Believe It or Not!

Before I started this blog, I was a contributor to one that eventually died a natural death.  However, let it not be said that I don’t favour the reusing of material.  After all, it’s not like any of you non-existent readers ever saw that original blog, right?  In any event, this was probably my best attempt at comedy writing, so I hope it at least gets a chuckle out of you:

The following are all true. A team of scientists, researchers, historians, and other specialists have spent their lives verifying these claims.

Believe it or not…

…the modern flush toilet was popularized by a man named Crapper! Thomas Crapper was head of a London plumbing concern that bought the patent rights from Albert Giblin and proceeded to market the device to great success!

…Michael Jackson owns the publishing rights to all of the Beatles’ songs! In 1984 the ATV Corporation, then owner of the rights, sold its 4000 song catalog for $47.5 million! Although Jackson owns the publishing rights the estates of Paul McCartney and John Lennon still receive their songwriter’s share of royalties!

…Life Savers candy are so named because its inventor’s daughter choked to death on a solid mint! Clarence Crane created the holed candy to allow choking victims to breathe even when the candy is lodged in their throat!

…while it’s untrue that Richard Gere was once admitted to a hospital with a gerbil stuffed up his rectum, it’s true that he prepared for his role in Pretty Woman by repeatedly soliciting prostitutes! He was eventually arrested for this behaviour but the studio arranged to have his record and the arresting officer “disappear”!

…Marie Antoinette was the first to discover cold nuclear fusion! In 1788 she described the process in her journal, calling it “an astounding discovery” with “far-reaching implications”. Unfortunately, all her papers detailing the process was lost in the chaos of the Revolution!

…Nostradamus’ mistaken prediction of a Saxon reinvasion of France in 1889 was actually supposed to read 2009 and was due to a mathematical error! An enigmatic figure known only as “Charles the Commander” shall rescue France in her darkest hour. Modern translations indicate that “Charles the Commander” actually means “Charles in Charge”; the French government has already secured Scott Baio in a secret bunker in Provence to await the fated day!

…Albanians are born without a heart! The exact process is a secret, but it’s known that they must grow one from the seed of a camphor tree and water it with tears from a heartbroken crocodile. Only by tending the tree can they learn to love, though the heart itself must be installed by a qualified cardiologist!

…most people are aware of prima nocta or “first night” from the Mel Gibson movie Lethal Weapon 2, but in real life medieval lords actually performed the act of ultima nocta or “last night”! This was the right of the nobility to enact sexual congress upon persons right before or right after they die. It grew out of fashion in the mid-1700s, primarily because the practice was scientifically proven to be immoral!

…Abraham Lincoln was a secret practitioner of Zhaquan wushu, while his rival, Gen. Robert E. Lee, appropriately enough studied Hung Fut Pai, a southern style of kung fu! During the Battle of Gettysburg the two dueled in an abandoned barn a scant 30 miles from where the great conflict raged. Upon defeating Lee the Great Emancipator emasculated his enemy with his bare hands. For the rest of his life Lincoln would always keep the trophy in a jar close at hand, though he would only show it to his closest associates!

…the secret society of Alamut (more commonly known as the Assassins), generally believed to have been destroyed in the 13th century, actually survives to the present day through a process known as Photosynthesis!

…the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Kelo v. New London extended the definition of eminent domain to “physical property on one’s person being underused or not generating enough tax revenue where such seizure is for the public purpose”! This means the U.S. government is now authorized to take into possession any citizen’s heart, lungs, spleens, etc. if it can demonstrate that such organs are underutilized and its seizure can serve the public good!

…the newest science of eschatology describes the study of the LiveJournal postings of Jennifer Eschat of St. Paul, MN, greatest of all modern thinkers! Stanford University has already begun offering a bachelor’s degree in eschatology and has plans to expand the program into graduate-level studies!

…the Jesuits are the literal Army of Christ! Ignatius Loyola, their founder and the first General Superior, started the society after dreaming of Christ and him on a beach with a varying number of footprints. His Spiritual Exercises actually contain cleverly concealed lessons drawn from history’s greatest battles, and more are added after every century. The ubiquitous schools are essentially indoctrination centres where the most promising are trained in the military arts. When the final trumpet is sounded the Societa Jesu will take up their swords and cruise missiles and charge the army of the Beast written of in Revelations, who, in a surprising turn of events, will turn out to be Scott Baio! Baio will by then have wrested control of the International Civil Aviation Organization and filled it with his most loyal and battle-hardened cronies. He will only be defeated by the pure love of an Albanian. The last war will begin in the tenth year of the reign of Jennifer Eschat Caesar!

…formica was developed as a cheaper and more reliable substitute for mica, the most widely used electrical insulator of the time!

Since you read all the way to the end, you’ve proven yourself worthy, and may now watch the video you were probably Googling for when you clicked on this post by accident:

I wonder why the Greatest American Hero has the symbol for China on his chest.  In any event, I think the definitive version was by George Costanza:

Fuck tha police

I think I’ve only used my “Fuck tha police” tag once, so, in an attempt to make quota, I will put up this video of the RCMP killing an unarmed man at the Vancouver airport. You may have seen this already, but there’s no harm in seeing it again.

If you’re the impatient type, fast-forward to the RCMP’s arrival five minutes in. Don’t fast-forward too far, though – if you overshoot by a minute the guy is already dead. To top it all off, the man who shot this video had to sue the police to get the tape back. They said they needed it for their investigation and wouldn’t release it until after the coroner’s inquest (which can take anywhere from a week to a year). Luckily, they caved under threat of a lawsuit. As for those officers, I hope they get charged (or at least fired), and I hope the man’s mother sues the shit out of the RCMP.

