Family movie night recently featured a great product of the 60s – Fantastic Voyage. For the recollection of those who might have long ago vacuumed memories of this one completely out of your mental archives, it’s the one where a small team of scientists board a submarine, which is then shrunk to microscopic size in order to be injected into an injured man’s body, because the only way to remove a blood clot on his brain is from within.
Despite some monumentally questionable science (not to mention practical considerations) that should automatically have swiftly relegated this movie to the schlock file, on re-viewing it I was amazed (a) just how much I still enjoy it; and (b) how much of it has remained in my mental archives. I suspect this is because I, like almost every other teen-aged boy on the planet at the time this movie came out, was mightily impressed by Raquel Welch. (Oh alright… “was mightily impressed” = “had the hots for”.) Ask any of us mid-life male baby-boomers today and the role we remember her best in will almost always be one of two: either 1. as Loana, the meticulously researched, authentic Cro-Magnon woman with a startlingly prescient sense of the future application of fur as an essential to fashion in 1 Million Years BC ( http://www.artland.co.uk/page2019cb.htm ) -- a site demonstrating either that at this point in her career she was still so unknown that she has been identified as "Rachel" Welch, or that the site's creator is a typical modern teenaged boy whose principal concern is image and who is possessed of a "close enough" sense of priority for its accompanying text, or 2. as Cora Peterson, the skin-tight diving suited “surgeon’s assistant” in Fantastic Voyage. (http://members.tgforum.com/corafmnoir/fantastic.html )
In fact, one of the movie’s signature recollections (and not just for me, because a lot of contemporary commentaries on the movie also single it out – for example scroll down in the link above) is when a growing army of antibodies have begun attacking her and, like the army of cheap rubber toy boa constrictors they appear to be, are already choking her to death as the energetic male crew members haul her into the sub and begin clawing at the antibodies in order to enable her to breathe. And guess which antibodies get the almost unanimous attention of six feverishly grabbing male hands? Clearly, their reasoning was, “Never mind where the air actually needs to go to get into her body – her nose and mouth – her lungs are right under these, so this is where we have to grab!”
But even our newly-14-year old female offspring also claimed to enjoy it. After we got past the “There were movies then?!!” outburst when I told her it was made in 1966, she confessed a grudging admiration for some of the special effects. In some recent post-viewing Googling, I was surprised to discover that the movie in fact won an Oscar for its visual effects, so apparently I am in a large company of “two thumbs-up”pers for this one.
Other bits that I discovered to my shock I still retain in my head: the logo for the special military unit, “CMDF”, stands for “Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces” (And not only that – I also remember in the Mad Magazine satire of this movie (Fantastecch! Voyage), it was “LSMFT”, and it stood not for the hugely publicized cigarette slogan of the day – “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” – but rather for “Laboratory Section for Making Folks Tiny”.)
Some of the scientific inconsistencies? Well, CMDF is a super-secure sterile environment in which the surgeons and military administrators are working. Yet it seems smoking is quite freely allowed, and it is infested with ants (In one scene, Edmund O’Brien stops just before crushing one with his thumb, which prompts his colleague to remark that he appears to have a new respect for life whatever its size. See also, “Horton Hears a Who”, by Dr Seuss – “Because a person’s a person, no matter how small.”)
Except for the sub’s captain (and pilot), the entire mission team is thrown aboard apparently with absolutely zero training. At several points, the captain has to direct other crew members what to do – and then explain to them where the necessary buttons or levers are to fulfill the task – “Open the main flood valves – it’s those levers back on the aft bulkhead beside the blinking lights.”
This is a submarine they’re aboard, one intended for oceanic “piscatorial research” missions we are told. Yet its entire front end is an array of gigantic picture windows that would implode at any depth greater than about 25 feet in the real world.
What I like about Fantastic Voyage is that, unlike so many modern sci-fi movies, the writers clearly felt no need whatsoever to justify or explain either the science or the gaping inconsistencies behind their fiction. “OK… shrink them” and five minutes later, after “Phase 1”, the mission crew are sitting in a toy-sized submarine on the “sterile” floor as giant feet move carefully around outside the sub’s windows. A modern movie would require at least one cutaway, probably several, to a nerdy scientist complicatedly explaining to a reporter or supervising senior military officer the physics of the process. But then this is 1966, and the nit-picky demands of Star Trek fans for good and consistent science have not yet begun to make their impact on the genre.
There’s also a plot device by which the submarine’s power is drawn from a chunk of radioactive matter. Pre-shrinking, it’s utterly invisible. Once they’re shrunk, it’ll be more than enough (“in theory”, explains the captain – does no one pre-test anything in this movie?) to power the sub because they can’t shrink radioactive matter. Why? Who knows? Knowing why was not necessary to move the plot along so the writers don’t bother even trying to pretend to craft a semi-plausible explanation.
Not to mention that the plot calls for everything to resume its normal size after 60 minutes. At that point, most of the team is miraculously recovered by being plucked off an eyeball on a glass slide, while the submarine itself, abandoned as a wreck inside the freshly de-clotted victim, is supposedly being devoured by white corpuscles, conveniently overlooking the fact that the original’s molecules and even the molecules of the water injected into the victim along with the sub, should be expected to resume normal size at the 60-minute mark, blowing the victim – as one might reasonably and gorily expect – to smithereens.
I also love the fact that when the military guys have to explain to the mission security guy what’s going to happen, one of them switches on a big clunky overhead projector, and then lays on colour transparency overlays to show the circulatory system through which they’ll be travelling. No Powerpoint in 1966! Later, when another has to perform a quick calculation to determine if the sub can successfully transit a stopped heart before they have to reactivate it or lose the patient, he whips out a slide rule from his inside tunic pocket and concludes they can do it “with three seconds to spare”. No pocket calculators in 1966!
But meanwhile, a couple things now quite prominent in the real world appear to have been prophesied in Fantastic Voyage. (No, not them. Despite its rather obvious deployment in this movie, the starlet-enhancing, cantilevered push-up half-cup bra had already been invented by engineer and eventual billionaire Howard Hughes for Jane Russell some two decades earlier.)
One example? – the use of a laser in surgery, because it “can be regulated to one five-thousandth of an inch”. It wasn’t until 1982 that discoveries about a laser’s interaction with human tissue led to its widest use in laser eye surgery, first performed on a living human eye in 1991.
Also, the whole concept of using a highly miniaturized piece of machinery – the submarine in this case – certainly anticipated what we today call nanotechnology.
= = = = = = = = = =
Speaking of small minds…
Finally, just in case it has occurred to any readers of this blog, with perhaps a trembling sense of fear and apprehension, let me set your mind at ease. Despite my professional and personal interest in things media, except for this note I promise that you will read nothing more in here about Michael Jackson’s trial.
In this latest, albeit sparsely covered example of US justice on parade, unfortunately I can’t imagine where you might be able to find any coverage should you in fact be interested (maybe www.induceprojectilevomiting.com), but regrettably, you’re on your own for this one.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Have you been “viral marketed” yet?
If you’re a regular internet surfer and e-mail user, chances are you have.
“Viral marketing” is an interesting new concept in advertising in which an ad is developed for a product that is so edgy (the ad, that is, not the product) that it probably will never see the light of day in mainstream media but, instead, winds up in wide internet circulation as like-minded surfers pass it along to their friends with comments like, “You’re not gonna believe this!”, insinuating itself into cyberspace like a disease, but without the file destruction that attends what we traditionally call a “computer virus”. The cost to the advertiser begins and ends with the cost of production but an ad’s impact is multiplied exponentially as it circulates around the net’s bazillions of users.
The ads are also usually quite clever, often with a strong emotional kick and, although many viewers won’t be heard to admit it in public, hilarious. (When advertisers operate outside the realm of advertising standards councils, they can damn the forces of political correctness and strike out the bland.)
Here are two examples, both in wide internet circulation:
1. An ad for the Ford SportKa, a British car that adds a few sporty whistles and bells to its tiny commuter car, the Ford Ka, shows a cat climbing curiously up the windshield of the car. As the cat reaches the roof, the sunroof mysteriously slides open. Curious cat pokes its head in; suddenly the sunroof snaps closed and the shocked viewer sees the cat’s head tumble into the car while its lifeless, headless body slides back down the windshield. The final caption appears, “Ford SportKa: Ford Ka’s evil twin”.
2. An ad for the Volkswagen Polo shows a swarthy type getting into the driver’s seat. A close-up reveals a black-and-white Palestinian style scarf around his neck. He drives to a streetside café, where cutaways show shirt-sleeved business types chatting, a mother nursing an infant. Cut back to the car, just as the driver pushes a bomb detonator button. The scene becomes a long shot of the car just as its interior lights up with the bright flame of the explosion; a muted “whoomph” is heard and the car lightly rocks from side to side, but is otherwise undamaged. The onscreen caption appears: “The VW Polo: small but tough”.
In both cases, Ford and VW officially deny the ads’ authenticity. But inveterate internet junkies have tracked source references and both ads appear to have been birthed in multi-million dollar agencies. For example, an online article in The International Herald Tribune last May reported, “Ford and its advertising agency, Ogilvy Mather, acknowledge creating the [SportKa] clip but insist that it was never meant to be released.” Yeah, right. And the VW ad’s links, apparently, go back to Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), their agency of record for decades. (As one ad industry journal notes, “DDB's ads for VW successfully sold a Nazi car that looked like an insect. No one has topped them.”)
The ads’ obvious production values also bespeak some serious money behind their filming. The lighting in the VW Polo ad, for example, is beautifully professional. And of course, the louder the product manufacturer denies involvement, the more coverage will ensue, in some cases spilling the ad into the even wider realm of mainstream news coverage – and more free advertising.
Googling “viral advertising” turns up all sorts of commentary about the format, including news articles written about a particular ad. The advertiser is consistently on-message, arguing in essence, “The ad is bogus. We’d never advocate cruelty to animals (Ford) / using terrorism as a theme to sell a product (VW).”
Viral advertising. Watch for it. Coming from a friend to your e-mailbox someday soon. As sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. (I oughta know; I’ve already forwarded the Polo ad’s link to one or two friends.)
= = = = = = = = = =
The next time you’re on an escalator, take a look down.
Where the edges of the moving steps pass along the side walls, if you look closely enough you will see a tiny, almost immeasurably small, gap. If it’s more than a couple of millimetres wide, I’d be surprised.
Recently at work, I discovered that the “Up” escalator leading from the street level at my office tower’s entrance to the next level has received a structural enhancement. Just above the line where the steps’ edges travel beside the escalator’s side walls, an escalator-long line of brush bristles has been installed. The bristles are thick, and jut out about an inch and a half over the edgeline of the travelling steps.
And as I travelled upwards on those steps, I wondered about the purpose of such a brush. It runs the escalator’s full length, even to the point of curving at the top and bottom to follow the line as the steps flatten out. My only previous experience with anything even remotely similar has been at golf courses where occasionally, anchored to the ground right at the entrance to the clubhouse, there will be a thick and bristly brush on which a golfer can clean his mud- or grass-cluttered shoes before entering. At the better courses, they will even mount one on the fender or running board of each of their golf carts. The English also have a quaint little front-door hedgehog that accomplishes the same thing for the gardener’s home use. A cast-iron rendition of the animal has brush bristles in place of its prickly spikes.
