Language Arts

I haven’t looked this up yet, but what are the two most popular “event” shows on TV? I assume No. 1 is the Super Bowl, but the Oscars must not be far behind. I don’t think I have missed an Oscar telecast in half a century.

One of the first production numbers out of the box this year was the Gay Men’s Chorus singing, “We Saw Your Boobs” as part of a bit with William Shatner playing Captain Kirk. Whether you think the bit was funny or misogynistic, for me that wasn’t quite the point. If the same number were to hit the air 30 years ago, the plug would have been pulled after about 10 seconds. Now it’s everyday humor.

A friend of mine has a 5-year-old son. She and he watched the Oscars together, and the next day, the little boy was running around the house singing, “We Saw Your Boobs,” which, of course, was less than thrilling for his mom.

When I was growing up, “boobs” were fools, not part of a woman’s body. I have always hated the latter use of this word, feeling that it’s demeaning to “breasts,” but even that word is a euphemism for “glands,” which is what they are, but kind of an ugly word, and not nearly as nice as the euphemism. Curious that we generally don’t have nicer words for our parts, male as well as female, but I think the late George Carlin was in this space long ago.

Cut to Washington, D.C. this week, where Speaker John Boehner, upset that the Senate hadn’t taken action on a bill sent over by the House, called on senators to “get off their ass.”

Another friend of mine – a woman -- who was actually defending the “boobs” song, was more upset about Boehner’s quip, and said that while “boobs” might be demeaning, “ass” was a curse word. That was a new one on me. I think the DBU, the Donkeys and Burros Union, might have something to say about this!

When I was in boarding school, we had to attend chapel, and at Christmas, the selected hymns were carols. When we got to the line, “Ox and ass before Him bow,” there was always a little snickering on the part of some.

My favorite use of this word, though, was in an edition of New West Magazine many years ago. It was a display ad for a public relations agency in L.A. whose name escapes me now, so I’ll have to make one up. In any case, it featured a donkey standing on the stripe in the middle of a two-lane road, and the wording was, “At Bartleby and Goldblatt, we put our ass on the line every day for our clients!”

So where am I going with this discussion, aside from bemoaning the degradation of our language in public discourse? Maybe it’s just an SEO scheme on my part to see if the use of these words will drive traffic to this blog. I’ve already tried "porn" and "knockoff handbags" as tags. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Oscarization

This is America, and what we do here really well is the award ceremony. There are few greater turn-ons in life than listening to the crackle of the paper as that envelope is opened, and we find out if our opinion has been validated, or in some cases, if we won our money. 

Almost every professional pursuit now has an annual awards ceremony. Some even do it more often. When I was in radio news, I occasionally had to cover local meetings of community service clubs if there were an important speaker. I went to one luncheon that included an awards ceremony, which must have lasted three hours. Every member of the organization received an award. At the end, they made the emcee leave the stage, so that they could give him one.

Even I have received a few awards (for broadcasting), so have attended more than a few ceremonies. At first, the organizations I was part of gave out relatively few awards, but then they started adding categories – in part, of course, so they could collect more contest entry fees. But that made the ceremonies longer, and in some, they allowed the recipients to give acceptance speeches – BIG mistake in a broadcasting awards event. My organizations did not use the Oscar technique of saving the biggies for the end – they did those first so the TV anchors could get back to their stations for the 11 p.m. news. I was getting a “smallie” on one particular night, so my time was close to the end, and I had to give a speech to those few remaining in the banquet hall. It was about 1 a.m., and not having much to say that hadn’t been said, I offered to take those left in the audience out for early breakfast. I had enough cash on me to cover them easily.

The Oscars, of course, are special. Tonight, I have a rather elaborate party to go to. The first thing we have to do is fill out Oscar ballots with our picks for all the categories, and we each chip in a buck to the pot, which the ballot with the most correct answers wins. This year, it’s interesting, as there are more than a few horse races. And some of the partygoers are serious – they do heavy research on this. Americans don’t like to lose—ANYTHING.

