On Dangerous Penises and Harmless Torture

To continue my previous rant...er, post, and to indulge my love of throwing a controversial theory around, are images of sex, violence, and drugs in popular media all that harmful? Or is the contextual basis what we should really be looking at?

Here's my (soon to be belaboured) point. I don't think that violence, harsh language, or sex is all that harmful to older children or teenagers, provided they are capable of understanding the context and the purpose for showing it. When it doesn't have a purpose, it's what we call gratuitous. There just to titillate, a little "gratuity" or tip for the hardworking average Joe for coughing up $25 or whatever it is now for a ticket. I love gratuitous nudity and violence in its place. If you ask me, a courtroom drama where the DA takes down her hair, whips out her breasts, blows up a car outside, and then resumes her closing argument is a better courtroom drama because of it. But I'm 28 years old and a working professional. I would never blow up a car I paid 18% interest on for four years. And I also know that showing your breasts in a professional situations is more likely to get you hauled into HR's office than into a plushy executive position.

There, the purpose is to entertain. It's not a part of the story, no statement is being made, and the contextual basis is nil. We as adults can make that distinction. But children can't. We'd hardly want an 8 year old to think that blowing up a car doesn't have consequences. Or to not realize that when a ninja clears a room of bad guys, that the reason the bad guys are conveniently lying quietly afterward is because they are dead or dying of massive internal injuries. So do I believe we should limit gratuitous nudity, drug use, violence, and language in film to adults? Abso-fucking-lutely. Without the ability for children to understand not only what they're seeing, but why they're seeing it, they should never see disturbing material separated from its proper contextual basis. They just don't have the capacity to make the call...but moreover to even understand that a call is being made.

But when controversial elements are used to make a point, I believe it can be more beneficial than damaging. Sure, you don't show a three year old a beheading under any circumstances. But look at Glory, Boys in the Hood, Requiem for a Dream, Mean Creek, or Bowling for Columbine. These movies all use controversial elements, and all of them earn their right to depict what they depict with a thoughtful treatment of the matter at hand. Hotel Rwanda showed little children dead on the lawn of a suburban neighborhood, and that image has never left me. But it earned the right to do that. Pay it Forward used the death of a child to force people to cry right at the end. It was completely unnecessary, exploitative, and served as a plot twist. It was melodrama, and melodrama is entertainment. Is the death of a child entertaining to you? Not to me.

Glory showed graphic violence, yes. Would I recommend that 11 year olds see it? No, but it's a well-made film with considerable historical value that puts across so many valuable messages without being preachy: that people united in something of value can put aside racial and class differences and support one another, that standing up for what is fair and right is more important than monetary gain or social acceptance, that bad attitudes can be changed by empathy and willingness to understand a fellow man's experiences, and that war is a horrific experience and that the casualties involved are significant and personal and tragic - unlike most video games would have us believe. Yet no one under 18 is able to see this movie, despite the fact that they are the very same age group targeted by military recruitment efforts. Apparently we believe that 17 year olds with parental consent are fit to serve in the military, but not old enough to witness the human consequences of war.

Boys in the Hood was a movie that looked at systemic racism as a whole, and more specifically, how gang violence, drugs and alcohol, and absent parents contribute to the shocking mortality rate of (mostly) African-American (mostly) men living in ghettos. This is a very relevant film that takes a hard look at the senseless violence that results from joining a gang, and the trap that drug and alcohol use can create when it strips away the desire to change one's current environment. Unless I'm mistaken, and the newspapers would lead me to believe I'm not, the 15-17 year olds that can't see it would be the ones that need this message, in time, the most. Not to mention that the characters in the movie were 17 year olds; are we arguing that we can bear that they deal with in reality what we couldn't bear for them to see in a movie?

Requiem for a Dream is disturbing, all right. The MPAA felt it was so much so that it was hit with the NC-17 rating, meaning that no theatres in their right mind would have shown it, and it would have faced financial ruin. The producers finally elected to release it unrated to avoid this, but theatres would then still have to restrict children. Now, this is not for the kiddies; double-headed dildos, forced amputation, electroshock treatment and prison beatings are pretty extreme consequences of drug use. But as a deterrent from drug use, for older teenagers who are experimenting with harder and harder drugs at younger and younger ages, this sure would beat the pants off the vague "just say no" superficiality of most anti-drug policies. The presence of the drugs isn't the point, and their inclusion shouldn't necessarily be the problem, since only the certifiably insane would claim that this film glamorizes drug use in any way.

