First off, sorry to all the “dedicated” blitz readers and especially the one other writer for slacking off for so long.

Anyway- The winter season is finally drawing to a close (although we got 6 inches of powder yesterday), and I’m sure you are all wondering how “I” will continue to “ride” daily (daley). The answer of course, is eBay. It should be noted that I meant to write this post like a month ago and ask you all if anyone lived in or around Vancouver, but as of this point it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that my brother, the eBay nerd, got me into bidding and buying useless shit on said site and once I won my first auction I was hooked. I used to buy things from eBay occasionally, but only with the “Buy it Now” option, because I didn’t feel like sitting around for 3 more days monitoring the auction and slipping in a low-ball bid 30 seconds before the item closed. Only now do I see the error of my ways. Here’s what I got in the last couple of months:

3 Lift Tickets and a Discount Card to Whistler Blackcomb - I later got another lift ticket through eBay so that Lindsay and I each had 2. I think I saved a total of about $50 vs. getting them at the window, but I’m not sure what the tax would have been. GST sucks, by the way. This purchase was not essential to keeping the ride alive, since my local ski area is still open for another week and some places around here don’t close until May, but it certainly made the ride a lot more awesome. Case in point:

We were only there for 2 days right after Easter, but we got a ton of powder and some really good food. Vancouver was not quite as exciting, but still fun and interesting, especially the freaks on Hastings popping pills and dancing at 10am and this random guy who decided to direct traffic (I created a youtube account just to post this so you BETTER watch it):

Also, I don’t think I met any Canadians the whole time we were in Whistler, just lots of Aussies, Kiwis, and Brits, but the Hostel manager in Vancouver had the most stereotypical accent ever and kept saying “eh” and “aboot” to the point where I thought he was fucking with us.

On to the main event- The following two items are the key to continuing my newfound hobby of kicking ass on a board of some sort:

1) Lightly Used Girl Skateboard with Thunder trucks and Spitfire wheels - Actual quote from the listing: “i bought this sweet complete, subsequently got married and never again set foot on the board. thats what happens. beware of those ladies, they suck you dry.” This board barely had a scratch on it and even after shipping cost me less than half of what it would have in a store. I used to love skateboarding when I was like 13-16 but I kept getting minor injuries which upset my dad and his need to live vicariously through me as I played high school sports. No more competitive sports = bring on the pain!

2) Emerica Lashed Shoe Size 7.5 - Yes, my feet are that small. That’s not the point, though. The point is that as long as the gum sole of these puppies is in contact with the griptape of the aforementioned item, the ride will remain alive. OH YEAH! Also- The seller of this item contacted me prior to shipping and offered to knock off $20 from the total because they turned out to be a display model and one of them was slightly faded from being in the window. I still can’t figure out which one it was…

The one bad thing I will say about eBay is that it is highly addictive. After these crucial items I ended up also getting some wrist guards (one of which I lost at Whistler) and a $5 copy of Sid Meier’s Civilizations III, which is one of the main reasons I didn’t write a post for like a month.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article along the lines of how Canadiana is represented in the Canadian media. Not surprisingly, the CBC was referenced. Without getting too far into it, I said I liked the CBC. I do. But now I’m going to muse over it a little more, and to be fair, I can’t let it off that easily.

The man in red is Wayne Rostad. He is maybe 12 feet tall, totes a guitar, sings like your uncle, has had that moustache since Christ was a corporeal (though recently he has shaved it leading me to not recognize a photo of him), and for two decades hosted the CBC series On the Road Again. This is a show I watched regularly in my childhood, not because I was particularly interested in cross-country travelogues and interviews with farmers in places like Carrot River, Saskatchewan, but because my father watched it. That, Land and Sea, Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness, and many others. We pretty much figured we knew Wayne on a first name basis if he ever decided to drop by, and heck yeah it was exciting when he visited somewhere in Nova Scotia. So forgive me if I carry a soft spot for a 20 year old show and its mustachioed troubadour host, but it’s there. Which now brings us to the beginning of 2007, when the CBC quietly pulled the plug on Wayne Rostad. Of course, On the Road Again was old. Yes, the ratings were lagging. But it didn’t lack for source material. It had a loyal audience. There were a lot of people upset to see it go. But cancellations happen to a lot of good shows. Who wasn’t sad to see Arrested Development cut after three seasons?

