I used to watch the Monkees every day after school.

A lot of board games come out every year. Some of them are really great. Many of them are okay rehashes of what has come before. Some are crappy. And some are just sort of there. This post is dedicated to the last category.

Tobago came out a couple of years ago and was immediately very popular; it’s a weird puzzle game where players gradually winnow down the number of possible sites where treasure can exist on an island, and then race to get the treasures. It has an interesting set of mechanics and is reasonably interactive (which is key for me, because I hate multiplayer-solitaire games like Agricola – seriously, I could write a thousand words easily on how much I fucking hate Agricola, but that is for another day). But when it is suggested, my response is always “eh.” Tobago doesn’t really feel very competitive to me – in a three- or four-player game, it’s far too easy for a player to scavenge wins based on little more than turn order and a bit of luck. It’s just sort of there. The pieces are cute and I suppose it’s a good gateway game to get people to heavier stuff, but there are plenty of good games to get people to heavier stuff that are better than Tobago – not least because Tobago isn’t really like anything else. That should be a plus in its favour, but it isn’t, because it feels so inessential to me. I mean, when I teach Stone Age – another light game I don’t particularly like – I can at least try to push people to try Caylus eventually, or one of the other half-dozen really good worker placement games out there. But Tobago doesn’t really link to anything.

Fresco is a worker-placement game that can at least lead to better experiences, but I dislike it. It has one clever mechanic – “waking up” your workers earlier means you get initiative for the best slot placements, but it makes your workers less happy which in turn means you gradually get less actions. That’s a clever initiative system and I wish it had been better implemented in this game, where I rarely see worker happiness matter overly – and that’s really my beef with Fresco, which is so very straightforward a game. You get cubes, you turn them into other (more important) cubes, and then you trade in the cubes for points. Too many modern Euro-style boardgames are about trading cubes for other cubes. (In this game, the cubes are supposed to be paint. But really. They’re cubes.) Fresco fails for me, because in attempting to be accessible it fails to really be a game. It’s just a pretty straightforward expanding economy game – get A to get B to get C.

But what’s worst are the ones I really, really want to be good. I was waiting eagerly to play Pret-a-Porter because the theme is so awesome – you’re competing fashion design moguls! Come on, that is a great theme for a boardgame. If I play one more game where I am a merchant in historical Europe I may shoot myself. (Or, more practically, I might shoot other people. I mean, come on. There is only one of me, and so many other people. This is logical, see.) But Pret-a-Porter did not live up to my hopes. It’s a worker-placement game with an economic theme – you’re buying buildings and hiring employees to get more clothing designs and materials so you can present the biggest and best collections at fashion shows.

In practice, the game is a very complex set of steps – buy business resources (A) to assist you in getting designs (B) and raw materials (C) so you can complete sets of clothing (D) which generate you money (E) and victory points (F), the latter being determined by special categories of attributes which you can also earn from the buildings and employees as well as other areas on the board (G) but the victory points also earn you money (back to E) and you need the money to buy the resources and materials in the first place (back to A and C). Furthermore, the game has not one but TWO different ways to borrow money – the “on purpose” way which is reasonably easy and straightforward for a player to play back, and the “emergency loanshark” way which is not. The employees and buildings all do appropriate things (for example, the PR person gives you additional VPs when you come in third or fourth in a category). Really, this game has a ton of clever ideas.

But they don’t work. Because the employees and buildings – which are really the core of the game, as you need them to build your efficiency engine – show up randomly every turn and initiative shifts on a preset order, there is no real way to sacrifice to guarantee to get what you want or need. Which means that the essential parts of the game are essentially doled out to players at random, which would be fine in a lighter game, but this is a game with at least four levels of mental accounting. Which means that you’re brainburning on a game which doesn’t reward you for it. I have no problems with four levels of mental accounting if the game respects the work I’m doing to make it work, but Pret-a-Porter just doesn’t. And that sucks, because I really wanted this to work.

See also: Core Worlds. I’m kind of burned out on Dominion lately, and I’d really like to see a great deckbuilding game take Dominion’s ideas and run with them. None of the wannabes have done so – most have not even come close. Core Worlds was advertised as Dominion with space-empire building, which seemed like a slam dunk. I love Eclipse, but want a quick-and-dirty space game. Something that does what Race For The Galaxy does, except in a deckbuilding context. Core Worlds seemed like that thing! Except, of course, it wasn’t.

