Maybe KFC should stop using X2 chickens and use actual real meat. Its funny how te public seems to forget how fucking bad it is for you, I mean come on... 58 G of fat in drumstick! Thats rediculous. No wonder 60% of the population is overweight.

;/\:

Bullshit X2 chickens. That's the worst urban myth there is. Like some googly-eyed scientist is sitting at the KFC Laboratories squealing away about his mutant chickents and how much money Pepsi will save because they don't have any beaks. Think about how hard it would be to feed a fucking chicken with no fucking beak. I hate that shit. Fuck, of course fucking deep fried fucking chicken is fucking terrible for you. Nobody forgets how bad that stuff is for you, lots of people just like cheap shitty food. That's so racist too- you don't think fancy french food has lots of fat in it? But that kind of fat is okay because it's high-brow fat? You fascist. And what the fuck was that thing at the bottom of your post? I bet you put that shit in your highschool essays-like all BTW and LOL and FYI and

Wow. There was so much vitriol in that last post that it froze my browser and i had to reboot my computer with an unbent paper clip. Apparently spreading urban legends is a poor use of the inter-web, but textually napalming people is just what the doctor ordered. Not that i'm complaining: that was pretty fucking funny. I'm a sucker for a good rant.

I'll agree, urban myths are fairly stupid, but maybe they do serve a useful purpose. Think of them as a grassroots form of detournement - Pepsi's fast food chain gets recontextualized with each urban legend soldered onto it, no matter how ridiculous each story may be. Eventually, when you think KFC, you don't think of some friendly southern plantation owner mascot, but rather of how they had to start calling it KFC because the animals they serve are so heavily genetically modified that they can't be legally called 'chicken' anymore. Who gives a flying fuck if it's true or not? If even one astonishingly gullible teenager believes it and eats somewhere else, then maybe we can count that as a victory against both the insidious forces of late capitalism and the even more insidious forces of morbid obesity.

Right but all these crustfuck vegans and champagne socialists are so obnoxious with their organic food and fair trade dishwasher detergent- clearly they're only into buying that shit so they can hoist their noses high and squat deeper in their complacent obliviousness to the scores of other problems here and everywhere. Equating people who are into that stuff with reasoning like "I ate tofurkey today so I don't have to worry about that smelly schizophrenic guy strewn across the pavement" maybe a bit reductive and unfair but it seems to me that for the most part it's not far off. As far as fast food hegemony is concerned- yeah it's awful and exploitative and entirely unhealthy but it's taken an easy-to-consume and competitively priced book to prompt people to be vocal about it. I'm so sick of hearing people talk about that Eric Schlosser book and feeling as though reading a book like that imbues them with some enlightenment that nobody else could ever fucking grasp without them loudmouthing about it sternly for fucking ever. Being informed about something has little to do with coping with a problem if all your going to do is preach about it. Being hypermoral like that is just as self-indulgent and decadent as a bucket of fried chicken. Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein can go fuck themselves too. Both of them wear designer frame glasses. Fact. At least I'm pretty sure.

"To fight the empire is to be infected by it's derangement...whoever defeats part of the empire becomes the empire; it proliferates like a virus...thereby it becomes its enemies." Philip K. Dick, everyone's favorite paranoid-schizophrenic-speed-freak-sci-fi-writing wacko, was probably right. How does a person deal with a social fabric that, instead of deflecting criticism, absorbs it and sells it back to you in an easy-to-consume and competitively priced package? So that champagne socialists, instead of trying to effect real social change, wind up just buying the deluxe edition of "Fight Club" on DVD and regurgitating Naomi's column in the previous day's Globe to each other over veggie burgers and local microbrewery ale. Sticking it to the man in prefabricated lots of 1000.

Of course these dilletantes are irritating; stupidity is always irritating, and how can they not see the logical flaw in their actions: no problem caused by mass consumption is going to be solved with more consumption. But maybe they're also irritating because they remind me of myself. My entire lifestyle (not to mention the very fact that i have a concept of life*style*, and insert a tangential rant here about what a pompous twat Bruce Mau is) is based upon a tacit acceptance of a world structure that is ridiculous at best, morally reprehensible at worst. I'm too comfortable to change anything. Lazy really *is* the passive tense of selfish.

Or maybe i'm talking out of my ass. Why am i in here typing on this gadget. It's a beautiful day & i'm going outside.

Exactly. Totally. Me too. Bruce Mau is a big, fat idiot.

