Website Of The Day

There are times in Life when things change, moments that leave you transformed for the rest of your life, in a way that there is no possibility of ever turning back.

This is one of them. Be prepared.

Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor.

Is There?

They didn't need three squad cars, they barely needed one, but they were there, so while they were at it, why not have a go at it?

Sometimes things just fall on your lap, and you can either push them away or give them their ten bucks and just let them dance, and that's what they were intent on doing, which is basically doing nothing and letting the night happen as they saw it occur, not intervening and seeing if there was, indeed, a Guiding Hand.

By the time sun came up, they still weren't so sure, but by God they had fun and it was worth doing again, so instead of going home, of lying in a warm bed, they went at it again, they did.

The events themselves were different but the result was still pleasant, and again the questions arose about Divine Plans and fate, and freights and weights, and... wait a minute, freights and...?

And that's when it happened, the cop car hadn't stopped and the train ran it over killing the driver and two passengers.

So we'll never know, will we?

The Tony Danzig Extravaganza

Mother,
Tell your children not to come my way
Tell your children not to hear my words
What they mean
What they say
Mother...

Mother
Can you keep them from watching Who's the Boss?
Can you hide them from the Tony Danza Show?
Oh, Mother

The Top 10 Hockey Mascots

According to The Hockey News, here are the 10 best mascots in the sport.

Weird to see Youppi! getting such respect. Cool, but weird.

Also: Wild Wing: no, absolutely not, what an ugly piece of trash. And Carlton the Bear looks like he's asking for a bullet in the brain.

Video Of The Week: Desert Owls

Animals rule; they inspire us to reach taller heights, run faster on longer distances, reproduce whenever we can, and to eat our young. One act who can take care of themselves in this dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest world is Montréal's own Desert Owls.

Desert Owls was formed in late 2008 when drummer JP Aubin joined co-songwriters Freedom Sebastian and Luca Fantigrossi to rock and roll our butts back to grooveland, like a Lennon/McCartney for Generation Y. Aubin left after a few months, and when a succession of fill-in drummers worthy of quoting Spinal Tap weren't deemed enough to push their sound forward, the pair enlisted Tomas Matthews to beat the skins to a suitable tempo.

This song (and video), ''Who?'', lead-off title track to the EP released just last week, fully captures The Spirit Of Rock In Montréal, fast-paced, dark as the night but lit by bright flashy colours, claustrophobic and voyeuristic - okay, I might have just added that last one in myself. Either way, you decide. The song was recorded at current ''it'' studio, Digital Bird Studios (where Nightwood recorded theirs, and Tasha Cyr is about to for hers), and the video was directed by J-P Lamarche (more credits precede the video).

Poor Girl!

Even when she's laying low, doing nothing, someone has to bring her up. I'm not even above it myself (I know it brings my reader count up).

But this... she isn't even out of bed yet, and someone's snagging a picture of Megan Fox!

The Lost Art Of Inglorious Basterds

Found on poster blog OMG Posters!, a bunch of posters promoting the Quentin Tarantino WWII epic Inglorious Basterds that were never actually used, released as VERY limited art prints to benefit the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

See them here.

A couple of noteworthy ones:






I hope a few Chile benefits start popping up soon, or something will feel uneven, to say the least.

Kate Winslet And Sam Mendes Break-Up

You've probably heard by now, superb actress Kate Winslet (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Finding Neverland) and over-rated film director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) are calling it quits, just like Sandra Bullock and Jesse James, apparently.

Some sites call it the ''Oscar Curse'', claiming the marriage of half the recent Best Female Performance winners... a statistic that resembles the fact that half North American marriages end in divorce...

Poor Kate, though. A creature like that doesn't deserve bad breaks, let alone break-ups.

You know who would make an ideal rebound guy? ME.

She is Class Incarnated. She can support herself very well. She has a radiant smile. And then some. She's as pure as the bright, blue sky.

Alright, I've achieved my goal: to finally have more Kate Winslet pictures on my blog than of Megan Fox; it took a while, but it's well deserved.

So the next two are just purely for me.