Mean Creek, rated R, takes a calm, quiet, deeply unsettling look at school-age bullying and what can happen when a bad, if somewhat understandable idea gets into the hands of the wrong kid. The bully in this movie is pretty bad, but the movie is brave enough and cares enough to show that his aggression is due to the deep loneliness he feels at being unable to connect. The teenager that encourages the others to act out a vengeance ploy is no white knight avenger but a bully in his own right, satisfying his own emotional agenda. The teens realize once the plan is underway that it might be a bad idea, but don't act, and their inability to resist the mob mentality results in tragedy. As if that wasn't enough antidote to the "kick the bad guy's ass" simplicity of most teen dramas, they must struggle with whether to tell the truth and deal with the consequences, and why they must in order to hope for redemption. The reason, incidentally, for banning this film from being seen by teenagers is because of the use of the "F" word. If you know of even a 10 year old who has never heard this word, you live in a much nicer world than I.

Here we have a movie depicting preteens and teenagers struggling as they start to develop an independent moral system. It's just that lack of moral system that we point to time and time again when we see horror in the news; but since we never give young people the encouragement or opportunity to think about these issues, how can we expect them to develop it in a vacuum? Bowling for Columbine is another great example of this specious logic, a thought-provoking film that teenagers cannot see. If anyone should be outraged by this, it should be those very teenagers, their schoolteachers, and parents. Gun control is becoming an issue that is screaming to be addressed. Children do not feel secure at schools, and they know damn well why they shouldn't; the same 17 years olds that acquired the guns and killed their classmates would have been deemed too young to see a film discussing their actions or the political system of a country that allowed it to happen. If teenagers are not asked to think about such things, we are putting an already vulnerable segment in an even more precarious position: ignorance.

I am certainly not advocating movies as a scare tactic for today's youth, but I believe that raising consciousness and having discussion about issues like drug use, bullying, gun control, gang violence, war, racism are more important than using censorship to pretend they don't exist. If a movie earns the right to depict something with sensitivity and depth, let us think twice before we reject it out of hand.

Or at the least, demand that the MPAA start to justify their decision making process. The sight of a penis or pubic hair almost guarantees an NC-17 regardless of context. Too traumatizing, I suppose, for teens to see something that exists in their own pants. But somehow it's not considered traumatizing for trashy Hollywood fare to show misogynist attitudes and violence if it's supposed to be funny.

How else do you explain the MPAA feeling that a movie like Employee of the Month, where the clerks sit around spewing homophobic remarks and a dimwitted female lead rewards with sexual favours anyone who attains "Employee of the Month" status as suitable entertainment for 14 year olds?

And then there's Big Daddy, where an unfit adult caregiver repeatedly has fits of violent rage in front of a 5 year old and even encourages said 5 year old to participate. Adults know that a child in real life who was abandoned, found by a stranger and forced to witness violence and urinate on newspapers would be seriously traumatized. And probably, so do most teenagers. But a little more insidious is how the main character continuously degrades and humiliates a woman because she worked as a waitress for Hooters to put herself through medical school. Somehow this feels...icky. What is the movie trying to say, here? We know that a woman intelligent and driven enough to support herself and get through medical school while working is a far better role model than a 32 year old who works one day a week at a tollbooth because he's living off a settlement, who uses an abandoned child as a ploy to get dates, and who is a violent jerk, but the movie's not quite sure about that. His incessant and misogynistic comments about her being "nothing but a Hooters girl" and "what are you going to tell your kids about their mother" despite her being a doctor is a little worrisome, considering that his character uses a "live nudes" sign as a night light. But the fun is being poked at his stupidity, right? I'm not so sure. The former Hooters girl with the medical degree is portrayed very clearly as the 'bad guy' for being concerned about the child's welfare and condemning the clearly antisocial behaviour of the Sandler character, while the Sandler character comes off as sympathetic. So what's going on? And can a 13 year old really make that distinction, if I can't quite figure it out?

Or 2 Fast 2 Furious, another PG-13 where we have men repeatedly punching and kicking each other, a race where a car (and presumably, the driver) ends up turned sideways beneath a semi and is crushed, a man repeatedly bashing another man's head onto a dashboard and then using a button to eject said man into a body of water and (are you ready for this?) a scene where a men forcibly ties another man down, places a live rat in an upside down can on the man's bare chest and heats the can with a torch, thus making the tortured rat have nowhere to escape but through the man's body. Soon thereafter the man removes the can and rat, we see the bloody scratch marks on the man's chest.

