Respect To The 中国人

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life." - Chinese Proverb (because THEY know how to eat the bastards!)

Just finished trying to put down a 1/2 mug of this instant oatmeal beverage that my co-worker Pam gave me ages ago. You might ask why, after just eating lunch, do I need to consume breakfast products. You might ask, but I doubt it. So, the reason is... fish. To put it frankly, I hate fish. I mean, I've got nothing against them. I'd give my seat to one on a bus, I'd say hello to it on the street. But my politeness ends there.

These little refusers of evolution were born with more bones than they could possibly know what to do with. I understand we all deserve a suitable framework by which our meat can cling to - but c'mon!

I've never been much of a fish eater, but I certainly don't shy away from a nice chunk of salmon, or if I'm really lucky a properly prepared bit of ahi tuna. Notice that these are both rather meaty fish.

Sadly, meaty fish are not on my school's lunch menu. Only scrawny, slow ones. I swear that the main reason for the serving of fish here is for the sole (pun intended?) purpose of humiliating the laowai. I sit there painfully trying to remove what little meat I can find, covering myself in fish bits and intermitantly lodging sliver-like bones in my throat... only to look around and see a room full of Chinese people (the aformentioned 中国人) sucking the meat off like it's as easy as Paris Hilton. (ok, that pun actually wasn't intentional... but I couldn't change it, I just couldn't).

Right, so fish. Bane of my esophagus. Unebater of my hunger. Killer of my pride. Swimmer of my fish tank.

Why I Live In China

I realized today that though I've been along for this bloggin' adventure the whole way, some have not and they may be a little unclear as to my current motivations and reasons for living in a country that can often be rather crazy and confusing. So...

People come to China for a bazillion reasons. Some of the more popular are: 1] To experience a new culture (developed over 4,000 years and destroyed in about 50). 2] To learn Chinese (what an insane task that is!). 3] To travel and see a world different than anything they've known before. 4] To get away from life. 5] To donate time and knowledge doing good in a developing nation.

When I boarded that small airplane in Penticton, BC, last January I admit that these were all on my mind (all but that last one ... I can be culturally-centric, but I don't think I ever believed I was doing the Chinese a favour by coming here). That was my first eight months. By the end of my eight months I had had enough. I was China'd out and was extremely excited to get out of the country, with an option to possibly return a year later and study Chinese - but long after I'd gotten a much-needed dose of Western culture and sensibilities.

That's when I made the easiest hard decision of my life. I stayed on. I stayed for Maggie. I had finally, after quite literally eight months of avoiding it, confessed my love to the girl I had endlessly talked to, taught, learned from and - frankly - drooled over my entire time in China. I realized that I couldn't leave and always wonder if she was the one I was meant to be with (I'm 50/50 on that fate crap.. but meh.). Turns out my gut was right, as I've spent the last eight months blistfully in love. Maggie and I are made for each other. We're great together. We have ups and downs, as ya do, but I've never felt more positive about a future with anyone.

It's that future that has made me choose to do whatever needs to be done to make it work. Right now that means staying in China. To move to Canada involves a lot of very complicated things, the least of which not being the fact that we need to get married. I wouldn't be with Maggie if I didn't think that was in the cards, but marriage is a tricky thing for me, and I don't want to just jump blindly (as I'm prone to with matters of the heart).

As such, I've tried to take my available options and mould them around the things I can't change. So, what does China give me? A great resource for Chinese language practice (hense I'm learning Chinese) and a part time job that more than sustains myself and Maggie, which in turn gives me time. Time I'm using to finish my degree via distance education.

Number [4] in my list was "get away from life". That is a common reason people come here. It's easy to disappear in China, no one knows you, Chinese people treat you like you are some sort of English-speaking prophet (aka. profit), and you can generally live quite comfortably not going forward or backwards in life. This is not me though. I've never taken a step backwards when it comes to my life and would someone please explain this to my grandmother, as she seems to think I'm living a college student life with no responsibilities.

Though often used to support the irresponsible, ESL is not in and of itself an irresponsible career path. There are a hundred options for an experienced ESL teacher. One course I could choose is to finish my degree and then move to Hong Kong, where I could make upwards of $4,500 CAN per month to start. Not at all a bad wage. The other is use the experience as a stepping stone to illustrate international exposure, and cultural awareness to a company looking for a communcations manager.