Also for this party, the guests are asked to bring a food item related to a nominated movie. In some cases, this is easy (French bread for “Les Mis”). For others, it’s hard (Canadian wine for “Argo”?). But if you need help, there’s apples for “Lincoln,” pie for “Life of Pi,” or Philly cheese steaks or crab dip for “Silver Linings Playbook” – even Raisin Bran for that one if you’re cheap. I have a relative who’s especially excited, as he’s a James Bond fan, and as “Skyfall” is nominated in several categories, he gets to mix shaken-not-stirred martinis in his very own 007 shaker. I think we’re going to be driving him home.

BTW, the food items don’t always have to be completely edible, they can be symbolic. I remember spending an afternoon gluing peas in lines to a paper plate for “The Aviator.” My wife had to construct an elaborate papier-mache chocolate dessert for “The Departed.” We also made substitutions of edible for inedible items: pate for cat food (“District 9”). I can’t remember what we did for one called “Winter’s Bone” – had to come up with something for Tennessee squirrel stew.

But don’t get me wrong. I love the Oscars. I was watching when Sasheen Littlefeather picked up one for the protesting Marlon Brando, and when someone named Bob “streaked” across the stage, and David Niven made a deliciously British remark about that fellow’s “shortcomings.”

In the end, the Oscars represent an increasingly rare phenomenon in the modern world: the true collective experience. We need to hang on to those while we can.

Wall to Wall to Wall...?

One of my hobbies is listening to the live streams of radio stations in local cities where news is breaking, as I was once a radio news director. This week, I listened to a station in Kansas City, where a huge explosion and fire engulfed a popular downtown restaurant, killing one and injuring many others.

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The discussion on the talk portion of the station’s programming involved not only the circumstances of the fire, but also the coverage of it in local electronic media. The hosts on the station I was listening to noted that the previous evening, the station’s broadcast of the University of Missouri basketball game was interrupted to cover the breaking news. Many listeners approved – but a few complained about missing their game. Similarly, a TV station in town that offered wall-to-wall coverage of the explosion and fire got complaints that popular TV shows were being pre-empted. One young woman texted, “We get that there’s a fire in Kansas City, but can’t we see ‘The Bachelor’?”

Journalism purists like me were shocked that audiences could be so callous about a breaking news event. But one caller on the radio station today came to their defense. “Showing the same fire footage over and over,” he said, “and repeating the same information several times does not constitute ‘coverage.’”

When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, radio stations did not drop their regular programming. Of course, they had no tape to replay over and over, so they simply reported the news they had and went back to their regular programs. That was all people expected. If they wanted a full report, they waited until their evening network news show.

These days, stations could do the same thing, if they wanted: report the information available, then return to regular programming until there was new information. But they don’t – sometimes, ”wall-to-wall” is the way to go.

But why? Is it to serve the public and make sure that the station is there for them in a time of crisis? Sure – but there’s more to it than that. The other part is, “How can I show up better than my competitors? If we don’t do it, will they?” Then there’s the issue of a viewer or listener tuning in for information in an “off” moment and finding only regular programming, then searching for the station that’s doing the coverage  -- which often involves the same reporter/anchor babble until the next hard information becomes available.

And some potential audience members just don’t care. Are they lesser human beings who have failed to evolve? Or are they actually entitled to a legitimate choice?

Different strokes, as they say, for different folks.

Just Another Day in the Universe

What on Earth (literally) is going on here? Meteors hitting Russia? Asteroids flying by closer than our communications satellites? Were the Mayans right after all?

Turns out, Earth has seen this movie before. Our lifetimes are so short, and our historical attention spans so limited, that we may think something is “happening,” but it’s all part of a very big routine, occurring on a low frequency that’s at the edge of our ability to process it.

Meteors have hit Russia before, and cosmically speaking, not all that long ago. Something very large hit northern Siberia in 1908, laying waste to vast stretches surrounding the point of impact. It was truly devastating, but it affected a relatively unpopulated area, so few were around to record it – plus, it was before the era of modern communications.

Something very big created Meteor Crater in Arizona long ago. It’s a nice tourist attraction now. Lucky you weren’t camping nearby, right? Another enormous crater, this one the remains of a volcano, is a huge tourist attraction in Oregon: Crater Lake. It used to be Mount Mazama, which erupted thousands of years ago, covering much of the Northwest in feet of ash.

