My title is not really related to my post, but then it doesn’t look like anyone is ever going to see it anyway so who gives a shit? This is a throwaway post. Crap. Boobs. Crap.

I went ahead and saw The Simpsons Movie yesterday, as I had suggested earlier, but considering that no one ever responded to my suggestion to make it this weeks SunDate, I can’t do a full review. I would use the spoiler black-out thing that Weasel had given us, but after trying all of the buttons offered by the Wordpress post editor thing, I have concluded that I am too dumb. That said, I have to agree with Hawkeye and say that it did not suck. I recommend seeing it.

Naturally, the movie did not live up to my expectations, but I don’t think anything possibly could have. I wanted to rupture something laughing so hard, but was content to have sore cheek muscles from smiling/laughing. I also wish it would have at least surpassed the 90 minute mark, but considering that the Simpsons’ first attempt at a movie resulted in onbe of the shortest episodes ever (Kamp Krusty for the uninitiated and hopelessly Simpsons-trivia-ignorant) I guess I should be happy that they got it over an hour.

Two things that I want to say quickly and then I’m done:

1) Previews - I don’t know what trailers they were showing in Canada, Hawkeye, but I walked in a few minutes late and caught the end of the Bratz trailer and An Arctic Tale. Bratz are by far one of the most obnoxious toys available to young women these days that teach them how to be stuck up, superficial bitches and as if the dolls and video games weren’t bed enough, this movie looks to top them all. I threw up a little in my mouth when I saw it. Arctic tale is basically a combination of March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient truth because we are all supposed to feel guilty about global warming when we see how it affects cute polar bear cubs. I don’t have a problem with this in theory, my beef is with the narrator. No, not Morgan Freeman again. Fucking QUEEN LATIFAH. Yeah. Ugh.

2) Fun for the whole family - I hate this phrase, but the Simpsons Movie is one of the few times I could use it without irony. There are plenty of sight gags and fart jokes for stupid little kids (like the one sitting behind me who would shut up) but also a TON of references that only a die-hard Simpsons fan would get. (Look for the crumpled ambulance in the background that has apparently not moved since it was crashed in season 2, etc.).

End communication. Enjoy not posting anything, commenting, or in any way participating in our community.

(It appears that most people here are on a vacation of sorts. It seems when Weasel falls off the internet, the rest of us fall like dominoes, as he indicated in an e-mail I didn’t receive, despite being on the list for it. Thank you Hotmail. Well, no matter, writing for this site IS my vacation, so I’ll be throwing in a few articles a week just to fill things up for the, apparently traditional, summer dead period. You don’t like it? Fine. Go watch anime.)

There is little doubt in my mind that the next Batman movie (titled The Dark Knight, the first Batman movie without the word “Batman” in it), which will be released next year, has by far the best promotion for a film I’ve ever seen. The viral marketing campaign employed is dense, multi-layered, and overall, very rewarding for those who stick through it.

It all started a few weeks back, when these two sites were launched:

I Believe in Harvey Dent 

I Believe in Harvey Dent, too

The first is merely a political campaign poster for District Attorney Harvey Dent (who, as anyone with a rudimentary Bat-knowledge knows, eventually is horribly scarred with acid and becomes Two-Face).

The second site is where things get interesting. Originally, the site had a login for a forum, but no actual forum. However, people noticed that everytime you logged in, there was an image that would get a little more clear. Eventually, this was how we found this:

Our first look at Heath Ledger as the Joker. Pretty creepy, eh? Notice the scars on his face? That’s frigging brilliant, I love it. In spite of it looking like Courtney Love put his lipstick on, it reminds me of one of my favorite takes on the Joker, by artist Lee Bermejo:

If you go to the site now, the image is gone, and you get a “page not found” message. For fun, hit “select all.” For more fun, copy that text into a word processor, and remove all the “ha”s. Get the message?

