So I buy organic milk. It is generally glorious, but sometimes it sours before it ought to. I regularly forget about this, and try to consume it anyway. Usually I try to cook the milk for consumption and it will curdle in the saucepan, thus sparing me from actually having to taste rotten milk. Tonight, however, I wanted milky tea. So I made tea, poured a generous dollop of milk into my mug and wandered over to the computer. Then I tasted my tea. Worst. Tea. Ever. “But Wait!” I thought “maybe it is just that I don’t really like this tea because it is not one of my favourite kinds.” So I tasted it again. Still. Worst. Tea. Ever. So I wandered to the kitchen, poured it down the drain, and started boiling more water for more tea. While waiting, I decided that I should really taste the milk (even though I abhor milk in its natural form due to childhood milk related trauma) to make sure that it was the milk that was off and not the tea, since the tea really isn’t my favourite thing in the world. So I poured an ounce, steeled my courage, and sipped. Turns out it wasn’t the tea. Milk’s off.
Ruminations on Anglican Catholics
It has been some years since I paid much attention to the Catholic church, but when there is a major policy shift welcoming people of other faiths into its dry, bony arms, even I sit up and take notice. As the news has been telling me for days, the Catholic church has welcomed some Anglicans into its fold. I was a bit surprised to hear this, since it echoed ecumenical tendencies of JPII that I assumed would have died under this pope. What with his reputation as a rabid fascist who adheres strictly to dogma. As a cardinal, the man was nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” for this exact reputation. I know people (far more devout than I, mind) who have left the church because of this man’s election and direction. He denies women the priesthood, denies that contraception might be a good thing for some people, denies that condoms should be given out to help stem the tide of HIV/AIDS that is decimating a continent, denies the blessing of civil unions. I could go on. But I don’t really need to. As the above CBC story states, people are leaving the Anglican church because “many Anglicans have become disillusioned with the more open stance of their church in recent years, including its ordination of women, election of openly gay bishops and blessing of same-sex unions.”
Know what? You can have those people, Pop Benedict XVI. Open your arms to the hating haters and watch my contemporaries leave the church in droves. Because we don’t believe that only men can understand and deliver the word of God, or that Every Sperm Is Sacred above and beyond the life of the people creating it, or that gay people are an “abomination”, or that hate and intolerance should trump love and spiritual community. You take those people. We will keep spreading the love.
The importance of translation
I totally maintain that translation is an art. In this case, what the product does (remove makeup, presumably) and what it claims to do are … a little different.
The text:
Water Démaquillante 3 in 1 Phyl’ Activ with fluid ultra texture was especially designed to remove the face and eyes in only one gesture, without rinsing.
The link here.
Mysterious Telemarketers
There has been muttering in the press of late about anti-spam legislation and the do-not-call list that Canada instituted a year ago. For the most part, the list is ineffective because it doesn’t really apply to any business to which one thinks it should apply and the anti-spam legislation seems to be going to same way. These pieces of legislation are gutted before they are ever made into law, most likely because it pits the interests of big business against the interests of average people. Who, of course, always lose. I mean, we lose when it comes to important things, like business taking lives and poisoning our environment (to name just a few. I could go on, but it is depressing and I don’t wanna). Why on earth would our interests be deemed important when it comes to what is, after all, a minor annoyance?
All of this to put into context a phone call I got at work the other day. I am currently working as a secretary, and I get all sorts of odd calls that are mysterious in nature. Generally they go something along the lines of “Oh hi, this is so-and-so, I am calling regarding something, please call me back”. Yesterday’s message was no exception, and I had to listen to it twice to get that what Abigail was calling about was “your debt problem”. So of course I assumed it was a creditor looking for someone until I listened to the message again and deduced that Abigail was calling to talk to me about my debt-collection problems. So it seems my telemarketing caller was actually haphazardly calling (people? institutions? work numbers?) to purchase bad debts. Which, I’ve gotta say, seems like bad business policy. How many people are just holding onto debts? Even if I were holding a debt, would Abigail be interested in the twenty bucks that I had loaned to a friend a week ago? If not, if this is all a sham, what is Abigail looking for?
Waking Optimus Prime
Guest post by D R-C
Transformers 2 transcends the entire history of cinema.
The flawless cinematic entity that is Transformers 2 has tragically been completely misunderstood by critics. Sticking to their job descriptions of picking apart trifles like plot clarity, action, and character development, they manage to miss the point completely. This is understandable, since Director Michael Bay has worked hard to keep secret the groundbreaking yet ethically dubious method used to create this film.
Confidential sources have revealed to me that a lightning strike on the set of the first Transformers movie left a ten-year-old boy in a coma. The boy had been sitting on a 3D imager used for scanning actors into the computer, and the lightning also fused him to this device. Bay worked hard to keep the tragedy quiet not because he feared bad press, but because the lightning strike synced the 3D scanner with the boy’s brain waves, and the device began streaming constant video of the young coma victim’s dreams.
The dizzying, exhilarating, sometimes uncomfortable visions of this boy were recreated shot-by-shot by Bay, forming an action film that is not shackled by the staid sensibilities of a mature, intelligent adult scriptwriter. The random lightning strike found a perfect specimen of suburban mediocrity, the kind of kid who will tell you how black people are so much cooler than people who can read. It’s fascinating to watch him try to imagine himself as an average college guy while lacking the life experience to imagine any appealing character traits for a twenty-something to have. We are seeing the soul of a boy raised on television, his vision of humanity pieced together from agreeably two-dimensional sitcom characters and the clutching awkwardness of real life.
