In a television news item about Jerusalem pilgrims who, at Easter, follow the 14-station Way of the Cross, traditionally believed to be the route taken by Christ to His Crucifixion, you explained to us all:
“The route, Via Dolorosa, also known as the Way of Suffering, is…”
Well as others before me have articulated, duh, because that’s the English translation of the two-word Latin phrase.
“Also known as” (often rendered as “a.k.a.”, or “alias”), is correct when used in a form like: “Al Capone, also known as ‘Scarface’...” or “General George Patton, a.k.a. ‘Old Blood and Guts’...”, but not, “The restaurant offers as an opener a soupe de jour, also known as soup of the day.”
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Finally got around to watching “Shut up and Sing”, a documentary about the country girl group, The Dixie Chicks, that covers three years of the now-legendary chill that swamped their collective careers when lead singer Natalie Maines, in a bit of between-song off-the-cuff banter at a 2003 concert in London, England, said, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
As a media analyst, I was especially interested in some of the discussion the band had with their manager about the spin of subsequent messages, but I was also disappointed at how quickly such moments passed in the film with little more than a scratch at the surface of the passion that some of that discussion must have produced.
In many ways, the film also reminded me of the style used by Frank Capra in a set of masterful propaganda films produced for American home consumption during World War II entitled “Why We Fight”. Capra used miles of footage taken from enemy newsreels – German, Italian and Japanese – and in many cases simply cut them into his own material with no further comment. US theatre-goers were hammered with images of seas of swastikas, bobbing in rank after endless rank at thunderingly militaristic assemblies like the Nuremberg rallies and, on the other side of the world, crowds of Japanese soldiers shouting “Banzai” as they thrust their bayonet-tipped rifles skyward. No doubt theatre-goers from Manhattan to San Diego all came swiftly to the same conclusion, “This is NOT EVER what we want to be!” So off they went to war to prevent just such an outcome.
Similarly, the producer of “Shut Up and Sing” includes several cuts of various inhabitants of the White House – Rumsfeld, Cheney and the man himself – stating unequivocally, “We know he [Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction…” And in the wake of Maines’ statement, there are also many cutaways to the variety of my-country-right-or-wrong-but-it-ain’t-never-wrong protesters who would turn out to Dixie Chicks concerts simply to wave anti-them, pro-Bush placards at the band’s fans as they went into the arenas. One especially ugly little clip shows a mother prompting her arm-held toddler to mouth an appropriate sentiment, which the kid does, having no idea at all what he’s (a) saying and (b) learning.
Maines and her colleagues have since penned more than a couple of songs whose lyrics are driven by the emotion of what happened to them. In a song with the admittedly groan-inducing title of “Lubbock or Leave It”, Maines sings a couple lines in tribute to her home town’s other musical hero, Buddy Holly, who was also driven away – in his case for choosing to play rock and roll in a 1950s environment where such music was generally believed to have been birthed in Hell:
“As I'm getting out I laugh to myself
Cause this is the only place
Where as you're getting on the plane
You see Buddy Holly's face
I hear they hate me now
Just like they hated you
Maybe when I'm dead and gone
I'm gonna get a statue too.”
Watching “Shut Up and Sing”, we have the advantage now of five years – and growing – of hindsight, magnified by the fact that roughly 90 per cent of the now 4,000-plus US war dead were killed after the president made his appalling appearance under that infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner. But the film is especially interesting in that you get to see it unfold as it happens – the excoriation of the band by its country-radio base, and their collective resolve to continue to sing, but to seek an audience without using radio play. It turned out to be a decision that, in 2007, resulted in their winning every last one of the Grammy Awards in all five of the categories for which they were nominated.
The Dixie Chicks, admittedly, are fortunate to be playing in an era of exploding video music, and their regeneration campaign was not hurt in the least by the fact that not only are they pretty good musicians on a variety of stringed instruments, they are also three very attractive women.
