A new porn channel was approved by the CRTC, the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission, a body normally responsible for ensuring that no-body inadvertently sees a-body. Who these people are, is anyone’s guess, but like its FCC counterpart in the US they’re the ones responsible for ‘calling fellatio a trouser-friendly kiss’ (click here for the engaging Family Guy FCC-slamming sing-a-long) and generally looking out for our best interests, because as intelligent, capable human beings we are unable to do so. As such, their granting of a license to Northern Peaks (Twin Peaks an obvious copyright violation) is quite surprising and represents a slight easing of their normally clenched buttocks.

This development, not surprisingly, has run afoul of certain ‘old media‘, as hemorrhoid-courting bluenoses who haven’t gotten their laps wet since someone tipped over a coffee mug, are again sounding the alarm over this ‘abomination’.

Unlike old media, pornography has changed and adapted to new systems of delivery and getting one’s innards in a knot over some channel nobody will watch, is akin to the FAA focusing their efforts on hang-gliding, rather than passenger jets. In case they didn’t get the memo, a charmingly dated phrase that unfortunately isn’t as far as many of these people are concerned: the vast majority of people get their porn online.

So-called ‘direct correlations between crimes of rape’ and the proliferation of pornographic materials argument is an incredibly patronizing non-starter, as, just like horror films, pot, or violent video games, etc, the overwhelming majority consume them safely and without ill effects.

The Calgary Herald even used the phrase ‘virtual reality’, a term you won’t have heard anywhere if you missed the release of The Lawnmower Man onto DVD, and advocates ‘writing to your own cable provider’ [name and address available on your monthly bill (!)] in protest.

Anyone in our demographic, that is to say, anyone familiar with the Interweb, sends one piece of mail per year and it’s not even a letter: It’s a tax form, and even that has gone by the wayside the more people file online.

The only thing left for them to scream about (and this is the only time many of them will even get to use that tone of voice) is policing the internet, whenever they get around to discovering its existence–say, 12-15 years from now.

So, a round of applause (or the sound of one hand clapping) in welcoming Northern Peaks to Canadian television, and kudos for not using that semi-aquatic rodent in your application.

[Editor’s Note: Welcome to TheSharkGuys on Wordpress. We’re still going through some transitional pains, so please bear with us. We apologize for any inconvenience, but we assure you that we have forsaken our union-mandated coffee breaks and all will be sorted out soon. ]

We have on occasion blogged about the wackier side of drunk driving, but for the most part we’ve opted for boozing insanity that didn’t involve automobiles for fear of upsetting those killjoys over at Mother’s Against Drunk Driving. But in this instance we just couldn’t resist.

A French journalist (that this was his profession is the only unsurprising part of this story) was arrested for drunk driving after police spotted him veering along a country road in the wee small hours of the morning. He was with his photographer, who owned the car. Being inebriated didn’t help his reflexes on the road, what compromised them even further was the fact that he lacked sight and we don’t mean insight, or vision for the future, but the actual ability to discern objects and light.

The journalist and the photog had been out tilting them before the blind man made the request. “I really wanted to do it (drive the car),” the blind man told the court. “I expressed this wish. He (the owner of the car) agreed.”

The owner is one of the nicest – or least sane – drunks we’ve read about. He agreed to let the blind man take the wheel, saying that once he did, he saw “a lot of happiness emanating from him.”

The driver later told the judge that he had one hand on the handbrake and the other on the steering wheel and that he was “very concentrated on the road.”

The judge, a sane person, told the car’s owner that his state of intoxication “didn’t make you a very reliable monitor”.

The judge fined the pair of them. Inspiration for the plan appears to have come from the blind journalist’s previous experience getting behind the wheel of a car on a closed circuit. It was not reported whether the sentencing was conditional on the journalist keeping to these sorts of courses and the bumper cars at the carnival.