See, Core Worlds is another game where turn order is determined by the first player changing every round (the person on your left is first player next round). And you draw replacement cards into the pool randomly from the deck. These cards are either troops and ships, who can earn you the two types of “currencies” in the game (ground-fighting and space-fighting, basically) which let you conquer planets. Simple – except that since the planets are also dealt out randomly, it is quite possible to, for example, have a situation where all of the planets need starfighters, and you never get a starfighter because on your turn to go first there are no starfighters and on other people’s turns they buy the starfighters before you get a chance, so you basically sit there having lost the game in the first couple of turns and that is that. Core Worlds is an example of terrible game design, because when a game can assfuck you on a totally arbitrary basis from the very start of the game, that is a bad idea. Many deckbuilders have also made this same mistake, but their mistake has been to incorporate more complex ideas than the deckbuilding mechanic can handle. Core Worlds is relatively simple and still fucked it up.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

8:12: Red carpet bullshit. Other people can blog this. I have my limits.

8:15: Oh jesus they’re doing recaps of the red carpet now?

8:16: No, seriously, whose idea was that, anyway? “Okay, we’ve got about fifty minutes’ worth of softball interview time, so let’s flashback towards the end of it and talk more about the dresses we already showed.”

8:21: Natalie Portman explains that Billy Crystal will be wonderful as host because he won’t be mean and he’ll only want to entertain. The Oscars are the only place and time on the entire planet where anybody expresses enthusiasm for Billy Crystal any more, you know.

8:25: Chris Rock says that he has given Billy Crystal some material but doesn’t know if Billy will use it. Let’s see if Billy is funny! Then we’ll know.

8:33: One minutes and thirty seconds – that was how long it took Billy Crystal to drag out his Sammy Davis Jr. impersonation. Which, it seems, now must be done in blackface. Good call there, Oscars! Boy, I sure am glad we fired Brett Ratner for being homophobic so Billy Crystal could be sorta-racist.

8:35: One thing about the BillyCrystalVerse that is in its favour: The Adventures of Tintin was, it seems, a much bigger deal than it was here.

8:37: One good joke in his first pre-singing part of the monologue (the economy and millionaires giving one another golden statues) and now we’re into the singing, which is excruciating. I mean, James Franco was really bad last year, but he didn’t sing, and at least Anne Hathaway was pretty. Billy Crystal is cheesy – not the good kind of cheesy either – and he’s fallen so deep into his schtick that the jokes are increasingly about his schtick. And he’s not pretty like Anne Hathaway. And he’s arguably less funny than Hathaway is now. Actually forget the “arguably.”

8:43: Tom Hanks gives away the award for Best Cinematography. Should go to Tree of Life or War Horse, I think, but ends up going to Hugo, which is not an indefensible pick. Does this mark the start of a Hugo landslide? And then ten seconds later we jump to Best Art Direction, which goes to Hugo as well. Interesting! And then they give the winners like fifteen seconds to accept their speeches because who cares about these people and their life achievements, am I right? Arrrrrgh I hate how the Oscars have cut down the victory speeches for non-celebrities to basically nothing.

8:45: Jaime Weinman, on Twitter, says that Art Direction always goes to a period film or fantasy film because otherwise the art director (is deemed) to be doing basically nothing. By my count, the last film which argues against this hypothesis is All The President’s Men, which won it in 1976. Ow.

8:51: Billy Crystal explains that the theatre is made up like the “movie palaces of our youth.” The movie palaces of my youth were strip malls with shitty seats, so I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. And to make his point here are a bunch of random scenes from famous movies! Quick – what do Jaws, Ghost, Avatar, The Princess Bride, The Godfather, The Hangover, A Few Good Men, Star Wars, Twilight, Amelie, Raging Bull and Midnight Cowboy have in common? If you said “they are all movies,” you are correct!

8:54: Costume design! Where Anonymous is nominated, amazingly enough, as celebrities explain why costume design is important. I was wondering if perhaps Hugo was going to go three-for-three, but no, The Artist takes it. Ugh ugh ugh The Artist.

8:56: Makeup! Will Albert Nobbs take it because Glenn Close pretends to be a guy, or will it be Harry Potter because wizards and monsters? Neither! It goes to The Iron Lady, and Meryl Streep’s odds of winning Best Actress just went up a couple points. Makeup people’s speeches are actually very nice and there is no musical hustle off the stage, so that’s all right.

