Dangerous Trend Alert

What's going on with Katie Holmes?

I know there's the whole being married to a wingnut thing, and she's trying to keep up with her new friend, Posh Spice, but these jeans have got to be the final indication that signals a team of mental health professionals to swoop in and save her denimed ass.

There are trends that we try for the sake of the trends (I have a black fedora sitting on my hall table). There are trends we avoid, because there's no way it can look good (those short, high-waisted shorts were all over London while I was there this summer and like, two girls could actually rock them). And then some people seem to make an attempt to start a trend - is this what Katie is doing? Baggy jeans cinched just above the ankle that accentuates a heaviness in the hips, extending into the upper thighs?

I remember when Katie was the cute girl from Dawson's Creek that my brother had a crush on...

Battle of the Single Broads: Elaine vs. Carrie vs. Bridget

Three iconic singletons have emerged in popular culture over the past 15 years: Elaine Benes from the sitcom Seinfeld was the first. She kept up with her male friends, dating as many men as Jerry dated women; never placed too much importance on whatever man she was with; and entered (and lost) The Contest. She was intelligent, self-sufficient and witty. When Seinfeld ended in 1998, it paved the way for Carrie Bradshaw, the fictional sex columnist (based on real sex columnist Candice Bushnell) in the HBO series Sex and the City. Carrie dated far and wide, placing importance on finding a good man, but even more importance on a great pair of shoes. And across the pond in Britain, Helen Fielding was creating her heroine (and coining the term “singleton”), Bridget Jones, through a series of columns appearing in The Independent, which were fictionalized into the 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary. Bridget Jones was a fumbling London thirtysomething trying to navigate her way through the dating scene, avoiding all "fuckwittage" and losing a few pounds along the way.

But how do these three women compare when lined up against each other? How do the major arenas of their lives measure up?

JOB:

Elaine: Writer for J. Peterman catalogue (after a turn at Pendant Publishing and personal assistant to Mr. Pitt), which she clinched just after meeting Peterman in the rain and describing her shirt: “This innocent looking shirt has something which isn't innocent at all. Touchability. Heavy, silky Italian cotton, with a fine almost terrycloth like feeling. Five button placket, relaxed fit, innocence and mayhem at once.”

Carrie: Sex columnist for New York Times, sometime freelancer at Vogue; lives her fabulous life and gets paid to write about it.

Bridget: In the first book, Bridget has an office job at a publishing house where she sends flirty emails to her boss, Daniel Cleaver (see Significant Relationships, below). In the second book, Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason, she becomes an on-air personality who attempts such stunts as parachuting into a pig sty and sliding down a firehouse pole, ass-to-camera.

FRIENDS:

Elaine: Apart from the obvious Jerry, George and Kramer, Elaine has some girlfriends out in Long Island who keep entreating her to “come and see the baaayyy-bee”.

Carrie: Solid as a set of Manolo wedges in bright summer colours; Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte have been by Carrie’s side since the beginning.

Bridget: Sharon (Shazzer), Jude and Tom are always happy to drop everything and meet Bridget in the pub for more than 14 units of alcohol and several cigarettes, despite any New Year’s resolutions.

SIGNIFICANT RELATIONSHIPS:

Elaine: Puddy, the face-painting, eightball-jacket wearing lug who Elaine is constantly breaking up and getting back together with – one time, both events happened on a single plane trip; another time Elaine got back together because she needed a bureau moved.

Carrie: Mr. Big is the one man that Carrie keeps coming back to, even when she’s committed to a live-in relationship with Aidan (who we all know is just too simple and too easy for Carrie). At the end of the series, Carrie ends up with Mr. Big. In the big screen version, after two painful hours of breaking up, she ends up with him. (Seriously, in real life, girlfriends would never let their friends go back this many times to such a waffle-weave man.)

Bridget: The first book starts out with Mark Darcy, in a cheesy Christmas jumper, being a bit rude to old Bridget. Then she gets caught up in the romance of bad boy Daniel Cleaver (who also happens to be her boss). As is to be expected, Bridget makes nice with the dashing Mark Darcy by the time he’s ready to wear his cheesy Christmas jumper again.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION:

Elaine: She is always in search of the perfect apartment in Manhattan, even considering Jerry’s apartment.

