Noel recently recorded a segment for the second episode of the Bad Psychics podcast, the Badcast. The topic is psychic year-end predictions. Readers familiar with this rundown of psychic predictions from 2008 and this one from 2009 will be able to safely predict the tone of what he has to say about our clairvoyant friends.

Listen for him at the 13:50 mark, and stay tuned for future Badcasts, as you never know which Shark Guy might turn up!

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Someone once described journalism as “the ability to meet the challenge of filling space” and, with Eye poised on death’s door (death is using the current edition to wipe his boots) it seems its staffers have taken up this challenge; Theater critics have been musing about urban planning, music critics writing about anything and everything—its’ safe to say they’re noticeably a few femurs short of even a skeleton staff.

And this is a shame. What was once a fun little rag full of lively writing from Donna Lypchuk, Bruce LaBruce, Bill Burill, etc, is now nearly exclusively staffed by teen interns, placated with bylines so they won’t go hitting the pavement in search of full-time work.

Over the past few months, the publication, previously known for among other things, placing a premium on the word ‘pastiche’, crappy Venn diagrams and mopping up leaks from the shower has seen a reduction in size to grocery flyer-like proportions— although without the benefit of pointing out the local shop ‘n’ plop has a special on Pert.

Speaking of which, it seems ample endowments are getting in the way of the kinds of navel-gazing that its columnists have become known for of late, case in point:

“We are collectively tit-notized. Big breasts are seductive in a way that’s beyond sex, maybe even beyond the mommy-milk connection. There is the obvious, banal power of big breasts. I can reliably change the dynamic between me and any given male with the release of a button. Watching my breasts move when I walk or have sex or even briefly touch them, makes me feel hot.”

Apart from the obvious issues we have with this—the cheesy ’soft corn’ writing, if you will—it’s that given the inordinate number of pedestrians taken down in their prime on Toronto streets, watching your tatas move when you walk is probably not the best course of action, especially at busy intersections.

On the plus side, when Eye Weekly finally puts out its last threadbare issue, Torstar’s other, more profitable unit, Harlequin, might be looking for the kind of prose featured above.

And later, from the ‘Theatre’ review:

“Her witty, triumphant displays of vulnerability, including a lip-synched cover of “It’s not Easy Being Green” as lovelorn Kermit, the insertion of multiple clown figures into her vagina as a novel reinterpretation of the classic “clown car”…[Editors' note: presumably not at the same time]  

Such witty, triumphant displays of vulernability can also be found on Patpong Rd in Bangkok, but with ping pong balls.

From ‘How to Drink Better’, “sure, vodka and water tastes a little bland, but really, who drinks alcohol for the taste?” [Editors' note: people over 17?]

Let’s begin the countdown, shall we?

While it’s difficult to watch the journalism profession slowly wither in the digital age, we won’t hold back raising a middle finger to Eye Weekly as it sinks under the weight of its own self-importance and crappy writing. Besides, Now Magazine still has all the band listings.

In 1992, in a move that riled both the previous host, Johnny Carson, and anyone with a sense of humor who had not been somehow decisively thwarted in life, Jay Leno won The Tonight Show spot over the far funnier, innovative legend of Late Night, David Letterman.

Leno then spent years upsetting anyone who made the mistake of turning on the television during a commercial break, figuring it had been tuned into Letterman and then getting into bed only to have the Chin appear on the screen and realizing too late that the remote was out of arm’s reach. His show was popular among the lowest common denominator of comedy fans, which also meant that it was hugely successful for a number of years since a surprisingly huge number of people embrace crap.

Do it for Team Coco!

Then the hope of pre-midnight laughter on NBC arose when it was announced that Leno was going to be stepping aside for Conan O’Brien.

Often when current, big shot comedy writers talk about their formative experiences, they talk about being on one of three writing teams: SNL, Letterman, and Conan during his time at Late Night. Conan wrote some of The Simpsons all-time best episodes, including a Shark Guy favorite, “Marge Versus The Monorail”, and he actually improved upon what had up to that point been the funniest franchise in late night talk show history, “Late Night With David Letterman”, with his team’s own hilarious sketches, top among them Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, and the Masturbating Bear.

