Breaking the Oprah barrier

Our celebrity-obsessed culture devours news about who's fat, who's fucking, who's failing, drunk, drugged up, etc. There's no shortage of gossip rags that continue their unfortunate and embarrassing existence covering all aspects of the lives or rich, beautiful and stupid people who don't give a crap about us.

Celebrity egos also get more and more attention these days, especially since the word "diva" was inexplicably co-opted by the gossip-media and has been distorted to an extent that the word's incorrect usage is far more common than the correct one.

Many of the biggest egomaniacs in showbiz are well known. The gossip rags often publish lists of the biggest egos in Hollywood or the music industry, or the growing industry of being a worthless oxygen-bandit who actually doesn't do anything (You know who I'm talking about).

Search for celebrity egos on the ol' interwebs and you'll find a lame hodgepodge of big names, but they're usually just an excuse to talk shit about Kanye West and Paris Hilton, as if there was already any shortage of that.

Inexplicably missing from such discussions is the one of the smuggest, preachiest personalities in all of North America, who flies her self-satisfied face in tens of thousands of bookstores and newsstands each month.

Who else but Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah has unequivocally established herself as one of the most reprehensibly self-congratulatory blowhards in all media and she's done it with her disgusting O: The Oprah Magazine, which features her face on the cover every month.

Let me repeat. Oprah's magazine has her on the cover every month.

By herself.

This April marks the 9th anniversary of her rag's first publication. It's a monthly magazine, so that makes 107 straight covers with just her.

I say 107 because this month, she made the shocking move of deigning to appear with someone else. That's what motivated today's entry. This is some of the most earth-shaking news in the magazine industry. Oprah shared her cover!

This might sound insignificant to you, but really, I can't stress this enough; for nine years, this

woman has been on every single cover of a magazine already named after her. How full of yourself do you have to be to pull a stunt like that? Even Rosie O'Donnell's self-aggrandizing pap showed her with another celebrity each month. Even Penthouse doesn't show tits on the cover every month.

Oprah's already got a high enough profile. Her cachet won't suffer if she featured someone else on the cover, maybe even by themselves.

Well, shut my mouth! Here she is, god forbid, sharing the limelight. Except … wait a minute!

As years of shameless self-promotion and wrong-headed "guidance" to her viewers should indicate, even this is just a calculated move that indicates no deflation of ego on Oprah's part. This is not to laud or promote her guest. It's a slightly more subtle way for Oprah to show off.

The first person who Oprah ever shares her cover with is Michelle Obama. For all her grace, good looks and intelligence, the plain fact is that Mrs. Obama hasn't really done a whole lot, certainly not enough merit a magazine cover. Oprah has interviewed winners of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzers and Oscars, far greater achievements than being the wife or a president. Why don't they merit a cover?

Because none of them serve Oprah's ego the way Mrs. Obama does. It's well documented that Oprah has been a big Obama fan since 2004, cajoling him to run for president, and being prominently shown crying on the cameras after Obama's victory.

Obama's election was the subject of more eye-rolling hyperbole than any other event in recent memory, and Oprah rode that wave of hysterical rhetoric. She's gotten in on the ground floor of Obama-mania and she's attaching herself, leech-like, to the new president. Not content to be one of the biggest media presences in North America, Oprah is now trying to worm her way into history as an close friend of a historic president. And just you watch, that association will come in handy when she decides to run for office or at least finagle some government appointment.

Naturally, the president is too occupied to appear on the cover of Oprah's self-serving rag, but his wife will do quite nicely.

And it may go down as one of her greatest achievements, being the first person to break the Oprah barrier on the cover of the world's most arrogant and insufferable magazines.

Oliver Twits

Rest easy, everyone! Yes, the North American economy has well and truly shit the bed and our government is poised to resume its massive clusterfuck status after a nearly two month-long hiatus, but there's some very heartening news in the papers these days as well!

A recent study released by the British Medical Journal found that Oliver Twist's diet was entirely adequate from a nutritional standpoint. I don't know about you, but that's a huge fucking load off my mind.

