Saturday Morning

Oh, bloody heck. A Smurfs movie?

Look, the Smurfs were about my least favourite show as a child. The Smurfs were our punishment viewing for waking up so early that the good shows weren’t on yet. The Smurfs were so hopelessly silly that as words like “retarded” and “lame” have been appropriately purged from my repertoire of acceptable insulting epithets, they have been replaced with the adjective “smurfy”.

Very, very smurfy.



What bugged me most about the Smurfs wasn’t the sub-Hanna-Barbara animation. It wasn’t the bizarre seven-dwarves-on-acid thing where each character was allowed one character trait only. It wasn’t even the vile Smurfette, and the show’s notion that to be a mere female is to be so overwhelmingly different that the girl didn’t even get a character trait. Instead, she got eyelashes and a simper.

(It wasn’t even that episode wherein a purple fly bit a Smurf, turning him into a purple zombie Smurf that marched around saying nothing but “Gnat! Gnat!”, biting other Smurfs and purple-zombifying them. This episode of the usually saccharine show scared me so badly at the age of four that, even right now, I cannot even make myself search for a clip on youtube.)

No, it was the shamefully mean-spirited treatment of the villains that turned me off the little blue weirdos. Bad guys on children’s shows are usually comical and pathetic to the point of earning some sympathy, but Gargamel the wizard and his cat Azrael were subjected to so much mockery, abuse, and schadenfreude that I was positively rooting for him to stomp out Smurf Village once and for all.

Hey, that sounds like a Smurfs movie I’d totally go see.

Friday Afternoon Kitten!

Adorable kitten adorably battles remote-control toy mouse.



Sooooo cute! Squeal!

Six In The Morning

1 MAYBE HE'S JUST A DICK? What is Saskatoon-Humboldt MP Brad Trost thinking? He insults the one million people who participated in Toronto's Pride events, as well as the millions more who support such things, and embarassed all Saskatchewan with narrow-minded, old-fashioned opinions. But the Conservative MP says he stands by his comments to a fundamentalist Christian website. Trost also accused the interviewing journalist (presumably Cassandra Kyle, who wrote a great story but should've reported this bit in the first person) of ambushing him, and then turned off her voice recorder. I hope the StarPhoenixs' publisher is lodging formal complaints with the Conservatives over that nonsense. (StarPhoenix)

2 THE KEY TO SURVIVAL A University of Regina prof just wrote the book on Regina's mean streets. And it comes with directions. (Leader-Post)

3 THE THIN EDGE OF THE ATOMIC WEDGE A retired U of R prof says the proposed Saskatoon reseearch reactor could be used politically to make the case for a bigger, badder model. And the Provincial opposition says it's a problem that the guy helping the government with the pitch is the same guy who chaired the Uranium Development Partnership--which was criticized for not having answers to good questions. Story here. (CBC)

4 ANOTHER $100 MILL DOWN THE CRAPPER, SHRUG Canwest lost more money last quarter--but what's $100,000,000 when your debt is $4 billion? (Globe And Mail)

5 HARPER APOLOGIZES FOR ATTACKING IGGY, AND BY THE WAY, ABOUT THAT WAFER... The PM says he's sorry for criticizing Michael Ignatieff for things the Liberal leader didn't say. Fortuantely nobody cares. On the bright side for the PM, the Catholic archbishop from that funeral tells Harper no problem, don't sweat the communion stuff.

6 SONG OF THE DAY I bought an awesome purple iPod Nano on Monday and I'm listening to it all the time. Currently playing: Lily Allen, of course! Feel free to re-read this post and dedicate this robustly not safe for work (NSFW) song to any newsmakers you think deserve it.