"Earnest" Canadian comedy

The CBC in Canada is debuting a new sitcom in January called "Little Mosque on the Prairie," which details the travails of a muslim woman in Saskatchewan. In a NYT preview today, the producers are quoted as wondering if such a thing can be funny in tense times. The best line in the piece is this:

"In an earnest manner not atypical of Canadians, one goal of the show is to explain Muslim behavior, or at least make Muslims seem less peculiar, much as humor about Jews, Italians or gays helped those groups assimilate."

I'm not so sure that Canadian humour is generally earnest. In fact I think our reputation for being earnest and harmless lets us get away with a lot.

The best example of this is Rick Mercer's series "Talking to Americans," which is archived here. No one from Canada could be anything other than harmess, right?

The horror, the horror (Pocono edition)

One of the things that makes life in a small Pocono town bearable is the presence of interesting book and record stores. Stroudsburg had an exemplary example of the latter, the Main Street Jukebox, until just last week. Early Sunday morning on November 26, several stores on the block that the store was in burned to the ground. The building that held the store was also a historic building from 1900.

The Jukebox had a fantastic vinyl collection, where in addition to the rareties, one could find all sorts of great music for $1 (or 15 for $10). If you want to make yourself sad, click on their website above and check out their still-posted collection to get a sense of what was destroyed.

I was just in the there the week before and snatched some great records from the jaws of impending meltdown (nice mixed metaphor I think). Included were two albums by the Tygers of Pan Tang, an early-80s British metal band that everyone cites as seminal but no one ever listens to.

The two albums I picked up, Crazy Nights and Spellbound, are somewhere between early Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. This makes sense since the Tygers are always included in descriptions of the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" (NWOBHM for short). The reason they're always cited is that you need three bands to make a "movement," although as we all know two will do in a pinch if they're from the same home town, or if the editor really needs a story that day.

There is a million-selling, worldwide fame niche out there for a great metal band without the "growl" vocals.