The BillPages

So, I was watching "Real Time With Bill Maher" on the weekend. He mentioned a little pop duo called Prussian Blue. They're young teenage girls who made the news for being told they were not allowed to perform at some state fair somewhere. Why not? Well, aside from the fact that their music sucks, it seems they are white supremacists.

That's their photo on the right. Cute, huh? I like the smiley-face Hitler.

Scary, scary stuff. I did a little websurfing for info on them after I watched the show. I am now ashamed to have some of those URLs in my browser history. You know those banner ads that say things like "Click here to support families left homeless by the hurricane" or "help Americans who lost family in the war"? Well, these ones say "...support WHITE families left homeless..." and "help WHITE Americans...". It's just so... BLATANT. I guess I knew stuff like that was out there, but I never actually looked at any of it before. Crazy.

Anyway I started thinking about people down in troubled areas of the world, being offered aid by some racist-backed organization, and finding themselves in the position of starving or accepting aid from these brain-dead bastards. And I thought... hey, buddy. TAKE THEIR MONEY. Take as much of it as they will give. If at all possible, bankrupt the bastards. Then, when they come to you to help them with their cause or whatever, tell them in no uncertain terms to F*** Off.

And don't for an instant feel guilty about it.

Oh, and do not - even out of curiosity - listen to Prussian Blue's music. I've taken that bullet for us, and only barely lived to tell the tale. Seriously, I don't normally speak this harshly about children, but as these two are apparently aryanist knuckleheads I'll come right and say that it's god-awful caterwauling mixed with off key droning over dead-fingered acoustic guitar noodling. And those are the "sample" tracks they offer to people who might be interested in buying a cd. Presumably, the rest is worse.

I'm doing another Haunted House this weekend. If any of you have small children that you want to traumatize, please bring them to:

Chris Gibson Arena
125 McLaughlin Rd. N.
Brampton
(N of Queen/E side of McLaughlin)
6:00-9:00PM
Saturday, October 29, 2005.

Remember: teaching your child to go into a dark room filled with strange men in unusual costumes is a good idea. If nothing else, it will help prepare them for this.

For no reaon whatsoever, here's a scale model of the city of San Francisco made entirely out of Jell-O.

Saturday night, I terrorized small children.

Some of them cried.

And I'm getting paid for it.

The City of Brampton is having a series of Haunted Houses for Hallowe'en, and I was one of a large number of people who put one on at Chris Gibson arena on Saturday night. It was quite an operation. We built what was basically a big maze, decorated, lit it, haunted it for three hours as troops of kids went through, and then tore it all down and loaded it into a truck. They'll do it again next Thursday, and I'll join them again for Saturday.

The thing is, for the most part, the kids were total wimps.

Or maybe it's the parents. I don't know. But these kids - 8, 9, 10 years old some of them - cried, screamed and refused to go through. The parents were just as bad, asking at one point if they could just walk their kids through the maze without any one in it, so that it wouldn't be too scary. The manager of the facility sent a message over that someone had said it was too scary, and could we tone it down.

Too scary?

It's a HAUNTED HOUSE people!

I shouldn't be surprised. years ago Todd McGinnis and I wrote 'Haunted House' shows for the city, which were put on at the Peel Heritage Complex (the old Brampton Jail.) A fairly tame show, we thought. Some kids didn't make it even half way through. Plenty of little ones cried and screamed. One angry parent threatened to sue the city.

Let's make it clear: we're not putting on some kind of gorefest, here. We didn't have fancy pyro effects, there was no burning pit of hell here. It was a bunch of folks in (mostly) off the shelf hallowe'en costumes standing in the dark screaming 'Boo!'.

Too scary.

Here's my word of advice to the parents of the world: if your kid can't handle these Haunted Houses, take him to more of them. Show him the Exorcist and The Omen. Read him the ORIGINAL Grimm fairy tales. Hell, wake him up in the middle of the night wearing a wolfman costume. By the time the kid turns ten, he should feel completely blase about things like this. Or this. Or even this.

Well, Karate and I have a passing aquaintance, anyway.

I went with my brother to "Bring A Friend" night at the dojo at which he regularly trains. What a blast.

