movember

Culture

People are passionate about Movember and fighting cancer. Few things these days bring people together under a common cause. Our strong, natural solidarity to fight for good causes has been  undermined and perverted by greedy jerks. We need to take back our movement.

The Movember movement tries to create a better, more healthy world. Supporters have the purest intentions. It is beautiful when good people come together for a good cause. And us Canadians do it very well.  But, like many good movements, it has been spoiled by greed. Some big business types and their buddies don’t care about us or our movement, they only care about our money.

Our movement has been hijacked by big business. They turned love and solidarity into marketable CancerCure™ campaigns. It’s all corporate. The big shots took it over. These big business big shots brandish CancerCure™ ribbons and slogans on their products and then throw pennies at the cause. They mark CancerCure™ on make-up, ointments, foods with dangerous additives and hormones proven to cause cancer or contain cancer causing carcinogens. People die and they lie. Someone’s making dough.

And what about Big Pharma?

Big Pharma get trucks loads of CancerCure™ money and then they have the nerve to charge an arm and a leg for their lifesaving drugs. Their large profits are criminal. We run marathons, they get obscenely rich, poor Canadians get poorer into debt to treat tumors. Why don’t the Cancercure™ big shots  say anything about that?

Well, they’re in bed with Big Pharma. If they weren’t so obsessed with getting rich and having fancy fundraising festivals we could save millions of lives around the world. Simple diseases could be eradicated if not for the giant inaccessible costs of their drugs and Big Pharma’s greedy lust for profits.

Let’s look at AIDS and Malaria. Poor folks in the third world are dying in droves. If Big Pharma wanted, they could produce enough HIV/AIDs and Malaria medicine to eradicate the disease and end related deaths once in for all. But they don’t. It isn’t profitable. The dead and dying are a lucrative market. Canadians are going into poverty, people in the third world die. Whose winning?

Movember and similar CancerCure™ campaigns have the real potential to change the world, but first the movement needs to stand up for Canadians and people around the world. Big shot Stephen Harper is pushing a new free trade deal with Europe down the throats of Canadians. Patent protection will be increased. Expensive drug treatments will become explosively expensive for longer periods of time. Cancer will cause poverty.

The Movember big shots and their CancerCure™ buddies haven’t said a word.

Whose side are they on?

CityCultureThe Morning After

I don’t know about you, but my office sure has been looking a little more manly this month. I even caught myself making flirtatious eye contact with guys I’d never really given more than a glance to before. Then it hit me: Movember! I wasn’t flirting with the face – I was flirting with the mustache.

Yes, there something about the mustache that signifies manliness, an image which the team at Movember has continued to cultivate with their ever-growing fundraising campaign. Last year, the Canadian campaign raised over $32 million for prostate cancer research, with nearly a quarter of a million men donating their upper lips for the cause.

No one could have predicted that what started off nine years ago as a team of 30 “Mo Bros” in Melbourne, Australia would turn into a global movement involving millions raising funds and awareness towards men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer.

This year, Montrealers flaunted their handlebars, Fu Manchus and and porn staches on twitter @MovemberMTL. Their month-end gala party will be held Friday, November 30th at the Rialto theatre, 5723 Parc, where they’re be handing out prizes for Best Mo in Character, Team Mo, Miss Movember (wonder if there will be any muffstaches?), and Man of Movember 2012.

Competing for the mustache crowd that evening is the crew at Spreakeasy Electro Swing Montreal, presenting an Electro Swing versus Electro Blues event at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent. I imagine the mustaches will fit right in with the bow ties and retro vibe of what promises to be a night of sweet dancing and solid grooves. They will also be holding a contest for best mustaches on the dance floor, best man and best woman, where they encourage women to get creative in the facial hair department.

So in honour of Movember, I present a few of my favorite mustaches:

Groucho Marx:

I had to include him here, as his bushy black stache is one of the first that the mind conjures when it hears of the word mustache. Marx’s moustache began as greasepaint smeared on his upper lip during in his vaudeville days, making the switch to a real one when he moved to television.

Salvador Dali:

Of course the reigning champion of all things bizarre and surreal would have his own take on the mustache. The Dali stache is so renowned that it has its own category in the World Beads and Moustache Growing Contest, who describe it as “slender with long tips, straight up or arching up”.

Burt Reynolds:

Mr. Reynolds has the distinction of having likely the only mustache in the world with a band, Facebook group and abhorrent sexual tryst named for it. It’s right up there with Tom Selleck’s as a pillar of rugged of masculinity.

If you’re throwing your own Movember party, you can even Pin the Mustache on Burt Reynolds:

Nick Offerman:

The contemporary mustache champion of the silver screen is without a doubt Park and Recreation’s deliciously deadpan Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman. In addition to being able to grow a truly awesome mustache, Offerman has helped to shape this “man’s man” in other ways, such as incorporating his real-life passion for woodworking. This year, he’s served as one of the spokesmen for Movember, filming a mock PSA for men with the in-between stache hoping that it gets fuller.