8:59: And now: celebrities in a dark room will tell you about their first movies! Hilary Swank of course names three or four because she is an overachiever and she is all “and I won two Oscars already, not that I would tell you this.”

9:03: Ad for The Lorax. Hey, did you know the Lorax is now shilling for an SUV? Probably you did, but it turns out the Lorax is shilling for many other products as well! It’s almost as if they missed the entire point of the book!

9:06: Sandra Bullock says we are going “to try something new,” which is always a sign for “joke that will fail.” This time, it is Bullock explaining that she will be speaking in Chinese, but instead actually speaks in German. Which is the sign for Best Foreign Language Film, which goes – not surprisingly – to A Separation, because it was very good. In fact it was better than most of the Best Picture nominees! But this is nothing new. Also, I somehow managed to miss that a Canadian (e.g., Quebecois) film got nominated for Best Foreign Film this year. I’m out of the loop!

9:08: A Separation guy explains that Iran is actually mostly filled with people who don’t hate everybody, which should be a fairly non-controversial statement, which means it will enrage Fox and Friends tomorrow morning for at least two minutes and thirty seconds.

9:10: Christian Bale presents Best Supporting Actress because he won Best Supporting Actor last year. Did you forget about that? And it’s going to Octavia Spencer, which is not a big surprise because she has a good performance in what was, admittedly, a terrible movie, but at least she gets an Oscar out of it. Octavia completely melts down when she gets the award, which is cute. Maybe now she’ll get a post-Oscar career bump! Wait, no, that only happens to guys and young ingenues, and she is neither of those. Oh well.

9:18: Billy Crystal does a bit about old-timey focus groups, which actually means Christopher Guest and his usual gang get to do a really good bit about focus-grouping The Wizard of Oz, and that is nothing I can complain about. Then Billy Crystal thanks everybody famous who was in his terrible opening number and the show returns to being insufferable.

9:22: Editing! Usually goes to the winner of Best Picture, because most of the voters don’t really think about what editing is but assume the best movie is also the best edited. (Which, given that editing is supposed to be invisible and unnoticed, is not really the worst argument around.) Sometimes, though, it goes to a movie with very obvious and dramatic edits, because those films can say “hey, editing!” to voters. And it goes to… Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which I do not think will win Best Picture and had showy editing. The winners clearly had no idea they were going to win and apologize for stammering by saying “we’re editors.” Heh.

9:25: Best Sound Editing, meanwhile, goes to Hugo, and there’s definitely some momentum building now.

9:27: Best Sound Mixing! Hugo is nominated for this one, and… yep that’s another win. See, in the last week, all of the buzz has been about The Artist, The Help and The Descendants. All of these technical wins for Hugo might indicate a steamroller building up, but then again with the exception of The Artist none of those films are particularly deep in the technical categories. In short: I have no idea what’s going to happen! This type of incisive analysis is why you tune in to these liveblogs, folks.

9:34: Kermit and Miss Piggy show up to be briefly amusing and break the tedium… by introducing Cirque du Soleil, who then present the opening number that the Oscars never have any more because they’re too cool to do that, I guess.

9:41: Robert Downey Jr. comes out with a camera crew claiming to be the subject of a documentary, and does a bit with Gwyneth Paltrow. Which is funny. (I am not one of those people who hate Gwyneth.) This is all to present the documentary award, which goes to Undefeated, the great football documentary which is approximately nine months away from being fictionalized by Disney.

9:44: And we have our first “play them out forcefully” moment of the night, because we need more time to make sure celebrities tell us about their first movie experiences while in a dark room.

9:45: Chris Rock does a brilliant bit about race and voice acting for the best animation awards, which unfortunately downplays the difficulty of voice acting, which is a problem Hollywood has nowadays. (I blame Robin Williams.) And the Oscar goes to Rango, because Pixar didn’t make a movie last year, despite rumours otherwise that they might have done. Those rumours were not true. Ignore them.

9:52: Crystal does a bit with Melissa McCarthy where she does her bit from Bridesmaids, because that is what Melissa McCarthy does now as deemed by Hollywood. Emma Stone and Ben Stiller do a bit and she is much funnier than him. Also, she is taller than him. Jonah Hill is in this sketch for approximately two seconds and is funnier than Billy Crystal has been all night.

9:54: Visual effects! Hugo is nominated: will it take the award from those movies with far more elaborate effects like Harry Potter or Rise of the Planet of the Apes? And it will! Momentum, Hugo has it.