What makes a difference is that it didn’t skip people’s attention that the cancellation of this show was indicative of CBC’s recent attempts to slide into the race for higher audience ratings, to target a youth audience, to go populist, maybe even to be (God help me) hip.

Not that change is a bad thing, and maybe some people have their hearts in the right place, but the attempts thus far to court the kiddies on part of the CBC have been nothing short of embarrassing. I think the American Idol- like The One is the go-to example of just what we’re dealing with here. Hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos, a man I watched lobby for Tommy Douglas on The Greatest Canadian with impressive candour, it is an extreme departure from what those of us who had watched Stroumboulopoulos move from the ultra lame MuchMusic to the respectable CBC had wanted to see. This show, The One, was so obtrusive, it bumped The National’s timeslot back. Manhandling Peter Mansbridge! That’s not allowed even for good shows! And as part of the young crowd the CBC is trying to attract, I’m insulted.

You see, I have a brain. And nearly all of the friends I have who are also fans of the CBC like it because we consider information to be entertaining. We listen to Information Morning (in the Maritimes anyway) and have opinions on Rex Murphy’s diatribes (and also his scary eyebrows). And we’re still there, watching programming like China Rising (which is really great) but wincing every time ads for Fashion File Host Hunt play during the commercial breaks. Unfortunately, however, the going idea is that informative programming plays to an elitist audience of people three times my age, making me and my friends not exist, and not being fair to the upcoming generation of viewers who are now being fed this ‘new’ CBC.

The vision of Executive Vice President Richard Stursberg’s “2.0 environment” makes sense in theory but because nobody there appears to know how to do “2.0” right, it seems to be taking everything fans of the CBC cherish and, if not getting rid of them, mulches them into some kind of easily digestible paste, which is as gross to observe as it sounds. If I want to watch shitty, popular shows that pander to an audience with sub-zero attention span and remarkable disinterest in everything except flashy colours and celebrities, I’ll turn on Fox – or even A&E, which also fell down a slippery slope somewhere in between Biography and Dog the Bounty Hunter. And everyone, including me, likes that type of show now and then even if they say they don’t. But this is the national network. It’s a backbone, where at its best (if you’ll allow some doe-eyed wishful thinking) it should be the visible integrity of the country. Please, don’t let it degenerate any further. I’ll even watch Rita MacNeil Christmas specials again, if you want.

Ah hell, I watch those anyway.

This is a page from the new Scott Pilgrim book, out sometime soon, which I am really excited for. The website gives several pages of non-spoiler previews, but this one caught my eye. I think it’s really cool that Scott is wearing a CBC shirt.

If you grew up here, or have paid attention to what’s on CTV, or have watched the Gemini’s (that’s just an example, I’m fairly sure nobody actually watches the Gemini’s, or is it the Genie’s?) you can probably recall times when someone makes a point of setting their movie, tv series, or what have you in Canada, and they easily fall prey to presenting awful and embarrassing cliche. It may even be that things center at random on the fact that they are taking place in Canada, instead of sticking to the story. For some reason, some people can’t just let culture take care of itself. That being said, I know about Canadian content laws on radio and television, and I’m sure it is frustrating for anyone trying to tell a story to have to put up with these content restrictions. Having to bother accounting for just how Canadian your story is before getting the green light? Lame.

