The Dutch Oven: Remembering Ernest Borgnine while we try to forget Avril Lavigne

Remember Marilyn Manson? Me neither, but the middle-aged antichrist took time out yesterday from the hectic business of being irrelevant to pick on somebody even smaller than he is.

"Yesterday I read that I was dating Avril Lavigne, and I was like 'What the fuck was that?’” Manson told U.K. website Entertainmentwise. “She's Canadian, I wouldn't do that.”

This wouldn’t be news except that Manson’s slam on the Great White North has upset people almost as much as Michael Mann’s last tequila-fuelled troll job for the Georgia Straight. Even worse: why did he have to remind us that the Lavigne entity exists at all? We threw our TV out of the window three years ago just so we wouldn’t have to see that candy-coloured shill doing her own million dollar troll job for Canon, T-Mobil, and that ass-flavoured perfume of hers, but then again we never much cared for punk.

Speaking of throwing your TV out of the window—hotels. They ain’t what they used to be. Take the Opus hotel in Vancouver, which has dumped all its landlines and furnished each room with an iPhone instead

According to the CBC’s blog,“The Yaletown hotel invites its guests to take the Apple smart phone out of its charging station and roam the city with the device—using it as a camera, a map, an internet connection and, indeed, as a telephone with a local number.”

The Opus also assures patrons that it will remove any “personal material’ from the device once you’ve checked out and they’ve all had a good look at it, so you shouldn’t feel shy about taking pictures of the tangerine you stuffed up your foreskin.

Thanks to a labour dispute, three nuclear reactors in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick are operating themselves today, kind of like the super-computer in Colossus: The Forbin Project (probably).

Having failed to reach an accord with Candu Energy, 800 of the industry’s scientists and engineers went on strike this morning. Among their tasks: “troubleshooting.” Here’s the perspective from those of us who’ve spent the last year living in the hot-particle winds of Fukushima: for the love of God, give the “troubeshooters” what they want (or, more probably, deserve).

Finally, since all the obituaries focused on his Oscar-winning role in the otherwise dreary Marty, we’d like remember the late Ernest Borgnine for these things: The Wild Bunch, Escape From New York, The Devil’s Rain, The Poseidon Adventure, The Neptune Factor, Willard, Ice Station Zebra, and whatever the hell this is from.

It’s probably also a good time to remind everyone that Borgnine’s 32-day marriage to Ethel Merman in 1964 ended after he farted in bed and held her head under the covers, a technique commonly known as the Dutch Oven. Speaking of which, welcome to our new column, provisionally called The Dutch Oven until the complaints start rolling in.

You can follow Adrian Mack's contribution to the lobotomizing techno-nightmare known as Twitter at @AdrianMacked.