We’re getting ready to head off to Vegas.  Doc has put ME in charge of making sure we don’t get roofied.  I’m torn between pointing out to him that The Hangover was fictional, and being offended that he doesn’t consider me to be the likeliest candidate to actually put roofies in his drink.  I don’t think that’s the biggest worry though – I’m concerned about accidentally ordering a hooker by saying the wrong catch phrase to the wrong person.

     At any rate, this will be  my last post for a week, and I’d like this one to be up for the week – the 24 Hours of Homelessness event is coming up next Thursday.  On the William Street mall (near the Sugar Mountain, just off Rideau Street), from 4:00 Thursday to 4:00 Friday, I will be sleeping outside to raise money and awareness for Operation Come Home.

     I don’t know who’s going to be joining me this year, but usually some college kids and intrepid OCH volunteers join me, and I’m sure this year will be no exception.  We spend the 24 hours outside, trying to draw attention to the fact that on any given night in Ottawa, 100 street youth will have to do the same, whether it’s wet, snowy or bitterly cold.

     Any donations to Operation Come Home can be made by clicking that link, and be sure to tune in to the Doc and Woody show Friday morning, as I will be waking up on the street, trying to gather my thoughts and doing my best to speak through the cold in order to make sense on the radio.

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    I know a lot of you clicked on this link hoping for pictures of women in bikinis.  I am sorry.  But I do hope that you stick around to watch this video, which is totally amazing.  Here is the greatest rally I have ever seen in sports.

     Another bonus here – this will be the only post about sports you will see all weekend that doesn’t mention Tim Tebow in any way.  Oh.  Oops.

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     Frederica Sagor Maas (Freddie Maas in many of her credits) died just before New Years at the age of 111.  One hundred and eleven.  Years old.  She was maybe the last survivor of Hollywood’s silent movie era, where she was a screenwriter for films such as Greta Garbo’s Flesh and the Devil and Norma Shearer’s His Secretary and The Waning Sex.  She also wrote The Rolled Stockings, The Way of All Flesh and The Plastic Age.

     Weird how silent movie titles from the 20s could easily work as porno titles today, huh?

     Anyway, I think the coolest thing about Maas, (and the reason I’m writing about her at all) is that she was pretty badass!  She had to write mostly “flapper” comedies with Clara Bow and Betty Grable because the studio honchos figured that was all a woman could do.  She and her husband, Ernest Maas, became a fairly prolific writing team, but studios wouldn’t take anything of substance from them.

     They continued writing after the silent era, doing a few talkies through the 30s and 40s.  Finally, in the late 40s, Maas wrote a deeply personal, powerful movie script about womens’ struggles.  Hollywood took that script and turned it into the fluffy, utterly vacuous musical The Shocking Miss Pilgrim starring Betty Grable in 1947.  Freddie Maas had had enough, gave the finger to the whole industry and quit in disgust.

     The industry was a little sour about that.  So even though she was out of Hollywood by 1950, they still had her interrogated by the FBI for suspected communist activities, and she and her husband were placed on the Hollywood blacklist.  This is 1950 now, she was already fifty years old.  And she had another 61 years to live.

     So what do you do?  Well, she wrote.  And in 1999, at age 99, she published her autobiography, called The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood.  It was a tell-all book about Hollywood in the 20s, a scathing indictment of the vapidity of the industry, and a series of anecdotes about famous people that by then, almost no one remembered.

     Clara Bow once danced nude on a tabletop!  That would have been huge news in 1925…Jeanne Eagels pissing out in the open right there on the movie set…Louis B. Mayer being an insecure, pompous douchebag who was apparently disliked by every person he ever met…all of this was great – but sort of irrelevant as everyone else who had co-existed with these people was long dead.

     I just love someone who finally decides, at the age of 99, to unleash all of her bitterness toward the industry in a book.  And it makes me think that perhaps anger, bitterness and resentment are some of the keys to a long life – the other Hollywood writer-director that comes to mind when I think of centenarians is Leni Riefenstahl, the controversial Nazi film-maker who bitterly raged against her critics until her death at the age of 101. 

     By this logic, I think a couple of people who post on our facebook page will live a heck of a long time!

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     I spent much of my Christmas vacation lying on my favourite chair and not moving around much.  I wrecked my back, you see, carrying a giant box of fire logs on a tiny patch of ice.  So having lost much of my ability to move, I was fairly stationary.  But antsy, because I hate not doing stuff.  So I perfected Word Mole on my wife’s blackeberry.  Then I watched the entire PBS documentary series on American Presidents…again.  Then I ruined Christmas.

