October 10, 2008 lists

As we noted in Part I of The Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy, nobody it seems, has the time to cook anymore. Yet somehow, cooking shows have seen a surge in popularity and have spread across the expanding cable universe like a grease inferno at a fireworks factory cook-off.

This undermines the claim by some that they cannot find time in their hectic lives to prepare meals for themselves, not to mention a few spare minutes to actually sit through one of those deadening phone surveys to say as much (and then voluntarily sounding off about their Tri-athlete prowess in the boudoir)

If aliens based their impressions of humanity solely on our viewing habits, they’d think mankind was populated by stay-at-home gourmands who’d make Gordon Ramsay look like a short-order cook at Maury’s Messy House of Meat. [Editor's note, for those of you moved to culinary space exploration by the Dining with the Stars tome, stay tuned for the Top 5 of this list]

Luckily for the tanking publishing business, there are people who actually do find the time to prepare meals, to offset that more common, grim reality: couples sitting on a couch with a microwavable Kung Pao chicken testing government suggestions on just how long food can be safely stored left in a greasy box in the fridge.

Whether they’re purchased as last-ditch attempts to impress the in-laws or as the first step in a diet that was abandoned in a Dairy Queen parking lot, the consumer appetite for fancy or celebrity-penned cookbooks remains far from sated, even if a common outcome is a lamb shank that has to be rolled in a blanket and stomped out.

Average Joes and Janes soon come to appreciate that the only thing they might have in common with a reality TV chef is a foul mouth and a fondness for the cooking sherry.

These days it seems that just like children’s books, anyone with a keyboard, a finger on each hand (or a sufficiently pointy nose), spousal income and a dream is penning a cookbook, and certain volumes, possibly because of afternoon naps taken during editorial meetings, have graced the market that have absolutely no business being there.

So on that note, kick back, neutralize that stomach acidity, grab that asbestos-lined Kiss the Cook apron, hit  mute on that gabby person on the Food Network and check out Part II of our Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks Money Can Buy, none of which will be reviewed in the pages of Fine Cooking Magazine any time soon!

5) Fanboy Cooking — Star Trek Cookbook, Wookie Cookies: a Star Wars Cookbook, Regional Cooking from Middle Earth: Recipes of the Third Age etc.: These works of varying artistic quality share certain commonalities. They all include otherworldly themes, unearthly locales and phantasmagorical characters, but what they really have in common, at least as far as the recipes are concerned: is a “serves one” portion size, as articulating any interest whatsoever in the above is akin to nose-hair curling BO when it comes to attracting a significant other (or at least a significant other who is not the mother the monthly rent check is made out to). They are for fanboys, a breed best exemplified by The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy character, and people so far into the alternate reality provided by these franchises that they show an interest in exactly how an elf would season a plate of ribs.

It’s well known that knowledge of kitchen topography beyond a direct arc to the fridge door to swill milk from the carton is a sure-fire way to impress the fairer sex. However, any apron-clad battle of the sexes advantage that might be accrued is unfortunately, completely neutralized by name-dropping a Romulan, Orc or a Wookie in casual conversation.

Regional Cooking from Middle Earth has an Amazon product description that is, well, of Tolkien length. It offers gems like “Mince meat pie is nicknamed for the Balrog because that’s probably what would go through your mind that you might become if you ran into him in the Mines of Moria” — references which if made in a bar, would have your interlocutor reaching for the mace in her purse.

In The Star Trek Cookbook, the question “Is there one food that humans, Klingons, Bajorans, and Vulcans would like?” is posed. If your eyelids droop at that question, welcome to the majority of the world, if not, you likely own this book, are speaking from the Klingon dictionary and are barbecuing outdoors wearing Captain Kirk’s new summer line.

4) Spam: The Cookbook Schopenhauer, the thinker, not the guy who might have tended goal for Germany in the last World Cup, once remarked, “If pigeons flew around already roasted, people would die of boredom or else hang themselves”, a remark that has yet to be adopted as the official slogan for the Food Network. While there is much joy inherent in having produced something yourself, even if it is roasting a pigeon, (a beast those of us who live in high rise apartment buildings were sad to see fall out of favor as an entrée), we’re fairly certain no good can come out of preparing any sort of repast using spam, or canned ham.