9:57: EXTREMELY MEAN-SPIRITED JOKE I COULD HAVE MADE ABOUT THE MELISSA MCCARTHY/BILLY CRYSTAL BIT FROM EARLIER: “Man, Meg Ryan has gained a lot of weight.”

9:58: Melissa Leo shows up to present Best Supporting Actor. Christopher Plummer wins – note that he is wearing his Order of Canada pin! – and gets a mammoth ovation. Plummer gets off a crackerjack joke about how he was practicing his acceptance speech when he was born. Nolte looks pissed that he didn’t win. Christopher Plummer winning officially redeems all of the shittiness thus far of this year’s Oscars, which have been remarkably shitty.

10:07: Billy Crystal does his “telepathy” bit. Mostly lame, although Scorcese trying to play along with Crystal’s schtick is cute. Also, the dog from The Artist shows up, because it is my theory that secretly The Artist is so popular because people want to give the dog awards but there are no major awards where the dog is eligible.

10:11: Crystal actually gets off a decent joke about the stupidly elaborate stage prop for the musical portion of the awards. The world stops dead, the universe is instantly annihilated, and then we are all recreated anew. So that happened.

10:13: Best Original Score (as opposed to Best Stolen Score, removed as a category in 1931) includes a nomination for some film called “The Adventures of Tin Tin,” but who cares because The Artist wins its second award of the night! The composer has no formal training in music, because absolutely everybody involved with this film is a plucky underdog. His mike seems to be sorta metallic for some reason, which is probably why when he asks for another ten seconds to thank his wife, he gets it.

10:16: Will Ferrell and Zach Galifakanis come out banging cymbals. They are actually entertaining. Hey, remember when Best Original Song included performances of the songs? That was great. Now, you get ten seconds of the song. But since “Man or Muppet” from The Muppets won, nobody is going to complain about that, even though they should. Brett McKenzie doesn’t thank Jason Segel, and I wonder if Segel’s strained expresson is a bit or not. My guess is that it’s a bit.

10:23: I don’t know if Americans are getting similar ads at all, but here in Canada, that was about the seven hundredth advert for Missing, Ashley Judd’s new TV series. It is not making me enthusiastic.

10:24: Angelina Jolie presents Best Adapted Screenplay, telling us that people think writing is easy but in fact it is very hard! Nobody has trouble believing this. (People have trouble believing that when they write, it it hard for them to do it poorly.) The movies are presented with little minimalist art things like you would find on the Internet when people do those “hey what if movies were old Penguin books” dealies, which is nice. The Descendants wins in what is its first real opportunity of the night. So that is interesting!

10:28: Original screenplay. I have this sick feeling that The Artist will win, particularly after Bridesmaids gets one of its most boring scenes for the presentation reel. (They have been pimping its few nominees all night because a lot of people actually went to see Bridesmaids.) But no, Woody Allen wins for Midnight in Paris, because he really had a lot of difficulty writing a movie about a screenwriter who wishes he lived in the good old days.

10:31: Celebrities in a dark room talking about movies! Best bit: Reese Witherspoon admitting that her favourite movie is Overboard. Second best bit: Robert Downey Jr. saying “this needs Werner Herzog to say something complicated” and then cutting to Herzog. Worst bit: the rest of it.

10:37: Billy Crystal welcomes the entire cast of Bridesmaids, who are good enough to show up and juice ratings but not quite good enough to win awards. They are presenting short film awards, so Kirsten Wiig and Maya Rudolph make a bunch of dick jokes and instantly win my loyalty forever. The winners of the dramatic category are a father/daughter team, and dad says that “now I don’t have to wait till her wedding to say how brilliant she is,” and the audience goes “aww,” and then the daughter dedicates the win to her mother and the audience goes “awww” again. Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy interrupt their speech to shout “Scorcese!” and do shots. The Best Documentary short winners are the ones who did the one about plastic surgeons working in Pakistan and they give a short but enthusiastic speech. Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper don’t do anything really interesting. The Best Animated Short award goes to The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and the title is really long and I have nothing else.

10:47: For some reason, at the commercial breaks, the oscars have girls dressed up as old-timey confection vendors walking up and down the aisle. I’m not sure what the point of that was except to make viewers say “what the fuck?” But on that level, it certainly is effective. Because: what the fuck?

10:50: Michael Douglas sounds raspy and looks much more gaunt than usual as he presents Best Director. I hope he’s doing all right. The Best Director vignettes are unintentionally hilarious, especially the Terrance Malick one where the actors basically just throw up their hands and say “I don’t fucking know, okay? We don’t get it either.”