Forgetting for a moment the more overwhelmingly stupid aspect of the study, let's look at some of the smaller issues raised by this ingenious and entirely worthwhile piece of work.

In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens describes the workhouse menu as three meals of "thin" gruel a day, an onion twice a week, half a bread roll on a Sunday. Using a methodology that becomes worthless as soon as its embarked upon, the sharp minds behind the study decided to change the one piece of evidence they had to go on and then use their substitute information to arrive at their conclusion. Referring to surviving evidence from period workhouses as well as existing laws in England, they've concluded that this gruel wasn't thin (take THAT, Chas!), and the 1.75 litres of gruel had enough nutritional content to sustain the Dickensian whiner.

Of course, they're going on the assumption that there was any sort of standardization in such workhouses and completely missing the point that Dickens was trying to convey as miserable an existence as possible. And by unilaterally deciding the gruel was thick and hearty, despite what Dickens said, the whole study is redundant. Oh, and that 1.75 litres a day? They plucked that handy statistic out of nowhere. Nice research!

See, if you have one primary piece of evidence and some vague possibilities, you don't go with the latter. If that's how they figure out problems, it's scary to think that they're doctors. The lead researcher, one Sue Thornton, pediatric dietitian, likely isn't the sharpest diagnostician.


Hypothetical medical emergency:

Your kid eats a rusty nail. You rush him to the doctor. The nail is sticking out of his stomach.

Dr. Sue Thornton: "What's the matter?"

You: "My kid ate a rusty nail!"

Your kid: "I ate a rusty nail!"

Dr. Sue Thornton: "Ate a rusty nail, eh? No, you're wrong. He has scurvy. Eat more fruit."

Your kid dies.

Dr. Sue Thornton: "Yup, scurvy."

You stab the doctor in the eye with a syringe.

Dr. Sue Thornton: "Oh my God! You broke my leg!"

In fact, my own literary study of A Christmas Carol finds the story has numerous flaws. Dickens often refers to snow and cold. However, I chose to ignore that he said the story takes place in England. My own research shows that it occurred in Havana. Therefore, the whole tale is bullshit.

As I alluded to before, there is an overwhelming stupid aspect to this study as well. That is, of course, that Oliver Twist is a fucking work of fiction. British scientists and researchers actually took the time and effort to conclude that a fictional character's diet was nutritionally adequate.

Meanwhile in the U.K., one person dies of lung cancer almost every 15 minutes.

7,950 people die of AIDS every day.

And we have doctors researching the possible diet of a fictional character.

"Studies" in general can be a fount of completely useless and pointless information. The Oliver Twist one is just stupid because it's a waste of everyone's time. But also very common are the really obvious ones.

For example, a 2008 study by two American University profs found that as gas prices go up, car accident fatalities go down. Thank God we have university profs to fill in that cryptic middle step that people drive less when gas costs more.

And here's another; parents are generally found to be happier when their kids leave the home and are no longer a drain on the parental resources. Who would have guessed? Until they shed the light on that issue, I always figured my parents were heartbroken when I left home and became financially independent.

Another brilliant study released in 2008 concluded that, had Al Gore won the presidency of the United States, he also would have invaded Iraq. That one might be even better than the Oliver Twist one, because there's nothing to base it on. At least the Oliver Twist guys had some evidence to work with. The Gore study is bulletproof because it can never be proven wrong.

It's dispiriting that we live in this day and age when academics and scientists a) continue to receive funding despite being incredibly fucking lazy, b) get such lax oversight on their funding that they can research such worthless things when there are more important issues and/or c) think that the general population is so goddam stupid that we need to have these less-than-startling "truths" revealed to us.

Of course, another, unintentional consequence of the Twist study is that it's ruining this esteemed work of fiction. It turns a bold, starving boy into a whiner. Adhering to the same intellectual rigour as the Oliver-studiers, I've concluded that, as the employee of the wealthy Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit would have made a lot of money. However, he lived in a cold house and wore tattered clothes. Where did the money go? I'm forced to conclude he spent it on whores and opium. There goes the warm fuzziness of A Christmas Carol, lying dead before the sword of my ingenious research! No character must be spared!