The first week of the Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien contained more fresh ideas and innovative comedy than any single year of the show under Jay Leno. It seemed that Team Coco was going to extend and improve upon The Tonight Show franchise just as it had done with Late Night. Admittedly, this was far easier to do as it was building from the ground up comedy-wise with The Tonight Show, but still, all positive up to that point.

Of course, rather than fading into an endless succession of Las Vegas stand-up dates playing to rooms full of lobotomized people, Jay Leno announced that he was going to move to 10pm, which he called the “new 11.30pm”. He did the impossible and managed to produce a program that was even more derivative and uninspired than his Tonight Show.

Like being the captain of the next ship on the RMS Titanic Co's cruise calendar.

Leno might have been stroking that big chin of his when he made this decision, as it turned out to be a crafty one. The Jay Leno show comprised lame skits, monologues so bad they almost seemed antagonistic, and set pieces that made one wonder if the writer’s strike had really ended. Much good humor had already been sucked out of the world by the time 11.35pm came on and The Tonight Show began.

For Conan, following the Jay Leno show was like being thrown out of an airplane with a 200-pound weight on your back instead of a parachute. As Leno himself said in this interview when justifying why his own show was tanking at 10pm.: “Lead-ins are important. On the nights when we have a strong lead-in, we are competitive; on the nights we don’t, it’s up to us to try and carry the ball ourselves….”

To salvage the wreck of the Jay Leno Show debacle, NBC decided to give Leno back his 11.35pm slot, perhaps reasoning that it would be impossible for Leno to decimate his own audience by leading into his own show. After a few disingenuous jokes about how he had been “fired again”, Leno accepted the offer, undoubtedly thrilled to steer the Tonight Show franchise back on the path of unchallenging mediocrity that he has long championed.

Below we have identified five traits that we find particularly irksome about Jay Leno. This is by no means a definitive list — we make no mention of Leno’s band leader, Kevin Eubanks, the most uncharismatic man on television — but here are The Five Most Annoying Things About Jay Leno.

5. Shameless Corporate Shill

Network television is run by ads, so anyone on it can be dubbed a corporate shill, but there’s a way to handle that without seeming like the president of the local chapter of the Big Industrial Pollute, Fatten and Stupefy fan club.

The late comedian Bill Hicks once admired Leno, but grew disillusioned when he saw Leno on TV stuffing Doritos in his gob for cash.

This from Alternative Reel’s Top Hicks quotes:

“Selling Doritos on TV? What a fuckin’ whore. And not even when he needed the money either, you know? If you’re a young actor, I’ll look the other way, but the guy makes $3 million a year, he decides to hock Doritos to make more money. You don’t got enough money you fucking whore? You’ve got to sell snacks to bovine America now? It’s Satan fucking him in the ass on national TV man . . . fuck . . .”

To this day, Leno is no stranger to sucking at the teat of Corporate America, as this compilation from a September episode of his terrible recent foray into prime time makes clear.

4. But Says He’s Not in it for the money

It’s one thing to prostitute your creative output in the pursuit of filthy lucre. We can understand that, and we too like our lucre, the filthier the better. But Leno claims he’s not in it for the money.

He told Rolling Stone:

Showbiz is not that hard. People make it difficult. The problem starts when you have to have all the money. I don’t need all the money. I’ve said this a million times, and it’s clichéd, but I’ve never touched a dime of TV money. I put it in the bank and live off the money I make as a stand-up comedian. That keeps me honest.

If the money isn’t important to him, and he doesn’t give a crap about doing anything worthwhile in comedy, then why does he insist on continuing with the show?

Jay trades wits with a puppet. Puppet 1, Jay 0

3. His Nice Guy Shtick

Mention Jay Leno and the most common response you get even from those who would rather watch their own open-heart surgery in the OR is that he seems like a really nice guy.

First, who cares if he’s a friendly guy in real life, and tips generously at places with valet parking? Overly talkative people on the bus are often quite amiable, but we wouldn’t want to listen to them deliver monologues after the news, especially if the experience is not preferable to discount root canal at the dental college. But more importantly and as recent events make perfectly clear: he’s not that nice. Leno undermined Conan with his lousy lead-in show, and even went so far as to say in an interview that he would be happy to take up the reins at 11.35pm again “if [NBC] wanted it”. He said that before anyone suggested that NBC might return him to his old slot, and was basically implying that he’d happily knock Conan out of the position if given the opportunity.

