(SNN) - Can we all get over Beyoncé, now, please? She didn’t sing ‘live’ at the Presidential Inauguration, she did at the Superbowl. She was lambasted for doing both by the mainstream media who have long forgotten how to report real news, and now point and sticks it’s tongue out at the famous like five-year-olds in a schoolyard that weren’t allowed to join the cool kids’ gang.
Hey – Canada! These are details. As long as we import these special events and take them on as our own, let’s at least concentrate on the main event, can we, and not the side-show. I’m very proud to say that I didn’t watch either event. It’s well known that they are both over-long, over-hyped, and generally leave you with a feeling of being ‘not-quite-as-exciting-as-you-thought-they’d-be’. When you factor in the alcohol involved in the Superbowl, it’s a lot like sex, really. Suddenly ‘coming to’ in the third quarter thinking: “Didn’t I experience this about an hour ago?”
I suppose that we should feel lucky that Justin Bieber wasn’t the half-time show at the game. It appears to me that every slump in the news cycle features the Canadian Sideways-Hat-Model getting tattooed, or doing something else similarly monotonous; it is trumpeted from the internet with the verve of a Wikileaks exclusive. An inauguration with ‘The Biebs’ would feature screaming fanatics in love with the guy on the stage that would completely wreck the grandeur of the event. This year, the democrats were those fans, ogling the President with love as if they were about to rush home and cut themselves. Actually, our little Ontario Orang-Utan (Have you ever seen footage of him onstage? You know what I’m talking about.) was in the news for something remarkable this week: The youngest artiste ever to have five Number One hits in the States. He’s eighteen years of age. No matter what you say about him sounds like sour grapes based on his youth, so I’ll just say, I wish that I was eighteen again – but without the acne. What the hell has happened to his acne, by the way? There’s another reason to hate him.
Unless of course, you want to save your hatred for our Governing Conservative government: In the news this week for all the wrong reasons, I was reminded the Russian Revolution, and how our Government is becoming just as corrupt, dictatorial, and uncaring about its people. The only difference I can see so far is that one leader wore a silly furry hat, and the other wears a silly, furry sweater. In short order, they admitted to making ‘Robo-Calls’ to voters in Saskatchewan, about possible riding changes, has admitted that one of its senators hardly ever goes to hoe riding, and have shunned another Senator for Costco-sized shopping list of infractions that could end in a jail sentence. If Senators Duffy and Brazeau weren’t begging to be parodied, which should keep us all talking about them or some while, I would expect them to be taken out and shot in a forest somewhere – perhaps a private one in a new riding in Saskatchewan?
Not to let itself down in our eyes, the country of birth appears to care more about Kings of its past, rather than its own Conservative Government’s plans to drive the country into an economic state that is broker than an African Nation at War. News that King Richard III’s mutilated corpse had been dug up from its six hundred year repose under an urban car park, brought the usual contented-cat-like meowing from ‘The Old Country’, as they casually mention that ‘yes, we have had a Monarchy longer than you have had First Nations.’: That cosy feeling that West Coast ex-pats only get from watching the latest episode of ‘Downton Abbey’. Considering he had had limbs lopped off by swordswipe, and had so many hacks to the back of his head that he could have been in the Stanley Cup riot last year, and then suffered various years of having trucks parked on his face, he looked pretty good. The bad news is that he is going to be laid in state in Leicester Cathedral. If you have ever been to Leicester, you will know that, if he could, he would prefer to be put back in that hole in the car park.
At least during his crowning, he didn’t have to put up with Beyoncé…perhaps there was a court jester like Justin Bieber he had to put up with instead? Oh, if only there was a death penalty by Royal decree today.
Steve James is an Actor, Stand up and Comedy writer in Vancouver BC. If you cannot catch him on stage this spring, breaking in new material, you probably won’t catch him emptying his cat’s litter box, either. It’s all he seems to do on a daily basis.
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