Come on Blogger, stop shoving my sidebar down to the bottom of the page.
Monthly Archives: October 2004
George W. Trudeau?
U.S. President Bush gives us the Texas salute.
das Büro
The BBC is investigating a German version of “The Office” for copyright infringement. It seems a pretty blatant rip-off but it still may be funnier than the official American version (Don’t worry Steve Carell, your day will come).
Coal fired radio
The funniest thing to come out of Newfoundland since Codco was The Great Eastern: Newfoundland’s Cultural Magazine. Broadcast on CBC radio in the 1990′s, the show was a parody of just about everything from Atlantic Canadian stereotypes to politics to CBC radio dramas to postmodernism.
But its main target was radio itself. The show took the form of a weekly cultural affairs programme broadcast on the fictional Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland, an outfit which has been around since the 1930′s. The show was so well crafted in its razor-sharp imitation of community radio that the first time I heard the show, I thought it was for real. Then the show’s commmunity annoucements came on:
“The Avalon League of Deep Fat Fryers hold their biennial meeting in the kitchens of the Cabot Institute at 3:00. Today Gid Stockley will
be formally named a Grand Master of the League in recognition of his
ground breaking work in deep fried salt. Also on the agenda, the
League’s efforts to keep the province Olestra free. “
Those and the BCN programming highlights quickly became my favourite bits:
“At 4:00, it’s Playlets and Episode Sixteen of Delbert Onglow’s
gritty dramatic cycle, “Please Make It Stop”. The Christmas
siege at the Fleming’s is still holding. Feral Dad remains
bivouacked behind a parched Christmas Tree; Mom, fortified
with fruit cake fixings and a stocking full of wake-ups, holds the
kitchen; while sullen daughter Brenda maps a possible nocturnal
escape through the rec room corridor. “You Shouldn’t Have”,
this week on Please Make It Stop.”
Everything on the show, from the station’s rich history (marred briefly in the 1940′s when the show’s original host became a Nazi sympathiser after the Mayor of St. John’s surrendered to the Germans) to the detailed descriptions of Newfoundland as a cultural and intellectual hotbed seemed authentic. It was likely cancelled by the CBC because they just didn’t understand it.
The site contains pretty much every episode in the show’s five year history in MP3 format.
Tiny happy people
I love stuff like this: scientists have announced the discovery of relative of modern humans who were only one metre tall. The new species, dubbed Homo floresiensis after the island where the discovery took place, have been nicknamed Hobbits because of their diminutive stature and because a major motion picture trilogy was recently released which featured similarly proportioned people. Had this discovery happened twenty years ago, they undoubtedly been named Ewoks or Jawas.
What is surprising is that they may have co-existed with modern humans as little 13,000 years ago. The article doesn’t give any definite theories as to why they died out but one scientist suggested they may have been cannibalised by their bigger cousins. A shame really, because it would have been more beneficial to humanity to dress them up in tiny tuxedos and make them serve us. I mean those damn dirty apes haven’t been good for much except their innate ability to wash cats.
I’ve always been somewhat interested in early humans so, really, this is fascinating. There are still tons of things about evolution that we just don’t know.
