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.

Uggs: Ever wanted an office cubicle on your feet?

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.

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.

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:

waging a one-man campaign to prevent Favre from retiring

see, photography composition and the 'rule of thirds'.

free ticket to the gun show, courtesy of a German user

how true

one of the more normal sights you'll see on there

OK, so it's not all bad

legalize it, don't criticize it

just plain creepy

Half cut-rate therapist and matchmaker (if you consider the pairing by paternity test a mom and her would-be flight risk of a dead-beat dad matchmaking), Montel amazingly, received a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host.

Of course, during the 90s, anyone who even attempted to shy away from dueling monozygotic dwarfs and men who banged a sitter while mom was battling chemo, was thusly awarded (See Oprah, whose lowly origins as a peddler of exploitative crapola seem to have been forgotten with her up with people, up with Body Mass Index MO)

With days counseling pregnant teens a distant memory, Montel’s current paying gig is one that has him wowing the insomniac set as an infomercial pitchman for the Living Well Healthmaster, a digital emulsifying device that is by any other name, a blender.

The Healthmaster is a marvel that can crush more ice than a Zamboni at a Monster Truck rally, and, as it’s pointed out, with 2 horsepower of centrifugal force, is more like an outboard motor (this is something to keep in mind if you’re trolling through a margarita instead of a swamp)

that poor avocado didn't know what hit it

Montel has asked the manufacturers of this Health Master (which can ‘power a small boat’) to “knock off one easy payment if you call now”:

Conversation:

Montel: “Can you knock a payment off one of the 5 easy payments?

Manufacturer of the Living Well Healthmaster: “Listen buddy, we determine the price point thank you very much.”

Testimonials:

The device, which makes “stealth veggies”, (vegetables that interfere with radar technology?) is no doubt deserving of this military comparison as it can also “decimate chunks of solid concrete”, handy if you’ve got some government stimulus money kicking around for road repair.

“I’ve tried every pill, diet and exercise program and I thank Montel!”

We wonder if this person has donned tights and kicked their dignity away to Turbo Jam?

The digital emulsifying device “literally pulverizes fruits, legumes and leafy vegetables”  and is specifically designed for people “who would never eat a plate of vegetables”, which seems like the target demographic is one which is a good decade away from being able to legally own a credit card.

Stay tuned.

The Simpsons

Last Exit to Springfield

This week, Toronto Transit Commission came  under fire over employees doing what people normally spend one-third of their lives doing—not a workplace commute—but sleeping.

The napping employees were the subject of an excellent meme and a not so excellent exculpation from a self-described humour writer (seeing what passes for humor in a major daily is enough  to make us consider a career change).

Speaking of which, walking papers will not be forthcoming as a powerful union, the ATU, represents one of the busted dozers, whose mea culpa is enough to ensure he stays behind protective glass for years to come.

Now don’t get us wrong, we sympathize with ordinary TTC workers.

Having to work for a transit system that is the envy of Bratislava, Slovakia in the face of silly fare hikes, out of commission token machines and in subway stations, more exposed pipes than an American Idol audition has got to be a tough gig. However, the bear minimum that can be asked of an employee, that they not sleep on the job (or  in the case of some occupations, shoot up the place—please see our list of the Top 10 Postal Workers) was violated.

Now, we’ve talked about the TTC briefly before (in our list of suggested acronyms to which we can now add Toronto Transit Catnappers) and for those unfamiliar with Toronto, if you were born too late to have experienced the 70s, instead of renting Saturday Night Fever or growing your hair long, you can simply experience the decade second-hand with our third-rate mass transit system.

Their much-touted screens that let commuters know when the next train/bus is coming, were in place when one of us lived in Germany 20 years ago and their lumbering trolleys (mostly inaccessible to the elderly/disabled—-the only way our system is a step up relative to others, but not in a good way) can be beaten on foot provided a heavy wind isn’t blowing in the opposite direction.