Next week, I'll present the damning evidence that Bambi actually killed his own mother, since you don't see any hunters do it onscreen. Stay tuned!

Unintelli-vision

I recently watched the movie Idiocracy, a middling satire where an average guy is cryogenically frozen then wakes up 500 years later and finds that western society has become so stupid that he's now the world's smartest man. One of the best examples is a family restaurant called Fuddrucker's eventually evolves into Buttfucker's. The #1 movie in the nation is Ass, a two-hour shot of a person's ass and Ow, My Balls! is a wildly popular TV show.

Fox, which distributed the movie, pretty much buried the thing. If it hit the theatres here, it was probably in and out in the blink of an eye. But it's not because it’s a bad movie; hell, way worse pieces of shit become blockbusters. It's because it's scary as hell.

Dystopian stories have long been popular fiction fodder. Look at Children of Men, V for Vendetta, Logan's Run, Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Brazil, Escape from New York – these are (mostly) well-regarded dystopian tales. But Idiocracy blows them all out of the water because it's far and away the most plausible.

In the last couple of months, I've gotten a frightening look at how stupid our culture is becoming. That's right, I got cable TV.

Aside from maybe visiting Cambodia, it's one of the most unsettling things I've seen in quite some time.

I can't say it's overwhelmingly shocking, since no one expects TV to be some sort of educational device. I mostly got it so I could watch more Raptors games this season. But even the ostensibly intelligent programming has disappeared.

On Remembrance Day this year, I had my own moment of silence by sleeping until close to 11 a.m. I snapped on the TV at 11 and flipped over to the History Channel to see what they're showing at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the precise moment when the First World War finally ended. A war which changed the world as we know it, a black mark in human history. What did they have on?

CSI: New York.

Apparently it was the day for remembrance of fictional murder victims and honouring their memory with forensic skills that track down their killers.

Of course, being the responsible and conscientious reporter that I am, I wouldn't just use this one example to condemn the whole channel. It's more the straw that broke the intelligent camel's back. Prior to Remembrance Day, the last three times I switched to the History Channel, it was airing movies: The Fugitive, Twelve O'Clock High and The Quick and the Dead. Exactly how does a God-awful girl-power western with Sharon Stone and Leo di Caprio count as history?

But hey, at least there's another entire channel devoted to intelligent fare right? God bless The Learning Channel! It has all you could ever want to learn about weddings, babies, house-flipping, babies, nannies and house-flipping.

Oh wait, that's not fair. They also show What Not To Wear, which is wholly educational.

It makes little difference to me that these idiots choose to fling their credibility out the window; it's their product to run into the ground if they want to and to some extent, I don't blame them. These be lean times and intelligent programming doesn't pull in as many viewers as something with lots of tits and explosions.

(Full disclaimer here: I like tits. And explosions. I didn't get cable just to watch documentaries about Proust or question period. I like a good action movie and sometimes you just want to veg out in front of the tv and watch something brainless. But TV is full of brainless content. Can't there be a least a few stations that have something better?)

It probably makes me a bit of an elitist, but a small part of me resents that idea that these channels show brainless content while also bolstering egos. Showing piss like The Quick and the Dead allows Little Johhny Mouth-breather to sit at home and fap to Sharon Stone, but he can still say he spent the afternoon watching The History Channel. It's already hard enough to be a teacher without mass media dumbing down the concepts of what "educational" really means. This society of ours already re-brands everything (retarded = special, fat = big-boned, etc) so that nobody gets offended, but we have to draw the line somewhere. I'd draw it at calling stupid "smart."

A guide to avoiding cinematic crap: again!

In my last entry, I happened upon a concept so rich in material that it demands at least one sequel; that is educating the movie-going public about the readily apparent but too often ignored signs of shitty movies. I'm not going to waste your time or mine telling you to avoid Olsen Twins movies or flicks based on video games, because you really ought to know that by now.