Like all things, it's what you make of it and it would be unlike me not to make the most out of everything I do. Anyway, all of this is to give some outline, for those that might not know, why I live in China.

My previous post may have passed the opinion that I was tired and just wanted to go home - and of course I have those days, but I know exactly how I'd feel back home, like I wasn't moving forward. My way forward wont always be in China, but it is for now.

PS: A new vBlog is up!!! Go check it out.

Got Bumped

Well, life in China is finally catching up with me. Most days it's easy to forget that there is an entire collection of lives being lived by people very dear to me in a country that I still call "home" though it isn't in any functional sense.

That I'm not there living it with them was driven into me the other day when I was talking to my best friend Cory and he informed me I had been bumped from 'bestman' to "guy#somethingontheright" (I don't know the exact location) in his upcoming wedding.

His reasoning behind the bump is sound, and I don't fault him at all for making it. I'm simply not there to help out with the wedding planning, or any of the other things a bestman traditionally does. And as much as we've been friends longer than we haven't, that stuff is important. Hell, I've not even met his wife-to-be as he met her after I left Welland for B.C. in August 2004 (the last time I saw any of my friends or family in my hometown - not including Sarah and Vanessa who were wonderful enough to come visit me here last spring and summer respectively).

I'm a bit bummed about getting bumped, not because I think it hurts my friendship with my friend, but because it shows me directly the affect my being away has caused on my relationships with people that are still very important to me. It's been a while since I was homesick, but lately it's been a growing feeling. I look at the last 10 years of my life and I've lived away from my friends and family for a total of about three and a half years (BC twice, backpacking and now China).

It's a fight to stay in touch with everyone, and with most family members it's not been too hard. My mom and dad usually e-mail me once every couple of weeks or so and let me know what's going on and I'm in semi-regular contact with my aunt as well, which is nice. But my big failure is my sister.. I rarely hear from her at all - and if I do, it's usually not more than a sentence-long, very functional e-mail. I'm not sure why it is, I've tried repeatedly to keep in touch with her, but she just has "no time" to maintain it.

It all just furthers my feelings that however much in my mind living abroad doesn't affect my relationships with those back home, in everyone elses it does. For me they are a base I can always return to and that gives me the strength and energy to somewhat fearlessly live in or visit foreign places, but for them it's a quite natural occurance of out of sight, and out of mind.

I guess this all sounds a bit whingy, and I don't mean it to be such. If anything, all of this is making me re-evaluate life abroad. The problem is: there's nothing for me back home. I mean, friends and family are great and important (some would say the most important)... but back home I'll just be working some crap job, living for the moments I have off to go watch the game with my buddy or go out to a bar with friends - and of course being able to attend the family functions a handful of times a year. As much as I miss those things, really miss those things, they're simply not enough to base a life around. I need challenges, goals and change.

So it is now my goal to see how I can meld these two things together. How I can live close to my friends and family, but still live the life I want to live. I often read Steve Pavlina's rather insightful blog, and a recent post talked about how we often look at our careers (and in turn our lives) from an outside-in perspective. Trying to weigh the avaiable options and choosing the best (or good enough) one for us. He wrote this often leaves people frustrated or confused, as there are simply too many choices, and what do we "really" know about any of them. What he then outlined was that it's better to take an inside-out approach, whereby you look at who you are, the things that are important to you and the qualities you value in yourself - then apply these to a job that would suit them. I think this system may also be the solution to all that I stated above. We'll see. I'm still working on his advice for waking up right when my alarm goes off, and nixing my caffeine addiction. Woke up late and had two cups of coffee today.

Earth Day, And Other Fictions

Earth Day and Easter seem to have a lot in common. 1) they both happen in April, 2) they both were forgotten by me, 3) they are also both largely ignored or unknown to the 1.3-1.5 billion people residing in the rooster-shaped beauty of the PRoC.

My friend Eric posted this in its entirety at his blog (click the name - turn on Tor if you're in China), but I think this paragraph sums up my feelings about the planet and how much it needs to be "saved".

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" Plastic...asshole. - George Carlin.

