The Bitch in your day, the Suck in mine.

The more I wander this blue prison Orf, the more I think as people as less and less personally responsible for most of what they do, and the more it pains me to have to deal with them personally, as if it is all their doing.

Allow me to give an example: I recently attended a concert at the Commodore ballroom in Vancouver. It's a famous place - even Lady Gaga has played there. It has a big dance floor and generally a very nice, open concept sort of lay-out that is all the rage with interior designers and new home buyers alike. Everytime I see that an act I like is playing there, I get all excited for the space and utterly forget that I never have a great time there. Inevitably, I leave full of more piss and vinegar than joy for the act for one simple reason - everyone smokes there.

They smoke the 'juanga, and they when they are drunk enough, they break out the cigarettes. That's not just magic mist in the air.

I have a rabid and admittedly completely disproportional hatred of cigarette smoke and have had ever since I can remember. I've always thought of cigarettes as a kind of assault weapon against my person, probably thanks to a hardy dose of childhood cancer, and so whenever someone smokes around me, I act without mercy or patience, assuming they must be making me far more miserable by smoking than I could be making them by stubbornly cock-blocking the itch for a drag. I have a few friends that smoke and I love them, but everyone I don't know who smokes around me is a Smoker TM and unfairly gets nothing but my contempt. The targets of my righteous indignation have inevitably been the people smoking around me in places they shouldn't. I remember one time catching this construction worker crouching down trying to hide his cig as he snook a puff on the sky train platform when I was on my way home from a very disappointing job interview. While others played polite but cursed him "or whoever the hell it was" under their breath or with irritated glances, I sniffed him out like a bloodhound, snatched the cigarette from his hand, stamped it out and said "this area is non-smoking".

Naturally, he stared wide-eyed at me for a moment in shock and then sputtered out "You...you bitch!" as I was spirited away by the sky train.

And I did it again at the concert.

Just as Front Line Assembly finished up their last song of the night, I became aware of, and thoroughly annoyed by, several people smoking cigs around me. It was about that time of night, booze had been flowing for at least 4 hours, washing away any consideration for the ENTIRE NATION'S indoor smoking ban. I hurried off to take some shelter in the bathroom only to confront a women sitting on the counter-top about to light up. I left her know that she wasn't allowed to smoke here, but she ignored me, slurring "I'm gonna 'ave a smoke". So I grabbed the cigarette out of her mouth as she went to light it. Several days after this, my best friend told that this technically constitutes assault, and I was an all incensed by the bullshit of that idea, until I mentally replaced the word "cigarette" with "personal property" - then it was clear, it was assault. And that is clearly how she took it.

I maintained the type of calm Caesar would have admired as I explained that I was going to return her cigarette but that she could not smoke it here. That statement was met with something about taking on the wrong bitch- she was a toughened broad who spent time "on the streets" and was going beat the crap out of me. Luckily, I am tall and not physically un-intimidating, so after a good stare down, she just pushed her way past me giving an angry, but only half-hearted attempt at a shoulder check, and left le' femme de toilette. A friend of mine happened to be right behind her attempting to talk to me during the confrontation, so it ended with a tension-shattering "XXXlie! How the hell you been?" She was proud that I put the would-be-smoker in her proverbial place, but afterwards I was plagued with a nagging unhappiness.

In fact, I had been a monstrous asshole.

Upon further consideration, I realized that I had packaged a very social/institutional sort of rage and vomited it on a convenient target, one who, if her story was true, has probably been made to feel powerless more than enough for one lifetime as it is.

It is entirely the Commodores fault that people smoke in the Commodore. It's the system, man. The system.

There door policy is No in and Outs and doors often open at least 4 hours before any concert starts, presumably to allow people ample time to empty their wallets at the bar and to ensure that their wallet is proper-empty by preventing them from buying more affordable drinks at the Cafe Crepe one block south. Cigarette smokers for the most part are addicts, and addiction is an disease not a simple failing of willpower. Some smokers simply cannot endure 4-6 hours without smoking unless it's absolutely unavoidable - like on an airplane - and even then there are people who will still try, like the entire idiot family who got arrested for smoking in the loo on a flight from Halifax to the Dominican Republic in 2013.

There have actually been multiple comments about this both on review sites like Yelp and on Facebook, to which the Commodore Management has responded thus: "The staff and management are constantly working with our patrons to respect the Non-Smoking by-law at the Commodore. If you see someone smoking at the club, please alert a staff member and they will be happy to deal with the situation. If you do want to discuss further, please feel free to contact the General Manager, Gord Knights at 604-739-7550"

This was in 2011. Nothing has changed. I saw many of said security guards running around tracing plumes of smoke, only to turn away once the smoker concealed his/her cig. Even a group of people caught puffing up right in front of me were not expelled from the venue. I also tried to call Gord Knights, but the number is out of service.