A good deal of my warning signs come from movie posters, so some readers may take me to task for judging a book by its cover. Well, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, "You don't need to eat a whole egg to know that it's rotten." Besides, judging a book by its cover is often very effective.

That being said, here are some more warning signs to keep watch for:

The point

Mutually pointing co-stars is a rare, but strong red flag. It's a sign that the stars themselves feel awkward and embarrassed about the film and whether they know it or not, it's a reflexive motion to deflect blame for what a pile of dung the movie really is. The bad comedy face says "Sorry about this!" while the point says "Hey, he's in this too! It's not all my fault!"

It's a quick attempt to show chemistry between the wackily mismatched leads. It shows hilarious camaraderie and silliness. It shows that the movie sucks.

Example I: Wagons East! That's a deadly poster. A 2007 statistical analysis by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and MIT shows that 98.7 per cent of points are accompanied by bad comedy faces, a deadly fusion of lame stabs at hilarity. I need not even include the Rottentomatoes rating for Wagons East! Because there's an even stronger indication of how bad this movie is. John Candy, a fun comic actor who nonetheless starred in many, many shit movies only did this movie out of contractual obligation. Forced into the role, took the only graceful alternative: he DIED. Yes, this movie is so awful that even a non-discriminating actor like John Candy was too embarrassed to finish it and continue life with a name forever associated with this disaster.

But just to add insult to injury, here's the tomatometer rating for Wagons East!: Zero

Did you catch that? ZERO.

Also note: exclamation points in the title? Stay away!

Example II: Showtime. From a marketing standpoint, this may be the worst movie poster of all time. It's got two bad comedy faces, the double-point, Robert de Niro and Eddie Murphy, one black guy and one white guy obviously exasperated with each other and the brutally lame and uncreative tagline of "Lights. Camera. Aggravation." There are so many bad comedy conventions in this one poster that it's hard to think up a good simile for how much you should avoid this movie. I'm thinking along the lines of a naked Gilbert Gottfried throwing water balloons filled with diarrhea.

Robert de Niro showed the world his great comedy chops in Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, where he alternated between "looking constipated" and saying "Focker" a lot. Simply put, he can't do comedy. Eddie Murphy is hit-and-miss at best, but he's mostly miss since the mid-1990s. Buddy-cop comedies are torturously overdone and wisecracking interracial buddy comedies are among the worst genres of all time.

Showtime's tomatometer rating: 24 per cent.

Example III: What Happens in Vegas. The headliners are one charmless dolt and one gorgeous airhead. The trailer shows the gorgeous dolt in her underwear, so we know the filmmakers know what their big asset is. So here you've got the dolt - knowing many people will not pay to see him - pointing, essentially saying, "Yeah, but she's in this too! Doesn't THAT make you want to come?" Not a good sign.

What Happens in Vegas on the Tomatometer: 28 per cent.


Jim Carrey

The Truman Show was simultaneously a very good and absolutely awful movie. It's good in the respect that it's well, good. It's bad because it gave Jim Carrey the idea that he's actually a good actor and it gave him a taste of Oscar glory he's been gunning for ever since. That's not to say he was bad in The Truman Show; it's more like he made like F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus – somehow the stars aligned just right to pull out the one great performance they had in them.

Note that I'm not saying Carrey's one good performance was anywhere near Abraham's. F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus is about as good as acting gets. Jim Carrey in Truman was just about as good as Jim Carrey gets.

Anyhoo, The Truman Show started a shameless Oscar-grab campaign that included ridiculous fare like The Majestic and the amazingly, hilariously, mind-bogglingly awful The Number 23. Interestingly, Carrey has made 11 movies since The Truman Show and you could make a strong argument that he wasn't good in any of them. Yes yes, people love fawning over Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but Carrey? Not so good. He was playing his typical low-key, mournful-eyed, sad-sack role that marks his "serious" work. And if you look at his whole resumé, you could make a good argument that F. Murray Abraham and Jim Carrey have had the same career: a parade of awful movies bookending one good show.