I read, what in my opinion is, a really great book once called "Straw Dogs". It maintains the opinion of George in that environmentalists are a bunch of human-centric worriers that believe we have harmed or could some how harm this massive ball we call home. Keep in mind I'm a) human and b) a semi-practicing environmentalist. The book led me to my current belief that if I really want what's best for the "planet" then I should help pollute it anyway I can. The quicker we kill ourselves off, the better off the planet will be - until insects with opposable thumbs comes along.

The thing about "-ists" and "-isms", beliefs and idologies are that they're just concepts, ideas that we've made up... and when you start incorporating them into your life as dogma, it's bound to mess things around a bit. So I don't. I accept that I should do my part to live a clean, eco-conscious life, but I also accept the more nilistic view that we really have no idea, and we might just be genetically programmed to kill ourselves off. Add these to a thousand other conflicting "beliefs" I hold at any given time and you start to get a picture that the world often operates on principles of black and white - but those aren't our rules, we're just tenants, we live in the grey.

Oh... went to a wedding today. My second Chinese wedding. It was pretty amazing. Expect photos and a new vblog soon.

ChinesePod: One Smokin' Pod

Hey, so I'm not sure why it's taken me this long to mention the wonder that is ChinesePod, but well, here we are. If you are at all interested in learning Chinese, this is the place to start, linger and finish.

The term "pod", for those that don't know, is from Apple's amazing ability to come up with cool branding - i.e. The iPod. Basically pods are sweeping the net as they are on-demand radio, television and, as ChinesePod illustrates, learning. Coming in any number of formats the standards are generally MP3/MP4 (audio/video), making them easily listened to or watched on a variety of computer software.

Back to ChinesePod. The site offers a new lesson in Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) each day. Ranging from Newbie to Advanced, all students can find a suitable lesson fit to their personal ability.

They launched mid-2005 and I clearly remember it being touted to me by my former neighbour Matt. I looked at it quicky, but at the time I was still in the "osmosis" stage of learning Chinese - you know, when you sit and hope that just by eating Chinese food and talking to English-speaking Chinese people you might learn the language.

However, I now find it an invaluable tool. For the full service it isn't free, but you can get all the pods (sans PDF transcriptions and access to the Learning Centre) without paying a fen (note: 100 fen = 1 yuan, or roughly $0.0014 CAN). They have an extensive archive of all their previous lessons, complete with convient ability to leave comments - often used to post questions about the lesson.

I throw a couple episodes on my MP3 player and listen to them on the bus. At first I didn't notice a huge improvement, but now I find my listening is improving quite a bit, as is the extent of my vocab.

NOTE: For any Chinese readers - there is an EnglishPod constructed in much the same excellent format. Maggie's been using it to round-out her English... I almost busted a nut when she used the phrase "Da BomB!" yesterday.

In other news, I've recently noticed we have a new neighbour. He sporadically appears during the day and makes his presence known to all. While writing this I can hear him calling out to the gods above asking, "Why? ... Why? ... Why do I haul barrels of some unknown substance saddled with garbage bags. My forefathers bore Mongolian cavalry.... oops. I just made a doodoo."

5 Reasons Why I Love My Job

Here are just a few reasons why I love my job (with a little help from my camera phone):

	1. Cute Kids Ok, sometimes they piss me off, but mostly they are just completely adorable and it's hard to stay mad at them long, even if it's the 12th class and they still can't remember "How are you? I'm ok."
2. Free Lunch There's no such thing as a free lunch, my ass! Sure, it may come in a bucket, and be made of random bits of animals or rather old vegetables... but hell, it's free! Saving me - at least - $1-2 a day.
	3. Eye Exercises: Mao Style Everyday at 9:30 a.m. the roughly 2,000 students at my school can be found rubbing acupuncture points around their eyes so as to relieve pressure and end the need for glasses. Many, even most, of my students have glasses.
4. Eye Exercises: My Style Everyday while the Happy Birthday tune signals the start of class, my students illustrate that they've practiced the things I taught them the class before.
	5. Creative Writing I tell them and tell them that they need more spacing between their words ... and this is why.

Is It Easter?

