Ever watch Fridays Without Borders on Showcase?
I don’t, as a rule. But I’d be lying if I said that, whilst flipping channels between lawyer show reruns and budget home renovations, I don’t sit up and take notice of the beautiful naked people fondling each other on channel 39.
Fridays Without Borders is, in theory, Showcase’s lineup of “sexy” shows.
But if “sexy” is defined as “Arousing or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest,” then the word is a poor fit. These shows need a different word, one that means merely “containing much sex” - a word that is less “buy this issue of Cosmo!” and more “These chips may contain trans fats.”
I’m suggesting “sexful”.
You remember the debate among sticklers over “healthy” vs. “healthful”? The argument went that “healthy” means “in good health”, so a meal can’t very well be “healthy.” So they invented “healthful” to indicate “good for you.” (More sensible folk said that was nonsense.)
Anyhow, that’s the sort of nuance we need here. Fridays Without Borders shows are possessing sex, but probably not conducive to sex. At least not with anyone else.
The subject matter is theoretically sexy: bikini babes, porn, bondage, one night stands, etc. But it’s awfully clinical. It’s like nobody involved in the process had ever actually been aroused themselves, but were told to go out and film things that were listed under “sex” in the dictionary.
The shows? Well, there’s Porno Valley - interchangeable blonde porno stars reenforce your preexisting stereotypes. Sin Cities - A nerd named Grub finds the icky parts of the global village; bring sanitizer. Family Business - Seymore Butts should have stayed a Simpsons prank call. Kink - Hideous Nova Scotians have difficulty learning how to spank each other. Webdreams - After 10 episodes, we learn that running a sleazy website is almost as unintersting as running any other website.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise - most of these shows are reality TV. They are to lovemaking what Survivor is to camping and The Apprentice is to doing your taxes. Theoretically applicable, mildly intriguing, but in the end you’re glad you don’t have to hang around with those jerks.
Even if they’re sexful.
I’m not being a prude here, just let down that TV really doesn’t get the difference between lurid and erotic. And it makes me ask: when was the last truly sexy (not sexful) thing you saw on TV?
—————-
Notes:
- Now that I do a web search for that word, I see that it was used on Futurama by none other than Zapp Branigan - a cartoon prototype for the jerks I was talking about. If ever there was a proof of my sexy/sexful thesis, he’s it!
- I’ll say this for Fridays Without Borders, though - at least I now understand Ouimet’s reference to Emmanuelle 2000: Emmanuelle Pie. Eeep!
Flying back from Cuba a week ago, our kids were pretty tired from their first trip abroad. When my five year old gets tired, she gets mopey. The three year old? She turns into a raving lunatic.
She was manageable for the first two hours of the three-hour flight. Then she spills her water on her shirt, and insists on taking her shirt off. Fine, I figure, she’s puny, she’s got the window seat with only family members beside her. Shirt comes off. Shoes, too, for some reason.
Then: “Uh oh, pee pee!” So my wife takes her to the bathroom lineup, only to be sent back to her seat due to turbulence. Same thing happens three times, at which point my wife says the turbulence can go to hell, this child is gonna pee pee. That mission is accomplished, but she (child, not wife) kicks off her pants and underwear. And then she makes a run for it!
I don’t know where she figures she’s escaping to, but she runs down the aisle of the plane until she gets to my seat and I’m able to reel her in. By the time I plunk her in her seat, she’s laughing like crazy and talking gibberish, her sun-bleached hair is all over the place and she’s bouncing around trying to avoid a reunion with her pants. She looks like some sort of feral monkey child.
I tell the sniggering people behind us that we found her on the beach, and are bringing her home to see if we can civilize her.
At least the last part is true.
(And no, that’s not a photo of the event, it’s a father’s Photoshop interpretation. I didn’t have my camera with me. And I wouldn’t put my child’s ass on the internet. And the chortling passengers are missing. And she wasn’t wearing shoes.)
I mentioned in a previous post that I had sent some of my juvenile photoshopping efforts to the Rick Mercer Photo Challenge, but none had been deemed good enough.
I don’t disagree with the judges - I’m not terribly proud of these ones. They don’t seem realistic enough, and worse, there’s no clever theme to them. Still, someone asked to see them, so here they are.
Kenney Time photo challenge
Original:
My version (Title: “Pie Hole”)
Stéphane Dion/Garth Turner photo challenge
Original:
My take:
Jim Flaherty photo challenge
Original:
My take (I seem to have a food thing, no?):
There was another one of Chrétien as a Toronto Argonauts running back, but I’ve lost it. Probably just as well.
