Okay. You’re hip to the cultural scene. You know Tupac’s criminal record. You can never get enough of Avril Lavigne’s belly button. You know that when you go to a Simon and Garfunkel concert, you have to do so with ironic detachment. You watch Entertainment Right Now.
But, don’t you get the creeping feeling every so often that what’s cool changes behind your back? Blink, and people are doing things that you would have thought were idiotic before you blinked, but now seem to be cool. Not blinking is not the answer. Things will change whether you blink or not, and, in any case, your eyes will dry out and eventually pop out of your head with a nasty plinking sound.
No, the answer is to take the following quiz on popular entertainment. If you get enough questions right, you’re still cool. But, whatever you do, don’t send completed quizzes to us! Reading completed quizzes is for nerds and graduate students.
1) What was your response to the film Elf?
a) it would have been better if it had starred Colin Ferrell instead of Will Ferrell
b) no wonder Peter Dinklage got sick of the big city and retired to the country in The Station Agent
c) Christmas has come early this year (and that’s not a good thing)
2) What is your impression of Paris Hilton’s sex video?
a) I wasn’t impressed with her performance, but it’s a good move – look what being caught engaging in a sex act on video did for Pamela Sue Anderson’s career
b) I blame her parents. Naming her after a city was obviously too much responsibility for her – they should have named her after a suburb…
c) I think it should have taken place in one of her father’s hotels – doesn’t she have any family pride?
d) I find the whole thing disgusting – do you have a URL where I can find it?
3) How do you feel about Stephen King winning a National Book Award?
a) it’s scarier than anything he ever wrote
b) if you don’t mind, I’d rather go back to the question about Paris Hilton’s sex video
c) what’s a National Book Award?
4) What would you like not to see on Michael Jackson’s official Web site?
a) Jackson’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, threatening that any child who claimed he had been abused by the musician would be spanked…with extreme prejudice
b) unicorns
c) any reference to Michael Jackson
d) all of the above, and so much more
5) How did Roy E. Disney, who resigned from Walt Disney Co.’s board of directors, know his relationship with Disney Chairman and Chief Executive officer Michael Eisner was on the skids?
a) Eisner gave Disney front row seats to the opening of Treasure Planet
b) internal memos from Eisner kept making references to Disney’s “high, squeaky voice”
c) Eisner ensured the seating arrangement in the boardroom was changed so that Disney sat on the other side of the window with the amazing view of Los Angeles
6) What advantage would opening up Canada’s broadcast sector to increased foreign investment have for the average TV viewer?
a) whiter whites and brighter brights
b) children would have more respect for their elders
c) the foreign companies that make the majority of programmes shown on Canadian private broadcast networks would be able to make money more directly from Canadian viewers, and this is good because…umm…it…err…yeah
7) A mob of shoppers trampled the first woman in line for a sale on DVDs at a Wal-Mart. What is the store doing to ensure that it won’t happen again?
a) issuing elbow pads to everybody with their carts when they enter the store
b) not allowing anybody into the store who is wearing cleats
c) running John Maddin football commentary on the in-store video monitors
d) putting up signs with a silhouette of an 80 year-old woman using a walker and the caption “slow – shopper crossing”
8) To save money, the Art Gallery of Ontario has closed its Canadian gallery until 2007. How can it sell this to the public?
a) “The Group of Seven is now The Group of Zero!”
b) “You’ve seen one abstract painting of an ice floe, you’ve pretty much seen them all!”
c) “Giving you more Breughel for your buck!”
9) Tom Cruise nearly lost his head doing a stunt for the film The Last Samurai. So?
a) big deal – where was his head when he made Days of Thunder?
b) well…we all knew those cheekbones couldn’t last forever
c) so, big deal – Uma Thurman would have kicked Cruise’s ass if he had been in her martial arts movie
10) A free press is a cornerstone of democracy. Yet, the United States, which claims it is trying to build democracies in the Middle East, has bombed, censored and otherwise obstructed the work of Arab TV news networks like Al-Jazeera. Why?