Wow, so it hit me last night. Today's Easter. Totally didn't see that coming. I mean, you take away the massive amounts of chocolate company marketing, the dinners with family, and the childhood hope of searching the couch cracks in May for un-found eggs and there's really nothing here in China to indicate that today is the day that marks JC's return from the grave.

Funny that.



The question hit me last night, and was confirmed by John's Sinosplice blog today where he referenced something called "The War On Easter". As is so often the case, one link led to another and I found myself:

A) Reading about The War On Easter
B) Downloading The God Who Wasn't There - Torrent

Well, whether you worship The Resurrection or The Rabbit - Happy Easter - as in China we've got neither.

The God Who Wasn't There: Trailer

Back To The Future

I have to admit that 90% of my motivation to write an entry comes from the fact that I have a legitimate reason for using that title. Hehe.

Well into using a couple bottles of China's finest pijiu to wash away the week's hardships last night I got a phone call from my old manager at Future School. Looks like one of the teachers there was out for the count with illness and they needed a sub.

Enter me, sub extrodinaire. I swear, I was made for jobs that require me to come in, have little to no responsibility and get paid nearly twice as much as the regular staff.

That said, I have noticed that I've a new found hmmm... love is just too strong a word, but a new found something for teaching. Teaching at the primary school for a little more than a month now has given me a real sense of what it is to teach to a massive amount of kids that want to do anything but sit still and pay attention for an extended duration of time.

It has also shown me that I really do dig kids. I've mentioned it a few times on here, and I notice it more and more. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still yell something fierce when they get too noisy and I've more than once considered the ratio of how long it takes a particularly naughty student to fall from the second floor and how long it takes me to get to the embassy in Beijing... BUT, I've started to develop a real affection for the students I teach. I see them learning, and see them look to me to teach them and it's amazing that you can actually play a difference in someone's life that directly.

There aren't a lot of other jobs where you have the opportunity to play such a seminal role in someone's life.

Anyway, back to the future. ;-) (that's twice). I only had to do five and a half hours teaching today, and it was a nice amount to remind myself of what I'm missing at Future School and also how different things are at the primary school.

Small classes is just COMPLETELY the way to go. If I could combine the small classes of Future School (no more than 18, and averaging around 10-12) with the short classes at my primary school (40 minutes) - that would just be excellent. The kids would have more one-on-one talking time and be able to ask lots of questions, plus they wouldn't get exhausted in a big 2 hour session.

It's funny as I was told by the Chinese teacher assistant that a couple of the classes I was teaching today were "rowdy/naughty" and it's possible that just having a stranger come teach them might have straightened them up for the day, but managing a class of 10 students WITH a Chinese teacher assistant always there to step in and help me is just SO much easier than trying to control 40 kids all trying to talk at once, with only 5% of them actually using English to do it - sans Chinese teacher assistant.

Strangely enough, I don't mind it though. I'm not kicking myself for changing jobs and with the perspective that today leant me, I really do just see it as "different". Not better and not worse... just a whole other animal.


[LEFT] From 9:30 to 10 a.m. every morning this is what all my students can be found doing. [RIGHT] An English teacher and Foreign Teacher Liaison extrordinaire. Oddly enough, also named Maggie.

China Rises: 坐下中国

So, has anyone in Canada, or the US caught any of this China Rises special? I'm not sure about dates or times, but it's a combo project of the NY Times and CBC.ca (and some other guys - Germans I think).

You can check out some information here and if you dislike commercials or don't live in the US or Canada - just go to TorrentSpy.com and download it.

I've downloaded the first two parts but haven't had time to watch them yet. I was told that for any foreigners living in China it's mostly old news, but I'm excited to watch it anyway.

I've only recently started browsing for torrents of documentaries about China. Watched an interesting one from The History Channel about the Tiananmen Massacre - or as it's known in China: "The Day Something Happened But We're Not Sure What". It was good to finally find out what all the fuss was last year when Zhao Ziyang died. I didn't really know his significance, and the documentary explained it well.

