The 2005 dooneyscafe.com Awards
The 2005 dooneyscafe.com Awards:
Charles Darwin Survival of the Fittest Prize:
Two Toronto teenaged boys who were, um, visiting a girlfriend on the 15th floor of a Scarborough highrise, decided to avoid a confrontation with the girls unexpectedly-returning parents by tying bed-sheets together and climbing down them to the building’s third floor, from which point they planned to jump to the ground. They ran out of sheets at the eighth floor, where one of the boys fell to his death.
800 Pound Gorilla of the Year:
The Chinese economy: human rights abattoir, environmental disaster generator, industrial juggernaut, unrestricted copyright theft zone. Western countries have become so lazy they can’t even manufacture the souvenirs they sell to tourists anymore. Everything comes from China . What do those underpaid Chinese workers think they’re doing when they’re painting plaster-of-Paris mementoes of Niagara Falls ? How long before the Chinese own our tourist landmarks too?
Jackass of the Year:
The unidentified tourist in Thailand who was photographed tanning his fat ass on a chaise-lounge while rescue teams dug corpses from the tsunami rubble. And we wonder why people in the underdeveloped world want to kill us.
Overexposed Media Personality of the Year :
Ryan Seacrest: Can’t they just give this 21st century Dick Clark his own television network so he isn’t on every other one?
Doris Day Award for Puking in Public:
Mickey Mouse Club alumni Lindsay Lohan pukes away half her body mass while insisting that she’s merely getting in shape. At least Karen Carpenter had some talent.
Diver of the Year:
Carly Fiorina, Hewlett Packard CEO and corporate feminist poster girl was a business lunatic and a human female all in one package. Who’d have thought? Well, she was wrong about virtually everything, and was drop-kicked from the boardroom to the tinkling of rising HP share prices.
Amnesia Victim of the Year:
Darfur , where more people died in 2005 than were killed by the tsunami that swept across southeast Asia, continues to be the planet’s primary genocidal shithole that nobody wants to deal with.
CIBC Prize for Vile and Feckless Banking:
BMO Nesbitt Burns, for the FMF Capital Group fiasco, which sold high risk U.S. and offshore mortgages to Canadians and quickly crashed and burned.
Corporate Courage Award:
The Ford Motor Company, under pressure from the evangelical Christian American Family Association, stopped advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles in gay magazines and newspapers.
Canadian Revolutionary of the Year Prize:
To the Supreme Court of Canada for their June 9th decision to official end universal health care—such as it has become.
Separatistes of the Year:
The Ted Byfield-spiritualized Western Standard, no doubt abetted by the Fraser Institute opinion poll geniuses, discovered that 42 percent of Albertans want to separate from Canada .
Drowning Victim of the Year:
Conrad Black, now living above a coin laundry in Scarborough , asked for the return of his Canadian citizenship in the hopes of using it to elude prosecution in the United States , and, one suspects, to elude the horde of faithful friends phoning to offer their help.
The Avian Water Award for Covert Upselling:
Kashechewan, a First Nations community in Northern Ontario , has a water system so dysfunctional and polluted that the Ontario Government airlifted the entire 1700 member community to vacation in points south until the system no longer dispenses 40 overproof 2-4-D.
Media Phenomena of the Year:
The Toronto Film Festival continued to morph into the Toronto Film Celebrity Festival. Soon to be indistinguishable from the Warner Television Network for its celebration of lousy behaviour, stupidity and breast implants.
The Doctor Faustus Prize for Selling Your Soul to the Highest Bidder:
Federal Conservative Party MP Gurmant Grewal tried to auction his and his fellow-MP wife’s parliamentary votes to the Liberal Party. When they weren’t offered twin baby blue Hummers and a life pension in the Senate, he went to the media and tried to rat them out.
Environmentalist Pinup Babe of the Year:
Hurricane Katrina, for demonstrating that any area anywhere in the world without resources easily exploitable by the Halliburton Corporation shouldn’t expect much help from the U.S. Federal Government.
