Category Archives: Entertainment

If one were to measure agate lines and minutes of coverage as a measure of newsworthyness, then Mel Gibson is on par with the invention of antibiotics.  Essentially Mel went nuts when arrested in an over-refreshed state.  Quotes of his comments start at the intellectual pinnacle of “Goddam Jews run everything!” and go down hill from there.  His rant is the winner of the “Please Euthanize My Career” award for the month of July and August. 

The part that I don’t quite get is the media fascination with celebrities.  I know Hollywood is a mammoth PR factory that will occasionally put out a film and the measure of a celeb is the number of minutes or lines they get in the various trade publications.  For most, if they aren’t being talked about, they don’t exist.  Paris Hilton would be another skanky party-girl if she wasn’t an heir to the Hilton fortune.  Tom Cruise would be a street trolling Scientology pamphlet pusher in Ottawa if he didn’t make films.  Owen Wilson would be the drone behind the counter at a video store who collects Traci Lords videos.  Keanu Reeves would be a stoner bassist in a Vancouver garage band.  Mel Gibson would be a house painter in Tasmania.

Now Mel is doing the Apology 2.0.  There is a sound reason for this:  Money makes movies.  Scripts and properties and options are not the stuff of movies.  It is business, which means investors are needed and a return on investment is expected.  Hollywood does not exist to further careers unless it can be proven that furthering a career will make the investors more money.  Art is a necessary evil.  Artistic temperament is something that must be endured. 

The old era Hollywood moguls understood it:  Put on a show for $10, take $75 in box office after the split with the theatre and that’s $65 in your pocket.  It is a very simple equation that even the less than brilliant can grasp very quickly. 

Movies are the same:  Make a film for $11 million use another $11 million to promote it and bring back $40 million in receipts.  You are now $18 million to the good and can make another $11 million dollar film, plus have $7 million left over. 

The good businessperson knows that getting others to pay for everything is key.  Why put up your own money if you don’t have to?  Ask a bunch of wealthy star-struck ninnies to invest in your movie, in exchange for being ‘in Hollywood” and interest paid back on their investment in less than two years.  Sell the movie on the basis of “We’ve signed Joe Bathwater who’s last film made $22 million and Jane Wetpants who is in this weeks’ People and who made an album that sold 120,000 copies to the 11 to 19 year olds”. 

The ninnies will nod sagely and pull out the chequebook.  Collect enough ninnies and give them screen credit as “Executive Associate Producer” to keep their money in the project.  Invite the ninnies to occasionally come to the set to watch Joe Bathwater and Jane Wetpants make faces at a camera.  Ensure the catering is excellent and the ninnies get a folding chair that says “Executive Associate Producer – Bob Dumbass” with glittery stars as punctuation on either side of their names. 

Notice that so far, the money isn’t actually involved in the mechanics of movie making.  They are not directors, or photographers, or grips, or prop technicians.  Most of them couldn’t tell which end of a camera to look into if the cinematographer hadn’t told them to “close one eye and look in here”.  They’re money people and they have insane amounts of power in Hollywood.  If they don’t do their job well, then nobody works.

Historically, the majority of money people in Hollywood have been adherents of the Jewish religion or of Jewish heritage.  It isn’t a stereotype, it is merely a fact.  Most money men don’t give a blue gopher’s nose if the people they’re hiring are of any particular group.  It is just business, get the best you can afford (best being described as how much their last project made as profit, not if they’re any damn good or not) and put them together with money and time to create something that will make you more money. 

Mel Gibson, going off in an anti-Semitic rant, even if blind drunk, is simply ignorant of the realities of his industry.  It isn’t People magazine, or websites or even tabloid headlines that make movies:  It is money that makes movies.  Ask the question then, “Why would I want to bust my ass to find the investors to put up money for Mel’s next project, if Mel thinks a group that is important to me, is evil?” 