Now that's something that I just wouldn't want a 14 year old to be exposed to. MPAA, you have some 'splaining to do.

On Fascism in Hollywood

The MPAA gets to do whatever they want and that really pisses me off.

The MPAA (that's the Motion Picture Association of America, natch) is the association that determines movie ratings. Movie ratings, in turn, tell us what subject matter is harmful to people, and at what age.

So what, you ask? Well, film has and continues to play a large part in shaping dominant cultures, and is a medium through which we express what is relevant to our society and how we interpret it. Not only the boob, to be flip, but how we feel about boobs. It gives us both the subject and the contextual frame. The medium, as MacLuhan has long said, is the message.

Said MPAA has had a long standing (and long criticized) policy of tolerating extreme movie violence while adopting a very punitive attitude towards acts of sexuality, particularly that related to the human body. This would lead me to believe that the minds behind the MPAA's rating system feel that extreme gory violence is less harmful to people than sex. As someone who has dated in Vancouver for five years now, I'm almost tempted to agree.

The identity of the MPAA members is a secret more carefully protected than how they get the Caramilk into the Caramilk bar (which by the way, I looked up, and it's clever machinery and judicious layering.) Despite all this cloak and dagger crap, it's probably a safe guess that an association that would give a movie featuring loads of casual and gory violence and pretty extreme homophobia a PG-13, one free of violence but featuring a naked woman an R, and one featuring a plain old penis the "kiss of death" NC17 rating might possibly have a disproportionate prevalence of heterosexual conservative white males. But that's only my guess; the MPAA has never, to my knowledge, been required to reveal the demographics of their members, how they are chosen, or even the system they use to rate the movies themselves. Doesn't that seem a little strange to you? My beloved second family throws an annual rib competition that has a more formal and accountable process than that, and last I checked, BBQ ribs have only a very minor impact on the formation of cultural values, at least outside of Texas. So why all the secrecy?

The MPAA claims that their group is demographically balanced, but given that they've taken pains to never be accountable to prove that, it's a questionable claim at best. Secondly, the fact that the members selected are exclusively parents inherently refutes their claim that the association is demographically balanced, at least in terms of sexual preference, given that there are still states in the US that ban gay adoption. If fewer gay people are permitted to adopt in the US, and thus be parents, then that automatically ensures a heterosexual bias, admittedly slight, on the association.

And doesn't it seem odd that the fact that the members have to be parents? This would lead us to conclude they don't think that people without children would have a balanced perspective on what is and isn't damaging. This is a distinction that eliminates the rather valuable opinions of counsellors, sociologists, schoolteachers, doctors and politicians, should they not have children themselves. There are some pretty bad parents out there and some pretty conscientious single people who would like to have some say in the world they bring children into, should they choose to. I think it would be a tough argument to state that bearing children makes one more open-minded, educated, or morally apt. It didn't do much for poor Britney, did it?

Even more ridiculous is that the parents in question aren't even required to be parents of young children - the very ones that would impacted by the ratings - so a 60 year old with grown children would still be prefered over a childless child psychologist. I'm not trying to generalize, but someone whose last experience raising little children was when Eisenhower was president might be slightly out of touch with the challenges faced by today's parents and the progressions of modern social norms. Kids today have internet access, cell phones, and increasingly live in urban cities. Trust me, a boob is probably the last thing you need to worry about them being harmed by.

So we have an association made up of the most wealthy studios dictating who can see what and when and why, using a rating system and a member selection roster that is deliberately kept from the public. And the studios stand to profit by their decisions, of course, which makes the whole thing even more suspect since they aren't exactly impartial. There is no accountability save a repeal board - made up of the same members, through a process also not required to be visible. Excuse me if this sounds a little libertarian, but isn't that just de facto censorship supporting the moral beliefs (and prejudices) of a specific social and demographic class who stand to benefit financially from maintaining the status quo? And don't we all kind of agree that that's a bad thing?

Adolf, put your hand down, please.



For Roger Ebert, a tremendously gifted writer who once postulated that the MPAA board members have "cut loose from sanity and are thrashing about at random."

On Envy

Avarice, envy, pride,
Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all
On Fire. ~Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

I always thought of envy as a pretty powerful motivator as opposed to a venal sin, but then again, I also didn’t think gluttony was all that bad either.

