Just...shitty.

It's especially bad when you're sitting inside and the sky outside is blue with puffy, cartoony clouds that may as well have fucking cute smiley faces like the ones in Super Mario Brothers and all you want to do is sit on a patio or balcony with a beer and a spliff and maybe play the new Super Mario Brothers but you can't because you're at work and drinking is frowned upon and you can just forget about the spliff because you had a cold last week which has turned into a phlegmy cough which only comes out a night to keep you and your girlfriend awake, so you end up sleeping for three hours on a couch that's way to short and so you're totally tired and also you're up to your ass in bills and so a Nintendo DDS is totally out of the question and so you think "why the fuck am I working this shitty, boring job with no prospects for advancement and even if there were, I'd probably tell them to stick their prospects for advancement up their ass because the job is so shitty and boring" and then it hits you that you’re turning 30 this year and have pretty much nothing to show for the first 1/3 of your life and the remainder isn't looking so shit hot either, but hey an empty dull life beats no life at all, but then chances are the monitor you spend your days staring at is sending radiation that is causing tiny cancer cells to grow in your brain or your balls which means at some point in the near future you're probably going to be laying in a hospital ward praying to a god you don't even believe in to make it through this ordeal so you can live until you lose total control of your bowels and forget the names of the people who you love if you're somehow lucky enough to have anybody, but then it hits you that you’ve just wasted 10 minutes writing a really depressing run-on sentence, which brings you that much closer to the end of the day so you might be able to catch some sun after all, plus the week is almost officially half over and the Oilers are in the motherfucking Stanley Cup Final and suddenly things could be a lot worse. Yeah.

Whyte riot, a riot of my own!

If they really want to keep a lid on the Cup-related shenanigans on Whyte Ave, rolling a couple of vials of nerve gas into the Thirsty Turtle at the final buzzer would be a good start.

Idolotry

...or why Europe is, and always will be, better than North America.

Last night, millions of idiots people tuned into to watch this dink "wow" the judges and voters on "American Idol" with a hackneyed, overblown performance of a tired old Stevie Wonder song.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, the Eurovision Song contest was held to select the most popular song in Europe. The winner? These guys.

There's only two words for that: "fucking" and "awesome".

Whoooo!

What a game. despite falling behind early on, the good guys perservered and scored the two goals they needed to propel themselvs to victory. yes folks, FC Barcelona are the champions of Europe!

Oh, the Oilers? Yeah I missed most of that one.

I was saying "Boo-urns".

So San Jose fans booed the Canadian national anthem on Sunday night. I'm surprised, not by the booing, but the fact it took so long to notice: the same Shark Tank faithful gave "O Canada" a chorus of boos in Game One. Ask anyone who was in the Underdog for that one, they'll tell you.

But, really: who fucking cares? I don't even know why they bother with the anthems at NHL games. Given the international flavour of the game these days, choosing to sing just two anthems isn't representative of the players. And, more than that, it's just silly and archaic. Ditch 'em.

"...Code" causes Christian crack-up

I don't care to read the "DaVinci Code" (pop-lit is not my bag), but I am intrigued by the movie. It has a good cast (how can anyone not love Audrey Tatou? And Ian McKellan? Fuggetaboutit.), a good director and, based on the trailers to be the kind of popcorn film that Hollywood has forgoten how to make. But what seals the deal for me is that the film (which puts forward the crazy notion that Jesus Christ-wait for it-may not have actually risen from the dead three days after being nailed to a post) is causing conniptions among right-wing religious nuts.

"Christians are under no obligation to pay for what Hollywood dishes out, especially a movie that slanders Jesus Christ and the church," said Robert H. Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian group based in Washington.

"I don't have to see 'The Devil in Miss Jones' to know it's pornography, and I don't have to see 'The Da Vinci Code' to know that it's blasphemous," said Mr. Knight, who plans to join religious leaders from groups like Human Life International and Movieguide in Washington on May 17 to announce boycott plans.

(I love this line: "Christians have not been this worked up about a movie since Martin Scorsese's Jesus stepped down off the crucifix in "The Last Temptation of Christ" in 1988.")