Leno denied having any such ambitions in his Rolling Stone interview: “I said, ‘Guys, whatever you want to do.’ I’ve never been one of these guys that breaks up with a girl and goes, ‘But why? If I do this, will you go out with me?’ I’m more like, ‘Babe, if you don’t want to see me, I’m gone. It’s over. Thank you.’ ”

Actually, he’s more like the passive aggressive guy who gets dumped and then waits for the right moment when his ex is either drunk or suffering from low self-esteem to sweep in and get a leg-over.

Jay Leno, likely in the process of delivering a terrible monologue joke.

2. Horrendous Monologue Jokes

Also in his interview with Rolling Stone, Leno lists extending the monologue from 3-4 minutes to 14 as one of his innovations during his time at The Tonight Show. Since his monologues elicit more groans than recent gunshot wounds, this hardly seems like an innovation worth bragging about.

If these zingers from recent episodes of the Jay Leno show are any indication, he could have extended the monologue to PBS Pledge Drive drive proportion and not registered an increase in funny material:

(on the link between hemorrhoids and marijuana):
“Talk about a doubie up your bootie!” -Jay Leno

“Well, it’s growing more and more likely that California will legalize marijuana. You mean it’s not already legal?” –Jay Leno

“Well of course, the big political story, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got himself in hot water during the election, when he described Barack Obama as a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no negro dialect.’ See, that may explain why Reid was the Senate majority leader and not the Senate minority leader.” –Jay Leno.

1. He was funny once

It may seem shocking, but Jay Leno was actually funny once. As Patton Oswalt noted in this Comedy Death Ray segment, Jay Leno’s current incarnation is all the more disappointing because at one time capable of producing great comedy.

Here, in a segment from Late Night With David Letterman, Leno does a bit on hackneyed comedy, and it seems a shame that he would go on to become synonymous with just that.

2. Throttle a particularly annoying seatmate with your headphones (smothering them with a toxic smelling airline pillow can still be done from the comfort of your seat provided nobody is looking).

3. Enjoy, and we use the term more loosely than a draw string pant on The Biggest Loser, the latest madcap hi-jinks that have made Queen Latifah an unendurable part of the flying experience.

4. Be force-fed any in flight entertainment pre descent, featuring either Owen Wilson, Ryan Reynolds or Dermot Mulroney [please see our list of Top 10 Actors Whose Terrible Movies are Always Shown in-flight]

5. Aisle calisthenics, thereby robbing people of the ability to cartwheel from one end of the plane to the other to encourage blood flow.

Dexter is worthy of the attention –  it is one of the best shows on television despite some plot developments that would redden the face of even the most shameless, hard-core, “Never mind the fact that she’s already been cremated. We’ll bring her back reincarnated as the fetus of the husband’s mistress, have her age at a super-fast rate and get her revenge!” soap opera writer. The third season, for example, featured Jimmy Smits as a district attorney who, upon hearing of Dexter’s hobby of turning criminals who have slipped through the cracks of justice into steaks, thinks it’s a pretty good idea and even gets in on the action himself, sidestepping judicial niceties and strangling a defense attorney who beat him in court.

It’s a credit to Michael C. Hall’s considerable skills as an actor and the smart, winking tone taken by the show that what could have been merely absurd seems appropriate and a good bit of dark fun. Hall was on form this season, as was John Lithgow – here in his most twisted role since he played the father in Harry and The Hendersons.

[SPOILER ALERT]

By now everybody knows what happened in Dexter’s season four finale, even those who might consider it a sign of the end times that a show featuring an irony-loving serial killer is so popular. Julie Benz, who had played so well the role of a hot June Cleaver to Michael C. Hall’s cleaver-wielding Ward, was murdered by the Trinity Killer, left in a bathtub filled with her own blood. It was just the right ending to the season – emotional, satisfying in terms of the season’s story arc, and a relief to Dexter fans who wanted to see more of Dexter chopping up bad guys and less of him in marriage counseling.

The folks behind Dexter are basking in some well-deserved praise for the season finale and the series will surely be a favorite at awards shows – get ready for some permutation of the headline, “Dexter slashes the competition at Emmys” – but they’ve also set for themselves the challenge of having to follow up on that episode in a way that does not disappoint and embitter loyal viewers. As a fan of the show, I offer my suggestions on possible story-lines for season 5 of Dexter here.  Should the show’s writers take any of these ideas on board, I ask only that one of the criminals carved up by Dexter in season five be named after me. Here are Dexter Season 5 Storyline Suggestions!