The Commodore has many options to actually do something about this issue. If it wanted to get more Nazi about the Curse of the Grey Mist, it could expel smokers, or ban all cigarettes and search people for them at the entrance. But that is stupid and unnecessary and it punishes people for consuming a product that is stilly freely sold in this country - holding individually uniquely responsible for a social problem.

All it has to do is let people out. If not freely out, then at least into a smoking cage outside. Hell, they could hand out nicotine patches if they weren't so expensive.

I said earlier that "everybody" smokes there, but that is gross hyperbole - many 30-40 out of 500 actually light up, leaving 460-470 people to put up with it. Many of those people are better than me at doing so, but still why make the majority of the audience uncomfortable and put their health at risk when it's unnecessary? I would love to love this place, but the smoke just ruins it.

In closing, if anyone agrees with me, please post on the Commodore Facebook page. When that inevitably goes nowhere, you can do what I have done and report the Commodore to the City of Vancouver for violating the health by-law 9535. Just call 604-873-7000. That's Commodore, where there's smoke, there's a by-law fine.

Hopefully that'll light a fire under their asses.

Drop-kick to the head, rich muthafukah. That what your ass gets for driving me to porn!

This is the bullshit I'm talking about

That stereotype of the single mother working 3 jobs (alah the Donna Summers 80s power theme for the downtrodden mother who kids ate her dreams) that many may doubt is a reality for any significant number of people is the post I've currently hitched my cart to, minus the brats.

I quit my high stress corporate job a year ago after it made my intestines explode, and went back to school, relying on strange, intermittent employment to keep me in socks without holes, 3 meals a day, and Netflixs. I have a strange skill set that doesn't always combine well into a single job, so I settled instead on 4 – all contract, with no security or reliable flow of income at all, but have gotten the art of sequestering and juggling them down well enough that I have a minimum monthly amount I can be 80-93.2% certain will regularly come into my needy hands. Nevertheless, that minimum amount is below broke-ass po', with only a few months coming off as a decent run, and I would not be living in the manner to which I have become accustomed were it not for the support of my partner.

So I'm constantly looking for extra little side jobs to augment that meager amount – and Craigslist replied with an opportunity to translate and subtitle anime porn for $20 an episode. When it comes to translation, I get all edjumicational about the 'learning aspect' of the job in a self-denying bid to make up for the ludicrously low pay and completely unreliable work stream that is endemic to the freelance translating. Problem is I'm a touch of a perfectionist, so after I got my software downloaded and started 'plowing into' the first episode, I immediately started taking FOREVER to get through the sex dialog cause it's really hard to hear what people are saying when they have various projectiles in all their oral cavities. “Fuckin, get that cock out of your mouth, bitch. I can't understand a word yer saying”!

For the first episode, I tried to fudge a couple of lines where I couldn't clearly hear the dialog by inserting some standards based on what I could make of the dialog, like “oh yeah, that's my spot”, “It's so deep inside me”, and “Yeah, you want more don't you, dirty girl?”, and sonofabitch if the contractor didn't call me on it. He actually wrote back with “where you wrote, 'it's so deep inside me', it sounds like she said 'you can cum inside me'”. Then why aren't you translating this cockfeast, master porn expert? I do game dialog and printer manuals, shiiiiiiiit!

And I like porn as much as the next godless heathen, but watching the same penetration scenes over and over trying to make out what came out in between “You're so... Ah!...breaking my pussy”, was making me start to feel a bit pukey. The soundtrack was oddly disconcerting as well – a strange mix of hyperbubbly tween-pop, and the 'scientifically engineered' mood music they play at the dentists office. After 3 hours of this, and searching yahoo's 'frequently asked questions' section for the slang, which in Japanese features a huge number of inquiries like “what does “titty fuck” mean?”, I had a moment of complete clarity - “Why the hell am I wasting my time on this?”. At that point, I was down to working for about 6 dollars an hours, and was only half way done. So I just wrote and said, “I can't do this anymore. I'm gonna end up working for 3 dollars an hour cause my porn lingo isn't up to snuff, sorry”. And thus the saga concluded.

At one of my many other jobs (for a non-profit no less), the director drives a limited edition Porche. I looked it up out of curiosity, and found that the price tag attached to it is between $65'000-185'000, depending on the year and the features. I work for them for $15 an hour where occasionally getting punched or sworn at is part of the territory, so when I saw the car, I thought, what a pile of bullshit this is.How is this related to my tale of smut and woe? Well, that's is where my wanting to drop-kick rich muthafuckahs in the head came in because it is TOTALLY their fault – as in the fault of the large wealthy corporate lobby structure that has destroyed job security, unions, and made working conditions ones of permanent stress and overwork the norm, so that people who physically and/or mentally cannot endure them end up with little to support themselves despite having the skills and the inclination to work. There, I said it. Let me expound this with some factoids just to hammer that great corporate cock into the ass of the former middle class a bit harder.