Carrie: She rented her apartment in New York for years, choosing to spend 40 grand on shoes instead of a down payment. She eventually buys her place, with a little help from her friends, after breaking up with Aidan.

Bridget: Lives by herself in a small flat in London, well-stocked with granny-pants and by the end of it, Mark Darcy.

CATCHPHRASE:

Elaine: “Get out!” (followed by a voracious push)

Carrie: Any age old question that attempts to understand men.

Bridget: “Fuckwit.”

Fringe Benefits or, Bangs Away!

Being on holiday, I have a chance to practise my tabloid headline writing skills as well as comment on some less weightier topics (than, like, daytime television).


Here's a trend you can trace on the foreheads of fashionistas: the fringe. Kate Moss started it last fall, chopping her post-Pete Doherty locks into a 70s-inspired cut.


Model Heidi Klum soon followed suit, keeping up with the trends she might see on her show Project Runway.


After a few months, we see the trend trickle down from models to mere celebrities - Kate Hudson has been sporting some cute bangs while cavorting around Miami with Owen Wilson (who I was convinced tried to kill himself over her, but there you go).


And finally, our Friend next door, Jennifer Aniston was spotted sporting the shaggy bangs on the set of her latest movie.

Kate Moss started the skinny jean phase ages ago, and it took that style a good two years to hit the streets of North America (they were a bit quicker in London). My prediction? Fall 2010, we're all going to look suspiciously like our grade 3 bowl-cut bangs school photo...

Homer, Boners and a Pagan Rain Dance

In Dorset, in the southwest of England, there lies the outline of a sexually aroused Celtic warrior, carved out in chalk. Known as the Cerne Abbas Giant, it is thought to be an ancient symbol of spirituality and fertility. And now the promoters of the new Simpsons film have gone and painted a similarly-sized impression of Homer Simpson, naked but for his Y-fronts, offering a doughnut to the club-bearing giant (no really - he's actually holding a club).

Members of The Pagan Federation were not impressed with the depiction of the much loved cartoon character, daubed on the hill with water-based biodegradable paint: "We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away," said Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for The Pagan Federation. And judging from the torrential downpour that swept across the UK yesterday, the Pagan Rain Dance worked...

Posh: Reality Living in America

Along with the rest of the closeted Spice Girls fans across the land, I watched Victoria Beckham: Coming to America last Monday. I will fully admit to an odd fascination with the lives of a few celebrities: I followed Kate Moss’s torrid love affair with Pete Doherty, I’m still intrigued by Suri Cruise (along with Katie Holmes’s outfits) and I love seeing pictures of Victoria Beckham in impossibly high heels and tiny get-ups, carting around her three boys – how does she do it?

The special, originally planned to be a series of six episodes, was shortened when producers were left with little material after Victoria flew back to the UK early to see her football start husband, David Beckham. Producers scrambled and made it into a one-hour special, attracting a mediocre 4 million viewers in the U.S. on Monday.

Like most reality TV shows centred around celebrities, the show was about publicity – and warming Americans up to Victoria, who consistently wears a scowl (and those sky-high heels) in paparazzi shots in papers and on the internet. The show is carefully crafted to show Victoria, though always gorgeous and flawlessly dressed, as a down-to-earth mum who misses her kids, incurs traffic violations, and sometimes drinks too much at afternoon socialite parties.

As with other shows that document the lives of celebrities like The Osbournes and Nick & Jessica: Newlyweds, the editing is deft, frequently poking fun at the show’s subjects. From Ozzy’s exasperated interjections during his children’s squabbles to prolonged shots of Jessica as she tries to figure out if chicken really do live in the sea, we are made to laugh at the follies of the rich and famous.

And this is why we like these shows: they bring celebrities down from their airbrushed spot on a Louis Vuitton pedestal and show us that yes, they are just like us: Ozzy and Sharon have to deal with clearing up dog poop in the house, Nick has to deal with the olfactory aftermath of Jessica’s visit to the bathroom. And while Victoria Beckham is never brought down to this basest of human functions, we are shocked to see her having to step out of her car in [gasp] flats!

