It's Hollywood's Fault

Blaming others is nothing new. After all, in the garden of Eden, when God wanted to know if Adam had eaten the forbidden fruit, his immediate reaction was to blame Eve. Her response was to blame the serpent. It looks like the passing of blame has a strong precedent. These days it has become a common practice to blame the entertainment industry for the all manner of moral ills. How much of this is really Hollywood's fault isn't today's question however. Because whether or not you think Hollywood is the cause of general moral decay in western society, you will have to agree that Hollywood will have to answer for what happened to me the night before last.

Our story takes place on the peak night of the Perseid meteor shower. In somewhat of a quasi annual tradition, my wife and I had gone to the beach with a few friends to watch the meteors. It was a warm August eveing, but after an hour or two sitting on a damp and breezy beach to watch small chunks of rock fall from the sky, we were all a little chilled. Although it was approaching midnight at this point, we decided to visit a Tim Horton's (Canada's most popular coffee & doughnut shop — there are nine locations in my city of 32,000 people [11 within the metropolitan area with population of 58,000] if you don't believe me) and get some hot chocolate. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

After travelling back to town, we found the nearest Tim's was already closed, but we were undaunted. We went across town to a location that was open 24 hours. The five of us sat at a table in the corner and sipped our hot chocolate while watching the local riff raff. We also watched the three police officers who were a couple of tables away, and seemed to be far more interested on taking a break than watching the local riff raff themselves.

As usually happens when friends sit in a coffee shop and drink warm beverages, we chatted about various things. I can't remember very much of what we talked about, at least not until we got to talking about Heritage Minutes.

Non Canadians will be puzzled, but anyone who has watched Canadian television since 1991 has undoubtedly seen one or more of these little vignettes of Canadian history. Their ubiquity has permated Canadian society to the point where any number of randomly quoted lines from them can garner a smile of recognition. Were we ever to need a uniquely Canadian shibboleth, it would likely come from the Heritage Minutes.

Of course, the Heritage Minutes are a specifically Canadian entity and have little or nothing to do with Hollywood. Hollywood is to blame for what happened next. You see, our conversation jumped from Heritage Minutes to Manny the Stuntman.

You remember Manny the Stuntman, right? About two years ago the MPAA put out an anti-piracy spot featuring Manny Perry, a stuntman who worked on various movies, ranging from Tango & Cash to The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. In this infomercial, people who had paid their eight bucks to see a movie were treated to footage of a portly stuntman talking about the hard work of being a stuntman, and that downloading movies is bad.

During the 1:12 long commercial there is footage of an actual stunt Manny did, which is an SUV being blown up in Enemy of the State. He comments about this type of stunt with a line to the effect of "When that bomb goes off and that car is catapulted into the air 15, 20 feet, at 60 miles per hour, you're going for quite a ride." My friend Brian decided to quote this line verbatim. Now, it was well after midnight at this point, and I must have been tired, but my threshold of amusement was apparently quite low, because for some unknown reason, I found it very, very funny. Unfortunately I had a mouthful of hot chocolate at the time. At least, I did for a second.

You can guess what happened next — it's what usually happens when one starts laughing with a mouth full of liquid. I spewed the hot chocolate out on the table, and some of it managed to squirt out my nose. My wife told me later that it was actually quite gross, but at the time she laughed for at least five solid minutes. The whole group laughed about it, actually, including myself, well, as much as I could while attempting to clean up my mess and attempting not to make eye contact with the table full of police offers who must have been wondering why these young people were laughing like idiots.

Thankfully the officers decided against paying us a visit, which was probably for the best. And I am very thankful that the hot chocolate was only tepid by this point, because I can only imagine the pain scalding hot liquid would cause in the nasal passages. As it was there was only mild discomfort combined with significant embarassment.

So thank you Hollywood for enabling me to make a spectacle of myself in front of my wife, my friends, three cops and various other Tim Horton's patrons. You may not want to take the blame for corrupting a generation of youth, but my embarassment and my cocoa-flooded sinus cavities are clearly your fault.