Take all twelve inches of Snow

I've got an old song stuck in my head and I don't want it there anymore. It's "Informer" by Snow, and I have no idea how it got there. It was stuck in my head in 1993 when it first came out and somehow it's come back.

So I'm posting the video here, hoping that by putting it in your head it will leave mine -- kinda like how the devil goes from Regan to Damien Karras at the end of the Exorcist.



But wait, there's more! I was curious about whatever happened to this guy after '93. Turns out he's maintained a moderately successful career in his native Canada. (Not "Informer-successful," but successful) In fact, here's a "hit" video he did a few years back featuring Bubbles from the Trailer Park Boys. This is mesmerizing in a way that Mesmer only wishes he could have been.

Funny? Yes. Bad? Sure, but don't give me any of that "he's so white" nonsense. It's no different than any other R&B/Reggae crap out there today.

Bubbles makes it work.

How I love Scientology

The Germans, however, do not. Which is why the country is barring the filming of a movie that stars Scientology's most public, not-at-all-insane member -- Tom Cruise.

Cruise is set to star as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (A name best said while sporting a waxed mustache), a German officer who tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler by placing a bomb under der Furher's table. Hmm, an unsuccessful bomb. How very Cruisian.

Cruise and Co. wanted to shoot in Berlin, but Germany says nein doch!

Here is a typically blunt German assessment of the situation, from a Defense Ministry spokesman: The film makers "will not be allowed to film at German military sites if Count Stauffenberg is played by Tom Cruise, who has publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult." (I love that: cult). Another statement from Berlin: Scientology masquerades as a religion to make money.

What is comedy, friends? It is the meeting of celebrity Scientology wackiness with humorless German bemusement.

What is Scientology?


Who are Scientologists?

Amazing animal footage

Next time you think your life is hard, watch this. Things go from bad to worse for this little guy, but then the tides turn. Inspiring.

Remember the good times

Perfect ending to one of the most beautiful shows ever. No, Tony wasn't shot, stripped of power or arrested. He wasn't forced to pull a Henry Hill and eat egg noodles and ketchup like some schnook. And his family stayed with him.

So what did happen? Nothing. No resolution, because the point isn't in what happens but in how you accept what happens, and how you manage to be happy despite what happens because you can't ever really control what happens.

So we get the family in a diner as a lineup of potential assassins enters the restaurant -- everyone from the gangbangers who might be hired guns or perhaps representatives of a new power order, to the goomba you'd expect might do it, to the guy who looks like an ordinary nobody so you think, yea, it's gonna be him.

Of course, that would be too easy. But I still squirmed and leaned forward as Meadow struggled to parallel park between two cars you think might go off like a Pinto when she grazes the bumpers.

The camera moves around restlessly between Meadow and the family in the diner. Every new shot looks like the one set up to stage the final violent act -- we've all been trained to look for it, the way the camera lingers, the target slightly off center. It doesn't come.

And when Meadow gets the car parked, and A.J. recalls Tony's wisdom in a moment of understated epiphany that could finally mark his own turning point, in bursts Meadow to what you are sure will be a big explosion that takes out the whole family.

But no. Instead we get ten seconds of black screen without a sound or graphic. And just as you sit up and wonder if the fucking cable went out at a critical moment -- up comes the credits, silently.

And you think, huh? And then it hits you that it couldn't have ended any other way.

Beautiful.