Eddie Murphy (post-1988)

Here's a poster for Eddie Murphy's upcoming disaster Meet Dave. What's great about this is it totally sums up his career since Coming To America. Playing multiple characters and beaming at the audience with an ear-to-ear grin. Fact is, you could take that poster and use it for practically every movie he's ever been in. The only decent movies Murphy has whored himself for since 1988 were the first and second Shrek movies and Dreamgirls. Three movies. In two of those, his face does not appear onscreen. In the third, he's a supporting actor. No coincidence. All his other movies are awful vanity projects designed to show you he's still versatile and hilarious. Yeah great, you can play four characters in one movie. That would be way more impressive if the movie wasn't trash.

There's part two. Possibly more to come.

A guide to avoiding cinematic crap

For reasons impossible to fathom, people keep going to see shitty movies. Dreck like Meet the Spartans and You, Me and Dupree does well at the box office, even though they're just terrible, terrible movies and, as much as I grow increasingly convinced that the movie-going public is a bunch of tasteless stupid oafs who'll laugh at anything involving poop, I also need to believe things can change.

For that reason, here's a public service piece about how to avoid shitty movies. You might say it's about judging a book by its cover but, hey, sometimes that works. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains how "thin-slicing" - making conclusions based on very small pieces of data - can be often be more accurate than seeing the big picture. Well, it works for movies too. Things like posters or specific actors can tell you a lot.

Of course, a terrible movie comes down to taste, and how does on measure that? Box office receipts don't work, since, as I said, the movie-going public are morons with too much money to spend. Individual critics don't mean much either, but a collective opinion can tell you a lot. So, I'm relying on Rottentomatoes.com and its tomatometer, the yardstick it uses to rate how well a movie is received. Interestingly, I wrote this whole piece, then checked the ratings and sure enough, every movie that I claim is shit (without having seen) is also, by critical consensus, shit. And many of these shitty movies share certain characteristics that you should keep an eye out for.


The Bad Comedy Face

This is a universal sign for "Shit comedy! Flee!" It's an expression that shows degrees of shame, embarrassment and ineffectual wackiness. It's a plea to be forgiven for appearing in a shit movie and it's a sign that you don't know how to be funny. It typically incorporates a weary smile, raised eyebrows and/or eye-rolling.

Example the first: Matt Dillon from You, Me and Dupree. This bad comedy face says, "Boy, I'm not even ready for the wackiness in store, and neither are you!"

You, Me and Dupree's tomatometer rating: a whopping 22 per cent.

Example the second: Steve Martin in Cheaper By the Dozen. Similar to Dillon, this is the BCF of the hilariously embattled but endearing chump. It sucks to see it, but Martin is an expert at the BCF, because his recent spate of terrible, terrible movies have necessitated it.

Cheaper by the Dozen's tomatometer rating: 24 per cent.

The BCF can also be a sign to indicate that the movie is supposed to be funny, and if that's the best way the promoters can find to communicate that fact, it's a disaster. If a comedy is genuinely funny, it's obvious. If the actors have to wave these flags at you to indicate it's a comedy, you know it's trash.

Example the third: Leslie Neilsen from 2001: A Space Travesty. I mean, Jesus Christ, look at that. It's hard to even verbalize why that's so bad. Just trust me, when you see shit like that on the poster, save your money, your time and your brain cells.

2001's tomatometer rating: N/A (most critics didn't even bother to rate it, although some comments are found here.)

Possible exception: Bill Murray's Bad Comedy Face.

Bill Murray is a great comedic actor, but his major downfall is that he makes this face all the fucking time. He's tricky that way though, because he does it on the poster for one of his best movies (Groundhog Day), and one that I never saw, but I'm sure is irredeemable crap (The Man Who Knew Too Little).

