Category: In the News

If you were a friend of mine in the 1980s, there would come a time when

I’d tell this joke: I’d strike a match and then use it to mimic a man

screaming in unbearable pain. I’d go: “Who’s this? Richard Pryor.”

While he

shouldn’t be a role model for one’s life, anyone who wants crack wise

about society should make it a point to study his work. At the age of

16, after having been floored by a Betamax dub of Eddie Murphy’s

stand-up routine in Delirious

— yes, kids, he was funny once — I decided to go to the source and

check out recordings by Pryor, who was one of his biggest influences.

I remember once reading that black comedians’ two classic role models:

Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. I would like to add to that observation

by saying that too much Cosby and too little Pryor makes you pretty

lame: just look at Sinbad.

(In Eddie Murphy’s stand-up film Raw,

Murphy would recall a story about how Cosby phoned him, complaining

about the profinity in his act. Murphy said that Pryor called him

later, advising Murphy to tell Cosby to “have a coke and a smile, and shut the fuck up!“).

Considering the pretty stupid outfits that a lot of stand-up comedians wear onstage, Pryor’s a pretty sharp dresser.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase performed what is now known as the “Word Association Skit” on Saturday Night Live.

The setting for the skit was a job interview with Pryor as the

interviewee and Chase as the interviewer. The scene opens with Chase

announcing that the final step of the test would be a word asssociation

test: Chase would say a word and Pryor was to respond with the first

word that came to mind. As the test progresses, Chase’s test words get

increasingly racist, and Pryor responds in kind. I loved this routine

to death — so much that I used to perform it with some friends, in

which we substituted black slurs for Asian ones — and here it is, for your amusement [2.2MB, MP3, Not safe for work — racial epithets galore].

So long, Richard, and thanks for all the laughs.

16 years ago, when I was a 22-year-old student at Queen’s University studying electrical engineering (computer option), Marc Lepine (nee Gamil Gharbi) entered the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and killed 14 women.

In these times, it’s tempting to argue about gender, politics and

philosophy — and hey, we probably should — but I’m going to leave

that for another day. I’d rather take a quiet moment to remember them

as women, as fellow engineering students and as human beings whose

lives were cut short.

---

Other perspectives:

• pony
• Mark Steyn
• Misbehaving.net
• CBC’s archives
• Rotten.com’s article
• Anarchocyclist
• Men’s Center
• Men4Change
• Wikipedia’s Entry
• December 6 Fund of Toronto
• I’m the Dreamer
• Looking Out the Window
• Beyond Robson
• Government of Canada: National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women

Welcome to Day Five of the Accordion Guy Advent Calendar. Today’s goodie: comics!

First, let’s take a look at a recent comic by Ted Rall. If you’re not familiar with Martin Niemoller’s poem, you’re going to miss the not-so-subtle reference…

Now while I think that some of the actions of the current U.S.

administration are intended to have chilling effects and are

curtailments on the freedoms for which they’ve been a role model, it

hasn’t and probably will not come to this. It exists only as a paranoid

fantasy in the minds of those the extreme left and as a wet dream in

the extreme right-wing blogsphere (Adam Yoshida, I’m lookin’ at you).

Even less probable are the events depicted in the comic book Liberality for All, in which the gentlemen pictured below are action heroes:

Almost as implausible as making Michael Moore and Al Franken into comic book action heroes.

Uh…yeah.

The comic (literally) takes place in a different reality: one where

Al

Gore was acclaimed the winner of the 2000 election deadlock. Like a

gazillion “what if” speculative fiction stories in which one historical

detail is changed, the future was altered drastically. Let’s look at Sean Hannity, a year after 9/11:

What would have Gore done? Feel free to speculate in the comments.

That was all flashback. The comic actually takes place in the year

2021, 20 years after 9/11. The UN effectively runs the US (currently

ruled by President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore).

We jump to the UN in New York, where the “Honourable UN Representative

from Afghanistan” is being warmly greeted:

Don’t laugh. In the comic, I’m sure the NDP is running Canada.

The next panel, which I haven’t included, shows the UN ambassadors from

Canada, Germany, France and Spain — guilty parties in right-wing eyes

— applauding. Suckers! Osama’s goodwill gesture is a front: he’s actually planning to bring a nuke to New York City!

In the meantime, let’s get back to Hannity. In the year 2021, with conservatism outlawed, he’s part of the

underground, broadcasting his show via pirate radio and a key player in

the resistance. For reasons that I suspect are being saved for later,

he lost his right arm (presumably in a skirmish with left-wing pinko

fellow-travellers) and now has a bionic prosthesis. He also sports an

eyepatch in the style of Colonel Nick Fury from S.H.I.E.L.D.:

By “those who can’t”, he means “the pampered

upper-middle and upper class, tongue-tied folks that they are”. His

chamber is lit with red lightbulbs in memory of the red states.

