We all know who The Man is

I know it. You know it. The creepy guy following you around the grocery store eating from his open bag of dog food knows it. Your mom...she knows it too. She knows who The Man is. He is the definition of cool. So cool, that he has to break down his introduction into two distinct statements.

His name is Bond. James Bond.

I mean, really, all "double-oh's" are cool. But do they make movies about 001? Nope, he was just the test model. 005? Nope. Not yet sophisticated enough. 009? Not him either. Political correctness took over and M was forced to hire a gay guy. That's cool and all, but when you won't kill a guy because "he's just too dreamy," it's just not in the same class as 007. Nobody crosses 007. Not even Chuck Norris crosses 007 and lives. That's right, I said it.

Last week, I was sitting in the barber's chair when I was asked, "Do you want to keep the sideburns?" And I thought, "James Bond doesn't have sideburns, so I don't need sideburns." THAT is how cool he is. And that is not even a made-up story. Moral of the story - I will henceforth dedicate my life (or at least a small portion of my free time) to becoming more and more like 007.

So now that we have all agree that Bond is The Man, we will have to break down in what ways I can be more like Him. Spoiler Alert - read no more if you have not seen Casino Royale. And anyway, if you haven't seen it, you are no longer welcome to read my blog.

Part I - The Car

What He Has - James Bond ALWAYS has a cool car. There was a moment in the latest movie when I thought he was going to settle for a "decent" car. But then Q (rest his soul) came through from the afterlife and a wicked radical cool 2006 Aston Martin DBS showed up. Seriously. Look at it. That is a hot car. And you can go back through any Bond film to see his other sweet rides. He doesn't take the stock model, either. Can YOUR car flip upside down, then right itself? Intentionally?

What I Have - 1996 GMC Sonoma. Regular cab. 2.2L. 120hp. A "Syclone" decal on the side, without the Syclone engine. Ok, there is a reason that this is first on my list of ways to be like Bond - because my current situation is so far from the ideal. The only way I can improve the situation anytime soon is by:
a) winning the lottery so I can buy an Aston Martin;
b) winning an Aston Martin; or, less desirable,
c) accessorizing the Sonoma extensively.
I have already begun work on option (c). With the latest in cool, I now have an in-dash CD player, rubber floor mats, a convenient matching canopy, and even high-quality mudflaps behind all four tires to prevent paint chipping. I am torn between Stinger missles behind the headlights or an AED in the glovebox for my next upgrade. I guess it depends on the threat.

Part II - The Poker Skills

What He Has - Patience. Knowledge of the game. Cool under pressure. The ability to read other players. The means to acquire impressive sums of money to play in games of the highest stakes - and from the CIA, no less. Not that the CIA is known for being cheap or only financing worthy causes, but I have never personally been approved for a CIA loan.

What I Have - I have a friend with a sweet set of poker chips that he won in a contest. He has a book on how to play poker, too. Maybe my journey to be like Bond will have to start with a gander at that book. While 007 is calculating what to have in his martini and which broad to take home after winning his hand, I will still be counting how many cards are on the table. 7 cards? But I thought there were only 5? What are these two cards you gave me over here? I just lost HOW MUCH money???




Part III - The Fitness

What He Has - I think the picture says it all. If I said I am jealous, would that make me gay? But really, how does the guy find the time to hit the gym? Whatever he does, it is working. Not because he is super-hot, but because he is able to leap from building to building without breaking his knees, withstand explosions simply by turning his back to them, run forever, and put up with a heavy rope to the...well, you know. That is some disciplined training.

What I Have - I am required, due to my physically rigorous employment, to go to the gym 8 times per month. So that is about how often I go. I don't know if you have been to the gym lately, but you don't really get to look like 007 by hitting the gym twice a week. Maybe if you pump steroids and stay at the gym for 6 hours for those two sessions, but that's about it. In any case, I don't think my body could put up with hanging from cranes and jumping from great heights and swallowing poison. Sometimes I get sore when I have to walk over the snowbanks to get to the gym. Those workouts are pretty much a write-off.

Part IV - The Job Skills

What He Has - There is only one main blanket term for what 007 does for a job, and that is "kills bad guys." But there are so many variations, that each one could have its own category. He can kill bad guys by shooting them. He can kill bad guys by throwing them around in front of himself so their buddies shoot them. He can kill bad guys by shooting the highly explosive high-pressure bottle located conveniently next them in situations when he is desperately outnumbered. He can impale them, dropkick them, electrocute them, drown them, drop them off tall buildings, push them through some variety of large spinning blades, or do the classic neck-snapping with his bare hands. That doesn't even touch on his crazy secret spy skills, explosive skills, acrobatic skills, driving skills, or seduction skills.

