dream of being a musician, really, it would be Strange Meadow Lark and that F#.  You want the lark to fly high, you want it to hit that G, but no matter how many times you play it or listen to it, it always, always comes up a half-step short.


Writer

Now here's a dream that I haven't totally given up on as evidenced by this blog!  Ha ha!  Well, let's see now.  My first time out of the nest was a disaster.  Total failure.  I got two jobs but lost them both quick, got depressed, and moved back home a wreck.  As a de-wrecked myself, I started, well, writing.  I would listen to music and sit on my bed with a mechanical pencil and these coil bound books that I picked up in town and I would write.  Write what?  Short stories.  Well, they weren't short-stories.  The first ones weren't, anyway.  The first ones were like this huge nebulous mass that was chapter after chapter after chapter of two different stories.  But they were spy stories...

Only in my iteration, it was more like a Sandra Bullock from Demolition Man crossed with James Bond.  Weird, I know.

...and fantasy stories...

I'd illustrate, but man were they God awful in hindsight.

None of those ones ever got finished, but I can't tell you how good it felt to have some sort of creative outlet again.  I still have them in a box upstairs.  After I realized, though, that massive, never-ending stories don't work, I switched to short-stories and then my output just hit overdrive.  I would write one or two a month on top of a full course load at university - which I think ended up being part of my downfall, because instead of Musical Education, I decided on Administration cause we all agreed that I'd have a knack for that.  Well, I bombed (among other things) economics and threw my hands up in the air.  But I still wrote and still do from time to time.  Not as much as I would like to, though.  I suppose working seven days a week...

This is an artist's rendition.  May not be completely accurate.

...doesn't leave a whole lot of time to pursue intellectual projects.  I find that this here blog helps, though, to keep me creatively limber, or thereabouts, in case I do get, you know, find inspiration and get to writing again.  Someday I'd like to write something wicked cool and publish in some crappy journal and have a modicum of success just to say that I did it.  Someday, but it's still just a dream right now.  An achievable one, perhaps, but just a dream.


Philosopher

So, the world was ending.  Like this:

Boom goes the dynamite.

Well, sort of.  I left home, crapped the bed, and came crawling back to my parents' place.  While recuperating, though, on top of writing, I did some reading.  I started reading the Tao Te Ching.  Up until then all I had ever known as far as any sort of religion or philosophy was concerned was Lutheranism.  I had felt useless, powerless, and abandoned.  I don't mean abandoned by my family.  No matter how bad I've ever screwed up, they've always, always been there for me.  I felt abandoned spiritually.  So, in order to save myself I had made the conscious decision to take everything I know and everything I was taught about religion and spirituality and strip it down to the foundations and start all over again.

So, I went to university in Regina and took Administration.  And bombed.  Like this:

But I did do rather well in Philosophy - so well, in fact, that the Philosophy Department sent me a letter saying "Don't be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Philosophy Party".  I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.  And so I thought to myself, gee...  No one else sent me a letter.  Well, fine then.  And I started studying philosophy.  Not only do I enjoy it, I really enjoy it.  And I seem to excel at it!  You know, I'll never be Spinoza, but I'm competent.

Here's the thing.  In 2003, I quit university to move to Guelph, but last fall I took my first class since then and I did fine.  I brought up the class average and I did it writing philosophical essays about...

What better illustration of medieval philosophy is there than a sandwich?

...and...


Oh, I know!  A baseball!  Genius!

...and other sundry topics.  And it worked!  I remember planning the sandwich essay over and over again in my head and I thought to myself that this will either work or get laughed out of the classroom, and it ended up getting an 84 with a class average of 70.  Being a decade older than the other kids in the class, not taking a class for the best part of a decade, and then come out smelling like a rose?  This is one dream that's alive and kicking still, and it feels good.  I suppose more than anything that this is one dream that got away and then I chased back after it, corralled in and brought it back home.  It can be done.


Procurement

Now, after looking at this list, there's not a lot that I can really add to it.  I wasn't ever going to become...

Mua ha ha ha ha...

with this...

...ha ha ha ha- ow.

...so that was never really a dream.  Beyond that, not much.  Maybe have a family, see some more of the world that I've seen, but that's about it.  So, you know, I wonder...  Can new dreams be... planted?  Seeded?  Cultivated? 

It seems a lot easier as a child.  When your world is playing, games, neat stuff to do at school it seems to me that dreams come a lot easier, move around more freely and are more easily grasped and taken hold of.  Nowadays it seems like there's work, there's home, there's bills, there's friends and family, and there's good old bed, which is gonna feel so nice in three hours, by the way.  Honestly, I don't even know where to begin. 

Or maybe I do.  You know what?  Sunday.  Sunday I'm going to go to Victoria Park.  It's nearby.  Seems like it'll be a nice, warm day that day, too.  I'm going to take a walk, think, maybe meditate a little bit.  Watch the sunset.  I haven't done this in a long time and it's something that I've been putting off.  That, I think, is what I'll do.  Yeah...  Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

Now, I think that's all I got for tonight, now, so I'll call it a night.  Have a good night and thank you for reading.