So I had thought that perhaps this new escalator installation offered the opportunity for pant-cuff or boot brushing for walkers who’d picked up some slush spatters in the course of their commuting. But the fact that the bristles are so small, and the almost useless non-cleaning that would result from the incidental contact of a bit of pants or boots that might brush them, made me realize this couldn’t possibly be their purpose.
Fate intervened the very next day in the form of a brace of workers who were installing the very same arrangement along both inside walls of the “Down” escalator.
Fortunately, being in the possession of not only a degree in journalism, but also the keenly incisive, finely tuned and precision-focused razor sharp inquisitive mind that one requires in order to… to… Where was I?
Oh yes. So I asked one of them what the hell the brush was for.
He actually seemed pleased that someone had even bothered to stop to chat; being able to chat about what he was doing was an added bonus. He pointed to the minuscule gap between the immobilized step and the side wall, and said that in the US, that gap supposedly had trapped shoe heels and coat hems, and the brush was designed to keep this from happening.
Then he looked at me. I think he almost knew what my reaction was going to be. After bending down to examine a gap that wouldn’t trap a Barbie doll’s toy stiletto shoe heel and whose only snaggable fabric would have to be something so flimsy that it would register on Richter’s lesser-known “diaphanous” scale roughly where see-through lingerie sits. Hardly the stuff of a government office environment – unless of course they’ve recently moved their exotic dancer research in-house.
I burst out laughing. “You know what I think,” I asked? “I think there are way too many lawyers in the world; that’s what I think.”
He shared the laugh and ended by telling me that usually anything that gets changed in the US eventually works its way up to Canada after a few years.
So of course I did a little looking around the internet for information on escalator accidents and, in one of those hilarious re-affirmations that the world clearly thrives on irony, amid literally hundreds of links to lawyers willing to undertake “escalator accident” lawsuits on my behalf, I found this note in a report of a recent accident involving a group of schoolchildren on a movie theater escalator in Manhattan:
“The Buildings Department issued a stop-use order on the escalator until it completes an investigation, and it issued a violation for failure to maintain the escalator. Department officials believe the student's pants caught on a quarter-inch section of a screw that holds a black protective brush, called a skirt, in place. The skirt prevents material from falling into the escalator's mechanism.” (from Newsday.com, January 13, 2005)
Yep, this escalator accident was caused by a student’s pants getting caught on one of the screws holding in place the brush that’s supposed to prevent escalator accidents caused by pants being caught.
So I guess we can expect to see our brand new escalator skirts yanked off in about a decade or so, once the Manhattan lawyers have finished with the litigation over this one.
= = = = = = = = = =
A couple of one-offs:
This one’s too easy, but it’s for posterity (call it another entry in The Perils of Too-Fully Trusting Your Spell-Checker):
A story in the January 25th edition of The Ottawa Citizen was about a new home-based business that assembles “Canadian Student Care Packages” to ship to students at Canadian universities, but far away from home. Several theme packs were described, including a Movie Lover’s box, a Snack Attack box, a Laundry box and a Pantry Box. Of the latter, the reporter helpfully added that it includes “all the stuff you ever stole out of your Mom’s panty when you went home.”
- 0 -
And in the theme of recording for posterity, this is a personal favourite -- an oldie but goodie from my amazingly astute daughter when she was about 3. After listening to me grumble about the difficulty of grappling with an especially ornery child-proof cap on, ironically enough, a bottle of children’s vitamins, she informed me, “Dad, they call it a child-proof cap because you need a child to prove to you that you can open it.”
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally…
I made a passing comment recently in response to a woman co-worker’s query about my perception of her hair style of the day. I told her it recalled the “Brigitte Bardot windblown” look. She looked at me in great puzzlement and said, “Who’s Brigitte Bardot?”.
After releasing the brakes on my walker, I wheeled my aging bones back to my desk, googled up a hair-wild photo of BB “circa 1966” and e-mailed it to her with the admonition that if she ever came to me and said, “Did you know Paul McCartney played with another band before Wings?”, I would scream.
The BB photo search also recalled for me a classic Aislin cartoon from the days when Bardot launched her animal rights activism by helicoptering out onto an ice floe and flinging herself onto a baby seal during the height of that year’s whitecoat hunt.
Aislin had drawn a baby seal being crushed to Bardot’s bosom in an all-enveloping hug. The reader’s view was full frontal, and all you saw was this widely grinning baby seal’s mouth, the rest of its head fully encased between the twin mounds of Bardot’s renowned chestal array.
The caption was simply, “Je suis phoque.”
For the anglo-unilingual among you, “phoque”, as any young tittering French-as-a-Second-Language student will smirkingly repeat forever, is French for “seal”. That, and the discovery that the French for “dandelion” is “piss-en-lit”, kept that class alive for me in Grade 5.
And if a digression might be allowed, just for the record there is no man’s right answer to a woman’s question, “What do you think of my new hairstyle?” Liking it will elicit comments like, “Oh? You didn’t like my old hairstyle?” And not liking it will be even worse because a new hairstyle is not something easily undone.
I find that keeping a half-full (I’m an optimist) water bottle close to hand allows me to take a pensive swig while seeming to be seriously pondering the answer to such a question. Then I can fake a spluttery coughing fit and wave my hands in a helpless “Excuse me…” gesture while escaping to the nearest Men’s room in order to avoid having to deal with the conundrum.
Either that, or I simply shout out, “Shields Up! Red Alert!” when asked such a question, and run to my bridge battle station at Tactical.
If you’re a regular internet surfer and e-mail user, chances are you have.
“Viral marketing” is an interesting new concept in advertising in which an ad is developed for a product that is so edgy (the ad, that is, not the product) that it probably will never see the light of day in mainstream media but, instead, winds up in wide internet circulation as like-minded surfers pass it along to their friends with comments like, “You’re not gonna believe this!”, insinuating itself into cyberspace like a disease, but without the file destruction that attends what we traditionally call a “computer virus”. The cost to the advertiser begins and ends with the cost of production but an ad’s impact is multiplied exponentially as it circulates around the net’s bazillions of users.
The ads are also usually quite clever, often with a strong emotional kick and, although many viewers won’t be heard to admit it in public, hilarious. (When advertisers operate outside the realm of advertising standards councils, they can damn the forces of political correctness and strike out the bland.)
Here are two examples, both in wide internet circulation:
1. An ad for the Ford SportKa, a British car that adds a few sporty whistles and bells to its tiny commuter car, the Ford Ka, shows a cat climbing curiously up the windshield of the car. As the cat reaches the roof, the sunroof mysteriously slides open. Curious cat pokes its head in; suddenly the sunroof snaps closed and the shocked viewer sees the cat’s head tumble into the car while its lifeless, headless body slides back down the windshield. The final caption appears, “Ford SportKa: Ford Ka’s evil twin”.
2. An ad for the Volkswagen Polo shows a swarthy type getting into the driver’s seat. A close-up reveals a black-and-white Palestinian style scarf around his neck. He drives to a streetside café, where cutaways show shirt-sleeved business types chatting, a mother nursing an infant. Cut back to the car, just as the driver pushes a bomb detonator button. The scene becomes a long shot of the car just as its interior lights up with the bright flame of the explosion; a muted “whoomph” is heard and the car lightly rocks from side to side, but is otherwise undamaged. The onscreen caption appears: “The VW Polo: small but tough”.
In both cases, Ford and VW officially deny the ads’ authenticity. But inveterate internet junkies have tracked source references and both ads appear to have been birthed in multi-million dollar agencies. For example, an online article in The International Herald Tribune last May reported, “Ford and its advertising agency, Ogilvy Mather, acknowledge creating the [SportKa] clip but insist that it was never meant to be released.” Yeah, right. And the VW ad’s links, apparently, go back to Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), their agency of record for decades. (As one ad industry journal notes, “DDB's ads for VW successfully sold a Nazi car that looked like an insect. No one has topped them.”)
The ads’ obvious production values also bespeak some serious money behind their filming. The lighting in the VW Polo ad, for example, is beautifully professional. And of course, the louder the product manufacturer denies involvement, the more coverage will ensue, in some cases spilling the ad into the even wider realm of mainstream news coverage – and more free advertising.
Googling “viral advertising” turns up all sorts of commentary about the format, including news articles written about a particular ad. The advertiser is consistently on-message, arguing in essence, “The ad is bogus. We’d never advocate cruelty to animals (Ford) / using terrorism as a theme to sell a product (VW).”
Viral advertising. Watch for it. Coming from a friend to your e-mailbox someday soon. As sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. (I oughta know; I’ve already forwarded the Polo ad’s link to one or two friends.)
= = = = = = = = = =
The next time you’re on an escalator, take a look down.
Where the edges of the moving steps pass along the side walls, if you look closely enough you will see a tiny, almost immeasurably small, gap. If it’s more than a couple of millimetres wide, I’d be surprised.
Recently at work, I discovered that the “Up” escalator leading from the street level at my office tower’s entrance to the next level has received a structural enhancement. Just above the line where the steps’ edges travel beside the escalator’s side walls, an escalator-long line of brush bristles has been installed. The bristles are thick, and jut out about an inch and a half over the edgeline of the travelling steps.
And as I travelled upwards on those steps, I wondered about the purpose of such a brush. It runs the escalator’s full length, even to the point of curving at the top and bottom to follow the line as the steps flatten out. My only previous experience with anything even remotely similar has been at golf courses where occasionally, anchored to the ground right at the entrance to the clubhouse, there will be a thick and bristly brush on which a golfer can clean his mud- or grass-cluttered shoes before entering. At the better courses, they will even mount one on the fender or running board of each of their golf carts. The English also have a quaint little front-door hedgehog that accomplishes the same thing for the gardener’s home use. A cast-iron rendition of the animal has brush bristles in place of its prickly spikes.
So I had thought that perhaps this new escalator installation offered the opportunity for pant-cuff or boot brushing for walkers who’d picked up some slush spatters in the course of their commuting. But the fact that the bristles are so small, and the almost useless non-cleaning that would result from the incidental contact of a bit of pants or boots that might brush them, made me realize this couldn’t possibly be their purpose.
Fate intervened the very next day in the form of a brace of workers who were installing the very same arrangement along both inside walls of the “Down” escalator.
Fortunately, being in the possession of not only a degree in journalism, but also the keenly incisive, finely tuned and precision-focused razor sharp inquisitive mind that one requires in order to… to… Where was I?
Oh yes. So I asked one of them what the hell the brush was for.
He actually seemed pleased that someone had even bothered to stop to chat; being able to chat about what he was doing was an added bonus. He pointed to the minuscule gap between the immobilized step and the side wall, and said that in the US, that gap supposedly had trapped shoe heels and coat hems, and the brush was designed to keep this from happening.
Then he looked at me. I think he almost knew what my reaction was going to be. After bending down to examine a gap that wouldn’t trap a Barbie doll’s toy stiletto shoe heel and whose only snaggable fabric would have to be something so flimsy that it would register on Richter’s lesser-known “diaphanous” scale roughly where see-through lingerie sits. Hardly the stuff of a government office environment – unless of course they’ve recently moved their exotic dancer research in-house.
I burst out laughing. “You know what I think,” I asked? “I think there are way too many lawyers in the world; that’s what I think.”