The sad state of affairs means two lousy subway lines servicing a metropolitan area approaching 5 million people with no political will or vision to foresee what a city would look like 30 years from now, but  merely one that is a reminder of 30 years past.

Since our obits will be written long before a third subway line is built perhaps it’s best to just shut your eyes and envision what this city could become before you get very…very….sleepy.

You’d think someone who many people think is the Antichrist would have a better security detail, because you know what they say, the devil is in the detail. After this recent breach, perhaps it’s time to revisit whether the pontiff can be properly protected by a combination of Italian police and the Swiss Guard and use the New York Jets offensive line instead. If you meet the following criteria, feel free to apply c/o

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI PP.
00120 Via del Pellegrino
Citta del Vaticano
OR
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI
Apostolic Palace
VATICAN CITY

Credentials: Security Guard License.

Work Setting: The Vatican, the world.

Work Conditions and Physical Capabilities: Attention to detail, combination of sitting, standing, walking, praying, ministering, preparing the tarmac for osculation.

Skill Set: Follow emergency procedures, mixed martial arts take-down sprawl defense, monitor security television, operate security control room equipment, control Popemobile vehicular and pedestrian traffic, keep lepers to a manageable level.

Security and Safety: Criminal record check optional.

Languages: Anything, but preferably conversational German, Italian, English, Spanish, ecclesiastical Latin

Transportation/Travel Information: Must have own transportation.

...'You might be a redneck' hack comic Jeff Foxworthy as Ned Flanders

The Simpsons, despite some minor improvements of late, has been on a steady decline since it sat atop the comedy heap. But this hasn’t stopped the jaundice-toned ‘toon juggernaut from dominating the ratings. As bad as it is now, if you compare it to other shows that should’ve been canceled a long time ago—-Saturday Night Live say, where what passes for sketch comedy is dressing up as a celebrity and appearing on a mock TV show—it holds up pretty well. [Editor's note: the best SNL sketch remains one that never appeared on SNL: Krusty the Klown's Tuesday Night Live sketch, 'The Big Ear family', in which Krusty brandishing a Q-Tip, sighs "this sketch goes on for another 12 minutes"]

Since every bad idea a movie executive has while sunning themselves in the lap of a Vegas call girl gets green-lighted, don’t be surprised if a live-action Simpsons flick comes to the big screen.

On Stumbleupon, we came across a few posts that offered a hypothetical casting of a live action Simpsons movie. A few were pretty inspired (William H Macy as Flanders and Benicio Del Toro as Snake) and some downright wrong—casting the quintessentially Jewish-looking actor David Schwimmer as Reverend Lovejoy, or the 6′5 Jeff Goldblum as the hunchbacked hatchet-faced former pugilist Moe (please see our list of the Top 10 Bartenders of All Time).

Since we were able to accurately conjecture Rampage Jackson as BA in the A-Team Movie, and took a pretty accurate stab at the Three Stooges movie, we thought casting agents would immediately employ our services. However, since the phones haven’t been ringing off the hook (we have cellphones, which might explain it), we thought we’d try our hand at this again.

We had a few basic criteria: Nobody dead, which ruled out James Coburn as the Sea Captain and nobody way too old to play a particular role unless it suited our comedic purposes. This latter ruled out James Earl Jones as Dr Hibbert, as an 87-year old would not be the head of a working family unless the economy really took a turn for the worse.

Since this was harder than we thought, we set our sights on some of the more fringe characters in this, our Live Action Movie Simpsons cast.

Jon Hamm as Lenny.

Milan Kundera once said, “there are no small parts only small actors”. That being said, this part is about as small as it gets. Lenny, along with Karl comprise the show’s other dramaturgical dyad, along with Itchy and Scratchy, but they’re regularly confused for one another and appear in about one eighth of the episodes. If you shave 6 figures off Don Draper’s salary, but keep him unshaven, and less dapper by three quarters, you get Lenny. Consider this one a move from the nuclear family to the nuclear power plant.

