This morning I had my boss under my desk on his hands and knees.

The Great Canadian Dream?

No.

He brought his dog into the office on the weekend and the poor pooch puked all over the underside of my desk for some reason. When I told the boss, he was quickly down there cleaning.

I’m impressed! He’s the owner of a large(ish) company and he takes responsibility for his dog’s barf.

In between my legs.

I love the new Stumbe Upon extension for Firefox. I just found this demo reel and thought it was cute.

I wish I had long hair. Like when I was 20 years old. ‘Cause then I’d cut it like Mark Hamill in Corvette Summer (okay that’s a pic of Marky in Eight is Enough but it’s good enough). Its not like I am pining for my youth or anything, I’m just bored with my shaved head. It’s been shaved for close to 20 years and I’m just going through a phase.

I witnessed my local corner store owner take a pack of Scotch tape from a display, use some of it to hang a sign, then put it back on the rack. This is the same guy who charges $3 for a 2L bottle of Coke. This is the same guy who drives home from the shop in an Escalade.

I secretly want to run into Starbucks at 8:30am and yell out “Parking Ticket Cop!” and watch the place clear out.

While I hate Xmas mostly, I can’t wait to give Sharkboy his present. It’s totally a non-useful gift but I know he’s going to like it.

I want to see That Movie With That Woman from Quebec. Ach. I know. I can hear you tsk tsk from here. I’m curious, ok?

What? You wanted some deep rooted secret wrenched from the loam of my dark soul? Fuck you! Move on, beyotch!

Shelly here kids! Hey, remember when you actually had to get up to change the channel? I don’t. But apparently there was a show called the Mickey Mouse Club that brought to the United States the innocence and youthful vibrancy of the 50’s and 60’s in all it’s black and white glory. Gee! One particular serial insert they would show during the broadcast was The Adventures of Spin and Marty, the story of two young boys attending cowboy summer camp. The complete first season is out now on DVD from the magical head of Disney.

Each episode was about 15 minutes long and features two boys creating a friendship within the confides of The Triple R Ranch. We meet the spur-up-his-10-year-old-ass, rich bitch Martin, and the slightly older, wiser wrangler Spin (don’t ask me why he’s called Spin. I suspect it’s a hip, kooky 50’s nickname thing) who admires Martin’s plucky tough exterior, even after they obtain a draw in a mock boxing ring, 24 hours after meeting each other (Martin was executing the weirdest, girliest punches I have ever witnessed, and I’ve seen a few at last call at Bar 501, my pretties).

Throw in a slew of 2 dimensional characters a la Disney, like the British butler who watches over Martin, a fatherly riding coach, a could-be-drunk-could-be-crazy open-shirted farmhand (looking alarmingly a lot like Colin Farrell after a post-Oscar party binge) and a whole cabin full of pre-prepubescent, just-read-it-from-the-script kids and this show is on! Yippie Eye oh, motherfuckers!

If this sort of show was to be created today with the exact script and characters there would be alarm bells going off at every level of the Censor Board. At the Triple R, a group of 40 boys are overseen by 4 laughing and smirking men (don’t forget that one who might be drunk or crazy!) in dungarees. Not one woman in sight. While this sausagefest is taking place, it’s fun to destroy the innocent chatter from the 50s by twisting the lines into the sickest pedophile joke by adding “…in the showers” to everyone’s lines. The show becomes a lowbrow comedyfest, fast.

As I sat there, like a blue nosed gopher, I realized I had seen this set up before. Wrestling? Cowboys? Men? Jeans? Horsies? Oh, that’s right! Brokeback Mountain trailers! The similarities were unmistakable: two men who first admire each other, then fall in love, try to reject their feelings by wrasslin’ yet come together in widely accepted male bonding.

Okay that last “widely accepted” bit was a stretch, seeing how I saw a fucking anti-gay loser on CNN last night saying BBM was yet another step in “the selling of homosexuality” to the US public. Shut the fuck up you bitter queen. Go back to your church assigned trophy wife. Fuck I hate anti-gays. Useless waste of a good dick.

Where was I? Oh yeah… They’re frigging cowboys, people! One fifth of the whole male macho iconoclastic tribe (the others are biker cop, construction worker…you get me from there)! To have a story written about guys sitting around in isolation and suddenly have feelings for each other (to whatever degree) is going to be pegged as homoerotic or outright gay.

Lets get back to the kids (stop snickering). The whole first disk played out like a vintage Hardy Boys book right down to the checkered shirts and the “golly!” expletives. The staging even had the feel of those illustrations from the same books you’d find every 30 pages. The Adventures of Spin and Marty was fun, but I recommend it for hard core Disney/Mickey Mouse Club fans only. I gave it 6 shells out of 10.

Last night was a bit much.

Brokeback Mountain made me feel good. I left feeling hopeful that Hollywood movies could move away from the dopey stupids they’ve been in for the last 30 years.

Unfortunately the audiences will have to change with them. Prior to the movie a family of three, Mom, Dad and daughter sat behind us and moments before the movie started, the Mom touched Sharkboy’s arm and said:

“Can I ask you a big favour? Could you please slouch so I can see over you during the movie?”

Sharkboy came out with the best rebuttal to that ever:

“What? So I can break MY back on this mountain?”

I am so flustered that I dont recall the rest. She moved away and Sharkboy removed his baseball cap.

During the movie Dad was chowing down so hard on all his candy/popcorn that I was seconds away from telling him to grow up. Near the front, two twinks giggling hard during the sex scenes were told to Shhh! A woman laughed and said “Oh My God!” at a rather touching moment. These gay love scenes are fairly “new” to a theatre audience and I could understand their need to vocalize their discomfort, but these childlike reactions were embarassing.