So if Greed is the desire for material goods and worldly things, Envy is the desire for qualities seen in others that one lacks. Dante called this "the love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs." So it’s being a two-part asshole; first, you have to want what that person has, and secondly, you have to want them not to have it any more. In Purgatory, Dante noted that the punishment for envy was to have your eyes sewn shut with wire to remind you that you gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. (I actually thought that was an anti-aging procedure, so there you go.)

If this is actually a venal sin, then we’re all screwed. Who doesn’t like to see someone brought low? “Not me!” we claim, defensively. “I’m a positive person. I get immense gratification from seeing others succeed!”

I call bullshit. If that were the case, why do you think photos of celebrities with no makeup are so highly prized? Because deep down inside, in a dark and twisty place (the same place that takes the better umbrella from the umbrella stand and pretends not to see the person rushing for the elevator when you’ve already pushed the button), we love to see someone else brought low. It’s not a noble part of our makeup, but it’s there.

The real indicator that humans really are motivated by envy is to remember that we seldom, if ever, hate another person based on qualities we despise. Which is ironic. No, we hate others based on their attainment of those qualities that we admire. Think about it. Do you ever lose sleep about people who exemplify laziness? Or insecurity? Or negativity?

Nah, we hate people that have the things we really want. Success. Generosity. Patience. Perky boobs.

Jung would have a field day with this one.

On Gluttony

How did gluttony get to be a deadly sin? I figured I'd start with the "lightest" sin and work my way up, but come on. I'm not convinced this even is a sin. It would be understandable for it to be a sin if what you were eating was, say, babies, or if you were a glutton because you were taking food away from hungry people, but how is it a sin all on its own? Wanting more of something is pretty natural.

In fact, it's driven by a survival mechanism. If a wolf brings down a caribou, you never see it nibble a leg and then go all coy and say to the wolf head-deep in the belly next door, "oh no, you bad thing, I just couldn't eat one more bite!" No, they eat until they fall over. And they're the ones that survive the winter.

When people are gluttonous about good things, like exercise or charity or education, that's a good thing, although kind of annoying for the rest of us. So I suppose in order to indict gluttony, you have to indict it only as it relates to naughty things, like recreational drugs or Big Macs. But even then, how sinful is gluttony? Yes, it's not a good idea to turn one's body into Vegas, but is it a sinful one? For the most part, gluttony only punishes the person doing the gluttony, so it's a tool to punish sinners. (Just like religion.) I guess being gluttonous could make one grossly overweight, and thus makes one look bad in stretchy clothing, and I think that we can all agree that looking bad in stretchy clothing is definitely a sin. But the mindset behind gluttony? That's beyond reproach. We love people who really throw themselves passionately into things. So what if you're trying to smoke cupcakes through a crack pipe instead of adopting underprivileged orphans from exotic countries by the dozen? The central dedication is the same.

But, you say, people don't just hurt themselves. Addicts hurt their families and loved ones. People who eat, drink or hotknife their feelings tend to pass those traits on to their children. So, for the purposes of making this a very neat seven-part post, and in the spirit of not trying to refute the word of god, here are some gross facts about gluttony that make me kind of embarassed to be human.

In a medical study, people who had eaten a full meal within an hour were offered either a free medium or giant-size popcorn. Gues which one they invariably picked? And all the participants dug in and ate the popcorn even despite none being hungry, but that's not even the gross part. The people with the giant-sized ones were given stale, two-week old popcorn and they ate it anyway. Apparently, we'll eat something if it's free, even when we're not hungry and even when that thing is garbage.

In another study, one group was offered chocolate cake and another group 'gateau du chocolate.' The group with the gateau du chocolate ate way more than the chocoate cake group, even gateau du chocolate just means chocolate cake in French. (I guess that doesn't really make us gluttonous so much as snobby, and stupid.)

Scientists have found that if you eat with one other person, you'll eat far less than if you are eating with seven people. In fact, people will consume 96% more food in big groups. I have no idea why, except maybe that humans are pretty competitive; maybe we think it's kind of cool to be able to eat a steak covered in...another steak.

All of these facts, in case you were doubting me (and you are right to - I make up facts all the time) are from O Magazine. And I suspect Ms. Winfrey might know a thing or two about eating habits. So I maintain: gluttony is good in theology but not in applied science.

And eating babies is still definitely not OK.