Bringing celebrities down to the layperson’s level is a trend of the past decade or so. Remember back in the 80s when Robin Leach took us through the lavish and serviced homes and lives of celebrities in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? That programme was deftly edited, too – but it was all the boring, diurnal bits that were left out. Now, we want to see those bits. Celebrity magazines - a niche once left to the National Enquirer and News of the World, but now expanding faster than Nicole Richie’s pregnant belly - frequently run stories about celebrity cellulite and other body flaws the magic of Hollywood manages to hide. (And I use the term "stories" loosely, since much of the story is told through glaring graphics and little text.)

While Victoria Beckham does remain quite flawless throughout the special, we do see that she is followed around by her own makeup artist and hairdresser, and refuses to consume a proffered cookie from the bitchy celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton. But we also see her sweet side: stumbling over what she wants to be a polite description of a chubby, plastic, dolphin-calling socialite and dressing up a sex doll to act as a decoy so she can buy her husband a watch.

And though I never did figure out how she manages three boys whilst wearing skinny jeans and Louboutin heels, perhaps we will discover more in the near future: David Beckham has just signed on to star in his own reality series. Now, if only someone would convince Kate Moss to open up her model lifestyle to the scrutiny of the layperson…

In Praise of the Absurd

On my way to the gym the other day, I passed a flyer stapled to a telephone pole - one of those little posters with the tear-off phone number fringe on the bottom. Ever-curious, I stopped briefly to see if I should tear off a phone number and put it in my wallet alongside all the other tear-off numbers that if I would just call, would allow me to begin my Buddhist meditation practice, continue with my yoga postures and stop smoking through hypnosis (okay, not the last one).

This poster was offering classes in levitation. I looked again, sure I must have misread it. Nope, levitation. Call the number and you, too can be well on your way to floating serenely, cross-legged, just a few inches off the ground.

This levitation poster was the first in a string of stories I have noticed lately that are wonderfully absurd. Elizabeth Renzetti wrote in Saturday’s Globe and Mail last week about her new favourite headline, courtesy of The Scottish Daily Record that reported on civilians who tried to subdue the man who drove a burning car into Glasgow’s airport: Hero Cabbie: I Kicked Burning Terrorist So Hard In Balls That I Tore a Tendon.

Today’s Globe and Mail provided two offbeat stories. The first transcribing a 911 phonecall at 3am in Newmarket:

Caller: "Hi. Umm ... We've found an elephant walking down the street near the community centre, the Ray Twinney."

Operator: "Sorry?"

Caller: "We've found an elephant walking down the street. Like the ones from, like, the circus at the Ray Twinney centre. One of them got loose and it's walking down the street."

For the next few minutes, the caller explains that there are, in fact, at least two fully grown, trainer-less elephants milling about.

The second affirms what I’ve been saying for decades: the fashion of wearing underwear increases literacy rates.

The Author Stirs...

Apologies, Blogfans.

Apologies to all my faithful readers who, day after day, logged in over the past 6 weeks to the same picture filler, the calming green background devoid of inspirational and thought-provoking words. Sorry to all of you who came to this web address, and wondered what weighty topic would finally put my fingers back on my iBook and draw me out of my blogging slump.

Well, it's the Spice Girls, ladies and gentlemen... and they're reuniting!

Oh, glory be to this 1998 revival! Bring back girl power and sparkly micro-shorts and hit factory tunes that are played in between Madonna and Kylie at gay clubs across the land! (Okay, maybe just in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver!) Bring back Christmas singles and Spice Girls chocolate bars and drunken arguments over the feminist principles of the world's most successful girl band!

But most of all, bring back my blogging already!

My Internet Boyfriend in Michigan

There was a time when if you mentioned you’d met someone on the internet, it was laughable (remember Napoleon Dynamite’s brother meeting his wife online?) and often questionable (it’s easy to have a perfect boyfriend if no one’s actually met him). But these days, almost all forms of internet socializing are acceptable.

I came to this realization when a friend of mine told me that she lived in the same neighbourhood as a guy we used to go to high school with and she saw him quite often. In real life, she had never stopped to say hello, but within the medium of Facebook, she added him as a friend and made contact.