Annoyance

Good evening!  Tonight's topic will be things that have annoyed me lately - some good, some bad.  There will be, as always, a wide array under discussion.  Let's begin!


IMPARTIAL PLAY-BY-PLAY

So I picked up this AWESOME DEAL at mlb.com.  For $20.00/yr., I can listen to any baseball game I want, anytime, anywhere, which is just the perfect cure for your typical workday boredom.  I've noticed something odd with spring training, though.  You get the option of listening to either the home or away broadcast for any game, but if it's a spring training game and the local radio station isn't covering the game, some dudes at mlb.com will cover the game instead.  Now, on paper this sounds great cause you can listen to just about any game you want because someone's covering it.  The bad news, however, is that there's a huge drop off in quality between...

Juuust a bit outside.  He tried the corner and missed.

...the home or away's team broadcast and...

HELLO FANS.  IT IS A BALMY EIGHTY-TWO DEGREES IN THE SUN HERE AT PRESS PLAY ON TAPE FIELD.

...the mlb.com announcers.  You see, when you have local broadcast, either home or away, they really care about the game cause it's their guys on the field.  They know them, they want them to win, and there's passion tied to it.  In radio, all you have and the only tool at your disposal is your voice and you can hear when someone's really into the game.  I think that's why baseball lends itself so well to radio.  The snap of the glove, the crack of the bat, and the relatively slow pace of the play allows you to really get out the brush and paint a vibrant picture of what's going on down on the field, or even just have a conversation.  I've listened to half-innings where the announcers were just talking about hot dogs.  Sure, they did the play-by-play, but they talked about the grills, the hot dogs, the barbecue sauce ("with those little chunks of apple in it") and that was great!  You don't get that in other sports - not by a long shot.  I'd love to hear Jim Hughson talk about hot dogs through a powerplay.

The annoying thing here is the mlb.com guys.  I don't wanna say anything bad about them cause they're just doing their job, but if you're employed by mlb.com, by that very fact you're just sitting there on the fence not taking one side or another.  Essentially you're just a neutral party that's just there to call the balls and strikes and put the game on the air for people to listen to, and by God is that boring.

Now, I suppose some people are thinking that, well, don't you want impartial commentary so that you know what's really going on in the game?  It's no fun listening to total homers like, say, for example...

Green is the colour, football is the game, blah blah blah...

...cause that's just not - well especially the talk radio shows that debate the game.  Even worse.  But I suppose the point that I'm trying to make here is that if I picked up a regular season ballgame on the radio I get my choice of home or away broadcasts, and that's as it should be.  One broadcast for both sides by someone who really doesn't get involved really flies in the face of what it means to the typical fan of professional sport - but at the same time, please be courteous to both sides, respectful to your adversary, and put the 'sport' in 'sportsmanship'.


SOCCER

As a teenager I played soccer at school and it was fun.  I quite enjoyed it.  It was a fun game if you're in it or on the field.  I find it to be the archetype of games that are more fun to play than to watch, unlike games that are more fun to watch than to play like for example...

Aw, sorry.  Wrong pic.  I thought this was UFC but it's just a Miami grade 12 gym class.  Oh wait.  No, sorry again.  Math class.

I think that soccer is one of those things that's an acquired taste to watch on TV.  I think that, maybe, if I sat down on a Saturday (or Sunday, or...  actually I have no idea when soccer's on TV at all...  Please check your local listings.) morning and watched a day full of it that I might get it, like it, understand and appreciate it, but right now... yeah, not so much.

I'll tell you one thing, though, there's one huge thing that gets in the way of me finding the will to see the light and start appreciating soccer:

Corruption.

Now before I tear into soccer, I'll preface it by saying that other sports have their failings as well.  For example:

Baseball

Hockey

Basketball

Football

But for crying out loud!  See there's this fundamental thing where when two teams get together to play a game that they're both going to try.  They're both going to go duke it out and may the best team win.  Sure, some teams are better than others, but when you get ot the stadium and you sit down in the seats you don't know what's going to happen.  That there is the essence of sport: you don't know what's going to happen.  Without that it's just plain not sport anymore.  It's not even theater.  It's nothing.  Case in point this game right here.

Let me paint the picture.  What this game is is a qualifying match for the 2014 World Cup.  Indonesia's already out of contention, so whatever.  Bahrain (and if you don't know where Bahrain is, it's an island in the Persian Gulf) however is still in contention.  Well, sort of.  They have a nine goal deficit going into the game in the standings which they have to overcome if they want to make it to the next round and after looking through a few tables of recent statistics, the average goals per game in any professional league is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0 - and that's not 2.5-3.0 apiece, that's 2.5-3.0 total.  So there are a whole lot of 1-1, 2-0, 2-1 games.  So it doesn't appear likely that Bahrain's going anywhere.  Now what was the final score of this game?  10-0 for Bahrain.