Anyway, this was enough awesome for a while, until we approached the busy summer comics convention season. One of the biggest ones is the San Diego Comic Con. For the weeks leading up to the convention, there was talk of a Batman movie presence at the convention, but this was denied by Warner Brothers. Apparently, they were just going to appear at the Wizard World convention later in the year (naturally, as of press time, they have had a falling out with Wizard, and are no longer set to appear at that convention). But, things were not as they seemed.

On the first day of the convention, dollar bills were circulated with a sticker of the Joker’s face on it, and “In God We Trust” covered with a sticker that said “Why so serious?” This lead intrepid fans to eventually figure out a third website:

Why So Serious?

The site originally showed an old school “I Want You” army recruiting poster defaced by the Joker, with a count down clock and a set of co-ordinated (longitude and latitude style baby!). The co-ordinates, it turns out, were just across the street from the convention centre. The poster talked about needing an internet crew, and a ground crew.

What happened next is where the marketing for the film became truly brilliant, and started to really get me excited. The ground crew would have to follow clues, and upon finding the clues, would have to contact their “internet crew,” giving them the clue to decipher the next “checkpoint” on the website. If you go to the Why So Serious site now, you can look through these pages by clicking on the little police report on the bottom right.

The clues were well played and the intricacy of the campaign is staggering. At one point, the groud clue was instructed to look up. When they looked up at the appointed hour, they saw a plane fly by, trailing the message “1-800-395-9646 HA HA HA”. Give the number a call. You won’t be disappointed. Trust me.

Anyway, a ton of people in the San Diego area ran around the area of a comic book convention, getting fresh air and exercise, while meeting up with people associated with the promotion. Many of the mob was dressed up like Joker already, those who weren’t were given makeup by the movie’s crews who were there. You can see a bunch of them on the “wannabees” section of the site. In the end, one of them was chosen, pulled into a black van, presumaby will be given a part as an extra in the movie, and for the purposes of the promotion, was made up to look like he had been killed and is featured in a police report on the site that claims police found the Joker dead.

That was the end of the day for the ground crew. For the internet crew, if you’re ground work got you all the clues you needed, and you were able to decifer them, you got the teaser trailer for the movie (which is now available on the main page). It’s pretty cool, although it doesn’t reveal much, except that Heath Ledger has an awesome Joker laugh. I, however, was very happy to find this image by clicking on the word “knife” on one of the random pages in the site.

Joker is totally going to carve up that chick from “Secretary”! That’s a pretty awesome and creepy Joker, I must say. I was briefly upset to notice that he is noticably wearing make-up and doesn’t just have his skin bleached from a drop into chemicals, but I have a theory.

I figure that he’ll start of the movie with his “smile-scar,” that he did himself, and make-up. He feels he’s made himself beautiful. But somewhere towards the end of the movie, my guess is he’ll take the dive into the vat of chemicals and we’ll have an old-school Joker like we all remember.

Regardless, the one message to come out of all this viral marketing was “See You in December.” I guess the marketing will kick into high gear come then. If this isn’t high gear now, I can’t wait to see what high gear is. Color me excited to the point of almost peeing.

Subtext: “SOMEBODY THROW THE GODDAMN BOMB!”

Also, I figured I’d mention that I saw the Simpsons movie on Friday. I dig, quite a bit. See, we were going to wait until today to go, but then I heard that the Dark Knight teaser trailer was on the Simpsons in select cities, so I decided we had to go Friday. No teaser trailer, but I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. It wasn’t amazing or epic, but it was entertaining from top to bottom and provided some really good laughs. Just thought I’d put that out there. THE SIMPSONS MOVIE: RECOMMENDED!

I love my job. I really do. I get paid to write for a living and meet people. How cool is that? But like any job, there are times when you just want to pull someone’s eyes out of their sockets and make them dance like some sort of disturbing marionette. Or perhaps a super marionette (Thunderbirds, anyone?)

