Last Thursday I stayed home sick. And while I was laying in bed hoping for my cold to go away, I was chilling out listening to some music I hadn’t turned on in a while. One of those bands was T-Rex. In North America, we mainly know them for their “one hit wonder” Bang A Gong and their song Buick McKane, which was covered by Guns & Roses on their “The Spaghetti Incident?!” album.

Marc Bolan and T-rex were an extremely influential band from the glam rock era, really only second to David Bowie. They were catchy, just slightly aggressive enough to be dangerous and totally weird, especially lyrically. T-Rex had a massive influence on the first have of punk bands out of the UK, post-punk, new wave and the hair metal bands of the 80′s. They had hits on several of their records, but for my money, their best album was The Slider, which is chock full of bizarre lyrics, insanely catchy hooks all backed up by a massive string section. If you want to kick your Monday up a notch, throw on this little gem called Chariot Choogle.

James

Back in the year 2001 I predicted that within 20 years there would be sex devices that would be plugged into a computer and we could engage in simulated sex with someone across the world wide web. People thought I was crazy, but low and behold, Durex drops the bomb today that they’re putting the finishing touches on special clothing that can vibrate via a phone app. That means that if your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/random stranger is far far away from you, you can kind of “do it” via technology.

More on this at Telegraph

James

If you have a woman between the ages of 15 to 65 on your Facebook or Twitter newsfeed, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen this ad over the past 48 hours. Dove hires an FBI sketch artist to draw a womans face the way she sees it. It’s being applauded as yet another example of Dove encouraging “real” beauty in women and being satisfied with your body image.

My friend Mike Morrison over at Mikes Bloggity Blog also noticed this trend and he also has pointed out that Dove  is owned by Unilever. And you know what else Unilever owns? Axe Body Spray. Axe has a slightly different take on females, body image and feminine beauty.

Unilever also has no problem portraying women as needy, high maintenance and something to be “put up with” until they “put out”. Just remember this, ladies, next time that Dove advertisement makes you smile.

Don’t be fooled. At the end of the day, all they want is money. Whether it’s making you feel beautiful or making you feel like a sex machine. I don’t care about either message. However if you think Dove should be celebrated for their campaign of real female beauty, they also take money for highly sexualizing women as well. Think about that before you go “OMG SHARE”.

James

Bro KILLS this. Guys, you HAVE to check this out.

Do you have trouble waking up in the morning? Are you the kind that makes sweet, sweet love to the snooze button over and over again? Does your alarm ignorance or snooze love affair lead to you being chronically late for work? Well do I have the app for you!

It’s called Sleep If You Can. The app works like a standard alarm. You set it before bed and you’re good to go except for one small twist. You have to take a picture of something to activate it and to turn it off in the morning, you have to take a picture of THE SAME OBJECT. The point of it is to take a picture of say, your shower or sink, to get your lazy ass out of bed. There is no other way to shut it off unless you match the picture, however knowing how lazy I am, I’d likely just take a picture of my pillow.

JC/NB

via the rock solid Geekologie

Think about so many things that might anger or frustrate you in a day:

Bad drivers

Racists

Homophobes

Loudmouths

Ignoramuses

Reality TV

Lousy co-workers

There might be  a cure for it. In fact, the problem might be you. Not sure what I’m on about? Check out the video…

JC/NB

Yesterday Canada lost a true icon in Stompin’ Tom Connors. The man lived Canadiana and was a larger than life legend. He traveled by one way or the other across this country and back many many times singing songs about the country he loved and the people he met along the way.

Stompin’ Tom had no desire to be successful south of the border. In fact he quit attending the Junos as he felt that Canadians who were winning Grammys shouldn’t be on the same stage as Canadians who were up for Junos. He referred to the big Canadian acts making their way in the US as “border jumpers” and resisted all attempts to become more commercial.But don’t let me tell you, just check this cartoon from Hark, A Vagrant:

My favorite Stompin’ Tom song plays tribute to the only uniquely Canadian game, the CFL:

And then there’s a song that makes you want to pound beer no matter the time of day, Sudbury Saturday Night, live from the Horseshoe Tavern in 1972 (check the full performance here):

And then another dear to my heart, Roll On Saskatchewan:

Stompin’ Tom Connors is as elemental to Canadian music as Bob Dylan or Hank Williams is to America or Lennon & McCartney are to England. Thank you for the memories Tom and I consider myself very lucky I got to see you way back in the day.
Roll OnTom,

JC

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Friday Flashback so I’m trying to bring them back, with style. This week, I want to pump the tires on one of my favorite comic book artists of the moment, Ed Piskor. Piskor does a really cool comic on BoingBoing.net called The Hip Hop family tree. He obsessively and meticulously has written single pages week after week slowly detailing hip hop’s emergence from the South Bronx to global domination. I’ve been on the tip for well over a year now and Mr. Piskor just finished talking about the elemental hip hop film, Wild Style:

Grandmaster Flash

Piskor has done a fantastic job adding a fun element to the story of hip hop, laying it out in a style that’s very reminiscent of the comics I grew up with (he cites GI Joe as an influence and I see it all over his work) working up some really obscure stuff and tying it not only to hip hop, but what was happening at the time in New York, world wide and in other forms of music (I’m very stoked to see the early connections between punk/new wave and rap).