10:51: And the Oscar goes to Michel whatsisname from The Artist, which… fuck off. People keep asking me why I hate this movie, and my answer is this: you remember how people hated on, and continue to hate on, Shakespeare In Love for being fluffy and inconsequential? Well, Shakespeare In Love actually makes some statements about the ennobling pursuit of art above all, and about the craft of writing. The Artist says, figuratively speaking, not a goddamn thing. It actually merits all of the complaints Shakespeare got. That’s why I bitch about it.

10:56: The Governor’s Awards recap, which used to be the lifetime achievement awards they presented on the main show, but now that would take up too much time from covering the fucking red carpet, I suppose. Better to do a brief, edited recap and then trot out James Earl Jones, Oprah Winfrey and makeup artist Dick Smith for a perfunctory standing O. Ugh. The Oscars were always schmoozy and shamelessly opulent, but now they’ve become just soulless.

11:03: Memorial reel time. Billy Crystal gives a shout-out to two former Oscar producers: Gil Cates and the other one who died this year, who is not as important as Gil Cates apparently. The reel this year is filled with still images, because that is classier, I suppose, then actually showing the actors doing what they did on screen. God, they can even overproduce the memorial reel?

11:10: Celebrities sitting in a dark room talking about movies, part three! Jonah Hill explains that film people are crazy because they want their film to be the best thing ever and then says that it’s because they care more about the movies than themselves, which doesn’t quite work if you think about it for more than two seconds.

11:13: Natalie Portman presents Best Actor. Instead of having five actresses give actors verbal blowjobs this year, instead they are going to have Natalie Portman give all the blowjobs. In other contexts this would be far more enjoyable, but unfortunately we are on this Bataan death march of an awards show.

11:14: Portman claims that George Clooney made us all believe he was “just a regular guy,” which – not so much, and I liked The Descendants but Clooney is always going to be a movie star even if he gains weight to look schlubby. For Jean Dujardin, they pick one of the two non-silent scenes from The Artist just because they want to fuck with people. And then Dujardin wins and that fucking Artist score plays again.

11:19: Dujardin thanks Douglas Fairbanks for hosting the first Oscars and then screams a bit. He can get away with this, because he is French.

11:23: Colin Firth gives the ladies nominated for Best Actress their blowjobs, because the Oscars are equal-opportunity. Because he is Colin Firth, he can give the trite emotional boilerplate real heft and meaning. The only fun bits come when he references Mamma Mia while celebrating Meryl Streep, and when he tells Michelle Williams she taught him so much despite being twenty-three years younger than him.

11:29: And Meryl Streep picks up her third award for a great performance in an otherwise shitty movie. Somebody in the audience is screaming “YEAAAHHHH” over and over again. Despite the fact that Viola Davis probably should have won, I can’t get upset, because Meryl Streep is wonderful and awesome. She first thanks her husband and then her makeup artist, who won earlier tonight, and they both spoke about having worked together for thirty years, which is really nice.

11:33: Best Picture montage! Which is kind of pointless, since The Artist seems like a lock at this point.

11:36: Yep, The Artist. Ugh. Okay, I am out.

Rob and Doug Ford are doing a radio show. So I am liveblogging it for Torontoist.

I don’t want to look at the pretty landscape, no matter how gorgeous it may be, graphics-wise; I want to play a game, and if I have to spend twenty minutes looking at pretty landscape in order to play the next part of the game, I will decide to play some other game.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