The answer is not as simple as you might think:  Mel’s movies make a lot of money.  Mel is famous and investors want to be near ‘famous’ people so some of their cachet rubs off on them.  As long as Mel Gibson’s movies make a ton of money, Mel will get investors.  As soon as Mel stumbles at the box office, Mel will be painting houses in Malibu to make ends meet. 

It ain’t entertainment.  It is business.

In the 60’s and the 70’s before the advent of FM and the extended mixes of songs, DJs on AM talked over the musical intros of songs with what I would now call blather, but was called patter back then. 

You can’t really do it justice with the written word.  You had to hear the pounding wall of sound that poured out of Grandma’s radio:  Song to commercials to station ID to song in a seamless hosing of rock and roll radio energy.  There were three stations in Canada that provided that blast of power:  680CFTR, The Big 8, CKLW and the one and only 1050CHUM.   

Mark Daley at City-TV was one of the big voices at 1050CHUM.  You can still hear the resonance in his pipes when he introduces Great Movies, but imagine that basso profundo, with a tiny bit of echo, two paces back from the microphone, bellowing Ten-FIFTY CHUM! like the Voice of Doom.  It made “This is CNN” by James Earl Jones sound like the Vienna Boys Choir having a hissy fit. 

That was how it was in AM radio back then.  I was fortunate to come into radio as a DJ during the last twitch and gasp of AM.  You could play rock and roll at 7:50 in the morning and people thought it was great, even in small towns up in the Ottawa Valley, which was where I was a fish in a pond.

I was lucky enough to go to a couple of radio station conventions in Canada.  I got to meet some of my colleagues before AM went away to become the last bastion of the call-in show catering to the shrill and marginally sane. 

Some of the wildmen were, Art Stevens, Mark Elliot, Terry Steele, Tom Lucas, Casey Fox, Jim Hunter, Dan (The Canadian Spy) Ferguson, Ivan Hunter, Shotgun Tom Rivers and Mike Cooper.  There are too many stories and many of the participants are still alive, so the stories will have to wait, but they were all talented and as crazy as bedbugs on Laughing Gas.

Yesterday a huge conglomerate, BellGlobemedia bought CHUM Limited, which had become another huge conglomerate.  The new company will own about 40% of the radio, television, cable channel and newspaper outlets in the country.   The layoffs have already started as CHUM is absorbed into the Borg.

1050CHUM will probably go away.  The format and the spirit are long dead ghosts today.  But late at night, find an AM radio and tune up and down the dial, slowly. Maybe, if the stars line up right and the Gods of AM are on your side, you might just hear a station identification from the past that will make your hair stand on end while the opening notes of Junior Walker and the All-Stars “Shotgun” runs up in the background. 

Sunday it was announced that Juan Pablo Montoya is going to run the NASCAR Nextel Cup next season for Chip Ganassi Racing.  Today, it is rumored that Danica Patrick from the Indy Racing League is looking at making the change to NASCAR as well.  

If you are a gear-head, don’t yell me.  I’m going to simplify greatly for the non-gearheaded of our readers, as motorsports is big business, as well as fun. 

Stock cars, meaning NASCAR Nextel Cup, are those big rolling billboards with fenders over the tires.  Believe it or not, those bodies are somewhat like a Dodge Challenger, Chevy Impala and Ford Fusion.  Next year you will see a Toyota Camry body style.  

Under the metal skin, the things are purpose-built race cars with walloping big V-8 engines and carburetors.  700 to 800 horsepower are common and they run on Sunoco pump gasoline.  The car must weight 3500 pounds, ready to race. 

Formula One and Indy Racing League cars are sort of alike.  They are the low-slung fragile looking ones with the exposed wheels.  There are dozens of little wings, big wings, Gurney flaps and wickerbill aerodynamic devices bolted onto them.  There are all kinds of advertisements plastered on the Formula One and IRL cars too.  

IRL cars run on methanol, while Formula One has a unique gasoline-related fuel, special to their series.  A Formula One car has to weigh 1100 pounds and the tiny little computer controlled engines put out around 800 to 1000 horsepower.  IRL cars are less powerful and weigh a little more.