He shared the laugh and ended by telling me that usually anything that gets changed in the US eventually works its way up to Canada after a few years.
So of course I did a little looking around the internet for information on escalator accidents and, in one of those hilarious re-affirmations that the world clearly thrives on irony, amid literally hundreds of links to lawyers willing to undertake “escalator accident” lawsuits on my behalf, I found this note in a report of a recent accident involving a group of schoolchildren on a movie theater escalator in Manhattan:
“The Buildings Department issued a stop-use order on the escalator until it completes an investigation, and it issued a violation for failure to maintain the escalator. Department officials believe the student's pants caught on a quarter-inch section of a screw that holds a black protective brush, called a skirt, in place. The skirt prevents material from falling into the escalator's mechanism.” (from Newsday.com, January 13, 2005)
Yep, this escalator accident was caused by a student’s pants getting caught on one of the screws holding in place the brush that’s supposed to prevent escalator accidents caused by pants being caught.
So I guess we can expect to see our brand new escalator skirts yanked off in about a decade or so, once the Manhattan lawyers have finished with the litigation over this one.
= = = = = = = = = =
A couple of one-offs:
This one’s too easy, but it’s for posterity (call it another entry in The Perils of Too-Fully Trusting Your Spell-Checker):
A story in the January 25th edition of The Ottawa Citizen was about a new home-based business that assembles “Canadian Student Care Packages” to ship to students at Canadian universities, but far away from home. Several theme packs were described, including a Movie Lover’s box, a Snack Attack box, a Laundry box and a Pantry Box. Of the latter, the reporter helpfully added that it includes “all the stuff you ever stole out of your Mom’s panty when you went home.”
- 0 -
And in the theme of recording for posterity, this is a personal favourite -- an oldie but goodie from my amazingly astute daughter when she was about 3. After listening to me grumble about the difficulty of grappling with an especially ornery child-proof cap on, ironically enough, a bottle of children’s vitamins, she informed me, “Dad, they call it a child-proof cap because you need a child to prove to you that you can open it.”
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally…
I made a passing comment recently in response to a woman co-worker’s query about my perception of her hair style of the day. I told her it recalled the “Brigitte Bardot windblown” look. She looked at me in great puzzlement and said, “Who’s Brigitte Bardot?”.
After releasing the brakes on my walker, I wheeled my aging bones back to my desk, googled up a hair-wild photo of BB “circa 1966” and e-mailed it to her with the admonition that if she ever came to me and said, “Did you know Paul McCartney played with another band before Wings?”, I would scream.
The BB photo search also recalled for me a classic Aislin cartoon from the days when Bardot launched her animal rights activism by helicoptering out onto an ice floe and flinging herself onto a baby seal during the height of that year’s whitecoat hunt.
Aislin had drawn a baby seal being crushed to Bardot’s bosom in an all-enveloping hug. The reader’s view was full frontal, and all you saw was this widely grinning baby seal’s mouth, the rest of its head fully encased between the twin mounds of Bardot’s renowned chestal array.
The caption was simply, “Je suis phoque.”
For the anglo-unilingual among you, “phoque”, as any young tittering French-as-a-Second-Language student will smirkingly repeat forever, is French for “seal”. That, and the discovery that the French for “dandelion” is “piss-en-lit”, kept that class alive for me in Grade 5.
And if a digression might be allowed, just for the record there is no man’s right answer to a woman’s question, “What do you think of my new hairstyle?” Liking it will elicit comments like, “Oh? You didn’t like my old hairstyle?” And not liking it will be even worse because a new hairstyle is not something easily undone.
I find that keeping a half-full (I’m an optimist) water bottle close to hand allows me to take a pensive swig while seeming to be seriously pondering the answer to such a question. Then I can fake a spluttery coughing fit and wave my hands in a helpless “Excuse me…” gesture while escaping to the nearest Men’s room in order to avoid having to deal with the conundrum.
Either that, or I simply shout out, “Shields Up! Red Alert!” when asked such a question, and run to my bridge battle station at Tactical.
Monday, January 17, 2005
What’s the difference between a Canadian national crisis, a British national crisis and an American national crisis?
Well, in the US, the Bush administration has finally called off its search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, having found none and, in fact, only grudgingly admitting that there probably never were any to be found. Essentially, it also means that up to half a dozen key political figures surrounding, and including, the “Nigerian yellow cake” President baldly lied to the world about circumstances – although they’ve now blamed “faulty intelligence” – used to justify an invasion that so far has caused tens of thousands of deaths, and reduced a foreign country to ruin. It’s doubtful it will ever lead to a Nixonian outcome, but among people who use their entire sense of ethical dimension to evaluate a President’s integrity, Bush’s credibility is simply no more.
In the UK, scant weeks before national observances commemorating the Holocaust, the 20-year old third in line to the Throne (apparently bereft of a public image counsellor) decided that a costume appropriate to a “Natives and Colonials” themed masquerade party was the summer uniform of the German army, complete with swastika armband. The British media, indeed the international media, erupted in shock and somewhat justifiable dismay. Germany has called for an EU-wide ban on public displays of the swastika, and it seems their call has a very good chance of resulting in just such a ban throughout the European Union, spurred by the public media whipping of the Crown Prince, twice removed.
Meanwhile here in Canada, it is “alleged” that a temporary-status immigrant who owned a pizzeria, but who also has a less than stellar record of integrity* and who was seeking asylum in this country, was approached to provide pizzas for campaign workers in the election office of a candidate who went on to become, as luck would have it, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Someone from among her staff, so goes the rumour (for all the accusations are so far unfounded) and perhaps the minister herself, promised that the pizza provider’s magnanimity would not go unrewarded and indeed, in return, the would-be electée would do everything she could to block his scheduled deportation. (Does this sound like the famous Seinfeld “You are a veddy, veddy bad man” episode featuring a hapless immigrant named Babu, http://www.seinology.com/epguide/55.shtml or what?)
* The Globe and Mail summed up the man’s rather checkered background in a paragraph recently:
“Mr. Singh has spent 16 years in Canada, using the country's immigration system and its numerous loopholes in an unsuccessful attempt to stay. Mr. Singh has also been in trouble with the law in Canada: An Ontario Court judge ruled in a civil suit last July that he and his three adult children must repay $900,000 to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Canadian Bank and Toronto-Dominion Bank for their involvement in a massive credit- and debit-card fraud.”
But the biggest difference, of course, is that despite the continent-wide scope of the wayward Royal’s story, and the (pick your travesty) scope of the US administration’s web of lies, it is the Canadian crisis that is the only one of the three, so far, to have resulted in the resignation of the principal, in this case the Minister. “Canada Immigration Minister Quits In Pizza Scandal” was how Reuters broke the story online. So far, thank goodness, “pizzagate” hasn’t yet made it into press.
Oh damn! Spoke too soon: from The Seattle Times, January 15, online edition:
“Canadian politician quits over pizzagate
By Beth Duff-Brown
The Associated Press
TORONTO — A Canadian Cabinet member who once called herself the ‘minister of hopes and dreams’ resigned yesterday amid allegations she promised a pizzeria owner asylum in exchange for free pizza…”
Let’s see: thousands of military and civilian dead, vs a well-educated potential future monarch’s adolescent humour in “colonializing” the deliberate extermination of upwards of 13 million people, vs wangling a couple of free pizzas.
Sigh…
= = = = = = = = = =
Recently I took a sick day off work. At our department, we’ve now instituted a hideously cumbersome computer program that bears the environmentally correct name, “The Paperless Office”. Essentially, it compels you to seek leave approval, report absences, and do anything else you can possibly think of under what used to be called “Personnel”, not by actually speaking to a person who works in the Personnel department, but electronically.
Including, in my case, reporting an absence due to illness.
The program, however, is just not geared to allow reporting your absence after you’ve returned. Because the department in which I work is such a hierarchical environment, you are required instead to obtain approval – after the fact – for having been sick. So you fill out the online form that is a “Request for Leave”; you select “Sick Leave – Uncertified”, (Its opposite, “Sick Leave – Certified” is when you’re away so long, you need a doctor’s note.) and you hit “Send” to dispatch it to your supervisor. But before the system allows it to actually go, you are required to click “OK” in a little box after the following statement:
“I declare on my honour that due to illness or injury I was incapable of performing the duties of my position during the entire period of absence for which the leave is requested as indicated.”
I’ve always wondered about statements like that. It seems to me to be both redundant and oxymoronic. Redundant in that, if you’re an honourable person – a Klingon, say – you’re not going to abuse a sick leave allowance. And oxymoronic if you are a dishonourable person, when the statement might just as well read, “I declare on my honour that I slept in, stayed home and watched TV all day,” for all the personal integrity that you will attach to endorsing a statement that begins “I declare on my honour…”.
= = = = = = = = = =
I think we can now safely add to the list of words that have completely lost whatever import they might once have had, the phrase “Special Edition”.
DVD movies have killed it.
As it relates to movies, it wasn’t too long ago when the “Special Edition” was indeed an edition that was special. Its release on home video meant that a successful director was able to return to the raw material from which he had first crafted his movie, before it was savaged by the sponsoring studio’s money people for any one of a hundred non-creative but more commercially viable motives, and produce the version he really wanted to make.
And if that Director is a genius, the resulting new “Special Edition” might indeed be special.
Now admittedly I haven’t seen enough videocassette or DVD “Director’s Cut”s of theatrically released movies to make the application a universal truism. But recently, what I have noticed is that the flag “Special Edition” means simply that, “We’re releasing the home version of this movie this in a medium with enough resident memory to include every single scene deleted in the editing process, storyboard drawings of scenes we decided were so bad we never even bothered to film them in the first place, theatrical trailers promoting the very movie you’ve just watched! (You sucker!)”
Not to forget, of course, the ubiquitous “Outtakes and Bloopers”, which almost without exception are repeated takes where one or the other of the movie’s stars breaks up laughing or, if he’s Jackie Chan, inadvertently lands on his crotch on a prop he was supposed to clear in the course of doing one of his own stunts.
The exception is in the happy case of funny animated movies where the “outtakes” are mini animated cartoons in and of themselves. (The “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” “outtakes”, for example, are hilarious.)
What? Oh no! You mean you thought computer-generated animated characters actually did make “mistakes” during the filming…?
But so as not to diss entirely the questionable value of the live-action “Director’s Cut”, and to take just one example where I have seen both, I stand in awe and approval of the home-release version of “Blade Runner”. If what Ridley Scott was able to restore to his vision of this dark story is any indication, there’s something to be said for allowing the creative juices to flow freely when the end product is in the hands of a competent and confident visionary.
Here are the essential differences between what was largely a bust in the theatres, but has since come to be seen by many fans as a science fiction classic in the home video “Director’s Cut” release, as outlined in one online summary.
(SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen “Blade Runner” and think you’d like to some day, SKIP RIGHT PAST THE FOLLOWING ITALICIZED PARAGRAPH.):
“The film's screenplay (originally titled Dangerous Days and Android) by Hampton Fancher, and later supplemented by David Peoples, was based on science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Originally filmed without a monotone, explanatory voice-over in a somber, Raymond Chandler-like manner, two elements were demanded by the studio after disastrous preview test screenings: a noirish, somber, flat-voiced narration (written by Roland Kibbe) to make the plot more accessible; a tacked-on, positive, upbeat ending (using out-takes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)), added to the 1982 release (of between 113-117 minutes) Since that time, the 1992 revised 'Director's Cut' (of 117 minutes) was released to mark the film's 10th anniversary with a new digital soundtrack - it dropped Harrison Ford's mostly redundant voice-over and restored the film's original darker and contemplative vision. Many Blade Runner afficionados prefer the subtlety of the film's images in the restored version rather than the slow and monotonous tone of the earlier film with voice-over. The 'director's cut' also substituted a less upbeat and shorter, more ambiguous, non-Hollywood ending, and it inserted a new scene of a 'unicorn reverie' at the end. It also emphasized and enriched the romantic angle between Ford and a beautiful replicant played by Sean Young, and more clearly revealed that Harrison Ford's character was an android himself.”
“Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut” is well worth the viewing and I think I might get it and trundle over to my friend-with-the-home-theatre’s house some day.
But it’s an exception -- and I suspect finds itself in a very small minority, to a generally diluting trend in making the home release version “Special”.
“Bigger vision” does not always mean “better movie”, and if the subject of getting a major studio movie from the brain to the screen explored in all its minutiae really interests anyone, I commend to you a book entitled “Final Cut”, by Steven Bach. The story documents the monumental disaster that can be visited on a movie when a primadonna director, fresh from a major box office success, is given free rein when much clearer studio heads know better that he should be held in close check. (Key words: Michael Cimino, “Heaven’s Gate”, bomb.)
And much to my surprise, Googling it turned up (for me) the hitherto unknown discovery that it apparently spawned a 2004 limited release, but favourably reviewed, film documentary entitled, “Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of 'Heaven's Gate'”.
Of it, one reviewer said, “Even for those of you who do not care much for film or film history; even for those of you who have never seen Heaven's Gate and never want to; the film is about failure, personal and financial, on a grand scale. Though seeing someone flounder miserably is not often fun, shaking your head in hindsight can be.”
Having read and enjoyed Bach’s book, I am definitely putting that one on my “someday” list.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally…
Are we becoming a nation of weather wimps?
On a recent morning of forecast temperatures that were “unseasonably warm” (hovering about the freezing mark), I awoke to a clock radio’s warning that the day carried a “risk of freezing rain”, along with the news that several school boards across the region had already cancelled their bus services even though not a drop or a pellet had landed anywhere within a hundred miles.
If you’ll pardon a “Why, in my day…” indulgence, when I was but a school lad, we used to go to school in all but the most extreme weather – and even then suffered cancellation only in those very rare cases where a large overnight snowfall had not yet been cleared away by morning. If the day’s forecast included a “risk of” anything, up to and including wayward comets, we went to school anyway and if it did turn out the day started delivering “iffy” weather, it meant only that the kids who were bussed in got to leave a little earlier to enable the drivers to complete their routes during winter’s shorter daylight hours.
(Cue the stuffy old club members: “Arrr… Luxury! You ‘ad busses. We used to walk 11 miles, up’ill… all the way to bloody school, then 11 miles back ‘ome, all of it up’ill too!”)
Maybe it’s the advent of a 24-hour national weather channel. You can be watching in Ottawa as the announcers talk in crisis tones of a major winter storm blasting Atlantic Canada. And if, in the very next breath, they talk about a forecast 10-centimetre “blizzard” en route to Ottawa, your brain still hasn’t flushed those Atlantic images so maybe your mind immediately shifts to “OmiGAWD!” mode. I don’t know. (I do know I like this guy! – from The Globe and Mail online, January 17):
“’Fierce storm blankets Atlantic’ (Canadian Press): Halifax — His beard encrusted in a layer of ice, Brian Ferrier snorted with disdain at the latest winter storm to hit Atlantic Canada. ‘The big deal they've been making of it? That's bull,’ Mr. Ferrier said Monday as he dug out his Halifax driveway.’ They must be from the States or pampered all their bloody lives.’ Traffic was light on Halifax streets after up to 39 centimetres of snow fell on the region, disrupting travel and forcing the cancellation of schools, flights and a major political visit.”
Even locally, radio talking heads who’ve probably been watching the same weather channel will often express astonishment when no major closures have been announced despite, “10 centimetres are on the ground and the forecast is for another five before this blows itself through the national capital!”
It’s Canada, people! And it’s January! Get a good pair of boots and a warm coat. And if you’re driving, give yourself a little more time and a little more room between your front end and the guy in front of you’s butt. Stuff like this is why the Good Lord made some boys and girls answer, “snowplow driver”, in response to their Grade 4 teachers' asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Well, in the US, the Bush administration has finally called off its search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, having found none and, in fact, only grudgingly admitting that there probably never were any to be found. Essentially, it also means that up to half a dozen key political figures surrounding, and including, the “Nigerian yellow cake” President baldly lied to the world about circumstances – although they’ve now blamed “faulty intelligence” – used to justify an invasion that so far has caused tens of thousands of deaths, and reduced a foreign country to ruin. It’s doubtful it will ever lead to a Nixonian outcome, but among people who use their entire sense of ethical dimension to evaluate a President’s integrity, Bush’s credibility is simply no more.
In the UK, scant weeks before national observances commemorating the Holocaust, the 20-year old third in line to the Throne (apparently bereft of a public image counsellor) decided that a costume appropriate to a “Natives and Colonials” themed masquerade party was the summer uniform of the German army, complete with swastika armband. The British media, indeed the international media, erupted in shock and somewhat justifiable dismay. Germany has called for an EU-wide ban on public displays of the swastika, and it seems their call has a very good chance of resulting in just such a ban throughout the European Union, spurred by the public media whipping of the Crown Prince, twice removed.
Meanwhile here in Canada, it is “alleged” that a temporary-status immigrant who owned a pizzeria, but who also has a less than stellar record of integrity* and who was seeking asylum in this country, was approached to provide pizzas for campaign workers in the election office of a candidate who went on to become, as luck would have it, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Someone from among her staff, so goes the rumour (for all the accusations are so far unfounded) and perhaps the minister herself, promised that the pizza provider’s magnanimity would not go unrewarded and indeed, in return, the would-be electée would do everything she could to block his scheduled deportation. (Does this sound like the famous Seinfeld “You are a veddy, veddy bad man” episode featuring a hapless immigrant named Babu, http://www.seinology.com/epguide/55.shtml or what?)
* The Globe and Mail summed up the man’s rather checkered background in a paragraph recently:
“Mr. Singh has spent 16 years in Canada, using the country's immigration system and its numerous loopholes in an unsuccessful attempt to stay. Mr. Singh has also been in trouble with the law in Canada: An Ontario Court judge ruled in a civil suit last July that he and his three adult children must repay $900,000 to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Canadian Bank and Toronto-Dominion Bank for their involvement in a massive credit- and debit-card fraud.”
But the biggest difference, of course, is that despite the continent-wide scope of the wayward Royal’s story, and the (pick your travesty) scope of the US administration’s web of lies, it is the Canadian crisis that is the only one of the three, so far, to have resulted in the resignation of the principal, in this case the Minister. “Canada Immigration Minister Quits In Pizza Scandal” was how Reuters broke the story online. So far, thank goodness, “pizzagate” hasn’t yet made it into press.
Oh damn! Spoke too soon: from The Seattle Times, January 15, online edition:
“Canadian politician quits over pizzagate
By Beth Duff-Brown
The Associated Press
TORONTO — A Canadian Cabinet member who once called herself the ‘minister of hopes and dreams’ resigned yesterday amid allegations she promised a pizzeria owner asylum in exchange for free pizza…”
Let’s see: thousands of military and civilian dead, vs a well-educated potential future monarch’s adolescent humour in “colonializing” the deliberate extermination of upwards of 13 million people, vs wangling a couple of free pizzas.
Sigh…
= = = = = = = = = =
Recently I took a sick day off work. At our department, we’ve now instituted a hideously cumbersome computer program that bears the environmentally correct name, “The Paperless Office”. Essentially, it compels you to seek leave approval, report absences, and do anything else you can possibly think of under what used to be called “Personnel”, not by actually speaking to a person who works in the Personnel department, but electronically.
Including, in my case, reporting an absence due to illness.
The program, however, is just not geared to allow reporting your absence after you’ve returned. Because the department in which I work is such a hierarchical environment, you are required instead to obtain approval – after the fact – for having been sick. So you fill out the online form that is a “Request for Leave”; you select “Sick Leave – Uncertified”, (Its opposite, “Sick Leave – Certified” is when you’re away so long, you need a doctor’s note.) and you hit “Send” to dispatch it to your supervisor. But before the system allows it to actually go, you are required to click “OK” in a little box after the following statement:
“I declare on my honour that due to illness or injury I was incapable of performing the duties of my position during the entire period of absence for which the leave is requested as indicated.”
I’ve always wondered about statements like that. It seems to me to be both redundant and oxymoronic. Redundant in that, if you’re an honourable person – a Klingon, say – you’re not going to abuse a sick leave allowance. And oxymoronic if you are a dishonourable person, when the statement might just as well read, “I declare on my honour that I slept in, stayed home and watched TV all day,” for all the personal integrity that you will attach to endorsing a statement that begins “I declare on my honour…”.
= = = = = = = = = =
I think we can now safely add to the list of words that have completely lost whatever import they might once have had, the phrase “Special Edition”.
DVD movies have killed it.
As it relates to movies, it wasn’t too long ago when the “Special Edition” was indeed an edition that was special. Its release on home video meant that a successful director was able to return to the raw material from which he had first crafted his movie, before it was savaged by the sponsoring studio’s money people for any one of a hundred non-creative but more commercially viable motives, and produce the version he really wanted to make.
And if that Director is a genius, the resulting new “Special Edition” might indeed be special.
Now admittedly I haven’t seen enough videocassette or DVD “Director’s Cut”s of theatrically released movies to make the application a universal truism. But recently, what I have noticed is that the flag “Special Edition” means simply that, “We’re releasing the home version of this movie this in a medium with enough resident memory to include every single scene deleted in the editing process, storyboard drawings of scenes we decided were so bad we never even bothered to film them in the first place, theatrical trailers promoting the very movie you’ve just watched! (You sucker!)”
Not to forget, of course, the ubiquitous “Outtakes and Bloopers”, which almost without exception are repeated takes where one or the other of the movie’s stars breaks up laughing or, if he’s Jackie Chan, inadvertently lands on his crotch on a prop he was supposed to clear in the course of doing one of his own stunts.
The exception is in the happy case of funny animated movies where the “outtakes” are mini animated cartoons in and of themselves. (The “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” “outtakes”, for example, are hilarious.)
What? Oh no! You mean you thought computer-generated animated characters actually did make “mistakes” during the filming…?
But so as not to diss entirely the questionable value of the live-action “Director’s Cut”, and to take just one example where I have seen both, I stand in awe and approval of the home-release version of “Blade Runner”. If what Ridley Scott was able to restore to his vision of this dark story is any indication, there’s something to be said for allowing the creative juices to flow freely when the end product is in the hands of a competent and confident visionary.
Here are the essential differences between what was largely a bust in the theatres, but has since come to be seen by many fans as a science fiction classic in the home video “Director’s Cut” release, as outlined in one online summary.
(SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen “Blade Runner” and think you’d like to some day, SKIP RIGHT PAST THE FOLLOWING ITALICIZED PARAGRAPH.):
“The film's screenplay (originally titled Dangerous Days and Android) by Hampton Fancher, and later supplemented by David Peoples, was based on science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Originally filmed without a monotone, explanatory voice-over in a somber, Raymond Chandler-like manner, two elements were demanded by the studio after disastrous preview test screenings: a noirish, somber, flat-voiced narration (written by Roland Kibbe) to make the plot more accessible; a tacked-on, positive, upbeat ending (using out-takes from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)), added to the 1982 release (of between 113-117 minutes) Since that time, the 1992 revised 'Director's Cut' (of 117 minutes) was released to mark the film's 10th anniversary with a new digital soundtrack - it dropped Harrison Ford's mostly redundant voice-over and restored the film's original darker and contemplative vision. Many Blade Runner afficionados prefer the subtlety of the film's images in the restored version rather than the slow and monotonous tone of the earlier film with voice-over. The 'director's cut' also substituted a less upbeat and shorter, more ambiguous, non-Hollywood ending, and it inserted a new scene of a 'unicorn reverie' at the end. It also emphasized and enriched the romantic angle between Ford and a beautiful replicant played by Sean Young, and more clearly revealed that Harrison Ford's character was an android himself.”
“Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut” is well worth the viewing and I think I might get it and trundle over to my friend-with-the-home-theatre’s house some day.
But it’s an exception -- and I suspect finds itself in a very small minority, to a generally diluting trend in making the home release version “Special”.
“Bigger vision” does not always mean “better movie”, and if the subject of getting a major studio movie from the brain to the screen explored in all its minutiae really interests anyone, I commend to you a book entitled “Final Cut”, by Steven Bach. The story documents the monumental disaster that can be visited on a movie when a primadonna director, fresh from a major box office success, is given free rein when much clearer studio heads know better that he should be held in close check. (Key words: Michael Cimino, “Heaven’s Gate”, bomb.)
And much to my surprise, Googling it turned up (for me) the hitherto unknown discovery that it apparently spawned a 2004 limited release, but favourably reviewed, film documentary entitled, “Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of 'Heaven's Gate'”.
Of it, one reviewer said, “Even for those of you who do not care much for film or film history; even for those of you who have never seen Heaven's Gate and never want to; the film is about failure, personal and financial, on a grand scale. Though seeing someone flounder miserably is not often fun, shaking your head in hindsight can be.”
Having read and enjoyed Bach’s book, I am definitely putting that one on my “someday” list.
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally…
Are we becoming a nation of weather wimps?
On a recent morning of forecast temperatures that were “unseasonably warm” (hovering about the freezing mark), I awoke to a clock radio’s warning that the day carried a “risk of freezing rain”, along with the news that several school boards across the region had already cancelled their bus services even though not a drop or a pellet had landed anywhere within a hundred miles.
If you’ll pardon a “Why, in my day…” indulgence, when I was but a school lad, we used to go to school in all but the most extreme weather – and even then suffered cancellation only in those very rare cases where a large overnight snowfall had not yet been cleared away by morning. If the day’s forecast included a “risk of” anything, up to and including wayward comets, we went to school anyway and if it did turn out the day started delivering “iffy” weather, it meant only that the kids who were bussed in got to leave a little earlier to enable the drivers to complete their routes during winter’s shorter daylight hours.
(Cue the stuffy old club members: “Arrr… Luxury! You ‘ad busses. We used to walk 11 miles, up’ill… all the way to bloody school, then 11 miles back ‘ome, all of it up’ill too!”)
Maybe it’s the advent of a 24-hour national weather channel. You can be watching in Ottawa as the announcers talk in crisis tones of a major winter storm blasting Atlantic Canada. And if, in the very next breath, they talk about a forecast 10-centimetre “blizzard” en route to Ottawa, your brain still hasn’t flushed those Atlantic images so maybe your mind immediately shifts to “OmiGAWD!” mode. I don’t know. (I do know I like this guy! – from The Globe and Mail online, January 17):
“’Fierce storm blankets Atlantic’ (Canadian Press): Halifax — His beard encrusted in a layer of ice, Brian Ferrier snorted with disdain at the latest winter storm to hit Atlantic Canada. ‘The big deal they've been making of it? That's bull,’ Mr. Ferrier said Monday as he dug out his Halifax driveway.’ They must be from the States or pampered all their bloody lives.’ Traffic was light on Halifax streets after up to 39 centimetres of snow fell on the region, disrupting travel and forcing the cancellation of schools, flights and a major political visit.”
Even locally, radio talking heads who’ve probably been watching the same weather channel will often express astonishment when no major closures have been announced despite, “10 centimetres are on the ground and the forecast is for another five before this blows itself through the national capital!”
It’s Canada, people! And it’s January! Get a good pair of boots and a warm coat. And if you’re driving, give yourself a little more time and a little more room between your front end and the guy in front of you’s butt. Stuff like this is why the Good Lord made some boys and girls answer, “snowplow driver”, in response to their Grade 4 teachers' asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
We’ll get back to our regular blog, but first here’s a word from The Rantmeister…
It’s difficult to sound unsympathetic about the whole notion of state-mandated public grief, or for that matter public grief whether state-mandated or not, without sounding unsympathetic about the nature of the tragedy that triggered the grieving in the first place.
But I am indeed both: very sympathetic to the victims and their families of the December 26th earthquake and tsunami in the Far East, while very unsympathetic, indeed not a little ticked off, about recent actions connected to it by some of our politicians and some of our media.
On a recent Monday morning, our Ottawa local CBC radio station was lamenting the noticeable absence of much of the “public” from a public ceremony held two days earlier for the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami, on what was declared to have been a “National Day of Mourning”.
The event was held in a local hockey arena. It was attended by the Prime Minister, the Governor General, religious leaders from nine “affected” faiths, relatives of several of the victims and, among seats for 15,000 members of the public, about 400 other people.
It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to the CBC morning person’s distress, if only because he seems to function best when his answers are 15 seconds long, and this is something that requires significantly more than a soundbite to argue.
The event was a huge natural disaster. The victims were ordinary parents and children, pupils and teachers, employers and employees, foreign vacationers and local providers of services for foreign vacationers. In other words, almost no one who was killed or wiped out of home and livelihood was performing any extraordinary task demanded by their country or dictated by their professions. These are not people who died “in the heroic performance (that is, “above and beyond the call”) of their duty.” They were simply going about their day-to-day lives, or taking a vacation from same, when a natural marine catastrophe of vast magnitude smashed unexpectedly onto their shores.
It is an enormous tragedy, and recovery will take years. In some areas, de-salinating sea-poisoned farmland will take a generation. Whole families were wiped out at a stroke; others left with often but one survivor. In minutes, the region’s social roster was re-written to include a significant new population of widows, widowers, unsupported seniors and, perhaps saddest of all, thousands of orphans.
But a cause for a Canadian “National Day of Mourning”? No.
At its worst, it is crass political opportunism for the Prime Minister and Governor General to participate in an arena event to which grief-shocked relatives of the dead and missing were paraded in a public display of their sorrow. Even if Mr Martin and Madame Clarkson personally were there for what they honestly felt were good reasons, it was at best a terribly inappropriate event. For “event” it was.
Why in this day and age of growing public cynicism, politicians still feel they gain by appearing at an opportunistic photo-op, with their heads bowed reverentially, or photographed as they walk among the ruins, is something I have difficulty understanding. And 14,600 people who didn’t show up at the observance would seem to agree with me.
And yet why, I also wonder, do so many people in the larger world outside the “I’ll need a compassionate image for my next election campaign brochure” world of politics seem to feel the need to wallow in the grief of others? It is now a routine part of every tragedy for people completely unrelated to the victims or their relatives to go to the site of the event, whether it was a calamitous accident with a large death toll or a brutal kidnapping and murder of a single victim, and lay flowers, leave notes or, God help us, little teddy bears when the victims are children.
Think of a media-saturated tragic event and think of what images you associate with it: When the Challenger disintegrated on that chilly January 31, 1986 Florida morning – we saw repetition after endless repetition of that image of the shocked, still uncomprehending faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents while they looked upwards at the remnants of the explosion and its sinister, horn-like trail of separating plumes of smoke. When the Princess of Wales died – we were shown repeated close-ups of the poignant “Mummy” card atop a bouquet of white roses on her coffin as it was wheeled sombrely through the streets of London on September 6, 1997. A year and a half earlier, on March 13, 1996, schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland died in the hail of a madman’s bullets – and we saw that terrible image the next day of one shaky little girl pushed reluctantly forward into the camera lights’ glare by her mother to place a bouquet of flowers on the growing mountain of colour at the school’s gate. (That one took me away from watching any television news for a month.)
We have become a world of “grievers” for whom the media no longer simply report the event, they relentlessly seem to feel there is a need to find some way to bring home the tragedy for each and every one of us to share.
And in the process we have given birth to a whole new job description. Stand up, “Grief Counsellors”, to me a most peculiar breed of professional. I can’t help but see them as anything but a collective of psychic wet nurses, who are deployed like some spiritual SWAT team into a community or an institution the moment the bodies are removed from an accident scene, or a crime-related tragedy’s perpetrators are either shot dead or hauled away in handcuffs. When I was growing up, my “grief counsellors” could always be found, indeed could be counted on to be found, among family members, close friends, priests… even in my own brain, firing neurologically along my cranial pathways, in emotional channels nurtured and shaped by my developing lifetime of contact with those same caring people.
But equally unfortunate, to me, is our media’s tendency to unleash their “Gotcha!” attack dogs when "official" response is not what the media feel it should be. In this most recent example, the CBC is exceedingly guilty on this count, having spent the days immediately following the tsunami excoriating the government, in ever-increasing stridency, for its “failure” in getting our Disaster Assistance Relief Team (DART) on the ground only days after the actual event and to a particular point in a geographical region whose boundaries frame a considerable portion of the far east. Never mind the logistics and never mind the local politics, which always transcend disaster. (Already the Prime Minister’s next planned photo-op – a visit to parts of the affected area – is running up against intense lobbying at home for him to make a token visit to that part of Sri Lanka under the control of rebel Tamil Tiger forces.)
“Where was Canada?!” the media still bleat, as though it were a matter no more complex to arrange than shouldering a backpack and taking a bus downtown.
Some reporters even drew the odious comparison that since they found resources to get them to the shattered countries, then so should the government have been able to deploy its relief forces with equal alacrity. Then they are so baldly hypocritical as to focus their coverage on the “growing criticism” -- their own -- of the deployment of our aid.
Here’s a clue, fifth estate members: Pretend your job is not only to get there on someone else’s dime, but also to get there with everything you own, including all your house’s furniture, food and clothing, with none of it broken by the trip halfway around the globe. Then if you can still beat the DART deployment speed, well feel free to criticize the Government.
- 0 -
We now resume our regular focus on the trivial and the unimportant.
= = = = = = = = = =
The Government of Canada keeps forcing me to reset my personal benchmark for the definition of “irony”. Or maybe it’s “hypocrisy”. One of the two. Or both.
