Western’s Bottle Drive for Cancer Research: Making a Dent, Ten Cents At a Time


Since April, I have been honoured to be a member of the Huron Soph Team’s charity initiatives. A tradition amongst the orientation teams across Western is collecting bottles for its bottle drive over the summer to raise money for cancer research. This is a charity initiative that I am passionate about, with my family losing a close friend a year ago to the disease and my Grandmother who was taken before her time when my mother was my age and a Huron student in history herself. It is a disease that is disturbingly prevalent and I know many people I’m close to have their own horror stories of how cancer has taken has taken away a loved one.

The thing  that really scares the shit out of me is how much of an equal opportunity killer it is. Cases arise every day.  I’m terrified to think about who in fifty years time that I know now may obtain a form of cancer or will have had to lose several friends and family along the way through their life’s journey to it. One thing that being a Western student has taught me is that everyone has their own cancer nightmare and they hate it. The great thing about Western is that it is such an amazing environment that it encourages people to spin that hatred into passion and attempt to truly make a difference.

And that’s why we are the best school on the planet.

I am writing this because of a scary little Google search I made about ten minutes ago. Huron has just hit the $1,000 mark with its bottle drive, and I could not possibly be more proud of my team than I am right now. I suggested the goal of $1,000 because of all the little zeroes at the end. After all, collecting the equivalent of 10,000 bottles is no small feat. Tonight, I wanted to see what $1,000 could do in the fight against cancer. While looking for some rateable figures I stumbled upon the American National Cancer Institute list of how much funding each type of cancers received in 2008. You can read the list here. Now those are some scary numbers, especially given no cure exists. $572.6 million for breast cancer, $110.8 million for melanoma, $247.6 million for lung cancer. The numbers are astronomically high.

My team of 35 dedicated Huron sophs has raised $1,000 in just empty bottles, something that many people just throw away.  Little things can easily make a big splash, and friends of the Huron community have shown that. Those two beers I knocked back last night while watching “Breaking Bad” last night equates to twenty-cents towards cancer research. A friend’s Canada Day party: $9.80. A teammate’s parents having multiple backyard wine parties throughout the summer $13.80. The entirety of the Huron’s Beaver Dam bar night empties for the year: $170. People love to give little amounts to big causes if they know about it, and that is what truly makes the difference.

One beer keg = $50. Enough to make some serious change.

On average, a round of treatment for cancer in Canada costs $60,000, This can be broken down further as well. A pill of filgrastim, a drug that tackles the side effects of chemotherapy costs $1,600 per month. One anti-nausea pill can cost $23 a pill. That pill can make a cancer patient forget about their sickness for just a little while, which must feel like the greatest gift in the world. With $23 providing some temporary relief, $1,000 can really go a long way.

It is the little things that help make a huge difference. We turned one bottle into ten thousand in just three months. Unfortunately cancer will not be cured by instantly by any one fundraising initiative but by fostering the people-focused environment that Western and Huron has and applying that personal connection with every donation, no matter the size, the life of once cancer patient can be made easier. So donate a couple of bottles to your constituencies soph team. I guarantee they will appreciate it and will be more than willing to take it as I know that they have the same mentality that I do. I believe that that if for even one second, Western provides a single cancer patient some ease of mind and a helping hand, then cancer has lost its fruitless battle as life and determination has overcome it. That will gives us the time to get the rest of the time and money needed to deliver cancer a killing blow.

Western is ready to lead the fight.

DISCLAIMER: I understand that the stats I have gathered may be outdated. I believe ballpark figures are good enough to get the point across that cancer sucks and humankind rocks and will win.

The Blame Game after Violent Acts


My sister just posted a blog about Rick Warren, an American minister who claims that teaching children about evolution caused the Aurora shootings. He tweeted “When students are taught they are no different than animals, they act like it”. The media has already jumped on this, criticizing his stance. This thought process of finding a scapegoat instead of actually examining an issue is something that I believe allows atrocities to still remain.