Joe Pantoliano as Sarcastic Man.

Noted character actor, Hoboken-born Joe Pantoliano had a splendid turn in the eminently memorable Memento and distinguished himself nicely as Ralphie in the Sopranos.

How this relates in any way to Sarcastic Man we’re unsure but what is for certain is the ratio of memorable lines to screen time is highest for this service sector everyman.

There is no denying their physical similarities and Joey Pants’ ability to crack wise, “you better hurry up kid, this is becoming a Starbucks!”

Kurt Russell as Snake.

This one’s a no brainer as Springfield’s resident recidivist is likely based on Snake Plissken from the John Carpenter classic 80s flick, Escape from New York. Now, he might be a bit old for the role but Snake has done several stints in the pen and this might’ve aged him considerably.

Runners up: Wrestler and Bar Fly star Mickey Rourke and Traffic and Usual Suspect Benecio Del Toro—the latter because he always sports the hair. Speaking of which…

Noted bestselling author and public intellectual Malcolm Gladwell as Sideshow Bob.

Shaking things up a bit as the bald-domed Kelsey Grammar, while voicing a magnificent Sideshow Bob, couldn’t pull off the locks required for Robert.

For someone plotting to take over the world, who better to play the part than a Canadian who shares an Alma Mater with one-half of the Shark Guys? Now, the author of Blink and the Tipping Point is no actor but who else would be cast in a Simon and Garfunkle biopic? We don’t know much about Art but we know what we like for the part.

Kelsey Grammer as Superintendent Chalmers.

There is nobody better suited to bald authority figures than the talented triple threat Kelsey Grammer (he can sing, act and is a menace behind the wheel).

For years, Grammer’s psychiatric practice suffered while he drowned his sorrows on a Cheers barstool, before moving on to the excellent Frasier.

We never saw his recent series Hank, but we’re not alone in that. Whoever did see it, would be though.

Jodie Foster as Miss Hoover.

Elizabeth Hoover is not known for much other than copiously drinking and smoking in order to deal with the daily stressors of being a second grade teacher. As far as casting overkill goes, getting a multi Oscar winner for a role as one of the least popular teachers at Springfield Elementary would be a major coup. But then again, considering the show’s producers got Liz Taylor to voice Maggie’s first word…

Gilbert Gottfried as Moe the Bartender.

Gottfried is an underrated comic who kills on the comedy roast circuit and tells the best version of the infamous ‘Aristocrats Joke’. He’s got the voice, the negative sex appeal and the unpleasantness for Springfield’s resident tap puller.

Adrien Brody as Dr Nick Riviera.

The Simpsons’ medical malpractice sawbones, Nick Riviera, “Well, if it isn’t my old friend Mr. McGregg — with a leg for an arm and an arm for a leg”— is actually based on a Hungarian, despite his Latino-sounding surname.

We figure Brody owes us and everyone else who slept through the Village (or felt for, instead of up, Halle Berry). He’s of Hungarian descent and should be able to nail the accent, especially after a few run-throughs of “Keyser Söze”

Patton Oswalt as Chief Wiggum.

The portly stand-up earned rave reviews for Big Fan, about a sports nut obsessed with the New York Giants who prepares elaborate talking points for calling into talk radio. He’d be a shoe-in for this fat gum-shoe.

Described by one user as a gift that works ‘for the beer drinker who has everything’, (including, it would appear, a color of jeans only available at a novelty store where sunglasses would be required indoors) the beer holster is “Made of rugged leather, [and] snaps onto any standard belt [with] adjustable nylon strap wraps around the thigh for additional support.”

While the device’s gift appeal is obvious—wrapping several down each leg and then betting how many bottles can be kept airborne through impromptu juggling—a nearly $40 price tag keeps us from any kind of ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us alcoholics” novelty buying.

A ‘convenient holder when he needs his hands free for grilling’ (we’re assuming the grilling in this case refers to the dressing down you’d get after admitting $40 was spent on this cincture for sphincters)  the product description, not surprisingly, only references the male pronoun.