On Why I Love the English Language

“Owl, wise though he was in many ways, was able to read and write and spell his own name, WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”

~From Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

The English language is a marvel of malleability. While there are some who will rage over the inclusion of slang terms into the dusty old upright corridors of Webster’s Dictionary, I am not one of them. I take a perverse delight in the confusions that result from the fluidity of modern language, and in no confusion do I take more delight than the made-up word.

Probably the primary reason that I do not censure the made-up word is that I have discovered I use a few of them myself. For example, today the auto-dictionary scolded me with its censorious little squiggly red line for using the word “agreeance.”

Surely agreeance is a word. I use it all the time: “if so-and-so is in agreeance, we’ll move on this.” “Are we all in agreeance?” Et cetera, et cetera. Except agreeance isn’t a word. The actual correct word is agreement. And so I was forced to acknowledge my own ignorance and be corrected by that bloody Microsoft paperclip. Guilty as charged.

Another set of words which cause a lot of confusion, and which result in descriptions of physically impossible feats, are figuratively and literally. Literally is shorter and therefore easier to remember, so is often used both for its actual meaning, and when people really mean figuratively. Literally means it actually happened as the words say it did – if someone literally jumped out of their shoes then you have a human being who has just levitated out of their Sketchers, and it’s probably time to call Ripley. If they didn’t actually physically jump out of their shoes, but were very scared (and perhaps demonstrated other amusing bodily feats, like wetting themselves) then they figuratively jumped out of their shoes. But literally sounds much more dramatic, and is thus much favored in cocktail party conversations.

My other particular favorite is irregardless. That is definitely not a word, although Websters caved and decided to add it with the definition of “the frequently misused synonym of regardless.” I suspect this made-up word was birthed from regardless and irrelevant, like some freaky centaur of ancient Greece, and I love it. But for the record, it's just plain regardless.

This word is extra fun because it’s often used by pretentious people who are including it in their sentence to sound smarter...

...but who are really just showing themselves, in fact, to be Wols.


For my friend T, who knows irregardless isn’t a word, and gleefully uses it anyways.

On Why Kids Nowadays are Great Big Wussies

"The environmental movement of our times was sparked by the re-release of Bambi in the 1950s." ~Tom Platt, from Walt Whitman's The Last Days of Disco

Do you remember the huge brou-ha-ha that erupted when The Lion King came out?

First there was all the fuss over the word “sex” being subliminally inserted into a scene. A conservative activist even went so far as to ask for a ban on the film because he felt the intent of Disney was to make children sexually promiscuous (guess it worked, huh, Paris?)

Seems kind of argumentative to me, considering that kids have memorized every song from Disney movies and own the DVD before the thing is in pre-production. If you want a Disney movie to influence kids, don’t use a hazy word that you have to freeze frame the movie to find. Just have one of the lions tell kids outright to have promiscuous sex, for heaven’s sake. That would get it done much more efficiently. Only very, very nerdy children run through animated films in freeze frame trying to find hidden stuff, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they see messages telling them to have sex, because they are never going to get laid anyways. Freeze frame nudity is the only kind they’re ever going to see. Don’t take that away from them.

The Lion King was also criticized for being too “dark” for children. I guess the Nazi hyenas were pretty scary, but I don’t know that children are really grasping the fascist or genocidal undertones while they’re watching a hyena voiced by Whoopi Goldberg do a song and dance number. The dad lion did get trampled by a herd of buffalos, but that was far less traumatic than Bambi’s mother getting both barrels from that hunter. And Scar was a threatening character, to be sure, but if you’re looking for true terror in the form of Jeremy Irons, may I please direct you to Kubrick’s Lolita. That presents both Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffiths as sex symbols. Not for the kiddies. (Or grownups, for that matter, Mr. Irons, please put your pants back on.)

So what’s all the fuss these days? Kids are too sheltered if they think the African savanna is a place where zebras and lions hang out together and happily fulfill the socially dictated requirements of the caste system. Wait until they get into the corporate world. This is not a world we want children to go into unprepared for reality. Protected, yes; ignorant, no.

Let’s look at what was put forward to my generation as good kiddie fare:

Watership Down. Made the year I was born, this featured a bunch of bunnies dealing with displacement and dictatorships, all in psychedelic animation and scored to John Denver. (No, seriously.) It depicted, in full colour no less, a rabbit getting its ears torn to shreds by the owsla, the rabbit secret police (cough cough) and a rabbit burrow being plowed over while the rabbits and their babies crush each other to death as they try and scramble to the surface. The climax features a rabbit being freed from choking to death in a wire snare, blood oozing down his throat, and one rabbit tearing another’s jugular out while it screams, backlit by lightening, and blood pours down its jaws. And these bunnies are the cutest things you’ve ever seen, all expressive ears and huge eyes. I remember walking home from school very, very slowly the day we all watched that.