Dexter as the Alligator Hunter

Dexter opens the Miami Herald the morning after Rita’s murder. The main story is, of course, a report on his wife’s grizzly death and how a serial killer is again at large just when you thought it was safe to return to your shady Miami doings. Below the fold, however, is a small item about how an alligator found its way into a suburban backyard and made a quick lunch out of the family Cockapoo, “Mrs M”.  Back at Miami Metro, Dexter searches the police database and finds countless other stories of pets and children eaten by alligators. Driven by a desire to protect his family and seek vengeance against such attacks on domestic life, Dexter sets off on a one-man mission to rid the state of the alligator scourge.

Dexter as Eco-Warrior

Dexter is one of the least eco-conscious characters on television. He drives an SUV, often alone, all over Florida, and dumps an unconscionable amount of plastic into the ocean every time he kills someone – both the bags he uses for body part disposal, and the sheets of plastic he uses to catch the spray of gore while he’s carving someone up. Coming to terms with his guilt over his wife’s death, Dexter starts looking at other areas of his life in which he could improve, and realizes what callous disregard he has been showing for the environment. Dexter sells his SUV, starts taking the bus, and joins a Florida everglades conservation society to learn the names of the state’s top polluters, who soon populated his to-be-killed list.

Dexter as Wall Street Avenger

Again, it’s the morning after Rita’s murder and Dexter is reading the Miami Herald except below the fold this time is a story on the economic bailout and how taxpayers’ money is going to help the corrupt, greedy Wall Street bankers who caused the financial crisis in the first place. After calling an economics professor he had in college to make sure he understands the situation correctly, Dexter becomes enraged. While his murders of serial killers and child fornicators improve the lives of people in those immediate circles, he realizes far deeper satisfaction could be had by targeting upper-level corporate fraudsters.

It Was All a Dream

Dexter had fallen asleep on his boat after murdering the Trinity Killer and dreamed Rita’s end. He returns home to find Rita giving a sponge bath to Patrick Duffy, who plays the driving instructor who took her virginity at age 16. Rita tells a shocked and creeped out Dexter that she had invited the driving instructor over out of pity as he had recently been paralyzed in a car crash, and she offered to give him a bath only because the air-conditioning was broken. The awkwardness of this encounter is so intense that Dexter loses his blood-lust completely and develops an interest in rare, collectible soda pop cans.

Dexter realizes he’s basically Batman

Dexter is basically Batman minus that annoying rule that keeps the latter from strangling the Joker and putting an end to his decades-long string of ghastly homicides instead of relying on Arkham Asylum, with its terrible security, to keep him locked up. They were both warped by the murder of their parents at a young age, both have secret identities and both are arguments for vigilantism as the only guarantee that justice will be served. Since he’s having a tough time coming to terms with Rita’s death, Dexter’s sister Deborah pops over with The Dark Knight on DVD to help him keep his mind off it. Having never previously heard of Batman, Dexter is startled at the similarities  between the character’s life and his own. He realizes he is essentially a middle-class Batman who kills people. Dexter thanks Deborah for bringing over the DVD and it appears to have really cheered him up. He gets to work fashioning his own Batman suit until he realizes how completely this would blow his cover and sinks back into depression.

Vince Masuka becomes Dexter’s partner

With Rita gone, single dad Dexter is bound to be starved for adult conversation and he has next to no friends, having punched out the neighbor for trying to make a cornudo out of him. His partnering with Jimmy Smits didn’t work out so well in season three, but he would probably have better luck with Vince Masuka. While seeming less lecherous in this season than in previous ones, Masuka is nonetheless clearly a maladjusted individual; a porn addict largely incapable of relating to women other than on a crude and inappropriate level, and he shares Dexter’s ironic detachment when it comes to horrific crimes. With Masuka’s forensic knowledge and troubled character, he could make the ideal Robin to Dexter’s Batman.