a) the US is waiting until the Arab networks are taken over by multinational entertainment conglomerates that will do the country’s censoring for it
b) indigenous press censorship worked so well in developing democracies in Latin America
c) democracy in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is a fragile flower that would shrivel under the harsh sunlight of intense press scruti – of, fuck this idiotic metaphor; we do it because we can
11) Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman argued that the draft should be reinstated, claiming, “National Service calms you down and gives you perspective. Perhaps I would have been even more crazy without it.” Oh, really. What crazy stunts would Wyman have pulled if he hadn’t done compulsory military service for a year?
a) run for Prime Minister
b) took part in Paris Hilton’s sex video
c) stayed with the Rolling Stones
12) What is your favourite song off The East is Red, a new album of songs by Mao Tsedong?
a) “The Sun Sets on the Running Dog Lackeys of Imperialist Hegemony” (acoustic version)
b) “Ballad of a Thin Man Sent Into the Countryside for Reeducation.”
c) Mao’s cover of The Beatles’ “Revolution 9”
13) How do you feel about a 1920 painting by Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris selling at auction for $400,000?
a) wow! It’s worth 1/140th of van Gogh’s “Sunflowers!” Who says Canadian art isn’t appreciated on the international scene?
b) I refuse to comment until the Harris estate admits that he willfully left the “ce” off his name
c) good thing the AGO is closing its Canadian gallery, because acquiring this piece would have bankrupted it!
14) How will the bankruptcy proceedings of FAO, owner of ultrachic FAO Schwarz toy stores, affect the world?
a) the movie Big will have to be reshot
b) oh, no! – the Zany Brainy chain of toy stores will be liquidated! Good thing the Rummy Dummy chain will survive
c) I’ll just have to find another place to get my 26 foot teddy bear, but at least the Empire State Building will be safe this year
d) Wal-Mart is one step closer to complete domination of the Yu-Gi-Oh market
15) Kill Bill is being advertised as Quentin Tarantino’s fourth movie. However, he wrote and directed one of the stories in Four Rooms, so why isn’t Kill Bill being advertised as Quentin Tarantino’s fourth and a quarter movie?
a) would you go to see somebody’s fourth and a quarter movie? It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and it probably wouldn’t look impressive on the one-sheet
b) studio weasels
c) they probably just forgot Four Rooms – lord knows, I wish I could
16) Conrad Black’s Hollinger International gave a conservative magazine called The National Interest $200,000 a year for an undisclosed number of years. Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger (not to mention the Lord of CrossWords) were both advisers to the magazine and members of Hollinger’s board of directors. Coincidence? Or conspiracy?
a) coincidence – if there had been any conflict of interest, Perle, Kissinger and Black would have announced it to the board’s audit committee
b) coincidence – the fact that Perle and Kissinger refuse to comment is just because they’re too busy raping the Middle East of its energy resources
c) coincidence – lord knows there aren’t enough conservative publications in the world, and thank the lord for men like Perle and Kissinger who are willing to put the public interest before their own personal profit
17) You’ve now taken the lord’s name in vain in two consecutive questions. Aren’t you, an avowed agnostic with atheistic tendencies, being hypocritical?
a) I’m sure the lord will forgive me; the lord is like that
b) what the hell are atheistic tendencies?
c) three consecutive questions, actually
18) Rosie O’Donnell and Gruner & Jahr, which published her eponymous magazine, were both told to get a life by the judge who heard their breach of contract case. What do you make of this?
a) thank goodness that’s over with! Now Rosie can get back to doing what she does best…which is…uhh…no, wait, give me a second…
b) it’s the lawyer’s life for me-oh…
c) that’s an American entertainment story – don’t you have anything that reflects Canada’s cultural environment?
19) Okay. Why did former National Post editor Ken Whyte’s much anticipated column about working with Conrad Black get pulled from The Toronto Star?
a) uhh, now that you mention it, Rosie’s legal troubles are actually kind of intriguing…
b) I’m no doctor, but that cough certainly sounds like a nasty case of libel chill to me
c) unrequited love is a terrible thing, but, really, there’s a time and place for everything
20) Stocks of fish in the Vanuatu archipelago are collapsing in the wake of increased sales of aquarium fish to children who had seen Finding Nemo. What do you think of that?
a) thank goodness the same sort of run on wildlife didn’t happen after the release of The Lion King
b) proof, as if more proof was needed, that Disney is a menace to the safety of the world
c) I better get my clownfish before they disappear! You think they carry them at FAO Schwarz?