ME: What are you doing on my internet?
FLAPJACKS: I’m reading Nelson’s Wikipedia entry.
ME: …why?
FLAPJACKS: Because.
ME: I don’t think I can actually get a more honest explanation than that.
FLAPJACKS: Did you know they released an album called Because They Can? Nelson have some big balls.
ME: I did not know that.
FLAPJACKS: I’m also pretty sure that they wrote their Wikipedia entry. “In addition to touring as NELSON, the twin singer-songwriters also perform a separate tribute act for their father, called “Ricky Nelson Remembered.” Plus, they perform with celebrity all-star rock and roll rat pack SCRAP METAL.”
ME: Wow, I could hear the all-caps.
FLAPJACKS: Only because I say the all-caps parts in a bass voice.
ME: Well, yes. Say, do we know who Scrap Metal – excuse me, SCRAP METAL – are?
FLAPJACKS: I Googled and it turns out it is Nelson plus other people from formerly famous rock bands. Like, the “about” section says that it was founded by Nelson and the former lead singers of Mr. Big, Slaughter and Night Ranger.
ME: Night Ranger? Are they a real band? I thought they were the band in Left 4 Dead 2 that had the concert where you fight zombies.
FLAPJACKS: I think that’s someone else. But anyway, apparently Scrap Metal are mostly just Nelson, and whoever Nelson can get to tour with them that week. Like, here’s a press release where Scrap Metal played before “2,000 of our country’s future military leaders” in Annapolis –
ME: So basically they’re the guys you get for your high school prom or something.
FLAPJACKS: I don’t judge. But for this event, they had Nelson, plus the former lead singer of Vixen, and some guy who is described as being “of Ted Nugent.” I guess Ted Nugent is a band now, otherwise they would have said “this guy who used to play with Ted Nugent.”
ME: I believe technically Ted Nugent is an institution now, thanks to an official recognition from Congress in 2003.
FLAPJACKS: Oh, here’s something where they welcome the former lead singer of Motley Crue –
ME: Vince Neil? How did Nelson get Vince Neil to do anything with them? Vince Neil is still sort of famous.
FLAPJACKS: They got John Corabi.
ME: Oh, come on. Calling John Corabi “the lead singer of Motley Crue” is only technically correct. He was there for like four years where Motley Crue barely did anything and then they fired him and brought back Vince Neil. That would be like bringing in Guy from Extreme and then calling him “the lead singer of Van Halen” when you don’t even have Sammy Hagar.
FLAPJACKS: Are you sure you want to call out John Corabi like that? I mean, the guy probably doesn’t get mentioned on the internet that often. I bet with a couple weeks this will become the #1 Google result for “John Corabi.”
ME: I’m fine with it, because unlike Steven Seagal, John Corabi does not have his own brand of knife.
FLAPJACKS: You promised never to mention Steven Seagal again! Oh god, now I’m saying it! Stop it! Stop it!
ME: Maybe we could talk about more long-dead hair rock bands. It’s like internet camouflage.

Look, I know each week a conservative politician in Canada will open their mouth and say something stupid and be the Worst Politician In Canada (for that week). That’s how the news cycle works. But I don’t want people to lose perspective. Yes, Rob and Doug Ford are incompetent and ignorant. Yes, John Baird is a contentious blowhard who probably shouldn’t be in any diplomatic role, much less Minister of Foreign Affairs. Yes, Stephen Harper is a smug robot who has to work overtime to keep his contempt for Canadians’ general predilection for egalitarianism under the surface. Yes, Jason Kenney is an embarrassment who frequently says and does stupid things.

But not a one of these people is worse than Vic Toews, because as bad as they might be, they are all still occasionally capable of doing good things in public service. Not so Toews, whose track record speaks for itself: he has constantly and consistently advocated for bad public policy. When Vic Toews was made Minister of Justice, he attempted to pass a three-strikes law (which was obvious at that time to be extremely bad policy), advocated for lowering the age of criminal responsibility from twelve to ten, and added police representatives to judicial advisory boards (a move that practically the entire judiciary complained could cause severe imbalance in the judicial nomination process). He also very likely “forgot” to inquire closely into the Karlheinz Schrieber affidavit.

As President of the Treasury Board, his job was one of government oversight, which meant that Toews introduced the new Lobbying Act, which actually makes it easier for lobbyists to arrange unreported meetings between government officials and lobbyists’ clients. Toews also scrapped the Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, which was a useful and cheap tool for Canadian citizens to exercise oversight over public documents.

And now, of course, as Public Safety Minister, Toews is demanding that ISPs install equipment to track their users and that such information be available to the government without warrant. Why? Because of child pornographers, of course! The flood of child pornography that we all know threatens to drown the nation apparently demands it, according to Toews.

Again: Vic Toews is the worst politician in Canada. Any politician can say stupid or thoughtless things (Justin Trudeau does so regularly). It is quite another thing, however, to consistently advocate for and draft, and execute bad or actively harmful government policy. Vic Toews does so and he has done so for most of his government career, in service of an authoritarian ideology that is at odds with the right-wing small-government ethos for which he so frequently agitates (and which belies his political career, now in its seventeenth year). To use a line I have used before: if Vic Toews agrees with you about anything, consider strongly the possibility that you are wrong about everything.