Dexter goes to the nuthouse

Dexter is a pretty high functioning individual for someone who faced such a terrible trauma in early childhood. But being responsible for Rita’s demise is too much and when she rushes to his house after hearing about the crime, his sister Deborah finds him in the fetal position, talking to the neighbor’s garden hose as if it were a magical snake giving him advice on who is likely to win the World Cup. Saddened, but realizing what she needs to do, Deborah commits Dexter into a home for the mentally insane, where a cast of character actors like Gary Sinise could deliver performances in supporting roles that would guarantee them Emmy nominations. A prime time drama based in a mental hospital is long overdue.

Dexter gets lethal injection

Let us not forget, that Florida is one of the US states in which the death penalty is still in force and as one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, Dexter would get moved to the front of the line. Angel Batista questions Dexter on Rita’s death since as the single most commonly cited murder statistic on television makes clear, spouses are to blame in 98% of all murders of husbands and wives. Still not quite in his calm, calculating frame of mind, Dexter makes a flippant remark, “Let me get this straight, you’re trying to pin this one on me”. Batista doesn’t think much of this — he is obviously not a great cop as his working every day with a serial killer and not suspecting a thing makes clear — but he brings it up during a lull in conversation at dinner with his new wife, Lt. Laguarda, who sees it for the implied murder confession it is. The two build a case against Dexter over the course of the season until the Season 5 finale when the line between reality and fiction blurs as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush guest stars, playing the governor who refuses to grant a last-minute stay of execution. Should the show get the green light for a season six, this ending can also be made into a dream using the above Patrick Duffy scenario.

Queen Street transit user's interminable wait for that ride into the sunset

Offering all the convenience of an extortion plot, the Toronto transit system would be the envy of post-war Budapest.

With a pitiful two and a half subway lines servicing a city with a greater metropolitan area of 5 million plus and lumbering trolleys that roll at the pace of meals on wheels deliveries and skateboarders (or mobility scooters if their batteries have been recently charged), it’s no wonder the joke that circulated when we were kids still stands today:  that the Toronto Transit Commission, or TTC, actually stands for ‘Take the car’.

Recently, the TTC took a moral stand against placing an advertisement for the adulterous dating site Ashley Madison on one of its trolleys, ironic as it’s been routinely screwing us behind our backs and to our faces for years with often shoddy service, crumbling infrastructure and stupid make-work projects (see, the Museum subway station makeover, which looks like a sound stage for The Mummy Returns).

Between the both of us, we’ve visited upwards of 20 countries all over the globe and countless big cities throughout North America, Europe and Asia, including New York, Chicago, San Fran, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Munich, Prague, Milan, Bangkok, Tokyo and there is absolutely no question that Toronto is a laggard.

Anyway, in the spirit of that long-standing and very true acronym injunction, we thought we’d compile a few of our own—to what end, we’re not sure as our children’s children will be interred before this city sees another east-west line…but whatever….

Here then, are our Top 10 TTC Acronyms:

1. Take the Car

2. Terrible Time-consuming Commute

3. Travel Tardily Consistently

4. Tarnishing Toronto Canada

5. Taxing Travelers Commendably

6. Testing Temperament of Commuters

7. Tortured, Trammeled Commuting

8. Transit to Chide

9. Tiresome Throngs Constantly

10. Terrible Transit Conveyances

Honorable Mentions:

• Treacherous Travel Complaints

• Trolleys That are Caricatures

• Transit Tuning-out Complaints

• Trumpery Transport Company

• Typically Tedious Cruising

• Trekking Tortoise-like Continually

• Tool-around Torpidly, Cruelly

• Too High Token Costs

• Towering Toil Charges

• Toronto’s Transit Caper

He's just read September's issue of Maxim.

Maxim magazine recently published an article in which the writer purports to relive the final days of David Carradine. We really didn’t take much notice of the mag up until now as Maxim is the type of publication that would be found in the waiting room of a dentist who’d compromise you sexually you once the anesthetic kicked in. Besides, when it comes to boobs, we prefer seeing them on a beach and not on a masthead.

In Bangkok there is no shortage of tell-all journalism with a urine sample’s distinct hue, but it is rare that even your most Gary Glitter-obsessed reporter would write a story about Thailand that beggars belief more than Yul Brynner in the role of a Siamese King.

Please read the original article linked above. For added effect, read it aloud as if you were a veteran Bangkok-based reporter shouting it down a staticky phone line to your editor during the Vietnam War era.

Writer Mark Ebner, who “has been covering crime and Hollywood for 20 years” (presumably like smog, only twice as thick), starts out recounting the circumstances of David Carradine’s death and the questions surrounding it. Was it suicide? Murder? Or did he accidentally choke to death while rubbing one out?

ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK — AT THE VERY MOST

Ebner scratches his chin, contemplatively. “Wasn’t it a little too convenient,” he asks, “that such a sordid suicide should take place in Bangkok, the sex capital of the world? I wanted to know.”

Maxim wisely made him ride coach on one of the cheapest airlines with regular flights from North America to Thailand – Ebner writes he “spent 23 hours in a cramped China Airlines 747”. Perhaps it was the mania-inducing monotony of the long flight (Suggestion: To make time pass on such a flight, bring enough sleeping pills to knock out a race horse and a novelty tie for drool) or passing over all those time zones that did it, but Ebner seemed to somehow disengage from reality as observable by other human beings during those fateful 23 hours on a long haul jet.

His flight was followed  he says, “”by a teeth-rattling cab ride through the smog-choked, sweltering squalor of metro Bangkok, dodging rickshaws and limbless sidewalk cripples begging for change.”

What fun! Grand Theft Auto Bangkok! But wait, rickshaws are human powered – commonly associated with heavy colonials weighing down a seat and cursing for a dawdler some poor bugger peddling for all he’s worth, who in turn curses  the heavy diet of his bosses – and would be in mortal danger on Bangkok streets. And if a sidewalk cripple were capable of interfering with traffic, he would by definition not be a cripple, or on the sidewalk.

This guy has been known to flip cars over just for shits and giggles.

Harrowing journey complete, teeth rattled so bad that they are probably still chattering now, Ebner arrives at the five-star Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel, where the late Kill Bill star died. “I’ve come here to follow in Carradine’s steps and try to reconstruct his final days,” he writes.

After seeing the so-called “penis shrine”, a Bangkok landmark filled with phalluses where people go to pray for fertility and make bawdy jokes, Ebner sizes up the country with one cutting observation: “Clearly, Thailand, like the death of its most recent famous victim, has more to it than meets the eye.”

The insights do not stop there. Bangkok, he writes, is “a teeming hodgepodge where native Thais rub elbows with Chinese and Indian immigrants, as Western sexual tourists explore the city’s seamy underbelly”. Aside from his bizarre decision to specify “native” Thais (surprisingly common in Thailand) and count the Chinese and Indians he sees as immigrants (some probably were, but both have been in strong numbers in Bangkok for generations), he turns to the lazy journalist’s favorite talking point when it comes to Bangkok – perverted Western men,  who are to cities’ seamy underbellies what Jacques Cousteau was to the oceans of the world.

Ebner  decides, based on his room – standard, unlike the suite that Carradine had – that hanging in the closet would be difficult if not impossible. He goes out in search of answers.

“The first stop on my quest is a lunch with Bangkok Dan, a handsome Swiss expat and wire-service journalist who’s been here 14 years.” He continues: “Much of what appears to Westerners as callousness, Bangkok Dan attributes to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. ‘Life is worth nothing here,’ he explains.”

It seems a harsh assessment coming from Bangkok Dan, founder and writer of AbsolutelyBangkok.com, one of the better blog sites about the city, and someone who does not give the impression of a man living in constant fear of death out here in discount life land. As the fates would have it, a commenter by the name of “Brolo” on AbsolutelyBangkok sought confirmation from Bangkok Dan that he was indeed the person quoted in the article.

The following is the exchange copied from the blog’s comments section here:

“Brolo”: Dan, please tell me you were not the Bangkok Dan cited in the incredibly idiotic article about David Carradine’s death? I like your site, but it’s guilt by association when it comes to adding fiber to such a monstrous turd of an article.

Bangkok Dan: I am, Brolo, I am, but, politely said, completely taken out of context. Didn’t recognize anything. And handsome and Swiss … go figure. Heavy jet lagged author I guess.

Had a good laugh reading the piece. Seriously. A good lesson. So much about working ethics and methods of some journalists. And was also promised a bottle of something that never arrived.

A journalist might be able to forgive a botched or misrepresented quote, but welshing on promised booze? Little Mencken weeps. Shame on you Maxim.

Ebner then goes on at length about Carradine’s career, his brothers – “the Baldwins of their time” – and his sexual kinks, before going back to give Buddha’s sleazy underbelly one more rub.