The History Of Cheerleading

Once in a while, a captivating link makes its rounds on the interwebs and achieves ''legendary'' status: the piano-playing cat on YouTube, the water-skiing squirrel, Amanda Palmer or Rose McGowan on the red carpet at award shows...

This link, from Cracked.com, deserves such recognition.

Sure, it's got the images you expect, such as:




But also improbable ones:






However, this one just may be my ''Pic Of The Day'':





But, more importantly, a relatively long blurb about ''The History Of Cheerleading'', and a ''Facts About Cheerleading'' checklist (ripe with pictures).

Fun times.

I'm left with a new-found respect for the sport...

About Bands Who Don't Come To Montréal

There is more and more (angry, disappointed) talk about many (most?) interesting music acts not making a Montréal stop in their tours of late.

More often than not, we're stuck with has-beens like Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Journey, Styx, and Mötley Crüe - you know, crap.

But if it means that the Jägermeister Korn Tour will miss my town, they, hey, it can't be all bad.

How a reputable beverage will only associate itself with the shittiest bands is beyond me. Sponsoring this tour doesn't equate their drink with ''danger'', nor with ''influential''; it equates it with Bud Light, Kid Rock, Monster Trucks, NASCAR, and people marrying their cousins because that date-rape from three months ago resulted in unwanted pregnancy.

I wonder if I can replace Jäger with Sambuca in a Liquid Cocaine, 'cause this seems like reason enough to boycott a brand.

Video Of The Week: The Pogues

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

As is customary at this time of year, when winter is forced to disappear a bit a melting snow mixes with dirt to make for a cold, dirty, grey mushy substance that aims to make humans fall flat on their faces or asses, particularly if they drank too much, the soundtrack of the day is loaded with Celtic content and, more often than not, The Pogues end up being the most played band, despite their being a London-based band with Englishmen in it.

While I missed the St. Patrick's Day parade last Sunday that involved at least one loony, drunk 20-year old, I am celebrating the day by drinking a few Kilkennys, the beverage of champions, and playing NHL10 and getting into many fights.

Plus, I woke up this morning with a headache, induced likely from drinking too much last night.

All in all, neither a loss nor a cliché-free post from me.

And the second Holiday in a row that I use a Pogues song as Song Of The Week... Pogue Mahone (i.e. póg mo thóin)!

Praying

I'm not a religious man, by any stretch of the imagination.

In any event, if there is a God, those who preach His words the loudest are likely to be the ones who have it the most wrong, seeing as they Hate everyone who isn't like them, be it because of race, sex, sexual orientation, different religious views, political views, different tastes in entertainment...

They also have praying down all wrong.

I like what George Carlin said about praying, it's funny, but, in essence I don't agree with him.

I've often thought people treat God rather rudely, don't you? Asking trillions and trillions of prayers every day. Asking and pleading and begging for favors. Do this, gimme that, I need a new car, I want a better job. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday His day off. It's not nice. And it's no way to treat a friend. But people do pray, and they pray for a lot of different things, you know, your sister needs an operation on her crotch, your brother was arrested for defecating in a mall. But most of all, you'd really like to fuck that hot little redhead down at the convenience store. You know, the one with the eye patch and the clubfoot? Can you pray for that? I think you'd have to. And I say, fine. Pray for anything you want. Pray for anything, but what about the Divine Plan?

Praying to get something, to receive something, is so totally wrong. It's insane, it's backwards-stupidity-becoming-double-stupidity.

Think about it for a second: God is like a parent, we're his child: he created us, made us. Everything we have, everything we are, we owe it to His Will, he was nice enough to give it to us. For, depending on your views (Creationism versus Evolution), hundreds or millions of years.

And the only fucking time we ever call him up is to beg for something more? No ''Hi, Dad, how are you doing today?'', no ''How's Eternity treating you?'', no ''How's Mom?'', no ''Thanks God I'm alive!''...

Instead it's ''I need a new car'', ''I didn't study enough but need to pass this exam'', ''I hope Marie-Julie Melançon will love me as much as I love her'', or ''My team needs to win the Super Bowl''.

Take, take, take. You praying people are ungrateful fucking children. And I'm sure there are more of you ungratefuls out there than we think who are, in fact, fucking children.