Take “Jean” for example. I won’t use her real name in case anyone she knows reads this, to spare her the embarrassment. Jean was one of the people I met during my various trips to Pictou Island, a place that is beautiful, isolated, and full of very intelligent and surprisingly well read people. Ken Banks, one of the gents I met on the island, is a really great guy. He’s probably the person who I’ve connected with the best since moving to this place. We clicked on an intellectual level and had a really great conversation. He’s a poet who was published in his youth, gave up poetry in favor of professional fishing when his children were born, and says he’ll probably go back to poetry after his youngest moves off the island. I digress…

I had thought Jean was another very intelligent person. She expressed herself well (despite many things she said that she asked me not to print, for fear of looking mean), and we had a good conversation. It was a very casual conversation, which was par for the course of a very casual article I wrote afterwards.

A few weeks later, after the story had been printed, I took a trip back to the wharf where the ferry to Pictou Island is to drop some copies of the paper off. They don’t get the News, or any other papers on the island, so I thought it would be nice to give the ferryman, Gregg MacDonald, some copies of the paper with the story in it to spread around to the residents of the island.

When I got back to my car, Jean was just getting out of her car, and proceeded to tear a strip off me for “fucking up” in the article. “What do you mean?” I asked. She wanted to know why I had mentioned she was smoking during the interview, as her grandchildren were now giving her shit.

I told her simply that she WAS smoking during the interview, and that it was important to set the scene and make the reader feel like they were there. After all, she did use her smoking almost as a way to emphasize her speech. An excerpt from the article:

“‘One thing we get really angry about is littering,’ she says, stubbing out her smoke as if to punctuate the sentence.”

Considering the dozens of things she had said and told me not to put in the article, if she really cared that much, shouldn’t she have said not to mention she was smoking as well? Fuck you, Jean. It’s not my fault you lie to your grandchildren.

Sometimes, assignments just have an irritating element to them. If you’re ever in the New Glasgow area, never hire “Bubbles the Magic Clown” for a children’s birthday party. She is just terrible, with a voice like cyanide tipped nails on a dynamite chalkboard, and magic tricks you could find in any third graders magic book he got as a reward for sitting quietly through church. Anyway, I took a picture of her for a fill shot (just a random picture with a caption, but no associated story) with the caption, “Bubbles the Magic Clown entertains children at the Stellarton Homcoming festivities.” It took a lot of effort not to put quotation marks around the word “entertains.”

Some people are just assholes. I wrote a story about the possibility of car inspection price gouging in the area. We didn’t have a specific instance to draw from, I was simply contacting local garages to ask them for their opinion on if it happened in the area. It was really entertaining to listen to them get defensive, even when I made it clear I wasn’t accusing them of anything. A guy at the Ford dealership told me simply “We are honest merchants,” and hung up on me.

Anyway, I called up this guy at Canadian Tire, and asked him for an opinion. He said he didn’t really want to comment on it, but then proceeded to comment at length about it. So, I turned on my audio recorder like any good journalist would. I would ask him at the end, since he had gone into such detail, as to whether or not that was on the record. When I told him I had been recording it, he started to accuse me of being “dishonest” with him, even though I had just given him the option of whether or not it was on the record. I told him, “Why don’t you take a day and think about it, I’ll call you back tomorrow, and you can go on the record then.” He thought that was fine.

Three hours later, my editor told me we needed that story today. So, I called Canadian tire guy, got his voice mail, and left a message telling him that unfortunately, I wouldn’t get a chance to get a comment from him, but I wished him well.

Next morning, I get a call from him, and he starts in on me again about my “dishonesty.” I asked him what his beef was. He said (and no matter how foolish this sounds, you must believe I’m not making this up) “you never told me you were writing an article.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I somehow managed not to say. I work for a newspaper! What the hell else would I be asking you for a comment for? My health? Shits and giggles? Anyway, I swallowed my rage down to my stomach, told him I was sorry he felt that way, and that I had a story meeting to get to.

Later, when I told some co-workers about it, they knew who I was talking about from the moment I mentioned Canadian Tire. Apparently, we had done a story previously and one of our reporters had gone to Canadian Tire and gotten a bunch of comments from the mechanics there. After the story had ran, the guy called one of our editors and started yelling at her that the mechanics weren’t authorized to give a comment. The editor in question, (bless her heart) calmly told him to better educate his staff and to stop wasting her time.

