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.

Trost For The Mill

Here's a couple more pieces in the Globe And Mail on the Toronto Pride funding fallout fiasco. First, we've got a Canadian Press article by Jennifer Ditchburn with the director of Montreal's annual pride festival, who says they've actually been funded more reasonably since the Tories took office. The story suggests that Brad Trost's troglodytic ilk are much more isolated in caucus than angry people (like me) think.

Next up, we have this piece that Paul Dechene told me to read, by the Globe's Adam Radwanski. Radwanski's blog lays out how the Conservatives have probably annoyed both social conservative supporters and normal people who aren't crazy (Radwanski calls these "social liberals") and might have been supporters. it's a good read too, and it links to yet more reads.

There you go, that's enough from me for a while.

Everybody (named Murdoch, in this case) Wants To Rule The World

One of my favourite non-Connery James Bond movies (YouTube) is Tomorrow Never Dies (James Bond Wiki). Seems as though Rupert Murdoch is a real-life Elliot Carver (Huffington Post).

Six In The Morning

1 BUT HOW DOES TOONTOWN FEEL ABOUT THIS? Research reactors: the University of Saskatchewan and the provincial government want one. (StarPhoenix). Not sure about this at all. I fully recognize how this proposed reactor will be used politically to advance the case for an expensive, wasteful, unsustainable and evil full-scale reactor. But Premier Brad Wall uttured one sentence of interest: "Governments should be involved in pure research. I think that's one of the ways we can diversify our economy away from relying on commodities." Well, uh... yes.

2 TWO DEGREES OF SEPARATION World leaders announce a limit on how much the climate can be allowed to change (Globe And Mail). Quick, someone notify Saskatchewan's climate change deniers--there's socialism afoot! Oh wait, Kate's got it covered. Phew. (smalldeadanimals)

3 RIOTS, RIOTS EVERYWHERE More unrest in Iran, unhappiness in Urumqi, plus bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fun! (Guardian)

4 HARPER'S HOOLIGANS REVIEW FUNDING The flap over $400K directed at Toronto's Pride Festival keeps on flapping. (Toronto Star) Some jerk-off Tories (like Saskatchewan MP Brad "Most of the caucus is still strongly pro-traditional marriage" Trost) and their supporters remain agitated about the funding. But as a smart guy I know puts it, "you find me another festival in Canada that attracts a million people and doesn't get government funding."

5 NO MO' BUFFALO Regina's exhibition has announced an awkward "over the next year or two" phase-in rebranding of their event, which will be called Queen City Ex down the road (Leader-Post). But why is this even remotely interesting? Because the old name honoured Saskatchewan's rural, agrarian roots while the new moniker speaks to the urban experience--which is how the majority of us now experience life in the province. Saskatchewan has changed.

6 NO SPECIAL DAY FOR SHANNON TWEED Awww. My inner 13-year-old is heartbroken. (CBC)

F**k Off. I'm Full.

Further to Rosie's post below (beat me to it, the bastard) I must add: It was only a tiny little thin one. Wafer thin! (Monty Python, NSFW)

Harper pisses off the Catholic vote

Being an occasional participant in United Church of Canada activities (hauling my five-year-old to Sunday School), I'm not totally up on my Catholic Church dogma. But as a BCer in Toronto points out, Stephen Harper committed sacrilege during the recent funeral for former Governor General Romeo Leblanc. When handed the communion wafer by the priest, he put it in his pocket. (A BCer in Toronto) Which, in Catholic liturgy, is somewhere between a severe no-no and a desecration of the body of Christ. (Harper's people said he consumed it later: videos posted on the net [A BCer in Toronto] are supposed to be 'inconclusive,' but to me it looks as though he didn't consume the wafer).

As I understand it (and Catholics or those who know and mock the Catholic religion, please help me on this), when the presiding priest blesses the communion wafer, it becomes 'the body of Christ.' So, doing anything else but consuming it is sacrilege -- it's as if you're insulting the works, efforts, and words of Jesus Christ, who said at the Last Supper, 'This is my body, it is given for you, do this in remembrance of me." (1 Corinthians, Chapter 11, verses 23-26 via Wikipedia).

Being a member of an evangelical Protestant denomination, Harper could have -- or at least had his protocol people advise him to -- decline the communion wafer. Or he should have consumed it right away, and if anybody questioned him on it, said something to the effect of, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.'

The fact that he screwed up -- he looks like he's trying to shake the priest's hand when he goes up for communion -- and that he won't admit it (TorStar) -- going as so far (in my mind) as to 'bear false witness' (Thanks again A BCer in Toronto) says a lot about his character. I said I didn't do it, therefore I didn't do it. All evidence to the contrary doesn't apply.

See, that's the problem. Like most social conservatives, Harper doesn't believe in God: he believes he IS God. Big difference.

Dying for a good news story

If you're a journalist and are thinking you're having a rough day, I suggest you conteplate trading places with this guy (Mother Jones). Thanks to the U.S. war on drugs, Mexico has ceased to be a democracy -- if it ever was -- and is now on the verge of becoming a 'failed state.'

Go. Read.

This Week In Suzuki

There's a good Science Matters column on seafood and sustainability in the current prairie dog (available FREE at 400 locations city-wide). I post here to pimp this fine article.

Sustainable fishing is an important topic since researchers have suggested the world's fisheries will be overfished and destroyed in our lifetime. What's nice is how David Suzuki's column provides some practical advice on how to purchase fish without contributing to (or at least exacerbating) the annihilation of ocean life. The centrepiece of the article is a mention of the website seachoice.org, which ranks delicious fishies by sustainability. But the problem with Suzuki's column in our dead-tree edition is that the links don't do anything when you click on them.

So in the interests of making people's lives more clickable, I've posted the link here. Check out seachoice.org and share the link with all your grocer and restaurant owner friends. Because not only are fish interesting and beautiful animals, they are too tasty to wipe out through over-fishing stupidity.

Click it. Do it. Share it. Use it. The tuna will love you for it. And then you can eat them!