St. Patrick's Day Drinking... Or How To Spend Your Whole Paycheque On Things That Go Down The Drain

A few years back I had a fine St. Patrick's that I never want to have happen again.

I started it at Opening Time, which for this special, joyous occasion was 9 AM - I decided to forgo watching the parade and instead spend the whole fucking day drinking at a bar, in this case Madhatter's, at the bigger location on Crescent, the third of four incarnations of the bar I've drank in.

We started out being four, well, there were two of us, but lack of space made another two people sit at our table, but soon enough, the three people sharing my space, being the social blabbermouths they were born to be, got the other tables interested in us.

Madhatter's, with a great sense of profiteering, had no specials on beer on the one day that pretty much celebrates the fucking thing - so it was $15 pitchers and $6 Jack Daniels. Lucky for me, ever thinker-ahead-of-times, I'd brought in a 40-ounce of Mr. Daniels' fine drink to re-fill my glass at my own convenience and save dough...

By 11 AM, there were waitresses coming around selling $1 shots of vodka-fueled drinks - Sex On the Beach and Kamikaze... I acquiesced and took two of each, and for the first time of the day, also paid some to my tablemates - at a buck a pop, it would have been wrong not to.

At noon we had our first meal - I ordered a plate of nachos, fully loaded with olives, black peppers, salsa and topped with a bit of mozzarella cheese; food helps keep the booze down, and keeps the booze hound from getting his noose wound - and spitting some juice, brown.

By 2 PM, our new friends were wasted and left, quickly replaced by new drinking buddies. It was around that time that I got up, for the first time, to evacuate a bit of liquid and take some more money out; I'd had at least 5 pitchers at this point, plus perhaps 20 ounces of JD and a dozen shots of the vodka drinks... so up the stairs I went to the men's room, which was already a walk-in puddle of transparent stickiness, and one stall - one of two, the one on the left, first from the door - seemed to be reserved for vomit-emitters and those afflicted by diarrhea. I finished what needed to be done as fast as I could to not have to spend a second longer than I had to, and promptly made my way back downstairs for more beers.

Soon enough, an army of musicians swarmed the place and got the whole populace festive, standing and cheering and yelling; it was a mini-parade inside the bar, so those of us who had missed the actual one outside were treated to a show anyhow. It was all good.

By 5 or 6 PM, it was time for another meal - a hamburger with fries. I realize in retrospect that I should have had the meal that requires the most careful handling first, before things degenerated, but hey, I didn't; not that anything was wrong with the food, both the burger and fries tasted exactly like they usually do there, but it was about that time that I, personally, started to buy the shot-waitress a shot every time she came by, which was becoming increasingly often; I can only imagine that the same thing happened with the rest of the staff, from the bartenders to the cooks. For most humans, alcohol consumption means motor skills and attention to detail start becoming a priority... but as I said, it tasted fine.

I probably went to the washroom after my meal, say by 7 or 8 PM, and it was probably stickier, smellier and more disgusting than before. At this point, it was only my second time (in about 10 hours of drinking), but I'd be going every hour on the hour from then on, and the situation upstairs just got worse. I was tempted to use the ladies' room, but it wasn't much better there, plus there was a line-up. Between 11 PM and 2 AM, I'd just go outside and urinate in the alley to save time and keep my sanity, but later than that, I feared not being let back in - keep in mind, closing time is 3 AM...

In any event, they only kicked us out past 4 AM; they stopped serving us alcohol at 3:30 (well, the shooter girl handed us drinks, many of them free by then, until 4:15), the bar had been empty except for a half-dozen hangers-on for over an hour, and the staff was wanting to go home.

We each grabbed a cab - our table, and the shooter girl and bartenders - and headed our separate ways, sad to leave each other's company but exhausted (and, for some, dead-drunk). The sun was coming up, way in the distance, and with my going East, it looked like I was headed right for it, looking to meet the sunrise head-on.

When I got home, I called my bank to find out the damage done: $750. My whole paycheque I'd just gotten 3 days prior, and a bit more.