To the uninitiated, i.e., those of you who have not contributed to dotting landfills with what in 2002 amounted to 6 billion cans sold, the stuff is processed pork and so widespread, pun definitely intended, that it is even sold in a halal version permissible under Islamic law. The law it does violate though, is one of good taste and its presence here, ranked higher than both testicles and Wonderbread testifies to that.

Just Missed the Cut: Marmite: The Cookbook. Marmite, a British spread that resembles hot asphalt except that it doesn’t smell as good, has thankfully yet to find a home in cupboards on these shores—even cockroaches are put off by the stuff (Its Aussie cousin, Vegemite, has, to the best of our knowledge, yet to disgrace a cookbook and Shark Guy Chris Lombardo is currently rejecting offers to translate the Nutella Cookbook from Italian into English). According to the description, The Marmite Cookbook is chalk full of “Hilarious Marmite-related anecdotes”, which ranks somewhere slightly above “Droll orphanage fire wordplay.”

3) The What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook: A bizarre mixture of religious pandering (the S’s in Jesus’s name translate nicely into dollar signs as those who have found the right mix of piety and profit know) and the strangely popular theory that we somehow ate better 2,000 years ago when food preparation techniques consisted of some guy with lice wiping off a piece of fish on his filthy robe and handing it to you.

The book is a proponent of the belief that with heavily processed food not resembling anything remotely like food (see various items on this very list), that we would all be much better off eating the way people did in simpler, more plague-y times. While the idea that people should up the veggies and decrease the spam in their diets is generally accepted among those who can fit through their front doors, even the most devout Christians would likely balk at the diet actually observed in New Testament times, one that was equal parts starvation, intestinal parasites, and a grave before your 25th birthday.

To make up for this fatal flaw in his book’s premise, the author instead cherry-picks from all times of foods that have more to do with modern Mediterranean cuisine than anything that was likely to have been passed around at the last supper.  A more interesting premise would have been, “What would you eat if you were Jesus?” We’re not sure but we’d definitely be making hay with that water-into-wine bit.

2) Cooking with a Serial Killer: Recipes From Dorothea Puente: Dorothea Puente rented out rooms – both in a boarding house and in a home she owned – throughout the 1960s through to the 1980s. She was known to keep a clean house, buy the good stuff when it came to the toilet paper, and above all she was a tremendous cook. According to the product description of her book, one of her former tenants said that “Every meal she made was like a Thanksgiving dinner,” and much like after a Thanksgiving dinner, some of her tenants would fall asleep once the meal was complete. But these were not cranberry-debauched holiday slumbers; they were the kind from which you never wake up, i.e. death. Dorothea poisoned – or is alleged to have poisoned – at least nine people, and those are mostly just the ones dug up from her front yard.

While in prison, Dorothea began corresponding with an, ahem, journalist, telling him her life story and sending him her favorite recipes – sans poison we believe. The results were compiled in a collection that could only be surpassed if the Jeffrey Dahmer estate releases a posthumous tome containing his thoughts on proper refrigeration techniques.

1) Depression Era Recipes: Need a little something to nosh on while you watch the financial markets collapse? Well prepare to lick your chops as the author takes you back to the culinary highlights of an era when everything did turn to shit.

Who could this book appeal to? Those in the post-average life expectancy demographic perhaps, though they are unlikely to hold fond memories of times when the pet rabbit went into the supper pot – and they would certainly know the value of a dollar too well to sink 20 of them into the purchase of this book.

Choice Recipes: Not surprisingly, the recipes in this one are pretty basic – pickled fish, meatballs, government gruel (well, we’re not sure about that one but the other two were mentioned in reviews of the book) etc. The author decided not go with thematically named dishes such as Boxcar Rapist Ron’s Oil-Drum Top Surprise, and “That which is handed to you by a scraggly looking man with the fingers cut out of his gloves.”

An Amazon reviewer writes: “Many of the recipes don’t look appealing but it contains a lot of interesting facts about lifestyles in the 30s.” So, don’t look to this for recommendations on things to eat, but if you want to relive the highlights of one of the darkest periods in modern history, then this is the book for you. A new edition featuring “Sub-prime mortgage cheese melt,” and “Ben Bernake Baba Ganoush” may soon be in the offing.