You may have heard that CBC just won (well, bought) the rights to keep broadcasting NHL hockey for the next six years. I’m not the world’s biggest hockey fan, but without it this place really would have gone to hell in a handbasket.
The thing I’m most excited about is the web rights:
Also, a multimedia package including live and on-demand video streaming of all CBC’s hockey broadcasts will be available online at CBC.ca in the near future. That means fans in Canada will be able to watch any Hockey Night in Canada broadcast on CBC.ca, regardless of what game is being broadcast in their area of the country.
Now that’ll be cool.
So I’m happy. More than happy, actually - given all the naysayers who predicted we’d lose hockey, and pronounced doom for the mother corp, I’m ecstatic. I was tempted to drop all pretense of professionalism and title this post, “In your face, CTV!” But I wouldn’t do that…
Instead, here’s a picture of me and the Stanley Cup. The corp celebrated the NHL deal by bringing the cup to the CBC building for an employee photo op, plus - what else - some Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts.
I suppose I could have waited for Toronto to actually WIN the Stanley Cup….
I read a great story today, accompanied by a greater picture, about a real estate dispute going on in Chongqing, China. The house in this picture is referred to as the “nail house”, because it’s so hard to remove.
It seems that while 280 neighbours sold their land to this real estate developer, one family is holding out - for a rumoured $2.5 million (a different article claims the owner is demanding an apartment of equivalent size in the new building.) They’ve been without water or power for two years. If you check out the first link, be sure to read the comments - there’s not as much sympathy for the owners as one might expect.
The blog Peering Into The Interior has transcribed an interview with Ms. Wu Ping, who owns the holdout property, including some spectacular photos. And check out this link for a picture of what happens when a “nail house” holds out forever.
What’s interesting about this story is that it’s both universal - fights between developers and property owners happen everywhere - and peculiar to China, where for the first time since 1949, legislators are debating protecting personal property rights. (All land in China is the property of the state.) The issue is so sensitive that the influential independent biweekly Chinese business magazine Caijing was mysteriously pulled from the shelves.
Ah yes, that’s Chinese media, old school.
China may be making strides to open up, but it’s got a long way to go - particularly on the internet. Of the seven links I posted above, four have been censored and are unavailable in China.
In his very amusing post Me vs. the World, Sinister Dan points to a site called the Great Firewall of China, which lets you plug in a URL to see if it’s reachable inside China.
He even extended the courtesy of checking my blog, and found that it has not been censored:
![gor[b] in China](http://www.gorbould.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/gorby_in_china.jpg)
In typical fashion, STD explains my blog access as follows:
Since Paul works for the CBC, this was actually fairly predictable. One centralized tool of cultural oppression could hardly pick on the employee of another.
His blog, on the other hand, is blocked. His best guess is that he made an earlier post containing the phrase “Mao was a Stupid, Fat Hobbit“.
Now, I may be a tool of cultural oppression (hell, that might get put into my Technorati blog description!) but I did once mock up a photo of Mao on a jar of mayonnaise. But I guess that’s OK in the new China.
Getting blocked seems to be a bit of a badge of honour - I’ll have to come up with something more offensive, so I can get the big red boot. Or perhaps I can try to see how long I can hold out, like good old Ms. Wu, and become a “nail blog”.
Not that it matters - I don’t seem to get much traffic from China. In the past 24 hours I’ve had visitors from Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Utrecht, Almaty, Victoria, Limburg, Poznan, Istanbul and Nantes, but nothing from the People’s Republic. I long for the opportunity to disappoint that fifth of the world as well.
A brief prayer of thanksgiving to the tech gods before I resume my usual blather (and no, this isn’t one of those “sponsored posts” - ick.)
Akismet, an indispensable spam-catcher for blogs, has now protected my blog from exactly 3,000 form spam comments - spambots that attempt to post junk messages in the comments area of this blog and others.
Sometimes these are obvious spam, like you get in your e-mail - links to porn sites, diet pills, etc. Sometimes they are more clever - the comments say something like, “Great information! I like your site design” - but the user name links back to a spam website. Sometimes they contain rather racy (and sometimes funny) jokes, then a link to spam.
Akismet is a filter that comes with WordPress which recognizes these comments as spam, and quarantines them for you. As you verify whether or not something is really spam, it learns from your decisions and becomes uncannily accurate.