I went to bed at 5:30 AM and had to get up at 8 to go to work. I got there at 9:30, barely a half hour late, with a headache, and proceeded to tell my boss the tale of my previous night; he wasn't surprised, but he had trouble believing it.

It was an amazing day and night, but I wouldn't do it again - I couldn't even afford to, anyhow. It's the last time I ''celebrated'' St. Patrick's Day.

Video Of The Week: Nightwood

Not really unexpected, right?

After a glorifying review, and a post on my autograph/collectibles blog, they just had to put out a new video... how could I resist?

The video is a condensed edit of a time-lapsed shooting of Nightwood's recording session at Digital Bird Studios, with the song The Bright Girls Of Summer running throughout and building momentum.

Nightwood is a three-piece consisting of drummer extraodinaire Jeremy MacCuish, also of Parlovr and Cotton Mouth, and the dual-singer/guitarist attack of Amber Goodwin and Erin Ross, who both used to work on a Montréal Riot Grrrl zine. Nowadays, Amber publishes the Lickety Split smut zine and is part of the experimental film collective Double Negative, which is definitely a positive (sorry, I had to).

This is definitely a must-see - and must-hear, obviously - band.

Nightwood, Sandman Viper Command And Green Go At Green Room

Sunday, March 7th, 2010.

Warm enough to wear a cap instead of a tuque, but chilly enough to catch a cold if you forget to protect your neck. The perfect weather to be invited to see a live show and drink 12 Mooseheads while there.

Three bands, two I've heard of, including one that I fucking love and have seen live four times already. All three are launching their records that night, so that's a special evening in and of itself.

First up, Sandman Viper Command, releasing Everybody See This. Energetic, sarcastic, these cats are almost too-cool-for-school, though, at times reminiscent of Fall Out Boy, but maybe less playful. Their best songs are when they drop the chords and go riff-a-riffic, like Oh yeah, It's Fusion and Midwest Moses, in my opinion, as it's where they stop sounding like other acts and have a more distinct personality. The Metal I've Spent might also make it onto my Eternal Playlist.

I'll skip the middle-man for now and head straight to what was expected to be the meat of the evening: Green Go (say it fast five times, you'll realize it actually stands for ''gringo''). It's hard to evaluate their performance, seeing as their do-it-all member Ferenc 'Fez' Stenton couldn't make this part of the tour due to illness and was hastily replaced by Rouge's Kelly McMichael (check out their song Sex Money Revolution for an accurate sample) who learned the songs on the drive to Montréal. However, from what I did witness, I prefer hearing their music from a CD rather than live and through the sound system of a rock venue like Green Room, which is ironic considering their brand of dance-electronica-rock is made to rally crowds into chant-friendly choruses and jumping like it's the end of time. But the songs themselves, especially on record, are quite catchy. Cash Money Gremlins, particularly, had me knowing the chorus by the second time it came around, and was so lively it lead me to 'freestyle' another song onto it by the break, a hit from a few years back:

Sweat, baby, sweat, baby - Sex is a Texas drought
Me and you do the kind of stuff that only Prince would sing about
So put your hands down my pants and I'll bet you'll feel nuts
Yes I'm Siskel, yes I'm Ebert and you're getting two thumbs up
(...)
You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery channel

That's right, it took me back to the Bloodhound Gang, although they are nothing like them apart from groovy. All in all, their songs are good, like as if Think About Life had balls or if The Killers had a vision - but the show didn't live up to their record. And they had to follow a hard act...

Which brings me to the pièce de résistance... Nightwood.

I'm not sure where to even begin with Nightwood...

I guess you should start with the record. Buy the vinyl, it comes with an mp3 download, and it is what it is. The artwork by Rick Leong shows big-ass waves on the front and depicts the bottom of the ocean on the back. That's it. So you can't help but just listen to the songs and make your own mind up about how you feel about them, through your own personal tastes.

If you don't heed my advice and opt, instead, to go see them live as your first contact with the band, you'll notice two girls with guitars, both singing, and a drummer with the most basic drum kit you've seen in a long while - don't be fooled: he is merely (and merrily) not pretentious, but he can (and will) bash with the best of them. His playing style is all about emotion, like he feels every single beat he plays, at times subued, other times just plain wild. He is at once Keith Moon, Dave Grohl and the Dresden Dolls' Brian Viglione. He is, quite simply, Jeremy MacCuish, drummer extraordinaire and the sexiest man in the bar that night.