Just Missed the Cut: Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner: Another book turning the page back to misery and asking the question: “But, like, were they eating anything good?” From its pages: “On the evening of April 14, 1912, few of the diners in the Titanic a la carte restaurant noticed that the vibrations of the ship’s engines had noticeably increased over the last few hours.”…Since the definitive ‘Light Snack Hors d’œuvres Aboard the Hindenburg’ has yet to be penned, you can go down with your own ship if your cooking doesn’t pass muster [Best avoided if you’ve hired a band for your party].

CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO PART ONE OF THE LEAST APPETIZING COOKBOOKS MONEY CAN BUY!

October 8, 2008 celebrities, lists

The art of actually preparing a meal has become a thing of the past. Who among us (who is not collecting on a bogus personal injury claim) has the time to seek out the various ingredients needed to prepare a proper meal, not to mention all of the digit-endangering chopping and preparation, setting and watching of timers and fine-tuning the olfactory senses to the smell of something smoking in the kitchen?

Most of us are happy enough to sit with a heaping bowl of something microwaved back to life and watch shows like Iron Chef, America’s Next Food Network Star, and Top Chef. There’s something inspiring about seeing a chef make a gourmet Bouillabaisse out of shoe leather and good intentions. If you think hard enough about what’s on the television screen, your extra helping of Stouffers’ Artery Attacker will actually taste better. It’ll kill you just the same, but your remaining dinner time will be enjoyable before your calorie-hastened send-off to that big day-old sandwich cart in the sky.

But there are those, however rare, who go beyond scouring grocery store aisles for the boxed item with the fewest preparation directions. For these people, and allegedly for Jerry Seinfeld’s wife when she was thinking of what kind of book she should choose for her debut as a plagiarist (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!), there are cookbooks.

Through cookbooks you can learn the secrets of the world’s top chefs, without actually having to work in a kitchen. This is a bonus if you don’t like criminals, as the restaurant profession is second only to roofing when it comes to employing them.

Cookbook authorship, however, is not the sole domain of the likes of Gordon Ramsay, and that excitable fat guy with a head on him that looks like a 14-pound squash. Much like Top-10 lists, anybody can write a cookbook. Here are 10 that we’ve found that show how painfully true a statement that is. These are books — all currently being sold on Amazon — that are enough to cause even your most indiscriminate eater to pause mid-gorge and go on a monk-like regimen of fasting and coffee enemas. These are, in other words, the Top 10 Least Appetizing Cookbooks That Money Can Buy!

10) The Testicle Cookbook: Cooking with Balls: The first book on our list is a complete balls-up – hardy-har-har. Actually, we would have just spun out one cheap pun like that after another for this entry had the copy-editors of the world not beat us to it when the story of this book’s release made headlines around the world including: “Men may get testy at Cooking with Balls book” “On The Ball”, “Testicle recipe book is a load of b*llocks,”  and, our favorite, from The UK’s Sun newspaper of course, “This dish may contain nuts”.

All of the fuss surrounds a Serbian chef who has just published an e-book documenting his favorite recipes for cooking up the family pride of all manner of species; stallions, ostriches, bulls, and possibly even tree squirrels (a delightful appetizer from what we hear) are all subjected to the unkindest cut of all. The 45-year-old author, who is the male animals’ least favorite visitor at the local zoo, says that all “All testicles can be eaten,” while being generous enough to add, “Except human, of course.”

The e-book format allows the author to be more successful in his attempts to get his male readers to squirm, allowing as it does for downloadable videos showing the cook peeling off skin, uggh, slicing, (shrill scream) and… Alright, that’s enough of that.

9) “Classic Cooking With Coca-Cola”: Hate your teeth? Well, have we got the cookbook for you. Remember that childhood friend of yours who was always jealous of you for being able to guzzle Coke while he was sipping potato water and eating Melba toast? Well apparently his mother was wrong about Coke being able to dissolve a nail or a T-bone steak overnight. That’s an urban legend, but that a nail won’t disappear overnight in a glass of it is about the only positive thing that can be said of the effects of Coca-Cola.

But for those who spit in the eye of such things as keeping calories out of the stratosphere and also for those with excellent dental plans, this tome offers recipes such as Chocolate Coke Cake and microwave French Onion Soup (presumably with Coke). An alternative would be to stick your face in the sugar jar and lick away until you pass out or somebody pulls you away.

Just missed the Cut: The Wonder Bread Cookbook: Unless you’ve crashed in the mountains and your only alternative is a fleshy seatmate, or you’ve been lost at sea and a loaf of the stuff happens to float by, under no other circumstances should the human body ever ingest Wonder Bread.