Upper Class Twit of the Year:
Lip-syncher Ashley Simpson lost it in a Toronto-area McDonalds outlet when the staff there didn’t recognize her, leaping over a partition and howling “Don’t you know who I am?” Well, we know what you are, anyway, and now so do the Sri Lankan kids at McDonalds.
Plan of the Year:
U.S. Homeland Security Agency’s disaster response plan for hurricane Katrina was to counsel citizens to have enough money to afford a SUV so they could flee before the storm hit.
Audra Alexandra Brown Poetaster of the Year:
Globe and Mail reporter John Allemang, who has clearly convinced the boffins upstairs that he’s actually Marv Allemang, the ex-Toronto Argonaut tough guy, and therefore deserves to inflict his inane rhymes on the papers readers. Pulleeze…..
Broadcasting Arrogance Award:
The Canadian Broadcasting Corpse, for allowing a strike to go on long enough to put its declining audience levels into freefall, and then thinking it could recoup by becoming, well, more stupid, popculty, and topical with things like the patronizing National Playlist on CBC Radio 1.
Patriot of the Year:
Ken Whyte, newly-appointed editor of Macleans Magazine, for commissioning Livent Fugitive-from-Corporate-Justice Garth Drabinsky to produce a 100th birthday musical history-of-the-magazine that didn’t seem to be aware of the magazine’s country-of-origin. The oblivious Whyte reportedly grinned through the entire embarrassment.
The George W. Bush Beyond-the-Pale Prize
To George W. Bush, of course, for his unflagging stream of personal pratfalls, garbled sentences, corrupt policies, programs and appointments, etc.—and for recently admitting he’s been quietly playing Senator Joe McCarthy with the U.S. Constitution ever since 9/11.
“With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies” Award:
Alberta Premier, Booze Industry booster and Conservative Party loose cannon, for constantly revealing Federal Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s concealed agenda.
Canadian Family Values Award:
To the Khadrs: Al Qaeda father killed in Afghanistan, mother a nightmare of veiled murderous intent; one son locked up in Guantanamo Bay on a murder charge for killing a U.S. army medic; another just released in Pakistan then rearrested in Canada for extradition to the U.S.; a third son in a wheelchair after a combat incident in Afghanistan; and the fourth son wandering around Toronto trying to get back his Canadian passport, presumably so he can return to the scene of the family fun—and all of them wailing about their Canadianness and their rights under the Charter.
2005 Cold Fusion Prize:
South Korean geneticist Hwang Woo-suk, who claimed that he’d found ways to clone stem cells from cloned human embryos in a 2004 article in Science magazine. Among the many aspects of his data that raised suspicion was his impossible-to-duplicate embryo harvesting tricks, which he attributed to having his staff practice with slippery metal chopsticks.
Entrepreneurial Ghouls of the Year:
The New York City funeral parlours caught hacking up headed-for-incineration stiffs and selling the parts for profit. The story was broken by the New York Daily News and not the New York Times, whose editors were presumably too busy wringing their hands and moaning “What to do? What to do?” over their discovery that the Bush Administration has been violating the constitution with illegal surveillance of American citizens since 9/11 and still ain’t catching any terrorists.
Rookie of the Year:
Wafah Dufour, Osama Bin Laden’s niece, posed nude, sort of, in a bathtub for GQ. Dufour claims that she did the photo-shoot to demonstrate that she’s a true American, obviously having missed the family meeting about what Osama thinks of true Americans. We hope Condoleeza Rice and Hilary Clinton don’t decide to show their true Americanness anytime soon.
Victorian Parents of the Year:
The parents of Zuo Zhiyang, who murdered a Toronto private school owner in 2002 but was so frightened of parental disapproval he didn’t tell his parents for three years that he was up on a murder charge. When apprised of his son’s plight, Father Suo Fenghuan blamed everyone and everything except his own expectations.
Reptile of the Year:
Canadian Prime Minister-Elect Stephen Harper, for keeping that hot water bottle strapped to his belly throughout the Federal election campaign and not having to wander off mid-campaign to lie on a hot rock and munch on live mice.
