Saturday, February 28, 2004
AND FASTER, TOO!
It is odd that what appears to be the first serious efforts in a long time to attempt to clean up our entertainment a bit, should happen at the very time that violence seems to have peaked at a new, higher level.
Two seemingly unrelated incidents are involved.
The first was the unfortunate decision made , it appears, by two mediocre young performers who decided to spice up their rhythmic talk and gyrations routine during the Half-Time “show” at this year's Super Bowl game. No one expected much from the show which was billed well ahead of time as a sleeze showing to include cheer leader-type girls undressing. A bare bosom would not be out of place, exactly, yet when Justin Timberlake tugged at Janet Jackson's costume blouse enough came off to reveal one-each bare breast.
People were shocked! If one compares the incident with scores other entertainment acts on stage the very day, theirs was kindergarten stuff, at best.
The time was right, however, and millions of people - many who did not even see the act - condemned it and spilled ink and phone calls all around the world bemoaning the low depths to which our moral life had descended.
Now all that took place a good three weeks or so before Rosie O'Donnell and her homosexual companion were officially “married” in freaky Frisco along with three-thousand other such couplers. Rather than “capping the climax” that public display knocked the bottom out of the lowest level to which we had fallen by that time.
Meanwhile, back at the entertainment ranch...
An old violence theme had been re-done and was being made ready for the public with great care and detailed planning. It will take a while for society to understand the relationship of the Janet Jackson bare breast bit and the intensely hyped introduction of Mel Gibson's R-rated film masterpiece: “The Passions Of The Christ”
It appear that Mel Gibson has successfully pulled off an old stunt done on a fine but much smaller scale many years ago here in Virginia. Robert Porterfield started his famed “Barter Theater “in wrongdoing, Virginia That was home to him and he knew his family roots well. He knew he had to be very careful about bringing actors and actresses to the rural area in any number. To many “locals” actors and actress were symbols pf “loose living”. Upon their arrival, Porter field already had a plan at work. H He held orientation sessions with them and on the following Sunday morning, and the very first after their arrival they scattered and appeared as earnest twosomes s with a natural desire to be in church of a Sabbath morn. They knew the hymns, joined in the singing with much interest and seemed at ease with the litany of the varied services. They met and mingled with the people and formed actual friendships in those first weeks .The idea of having resident theatrical troupe in the community ceased to bother the long-time residents. They worked together to make the “Barter Theater” the success it became even in those Great Depression times. Admission to the theater productions could be – and often was - done by bartering of local food and products. They locals became an important part of the theater itself. A host of stars came from the companies on stage at the Barter Theater, Abingdon. Robert Butterfield, actor and manager won over a supporting audience at the very start for a chancy, doubtful project and Mel Gibson has done the very same thing on a grander, national scale by gaining the support of religious leaders and church members before the premiere of his masterpiece - “The Passions Of The Christ”.
The film, which was R-rated because of excessive violence would have had a tremendous uphill battle without his pre-showing screenings to church groups before the film was shown to general public. The Gibson gambit worked well. It worked so well that books will be written about it.
Then ,following those two events, we find a sudden flurry of activity from regulatory agencies causing one network to kick Howard Stern off the air in six leading markets... that's “s-i-x.” Suddenly new legislation surfaces seeking to apply present limitations to cable TV as well as over-the-air transmissions. “Cool the cable” seem to have become the watchword for a clean-up crusade with some. Most telling of all is the fact that ABC-TV has set,for the first time, a mandatory five-second delay of the forth coming Academy Awards Presentations program, which gives producers a change to delete profanity, obscenities and who-knows-what-else which may be tried?
I have worked with two second delay on talk radio and we became quite comfortable with it on the doing end. Two second delay enabled us to cut quite a few nasty expressions, cuss words and indecent references without those notable “bleep” sounds. A five-second delay makes you wonder what ABC-TV is expecting to meet with during the Academy Awards speeches.
A.L.M. February 27, 2004 [c856wds]
Friday, February 27, 2004
HOW MUCH?