And 25 or 30 years earlier, the power of a radio boycott probably would have crushed them. (This photo is a shoot they did for the cover of Entertainment magazine. They have adorned themselves with a selection of the labels hurled at them by a minuscule representation of their e-mailing critics -- the negatives were directed at the women; the positives were how their critics self-identified. The partial label, just visible lower left, is "Saddam's Angels". The band's own message, front and centre, is "Free Speech".)
Even acknowledging the contemporary perks available for pretty people in a visually-driven medium, it is gratifying to watch as "Shut Up and Sing" chronicles their determination and their talent as it turns into the reward of sell-out concerts. And while it does not appear in the film -- because its conclusion predates the 2007 Grammy triumph -- YouTube has a lovely video of Joan Baez introducing them at the Grammies by reminding the audience of Woody Guthrie’s anthem, “This land is your land; this land is my land”, then turning the stage over to the Dixie Chicks to deliver their slap in the face to people who just want them to get over it:
“I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting.”
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Another movie rant…
Actually, to be completely accurate, a rant about the medium, not the message.
Someday, I might watch another movie on Atlanta’s “Peachtree” network. But in order for that to happen, it’s either going to have to be a documentary about the extracurricular aerobics program at the Scandinavian Air Services Stewardess School, or a movie about me.
I came to that decision while watching a movie recently that Peachtree absolutely butchered for the sake of jamming in as many commercials as could possibly be jammed in without actually changing the title of the program to “two and a half hours of commercials with occasional movie cutaways”.
But more than just the fact of the commercials’ intrusion, it was what Peachtree chose to cut in order to shoehorn the advertising into their time block that prompted this rant. (Peachtree, for the trivialists in the room, is how Turner Broadcasting rebranded itself in October 2007. They were WTBS-TV; now they’re WPCH-TV. Cute, eh?
(SPOILER ALERT: At this point – a warning. If you have never seen “Mr Holland’s Opus” and plan to see it someday, you will want to jump ahead to the next “ = = “ break, because the following few paragraphs include one huge plot spoiler and several of my comments that enlarge on it.)
I like the movie, “Mr Holland’s Opus”. It begins as one man first enters the teaching profession in the mid 1960s with the idea that teaching high school music will provide him with an income while he works on his real love – composing his own music. It doesn’t take a huge leap to know that by the movie’s end, of course, it will turn out that it is the teaching of music that will have become his first love, that he will prove to be very good at it; and that at least two generations of music students will have become the better for having gone through Mr Holland’s class.
In one of the movie’s more affecting moments (affecting, at least, not for those people watching on this channel, but rather those lucky enough to have seen it previously either uninterrupted or on a channel where the advertising supports the movie, not vice-versa), there is an hilarious scene that features the debut of the high school’s first-ever marching band. In a scene lasting just a few dozen seconds (or at least so the director intended), you the viewer have your emotions jarringly whipped about when a huge fire engine horn blast has disrupted the band’s lively march-tempo rendition of “Louie Louie”, forcing the spectators to cover their ears. The brief scene concludes with the camera drawing you slowly around to focus on Mr and Mrs Holland’s toddler, sleeping blissfully in a stroller through the entire sonic blast.
And suddenly you realize with a shock of irony that the son of the man to whom music is everything has been born deaf. It is, as some might say, a mightily impactful scene.
But what Peachtree did was to cut away from the parade scene for a fresh wave of commercials mere seconds before that fire truck horn explodes intrusively into the band’s music. And after the commercials, Peachtree picked up the movie not at that point, but in the next scene (!!), an office where an audiologist is quietly explaining the depth of their son’s condition to the stunned parents. By axing the dramatic power of the previous scene for the sake of one more friggin’ round of commercials, to my mind Peachtree committed an act of robbery – pure and simple – and one perpetrated specifically on the viewing audience.
It’s actually the first movie with which I’ve had a strong familiarity that I’ve watched on Peachtree (but not the first movie I’ve sat through with them). Incidentally, they do something else I have to acknowledge that I find clever but really, really irritating. It only takes a few minutes to discover that this channel is really about sucking you in and then top-weighting their movie showings with ads, but as each ad break approaches its end, what Peachtree does is to drop the volume way down so that when you return to the movie, the soundtrack is so distantly muted that you inevitably seize the remote and whack the volume way up.
