Friday 27 December 2013

Some Beef for Christmas




Here is a list of things that annoy me greatly. As I have always been something of a curmudgeon, I am offering them in the spirit of the season.

  1. Cuisine Movies.
I’ve had it with these stupid cuisine movies. I haven’t even seen any of them and I don’t intend to. First there was  ‘Juro ‘Dreams of Sushi’ and now there is ‘Spinning Plates.’ Who cares? It all comes from the mistaken notion that creating food is an art. It’s not.  (How do you tell if something is an art or a craft? Easy. If it’s an art then you simply must do it, you are compelled to do it. You’d go mad without doing it. And yet you can’t make a living from doing it, and your work will never be fully understood in your lifetime. If you are quite happy, generally, and you are doing something people not only love but fully understand, and buy up in droves -- then what you are doing is categorically not art.)  Anyway, rich, fat, bourgeois couples love to go to restaurants. So, somebody figured out that making movies about how wonderful restaurants are is a surefire moneymaker. But I don’t have to see the damn things, do I?

  1. What after all, is an apology?
Rob Ford has been giving apologies a bad name. Recently he delivered a so-called apology for implying a Toronto Star reporter was a pedophile. But what he delivered instead was what I call a ‘Right Wing Hater’s Apology.' This is when you are a Tea Party Member or the Head Of Ford Nation and some left wing crackpot catches you red-handed in a dumb political correctness mistake.  So instead of a real apology you do a fake one. What’s great about a fake apology is that you not only take absolutely no responsibility for your actions but also manage to blame your accuser. Let’s say your right-wing fundamentalist dog tramples on some lefty’s lawn, and they go all crybaby on your ass, and you are obligated to apologize.  This is what you say: “I’m sorry that you feel that my dog trampled your lawn. I certainly didn’t mean for that to happen. But if that is what you think happened, I am sorry for any hurt you feel.” The meaning is clear: “You are demented. I would just say ‘put a sock in it’ but since everybody is pressuring me to apologize all I can say is that I’m sorry that you’re crazy, nuts, and insane, and that you imagined the whole thing."

  1. Yes, women are evil too!
I got this idea from my female writer friends Moynan King and Lynn Crosbie both of whom have written fabulous stuff about female serial killers. Okay, so have you seen Chris Lilley’s new HBO show Ja’mie Private School Girl? The leading character is a deliciously horrible, selfish, racist, privileged, spoiled brat named Ja’mie. She is concerned only with keeping a tightly knit clique of close friends in awe of her, and excluding girls who she spurns as fat, lesbian, foreign or poor. This show will hopefully encourage many to entertain the radical notion that yes, women are just as evil as men, it’s only that most of them lack the brute force needed to carry out their schemes.  Fortunately for evil young women everywhere, social media is a very convenient tool that can be used by less physically powerful members of the female gender to drive their victims to depression, and sometimes, even, to suicide.

  1. The demise of bathroom sex……
I don’t know how it is in straight clubs -- but in gay ones you’re not supposed to have sex in the bathroom anymore. I got lectured at Toronto’s Eagle recently for trying to have a bit of quite innocent sexual perversion in a bathroom cubicle. There was no one around. We were upstairs near a sex maze in a leather bar on Church Street. What was the problem? I don’t blame The Eagle; I blame the police for pressuring gay bars to clean up their act. I, of course, am the only gay man in Toronto who will ever complain about this, because apparently Toronto gay men are so busy getting married, attending church, and adopting little black babies, that they have little time for promiscuous sex. Which begs the question, who am I actually having my promiscuous sex with? Is it with men who don’t exist?  I leave this question -- which has a ‘who created something out of nothing’ quality to it -- for Stephen Hawking.

that's all for now.....