It’s all pretty funny to me now. I’m sure these folks feel they’ve been terribly wronged by the media and they won’t trust journalists in the future. That’s a shame, sure, but a phrase about omelettes and eggs comes to mind.

For Jean, she’s just immature enough to get caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and like an 8 year-old, got mad at the person who caught her instead of getting mad at herself. Whatever helps you sleep at night, Jeannie. Canadian Tire guy, I’m sure, feels he’s doing his job to the best of his abilities by making enemies of the local media. After all, we’re just bottom feeding scumbag ambulance chasers. And, he was probably right to try and push us off. The day after the story printed, I got a few calls from ladies who said they had been ripped off at Canadian Tire. And just so you don’t go thinking I went out of my way to make CT look bad, I didn’t even mention them in the story.

Anyway, these are just the funny stories I was able to think of off hand. Everyone else I’ve talked to has been really cool, from the Polio guy in the wheelchair who organizes events for the disabled, to the fire chief in Eureka who’s pissed off about their new communications tower not being activated yet, to the guy who runs the forestry products company that’s spraying a potentially hazardous chemical on a local wood lot. In most cases, even if there is a contentious issue, and their livelihoods and reputations are at stake, people are courteous and respectful. As I said though, some people are just assholes.

(disclaimer- I fucking hate Macs. Or maybe just the ones here at work. I tried to include a plethora of links and pics in this post, but none would take. Steve Jobs, you won’t see the back of my hand coming, but you sure will feel it son.)

So my laptop died not long ago. I was pretty broken up about it. I mean, shit, that laptop was my connection to the outside world. I have a calling card, sure, but if I called everyone I wanted to talk to, I’d be going through calling cards like they were American soldiers in Iraq (Hey now!).

On the flip side of this coin, I recently got a Wii I bought off ebay. And yesterday, I bought a “wii points” card and downloaded the internet browser for the Wii, so I can get internet through that. As convenient as it is for surfing and watching videos off dailymotion (and it is awesome, since I have the Wii running through my stereo, so the illegally uploaded episodes of the Venture Brothers I’m watching are presented in full glorious stereo sound. Well, no, its in mono, but its played loudly,) they really need to release a keyboard for the Wii to really make it worth while. Well, for people like me who write silly stories on the internet for fine sites like this one, anyway.

So, that’s the tale of how I ended up here, at work, on a Saturday, writing up my little blitz article. It’s actually pretty cool here on the weekend. The lights are down low, and there’s only me, the crackle of the police scanner and the occaisional gurgle of the water cooler. The usual constant buzz of frenetic (probably not a word) energy in here is totally absent. And I just noticed, for the first time, above the door of my editor’s office, and over the door to the meeting room, two giant signs that read in huge block letters LOCAL “PEOPLE FOCUSED” NEWS.

It’s one of those strange things you’ll see around an office, or other workplace, that just seems out of sorts. Mottos and slogans, designed to improve workplace productivity or something. Not that I’m against what the banner says. People should be the focus. If a meteor crashes into a guys house, the story isn’t the meteor, the story is the guy who got hit with the meteor. Sure, the meteor is an important part, but the focus is the dude. You can’t get a quote from a rock.

But usually, I find those sort of things incredibly funny. I remember reading a quote from the guy who writes Dilbert (Scott Adams, I think his name is), who said he had worked at a company once that underwent a “quality” initiative. According to him, the only thing that changed was they added the world “quality” to the company stationary.

Another good one was a stand up comedy bit I read in a book of stand up bits from the old Comic Relief fundraisers. I can’t remember if it was Paula Poundstone or Rita Rudner (I’m more inclined to think it was Rudner), but it went something like this:

“I was at a hotel the other day, and there was a sign by the front desk that said “Our staff is totally drug-free.” Kind of an odd thing to say. If I had been here a few years earlier, would the sign have said “The bell-staff is high as a kite?”"

