Category Archives: Humour

Cherry Chocolate Rain

Good God.

Tay Zonday has gone mainstream:

Cherry Chocolate Rain (via Transmission Marketing)It’s cute, but the fact that the original song “Chocolate Rain” was about how racism still permeates society, having its remix/sequel video done throwing money around, surrounded by gangsta rappers and video skanks and shelling a soft drink… I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be ironic.

Good for Tay Zonday for capitalizing on his immense success. As for Dr. Pepper’s marketing department…

UPDATE: I got an email from a company whose job it is to search the Internet for Tay Zonday blog posts, pointing out another version of the song promoting Comedy Central’s Last Laugh ’07 tonight, singing about celebrity gossip (is that worse than a soft drink?). No word on when The Comedy Network will air the program in Canada.

Sports parody songs

I’m a fan of parody songs in general, and sports parody songs (at least the funny ones) specifically. Some are musically enjoyable in addition to lyrically entertaining. Others take annoying songs and make their topics infinitely more interesting by tying them to sports teams.

Sadly, I can’t find any central repository for them (nor any links to some Montreal-based ones created by local radio stations I find particularly funny). But to demonstrate, I’ll show you this one (via), a song by Ryan Parker that makes fun of the Boston Bruins (in contrast to the success of that city’s other major sports teams):

Bowser and Blue: YouTube stars?

In researching my article on poutine, I found myself singing Bowser and Blue‘s “The Night they Invented Poutine” in my head a lot. I even ended up quoting it in the article.

With B&B on the brain, I started looking around the intertubes, and noticed that Ricky Blue has taken to uploading videos of the pair performing their songs. Most of the videos have an amateurish YouTube-like quality (which fits in well), shot at home with the aging performers straining to see the notes and lyrics through their old-guy eyesight. And the quality is pretty bad compared to what you’d get on a DVD of a big performance, but the funny is still there. One video even elicited a response asking whose song they were performing.

There are also some videos from Just for Laughs and other appearances.

None of the videos has gotten more than 5,000 views, which shows that they’ve stayed under the radar so far.

This can go on no longer. So I present my favourite from this selection of Bowser and Blue home videos:

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Future Shop needs translators

From Blog Story comes this hilariously awful translation on Future Shop’s website:

Obtenir commencé - Future Shop

Yes, folks, they translated “get started” into “obtenir commencé”.

UPDATE (Nov. 22): A representative of Future Shop responds below (Comment #5, basically a cut-and-paste of what he sent Pat Lagacé), blaming a U.S.-based subcontractor for the bad translation job. He says the link to this page has been removed (in both languages) and the company has been asked to fix it.

I tried to send a message to the company (iGo Digital out of Indianapolis, IN). But when I filled out their contact form (the only electronic way to reach them), I got this:

Server object error ‘ASP 0177 : 800401f3’

Server.CreateObject Failed

/contact.asp, line 15

800401f3

It really inspires confidence.

Blaming subcontractors is becoming a more common tactic for big companies, I notice. It absolves them of responsibility when those subcontractors cut corners. If the error is bad enough, they just cut ties with the company and find a new one.

I don’t doubt that an Indiana-based technology company would fail horribly at translating a web page (apparently resorting to some sort of automated translation). But why doesn’t Future Shop have proofreaders? Surely someone there must have at least looked at the page in question before it went live?

Go Sox!

Now that the impossible has happened for a second time in four years, perhaps it’s time to reflect on how some of the media down south are recognizing this momentous achievement on their websites:

The Boston Globe’s Boston.com:

AGAIN! (Boston.com)

The New York Post:

A-Rod (NYPost)

The New York Daily News:

A-Rod again (NY Daily News)

Yeah.

It’s also as good a time as any to delve into the vault and bring back this jewel of a fake ad from just after the 2004 series, which starts off asking Boston fans what they would give to have the Sox win it all. (Off the Comedy Network’s website since Comedy Central blocks Canadians now. If it doesn’t work, you can get it off YouTube here)

And if you’re the more sentimental type, Nike’s Red Sox Memories of Losing is here.

UPDATE: Never underestimate the Sox.

New Galacticast is thrusterific

Fred NgoOhOhOh!

If you’re like me, you wake up every morning thinking: “I wonder if I’m going to see some sweet bare-chested Fred Ngo or other Fred Ngo-related softcore pornography.”

We got a sneak peek back in July with a water fight, but since then he’s been mostly clothed in public.

Well today Barechested Fred Ngo is back, with a bang, in Galacticast’s new episode. He thrusts.

The episode is a very funny Star Trek parody, filled with homosexuality, incest, bullying, sluttiness, simulated cunnilingus and Julien Smith. All things that other people wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

Well… Fred Ngo would touch it with his 10-foot pole. But he’ll touch anything with his 10-foot pole.

Air Farce Live: A gimmick won’t magically increase ratings

I just finished watching the premiere of Air Farce Live on CBC. The umpteen-year-old show, which has been sagging in the ratings these past few years because it’s a Friday-night show and it’s not funny, came up with the idea of doing it live as a gimmick. It worked for me, at least this first night.