A budding Thomas Edison noted that they “thought the leg strap was a little short” and later “A belt clip that pivots would be an improvement” (we’re unclear as to whether this would be around the circumference of the waist (awkward) or up and down as the latter would result in spillage.

We’ve previously covered the Remote Control Beer Pager here, designed for beer problem drinkers who may have misplaced their drinks at a party without first identifying them with some kind of indelible marker, and who require a button pressed on a mini-remote that might be affixed to a belt as well.

We’ll keep our readers posted if any other beer device attached to other articles of clothing come down the assembly line this holiday shopping season.

Ivan the terrible machinist

As the longevity of organized religion makes painfully clear, imaginary friends hold a powerful allure. They are not, however, limited to the fiction of holy texts. Imaginary friends manifest themselves in the lives of many — the overly creative person whose genius spills over into the make believe, the psychopath with a second face for dark deeds, or the friendless kid who’s practical.

There is something to be said for befriending a figment of one’s imagination. Unlike the real kind, an imaginary friend is incapable of, say, borrowing money and not paying it back. And if an imaginary friend asks to use your bathroom, it’s unlikely that he will rifle through your medicine cabinet or deposit anything of substance in your toilet.

In some films,  imaginary friends are depicted in a positive light, like an imaginary Humphrey Bogart  in Play it Again Sam, who encourages Woody Allen to grow a backbone and other advice that  unfortunately excluded both passing on Stardust Memories and not romancing someone whose school consent forms he once signed.

Here though we are looking at 10 imaginary characters in films who — like that kid in elementary school who enjoyed trapping birds — you would not want to befriend. These are the 10 Worst Imaginary Friends in Movies.

Children from yesteryear were as creepy as all get-out.

10.The Kids, The Orphanage

Do-gooder couple take their HIV-positive son, Simon to an orphanage in order to convert it into a home for kids with special needs. Along the way, the kid discovers playmates—not the good kind that bring you warmed hors d’œuvres in Heffner’s grotto—but imaginary ones who involve him and his mom in a dangerous game which ambiguously plays itself out when the kid goes missing and psychics are hired to track him down (never a good option, even as a last resort for the dumbest police officers).

Dishonorable Mention: Imaginary Friend, Dark Water

A divorcée moves into a concrete bunker of a building with her daughter and tries to piece her life back together after a bitter custody dispute, which the child eventually finds out she was on the losing side of when their ceiling starts to drip—an awful outcome for anyone renting an apartment under a compulsive toilet clogger. In this case though, while far less odoriferous, there lurks upstairs something even more frightening: the ghostly presence of a girl who drowned in the bathtub and comes to torment the new tenants. What follows is more murky water than even the most backed up shitter.

"I like you Clarence, always have."

9. Elvis, True Romance

The real Elvis was known more for committing violence against peanut butter and banana-packed sandwiches than people . When it came to gun play, his fury was reserved for televised images of Canadian crooner Robert Goulet. But in 1993’s True Romance, the King of Rock N’ Roll, played by Val Kilmer, is a strong advocate for vigilante retribution. Clarence (Christian Slater) is  out of sorts after a run-in with ill-mannered pimp Drexl (Gary Oldman) and unsure of how to proceed.

Ghost Elvis tells him what’d he do:  “Well, I’d kill him,shoot him in the face, put him down like a dog.” Clarence admits he’d enjoy that, but not so much the prospect of being a small pretty boy in prison. Elvis talks him into it. “Every pimp in the world gets shot … Cops’d throw a party, man.”

8. Ivan, The Machinist

The workplace in this well made Christian Bale film must have one of the most ineffectual unions ever, not to mention occupational health and safety standards south of your average cut-rate Victorian textile mill. Bale plays ‘Reznik’ (Czech for ‘butcher’, a term that, unlike ‘pharmacy’ or ’strip club’, you won’t require backpacking through Prague unless you want to lug a  rack of lamb up to your hostel), who, like Brad Pitt in Fight Club (just wait), altered his appearance considerably for the role, shedding some 60 lbs’ worth of real acting in favor of the method kind.

