Archive for August 2010

Eat Pray Love: My word

August 12, 2010 Entertainment, Personal 3 comments
Amusing Muses

Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert

Wednesday night I saw Eat Pray Love in a sneak preview. I haven’t been able to get through the book (I gave up two years ago somewhere in India), but was looking forward to the film nonetheless.

In Italy, Liz and her friends are discussing their word — the word that sums them up best.

Liz’s first attempt at her word was mine too.

“Writer.”

“That’s what you do. Not what you are,” one of her Italian friends cautioned her.

But that’s what I am, I thought silently at the screen.

Wednesday night I lay in bed pondering what my word was. All the words that came to me were action words, description words. None of them really rang true.

Waking up this morning, I had a mind to open the dictionary and start going through it — from the beginning — searching for my word. And then I realized how that just defeated the point.

I don’t know what my word is. Not yet.

I know it’s not writer or sister or daughter or friend or girlfriend, either.

I wonder if, like Liz, my word exists in another language that when translated to English is a phrase.

I also wonder if not having a word makes me empty, or means I don’t really know myself after all. I also wonder if it’s harder for one to find the word that best describes them, but others know it.

So I leave it up to you, blogosphere: Do you have an idea as to what my word might be? And why? Do you have a word that best describes you? What is it and why? Leave your answers in the comments, I’m curious.

(Photo of Elizabeth Gilbert courtesy of jurvetson on Flickr. Find more of his photos in his photostream).

What happened to the “real news?”

August 11, 2010 Media One comment

As I sat down to watch the 6 p.m. news Tuesday night, I was happy to be away from the Internet for awhile.

Away from Steven Slater. Away from Dry Erase Girl. Away from Chicken McNugget Freakout.

So imagine my horror when Steven Slater was promoed in the introduction to the newscast — a local newscast. And how was it promoed? They sent a reporter around retelling the story to people to get their reactions.

You’ve got to be kidding me (oh and for good measure, Chicken McNugget Freakout was in their “world” news).

I know television news is having trouble staying afloat during the recession — after all, advertising is down for them, too. But this made me shake my head. I only felt a little bit worse when I saw on Twitter that both these stories were also on my national newscast.

The biggest problem I have with this is why stuff like this is taking up valuable airtime and taking time away from an actual story. My local newsman could have been out trolling the streets for a real story (after all that Rob Ford parody site was shut down on Tuesday, perhaps that could have been looked into or what about the Hamilton Tiger-Cats threatening to leave Hamilton and the city council vote that could push them out the door that was going on?).

I watch my local news to see what is going on in my city. Not to watch people in my city describe what someone else did in another city the day before!

Perhaps that’s what really irks me about the situation: Slater’s tantrum happened on Monday. Unlike newspapers, TV news comes out the same day events happen (that’s their “advantage”). So why is local news still talking about it? Mention Slater got bail, but don’t send one of your few reporters around the city retelling the tale.

Newspapers may not know how to work the Internet into their business model, but TV news is even worse. They tend to play videos that are a hit online just because (a few weeks ago I saw a goal celebration video on the news that I had already seen on the Internet the week before).

It’s about repackaging content. And perhaps I am just too tuned into the online world and the real world to fall for such shenanigans, but it get shameful when “stories” like these two take up valuable airtime from other newsier items of the day.

Thank god Dry Erase Girl is a hoax, maybe that means I won’t be seeing her on tonight’s 6 p.m. newscast. Or perhaps it means I will.

Quitters aren’t heroes

August 10, 2010 News commentary 5 comments

Update: Gawker reporters there is no Jenny. My original post remains below.

It’s been quite a week for dramatic exits when it comes to quitting your job.

First, JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater decided he had enough after being hit on the head with some luggage and being yelled at by passengers. He quit his job by yelling obscenities over the airplane intercom, followed by deploying the plane’s emergency slide, grabbing a beer and taking off.

And became an Internet hero.

Then on Tuesday, “girl quit” and “dry erase” became two of Twitter’s top-trending topics thanks to the girl who allegedly quit her job via messages written on a dry erase board about her boss which she allegedly emailed to the entire company (I saw alleged, because this is the Internet, so you never know).

And now she has been crowned the Internet’s latest hero.

In the span of 24 hours, the discussion has gone beyond whether the flight attendant was right to quit the way he did (the Star‘s Jim Byers argues that airline passengers are too entitled nowadays). Instead, what we should be discussing is whether either of these “heroes” should have done what they did.