The issue with finding a simple scapegoat for why an action is caused rather than looking at the big is that it does nothing but spark controversy. It implies causation.  For instance, the Columbine shooters both played “Doom”. They went on a killing spree. Therefore “Doom” will cause the player to become violent. This does not really look at the issue at all. It was clear that they were motivated by getting revenge on those who picked on them. They committed their atrocity because in their twisted minds they had a disturbed sense of morality and a God-complex that made them violent. That with easy access to weaponry (which I discuss in yesterday’s blog post) they were able to massacre innocent high school students.

My point is, is if “Doom” or Marilyn Manson music is allegedly the problem as some commentators claim then why hasn’t the world erupted into chaos?

I played “Doom” a lot as a kid but it did not make me want to travel to Mars, open a gateway to hell and battle Cyberdemons, much like how playing NHL ’99 did not make me an athlete. People want an easy fix to societies problems but society is too complex to allow it. I may sound hypocritical to some here by saying that after my thoughts on gun control, but guns ARE the problem whereas violent video games and evolution are not. It is simply people ignoring the facts and twisting the truth to fulfill and promote their ideology. The fact is, without weaponry there would have been less death and more time for police response in order to keep families from having to mourn love ones. I guarantee evolution was not thought about by a single person in that theatre whereas the concept of gun violence was the only idea on anyones mind.

It does not matter to me if you do not believe in evolution, but it is disrespectful to the victims in Aurora to claim that that is the cause. You may not like it Rick Warren, but you are the same species as the man you are calling an animal. Internationally world and religious leaders are lending their sympathies and support to the victims in Aurora and are condemning the act. This will without a doubt become a huge campaign point for the American 2012 presidential election but the one thing every single side can agree upon as rational, sane human beings is that this is an atrocity committed upon innocents. There are some fundamental issues that need to be discusses such as gun control and mental health that will be discussed and debated. Those are both big picture concepts and not easy solutions to a complex problem like banning media is.

It will be interesting to see what is uncovered in the shooter’s apartment and what some commentators will attempt to pinpoint the root cause on. If there is a copy of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” or “Call of Duty” then I’m sure those will become hot topics. In the meantime, let’s remember the victims and condemn the actions of the killer and truly think about the real issues instead of finding scapegoats and easy fixes.

My Thoughts on Gun Control


I have yet to be very political in these articles but I feel in light of the Aurora shootings that I want to discuss something that truly scares the shit out of me: random shootings and the media and political reactions. Incidents like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and both the Eaton Centre and block party shootings really remind you have how fragile and chaotic life is.

For the sake of this article I will not refer to the shooter by name. The smug attitude and Joker comments he made makes it clear that he did this for attention. I will not give him this attention because then he wins and the victims died only to glorify a monster. I will make him anonymous, to take away his power and give respect to the victims. I will not give the internet one more article about him. This is an article about the issue and how it creates victims.

I was in a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in a Cineplex theatre just like the victims in Aurora and I could not imagine being in the same dark and confined chaos as them. What made my theatre different from theirs? Not much at all. Sure, Canada has a different relationship with guns than America (go watch “Bowling For Columbine”) but in the end it comes down to one person with a twisted sense of morality and a couple magazines of ammunition to end lives and shake the world. We can’t stop people from committing crimes, but you take away their toys.

I do not believe that handguns or automatic weaponry should be legal for anyone except police officers and military forces. I am not against hunting animals for sport (actually doing it however, is a different story) or long guns used for riflery, but banning those guns is not the issue. The fact that a 24-year old is able to legally and easily acquire a shotgun and a military grade assault rifle points out a major flaw in how society operates. There is no need for any common person to be able to buy that equipment for everyday use. That person is planning to hurt people, why is it being sold to him?

All it takes is one person to fire that weapon to forever change hundreds of lives who have now lost a friend, colleague, lover, best friend, husband, wife or child. The onus should be on companies who actually make these items available. The whole “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is bullshit. Guns give said person the ability to maximize their destruction. Planes haven’t been banned since 9/11, but security has drastically been changed. Why hasn’t gun security been drastically changed?

This image should be enough to motivate someone to make change.

Because people love their guns. The two schools of thought in regards to gun control following the Aurora shootings are this:

  1. Guns should be controlled so that innocent people do not become victims.
  2. The other camp is full of communists. If everyone had a gun, than Shooter X would have been gunned down in the theatre.