The stuff is so devoid of fiber that it can be squeezed in half like an accordion and with whole grains completely purged from it (and Vitamin E, folate, phosphorus, thiamine, and a slew of nutrients usually found in bread missing as well) it’s the nutritional equivalent of taking gulps of air. Somehow the folks at Wonderbread, much like their Coca-Cola cousins have managed to fill a cookbook full of ideas of how you can stuff yourself with something completely devoid of anything nutritionally redeeming. It’s a Wonder that they managed to churn out 50 recipes for the stuff that aren’t 42 variations of PB & J.

8) “Microwave Cooking Made Easy”: The narrowest possible market we’ve come across yet, mainly those whose cooking skills extend to making popcorn while high and listening to The Great Gig in the Sky on repeat (or another, less well-known usage: drying out a bag of weed, making sure it doesn’t catch fire while nodding off). If you hosted a dinner party, casually leaving out an autographed copy of a Larry Flynt biography on the coffee table would be less damning to your character. Bouncing electromagnetic waves off food has been abandoned by every chef not currently serving 7-10 for manslaughter and requesting kitchen detail solely to get knife access. Because flavor reactions of the type normally required to not jeopardize friendships typically occur at temperatures outside of its range, microwaves are no longer in use as a serious cooking aid except by people who are confused by what it means to ‘broil’. As it says in the Amazon write-up, the author’s name is ’synononymous (sic) with Indian Cooking’. We couldn’t agree more.

7) Dining by the Stars: An Astrology Cookbook: While the title might suggest rubbing elbows with cast members of ER before you’re asked to settle your tab by some A-lister’s security staff, Dining by the Stars is actually about astrology, that ancient superstition adopted by people who insist sharing a birthday with someone means sharing their personality traits as well (a dreadful suggestion for one of us, who shares a birthday with Dane Cook — that’s definitely some bad celestial mojo).

While the only time we see stars is the result of one too many push-ups, or getting up off the couch too fast when the smoke alarm goes off, this tome offers a gastronomical guide for those who inexplicably look to the heavens for extraterrestrial lifestyle how-tos (100 million year old light emanating from balls of plasma–we checked and Chinese Plasma Balls are not among the choice recipes listed here)

Dining by the Stars classifies each sign of the zodiac, and listed for the reader are “dominant foods and condiments with which each is associated,” so that when your moon is in Uranus, a delightful basil pesto mustard can spice up that cosmic space chicken.

Given the glut of similarly themed books dotting store shelves, the author apparently did not have the prescience to realize that the market for such reserves, unlike the expanding universe, is a finite one (indicated by its dismal 2.5 million sales ranking on Amazon, or roughly in light years, the distance between our solar system and The Andromeda Galaxy or between astrologers and rational thinking).

6) All Elvis Cookbooks: The 1996 BBC documentary “The Burger & the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley” grossed out its viewers with tales (taken from the King’s kitchen staff and friends) of the up to 100,000 calories that he consumed daily in the period leading up to his death, a figure the British Nutrition Foundation described in the film as “impossibly appalling” (an Asian elephant gets around on less). Much of this came in the form of “Fool’s Gold” sandwiches, an – to borrow a phrase – “impossibly appalling” concoction containing a jar of strawberry jam, a jar of peanut butter, and a pound of fried bacon. (Editor’s Note: Merely reading that last sentence means you have just ingested 10,000 calories.)

So when a human grease conduit such as the King of Rock and Roll passes away due to what the coroner described in that BBC documentary as “a terminal event on the commode”, what would make more sense than releasing a series of books celebrating a lifestyle that Brando or Orson Welles would have lost their own gigantic appetites just thinking about? Elvis’s mug — though rarely that of the “elephant in lingerie” years — has appeared on the covers of numerous cookbooks. Such titles include:  “Are You Hungry Tonight,” “Fit For a King: The Elvis Presley Cookbook”,” “All Cooked Up: Recipes and Memories from Elvis’ Friends and Family,” and “You Did Not Want to Do Elvis’ Laundry after He Started Eating Fool’s Gold Sandwiches: A Maid’s Tale” (the last one is merely rumored).

CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP FIVE LEAST APPETIZING COOKBOOKS MONEY CAN BUY!