That isn’t to say that the Canadian media produces nothing but cliche crap. Not at all. In fact I think the general consensus is that in recent years, a vast improvement is on the way for Canadian television, thanks to go-to examples like Trailer Park Boys or Little Mosque on the Prairie. Good to hear. But I do think that a bigger deal is made over the cliche crap for no good reason. It’s why programs like Due South are at the tip of everyone’s fingers when they want to reference a Canadian show instead of other, better fare like Traders, which made no secret about where it was set but didn’t make a fuss about it and aired at the same time as Due South.

Has anyone seen Bon Cop Bad Cop? It was so bad I couldn’t even get halfway through. It’s a buddy cop comedy with one Anglo cop from Toronto and one Franco cop from Quebec who team up against a criminal who wears a HOCKEY MASK. What the fuck! The bilingual thing was a cool idea for sure, but did they really have to pander to obvious and awful stereotypes? This thing was hailed as the greatest Canadian flick to hit the streets since whenever the last time it was that Atom Egoyan used his camera to depress the nation.

Or why can’t I turn on the television without seeing a show that is Canada’s answer to American animated fare like the Simpsons or South Park playing? I’m talking about Chilly Beach, which is so terrible it makes me cringe. This sort of thing is frustrating, when something with promise (not to mention praise) ends up being overbearing instead.

Letting culture take care of itself doesn’t mean you have to be identity-less or can’t be patriotic. I’m using Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work as an example because it happened to strike me as a way I think it’s done right. Scott Pilgrim lives in Toronto. That could be enough, as for example: the Trailer Park Boys drink pop, not soda, and that’s that. But O’Malley is pretty clearly also proud of being a Canadian and wants to show it. That’s cool, he could go about showing it on all kinds of detracting levels where it interrupts the story, but he doesn’t. O’Malley appears to show patriotism through, for instance, t-shirts. Look at this:

Isn’t that the Ontario trillium provincial symbol? It is! It isn’t part of the story, but I saw it and recognized it and thought, ‘fuck yeah!’ because I also love this country and I get what he’s saying. But there’s no preaching here, just Bryan Lee O’Malley’s little odd display of affection. And I like that about it. Hell, I HAVE a CBC t-shirt. I guess what it comes down to is that being told what it means to be a Canadian is something that gets dished out far too often. Being shown what someone thinks or feels about their country is far more interesting, and in the Canadian arena of visual media, with CanCon always a stone’s throw away, it’s always nice when a genuine example pops up.

Why is it that people can be so interested in what is foreign and strange?

I’m speaking in terms of foreign countries, in this instance. Why do us residents of Canada - or even residents of the US of A or even Australia - look outwards for their entertainment?

I’m interested in history, geography, and heck, even differing cultures. I don’t make it a hobby or anything, but when a friend of mine starts reading a detailed book on the history of North Korea, I’m interested. And that bugs me.

I can see inhabitants of smaller countries wanting to escape. In Portugal, culture and geography is largely the same throughout. Compared to Canada, I mean. You’d want to travel to Germany - England - Egypt - and see what there is to see. But here in Canada? They speak a foreign language on the opposite end of the country. In the north end of the country they speak yet another language. We have native indian reserves larger than some small countries!

Take Nunavut, for instance. The North West Territories was (and probably still is) the largest province in Canada. Due to some native land claims, the Government of Canada decided to cleave our largest province in twain, and give the Eastern bit to the Inuit - which named the province “Nunavut” in April of 1999. Sounds pretty generous of us, eh? Well did you know that if it were a country, Nunavut would rank 13th largest country in the world? Yeah, it’s pretty fuckin’ generous. It’s bigger than Mexico for Chrissakes.

And get this - I had no idea until just a few hours ago, but Canada wasn’t fully independant of the UK until 1982. EIGHTY-FUCKIN-TWO! Who knew?! Canada was named and given it’s own flag in 1867 - which makes us just a smidgen under 150 years old - but in terms of actual seperation from mommy and daddy? We aren’t even out of puberty yet!

I wonder what else awaits me in my own country. What other tidbits or facts are there to learn? What places or people will I be amazed with?