Over the past few weeks that I have been signed up with Facebook, I have “added friends”* who were people I went to grade school with, people I’ve worked with, boys I’ve gone on a few dates with, friends of friends and one guy who I think I’ve said 3 words to in my life. All contact has been over the website, although I’ve had two suggestions of getting the “web communities” together at an event.

Which slightly scares me. And I don’t really know why. Maybe because you hear of all the cyber-stalking that goes on (a benign form of which I myself have indulged in on occasion – my brother likes to refer to looking at people’s Facebook profiles without their knowledge as “passive stalking”) or maybe I still harbour some Napoleon Dynamite bias, if that is the right word.

I have been reading and commenting on the insightful and perspicacious blog That Shakespeherian Rag over the past couple of months, a blog which I found through a series of serendipitous six-degrees-of-separation-esque events (okay, I dated his friend), and recently found myself in the same room with the author. Due to my aversion to meeting blog buddies in real life, I chickened out at the offer to meet face-to-face (see my comment on the Quiz Night post). I felt like my web community should be separate from my real-life community.

Which brings me to internet dating. I haven’t tried it, and I’m still not at a point in my life where I’m willing to try it. But really, being on Lavalife if you’re single is a totally normal thing. Many relationships have started on dating websites and I personally know of two marriages that have happened as a result of hooking up online.

Our lives are lived online more and more. Instead of going to the bank to pay bills, you do it on EasyWeb. Why bother buying an actual newspaper when you can read most of the articles on the online version. Memos have long been a thing of the past because information is now disseminated via e-mail. I don’t even check the weather on TV anymore: the Weather Network is bookmarked as one of my daily sites. And now, instead of wasting time and money at the bar, you can sort through hundreds of potential suitors and not end up kissing the wrong one at 3am just as the ugly lights are coming on.

But ay, here’s the rub: my real-life friends have become my online friends. So why can’t my online friends become my real-life friends?

Ignoring the choplogic, I think the answer lies in our innate sociability as humans. Sure, the internet acts as a conduit for social introductions, but it doesn’t replace the day-to-day interactions with people you know. And just as you may smile and wave at your letter carrier and leave it at that, you may poke or write a wall message to one of your Facebook friends and never really go beyond that.

And although using Lavalife as a forum to meet your partner is completely reasonable nowadays, conducting an entire courtship over the internet, without ever meeting, is still considered just plain weird.

Now I wonder if my friend will stop next time she runs into her Facebook friend in her neighbourhood and make their virtual socialization into a tangible interaction…


* For those of you not on Facebook, a) what’s the delay? and b) adding a friend is when you find someone, or someone finds you, and you add them to your visual list of friends on your profile page, for everyone to see how popular you are.

Paris Hilton and Other Clutter

Back in January, some enterprising individuals bought the contents of Paris Hilton’s storage unit (after she failed to settle the bill) and posted the pictures, videos and other itemsthey found inside on a website (parisexposed.com) that has since been taken down.

Now, I know that Paris Hilton is not the most appropriate of barometers with which to measure trends in our society, but an article in the Globe this weekend by Suzanne Gannon noted that the number of self-storage units in the U.S. are up by 90% since 1995.

Ninety percent.

One could argue that this is a space issue: more of us are moving to cities, city real estate is expensive, we’re buying smaller places, therefore we don’t have enough space in our dwellings to store all of our belongings.

But surely this logic doesn’t apply to Ms. Hilton, whose family owns a series of temporary storage units around the world (albeit, for human storage).

I think the more feasible answer is that we just have (and covet) more things. A simple trip through IKEA (which I made today) overwhelms you with a profusion of items you didn’t know you needed, but now you can’t live without. I picked up and put down a glass pitcher (for what? my homemade lemonade I make on sweltering March afternoons?). I mulled the possibility of bamboo shoots in a glass vase (because unlike the other plants in my apartment that are hanging on for dear life, bamboo would proliferate under my care). And yes, I even considered a collapsible storage unit to help contain my accumulating effects.

I guess humans just like to have “things”. They may represent status, memories, or, heaven forbid, actually have a function.

Maybe the guys at parisexposed.com are onto something. They've helped Ms. Hilton by taking her possessions and storing them virtually on the internet. And now she doesn't have to worry about paying that pesky bill each month - she can log in and enjoy her digital memories, along with the rest of the world...