Reznik is a sleep-deprived machinist lulled into a state of negligence and complacency by a creepy co-worker, the grinning ‘Ivan’. Alarm bells go off when it is revealed that the company has no record of any such worker and the viewer begins to wonder if the electricity powering the machines in the film might also be used for shock therapy purposes on our delusional protagonist. Distracted by a grinning digit-deficient Ivan, Reznik unwittingly powers up a saw, which results in another co-worker no longer being able to hail a cab, or flip anyone the bird.

7. Charles, A Beautiful Mind

Math phenom John Nash, who because he’s book smart is automatically depicted as socially awkward (this is the opposite of the Forrest Gump Effect—dumb people who do marvelously well despite having the IQ of a chimp),  slowly begins to lose his marbles. The obsessive egghead  scribbles numerical equations onto window panes and hallucinates a lit student roommate named Charles (Paul Bettany) — who wouldn’t be able to help him in any way with his thesis (please see our list of Easiest College Majors) — who is obsessed with DH ‘My soul is a dark forest’ Lawrence.

Nash, played by Russell Crowe, doesn’t hurl a phone at this phony apparition, but allows this bad influence to, much like a real life roommate, tempt him into shirking school work in favor of heavy boozing.

6. Captain Howdy, the Exorcist

The Exorcist did more for puking, spinning and hallucinations than untreated alcoholism or a third rate roller coaster. “Captain Howdy” sounds like the world’s second creepiest children’s TV character (Mr McFeely of Mr Rogers being the worst)  and is conjured up by Regan’s mother on a Ouija board. A psychiatrist asks to speak to Captain Howdy:

Psychiatrist: Is there someone inside you?
Regan MacNeil: Sometimes.
Psychiatrist: Who is it?
Regan MacNeil: I don’t know.
Psychiatrist: Is it Captain Howdy?

Any patient asked that question by a psychiatrist should be entitled to a full refund.

AND NOW A VIDEO WITH SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TOP 5 WORST IMAGINARY FRIENDS OF ALL TIME!

5. Jodie, the Amityville Horror

Some see a notorious property as a buying opportunity, where you can sweep in, low-ball the agent, give the place a good scrub down and remove all the bad Mojo and hanging plants. The more passive approach—-leaving things the hell alone, is luckily not the preferred course of action people take in horror films, who also, try as they might, can’t help but trust the guy with an impossibly large collection of pickled insects who runs the gas station.

The Amityville Horror is based on the true story of serial killer Ronald DeFeo and was adapted from a novel by Jay Anson, who did for the town of Amityville what Truman Capote did for Holcomb, Kansas—except without the witticisms. In the movie, a couple move into a Long Island home where the murders took place and make the fatal mistake of not calling in an interior decorator and adding say, a nice peaceful aquarium to the killing room. Their daughter develops a relationship with a sinister imaginary friend “Jodie”, whose eyes glow red, who recounts tales of the house’s nasty history and “Tom Cruises” her, i.e., traps the girl in the closet.

4. Tyler Durden, Fight Club

As an actor, Brad Pitt possesses all the range required for dodging people at the mall handing out food samples,  but he’s got an incredible knack  of appearing in decent movies. Fight Club is one of them, where he befriends a white collar drone  (Ed Norton), with whom he sets up a ‘Fight Club’ in a bar basement.  Despite the odd casting of Pitt, who is one of those ‘Please, not the face’ type guys, many regarded Fight Club as a moderately effective anti free-market polemic, while others saw it as violence porn, with a fantastical plot in which the best scenes featured Meat Loaf with boobs. There is no denying its influence though: the website What Would Tyler Durder Do was named after Pitt’s character in the film (Apparently, Tyler Durden would dedicate his life to celebrity cleavage) and most recently Fight Club has proven influential in a real life teen plot to bomb a New York City Starbucks.

