Amuse-Bouche

• According to Michael Moore in his recent article "Goodbye GM," General Motors has nobody to blame except themselves: "Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided."

• Angelina Jolie is "too old" to play Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider series anymore so the producers are doing what all lazy-money-for-nothing-since-when-is-cinema-art studio wonks do: they're coming up with yet another "origin" storyline. I don't think she's too old, certainly they could write a story around an aging (!) Lara Croft and some 'Tween vampires...the latter seems to be working at the mo.'
  
  What I suspect here is market over-saturation with Jolie and "the powers that be" recognize this. She's also too skinny. They'd have to digitize the bejeezus out of her (like they did for 'Beowulf') and bulking her up will take some work; it's not just implanting a background or throwing some actor in front of a green screen. Now, if they made a movie (I don't even call these pieces of shit "film") called "Fridge Raider" and it revolved around some bulimic sitting crosslegged on the kitchen floor hydraulically spooning in icing and mayonnaise, that would be more do-able...
  
  ...This leads me to ask: When have we ever seen the eating disorders onscreen? I mean as the focus of the film? Am I missing something? We've had the alcoholics ('Barfly',' Leaving Las Vegas' etc.), the junkies ('Drugstore Cowboy,' 'Rush' etc.); Most of the mentally ill roster are there ('One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' 'Taxi Driver' etc.,) why nothing about anorexia or bulimia nervosa? Oh wait, that would involve two-thirds of Hollywood actresses playing themselves and that, people, just isn't "acting." I suppose a film about a bipolar character would be just as pointless...

• A woman boarding a Toronto commuter train yesterday flipped her lid when apparently jostled by another passenger. She said "Don't you fucking cut me off!" - which is where most of us relatively sane people would have left it - and then proceeded to throw her coffee in the man's face, causing second-degree burns.
  
  Of course this woman cracked, she does Customer Service for a living. People have no idea what a difficult job it is to deal with the Great Unwashed and be treated like crap on the daily AND have to, at the very least, be courteous. Customer Service is hard. It chips away at a person's self-esteem and a paper route pays better. In fact, the paperboy gets more respect: you piss that kid off or don't pay him when he comes collecting, he's going to leave your "Anywhere Times" bagless in the rain or in a pile of dog-do. He's got the upper-hand.
  
  Customer Service people have no control over their own work but are expected to shoulder the accountability for practically the whole damned planet if the volume knob falls off somebody's new bookshelf stereo.That means tremendous job stress. People can be atrocious to customer service folks. Especially when one's computer goes tits-up and the helpline connects you to some guy who has to move a cow out the way before answering his phone.

• My sincerest and deepest condolences go to the family and friends of the 228 souls aboard Air France Flight 447. I don't know if it will ever be determined what happened but so far, whatever did was catastrophic enough to take that plane right out of the sky and into the ocean without a Mayday call. If the pilots did have radio contact with other flights in the region, nobody is talking - and apparently regular radio contact is something that occurs over this dangerous flightpath. Searchers will never find the Black Box in the mid-Atlantic, that's absurd: The mid-Alantic ridge is essentially the Rocky Mountain range covered in water with the Grand Canyon at the bottom. Something caused immediate electrical failure and decompression of cabin pressure in that plane. Lightening or storms alone apparently do not do that. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying nobody's saying. That's what worries me.