UPDATE: And just as I write this, up pops Vikileaks on Twitter, making a point about personal privacy by publishing excerpts from affidavits in Toews’ divorce case.

I suspect that very few of you know what ‘The Shining’ is really about. You might think you know; you might talk about themes of isolation, claustrophobia, and the darkness in the human spirit made manifest as a “haunted” hotel. But you’d be wrong. You probably aren’t aware of the hidden messages about the dangers of going off the gold standard. You didn’t even know that it was a hidden confession from Stanley Kubrick explaining that he faked the moon landing footage. You hadn’t the slightest clue of its hidden warnings about the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. And you…okay, you probably knew about the secret subtext relating to America’s treatment of Native Americans. That one’s so well-known that even Cracked.com covered it. But you probably didn’t know about all of the hidden meanings, because you simply can’t. There’s so many hidden meanings that there’s a whole other movie coming out just about all the meanings in the first movie.

In all seriousness, what does make ‘The Shining’ such a popular subject for such a diverse range of “cryptic meaning” essays? Surely if Kubrick really had a message he was trying to convey, no matter how cleverly he concealed it, you’d expect to get some kind of consensus as to what it might be. But (for those of you who really don’t feel like sitting through a 40-minute YouTube video, or spend an hour or so looking at screenshots) Kubrick’s film almost seems to become a sort of Rorshach test, continually revealing cryptic messages that just happen to exactly coincide with the researcher’s personal perspective. Why? What is it about ‘The Shining’ that makes it more confusing than ‘The Prisoner’? What makes this film the one that people fixate on, while ‘Donnie Darko’ (to name another cult film that plays its cards close to the vest) seems to avoid these kinds of questions? I don’t know that we can ever know for sure, but here are my suggestions.

1) Kubrick isn’t talking. Well, I mean…of course he’s not talking now, but even when he was alive, he wasn’t talking about his movies. Kubrick had a reputation as a notorious recluse, but it would be more accurate to describe him as someone who just didn’t give interviews. He was perfectly content to be social, but he also hated the way that filmmakers who loved to talk about their work had reduced watching a movie to a sterile exercise in spotting the things the director had talked about in a magazine. He didn’t want you to be thinking about the technical reasons that the hedge maze had replaced the hedge animals (budget constraints, for the record–moving hedge animals weren’t technically feasible in 1980.) He wanted you to be watching the movie, and to let you come to your own conclusions about it. Seen from a certain point of view though, a reclusive movie-maker who doesn’t want to talk about his movies because he wants you to “work it out for yourself” can sound like someone who’s embedded a secret meaning. The more mystery invested in the process, the more people expect from the ultimate solution. “Some people are just crazy” is not going to satisfy them.

2) Kubrick had a reputation as a perfectionist. Time and time again, as you read these analyses, you’ll come across a phrase that’s almost word-for-word identical every single time: “A legendary perfectionist like Kubrick certainly wouldn’t allow such an obvious continuity error.” It is a prima facie assumption made in all of these analyses that any apparent mistake in the film must be placed there deliberately, as Kubrick was known for being a perfectionist. These must be hidden messages, because Kubrick doesn’t make mistakes.

This is, of course, an assumption so wrong that it almost has to be unpicked word-for-word. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, true, but “perfectionist” in this case doesn’t mean “meticulous about set continuity.” Kubrick’s reputation came from his habit of shooting far more film than was necessary, sometimes doing 80-100 takes of a single scene, in order to get the widest possible ranges of performance from his actors and to force them to genuinely inhabit their characters. ‘The Shining’ was no exception; Kubrick spent 200 days in principal photography for a 144-minute film. (This means that on average, Kubrick shot about 45 seconds of usable footage per day. Almost certainly, there must have been whole months worth of days where he shot nothing at all that he used in the final film.) Kubrick was a perfectionist in that he wanted the perfect take, and was willing to shoot as long as was needed until he got it; and once he was armed with all those perfect takes, he would go into the editing room and spend months assembling them into a finished film.

But there’s a big difference between that and being precise about continuity. In fact, Kubrick’s approach works against tight set continuity; when you’re shooting 30, 40, 50 takes of one shot, even going back the next day for more, then of course tiny details aren’t going to be the same from shot to shot. Kubrick wanted the perfect emotional resonance, not the perfect amount of sandwich eaten from moment to moment. Even if he did notice the continuity problems (and he almost certainly did) what was he going to do once he was in the editing booth? Throw out the best performance because the scrapbook was on the wrong page? Kubrick had to be aware that only obsessive viewers notice continuity mistakes to begin with, and he almost certainly had more important things to concern himself. But to the ‘Shining’ enthusiast, each of these tiny mistakes has to be a deliberate message, because they assume Kubrick is a genius who doesn’t do anything by accident.