3. Fred, Drop Dead Fred

Called a ‘putrid mess’ of a film by Leonard Maltin, one of the worst Roger Ebert has ever seen and number 16 on About Film’s 30 Worst Films of the 90s list (ahead of heavy shitters like Major League II, Striptease and Armageddon), it will nevertheless be remade starring Russell Brand, which is proof that the film industry applies no standards whatsoever when it comes to picking films for remakes. For the purposes of this list, one of The Shark Guys tracked down a copy of the original and watched it as long as would be permissible under the Geneva Convention. It is a truly a puerile, nerve-grating, poorly paced and obnoxiously acted movie that should have been buried deep in a Nevada mountain with nuclear waste and forgotten forever. The themes brought up in Drop Dead Fred require no further exploration. What’s more the film isn’t that old. Someone born when this movie was made would still be unable to legally purchase alcohol.

For those who want to bone up on the original in preparation for a remake that has nowhere to go but up, Blackadder’s Rik Mayall plays an imaginary childhood friend who pesters a grown up Phoebe Cates. Please check out the clip on Youtube and be disabused of the notion that a fridge with a head being slammed in the door is the very height of hilarity.

2. Tony, The Shining

Creepy kids with imaginary friends is a horror film cliche up there with the hick sheriff who warns prophylactic-preoccupied Spring Breakers that there are strange doin’s out in the woods other than the doin’s Spring Breakers do to each other.  The ne plus ultra of kiddies with bad, bad made up friends, is the Shining. “Tony” is Danny Torrance’s imaginary friend who, among other things that no doubt contributed to shunting him off to the child psychologist, makes him spell out words in lipstick.

Hated by Stephen King, who was instrumental in remaking it as his own version—hated by everyone else—the Shining is visually stunning and a frightening isolationist exercise, with poor Scatman Crothers done in just like black folks always are in these types of films…Another imaginary character from this film is Lloyd the Bartender, who is overall a pretty positive influence as you wouldn’t have to tip a hallucination, or for that matter, need to worry about getting cut off.

1. Frank, Donnie Darko

Whacked out teen sleepwalker is tipped off that the world will end in 28 days by a giant rabbit, Frank, who convinces him to commit a serious of increasingly violent acts, the first of which is flooding his school by taking an axe to the water main and also embedding said axe in the bronze statue of a bulldog, the school’s mascot. The coup de grace is Donnie’s torching of the house of a phony baloney motivational speaker, Jim Cunningham, played by the late  Patrick Swayze.

Wanton destruction of personal and private property should not be encouraged but because of Frank’s encouragement, students are saved from having to attend a school that strangles independent thought; a statue of a bulldog becomes a whole lot more interesting to look at, and a motivational speaker who was secretly hiding some kind of dungeon of child pornography beneath his home is outed. While Frank makes the list for the creep factor and encouraging his real-world (though in this movie that is to judge) buddy toward evil ends, it must be said that his ideas did turn out to be pretty good ones after all.

The more traditional 'barrel in the mouth' works just as well.

by guest columnist Mike Sauve

More than anything else I am a Bob Dylan fan.  Nothing gets my blood boiling like an ignorant staff reviewer sent to the local Bob Dylan show.  They Google him.  They make shallow, obvious observations about his voice and his hat.  The hat is always mentioned by the third paragraph.  Last night I found myself in a similar position, sent on assignment by The Shark Guys to a sold-out Jimmy Buffett show at the Air Canada Centre [Editor's note: the conversation went something like this. MS: "I have free tickets to a Jimmy Buffet show". Shark Guys: "Oh my god, that sounds absolutely awful. Please write about it."]

What I knew about Buffett going in:  most of the lyrics to Margaritaville, he was friends with Hunter S. Thompson, and in a recent interview Bob Dylan [reviewed by the Shark Guys here] listed him among his favourite songwriters.  This generated some enthusiasm but then I listened to Cheeseburger in Paradise on Youtube and the tropical wind went out of my sails pretty quick.