Plague Dogs. This is another animated movie that ostensibly indicted animal testing, something I think all of us would admit is pretty horrible as subject matters go, but that really only served to scare the pants off the children that expected the “can’t we all just get along?” camaraderie of the Fox and the Hound. No, while this movie does admittedly have a fox-dog friendship, the two titular dogs start off trapped in an experimental laboratory in Britain. (Boy, the Brits are mean to their animated animals…and let’s not even get into the concept of Dalmatian coats.) The lab is a nightmare – it even has a gas chamber for kittens. They endeavor to shield children from this horrible concept by calling it..."the kitten gas chamber.” Well done. So one of the dogs has undergone brain experiments and wears a bandage over his exposed brain (not kidding) and the other dog, noble Rowf, has had rocks sewn into his stomach cavity and is forced to undergo tests where he swims in a tank until he drowns, and then is electro-shocked back to life to do the test again. Then the dogs escape, and you breathe a sigh of relief until half an hour later when the dogs are accidentally shooting a farmer point-blank in the face with his own rifle and eating the dead human corpse. The movie ends with the dogs being driven out to sea, and it fades away as they swim towards a hallucinatory island off in the distance but presumably drown, alone and terrified. Get the popcorn, kids!

The Secret of Nimh. Yet another animated feature showing cute animals having terrible things done to them and doing rather gruesome things to each other to the sound of synthesizer music. It centers around a brave little widow mouse whose child is bedridden and in the path of a plow that will crush their home (in case the children couldn't figure out what that would look like, the movie helpfully shows it in a flashforward.) Brave mother mouse, being romantically pursued both by a seagull and a libidinous secret police mouse, consults with a group of rats. These rats are shown in flashback to have been experimented on and injected, thrashing and squeaking, with all sorts of components, and as a result have developed superhuman intelligence. Nicodemus, a superintelligent rat who has visions and really creepy glowing eyes, is plotted against by a power-mad capitalist rat faction, which is eventually successful in crushing poor Nicodemus underneath a cinderblock. All of this takes place underground, in gloomy wet caverns, and drugs are featured all over the place: medicine for the baby, sedatives for the cat, psychotropics for the rats. Pretty far from the mousy frontier fun of An American Tale.

The Last Unicorn. This wasn’t so much scary as just plain weird. It was as if the producers at Rankin/Bass got together, smoked a few joints, consulted King Lear and a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and then decided to make a children’s movie. There are sexual undertones all over the place: the huge rampaging Red Bull forcing all those delicate white girl unicorns into submission and then drowning them in the sea, the tree that tries to date rape a magician, and finally, a man that falls in love with a horse. Might be a little touchy to replicate these characters for McDonalds toys, don’t you think? Not to mention some pretty serious violence: a woman is torn apart, screaming, by a naked-breasted harpy, a young prince is trampled by a flaming bull, said bull is dragged under the waves and drowns, a decapitated skull gets loaded on wine, and the unicorns rush the castle en masse, tumbling the old king to his death on the rocks. It also features a song with the following lyrics:

“...when the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain
and the last lion roars at the last dusty fountain
and it seems like all is dying and leave the world to mourn...”

Not as catchy as Hakuna Matata, I suppose.

Old Yeller. "Ma? Ma...there's sumthin' wrong wit Yeller. Hey boy, who's my Yeller? What's wrong, Yeller?" Nuff said.

So after my generation survived all the fascism, rabbit capital punishment, kitten gas chambers, doggie vivisection, rat torture, and the forbidden love between a man and a tree, you’d think that Poor Mufasa’s off-screen trampling wouldn’t be considered nearly so terrifying.

Hiding anything scary from our children might be a bit of a worry. This is a generation, after all, that will have to live with environmental devastation, the continued ghettoization of the developed world, the poverty, insurmountable national debt, vicious civil wars and widespread epidemics of the undeveloped world, and Britney Spears’ continued moral decline.

They can handle a few Nazi hyenas.

For my sister A, who I remember being very scared by The Dark Crystal.

