Board Shame

Pretty sure I'm addicted to sugar because I played Candyland as a kid. The game has nothing to do with learning to read or counting, but it has everything to do with mouth-watering images of sweets. There's no strategy so you brain can really focus on the succulent images of Chocolate Marshes and Peppermint Stick Forests. Yeah, like that's not habit-forming; why not just stick a heroin needle in my arm, Mom! Nobody mentioned diabeatus when I was taking the shortcut along Gumdrop Pass!

Punxsutawney Thrawn

I step outside, pale and feeble after months and months of living indoors. A black fly lands on my forearm. Three more months of de facto winter.

New Democratic Apathy

After the Liberals submitted their last budget to the Ontario legislature a few weeks ago, the NDP setup a toll-free hotline and a website to give Ontario's citizens voters taxpayers "everyday folks" a chance to let the party know their reaction to the budget. The NDP described the response to their hotline as a "flood" whereas I would describe it more as the democratic tap not being turned all the way off after the election and a few annoying drops landing on the porcelain (if we are stuck using hydrological metaphors).

Ontario's population is over 12,850,000 yet the NDP only got 10,000* people to contact them about the 2012 budget. That’s only one out of every 1,285 Ontarians. So less than 0.1% of Ontarians could be bothered to contribute to an important discussion about a watershed austerity budget with many long-term consequences. And of those who did get in touch with the NDP, I'm sure a lot of the complaints were about stupid little things like ending subsidies for the horse-racing industry because racetracks and horse breeders urged people to do so, which just seems weird to me.

But at least the NDP got a better understanding of what the 0.1% of Ontarians who contacted them thought of the budget, right? Wrong. The responses they did get it were, "all over the map," according to their leader, so the whole exercise was a waste of time.

Two weeks have gone by since the Liberal budget was tabled and the NDP's full list of proposals still has not been put forward. The NDP had 6 months after the last election to sort out their policy priorities; instead, they waited until the budget was already out before they started soliciting ideas from the public-at-large. Predictably, the public-at-large did not speak with a single voice and this got them nowhere. In other words, the NDP held an ostentatious focus-group that failed to provide any useful feedback and delayed important discussions about the future of the provincial government by at least a week.

I am most surprised that there wasn't more of a reaction from public-sector unions to the Liberal announcement that they are essentially doing away with collective bargaining in the public sector for the next two years and freezing pay. There are approximately one-million public-sector workers in Ontario who would be affected by those proposals and they have strong unions and trade associations to make their special interests heard. In the words of the OPSEU head, “We’ll give [the finance minister] a fight the likes of which he’s never seen and he won’t forget for a long, long time because unions are good at fighting.”

Yet behind this rhetoric, Ontario's public-sector unions could not get even 1% of their members to let the NDP know they would like more money. It makes me suspect that the unions colluded with the NDP to make sure the party was not pressured into forcing an election and now the unions will hammer the Liberals for freezing pay and collective bargaining without mentioning that the NDP supported the budget that contained those same measures in the first place.

*: Most sources I saw actually said it was half that, only 5,000. Maybe the numbers were inflated by repeat callers, prank calls, wrong numbers, and people outside Ontario.

Silver Lining

The Sabres season ended in a depressing fashion but the silver lining is, as always, gambling. I made a bet before the season that Brad Boyes would score less than 57.5 points and I was right by a mile. Boyes finished the season with only 23 points.

I only wish I bet more. With -115 odds, you only win 87 cents on a $1 bet. Still, I will cherish that 87 cents and be able to look back at least somewhat fondly on Brad Boyes going from point-producing NHL forward to someone who gets scratched for Corey Tropp in the biggest game of the year.

DXM

Feels like that time I drank too much cough syrup and fell into the simulacrum.

Ugh, Just Terrible

This is a real thing that exists and will be intentionally broadcast:

The CBC is calling it a "TELEVISION EVENT"! Technically that is in true insofar as it is on television and it meets the bare minimum definition of "event" by being a "thing that happens". But by that standard so is a test pattern.