If I was Ang Lee, I’d be so Hidden Tiger on their asses.

To get the scent of romance and feel-goody-ness out of our heads we went home and watched The Devil’s Rejects.

Transcript from my cell phone voicemail.
Call from: 905 XXX XXXX
Time: 1:10am

“Hey. This is Leo (Could have been “Theo” or “Neo”). Uh. I know it’s late at night. *mumble* like 1am. I was just callin’ you know. Just wondering how you *mumble*.

Anyway I was just got up and *mumble*. Like lots of memories.

(Pause)

And I haven’t even met your dude yet. So call me. I know it’s late. Maybe call me tomorrow, like around noon.”

The poor guy sounded pretty desperate. I knew a Theo back in the early 90s but he’s in London Ont and could not have got my cell number from anywhere, anyone. The only Leo I know was a customer from the Eagle who I would not give my number to. The only Neo I know is stuck in a matrix.

I hope he found the boody he was calling.

Good. Freaking. Lord.

When does this guy/gal have time for …like… hygene?

I am not work-burdened right now. The company has turned it’s crazy must-get-it-done-now gaze away from me and settled upon the poor two hapless print slaves and has demanded that a couple brochures and newsletters get done before the world cracks in half or something. I’m left to my own devices and I am rewriting meta tags on this, the last slave day before Xmas.

The previous web staff thought it was ok to just reuse the exact same words for the meta description and keyword tags for all 3500 pages of our company site. That’s right, our company’s site is ranked somewhere right beside “The Last Page On The Internet”. It’s a slow process as that I have to actually read the travel drivel describing toasty Tunisian landscapes and far-off exotic souks that syrupy drip over the HTML that is our site.

Needless to say I want to get out of here.

Tonight, Sharkboy and I are dining with Da, the WriterBrother and the Punk Neice and then driving to Montreal at 5am tomorrow morning where I will sit nursing a spiked egg nog as the French relatives talk around me. Then we get into the car and drive to Brockvegas to see my Mum for lunch, grab my WriterBrother and hit the Thousand Island Casino. We’ll be back in the city on Sunday night. Thankfully I have Mon/Tues off to decompress.

I hope you get every single present you ever wished for and greedily eat everything on your plate. Happy Christmas-Xmas-Kwanza-Festivus-Haunuka-PaganSolstice-bla-bla-bla!

Update Sharkboy just sent me this list of things he and his co-workers are saying loudly to get out of the office early:

Me: Elana, thank you for a great year, you can go home now
Me: Well, looks like Marketing is leaving, maybe we can leave too.
Me: The phones have been so quiet since lunch, that’s a sign.
Me: Did you notice how empty the parking lots are? Everybody’s gone home early!
Me: Did you finish all your shopping? Would be good to go now before everybody leaves work at 5 and fill out the mall…
Me: They were saying on the radio that the traffic is heavier at 3pm today than it’s been all week, I guess a lot of people are leaving early.
Me: I can’t believe the coffee place closed early today.
Me: I have so many things to do at home before dinner tonight.
Me: I guess I’ll clean the desk, not in the mood for anything else right now…

I sent back:

Try this one:

Did you see that movie last night? A Christmas Carol? Boy that boss turned really nice, eh?

And just now I got from him:

I guess my talking to everyone and not really being at my desk got me in trouble… Anyway, long story short, I was just told that if it’s that quiet, I could go home.. hehe

I am extremely sorry I haven’t gone to Sloppy Joe’s site sooner when the URL was passed to me on a dirty Black Eagle trick card.

You should go now. While you’re still in the Xmas spirit. Sloppy Joe loves video and it shows. Watch The Story of Jesus for stellar scripting like this:

God: Mary, this is GOD!
Mary: Where are you?
God: In … the air.
Mary: Oh wow!

Enjoy!

Remember how I absolutely loved Joe Schmoe? You might remember I loved it because it took all the incredibly ridiculous things found in reality tv shows and threw them at an unsuspecting “schmoe” to see if he could withstand the barrage.

I have a new favorite show.

I have only seen one episode and it will probably never play in Canada. Its called Space Cadets and it is brilliant. If you have Bittorrent I suggest you get it right now. I’ll wait.

The first episode took 100 applicants and widdled them down to 12 (with three producer-hired actor plants amongst their midst to move the prank along) and then announced that they were to be taken to STAR City (The Russian Space Tourist boot camp) and 4 would be chosen to be the first British space tourists to be televised on TV.

They didn’t know that the whole thing was fake. And filmed in an abandoned military base in Ipswitch.

Apparently since the show was televised, there has been immense backlash from the British public saying the show was cruel and went too far. I would think that the people doing the biggest complaining probably never sat through a season of (American) Survior and then devoured Joe Schmoe in comparison. After seeing the fist episode I would say that the show’s producers might have omitted the spirit of satire and didn’t put instances of utter absurdity to hint that the show was fake to weed out the “smart” ones. Example: in JS, one of the elimination games was “Don’t take your hand off the hooker!” where contestants had to keep their hands on one body part of an admitted prostitute (actor) for hours. Any contestant who would have stopped for a moment and really thought about that challenge would have suspected the airing of such a racy contest.

In the first episode, the 100 applicants got a battery of mental tests to see if they were “suggestable”, meaning they would believe in something if the majority of the group agreed upon whatever was suggested, even if it meant gravity in space proved them wrong. While Space Cadets so far doesn’t seem like anything more than a practical joke (I am not going to spoil it by reading reviews or news claims stating contestants might sue), I hope they do throw in the odd satiracle jab at reality shows. Apparently there is a bit where they honour a fake Russian Astrodog while onboard the spacecraft. Looking forward to that one…

So far, I say khorosho, Comrade!