In our recent past, there was a 9-point earthquake in Japan. But what about the historic quakes that have happened in unlikely places? The New Madrid quakes in the early 19^th century featured two bigger than 8 points in Missouri. There have been significant damaging earthquakes in places like Charleston, South Carolina (1886) and Boston (1755).

Don’t forget the enormous 1859 solar flare that caused telegraph wires to burn. If the same thing happened today, what would happen to the North American electrical grid?

I’m sorry that this post isn’t going to help you sleep better at night. It’s not about defending ourselves against these cataclysms – that’s a little above my pay grade, other than to tell you to have the usual emergency supplies on hand.

But these events occur periodically, maybe just to remind us that on a cosmic scale, s*** happens, and that we don’t have as much control over events as we like to think we do. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Cluster Fubar

Just in case anyone’s wondering, the “F” in Fubar can also stand for Fouled (Up Beyond All Repair).

Christopher Dorner is dead, as best can be determined at the moment, and that’s a good thing, but Tuesday was bizarre in many respects. It was Mardi Gras day, and then there was that other thing…oh, yeah, I forgot, the State of the Union address.

The Dorner incident, for the most part, did not represent journalism’s finest hour, as reporters badgered the PR people for the LAPD and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office with stupid, repetitious questions, calling on them to “speculate.” On the other hand, one television reporter for KCAL-TV in Los Angeles performed almost heroically, relaying the sound through his cell phone of an intense gun battle between Dorner and the cops. It was historic audio, as one anchor observed.

There were conflicting reports about Dorner being dead and in the burning cabin. “Multiple sources” told reporters that he was dead; the LAPD said no body had been found yet, and that as far as they were concerned, he was still alive. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s spokeswoman said that authorities believed that Dorner couldn’t have escaped, even though the body hadn’t been found. LAPD kept saying it was San Bernardino’s case all along, so why their spokesperson had to comment at all, I don’t know. The media were blamed for running with the dead-Dorner story without confirmation, but if multiple people, perhaps some wearing uniforms, tell you something happened, you’re inclined to believe it, right?

Did the Dorner incident say anything about guns in America? No; he was an ex-cop, trained in all those things. It perhaps does say something about how quickly respected and well-trained people can become unbalanced.

But it must be hard walking down the streets of Hollywood now, with all the saliva flowing from movie producers’ mouths over this one. I have no doubt we’ll see the premiere happen early next year, if not sooner.

The Big Thaw

Spring is only a few weeks away. The ice, still solid enough on northern lakes to support heavy trucks, is imperceptibly weakening as the sun angle increases a few degrees each day. When the ice finally starts to break up and water reappears, it will seem as if it happened all of a sudden, but the process will have started much earlier – we just couldn’t detect the evidence of it.

It’s my feeling that thaws are breaking out all over. Take immigration reform – an insoluble problem for decades. But Romney lost the election, many say, because of the Latino vote. It wasn’t some wild political swing. For decades, Latinos have been having more children than folks of other ethnicities – there are simply more of them, but the evidence is only now making headlines. True, not all Latinos are Democrats, but a lot voted that way. So now even Republicans are talking about immigration reform. Positions frozen for decades are unfreezing.

The same is happening with gun control, although it took a terrible tragedy to spur the breakup of long-frozen positions on that score. The NRA is no longer a solid block of immovable ice, or at least the block is smaller than it once was. Women will be officially allowed combat roles in the military – unthinkable until this month. Will widely accepted gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana be next? I wish the big thaw would extend to tax reform, but that ice is pretty thick yet.

Then there’s the economy. The struggling stock market has actually been improving for years, but it seems like it happened just last week, when the Dow closed above 14,000 for the first time in recent memory. Home sales are increasing; money is flowing again.

Even internationally, I hear ice cracking. Iran has agreed to return to the talks on its nuclear program. Is this simply deception, or is a hard frozen position melting? Even some members of the Syrian opposition are no longer ruling out talks with the brutal Assad regime.

Is common sense actually starting to bloom? I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced something is going on. Spring is a hard season not to like.