Prominent crotch jokes

If you're promoting a movie, you need to put your best foot forward. You put some of the funniest parts in the trailer and the poster. And if someone getting hit in the balls is in the funniest thing they can find to promote, the movie sucks.

Look at this poster for The Big Green. Now that you're in the know about the Bad Comedy Face, you should know that this movie is only good for violating other peoples' human rights. This poster features five, count 'em, FIVE Bad Comedy Faces. The only thing not making the BCF on this poster is an animal, and Disney execs had a long debate over weather to photoshop a dumb grin on its face.

The Big Green's tomatometer rating: ZERO

Similarly, testicular plays on words are another bad sign. Take a movie like Balls of Fury, which crams two stupid "balls" references into one poster. Or Mr. Woodcock, using a hilarious one-two punch of cock and a visual representation of giant balls. If you're a 13-year-old idiot, your comedic cup runneth over.

Mr. Woodcock on the tomatometer: 13 per cent


Eugene Levy

It pains me to put him here since he's a gifted Canadian comic actor, but Levy is now a strong indicator of cinematic shittiness. Take a glance at his IMDb listing of say, his last ten movies. You've got three American Pie spinoffs, one movie with the Olsen Twins (with a terrible Bad Comedy Face on the poster - seen at right) and another where he stars as Mr. Nerdlinger. It's indisputable, empirical truth that those all suck, and even by abandoning all reason and giving Curious George and The Man the benefit of the doubt, it means at least 60 per cent of his recent movies are grotesque abortions.

Exception: Anything also starring Christopher Guest. Those collaborations give you stuff like Best in Show and A Mighty Wind - good flicks.

TV remakes

Movies based on TV shows are always to be avoided. In all of cinema history, there are just two good movies based on TV shows: South Park and The Muppet Movie (The Muppet Christmas Carol, while awesome, does not count). Otherwise, it's a parade of mind-numbing garbage that was approved at drunken board meetings of the respective film companies. Some are shameless money-grabs (The Simpsons) and some are wrongheaded attempts at nostalgia bucks (Bewitched), but they (almost) all suck.

The sheer ratio of good remakes to awful ones make the movie-going decision for you. The odds are largely on the side of the movie being a craptacular waste, so don't bother.

This is by no means an exhaustive manual, but it really should make a difference. There are so many good movies out there, why waste your time on the crap ones? Hopefully, this will help improve your viewing experiences. And if you find these warning signs are common to your favourite movies, you're just a hopeless mouth-breathing dolt anyway, and who helped you read this far?

Eternal life, the musical way!

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.

-Woody Allen

Guess what? You're dying. In the time it's taken you to read this line, you've inched 3 seconds closer to death (depending on how fast you read - if this line has taken you ten seconds already, you may as well give up and die now). If that thought actually bothers you, you might be able to take some sadistic pleasure in knowing that writing this has cost me more time than you'll lose reading it.

As much as people seem imbued with a certain feeling of immortality, -the "that could never happen to me" feeling - most mature people are keenly aware that the icy black hand of Death waits and watches as we smoke, drink, drive, jaywalk, breathe, be born and do the other stupid things we do that lead to our eventual demise.

Because of that knowledge, a great may people do their best to create a lasting legacy for themselves. People spend millions to have buildings named for them, they build statues and monuments, name their kids after themselves. And that's just for starters.

The disgusting, money-sucking leviathan that is the North American recording industry can also ensure your name lives on through the ages. Unfortunately, the trade-off for you is that you've got to die an untimely death. But hey, that's the price you pay for immortality!

But you've got to do more than just die. There are criteria to satisfy before you blow your head off or OD and choke on your own vomit. Fortunately, the music industry offers no dearth of case studies. Here's a rundown of which sort of musician burnout to emulate, complete with a handy grading system of who's best to emulate. So let's dig in!