Resignation letters are so 2009.

When Conan O’Brien decided to leave the Tonight Show instead of have it pushed back, he went on a parade of anti-NBC comments for his final shows. The network ignored it, and Conan was a hero to the common man.

But everyone seemed to remember that “normal” people shouldn’t do such things when it comes to leaving their jobs. For one, a lot of industries are small nowadays and word gets around. And you never know when you might need a reference from that horrendous employer you trash-talked before.

Which brings us to the great Quit-gate of 2010.

Why are these people heroes? Slater took a beer from the plane and took off driving. Which is a crime. (Slater was later arrested for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment). As for Dry Erase Girl? We don’t even know her name — so at least she’s being smart about that but her pictures are all over the Internet, and the Internet never forgets.

Behaviour like this should not be rewarded. We should not be commenting about how great these people are because of these Internet memes. The flight attendant will likely never work in the airline industry again (even if he wanted to). Both him and Dry Erase Girl will have to overcome being these Internet memes when it comes to getting a new job.

Sure, we all want to stick it to the man. And so when we see someone else do it, we’re automatically in their camp. But there are limits when it comes to real life.

What both of these cases illustrate is just how selfish the human race has become. Am I defending the actions of the airline passengers that contributed to Slater’s tantrum? Not totally, but I’d be willing to wager the one who hit him in the head with their luggage didn’t mean to. And the ones who yelled at him are also illustrating how selfish we are as a society nowadays.

As for Dry Erase Girl? Work is called work for a reason. If she felt she was being sexually harassed at work for the way she looked, then there are avenues for that. Making a jackass of your boss to the world wide web is crossing a line and is (almost) no better than what he (allegedly) did to her.

So let’s nip this in the bud before it really gets ridiculous. End the quitting memes. Please. My Twitter feed appreciates it.

(Photo courtesy of Sighthound on Flickr. See more of his photos in his photostream.)

Why it’s a great time to be a Blue Jays fan

August 9, 2010 Sports 2 comments

The night the Blue Jays won the pennant
I was sitting in the second row
And I thought of you all throughout the game
And how we’d curl up on the sofa on a Friday night
And holler at the players
Like they could hear what we were sayin’

— Fallin’ by Bruce Guthro

Full disclosure: I am a Blue Jays fan first. Before the Ottawa Senators captured my heart, even before the Hamilton Tiger Cats made me fill with hometown pride, I have loved the Toronto Blue Jays.

It started when I was a kid. I would watch Friday night baseball games with my mother (the sports fan of the house). Baseball moved slow enough that I could follow what was going on. That was 1991.

We all know what came after.

First came 1992.

Then came 1993 — and Joe Carter:

Since then, we all know how the Blue Jays have fared. It’s been a long 17 years since that final win.

But I still loved them after.

The Jays get a lot of guff from this city and sports fans in general. No one really goes to games anymore (at the start of this season, nightly attendance dipped to just around 10,000 — in a stadium that has around a 50,000 capacity.

Travis Snider is one of the young Jays who has brought a lot to the franchise.

But here’s where everyone gets it wrong: This year, the Jays don’t suck. This year, the Jays are even more a victim of circumstance.

Their biggest hurdle to overcome is their division. And by their division I mean the Yankees and the Red Sox. Two of the American League’s top teams are in their division. If one doesn’t top the AL East, then it’s the AL’s wild card when it comes playoff time.

And yes, the Rays did it. They overcame the two AL East powerhouses — but their year just happened to come on a year the Yankees sucked. When will that ever happen again?

Even if you use the Rays argument as proof the Jays can overcome their division rivals, well now there’s three. Because the Rays continue to be at their top level.

Why don’t the Jays suck? A few recent reasons:

  • They have won five of their last six — against the mighty Yankees they took two of three, and they swept the Rays

    Attendance at the Rogers Centre this year has been dismal to say the least.

  • Saturday’s game: Rookie J.P. Arencebia in his first big-league at bat hit a homer. he went 4 for 5 on Saturday.
  • That whole game, the Jays alone hit eight homers as a team (they lead the league in home runs — a stat they have maintained all year).
  • Sunday’s amazing one-hit wonder by Brandon Morrow — one out away from being a no-hitter, but 17 strikeouts by this 26-year-old pitcher
  • They’re doing it all this year with no Roy Halladay — most people forgot about the Jays as soon as Halladay left for the Phillies.