That last post probably came off as facetious but honestly that's the right on. That whole business is what early critical theory was all about right? Althusser and Alain Krivine and all those guys were coping with how to confront dominant ideologies while operating within them and that was like 30 years ago. Klein & Co seem to act like that was never brought up. All these recent granola types and antiglobalization hacks have for the most part chosen to just ignore that problem or acknowledge it vaguely and then continue being reactionary and whatever because it's easier to appeal to the 'common denominator' without making things too difficult and then your book is a bestseller and your self-satisfied husband has his own talkshow.
I'm not doing all that much about these problems either, mostly because I feel uneasy about where I stand as far as capital and capitalism are concerned. The only public nobility and reasonability afforded to the left resides in the Quietist camps. The Green party practically ran most of Northern Europe for a healthy part of the last 5 years and most coalition governments over there have or have had an extremely well-represented socialist component. These sorts of things aren't the result of half-heartedly backing up hooliganism with sophomoric revolutionary politics nor are they the result of the short-lived conviction and devotion of the legions of upper-middle-class snotnoses playing truant from their parents' politics. They're the result of being reasonable and showing the public at large that progressive politics ARE more reasonable than anything the centre-right can scrabble together from slapdash management theory or anachronistic policy propped up by precedent rural white males that have had their proverbial boots on the proverbial throat of everybody on this continent for fucking ever. Maybe not boots-on-throats but it drives me up the wall that guys from Thunder Bay or fucking ALBERTA or whatever
have any opportunity to make decisions on my behalf. On that note, Toronto should become a nation-state like next week. Think about how fantastic that would be?

Nice. It would also help in reverse: Toronto wouldn't have to make decisions for Alberta. What the fuck do i know about wheat anyway. The rest of the country hates our asses, so I don't think they'd stop us. How do you demarcate that border, though. At what part of the southern ontario metropolitan axis does Toronto end? I vote Bathurst street. That way we lose little italy. Seriously, if the city-state did secede, it might actually help the huge ecological footprint this place has. To maintain an urban area the size of Toronto, the way it's run now, you need a swath of territory the size of like Manitoba for food, raw materials, and places to hide our garbage from the easily offended noses of 905-belt voters. Plus, we could issue our own currency. Take that moose off the quarters and put hazel mccallion's face on them. "Dude, can you break a two? I need some hazels for laundry."

Guy, I had to look up "secede" in my Shorter OED... That's a hot word. I'm all about seceding, in both a general Torontopia sense and in a localized "fuck going to a shitty College Street bar on a fucking saturday with all the mouth-breathers from Ajax acting like they own the neighbourhood; you guys can do what you like, but I'm going to secede to my house and read gender theory" sense. Speaking of which, Torontopia is a movement started by a friend of mine which posits Toronto as the greatest city in the world right now, which is completely accurate. Unfortunately most people from Toronto or who live here contribute to a general trend of self-effacement and either anachronstic colonial feelings of inferiority to England/Europe or a totally irrational assumption that everyone in New York lives in Vice magazine (like wallpaper*, a magazine with a totally nonexistent demographic) or at any rate is having the times of their fucking lives. Which is bullshit. Toronto is the hottest. Toronto has everything going for it. Toronto has a fantastic cultural history that nobody knows about. Toronto is still recovering from the ideological recession that abruptly followed the swell of Canadian nationalism in the 70's. Toronto already has the entire world wrapped around its finger and bizzarely is only getting much better. Much much much better. Toronto finally seems like it might switch housing situations with the entirely non-deserving Montreal. Toronto has, for the first time since the early-to-mid 80's, produced and cultivated a brilliant and fantastic musical community that everybody's starting to pay attention to. Toronto has good art. How many sports teams does Toronto have? If you don't like sports, how easy is it to ignore Toronto's sports teams!?! Toronto has things like Bikeshare and Wavelength and half-price or no price days at art galleries or museums and $1.50 vietnamese sandwiches that make having fun cheap or free. Toronto is exactly the right size for a city. Downtown Toronto is so great that you never really have to go north of St. Clair unless you have a dentist appointment or something. Face it, Toronto is on the cusp of being the best place to be ever. Toronto ah run tings. Torontopia the city-state would only improve this dizzying rise to every occasion. Torontopia would restrict 905-area 20-somethings to once a month passes into Torontopia with the threat of revocations of such passes if they talk loud in restaurants or throw up outside apartment buildings. Torontopia would treat the rest of Canada as a big fucking ashtray, with the exception maybe of Newfoundland. Torontopia could take the CN tower and move it to the western-most part of Torontopia and dress it up like a big middle-finger. Torontopia's currency would be really really colourful, like old Dutch money, and would feature,(aside, natch, from Hazel), Al Waxman, the entire cast of Degrassi and SCTV, Martha & the Muffins, Ben Kerr, Robert Fulford, Heather Mallick, and I guess Ed Mirvish. Russell Smith, the Barenaked Ladies, Leah Mclaren, Mike Myers, Evan Solomon, Andrew Pyper, Daniel Richler, Mark Kingwell and Moses Znaimer would be put on trial for culturally misrepresenting Torontopia retroactively and deported to Kingston. Rick Moranis would make an awesome Chancellor of Torontopia.
All that stuff about an area the size of Manitoba to sustain Torontopia? We'll fucking use Manitoba.
Seriously though, Torontopia is nigh- anybody who badmouths this city is full of shit and not necessary. Go away, we don't need you. I'm already laughing at you, laughing sooooo hard, because I know how sad and angry you'll be with yourself for looking a gift-horse in the mouth. A gift-horse the size of fucking Torontopia. Eat it. You lose. Torontopia, as usual, wins.
For everyone else, I say keep doing what you're doing because it's working and it's working better than ever. Toronto/pia in some sense is so good that it can only get worse, but it won't, it will get even better.
Also, bullshit to SARS. It doesn't exist. It's the result of post"war" slow news days. Hand-flapping alarmism from people within Toronto/pia who have been manipulated by people outside Toronto/pia who are jealous thereof.