     Now, I must say I didn’t ruin eveyone’s Christmas.  Just my own.  See, I had just received the fourth season of Jersey Shore, sent to me by Paramount Home Entertainment for Cynical Cinema.  And I put it in my DVD player.  And I watched it.  The first episode was about the Jersey Shore gang travelling to Italy.  Snooki and Deena seemed a little confused about which country was the one shaped like a boot – it was either Italy or Europe, they figured.

     So they douchebagged their way to Italy (by way of Europe, no doubt), and got unpacked.  I had worked out a little beer cooler beside my chair, which helped me get through the plane ride.  In much the same way, it appeared that alcohol had helped Snooki and Deena through the same plane ride, as they kept falling down in the airport with stacks of luggage around them.

     Things started to get interesting/perplexing during Beer #2.  Mike “The Situation” confided to Ron that he and Snooki had been intimately involved a few weeks earlier, and then drunkenly professed his love to Snooki herself.  This confused me.  What rational person, drunk or otherwise, would ever admit to having had sex with Snooki?  And even more so, who would ever make an attempt at a relationship with this sloppy drunken troll?  None of this made any sense.

     Then I got to thinking.  Maybe there was another explanation.  Maybe the producers of the show decided there hadn’t yet been enough drama, and asked the Situation to do something stupid to create some.  But that didn’t make sense, because in the next episode Ronnie and Sam started getting back together.  So that must have been what the producers asked the cast to do in order to create drama and fights.

     Then I thought, cynically, that the Situation was just trying to increase his own fame – see, he and Snooki are the two biggest names from the Jersey Shore cast, and if they became a celebrity power-couple, like they combined forces to become the Snookuation or something, they could make more money in the offseason.  But that seemed unlikely.  Deena’s drunken move to have sex with some blond girl in episode three was more obvious as an attention-grabbing move.

     On episode #4, beer #4, I started to think that maybe I was approaching this all wrong.  Maybe the Situation IS as dumb as he appears.  And maybe he believes that Jersey Shore is actually reality television.  And maybe he thinks all reality TV is like Survivor.  And perhaps he thinks that, like on Survivor, you have to be the biggest douchebag in the gang to win the $1 million?

     I noticed that a lot of the cast members say “right now” or “at this moment” a whole lot.  Like, they will say “I’m just not equipped to deal with this right now”.  Or “I’m just an idiot at this moment”.  It seems to me if they could just remove those two expressions from their vocabulary, they would unwittingly be speaking a whole lot more truth.  I began to sink into a deep depression.

     It then occurred to me that every girl the guys were picking up was American, living in Italy.  The dirty booty call chick, the two slutty blonde twins, all of them!  I once told my buddy Kent that he would never have sex with a girl who spoke English, because she would be able to understand what he was saying, and he would never get laid.  He married a Japanese woman.  It’s the opposite for the Jersey Shore idiots – they can only pick up American girls, because they are the only ones who know these morons are celebrities, and this might get them on TV! 

     When the two hot blonde twins came back to their house to have sex with several of them, I asked my wife to bring me some cyanide.  It turns out we didn’t have any.

     Finally, mercifully, the first disc was almost over.  The pain was about to end, since I was definitely NOT going to get up and put in the second disc.  Episode #4 was almost done, and beer #6 as well.  By now, every person in the house hated the Situation.  This created a dilemma for me.  So…do I now like him?  Is the enemy of my enemy my friend…or my enemy?  I felt like Wesley Snipes in Blade II.  The beer and painkillers helped me think this way.

     Then just as I was about to stop the first disc, the Situation and Ronnie started a fight!  A fight that was going to take place…in the next episode.  On the next disc.  And…I got up.  And I put in the next disc.  And my back screamed at me.  My brain screamed at me.  My wife screamed at me.  My self-esteem screamed at me.  Even my beer started to think I was less of a man.  And it was right.

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     I could write a really long paragraph explaining why this happened.  Or I can just post the picture.

     If you really need the details, and can’t just enjoy this picture for what it is, click here.

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     I came across an article today that said Santas are now being trained to lower the expectations of children when it comes to what gifts they are going to get.  An example – if a kid asks for an iPad, what Santa is supposed to say is “oh, I wish you hadn’t asked for THAT.  See, the elves who are supposed to be building the iPads can’t stop playing with them, and they’re getting no work done!”

     There was also supposed to be a long, convoluted explanation of the elves working in Building A and Building B and Building x-12 or something.  Whatever.  I think this is the wrong way to go about it – and having now played Santa at one kids’ Christmas party here at work, I think I am qualified to give some advice to all those taking to the malls and street corners this year.