Why is the CBC doing this? Who was asking for the Don Cherry Story Part I, let alone Part II? I mean, I understand the nepotism behind Don Cherry supporting his son Tim who wrote the first Don Cherry Story and produced the second one, but is the CBC brass really so beholden to Don that they can't say no?

At some point in time, many people with suits and certificates proving they graduated from institutions of higher education sat around a big table in the CBC building on Front Street and decided that, "Yes, another mini-series celebrating a xenophobic curmudgeon is what's best for Canada." And Don Cherry isn't even the benign type of curmudgeon that you encounter every year at Thanksgiving; Don Cherry is a malignancy promulgating prejudice* using a bully pulpit paid for by the Canadian taxpayers.

This is also a real mini-series the CBC made.

It feels like the CBC ran out of ideas about eight years ago so now it is feeding on itself. When they showed a clip of the fictional Coach's Corner from the mini-series on the real Coach's Corner last Saturday it was like a Canadian faux-culture-qua-culture Ouroboros of masturbatory, self-congratulatory, narcissistic, navel-gazing, vainglorious crap. You can watch it yourself at the six-minute mark of the video below or click this link to go right to the six-minute mark.

I was hoping the CBC would at least wait for Don Cherry to die before they made a second multi-part biopic about him. When he does pass away I bet there will be a week-long, round-the-clock tribute to him and his bigotry on all (English) CBC stations and approximately 37 more movies made about his life by the good folks at the CBC. Peter Mansbridge will report on how Cherry died for our sins, George Stroumboulopoulos will interview Elliot Friedman about Cherry's legacy (because Ron McLean is too big a star to come on George's show), and Randy Bachman will talk about his 5 favourite songs that feature the lyrics "cherry" and a G chord for CBC Radio.

Keep in mind that Don Cherry is not really notable outside of the CBC: his career as a hockey player was marginal (one NHL game played), he did not win any Stanley Cups as a coach despite having the greatest hockey player of all time on his team, and he released a series of VHS tapes featuring concussions rock'em, sock'em hits. He wears ugly suits to try and make himself noteworthy which makes him the Canadian equivalent to Craig Sager.

Yet the CBC features him constantly. He gets to rant like your racist great-uncle about the "left-wing pinko media" on the CBC's flagship program every week, he has seven (7!) hours and counting worth of CBC television movies already made about his life, he was featured on an hour-long CBC show called "Who Do You Think You Are" about his family tree, and he gets to blather on boring CBC documentaries and other CBC programs. The CBC claims that "WRATH OF GRAPES: THE DON CHERRY STORY PART II" will uncover who Don Cherry really is but if the Canadian public has not figured it out by now then what hope is there?

Does not include the story of how he blew the Bruins best chance to finally beat Montreal by taking a too many men penalty

According to the 1991 Broadcast Act, the programming on the CBC should reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada but his views are at odds with Canada’s understanding of multiculturalism. What Don Cherry proves is that as long as you can wrap yourself in the Canadian flag and yell about supporting the troops, you can say pretty much whatever else you want and get paid upwards of $800,000 per year for the privilege of being hero-worshiped.

*: If you watched the linked video where he complains about soccer-style goal celebrations by Europeans, you might have noticed the irony that Cherry labels extravagant goal celebrations as un-Canadian despite the Canadian Football League being known for having ostentatious TD celebrations.

Post 100!

I say no to drugs as much as the next guy but if Ryan Gosling asked me if I wanted to hang out with him in a motel room freebasing cocaine and listening to Broken Social Scene I would have to think about it a little before politely declining. There are worse things in the world than drugs (e.g. personal injury lawyers that drive Hummer H3s while drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade and viewing child porn), and movie stars as superlative as Gosling can make doing drugs look cool even if that is not at all the filmmaker's intention. It doesn't hurt to have models in bikinis lying around in the background either, tbh.