For starters, CEO's in the US make 476 times the amount of the average worker (in Canada it's 20:1), and the top 20% of the richest Americans saw a 67% increase in their incomes since 1967, while the poorest went 20% deeper into debt. As of 2011, the top 1% of Americans owned 36% of all the countries wealth (these stats are from Fortune Magazine, Nov 7th, 2011). At the same time, Corporate income tax as a share of GDP went from 6% in 1955 to 1% in 2009.

One might wonder what any of this has to do with the everyday person and their job plight, so I'll try to make the connection clearer – the less wealth the government and ordinary citizens have, the less they spend, which decreases the demand for jobs and services, and the wages, as greater numbers of unemployed people are now competing for the same work. The BC government for example instituted a wage freeze in 2008 for civil employees (NOT MLAs of course, who voted themselves a pay increase). Although wealth in the way it's used these days is more and more a fairy concept that exists as nothing more than numbers on screen that changes every billionth of a second, apparently, it isn't limitless. When wealth concentrates at the top, there is little to go around and you end up with, functionally, unrelated economies – the uber riche, who trade amongst themselves and who own an estimated 81% of all stocks, the ever shrinking middle-class, and the dirty-ass poor, who, as George Carlin so eloquently put, exist just to scare the shit out of the middle class and keep them from realizing that the rich are the real threat.

There is no trickle down because the man (oh yes, and that's a goddamn middle-aged white man ta boot, except for that hideous goblin queen mining baron from Australia) doesn't want to share wealth. Despite that fact that even Nick Hanauer, the multibillion dollar venture capitalist who helped start Amazon, has pointed out that no one could become wealthy without poorer people paying them for their products, the wealthy have consistently blocked fair wage legislation, sent more money than the entire US economy has to tax havens, and spent billions on lobbying and union busting to ensure that their will be NO trickle down, while at the same time arguing for tax breaks for themselves by stating that said non-existent trickle down is essential to the economy. Apparently, if minimum wage increases kept pace with increases for the top 1% of earners, it would be just over $22. . These statistics are American, and the Canadian economy is far stronger, but it is following the same trend, especially in Vancouver, which has the highest housing prices in the country.

So yeah, fuck you, you wealthy assholes, for making me translate porn. You have fucked the economy so hard in the ass that a person who is multilingual and has 2 degrees is forced to do shit like this for a living because there are less jobs, more competition for them and lower wages. May all your limited edition Porches spontaneously explode in their multi-car garages and destroy all your tropical beach villas – insurance voided.

I take it all back!

About 2 years ago, I published a rather an un-uniquely vitriolic diatribe about hating Richard Dawkins, who no doubt has been the target of that sentiment many, many times before. I even went so far as to defend religious belief as a necessary balm for the ignorant masses to soothe the aches and pains of their existences, and thought Richard cruel to deny them that, the way denying crack to a crack baby would be cruel.

What the fuck was I thinking? Please forgive me Richard, I take it all back.

I've been on a bit of an anti-religion kick lately, and Bill Maher said it best in that even the most benign defense of religious belief is not benign at all. This benign defense that I brought up in a previous blog was that the masses need their opiates, cause life is hard and people gotten believe something. If they are only using their beliefs as a coping mechanisms for the trials and tribulations of life, then what's the harm?

Well, the harm is that people don't confine the influence of their beliefs to only a single aspect of their existence. People form other beliefs based on what they already believe, pardon me, what they know , and at some point they ACT on those beliefs.

And religious beliefs are total crap. This doesn't mean that religious people are horrible, by any means. Most believe what they believe because they were raised that way, and I am no different. I was basically raised atheist, and just lucky to live in Boo-Yah-We're-Right-Ville (pop. approximately 60% of Czechs and Estonians,30% of Canadians, 2% Americans) because that is incidentally where all the evidence points.

The only religious values/beliefs/teachings that aren't crap aren't crap because they make sense and have backing and validation OUTSIDE the the realm of religion. After all, the religious texts were all written on earth by people, so they do occasionally hit on some thread that actually applies to real life, you know, thanks to the "real-life" circumstances the books are describing. But all the purely made up ones are just that...made up. Again as Bill Maher said, these books were written when people didn't know where the sun went once after dusk, so they aren't great sources of factual information.

When people make real-life decisions based on suppositions that are not grounded in reality, bad things happen. This applies to the most benign type of religious behaviour, nevermind the deliberately wicked shit that people do in the name of the religion. Even simple, day to day decisions, if made based on false information, can have potentially disasterous consequences, and it's just a crazy miracle if they DON'T, and that, friends, is beautiful randomness and circumstance.

I used to cling to a false sense of "spirituality" under the pretentious belief that spirituality isn't as stupid as religion because it's more personal; you know, everyone knows someone who is all, "Man, the problem isn't religion, it's ORGANIZED religion." The problem is the belief system itself; it's level of organization makes it either a BIG problem (Catholicism/radical Islam) or a smaller problem (that cult with the leader who looked like a thin Donohue and they all committed suicide so their souls could ride a passing comet).

And the term "spirituality" applies to loosely the same set of baseless beliefs; i.e. David Ike and lizard men ruling the earth, the idea that the "Universe" is looking out for you, and that some things "are/aren't meant to be". I got this new soap, and my hogs need a bath...

