Its been a pretty tame Toronto Film Festival, so thank goodness for Sean Penn!! We can always count on Sean Penn to stir things up a bit. At a press conference in a Toronto hotel, to promote his new film, ‘All the Kings Men’, Sean Penn did the unthinkable! He smoked a couple of cigarettes! This unforgivable offence has now landed Sean Penn in hot water with our Minister of Health, Jim Watson. And a photograph of Sean Penn with said cigarette dangling from his mouth has been picked up by newspapers all over the world. (I’m not a smoker, and I agree with the smoking ban). I find this story amusing for a different reason. We allow celebrities to get away with just about everything. We just don’t allow them to get away with smoking. Even Keith Richards was cited for smoking on stage in Glasgow Scotland a couple of weeks ago. It is not acceptable for even our crustiest rockers to smoke. We let celebrities get the best section of the restaurant, we dutifully respect celebrities’ security, they can bump you from your honeymoon suite if they want the entire floor of a hotel, but they just can’t smoke. If we can’t smoke, they can’t smoke. Its become the one thing that regular folk and ‘celebrities’ have in common. It doesn’t matter if you’re Madonna, Bono, or The Pope. You can’t smoke in a public place in Ontario. Although I doubt the Pope will face this problem.
Congratulations to Lukas Rossi of Toronto, new lead singer of ‘Supernova’! Wow, Toronto’s JD Fortune won the Rock Star contest last year, now fronting INXS, and here we have yet another Toronto boy taking the prize. Is there something in the water in Toronto? I wonder if Lukas Rossi’s hairstyle will be the new trend. Black hair, big white stripe down the middle. Just like a skunk. Thick mascara, eyeliner, even lip gloss. It’s a good thing Lukas won this contest to be in a rock band. Don’t know that he would’ve fit in at a 9 to 5 office job!
Isn’t it great that we are getting some relief at the gas pumps? I got gas today at 86.9, what a deal! But my happiness quickly turned to aggravation, when I couldn’t actually ‘leave’ the gas station. In the downtown core, taxi cabs pull into gas stations to grab a coffee and donut and newspaper, and they park right in the middle lane between the two gas pump islands. Then the guy at the gas pump in front of you also goes inside the gas station superstore and rents a movie, gets a bag of ice, picks up some lottery tickets. The woman at the pump behind you has disappeared too. This is what I call the ‘gas station box-in’. Does this happen to you, too? At least while I was waiting for someone to let me leave the gas station, I got to read my newspaper with the big news story about Sean Penn smoking.
Canadian Idol’s Eva Avila from Gatineau is 19 years old, and it was revealed this week that she is dating another Canadian Idol finalist, Chad Doucette, who is 17 years old. Way to go, Chad!
And speaking of cute new couples, Liberal MP Belinda Stronach is now dating Toronto Maple Leafs’ Tie Domi. Insert your own comments here.
Congratulations to Ottawa’s Dawn Ferrell, the winner of the BOB FM/Corner Gas contest. Dawn flies out to Regina and joins the cast of Corner Gas to be our very own entertainment correspondent, and next season, she will have a ‘walk-on’ role on this popular CTV comedy! We did chat with Dawn on the morning show, and it wouldn’t surprise us if Dawn becomes a regular on ‘Corner Gas’. She is one of the bubbliest people ever. There are people who are just not ‘morning people’, and then there are people like Dawn. Listen to ‘the Morning After’ on BOB FM this Monday, and catch Dawn’s first reports from the set of Corner Gas in Dog River Saskatchewan. I bet she makes a big impression on Brent Butt.
We are still taking votes for Ottawa’s most annoying animated computer voice. The nominees are: ‘Emily’ from Bell Canada, the Rogers guy, Claire from Ticketmaster, the Bell area code lady, and my personal favourite, the female computer voice at Loblaws self-scanning checkout. The one who reminds you, after each and every scanned item, to ‘please put the item in the bag’. Loblaws also sells tv’s and patio furniture. Just try to put that in a bag.
