Jonah Kondro
“Don’t keep opening the fridge”, “turn off the lights when you leave a room”, and “don’t touch the thermostat” are all phrases that still linger in my head from my childhood.
Mum had every right to monitor me and my sister’s bad energy habits while we were still kids at home; that’s because Mum was paying the bills. She was keeping an eye on the cost of keeping a roof over our heads.
So it’s a little disconcerting to hear the Alberta Health Services had an $850,000 cell phone and data bill in 2014. Who was watching their spending? Certainly not my Mum. I find it a little outrageous that such carless spending was committed by AHS on cell phone use. It is extremely likely that a few employees, that had their mitts on a company phone, were checking social media websites or cinema times for upcoming movie releases. This practice would rack up huge quantities of data charges that us tax payers had to take care of. There is nothing worse than someone else sending a selfie that I had to pay for.
Aside from AHS admitting to a huge cellular bill, I’m more concerned with the forty million dollars spent turning E.L. James’ novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” into a film. Alberta’s economy is on the rocks, people are losing their jobs, spending cuts have been announced by Prentice, and Hollywood is liquidating millions on bad porn.
I bought and began to read the outbreak novel of James’ after its initial popularity had begun to plateau. Quite soon into my reading I felt resentful – kind of like when you pour expired milk over a stale bowl of Cheerios. I struggled through the pages like my first attendance at a middle school dance. Eventually I gave up – on the book.
I made it two thirds of the way through the first novel out of the three that were written by James. Regardless of the raw content within “Fifty Shades of Grey”, I saw it fit to not even finish the book – it was quite simply written badly. I didn’t want to risk letting the demons free from it pages in a sacrificial back yard fire pit burn, so I tossed the book into my recycling pile; a suitable demise awaited in the Rimbey Recycle Facility.
Long after I submitted my copy of James’ novel into a certain recycling doom, I was wandering through Chapters in Red Deer. I was struggling to find an anthology of Rolling Stone Magazine articles Hunter S. Thompson wrote and literally stumbled over a pile of copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey” on the floor. There were multiple boxes of copies, near one aisle of bookshelves, which had created a literary inflection spilling all over the floor of Chapters. I ran out into the parking lot escaping potential intellectual drowning. The pages of “Fifty Shades of Grey” need to be put through fifty stages of shredding.
I’m scared for the misconceptions that any adolescent with an Amazon gift card might get after purchasing and reading E.L. James’ book through an eReader; or for any youths that manage to gain access to the film’s theatrical viewing. If there is any money left in the Alberta Health Services cell phone budget, they should call Hollywood long-distance, and advise them to stop inflicting any more psychological harm in the form of bad books made into bad movies.
You won’t catch me buying a ticket to view “Fifty Shades of Grey” in the theatres. I’m more likely to be caught holding a bag of Skittles and walking in to see “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water” in 3D.