Compare and Contrast: Sinead vs Britney

After checking herself into rehab and then checking out the very next day, Britney Spears has gone and shaved her head (and got a few more tattoos it would seem). Emily Wynne-Hughes, a woman who was present for the tattooing part of the identity crisis, said Britney was “tired of having things plugged into [her hair] and she didn’t want anybody to touch her…”

This coiffure overhaul harkens back to Sinead O’Connor, another troubled songstress, who shaved her head in reaction to her record company telling her to grow her locks to appear more feminine. Could this mean a dalliance into the priesthood for Ms. Spears? Let us compare and contrast...


SINEAD O’CONNOR

Born: December 8th, 1966 in Dublin, Ireland

Children: Jake, Roisin, Shane and Yeshua, by a variety of fathers

Famous ex-boyfriend: BloodSugarSexMagik singer, Anthony Kiedis

High point: covering Prince's song, "Nothing Compares 2 U"

Publicity stunt: tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, sans lament

Insightful Lyrics:

How could I possibly know what I want
When I was only twenty-one?
And there's millions of people
To offer advice and say how I should be
But they're twisted
And they will never be any influence on me

- from The Emperor’s New Clothes


BRITNEY SPEARS

Born: December 2nd, 1981 in McComb, Mississippi

Children: Sean Preston and Jayden James, by a father to a variety of kids

Famous ex-boyfriend: SexyBack singer, Justin Timberlake

High point: covering (barely) her backside with a Catholic schoolgirl-inspired kilt

Publicity stunt: tore up the town on a Saturday night, sans lingerie

Insightful Lyrics:

There is no need to protect me
It’s time that I
Learned to face up to this on my own
I’ve seen so much more than you know now
So don’t tell me to shut my eyes

- from I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman

Pavlov, Nickelback and Me

I used to detest Nickelback. They were one of the few bands that I would actually turn off if they came on the radio. And as a rule, I do not participate in music snobbery, but Nickelback songs, I eschewed.

Then something weird occurred. I happened to hear a Nickelback song during a happy event in my life. And all of a sudden, Nickelback was okay. I bought a couple of tracks from iTunes. I even developed a weird, Neanderthal-crush on Chad Kroeger, who has since been voted the ugliest person in rock in an online poll.

The funny thing is, I can’t actually remember that happy event that made me start to like what I had so abhorred before. It is a perfect illustration of Pavlov’s classical conditioning. The happy event was the unconditioned stimulus, my feelings of joy being the unconditioned response. Nickelback became the conditioned stimulus – I’ve now forgotten that event, but am left with feelings of jocundity at the first few bars of Photograph…

Comics on the Fridge

What makes people seek out the kitchen scissors (why are they not in the drawer where they should be?) and cut out a comic from the newspaper (oops, forgot to check what was on the other side and now there’s a swath cut through the article on rebuilding Israel that I had good intentions of reading)?



I had this thought as I cut out the above comic from the Toronto Star today. Why this one? And why did the comics below make it to my fridge, displayed in perpetuity, garnering smirks as I reach for the milk, and not fade from my memory as I curse the 4 flights of stairs I must negotiate while taking the comics, along with the rest of the unending piles of newspapers that seem to pile up at an astonishing rate, out to the recycling bin?




Well, first of all, they're clever in a cerebral way. Not in a "oh, isn't that cute?!" Family Circus kind of way. They require the merging of several areas of knowledge: Stonehenge and its celestial precision and Daylight Savings; the story of Robinson Crusoe and the pop culture phrase shepherding the weekend; laws of probability and songs by The Clash.

Second, by residing on my fridge, they represent me as intelligent and clever - I was sage enough to understand, appreciate and subsequently cut out the comic. So anyone that casts their eyes across the disarray that is the front of my fridge, immediately reads me as insightful and canny.

Well, either that or I know where to find the scissors...

Lavalife, c. 1850

I have read theories that the rise in popularity of internet dating sites like Lavalife, and match-making events like speed dating, is due to our increasingly busy lives – singletons just don’t have enough time to find that special someone.

However, a 150-year-old Irish festival held in Lisdoonvarna every year shows that “putting yourself out there” is an age-old tradition.