If no one had a gun, no one would get shot. That is a fact. Vigilante justice does not work for the common person and being judge, jury and executioner leads to even more insanity. The movie that was being watched during the shootings was “The Dark Knight Rises” which tackles that exact issue first hand. Look to Christopher Nolan’s Harvey Dent for an example of someone being corrupted in his attempt to do something right.

Long story short: if no one has handguns or assault weaponry, less people would get murdered. That is a fact. How often do you hear of someone going on a killing spree with a registered hunting rifle? Hardly ever. If people want their guns so badly, get one of those to fulfill that need. Stop bringing up your freedoms and rights to own assault weaponry as they are tools designed to kill human beings faster. It is not about controlling your life, it’s about protecting it and ensuring incidents like Aurora, Colorado become extinct.

Villainous Villains and What Makes Them Appealing


I think I’ve noticed a pattern in how I write. It seems to be that I get inspiration from going to theatre and noticing what annoys me about the experience. This time it was no one in the theatre that ruined “The Amazing Spider-Man” for me, it was an extremely lackluster villain that proved a liability to a movie that could have been great.

I’m not a comic reader at all but I find superheroes to be fascinating. You can only watch Jack Bauer (my favourite superhero) clobber his superior officers so often before it gets boring, so he needs different baddies to fight to keep things interesting and relatively fresh. This works when the villain is as interesting as the hero, but what happens if the villain is incredibly dull and has a motive that is thinner than my tolerance for moviegoers?

You get a story that is not as good as it could be. I don’t really feel like reviewing “Spider-Man” right now, but I’ll just give a quick summary of the villain. If you’ve seen trailers you should know that the villain was The Lizard. He sums up his motives in some clumsy dialog that essentially states “reptiles are always on the top of their food chains. Humans are weak and feeble. Everyone should be a part of the reptile master race!”

Any species that does not have ability to fully apply sunscreen cannot really be that masterful.

As a reptile owner I know that this is not true. Reptiles have all kinds of predators. Leopard gecko’s for example are camouflaged (not as good as Peeta Mellark’s magical transferable cake decorating skills) to hide from attackers. If they get caught by the tail, they can willingly detach it to escape. A stumped tail can then grow in it’s place. If leopard gecko’s were truly at the top of the food chain, then we would all be eating live crickets, nocturnal and stomping aimlessly through the night.

The Lizard’s motives were weak as his ideology was not something you could believe anyone could really stand behind. It’s kind of like how in “Twilight” the villains are only evil because Bella smells good and they do not share Mormon family values. Some villains do not need an ideology to be interesting if sometimes something as simple as money or power is a motive. All a villain needs to resonate with audiences is to have a goal that is believable to the confines of human nature or some philosophical interpretation of it.

The superhero movie to compare all superhero movies to is of course “The Dark Knight”. The Joker is nothing but a catalyst and believer of chaos. He does not have any codes of ethic or goals beyond watching the world burn. This challenges Batman’s idea of justice and the criminal codes that his foes follow. The Joker was more interesting of a character than Batman in the movie, but it was truly the contrast of ideas that made the movie shine and allowed for everything about it to be compelling.

“Welcome to a world with no rules”

Sometimes a villains motives can be a lot a simpler and still work. In “Star Wars” the antagonists want one thing only: power. It does not go deeper than that, unless you are “Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace” and your motive is simply controlling intergalactic space taxes. In “Alien” and it’s sequel (there is only one) the Xenomorph only wishes to eat and reproduce. Huh, I guess Xenomorphs and The Situation have more in common than previously thought. The motives that these bad guys have is at least consistent to the frame of their own story. They may not be as complicated, but that does not mean they are any less compelling.

“On MTV no one can hear you scream”

What fails is whenever they get unreasonably sidetracked. Why does The Lizard take a break from achieving his goal to provoke Peter Parker? No idea. Why does every James Bond villain put 007 through a slowly descending trap as opposed to simply shooting him? It often fits their twisted motives and desire to watch their enemy suffer. It at least fits into the James Bond canon. Attempting to give The Lizard side-goals does not fit the primal instinct the writer tried hard to produce nor does it fit the “smart reboot” concept the rest of the movie tried to accomplish.

