Balls. It appears I will have to scratch “Buy Sleddale Hall,” better known as Uncle Monty’s cottage, off my “ludicrous aspirations” life list. Kate Moss and Jamie Hince are reportedly after it. I especially like the fact that Hince supposedly refers to Moss as Withnail, and Moss to Hince as I. It’s the correct analogy, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not very romantic.

“My understanding of international law is, to be a child soldier, you have to be in an army.” –Stephen Harper

Words fail me, except these ones: Mr. Prime Minister, you are a self-destructive ass. I’m hoping to have something more eloquent to offer on the subject tomorrow.

(Photo by Flickr user guil3433)

In the past decade or so, as they replaced all the old cinemas I loved with technically superior but sterile and placeless mallscapes, and then doubled, and then tripled the prices, I have fallen out of love with movie-going. Look, for the love of Christ, at what they’ve done to the Loew’s on Ste-Catherine Street (above). It makes me want to put my fist through something. So it now takes the promise of something extraordinary to get me out. But I’ll read Roger Ebert any day of the week, not just for his impeccable taste in film but for passages like this, in his review of Revolutionary Road:

[Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet] are so good, they stop being actors and become the people I grew up around. Don’t think they smoke too much in this movie. In the 1950s everybody smoked everywhere all the time. Life was a disease, and smoking held it temporarily in remission.

Yowzah. On the one hand, I’d love to read more about his thoughts on the 50s. On the other, I’m kind of frightened.

The theoretically impossible Warren Kinsella:

At first, I was pissed off I’d be missing the inauguration ceremony. But when I sat down and thought about it, I figured—in the impossible, saturnalian, other-worldly event Barack Obama ever learned where I was, let alone existed—he’d probably say I had been in the exactly right location, at precisely the right time, after all.

Olaf responds absolutely perfectly:

Surely, that’s exactly what he’d say. And then he’d invite you to the Kingdom of Heaven where only the most righteous may enter. Jesus, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama, and Warren Kinsella. History’s Giants of Equality.

Attention, haters of Maher Arar. Meet your new hero: Omar Khadr.

As we speak, Ehud Olmert is announcing an end to the Israeli operation in Gaza. Only BBC World bothers to carry the news conference. In the middle of it, Rogers interrupts him with a commercial for… itself. Surreal.

Note to the NHL’s poor cousins: avian attendance does not count towards the revenue sharing minimum.

The Toronto Star’s public editor, Kathy English, polls readers on various editorial decisions the newspaper made over the past year. Among the results: 74 per cent of readers disagreed with the decision to publish a photo of “kayaker Adam van Koeverden bent over with the dry heaves after his eighth-place finish in a race he was favoured for a medal.” That’s a little weird on its own, even before you find out that 70 per cent of those same readers agreed with the newspaper’s decision to run “an AP photo captur[ing] an anguished mother cradling her dead daughter” after the Chinese earthquake. The lesson: there’s no way to please these idiots, so publish whatever you want.

Other than Full Pundit, my recent and semi-recent contributions to the National Post:

• NEW! My irritated reaction to the politically fruitless free speech debate.
• On the blind self-assuredness of hockey’s pro- and anti-fighting crowds.
• Who wrote the wrongest column of 2008? Hint: it sort of rhymes with bologna slime.
• Against Canadian hockey players running up the score against helpless Kazakhs.
• On the inherent absurdity of government-controlled liquor sales.
• On whether parents should be allowed to name their kids, for example, “Adolf Hitler.”
• On giving Barack Obama a chance to fail (or succeed) on Guantanamo.