And in yet more China watching news... check out this site:


It's interesting to contrast Canada with China - quite different in fact when comparing China to the States. I never realized how much it craps on your country to be competing for something. The States have a bunch of power, so they're struggling to keep it and in the end they turn out to be (International) assholes (no offence to my American readers - I'm sure you're all NOT assholes... but have your neighbours put up Anti-Iran flags yet? Or is that next month?). The same can be said about China. Sitting in the wings, waiting for the announcer to say "C'mon China... get on stage... it's your time." Everything is pressuring China to keep the momentum going, and it, like the US, just can't keep it up for ever.

But Canada, oh Canada. Our biggest problems are: A) wood, B) seals and C) being next to a country with a feck off target on its back. We're constantly awarded one of the highest standards of living, we've got pretty damn good healthcare (despite the PC's best efforts), we've got loads of trees, somewhat clean water (not counting Hamilton, which is apparently causing people to mutate into merpeople), we're at an all-time low in unemployment... Life for Canadians is pretty sweet I'd say.

So... the moral - in so far as I can tell - is ta hell with being the biggest, most important, most powerful country in the world. I'll settle for being the one that's got a kickass flag and an obsessive liking of hockey. Who needs oil when you have maple syrup?

Soapbox: Smokers

Always one to step on my little soapbox here, I just read an article on CBC entitled "Anti-smoking crusader takes on final campaign" and if you're a smoker and feel it is your 'right' to be able to smoke in public places, please read this and educate yourself.

This is not an issue of civil liberties for smokers this is an issue of civil liberties for non-smokers. Personally I'm all for allowing people to do whatever they'd like to do in the comforts of their own home (where children don't reside), and hell, if they want to smoke outside in uncrowded areas, not a problem... but for those smokers out there that start to cry when the government passes a new law banning smoking from various confined public areas (i.e. restaurants, coffee shops and bars) - don't be ignorant and claim you have the right. You really don't. No more than I have the right to shove the lit cigarettes down your throat - something I'm reasonably certain is equally bad for your health.

Lights, Camera...

Ok, so the YouTube thing didn't work out for my vBlog idea. However, having already strung together the first entry, I've decided to go ahead with it anyway, bandwidth limits be damned.

Take a lot of meat, a lot of beer, a few friends and a rather steep video-editing learning curve and you get...

The vBlog

Please go check it out. It's all still in its infancy, so if you notice any problems, please let me know. Also - a note about the pixilization (not crystal clearness) in the video. It's because of the file size. Right now the file is sitting at 15MB, to get it at its optimum quality I would have to have a file of about 70MB. I'm currently looking for solutions to this - if you have any ideas, please e-mail me.

YouTube, I Tube, We All Tube: Banana

Ok, sometimes I just don't know where the blog post titles come from.

Last night a few of us met down by Olympic Square for some BBQ. In the course of stuffing ourselves full of meat and beer, Rick, the man behind Panda Passport, mentioned a site called YouTube.com. I sort of yaya'd it at the time, but today I got a chance to check it out.

It's awesome.

Basically it's a site that allows you to upload videos and share them with the world at large. It's got a huge collection of just random videos. Here are two that I thought were pretty good:

Japense Police vs. Darth Vader


First it was table tennis, then badminton, now skipping... what's next, marbles?

For a while now I've been tossing the idea around of doing more vBlogging. As uninteresting as the video tour of my apartment was, I just sort of like the idea of presenting some of the stuff here in China in a video format, as it's got a bit more life to it. Photography and writing are great, don't get me wrong. There's lots you can express and convey, but still, some of the things in China need that motion. I recently got turned on to a guy named Ron Sims here in China that's doing this very thing. Check his site out to get a sense of the potential of vBlogging, or video podcasting (I dig the non-brandenominaltional term more though).

The problem I forsaw was that an average video will be up around 10-15 MB for just a few minutes, and that's going to kill A) the storage capacity and B) the bandwidth of my server. Enter YouTube. They just let you upload and upload. No problematic size restrictions and complete freedom to link the videos.

Expect more on this soon.

Pizza & Beer Wine

Ah, the comforts of home... brought to you by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Walmart

Yeah, so I've sort of become a tad dependant on Walmart pizza. I discovered it a couple weeks back nestled right next to the freshly steamed Bao Zi (steamed bread stuffed with meat) and it's become nearly a daily thing.

It's a sad fact that I have absolutely no motivation to cook for just myself, and with Maggie working until 9 o'clock most nights, it leaves me scrounging for easy to prepare dinner. Pizza, with no surprise, has become the answer.