What I Have - Nothing. Nothing at all. I am still in training, and I am being taught by a girl even younger than me. And it is taking me this long just to learn to fly a plane. Bond already knows how to fly a plane, and he had the time to learn to do all this killing and spy stuff along the way. I don't think I will ever match him in this category, it's just not in the cards. I can't even juggle. I've tried.

Part V - The Style

What He Has - For a guy whose job demands that he be crawling through dirt and mud, hiding behind doors, and generally being sneaky, he sure does have some snazzy clothes, doesn't he? This guy has no problem fitting in at a summer resort, with his lightweight shirt and slacks, nor at a cocktail party, with his classic dinner jacket and bowtie. As for his drink, he is no slouch there either. I think it is Bond who made the martini moreso than the martini that made Bond. There is just something about a shaken martini that makes shiver inside.

What I Have - The uniform I wear everyday more closely resembles a potato sack than anything "stylish." It is bland green, shapeless, and seeing as it is one piece, quite revealing if I have to reach above my head for anything. My other clothing includes such a fine selection as homemade t-shirts from ski trips in the late 90's, jeans that were cool in grade school, and shoes that aren't even stylish enough to need polish. I didn't get my first suit until I was 24, and for every job interview I can remember I needed to borrow a shirt. And a tie. Pants. Shoes. Belt. Black socks. It's embarrassing, but true. As for a stylish drink, I stick to beer. I don't know if 007 would approve, but at least my current selections are a big step up over the Black Ice that used to fill my fridge.

Part VI - The Women. Hot ones. Everywhere.

What He Has - Like I said - hot women. He is surrounded by them. So much so, that he can easily order her champagne from room service and go off chasing after her evil husband before even taking advantage of her, knowing perfectly well that another woman will be entering in the next scene. I could say "the hot chick from Dr. No" and "the hot chick from Octopussy" and "the hot chick from..." but then I would just have to list off every Bond movie ever made. When you have all those things I talked about before (cars, skills, muscles etc.), you tend to find the women more easily. When you're Bond...it's like flies to honey.

What I Have - Oh man. I almost couldn't fill this part in, it brings me close to tears. If you can imagine whatever the opposite of being surrounded by hot chicks is, that's what I am. In addition to the fact that at least 90% of my coworkers are male, the overwhelming majority of that other 10% don't fill one of the two requirements to be a hot chick (that is, "hot" and "chick"). If I go into the thriving metropolis of Moose Jaw, I find retired farmers, and the odd blue-collar worker. Maybe there is the odd female about, but we're not allowed in the bars so I will certainly never be surrounded by them like 007. (BIG SPOILER) If there is one thing that can give me hope, it is that even Bond found just one woman with whom he hoped to spend the rest of his life.

But then, she screwed him out of millions of dollars and unwittingly lured him into a trap that killed her and nearly killed him, so now he is back to the business of knocking off bad dudes and meeting a new woman everyday. That's more like the Bond I know.

You, the racist

This article is from Michael Shermer, editor or Skeptic magazine and website. This dude makes lots of sense, you should check out the website. This editorial is about Michael Richards' racist tirade a few weeks ago. I saw it on YouTube, it was pretty bad. Check out the link in the story for some interesting tests on whether or not you are a closet racist. Apparently, I favour young people slightly over old, but I have no preference between George Bush and Thomas Jefferson...and yes, I will write a real blog again sometime soon. I'VE BEEN BUSY, OK?

Kramer’s Conundrum
What the Michael Richards Event Really Means

an opinion editorial by Michael Shermer

After a paroxysm of racial viciousness at the Laugh Factory Friday night, November 17, 2006, Michael Richards, the 57-year old comedian who played Kramer on Seinfeld, explained to David Letterman and his Late Night audience the following Monday, after a barrage of negative publicity: “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this.”

Michael’s shattered demeanor and heartfelt repentance leaves us with what I shall call Kramer’s Conundrum: how can someone who spews racial epithets genuinely believe he is not a racist? The answer is to be found in the difference between our conscious and unconscious attitudes, and our public and private thoughts.

Consciously and publicly, Michael Richards is probably not a racist. Unconsciously and privately, however, he is. So am I. So are you.

