Bladder Management

They sell 64-ounce drinks in movie theatres? (MSN)

Ayatollah Endorses Election Loser; Tel Aviv Mourns Murdered Gays

Mahmoud Amadinejad is officially approved as president of Iran and they're shooting gay people in Israel. Good golly, I sure wish I lived in a country run by religion.

FIRST, IRAN. Today, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei endorsed Amadinejad as the country's president (Globe And Mail). This of course follows an election widely viewed as a sham, which led to massive protests, and arrests and lethal crackdowns by the regime. Obviously, this all kind of sucks.

On the bright side, much of Iran's "establishment" boycotted the endorsement ceremony. Two former presidents and two presidential candidates were no-shows, once again demonstrating the country's political elite is badly, badly divided. And that's a good sign for everyone who likes ordinary Iranians and is rooting for them to throw off the shackles of superstition, hatred, fear and repression you always get with theocracies.

The way I see it: the reason Iran's power elite is split because the illegitimate election has undermined the legitimacy of Iran's entire ruling class. It's not just Khamenei and Amadinejad whose political careers/influence is at risk--their idiot shenanigans have undermined the whole system and that's no good for the (naturally, all-male) fancy-pantses who benefit from that system.

By over-reaching their power, which they did when they (probably) faked the results of the June 12 election, Iran's rulers pissed off a country full of people well-known for their tyrant-tossing skills. Maybe nothing will happen this month or this year, but Iran's religious regime has revealed itself to be phony and hypocritical--and Iran is one country where people won't put up with that shit.

Amadinejad will be sworn in as president on Wednesday. Iranians aren't gonna like it. If you're in Iran that day, wear a helmet.

(By the way, I love the photo with the Globe And Mail article I linked to--Amadinejad has that same smug yet slightly puzzled expression George Bush always had when he was having some poor country bombed. What a fucker.)

ISRAELI GAY SHAME I don't know what to say about the masked and/or helmeted lunatic/sissy who's afraid of gay people who walked into a youth centre and shot 15 people, killing two, this weekend. But Israeli's gay community is, quite reasonably, blaming religious bigotry and smears for inciting violence. You can read the basic story here and a commentary here (Aljazeera, Guardian). Religion and righteousness inspiring violent behaviour in Israel? Wouldn't be the first time.

Six in the Morning

It's a wacky weather edition of Six in the Morning! Happy summer!

1. "ACT OF GOD" ENDS COUNTRY MUSIC FEST: A sudden windstorm blew through Camrose Alberta on Saturday, just as the first of the evenings headliners were about to take the stage at the Big Valley Jamboree. The winds were so powerful they smashed the main stage, killing one person and injuring dozens more. In the wake of this tragedy, the Jamboree was canceled. (Globe and Mail)

2. BC ABLAZE: A heat wave affecting much of British Columbia is responsible for one of the most widespread outbreaks of forest fires in history. While the record-breaking heat finally broke late last week, temperatures are hovering in the high twenties and a significant rainfall still hasn't hit the typically sodden coast. Fires remain a worry, then, as the hot summer has left forests tinder dry, and, thanks to a pine beetle infestation worsened by years of warmer-than-usual weather, thousands of hectares of BC are covered by dead trees. (Globea and Mail)

3. DEAD SEA DYING: While it is being considered for inclusion on a new list of the world's seven wonders, the Dead Sea is evaporating at an alarming rate. Thanks to over-eager irrigation off the Jordan River compounded with years of drought, the famous body of water is shrinking at the rate of a metre a year. (Globe and Mail)

4. MONARCHS LATE AGAIN: For the second year in a row, monarch butterflies came to Canada later than usual and in such small numbers that insect fanciers are worried. (CBC)

5. SPAIN ABLAZE: The Spanish prime minister ended his holiday early to inspect forest fire damage on the Canary Islands. Thanks to sizzling hot temperatures and high winds, southern Europe has seen a marked increase in forest fires. Spain and Greece have been the hardest hit. (Yahoo News)

6. CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS IMPERVIOUS TO REASON: After Globe and Mail columnist and CBC personality, Rex Murphy, let loose with a tirade against climate change, Desmogblog points out that he has a habit of spouting such myopic nonsense. Meanwhile, Murphy's science hero, Ian Plimer, is chickening out of a chance to debate Guardian science columnist, George Monbiot. This despite the fact that it was Plimer who challenged Monbiot to the debate in the first place. Turns out, Monbiot was willing to accept the challenge to a public debate on climate change only if Plimer accepted his challenge to respond in writing to the serious charges about misinformation in Plimer's book, Heaven and Earth. That was apparently a little too daunting a task for the author. On a related note, Monbiot writes about climate change deniers whining that they're being censored despite being unable to provide a single example of that happening, while at the same time, there are numerous examples of legitimate climate scientists being muzzled by climate change deniers. (Dog Blog, Desmogblog, Guardian)

