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Monday, February 15th, 2010 The Struggle Update by Clayton |
It's been a major struggle to come back to updating Claytopia. I've tried several times over the past few years and I keep giving up. Recently I was reading through my hilarious annotations to The Comic™ and I finally was able to describe what was wrong: while I still had my sense of humour, I couldn't seem to reproduce it in writing as I could before. It was as if my creative writing juices were all used up.
Truth be told, a lot of crazy crap has happened to me (as my last brief update implied) and I've been busy with one extracurricular project or another since December of 2003. I really haven't had much time or energy to falsely lure you to this site with promises of Avatar porn or angry complaints about global warming conspiracies.
The one benefit of all this, though, is that it has allowed me to better identify the problem. With the problem identified I can start taking steps to overcome it. And I think the first major step is to start updating regularly and give this site the major overhaul that the last 6 years of my ever-growing expertise can provide for it. So here's my first attempt to be angry and funny again after three years of inactivity. I'm sure I'm quite rusty so this is probably going to suck. Oh well, it's your fault for coming here and reading it.
The 2010 Winter Olympics
I don't like sports very much as I'm sure my readers know, and I like the Olympics even less. They take the public's ADHD-limited attention span away from important issues, the whole International Olympic Committee goes through regular charges and suspicion of corruptions and worst of all, they pre-empt my favourite TV shows for their nonsense. We have 800 cable sports channels; don't tell me I have to miss House because some moron is shooting at stuff while on skis. I also don't like the attitude the Olympics have about themselves and their participants. Take this commercial for example:
THE BEST OF US? Come on! Do these people save lives? Do they develop cures for diseases or new technologies to improve our wretched existence? NO! All they do is skate or ski or slide down an ice tube and try to be faster than the previous guy. That's it! And as for these illustrious "best" of us, on February 11th, the New York Times announced that 30 Olympic athletes were banned from the games after failing drug tests. It's really quite pathetic and I wish people would start boycotting this nonsense. There's nothing patriotic about supporting some THC-laced snowboarder while Donald Sutherland drones Canada's "Do You Believe?" mantra. Guess what, Donald? I DON'T BELIEVE!
I wonder how many homeless people, drug abusers and prostitutes were pushed into the suburbs of Vancouver to make the city pretty for the Olympics? I'll bet Vancouverites are just thrilled about it.
Bizarre TV Show Episode Releases
I'm trying to get back into watching TV shows on actual televisions again, but the bizarre nature of their epsidoe releases (and the gaps between) leave me scratching my head. Take a series like V for example. They play four episodes back in the fall, introduce a compelling and multi-arc storyline and then it falls off the map with episode five coming out sometime near April. Stargate Universe did basically the same thing, though they managed to play more episodes. Its a small wonder that most of the people I know wait until an entire season is done then download the episodes to watch all at once. Modern shows are now complex enough to require watching episodes at fairly regular intervals in order to keep the plot and characters straight in their viewer's heads. I just wish the networks would get that.
I watched Alias in a back-to-back episode fashion after the series had completed; I couldn't imagine trying to keep that show straight with gaps of six to eight months between episodes.
Politicians I Don't Like
Gary Doer never did much for me (no pun intended), but I find his stepping down as Premiere of Manitoba to run off to be the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. kind of shallow. Of course, it is a big step up from being the premiere of one of the crappier Canadian provinces and if I were in his shoes I might have done the same thing, but I can't help feeling like the top job in this province is nothing more than a stepping stone to bigger and better things. The promises made and the "dedication" displayed seem to fade to nothing when one turns their back on it for the next best thing. I've been in relationships like that and another political figure in my life did a similar thing and it ultimately left me with a lot less respect for those in question which is kind of sad, as I respect so little to begin with.
Glen Murray, Winnipeg's former mayor recently got elected to Ontario's Provincial Parliament as an MPP. He, like Doer, also stepped down to pursue some better thing in elsewhere (to run for House of Commons in Ontario, which he did not succeed at). Not that I'm really complaining. As a mayor I found him arrogant and wasteful, focussing on building ludicrous monuments to nothing in Winnipeg while the garbage failed to get collected and the roadways fell apart. His leaving, like Doer's, was also during his term as elected official and to me it just speaks of the dedication these sorts of politicians truly have.
Of course it's no secret that politicians are mostly out for themselves and the whole reason I've stayed out of politics during my life is that I don't want to be pulled into the corruption of The Machine. It just disappoints me and reaffirms my reasons for not voting.
Bizarre Restaurant Experiences
Amongst my ever-dwindling number of friends I am reknowned for my seemingly supernatural ability to have a bad experience when dining out. Granted, I do it far too frequently (as my bulbous gut will attest) but even at my high rate of visitations, the number of bad and bizarre experiences is too large to be merely random. It became so bad in my late teens and early twenties that almost every dining experience with friends (or alone for that matter) ended up with the restaurant screwing up my order. It was like I had a magic power that no one would ever want.
Naturally it depends on the restaurant one is talking about here. Half the time I go to McDonald's, their legions of inbreds and Art History majors seem absolutely incapable of assembling a cheeseburger. I'll unwrap the paper surroudning it and find myself looking upon a a teetering slop of bun, meat and cheese that puts the leaning tower of Pisa to shame. Not to mention the fact that most McDonald's employees equate "plain cheeseburger" with "cheeseburger with every imaginable topping". If it wasn't for the MSG and the fact that their prices are way cheaper than making the food myself I probably wouldn't even eat there. Pizza Hut is notoriously bad for me too, once placing the pizza I ordered into the buffet for consumption by the buffet-goers. To add insult to injury, Damien, who had selected buffet, was sitting next to me eating a slice of my pizza when the waitress came and informed me of the mistake.
The ultimate outcome of my experiences isn't always negative though. On many occassions I've walked away with free food or gift certificates because a waiter/cook/rat chained up in the kitchen/manager has screwed up my order in some meaningful way. Those are the good bizarre experiences and while most have happened to me during my 20's the most recent one was back in December/January, so I still have the mystical power.
Anyhow, that's all I'm going to write. I realize it wasn't as funny as part articles but darn it, at least I'm trying! What have you done these past few years? Nothing? I thought so. Lousy readership.
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