At some point, the prospect that Universe was doing anything intentional for me lost all it's emotional appeal, and this is the point that really gets me in the end. I used to accept that there is no evidence-base for believing anything religious or spiritual, but I thought that religion was a valid tool for coping with "life: one damn thing after another" because it provided a cushion of perceived justification, hence predictability, hence sense of security and relief to life's events.

If you furrow your brow and think really hard though, this belief system isn't comforting at all! It means that every time things go wrong in your life, you must have done something wrong and are being punished. Religious texts will all have some opinion on what said-wrong could have been, but considering that Leviticus cites eating shellfish as one of the possibilities, how the hell do you narrow it down? Especially if you are a woman - most religious texts were written over 1500 years ago, when having your period was still considered a sin.

How do you feel if you're a devote Muschrisbudjew all your life, then you get hit one day with the news that you have cancer of the everything (which by the way, your chances of getting is now a staggering 2 out of 3)? Does that mean you recently ate shellfish and now God hates you? How comforting is that!?

Even if good things happen, how do you know which particular good deed you've done caused your good fortune? Because again, according to evidence-based statistics, being born a Caucasian man might be the best decision you ever didn't personally make to ensure a blessed and (literally) rich life.

Would it not in fact be far more comforting to believe that things happen to you based on a set of predisposing factors, some of which are in your control and to which you can proactively make changes, and that the ones your can't affect exist largely because of chance, are not your punishment for wanking off or listening to death metal at your unholy friend's house?

The greatest pile of bullshit about religion is how it takes away agency for individual beliefs, actions and outcomes, while simultaneously placing blame and punishment squarely on the individual. Sin is personal, but salvation is delegated to other forces a devotee must try to appease for his/her redemption without having a very clear idea of how. People are also taught to appeal to an invisible deity for help and they thank said deity when help is given when it's generally PEOPLE (or animals) that help you and PEOPLE to whom thanks should be given. It's almost like religion exists so that people can pretend that they don't depend on one another, and that hardly forms the basis for a cohesive and cooperative society. People often cite charity work as a supposed benefit of religion, as if charity is an inclination only the God-fearing have, and that is total bullocks.

Fundamentally, most major religions are diametrically opposed to democracy; right wing religo's just want Big Daddy to lay down the law and tell them how it's done. This is where the basis for the separation of Church and State: it is widely recognized that the church and all organized religious structures are hierarchical and unequal, and tend to be bizarrely secretive, which is also bad for democracy as it leads to lack of transparency in government reporting and lack of public policy based on evidence. This is why I don't think that highly religious people should be allowed run for public office in a democracy - Harper and Bush come to mind...

So yeah, 1200 words later, my final conclusion is "God bad: Critical Thinking good". If any out there reads this, then dies, reanimates and brings back evidence of an afterlife and a supreme being (or beings), let me know and I'll publish a retraction.

Hell might freeze over by then. Oooooooh, SNAP!

If you love someone, let them pee

When I was young, all-right, not so very young, I pee-ed my pants on an embarrassingly regular basis. They say this is normal for small children, but I never noticed that anyone else in my grade wore a cardigan year round so they could wrap it around their waist at the first sign of spillage.

Almost every time I laughed, my bladder would open the dam, without so much as a sirens warning. It got so bad that one of my best friends refused to let me wear her leotard for our dance recitals because surely enough, something funny would be said or done, and into the laundry the leotard would go. I played the chemotherapy for all it was worth, and it just so happens the research backs me up on this one but after age 11, it's value dropped considerably on the open market. C'est la vie.

The last time I pee-ed my pants in earnest (dribbling only counts in basketball, yo), was after Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Die-hard fans that me and my besty were, we held a candle-light vigil and guitar strumming hooplah down at the beach (how much I have not a drop of respect for Kurt Cobain now is the subject of another lengthy diatribe).

Some tears and other fluids were shed in a cacophony of irreverent laughter. Not that Kurt Cobain's blowing his brains out (or possibly being off'ed by Courtney in her bid for the perfect drama-filled and heart wrenchingly painful launch to stardom that grunge-punk idolizes -Conspiracy!) was the funniest thing that had happened all year, but we were teenagers and candies quizzically shaped liked wieners were enough to send us off the diving board of laughter into the pool of hilarious for hours.

At some point something was really, REALLY funny, and me bladder cast off her oppressive bondage and let her people free. Fortunately, I had a obscenely long coat on for that time of year, and it protected my soggy ass from discovery. I didn't think much at the time of the fact that my besty was also trying to walk behind me, and had her cardigan tied around her waist.

Over a decade later, we were having a conversation about the last time we both pee-ed ourselves, as friends tend to have. Ah, reminiscing on our glory days! The minute the Kurt Cobain vigil at the beach bit was uttered, we both looked at each other wide-eyed, and proclaimed "but that's the last time I pee-ed myself!" What a coincidink! Apparently, we were both trying our darned-est to hide this from each other at the time, with great success. For shame!