Only gradually does Peachtree restore the broadcast volume to the level at which you were viewing the movie, at which point you presumably use your remote to reduce the volume until the cycle repeats.
This is no big deal if what you’re doing is only watching the movie, remote easily to hand. But if you’re doing something else – folding laundry, say – while the movie is on, you’re just going to leave the volume up. And thus has Peachtree quite cleverly dealt with people who routinely turn the sound down during commercials.
So to the hundreds of thousands of regular Baby Duck readers – don’t watch movies on Peachtree. It’s a waste of time, and what the excisors do is cruel and unusual punishment for movie fans. You’ll only come away angry.
Unless, of course, it’s a documentary about the extracurricular aerobics program at the Scandinavian Air Services Stewardess School.
Or it’s about me. Then by all means go for it.
But skip the commercials.
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Yes, the following is yet another verbatim transcript of a memo we recently received by e-mail at work. I’d apologize for inflicting it on you, but it’s so painfully hilarious, it deserves to be here in toto. It's about employee use of the massive parking garage under our office complex. Full at the best of times, the garage’s limited number of spaces are restricted even further for the next few years as entire sections are in the process of being sequentially shut down to undergo a complete refurbishment. (I don’t just mean wash the floors. Years of neglect and salt damage have done serious damage to the concrete and its embedded rebar. By the time the retro-refit is done, the entire multi-storey indoor parking garage will effectively have been completely rebuilt.) So the bureaucrats who manage the process put together what passes for their heads and decided the only fair way would be to assign spaces based on a combination lottery / priority ranking (to accommodate the Minister’s staff and senior managers, of course, for whom “fairness” is to be found in their dictionaries as an alternate meaning for “anathema”).
What follows, in the absolute best traditions of Canadian government bureaucracy, are the rules. (And yes, “’looses’ their parking privileges”, near the end, appears here exactly as it appeared in the original e-mail.):
Questions and Answers for Managers: Parking Re-assignment Project
1. Why does the Department re-assign parking privileges?
Parking privileges are re-assigned every three years in order for all employees to apply under a fair and transparent application process.
2. How is parking allocated?
Available parking is assigned in priority sequence as follows:
a: Crown-owned vehicles;
b: Persons with a certified disability;
c: Specially designated employees from the Minister's Office, the Deputy Minister's Office or the Deputy Head's Office;
d: Points.
3. How are points calculated?
Points are calculated, based upon the information received in the application, as follows:
A. Distance to place of work
One (1) point will be awarded for each kilometre you must travel from your residence to your place of work, including the distance you must travel to take a dependent to a caregiver.
Maximum – 20 points
B. Car Pools
Ten (10) points will be awarded for each additional permanent departmental employee accompanying the driver on a daily basis subject to verification by the NHQ Departmental Parking Administrator. Each member of a car pool is required to apply for parking. The applicant with the highest number of points will be the parking permit holder.
Maximum – 40 points
C. Inadequacy of Public Transportation
Distance
When calculating the nearest bus stop from the employee’s permanent residence, the following point allocation will apply:
One (1) kilometre = 1 point
Each additional kilometre = 1 point
Maximum – 10 points
Frequency of Bus Service
The following calculations are based on the bus schedule from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
20 minutes = 2.5 points
30 minutes = 5 points
40 minutes = 7 points
50 minutes = 10 points
60 minutes = 15 points
Maximum – 15 points
D. Length of Continuous Service
One (1) point will be awarded for each year of continuous, unbroken service in the federal government as of January 1 in the applicable year.
Maximum – 35 points
E. Salary
One (1) point will be awarded for each multiple of $1,000 of substantive group and level salary over $20,000, calculated as of January 1 in the applicable year.
Maximum – 25 points
F. Management Category
Members of the EX1 and EX2 Management Category are assigned 75 points.
