Frankie guest-hosts, throwing to his streeter with the denizens of Sudbury, one of whom wears a Bad Religion hoodie. All confirm there is not a single thing to do in Sudbury. Well, apart from Zig’s.
We are then stuck with a reportage from the Night on the Pond, which isn’t even of interest to the French.
Renée dolls herself up in PJs (a simulacrum of me every night, save for the gender and hair colour and a few tiny issues of DNA). Her topic: Sleep. May I suggest Sleep Thieves by Coren? Even after reading it I still don’t follow his advice.
Rather elaborate fausse pub – in N&B, no less! – involving Fred’s manful driving of a minivan to rescue a mislaid Gaétan.
Dot Whitehouse returns to grace us with her extra-dramatic, extra-pinched rectangular eyeglasses and excellent accent to cover abusive relationships in no useful detail whatsoever.
I see. The Voltistes excuse themselves from one further episode per month simply by running some kind of documentary about students and their eating habits.
Let’s recap:
That means Volt labours under the yoke of producing a mere 11 original episodes per four-week month. Workloads escalate massively in those rare months with five weeks.
And the scrunched documentary credits destroyed Line 21, conveniently camouflaging the credit for whoever did the piece-of-shit captioning job.
Fred needs to wear two days’ (or, more thrillingly, a single day’s) beard growth more often.
I snoozed through Nadyne’s segment on vitamins, which was strewn with errant captioning lines. (I can’t ever remember seeing cyan characters before.) This says nothing about Nadyne.
However, I enjoyed the Photo Volt fausse pub. I would pay for a camera that inserted a cat into each picture.
I snoozed through Frankie’s exegesis on “slow food.”
Crystals et Monique woke me up, though!
I don’t do the rehash shows.
Fred’s ultra-skin-tight burnt-orange shirting highlights his trapezius muscles. And for the love of God, keep that stubble!
He’s still gonna make a good father.
Oh, wait. Isn’t this a repeat?
Or did I somehow fail to tape over last week’s? (How is this possible with a timer?)
Anyway. The real Monday show has a clean-shaven, nay, baby-faced Fred in a loosish green shirt. Apparently – and this is a JavaScript onload function if ever I heard one – restaurant chow mein arrives with buttered toast in Hearst, as it does in all God-fearing lands.
Footage from Volt’s Northern Exposure Tour. Frankly, it looks fun. Nadyne got to make a principal’s announcement, while Renée went bobbing for tampons in a basinful of gruel. Then the city girls give the northern girls a facial.
By the way, Fred’s vaunted fauxhawk is looking like – what is that character’s name? Alfalfa!
Belly dancing with Nadyne and, later, Frankie.
Fred interviews an extra-young candidate for Sudbury city council – in a urinal. Everyone’s fantasy, shurely?! Hmm... didn’t young Adam Giambrone win here in Toronto? He allegedly speaks French.
And we have to wait till tomorrow to find out if the youngin from Sudbury actually won! (I should jot down his name: Éric Thériault.)
How Freddy Got His Fauxhawk Back.
I dunno. Today I get the inchoate impression he could profitably remain an émigré torontois forever.
No, Éric Thériault didn’t win. 604 votes. (Are their sites ever buggered.)
I rather did not follow the black chick’s presentation on her personal interpretation of Remembrance Day, but it seemes well-considered and sincere. She too has great hair.
Frankie gives a quick and not-very-thorough dermatology lesson about desquamation and itching. Then Nadyne gets acupunctured.
Kid Koala, inevitably and uninterestingly. Loved the added touch of handing Eric San (an unpleasant name even by Orientalist standards) Chuck LaBelle–calibre Franco-Ontarian records!
And then Frankie shows up in a trucker cap, as he might in Williamsburg circa last May.
It is, at least, a Montreal Expos trucker cap.
Martin “NOT RENÉ” Simard gives us some kind of Internet “chronicle.” Valid code on that online music generator, Martin? (They can do it for a colour picker.)
Was there a segment about record producers? It was content-free, so I snoozed through it.
Hey, where’s Fred? Frankie plays host to the staff Jewess. I do like the educational aspect, thankfully unencumbered by Franco-Canadian sepulchral delivery.
“Smack” by Bettie Serveert (which would be pronounced “sehrvayrt”), a typical (hateful-)leftist(-)girl band. “Testify” by Rage Against the Machine. “Furious Angels” by Rob Dougan, disjointed, grooveless, overdetermined, and tedious [( distant voice sings soaring melody )].
«Ostie qui se lève tard» (I won’t do the contractions) by Marc Déry, somewhat less godlike now than before. “ ’80s Rock Song” by the Weekend, with appalling captions.
We do a double tour of ’earst and Volt’s semi-corporate offices. And heck, they even switch jobs! You Are There!
Fittingly, JS becomes janitor. Also fittingly, Nadyne becomes principal. She has essence of command, even though she’s playing it for laughs.
The ’earst high school seems reasonably moderne.
Some kind of “counselor” comes in to discuss remedies available to students bullied by Web sites. I doubt she’s qualified as a libel lawyer. And why isn’t Volt interviewing the actual student in Shawinigan who was allegedly bullied this way? Or why isn’t a similar local student being interviewed? Why listen to an adult give adult-level advice?
Was there a segment on combatting procrastination? How does one do that?
Today, we do Kapuskasing, the TFO make-up closet, and the TFO control room.
The fauxhawk is off-centre today. (Which fauxhawk? The fauxhawk.)