October 6, 2008 weird news

Canadians who were children or unemployed adults during the 1980s might remember the game-show Bumper Stumpers on which contestants had to decipher various vanity license plates. Like all Canadian game-shows, it was the kind of program where contestants would have to defend their titles in a reign that would rival Rocky Marciano’s in order to get their hands on a prize that would normally be found under every audience member’s seat on Deal or No Deal.

Among the puzzles never solved on this show was why anyone but the most vulgar human beings tearing up the asphalt on god’s formerly green earth would bother forking over good money to get a personalized plate.

Vanity plates, while a ray of sunshine on a state prison work detail, do not brighten the day of anyone else maintaining a three-Chevron distance between themselves and your tailgate, who are either mocking you or secretly wishing they could scoop you into the nearest ditch with a giant cow catcher.

Like the Metallica plate above (if Metallica ever got wind of that, they’d set their lawyers on the poor owner with Napster-like ferocity), most vanity plates are devotional, mocking of the poor (KYLIESBMW) or convey some cutesy sentiment about a physician’s particular area of expertise involving odor emitting body parts. They also show someone’s affinity with outlaw biker culture, an ‘ezy rydr’, in a sensible Japanese import with decent mileage.

A man in Christchurch New Zealand recently received his just desserts for putting a vanity license plate on his newly purchased Subaru. “”A while back me and a group of friends were sitting around thinking up great names for personalised plates,” the man said, adding that the brain trust eventually selected “STOWLN” from among the “great names” being bandied about.

According to the country’s insurance reports, Subarus are New Zealand’s second-most stolen vehicles, so going the extra mile to tempt thieves into jacking your particular vehicle might be unwise. The car with the “STOWLN” license plate was stowln, err stolen, that is.

The man, whose sense of humor needs some emergency work done under the hood immediately, said: “When I got my car, I thought it would be hilarious to get the licence plate, so I bought it and put it on my car. It was so funny but I’m certainly not laughing now.” (We’d like to point out that laughter was more appropriate after the theft than before). “My friends have all been giving my sh..t about it as well, I don’t think I will ever live it down.” Certainly not if we have anything to do about it.

October 3, 2008 lists

As we noted in Part I of our Canadian Election 08 Blooper Reel, the gaffe pipeline has been steadily fed by political parties of every persuasion and is showing signs of structural compromise.

Wednesday, we focused on the Liberals, our self-described “natural governing party”, who, at election time, like Mike Tyson pre-Buster Douglas, often feel that they’ve got things in the bag just by showing up. Unfortunately for them, the Liberal Big Red Machine (a nickname they share with the Hells Angels, fitting given the previous government’s penchant for bribery and extortion), is going to take it on the chin this time round. With polls showing that the Liberal War Horse might soon become pet food, we figured it was the ruling Tory’s election to lose.

These past few weeks changed all that, as no sooner had we laid down our Tory win/Tory majority parlay, then the election bookie laughed and dropped the phone. It seems our PM Stephen Harper, the alloy-eyed cyborg economist dressed up in sweater vests to hide his mechanical shell, was nailed using a speech which like the comedy of Dane Cook, was nearly completely lifted from other sources.

In this recent clanger an aide (who’s since had the good sense to step aside before getting his bottom reddened) admitted to lifting lengthy verbatim passages from a speech on Iraq by former Aussie PM John Howard in this, another in a series of embarrassments that have dogged Tory Blue.

Stephen ‘Toastmaster General’ Harper, who’d been busy cramming for the upcoming candidates debates was busted like some C student, and this while tell-all required reading by Julie Couillard looms. She’s a Hells Angels affiliated one-time girlfriend of a former foreign minister in Harper’s government, who’d left sensitive NATO documents in her home. (Minister Bernier, apparently, had some choice words for his old boss the PM in Ms. Couillard’s new book, saying he had a lousy sense of style, was fat, unhealthy and drank too much Pepsi).