Actually, it's to the timely use of "secede" in a sentence that i attribute my silver medal win at the 2002 X-Games, X-treme Semiotix division. You should have seen it. We were signifying like motherfuckers. But really, it was an honour just to be there and represent my country.

I DID see it. I have this rich friend (I know, I know, who doesn't?) who has digital cable and he gets the Deleuze & Guattari Channel so I saw some highlights. After seeing you guys get slayed by the Czech delegation in the freestyle hermeneutics of the flickering syntagm event AND the downhill polylogous dialectic intertextual invocation of the Other slalom I thought you were finished for sure. But the sheer tenacity and unwavering devotion to post-poststructural theory (not to mention the fucking heart. Oh! the heart!) you guys displayed on the autocritical diachronic metalingual analysis street course really blew all the others out of the bitching water. Even the Scandos and the krauts looked scared. Holy fuck. It was... breathtaking.
Congratulations and all but nevermind that stuff.... Torontopia will take it all out and chop it all up at next year's compeittion. As far as I can see it, Torontopia will be able to sustain itself money-wise on the crazy revenues that biannual competitive semiotics meets will generate. In the 13-point plan for a better Torontopia, point 6 a) calls for bulldozing Ontario Place and replacing it with a stadium called the Semiosphere. But it won't really be a sphere, only half of one. It will be the realness. In Torontopia, we're going to have the realness, right here.

Wow. Well, I'm all for Torontopia, minus the Semiosphere -- I'm against the mainstreaming of semiotics, but then, so is the mainstream. I do agree with you though Discourse, that SARS doesn't exist. And I like the idea of using Manitoba as a garbage dump/food foraging ground. Kudos to both of you for your T-Dot tooting.

King, semiotics is already mainstream. It's too late. It's infected every meme out there, and you can't even see it, it's so fucking huge.
TheDiscourse, may i suggest putting the semiosphere beside the SkyDome, instead? It makes me sad that our vast concrete phallus has only one ball.
Torontopia Uber Alles, baby.

That's not a ball, it's a scrotum.

You could be right about the usurping of semiotics by the mainstream. At the very least the word "semiotics has been usurped. I mean, look at how shit semiotics.com is. What could be more boring than a company that offers Filemaker Pro Solutions for your business? Not that studying semiotics is a thrill-crazy ride into adventurefuntown. Nevertheless Barthes, Baudrillard, and the ghosts of Foucault and Saussure oughtta go "semi-psych-otic" all over Allen & Allen. Foucault looks terrifying. He's like that bald dude in Streetfighter that eats your face. Maybe it's not Streetfighter, I don't know, d would know who I'm talking about. I say fuck semiotics -- and I've said that before, but this time I'm saying fuck the word "semiotics" -- let the mainstream have it. It's time for some hardass fullotics anyhow.