The Fantastic Wes Anderson

I must have had a deprived childhood because I don't think I've ever read any of Roald Dahl's children stories. I've read his twisted murder short stories like Lamb to the Slaughter but I must confess I've never read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach or Fantastic Mr. Fox. One of my favorite director's Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited) has decided to make a stop motion animated movie out of Fantastic Mr. Fox. It looks very cool, different and very un-kids movie like. Which is a good thing in my opinion.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

This week saw the release of Green Lantern: First Flight, the first feature-length adventure of the Emerald Crusader. It comes hot on the heels of news that Canadian-born Ryan Reynolds (CBC)-- one-time paramour of You Can't Do That on Television star Alanis Morrisette--has been cast as test pilot Hal Jordan, the man with the verdant vim. We'll see, I guess. Reynolds is best known for wearing a fat suit in the only Regina-shot movie featured in Roger Ebert's book Your Movie Sucks. On the other hand, the film is being directed by Martin Campbell, who also directed the best two Bond films of the last 30 years as well as the pilot episode of my all-time favourite TV show, Homicide: Life on the Street. So who knows how this movie will turn out.

Interestingly, Gil Kane, the original artist on the 1959 sci-fi revamp of Green Lantern (there was an earlier magic-based GL during the 1940s), based the character's look on Paul Newman.

Here's the 60s Filmation version of Green Lantern, which is pretty close to the Green Lantern comics of that era and probably miles away from what we'll see in the upcoming Ryan Reynolds movie. Pity.

Up! A Review

Before, I launch into my review of Pixar's latest blockbuster release, Up!, I have to admit, I haven't actually seen the movie. But I have read the colouring book. So my comments are based entirely upon that.

Truth be told, going into this colouring book, my hopes were pretty high. While I've never read any of the colouring book adaptations of their films in the past, I have enjoyed every single Pixar release I've seen. From Toy Story to the Incredibles to Wall-E, their work is witty, rich, complex and visually stunning. I'm not generally a fan of computer animation, but in the hands of Pixar, the cold precision of pixel art becomes warm and endearing. I'd pretty much decided I'd follow Pixar wherever they decided to go.

And yet, back before it was released, upon hearing what the hook for Up! was -- grumpy old man ties baloons to his house so he can escape his neighbourhood -- my immediate thought was, "Wow, this doesn't sound like my kind of movie at all." But, seeing as it was Pixar, I trusted they'd be able to win me over.

Well, after reading the colouring book, I think I should've trusted my initial reaction. If the plot of the movie bears any relation to what I've read, frankly, this film is a disaster.

(Warning: numerous spoilers ahead... of the colouring book... and maybe the movie, I'm not sure.)

The story opens with grumpy old man, Carl, floating away in his balloon-carried home. Sadly, the colouring book never really makes his motivation for tying balloons to his house clear, and I have to admit I found this jarring. But the idea was sufficiently amusing that I was willing to follow along and see where this floating two storey took me.

But before getting anywhere, I had to endure a couple of those obligatory "puzzle pages" that still plague the colouring book genre.

First up, there's a tedious "circle the two Russells that look exactly alike" puzzle. After that there's a truly baffling one where you're supposed to circle plates to keep them from cracking. The scene depicts the house shaking about in a storm so, presumably, your waxy circles of crayon are somehow supposed to save the china from crashing on the floor -- unnecessary busy work, if you ask me, as the plates are going to hover in the air forever because this is after all a picture in a colouring book and not a scene in a motion picture.

What turns this "puzzle" into a real annoyance, though, is that after all this circling you're supposed to identify how many unbroken plates there are. Do they mean how many in the picture are drawn unbroken? Or how many will remain unbroken if my crayon circles are drawn with precision about them? What if one of my circles isn't completely closed or if what passes for a "circle" from my three year old is really more of a scribble in the vicinity of a plate? Do we count those plates as broken? You see my confusion?

The colouring book never clarifies any of this but fortunately it provides a solution if you turn the page upside down. Phew! (Spoiler: the answer's four.)

Finally, Carl and his house wind up somewhere called "Paradise Falls" and it's here that things really go off the rails.

I won't blow the rest of the story -- such as it is -- for you. Suffice it to say it involves an exotic species of bird, mastiffs with talking dog collars and a mad scientist.