Recently, in a grand display of high-dudgeon pissed-offedness over federal-provincial natural resource revenue sharing (“offshore oil money”) negotiations, Newfoundland and Labrador's Premier Danny Williams ordered that all provincial government offices in the province have the Canadian flag removed from their exterior flagpoles.
In response, the Prime Minister delivered this verbal slap at the Premier:
"Let me say that I believe that the Canadian flag should not be used as a lever in any federal-provincial negotiations. ... I don't believe that it should, and I believe that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians don't believe that it should be used as a lever. The flag is a symbol of unity, and it shouldn't be used in terms of differences."
Now this is a man who was Minister of Finance when his governing party embarked on the blatantly propagandist use of the Canadian flag that has come to be known as “the sponsorship program”. Ostensibly, the program was intended to heighten the federal profile at events where federal sponsorship money was provided by setting up public displays of the flag, or a logo-ized version of same, on everything from the beer billboards displayed at a Bryan Adams concert to the (literal, not figurative) horses’ asses cantering along under the derrières of the Mounties in their world-famous Musical Ride.
But for well over a year now, the sponsorship program has been the target of ongoing coverage and a formal investigation into allegations of kickbacks and faked invoices for work that was never done. The investigation aside, the physical manifestation of the program was the Canadian flag. And the investigation has already heard evidence from several key players that they viewed it as a vehicle for suppressing the Separatist messages in the Province of Quebec. Their defence, in other words, has been that when the country itself is at risk, the normal rules of accountability can be waived… can’t they?
(“No,” is the short answer many have since heard in the documentation accompanying the notices of their firings.)
But Lord, it seems to me that if ever there was an example of the flag’s being used as a “lever in any federal-provincial negotiations”, it was in the governing Liberal Party’s ill-advised and horribly monitored sponsorship program.
The best advice I have for our Prime Minister is to recall that old saw about being careful when you point the finger, because your hand’s configuration is always such that three times as many fingers are pointed back at yourself.
Or as internetters so eloquently and concisely put it, “Pot. Kettle. Black.”
= = = = = = = = = =
I found this in Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post humour column, “Below the Beltway” online Jan 4, attributed to “Today’s Express”, datelined Alexandria, Va. (I cite all this only to disclaim that, despite what you’ll think when you hit the end of this brief item, no, I am not making it up.)
“With towering dinosaurs, a Kentucky museum looks like a destination for ‘Jurassic Park’ fans. But the $25 million Museum of Creation, opening this spring, is for fundamentalist Christians, the Daily Telegraph reported Sunday. The centerpieces of the museum, promoting the view that God created man, are huge dinosaurs alongside men, contrary to scientific conclusions that they lived millions of years apart. Market researchers predict at least 300,000 visitors, paying $10 each, in the first year. Other exhibits include a planetarium showing that God made the Earth in six days; a Tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve; the Grand Canyon -- as formed by the Great Flood -- and a reconstruction of Noah's Ark, where visitors ‘hear people outside screaming,’ museum creator Ken Ham said. Other exhibits portray diseases and famine as the result of sin, and blame homosexuals for AIDS.”
And, from the Museum website’s (http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about.asp) “About Us”:
“We also desire to train others to develop a biblical worldview, and seek to expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas, and its bedfellow, a ‘millions of years old’ earth (and even older universe).”
Now I’ll be among the first to admit I’m not opposed to a “biblical worldview” when it begins with sentiments such as those espoused in Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But I’m afraid that any so-called bibilical “scholars” whose followers define their mission in terms of exposing the “bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas” get relegated to my personal encyclopaedia under the W’s, specifically “wingnuts”.
I don’t know whether one can therefore conclude that this must be why church attendance is down, or that this must be why church attendance can only soar as more and more people seek spiritual solace and sanctuary from the secular surrealism exemplified by projects like this “Museum of Creation”.
(“Spiritual solace and sanctuary from the secular surrealism” would’ve been a great title for a song by, oh maybe Three Dog Night, or an album title by Stevie Wonder, but I digress.)
= = = = = = = = = =
(Oh? It wouldn’t be because this thing gobbled louder than the traditional Christmas dinner centrepiece, would it?)
At the December London premiere of his latest epic, Alexander, Director Oliver Stone explained why it flopped in North America. (Despite the surely formidable combined acting dynamics of both Val Kilmer and Angelie Jolie on the screen at the same time, The Toronto Star, for example, said it was "not just a bad movie but a bad movie of truly epic proportions".):
“The Platoon director previously defended his epic of the Macedonian conqueror, saying that it was too complex for ‘conventional minds’. ‘The script was just too ambiguous, too questioning about an action-hero who was masculine/feminine. These are tough qualities in Hollywood,’ the Platoon director said last month. ‘It's just too big a life. It doesn't fit in into the Hollywood formula.’”
There’s the stuff of great artists: “If you don’t like my work, it’s obviously because you just don’t understand it.” (I also noticed they i.d.’d him, twice in this one short paragraph, as the “Platoon Director”. I suspect Stone himself dictated that. After all, calling him the “JFK director” in reference to another of his this-side-of-the-Atlantic box office bombs might suggest a pattern at work.
= = = = = = = = = =
The Continuing Power of Google
Just recently, I plugged another CD into the drive and, just before the door closed and the disk slid out of sight, I noticed a small printed box on the label that proclaimed “GEMA/BIEM”. So I figured why not? And ran it by Google.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to be told that a “Gemabiem” is a twelve-bulb floor lamp available at IKEA. But no, here’s what I discovered:
“On all German releases the word ‘GEMA’ (Gesellschaft für Musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte) is printed. If ‘GEMA/BIEM’ (‘BIEM’ = Bureau International des Sociétés Gérant les Droits d'Enregistrement et de Reproduction Mécanique in Paris) is printed, that means the release is manufactured in Germany and sold in Germany and in the UK as well. You can find differences on labels for the same LP with "GEMA", "GEMA/Biem", "GEMA/BIEM".
I’m a little puzzled about why a recording manufactured in Germany, for sale in the UK as well, needs the approval of a French copyright registration authority – maybe it’s an offshoot of that danged Chunnel – but at least Google spit out the answer to my question in a number of seconds measured by a single digit.
= = = = = = = = = =
Unusual names update
Next in a series, of what appears to be a developing theme here:
From the Stetson University (DeLand, Florida) Varsity Basketball team biography website:
“Grlenntys Chief Kickingstallionsims, Jr. was born September 15, 1986 in Pompano Beach, Florida ... Son of Grlenntys Sr. and Barabar Kickingstallionsims ... Majoring in Sports Management ... Name means "strenghth of the fallen rocks" ... At 19 letters, has the longest last name in Stetson and Atlantic Sun Conference basketball history ... Is believed to be the tallest player in Stetson history ... Has a shoe size of 18.5 ... Can touch the net flat-footed ... Father is part Native American.”
To that last point, I can only say, “My gosh, what are the odds that a child named, in part, 'Chief Kickingstallionsims', would have Native roots…?”
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, here’s a sparkling example our tax dollars at work.
It’s official; it’s time to take down the Christmas lights. Being the National Capital Region, Ottawa each year festoons its publicly owned spaces with Christmas lights, hundreds of thousands of Christmas lights. Each year, in fact, the “throwing of the switch” is the highlight of a celebratory event held on Parliament Hill. The resulting illumination is not quite the Griswolds power-grid-evaporating event featured in the movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, but it is a major explosion of colour and sparkle.
On a recent morning walk to work, I passed a site where the job of taking the Christmas lights down and putting them away for another year was underway.
What does the phrase, “taking the Christmas lights down and putting them away” suggest to you (mechanically, not emotionally, I mean)? If you’re like me, it suggests giving some thought to at least being able to re-use them and, thus, to store them with sufficient care that their re-use next year won’t be an exercise on a par with trying to unsnarl a badly miscast fishing line.
What I watched was one of those hydraulic lift trucks extend a platform -- like a roofless cage with chest-high rails all around -- containing two workers up and over a huge tree onto which were strung dozens of strands of multi-coloured lights. They reached down, grasped a couple strands and then proceeded to raise their platform straight up, and far above the tree. As they did so, the attached strands were simply yanked from the branches over which they had been draped and the entire conglomeration rose with them like some fibrous shroud. The mechanical sound of the lift’s elevation was augmented by the sound of the snapping of dozens of small frozen branches, which cascaded down as the lift progressed.
But what happened next utterly astonished me. Like Newfoundland dorymen hauling in their jigging lines, the two platform-bound workers simply pulled the snarled light strings into their cage, over the metal rail that completely surrounded them. No lifting, just dragging. As the lights collided with the metal rail, they began shattering and the two workers performing this act simultaneously triggered so many explosions of bursting bulbs it sounded like a cheap movie’s attempt to reproduce machine gun fire. Thousands of coloured bits of broken lightbulbs cascaded from a height of about six storeys as the snow-covered ground swiftly became littered with this glass confetti.
Yes, it was cold this morning and no doubt the workers’ desire was to minimize the amount of time they had to spend about 70 feet up in the breeze. And there was a supervisor on the ground who watched the whole thing. But he seemed interested only in making sure no pedestrians walked under the shower of shards – not in the massive amount of waste his crew was producing. Which suggested to me that this method was business as usual.
On the Internet, the acronym, “WTF??” appears frequently. (The first two words in that acronym are “What The…”) That certainly crossed my mind as I hurried along past the crystal carnage, to the audio accompaniment of the D-Day landing scene in “The Longest Day”.
But what I’d really like to do is to get a peek at their budget (read our expense) for replacing broken bulbs. Because I have a suggestion to make the next time they announce they have no alternative but to once more hike that portion of our tax bill that goes to the National Capital Commission’s Electrical Festive Spirit Enhancement Division.
Enhance this!
It’s difficult to sound unsympathetic about the whole notion of state-mandated public grief, or for that matter public grief whether state-mandated or not, without sounding unsympathetic about the nature of the tragedy that triggered the grieving in the first place.
But I am indeed both: very sympathetic to the victims and their families of the December 26th earthquake and tsunami in the Far East, while very unsympathetic, indeed not a little ticked off, about recent actions connected to it by some of our politicians and some of our media.
On a recent Monday morning, our Ottawa local CBC radio station was lamenting the noticeable absence of much of the “public” from a public ceremony held two days earlier for the victims of the Boxing Day tsunami, on what was declared to have been a “National Day of Mourning”.
The event was held in a local hockey arena. It was attended by the Prime Minister, the Governor General, religious leaders from nine “affected” faiths, relatives of several of the victims and, among seats for 15,000 members of the public, about 400 other people.
It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to the CBC morning person’s distress, if only because he seems to function best when his answers are 15 seconds long, and this is something that requires significantly more than a soundbite to argue.
The event was a huge natural disaster. The victims were ordinary parents and children, pupils and teachers, employers and employees, foreign vacationers and local providers of services for foreign vacationers. In other words, almost no one who was killed or wiped out of home and livelihood was performing any extraordinary task demanded by their country or dictated by their professions. These are not people who died “in the heroic performance (that is, “above and beyond the call”) of their duty.” They were simply going about their day-to-day lives, or taking a vacation from same, when a natural marine catastrophe of vast magnitude smashed unexpectedly onto their shores.
