Tag Archives: children

Culture War Correspondence: Music – Catchiness vs. Content

KAT: Greetings friends! Tonight Evan and I bring you a topic that is close to the heart of anyone with the ability to hear (or feel vibrations): music.

EVAN: In particular, we’ll be discussing lyrics, appropriate since I can just barely sound out “Amazing Grace” on the piano. As far as pop music goes nowadays the words our favourite artists are singing are not always ones we can agree with.

It’s why this version of a certain Robin Thicke song is the only one I can listen to with a clean conscience:


KAT:
 It’s also why I just can’t enjoy jamming out to Rihanna and Eminem’s romanticization of domestic abuse (“Love The Way You Lie”). Continue reading

5 Lessons from the HIMYM finale

So, How I Met Your Mother is finally over. And the internet is pissed.

Spoilers below, obviously.

This is what everyone wishes they could do to the writers.

Continue reading

Shame Day: Dark, Gritty Fan Art of Beloved Childhood Characters

I was in a dark place when I wrote the post I am least proud of: Fame Day: Creativity [and Imagination]. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a relevant topic, especially right now when it’s more common to see children in front of screens than playing make believe with their toys, it’s just that at the time I figured that writing it was the easy way out. As luck would have it, all of that segues really smoothly into today’s topic-

I hate dark and gritty fan art because it is both uncreative and lazy.

To be totally transparent, I was a high schooler once, so I did think these were really awesome once upon a time. It wasn’t until much later when I realized that if you want to take a beloved childhood character and make it appeal to a large section of the internet you have three simple options:

1) Make said character a killer/capable of killing.

There are altogether far too many gritty Inspector Gadget pictures out there.

Continue reading

People Who Disappear: A Book Review

peoplewhodisappearcover

“Sometimes romantic, sometimes elegiac, Alex Leslie’s coastal stories take place in ocean inlets and city streets. Haunted as much by technology as by their own ghosts, Leslie’s characters face the disappearance of sanity, love and landscape. An electric, poetic debut.”

So says the back cover to a book I picked up for $4 at a U of T book sale. An accurate blurb if there ever was one, Leslie is an author who has undoubtedly mastered setting, and you can practically taste and feel the salty, frigid air of Canada’s west coast. Her first book’s title is also one complete with a promise: between these covers live characters who fall between the cracks. Continue reading

CWR Writers’ Roundtable: Halloween Costumes

EVAN: Loyal readers, and those who don’t have any strong feelings about the blog whatsoever, welcome to an old feature with a fancier name where the three writers get into the holiday spirit.

That holiday is, of course, All Hallows’ Eve, and the topic we will be discussing is the broadest possible one, at least in my opinion: Halloween costumes.

There are a number of different directions we could go with this, so I’m going to start things off light and ask what our ideal Halloween costumes would be, if we were actually going to dress up. Gordon mentioned earlier this week that he tends not to celebrate holidays, so it’s definitely hypothetical. Continue reading

Fame Day: France Against Child Beauty Pageants

Look at that image on the right. Look at it. Falling back on that whole idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words” that should really be all I need to present to make the point that child beauty pageants are really not a good thing.

I like to fall back on facts, though, so I went out of my way to Google the words “how child beauty pageant facts” and clicked on an article helpfully titled “5 reasons child pageants are bad for kids.

This article had some pretty standard stuff like how these girls are too young to refuse and how they’re clearly being sexualized through these pageants [I’ll be referring to the latter article again later]. What surprised me the most was their fourth reason, which was that hair spray can actually act as a hormone disruptor and stunt growth or cause lung cancer. Continue reading