No pain no gain!

I recently was solicited to donate money to a spin-a-thon benefiting overweight kids. The raised money would send them to a camp where they would lose weight. I'm sorry but I laughed so hard when I received this email.

There are plenty of worthwhile charities out there to feed starving kids and this one wants money to take kids who are eating too much food and make them lose weight? Why don't the overweight kids just participate in the spin-a-thon? Or better yet, why don't they give their excess food to the starving kids? Then we kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

Quick thought

Does the word "rehearse" mean to "hearse again"? And if so, what does hearsing mean?

Words fascinate me.

Post Halloween Post

We all love Halloween. As kids, it's a parent-approved way of loading up on sugar - unless your parents are complete squares, you know, the kind who would only let you watch CBC or something equally lame. As adults, we love Halloween because chocolates go on sale for 75% off normal price on November 1st and we get to go to Halloween parties.
It's been said plenty of times elsewhere and by funnier people than me that Halloween is the only time of year that gives ladies the chance to dress completely inappropriately and get away with it. That's all good and well and naturally, starting the next day, everyone's Halloween party photos start showing up everywhere, especially on Facebook as profile pics. But this leads me to my Complaint of the Month.
Those Halloween pics you thought were fun as a profile pic? They get old. Fast. The worst thing is people forget they put a picture of themselves as a sailor or nurse or cat or whatever and they leave that pic there for months on end, way past its best before date.
I urge people to swap our their Halloween pics from their Facebook profile no later than seven (7) days after Halloween itself.
Thank you for your understanding.

You lost me at Facebook

I was reading an article today on CNN about how Nigerians were incensed at their portrayal in the (awesome) scifi movie District 9. Nigeria is demanding an apology etc etc blah blah whatever. Man, if I saw a movie where Armenians were evil people, I'd love the attention. Any publicity is good publicity! But I digress.

I was going to write a post about how sensitive everyone is now days when I noticed something in the article that is popping up with alarming regularity in recent times.

The depiction has sparked an outcry, including a Facebook group condemning its portrayal of Nigerians.

CNN saw fit to tell us that -GASP- a Facebook group denouncing something exists? Oh my god, then the complaint must be wholly legitimate! Prior to a Facebook group's creation, Nigerians' beef was totally immaterial but now hey watch out! A Facebook group will change everything.

In case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic. I'm not sure if the writers of these articles are even aware how stupid they sound. Hey Faith Karimi, next time you write a piece about anything other than Facebook, do not mention that a Facebook group exists. Anybody with two marbles shooting around in their skull will realize that writing something like that totally destroys whatever credibility the article was aiming for.

Do you even know how easy it is to make a Facebook group? In a matter of clicks and keystrokes, I could start a group warning people of the impending danger of super-grown Lyme ticks from the forests and how they'll rise up and enslave the human race. Just because there's a group out there, doesn't mean the argument has legitimacy.

For god's sake, in 2 seconds, I found this group on Facebook: "Protect Traditional South African Values: Reinstate Apartheid!" Seeing as how District 9 is a thinly veiled take on South Africa's institutionalized racism, why didn't Faith Karimi write an article about reinstating Apartheid and include this group as evidence that there's a push for it? There's a group for everything!

It makes me wonder about the state of journalism out there. It seems that anyone can get paid to write.

The only tomato that is rotten, sir, is yours!

I have a beef with rottentomatoes.com. So much so that I didn't even make the preceding address a link, as to not give them extra traffic.

You see, everyone quotes a movie's score on RT (that's what us cool kids call it) as the final say on a movie's quality. But do you even know what that score represents?

RT (there's that cool moniker again!) recommends a movie as "fresh" if the aggregate score is 60%+. A movie is not recommended ("rotten", putting the R in RT) if the score is below that. But the thing is, they're not taking an average of all the reviews they cull from throughout the internet. They are using a binary system. If a movie got a recommendation, it will go in the fresh pile, regardless whether it got a lukewarm ok or a rave review. They are both counted the same according to this metric. Likewise, a movie whose individual score is less than 60%, say 2.5 stars on 5 in your local paper, will get a rotten tag. The reviewer may have been on the fence about a movie and thought it was just ok, but such a movie will be lumped together with god-awful dreck like the latest Transformers movie. Then, all the fresh reviews and all the rotten reviews are counted, and the score is given.

My problem with this is that there allows no room for nuance; it's either yes or no. Movies are a form of art and as such require shades of grey in between, something the fascist system at RT enforces.

However, all is not lost. Buried in tiny font to the right of the giant % score is "Average Rating". This is the true indication of what the critics think. It's the true average of the scores and a better indicator of the critical opinion of a movie. Were it not for this, RT would be a complete waste of time.

Either that or just go to metacritic.com.

Fan of Facebook

I'm not sure exactly why this is, but I find it hilarious that Facebook allows people to be "fans" of things. I can understand becoming a "fan" of a band or a tv show on Facebook in order to see who else likes the same things as you to maybe have a discussion about it. But, like most things, people take this too far.

You can be a fan of just about anything on Facebook, it makes the word lose all meaning. I've seen some ridiculous things out there attracting fans, including (but not limited to) cuddling and sarcasm. Yay, I could be a fan of sarcasm. This is the greatest thing ever! I'm so awesome now!

I recently saw people become a fan of god and I thought this was too much. Firstly, the image associated with being a fan of god was a photo of Earth from space. Oooh, how divine! But the reason I find this funny is that I feel it should be offensive, no? On the one hand, you have people becoming fans of the Montreal Canadiens and Alexisonfire, yet the very same mechanism is used to be a fan of god. By no means a religious person, I would have thought that believers would be appalled at their almighty tritely being reduced to the same level as a local sports team or a terrible musical act.

Even better than being a fan of god is being a fan of peace. I kid you not, I have seen people become fans of peace on Facebook. What a conversation piece that is!

You're a fan of peace?! Wow, that's like so deep, man! Who would have known peace is something that would attract fans? Personally, I don't care for it but since I saw that you became a fan of it on Facebook, it totally changed my life. I, too, enjoy peace now. The power of Facebook compels me!

Why not become a fan of oxygen while you're at it?

All this to say that life was better before Facebook came along, allowing me to guess at people's stupidity instead of having it confirmed by their postings.