Some argue that Formula One is the pinnacle of the automotive engineering arts.  The vehicles generate enough downforce from all those wings that, theoretically, you could drive them upside down inside a big pipe. 

Other argue that paying $10 million for a chassis and another $5 million for one engine is insane even if it will rev to 20,000 rpm.  Some call NASCAR stock cars overgrown taxi cabs.  Some call the IRL cars toys, not fit for decent race fans.  I like them all.  I’d watch riding lawn mowers race, but I’m different. 

Drivers in NASCAR race into their 50’s and are just as competitive as the teenagers and twenty-somethings.  Formula One is only for those who have jackrabbit reflexes and eyes like a cat.  A Formula One driver is ancient at 30, if he isn’t dead.  A career in NASCAR is 10 to 25 years like Jeff Gordon or Mark Martin.  The Formula One career is perhaps 10 years at the most and only for the truly stellar like Schumacher.

NASCAR has the rules set up so of a field of 43 cars, at least 30 have a real shot at winning that particular race.  IRL, it comes down to cubic dollars.  It will be a Penske car that wins.  Formula One, either Schumacher or Alonzo, Ferrari or Renault.  If you aren’t in those rides, you are at the back.

Formula One is notorious for the utterly confusing politics of any decision that involves Bernie Ecclestone.  The IRL is not quite broke and the rules reflect that state of mad panic, plus Tony George.  NASCAR is ruled by Brian France and Mike Helton.  If they say so, it is so and don’t ask again.  Behave or Be Gone. 

There are thirty-six races in the Nextel Cup from February to November.  Formula One is eighteen races.  IRL holds fourteen.  Drivers are very rarely salaried positions:  They race for a percentage of the purse, sponsorship and other money that comes in.  There might be bigger money in Formula One, but the racing isn’t good.  The IRL doesn’t pay well but the racing is occasionally good. 

So Montoya and Patrick can race more often, more competitively, in cars that cost a couple of hundred thousand, for a purse in the millions.  In Formula One and the IRL you have cars that cost millions running for a purse in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

It might be a tougher gig in NASCAR, as the drivers race more often, over longer distances.  The upside is the money and the sheer joy of competing door to door with 42 other drivers.  

There will be a learning curve, as the dynamics of the two types of cars are almost polar opposites.  Expect some truly bone-headed mistakes and crashes from Montoya and Patrick if she jumps.  However, the racing, the real reason, is worlds better than where they are now.

I’ll address the gender issue too:  For those who think a woman isn’t “strong” enough to hustle an evil-handling stock car around Richmond or Texas, let me remind you that Nextel Cup cars all have power steering.  IRL cars don’t have power steering and Danica Patrick has done just fine at Richmond and Texas. 

Montoya and Patrick are racers.  Watching racers compete is a blast.

Since we’ve had our Canada Day fireworks and our American readers are getting geared up for their big blast, a quick primer on fireworks is in order.  

Gun powder, or black powder is something that when you set fire to it, produces huge amounts of hot gas and smoke, very quickly.  This called going High Order.  Contain that pressure in a tube and you can make the hot gas move things.  A musket ball, or a flare, or an artillery round are the common examples.   

The whole thing is Newton’s First Law.  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Expanding gas with only one way for it to go, with more force that the weight of what it is lifting, will move the thing, usually at a very high speed, in slices of time measured in millionths of a second.  

In aerial fireworks, the shell is cardboard or light plastic.  On the bottom of the shell is a lift charge, made of black powder.  The shell snugly sits in a tube, called a pot or a mortar.  There is only one direction for the gas to escape, as the bottom of the tube is buried in sand and closed off.  This means the gas will push the shell itself.

The pressure of the gas moving the firework charge stops at the open end of the mortar, depending on the size of the shell, 6 to 24 inches.  From that point on, the firework shell is coasting, based on where the mortar tube is pointing:  A big lob shot.  Up is the preferred direction.   

This works for aerial fireworks shells, as you’re lifting, at the most, 10 pounds; the shell proper.  For aerial shells, they top out around 1,000 feet in the air; most around 600 feet up. 

If you tried that kind of lob with humans you have a problem:  Accelerating live people that fast in a very short period of time would turn the people into puddles of elemental goo all over the back wall of the space craft.  Humans can go fast, but we need to get to fast, slowly. 

To get around that little hiring and human resources problem, you bring the things that produce big quantities of gas and smoke with your space ship, rather than lobbing the space ship out of a tube.  In the case of the Space Shuttle, the speed you want to get to is 17,800 miles per hour and the altitude is 200 miles, or so.  Both numbers are give-or-take a bit.  

The Space Shuttle is the whole thing you see on the launch pad.  The Orbiter is the actual airplane looking device.  It is about the size of a DC-9 and is about as old as a DC-9, meaning 30 year old technology.  There’s nothing wrong with thirty-year old technology as long as the maintenance is done.  Be assured, the Shuttle maintenance is done, to orders of magnitude higher standard than any airline on Earth.   

The issue is more of an essential nature.  By design, the Space Shuttle uses two solid-rocket boosters; those two long rockets down the outside of the creature.  The problem, as was demonstrated by the Challenger disaster, is that when solid rocket motors go wrong, there is nothing you can do to shut them down.  They are fireworks.  Light a fuse and get out of the way.   

The solid rockets are electronically fired; there is no geek sitting in the basement with a Bic lighter, counting backwards from 10.  What happens in the solid rocket motors is a long jet of flame is shot down the length of the motors, igniting the solid propellant.  The fuel is a very complex piece of chemistry:  It’s solid, but a little bouncy, like a scuba diving suit, as one of the components is a polymerized synthetic rubber.   

All the stuff in the fuel burns relatively slowly, compared to the lift charge of an aerial firework, producing huge gobs of smoke and expanding superheated gas.  The metal casings of the solid rockets keep all the ferocious pressures in, until it squirts out the nozzle in the bottom at a hellacious speed.  When the force downwards of the gas is greater than the weight of the Shuttle, then the whole Shuttle moves in whatever direction the rocket is pointed.  Up being the preferred direction.   

The other three motors, the ones that are on the tail of the Orbiter proper, are fed by that big zeppelin-shaped tank until the Orbiter gets to earth orbit.  Those are liquid fueled motors that are individually controlled, even turned a bit as need be.  You can shut them down and restart them.  Computers do all the heavy thinking; there is no gas pedal on the Orbiter.  

The tank holds about 500,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that are combined and lit off in the Orbiter rocket motors to produce huge quantities of expanding gas and smoke.  The Orbiter itself can’t carry enough gas for launch, which is why the external tank is tossed after it is emptied.  That takes about three minutes.  Gas mileage is not the long suit of the Orbiter.  

There is sprayed-in-place foam insulation all over the outside of the external fuel tank to keep the liquid oxygen and hydrogen super cold until it is ignited.  Since metal contracts with cold and the foam is sprayed on at room temperature, some of the foam will crack and fall off.  It always has, since the first launch.  It is a known design problem and NASA is very good at managing known design risks.  

The problem has been big lumps of foam falling off the external tank at high speeds and whacking into the Orbiter.  If it is going fast enough, hospital-grade banana pudding would damage the Orbiter:  The Shuttle goes real fast.  A big piece of foam fell off from the shaking of launch and walloped the Columbia, damaging enough tiles on a critical place of the Orbiter to destroy the machine and incinerate the astronauts on re-entry.   

What we have is a thirty-year old piece of somewhat fragile technology, bolted to a big gas tank that sheds parts of its skin, with two massive, vaguely controlled fireworks strapped to the outside.  To get it off the planet, we set fire to parts of it.   

Humans train for years to ride in it.  I’d go.  A reminder that a slim majority of the panel said I am not crazy, so there you are.   

The Space Shuttle, the whole space thing, is about managed risk. Today, you get to watch how good NASA is at managing risk.  Tonight, in the US, you get to watch Newton’s First Law in action.  Enjoy.