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This just in... amateur video posted on YouTube is actually worth watching.

More on this shocking story as it develops.

Is Canadian The New Black?

From the National Post comes this bizarre article:

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. "She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn't understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else," the blogger wrote.

"After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian' was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]"

A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.' "

Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university's Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other.

"This ‘code' word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious," he said. "What's left? Right, the guys to the north."

Keeping up with modern slang can be so confusing. Does "redneck" still mean the same thing it always did?

I checked the Urban Dictionary definition of Canadian, and there it is, so that must be the online slang dictionary they refered to in the article.

Read the rest of the story here.

James Bond Will Return In... Quantum of Solace?!?!?!

The title is taken from one of a collection of short stories published by 007 creator Ian Fleming in 1960.

Um... really? This is not a hoax, or a journalistic blunder? This is the actual title for the next James Bond movie? Really?

I'm thinking Bond 22 would have looked better on a marquee.

On the plus side, I probably won't confuse this new film with any of the other Bond flicks the way I did with last few Brosnan efforts, The World Never Dies Another Day and Tomorrow Is Not Enough.

Another plus is that I already have a good title for my review of the film, should I write one...

"Quantity Of Suckage".

If the movie turns out to be good, I'll just have to find a way to make that title fit.

Quantum Of Solace... Really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

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