thinglets: Vintage Tobacco Advertisements

From the fine folks at wellmedicated.com comes a great set of old tobacco magazine ads from different points in the 20th century. The selection I've chosen above strikes close to home as it is a Canadian brand and the apartment is decked out in an "oh-so-hip" 60's design.

Click on the link under the pic to see the full set. I sometimes wonder what people could get away with advertising using such a stylish shot. So many products would work. Imagine this same shot today with Canadian Club, Viagra, or (what I think would be way cool) and iPod with a dock.

The power of kitsch compels you!
The power of kitsch compels you!

thinglets: C-61: A Speculative Documentary

As with all dystopian stories, the video clip gives an alternate future of Canada if Bill C-61 had been passed by our previous Conservative government. Much like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Bill C-61 threatened to send Canada down the path of lawsuits and lobbyist scare tactics. For those of you reading from the US, check out a cynical perspective on our version of DMCA. You know, us top-of-the-list international pirates.

thinglets: the cat came back

Many Canadians are all too familiar with this classic cartoon from the National Film Board, but for the benefit of the unitiated, I submit for your perusal, The Cat Came Back. If you just can't quite appreciate the storyline, you'll probably find the music quite infectious. It's sometimes years between seeing this short for me and I usually smile a nostalgic smile every time. Hope you enjoy it.

Podcast Forty Two - Loading the Cannons

Concerning the death of originality in the summer blockbuster movie season, snippets of a life lived in and around hockey and...

by special request...

a special reading of a letter from Linus Torvalds explaining the penguin as the Linux logo as read by... Morgan Freeman!

penguins

lovehate: My Offside Life

Never let it be said that the iPod touch cannot be used for a long form blog post. I said in a recent podcast that I never thought I'd be podcasting about hockey, but I'm Canadian, and after some 70 or so podcasts and a couple hundred blog entries, I think I'm entitled come playoff season. As I sit in a Montana's in Mississauga (restaurant chain for the uninitiated) I am watching the NHL playoffs on multiple TVs and recalling a few memorable times that hockey has influenced my life.
 
The only time I ever felt like a sports hero was at age seven when I scored an overtime goal on a breakaway and, for the first time in my life, intentionally lifted the puck off the ice for the winner. And while I enjoyed many other moments playing hockey, that moment ranked right up there.
 
A couple of decades later I had bit more of a surreal hockey moment when I spent the one semester if my post-secondary life in a university residence during Teachers' College. Sitting in our floor's TV lounge/common area, a group of us foul- mouthed Canadians in a US Teacher Ed. program (all guys in the room at the time mind you - and at a university that still bore the vestiges of a Franciscan monestary... save your Catholic jokes for later) learned that Mario Lemieux had been stricken with cancer in the prime of his career. In the five months I spent in that dorm, I never heard the place so quiet... eerily so. You wouldn't think that a collection of some of the most misogynist mouths I'd ever heard could be stunned into silence at the news of a hockey player's illness. No one spoke for several minutes, or at least until the next gratuitous sex-filled beer commercial anyway.
 
The last hockey memory comes in the form of a trip to Las Vegas. The moment itself was hardly earth-shattering, but did suffice in conveying a vast gulf between two culture. On the one occasion I've been to Vegas in October, I happened to be sitting in the MGM Sportsbook in front of a sea of television screens (a place I often refer to as Valhalla). That night was a major playoff game between the Red Sox and the Yankees and the room was full of fans in official MLB attire hootin' and hollerin' as their teams played what I'm sure was an amazing. My friend and I, however, sat at the far end of the room watching two small screen that were playing NHL games. It was the opening night of the regular season. The games were insignificant. I think Minnesota and the Ducks may have been involved. And we were in our glory.
 
There was a popular beer campaign a few years back that rifled off a dozen reasons to claim "I AM Canadian". And while I would never claim that Canadians have a sole claim on the game that I was raised with, I never watched one of those commercials without thinking, how many people could explain the following: Peter Puck, putting the biscuit in the basket, straddling the blue line, going roof, Savardian Spinnerama, neutral zone trap, or why 92 goals or 215 points in a season are feats of biblical proportions.

hockey

thinglets: Gavin at the Butcher's

If you haven't seen the character of Gavin from the Kids in the Hall, do yourself a favor and check out this classic sketch at the Butcher Shop. As with most slightly bizarre humor, you'll probably either love or hate it, but that's what the blog's all about. If you like it, there are a ton more over on YouTube.

Cow's eyes, dog's heads, old phonebooks are ingedients in what? Gavin'll tell you.

Impromptu Podcast 33: Where the Rubber Meets the Goal

I never thought I'd be podcasting about hockey, but next to the other six seasons: Winter, Spring, Construction, Summer, Fall, and TV Premiere, NHL Playoff Season is right up there in prompting a two month anticipation of great televised sports.
 
In as much as I believe that any product of a culture can help to define at least one piece of the culture that spawned it, hockey helps to define the entire Canadian culture for the past century.

stanley cup

thinglets: SCTV Half Wits

Okay... was running short on consciousness, but wanted to get a post in before the night was through. Perhaps one of the most classic sketches from SCTV. If you're too young to know - learn. If you're old enough to remember - laugh!

Eugene Levy as Alex Trebel, John Candy with the Flock of Seagulls Coif, Andrea Martin as the dim-witted Blanche, Joe Flaherty with the Karl Malden nose, and Martin Short as the determined Lawrence.