You could of course blame it on the fact that Bond often brought the ruckus to the villains girlfriends.

My favourite works of fiction complicate the relations of what is good and what is evil. “Battlestar Galactica” has almost everyone in the main cast playing an antagonistic role at some point in the series but at least it is always consistent to the characters’ nature. “Lost” layers a simple “light vs dark” narrative underneath complex interactions between various complex characters who have different ideas of surviving through tormented lives.

In real life there is no true “villains”, just individuals who have an ideology that is completely different than your own. To them, you are the villain for whatever you stand for. Various figures throughout history have declared wars because they have not liked other groups stances on religious freedom, capitalist ideology or Obamacare. But sometimes people just do it to obtain wealth or land to boaster one’s power. Fiction reflects reality.

Conflict of some sort is required for any story to function and without an interesting conflict, it is very hard to become invested in the story. Now, go read “Harry Potter” and see how the awesome the Harry/Voldemort rivalry generates seven fascinating books.

They fit under “The Joker Model”

Body Spray: The Fundamental Difference Between High School and University


I went to see “Men in Black III” with some friends last night. Since it’s a movie theatre and I paid good money to see it I was fully expecting someone to continuously grind my gears the whole time. The movie was probably more mediocre and annoying (but not bad) then the moviegoers. But of course, there has to be one person whose actions or odor stands out. I knew the phone-checking, shuffling-in-his-seat-LMFAO-style guy beside me (not my friend) was a high school student based on one thing alone: his stench. Allow me to take you on a time travelling adventure that is likely to be more coherent and less manipulative than the plot of “Men in Black III.”

One thing I always remember about high school and walking down the hallways of Oakridge was the smell of body spray. When I think of gym class I think of people caking Tag on like there was an infestation on their bodies. High schoolers are often smelly and frequently teachers had to pull them aside and hand them deodorant. Hell, I remember once a year they gave everyone a small stick of deodorant in home room. This is not to say that University students are not smelly either. Plenty of them are. The fundamental difference however is the thick aroma of Axe.

“Oh hey there big boy. Wow, your stench is strong and pungent. I can’t smell anything in the room but you.”

Flashback to 2004. The year that “Friends” ended and passed off it’s torch of being the best show on TV to “Lost”. America was still neglecting “Arrested Development”, and Abu Ghraib made international headlines. It was also the year that I and all my other Grade 8 class mates became teenagers. At the ripe age of thirteen, the media decided to push body spray as the number one way to get girls to like you to our age group. As hormones raged on and boys realized that girls do not really have cooties this was an important and confused step in everyone’s coming of age. It also happened to be the age where we all discovered how much fun lighters could be. The combination of aerosol body spray and lighters led to some hilarious recesses.

Everyone thought they were Rorshach. Except no one was an anti-sexual and no one had heard of Watchmen let alone touched a novel.

Flash forward a couple of years to 2006. “24″ hit it’s peak, “Arrested Development” was murdered and a little show called “How I Met Your Mother was failing to get good ratings. The Playstation 3 had a disastrous launch and “Brokeback Mountain” reopened discussions on the public perceptions of homosexuality. It was also the year that Al Gore made a slideshow and won an Oscar and a Nobel prize for it. “An Inconvenient Truth”, despite WEATHER (hardy har har har) the facts presented were 100% accurate or if you are a skeptic to environmental change, brought the environment forward for discussion.

High school students are in an age of expression and exploration of their personal beliefs. Environmental discussions were far more hardcore and radical than I have ever seen them in university. [NOTE: If any member of the Oakridge Ecoteam reads this, I still want my damn money back for the defective eco-friendly water bottle you sold me.] This led to a rift in the social jungle between eco-friends and body spray users. Aerosol cans were a target of many environmentally conscious students, and it made the school smell much better.

I blame him for not getting my $10 back for the defective water bottle. I don’t care if he invented the Internets or not.

Flash forward to 2009. “Lost” got more fucked up than ever, “Scrubs” had the greatest ending to a sitcom ever and ended right there (I will have none of this “season 9″ nonsense), and “Star Trek” became cool again. “Arrested Development” was no where to be seen. Swine flu was a thing and Michael Jackson passed away. I enter university and notice the smell of body spray goes away.