On guitars and vocals, upon first eyeing the dual attack of Amber Goodwin and Erin Ross, your brain will immediately conjure up thoughts of Veruca Salt and/or Heart (even Green Go mentioned it) - don't. Stop that shit right away. Do NOT try to compare them to a major-label act you know - they're not it.

What they are is a tsunami of rock. As a matter of fact, many of their song are like waves, starting off slow and soft, and building into a roaring climax of screaming proportions, like Pearl Jam's Given To Fly or my own Let's Last Dance (sorry, couldn't find a better version).

You could tell early on that this crowd wasn't there for Nightwood, but the sheer energy their songs build up to got every one who left (say, to smoke outside or in the washroom) to come back in a haste and catch the wave, and get swept up by it.

Individually, there were definitely stand-out tracks: Skeleton Crew rocked the house HARD, Johnny was magnificent, Sunken Mountains was a terrific power-ballad that deserved a louder volume. And the very last song they played, I'm not sure what it's called (just because I've seen them before doesn't mean I'm familiar with all the new songs!), but featured some guitar heroics by Amber Goodwin and she two-handed finger-tapped directly onto her guitar's neck, Van Halen-style, just, you know, not cheesily.

Seriously, with a manic octopus on drums and two powerful angelic voices (the type of angel who can also slit your throat) playing wholly original build-up rock music, this is an act to witness many times.

And if you're not going to go for the right reasons - i.e. the quality of the songs - then at least go for the totally wrong reasons: Jeremy MacCuish could make your dead great-grandmother moist, Amber Goodwin looks like she was the model for the perfect doll your sister had as a kid, and Erin Ross is - by far - the hottest human ever to rock a Flying V/Kiss-inspired guitar, and just may be the sexiest person in rock, period.

Thanks to Meet You At The Show for holding this and inviting me to it, you can read their own review here, with even more pictures. Thanks to Nightwood for signing my record, as you can see here.

My Local Dive Burnt Down... And My Whole Fucking Hood Is Going Bat-Shit Crazy

What. The. Fuck. Eh?

It started a few weeks ago with some dude getting beat up right on my fucking doorstep. Like, seriously, pounded on the sidewalk, at 3:30 AM, parts of him touching my front porch. It pissed me off, but I had to intervene.

It seems the whole neighbourhood is on the brink of tremendous violence, in a fit of rage I can't even begin to comprehend.

Hours ago, in the middle of the night, my local neighbourhood dive bar, Bar Fullum, a place I was happy to frequent one a week because it was at the corner of my street and was now equipped with huge HD screens for me to watch hockey games and incite me to leave home during the cold, dead winter months, albeit not by straying too far - well, it burned down. 5:30 AM. It's gone, along with the two apartments that were on top of it. The newspapers say it wasn't criminal, but those who worked there aren't convinced.

And just a few minutes ago, as I went to the grocery, I saw a couple fighting violently on the street - screaming at each other and she hitting him - and what looked like two gangs engaging in a beef, two groups of maybe a dozen late teens/young adults each, engaging in fights, then forming a circle as two combatants got into it - right in the middle of a McDonald's parking lot.

It feels like one of those zombie/disease/violent rage movies, when shit's about to break loose. I'm here with two baseball bats, protecting my two cats and possessions, waiting for it to actually start so I can get working on upgrading my weapons, one at a time, so I can survive those fuckers.

I'm not crazy, I know it's not likely to happen. But if it does, I'll be the one asshole who is prepared: good music, enough brains to not follow everybody's path, a habit of not sleeping much and a bad attitude.