“I’ll hear later that Carradine was spotted the day before his death in Bangkok’s red-light district shaking hands with the locals. It’s my next stop.” (What was whispered in Ebner’s ear – that Carradine was out glad-handing the punters at go-go bars the day before he died – has not to our knowledge been reported anywhere else).

IT’s ALL GONE PATPONG

And here Ebner sprovides a description of Patpong that anyone from a seasoned go-go bar veteran to a person capable of operating Google Maps can see is almost entirely wrong. Ebner breaks from journalistic tradition here. Rather than fudging on facts so he can spend more time enjoying his per diem in the way nature intended — in  a bar — he instead gets his bar facts wrong.

The quotes that follow here are all from one breathtaking paragraph that is best savored in bite-sized morsels:

“A vast open-air sex market, the Patpong is a 20-minute walk from the hotel, past the U.S. and British embassies; an X-rated bazaar that looks like a psychedelic Bourbon Street.”

A dessert shop in Bangkok. There is little need for invention when it comes to this city.

“Open air sex market”? “X-rated bazaar? I’m picturing goats with stories to tell in their eyes. Fornication at the bus stops. Dildos and Betsy Beaver brand synthetic vaginas piled high like so much fresh produce.

Patpong market is located on and around Soi Patpong, which along with the parallel Patpong 2, is a road with go-go bars and prostitutes as well as transvestites (a group Ebner more than amply covers in his article based on the barstool rumor that Carradine met his end at the hands of one) .

Patpong market is one of the city’s most popular outdoor night markets and it sells overpriced (for Thailand) T-shirts, trinkets, and pirate DVDs, including – as any pirate DVD business worth its name would – porn. But X-rated bazaar? Not really. If Ebner did somehow find himself in a vast open air sex market, one hopes he thought carefully before ordering food.

“This is where they filmed The Deer Hunter to simulate wartime Saigon.”

Suspicions are raised when one of the lone verifiable facts in a lengthy descriptive paragraph is probably the most common piece of trivia about a given place.

“The Patpong is divided into Soi 4, which is predominantly gay; Soi Cowboy, a note-perfect re-creation of pre-Disney Times Square, designed to cater to the Western tourist; and Nana Plaza, which is where they keep the kink.”

This version of “The Patpong”, as the map below illustrates, is a fiction. Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza are located in another part of the city. Moreover, it’s unlikely that the go-go bar owners and and the local business improvement association on Soi Cowboy gathered prior to opening up their watering holes to ensure that theirs was a “note perfect” re-creation of pre-Disney Times Square.

It is good to know, however, that the kink is kept at Nana Plaza.

Ebner ends up “looking for answers at the dodgy Nana Hotel” which he says is “in the Patpong” (actually located, not surprisingly, near Nana Plaza and, again, in a completely different part of town). It is there that he meets “a striking-looking child bride who calls herself ‘A’. She pours herself into my lap. Like everyone I talk to in the Patpong, she doesn’t know anything about Carradine, but for 10,000 baht (roughly $300 U.S.) she will come back to my hotel, tie me up, choke me, and stay the night. I take a rain check.” Some hotels offer valet parking, others, according to Ebner at least, the services of child brides who will choke you out and keep you company till morning for a few Benjamins. It’s the subtle differences that make international travel worthwhile.

He later interviews famous Thai forensic investigator Khunying Pornthip (more on that interesting lady here) who, he writes, “also announced that Carradine’s room came equipped with its own penis shrine.” Earlier Ebner noted the presence of a penis shrine next to his hotel remarkably accurately given his coverage of the rest of Bangkok, but he nonetheless failed to realize that Pornthip was referring to it, and not a phallic shrine in Carradine’s room. Swissotel room service draws the line at the artful presentation of plates of sausage.

MAXIM-UM OVER-DRIVEL

Some who commented on Ebner’s Maxim piece wondered if Ebner’s Bangkok portrayal was the result of his watching the Nicolas Cage version of Bangkok Dangerous, standing up too fast and then writing this article before the blood that rushed to his brain had a chance to settle. He does, however, close with an authentic touch:  interviewing a bar-stool conspiracy theorist — and Bangkok must also be the world capital of these along with sexy time — at the city’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club. He then quotes this unnamed font of wisdom’s unsubstantiated and worthless gossip.