I don't know about the mainstream consciously 'usurping' semiotics/cultural theory per se; i can't see a board meeting of haircuts in suits saying "You know what this product needs? A good ontological framework. i'm thinking french, i'm thinking twentieth-century...work with me here, people, talk to me," &c. It might be more of a case of parallel development. Advertising, the metatron of late capitalism, has always understood that anything can represent anything else, & that the reader will always (re)interpret a given text to get what they need/want out of it - it's a common ad technique, but it's unlikely anyone at TBWA-Chiat/Day has read de Saussure or Barthes. So you get ivory tower intellectuals and ad-men using very similar techniques to pursue radically different agendas, "buy into the system" vs "deconstruct the system". Same shit, different pile. And now they hybridize and borrow ideas from each other, they've become interdependent. "Cultural Theory" becomes more 'sellable', more digestible, comes in nicer packages (cf. Zone books - thanks again, Bruce), while ads spontaneously deconstruct themselves. In the future, beer adverts will feel like reading Mille Plateaux after doing six lines of coke, and it'll seem PERFECTLY FUCKING NORMAL. My God, it'll be wonderful.

Back to Torontopia: first, King is right, SkyDome is not a ball; it contains balls and is thus a scrotum. My bad. Second, the Gooderham & Worts complex renovation should continue apace, and yuppie fucks in their SUVs should be encouraged to visit, but i would like hungry lions to roam about, or possibly we could set some bear traps. Also, I'd like the ChumCity building made watertight, the roof and floors removed, and i'd like the whole thing filled with water and tropical fish. Also also, more buildings atop brightly-coloured stilts, please.

First up, a shout out. King: word.

Second, y'all are a bunch of hilarious motherfuckers. Might I suggest a collaborative/ anonymous effort? You could get on the "I AM the Scarlet Pimpernel" tip and reveal yourselves to each other first. In any case, your collective brilliance is languishing here; as great as it is (I love this blog), this is perhaps not the best forum for it. Why should assholes like Russell Smith (did anyone read his apologetics regarding "manpri" pants in the Style section a few weeks ago?! "I would recommend a thick sandal," etc. What the *fuck* was that?) and Leah MacLaren and that inane bitch from the Post get paid, when all the best ideas are right the fuck HERE? *My* Torontopia doesn't include them (for starters).

Check it out: I'm not hater (like I said, no disrespect to the almighty blog); you lot have had me laughing so hard I have to run out of the office or face "Why are you laughing? Do you find that bibliographic record funny?"-style confrontation from my co-workers, but it's worth it. So carry the fuck on talking about shit I mostly have a basic grasp of and therefore will not comment on: X2 chickens, semiotics, Torontopia, balls, whatevs.

PS- TheDiscourse, you mad prolific genius: you should get your views on Michael Caine fucking PUBLISHED. Fo' shizzy, yo.

Life should taste as good as Swiss Chalet.

Life should taste as good as Swiss Chalet.

you fuckin twats what r u playin at

Don't you wish your last name was "Bass"? I do. But only if it was like "Base"- Bass rather than "rhymes with ass"-Bass.

WOW

I understand how upset the people expressing their views on KFC and other subjects, But, this swearing on the internet is wrong. Young children
will in time find this site & what do they see.??? Filth. How can they understand what they are reading when every second word is something you would hear in the gutter. Where is your education at??? You have to be from the LOWER ClASS to have such a DIRTY MOUTH.

I think if you're a young child and you're using the internet to look for information on KFC, then reading the word "fuck" -- or even "piss"
"shit", "balls", or "cunt" -- is the least of your fucking worries.

As far as the internet in general goes, I guess I understand your point of view, but you're going to have to let go of that idea I think. Why repress language when you could just as easily stumble across half a million sites with images of strung-out pregnant teenagers getting violently gangbanged by old men?

You know what I mean?

There's swearing on the internet now?

For sweet blind Jesus' sake. I can't let my children watch TV because they let that WHORE show her FILTHY FILTHY TITTY on the TV, and now POTTY MOUTH POOR PEOPLE have taken over the internet and are besmirching Harland Sanders' good name.

I completely agree. I heartily disapprove of all this sex on the television.

I mean, I keep falling off.

(Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the buffet.)

The housing situation is pretty bad.

I hope the KFC situation turns out ok.

you're all idiots