You know, it kind of troubles me that this guy has become the default spokesperson for my generation. I really don’t want “George Stroumboulopoulos” to be the answer to the question “who are Canadian thirty-somethings looking up to these days?”
Why’s that? Because he tries too hard. He seems, at any given moment, to be dabbling in opposites–”I’m tough yet sensitive”, “I’m erudite with street cred”, “I’m hip to be square”. To me, his performance always ends up somewhere in-between, middlebrow and wishy-washy. I think his job is tricky, but I see plenty of other hosts establish a more genuine on-air persona.
I suspect The Hour’s producers are as much to blame as the man himself. Tonight’s a classic example. His guests on the show are legendary pornstar Ron Jeremy and former Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney.
First off, that’s just inappropriate. You shouldn’t book a pornstar and a former Prime Minister on the same show. I have no love lost for Mr. Mulroney, but that’s just not on. One can be hip and edgy, and still have respect for one of our nation’s more important institutions, the office of the Prime Minister. I’m guessing Mr. Jeremy’s free another night this week.
I wouldn’t bring this up, but Stroumboulopoulos made so much of it in his opening bit (after the tragically unfunny sketch comedy schtick, which ought to be dropped like a spoiled beaver tail). He protested way too much, emphasizing the juxtaposition between the two guests and that his show was big enough to accommodate them both.
The show’s counter-cultural, edgy vibe is about as thin as the ice on Lost Lagoon in November, because why’s Mr. Mulroney on the show? To pimp another show on the CBC, of course (which actually looks pretty fun).
What’s Stroumboulopoulos’s ultimate message? “We’re so cool we’ve got a pornstar and a former head of state on the same show. But we’re not too cool to sing for our supper.”
Clive has discovered this excellent paper (PDF) entitled “Ghosts, Vampires and Zombies, Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality”. In particular, he’s interested in the section about the viability of human and vampire populations.
The paper concludes that because when vampires kill humans they make new vampires, the human population of the planet would be eliminated in less than three years. I made a little chart of their data (click for a larger version):
I’m guessing that last couple of months would be very 28 Days Later.
Clive then goes on to speculate about how a vampire slayer (say, Buffy Summers) might manage the population the way we occasionally cull deer:
So the really sweet spot seems to be months eight to ten — when the vampire population would range from 128 to 512, respectively. Those seem like realistic numbers of vampires for a slayer to kill in a single month, assuming she kills 2 to 8 per night. With that kill-ratio, a slayer each month could kill enough vampires to knock the population back a month or two.
Clive says he’s not a Buffy fan. As such, he (and the researchers) understandably skips over some key factors in Buffy mythology. Let me see what I remember:
Not all humans killed by vampires get turned. In fact, in most popular myths, it’s actually quite a rare occurrence. I’d guess the rate of new vampire to humans killed by vampires might be, I don’t know, 1 to 100.
The researchers suggest that a vampire feeds once a month. In the world of Buffy, they seemed to eat a lot more often than that. As I recall, the only night they took off was Halloween.
Buffy and her colleagues occasionally kill a whole schwack of vampires. At the current growth rate, she surely would have killed off 500 or so by the end of season two.
In the show’s final episode, there are a crap load of vampires. Like, maybe, thousands? I don’t remember all that way.
I happen to own the top Google search results ranking for the phrase “worst baby names ever”. As such, people occasionally come by and leave a comment on the related post with stories of bad baby names.
A good portion of these have geeky connotations, so I thought I’d generate a little list using that entry, the site it linked to, and a bit of creative searching. There’s no way to verify if these are all legit, but they’re all from reports I found on the web–I didn’t make any of them up.
Here’s the list thus far, feel free to offer additions:
Strider – It could have been worse, he could’ve been named Pippin.
Arwen – Again, it could have been Eowyn. Plus, it’s quite a pretty name.
Lestat – “I can’t understand why junior keeps wearing all that white makeup…”
Neo – You might as well name the kid “Jesus”.
Keanu – See above.
Nikita – Apparently from the Elton John song, not from La Femme Nikita, but we can hope.
Nero – “Son, you’re named for a a Roman Emperor. No pressure.”
Maximus – See above.
Cosmo Ranger – I got nothing.
Eaton – Last name Seamen. Not so much geeky as just plain cruel.
Cleopatra Evita – Presumably she’s the daughter of drag queens.
Corran – Apparently a character in the Star Wars books.
Mara Jade – Another similarly non-movie Star Wars character.
Anakin – Bound to be a mouth breather.
Luke – Climbed the charts from 228th in the seventies to 42nd today.
Ada – Destined to work in a cubicle among smelly coding boys.
Mars – I know, it’s also a Greek god. But it gets dodgy when his sister is named Venus. And what if you named a kid Pluto and he got downgraded to a mere dwarf planet?