It started out as a small event for farmers to find brides and grooms for their children, but has since grown, attracting visitors from across Ireland, the UK and beyond. There is an official Matchmaker (whose father and grandfather before him held the same title) who sets up introductions between potential partners during the festival.

I could find no statistics as to the number of people who hook up at Lisdoonvarna (or on Lavalife) and how many actually stay together for the long term – I wondered if the antiquated Irish festival was just as good as internet dating for finding your soul mate…

The fact remains, though, that both the festival and websites like Lavalife serve the same purpose for participants: they act as that friend in real life who facilitates the meeting of potential partners: The web designers for Lavalife are to the dating website as the Matchmaker is to the Lisdoonvarna festival. And when a singleton has run out of friends with other friends to introduce, they have to step outside their circle and dip into other pastures (pardon the farming metaphor).

Personally, I have yet to be convinced to try any kind of dating service. Perhaps this is because I haven’t run out of friends with other friends yet. Or maybe my life isn’t busy enough. Or maybe I’m just happy watching the cows in my pasture…

All I Really Really Want Is Zigazig Ha...

In an article entitled “Girl Power as Anarchism”, that appeared in The Guardian on Monday and has now been reprinted in this past Saturday’s Globe and Mail under the title “What Happened to Girl Power?”, John Harris writes about the legacy of girl power, ten years after the Spice Girls’ single “Wannabe” topped the charts.

Harris claims that despite heavy media criticism and the band being “shot through with absurdity and contradiction…their claim to be waging war on a testosterone-heavy consensus just about held up.” That the Spice Girls were a valid form of feminist thought is an argument I had with many people during those first heady years of Spicemania.

The Spice Girls were widely criticized for declaring their maxim of “Girl Power” while dressing in revealing outfits and generally not being very cerebral. (I remember reading a Vogue interview where the author gave a list of words that the girls had to have defined during a conversation, one being “sibling.”) The irony of the situation was that critics divorced the women’s sexuality and intrinsic interests from the band’s explanation of Girl Power: we are going to do what we want to do and we’re not going to let men dictate what that is (which is basically a tenet of feminism). Critics wouldn’t let overt sexuality and an interest in fashion exist with feminist thought. But these two things are not mutually exclusive.

Being the feminist that I am, I can’t ignore the fact that many societal factors influence what women perceive as sexy or interesting. I shave my legs because I say I like the way it feels and looks, but really, through many subconscious avenues, I have been told that I like the way it feels and looks. But the basic underpinnings of the Spice Girls’ assertion were that you should feel good about yourself and not let anyone cut you down. Is this way of thinking so inconsequential and enslaved?

Harris mentions in his article that he read “The Whole Woman” by Germaine Greer, published in 1999, “when Spice hegemony was fading fast. ‘The Spice Girls did make a difference,’ [Greer] wrote, ‘because their most passionate fans were eight-year-old girls.’ A study of children's oral culture had found, in the post-Spice climate, that ‘whereas half the space in school playgrounds used to be taken up by a self-selecting group of boys playing football, girls' clapping and dancing games were taking over’.” The eight-year-old girls took on board the message of Girl Power and were putting it into action; and not by becoming part of the male world by playing football. They maintained their interests (just as the Spice Girls maintained theirs, as well as their sexualities), marrying that with a greater sense of self-worth and entitlement.

The Spice Girls are not the voiceless, nameless girls that we see splashed across men’s magazines. They may have dressed similarly to the nameless girls, but their voice was what set them apart. They took their notoriety and influence and changed the thinking and actions of little girls.

And all they really wanted? To “zigazig ha…”

Thoughts from Terry

"It's like, sometimes you go to a party, right, and everyone's all fuckin' loaded and you're not loaded, so you go up to people and you're like, how's it going and they're like, woooo!!! And then you're like, ya, okay; and you're trying to talk a bit and they're fuckin' loaded and then you realize the only way to keep going is to catch up to them. So you shotgun a few and then you get good and pissed right away."

FUBAR, 2002

I Hate These Shoes

I've been away. I've been away trying to come up with other fashion trends that I have hated, like the ubiquitous shoes shown above. However, I can't remember any.