How I Used To Entertain Myself As A Child

(reposted from my collectibles blog at http://hellsvaluablecollectibles.blogspot.com/2010/03/peter-zezel-autographed-card.html)

I was always a fan of Peter Zezel. Well, not always, I didn't find out he even existed until the 1986-87 O-Pee-Chee set, but from the moment I saw his card, his name, his position, and his stats - I was fan. More so when I actually saw him play. I liked him so much that I'm willing to pretend he never played for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

What I used to do with hockey cards, in my parents' living room, in our apartment on the second floor of a duplex on Melrose between Terrebonne and Somerled, was take all my hockey cards, and hold drafts, separating all of my cards (from different years) and making new teams up, since most sets I had didn't have complete teams (say, all the Habs or all the Rangers).

I'd have favourites, of course, but I always tried to play it fair, letting the flow of the game - and the eccentricities of our carpeting - do their thing. ''My'' team, Les Nordiques de NDG, was always the one with Patrick Roy in nets, and was usually the only one who got the games where officiating was, shall we say, uneven. In the best of worlds, that Roy team would also have Al MacInnis on defense, but not always. But almost inevitably, it had Zezel at centre.

Each team would be comprised of 7 players (a goalie, three forwards, two defensemen, and a backup player in case of injury), and the puck was one that I took from my table hockey set. I kept full statistics of every game, that I wrote on endless sheets of loose leaf paper, then compile all the stats on other sheets, and actually hold 80-game seasons with full schedules that I'd pre-set by hand. And not just the easy stats like goals and assists, but also penalty minutes, powerplay goals (and assists), shorthanded goals (and assists), plus/minuses, empty-net goals, game-tying goals, game-winning goals, the first goal of a game, shots on goal, faceoffs taken and won, hat tricks... I was NHL 09 twenty years ahead of my time.

And many times, at season's end, he would be in the league top-5 for scoring, close to Wayne Gretzky, Peter Stastny, Mats Naslund, Brent Sutter and Brett Hull. He was even named League MVP a couple of times - yes, I even gave out all the awards, even the Rocket Richard trophy, 15 years before it even existed, known in my league as the Guy Lafleur trophy. Needless to say: Zezel was one of the very best players of the league that played out in my mind.

In real life, though he was a very good player, he was never quite as spectacular: four seasons with more than 20 goals, including one with 33, two seasons with 72 points (one with the Philadelphia Flyers and one with the St. Louis Blues), always among the league leaders in faceoffs won and reliable in his own end. All that, and a tendency to have as many penalty minutes as points. And two Stanley Cup finals as a Flyer, both lost to Gretzky's Oilers.

What I didn't know about Zezel (a Serbian name, originally, although he is a ''good Canadian boy'' from Toronto) was that he had hemolytic anemia, a rare blood disorder. It had messed with his health in 2001, and eventually claimed his life (after a spleen-removal surgery and subsequent brain hemorrhage) on May 26, 2009.

A few months ago, I saw a post on Sal's Autograph Blog, where he had purchased a Zezel-autographed card on Ebay, and mentions his small part in the Rob Lowe/Patrick Swayze film Youngblood (he even made fake hockey cards for his character in the movie, which you can find here). From then on, I was also on the lookout for a decently-priced Zezel card on Ebay.

I hoped it would be as the Flyers' #25, but I found this one instead: a 1990-91 Upper Deck (card #17). He appears as a Blues (even though the Blues sent him to the Washington Capitals in exchange for Geoff Courtnall in the off-season), but unlike Sal's card, which he signed in blue sharpie over a blue Blues jersey, mine was signed in black, which contrasts enough with his white uniform that the autograph seems clearer (and it looks sharp and great!), and the picture as well. And as Upper Deck was known to try to do at the time, the back picture features Zezel in the team's dark, away jersey. The best of both worlds.

Terrible Marketing Ploy

So you've noticed all these huge earthquakes of late, right?

California, Haiti, now Chile's 8.8, so strong that it changed the earth's axis and we've lost 1.26 microsecond every day.

All just about when the shitty movie 2012 is set to come out on DVD...

Sony might be causing these, killing all those innocent poor people just to sell copies of their DVDs. Sick bastards.

Everybody is A Fucking Nazi

It has existed as far back as I can remember: the late 70s, the 80s, the 90s...

Every single time someone who is prone to exaggeration disagrees with someone, it's what they resort to. 'That Person' is Hitler; his supporters (or staff) are Nazis.

