Gluemeat

Charlie Chaplin was quoted as once saying:

“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”

It’s also a great combination for a restraining order.

Here, this is Borat arriving in town for the Toronto Film Festival atop his wagon pulled by six peasant women. I don’t think he could have arrived in anything else.

Sacha Baron Cohen is undoutebly the funniest man on the planet. Da Ali G. Show is a testament to his versitality and uncompromising style, he was the best part of Madagascar as the lemur king, and if you haven’t seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, then you don’t know how much of a scene stealer he is.

With Borat, he plays the culture shock card perfectly as the uncouth, uncultured, misogynistic (and fictional!) reporter for Kazakhstan. The dark side of our grand Western principles get challenged to the very core as he goes around naively, trying to figure out what makes America so imitable while attempting to fit into our “strange ways” all throughout.

I can’t wait to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Here’s the preview if you have no idea what I’m speaking about:

Via Cove Blogger.

Bush can keep talking about creating a free and democratic Iraq, but I would wager he’s  wanting an Iraq brand of freedom: al-Arabiya, one of the Middle East’s top 24-hour news channels, has been ordered to stop broadcasting from Baghdad for a month.

This is the second time al-Arabiya is censored by the Iraqi government since the US invasion.
Al-Jazeera was banned two years ago and still remains blacklisted in Iraq.

According to a survey ran conjointly with Nintendo of Canada and Decima, Canadian grandparents are hip to trying to be adventurous in bed, listening to music on an MP3 player, and playing video games.

The survey was issued to measure “Canadian grandparents’ interest in traditionally younger generation activities.” Looks like video games, music and sex all belong to the younger crowd. Which goes to show how much I know.

The numbers went like this:

“[The survey] found that nearly half (46 per cent) would try more ‘adventurous intimacy with their partner’ if they knew how or could. About 40 per cent said they would listen to a portable MP3 player, and one in four would be interested in playing video games.”

Why does this kind of stuff remind me of those old Pepsi commercials where old folks instantly became hip by drinking soda?  Seems like we’re so obsessed about youth we won’t even leave our grandparents grow old gracefully without feeling the pressure of being part of current trends.
Via GoNintendo.

Reason Numéro Trois: Random resetting

In our last exciting episode, our hero (me) was assaulted by inexplicable playback interruptions while listening to music on his iPod Shuffle. Now he is faced with the dire Apple recommendation of resetting the playlist to be able to continue enjoying talented musical acts on his portable MP3 device. Will he do it? What grim outcome awaits his day of musical pleasure if he does?

Well, it is drastically simple, citizen. Resetting the playlist is the unavoidable consequence of both elucidations Apple proposes to decamp from the gelid clasp of a Shuffle crash, as I prelected in part the third. Therefore, if one resets the playlist, logically, one divests one’s lieu on the playlist, and then encounters a circumstance similar to what was outlined in part the second.

Let’s be frank: it isn’t so bad having to reset the playlist. After all, it just sends the playback position back to start, so all one has to do is skip over all the songs one just heard to get back to the place one was. Annoying, very annoying, but not the catastrophe which will bring upon the end times. Of course, if one had been listening to one’s Shuffle for four hours, the skipping process becomes rather tedious, unless one entertains the button mashing by concocting an old-school dance beat based on the meter and rhyme scheme of the words “blisters on your fingers.”

But the main problem with resetting the playlist is that it doesn’t always behave in the same fashion. Sometimes the playlist reset not only resets the playback position; it re-shuffles the entire playlist. That, my friends, is a major harsh on anyone’s mellow.

Lost is the simple luxury of skipping forward through one’s playlist to reclaim the place which was unjustly stripped away. Now one deals with an entire new order where songs which one has listened to intermix with those which have yet to grace one’s ears. It’s a baffling ordeal which compromises the relaxing possibilities of sitting back and letting the music play.

What does Apple have to say about that? “We’re not aware of that kind of problem,” the support people regurgitate from their cozy support centers. Therefore, it would appear that even the solution to the bug is buggy.

Oh, cruel irony.

Read the previous entires:

- Why the iPod Shuffle sucks, part 1
- Why the iPod Shuffle sucks, part 2
- Why the iPod Shuffle sucks, part 3

“In many of the European countries, as you know, the governments are much more left wing than our own, and it’s not very hard to find sympathizers to such causes.”

- Canadian Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn in reaction to the involvement of animal rights groups in a possible European ban of products derived from seal hunts off the east coast of Canada.

He was a pallbearer for one of the five Canadian soliders who lost their lives over the weekend in battle in Afghanistan.

He was limping.

He told his mother the coffin weighed like 700 pounds.

It was his squad which was accidentally hit by an American airstrike. He actually saw Pte. Mark Graham die as result.

Most of his squad are now either dead or injured.

He’s supposed to be there for six months.

He’s only been there one month.

My warmest thoughts are with him. I hope he comes home safe.

Any person who knows me, even remotely, can readily assess to the fact that I have often wished, no, pined for the day I could find a zucchini that would smile at me all the time I was steaming it.

That day, my stars, has finally stumbled upon me, like a drunk indie rock babe who swore to me she could hold her liquor.  Ladies and gentlemen: the Vegiforms.

Nothing like the type of mutant vegetable that Monsanto proposes, the Vegiform is the latest innovation in the field of squash manipulation. Simply place the 1/8″ thick, clear plastic molds over a growing eggplant, melon, pumpkin, cucumber, zucchini or summer squash so it can grow into the casing and conform itself to the design. In a few weeks time, you will have yourself a pimped-out, one-of-a-kind veg to freak out astound your entourage.  Imagine an actual cornucopia of Garden Elf shaped melons gracing your favourite neighbour’s lawn, one dewey morning…!

Or cucumber that looks like corn on the cob!  Cucumber that LOOKS like CORN ON THE COB!! IT BOGGLES THE IMAGINATION!!!

Thanks to Lee Valley for making my life this much more complete.

“Is it next going to be tea with Osama bin Laden?”

- Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay maturely responding to NDP leader Jack Layton’s recent calls for negotiations with the Taliban and Hezbollah of peaceful solutions.

I always liked Steve Irwin.  A man with so much enthusiasm and passion for his work is one in a million.  You could tell that all the stunts he did were just a pretext to raise awareness for conservation.

As a modest tribute to his memory, here are three Gluemeat comics I did back in 2002 as an homage to his character.  May the Crocodile Hunter rest in piece.
- Crocodile Hunter (Part 1)
- Crocodile Hunter (Part 2)
- Crocodile Hunter (Part 3)