On Notice!



I complained about this almost a year ago, and yet City TV's campaign to make weatherman Michael Kuss more famous than the Pope is still continuing. Not that I figured my one post would be the impetus for them to stop, but man, you just figured common sense would kick in at some point. Now Kuss isn't just in ads about his weather broadcast, but he's got ads with him and a kids' hockey team, visiting a school classroom, little skits, a phony 'bad weather man' as a counterpoint. We're a month away from Mel Lastman saying noooooobody forecasts the weather like Michael Kuss. Seriously, he's A GODDAMN WEATHER MAN. Is this such a drawing card?

Man, don't you hate it when your life is going well enough that you don't even have eight things to put on notice? Lousy stupid satisfying existence.

There's been talk that Hasbro and Mattel will be forcing Facebook to shut down the Scrabulous game due to copyright infringement. It figures...I mention it in a post last week and this happens. I am the angel of death. The best part about this is that the Scrabulous creators thought they could produce this game without eventually being sued. They were even clever enough to change the end of the game's name from 'ble' to 'ulous.' It was foolproof!

A surprisingly large number of people (my pal Jeff included) will judge Cloverfield based solely on what the monster looks like or what it actually is. This is where J.J. Abrams' make-everything-a-mystery storytelling habit has a bit of a flaw --- when you build up the monster this much, people are going to expect a big payoff. It doesn't really matter what the monster actually is, just that New York is being attacked by it. I talked about a MacGuffin a few months ago in regards to the case of money in No Country For Old Men, but the Cloverfield monster is another good example. It's ironic that people keep using Blair Witch Project as a comparison to Cloverfield's shaky-cam shooting style, since that was a classic example of a horror movie where the villain is left to your imagination and thus made all the scarier.

So yeah, the writer's strike. Two and a half months. It isn't fun anymore. On the bright side, we get Dexter on network TV in a couple of weeks, so that saves me the trouble of renting the DVDs.

Figure this one out. I'm back at my old grade school, John Dearness, except I'm my current age. I'm taking the bus home from school, which is driven by ol' Bob, the mixture of Kojak and Crankshaft who used to drive the bus back in my primary days. I'm apparently taking some form of comedy class taught by Ricky Gervais, though I only experience the ride home from said class, not the actual in-room sessions themselves. I'm looking through a sheaf of recently-marked tests I've taken in the class, and have scored 75s across the board. My buddy Trev is also in this class, and has scored the same grades. Gervais shows up at the bus window and reminds me to bring back a CD I borrowed from him --- not music, but a Stuart McLean comedy album. So, yeah, that's the whole dream. My amateur analysis is that it means Ricky Gervais is gay.

I haven't seen the movie (due to my lack of a vagina) but it seems to suffer from a critical plot flaw. Katherine Heigl's character has been a bridesmaid 27 times and she's complaining about never getting married herself...but man, 27 times as a bridesmaid? That means she has 27 friends that hold her in high enough regard to enlist her as a bridesmaid on the biggest day of their lives. I mean seriously, I consider myself to be a fairly well-liked chap, but I can think of maybe six people at most that would make me a groomsman. What this movie comes down to is a woman who looks like Katherine Heigl who is so well-liked that she has 27 people that consider her to be a close friend, and yet she's still upset over being single. Bitt-chee.

I don't even need an explanation here.