Comfort, schmumfort. These shoes make a seemingly normal person look like a mammoth-hooved garden gnome.

Baby Brangelina

A couple of years ago, I swore off ever buying another one of those glossy, graphic gossip magazines because, like that bag of chips that looks so tempting on the shelf a the corner store, I knew that after the purchase and consumption I would eventually end up feeling empty and slightly stupid.

Even though I have not actually purchased Us or People or a similar rag for several years now, I have managed to keep abreast of the events in the lives of several celebrities by reading magazines at the gym and wandering the internet: I know some of the details of the Heather Locklear-Denise Richards feud, I’ve seen Britney Spears’s various maternal mishaps and I can name the offspring of Gwyneth and Chris, Katie and Tom, Gwen and Gavin, and now Brad and Angelina.

But it wasn’t until the birth of Shiloh Nouvel and the subsequent interview that “Brangelina” gave in Namibia, thanking the country for hosting the birth, that the complete weirdness of our culture’s obsession with the lives of famous people really hit me.


Here are two parents, one a UN Goodwill ambassador, who have just sold their newborn pictures for over $4 million (the money will be given to charity) and are now discussing the birth in a country where the infant mortality rate is 48.1 in 1000 births (compare to 4.69 in Canada). And this is major news.

It just seems such an odd thing to hold an almost “press conference” about the birth of a child. But, as celebrity magazine sales show (and column inches in respected newspapers around the world exhibit), we want to know about the exploits of those in the public eye.

Now if I could only swear off the chips…

What the Hell is on Joey's Head?

Like the line from the Nickleback song "Photograph," a similar question may be asked about the gentleman at left.

Why, after several drinks, do males feel the need to adorn their heads with improper and unbecoming headgear? Along with the pantyhose at left, I have seen underwear, pots, cardboard boxes and colanders atop the heads of men; beer usually in hand.

Is it a throwback to their manly hunting days, when they donned the antlers or hollowed out heads of their prey in order to lie in wait? Is it some kind of bizarre mating signal, indicating their readiness to procreate? (Lord help us if this is the case.)

Or is it just the drunken male thought process: "Whu-hoooo!!! Cheers! Let's drink! Hey...what's this? Oh man, this would look great on my head..."

Happy May 2-4. Go put something silly on your head.

Whine Culture

In this Saturday’s Globe and Mail, columnist Karen Von Hahn writes about the growing occurrences of people in the service industry complaining to their customers. She relates a story involving a flight attendant quipping to her, the passenger, that he had not sat down for the entire flight and hadn’t even been able to get a drink of water.

Now, I generally smirk when I read Karen Von Hahn’s column, entitled “Noticed”. I smirk because whatever societal trend she “notices,” is something that the rest of the world noticed six months previous (distracted drivers, quotes on Starbucks cups, and Napoleon Dynamite, for goodness sake!). However, I have to agree with her on this one.

Unless you are a close friend about to unload some psychic issues, the only answer to my question, “How are you?” should be: “Fine, thanks!”

I had a rather negative experience at a downtown restaurant recently when a few friends and I had to wait for a table, despite the fact that we had a reservation. When we were finally seated, we actually had to ask for the wine list and then ask to order a bottle. The harried waiter came over and mumbled something about “getting slammed” and being short a server as he took out his notepad, failing to make eye contact. We hadn’t even asked him how he was.

I understand that the food service industry is a high-stress job at busy times (I’ve been a server), and I understand that serving people in a small, metal tube, 35 000 feet in the air is not the most relaxing of activities, but why people think that unloading their problems/excuses/stresses is appropriate employee-customer discourse is beyond me.

What Ms. Von Hahn’s flight attendant should have done, was smiled, topped up her glass of wine and then gone to complain to a fellow staff member. What I might have done, had I been in the columnist’s shoes, was gently remind the flight attendant that it was I who was paying a grand for this experience, and he who was receiving a wage for the experience.

But then I might get “noticed” as one of those bitchy customers who enjoy criticizing underpaid customer service representatives. I’ll stick to being a bitchy blogger.

Karen Von Hahn: Noticed

Chris Martin Interview

Ricky Gervais interviews Chris Martin, asking indepth and probing questions.

http://www.rickygervais.com/video10.php