Happy Valentine’s Day! If you need a last-minute card for a special someone, try these ones, starring the rapper who knows love like no one else…Kanye West!
I just had to put this out there, because I can. This calls for a song by an appropriately-named band:
Funny ad placement of the day!
The Sun News Network — for those of you outside Canada, imagine FOX News, but with on-air personalities seemingly culled from a fifth-rate college’s Ayn Rand club and production values that made Wayne’s World’s basement show seem opulent — shut down after four years.
While it’s sad that 200 people are losing their jobs and it’s nice that many people in the same Canadian media who were often attacked by Sun News Network are offering kind words to them, let’s not mince words:
It was a shitty, shitty television station, and it deserved to go under.
It was available to 5 million households and on its best days could barely garner 8,000 viewers, which isn’t even two-tenths of a percent of their market. By the rules of the free market which they claim to hold dear, they should close up shop. Which they did, so hey, kudos to them for sticking to their guns!
Another area in which they were consistent was their “white makes right” messaging. They featured on-air “personality” Ezra Levant calling the Roma “a culture synonymous with swindlers … one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging”, which led to him having to make a rare and unconvincing apology, the usual diatribes against First Nations people, and of course, invectives against their favorite target, Muslims, with pieces like Islam’s War on the World, which attempted to paint 1.6 billion people with the same brush. And how can we forget this classic “whitesplaining” segment in which they had a bunch of white guys explain to a brown guy that there’s no such thing as white privilege?
They did try to make up for it in a follow-up segment by asking Desmond Cole, a black guest, to explain white privilege, but host Jerry Agar does an even better job of explaining it — inadvertently, by demonstrating that he’s got it in spades.
They knew how to sensationalize, as shown in this promo for their expose on — of all things — wind power:
They made their dislike of the arts and arts funding known, in the infamous Margie Gillis “ambush interview”. It led to nearly 7,000 complaints being filed with the CRTC, a number almost as large as their viewership:
They took the worst people in Toronto politics and gave them their own show, even if it lasted for just one episode:
Although they got few fans, the ones that they were able to get were really big ones. Here’s Sun News Network’s biggest fan from the U.S., and surprise, surprise — he’s from the worst state in the Union:
More recently, one of their reporters, Vandon Gene, crassly asked Anderson Cooper to pose for a photo with him at the scene of the Ottawa shooting, and threw a hissy fit when Cooper refused, reminding him that they were in a place where a soldier had just been killed:
Gene took the hissy fit to Twitter. He later deleted these tweets, but it was too late — people had already taken screen shots:
Sun News Network promptly fired Gene, who’s still carping away on Twitter and presumably embarrassing his schoolmates at Carleton University. (As we used to say at Queen’s: “If you can’t go to school, go to Carleton!”)
And finally, only a few months ago, a straight-up, cynical, bald-faced lie. I’ll let Jonathan Kay do the explaining:
This desperation to whip up outrage—any kind of outrage—within the Sun News audience community caused Sun producers to target dubious scare stories. One of the worst examples came on November 10, 2014, when the network began zeroing in on a single school board that, Levant claimed, was letting Muslim kids opt out of Remembrance Day ceremonies. The story wasn’t even true, but the network kept spinning it for another day or two simply because it had nothing else to put on the air.
Worse still, Sun News Network’s Ezra Levant continues to use the fake story, even though it’s been discredited, to drum up business for his online store selling T-shirts:
Of all people, Levant should know how wrong this sort of libel is, never when it’s used in the service of crass commercialism. But hey…it’s against people he doesn’t like, so that’s okay! And besides…CAPITALISM!
But after a long battle for viewers, an unsuccessful bid for “mandatory carriage”, and bleeding money, they closed their doors in every sense. On Friday the 13th, no less! If you tune into their channel slot right now, it now looks like this…
This is an opportunity to start that “All Beastmaster, all the time!” channel.
…and even their web presences — their site, Twitter account, Facebook page, and so on — have been yanked offline.
It’s my hope that the 200-ish people who worked at Sun News Network go on to find new jobs. Preferably real jobs where their efforts would go to making the world a better place, or at least where their talents for creating some of the most surreal television in Canada are applied in a more productive and beneficial direction. I hope that they capitalize on their downtime to think and reflect long and hard about what they’ve done.
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T minus one month!
This time next month, the hall will be empty, the guests will have already gone home (possibly with a little beach sand in their shoes), and The Future Missus will be The Missus. Looking forward to it.
“Florida feels like home,” says Brian Johnson, the man who’s fronted AC/DC since 1980, when he replaced their late singer Bon Scott and debuted with one of the all-time greatest albums in rock and roll, Back in Black. “When I go back to England, I feel like I’m visiting.”
He’s lived in Accordion State for a number of years, in some pretty posh locales. “I went to Fort Myers first and bought a place on the beach. It was to get away from the tax in England, as well. I wanted to live outside of England. The tax was just crippling, just ridiculous. Way above 50%.” Since then, he’s moved to the Sarasota area, to a house that’s known for having a great view and this bit of custom work in the back yard:
OF COURSE he has a guitar-shaped swimming pool.
The Sarasota Memorial Hospital has a room in its pediatrics department called the Brian Johnson Music Therapy Room. “It’s for sick children, terminal children. It’s to get them away from the shiny things, the scrubs, the rubber gloves and the needles. There’s guitars, keyboards, drums. Music is good for you.”
Here’s a news clip from 2008, when the room had its grand opening:
Sarasota’s just an hour and a quarter’s drive from Tampa, so there’s always a chance that we could jam:
(If you speak German, could you please provide a translation?)
Update: Rainer Brockerhoff to the rescue! He told me via Twitter that it translates as christmastreedecorationspecialtyshop.
Don’t you wish all government handbooks were set in Comic Sans
and had the word STUFF in all caps and quotes?
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Believe it or not, this is an official government handbook on the topic of one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in your life, and it’s set in Comic Sans. Comic effing Sans.
It’s also really more of a “What happens if you decide to end your marriage” book, and state law requires both parties getting married to read it before they’re allowed to get a marriage license. Again, I stress that this is a document that you are legally mandated to read, even though its poor choice of fonts and crappy clipart make it look more like a memo about proper use of the communal fridge at your office. Here’s a snippet:
Anitra and I had to read this poorly-designed, somewhat depressing document this morning, as we got our marriage license today, a month out from the big day. As we were paying the fee, two guys walked up to the booth beside us. They’ve been together for 22 years — that’s over four times the length of my previous marriage — and only now do they they have the legal right to get hitched. They raised their eyebrows at having to read this cheesy little book, and I said “It’s not too long. A bit of a bummer, but not long.” Later, when we got our license and made out way to the exit, they congratulated us and we congratulated them back.
If you’d like to read it for yourself, it’s posted online. Enjoy!