****/5

Bob Dylan, Copps Coliseum, Hamilton Ontario August 20, 2008

“Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before”

Dylan might be haunted by his musical past, but as he nears closer to the Heaven in the song, (or its counterpart, reserved for musicians, even those who’ve given us Time out of Mind) he’s embraced it—though not warmly. Continuing to delight in undermining his audience’s expectations, he forges ahead on this long and lonesome road, playing to packed houses of fans, the majority of whom, by all accounts, haven’t made the musical journey with him beyond Highway 61 Revisited.

Those who have though, were the sizable contingent of those (mostly younger) who warmly welcomed newer material with which their parents were less than familiar like Thunder on the Mountain, a rollicking stand-out, or the stunning When the Deal Goes Down (“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours. That keep us so tightly bound”), maintaining a generation gap that went beyond the choice of intoxicants and demonstrating that the true measure of any performer is a multi-generational legacy that isn’t a chaperoned minivan accompaniment to a Jonas Brothers scream-fest.

Dylan and his entirely capable matching Zorro-chapeau (and confederate army doppelganger) backing band, was positively energized with this newer material, with Bob even doing a half-jig, or stretching out one leg, than the other, depending on how you look at it, as they blew a hole through Rollin’ and Tumblin’, transferring kinetic energy into stand-outs Highway 61 and Stuck Inside of Mobile.

Nashville Skyline’s Girl from the North Country, was virtually unrecognizable without Johnny Cash’s canyon baritone, as were other muddled classics reverberating in the home of the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey team, where some songs were only decipherable by snippets of chorus. Just Like a Woman, with her ‘fog, her amphetamine and her pearls’ became a peppy, creepy crowd sing-a-long, with a Copps Coliseum capacity breaking into song as she broke like a little girl. A set list heavily weighted toward the gorgeous Modern Times, Ain’t Talkin’ was less moody than the album version, (carryin’ a dead man’s shield), probably not a bad thing in a Blackberry-back lit stadium setting and clocking in at nearly 10 minutes.
A considerable increase in volume accompanied the twin crowd pleasing encores Like a Rolling Stone and a heavily staccato keyboard All Along the Watchtower, which closed the show, one could say in Dylanesque fashion—with the house lights coming up after a significant delay, and much second guessing about whether another song was forthcoming.

For those of us who grew up in the West, ping-pong occupies a place somewhere below darts and above foosball and seems fit mostly for suburban basements and the rec-rooms of rehab centers. It is the kind of sport that causes us to use our hands to make air quotation marks when we use the term “sport” to refer to it.

But, of course, these perceptions are cultural. Soccer, or football, which people across huge parts of the world follow like a religion (the kind where attendance is not falling off and you can gamble on the outcome of the service) barely registers a blip on the radar in North America compared to other major league sports and is most enthusiastically enjoyed by pubescent teens, most likely because all of that endless running back and forth over a mile-long field is a needed distraction from the raging hormones that would otherwise win the day. Baseball, referred to as America’s national past-time, likewise is called rounders (or a form close enough to it is) in Britain and it really isn’t taken seriously outside the schoolyard.

And so it is with ping-pong. While we in the West might think little of the game, with a ping-pong table serving as a convenient shelf for a pack-rat’s junk in a cluttered basement, it is the national sport in China and is popular throughout much of East Asia (though this popularity doesn’t seem to have spread to Bangkok, where “ping-pong” carries an entirely different connotation altogether). So, “Balls of Fury” is not absurd because it treats ping-pong as a sport of consequence. In almost every other respect, however, “Balls of Fury” is completely absurd.

The central character is Randy Dayton (Dan Fogler), a table-tennis prodigy at the age of 12, who loses a showdown in the ’88 Olympics, which were actually the first games to feature ping-pong as an official sport – one nod to reality from the film-makers. He loses to Karl Wolfschtagg who, as you can no doubt ascertain from the name, is a crazed East German stereotype. (Incidentally, this character is played by the film’s co-writer Tom Lennon, making “Balls of Fury” the first movie to my knowledge to be co-written by someone playing an ethnic stereotype.)