Speaking of victuals, recently a bacterial illness resulted in the largest food recall in Canadian history as 19 people died from processed meat from a Toronto plant. Conservative Agricultural Minister Gerry ‘Wisecracker’ Ritz, who apparently had more than a few lines of his sensitivity manual blacked out, called the health scare “Death by 1000 cold cuts,” and when hearing of the latest victim’s passing (and seeing that he was not going to be played off-stage by a Vaudeville piano) cracked that he hoped it was a rival Liberal. Amazingly, he hasn’t hung himself with this gallows humor and remains in cabinet [seen here inspecting food]

Conservative Candidate Chris ‘Macho Man’ Reid: Recently, a terrible story made waves across the continent. A young man was randomly and savagely beheaded aboard a Greyhound bus by a maniacal fellow passenger. How do you handle such a horrific incident when you’re campaigning? Well, three choices: A) You don’t mention it (Hint: This is the best choice). B) You make some sort of call for increased safety on buses. C) You take on the role of armchair Batman and chastise the traumatized people who witnessed the horrific event for not trying to overpower a machete-wielding psychopath. If you chose C, you’re probably Chris Reid. The conservative candidate, who’d apparently slept through the important bits of Ritz’ sensitivity training seminar, resigned after he criticized passengers who “couldn’t muster up any courage or self-sacrifice to intervene”, blaming the lack of action on a “castrated effeminate population.”

Speaking of castrati, at least politically speaking, we now move on to the NDP, a party whose sphere of influence covers shabbily dressed public-sector workers, fans of government-mandated extra-long coffee breaks, Vegans, non-tenured professors, their debt-addled students and the homeless.The NDP has never and will never form a national government, but they can often be relied upon to provide some much-needed color come national election time, and this year they outdid themselves.

First up, the toker twins, Dana “Don’t Bogart Those Joints” Larsen and Kirk “Dave’s Not Here Man” Tousaw. (Larsen is the guy pictured to the left trying to get into the Guinness Book in a way that is a hell of a lot more fun than attempting to best the record for most handstands on a grapefruit). Larsen was the first of the two candidates to drop out, and he presumably did so because the NDP Party has yet to discover Google. Larsen appeared on an episode of “Weedy Wednesday Smokefest,” a mainstay on the now defunct Internet-run Pot-TV (apathy concerning the need for someone to get up and flip on the webcam believed to be chief among this outlet’s reasons for ceasing production).

Larsen was filmed lighting up a handful of joints (see above), as well as dropping acid, and driving a car while high on TMT and smoking a joint. (Editor’s Note: High-five!) His videos are best remembered for the stunning insight he shared with viewers during his acid experiment: “Hey, look at my foot – isn’t that trippy?” Tousaw (right), Chong to Larsen’s Cheech, dropped out of the running when another video surfaced of him sampling the contenders at a marijuana competition.

Both Larsen and Tousaw (for YouTube news clips of both stories click here) were recruited from the MARIJUANA PARTY, so we’re a little baffled as to why the sight of them indulging so reddened Layton’s bald head. Layton too was on Pot-TV, singing to the choir about how “an NDP government” would legalize marijuana, etc., and popular pot spokesman Marc Emery said a deal was cut with the NDP: You push for legalization and we’ll give you the pot-smokers vote. Layton has apparently changed his mind, no doubt after realizing the risk of putting all his political hopes in the hands of a group of people who may or may not decide to stay in for pizza and Playstation come Election Day.

Finally, we’ve saved the creepiest for last. Say hello to Julian “Currently Pointing” West, completing the BC NDP trifecta. Julian stood for environmental protection, caring about the needs of you the voter, and having the scientific truth behind the shrinkage factor in cold water taught in our nation’s schools. Mr. West also dropped out of the race recently after it was found out that he had taken his clothes off in a front of a group of teenage girls at an environmental retreat in 1996. It was initially reported that West merely went for an impromptu skinny-dip, and he said nothing inappropriate happened. But what he initially referred to as a “serious error in judgment,” is now being referred to among the now grown women who were there that day as “the day that creep, the tree-hugger got naked and was evidently happy to see us, without the possibility of anything being in his pockets.”

Two women who were there at the time said that West – a Green Party candidate at the time, so we’re really killing two birds with this entry – stripped down completely in front of the girls who had been facepainting, and, they wrote in a letter to CBC that “Mr. West’s behavior was grossly inappropriate and of a sexual nature.” While witnesses allege that Mr. West was aroused at the time, we would like to raise the possibility that his arms were paralyzed and he was merely pointing out the direction to the free parking. We’re not saying that’s definitely what happened, we’re just throwing that out there.

NDP Leader Jack Layton, again showing the ability to take command of a perennial third-place party in troubling times, said that his party would have to review its screening measures for potential candidates. And by “review”, he meant “have some.”

CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF THE SHARK GUYS’ ELECTION ’08 BLOOPER REEL!