I find it difficult to understand how a car dealer can offer me, and anyone else, “over four thousand dollars” back, if I agree to buy one the cars he sells.
He must have a dependable stock of money which allows him to make such and offer, which he, himself, terms as being a “generous”one. I have never been a real threat to any sixth grade math student, but I do add and subtract well enough to realize that he is talking nonsense. He is a person whom the American Indians warned us of years ago.
We might easily become skewered on his “forked tongue” if we head his message for rush right down to buy a car while we can get this fine rebate. The amount of money he says he will return to you, we find, makes reference only to your cash purchase of the most expensive model expensive model of the finest car he can offer, If he kept one in stock in his showrooms, he could show it to you. The price tag on such a unit is astronomical and he could well afford to discount up to four thousand dollars and still make his well-known “killin'”. You find that the refund on the smaller, less-padded, crummier, maintenance-prone model you want to buy brings his “generous” offer:down to around $2.37 cent a week for two weeks, unless you buy a special Service Package he has available just for you, your refund can be goosed a bit up to the double digest area.
It's the old “bait and switch” con routine under a slightly different guise, and its continued on the v-screen, on the radio waves and in print.
If you listen carefully, read with intense suspicion and have a short of double vision to see through glamorous settings and dancing dollars, you can avoid much of the heartache and, possibly years of financial servitude.
When someone offers me a sum back, I have a deep feeling that is almost the exact overcharge he would otherwise be making on my purchase, or those of others, if he had not been so overcome by his sense community responsibilities and of fairness in his business whatever the product may be.
I question refunds, rebates, and other forms of inducement gimmicks.
A.L.M. February 26, 2004 [c402wds]
Thursday, February 26, 2004
TALK ABOUT BEING “BIG!”
We have all been well-schooled concerning about the the size of the State of Texas really is as a state, then , along came Alaska, and Texas seemed puny.
An metaphorical story has a young Texan couple deciding whom should tell Junior the facts of life. Finally, the father agreed: “Okay, you tell him all about the birds and the bees, and I’ll tell him about Alaska!”
But many citizens of the lower forty-eight, are woefully ignorant of the dimensions of the State of Alaska. It makes Texas seem puny.
If you could pickup the entire chunk of real-estate we call Alaska . Break it away from Canada in a straight line, and place it over a comparably-sized map of the United States and your will see some convincing evidence of it's large size.
Someone who has done that sort of thing tells me that if you place the southern end of the the map of Alaska over the edge of Florida on the map you will find a chunk of it goes up into Canada above the Great Lakes area and the west end extends to within a few miles of Santa Barbara, California.
Alaska has varied, uneven coastline dotted with an uncounted number of islands and it is bounded by three distinct bodies of water.
Three coasts? There’s another informational trap awaiting us. If you were a contestant on a TV quiz show you might well be asked: “What bodies of water border the State of Alaska?” Most of us would say “Pacific Ocean” and we would be one-third right. Everything above the long string of the Aleutian Islands is the Bering Sea and along the north coast is the Arctic Ocean. Two oceans and one ocean-sized sea.
The west end of the State of Alaska is the island of Attu ,scene of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II. Today the total population consists of twenty-four weather station personnel on assignment to the lonely outpost. Attu is said to have been the last place in the world to enter the 2lst Century. Alaska spans six time zones. It would be seven if someone had not decided to make a little box around Attu to keep it in the same time zone with others nearby.
Anyway you might look at it – Alaska is big.
A.L.M. February 25. 2004 [c415wds]
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
TIME'S UP, BEN!
Are you getting about as tired as I am watching them hunt for Ben-what's-his name- up there in those rocky Afghan “hills”. The call them “hills”on TV, but they begin to look more like “mountains” to me after a while of watching two locals stumbling around in the boulders for a few minutes.
It has been a rather a long one of those “whiles” since we first started searching for Ben Laden in those desolate mountain crag and craglet tes. We need to find him so he can be charged with a host of bad things he has done .He eludes everything we can do to smoke him out.