I wonder how many moments like that pass between friends and never come out in any sort of big reveal. Granted, pissing yourself is always embarrassing, whether you can help it or not, but nevertheless, we share plenty of things with our friends that really ought to be equally (if not more) embarrassing; waking up under a church wheelchair ramp after a hard night's boozing, making out or worse with nasty gross people who live in their mom's basement, flailing about naked about in the woods after a rave gone oh so wrong, etc. These are what we like to call 'stories'; the kind you bust out at the local jaunt during a get-together with friends, or on first dates with people from the internet.

As the waitress in Terminator aptly said; "in a hundred years, who's gonna care?". So if you love someone, or will probably never see them again, let them pee...and tell you all about it.

"Uh uh, bizaych, no you di'in't!"

Discourse on the Academy Awards as social commentary for America`s elite; or why the Oscars suck, and Hugo is a pile of bull-crap

No, not that Hugo.



Before I get into the titled diatribe, I owe it to my best friend, who has been recently been encouraging me to shit and stay on the pot; namely, to update this more than twice a year, to say something about my life since the last rant about John Gray, who, by the way, sucks just as much now as he did in August.

My lack of activity on the blogosphere is the mathematical result of the common equation work+hobbies+man=all my time; I honestly don`t know how children fit into this.. there must be some calculus involved. In any case, since August, I have fallen most happily into the perfect relationship and am moving in with mah man next month. We`ve become quite the alt. club power dance couple and can cut many fine Persian rugs on the floor; I`m hoping it`s out of respect for our combined talent, but it may equally be the result the other dancers defending themselves from my sporadic Bon Jovi kicks. That move may not translate as well from the karaoke stage as one might hope.

I spent Christmas and New Years in Turkey, walking through the streets at dusk hearing the most beautiful and calming prayers from the surrounding mosques in Sultanamet, eating canned beans from the grocery store like a cheap shit beggar, hiking though valley lined with abandoned cave houses, yelling obscenities at my car rental agent, and kicking molesters in the ass while defending my own from their loose and searching hands. My sister gave birth to a healthy baby boy, first in the family in 3 generations on the maternal side; bitch power runs strong in our family. Generally, I am a happy person, and am starting to share Gwynne Dyer`s cautious and cynical yet somehow optimistic view of the world.

None of this would have prompted me to write normally. But, damn, when something completely banal irks my ire, the flood gates open and ranting rapids come careening down the river bed. The last time I did it was to complain to the CBC about broadcasting Wheel of Fortune, which they have apparently been doing to years with my noticing, and now it is to set the record straight about that god-awful film Hugo and what the shit is with all it`s Oscar nominations.

For those of you who were thinking, òh Martin Scorcese directing a non-R rated film and it`s up for many Oscars, this must mean something, I am here to attempt to dispel that such a notion leads to a special happy place. This movie is a condescending piece of tripe, bleached and served up with fancy sauces as if the fact that it`s really full of shit shouldn`t have any affect on the taste.

Rotten Tomatoes gives rates this movie at a whopping 94%, offering another, at least benign, example of demonstrating that you can fool most of the people most of the time. If you haven`t seen it, here is their synopsis:

`This holiday season the legendary storyteller invites you to join him on a thrilling journey to a magical world with his first-ever 3-D film, based on Brian Selznick's award-winning, imaginative New York Times best-seller, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret." Hugo is the astonishing adventure of a wily and resourceful boy whose quest to unlock a secret left to him by his father will transform Hugo and all those around him, and reveal a safe and loving place he can call home`.

Yep, that about covers it.

Oh wait, no. It sure as shit doesn`t!

First, this movie makes the same irritating casting decision that all American films set in any European country other than England make: they cast every French character as a Brit, cause oh well close enough, and we like their accents more. While it was pure gold when they did it with Jean Luc Picard, it has become so common place that we might as well pretend that the British Empire never did fall, and rules with an iron fist over Hollywood`s imaginary take on Europe. It seems like the only way the French ever get to have their droll, or any other aspect of their language, preserved intact is produce themselves, so you can imagine why Quebec is so strict with it`s Francophone laws. I don`t blame them in the least.

And the characters...

Hugo is precocious orphan, with the obligatory drunken uncle who abandons him to live in the clocks of Paris central station after his father dies in museum fire, after his mother died ostensibly from being French in the 19th century. Despite all his tragedy, he is moral and un-cruel, and steals only food for sustenance. Children who lose both their parents and are constantly hunted and abused by adults are more likely to end up like the child soldiers of the Interahamwe than genius clock makers, but whatever. Let`s just say he`s well adjusted to his semi-tragic fate. He is joined shortly by Isabelle, the god daughter of Ben Kingsley`s character, who has the most ridiculously affect Cockney accent ever contrived, and delights in saying quintessentially British things like `is i`tah seecret? Oh, I luv seecrets` with all the sincerity of a rogue trader before a senate sub-committee.

