Some things are better left undone

The Culture Potato’s guide to some of the things to avoid this year

GERRY BOWLER
Special to CW Life

In last month’s column I proposed a list of events I would be paying close attention to in this, the first year of the new millenium. Today I want to tell what I will not be devoting any time to contemplating in 2001.

Anything involving Madonna. I’m sorry, but the aged Queen of Pop has outlived her freshness date and is no longer of any importance to popular culture. The well-publicized baptism of her latest illegitimate child followed by her $3.5 million wedding has exhausted the last remaining seconds of her allotted span of fame.

Anything involving Don Cherry. Readers of earlier columns will need no explanation.

Any shocking ad campaign by a purveyor of fashion clothing or fragrance. These sorts of advertisements will predictably violate some social taboo against incest, cannibalism or child molestation, draw howls of protest from culture critics and be withdrawn after the desired public attention has been attained.

Any professional sport in which the participants are making more money for a single game than I make in a year. This will allow to me to continue to enjoy the Canadian Football League and to wait for the cataclysmic economic crash and burn that I pray is even now stalking the NHL and Major League Baseball.

Any televised award-winning recording artist whose work celebrates the killing of one’s wife, the rape of one’s mother and the murder of homosexuals.

Any 17-hour broadcast consisting only of the names of hate-crime victims sponsored by a music channel now ashamed of being largely responsible for promoting the career of any artists mentioned in number six.

Tom Green. If you have to ask who this blight on civilization is, consider yourself blessed.

Left Behind. Sorry, nice try, no cigar. Christians can do better than this earnest but flawed attempt at filming a Hollywood thriller mated to debatable eschatology. But who knew that the raptured would leave behind their jewelry and prosthetic devices in such neat piles?

Any reality television show which explores the tangled emotional lives of toothless teen-aged single mothers from trailer parks who wish to confront their tattooed unemployed live-in boyfriends about the paternity of their illegitimate children.

Any reality television show which places four couples “at a crossroads in their relationship” on an island with scantily-clothed seducers and seductresses who will test the couples’ commitment to each other over two weeks. Temptation Island is brought to you by those same tasteful folks who gave us Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?

Any reality television show ... unless it’s that one with the motorcycle rider driving into the side of the bus at 60 mph.

Blackfly, the painfully unfunny Canadian rip-off of the brilliant British historical comedy Blackadder. Now, get this straight: Canadians cannot do sit-coms; Americans cannot do Shakespeare; the British are hopeless at rodeo chuck-wagon races; and the French cannot conduct a principled foreign policy. Let’s just stick to what we are best at.

Any movie in which the male protagonist is under 45 years of age (I’m 52). I just don’t care about plots peopled by brooding young hunks and beach bunnies barely old enough to have had their braces removed.

Any movie in which the male protagonist is over 45 years of age but the heroine is in her 20s. The pathetic sight of sexagenarian Sean Connery attempting to romance Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment has convinced me that, despite my remarkably witty conversational skills and profound knowledge of late-medieval history, I am actually unlikely to be attractive to women born after the death of disco.

Gerry Bowler is a Winnipeg writer and historian. Contact him by email: gerrybowler@home.com