What can you say about a subgroup who packs the house to see their Saviour get whaled on in great, blood-splattered detail ("The Passion of the Christ") but get insulted by a popcorn thriller starring the All-American Tom fucking Hanks? get your priorities straight, people.

Beat

I've never liked the Magnetic Fields. A few years ago, when "69 Love Songs" came out, a friend made me a mixtape (how old-skool is that?) and I found it unlistenable junk. I find Stephin Merritt's voice extremely grating and the whole Cole Porter/showtunes vibe left me cold. Now, Merritt is openly gay, but I'm fairly certain the fact I can't stand his music doesn't make me a homophobe. But according to music critic/pretentious wanker Sasha Frere-Jones, the fact that Merritt doesn't seem to like black music makes him a racist cracker. The article does a good job skewering the big fat balloon of illogic that the gasbag SFJ and somebody named Jessica Hopper send up. But what goes unexplored is the very basic notion of why certain type so music appeals to certain demographics.

The fact that I, as a middle-class white male, gravitate towards music made by middle-class white males for middle class white males does not make me racist or sexist. It simply means I gravitate towards music that I can relate to. Take a band I'm currently enjoying the shit out of: The Rakes. Now, despite the fact they are British and I Canadian, it nonetheless goes without saying that I have more in common with some sweater wearing white boys in an indie band singing about working a shitty white-collar jobs and going down to the pub than I would a lesbian folk-singer or gangster rapper. Music tastes can be aspirational, too, but I think individual tastes are determined in part by how closely the content mirrors the experiences of the individual (to say nothing of things like melody, beat, lyrical content etc.) Race is barely on the radar.

That's not to say race (or for that matter, sexism-I wonder if SFJ has more men or women among his favorites?) don't matter. Questions of race will inevitably cross over into art, but the course of action SFJ seems to advocate (which is, essentially, affirmative action for your CD collection) is flat-out ridiculous. Individual tastes are tricky things to pin down and, unless someone is talking about their love of Prussian Blue or RAHOWA, inferring racism by omission is irresponsible at best.

(This post is clearly not as insightful as I hoped: there's a disconnect between my brain and fingers right now. I blame the Oilers for making me stay up till 1 a.m. the other night, something I still haven't recovered from).

Trivial Psychic

I've ben reading a lot about Lily Allen of late and have had her sweet summer jam "LDN" going through my head for the last couple of days (hear it on her MySpace.) Something-probably the tinny-sounding horn sample and bouncy beat-reminds me of White Town's 1997 number one "Your Woman." Now I haven't heard that song in years, probably since it was big, and my searches for an mp3 have, so far, turned up nowt. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I walk into a dollar store at lunch and, as I'm paying for my purchase at the till, well, you can guess what song came on. So yeah: I'm freaked out.

Addendum

In response to the previous post, astute reader S. points to the recentimmigrant rights rallies in the U.S. as evidence that people get riled up about much more than meaningless sports events. So please allow me to clarify: people only stage spontaneous gatherings for meaningless sporting events and when facing the prospect of deportation.

Take it to the streets

Y’know, I like sports and hockey as much as the next guy. I wept the last time the Canadiens won the Cup and again the last time they made an early playoff exit. And I lustily cheered every Oilers’ goal last night. But at no point did I feel compelled to run down the street, yelling my fool head off, or drive around honking my car’s horn. After all, it’s not as though I had anything to do with the win; I didn’t accomplish anything, so what’s to celebrate? But that obviously didn’t occur to the thousands of well-liquored Oilers partisans who descended on my neighbourhood last night to demonstrate their pride in their local sports team by kicking over newspaper boxes and baring their breasts. As I tossed fitfully in bed, fantasizing about the EPS helicopter swooping down, Apocalypse Now style and machine-gunning the revelers, it really struck me what a big fat waste of energy the whole spectacle is. I thought of Paris in May 1968, of civil rights marches and other mass movements. These are distant memories, never to be duplicated: we live in a society where people passively accept every single obscenity the government and corporate world inflict: it takes a meaningless sporting event to get people to come together in a spontaneous show of unity. And that, friends, is fucking pathetic.