Today’s Morons: Adolf Hitler Campbell’s Parents

Were you looking for proof of Neo-Nazi stupidity?

Today’s Morons have a little boy they named Adolf Hitler Campbell. And they’re raising a stink right now, because their neighbourhood grocer in Greenwich, New Jersey, wouldn’t write the three-year-old kid’s name on his birthday cake, citing the fact that it’s a horrible, disgusting name.

Heath and Deborah Campbell actually went public with their complaint, trying to raise a stink about ShopRite’s decision. Backfire! All it did was give ShopRite a chance to defend its position by saying “No way would we do this, because it’s stupid,” or something along those lines.

And then there’s Barry Morrison of the Anti-Defamation League, who told The Associated Press this: “Might as well put a sign around their (the boy’s) neck that says bigot, racist, hatemonger. What’s the difference?”

Barry’s right. What kind of moron parent does this? Oh, wait: the bigot, racist hatemongering kind, like Heath and Deborah.

Guess what they named their daughters? JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell. Yeah. They have a kid with the middle name Aryan Nation.

Pathetic.

Time For A New Adventure

Something big just happened: I was laid off, part of a massive wave of cuts to the newspaper industry. Yes, it sucks. But I’ll be okay, and we’ll be okay, because we have a plan. In the meantime, I don’t have to work through the holidays and can spend more time with the kids.

It also means that the Weather Stations are now my full-time job … until I start at Home Depot or wherever.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Okay, I’ve told you before that I was never a big fan of the Wolverine character. And I wasn’t crazy about Hugh Jackman’s casting in the first X-Men movie. But he grew on me, the way he grew on you, and I’ve become a fan, more of Hugh than of the Wolverine character.

I liked him in the first two films. And I liked him a bit in the third, but to be honest, the third film was a tragic  nutlick, and I suspected then that the X-flicks were done for.

But this new trailer, for Jackman’s solo spinoff flick, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, has renewed my faith in the X-movies franchise. See, I have a limited knowledge of the last decade or so of Wolverine and X-Men comics, primarily because there are too many of them and I can’t keep up. But I know there was, finally, a Wolverine origin story told a while back that finally, once and for all, gave readers the history of this hundred-something-year-old Canadian super-soldier.

And from what I know of that series, this new film looks faithful. Let’s go over some points:

• Sabretooth is played by Liev Schreiber this time around, rather than Tyler Mane. I don’t get that. Mane looked like Sabretooth; Schreiber looks like Hugh Jackman with a brush cut. But I like Schrieber, so this might be okay.
• Ryan Reynolds is a pretty cool Canadian. He’s funny, he’s fit, he starred in Just Friends, which always makes me giggle, and now he’s Deadpool (for some reason without a mask). Ryan looks good in red spandex; pay attention, Flash producers.
• I don’t know who that is playing Gambit, but that’s dead on right … and they dumped the stupid pink costume. I never understood why Gambit wore pink.
• Hey, the Blob! I loved the Blob as a kid. Marvel reprinted early X-Men in Amazing Adventures around 1980, so I had a firm knowledge of the original team, and their early enemies. Jack Kirby’s Blob looked just like our minister, too, so I always had a secret smile at church.
• This movie, it would appear, offers some amazing weaponization of Wolverine’s claws. Watch him take out the army truck, or stop his motorcycle … brilliant.

All in all, I’m ready for this. It comes out in May, right before the new Star Trek, after Watchmen, so 2009, so far, is looking good for movies.

Today’s Moron: The Wrongest Wrong-Turn Trucker Ever

Today’s Moron is an unnamed truck driver who relied on his gadgetry a little too much.

Last month, this guy was hauling a load from Turkey to Gibralter. Go look at a map for a second, so you can familiarize yourself with the route. See how it works? You sort of loop over the Mediterranean, then down through Spain. Fairly straightforward.

Not for this guy, though. We should give him a name … how about “B.J.?” Because, you know, I loved B.J. and the Bear when I was a kid. Anyway, B.J. got himself some kind of GPS sat-nav system for his rig, and he liked using it a lot. So much that he apparently stared at it the whole time and never actually looked around.

What happened was B.J. took a 2,500-kilometre wrong turn. He typed the address of his destination into his little machine, and it led him to street with the same name … in Skegness, England. I like the name Skegness, by the way.

This happens with these devices. You may recall the story of the Argentinian tourist who came to Canada by mistake. Hell, it happens with Google Maps; we tried to drive half an hour to a provincial park a couple of summers ago and ended up taking a long and complicated back-road route thanks to Google Maps, which for some reason gave us a long list of three-minute dirt roads and strange turns, rather than just showing us the highway that would have taken us right there.

We figured it out along the way, but continued, because we like back roads and there were some nice old churches. But in B.J.’s case, he wasn’t sightseeing. Truckers are on schedules. They don’t have time to be tourists.

I just have to wonder how it was that he didn’t notice he wasn’t in Gibralter. Or Spain, for that matter. Or, when you think about it, in the sunshine. Let me show you why I say that.

This is Spain:

And this is where B.J. actually went:

Really, wouldn’t you have started to think, at some point, say, around France, “Maybe I’m not going the right way?” Christ, he crossed the English Channel. “Hmm, this Spanish river is mighty big!”

In a strange twist, B.J. was delivering a load of maps of Europe. Seriously. No, I made that up.

A Little Christmas Magic

Hey, sorry I haven’t been around for a couple of days. It’s been crazy. New and strange things are happening here, and I will tell you about them as they unfold.

In the meantime, I just dug up an old story of mine from about six years ago. It’s fiction, a goofy Christmas tale about a kid who meets Santa.

What happened was this: I was an editor at a daily in northern Ontario. We had sold a month-long ad campaign featuring a Christmas advertisement that almost filled a page, but not quite, and we needed something to run across the top each day for the month leading up to Christmas. A lot of ideas were knocked around — Christmas carol lyrics, recipes, photos, that sort of thing. But then we hit on the idea of running a serialized short story.

I was drafted to write it, because I am that extremely rare animal: a journalist who write fiction on the side.

Then it got corporatized, of course. Our publisher heard about the plan and asked us to centre the story on a community north of the city itself, a town that had been a famously tough sell for our paper. For decades, this area — predominantly francophone — had refused to embrace the paper, saying we didn’t represent them or their interests.

“Get a lot of references in there,” the publisher said. “Make these people think we care about them!”

The end result is a little strange, and not at all representative of my actual work. But it was fun to read again. I hope you like it.

You can read it here: When Santa Stalled