According to their official stats, Akismet has caught almost one billion spams (and, on the down side, 53 million legitimate messages.) Their numbers indicate that 95 per cent of all comments are spam.
On my site, Akismet has a better success ratio: Of the 3,000 comments it caught, perhaps 10 were not spam, and it allowed perhaps three spam comments onto my blog. And those were early on - it doesn’t make many mistakes any more (though it seems to frequently mark Peter J’s comments for moderation because he often includes multiple links, which I appreciate.)
(By the way, Maxpower has a very interesting blog post about what happens when Akismet incorrectly thinks you are a spammer and sends you to “spam jail” - and how this knowledge could be used for evil.)
In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll continue to miss out on entries like the following, which were repelled today:
penus enlargement
veagra
farmacology
Hi.. like your sit, congrats !!
huyaks
services of the lawyer
22 lady leg plus
sexy ebony hoe
womens coolmax underwear
Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children uganda
Intresting information about teeny angels model.
The bass head tab talking
Eye of adult female furry art
Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation!
Just Who Has Strong Heart Can Enter This Wonderful Site…WWERAW
Approved articles about topless totty.
But I’m sure you can find other sites for that without much difficulty.
Further to my post about the new rules for using the CBC disabled washrooms, and the official explanation that the rule was a response to “inappropriate use of these facilities”, please choose from the following:
Loading …
Hmm, I seem to be developing an obsession with the CBC washrooms.
Our stalls remain blissfully free of ads, and I’m still unable to locate the mythical Queen’s Own Loo. But now there are more washrooms I’m not supposed to visit.
A couple of days ago, new signs appeared on the doors of some of the handicapped washrooms in the Toronto CBC building:
This room is reserved for the use of staff and visitors with physical disabilities.
“Huh?” I thought to myself, “ONLY people with disabilities?” Not that I have strong feelings about the matter, but I’ve never heard of these washrooms being off-limits to the able bodied. And what prompted the signage? Were there complaints from people with disabilities who had to wait while the able-bodied used their johns? Is it poor form to use them at all? Or does our property manager just want to cut back on cleaning? I resolved to find out.
The disabled washroom on our floor is a single, unisex room with a separate entrance, located right between the regular men’s and women’s washrooms (the men’s has two stalls and a urinal; I can’t vouch for the women’s, though I’m betting it has fewer urinals.)
To my knowledge (and, as a CBC Fire Warden, I’m supposed to know) there are no employees with physical disabilities on our floor, and I’ve certainly never seen anyone waiting to use the special washroom. It’s generally only used in the following circumstances:
- When the regular ones are full (and since it’s located across from a boardroom used for meetings that last months at a sitting, this happens a fair bit.)
- When someone wants privacy. (I use it to change into my baseball gear. Once, I had an office and could change in comfort - and, less icky, on carpet - but after moving to a cubicle I found my colleagues just stared.)
- Since they ripped out our local “coffee station”, it’s the only place with a sink that you can use to fill the kettle. (Do you wanna make tea at the CBC?)
Even this minimal use has caused two rather amusing signage incidents in the past.
Once, a wiseass employee taped up a poll beside the toilet in there. The question: “Why have you chosen to use this disabled washroom?” The options went something like this:
- I’m disabled
- I like the extra space
- I make embarrasing sounds or smells
- I need somewhere to sleep/read/smoke dope
etc.
Another sign came courtesy of the poor slobs who had to work in the office across the hall from this washroom. Unlike the regular washrooms, the disabled ones have a single door instead of a double door - and apparently this makes them decidedly not soundproof.
The folks who had to work across from this washroom would be on the phone making business calls, and have to tune out the sorts of sounds that come from people who think they are eliminating in private. A paper sign was tacked up on the door requesting that users either use the main washrooms where possible, or be cognizant that the walls have ears.
That office has since been moved (they get cubicles too - are you sensing a trend? - which is no quieter) but handicapped washroom avoidance is now, it would seem, official policy.
Not that I have a problem with the change; I’ve never been clear on the etiquette of able-bodied people using them anyways.
Are these washrooms a dedicated resource for the disabled - like a parking spot - making their use by the able-bodied immoral or illegal? Or are they like wheelchair ramps - allowing accessibility to everyone?
Hell if I know. So I started poking around the internet.
