REMEMBERING CANADA’S TV HERITAGE MINUTES
My roommate is Japanese, which means her slippers magically clean whatever surface they touch, she draws faces on everything, and her quirky behavior—that would normally be unbearably annoying—is adorable.
THE TALIBAN JUST TRIED TO ASSASSINATE ME
There’s a certain amount of irony when you’re accused of being pro-Taliban, only to find half a kilo of explosives under your car, which have been put there by the Taliban. But that situation is something that Hamid Mir, Pakistan’s most well-known TV presenter, has had to deal with recently.
I WAS BANNED FROM PUBLIC ACCESS TV BY THE AGE OF 11
One of the great American TV initiatives is public access—local, city-based programming that grants weirdoes the power of mass communication. Here, the real scum of American entertainment thrive. Because the channels and the people who run them are mandated by the government, they have some interesting rules. For one: They can’t turn down anyone who asks for a show. For another, they can’t censor anything as long as it isn’t illegal. These freedoms helped me, as an 11-year-old boy, become a star of public access television.
The show was called The Dan Metz Show. Imagine a combination of Jackass, The Tom Green Show andSaturday Night Live, but all filtered through the ill-formed brains of an 11-year-old boy and his best friend who was from a “bad family.” It was fucking glorious.