1.  Concession creates credibility

     See, some kids are going to be inherently skeptical about Santa – they have likely heard from some jerk in their class or some other kid somwhere that Santa is not real.  There is an easy way to fix that, and have them believe again – you concede that not all of the Santa legend is true, which creates believability in all other parts of the Santa legend.  Memorize the following:

     “Mrs. Claus? Oh, I’m afraid Mrs. Claus is just a myth.  She was invented by a consultant, funded by Coca-Cola and Hallmark, and approved by a focus group who felt that I would be more marketable if I were seen to be married.  In reality, Santa’s a swinging bachelor.  Can you introduce me to your mom?”

2.  Collectivism is the key to consistency

     Kids should probably feel as though they, too, are a part of Santa’s world.  And to them, Santa’s world is the same one inhabited by elves, flying reindeer, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.  Try to take a holistic approach, and emphasize the inter-connectedness of all these things.  Memorize this:

     “Elves? There are more and more kids in the world, so we need more and more elves every year. You know those rabbits that lay eggs at Easter? They are employed by the Easter Bunny, who takes the eggs kids don’t eat and delivers them to me at the North Pole.  The eggs are then incubated through the summer by the reindeer, and in September they hatch into elves who are then up and building toys within a week.”

3.  Corroborate the collective

     Kids have surely seen other Santas at other locations. Some are fatter than you.  Most are thinner.  Some have long white beards, others more closely cropped.  The worst thing you can do (other than using the word “elf” and the word “sweatshop” in the same sentence) is to fail to acknowledge the existence of those other Santas.  Memorize this:

     “Yes, there are many individual Santas, all over Ottawa and, indeed, all over the world!  But while we are individual beings with our own hands and feet and boots and hats, we are still one entity.  All Santas in the world belong to what we call a “collective”, and we share a single purpose and a single consciousness.  Just like the Borg on Star Trek.”

4.  Cancel the calculations

     Some of the smarter children will realize that the logistics of a single Santa delivering toys to every kid in the world on a single night are astronomical.  They might even tell you some of the math – “you would have to travel four million times the speed of light”, or something to that effect.  Don’t try to figure that out.  Don’t even attempt to explain time zones and stuff like that, it’ll just screw you up and make you look dumb.  And Santa is not dumb.  So, if the Borg explanation doesn’t convince them, have this memorized as a backup:

     “Well kid, you see, Santa doesn’t actually deliver to every kid in the world.  I deliver only to the kids (like you) in countries I like.  In other countries, someone else brings the gifts. Like Father Christmas in the UK. Or Pere Noel in France and Quebec.  There’s St. Nicholas in Holland, and the Three Kings in most of South America and parts of Europe.  In Italy, a nice old witch named La Befana does the deliveries, in Germany it’s an angel.  In Syria, we use a really, really smart camel.  Russia is a country SO big it needs TWO delivery people – Babouschka, who’s an old grandmother, and Grandfather Frost, her husband.  And in Guatemala, gifts are brought to children by some dude named Jesus.”

5.  Conclude convincingly.

     You are sure, at some point, to get the question “Santa, do you really eat all those cookies and drink all that milk?”  It is now time to end the session.  Memorize this:

     “Yes. But I really would rather have something else waiting for me. Can you introduce me to your mother?”

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     I came across this today, thought I’d share it – these are the real streets from famous album covers, from the vantage point of google street-view.  I can’t put them into this post, so you can see them by clicking this link.  Very cool stuff!

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     I don’t have the first clue WHY this exists…I guess it’s a promo for the upcoming UFC event December 10th in Toronto – UFC 140 will pit Jon Jones against Lyoto Machida.  But whoever dreamed it up was just bonkers enough to actually do it, and I came across it because I have a “google alert” set up for Steven Seagal.

     And…there you go.  UFC 140 – complete with karate kid crane kick and a peacefully pleased Steven Seagal.

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     Virgins creep me out.   I don’t mean virgins who, through social ineptness or a lack of opportunity have remained virgins for years.  No, I mean virgins who have chosen to remain chaste and untouched throughout their whole lives until marriage.  Not only does it smack of an irritating self-martyrdom, it’s probably the most impractical idea when it comes to having a long, happy life and relationship.

     Now, some of you may be saying “that’s awful!  I think it’s lovely when someone saves themselves for the perfect person and for marriage, and in no way is that creepy!”  Those of you saying that are, of course, wrong.  I defy you to watch this clip, of a married couple sharing their first-ever kiss in life, and NOT be a little creeped out.