10 to nothing?!  10 to nothing?!  Let's look at this.  Indonesia's first round was against Turkmenistan.  Game One was a 1-1 draw while game 2 saw Indonesia squeak ahead with a more wide open 4-3 affair.  On to the next round they go. However, in the next round, poor Indonesia went 0-6, but the scores didn't seem that exaggerated.  0-2, 1-4, 2-3, 0-3, 0-4.  They're bad, but they're within reason.  So when Bahrain strolls in to play the last game and needs nine points to make the World Cup, although they may win it didn't seem likely that they were going to fill the net like they would need to so that they could advance.  So what happens right straight away to Indonesia's keeper on a sketchy trip?

Uh huh.  And Brendan Shanahan weeps.  Seriously.  Watch the game if you can stomach it.  From what I hear from serious soccer dudes is that this is a sickening display that gives every indication that the suitcases of cash were exchanged somehow.  Sick.

Oh, and the worst part of all?  FIFA has vowed to investigate the incident.

INTERPOL is putting their best man on the case.

Uh huh.  Moving on.


NANCY GRACE ET AL

Have you ever flipped through the channels and come across something so bizarre that you just couldn't look away?

Good morning!

It was some time ago.  I remember that she was going off about this girl who was convicted of murder in Italy.  Amanda Knox was her name.  She was convicted of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher and spent four years locked up in an Italian jail.  So when the verdict was appealed successfully and Ms. Knox was released and brought back home to America, Nancy was some pissed.  It seems once a murderer, in her mind, always a murderer.  I mean, if the court had found her free of guilt, that's good enough for me and any reasonable person, I would think.  I mean, we all have to live with the laws that our society has in place because that's how society functions.

I remember another instance.  This time it was another one of HLN's pit bulls.

Make sure you get my good side.

So, go google pictures of Jane Velez-Mitchell.  Go ahead.  What do you see?  A whole lot of pictures of her not just smiling, but beaming.  Everywhere!  You'd think she was a happy person or something.  However, I was flipping through channels during and after the Casey Anthony trial some time ago and I gotta say, she was none too happy then.  In fact, I flipped through one day and noticed she looked pissed while she was grilling someone.  Then the next day: pissed again.  And the day after.  And it was the same with Nancy.  Wow!

I don't get it.  Well, I mean, I think I get it.  They get paid a lot of money and saying outrageous things seems to sell.

Right?  Right.

But I don't get how you can stay "on" all the time.  I mean, she smiles.  A lot it seems.  So why is it that whenever I look at HLN she's snarling?  I wonder, could I snarl for two hours?  Three hours?  Four hours?  Could I look angry?  Indignant?  Fuming?  Mad as hell?!  Well, maybe, but you know what?  It's just all so fake and insincere.  Such garbage!  It's all just this theatrical nonsense designed to whip people up.  And the worst was after Casey Anthony was found not guilty.  They still went after her.  It's like never mind the court decision, we know the truth and she did it.  I feel so bad for Ms. Anthony!  She's found not guilty and yet her life is still ruined by it.  It's crazy!  The law is executed in the courtroom and not on television.  Period.  End of story.


YAY AMERICA MOVIE 
 
As a Canadian I have a ringside seat to see all of the shenanigans here, there, and everywhere, at home and abroad, and there's one thing that I just can't stand: Yay America Movies.  What do I mean by that?

Actually, if you photoshop out the alien and the death ray, it looks much like a Thomas Kincaid painting.

Independence Day.  Aliens attack and start destroying the world.  Who's going to save them?

The delightfully insane Randy Quaid.

The United States of America, that's right.  They can take down the Eiffel Tower, the Kremlin, the Cristo Redentor, the Dome of the Rock, and about anything else worth mentioning, but when they go and blow up the White House, oh it's on like Donkey Kong.

Just picture Donkey Kong as an alien and Mario as Bill Pullman.  Oh, and the Princess is Judd Hirsch.

Sure, there were funny moments, but it was pretty darn sappy.  And then there was this one which was totally, totally shameless.

This movie gets my vote for worst love triangle ever.

 Holy crap was this bad!  The love story was terrible, the faux emotion was terrible, and Dolittle's raid at the end was, well, terrible.  A terrible, terrible movie that just anguishes about the great, but vulnerable America.  Yuck.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't Boo America films...

He looks like he's enjoying this a little too much...

Remember: don't declare war. go to war.

Making dictators more and more ronery every day.

...but I find that Boo America films are a bit more pointed and thoughtful.

And I mean, come on.  Having the President leap into the cockpit to save the world?  Come on...  As much as I would like to see Harper fly an F18 on bombing runs through Libya, Chrétien drive a tank through Afghanistan, Mulroney pilot a rescue chopper during Desert Storm,  Trudeau wielding a flamethrower in Vietnam, or anything like that, but Canadian politicians just aren't like that, you know?  It just doesn't happen.  They're all scheming, Machiavellian lawyers and career politicians.  There's no such thing a Canadian war hero who is at the same time politician.

Funny how it takes a fighter pilot to win the Nobel Peace Prize and try to stop war.

Well, except Prime Minister Mike.  And he was a huge baseball fan, too!  I guess they're not all bad.  Hm!  And that's all the time we have today.  Thank you for reading and have a good night!