Richard Lewis had some great bits in that book too. “I don’t get the Karma Sutra. Look at position 33. Your wife is holding a wok. I can’t do that. If I wrote a book on sex positions, it would be called “Ow, you’re on my hair.”"

He had another great one-liner that I’m happy to steal at every available opportunity, “I’ve never had casual sex. I’ve always tried very hard.”

Gary Shandling had a good one too about how he wouldn’t want to run for president, cause he would be afraid that noone would admit to having had sex with him (this was more topical back in the Clinton days). “Come on Sandra, you know you fucked me!”

Actually, I think he may have been performing in character as Larry Sanders, because a lot of the jokes from that book I’ve since seen in his monologues on The Larry Sanders Show.

Do any of you read Harry Potter? Hahaha, dweebs. Seriously though, I don’t. But we did a big feature this week on the new Harry Potter book coming out, and what fans were predicting was going to happen, as well as talking to crazy people camping out at bookstores waiting for it.

I made a lot of jokes. I’m the only one of the news staff who doesn’t read those books. I would tease them with spoilers I had read online (which were actually just jokes), and you could actually hear their sphincter tighten. Apparently spoilers were leaked online, and Potter-heads (has anyone trademarked that yet?) have been raging about it. So we thought it would be great for the article for me to come up with a big list of fake spoilers of what’s going to happen in the book. Not being a fan, I would have the best chance of writing spoilers that would be funny to everyone, not just fans (although, I did get some specific details from fans in the office so that the nerds would appreciate it too).

Low and behold, the story went to print Friday, and my spoilers were nowhere to be found. Not enough space, the curse of going from standard newspaper format to magazine format (turned sideways).

So, with that in mind, I present to you, my intended, never before seen in any newspaper, SPOILERS FOR THE NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK!

-Harry forms magical terror network, Al-Cadabra
-Harry’s scar actually result of Agent Orange
-Ron revealed to be Mikey from the old Life cereal commercials (”Hey Mikey, he likes it!”)
-Dumbledore not dead, just sleeping off a bender
-Snape is actually the white spy, from Spy vs. Spy
-Hogwarts pranked mercilessly by Delta Tau Chi fraternity
-Nearly Headless Nick cries after teasing from Sleepy Hallow’s Headless Horseman
-Harry sucker-punched by David Blaine
-The only reason Harry is conscious right now is because Jack Bauer doesn’t feel like carrying him
-Voldemort cuts off Harry’s hand, reveals he is his father
-Hermione runs off with fast talking older European man with a ‘vette
-It was all a dream
-Prof. MacGonagall and Prof. Flitwick elope on broomstick built for two
-Draco Malfoy and Aaron Carter form new boy band, Magically Delicious
-Hagrid and Grawp form tag-team, win WWE championship at Wrestlemania 25
-Percy Weasley takes lucrative postition as assistant to Steven Harper
-Prof. Trewlaney gets botched laser surgery on her inner eye, predictions now limited to what’s going to happen next week on “Lost”
-Neville spends most of book trying to sell “The Garden Weasel,” in infomercials
-Invisibility cloak used to smuggle 560 kilos of cocaine
-Harry wins arm-wrestling contest with Gandalf the Grey, promptly loses rematch with Gandalf the White
-Book-on-tape version includes sound of J.K. Rowling laughing all the way to the bank.

That’s all for now. I will suggest, however, a few links to help you through the day.
http://weebls-stuff.com/toons/Cat+Face/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=d6VHZcR4xLQ
Also, check out the documentary, “The Bridge.” It’s about people committing suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Franscisco. Apparently, that’s a pretty good place to off yourself. Really nice view.
Like a lot of good documentaries, (The Corporation!) you can find it in the documentary section at http://www.tv-links.co.uk/

I get it, I won’t quit my day job. Obviously it is going to take a lot more personal enrichment classes before I will ever be able to write anything someone will want to read. The problem is I have the soul, but I don’t have the heart. Or I have the heart and the soul, but I don’t have the talent. Anyway I suppose translating and dog care are paying the bills at the moment.