Randy’s loss is bad news for his degenerate gambler of a father (Robert Patrick of “Terminator 2”) who bet heavily on the game with the Chinese triad, is unable to make good on the debt and is killed so quickly that neither the audience nor his own son really seems to give too much of a hoot about him after that; when Randy delivers the line “You killed my father” later in the movie, those words could have been replaced by “I was saving that doughnut” and have had the same emotional impact. The man who did the dirty on his father, a criminal mastermind called “Feng” played by Christopher Walken, is the film’s main villain and this no-expense-outlaid setup “makes it personal”.

Knowing Randy’s history with Feng, an FBI agent looking to break into a secret ping-pong tournament that Feng is holding, and also somehow disband an illegal gun-running ring, (or was it a panda-smuggling operation, or a gigolo circuit? This is the kind of movie where such details fade from memory as soon as you learn them) and of course he wants Randy to serve as his ticket into this criminal underworld by playing ping-pong till he’s so good that no underground ping-pong championship would be worth the price of the paddles without him.

When digesting this utterly ludicrous plot, it helps if you’ve seen “Enter the Dragon”, and recognize that all major plot points derive from that film (the title of course is a play on another Bruce Lee film “Fists of Fury”). Robert Ben Garant who wrote and directed the film, admitted as much to KungFuMagazine.com, saying film-makers “took all the kung fu out of a kung fu movie and replaced it with ping-pong”.

And whether or not “The Karate Kid” is considered by anyone to be a classic or even a part of the Kung Fu genre, it too is parodied here, with James Hong (an accomplished character actor, though I recognized him immediately as the unhelpful host in the classic “Seinfeld” Chinese restaurant episode. Cartwright! Cartwright!) in the Mister Miyagi role as “Blind Master Wong”, passing on the secrets of ping pong and acting as the foil for about five more gags involving blindness than would have been advisable.

The makers of this one seemed to have been operating on a few basics. They liked kung fu movies, rock and roll and attractive Asian women (they would, no doubt, feel at home among the ex-pat population of Bangkok). The plot and a couple of rocking interludes involving ‘80s rock band, and suspected “This is Spinal Tap” inspiration, Def Leppard, take care of the first two. Maggie Q, who plays Wong’s niece and Randy’s romantic interest in an unbelievable development that comes out of the clear blue sky, takes care of the third. She provides the movie’s main Kung Fu scene and also makes the best use out of ping-pong’s infamous short-shorts, last seen on the big screen in the opening scenes of the “Borat” movie.

And there’s a conclusion to all of this that involves a ping-pong tournament, male sex slaves, a panda and Christopher Walken in what might have been an offensive portrayal of a Chinese man, had it not been placed in this absurd context. It is the film’s sheer absurdity, and general good natured feel that puts it in the company of movies like “Death Race 2000” (thought that was a better “B”), where to critique it too heavily for its shortcomings seems to miss the entire point and spoil the fun.

Noel, Bangkok

From where we sit, Nascar seems like it’s all about drinking beer while screaming your head off, while agreeing during more somber moments that Dale Earnhardt was a saint who walked the earth and we’ll never see his likes again on this terrestrial sphere. It seems like good fun – apart from that last bit – and preferable to Indy Racing with its loud noise and endless confusing laps of cars whipping by while you struggle to steady your drink from the vibrations.

We’ve never attended a Nascar event, but we’re guessing that if you were to look for a beer at one, you wouldn’t have too much difficulty tracking one down. This is doubly true if you’re performing in front of a Nascar audience. Presumably you’d get a cooler full.

In a case of idiocy instantly corrected, singer Pat Green asked the crowd at a Michigan International Speedway Nascar event: “Anybody got a beer?”

Inviting projectiles from the audience at any concert ever could be suicidal – indeed, if he regularly dresses like he does in the attached photo, one can picture attending his concerts with a basket brimming with tomatoes at the ready – but to ask for beer from an audience chock full of people drinking so much that piles of tins collect at their feet, well that’s just a step beyond.

Green got his wish. One audience member tossed him a beer – the one he saw coming – and another was fired in immediately after, beaning the new country singer right between the eyes and knocking him out cold. The concert was concluded, the beer, presumably, unopened.