On the subway ride I saw a lot of drunk senior citizens with low IQs in Hawaiian garb.  I’ve never been to a Weird Al Yankovic concert but I imagine in 20 years this is what his audience will look like.  Minus the beachwear.

I find my seats a few songs late and notice the teal-shirted, shoeless Buffett had easily filled the Air Canada Centre.  The crowd was more boisterous than the Neil Young show I’d seen here, and this is Young’s home turf.  Buffett is considerably richer.  It just doesn’t add up.  There were palm trees and unironic crashing waves on a video screen that must have been purchased from a stock footage sale in 1993.  The tour was called Summerzcool.  Is a joke even necessary here?

Many drove a long way to be there, like the 40-year old functional illiterates behind me.  (I’m speculating on their literacy)  The most offensive gentleman had consumed an estimated 38 beers in his van prior to the show and had the loud drunkenness only excessive beer-drinking can provide.  When Buffett crooned the relatively pleasant Captain Tony the drunk aggressively screamed this raspy demand:  “Everyone should get up and dance to this shit.”

I feared he was addressing me, cynically taking notes and not standing or swaying to the grating tropical drums.  But it was his companions he made this demand of, including the poor wife who was holding him up. “This could be the last time we see Jimmy.”

There was a desperate love for Jimmy in his voice.  Like most people at big-name concerts they required some kind of transformative experience.  However, their dancing and drunk screaming didn’t seem appropriate for the 100-level seats.

I have to say a couple of folkier numbers almost won me over.  A new song There’s Plenty To Drink About had plenty of topical references (Levi Johnston, Bernie Madoff) in true Weird Al fashion. Still, I started thinking, “This guy isn’t such a bad songwriter after all.”  But then he unleashed Surfing In a Hurricane, which consists of precious little more than the title refrain. I began to think of Buffett as the world’s greatest con man.

He also had the nerve to reference Leonard Cohen then proceeded to inflict some clownish spasms while massacring Cohen’s The Gypsy’s Wife. He was either trying to pantomime the exaggerated stage motions of Cohen or having a stroke.  Either way it left a bad taste in my mouth that could only be cleansed by a $12 beer and a one-hitter in the bathroom.

He also name-checked Gordon Lightfoot, and in a rare humble moment said it was his goal to be 1/10th the songwriter Lightfoot was.  Something is wrong with a society that elevates Jimmy Buffett to arena rock while Lightfoot wanders the country playing casinos.  Lightfoot was at Massey Hall last night, and I tried to astrally project myself there but the volatile alcoholic vibes in the Jimmy audience prevented the necessary peace of mind.

I finally stood when Margaritaville was played for the sole reason that two very attractive girls were dancing quite boisterously beside me.  They glanced in my direction a couple times and I tried to play it suave.  A couple brooding looks in their direction, an heir of sophistication.  I could not manifest an enthusiasm to match theirs so I thought an alternative to the madness might work.  It did not.  Moments later they were seen in a drunken embrace with the loud, drunken 40 year old monster’s two male friends.  This seemed completely unjust on an obvious level, but not surprising.  Then a song came on that involved the audience making shark fins by placing their arms in a steeple shape above their heads and rotating them from left to right as the song demanded.  The pretty girls did this with great zeal and I was glad not to have made their acquaintance.

This morning I listened to Jimmy’s greatest hits on Youtube and was surprised to hear a number of very pleasing ballads, many actually on par with lesser Gordon Lightfoot tunes.  But this was sacrificed to hurricane surfing and shark-finning in his live show, so I must turn my nose up not at Jimmy, but at the aged inebriates that reward a talented folk singer for turning into some marijuana-referencing Raffi for dull adults.

Mike Sauve is a Toronto freelancer who’s written for the National Post, the Toronto International Film Festival and Exclaim Magazine