The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

6, Oakville Beaver WeekendT H M U M ' . M 1 U Sunday September 26, 1999____ h c i « r f i..!■■£.?__«h.>.y Editorials M ilita ry d e s e r v e b e tte r Just once we'd like to see the smug face of Defence Minister Arthur Eggleton in a Canadian Armed Forces aircraft that's basically being held together with bail­ ing wire. Just once we'd like to see how he'd react when attempting to make a trip to a world hot spot, only having to turn back not once, but three times due to mechani­ cal failure. Just once we'd like to see the minister stand behind the men and women of our Armed Forces and tell Prime Minister Jean Chretien that he's not going to volun­ teer any of our forces anywhere until they have the kind of equipment needed. Just once we'd like to see the 'Egg' live in Ottawa on the kind of money and in the kind of conditions our Armed Forces are forced to endure Just once we'd like to see the defence minister put the safety and pride of the men and women in the Forces ahead of what's left of his political career and do the right thing, the decent thing. All of the above is a wish list that won't happen until Ottawa actually decides to believe the nonsense it preaches about the value of our 'peacekeepers' around the world. It would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic and potentially life-threaten­ ing. It's all pretty basic stuff. Imagine working in a chemical plant and being told that "the venting system has broken down so we're installing one small fan and oh, by the way, we don't have any money for breathing masks and filters, so you'll have to attach some Kleenex over your mouth and nose with duct tape." This is how the Canadian Armed Forces must function every day. The wonder of it all is that we have any personnel left at all. Can you imagine any western democratic country endangering the lives of its military by sending them across half the world in 34-year-old aircraft? Exactly. Show's silver anniversary makes him nostalgic It's one of those unfathomable markings of time that makes a guy feel horribly old long before his time. It's like when I heard about a famous rock star celebrating his 60th birthday, or when it suddenly dawned on me that my high school days are now 20-odd years behind me, or when my knee commemo­ rated the 20th anniversary of its first blowout by popping out of its socket. This Sunday -- and tell me this d o esn 't m ake you feel like a dinosaur -- the once great (and still occasionally good) Saturday Night Live is marking its 25th season with a two-and-a-half hour prime-time special. Twenty-five years! On Oct. 11th, 1975, the comedy sketch show that The New York Times called "ground-breaking, precedent-setting, establishment- tweaking" burst onto late-night tele­ vision and onto the landscape of popular comedy and contemporary culture; it's a landscape that the show and its Not Ready For Prime Time Players have since thoroughly dominated. In the beginning, S.N.L. offered oftentimes crass, cutting-edge com­ edy, hum our w ittingly made to widen the generation gap -- this definitely wasn't our parents' come­ dy show. This was something alto­ gether new, hip and happening and we were quick to claim it as our own. We became obsessive about S.N.L. Regardless of what we were f * Im ANDY i§»i i JUNIPER doing on a Saturday night, we always tried to be in front of a TV and tuned in to NBC come 11:30. Under the tutelage of the show's producer/creator, Canadian Lome Michaels, stars of that initial golden era emerged. Chevy Chase ("I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not") at the Weekend Update anchor desk, or doing his imitation of the bum­ bling Gerald Ford ("roll over, Liberty"). The late John Belushi as a killer bee, or Samurai Warrior. Dan Ackroyd doing the classic Bassomatic commercials ("It slices, it dices, it julienne fries") or bop­ ping with his Czechoslovakian hip­ pie brother Steve Martin, who was not a cast member, but whose fame rose each time he guest hosted. Bill Murray (geek pants hiked up to his armpits) and Gilda Radner (perma­ nently congested and hopelessly hard of hearing) goofing as the ulti­ mate nerd couple, Todd and Lisa. Noogies all around. Within five years, the show's first wave of superstars departed to becom e darlings (or duds) in Hollywood. Naturally, with these departures, the show 's fortunes sagged. And, as has happened dur­ ing several dire drought periods over the past 25 years, critics began slagging S.N.L., calling it Saturday Night Dead. But the show wasn't dead at all -- this show has had more lives than Mr. Bill, the poor plasticine character frequently featured (and flattened) on S.N.L. Indeed, any­ tim e the show has been on its deathbed, it's been resuscitated -- once by the return of Michaels, who left for five years after the show's first five-year run, and innumerable other times by fresh young comedic talent like Eddie M urphy, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Martin Short, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, David Spade, Norm MacDonald, and on and on. In a recen t story regarding Saturday Night Live's anniversary, The New York Tim es noted; "Nothing in popular culture can be hip for 25 years. The culture turns over far too many tim es. Icons become relics, objects of obsession become objects of nostalgia." Saturday Night Live has given birth to many icons. The more men­ tion of the show makes many all warm and fuzzy and nostalgic. And while the show is no longer cutting edge, it can oftentim es boast of being something that precious few other show s on television are...funny. ("lets go, j w U B y S te v e N e a s e /U-- f IS IT JUST ME, I OR IS THE BREAK BETWEEN so c c e r a n p h o c k e y g e t t in g s h o r t e r EVERY Y E A R -? <2>^4* Military deserve better Show's silver anniversary makes him nostalgic By Steve Nease