lovehatethings - When popular culture gets you down, get your rant on and proclaim your lovehate for everything, no matter how guilty the pleasure is.
About Me

When culture gets overinflated, yet refuses to pop, I want to be there with the needle. Enlightened cynics of the world unite! Express your love or hatred of things from the sacred to the mundane.

By the way, there's a good chance any podcast you listen to may have language not suitable for children. If you don't want to take a chance on hearing the occasional f-bomb, don't listen.

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Podcast 152: The Opposite of Schadenfreude

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A confused exertion about my misgivings over a recent Powerball winner of $258 million. Why do I feel sick that THIS GUY won?

Filed under  //  lottery   media   powerball  
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Podcast 148: Venomous Caterpillars and the New Prussian Ordinance

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A reflection on how the distraction stories that media lumped on the public in the 19th century were so much more interesting than now. Brought to us by the fine folks at newspapers.bl.uk.

Filed under  //  history   media   news  
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Podcast 129 - The Everybody Happy New Canadian National Anthem

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After a two-day distraction to keep media outlets and the public sufficiently distracted from the Throne Speech and the Budget, the Tories plans to change the national anthem to make it gender-neutral have apparently evaporated. How transparent can media manipulation be. Any news outlet that printed the anthem change as anything but a distraction should be ashamed.

I, however, have not given up on the dream and have constructed a new national anthem to keep everyone happy. To hear my process and the result, you'll have to listen.

Filed under  //  media   politics  
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Podcast 127: If You Are Reading This, You're Anti-social

An article that infuriated me so much... I had to rant and rave and swear a little bit too.

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Filed under  //  media   society   youth  
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lovehate: Daytime Schadenfreude

Sitting at home on Ontario's Family Day, I gained a new appreciation of the levels of Schadenfreude that have pervaded daytime television. And it's not that I didn't have hours of Olympic coverage of people sitting behind desks to watch, but you start to notice patterns in the On Screen Guide if you stare at it like a Sterogram looking for the sailboat.

The Home Fix Shows - Let's everyone celebrate the fact that people have been ripped off by contractors and have colonies of mold growing in their walls. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that we're not smart enough to find the mold in our houses.

The White Trash Extravaganza - For the Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos crowd, it doesn't matter what the topic is, these shows make Jeff Foxworthy look like Alec Guinness.

The Youth Empowerment Hour - Tyra splays out a bunch vulnerable young folk who have no idea what they're doing, thus making us feel better by their self-esteem crashes.

The Healing Hour - Oprah and Dr. Phil and their crack psych teams lay out a buffet of all the world's problems that everyone faces on a daily basis to such an exponential level of drama that everyone viewer must feel completely validated in their regular work-a-day problems and empowered enough to go out and by Oprah's Book Club titles about other people who are messed up.

Soap Operas - 'nuff said.

Cable Reality Shows which are often syndicated in marathons all day (let's run the list)

Intervention's extremist cases that make the average viewer think "at least I'm not as bad as that guy". 

B, C, and D-List Celebrities like Hulk Hogan, Gene Simmons, Kathy Griffin and Ozzy Osbourne get to show us how f'ed up their lives are - gee celebrities are people too... and pretty messed up at that.

And without beating a dead horse, how about Jon and Kate Plus 8, Dog The Bounty Hunter, For The Love of Ray J, Real Housewives of Schadenfreude USA, Dr. Drew... whew! I haven't even scratched the surface. But after a Family Day of flipping past many of these Downerfests, I wish I could say I feel better about myself, but then I realize that my life was reduced to watching these losers... which makes me?

Filed under  //  media   oprah   tv  
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thinglets: Alternative Superbowl Names So As Not To Get Sued By The NFL

Since the NFL threatens to sue anyone who uses the name "Superbowl" outside of reporting on it as news, I've decided to give some alternate monikers for people looking to spice up their local events or eatery promotions:

The Big Game

The Recroom Drunkfest

The Prop Bet Gambler's Paradise

The Poolie's Delight

The Game That's Rarely Good

The Media Blitz

The Super Bowel

The Hope-I-Die-Before-The-Who-Plays-The... forget it.