Consciously and publicly, most of us are colorblind. And most of us, most of the time, under most conditions, believe and act on that cultural requisite. You’d have to be insane to publicly utter racist remarks in today’s society … or temporarily insane, which both science and the law recognize as being sometimes triggered by anger. And alcohol — recall Mel Gibson’s drunken eruption about Jews, or the college Frat boys slurring alcohol-induced insanities about blacks and slavery in Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat.

The insidiousness of racism is due to the fact that it arises out of the deep recesses of our unconscious. We may be utterly unaware of it, yet it lurks there ready to erupt under certain circumstances. How can we know this? Even without anger and alcohol, Harvard scientists have found a method in an instrument called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which asks subjects to pair words and concepts. The more closely associated the words and concepts are, the quicker the response to them will be in the key-pressing sorting task (try it yourself at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/).

The race test firsts asks you to sort black and white faces into one of two categories: European American and African American. Easy. Next you are asked to sort a list of words (Joy, Terrible, Love, Agony, Peace, Horrible, Wonderful, Nasty, Pleasure, Evil, Glorious, Awful, Laughter, Failure, Happy, Hurt) into one of two categories: Good and Bad. No problem.

The next task is a little more complicated. The words and black and white faces appear on the screen one at a time, and you sort them into one of these categories: African American/Good or European American/Bad. Again you match the words with the concepts of good or bad, and faces with national origin. So the word “joy” would go into the first category and a white face would go into the second category. This sorting goes noticeably slower, but you might expect that since the combined categories are more cognitively complex.

Unfortunately, the final sorting task puts the lie to that rationalization: This time you sort the words and faces into the categories European American/Good or African American/Bad. Tellingly (and distressingly) this sort goes much faster than the previous sort. I was much quicker to associate words like “joy,” “love,” and “pleasure” with European American/Good than I did with African American/Good.

I consider myself about as socially liberal as you can get (I’m a libertarian), and yet on a scale that includes “slight,” “moderate,” and “strong,” the program concluded: “Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” What? “The interpretation is described as ‘automatic preference for European American’ if you responded faster when European American faces and Good words were classified with the same key than when African American faces and Good words were classified with the same key.”

But I’m not a racist. How can this be? It turns out that this subconscious association of good with European Americans is true for everyone, even African Americans, no matter how color blind we all claim to be. Such is the power of culture.

We are by nature sorters. Evolutionists theorize that we evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers where there was a selection for within-group amity and between-group enmity. With our fellow in-group members, we are cooperative and altruistic. Unfortunately, the down side to this pro-social bonding is that we are also quite tribal and xenophobic to out-group members.

This natural tendency to sort people into Within-Group/Good and Between-Group/Bad is shaped by culture, such that all Americans, including those whose ancestry is African, implicitly inculcate the cultural association, which includes additional prejudices.

The IAT, in fact, also demonstrates that we prefer young to old, thin to fat, straight to gay, and such associations as family-females and career-males, liberal arts-females and science-males. Such associations bubble just below the surface, inhibited by cultural restraints but susceptible to eruption under extreme inebriation or duress.

Michael Richards’ sin was his deed; his thoughts are the sin of all humanity. Only when all people are considered to be members of one global in-group (in principle, if not in practice) can we begin to attenuate these out-group associations. But it won’t be easy. Vigilance is the watchword of both freedom and dignity.

We should accept Mr. Richards’ apology for losing his temper and acting out those hateful thoughts. Perhaps we also ought to thank him for having the courage to confess in public what far too many of us still harbor in private, often in the privacy of our unconscious minds. As the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote:

"Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."

Just what you're looking for

What is the difference between Canada and the U.S., you ask? The two are practically the same, you exclaim! We are totally obsessed with the American media, you say. Well, we may be close, but thankfully we still have a bit of our own...culture. I wanted to say a bit of sense, but that is just too cruel (and number 8 below points to the folly in that belief). It's not great, and it certainly isn't what I'm looking for, but these are the top internet searches of 2006, according to Yahoo and Yahoo Canada (taxes are number 7!):

Canada's top 10 searches in 2006 (on Yahoo! Canada)

1. NHL
2. FIFA World Cup
3. American Idol
4. Rock Star Supernova
5. WWE
6. Neopets
7. Revenue Canada
8. Days of Our Lives
9. Environment Canada
10. Jessica Simpson

U.S. top 10 searches in 2006:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Shakira
4. Jessica Simpson
5. Paris Hilton
6. American Idol
7. Beyoncé Knowles
   
8. Chris Brown
9. Pamela Anderson
10. Lindsay Lohan