It is an enormous tragedy, and recovery will take years. In some areas, de-salinating sea-poisoned farmland will take a generation. Whole families were wiped out at a stroke; others left with often but one survivor. In minutes, the region’s social roster was re-written to include a significant new population of widows, widowers, unsupported seniors and, perhaps saddest of all, thousands of orphans.
But a cause for a Canadian “National Day of Mourning”? No.
At its worst, it is crass political opportunism for the Prime Minister and Governor General to participate in an arena event to which grief-shocked relatives of the dead and missing were paraded in a public display of their sorrow. Even if Mr Martin and Madame Clarkson personally were there for what they honestly felt were good reasons, it was at best a terribly inappropriate event. For “event” it was.
Why in this day and age of growing public cynicism, politicians still feel they gain by appearing at an opportunistic photo-op, with their heads bowed reverentially, or photographed as they walk among the ruins, is something I have difficulty understanding. And 14,600 people who didn’t show up at the observance would seem to agree with me.
And yet why, I also wonder, do so many people in the larger world outside the “I’ll need a compassionate image for my next election campaign brochure” world of politics seem to feel the need to wallow in the grief of others? It is now a routine part of every tragedy for people completely unrelated to the victims or their relatives to go to the site of the event, whether it was a calamitous accident with a large death toll or a brutal kidnapping and murder of a single victim, and lay flowers, leave notes or, God help us, little teddy bears when the victims are children.
Think of a media-saturated tragic event and think of what images you associate with it: When the Challenger disintegrated on that chilly January 31, 1986 Florida morning – we saw repetition after endless repetition of that image of the shocked, still uncomprehending faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents while they looked upwards at the remnants of the explosion and its sinister, horn-like trail of separating plumes of smoke. When the Princess of Wales died – we were shown repeated close-ups of the poignant “Mummy” card atop a bouquet of white roses on her coffin as it was wheeled sombrely through the streets of London on September 6, 1997. A year and a half earlier, on March 13, 1996, schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland died in the hail of a madman’s bullets – and we saw that terrible image the next day of one shaky little girl pushed reluctantly forward into the camera lights’ glare by her mother to place a bouquet of flowers on the growing mountain of colour at the school’s gate. (That one took me away from watching any television news for a month.)
We have become a world of “grievers” for whom the media no longer simply report the event, they relentlessly seem to feel there is a need to find some way to bring home the tragedy for each and every one of us to share.
And in the process we have given birth to a whole new job description. Stand up, “Grief Counsellors”, to me a most peculiar breed of professional. I can’t help but see them as anything but a collective of psychic wet nurses, who are deployed like some spiritual SWAT team into a community or an institution the moment the bodies are removed from an accident scene, or a crime-related tragedy’s perpetrators are either shot dead or hauled away in handcuffs. When I was growing up, my “grief counsellors” could always be found, indeed could be counted on to be found, among family members, close friends, priests… even in my own brain, firing neurologically along my cranial pathways, in emotional channels nurtured and shaped by my developing lifetime of contact with those same caring people.
But equally unfortunate, to me, is our media’s tendency to unleash their “Gotcha!” attack dogs when "official" response is not what the media feel it should be. In this most recent example, the CBC is exceedingly guilty on this count, having spent the days immediately following the tsunami excoriating the government, in ever-increasing stridency, for its “failure” in getting our Disaster Assistance Relief Team (DART) on the ground only days after the actual event and to a particular point in a geographical region whose boundaries frame a considerable portion of the far east. Never mind the logistics and never mind the local politics, which always transcend disaster. (Already the Prime Minister’s next planned photo-op – a visit to parts of the affected area – is running up against intense lobbying at home for him to make a token visit to that part of Sri Lanka under the control of rebel Tamil Tiger forces.)
“Where was Canada?!” the media still bleat, as though it were a matter no more complex to arrange than shouldering a backpack and taking a bus downtown.
Some reporters even drew the odious comparison that since they found resources to get them to the shattered countries, then so should the government have been able to deploy its relief forces with equal alacrity. Then they are so baldly hypocritical as to focus their coverage on the “growing criticism” -- their own -- of the deployment of our aid.
Here’s a clue, fifth estate members: Pretend your job is not only to get there on someone else’s dime, but also to get there with everything you own, including all your house’s furniture, food and clothing, with none of it broken by the trip halfway around the globe. Then if you can still beat the DART deployment speed, well feel free to criticize the Government.
- 0 -
We now resume our regular focus on the trivial and the unimportant.
= = = = = = = = = =
The Government of Canada keeps forcing me to reset my personal benchmark for the definition of “irony”. Or maybe it’s “hypocrisy”. One of the two. Or both.
Recently, in a grand display of high-dudgeon pissed-offedness over federal-provincial natural resource revenue sharing (“offshore oil money”) negotiations, Newfoundland and Labrador's Premier Danny Williams ordered that all provincial government offices in the province have the Canadian flag removed from their exterior flagpoles.
In response, the Prime Minister delivered this verbal slap at the Premier:
"Let me say that I believe that the Canadian flag should not be used as a lever in any federal-provincial negotiations. ... I don't believe that it should, and I believe that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians don't believe that it should be used as a lever. The flag is a symbol of unity, and it shouldn't be used in terms of differences."
Now this is a man who was Minister of Finance when his governing party embarked on the blatantly propagandist use of the Canadian flag that has come to be known as “the sponsorship program”. Ostensibly, the program was intended to heighten the federal profile at events where federal sponsorship money was provided by setting up public displays of the flag, or a logo-ized version of same, on everything from the beer billboards displayed at a Bryan Adams concert to the (literal, not figurative) horses’ asses cantering along under the derrières of the Mounties in their world-famous Musical Ride.
But for well over a year now, the sponsorship program has been the target of ongoing coverage and a formal investigation into allegations of kickbacks and faked invoices for work that was never done. The investigation aside, the physical manifestation of the program was the Canadian flag. And the investigation has already heard evidence from several key players that they viewed it as a vehicle for suppressing the Separatist messages in the Province of Quebec. Their defence, in other words, has been that when the country itself is at risk, the normal rules of accountability can be waived… can’t they?
(“No,” is the short answer many have since heard in the documentation accompanying the notices of their firings.)
But Lord, it seems to me that if ever there was an example of the flag’s being used as a “lever in any federal-provincial negotiations”, it was in the governing Liberal Party’s ill-advised and horribly monitored sponsorship program.
The best advice I have for our Prime Minister is to recall that old saw about being careful when you point the finger, because your hand’s configuration is always such that three times as many fingers are pointed back at yourself.
Or as internetters so eloquently and concisely put it, “Pot. Kettle. Black.”
= = = = = = = = = =
I found this in Gene Weingarten’s Washington Post humour column, “Below the Beltway” online Jan 4, attributed to “Today’s Express”, datelined Alexandria, Va. (I cite all this only to disclaim that, despite what you’ll think when you hit the end of this brief item, no, I am not making it up.)
“With towering dinosaurs, a Kentucky museum looks like a destination for ‘Jurassic Park’ fans. But the $25 million Museum of Creation, opening this spring, is for fundamentalist Christians, the Daily Telegraph reported Sunday. The centerpieces of the museum, promoting the view that God created man, are huge dinosaurs alongside men, contrary to scientific conclusions that they lived millions of years apart. Market researchers predict at least 300,000 visitors, paying $10 each, in the first year. Other exhibits include a planetarium showing that God made the Earth in six days; a Tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve; the Grand Canyon -- as formed by the Great Flood -- and a reconstruction of Noah's Ark, where visitors ‘hear people outside screaming,’ museum creator Ken Ham said. Other exhibits portray diseases and famine as the result of sin, and blame homosexuals for AIDS.”
And, from the Museum website’s (http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about.asp) “About Us”:
“We also desire to train others to develop a biblical worldview, and seek to expose the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas, and its bedfellow, a ‘millions of years old’ earth (and even older universe).”
Now I’ll be among the first to admit I’m not opposed to a “biblical worldview” when it begins with sentiments such as those espoused in Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But I’m afraid that any so-called bibilical “scholars” whose followers define their mission in terms of exposing the “bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas” get relegated to my personal encyclopaedia under the W’s, specifically “wingnuts”.
I don’t know whether one can therefore conclude that this must be why church attendance is down, or that this must be why church attendance can only soar as more and more people seek spiritual solace and sanctuary from the secular surrealism exemplified by projects like this “Museum of Creation”.
(“Spiritual solace and sanctuary from the secular surrealism” would’ve been a great title for a song by, oh maybe Three Dog Night, or an album title by Stevie Wonder, but I digress.)
= = = = = = = = = =
(Oh? It wouldn’t be because this thing gobbled louder than the traditional Christmas dinner centrepiece, would it?)
At the December London premiere of his latest epic, Alexander, Director Oliver Stone explained why it flopped in North America. (Despite the surely formidable combined acting dynamics of both Val Kilmer and Angelie Jolie on the screen at the same time, The Toronto Star, for example, said it was "not just a bad movie but a bad movie of truly epic proportions".):
“The Platoon director previously defended his epic of the Macedonian conqueror, saying that it was too complex for ‘conventional minds’. ‘The script was just too ambiguous, too questioning about an action-hero who was masculine/feminine. These are tough qualities in Hollywood,’ the Platoon director said last month. ‘It's just too big a life. It doesn't fit in into the Hollywood formula.’”
There’s the stuff of great artists: “If you don’t like my work, it’s obviously because you just don’t understand it.” (I also noticed they i.d.’d him, twice in this one short paragraph, as the “Platoon Director”. I suspect Stone himself dictated that. After all, calling him the “JFK director” in reference to another of his this-side-of-the-Atlantic box office bombs might suggest a pattern at work.
= = = = = = = = = =
The Continuing Power of Google
Just recently, I plugged another CD into the drive and, just before the door closed and the disk slid out of sight, I noticed a small printed box on the label that proclaimed “GEMA/BIEM”. So I figured why not? And ran it by Google.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to be told that a “Gemabiem” is a twelve-bulb floor lamp available at IKEA. But no, here’s what I discovered:
“On all German releases the word ‘GEMA’ (Gesellschaft für Musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte) is printed. If ‘GEMA/BIEM’ (‘BIEM’ = Bureau International des Sociétés Gérant les Droits d'Enregistrement et de Reproduction Mécanique in Paris) is printed, that means the release is manufactured in Germany and sold in Germany and in the UK as well. You can find differences on labels for the same LP with "GEMA", "GEMA/Biem", "GEMA/BIEM".
I’m a little puzzled about why a recording manufactured in Germany, for sale in the UK as well, needs the approval of a French copyright registration authority – maybe it’s an offshoot of that danged Chunnel – but at least Google spit out the answer to my question in a number of seconds measured by a single digit.
= = = = = = = = = =
Unusual names update
Next in a series, of what appears to be a developing theme here:
From the Stetson University (DeLand, Florida) Varsity Basketball team biography website:
“Grlenntys Chief Kickingstallionsims, Jr. was born September 15, 1986 in Pompano Beach, Florida ... Son of Grlenntys Sr. and Barabar Kickingstallionsims ... Majoring in Sports Management ... Name means "strenghth of the fallen rocks" ... At 19 letters, has the longest last name in Stetson and Atlantic Sun Conference basketball history ... Is believed to be the tallest player in Stetson history ... Has a shoe size of 18.5 ... Can touch the net flat-footed ... Father is part Native American.”