The Vegetative State Extravaganza

The Six Hour Build Up To A Coin Flip

The Excuse to Party

The Not-Good-Enough-Of-A-Reason-To-Bump-The-Simpsons Bowl

The Overpaid Immature Mutant Game

The Stupidbowl

The Not-Yet-Ready-For-Prime-Time Bowl

The I-Waited-Two-Weeks-For-This? Bowl

The CarQuest International House of Pancakes Geico Bowl

The Beer Commercial Bowl

The Oh-Look-There's-Counter-Programming-Figure-Skating-On Bowl

The Smoka Bowl

The I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Better Bowl

The Hey-Look-At-That-Commercial-While-I-Steal-The-Last-Piece-Of-Pizza Bowl

The Are-Those-Really-Bits-and-Bites-I-Haven't-Seen-Those-For-Years Bowl

The Bathroom-Is-Off-Limits-For-10-Minutes Bowl

The I'll-Cheer-For-The-Opposite-Team-Of-Everyone-Else-In-The-Room-To-Be-Different-And-Controversial Bowl

The Why-Do-I-Have-To-Watch-Promos-For-Canadian-TV-Shows-And-Miss-The-Commercial-Memes-That-Will-Be-The-Talk-Of-The-Internet-For-The-Next-24-Hours-Thanks-To-The-CRTC Bowl

Filed under  //  football   media   nfl   sports   superbowl   television  
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Podcast 119 - Look At Yourself

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Concerning why I haven't had a podcast up in a long while, 2009's media distractions, how James Cameron ripped off a pre-school show for Avatar, my Film-A-Month Faves for January to June 2010, and why YOU were the biggest cop out of the aught decade.

Filed under  //  2009   2010   avatar   balloon boy   film   james cameron   media   tiger woods   time magazine  
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thinglets: You Were Time Magazine's Grand Cop Out Of The Decade

Now that Time magazine has named a banker the Person of the Year 2009, I thought back to one of the decade's biggest cop outs. In 2006 Time named the Person of the Year YOU. What kind of sophomoric bullshit is that? I'm pretty sure the fall of print journalism that we've seen over the past few years was pushed along by this nugget of idiocy.

Before illustrating how truly pathetic YOU was, let's remember that in the past Time had come up with other gems like:

1960: US Scientists
1969: The Middle Americans
1975: American Women
1982: The Computer (Machine of the Year)
1988: Planet Earth (Planet of the Year) ...really? Not HD114762b?

A legacy of cop outs going back 50 years. But on to the real meat and potatoes of my argument. I don't know how many of you have heard of the band Uriah Heep. They were a hard rock/prog outfit from England who had their glory days in the 1970s. (Named after a Dickens' character for all you trivia buffs.) Anyway, in 1971 the record company released one of the cheesiest album covers of all time, entitled Look At Yourself, which featured a reflective cover so that fans could... well, you get the picture... in fact, you were the picture.

My friends and I laughed as teens when we picked up this cover in delete bins. Fair ball, however, the prog rock lover inside me actually kinda dug the music. The cover remains, to this day, one of the cheesiest concepts of all-time MOSTLY because someone thought it was immensely clever. And so goes Time 2006.

Can you imagine the cadre of geniuses that sat around a table and agonized over this? It's almost as though they had a story in the can about bloggers and the web and decided that it would be too much work to come up with a real person. (I suppose, in retrospect, I never bought the magazine, so I wasn't part of YOU.)

I appreciate that some of you probably thought this was immensely clever on Time's behalf when it happened a scant three years back. I would like to be moderate in my tone while placating your assertion and accepting your belief, but I can't. You're wrong. Time was wrong. And not since the goofball editors chose Earth as Planet of the Year in 1988 was there a bigger "stupid slap" in the face by this paragon of publications.

I know you think I may be making a big thing out of this, but when Time magazine and cheesy album covers are drawn parallel in my brain, it cannot be good news for print media. And in so much as I may be cheesy from time to time on lovehatethings, I always serve it up with a plate of saltines.

Filed under  //  2006   decade   media   time magazine   uriah heep  
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lovehate: 2009 - The Year of Distractions

There was a whole crapload of freaky, scary stuff that happened all over the world this past year. It's a shame that most of us got, at best, glimpses into what are probably some of the most pressing and meaningful issues of the day while most news outlets decide to spend the majority of their time on mindless minutiae, or buying into slants of stories that are promoted to shunt us away from truth. 2009 suffered the media equivalent of someone pointing up to a phantom airplane, and while everyone else looked, they'd run away.