Ben Kingsley`s talent for largely wicked roles is wasted here. He is a bitter old toy maker, whom it turns out is actually George Meleis, famed Sci-Fi director who amde spectaular films until the Great War came around and ruined his life by killing everyone who used to watch them. The entire length of film you are waiting for something deeper to reveal the true source of his malaise and grief, especially after his wife expels Hugo and his prepubescent girlfriend with line `he is too fragile. Oh, children should not know such sorrow`,cause if someone ain`t dead or raped, or raped then killed, and their entire village burned to the ground, you are expected to get the fuck over whatever else it is at some point, and move on with your pointless life. But no, not Monsieur Meleise. While still landing employment that kept him in house and seemingly well fed and clothed, he simply became unpopular and it was too much for him to bear. I imagine the sisters of Delta Kappa Pita would well relate.

In the end, Hugo helps Meleise rediscover his love of life and is adopted by him, to live happily ever after in an budding sexual relationship with his new sister in law, we assume.

Now, as scathing as that review just was, I must admit that I wouldn`t hate this movie half as much, in fact I wouldn`t comment on it at all, if it weren`t up for 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

See, there are worse movies. Hugo is quite benign, and it is beautifully filmed. However, what makes it somewhat less benign, and which isn`t it`s fault really but I have to criticize the film in order to segway into this argument, is that it symbolizes Hollywood`s new position on political affairs. This is my opinion as an educated layperson, not as an expert on the subject, so rebuttle is welcome, but it seems like the Oscars traditionally rewarded edgier fare. Films like Crash, Munich, Do the Right Thing: the Oscars were supposed to highlight movies that were politically and socially relevant, and were thought provoking in some respect to that end. That doesn`t mean that they had to end badly or be overly pessimistic, but they did tend to be; however, Crash does end with some significant reconciliation of the characters and the greater issues they embodied.

Hugo does not have any of these qualities. The characters and script writing are completely unoriginal and highly stereotyped, and say nothing, except that we should believe in wonder and imagination. While this message is by no means unwelcome, I don`t think it really qualifies as thought provoking either. The obsequious nomination of this film for some many categories made me feel like the Hollywood elite, with the exception of Matt Damon, can no longer be bothered to comment on anything of importance, and that the official Hollywood line is to `keep calm and carry on`and pretending that all is well is uber riche La-La Land.

But, even if that is the case, maybe it doesn`t matter that much. Are the Oscars really that representative of American society or even of Hollywood? I just can`t say `yes`.

They did, however, provide excellent fodder for my blog. Thank you. Take a bow.

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and John Gray is from Stupider Jupiter

Ladies and gentlemen, forgive me, but I need to take a moment to tear this man a new asshole; professionally.


Without getting into too much revealing detail, I have recently been exposed to John Gray in depth, and the experience has left me feeling much like most young women feel when an arrogant puffy-lipped man exposes himself in public right in from of them: ashamed, and mildly curious.

A little background; some of you may have hear of this man from the early 90’s, and he is the authour of the much-beloved by average people, much belittled by people in possession of actual facts, “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus”. This was only the first; there have since then been 16 more, all as barely varied in content as they are in name, that consist exclusively of John Gray’s personal version of human reality, the unreferenced version: cue drum-roll:

Mars and Venus on a Date

What You Feel You Can Heal

Men, Women and Relationships

Mars and Venus in Love

Mars and Venus Together Forever: A Practical Guide to Creating Lasting Intimacy

Mars and Venus in the Bedroom

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus Book of Days

Mars and Venus Starting Over

How To Get What You Want and Want What You Have

Children Are from Heaven

Practical Miracles for Mars and Venus: Nine Principles for Lasting Love, Increasing Success, and Vibrant Health in the Twenty-first Century

Mars and Venus in the Workplace

Truly Mars & Venus

The Mars & Venus Diet & Exercise Solution

Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improving Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress

Mars and Venus: 365 Ways to Keep Passion Alive

Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice – Hormonal Balance – The Key to Life, Love, and Energy

It is the latest installment in this epic saga of baseless neo-Christian pseudo-psycho babble that has irked me ire. If men are from Mar, and women from Venus, then this cheese is from the moon.

In his mind, John Gray is an authora-tay on the secret needs and desires of every man from every woman, visa vie what they want from each other, no matter who or what they are. Somehow, he was gifted this information on the basis of his Ph.D from Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited correspondence university that was closed by court order in 2000, though he does apparently have a bachelors and masters in “creative intelligence” from either the Maharishi European Research University or the Maharishi International University. One of these is in Switzerland , while the other is in Iowa , so it seems he may have been deliberately vague as to which one, as the Swiss end has scads of European intellectual sex appeal, while Iowa conjures up images of an overweight, white Gandhi sporting mutton chops and meditating in a corn field.

So aside from the degrees we all hold by graduating the kindergarten of getting shit kicked out of us, entering the school of hard knocks, and eeking by with barely passing grades in the University of “this is my life?!”, the man has about as much right to pen books that have altered the lives of millions of couples as dentist has to lead a wildlife adventure tour through Namibia.