This could be due to many things:

1.) People become self-conscious and realize that they are not making themselves lady magnets,

2.) No lockers to act as a basecamp for sinus cleansing aerosol gasses.

3.) Only environmentalists go to university.

4.) People have decided that they do not want to be flammable

5.) Barack Obama

Flash forward to 2012. “Arrested Development” is a thing again, “Game of Thrones” is taking over the world and pornography has gone mainstream with “Fifty Shades of Grey”. I use body spray occasionally. I treat the stuff like the rarest element in the world and use it sparingly. I know people use it in my peer group, but it is no longer “Sup. I’m fumigating my BO with Axe gangsta. Fuck tha police. Check out this new Slim Thug beat on my iPod Mini.” It is instead not a big deal that you apply deodorant to yourself.

I’ve been out of the high school system for a while but it would be interesting to see if it body spray is still treated as the most effective aphrodisiac in existence by it’s users (and no one else). I am glad that I do not have to smell it all the time. Even at the gym, it smells more of old man and feet then body spray. People may say the best part about higher education is the stronger caliber of learning, the freedom or the ability to truly become yourself. I say the best part is that I am actually able to use one of my five senses that strolling down the hallways of high school almost killed off.

So obviously body spray killed “Arrested Development” and now that it isn’t such a big deal the show can now return.

“Sonic 4″ and How Sega Keeps Screwing Over It’s Prized Franchise


To my knowledge (and a testament to my laziness to actually search my own site), I have yet to write a video game related article. Considering that it is one of my favourite past times and gaming politics and business is one of my favourite things to follow mainly due to how terrible and illogical it is. The other day I got “Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II” for my iPhone. It made me do a dangerous thing: think. So here are my thoughts on how Sega needs to get it’s act together and stop fucking up a franchise that I love(d) so dearly.

“Sonic 4″ is a mess. It is not a good game at all. It only functions as a piece of nostalgia and considering that every platform it exists on has the ability to get the original Sonic games (minus Sonic 3 in some cases) there is no reason to buy it. It’s no surprise it’s bad considering Sega’s track records with Sonic games. For being the 14th game in the series you’d think they would have a grasp about what to do right, but of course they misunderstand what the audience wants and keeps on creating games that alienate the original fans and are so meh that new players will not appreciate them. You know what they say, the 14th in the series is always the best.

The only 14th installment I can think of is this: the Bond movie where a 200-year old Roger Moore battles a nefarious Christopher Walken as he throws things from a blimp and rigs horse races. What a bad movie… I mean the opening sequence was pretty solid, but at the same time “The Spy Who Loved Me” did something similar in a much stronger way. The theme song wasn’t bad, but I keep thinking of when it played as Bond rescued a screaming Tanya Roberts from a burning building which leads to the awful scene where you get to see what it is like for an ancient specimen of a human being flung around on the back of a ladder in what is a poor excuse for an action sequence. I overall like Roger Moore as James Bond but that dude needed to retire after “For Your Eyes Only”. Right, “Sonic the Hedgehog”…

Because Sega only has nostalgia to work with, I am going to look at what I love about the Sonic games. Sonic the Hedgehog works well for me for being a colourful, inviting, smooth, charming and rewarding gaming experience. The art design for the original games always felt inspiring and in combination with a fantastic music score it made repeating difficult segments not feel like a chore. The gameplay was slick and varied. Each level in the early series felt unique and despite how similar the first three games were in style they all had a special feel to them that made them worth playing. The games were so good and unique that it made me want to own a video game console just to play them. This led to several disappointing birthdays and Christmases in which I never received a Sega Genesis. Yeah, I was that kind of a materialistic kid when I was younger. I think I have a better grasp on the true meaning of Christmas now.

The Grinch was evil because he kept dying in shitty Sonic games, forcing him to watch terrible cutscenes with terrible characters doing boring things over and over

In my mind, the good Sonic games are “Sonic 1-3″, “Sonic CD” “Sonic & Knuckles”, “Sonic Adventure” and “Sonic Adventure 2″. Everything else (especially that 2006 game which is one of the worst games about bestiality ever made) is an absolute waste of potential. [NOTE: I have not played Sonic Colors or Generations.  I've heard they are good.] It’s interesting comparing it with it’s initial primary rival, Mario, and how it has failed to pump out quality games.

