While preparing myself for a feature-length period being upended by Bruno, the Austrian arbiter of taste, I was struck by a sight almost as strange as Bruno in khakis.
The screen was adorned with an ad for U2. Well, it appeared to have been paid for by BlackBerry, but I wonder just how much it might do for perhaps Canada's finest brand.
As some erudite commentators have pointed out, the ad bears a remarkable resemblance to an Apple ad featuring Coldplay. And even to an Apple ad featuring, um, U2.
Which might make one wonder just what machinations might have occurred in order for such a faintly familiar work to see digital light.
What is really quite beautiful about the BlackBerry brand is that it was created without the obvious help of advertising.
It's not that BlackBerry has never been advertised. It's simply that people bought into the brand because they loved the feeling of that business-like machine so close to their fingers and pelvis, rather than because they espied an ad that made them laugh, cry, sing or perhaps even lose their victuals.
It's rarely easy to create ads that feature the extremely famous. They tend to have very strong opinions as to how they should be seen. So is it possible that BlackBerry might have ceded some influence to Bono in the configuration of this work?
When U2 signed a deal with RIM, Bono was positively vertiginous in delineating the difference between RIM and Apple. The Toronto Globe and Mail quoted him as saying: "Research In Motion is going to give us what Apple wouldn't--access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular."
While it would be lovely to be touched by the spectacular, this spot doesn't seem pass the spectacle test. Right down to the typeface at the very end, which bears an unnerving resemblance to Apple's.
"BlackBerry loves U2," it says. Might the implication be that Apple didn't? Could it be that it was Bono rather than BlackBerry who influenced the ad to be so similar to Apple's, in some slightly odd nose-thumbing gesture in the direction of Cupertino?
It's already a rather peculiar menage-a-trois, given that Bono was a founder of Elevation Partners, which holds a substantial stake in Palm.
So while pondering these peculiarities, I think back to "Bruno." The movie ends with a rather touching charity ditty, featuring Bruno himself. And Sting. And Snoop-Dogg. And Elton John. And, wait, there's Bono again.
He's everywhere, isn't he?
James Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, doesn't tilt at windmills. He butts them with the hardest part of his skull.
Which, when it comes to the crusty, decaying, worm-infested windmill that is the National Hockey League, is no bad idea at all. Rather a hockeyish gesture, too.
The National Hockey League is about as relevant to U.S. sport as the HGH-free baseball player.
Please try wafting down the street and bellowing about the NHL playoffs, which are currently occurring to a national indifference only rivaled, perhaps, by the interest in Tara Reid's welfare. You will be greeted with both sympathy and a call to the nearest paramedic.
So here comes Mr. Balsillie, the BlackBerry maker, who likes hockey so much that he apparently wanders onto the ice at 5.30 in the morning to hone his stick skills and, who knows, his right hook, with a passionate urge to bring an NHL team to Hamilton, Ontario.
The NHL, whose talent for self-destruction matches that of Michael Vick, doesn't seem to welcome dealing with Mr. Balsillie at all.
Over the last five years, he has tried to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators and the NHL hasn't been fond of the enthusiasm with which he went about those tasks.
Now a team in another picturesque coldbed of hockey, Phoenix, has gone bankrupt. And Mr. Balsillie can taste coyote. For this is the name of the ill-fated Arizona franchise.
Mr. Balsillie seems rather aware that he is not the NHL's first choice for a loving date.
Of his quest to buy an NHL team, he told the Toronto Star: "I spent five years looking for a front door. And you get all this characterization (of me): 'Brass,' 'club rules.'"
Yes, the same sort of thing that denied Mark Cuban a chance to buy the Chicago Cubs.
"I tell you, by complying with the club rules you get 100 per cent denied the very thing you're looking for (...) There was no other team coming to Canada. It wasn't going to happen. There was no chance. Certainly not Hamilton. Guaranteed."
The NHL strangely believes that it is so frightfully important that every US TV channel ought to beg to cover its puck-chasing punchfest. It wants to give the impression that hockey is a US sport. It seems rather reluctant, therefore, to allow for another team in Canada.
Yet most of the players are Canadian. Much of the money is Canadian. And the playoffs are, as I am sure you will have etched onto your nose and kneecaps, currently being aired on Versus. Yes, that is the cable channel that also brings you bull riding.
A court on Tuesday will first have to hear a dispute between the NHL and the Coyotes' current owner as to who has legal control of the team.
But Mr. Balsillie has bid $212 million, a far larger bite than the only other rumored bid of $130 million. He also has created a Website, makeitseven.ca, that is the rallying ground for those who would like to see Canada have a seventh NHL team.
It isn't success that keeps sports franchises alive. It's excitement. In the Bay Area, people will go to watch the often hapless Golden State Warriors to offer the team a little hap simply because the Warriors are peculiarly interesting.
They will go to watch the NHL's San Jose Sharks because they have turned flattering deception into a furiously exciting art form. And, well, because there are few other outlets for active aggression in San Jose.
Similarly, the people of Hamilton, Ontario will lose whatever marbles they might have over their Coyotes. They will worship them, caress them and stroke them like puppies returned from outer space.
As Balsillie himself told the Star: "I'm clearly just a passionate hockey fan."
Oh, and just a note for the dear, wise, chilly executives of the NHL- he knows how to make money.
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