I've never done anything like this before. By "like this" I mean "involving physical exertion". So this was a very new experience for me. I had done some stage combat training for a couple of shows in the past, including some reasonably intense martial-arts based training for a production of Henry IV part 1, but this was... well... real.

We started with just some calisthenic type exercises. After about three minutes, I was ready to die. My brother did 50 stride jumps, 25 push-ups and 25 sit-ups in about a minute and a half. I hadn't finished the stride jumps yet. I gave up on the push-ups. I never started the sit-ups.

But after that it settled down. Learn a simple punching technique. Repeat ten times. Now a block. Repeat. And a kick. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

This stuff was fun. And in about ten minutes, I really felt that I'd learned something. Nothing earth shattering, or particularly impressive, but something I didn't know when I walked in the door. This stuff, I liked.

Next was defense training. Some guy's choking you, what do you do? Now he's grabbed your wrist. Now your shoulder. We learned a bunch of basic break-away techniques, probably the same kind of stuff that they teach at any self-defense course, but here they have cool Japanese names.

Then we watched a couple of black-belts do their test katas, which were very impressive. Finally, we got some words of theory and encouragement from Kiyoshi Chris Doyle. "Kiyoshi" is kind of like Sensei, meaning teacher, only more. This guy is a seventh degree black belt, an honour he earned in Okinawa, where they take this stuff pretty seriously.

All in all, it was cool. And nobody better mess with me. Unless they've had TWO classes.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to hear what Gord has to say about this.

My guess is it won't be this girl.

What did I say? Hmm? Were you even listening to me?

I quite clearly told you to go see 'Serenity'. I don't think I could have been any clearer on the matter. Did you listen? No. $23 Million worldwide gross so far. That's not enough, people. The budget was over $35 Million. Sure they'll pick up some revenue in aftermarket sales, but not enough.

Look. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "But I never saw the show!"

You don't need to.

You're thinking "I don't know any of the stars."

Sure you do. Ron Glass was the black guy on Barney Miller. Adam Baldwin was the big bully with the heart of gold in "My Bodyguard." And Gina Torres was in the last Matrix movie, and is married to Lawrence "Don't Call Me Larry" Fishburn.

You're thinking "I don't like Sci Fi."

Yes you do. We already established that you watched the Matrix, right?

You're thinking "But I only like movies with Hot Chicks."

Well, how about her. Or her. Or her.

So quit your whining and go see this movie. More than once. If this doesn't become one of those long-running sleeper hits, you and I will have words.

And don't even get me started on how you're not watching Arrested Development...

I have completed Hapland 2. Way tougher than the first one, in my opinion.

Whew. I need a beer.

Go see Serenity. Now. Seriously, drop whatever you're doing and go see this movie.

Still here?

Okay, I guess I can say a bit about WHY you should go see it...

For those that have been living in a cave with no cable, Serenity is the new film by writer/director Joss Whedon (of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame) based on his own short-lived series Firefly.

Like a lot of Buffy and Angel fans, I was very happy to find out Joss had a new show, and happily tuned in to every episode of Firefly during its all-too-brief run on Fox. I even wrote letters to executives at the network, pleading with them to keep the show on the air. Sadly, I was among the minority, and the ruthless bean-counters at Fox Television pulled the show when it was still finding an audience.

So I was very pleased to find out a movie was in the works. Would we find out about the guys with blue hands? Would we learn about Shepherd Book's mysterious past? Would there be mayhem?

Serenity is EVERYTHING a good science-fiction film should be. Tight writing, based around a mysterious and somewhat frightening premise. Interesting characters who the audience can really empathise with. Snappy dialogue. Big action set-pieces. Babes. It borrows from virtually every page of the Sci-Fi canon and paints it all anew with a brush stroke that is uniquely Whedon.

I will tell you NOTHING of what the actual plot of the movie is. I will simply say that it is compelling, fun and exciting.

But the problem is, it may be the last Firefly movie ever. Box Office Mojo has the weekend estimate at $10.1 Million. That's nowhere near enough to interest anyone in funding a sequel. More people need to see this movie so that the Powers That Be (catch that reference, Angel fans?) will get behind what could be a brilliant franchise.

So go see it. Now. Stop reading this. GO!