One main issue the series as a whole has is the focus on “speed”. Okay, Sonic is a fast character and the original games had you constantly in motion as opposed to the stiffness of early platformers. This is not why people played the game. No one played Mario for the plumbing aspects and that series is still doing well. Puzzles were not the main concern as well and it seems like more and more the series wants you to be confined to solving obstacles as opposed to just jumping over them. In Sonic Adventure there was some shooting elements. Logically  they decided that the one black character, Shadow, needed a spin off where he used his gun to commit crimes and spew profanity.

“Because guns are fun kids and every game should have them!”

The series had obviously spun out of control but”Sonic 4″ promised to bring the series back to it’s roots.

lol jk.

“Sonic 4″ realized that Eggman was not a good enough villain so it decided to make it’s level design the true antagonist. Whereas other games kept you intriguing with fresh environments, “Sonic 4″ takes you to the same dull, rehashed areas over and over as you struggle to avoid being crushed by something so out of place that it disrupts the entire flow of the game. The experience is dampened by music that sounds like the composer only thought one key existed in music theory. It’s nothing like the Michael Jackson produced music of “Sonic 3″. Yes, that’s right. Michael Jackson did the music to “Sonic 3″ and yes, it was awesome.

Sonic was intended for children after all.

If you want a great classic platforming experience, just get one of the original “Sonic” games. This is an example of a series overdoing itself. “Sonic 4″ may look good, but it plays like I do in soccer: slow, clumsy and prone to running into things. I give “Sonic 4″ a 5/10, a fraction that is similar to how many good games actually exist in the series.

That being said, Sonic is an awesome character in “Super Smash Bros Brawl”.

It looks like he just played “Sonic the Hedgehog 2006″

“Dune” by Frank Herbert, Gender in Fiction and “Fifty Shades” Revisited


The worm is a metaphor for Christian Grey and how he has created an addicted patriarchal society.

This is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of thoughts. Deal with it.

The past three books I’ve read (“Catching Fire”, “Mockingjay” and “Fifty Shades of Grey”) have lacked real depth, quality or sandworms. Being a science fiction geek it has brought great shame to myself and my family for taking so long to read “Dune”. “Dune” is often called “The Lord of the Rings” of scifi and I would be forced to agree. I am also calling it the Anti-Fifty Shades of Grey as any mention of that book, literature, thing guarantees me page hits off of people who for some reason still use Yahoo! as a search engine. Apparently people love coming here to find out if they aren’t the only ones’ whose marriage was ruined by “Fifty Shades of Grey”. If you’re marriage was ruined by fan fiction, then I’m afraid you and your hubby likely have bigger issues than placing the blame on EL James. Not that I’m defending EL James or anything, because I’m not. She’s just the spokesperson for fan fiction this day and age. Anyway, what was this blog about? Oh right, “Dune”

“Dune” takes place thousands of years into a future in an empire where computers do not exist and instead navigators ingest the drug-like spice to gain a higher state of awareness. Paul Atreides and his family are betrayed in a plot by the Emperor and he is presumed dead. “Dune” follows his rising from having nothing to becoming the most powerful being in the universe.

Chances are there is no way I can sway anyone to read a science fiction book based on a summary alone so instead I’m going to talk about the structure of it and how it really enriches the reading experience. Every chapter begins with a passage from an in-universe text that describes the events in retrospect. Because of this many of the events in the book are known from an earlier point in the text. This distortion of the past, present and future fits in extremely well with the book’s themes of mysticism and omnipotence.

This is far more interesting than chapters being broken up by sex contracts that dehumanize women. In fact, the female characters in “Dune” are the strongest ones. The political systems in “Dune” are a clear patriarchy but the women hold a supreme amount of power, mainly in the bene gesserit (essentially woman Jedi) order. Women in science fiction has always been a topic I have been interested in as it seems to be the only genre of contemporary fiction that consistently makes quality female characters.