Originally Transformers 2 was to be made by the tired committee process of choosing some building conflicts, a climax, resolution and so on. Real life is not so neatly packaged though, and world events jostle us mercilessly as we struggle to miss as little as possible. Some government guy is uppity about something, some former bad guy is being helpful, some human-killing robot stops killing senselessly and starts killing with motivation…and while our young coma victim tries as we do to care about these important world events none of them manage to get under his skin as much as his parents.
Movies can offer any imaginable flavor of awful. War is woefully awful, Chainsaw killers are thrillingly awful, a slow battle with cancer is tear jerking awful, and then there are the parents in Transformers 2. At first you want to see these parents as two overly simplistic characters brought in for (failed) comic relief, but then the chilling truth seeps into your soul that you have known real people this shallow, annoying, and utterly implausible. For the first few minutes you cope by being smugly content in how above this type of entertainment you are, but long after your capacity for ironic enjoyment is exhausted the parents are still on screen, and you find yourself shrinking in your seat lest a friend of yours see you with this movie. A holocaust movie would have stayed comfortably in the screen for you to boast about how much you appreciated it, but this more-than-just-a-film has just forced you to personally relive the fear of being caught in public with mortifying parents.
This discomfort was merely a warm up for the twisted journey into the sexual fantasies of our barely adolescent coma boy. He imagines he’s in college now with his girlfriend of over a year, but the schoolyard grapevine somehow never even tipped him off about the concept heavy petting. He stares at his hot girlfriend on the lawn, stares at her on a webcam, stares at her on a motorcycle, and life just couldn’t get any better. The dream is turned into a nightmare by another poster-babe with (gasp!) desires of her own, who will reawaken a fear long forgotten by most of us. You may recall your schoolyard days of listening eagerly to the intrepid explorers who ventured into that laughably disgusting yet achingly compelling realm called…the TONGUE. There’s no need for me to spoil it and tell you what’s so scary, I’ve said enough to say you’ve been warned.
It is clear from the dreams of our young lightning victim that he is obsessed with trying to piece together what parts girls have, but is stuck with having only the knowledge of unwanted glimpses of his male peers. Awkward memories of sharing the lockerroom with friends are symbolized, as all things should be, by the sudden naked ass of John Tuturro. Some trauma also flashes back at us with a giant interrogator-bot proclaiming ‘It feels so good to touch your flesh”, and when we take a long look at the swaying testicles of a giant robot smashing the pyramids we, well, I’ll let the person it came from be in charge of explaining that.
I’ve been very unfair so far as I’ve been mostly talking about the parts of life that coma-boy works hard to mostly avoid. This isn’t someone who plays toys to keep up his social connections, this is a boy who spends days on end spinning around the backyard in a focused craze, entranced by the thrill of endlessly crashing toy cars, planes, and robots together. The neighborhood kids scoff at this socially clueless kid who doesn’t know when to quit, yet these superior kids don’t manage to find something engaging as shamelessly thrilling as smashing thing after thing together in new and exciting ways.
The first transformers movie was a bore because Bay thought the audience would care whether or not the boring flesh-bag main characters fell in love, got good grades, or were crushed flat by a robot’s foot. Thankfully this time the script is abandoned and we are treated to a pure stream of consciousness. Some viewers may be feeling guilty about the 10 year old coma victim providing it all for us, but he’s in a better place. A hot babe tripped and landed on him, he got to watch multiple battles erupt around him, and he was told what his ultimate purpose on earth is, and he was told by robots, and the robots were really big, and really strong, and really cool.
Remember Hypercolour shirts?
There was a time, back in the late eighties, when these things called Hypercolor shirts existed. The ads portrayed them as fun times waiting to be had, where people at dances would lay their hands on you just to see your shirt change into funky colours. You would be the coolest kid!
The reality belies the fantasy, of course. I had one of these shirts, and they were, in a word, embarrassing. The only part of the shirts that changed colour were the hottest parts – namely, under your armpits. (Or, if you were wearing a sweater, the small of your back.) I was thirteen-ish when these things came out, and at thirteen one still giggles about B.O. and sweat and various bodily functions. A lot. No one wanted to get near someone who so obviously had sweaty pits, nevermind lay their hands all over various bits of their torso. So I wore my hypercolour shirt about three times, and then it disappeared from my wardrobe. But it did not disappear from my wardrobe simply because it was embarrassing in ways that a thirteen-year-old has nightmates about. It was thrown away, if I remember correctly, because after three washings (and no drying – I was careful about the instructions on the label), the hypercolour pigment no longer worked and the shirt (I had a purple/pink variety) became an awful mottled design, and the pit stains became permanent. The fad came and went quickly; mostly, I suspect, because thirteen-year-olds did not have the disposable income to lay out $70 (maybe? I have no idea how much those things actually cost) for more than one shirt. And parents were unwilling to do so after children came home in tears because their guaranteed-cool-making-shirts had in fact led to teasing of epic proportions.
So hypercolour shirts? Bad news. Which is why when trolling through the internets I was STUNNED to see banner ads for this product from American Apparel. Allow me to assure you that unless either hypercolour technology has VASLTY improved in the last 10-20 years, or the dude in the shirt had been in a fridge and the woman’s hand touching him had recently been ON FIRE, the contrast between the shirt (being on his presumably warm body) and where her hand had been would not be so great. Other pics on the website portray the reality a little more accurately, but since when are the tops of your shoulders warmer than the underneath? I suspect that Thermochromatic shirts, like Hypercolor before them, are a social disaster waiting to happen.
I could be wrong, of course. American Apparel could have fixed the design flaws of the first generation of heat-activated-pigment-change clothes. Somehow I doubt it, but if any of ya’ll do buy one of these shirts despite my warnings, let me know, okay?
shenanigansandredtape 