Lest anyone think I’m picking too much on the Canadian police, I will link to this story from The Smoking Gun: Arrested For Salting A Police Officer. A McDonald’s employee put too much salt and pepper on a burger, but since management was always bitching about waste she went ahead and served it anyway. It was just her luck that it was a cop who ended up with the overly-peppered-and-salted burger. The guy took a couple bites and then went ahead and arrested her for “Reckless Conduct”. She spent a night in jail and had to post a thousand dollars in bail money.

Finally, I’ll leave off with another video, this time involving the use of pepper spray. A cop went through a Wendy’s drive-through and thought he got short-changed. He went into the restaurant and started making a scene, then approached the teenage girl who served him and accused her of stealing his money. When she refused to be intimidated, he pulled out his pepper spray and let her have a blast, then subsequently arrested her. The kicker is that, as the video clearly shows, the girl had no opportunity to steal his money and the cop never gave her the twenty dollars he thought he did. He was just being another dickhead drunk on his own power.

I don’t know about you, but I sure feel protected and served.

Intelligence fucking blows

I guess I should explain what I’m talking about, for those unacquainted with the depths of Canadian TV. Intelligence is a TV show on CBC about a big-time pot smuggler in BC. He ends up as an informant for the RCMP, but he uses them just as much as they use him. The show goes into his operation: his grow-op people, business partners, rivals, and others. The show also goes as much into the other side of the fence, showing intelligence and law enforcement people from both sides of the US-Canada border clashing and colluding to varying degrees.

Sounds interesting, right? Ed Brubaker sure made it sound that way when he gave the show a mention in the latest issue of Criminal (Criminal’s a decent crime comic, by the way, have a look if you’re into that kind of stuff). He said, “If you’re a fan of The Wire or The Shield, you need to track it down.” Like most Canadians, I make it a habit to stay away from Canadian-made dramas, so I hadn’t heard of the show -but I am a fan of both The Wire and The Shield, thus leading me to download the first season (and let me just say it was a total pain to find torrents with enough people still seeding). It was a major disappointment. Yes, the premise and the plots are fairly interesting, but the execution falls far short of the standards Brubaker compares it to. Where The Shield has crackling intensity, Intelligence has boring characters. Where The Wire has gritty realism, Intelligence has a bland atmosphere. In fact, if I had to describe the show in one word, that’s what I would use: bland. I’ve met enough government types to know that in real life they’re actually pretty bloodless and uninteresting, and the media probably makes drug smuggling more exciting than it actually is, but that’s the advantage of fiction. Take some fucking creative license, for God’s sake. The biggest crime when producing entertainment is not to make it entertaining. Even when a potential gang war pops up, the way it’s presented on the show is pretty bland and low-key. Actually, “bland” pretty much describes every this and every other drama made for Canadian TV. Maybe I’m not being entirely fair. I know the two American shows have much bigger budgets, which lead to better production values; the budget on Intelligence probably only amounts to The Wire‘s coffee expenditure. If the producers of Intelligence had access to the same kind of money, maybe they’d be able to create something as good. At the very least they wouldn’t have to keep setting so many scenes at night (which I suspect they’re only doing to take advantage of cheaper equipment rentals) and they could show more complicated set pieces and maybe an action scene or two. However, I keep thinking about Robert Rodriguez and how he supposedly shot El Mariachi with a budget of only sixty thousand dollars. Or think about the first Saw movie – shot for a hundred thousand, made tens of millions. I know there are differences between TV and movie production, but the point still stands that if the people in charge are good enough, they can find a way to make interesting fare while working within restrictive budget limitations.

(This raises the question, “Why aren’t the people in charge good enough?” This one is fairly easy to answer. The most talented and ambitious creative types overwhelmingly choose to go south, and not just for the money. The creative opportunities are just so much better, and you get to meet and work with some of the best minds in the industry. With those kinds of incentives, you’d have to be an idiot to stay behind in Canada. You do occasionally get a Cronenberg or an Egoyan, but they tend to be few and far between. Everybody else deserves to get stuck directing episodes of The New Adventures of Sinbad.)

What Intelligence reminds me of the most is MI-5, and what I was hoping the show would be like. MI-5 has the same premise, except it’s actually good (at least the first couple of seasons were, before they started trying to ape 24). The kicker is that British TV channels don’t actually have that much more money than its Canadian counterparts. I think it’s made by a private broadcaster, though, while the CBC is government-owned through-and-through. Maybe it’s true how they say that government work kills creativity? In any event, that’s another show Intelligence can be be unfavourably compared to.

I think I’ll have to revise my original title. Intelligence doesn’t fucking blow. Given what I imagine are a small budget and a limited talent pool, Intelligence works well enough with what it’s got. In other words, Intelligence is good for Canadian TV. And that statement tells anyone what they need to know about this show.

The Shield Comics Interviews

Back in 2004, IDW Publishing came out with a comic book story based on the TV show The Shield. IDW publishes a fair amount of licensed stuff from popular TV shows and movies; I suppose the company thinks licensed materials are easier to market because they have an already established fan base. The quality of the books tends to be decent enough, but the The Shield comic also contained a couple interviews from Shawn Ryan (the “show runner” or person most responsible for the show) and Michael Chiklis (Vic Mackey). What follows are those two interviews, which I got from scans posted on a popular comics torrent site. Enjoy.

Shawn Ryan Interview, page one
Shawn Ryan Interview, page two

Michael Chiklis Interview

Myself, as drawn by Matt Groening

Over at the Simpsons movie website there’s a Flash thingie that lets you recreate yourself in Simpsons form. Mine is surprisingly close to how I look in real life, down to how the shoes, shirt, and pants don’t match.

You can even put your avatar in areas from the show; so far, however, only Moe’s Tavern is available.