Here are a couple of interesting things:

My dog got terrible diarrhea and vomiting this weekend so we had to take him to the emergency vet clinic which cost $250. When my boss heard about this she offered to split the cost with me because she felt bad. She is also sending me to a $200 training session on her dollar and will pay for me to enroll in meditation or Tai chi classes. How awesome is that? I’ve never had a boss that gave a shit about anything but profit margins, it’s almost a little unsettling. I keep thinking she wants to fatten me up and eat me or something.

AOL Latino might send me to Las Vegas to cover the SEMA show (sooped up cars and accessories and stuff) but only if can demonstrate that there will be Latino-oriented stuff going on. As if Latino people aren’t interested in anything that isn’t expressly geared toward their market segment. I don’t know, it seems awfully racist to me.

Would anybody be interested in doing a Simpsons movie review for Sundate on July 30? We could all go see it and discuss on Monday w/o risk of spoilers. I assume it comes out on the same date in Canada as here and that more people will want to see that than most other movies this summer. I haven’t been to a theater in months, and I feel stupid reviewing a movie I got on Netflix that you saw like 5 years ago. (The One, anyone?)

Another possibility: Anyone interested in learning some Spanish? I specialized in curse words and insults, but have been known to use correct grammar and syntax. Fuck creativity.

This isn’t your normal chili! Comprised mostly of black beans (I added too many brown to this batch - funny how I keep messing up dinners I’m about to photograph) and corn, this lighter, not-too spicy chili is a break from the traditional.

The best part is the cheese and cilantro topping, which sucks if you hate cilantro.

The usual question…WOULD YOU EAT THIS?

As I am writing this, it is unbelievably hot and there is nothing my roommates and I have been able to do but try and not melt to the couches, and even this seems dubious. We live in an architectural marvel: in the summertime, it creates an oven-type atmosphere that is compounded by the fact that there aren’t enough windows, or at least ones you can open. In the wintertime, it is an icebox where all the heat seems to escape through the windows that don’t open, a fact that is highlighted by the regular breaking down of the furnace.

So it has happened now that the news has ended and Entertainment Tonight has followed right on its heels, and none of us being inclined to get up (we don’t have a remote), this is what we’ve been watching. It is really a horrible show, there is so much slimy glitz and dramatic music. But, among the news of celebrities getting married and such, two items of interest: one, that they’ve begun shooting the next Indiana Jones and that is totally sweet. Two, they’re going to remake ‘Footloose.’ Say what?

Footloose is a movie lodged in my memory because the soundtrack was everywhere plus it was a movie of choice at sleepovers, and so I must have seen it countless times. Dirty Dancing was also a big deal in those days (nobody puts Baby in the corner!). Now, a while ago Hawkeye said something about not messing with the classics (albeit we’re dealing with starkly different kinds of ‘classics’ here) but that’s the same point I’m going to make. Why the heck would you make another Footloose? A movie so lodged in the 80s it doesn’t just exemplify the era, it is iconic of it? Footloose was made into a musical and that is what this movie might be based off of- the musical of the movie. I’ve seen the musical because my university’s drama program put it on one year. It’s totally retarded.

The Kevin Bacon role is going to be taken by a fellow named Zac Efron. I looked him up on youtube and found a bunch of video homages titled things like “Zac Efron from Boy.. to Man” set to O-Town music which leaves me to believe I don’t know who he is because I’m not a screaming 14 year old girl. So he’s starred in this thing called High School Musical and is also appearing in the other new movie-musical-remake-movie Hairspray. Is this guy doing karaoke, but with movies? In any case, Kevin Bacon could pull off the outsider who made dancing cool because he had an edge and nobody had seen him dance before. This new guy is better described as greasy and has all the edge of the Disney padded room from which he sprang.

The thing is, Footloose isn’t even great of a movie, the story is stupid and it got mixed reviews when it came out. But it has stood the test of time, and that is commendable. And people like it. So hopefully this movie, if anything, will remind people of that.

Anyway, I hope they do keep the tractor racing scene. Now here’s some dancing!