Kurt Cobain
Grade: A+
Albums (pre-death): 3
Albums (post-death): 4

As much as I loathe how slobbering Cobain fans have canonized him in the years since his death, I've got to give him credit: he had all the right elements for musical immortality. First, Nirvana became the darling of brainless rock critics everywhere when it "saved rock and roll" (whatever the fuck that means). Cobain and Co. arrived at just the right time to shift music from the garish excess of 80's rock to the age of insufferable po-faced mope-rock we endure today. Next, he did a lot of drugs. Then, he married a grasping harpy who quickly exhausted her limited talents and was then forced to exploit her dead husband's name for drug money. Finally, he committed suicide, instantly endearing him to thousands of grunge losers and mopey adolescents.

Cobain's modest postmortem output is surprising, but it's mostly because Love and Cobain's bandmates have engaged in a long, drawn-out battle over who holds the rights to exhume Cobain's corpse and make it dance for money. He'll put out more albums and you'll continue to see his soulful, sad-bastard face (seen at right - that contrived mournful expression makes me want to smack him in the skull) on t-shirts and posters as long as so fans and rock journalists continue to lament the man who's been inexplicably elevated far beyond what he might have achieved.


Jimi Hendrix
Grade: B
Albums (pre-death): 8
Albums (post-death): 58

How hard did you work today? Well, big fucking deal, because you were still less productive than a guy who's been dead for over 40 years. Most people can't even slam out 8 productive hours a day at work when we're young and vital, but Jimi Hendrix's record output has gone up 625% since he died. I may not put out one album in my lifetime, and he's got 58 postmortem albums to his credit

Jimi gets extra points for dying in somewhat mysterious circumstances, but he does forfeit some pizzazz for possibly choking on his own vomit. The reason he only gets an B is this: he's not a good legacy role model. Lots of decent bands would be hard-pressed to churn out eight albums and in doing so, you'll run the risk that people will recognize what a no-talent you are before you die. Chances are that you're not nearly as talented as Jimi Hendrix, so don't put out this many albums before you kick the bucket.


Tupac Shakur
Grade: C
Albums (pre-death): 5
Albums (post-death): 21

Another shabby role model, this tatted-up bullet magnet nevertheless has some redeeming features. Pros include being a capable rapper, pre- and post-mortem sales and dying. Cons? Well, he was murdered, which you probably don't want to put up with. That was the second time he was shot too, so he might have left a much small legacy for the rest of us to hear about had the first shooting worked.

Also, lest we forgot that Tupac was a twat. Any Tupac apologist must be referred to the brilliant album cover for The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, released under the pretentious pseudonym "Makaveli." Using an utterly contrived and ham-fisted metaphor for Tupac's self-affected suffering, it shows a crucified Tupac, a reference to how the oft-maligned rapper was crucified by the media. Shame on you, media! So what if he once shot two cops and had separate convictions for sexual and physical assault? Geez, give him a break!

So there you have it: he left a lot of material and mystique for record-industry whores to exploit, but he's also an undeniable asshole. Is that what you want to be?


John Lennon
Grade: C
Albums (pre-death): 13
Albums (post-death): 27

What? A C for John Lennon, you say? Another prolific and talented musician, sure, but also a titanic asshole. Of course, that in itself isn't enough to preclude your musical legacy. His other mistake was turning into a numb and pretentious hippie, producing middling music on his way out. Every artist is entitled to a weak period but you've gotta bounce back; Lennon's work tailed off, then he stopped performing, then he died. Bad exit.


Nick Drake
Grade: D-
Albums (pre-death): 4
Albums (post-death): 13

The all Music Guide sums Drake up quite well: "A singular talent who passed almost unnoticed during his brief lifetime." Nick Drake was a talented and morose kid, which plays very well to some audiences. But as good as he may have been, his legacy sucks. He was a total recluse, which makes it harder to build a following. A good deal of his contemporary fanbase comes from a Volkswagen commercial and you can bet the a great percentage of his fans are poseur twits who love pretending they knew about him before that ad. He'd probably be spinning in his grave to hear some of the twats who claim fandom now, the poor bastard.


