...but it appears this is AS NOTHING compared to the what-the-fuckery that is the final book in the series.

Not that I plan to read it. Some things are much more entertaining in theory than in practice. I'll just let cleolinda or someone else suffer in my place and post about it.

Although I notice the lady doing the self-published vamporn novel hasn't been heard from in a while...

Is there any way we can get some kind of restraining order that forbids Will Farrell and John C Reilly from making any more movies together, EVER? Because individually those guys are both funny. Together, they've already come up with Talledega Nights, the least funny comedy I have seen in years. And every time that ad for Step Brothers comes on TV I want to kill myself with a hammer.

It's not that I am too intellectual for the movie, either. Like Detritus I get progressively stupider as the weather gets hotter, as witnessed by the fact that CBC is running The Tudors this summer but during its time slot I prefer to be on Global watching Wipeout, easily the dumbest show on TV. I say that with love, mind you. I didn't think I would like it because I don't dig shows where people get hurt, especially not when I am in chronic pain myself. But the obstacle courses in Wipeout are heavily padded, everyone wears protective gear and falls into water, and last Tuesday one of the obstacles involved trying not to fall into a pit of bubbles by running in a wetsuit and flippers along a treadmill littered with inflatable pool-toy animals. I laughed until I nearly herniated another disc. It's like the whole thing was devised by third-graders after too many bowls of Cocoa Puffs. That's some good TV, there!

Yes, there's another chapter summary/critique up over at crevette's journal.

No time for commenting. Too busy reading.

...but thanks to sucrelefey I am now thinking that if this dreck was published, surely there's a place out there for Coney and Vlad's crayoned musings of life around the litter box. (Coney and Vlad are not allowed to play with sharp pencils.)

And then I looked a little closer and found the books were self-published. Well, of course they were.

However.

sucrelefey's contribution to the fun was her link to this entry on the journal of someone I do not know in which the poster apparently takes one for the team in epic fashion, in the form of reading and summarizing so that others do not have to.

Believe me, the summary is bad enough. Although the critique is pretty well written, considering she must have had to stop regularly to claw her own eyes out.

Be that as it may, although I normally, for reasons of karma, try to avoid saying "I write better than that!"--well, in this case I do. Or at least with more restraint.

So. It turns out there are worse stories out there than the tale of a bunch of rock musicians trying to evade the clutches of a serial killer. Good to know.

Although, really, when I summarize my own story like that... it certainly does not sound promising. So maybe I should laugh less and edit more.

Nah. I think I'll laugh anyway. Although I reserve the right to retreat to sympathetic cringing, which seems to be my stock response to ohmyGodbad writing.

I seem to be more like Courtney, the skeletal Survivor self-proclaimed bitch, than I originally would have thought. Because I hardly even watched the show this season and I'm really enjoying the flap over Lunch Lady Denise's lies at the reunion show. Apparently she was too honourable to backstab and lie during the game, but she's willing to backstab and lie about her employer afterward. Nice!

Apparently she apologized on a morning news show, vindicating the extremely irritated superintendent of schools who posted a rebuttal on the school web page after getting a ton of nasty emails from all over the world. The impression I get is that the school she worked at was all "Rah rah Denise!" (Which--I have worked in an elementary school. You probably couldn't get down the hallway for Crayola portraits of the heroic lunch lady, who was in fact a custodian by the time she was on the show.) I do feel bad for the kids and her colleagues who probably now feel pretty hurt and rather stupid.

Over at Television Without Pity (where I go by MissMitzi) there were a few people defending Denise up until this morning, basically on the grounds that no one could possibly be dumb enough to think they would get away with a lie of this nature. To which I reply, "What, have you never heard of The Darwin Awards?" At least this act of stupidity (and cupidity) didn't have fatal consequences.

And yes, I am piling on, and I hardly watched the show. But my problem is, I began watching the show after it got really cold and Gloryhound moved to Thursday nights, which means after the first couple of setup episodes early on, all I saw of Denise was the last few weeks, when she turned into a whiny hanger-on (rather than simply a hanger-on) who tried to make other people feel guilty about her terrible life and therefore give her an unearned spot in the final three. (You could argue that Courtney didn't deserve that spot either, and I would agree. So would Courtney, I suspect. But there is a difference between accepting a lucky break and trying to force someone to give you one.)