That is until Natalie Portman brought feminism back fifty years with her being contrasted to Anakin’s dislike of sand.

Don’t worry Hermione Granger and Arya Stark, fantasy has some decent ones too. Unless the fantasy is of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Since I wrote my article “How Fifty Shades of Grey Ruined My Soul“, I have seen the book skyrocket in popularity. The other day I was walking through the University of Western Ontario and I saw two people reading it WHILE walking. This just means that they are absolutely shameless, hell I had to read the thing on an eReader because I didn’t want to be mocked. My sister was at Chapters the other day and an employee there was saying that they have to restock the shelves of that book daily. People are eating up “Fifty Shades of Grey” like Stephen Harper eats babies, and frankly it still scares me.

One thing I’ve noticed with “Fifty Shades of Grey” is the gender reading it. I still think I may be the only male in the known universe who has read it (other than Gilbert Gottfried). At least with “Twilight” I heard of some males who read it or saw it because their girlfriends forced it upon them. “Fifty Shades” seems to be solely an endeavor for females to embark on. I have never seen any bit of pop-culture so dominated by one-gender. Harlequin Romances and erotica, sure. But they have never reached the same popularity or oppressive attitudes as “Fifty Shades of Grey.” I can’t believe an entire gender is reading something that is so debasing to themselves.

It scares me. “Dune” does not.

I love “Dune”

“Dune” inspired animal photos like this. “Fifty Shades of Grey” has only inspired Gilbert Gottfried parodies. I’m not sure who wins.

My Battle with The Most Obnoxious Movie-Goer Ever


A while back I commented about how much I hate people who interrupt a good movie experience. Karma struck back. Hard. The obnoxious movie-goer struck back and won. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the tale of the best and worst movie experience of my entire life.

A couple of nights ago my sister and I went to go see “Prometheus“. I won’t go too much into the movie except say it’s one of my favourite movies to be released in the past few years. As a fan of “Alien” and “Aliens” I have been looking forward to a third installment to the franchise for a while. I knew what I was getting into based on the premise, but clearly this woman thought she was seeing “Markmaduke” or something worth heckling.

This movie does not deserve active attention.

I have never known what it is like to have an antagonist in my life. Not a true one at least. This woman has filled that gap. She is the Moby Dick to my Ahab, the Goliath to my David, the Newman to my Seinfeld. She has found out what I loved in life and actively attempted to destroy it.

This woman was approaching the 250lb mark and was attempting to rock a “Tim Horton’s Camp Day” t-shirt. She was with her husband (the most patient man on Earth). She was double-fisting her bucket of popcorn and large drink (I’m not being mean to larger people, these descriptions serve a purpose to the story). The seating went like this from left to right: myself, my sister, The Woman, the husband. My sister Andrea and I knew something was amuck when during the preview for that new John Winchester exorcism movie that is “based on a true story” she exclaimed loudly “OH YEAH RIGHT”. Andrea turned to me and said, “this woman is going to drive me insane”.

As the movie starts, my blood is rushing for some Ridley Scott awesomeness, something that has not really existed since “Gladiator” in 2000. As the movie starts, The Woman keeps muttering to herself in an above-a-whisper level of voice [NOTE: The husband NEVER responds to anything she says.] An establishing subtitle states “Scotland, 2089″ which leads to her shouting “2089″ as if she had just learned literacy that very moment and needed to share. It was at this moment I whisper over “could you please keep it down”. I proceed to tell her to be quiet twice more during the film with a “can you please be quiet” and a very under-the-breath “shut the fuck up”. I could have easily done it twenty more times.

Not only was she vocally annoying, she was physically annoying as well. During a scary scene I see flailing arms in my peripheral vision as she blocks my sister from actually watching the movie. Immediately she returns to her popcorn which she chomps loudly. Right when she is done with that, she eats her Kit-Kat chocolate as if she was trying to beat the world record for “Loudest Ingestion of Candy”. When she was done with that she dug into her purse for some bonus candy which she then stuck into a makeshift bowl she formed with her “Camp Day” shirt. After she was done consuming, she then dug into the ice cubes in the large pop cup. It wasn’t a simple task getting her hand through the diameter of the cup as she yet again topped the amount of noise she made previously. Metallica would have trouble making as much noise.