Anyway, it’s Stupid Frog Tricks as Franco-Ontarian students attempt to eat Cheerios from flat plates with hands cuffed behind their backs, plus a bit of bobbing for tampons. Mandat éducatif, anyone?
Charles “BRIDE OF CHUCKY” Duchesne is invited onto the show to plug the new, noncompliant, inaccessible Web site, if it can be called that. (Any site without valid code isn’t a Web site. It’s something else, and “Web” browsers may load it, but it isn’t a Web site. Shocking news, huh?)
How tremendously avant-garde and envelope-pushing for this barely-decloseted Web producer to wear a Northbound Leather T-shirt on the educational network. Chucky’s chummy embrace of Fred early in the segment was at least less likely to elicit an unspoken reaction of get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape.
And wasn’t the whole segment an exercise in prompting the kids to post more often on the discussion board?
Listen, the shit I put out on the Web amounts to graphically-simple belletrism, but when it comes to Web development, I’m better at doing more with less than Volt is. I have 19-year-old friends who in turn do even more with less than I do. What’s Volt’s excuse?
Hey, they’re renovating the school in Kapuskasing! Do we get to see Nadyne wielding a glue gun?
Sadly, no.
Wait. Didn’t I miss some kind of interview about horsies down at Cavalia in the Distillery? The other day?
Frankie is getting better at music “chronicles” faster than Chucky did. His oddball disco-thrash-style remarks about les Trois Accords piqued my curiosity.
Wait again! «Studio Météo» was on today, finally. What is the holdup? A bit weak with the theme of Josianne falling for the weather “robot.”
Wow, high production values for a music-video episode! Fred and Francine do a standup from a recycling depot, piled sky- or at least ceiling-high with bottles and waste. Artists who “recycle” today. Cover versions, in effect. Francine says the obvious – some reinterpret, some merely recreate – but at least it indicates an effort to educate.
“Boys of Summer,” absolutely the stupidest song of the 1980s, by the Ataris. (You do realize what “boys of summer” are, right? What Susan Sarandon was after in Bull Durham.) «Qui a le droit» by Sowatt, whoever or whatever they are. “Hot in Here” by Tiga, with, get this, scrollup captions. “Faith” by Limp Bizkit. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Avril Lavigne.
So how was the Leather Ball? Another chance for Chucky to wear the shirt, I suppose.
I keep missing the Gémeaux. Or would that even constitute “missing”? Anyway, Volt lost again. But how were they dressed?
Girl racer! Shirley Muldowney, where are you now? (Actually, she retired.) She seems entirely at ease with what she’s doing. Because of that, there doesn’t seem to be the mismatch between prettiness and femininity and her butch racing job. (This, you see, is the capital error of Hollywood casting agents, who always want us to believe that some thin-waisted starlet who can barely start her car is an engineer or electrician.)
Her name wasn’t Chyroned, so I won’t venture misspelling it. Ashley something.
Through it all, by the way, did we not hear the sound of a heart braking, as JS realized that he’d milked all the rallying segments out of the show that he ever will? The new posse has moved along... to racing. How common.
Fred slices an onion (nonprofessionally) with his left hand. I see a Steve Diguer gauchier/gauchiste sketch coming on.
Frankie’s segment on extreme ironing was pointless, with not a single visual, let alone video, and no explanation whatsoever of what the hell could possibly be extreme about ironing. Plus the prop iron Fred wielded wasn’t even hot. Why else could he pick it up by the soleplate, as it is in fact known?
Volt’s tenth-anniversary special. When does it come up?
Gadgets with Omar Hashem. I suppose.
So Volt does New Liskeard. You can tell it’s up north just from the skyline. And weirdly, the school talent pageant looked like good clean fun. The last time I was in one of those I got jeered at. Nobody seemed to do that here. Northern Ontario circa the Aughties is a tad more civlised than New Brunswick circa the Eighties.
But wait! They made fun of Fred’s fauxhawk («p’tit coq»). I take it all back, then. Fred’s never looked better than on the show today, and they need to recognize that.
More goddamned facials with the pageant winners! Is Volt trying to queerify everyone from northern Ontario or something? Well, whatever they administered externally would surely be coutnered, antivenom-style, by Volt’s prepared supper of Kraft Dinner and Pepsi.
Credible service piece by Nadia on sizing of contact lenses. I went through quite a bit of hell there, actually, then I gave up, since it was only one eye with a –0.5 prescription.
Vincent Pouliot shows up to talk international affairs. He’s a natural on TV. Possibly just enough actual facts were presented to be worth it; he’s supposed to be educational. Actually, things improve in the second segment. (He’s good enough to merit two.) Shitty direction, though – Fred wields his laser pointer on South America, camera zooms in on western Europe.
Vincent should be pimping himself to all the other kids’ current-affairs show as current-affairs “chronicler.” I’d watch him.
I don’t do the retro shows.
All videos. What babushka-style confection is Francine wearing? A bit busty while also fusty.
Andrée Watters, «Si exceptionnel.» An awful lot of double letters there, don’t you think? Static[-]X, “Bled for Days.”
I loved the treatment of Frankie’s outright dismissal of Nickelback. If that’s what it takes to get Fred dolled up like a glam Viking while Francine spanks him with a Volt flyswatter, well, I am so there.
That glam-Viking getup. It’s classic.
Hence: “Someday” by Nickelback. Then, inevitably, “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen” by Baz Luhrmann. I am so there.
And then they go and spoil it all by playing something stupid like «Amphibiens» by Groovy Aardvark.