(All of the above is in the context of a game show on TV, by the way. I think society owes a lot to the people who live in that society and can't make ends meet. But game shows on TV owe nothing to anybody.)

And also, the person who whined like a ten-year-old about being an outcast herself did not accept an offer from other contestants to form an alliance with them, with herself as a core member. She seemed more invested in squashing the outcasts than anything else, cutting off her own options like any normal person would have cut off her mullet.

Anyway, Denise and I are the same age and I expected more in the nature of maturity and common sense from her. So I disliked her portrayal on the show and am sort of enjoying the fallout now. I'll be over it in a day or two.

Edited to add: Honestly, I could just shake her!

I don't know what possessed me (Satan?) a few minutes ago to check out the online forum of a fandom in which I no longer participate. Or more properly, of a band I used to be a big fan of. But I did. And for no special reason except, I suppose, morbid curiosity, I started following some threads to blogs and I ended up at the blog of what I have to think is a sort of excommunicated fan/stalker (or so she has been characterized by fans on the official board, where she (a) is no longer welcome, or (b) no longer wishes to participate. Stories vary.)

[Incidentally, when I say I "ended up at" this blog, you may read that as "I expended a fair amount of energy and my most powerful librarian juju to locate it," because based on other people's roundabout comments it had This I Have To See written all over it.]

This is mildly interesting only because I read the blog FAQ, which is essentially sensible and moderate and talked about the desirability of fans minding their own darned business and letting other fans be their own kind of fans... laudable sentiments. And then I read one of the most recent posts which turned into a masters thesis on why the fans over at the evil old official site are wrong, wrong wrong and stunting the band with their misguided fandom and... Seriously, the longer the post went on the more obviously wrought-up and pseudo-intellectual and "I am the voice of Objective Truth" the whole thing became and I... I...

Well, to tell you the truth I read the whole thing in incredulous delight, and then I laughed my arse off, and I am probably going to bookmark the blog just to monitor the crazy.

I willingly admit this blogger is probably right about the level of crazy that exists at the official site, since it was my introduction to Internet fandom about ten years ago and within a few months I got unnerved and stopped posting (and to tell you the truth never quite felt the same about the band afterward, either. Although I continued to be a fan of theirs until I realized I didn't much care for their new musical direction.)

It's just that the obnoxiousness so obviously cut both ways.

Pot, may I present Kettle? Kettle, Pot.

Actually, if everyone involved had a little pot, the whole thing might be easier to handle.

[This reassures me because I thought I had crazyfan written all over me. It turns out I am still almost certainly pretty far back on the self-aware and not-too-scary end of the spectrum. Although I'm sure that's exactly what all the crazies involved in this situation think about themselves. sagitare, you'll let me know when I topple over the deep end, right?]

Charlottetown has Aerosmith, Moncton has Tim McGraw and Faith Hill — and now Halifax has Nickelback. As The Daily News reported last week, the Alberta-rockers will perform a Canada Day concert on Citadel Hill.

Confirmed day, the July 1 concert will also feature American Idol Season 5 finalist Chris Daughtry, Ontario quintent Finger Eleven, the punky boys of Hedley, and the alt-metal group Staind.

Yeah. I hear the barn is lovely at that time of year.

... that the librarian who runs the open mic event was probably grateful Joel Plaskett couldn't make it.

I mean, what are the chances my new favourite author would have chased him around trying to sell him a copy of The Book?

And what are the chances Joel would have been too polite to refuse him?

And what are the chances that would have led to a domestic disturbance call at Joel's place later that evening, in which the cops showed up to find Joel's girlfriend locked in the bathroom and him outside the door remorselessly reading her excerpts? "Really, honey, you have got to listen to this one!"? "It was ugly, chief, we had to taser him twice just to get the book away from him!"

All things considered it's probably just as well he was in New Glasgow.

I just got to the part where we meet the protagonist, a charming and handsome and otherwise perfect young man...

...and he has the same name as the author.

So now my only question is, do I continue reading simply for the heartless merriment, or just claw my eyes out now and have done with it?

Decisions, decisions...

Van Helsing, directed by Stephen Sommers, starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale

Okay, so the reviews of this movie were unreservedly terrible. I find that a bit unfair. Surely the energy and enthusiasm that went into making a movie this dreadful should be celebrated, if not exactly encouraged.

It's such a fine line, between clever and stupid.

( Spoilers Ahoy. )