A nasty bit of unpleasantness greeted my return to Toronto. I showed up for my second Rogers Digital Cable audition, not knowing that I would be taking part in what a colleague called an "act-off". It went something like this: The couples who were paired up together would go in for their audition, then be told to wait, basically until a better pair was found, at which point the losers could leave.

I guess the advantage of this would be that the client/director could mix and match actors when they got down to the final few, but it sure did suck for the rest of us who got rejected in front of their peers :-(

Friday night is party night in Hamilton, Bermuda. Folks go straight from work to the nearest bar they can find, and stay there 'til closing time. For banker types Saturday is sailing day, and by the time nightfall comes everyone goes home and gets ready for Sunday morning worship. Did you know that Bermuda has the highest number of Churches per capita in the world? Whereas other countries have cities and towns, the geography of this island is divided into Parishes. And if I'm boring you with trivia it's only because I've been sightseeing all day, and I'm trying to stay up late enough to sleep through Church tomorrow.

Anyway, a call to Fido on a borrowed office line resulted in yet another less than stellar experience with one of their customer service reps. After being told three or four times to turn the phone off and on again, I was instructed to go outside and walk around with my arm outstretched, handset pointed towards the heavens, until I got a signal. To top it all off, when I inquired as to what exactly was changed on my account I was given this answer: "You wouldn't understand, even if I told you." Translation: the guy's supervisor took care of it.

At any rate, a few hours later I was wireless again, and even got a text message about an audition from my agency. And my handheld Scrabble game kept Al happy while we were listening to my brother Tom sit in with a jazz band that night.

One thing my Visor can't do is give me the courage to rent my own scooter. Even though the speed limit on the island is 40km/hour and the scooter shops give you bright red and white loser helmets so that everyone stays the hell out of your way, everything is still on the wrong side of the road, and takes some getting used to.

For the sake of Al I was willing to do it, but an ominous downpour of rain began just as we were signing our contracts. Then I turned around to receive some kind of compliment about my shoes, and found myself face to face with an attractive young lady, covered in pussy scabs -- she had totalled her bike a few days before. I promptly talked Al into renting a double-seater for the two of us.

If anyone ever suspected that Al and I were a gay couple then they should be down here right now watching me putter around the island, with my arms wrapped tightly around the midriff of my "travel partner"...

Speaking of phonecos, shame on Fido for not getting Canadian rights to the new Handspring Treo -- that honour goes instead to Rogers Wireless, whose new GSM network apparently sucks :-(

My clunky VisorPhone may be my only link to the Internet this weekend; I'm heading to Bermuda today to visit my offshore banker brother, who doesn't yet have a 'Net connection at home, or even cable TV!

The TV show is as bad as its awkward title suggests. The producers might well have considered auditioning Bif Naked before hiring her to host -- I couldn't figure out if she was drunk, high or just a complete airhead... Whatever the case, she was awful, wretched, poo-poo stinky-bad! Likewise for the aimless noodlings of the guitarist/turntable duo. And what the hell was with the dyke-cam, anyway?! You'll have to tune in tonight at 11:30PM to see what I mean, worth doing if only for the end of the show, where everybody finds the nearest computer screen and rocks out on the ZeD website. Everybody's trying so damn hard to be cool... It was enough to make me laugh out loud!

As for the website, its little more than a sinkhole of content. Apparently anybody can upload pretty much anything. Thing is, it was more than enough tedium for me to navigate through the Mr. Dressup screensavers; what is one to do a month down the road after everyone has uploaded their first foray into Flash or digital video?

I'm not panning ZeD just because the producers didn't accept my submissions. In fact, I've got an easy fix to put this train wreck back on the rails: Instead of bombarding us with stuff, why not choose a single artist per episode, showcase a body of their work and detail some of their influences? Why? Because it's context, not content, that's king...

Apparently a new dance craze called the "Cha-Cha Slide" is sweeping across America. The good folks at Equal have decided to capitalize on this, coming up with a hilarious concept for a bunch of coffee shop patrons, so high on NutraSweet that they decide to make asses of themselves by getting jiggy with it. It was annoying enough that I had to show up at 10AM on a Saturday, and worse that I had to practice with an honest-to-goodness "five, six, seven, eight!" choreographer. But what finally did me in was that this humiliation was to take place on the stage of the Bathurst Street Theatre, the very same venue where Improv Heaven & Hell's second season was taped. During the on-stage practice I hid myself in a corner behind a wall of my peers, remembering of my former glory, and thinking "fuck this". So I walked off the stage, asked that my name be removed from the audition list and walked out, feeling way too self-important... And loving it!

Producer Michael Geddes says it's a way for the kids to have a say in the selection process. Uh-huh... So after sitting through eight hours of wailing wannabes the judges are then going to sift through untold amounts of videotape to hear what those same wannabes have to say about their peers, and only after that announce the day's cuts? How stupid do they think we are, for chrissakes?!

If they're really that hard up to fill a half-hour timeslot, why don't they make like the Internet and install webcams in the showers of all the contestants' hotel rooms? They're halfway there already; I'm sure fans of hummers (not the all-terrain vehicles) appreciated the many closeups of young, nubile lips vibrating as they were being warmed up :->