Up until this point I've been willing to happily suspend my disbelief. Floating house? No problem, I can accept that. But talking dogs and mad scientists? Come on.

No, seriously. A floating house with balloons coming out its chimney is a great idea. But a huge part of the magic of it derives from the fact that this house is special. Unique. If it exists alongside a completely unrelated island inhabited by talking dogs and mad scientists, the magic gets diluted. It's just one more crazy thing in a world where all sorts of crazy business goes on. Ho hum.

From then on out, the colouring book plot unravels pretty much as you'd expect, peppered along the way with a few too-easily-solved mazes and more of those "circle the two things that are the same" puzzles. (Nobody likes those puzzles. Why do colouring book writers continue to rely upon them? Is it laziness or malice?)

So far, Up! is coming up lacking, but at least with Pixar you can pretty much be guaranteed a colourful, visually-impressive spectacle if nothing else.

Not so with the colouring book, I'm afraid.

The art is standard black-outline fare, nothing innovative going on here. And as for the colours.... Well, the colouring book I picked up actually came with four crayons -- a nice touch, I have to admit. But the colours they chose were a pale lime green, pink, yellow and an innocuous purply-blue. Hardly inspired choices, and I have to wonder at what the editors were thinking. The lack of a fleshtone makes colouring the human characters difficult. And as anyone who's done any serious colouring knows, yellow crayons are almost always invisible on paper. Frustrating!

At least my daughter was happy to have a pink.

Ultimately, I can't say I came away with particularly fond feelings for Up! and I'm not inclined to see the movie at this point.

In short, I'll have to give Up! The Colouring Book a big thumbs down.

Daily Moon: One Last One

Streaming into my iTunes today came the Quiet Village's Moon Episode, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo XI mission. I'm listening to it right now. The Quiet Village, by the way, is my favourite tiki/lounge/exotica podcast. And, yes, I listen to enough of those to have a favourite.

Anyway, listening to all this space age music reminded me that I still have a pile of moon-themed advertisements scanned from that July 1969 Globe and Mail that I haven't posted yet. So here they are.


And while I was scanning all these, I happened to look over the movie listings and discovered that sandwiched in between decent fare like True Grit and Midnight Cowboy there were a few really dirty movies. Have a look...



The Miracle of Love. Inga. The Gay Deceivers. Yowza. And mom always said movies were so much more wholesome back in the day.

Jane Austen needs more tentacles

Quirk Classics, the mad publishers who decided that Pride and Prejudice needed more zombies, seems to determined to continue to milk their success. Thus in September they are introducing tentacles to classic literature with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Here's an amusing trailer to promote the book.

Nostalgia Alert

Be forewarned, Aug. 15-18 marks the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock. Formally billed as An Aquarian Exposition, it was held on a 600-acre dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur in Bethel, NY, a hamlet 43-miles southwest of a small New York town called Woodstock. It was undoubtedly a special moment in history. One that has been commemorated through an outstanding documentary directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, and numerous essays, novels, songs, interviews, movies and whatnot recalling the event and analyzing it from every angle imaginable. The news and entertainment media, as they are wont to do, will beat this story to death. Before they do, I'd thought I'd offer this as a reminder of how special Woodstock was.

Friday News Wrap Up

Here are a few news items to check out if you're looking to melt your eyes against a computer screen this weekend.

First, there's this story of a Brit who, covinced the Americans were hiding UFO evidence, hacked the hell out of military and NASA computers. He's facing extradition to the U.S., which under normal circumstances would be reasonable for cyber-crime (albeit pretty harmless cyber-crime, $700 K in alleged damage aside). The problem is that the hacker, 43-year-old Gary McKinnon, has Asberger's syndrome and is likely to be emotionally demolished by an experience in the U.S. courts. Nevertheless the U.S. is still pushing for extradition. And his own country is not doing enough to protect him. Story's here (Guardian). Hey, maybe then the Americans can just extraordinarily rendition him to Syria to be tortured. Save all those pesky jail and court costs.

Second, Corazon Aquino, a person and newsmaker I'd shamefully forgotten about, has died. Aquino was a former president of the Philippines who led an uprising to overthrew the regime of son of a bitch dictator (and naturally, friend of Ronald Reagan) Ferdinand Marcos, whose wife was the famous Imelda of the 10,000 shoes. Aquino was an important woman--and this obit in the Globe And Mail deserves your time.

Finally, here's a funny, sarcastic cartoon showing how the U.S. is totally screwed. (Salon) And that's as good a note as any to head to the bar on. Cheers!