I have to admit I have ever been a fan of old lady detectives but I talked with two older women recently who had BL.'s capture worked out to a state nearing “possible.”. One of the ladies had just been involved in a family situation in which a little boy locked himself in the family's only bathroom and refused to come out. The mother had asked to unlock the door and come out, then, pleaded with him, then had lapsed into a series of potential punishments - in a succeeding series of steadily increasing violence – which screamed “unless you come out within the next three minutes.!” Father tried. Aunt Bessie came over and took a whirl at it. No luck. Night fell.
Two ladies came calling at just that moment and were told, tearfully of the family's plight of the moment.
The ladies stood silent for a moment, then bade the family be seated and to remain quiet whatever happened, and asked if they might “take a crack” at the problem..
One lady leaned close to the mother; whispered a few words and turned to the other as they left the room together . “It is at the bottom of the basement steps...on the wall on the left side. Gimme two minutes.“
Suddenly total darkness total darkness. The family listened for any sounds of struggle upstairs. None. They waited. and The lights came on and they were surprised to see the one lady and the boy standing in the doorway. The other lady was standing behind in the hall.
To get Ben L. to show himself,the ladies suggest three months of absolute, total news blackout - not a mention of him anywhere. Then, start a steady praise campaign for a former friend of his ”taking over”. Curiosity and envy will bring Ben Laden out. You'll never get him by threatening worse-and-worse punishments. Make him think of natural reasons for coming out of hiding. Then, just knock on his door.
A.L.M. February 24, 2004 [c496wds]
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
TRADITIONS
Each generation fashions its own traditions.
We as a nation, are, obviously, an example to others. We are also constantly revising and modifying that which we either are, or want to become. In our gradual development we respect the traditions which have been handed down to our generation but we accept them only to certain degree. One might, for example, long for the seemingly quiet and peaceful home life of an era long gone. We want to bring such conditions back once more, but we will insist that it also include the air-conditioning we have found is good and needed. Without such advanced comforts, the formal traditions go unused.
The idea of altering traditions is not new. We have been changing the pattern regularly ever since we we as misfits from various levels of European society. We came to our new home rather heavily laden with a host of traditions from one or more of our points of origin. We quickly found that such guide lines have to be be modified to meet local needs. Some of our traditions hold firm,but outward aspects of the would not be recognized by our ancestors.
,
Many of those who arrived in the new country liked it at once and settled down in the Eastern coast. Others, discontent, moved westward into a unknown wilderness seeking their niche in the affairs of the world. Each of them is building traditions based on those which may have guided their lives to an important degree.
Awareness of the important of traditions in our lives is often triggered by news events. Right new. we are in such a period of alertness by the deliberate disobedience of the Laws in California and in New Mexico, by men and women enamored by the gay marriage problems. Homosexual society challenges many of our fundamental views and many bi-sexual persons are being forced to question their stance. We go through such periods of doubt from time to time. ..suffering, as it were, through times of war and times of peace. but this particular affront to our sensibilities has been made a political issue in our elections over the years by those who are desperate to get into a command position once again. It will take longer to re-set our values this time,. perhaps, but tradition will, I think, win in the final rounds.
Too many people think of traditions as being restrictive, sanctuary cells, staid, lifeless hulks of history. True traditions are the hallmarks of venture for each of us, leading into the promising and demanding future which we anticipate, desire and even dread at one and the same time..
A.L.M. February 23, 2004 [c456wds]
Monday, February 23, 2004
February 23, 2004
WERE WE THAT STUPID?
Do you realize that it was four years or so ago when you, and many of your fellow citizens, were seriously concerned about the end of our world?
- The new century was approaching day-by- day and each new morning thousands of people were filled with anew with fears of the disaster which would most certainly befall mankind with the coming of the 2lst Century. Many placed their fear on the back of the computers which had so recenlty come to control much of our movement and thought. Many individuals predicted. quite seriously, that our financial world would fall into ruin because the computers in our banks and in our industrial plants could not tell tell one century from another. Or, others thought that ignorant men and women had programmed the computers incorrecty to deal with the future and that things would go to pot overnight once the century ended. I remember one case in which a demonic individual was said to have set it all up that way so hat he could take ove the world as a hacker-dictator of some sort and put Adolph Hitler and his type to shame forever.
