W.

This is the trailer for Oliver Stone’s (I presume) satirical biography of George W. Bush. I’m a bit concerned about it, though. Not because it will be a bad movie. Bad movies from Oliver Stone are par for the course these days. Rather, I’m concerned that this will cause a backlash from Bush supporters, enough so that they will vote in large enough numbers to elect John McCain.

In 2004, Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11 before the November election and I’m convinced (entirely by gut feeling, mind you) that Moore’s talking to the audience as though they’re developmentally challenged children narration style drove people who were considering voting for John Kerry to vote for Bush just out of spite.

You know what? Forget I mentioned it. The movie looks delightfully awful.

Once again, Montreal is gripped by By-Election Fever

A little something to fire up the faithful in November

A little something I did with Flickr Toys, referencing this 1984 Reagan ad.

McCain Upsets The Applesauce

So, while Barack Obama was in Europe, getting elected Chancellor of Germany and making love to the French, his Republican opponent John McCain was trying to show how down to Earth he is by “assisting” some poor, innocent woman with her grocery shopping.

(via)

Afterward, McCain helped re-stock the shelves and meekly asked the nice young store clerk where he might find the canned prunes. He then proceeded to tell him the story of the time he needed to take the ferry over to Shelbyville. So he tied an onion to his belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. The important thing was that he had an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war; the only thing you can get was those big yellow ones.

Oh, that John McCain! He’s so old.

Weekend Update

Friday, I took the day off so that I could meet Kerry downtown before the Just for Laughs gala show. It was her last day at the office before her maternity leave so we figured we’d grab a bite on St. Denis and wander about. Sadly it was raining and there wasn’t much happening around the festival site before the show. At least my flamm at Les 3 Brasseurs was good.

The gala show itself was hilarious, mostly thanks to host Craig Ferguson who spent about twenty minutes savaging Tom Cruise.

On Sunday, we had some lovely friends over for a brunch/birthday party as I turned 37 over the weekend. Said friends were nice enough to present me with books on parenting, playing guitar, and poetry writing. The latter is a book by Stephen Fry which assigns homework. For example, last night I had to create a series of couplets using iambic pentameter. This is what I came up with this morning as I grew increasingly frustrated with my very slow office computer:

Computer grinds, it wheezes, chugs, and moans.

To tell the truth, I should have worked from home.

Well, we can’t all be W.H. Auden but I’m glad to be doing this as poetry was something I had little patience for in university. I thought that if I couldn’t read it like prose (and at that, I’m a frustratingly slow reader), then what was the point? Now, in my old age, I like slowing down and taking my time with things so I think I’d like to revisit my old English Verse text book and try a little verse myself.

Stephen Fry, I have to say, helped me get through university. While I miss going to the library, checking out a series of 19th century books, and sitting quietly and reading them, I struggled with the modern academic world: specifically, anything to do with post-moderism. When you’re in class with pompous and pretentious professors and their adoring students, it tends to colour your experience, even if most of your other classes were enjoyable.

Fry used to write a column for the Daily Telegraph and that was made into a collection called Paperweight. In that book, he often wrote about a lot of the same things I was covering and takes such an accessible approach to them that it helped frame the way I continued with my studies. I like him because talks about art in classless way, never coming across as superior or smug but, at the same time, never apologetic either (except about his background. In his memoir, Moab is My Washpot, he plays down his privledged upbringing a little bit, claiming to be middle class and modest and yet the photo of his childhood home is of a large estate).  All that to say, Fry makes it clear that art is:

• For all to enjoy
• Not a test of how clever you are
• Not something that, when it’s appreciated, will make you better than other people
• Something that, on the whole, makes you a happier person for knowing it.

And that’s plenty for me.