At 7.90 RMB a slice, it's not the cheapest thing you can buy for eating here, but it kicks the pants off a plate of jiao zi (dumplings). Now, you may be saying to yourself... "Walmart, pizza? Wha?" And if you are, talking to yourself is a sign of mindloss, don't challenge the pizza - ya nut.

It should be explained that Walmart here is 50% home goods and 50% full-on supermarket, not the 70/30 ratio that they were/are in Canada (at least when I left), so when I say "pizza" I mean oven-baked goodness, not frozen in a box stuff or anything of the sort.

Honestly, it's great. Perhaps it's just that I've not had real pizza in so long the Chinese versions are starting to be alright, but I had pizza at the local Pizza King a few months back, and have had it various other places since getting here and it was always startlingly craptastic. Maybe we just have to admit, Walmart can do things right.

Maggie, after asking what I ate for dinner the other day, gave me a flash of her qwirky smile and exclaimed, "Again!?" To which I very proudly pointed out that I've eaten Chinese food for in around 400+ days and no one says "you ate Chinese food AGAIN last night..." Honestly, don't get between me and pizza.

Now sitting here with a glass of wine (2 bottles of not hot, but not bad, Cab Sav for 36 RMB) and the pizza I have to reflect on the fact that I very definitely went to Walmart today NOT to buy pizza. I recognized early in the day that I was going to have the now all-too-common challenge of deciding for myself what to eat, and made the resolute decision to lay off the stuff today and settle for the more traditional (and equally convenient) bao zi. However, the pusher that she is, the woman selling the pizza conned me into getting not just my regular two slices, but she threw in a third free to sweeten the deal. She took one look at me and knew my "jin tian wo bu yao xie xie" was about as valuable as an yi fen note ($0.0014).

Meh, pizza and wine... really, I'm not going to beat myself up over it.

That's Fantastic

The other day it dawned on me that this new found BitTorrent technology that I've been utilizing to bring me the latest episodes of all my favourite TV shows from back home might actually be able to add some nostalgia value to my free time.

So it was that I did a quick search for two little-known cartoon movies that left an impression on me in my younger years - "Fire and Ice" and "Gandahar/Light Years". I've just finished watching "Fire and Ice", and wow, they just don't make cartoons like that anymore.

Disney-saturated family values have polluted the younger generation's right to learn about the real world via complete works of fiction. I've liked the return of violent fantasy movies that are creeping back into the mainstream these days. Stuff like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have a bit of fright, and a bit of death & blood (more the former than the latter) that movies since the late-80s just haven't had.

The fantasy films I was raised with, and that I owe a lot of my love for all things creative, are quickly being put on the "classics" shelf replaced with the computer-generated g'faws of Pixar and Dreamworks - but I suggest if you've got kids in that pre-teen age group, you should sit them down in front of the likes of The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, Legend, The Dark Crystal and Willow. Foster your kid's imagination ... because as funny (and subliminally racy) as Shrek and Finding Nemo may be ... it's all a bit candy-coated. Kids need death, swords, demons, unseen dark evils, seen dark evils... this is the stuff that childhood is made of.

That said, man, I didn't realize when I was seven that the heroine in "Fire and Ice" was so damn sexy. I guess the animators spent far too much time cramped up in their studios and this was their outlet. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trading in the far-sexier Maggie for an extended scenes DVD version or anything... but I was just a little surprised at how upfront (and upback) it was.

See for yourself:

Despite the photos, this film isn't some sort of early 80s Nordic-themed Hentai thing... it's not softcore porn. It's more Conan meets a pencil crayon.

Anyway, all this to say that we need to reintroduce the themes of violence, good/evil, and heroism back into what our children are watching. Kicking to the curb the bland, feel-good, lets all get along, sure-he's-bad-but-he's-a-person-too crap.

Have we gotten over passing the buck and blaming movies with a bit of blood and death in them for all the shit the youth of the world get into? We need to just relax and remember that fantastic stories complete with frighteningly creepy things have been around for centuries. We weren't blaming Homer, the monks that wrote Beowulf or The Brothers Grimm for the ills in society. Lets just move on.