In 2003, in his Quest For World Domination, I mean the War On Terror, George W. Bush invaded his second country in 18 months - a country of impure, coloured, backwards, retarded, living-in-caves-and-having-sex-with-animals people, according to his press releases.

His opponents compared him to Hitler. Of course.

Then Hurricane Katrina happened, and people hated him so much that, for some inexplicable reason, he went from the worst human of all time to, just, racist - or, as Kanye West put it, he doesn't like black people.

Speaking of black people, one of them was elected to bring grace and intelligence back to the White House. He came in with the worst deficit of all time, the worst economy, two wars that were quickly going nowhere... and while some people complain he hasn't made enough changes, his opponents seem to rather want to be in yet more wars, have less freedoms, more Patriot Act-like laws, have the rich pay no taxes at all and the poor no services at all. And when they're not adding Hitler moustaches to his pictures, they're taking a happy waive out of context to make him Nazi-ish:

Oh, and Hitlerizing figures isn't only for American politicians - in this column, Texan douchebag/idiot (but not Nazi) Gil Lebreton, who probably doesn't even realize he has French roots and likely thinks the French would still support the Nazis if they were invaded today, says the display at the Olympics reminded him of Berlin, circa 1936, although he is obviously too young to have actually covered those games - he's likely only seen images out of context. Anyhow, he says the Canadian Patriotism - clearly, unlike American Patriotism - is close to Nazi-ism. This despite the fact that our cars don't have Canadian Flags as bumper stickers, convenience stores don't sell flags nor have any on their rooftop or property, that half our stores don't allude to our country...

And, by the way, I'm not one myself - I'm actually quite the opposite, I don't really consider ''Canada'' to be my country. I'm a Montrealer first and foremost, and if I had to choose a country and set its limits, just about where borders are at the moment, I'd be a Quebecer - just not with the leaders we have at the moment. But that's beside the point. And so is the fact that Lebreton is a complete moron.

The point is that no one is fuckin' Adolf Hitler. Hitler went to war with a whole continent, killed millions of humans including a few million Jews, specifically, and he instilled terror among even his own people. Joseph Stalin killed an estimated 60 million of his own people. And no one's a fuckin' Stalin either.

At best, Bush is a fucking retard who was manipulated into being Richard Nixon. At worst, he is George H.W. Bush's son, heir, and the Worst President Of All Time. At worst, Obama is going to fail at being Martin Luther King, and at best he will be Nelson Mandela.

Notice how neither is Hitler.

Same goes for the Vancouver Games: they were a celebration of the things foreigners have come to expect from Canada - beavers, mounties, aboriginals (despite the inability to actually see any on their trips), more than the diversity of the inhabitants, the richness of the natural resources, the fact that they promote discussion rather than conflict in almost every sentence they utter.

Just like if Americans hosted the Olympics showing blatant racism, fat people, terrible beer with little to no alcohol content, celebrated five-patty hamburgers, wars for oil, shopping malls, pollutions and waste of water and food, instead of the ideals that (once) made the U.S. of A. a great country. And even that wouldn't be Nazi-riffic.

Leave Hitler alone. By speaking his name, you're lessening the plight and deaths of millions and soiling their memories.

No one is Hitler. Except Gary Bettman - that short fucking dictator has to be brought down, for the good of All.

Video Of The Week: Jack White And Alicia Keys

Yes, a second week in a row with Alicia Keys, this time her duet with Jack White for the James Bond film Quantum Of Solace.

There are two camps when it comes to this song: those who despise it so much they'd trash their TV when it comes on, and those who love it so much they call it a work of genius. And those are the ones who are right, of course.

This song manages to take a three-chord progression that has withstood the test of time and give it a fresh new twist; it also stays true to Jack White's White Stripes sound, while being very James Bond-y in its orchestration. And that's where it takes its importance, in my opinion: it's pretty much a parody of a Bond tune, mentioning secret agents, killers, Her Majesty, getting things done ''in the nick of time'' - but the parody is so complete that it becomes the quintessential Bond song - a new song taking elements of all past songs and making them bigger, better, a whole.

And because the riff gets stuck in your head so much, without ever becoming annoying, it was also my Song Of 2008.