It all sounds so silly now, doesn't it? Just a few years later we laugh about it and marvel that people could have been so stupid. Of course, we did not believe any such things, did we? Others did so, but not us. Only unthinking, unstudied, uneduated people would fall for such foolishness, we say.
The same sort of non-think fantasies happened in the prime days of radio when thousands of people from all over the nation ,in various educational and social levels, ran wild before the dramatic presenttioan of Orson Wells's play "Other Worlds". " Millions", we like to say, were conviced the events were takong place a t that moment. The Earth was being invaded by demonic space creatures and machines...but more people than we like to admit went to some pretty far-out extremes because of their misjudgment. One couple in southwestern Virgnia went outside, I remember, and took axes to their radio antenna poles, because they understood that the aliens were coming into even such remote loations as theirs by means of radio wave travel.
There is one case I would like to check out. in particular. Though much the yezar oi 199 systematically invested every cent he could beg, borrow or otherwise acquire, in stocking his mountain side home as a fortress against the arrival - sure and certain - of a re-poackaged disaster such a nature and magnitude tghat man had never known before. He installed underground passageways which he filled with stocks of such essentials as fuel oil, gasoline, batteries, spring water, favorite beverages and canned goods and other foods storable in his location. I have ofen wndered what he did with all that stuff when the disaster did not happen as he had scheduled it to do with the New Year. He has certain shown his face again after all that frenzied prepartion
.
It could be, of course, that he has, by this time, made a small fortune by selling off the entire stock and could cash in on mankind's natural tendency to be careless about such things. Or, he may even have moved on to Richmond or Washigton, D.C. where men of such superior forsight and managment skills are much in demand in governing circles.
A.L.M. February 23, 2004 [c487wds]
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Sunday, February 22, 2004
WHY?
I have often wondered why a man or a women chooses to run for the office of President of the United States.
What is the driving power that cause them to do so?
I am sure I have asked myself that question just about every presidential election day in recent times and I, obviously, have never thought of a good, sound reply or I wouldn't keep wondering.
Certainly it would take no more than a casual glance at the office to see that it has a few ,notable flaws which might make it less than a good place to work and live. Any man or woman in their right mind, would take such a critical look at it before stepping into the fray to wrest it from all others who aspire to win it as a special prize.
The impetus probaly comes from within more than from any other sourse, but we don't like to think of those who are ego-stricken as being ready to serve as a good, capable president. So, we shift our emphasis to followers - more like "underlings", one might say, who urge the victim to step into the snare and enter the election campaign trap. Then, it is too late.
I was not a all suprised last night to hear that Ralph Nader will place his name in nomination once again this week- end. This rather notorious "consuler's advocate" - which is his title with supporters, is typical of what also-rans might be. The Democratioc candidate now realize that it was Nader who cost Al Gore the presidency by sopping up from three to four per cent of the vote. While divided group of Democrats have been using their time to blame the "Bush peoplel" for downing Al by means of chads, ballot miscounts and other voting tricks, Nattering Nader has set up shop once more and will give it all another trial,
Ralph Nader is among those who really wants to be president. You may have noticed in the recent primary sideshows. that the people who knew they could not possibly win often were the best source of one-liners. a shake-em-up remarks which the media used and thre away. The also-ran candidate can be good to have aound.They can, and quite often do, say things which should be said. They can do so without any fear that they might have to "make good" on their statements in the future.
Some Democrats show their real concern that Nader will again be a "spoiler" inthis elecion.They clain that Nader will not do as well this time around because he is running as an Independent this a time rather than as a candidate backed by a group called "The Green Party". To many of us it appears that it was, instead, was the "Green Party" which was discredited rather than Ralph Nader. I have a feeling he will do better this time around without these "policy makers" hanging, rather uselessly, around his neck - which he likes to stick out now and again.
A.L.M. February 22, 2004 [c440wds]
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