     My skin crawled through that whole kiss.  Gross.  This is a trailer for what promises to be the most awkward, cringe-worthy new reality show on TV, TLC’s Virgin Diaries.  Says a show’s spokesperson, “Virgin Diaries takes you inside the lives of adult virgins who reveal the challenges, truths and anticipations of losing their virginity.”

     This leads to three questions for me – first, if these people have worked so hard for so long to remain virgins because of some silly idea that it makes them better people, then how do they reconcile losing it on television?  Second, if the first kiss was this awkward, how painful will it be to watch the first sex?  And third, how long has it been since The Learning Channel forget that they have the word Learning right in their name?

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     There’s a baseball short story by W.P. Kinsella about a barnstorming baseball team that takes on the National League champions in an exhibition game.  They manage to keep pace with the big leaguers through nine innings, then ten, and eleven…the game is being controlled mystically somehow by a native shaman of some kind – every time the pros manage a run or two, the shaman tries just a little bit harder in the bottom of the inning, and the amateur team always manages to tie it up.  The game stretches on and on – the pro team never returns to the major leagues, obsessed as they are about winning the game, which lasts for months.

     I can’t remember the name of the story, and my half-assed google efforts haven’t managed to turn up a title either.  But it’s the kind of story, as Kinsella (Field of Dreams) wrote so often, that really illustrates the beauty of baseball – it’s a sport that theoretically could have a game that lasts forever.  Sudden death applies only to ONE team in baseball - the home team, who bats in the bottom of the inning.

     That was the kind of game we saw last night, one that reminded me of that Kinsella story.  (I’m sure someone remembers it, somewhere, and will correct me if I’m wrong on any of the details.  Or all of them.  I read it when I was nine years old or thereabouts.)  A three run lead in the eighth?  Should be insurmountable.  Two in the ninth?  Almost impossible.  Two in the tenth?  Who’s gonna overcome that twice?  No way.

     So twice, the Cardinals are down two, down to their last strike in the game, the season, the World Series.  And both times they come through to tie the game and push it onward – creating a game that not only felt like it would never end, but one that will certainly live forever in the memories of those who watched.

     But it wasn’t the two miraculous two-out two-strike game-tying hits, or even the walk-off bottom of the eleventh home run, that I will remember.  For me, one sequence of plays stands out for me in this game, one that should remind everyone of the beauty of baseball.  And it happened in the fifth inning of what was, in many respects, one of the sloppiest, most error-filled games I’ve ever seen.

     It’s the top of the fifth.  Leading off the inning is Josh Hamilton, who hits a shot way up into the sky, a pop-up to the left side of the infield.  He puts his head down and trudges toward first as David Freese settles under the pop fly, about to make a catch that is a sure thing even in beer league games and T-ball games around the world.  And he drops it.  This is where it all begins.

     Now, who’s the goat on this play?  Freese?  Maybe, but not right away.  Right away, the goat is actually Hamilton, who failed to put any effort into his run for first base, accepting the out without trying at all.  When the ball falls to the ground, Hamilton is standing at first.  With even a tiny amount of effort, he would be standing at second instead, in scoring position right away.  If the next batter hits a single up the middle, and the Rangers get no runs out of the inning, Hamilton is the goat, not Freese.

     Michael Young is the next batter.  Instead of a single, or a double that leaves Hamilton stranded at third, he smacks a triple down the right field line, scoring Hamilton easily.  Hamilton is now off the hook – he looks silly, but now Freese is the goat, as the Rangers are now ahead 4-3 and have scored what could be the go-ahead run in the Series clinching game thanks to the huge mistake by Freese.

     The Cardinals get out of that inning, and have given up only that one run.  They are still down 7-5 in the bottom of the ninth, and Freese remains the goat (or at least one of them – there were many mistakes), should they fail.  And he delivers the two-out, two-strike, two-run hit that ties the game.  Goat no more!

     Top of the tenth.  Josh Hamilton is up again.  The Rangers’ best player, the heart of the team, who had shown such a lack of heart back in the fifth.  And he becomes the hero with one swing of the bat, hammering a two-run shot to centerfield to give the Rangers back the lead, and likely to win the World Series.  But the Cards tie it up.

     And then it’s the bottom of the 11th, and it’s Freese again.  Benji Molina is more important to the Cards.  Albert Pujols remains the best and most feared hitter in baseball.  Lance Berkman has had a better game and more clutch hits, including the tenth inning two-out two-strike two-run hit.  But it’s Freese the hero.  It’s Freese with the eleventh-inning walk-off home run.  It’s Freese who will be remembered, and not for dropping a pop fly my kids would have caught.  That’s the beauty of baseball.  And that’s why this game was perfect.  Game seven tonight!

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