March 16, 2010 | reviews

As regular readers know, we are very fashion forward—so much so, that for Daylight Savings, our clocks went ahead in January.

We are very aware of that paradox of fashion—in order for something to be fashionable it must first be unfashionable until enough people catch on to make it fashionable. As a result, we are unfashionable all the time, explaining it away as ’something you wouldn’t understand, but soon will in 6-8 months’.

What we are accuately aware of, is the brash, in-your-face ugliness of an Ugg boot, which looks like someone drop-kicking a French poodle.

As we noted previously, if Mongolia had a space program, its astronauts might wear something like these, as might a child raised by wolves in the hinterland of that country who found them dropped from a plane.

As a way to help nudge this trend into oblivion and get this footwear past homeless shelters and straight to landfill, we were happy to note that there is now some science to back up our aesthetic objections.

The head of the British College of Osteopathic Medicine called these galosh grotesquery  ’slippers’ and said they were not meant for outdoor use. We could not agree more, thereby relegating Ugg-style boots to the apartments of people behind on their heating bills.

Uggs and boots like them come in many forms like right—what you’d get if your office’s wall-to-wall carpeting was wrapped around your ankles— and have metastasized the world over.

Hopefully, observations like a consultant podiatric surgeon made in the Telegraph—that these boots cause wear and tear on the joints—will be the last nail in their coffin before they’re shipped off to the Bata Shoe Museum and laughed at by future generations.

February 26, 2010 | Pics, reviews

Someone once said journalism is literature in a hurry. They would’ve elaborated, but they were probably a journalist and recently laid off.

We Shark Guys will continue to bring you the finest the profession has to offer from the few remaining practitioners of the craft.

If you’ve ever wondered what a probe looking into a sunken ship would investigate, well, you heard it here first: safety!

In our second headline, as the US debate rages on, the Canadian healthcare system is always coming under close scrutiny. Things are obviously in good hands with our elected officials, as seen here.

February 25, 2010 | Pics, reviews

Anonymous chats have been a staple of online life ever since the heyday of IRC when hordes of lonely single men went online to lie about their ages, genders, sexual histories, and the extent to which they cause sighted human beings to wince. It was a more innocent time then – the chats were text-based and a 47-year-old, 300 pound well digger could pose as a 21-year-old fit platinum blond sex goddess and the Kleenex-box clutching college student with whom he’s chatting would soon be sending flowers through the mail.

Such ruses would be more difficult to pull off on Chat Roulette, the latest anonymous chat craze that brings together people who should be prohibited by law from owning or operating web-cams. Chat Roulette is like Russian roulette only bad luck here means being hit between the eyes not with a bullet, but with the sight of a fat guy molesting a plush toy. It’s difficult to say which is the more scarring.

Users on Chat Roulette seem to be divided into three groups: lonely single men (vast majority), perverts (making a “respectable” showing in terms of percentage of all users), gawkers just hoping to find the video loop of the fat guy nailing a plush toy raccoon, and last but not least, women, who can enjoy being catcalled and asked to show their breasts without having to walk past a construction site.

We have done a bit of gawking on Chat Roulette, making heavy use of the “next” function – one suspects whatever addictive properties this site may have will be tempered somewhat by the prominence of exhibitionist masturbators. Albert Einstein reportedly said, “You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.”

Well there is no victory for the eyes when it comes to excessive turns on Chat Roulette, and here is visual proof of that: