Live8 Makes World Take Notice, Canadians Settle for B Mulroney

Leaving their walkers discreetly backstage, the world’s octogenarian rockers smeared on their make-up, jiggled their beer guts and screamed into microphones one more time to ostensibly do something nice for starving people in Africa on Saturday, July 2. The crowd of 30,000 (the same number of people who die every day of starvation) attending in Barrie, Ontario can be forgiven for barely registering a ripple on the dancerama scale as the occasion followed by a day the Great White Suburbanite’s Holiday, aka Canada Day.

Crossing our fingers, we live in hope... 

World Watches, Mugabe's bulldozers silent

With simultaneous performances in London, Paris, Rome, Philadelphia, Moscow, Berlin, Eden Project, Tokyo, and Johannesburg (Mugabe opting not to crash the party with his urban bulldozers that day), rockers and celebrities joined in a call to the world to end extreme poverty.

"Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity but an act of justice."  

Aspers adrift in Chamber Pot

On this same day, our national newspaper chain owned by the Asper family - still refusing to believe icebergs are melting - took a break from earth-scoffing long enough to run front page stories about how altruism doesn’t work and why it’s alright for trust fund managers to make unethical investments. While these articles succeeded in attempting to more narrowly define their capacity for moral ineptitude as to resemble the residue of a child’s chamber pot, the rest of the enlightened world, up to three billion TV viewers, were listening to impassioned pleas by world luminaries the likes of Nelson Mandela and Kofi Anan.

Ben Mulroney survives murderous contemplations of Canada's viewers

Sir Bob Geldof used that world stage to provide one of the most emotional highlights of the day when he introduced stunningly beautiful 24-year-old Birhan Woldu , saying: “She had 10 minutes to live 20 years ago.” This grim fact was confirmed by the film footage of her at three years old clearly on the brink of death, a dire situation of millions which two decades ago Geldof’s Live Aid concert helped to expose.

The concerts were carried exclusively in Canada by CTV, its sadistic management team choosing to inflict upon its viewers the GusherQueen of the Canadian airwaves, Ben Mulroney to host the 8 hour affair. While attempting to radiate charm and spontaneity despite a rushed pancake make-up effort on his undauntingly smiley face, his inexhaustible self-consciousness and awkwardly vain utterances sent chilling waves of disgust throughout CTV’s viewership. Given that Mulroney was not made the immediate target of suicide bombers from Moose Jaw or Peggy's Cove representing enraged artists and intellectuals across the country it is fair to assume that Canadians were not only in a charitable mood but a forgiving one too.

Birhan Woldu survived extreme poverty to be assailed by Madonna as prop.  

Madonna subject of international predator study

Not to be outdone by any local rube calling attention to himself, Madonna arrived on London’s stage just in time to grab a faceful and plant a kiss on Birhan Woldu’s lips and then proceed to haul her around stage like her personal prop. It has since been discovered that psychoanalysts from around the globe, in a rare gesture of cooperativeness among academics, shared the cost of dispatching a professional hunter’s guide to check for her urine scent around the perimeter of the concert site.

Motley Crue were permitted to perform in Barrie, apparently as a panacea for the heavy metal relics of the 80’s, but the nuanced quality of their performance was somewhat unfortunately lost on the world viewers as most were craning their necks to make out what the tattoos on the inside of their nostrils said.

Interior nostril tatoos dazzle billions.  

Adrienne Clarkson skulks around stage

A member of the Barrie audience fainted after Blue Rodeo’s first song and needed to be taken out on a stretcher. A fellow octogenarian, he was heard to say just before he collapsed, “I can actually make out what they’re saying.”

The obscenely rich and spookily skinny (oxymoronic?) Celine Dion arrived in London to make her own inimitable impassioned plea to feed those millions she could buy a country for, and then proceeded to squeak and squeal into the microphone in all her French Canadienne glory. It was rumoured that during Celine’s squirming performance Adrienne Clarkson, having purloined her ticket from a scalper of dubious nationality, was witnessed following the mike wire, apparently miffed she wasn’t invited to inject her save-the-world formula into the sanctimonious mix.

Viewers everywhere, mostly young and of that demographic which seldom appear at polling stations, were cajoled repeatedly to vote online for something vague and irrelevant to convey to the G8 leaders.

Say a prayer for blackbirds everywhere. 

Mushy Feelings

On a day to remind one and all that 30,000 people are dying of starvation every day, many highlights and memorable performances were to be enjoyed by the class of people world-wide who can afford cable and satellite TV’s and the luxury of that mushy feeling one gets when one is almost going to shed a tear but doesn’t. One performance in particular was reported however to have had a directly debilitating effect on the bird ecology of Australia. Biologists equipped with night vision binoculars spied deranged blackbirds sexually assaulting crocodiles upon hearing Bono of U2 strangling the lyrics “Blackbird singing in the dead of night…”

But all was not lost. Will Smith got to say, “Hi, I’m Will Smith” and fleshy tons of old rockers got to jiggle it one more time on specially enforced stages in a frail but determined Last Hurrah for Me and Canadians at Barrie that day, in a fit of spontaneous patriotism, managed to assure at least two more seats for the Bloc Quebecois in Parliament as they belted out a monotonal, unilingual version of the national anthem of this ever-so-meek and obsequious country.

The Boys in the Band

Now that Pierre Trudeau has had his eternal rest disturbed this week with that unilingual anthem business, we may as well evoke him again as we recall his words those decades ago, “The government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”

That was about 27 years ago when he was decriminalising certain aspects of homosexuality. Homosexual issues have been front and centre ad infinitum since. Now that the Parliament has finally voted on the same sex marriage issue this week and made it perfectly legal to say “I do” to your lover, can we now please all have a little holiday from gay issues?

"I do!" and "I do!" and "I do some more!" "More!" "I want More More! More!"  

The Coming Plague: Gay Divorcee Lawyers

The common media has been plastering everything gay and alter-sexual on its front pages for 10 years now because of this one persistent issue. Its coverage was regularly little more than cheap salaciousness for most of all that and the result is what? Two guys or gals can live together and have sex and call each other man and wife (or something)? OK. OK. Sheesh. Cost to Canadian taxpayer? Indeterminately embarrassing.

The real bottom line in all this will, of course, be examined soon enough when the term gay divorceé will begin to have monetary implications for our society.

As to more bottom lines and greasy palms, see B. C. Place Stadium to join the queue for Gay Divorce Lawyers’ School, the week after the convention centre’s hosting of Gay Marriage Cake Designs which transpires a week after Surrey’s GayBasher Legal Defense Fund Hootenannies.

Mayor Plagued with Qualms

Apparently Mayor Larry Campbell doing a sister city Rumba with President Mugabe in Johannesburg was all too much for our former coroner-concerned-about-a-coronary so he has called it quits, planning to step down in September.

Larry MuCampbell in cognito trying to evade the hordes of bin divers.  

MuCampbell to Resign

It is hoped (by naïve ‘community-minded’ types) that His Right Honorable Mayor MuCampbell will on his day of resignation address his flock of bin divers and grocery cart pushers, who have increased twofold on the watch of his honorableness, and explain precisely to them what happened to all his convoluted plans to make their days better and their nights sheltered.

Global Chess Game Advances

Russia and China have recently come to terms about an old border problem and now that that’s been settled they are making goo-goo eyes at each other. Despite stating that they reject suggestions they are forming an anti-American alliance they are united by their opposition to US defence strategy.

China is vehemently opposed to the US plans for a missile defence system because of the threat it will pose to its own tiny second-strike capability.

And Russia also released a statement saying a recent American missile test threatened the international structure of nuclear disarmament.

Russia and China's Leaders forming new bonds.