On A Bad Day at the Office

Firefighter: You wanna tell me what happened here?
Lance: Uh, there was a fire, I dunno, I came by and it's... checkin out the fire.
Firefighter: Well that lady uh, Mona? She said that you two were in the building together when the fire started.
Lance: Yeah, she's a liar, cuz I dunno her so whatever, whatever she says is a lie, so...
Firefighter: K, so you're saying you weren't in the building with that woman?
Lance: No, not I! Aright, she started it, aright? Because she was like "I hate my job, I'm gonna burn this mother down!" And I said "You better not... you better not!"
Firefighter: She said it was an electrical fire.
Lance: It was. It was a total electrical fire.
Firefighter: Why aren't you wearing your pants, Joe?

Ever had the kind of day when you just wanted to turn and walk out of your office shortly after setting fire to it? We all have.

Luckily, we all also have the capacity to overcome irrational impulse. After all, it’s not your office pissing you off. It’s really more the unnatural requirement for you to spend nine or ten hours a day cooped up in it, creating emails that just create work for other people in little offices across the street from you. These, I suppose, are the questionable efficiencies created by the Industrial Revolution, so I guess it would make more sense to torch the collective works of Charles Dickens than to go around vandalizing office buildings. No wait…Dickens exposed the harmful humanistic impact of the Industrial Revolution. So I guess you should light the iron plow on fire, or whatever.

I guess you really shouldn’t light anything on fire, because that doesn’t solve anything.

But still, sometimes you just want to burn that mother down.

On Why I Miss the Cocktail Hour

“The idea of drinking before dinner has its roots in the Prohibition era. When the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act were passed banning alcohol consumption, citizens would host “cocktail hours” or “happy hours” at a speakeasy (underground drinking establishments) before eating at restaurants where alcohol could not be served. Cocktail lounges continued the trend of drinking before dinner.

The push against drunk driving and alcohol abuse has curtailed the use of the cocktail hour to some extent. In the 1980s, bars started providing free hors d'oeuvres to lower the blood alcohol content of patrons. Glasgow has banned happy hours to reduce binge drinking, as has the Republic of Ireland. Even the U.S. military got in the act, when in 1984 they abolished happy hours at military base clubs.

Despite the controversy, cocktail hour still exists around the globe. Today in the United States, "Cocktail Hour" culture consists largely of junior and mid-level
professionals getting together for a drink to unwind after work.” ~from Wikipedia, bastardized

Not anymore. Bring back the cocktail hour, please. I wasn't able to drink in the eighties, so I don't remember it and thus technically I can't miss it, but I miss the idea of it. We won’t drink and drive, we promise. (Vancouverites never drive downtown anyways, we like to pretend we’re in Manhattan.) So give us back our after-work drinks.

I don’t know when this tradition died, but Vancouver, you are a city desperately in need of a cocktail hour. There are thousands upon thousands of randy young professionals with lots of money here. After all, someone is buying up $400,000 studio condos. In fact, 100,000 people live in the downtown core; that’s a higher population density than LA, San Francisco, and Manhattan. The only cities that come close to comparison are Hong Kong and Rio.

So how are all these people unwinding at the end of a long workday? They’re rushing home, getting on their computers, pouring a glass of wine, and surfing through other singles online. Deliver me. We’ve allowed technology to transform our city into the ultimate high school dance where the sexes are lined up awkwardly against opposite walls. No, scratch that, it’s worse: we’re not even in the same room anymore.

Toronto has a cocktail hour. Manhattan has one. Why don’t we? I blame stratification. Left to pick between substandard sports bars and higher-end lounges that won’t get hopping until the weekend, most of the city’s best looking potential cocktailites are sighing in defeat and shuffling off to a sweaty 40 degree Bikram’s studio, mat in tow. There's no middle ground. What are the alternatives? Jostling arm-in-arm for bar seating with the mougars* on the roof at Joe Fortes? Getting peanut shells in your Steve Madden pumps at Madison’s? Suddenly sliding around in the sweat of 40 other people is looking more appetizing.

*man cougars

Bar owners take note: there are not enough good after-work places downtown. Women will not go to a place where there is carpet on the tables. Men will not go to places where their only drink options have names like “The Flirtini” and come in complicated glasses. And no one, male or female, over twenty-six years of age will step foot into a place where the bartenders pour shooters into people’s mouths.

A bar is a concept. It is not a club, and it is not a lounge. It has food, but it does not have edamame, or anything requiring a sugar cage or a reduction or even truffle oil. You can order beer, but they have wine that doesn't come in a tetra pak. There is a bar to belly up to. There are charming bartenders and cute waitresses to act as social lubricant for the patrons. And there are cocktails, not just sugary martinis. I'm very feminine, thank you. But if I want a Jack and Coke, I don’t want to be stared at as though I just crawled out from under a Chevy at a work-release program in the local women’s penitentiary.