Luckily for Hannity, he’s got help: G. Gordon Liddy, looking as spry as

he did when I last saw him during a visit to Crazy Go Nuts University

in the late eighties (for reasons unknown, he was often a guest

lecturer during Homecoming). Back then, he was so damned proud of his

involvement in the Nixon scandal that his car sported the licence plate

H20GATE. In the comic, he’s traded the car for a motorbike which he

drives with action-hero adeptness.

Even with at least three laser sights locked on his dome, Liddy can observe a moment of silence for his dead homies.

Hey, what’s a right-wing action hero comic without a little dig at gun control? Or, for that matter, France?

The real G. Gordon Liddy would never touch a French gun!

No matter where you live in the political spectrum (see this map of where I live in Politopia, according to their quiz), I’m sure you’ll find this comic, Liberality for All, entertaining reading.

If you didn’t like the comic — or at least not in the way its creators

probably intended — hey, good for you. You are probably free of head

injury.

Here’s an article which ran in last Thursday’s Financial Post: Tucows Milking the Internet, which is subtitled “Now it just needs to get investors interested”.

I’m not so crazy about the photo that accompanies the article. It’s

of my boss’ boss and occasional giver-of-special-assignments-to-me,

Elliot Noss:

It’s an odd photo. Elliot seems to be saying “As a matter of fact,

there just happens to be a small part in my movie that’s just perfect

for you. Why don’t you sit over here, where we can talk about it in

further detail…”

Silly stuff aside, the article will provide a quick overview of what it is Tucows does:

Tucows’ domain name business accounts for about 85% of annual sales,

which were US$44.7-million in 2004 compared with US$37.1-million in

2003. The company has operating income of US$2.14-million in 2004,

US$931,735 in 2003 and an operating loss of US$979,747 in 2003. So far

this year, the company has posted nine-month revenue of US$35.9-million

and operating income of US$1.3-million.

David Shore, an analyst at Desjardins, has this to say about our blogging tool, Blogware:

“Blogging has taken the world by storm but the big challenge from a

business perspective is how you make money off it,” Mr. Shore said.

“We

think Tucows might have come up with a way to make money from the

growth of blogs by providing blog capabilities to service provider

partners who bundle it or sell it to customers. To participate in one

of the top three hot trends in the Internet and make money off it is a

good thing.”

Another goodie of ours that the article mentions in passing is Email Defense,

our anti-spam solution. I’ve got it hooked to up my work email account,

and despite the fact that my email is published on this blog (currently

ranking within the top 1000 at Technorati), my spam is down to a

trickle.

(Don’t get the joke? See here, here and here.)

I’d write more, but dinner beckons. I’ll simply say that you can expect more election-related postings starting tomorrow and running right up to the big day, Monday, January 23rd, 2006.

Here’s something fascinating yet spooky: the newly-elected Polish government has opened its military archives from the days of the Warsaw Pact, which includes a 1979 scenario called “Seven Days to the River Rhine” based on the ridiculous assumption that NATO would be the aggressor in a nuclear exchange. Here’s a map that outlines the scenario…

According to the Telegraph:

Radek Sikorsky, the Polish defence minister, displayed a map of USSR strikes which shows a barrage of Soviet multi-megaton nuclear strikes on key river lines, including the Rhine and the Meuse, and a Nato counter strike with smaller more accurate nuclear warheads on the Vistula as it runs through Poland.

The Nato strikes are supposed to have been mounted to interdict the movement of Soviet reinforcements from Russia to the battle front.

The whole scheme, codenamed Seven Days to the River Rhine, is predicated on the idea that Nato would be the aggressor and that the Warsaw Pact, under Soviet control, would respond only in self-defence.

Yeah. Right.

Sikorsky didn’t consult with Moscow before opening the archive, which is sure to ruffle some feathers in Russia. In an article in The Independent, who covered the event in the sensationalistically-titled Soviet Plans to Annihilate Europe Revealed, Sikorsky is quoted as saying:

“We need to know about our past. Historians have the right to know the history of the 20th century. If people did some things they were not proud of, that will be an education for them too.

I think it is very important for a democracy for the citizens to know who was who, who was the hero and who was the villain. On that basis we make democratic choices.

I think it is also important for the health of civic society for morality tales to be told: that it pays to be decent and that if you do things that did not serve the national interest, one day it will come out and you might be called to account.”