Hip Hop & Punk have much, much more in common than you think.

Long story short, if you’re a fan of comics, music and history, check out Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop family tree every Tuesday. Mainly because I need others to geek out with. If you’d like to get caught up, you can also pre-order the first collection right here.
And to the people behind the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo….who do I have to bribe to bring Ed Piskor to town?

JC/NB

There’s been lots of outcry in Canada and elsewhere following Ben Affleck’s best picture Oscar for Argo. People are choked that Argo changes some of the events behind the Iranian hostage crisis and the Canadian efforts to get them out. If you’ve seen Argo but didn’t know about its massive Canadian connection, you should check out The Canadian Caper and get yourself educated on the matter.While Affleck did take liberties with the film (they had an easy exit out of the country, no last minute charges down the runway, the Americans wanted to be a film crew) and Canadians played a much bigger role in what happened that what’s portrayed in the movie, there are popular films  that got it way, way, way wrong. Today on The List, we’re going to break them down.

5) 300

I get that 300 is actually based off of Frank Miller’s graphic novel on the Battle Of Thermopylae,  but 300 is so far off what ancient Greece was like. Like way, way off. Persian king Xerxes was not an 8-foot-tall Cirque du Soleil reject. The Spartan council was made up of men over the age of 60, with no one as young as Theron (37). And the warriors of Sparta went into battle wearing bronze armor, not just leather tightie whities. They also weren’t any better human beings than the Persians, as Spartans owned slaves and regularly had sex with young boys. Stand up guys. As 300 is really more fantasy than reality, it goes in at number 5, but it got a LOT of things wrong.

4) The Patriot

Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion (Mel Gibsons character and basis for the awesome show Swamp Fox)  wasn’t the stand up family man they show in the movie. He owned slaves and didn’t get married until after the war was over. The woman he married? His cousin. Historians also say that he actively murdered harassed native Cherokees. And the thrilling Battle of Guilford Court House where he beats the British? In reality, the Americans lost.

3) Braveheart

Damn, where to start? How about with those wild kilts Wallace and his boys were rocking? For starters, no Scott during that era wore kilts, nor did they wear them for a long time. Not only that, the kilts they are wearing are actually completely backwards compared to how they were worn much, much later.  According to historians, it would be like doing a film on 18th century America and the men were wearing three piece Mad Men style suits, backwards. What else? Wallace is shown having an affair with Isabella of France before the battle of Falkirk. She would have been THREE at the time. Robert The Bruce did fight on both sides of the conflict, but he never betrayed Wallace directly. Also, Wallace is portrayed as a farmer and commoner which wasn’t the case at all.

2) Pearl Harbor

For starters, the scenes with Affleck and Josh Hartnet are flying around Hawaii, knocking dozens of Japanese Zero’s out of the sky did happen, but the actual amount of planes they shot down was far, far, far fewer than depicted in the film. They also weren’t zooming around at wave height. There are actually too many technical inaccuracies to mention here, but it should be noted that several Pearl Harbor veterans groups actively disputed what took place in the movie.

Also, no way in hell would fighter pilots be going on bombing runs to Tokyo. They fly fighter planes. Not bombers.

1) Gladiator

The historical inaccuracy of Gladiator is so bad it requires it’s own Wikipedia entry, as opposed to a blurb on the film’s main page. In fact, at the very top of said page, it has this line:  Historian Allen Ward of the University of Connecticut noted that historical accuracy would not have made Gladiator less interesting or exciting and stated: “creative artists need to be granted some poetic license, but that should not be a permit for the wholesale disregard of facts in historical fiction.”

It got pretty much everything wrong, stating Rome was founded as a Republic (it wasn’t), screwed up the architecture (the coliseum held way more people than stated), most of the linguistics were thoroughly incorrect (not to mention using actors with American & British accents in ROME), Commodus never died in the arena (however he fought as a Gladiator many times) and was 18 when his father died. He also never hooked up with his sister. Nor was it even hinted at.

So in the long run, if the Italians, Pearl Harbor veterans and the Scottish aren’t marching on Hollywood, then neither should we. Affleck took the most exciting parts of the Canadian Caper, added some more exciting events and focused far more on the minute role the CIA took in the exfil as opposed to the massive, yet nowhere near as exciting role, Canadians played in the matter.

Anyways, I enjoyed watching all of the above movies. Especially Argo (and not so much the lovey dovey stuff in Pearl Harbor) It’s a good movie.

JC/NB

This is beautiful, amazing and makes my eyeballs sweat a little bit.

Grover Krantz was a teacher for most of his life as well as a dog lover. He was particularly attached to his Irish Wolfhound (amazing dogs, by the way) Clyde. Krantz made the decision before he died to donate his body to science and to be displayed in the Smithsonian museum, on one condition: That he was displayed alongside Clyde, forever. After he died his body was shipped to the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm, which is where bodies are studied for their decomposition rates. After nature took it’s course there, Krantz and Clyde’s bones were shipped to the Smithsonian, where they are the final exhibition in a piece about using skeletal remains to solve mysteries, highlighting how body donations can be put to work as educational tools. In life and in death, Krantz remains a teacher. And he has his pal with him in a playful pose that was captured years ago. Perfect.

Via Geekologie

JC/NB