Brad Nowell
Grade: F
Albums (pre-death): 3
Albums (post-death): 2

The quickly forgotten lead singer of Sublime, which shat out some quickly forgotten frat-boy pop in the mid-90's, Nowell is no a role model for you musical legacy seekers. His heroin-fueled death was a good move, but it's totally annulled since Sublime became famous after he died, allowing the band to either achieve flash-in-the-pan status or soldier on with a new frontman (To their credit, the band called it quits). Making matters worse, Sublime employed ska and reggae influences, an unholy fusion of the world's worst musical genres, which would endear it to no one. Since the band didn't achieve fame until after its third album, it was already a proven non-entity. You need to prove potential first, kids.

Of course, we all face the obstacle of having to break into the music industry in the first place. But hey, I firmly believe that if Nickelback and their greasy hermaphrodite frontman can be a success, anyone can.

A World-class waste of space

Even though making fun of people and bitching about things are two of my greatest skills, I don't always enjoy doing it. Sometimes I hear about things so inane and stupid that I feel compelled to write about them even though I sort of dread it. Think of it like a movie reviewer going to see Meet The Spartans; they know it will be awful, but that's what they do (and yes they get paid while I don't, so you should appreciate my efforts even more). Sometimes I hear a story that I want to write about even though I hate it.

Today's entry is one of those. Several Toronto news outlets were straining themselves for various Elvis jokes today to celebrate local dork Suresh Joachim who just set a world record by impersonating Elvis for 55 straight hours.

Bad enough that Joachim's life is pointless enough for him to blow 55 hours on this fruitless exercise, but this marks the 53rd time he's set a completely pointless, worthless record.

I've never followed it closely enough to pinpoint when it happened, but there's no doubt that the Guinness Book of World Records has descended so far past the point of irrelevance that it couldn't catch a bus back to that point, and Suresh Joachim's resume illustrates that fact.

The father of two holds the following records:

* Continuous ironing: 55 hours, 5 minutes
* Balancing on one foot: 76 hours
* Continuous TV watching: 69 hours
* Non-stop crawling: 56.62 kilometres

One thing Joachim does not hold:

* A JOB

Any entity that lauds 69 hours of TV-watching or ironing obviously has no credibility at all. Why? Because any worthless idiot could do that. Many people probably have done it, but they don't want to brag about it because at least they recognize what a non-achievement it is. Why reward a moron who spent six days setting a record for escalator-riding (Joachim again)?

The Guinness Book still celebrates worthwhile and interesting records, but it's also polluted with stupid shit. Case in point: I went to the Guinness page and typed in "fastest." Do I get Olympic sprinters? Racehorses? No, I get crap like "fastest furniture" – some idiot driving a motorized sofa. It does have stuff like a dog that was trained to open a car window, which is kind of cool. But it's mostly trash.

It's not that hard to set a record for driving a motorized sofa or continuous ironing, because your only competition are losers. As long as you're creative enough, it's not hard to set a world record. My next blog entry will cover my record-setting attempt for Longest Time Spent Holding Down The Semicolon Key On A Black Keyboard While Facing East and Wearing Sunglasses In Toronto.

I was almost prepared to give Joachim a free pass today when I saw a glancing mention to how he does this to raise awareness for suffering children around the world. But in glancing over 10 newspaper articles about this idiot, I saw one quick mention of his cause. It smacks for of a justification for his being a total oxygen-bandit.

Much more prominent is the fact that he's really just a shameless attention whore.

He made his own wedding into a ridiculous record circus by having 79 bridesmaids, 79 groomsmen and the world's longest bouquet. Too bad you can't measure something like World's Most Tolerant Bride.

He's also amazingly deluded, somehow fancying himself an inspiring and impressive hero.

"God created everyone with the same talents. But so many don't like to try in case they fail," he told the Toronto Star. "People can achieve anything but they have to bear the pain."

No, most people don't like to try watching 69 hours of TV or 84 hours of drumming because it's a stupid fucking waste of time and we have better things to do. Yes, people can achieve anything. But most people apply themselves to achieving something that's not completely worthless.