One conversation took place on Everything2, under the title “Don’t use the handicapped stall“:
Unless, of course, you happen to be a handicapped person in which case you are one of a select few that should use it. Almost every time I go into the washroom at work the handicapped stall is occupied. Whenever I see somebody come out of it, he is an able-bodied, non-handicapped coworker. There’s something very wrong here.
The handicapped stall ought to be thought of the same way that the handicapped parking space is. Actually, I take that back. The handicapped stall is more rare than the handicapped parking space. If I see one handicapped space, I see at least two next to it. If I see a handicapped washroom stall, I see only one, and it’s tucked away in the corner of the washroom.
That view is rebutted later in the discussion:
Restroom stalls are not intended for the exclusive use by handicapped persons — one is supposed to immediately make them available to a handicapped person when possible, but otherwise, they are to be treated as any other toilet stall.
Why the difference? Because parking spaces and toilet stalls are fundamentally different facilities.
Toilet stalls are intended to provide privacy for attending to bodily functions such as elimination, changing sanitary napkins, etc. Sometimes people use stalls to change clothes. Some use them to quietly weep. In general, though, one can attend to business in a public restroom stall in less than two minutes.
Two very different points of view, but at least the discussion is civil. Not so, if you look to the debate in the blogosphere:
Woah, woah! HOLD ON DUDE. You mean only handicapped people can use handicapped toilets?
How come people have this notion that only the disabled can use facilities for the disabled? …. WTF is this? ….Sure, if I SEE that you are physically disabled, and you need to use the handicapped toilet, then yes, obviously I will let you use it and go use a normal toilet.
As far as I am concerned, you have a physical disability - and that is where you have a disadvantage. Your bladder is working fine isn’t it? So you wait, just like normal people do, when there is a queue for the toilet. The rest of us queue up to use a toilet - I don’t see why the disabled should be any different.
And the even less civil response:
BITCH, you should never ever used a handicap toilet in the first place if you’re an able person.
Get this, it’s for them. The space= it’s for the size of the wheelchair. The slope, it’s for the wheelchair too. You can walk down a slope, but they can’t slide down a flight of stairs, dumbass.
Working bladders? What makes you think they really have ones? What makes you think that it’s right for a handicap with incontinence to pee on herself/himself just because a dumbass like you was too lazy to wait at the other 6 cubicles.
You’re stupid, malicious and insensitive.
On the other hand, stupidity is a handicap. Perhaps that qualifies you for the handicap toilet.
Ouch.
Seeking sanity, I posed the question to Joe Clark, who - though seemingly able-bodied - knows more about accessibility than anyone I know (though he does tend to focus on accessibilty in media). Joe’s response to the sign:
“How do you know I’m not disabled?”
When I asked him about the propriety of admittedly able-bodied people using the disabled washrooms, here’s what he replied:
I do all the time. Tons more space.
Finally, I e-mailed SNC Lavalin Profac, the company that maintains our building, to ask for the official explanation. Today, they wrote back with the following:
We were receiving a lot of complaints from physically disabled people about inappropriate use of these facilities.
There goes my conspiracy theory about saving on Tilex. I showed the reply to Joe, and here’s his take:
The only *valid* complaint is “There’s only one washroom on the floor and somebody was in it when I needed it.” Then the complainant would have to prove they stuck around to see who was using it and knew for a fact that person wasn’t disabled.
I really wish there were a physically disabled colleague nearby that I could ask for an opinion. But there isn’t… which is what makes the sign seem so strange.
Anyone out there have any thoughts on the matter?
Guess who’s back
Back again
Ouimet’s back
Tell a friend.
.
.
.
.
So, we made it back alive. Our family spent a fantastic week on vacation in Cuba - the first time the kids had been on an airplane, seen the ocean, or even left the country. Everything worked out dandy.
Since I’m too tired to come up with my usual scintillating repartee, I think I’ll hit you with a few pages from my Cuba family notebook. If children offend you, come back in a few days.
Top 10 Questions From My Vacationing Children, to Which the Answer is No:
1] Did you bring my ballerina constume?
2] Can you go back and get it?
3] Do wolves come from eggs?
4] Are there pandas in Cuba?
5] Does everyone in Cuba have to wear a wristband?
6] Do kids like rum?
7] Can I be a Cuban showgirl when I grow up?
8] Is Strawberry Shortcake on TV?
9] Is that girl’s bathing suit called a “zuchini”?
10] Can I take my pants off on the airplane?
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