Replace “George” with “Brian” and “Upset” with “enraged beyond belief”

Finally the movie was over. I made some snarky, loud remarks while The Woman was still in my vicinity just to get my hatred out. My friend asked me in retrospect if I was afraid of her husband attacking me after the movie. That’s the thing, I wasn’t. Now I understand what it is like to have a cause that I can be truly devoted to. Now, I write to get revenge. It may not be as glamorous as Edmond Dantes revenge or even Timothy Dalton’s revenge in “007: License To Kill” but now I understand why it is necessary.  I ended up seeing “Prometheus” again the next day anyway so my experience of watching the movie is not totally tarnished.

This is a tricky thing about society. What can you really do if someone is annoying you in a silent setting? Sure you can tell them to be quiet but sometimes they don’t quite get it. You can rat them out, but then they win and you miss out on the performance you paid to see. I would gladly pay and extra $2 per movie for ushers in the theatres to tell people to shut their traps and turn off their phones. In the meantime however, I should be happy enough that I had the option not to pay an additional $3 for “Prometheus” and that perhaps someday movies will be affordable again.
On a more positive note, I just read “Dune”. I’ll likely write about it soon.

 

In the meantime, just be quiet and enjoy the damn movie.

Distracting Movie-Goers and How They Ruin a Good Experience


I was seeing “The Hunger Games” with my sister last night. As I was rolling my eyes at the fact that Peeta’s cake decoration skills make him a master of camouflage , I caught some girl BBM’ing away during the movie. [NOTE: If RIM wants to increase the value of their stocks they should discourage their users from texting in movies, it always seems to be Blackberry users. I blame them for their financial state] Now this is cheap night, so this girl has only spent $6.75 to piss off others and talk to her BFF, but the fact remains she has disrupted something sacred.

I own like a trillion DVDs, a huge chunk I have yet to watch yet, so there is no real reason for me to spend a large amount of cheddar to go to the movies. I’m not paying for the movie entirely, but I am paying for an experience. I love going to the movies. I get a thrill out of being in a darkened theatre and having Shia LaBeouf flailing his arms in the air in 3D. I love being bombarded by soundtracks. I find going to the cinema to be the ultimate way to experience a movie, even if it is terrible (refer to the Shia LaBeouf 3D).

$16 for this?!

I however am not paying $11+ to hear you talk to your friends about how hot Ryan Gosling is though. Shepard Book said it the best in “Firefly”.

I feel that 4/5 movies I go to there is always one person there to ruin the experience. When I saw “Inception”, the guy beside me was trying to show off to his girlfriend by providing running commentary such as “this film was directed by Christopher Nolan, best known for such films as: “The Prestige”, “The Dark Knight”, and “Memento”". “Social Network” was ruined by a trio of guys behind me talking loudly in Spanish. “Titanic 3D” was ruined by middle-aged women quoting lines the entire movie. “21 Jump Street” was ruined by a teenager twitching the whole time exclaiming “this movie sucks”.

I can keep going…

Movies are good for dates as it provides something to talk about before hand as well as after and you get to remain silent in-between so you can avoid awkward small talk. Movies themselves are not a social event. With movie tickets reaching upwards of $20, I want to get my money’s worth. I cannot understand how anyone would go into a movie with the mindset of “OMG I NEED TO TELL MY BFFL ABOUT THIS” after they have dished out that much money.

I forget “Revelations”, but was a movie-texter a siren of the Apocalypse?

For this reason I strongly believe movie theatres should have ushers. When I saw “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2″ at the midnight release they had people patrolling the auditorium ensuring no one had phones out. This was to ensure no one was trying to bootleg the movie, but it also worked as no one had their phones out or talked throughout the entire movie. It remains one of my favourite movie experiences ever. Perhaps that is where they can redirect my money instead of helping to finance terrible movies. On that note Hollywood, please don’t make a “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie or my “inner goddess” may feel the need to heckle it the whole time.

Long story short: no one better talk during “The Dark Knight Rises” or you may die.

[Disclaimer: People are allowed to talk during midnight cult classics. They are presented in that fashion for a reason]