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SATCE: Sex and the Canadian Election

Stoss — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:11:42 +0000

Well, our 36-day ordeal of lies, cheating, attack ads, nonsense, and moustaches is over. We have a majority Conservative government led by Steven Harper. But how did an election, which really should have ended up with the same result as before, change the political landscape of Canada so much? My theory is Sex and the City.

Canada is Carrie Bradshaw. We are strong and determined, a little neurotic, we help our friends and neighbours, and all in all we just want to be loved. A lot of people want us to succeed in our quest and we have a strong group of friends: Samantha (if there is a better analogy for the USA than this character, I don’t know it), Miranda (her lesbian overtones and her need for independence reminds me of Germany for some reason), and Charlotte (soft and quiet England, but piss her off and she’ll declare war like crazy).

Duceppe is Petrovsky. He wants Carrie to move to his foreign French land and woos her with art and smooth-talking, but all in all he offers empty promises and really only has one schtick. So, we move on to someone who at least doesn’t look like a corpse at his news conferences.

Layton is that weird guy from OfficeSpace… Burger I think his name was. He has a few good jokes and is a solidly written character who will make us feel warm and safe and loved, but in the end he will break up with us on a post-it note. Along the way he will tell us repeatedly that everyone else in the game is, “Just not that into us”, but we know the truth. After our inevitable break up we will meet his friends in a bar and tell them how awful he was.

Ignatieff is Aidan. He may very well be the perfect guy for us. He understands us, he truly loves us, he tries so hard to get us to love him, but for some reason we just can’t fully commit to him. He tries numerous ways to propose, but we just won’t wear that ring. We give a feeble attempt of putting it around our neck, but he won’t accept that, he wants it all. We push him out of our apartment as dramatically as possible and then he goes ahead and opens a bar with our good buddies at UofT. The nerve of this guy!

And of course Harper is Mr. Big. We bumped into him in Calgary and swapped coy glances. Then suddenly he comes knocking on our door and gives us a good banging once in a while. He provides us with some financial security, but then flies to a foreign land and comes back with a massive commitment. So,we give him a little ‘minority’ of our time, and he lies to us a couple times, but despite the love affair ending in yelling and screaming a few times, we whole heartedly commit and throw ourselves on his footstep. We marry him and give him all of our trust. I am just waiting for our trip to Abu Dhabi to start…

But in the end we realize that a crazy French man can’t do anything for us, a jokester with a moustache can’t really be what we want, and Aidan just tried too hard. So we fall comfortably into the rhythm of a known evil, who in all likelihood will screw us over, but hey, it will make a hell of a sequel for a group of four women who can’t get work elsewhere…

Two and a Half Brain Cells

Stoss — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:50:02 +0000

I make very little secret that I despise Charlie Sheen and ‘Two and a Half Men’ with a passion greater than the Pope has for Christ. So I am torn, because I am not normally the type of person that tramples on man’s… well… not grave… ummmm… tramples on a man’s hallucinogenic flying galactic unicorn.

Suffice it to say, this quote sums up my thoughts:

“When a production company and network are willing to hire someone who is a convicted felon and accused of putting a knife to his wife’s throat, and they know that this person has substance abuse problems, it’s obvious that their position in this dispute is ridiculous” — Marty Singer, Sheen’s attorney

So that is his argument? I am a drug addicted, law breaking, narcissist and therefore you should have expected this and therefore continued to employ me!?? Jesus, Charlie, you have really gone off the deep end! By this logic no company should ever hire a former arsonist, because they could only expect that he’d burn down their office.

In a weird way, Charlie’s life mimics the exact reason why I hate the show he stars in: Juvenile behaviour is worshipped in our society. Until the tragic earthquake off the Japanese coast, Charlie dominated newspapers. His life is not news people!

Anyway, go ahead and watch the reruns. I hear that in tonight’s episode Charlie makes a sexually suggestive joke about a gorgeous woman he just met and had intercourse with…

Why we’re destroying TV

Stoss — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:01:06 +0000

I started thinking about this topic after I watched this Craig Ferguson clip:

By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.

Ferguson’s hypothesis is actually quite intuitive. The youth do rule our society. The 18-49 demographic is what all advertising dollars are based on, and that is what makes the big 3 networks all of their money. What Ferguson missed, however, is that that “deification of youth” has continued, but the youth have drastically changed.

The public today want convenience. They want everything now and exactly how they want it. It started slowly with Sunday shopping, and 24 hour supermarkets. Then it grew with super stores that sell everything from perscription drugs to fresh chickens and motor oil. Pay Per View popped up and let us watch movies whenever we wanted without leaving our homes. The web started creeping in and suddenly we could monitor prices of things like flights, toys, books and more to buy when we wanted to at the price we wanted to. Then, in one of the smartest moves of the 21st century, someone put a harddrive into a VCR and PVR (TiVo) was born: So now we could watch TV when we wanted. Bittorrent made a debut about 7 years ago and made data share faster and easier. Pagers and then cellphones became ubiquitous in people of all ages: So now we were always conveniently available and could conveniently contact anyone. We became obsessed with everything being at our fingertips (There’s an app for that™). We started bitching when we were charged for Internet outside of our house, so Free WiFi became synonymous with Café. Undergrounds subways across Asia and Europe starting piping in cellphone signals. TV companies started endevours like Hulu and BBC iPlayer to satisfy the lust for anytime access. LoveFilm and NetFlix popped up so we could stop strolling to Blockbuster and the Kindle changed the way commuters read.