Here's only some of the stuff that occupied WAY too much time on the airwaves this year:

Michael Jackson: Sure he was talented, but he died. There were a whole bunch of other talented people who died this year, some who may not even have heard about before. That we had to sit through 24 hour coverage, for weeks on end, on where, how, and why he died  spoke not as much to any crime, talent or celebrity, but more about how news networks love to retell the same story 8000 ways when they have plenty of archived footage to use up. And why not kick in a film for good measure.

Tiger Woods: I don't care that a golfer screwed around on his wife more than the guy who works in the convenience store down the street. If you have couples living to the left and right of you at this moment, odds are one of the four are screwing around with someone. He golfs. He's an idiot. He will return. And our Schadenfreude will know no bounds.

Susan Boyle: Yay! A foppish English tart can sing! Who gives a shit? Anyone can sing... maybe not in tune, but at least they hit continuum. Everywhere I turned for a month there was some new story about the downward spiral of this complete fabrication of "reality television" and how she took the public, content with shitty quality mp3s and autotune voices to heights of ecstasy. If I never hear of her again, I will not shed a thought.

Balloon Boy: Even if the story was true, it should still not have garnered the attention it did. Why does the story of some kid in a balloon rate higher than the millions who starve every day? You know what they say: one child not floating in a balloon reported on by thousands of reporters is a tragedy. One million children starving and not being reported on at all is a statistic.

Copenhagen: Hey, let's drum up vision of sugar plums, or at least the Little Mermaid and take everyone's attention off what's really being done at these conferences... do you think they're really discussing climate change? Scientists discuss climate change. World and corporate leaders discuss how to make money and political spin off of climate change. Whether you buy into the changes in the weather or not, rest assured climate change for the good or bad of every day people was low on the list in terms of the real discussions in Copenhagen.

Swine Flu: Quick, let's come up with a sexier, sci-fi sounding name like H1N1. Let's threaten old people and children with it. Let's spend hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on vaccines that haven't been tested. Let's make sure everyone is scared enough to line up for hours to get the shots. Let's keep scaring everyone so that they don't realize we've spent so much money during a brutal depression on propping up the stock of Glaxo Smyth Kline. Let's try to figure out a way to not let people know that within a year we will have tens of millions of doses expiring in warehouses around the country when the final bill collectors come knocking.

Chris Brown and Kanye West: Fuck you both. Combined you idiots wasted more of my time with senseless drivel than any other asinine talentless duo except maybe...

Jon and Kate Plus 8: What the fuck? Do I really have to have news devolve to the point that reality show characters have become headline worthy? If that's the case, I may as well treat everyone on the news like a reality show character. Hey look! It's Barack Obama from Political Idol... I wonder if he'll get voted out of the house this week?

Octomom: Some stupid woman gets some stupid doctor to give her some stupid fertility pills and she pops out 8 kids and I'm supposed to give a shit? This is crap we would have laughed about in supermarket tabloids 15 years ago and now its international news. My how we have gotten dumber! The only time I ever want to hear the Octo prefix again is during a trailer for an upcoming Spiderman or a Discovery Channel show.

We are idiots. We allow this to happen through passivity or sheer ambivalence.

In most revolutionary handbooks one of the first things you are told to do is take over all the television and radio stations. By taking control of the media, you can control the public. If you count the hours you were exposed to these stories this year, and assume that those that control media are trying to control you, start to ask: to what end? 

Aren't broadcasters federally regulated? Doesn't this mean we (at least theoretically) could take some control back over mass media outlets? If we were at all going to buy into the Roland Emmerich pitch that the world would end in 2012, I'd say that 2009 was a pretty good case for thinking it might not be a bad thing... at least we wouldn't notice anyway... not if a celebrity had sex with an alien.

Filed under  //  balloon boy   copenhagen   media   michael jackson   octomom   susan boyle   swine flu   tiger woods  
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Podcast 118 - Teenage Stinking Boxing Tigers

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I know. A pretty crazy title, but I managed to get every major topic in. Enough cryptic titling. Let's get on with the podcast.

Filed under  //  media   tigerwoods   tmnt   unboxing  
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