Publicans: if you build them, they will come. If they come, they will mingle. I implore you, Vancouver, bring back the cocktail hour. We can handle it. I promise.

For my friend C, who remembers fondly with me a time when there was a cocktail hour, and even cigar girls.

On Why It's Important to Finish High School

Overheard at a Vancouver lounge on Saturday evening by two women exiting the bar to head to a nightclub:

Voice #1: "I had a really good time chatting with those people. I was talking to them for, like, an hour about Spanish."

Voice #2: "You're so great with meeting new people! People really like you. You're so, you know, personal."

Voice #1: "Oh my god, thank you! I really do feel like I have good communication skills."

Indeed. The word you were looking for, ladies, is personable.

You heard it first here, kids. Stay in school.

On Why You Want to be Single for Valentine’s Day

"Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl
But that was thirty years ago
When they used to have a show
Now it's a disco, but not for Lola
Still in the dress she used to wear
Faded feathers in her hair
She sits there so refined
And drinks herself half-blind
She lost her youth and she lost her Tony
Now she's lost her mind
At the Copa..."

~Barry Manilow, Copa Cabana

Valentine’s Day is not for couples. It’s really for single people.

Yes, there are plenty of single people who feel pressured or shamed about their status around Valentine’s Day. (These people are likely women, since it’s improbable that a man is going to call up his friends and say “I am just really longing for some old-fashioned romance, know what I mean, dude?”) But for single people in general, the weeks before Valentine’s Day can be a bombardment of reminders that other people are blissfully, deliriously in love and are about to engage in a veritable orgy of romanticism. Completely rational, fulfilled women start to fear that the latter half of their life will be spent alone, drinking themselves into madness a la Sunset Boulevard or spending Saturday nights lurching around a decrepid wedding cake and setting fire to themselves.

Except that the apparent romantic bliss culminating in the ides of February isn't real. Ask your couple friends; it’s more likely to be characterized by fear, paranoia, anxiety and resentment than moonlight and rooftop slow dances. It’s not the Summer of Love. It’s actually more like the Cold War.

You see, the entire Valentine’s Day industry is sold to women as a romantic holiday. An opportunity to cherish the unique aspects of your relationship with your mate by doing something special and out of the ordinary. Like what? Well, like doing exactly the same thing or getting the same thing as every other couple in existence on February 14th: a dinner out and flowers if he’s unimaginative and classy, and a dinner out and edible chocolate body paint if he’s unimaginative and really, really not.

So what happened? The clever folks at Hallmark, Hershey’s, and FTD teamed up and got busy building women up to expect something truly romantic on that fateful day while simultaneously encouraging the male contingent to do something classically romantic and thus missing those expectations by a long shot. For women, romance is when their men demonstrate that they truly appreciate the myriad ways that they are different than any woman who came before. For men, it’s sold as an opportunity to buy something or do something to make up for 364 previous days of perceived un-specialness. Caving under the immense societal pressure, men revert to the tried and true: chocolates, flowers, or dinners, which unfortunately is exactly what they gifted every woman that came before. But if they don’t do this at all, then it ends up being what they’ll gift every woman that’s about to come, after the current one dumps him on February 15th for being insensitive.

Women, too, are left mystified as to how to mitigate the pressure. Have we been together long enough to celebrate the holiday? Do I get him a gift? What if he doesn’t do enough, or worse, what if he does too much and then I didn’t do enough? What if he gets me a watch and I made him a macaroni angel? It’s like a Mexican standoff…him, her, and the VP Marketing for DeBeers.

The single, meanwhile, get to lean back and just enjoy the carnage. If anything, Valentine’s Day is a great reminder to them that the truly romantic times in a relationship don’t usually come in the form of socially dictated dinners and birthstone pendants. They come at the beginning, with those little initial discoveries that are so precious and exciting (long before they start driving you absolutely crazy.) The first kiss, the first time you get to see where they live, the first sleepover, the first breakfast, the first trip away. The first time she realizes he puts hot sauce on everything, and the first time he realizes she hasn’t put oil in her car for two years. Single people know that those magical times are still ahead of them.

So take heart, Lonely Hearts. If you weren’t taken in by the AbFlex, then Valentine’s Day is nothing to worry about.