This is how normal people think and talk:

“There is no Bureau of Puerto Rican Affairs or Black Affairs or Irish Affairs. And no group in America has been more helped by the government than the American Indians, because we have the treaties, we stole their land. But 200 years later, no group does worse.”

Watching Annie Hall and Manhattan (and, yes, Interiors) as a teenager gave me a much needed glimpse into a viable alternative existence to life in my working class factory town. And seeing Allen’s character as a child, saying of his classmates, “Even then, I knew they were all idiots” was one of the most liberating moments of my life. I heard an audible “click” in my brain. Maybe everything was going to be OK, as long as I stayed alive long enough to get the hell out of there.

Naturally, I realize now that I would have been happier, sooner, if only my Hollywood-inspired ideal of adulthood had been the movies of, who? Shit, I dunno… Hal Needham?. (At least then I’d have learned how to drive.) But Allen’s films were the booster rockets that got me off the launch pad.

Then came the inevitable disillusionment. Allen’s bizarroworld affair thingie with his stepdaughter shattered my friends and I, who had also grown up hanging on his every word and film. This is true: they gathered at my apartment a few hours after the news broke that afternoon and we had a group freak-out that lasted well after the sun set. (I distinctly remember that a couple of us didn’t even sit down during this lengthy cathartic get together; we just stomped around angrily. Luckily, I lived on the ground floor.)  

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I talked about this yesterday, and so did pretty much everybody else.

One more thing I’ve just noticed in my travels around the web:

The CBC has purchased Google AdSense ads promoting the ‘Vote Compass‘ (See! You’re a Liberal!!) quizmo.

Google AdSense ads can be cheap, or they can be costly, but they aren’t free.

So fellow Canadians: you’re paying for those against your will, too.

This is how normal people think and talk:

Academics at Leicester University interviewed hundreds of residents from rural communities across England to discover what they considered to be the modern rural idyll.

They found that the popular vision of English country life is ‘essentially monocultural, in all its forms – white, heterosexual, middle-class, conformist, family-orientated, church-going, conservative and ‘safe’.

Yawn.

If all goes according to plan, by December 2012 a team of three young Israeli scientists will have landed a tiny spacecraft on the moon…

Yep:

How did someone as smart as Rosenberg miss this? Specifically, how did she wind up coining a catchy name for an everyday phenomenon whose benefits she overstates and whose demerits she overlooks? The answer, as Zen masters like to observe, lies within the question. Rosenberg, too, yielded to peer pressure and joined a club: the club of the Big Idea book.

Its accidental founder and president in apparent perpetuity is Malcolm Gladwell. Its membership, like the membership of most powerful groups, is largely male. Its combined sales are stratospheric; whatever these books are hawking, we can’t stop buying it.

They coin phrases the way Zimbabwe prints bills. They relish upending conventional wisdom: Not thinking becomes thinking, everything bad turns out to be good, and the world is—go figure—flat.

What troubles me about the Big Idea Book Club is the way ideas often slide toward ideologies—grand unifying theories of culture, cognition, happiness, talent, the Internet, the future, you name it. “The Hidden Side of Everything,” “The Story of Success”: the italics are mine, but the emphasis is theirs.

I hung out with hardcore (meaning, multiple Second City workshops/three times a week pub gigs/iO) improv nerds for years, and they all liked Whose Line Is It, Anyway? So did I. Lots of laugh ’til you cry moments.

Maybe Canadian improv nerds are less — I dunno — bitchy, but this guy at SplitSider is not impressed:

Drew Carey, passable standup comic and guy every longform improv (read: UCB, Second City, iO) nerd likes to shit on for popularizing short form improv with Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is not going to be making any new friends with improv purists.

His new show on the Game Show Network, entitled Drew Carey’s Improv-a-Ganza (yep) seems inoffensive and ignorable enough as-is. I mean, it’s on the Game Show Network. But then Charlie Sheen decided to join him, and it is all just too much…

Again, over the years, I never heard anybody say this stuff. Carey isn’t a master improviser himself, but he was a great host, and that was his main role. I was never a rabid fangirl of the show, however (that stuff got pretty weird online — don’t know if some of those sites are still up, but wow…)  I can be as much as a purity bore/”hey, don’t touch MY stuff, you poseurs” bitch about things I’m into than the next person, but I’m just sayin’, is all.  

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Station finder.

I told you before about the reusable tote bag scam.

Now learn the truth about washing oil off birds, bio-fuels and volunteering overseas, you stupid useless college kid losers.

Libel laws are what we got when we outlawed dueling.

This quote from a post at The Corner shows why libel suits don’t work; they spread the “contagion” rather than quarantining it.

And most importantly, it is too funny not to re-post:

Dr. Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University, is suing the climate change denier Dr. Tim Ball and the think tank/web site Frontier Centre for Public Policy for libel – and particularly for an interview in which, in answer to the question, “Do you think anyone will be prosecuted for fraud?” Ball responds, “Michael Mann at Penn State should be in the State Pen, not Penn State.”

We’re here and here and here.

But all of us have had our… er… experiences with papers like the Post. They’re ok with us if we’re writing for free. Even if one of our pieces was an instant classic that people still talk about, we somehow don’t get invited back (with pay.)

It’s a well known fact that the National Post and Canadian media in general steals from bloggers all the time. Mark Steyn is a gentleman, so he always credits bloggers by name in his Maclean’s columns, and gives us a link from his site, and tells everybody how wonderful we are. But he is the exception. And he’s not a newspaper editor.

The National Post? They’ve quoted me before without daring to spell out my name — I’m just “that blogger” — lest their poor readers be led to my racist, sexist, anti-semitic yet weirdly pro-Israel blog.

(My gay Muslim business partner is still trying to wrap his mind around my radioactive reputation. And yes, we know: we sound just like My Beautiful Launderette. You have NO idea…)

Like I’ve said before, the only Canadian conservative bloggers with balls are the women — but we’re the political equivalent of sexual “mopeds”: “Fun to ride, but you don’t want your friends to see you…”. You know: that fat ugly girl who’s great in bed but too embarrassing to be seen with in public.  

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This is me:

“Living with Chronic Bitchface”

There IS a cure, though:

The magic words “Go f*** yourself, wino!”

UPDATE — OK, this response is better.

I’ve used, “My mother just died — do you MIND??” which is even more satisfying.

Tina Brown Blasts ‘The Big Greasy Paws Of Dick Cheney’