At least with the first book, he made a point of playing up his experience as a clinical therapist as the basis for his overly fixed opinions; in this latest installment, he’s all Science – he looked it up on the internet. You cannot get through 2 pages without coming across the kind of assertion that would make Stephen Hawking roll over in his grave, were he dead, could he roll.

There are only 6 different percentages used to expound the exhaustive critical examination of his data (this book has no reference section or bibliography, btw): 10%, 25% 40% 50%, 75% and 90%. For example “Men also have far greater stores of serotonin because they make it 50% faster and store 50% more”. And don’t forget the age old “research has proven…that women’s muscles have 75% more endurance power”. He even goes so far as to assert that women have 40% more connective tissue between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, meaning that our emotional female brain-parts communicate more fluidly with the cold calculating bits, making us more in touch with our feelings. He might as well have said that they extra tissue dampens left-right brain transmission, leaving women with only the flippant left to sort out their weepy, irrational lives. Anyhow.

Strangely enough, some of these outrageous facts are almost true. Men’s global brain synthesis, not speed or storage, of serotonin is 40-50% greater than women’s (1,2); however, to take that singularly impressive fact and electrify it by making it sound like men’s brains are serotonin-producing NAPA roadsters, takes all the credibility out of not only this one statement, but every similar statement in the entire book.

Similarly, while there are gender related differences in muscle endurance, which can be summed up basically with the statement that men go hard, women go faster, the different varies wildly depending on the muscle groups involved and the type of exercise being preformed, with no difference at all being observed in a number of scenarios. In one isometric contraction test, women had approximately 28% better endurance than men, largely due to women having better lumbar muscle endurance (3).

It’s almost like someone played a game of telephone with all his scientific information; which each degree of separation, the information became more outlandish and removed from its source.

As for the brain, as pointed out with so much eloquence by Ron Burgandy, women actually do have a brain a "half the size of a man", but we make up for it by having more grey matter: the bits that do all the thinking. Men in fact, have more white matter (connective tissue) in their melons, and more cerebral spinal fluid, hence greater brain volume – but it ain’t size that matters, its content (5). As for the connective tissue between the hemispheres, the corpus callosum, there is no 40% thicker, no nothing. Some of the substructures of the corpus callosum are thicker and/or more or less widely spaced visa vie men and women, and many of the notable differences can usually be attributed to medical conditions, like craziness (6).


You, Mr. Gray, can officially suck it.



1. Okazawa H, Leyton M, Benkelfat C, Mzengeza S, Diksic M. Statistical mapping analysis of serotonin synthesis images generated in healthy volunteers using positron-emission tomography and a-[11C]methyl-L-tryptophan. J Psychiatry Neurosci 2000;
25:359-70.


2. Nishizawa S, Benkelfat C, Young SN, Leyton M, Mzengeza S, de Montigny C, Blier P, Diksic M. Differences between males and females in rates of serotonin synthesis in human brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1997;94:5308-13.


3. Brian C. Clark1, Todd M. Manini1, Dwight J. Thé1, Neil A. Doldo1, and Lori L. Ploutz-Snyder, Gender differences in skeletal muscle fatigability are related to contraction type and EMG spectral compression Journal of Applied Physiology June 2003 vol. 94 no. 6 2263-2272


4. Ruben C. Gur,1 Bruce I. Turetsky,1 Mie Matsui,1 Michelle Yan,1 Warren Bilker,1,2 Paul Hughett,1 and Raquel E. Gur1.Sex Differences in Brain Gray and White Matter in Healthy Young Adults: Correlations with Cognitive Performance. The Journal of Neuroscience, May 15, 1999, 19(10):4065–4072



5. Senem Turan Ozdemir, Ilker Ercan, Ozdemir Sevinc, Ibrahim Guney, Gokhan Ocakoglu, Elif Aslan, Cagatay Barut. Statistical Shape Analysis of Differences in the Shape of the Corpus Callosum Between Genders. The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology. Volume 290, Issue 7, pages 825–830, July 2007

Murder by Awesome

Evolution is an interesting phenomenon; it gave us the platypus, and Nintendo X-box. And it took away the dinosaurs, so we’ll never have the chance to mount lasers on their heads and take them into battle against alien robot armies, like we did in the 80’s. But more practically, if there is anything that the scientific study of evolution has taught us as a general principle is that biological organisms have finite resources, and that evolved traits are usually brilliantly but barely suited, and not one iota more so, to the conditions that gave rise to them. Except for Australia, but there are always exceptions.

Even though it would have been totally radical, or “sick” if you will, for some people to have evolved horns, webbed feet, and x-ray vision; nature didn’t set out to make us as rock-on as we could possibly be. Apparently, we never went through a phase where we tended to regularly ram out heads into walls or each other, so we didn’t grow horns. And as much as we love Hawaii, we never swam enough to get webbed feet. As for x-ray vision, I guess if you really want to see a girls panties that badly, you can always just rape her, and we perfected that tactic so long ago as to make see-through eye powers totally redundant. If that weren’t enough, we couldn’t even maintain our ability to synthesis vitamin C endogenously because we needed that extra metabolic energy for something else; like making brains capable of science, the internet, and cosplay.