3) The movie is different from the book. This is true of just about all adaptations, of course, but there’s a little more to it here. One, Kubrick didn’t discuss why he made the changes he made when adapting the novel. (See above.) Two, it’s assumed that a legendary perfectionist like Kubrick wouldn’t make arbitrary changes unless he had a grand vision to them. (See above.) And three, King and Kubrick were legendarily at odds over the adaptation, with King going so far as to write and direct his own adaptation that was more to his liking. With the theme of “changes from the book” highlighted, everyone’s attention is drawn to them. And again, we’re back to the “hidden messages” territory, with every tiny alteration assumed to have cryptic meaning, from the hotel’s origin to its final fate and everything in between.

Again, though, this assumes that Kubrick was able to work in the realm of pure art, with no concessions needing to be made to practicality. Subplots like the simmering conflict between Ullman the hotel manager and Jack, or backstory like his assault on a student at Stovington Prep? Dropped for time, perhaps, because the movie is already over two hours long and there’s not even a mention of them. Wendy and Danny seem different because the characters wound up being interpreted by actors, and because certain elements had to be emphasized and dropped to get the film down to a manageable running time. Logistically difficult effects, such as the destruction of the Overlook Hotel or the moving hedge animals, had to be dropped completely. Nobody ever gets to do everything the way they want to entirely…except maybe George Lucas, which may explain why it’s not such a good thing…and Kubrick is certainly no exception. But if you’re not willing to believe that, then each change takes on a special significance.

4) The ending is ambiguous. Sure, we know that Jack died. But then we get that last cryptic scene, of the photograph in the empty hotel filled with mysterious people and Jack at the center. The caption, “July 4th Ball, 1921.” It has to mean something. It’s the final shot of the film, the one that Kubrick wants us to leave on, the one he wants to resonate in our heads as we’re leaving the theater. He actually went so far as to cut an epilogue out of the film after it reached theaters, so that all we see is the cut from Jack’s body to the mysterious photo. A cryptic ending like that is one that demands endless analysis, deeper investigation, because we want things to make sense. And that ending really, really doesn’t, at least not in a logical and linear sense. (It says a lot that even after “notorious recluse” Kubrick came out and blatantly explained the ending to everyone, people still don’t believe it.) Whatever conclusions you come to about the final shot, you bring something of your own ideas and experiences to it…which leads us to…

5) People really, really like to create patterns. It’s human nature, and the final element that brings the first four together. Once you’ve decided that there is a hidden meaning to ‘The Shining’, once you’ve started looking at it not as a film but as a series of cryptic messages encoded into tiny details, then there’s a sufficiently large mass of data present that you can draw any number of connections between data points based on your own personal viewpoint as a lens. Think that Kubrick was a numerologist? Examine the time codes, you’re bound to find a pattern of significant shots at significant times. (Because Kubrick didn’t really put in any scenes that he didn’t think were important.) Want to find messages about your own personal political, mystical, or historical views? They’re bound to be there if you think symbolically enough and are willing to put in some work massaging the data. (Remember, numbers are infinitely transformable. Add, subtract, multiply and divide and 7/4/1921 can become any set of numbers you care to name.) And ultimately, you will come away convinced that Kubrick’s message was about exactly what you want it to be about. It’s a comforting thought, really. Kubrick must be a genius for hiding such an intricate message in the film, and you must be a genius for being able to find it. The two of you no doubt think alike, and wouldn’t we all want to think of ourselves as being in the company of geniuses?

For myself, I don’t think there is a hidden message in ‘The Shining’. I think that Kubrick, like all great artists, loved ambiguity, and loved to insert it in the work instead of forcing his own conclusions onto you. You are required, by design, to think about what’s going on in front of you because the answers are not provided, and Kubrick isn’t telling because your answer is probably better than his anyway. I think he’d probably be impressed at some of the creativity people have brought to finding meanings in his film…even if I can easily picture Wendy looking at Jack’s manuscript and reading, “It can be ruled out that Stanley Kubrick didn’t notice this obvious mistake as he precisely edited the shot that way for a reason and we all saw it happen…”