Ripley – Likes her machine gun with a flamethrower chaser.
Dade – This one’s pretty obscure (but apparently legit). I mean, how many people saw Hackers?
Damien – You know, like the Prince of Darkness? Rose in popularity thanks to The Omen.
I was just reading what Adam Savage (of “Mythbusters” fame) had asked on Ask MetaFilter, and encountered this question about one of my favourite movies that hardly anybody has seen:
In the great movie Spartan (insert difference of opinion here) Val Kilmer plays a kind of special forces agent, with small bag he refers to (in the excellent commentary) as a “Go Bag” and says that it contains everything tha a real special forces dude would have in such a bag. Can anyone enlighten me what would be in there?
I must rent it again and listen to the commentary. Apparently the go bag or “bugout bag” is everything “you need to be able to survive for 24/48/72 hours”. Here’s one example from a gun collector’s forum.
I have an unhealthy affection for Mythbusters. The show’s hosts are such enormous nerds, and their experiments are such science-lite, how can you not like it?
I believe that Adam and Jamie have busted several of the myths described in this Neatorama post:
Sparking bullets are relatively recent invention in movie special effects. The gimmick provides a way of letting the audience know that the bullet just barely missed its target. In real life, sparks do occur when you scrape steel or other hard metals on hard surfaces (such as brick) because little pieces of brittle materials are heated to glow and fly off. The problem here is that bullets are generally made of lead because it’s dense and soft, and you don’t want the bullets scarring the steel of the gun barrel. Ever notice that no sparks fly from the front of the gun? That’s because you’re seeing lead bullets.
This is not really a myth, but I had a small eureka moment while watching early episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Yes, there was sound in space, but during combat the small ships would actually rotate on any axis, ignoring (as one does, in space) inertia. As a kid who grew up on the ‘dog fight in space’ model of Star Wars, this was kind of a shock.
We have a joke here on the show…we’re always happy when Mythbusters gets mentioned on Fark.com, because the site gets a bunch of hits. There’s no single mention of Mythbusters on Fark that doesn’t, within five comments, deteriorate to people wanting to have sex with Kari.
This got Dugg, but I thought I’d mention that Gnomedex guru and general alpha geek Chris Pirillo wants to launchCall for Help online.
I’ve never seen an episode. Probably because it was on TechTV, a channel we didn’t get in Canada. Plus I guess I was living in Europe for part of its run, so that didn’t help.
In related local news, I gather the television show ‘Call for Help’ is being renamed ‘The Lab with Leo Laporte’, and is becoming a Vancouver-based production.
It’s rather short notice, but I just heard about a cool sounding documentary on the CBC tonight. It’s called Gamer Revolution:
GAMER REVOLUTION explores how computer games are not only a new medium for the 21st century, they are a massive form of change in our world.†says Rachel Low, President, Red Apple Entertainment. “The idea of living inside a computer-generated universe is happening right now. The line between the real world and the virtual world is disappearing. Millions of people feel that they have a life inside these games.â€Â
Of course, I’ll be watching the Canucks spank the Oilers, but I’ll record this badboy for another time.
In unrelated CBC news, Tod Maffin shot a cool video of the master control room at the CBC Vancouver. I saw this room when Tod kindly took us on a tour of the building a couple of years ago.
UPDATE: As I mention in the comments, there’s an article about this documentary in The Tyee today. I liked this quote from the director:
Unlike rock music, to which gaming has a certain comparison, I’d like to see more activism, more political engagement. There’s very little indie spirit. It’s like Hollywood with the blockbuster phenomenon. Who’ll be the Sex Pistols of games? Or the Bob Dylan? Gaming is so apolitical. In certain respects, it has a very conservative worldview.
Amen.
I watched the first 20 minutes of this documentary, and enjoyed it. The America’s Army stuff wasn’t new to me, but I hadn’t fully grapsed how insane Korea for about games and gamers (in particular, Starcraft?).
The documentary also pointed out (I’d like to get a closer look at the research) that 18-34 year old males now watch an average of 27 minutes of TV each day, and play an average of two hours of games. I’ve exceeded my 27 minutes because now I’m watching a tribute to Paul Simon at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Jamie Cullum is a wanker, and Jim Cuddy’s doing a nice job of “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Hmm…five songs and no female performers. Odd.
UPDATE #2: The high point of the tribute by far was Sam Roberts, apparently escaped from an off-Broadway production of Hair, doing a lively version of “You Can Call Me Al”.
You know, it kind of troubles me that this guy has become the default spokesperson for my generation. I really don’t want “George Stroumboulopoulos” to be the answer to the question “who are Canadian thirty-somethings looking up to these days?”