For these reasons, though I am no expert, evolution strikes me as a bit of a lazy game, or if not lazy, then just at least a “fiscally conservative” one. You get barely what you need, and almost none of what you want; just like love (*bitter-tears*).

So it makes me really amused to see how the film industry takes this and spins it into: EXTREMEvolution: Let’s electrify them!
The latest inspiration to pass through my left ventricle on this vein is Pandorum, which I saw last year on the plane to London and then again recently at home. I have to confess, I actually like this movie. It was a bit of breath of fresh space-air. Someone finally made a mostly original Sci-fi story and a studio actually had the guts to put money into it. It obviously shares traits common to all deep-space sci-fi horrors - monsters, giant quasi-anthropomorphized space ships, dirty sexy ninja orphans with Eastern European accents, flashbacks of last-time-I saw-my-crying-wife, and apocalypses on Earth involving our beautiful yet tragically dying sun - but it also worked pretty well as a psychological thriller and it wasn’t totally obvious or predictable. The only thing about it that I thought fell flat in the realm of suck was the monsters.

*Spoilers* It will come as no surprise to anyone who has any knowledge of basic story structure, we are introduced, in the beginning of all places, to a set of antagonists, and they are bionic-gray-11th –dan Taekwondou-master-shrill-screeching monster-men (women and devil children make cameos later) with giant shards of blue superman’s-cavern crystals growing out of their backs. We soon learn that they are actually the descendants of some of crew who originally piloted the mission to somewhere out there, and they brought many people with them to start a new civilization. However, some key members went space-crazy; aka Pandorum, though on earth we know it as “losing our shit in the face of loneliness and isolation with no hope of relief”. They did something to the ship (see, I’m not spoiling everything), but most of the colonists were still in hypersleep (?), so they stayed people, whle everyone who wasn’t spent some insufficient number of mission-years living their sad, doomed lives and bred successive generations who morphed into cannibal monsters that “evolved to suit the ship”.

Excuse me, but what the shit? “Evolved to suit the ship”? Ok, so these post-humans had to evolve superior martial arts skills, the strength of ten elephants, and jaws that can engulf and severe a human head in one chomp in response to prey that consisted solely of groggy half-naked people who periodically fell limp and confused from their space-sleep tubes, and threats that were limited to the interior of the ship, which never went “Event Horizon” on their asses, and was mostly just dark and greasy.

Now, I understand that with all works of total fiction, willing suspension of disbelief is required for full effect (ala the bible, etc.) but there comes a point where the viewer is asked to suspend too much, and there are bread-riots in the streets of our minds hungry for reason. If all those people ever had to challenge their adaptive capabilities was essentially helpless prey, and a few slippery pools of hydraulic fluid on the steel causeway, they could have just as well evolved into sticky Jellyfish-like flesh balls that rolled over their prey and digested them with an external stomach, like sea urchins. For Pete’s sake, they could have evolved into a parasitic fungus and done in their prey almost as easily.


They should have been fighting that, but they were fighting these.

Let’s say they went full sea urchin and kept the shards, but that wouldn’t make any sense either as there were no otters or gulls on the ship, so big balls of jelly-flesh is more likely. The Blob managed to be scary when it’s monster was just a slow moving mountain of pink pudding, because the film relied more heavily on suspense and the hopeless feeling that no matter how slowly death was coming, it would eventually get you no matter what. And that film was set on Earth, where the protagonists could have gotten in car, driven to a plane, and flown to a remote atoll and safely assumed that they wouldn’t have to deal with the blog for many years, if ever again. These humans were on a dying space ship with severely limited options for escape; so why couldn’t they have gone with the scary blob people? They did a great job creating the whole suspense and mystery around who had actually gone crazy in the first place and sent the ship off course, and where hell were they now anyway; PLUS they had the time pressure of trying to restart the reactor that was failing after over 900 years of smooth operation (if only Fukushima Daiichi had been built so well). Why not just run with that and add to that list of trouble the fact that slow-moving acid blobs of post-humans that had evolved perfectly “to suit the ship” were oozing after them at every turn? I would have put my pillow over my face in horror, and not eaten Jello for weeks.

But that just isn’t good enough these days. Even Edward the Vampire was apparently slated to a kung-fu fisted vampire bounty hunter before the studio decided to let him be the sparkling undead romantic underwear model of Stephanie Meyers dreams. Is anything with even hint of sublety (i.e.more-truth-than-fiction) is doomed to be steam-rolled over by the likes of Wesley Snipes, Kesha, CG, Fox news, and the Vatican’s facebook page.

Please oh please, give me back my creeping blob, and my windy creek in the valley, and some nice, slow cooked, ghoul-free Pandorum stew to boil in.