But in the process, what happened, almost by accident, is we started to kill traditional television. Primetime was called such because that is when most people watched tv, and while that is probably still true, it isn’t the 18-49s any more. The ‘sacred youth’ are playing XBox or using MSN or any of the other things that can be used to relax our lazy asses that didn’t exist in 50′s when this all started. Prime time is becoming ‘When I Want Time’ and this is what started the demise of such shows as Arrested Development, Jericho, The Fly and probably (sadly) soon to be Chuck. The fan base was there and arguably still is, but the generation of people that watch these shows isn’t watching them when Neilsens is recording the metrics. Suddenly advertisers are saying it isn’t worth their money and the networks are are saying we need to find something better, regardless of the quality. This is why cable shows like Dexter, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and the like became such big long lasting hits, they don’t rely on ads, because the revenue comes from the cable fees.

Conan/Leno are the same in this regard. The part most people want to see of any late night show is the monologue, and in the case of SNL, Weekend Update. So we PVR that while we watch the prime time shows that we didn’t watch between 8 and 11, then watch the first 15 minutes and hit the sack, or save them up for another time: Convenience.

Mind you, the movie, airline and music industries are much farther behind then the big 3 when it comes to accepting the new technologies, but this doesn’t stiffle the fact that every year dozens of shows go off the air before they get to 6 episodes, because their on air rating are ‘too low’. Eventually the large corporations need to start catering to the desire of convenience. The food industry made the transition years ago with frozen dinners, the microwave etc., and pre-made dinner sales are always on the rise. Eventually the other industries will need to go down this path, because, for better or for worse, this is what their customers are demanding.

Flight Sense

Stoss — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:08:07 +0000

As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do! Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.

V is for “Anna Paquin is hot”

Stoss — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:05:18 +0000

As recommended by a friend and source of always different and enjoyable reading/viewing material, I recently started watching “True Blood”. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I will try not to issue too many spoilers, at least none that a pre-pubescent goth freak couldn’t grasp about 12.5 minutes into the first episode.

The show overall is enjoyable. I can willing suspend my belief that in this world vampires exist and Anna Paquin can read thoughts as a relatively good plot device, between her periodically losing her fake southern drawl that is. But, I do have to admit Mel Gibson did a better job using such a talent to his benefit, I mean banging Helen Hunt & Marissa Tomei in one movie? Good for him…. I digress…

A few things I find interesting:

For a religious small town in New Orleans, these people not only have crazy amounts of sex, the sex itself is more wild and elaborate than most Private releases. However that isn’t the disturbing part. what disturbs me is that before many of these sexcapades that would make Jenna Haze blush, they make it very clear to each other that they have had plenty of sex ,with plenty of people, and sometimes even state that it was just earlier that day. In fact, when our heroin Anna Paquin finally gives up her cherry, in what can only be described as the best display of breasts on television in 2008, she feels it necessary to scream it out loud… to a bar full of people… where she works… which the guy she just went on a date with a couple nights before owns…The few days after she discovered two loved one’s murdered bodies… But,hell, she had great hooters though, eh?

And then there is Jason, the brother, who I can only picture as an homage to Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, who fucks a girl doggy style behind a bar, while covered in garbage. I am all for adventure, and exhibition… but seriously? I am pretty sure I saw his truck in the background of the shot, it was 20 yard away… trade-offs, man, trade-offs…

Now, for a country that has been fighting the war on drugs so long that the girls they initially were targeting now have more problem with their nipples touching the ground, than with excessive marijuana use, they certainly are promoting the hell out of “V” (aka Vampire Blood). This apparently is a miracle drug! It saves a person’s life by miraculously healing her and giving her a dog’s smell and a bat’s hearing, then in one episode it acts like Viagra on Ecstasy and pumps up a guys cock in the most fake erection through the pants seen in TV history, and in the very next show it makes fireworks shoot of some guest star girl’s tits. Well, truth be told I see fireworks every time I see tits too, that has less to do with drugs… It also has this magical power of making you fuck up everything in your life. But then again, don’t all drugs? Don’t do drugs kids.

The other thing that is interesting about this town is that everyone seems to have a job (or 2) and they never need to go. I think the phrase “ isn’t coming in today” is uttered once per episode. But, I mean I guess there are more important things to do, like getting arrested for every girl you sleep with dying, but then getting let go after the cliffhanger, or trot around town with a vampire who you have more of a Ross/Rachel relationship with than me and my constant love/hate affair with Tostitos.

Now, what is missing from this review? Oh yeah, the VAMPIRES! For a show that has a premise of vampires, they are really nothing but a subplot and allusion to the black/white race issues of the southern US. It isn’t even an allusion, actually. It is referenced in the damn title sequence!

The references to this are not poetic and are not subtext-ed at all. The characters bringing up segregated bars, a main character comments, after her daughter notes how white a vampire is, “No honey, we’re white”. The continuous assertion that a “few bad apples are making all vampires look bad” and even the utterance that once you go vampire you never go back (Doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?)… Do they really need to spell this out anymore?

In the end, entertaining. Not my favourite show, but I find myself caring a little bit for what happens, and when sitting alone in a hotel it makes for good watching… wait, did you just say there is porn on the Internet? umm… bye…