If the Jays could get more guys on base, I have no doubt they could be leading their division right now. Yes, they lead the league in home runs, but most of those are solo homers — which doesn’t help the scoreboard.

And there’s still a remote chance they could make a playoff push. The majority of Toronto’s games for the rest of the year are against division rivals and they’re only eight games back from Tampa for the wild card. If they can take at least two out of three from Boston, they could make up even more ground.

In Toronto, it’s easy to say our sports teams suck. And a lot of times, they kind of do.

But as every kid is told, winning isn’t everything. Do I want to see the Jays bring home the World Series again? You betcha. But I had more fun this weekend watching the Jays than I have in a long time.

For a team that wasn’t supposed to do anything, it sure has done a heck of a lot this year.

(Photo of Travis Snider via tom sullivan on Flickr. See more of his images in his photostream. Photo of Rogers Centre via pechisbeque on Flickr. See more of his images in his photostream.)

The Not-So Secret Life of Bristol Palin

August 6, 2010 Media, News commentary 2 comments

Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are off again.

Don’t worry if you didn’t even know the two were on again — they got back together and split up faster than Ross or Rachel have on Friends.

I once thought it was impossible to make the story of a knocked up 17-year-old girl whose mother was running for vice-president of the United States for the Republican Party any sadder, but apparently there is. It’s the saga that is Levi and Bristol.

In 2008 when her pregnancy came out, I felt sad for poor Bristol. Sad that she had to suffer the weight of being pregnant before marriage in the public eye. Sad that she would never be able to raise that baby in peace — the press would hound her for years. And even sadder that now she was to marry the boy who knocked her up (after all, the marriage likely wasn’t because she wanted to, as much as she needed to accept the marriage as punishment for what she did).

But then Levi went all fame hungry, and Bristol played the teen single mom card. A few weeks ago, I read an interview with her in People magazine where she talked about how being a mom was, you know, like, hard, which made me find it hard to believe that Levi was the only one hungry for fame.

Really Bristol, you can go away now.

After all, Sarah Palin did not win the election and she resigned as governor of Alaska, so really there is no need for her daughter to still be making headlines by giving interviews. There is no need for Bristol to do an anti-teen pregnancy PSA. Or to be guesting on The Secret Life of the American Teenager (warning extremely BAD acting on that link — click on your own peril). Or charging at least $15,000 for public speaking engagement — I’m sorry what wisdom does Bristol possess that I would want, or need, to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hear?

Once upon a time, I felt bad for Bristol Palin. But not anymore. She may have been thrust into the media spotlight at a time when most teenage girls would rather not face the world, but now she demands it.

When her and Levi got re-engaged, the couple spilled all the deets to US Weekly (for the low price tag of $10,000 — I can’t imagine why anyone would think it was just a publicity stunt):

“I really thought we were over,” Levi tells Us Weekly. “So when I went, I had no hope. I think we both just started talking — and then we took Tripp for a walk.”

Says Bristol, “When he left that night, we didn’t hug or kiss, but I was thinking how different it was. He texted me: ‘I miss you. I love you. I want to be with you again’ … I was in shock.”

Gag.

And then this week, who gets the “exclusive” it’s over deets? People magazine, come on down:

And just like that, they were off again. “It’s over. I broke up with him,” Bristol Palin tells PEOPLE exclusively of her second try at an engagement to Levi Johnston, father of her 19-month-old son Tripp.

Palin, 19, says the relationship soured on July 14, the very same day they announced their marriage intentions to the world. Palin says he told her that evening he might have fathered a baby with another teenage girl.

This is worse than Days of our Lives.

The only person I feel sorry for in this whole charade is Baby Tripp who did nothing to deserve any of this. It would be one thing if Bristol and Levi were fighting over their son, but instead it appears the two of them are trying to outdo one another on extending their 15 minutes of fame.

Give me a break.

What we all should do is ignore all the forthcoming “news” from Bristol Palin and Levon Johnston. If you wouldn’t care about the intimate workings of the teenage couple down the street, then please, don’t care about these two. Don’t feed into their need to be famous.

Because there’s a baby involved in all of this. And one would hope he will grow up to be a wonderful person.

Even if his parents are limelight-loving, money-grabbing, publicity-seekers.

(Photo of Bristol Palin from chrisdat on Flickr. Check out more photos in chrisdat’s photostream).

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