The first episode had a bit too much “hey look at us we’re live now!” moments, which should hopefully disappear by next week. There were also three pre-packaged segments, which is a lot for a supposedly live half-hour show. And it became clear through the first few sketches that actors wouldn’t appear in consecutive segments, which will mean fewer actors in each.

I used to be a big fan of the Royal Canadian Air Farce as a kid. I had fond memories of the Chicken Cannon, which now seems to have been retired. But the jokes were too obvious, too immature, compared to the more nuanced ones of shows like This Hour Has 22 Minutes. By the time I got a high-school diploma, I stopped watching.

After a few years away, not much has changed. There’s new faces, and the old faces are a bit greyer (and in the case of Don Ferguson, balder), but the jokes are still the same. I laughed only a couple of times, mostly during a strange, Weekend-Updateish rapid-fire news segment with some guy in front of a laptop. (The joke, after one about Brian Mulroney’s massive book of memoirs: “Kim Campbell is planning to release her memoirs in a pamphlet later this year.”)

The Air Farce will always have its audience. And even if it doesn’t, the CBC’s commitment to Canadian content will probably keep it on life support for many years. But the idea of making it “live” seems like little more than a gimmick shark-jump to try and jump-start sagging ratings. Unless it’s matched by better writing (or some unpredictability that you can only get when live) it’s just not going to work.

2nd Annual Montreal Improv Festival

Next week at Comedy Works, the greatest of Montreal and Toronto-based improv troupes (Without Annette, On the Spot, Uncalled For, Theatre Ste-Catherine, Bad Dog Theatre) will go head-to-whatever-the-audience-says for five nights of unpredictable hilarity a the 2nd annual Montreal Improv Festival (Facebook link), Tuesday (Sept. 18) to Saturday (Sept. 22).

Considering that these groups individually are worth seeing, the combination is definitely worth the price of admission (between $7 and $12, depending on the night).

How to write a bad letter to the editor

I just needed to get this off my chest.

  1. Start off by guessing that the newspaper won’t run your letter, or “daring” them to do so. Spend at least a few paragraphs discussing the newspaper’s lack of balls and the reasons behind their future decision not to publish your letter.
  2. Insult the newspaper liberally without giving any reasonings behind your blanket statements. Say the paper is stupid and that you’re smarter than them. Conclude that their declining circulation numbers are a direct result of their extreme political views and their decision to silence dissent.
  3. Make liberal use of the cut-and-paste quote. Make sure the quotes are at least 300 words long, that they’re well-known by everyone, that they’re from someone like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy or Mother Theresa. Also be sure they have no direct relevance to the point of your letter.
  4. Use quotes around words with unambiguous definitions.
  5. TWO WORDS: ALL CAPS.
  6. Never actually get to the point of your letter. Instead, repeat steps 1 to 3 for at least 3,000 words and then call it a day.
  7. Demand that the letter be printed as an opinion piece instead of a letter and that no editing be performed on it, even to fix spelling or formatting.
  8. Use thinly-veiled threats of violence to get your point across.
  9. Lace the entire letter with vulgar profanity.
  10. Use excess verbiage like “I’d like to draw you to the fact that” which hike up the word count but add nothing useful.
  11. Use metaphor without making it clear what the metaphor is supposed to represent.
  12. Add in a bunch of paragraphs of PhD thesis-ese that uses words and concepts nobody but people highly-schooled in the subject understand. Assume everyone has spent years studying the issue and does not need to be brought up to speed on the basics.
  13. Make grammatical errors so egregious the sentences lose all meaning. Those that are correct should be run-on sentences which require minutes to parse into something meaningful.
  14. Write the letter in response to someone who was responding to a letter of yours, just to correct minor irrelevant points or make ad hominem attacks instead of dealing with the actual argument.
  15. Abruptly change the subject halfway through and discuss something entirely different.
  16. Invent your own credentials. Make yourself an expert in this field and imply that nobody knows as much as you do.
  17. Invent facts to support your case. Say 99% of people do something based solely on a guess. Use paranoid conspiracy theories as the basis for your arguments.
  18. Use opinion pieces by advocacy groups as if they were objective sources of facts. Take their word for everything they say, even if it’s self-serving and unsourced. Reference it in a way that hides the fact that this is a text from an advocacy group.
  19. Use footnotes with MLA-style references, even if the paper has never used footnotes before.
  20. Say that you’re writing on behalf of a group and add 30 of your friends’ names to the end of the letter. Demand that all the names be published.
  21. After the next issue comes out, even if it’s only hours after you sent your letter, assume they will never print it and start an email campaign accusing the paper of silencing you. Immediately send another letter admonishing them for not printing your previous one as if they’re actually going to print the second and not the first.
  22. Mention that you’re sending the exact same letter to dozens of other newspapers (list them all by name).
  23. Forget to include your name or any other information on who you are or how to contact you.
  24. Send dozens of letters every week. Demand the newspaper publish them all.
  25. BONUS: If the newspaper points out that they don’t have enough space to publish all of your letters, much less your letters and those of everyone like you, suggest they start adding pages or cutting other sections of the paper to make more room for letters.

Just use these simple steps, and you’re guaranteed* to get results.

*Not guaranteed