Members of the EX3 to EX5 Management Category are assigned 100 points.
G. Vehicle Classification
No points will be deducted if the vehicle has 4 cylinders.
Five (5) points will be deducted if the vehicle has 6 cylinders.
Fifteen (15) points will be deducted if the vehicle has 8 or more cylinders.
Five (15) points will be added if the vehicle is classified as a “Hybrid” (Transport Canada approved Hybrid vehicles).
4. What happens if a person "looses" their parking privileges under the re-assignment project?
Should a person receive insufficient points to be granted parking privileges, they will receive a 90 days notice to make other arrangements. They must return their parking permit and shield before the end of the 90-day period.
5. On a percentage basis, what groups get the most parking privileges?
Following is a table that demonstrates, on a percentage basis, what some of the larger classification groups have been assigned in terms of parking. It should be noted, other than the EX category, classification group has no influence on assignment of parking.
Group No. of persons assigned parking Percentage of total parking spots
AS 158 21%
CS 140 19%
EX 146 20%
PM 152 20%
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This year during Spring break, the family went to New York City. And that, as you might have suspected, is an introduction to the next few miles of Baby Duck text. But first, this teaser:
(from “On the Town”):
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down
The people ride in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!
(musical interlude)
The famous places to visit are so many,
So the guys would say,
I know my grandpa wouldn't miss any in just one day
Gotta see the whole town,
From Yonkers on down to the bay, in just one day.
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,
The people ride in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town
(musical interlude)
We sailed the seas and played a bit of poker way in Mandalay,
We've walked the streets till the night was over,
And we can safely say, the most fabulous sight is New York
In the light of day, our only day.
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,
The people ride in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!
Manhattan women are all dressed in satin, so the fellows say,
There's just one thing necessary in Manhattan,
When you just have one day,
Gotta pick up a date, maybe seven or eight,
By your way, in just one day.
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,
The people ride in a hole in the ground,
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!
My introduction – actually our introduction – to New York City was singularly scary. As our aircraft was on final approach to LaGuardia – so final that the end of the runway had actually passed beneath our wing and the rooftops of not-too-far-away buildings just two or three storeys high were already flush with our altitude (or lack thereof) – suddenly the engines changed from their easy descent glide power into take-off howl and our aircraft climbed steeply skyward.
The aircraft was not enormous and from where I was sitting I could actually see the flight attendant in her rearward facing seat mounted on the closed cockpit door. She grabbed a microphone and said immediately, “Ladies and gentlemen, as soon as I’ve got some more information about that, I’ll get right back to you.”
The pilot, having obviously completed as much of our abrupt climbout from the LaGuardia landing pattern as he felt was necessary, levelled the plane off at a single-digit multiple of thousands of feet, then opened his own microphone and with almost clinical calm, announced, “Uh… ladies and gentlemen, I decided they hadn’t been quite quick enough at removing some equipment from the runway so we’re going to do another go ‘round and we expect to be ‘wheels-on-the-ground’ in about ten minutes. Our apologies.”
(In airport parlance, “equipment” can cover a range of things from vehicles as small as one of those little tractors that tow planes around to a Boeing 747. I don’t know what we were about to hit, but based on the abruptness of our up-and-away acceleration, avoiding it had probably been a nearer thing than anyone aboard likely would want to know. Recalling the pilot’s calm tone, I marvelled at what must have been a rather swift emotional modulation from what I was sure had to have been a “HOLY %#$@!~!!!” moment in the cockpit just seconds, if not fractions of seconds, before he executed his runway-abort in a manoeuvre that would have done credit to an F-18 Hornet pilot being waved off a bad approach to the flight deck of the USS Nimitz.)
So we flew a frankly delightful wide circle around the Manhattan skyline (not exactly as pictured here, but close),
which offered me my first-ever view of such structural icons as the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges, and the utterly magnificent art-deco sky-piercing sisters: the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.Welcome to New York.
More, of course, to follow. Until la prochaine.