To that last point, I can only say, “My gosh, what are the odds that a child named, in part, 'Chief Kickingstallionsims', would have Native roots…?”
= = = = = = = = = =
And finally, here’s a sparkling example our tax dollars at work.
It’s official; it’s time to take down the Christmas lights. Being the National Capital Region, Ottawa each year festoons its publicly owned spaces with Christmas lights, hundreds of thousands of Christmas lights. Each year, in fact, the “throwing of the switch” is the highlight of a celebratory event held on Parliament Hill. The resulting illumination is not quite the Griswolds power-grid-evaporating event featured in the movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, but it is a major explosion of colour and sparkle.
On a recent morning walk to work, I passed a site where the job of taking the Christmas lights down and putting them away for another year was underway.
What does the phrase, “taking the Christmas lights down and putting them away” suggest to you (mechanically, not emotionally, I mean)? If you’re like me, it suggests giving some thought to at least being able to re-use them and, thus, to store them with sufficient care that their re-use next year won’t be an exercise on a par with trying to unsnarl a badly miscast fishing line.
What I watched was one of those hydraulic lift trucks extend a platform -- like a roofless cage with chest-high rails all around -- containing two workers up and over a huge tree onto which were strung dozens of strands of multi-coloured lights. They reached down, grasped a couple strands and then proceeded to raise their platform straight up, and far above the tree. As they did so, the attached strands were simply yanked from the branches over which they had been draped and the entire conglomeration rose with them like some fibrous shroud. The mechanical sound of the lift’s elevation was augmented by the sound of the snapping of dozens of small frozen branches, which cascaded down as the lift progressed.
But what happened next utterly astonished me. Like Newfoundland dorymen hauling in their jigging lines, the two platform-bound workers simply pulled the snarled light strings into their cage, over the metal rail that completely surrounded them. No lifting, just dragging. As the lights collided with the metal rail, they began shattering and the two workers performing this act simultaneously triggered so many explosions of bursting bulbs it sounded like a cheap movie’s attempt to reproduce machine gun fire. Thousands of coloured bits of broken lightbulbs cascaded from a height of about six storeys as the snow-covered ground swiftly became littered with this glass confetti.
Yes, it was cold this morning and no doubt the workers’ desire was to minimize the amount of time they had to spend about 70 feet up in the breeze. And there was a supervisor on the ground who watched the whole thing. But he seemed interested only in making sure no pedestrians walked under the shower of shards – not in the massive amount of waste his crew was producing. Which suggested to me that this method was business as usual.
On the Internet, the acronym, “WTF??” appears frequently. (The first two words in that acronym are “What The…”) That certainly crossed my mind as I hurried along past the crystal carnage, to the audio accompaniment of the D-Day landing scene in “The Longest Day”.
But what I’d really like to do is to get a peek at their budget (read our expense) for replacing broken bulbs. Because I have a suggestion to make the next time they announce they have no alternative but to once more hike that portion of our tax bill that goes to the National Capital Commission’s Electrical Festive Spirit Enhancement Division.
Enhance this!
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
As one of my first blogging acts of this bold new year, I find myself in the position of having to issue an apology to a fairly select group of people – new arrivals to Canada who play the accordion.
In my last post of 2004, I was sarcastically critical of a roving accordion player’s choice of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as a Christmas selection with which to regale us at our office complex’s food court. I even went so far as to speculate that the apparently unfortunate melody might have resulted from a recent arrival to one of our three coasts’ unfamiliarity with Christmas music, and who had limited his research to a Google search of “Glory Hallelujah”.
I believe that in England they have an expression, “Well I’ll be gob-smacked!”
Well, I’ll be that for sure.
On Friday the 24th of December, I treated myself to a cab ride home at noon when the office closed, because I had to drive for six hours to get where I wanted to be for Christmas Eve, and I wanted to get home to my car and on the road as quickly as possible. (As it turned out, the entire population of government workers in the National Capital Region thought precisely the same thing that day, and we got snarled in a large traffic jam along a road leading to the Queensway, the major East-West road through the city… but I digress.)
As I sat in the traffic-jammed cab mentally checklisting everything I had to do at home before heading out, I suddenly changed my half-listening to the cabbie’s radio station to all-listening as I realized I was listening to the music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but with French-language lyrics and a vocal chorus that replaced “His truth is marching on” with “Chantez, chantez Noel” (“Sing, sing Christmas”).
After Christmas, I paid a hasty internet visit to the home of my online friend, Google, and to my amazement turned up a French language Christmas carol called “Glory Alleluia”.
Well, I’ll be gob-smacked. (*)
(*) From Worldwide Words:
“[Q] From W S McCollom: ‘I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?’
[A] It’s a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further. The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It’s a combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means ‘utterly astonished, astounded’. It’s much stronger than just being surprised; it’s used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool, where it was common. It’s an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like ‘shut your gob!’ to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.”
But I… oh, you know.
So from one who should have realized that in a work location on the Quebec side of the river that separates Ottawa (Ontario) from Gatineau (Quebec), he might have expected to hear a uniquely French Christmas carol, please consider this a lavish apology to, oh let’s see, accordion players, Italians, Italian accordion players, new immigrants, old immigrants – both if they are accordion players – (and just to be on the safe side, Romanian exotic dancers).
Here it is (to the tune of, yep, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”):
“Glory Alléluia!
La plus belle nuit du monde (“Mine eyes have seen the glory…”)
C'est cette nuit de Noël
Où des bergers étonnés
Levèrent les yeux vers le ciel
Une étoile semblait dire:
"Suivez-moi, je vous conduis.
Il est né cette nuit!"
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!
Ils ont suivi cette étoile
Sur les chemins de Judée
Et des quatre coins du monde
D'autres les ont imité
Et ce chant, comme une source,
A traversé le pays
Il est né cette nuit!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!
La plus belle nuit du monde
C'est cette nuit de Noël
Où, au coeur de tous les hommes,
Un peu d'amour descend du ciel
Tant de choses les séparent
Cette étoile les unit
C'est la plus belle nuit!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!”
(I hope your French is enough to appreciate the quite lovely sentiments conveyed by these lyrics, especially in that last verse.)
= = = = = = = = = =
OK, so there may be worse things to be called than “Phinnaeus”. Recalling some of my earlier eloquent waxings of Julia Roberts’s choice of names for her twins (Hazel and Phinnaeus), this note appears in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia (“pronounced ‘Albin’”???):
“Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced ‘Albin’) was a name given to a Swedish child by his parents in May 1996. A district court in Halmstad, southern Sweden, had fined the parents (Elizabeth Hallin and ?) 5,000 kronor (approximately US$680 or €550) for failing to register a name for the boy by his fifth birthday. (The parents had planned to never legally name the child at all.) Responding to the fine, the parents submitted the 43-character name, claiming that it was ‘a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation’, and suggesting that it should be seen in the spirit of pataphysics. The court rejected the name, and upheld the fine.”
= = = = = = = = = =
Happy New Year, everyone! The Year of the Green Wooden Rooster / Chicken is about to be launched on the Chinese calendar and yes, there are some depths to which even I will not sink. (Grateful sighs caress a few monitors scattered across the continent.)
In my last post of 2004, I was sarcastically critical of a roving accordion player’s choice of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as a Christmas selection with which to regale us at our office complex’s food court. I even went so far as to speculate that the apparently unfortunate melody might have resulted from a recent arrival to one of our three coasts’ unfamiliarity with Christmas music, and who had limited his research to a Google search of “Glory Hallelujah”.
I believe that in England they have an expression, “Well I’ll be gob-smacked!”
Well, I’ll be that for sure.
On Friday the 24th of December, I treated myself to a cab ride home at noon when the office closed, because I had to drive for six hours to get where I wanted to be for Christmas Eve, and I wanted to get home to my car and on the road as quickly as possible. (As it turned out, the entire population of government workers in the National Capital Region thought precisely the same thing that day, and we got snarled in a large traffic jam along a road leading to the Queensway, the major East-West road through the city… but I digress.)
As I sat in the traffic-jammed cab mentally checklisting everything I had to do at home before heading out, I suddenly changed my half-listening to the cabbie’s radio station to all-listening as I realized I was listening to the music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but with French-language lyrics and a vocal chorus that replaced “His truth is marching on” with “Chantez, chantez Noel” (“Sing, sing Christmas”).
After Christmas, I paid a hasty internet visit to the home of my online friend, Google, and to my amazement turned up a French language Christmas carol called “Glory Alleluia”.
Well, I’ll be gob-smacked. (*)
(*) From Worldwide Words:
“[Q] From W S McCollom: ‘I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?’
[A] It’s a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further. The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It’s a combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means ‘utterly astonished, astounded’. It’s much stronger than just being surprised; it’s used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool, where it was common. It’s an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like ‘shut your gob!’ to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.”
But I… oh, you know.
So from one who should have realized that in a work location on the Quebec side of the river that separates Ottawa (Ontario) from Gatineau (Quebec), he might have expected to hear a uniquely French Christmas carol, please consider this a lavish apology to, oh let’s see, accordion players, Italians, Italian accordion players, new immigrants, old immigrants – both if they are accordion players – (and just to be on the safe side, Romanian exotic dancers).
Here it is (to the tune of, yep, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”):
“Glory Alléluia!
La plus belle nuit du monde (“Mine eyes have seen the glory…”)
C'est cette nuit de Noël
Où des bergers étonnés
Levèrent les yeux vers le ciel
Une étoile semblait dire:
"Suivez-moi, je vous conduis.
Il est né cette nuit!"
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!
Ils ont suivi cette étoile
Sur les chemins de Judée
Et des quatre coins du monde
D'autres les ont imité
Et ce chant, comme une source,
A traversé le pays
Il est né cette nuit!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!
La plus belle nuit du monde
C'est cette nuit de Noël
Où, au coeur de tous les hommes,
Un peu d'amour descend du ciel
Tant de choses les séparent
Cette étoile les unit
C'est la plus belle nuit!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Glory, Glory Alléluia!
Chantez, chantez Noël!”
(I hope your French is enough to appreciate the quite lovely sentiments conveyed by these lyrics, especially in that last verse.)
= = = = = = = = = =
OK, so there may be worse things to be called than “Phinnaeus”. Recalling some of my earlier eloquent waxings of Julia Roberts’s choice of names for her twins (Hazel and Phinnaeus), this note appears in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia (“pronounced ‘Albin’”???):
“Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced ‘Albin’) was a name given to a Swedish child by his parents in May 1996. A district court in Halmstad, southern Sweden, had fined the parents (Elizabeth Hallin and ?) 5,000 kronor (approximately US$680 or €550) for failing to register a name for the boy by his fifth birthday. (The parents had planned to never legally name the child at all.) Responding to the fine, the parents submitted the 43-character name, claiming that it was ‘a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation’, and suggesting that it should be seen in the spirit of pataphysics. The court rejected the name, and upheld the fine.”
= = = = = = = = = =
Happy New Year, everyone! The Year of the Green Wooden Rooster / Chicken is about to be launched on the Chinese calendar and yes, there are some depths to which even I will not sink. (Grateful sighs caress a few monitors scattered across the continent.)
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