Having traveled thousands of miles, past limbless cripple prostitute beggar rickshaw drivers and glided over the seamy underbelly of the imaginary land of Patpong with its Ferris Wheel of fornication and deadly child brides in search of answers to David Carradine’s death, Ebner closes with the following: “In death, as in life, Carradine’s complex persona offered more questions than answers. However he died—and we may never know—it wasn’t so different from how he lived.” Err, right. Well done.

Noel Boivin, Bangkok

Photos and edited by Christopher Lombardo

It seemed too good a story to be true: a young boy trapped in a camera-friendly balloon zipping across the skies like some modern-day Phileas Fogg and with the perfect name of Falcon (one wonders if the family had this child specifically for this purpose) to boot.  And it was.

The boy’s family, the Heenes, were apparently looking to get on reality television and decided, appropriately enough, to get the ball rolling by manipulating the public with a staged stunt meant to titillate those at home with the handfuls of Doritos at the ready.

But it came out in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, that bearded man who emerged like sand fleas out of the Gulf War and into our homes, that the whole thing was a hoax — even if Blitzer himself didn’t at first understand that.

Well not this old. (From FreakingNews.com)

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control suggests that gamers are not mainly young kids learning life lessons about the joys of indiscriminate violence and destruction, or college kids looking for something to do while smoking pot that does not involve contact with a book. They are, in fact, old enough to have moved on to more productive pursuits like developing a disastrous gambling addiction and/or writing daily letters to the editor that will one day find their way into a police evidence file.

According to the study, the average gamer is 35, thus old enough to have fathered many of the people who comprise the target audience for many games (had they been out and shagging at an age when they were in all likelihood filling a room at their parents’ place with the smell of musty human). The study also says that most gamers are male, depressed, and obese – the latter two being boxes best left unchecked when signing up for an internet matchmaking service.

Before you get too excited about the prospect of the majority of gamers being guys with a couple of decades’ worth of Doritos lodged in the couch cushions, it should be noted that the study is – like one blaming drinking on television and another on how Facebook causes jealousy – dubious. It was based on an online survey of 552 people in Washington’s Seattle-Tacoma area from the ages of 19-99 (educated guess: the 99-year-old does not exist). So this tells us that people in Seattle who have the time and inclination to fill out online surveys about their lives are also likelier to spend hours developing thumb calluses rocking out to “Living on A Prayer” on Guitar Hero. Neither of us smacked our gobs in disbelief at learning that.

As the authors state in the study’s conclusion: “Because the study uses a cross-sectional design, conclusions about causality cannot be made.” And indeed you’d have a chicken and the egg scenario to figure out what came first: did the person come to the video game with a long face and a wide bottom, or did the realization that one’s best friend is someone who you chase around with an automatic weapon in a virtual post-apocalyptic world take the wind from beneath their wings.

Well, we are not psychologists — unless we’re drunk and in a bar then we’ll offer you everything from marriage tips to the card of a reputable roofer — and neither are the people who published this study, which tells us nothing more than newspapers have next to no filter when it comes to this kind of science and when in doubt blame a video game for absolutely everything.

Coors Light, along with Bud Light, among the very worst beers on the planet

At the risk of never having a free case of the stuff end up on our doorstep (if it did, we’d donate it to the food bank and help the less fortunate get a load on) a frat house would not feed Coors Light to their alcoholic dog.

Coors Light is the Denny’s of beer—cheap crap nobody would ever ingest unless all other options, including abstaining entirely or guzzling Scope, were exhausted. Like carbon monoxide, Coors Light is odorless, colorless and tasteless and now, as far as the latter is concerned, they’ve got a campaign to match in which they take a potshot at Toronto:  the city many Canadians are secretly jealous of because it’s the cultural and economic capital.

AMC’s Mad Men glamorizes those in the marketing profession, not so much for the actual work involved (at this point, envision in your mind’s eye 100 monkeys at 100 keyboards) but for the heavy drinking on the job—an excuse, whoever came up with this head-scratcher, might consider using.

Anyway, above is their witless simile ad campaign (if you’re in the marketing profession, a ’simile’ is a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’ as in: ‘whoever devised this ad campaign is dumber than a bag of doorknobs’). Well done for attacking a market where 1 in 10 Canadians live. Good job!

As if another reason was required to shun this product, apart from it tasting like watered down concentrate lemonade.

Bottoms up!