Quackers for Sesame Street

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, I give you my all-time favorite music number from the show: “Put Down the Duckie”.

(It seems you’ve got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.)

There’s something about Gordon Jackson and Jean Marsh in their “Upstairs Downstairs” personas singing “You got to leave the duck alone.”

Or Ladysmith Black Mambazo lending their distinctive harmony to the line.

Or Itzhak Perlman plucking Yehudi Menuhin’s Strad like a banjo.

Turns out that Jeremy Irons does a crackin’ Charleston move.

For those of you who favor the other duck song, I offer “Rubber Duckie”. 

Frankly I think it doesn’t hold a patch on “Put Down the Duckie”, but de gustibus non est disputandum.

At any rate, this is an anniversary worth celebrating.

Remember, remember

Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. It’s not a holiday in the sense that you get out of school or off work; but tonight across the realm there will be fireworks and bonfires lit (along with suitable amounts of drinking) to celebrate the exposure and foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and King James I on this date in 1605.

Guy Fawkes wasn’t the leader of the plot, but he was the one charged with its execution (so to speak). Having been a mercenary fighting for the Catholic League and the Spaniards against the Protestant Dutch, he presumably had the experience necessary to handle barrels of gunpowder and set the charges.

He did, but the plot was revealed via a letter warning a Catholic Member of Parliament to stay away on the 5th. One thing led to another, the gunpowder was discovered (“Oi, mate—did you order 30 barrels of black powder and all this firewood and coal?”), Fawkes was apprehended and duly tortured to reveal the names of co-conspirators. (Unsuccessfully—as “interrogators” in our current foreign wars have learned, torture isn’t a good means of acquiring reliable information.)

Eventually there was a trial, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Fawkes cheated the hangman, though: he jumped from the gallows and broke his neck.

I’m guessing the executioners went ahead with the drawing and quartering, however.

Since the 18th Century, effigies of Fawkes, “guys”, have been burnt in bonfires with much gaiety on this night.

Now, while I think it’s a good thing indeed to foil mass murder plots (even when the prospective victims are politicians), there’s something about continuing this tradition of dissing Catholics down into the 21st Century that just creeps me out.

It’s not that I was baptized in the Roman Church, it’s this holdover from the time when where you worshiped defined your entire existence for good or ill. I mean—that’s so 19th Century. (Okay, people over here were certain that JFK would be taking all his marching orders from the Pope; but we got over that.)

But the Brits are stuck in this time warped mentality in which Catholics = Satan-worshiping-overthrowers-of-civilization.

Just last year, there was major hoopla over one of Her Majesty’s grandsons being affianced to a Canadian commoner…Catholic. Under the Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, no one can be in line for the British throne if s/he is or marries a Catholic.

(You can marry/be a militant Muslim, a Moonie, a Wiccan, a foot-washin’ Baptist or a Baha’i and ascend to the throne. But Catholic? Fuggedaboutit.)

So Autumn Kelly, who married Peter Phillips last year, converted from Catholicism to save her husband from having to give up his place in line to the throne.

There was talk, right up to two months before the nuptials, of Phillips renouncing his place in the royal succession, but in the end his situation was deemed more important than her faith, and she caved.

(BTW—he’s 11th in line to the throne. The royal yacht would have to go down with most of his close relatives on it to make him any sort of a contender. That just boggles my mind. I have as much chance at winning the Powerball as he does of becoming King Peter.)

And it’s not like the Royals are the same old Bastions of Propriety and Examples to the Nation they’ve been ever since Victoria and Albert. Phillips and Kelly sold the “rights” to their wedding for £500K to Hello! magazine. (If you don’t know the rag, it makes People magazine look like the New Yorker.) By all accounts Her Majesty was Not Amused.

Evidently they needed the cash to pay for the nuptials, even though the service was held at Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, and I’m sure the Queen hardly charged them more than £25 for it.

(She might have wanted more for the reception, held at Frogmore House in the Castle grounds. At least some kind of damage deposit. But still.)

This whole aversion to Catholicism is related to the monarch being the head of the Church of England, which emerged from Henry VIII having the hots for Anne Boleyn (and the possibility of producing a son who wouldn't die in infancy) and needing a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which Pope Clement VII refused to give him. For centuries after Henry declared the papacy irrelevant, all non-CoE followers were required to support the established church with their taxes. So if you were a Methodist, you were voluntarily giving money to your chapel and involuntarily giving money to the Anglicans.

That’s one of the reasons why our Founding Fathers slipped that separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment. That established church thing just rankled. (A lot of the provisions in the Constitution were reactions to British governing practices.)

There’s been talk, post-Phillips, of finally getting around to repealing the Catholic part of the Act of Settlement, seeing as to how the Catholic Church and its followers aren’t the danger they were in the 16th and 17th centuries. Really, the Pope, the Cardinals and the Bishops have too much on their plates to consider invading Britain in the name of the True Church. The cover-ups and payoffs for pedophile priests in the US alone would keep the entire Jesuit order occupied in civil litigation until 2050. And after that the Church couldn't afford an invasion.

However, even if the Act is repealed or amended, I won’t hold out hope that the latent anti-Catholic animosity that underlies Guy Fawkes Day will disappear. I think that’s bred in the bone.

Bailed-out British banks

Interesting news out of Mother England: Her Majesty’s Government, which bailed out several very large & very failing banks in the past year, are now instructing those institutions to start breaking up & selling their component parts in the interests of smaller companies & greater competition.

You may recall that the spectacular failures of the Royal Bank of Scotland & HBOS prompted something unheard-of in the corporate world: apologies from their CEOs in Parliament. With a suitable complement of crocodile tears (& no relinquishing of compensation).

So it’s interesting that HMG are playing hardball with the banks—seeing as to how they (on behalf of the British taxpayer) hold major stakes in the companies—wielding their shareholder power to give them what-for.

The deal apparently is: you want state aid? Start trimming the organization.&—get this—beginning with bonuses: no one at RBS or Lloyds earning more than £39K ($65K) in 2009 will be getting a bonus.

& no swapping assets among the Old Boys’ Network: only companies new to the financial industry will be allowed to buy. One of the interested parties is that wild man, Richard Branson. I’d like to see what he does with a bank, because I purely admire how he runs an airline. (If he buys NatWest I’ll have skin in the game, as I still have an account there.)

It’ll be interesting to see if our own Administration & Congress conjure up the cojones to start handing out machetes to Bank of America, Citigroup & Wells Fargo. That would help end the “too big to fail” argument for throwing billions of our money at these fools.

Taking my medicine

The flu is cutting a swathe through my workplace, so I got the seasonal vaccination last Friday.

(I’d tried getting it at work, but apparently the company ran out of the vaccine and suspended the free shot program. Turns out that my doctor’s office was also out, as well as local drugstores whose web sites advertised they had it. I finally found it at a Safeway, where I was the only person under the age of senility getting it.)

However, for the first time since I started getting the vaccination every flu season for the past 15 years (except one year in the UK when I couldn't get it, whereupon I was flattened for four weeks, not a word of lie), it seems I’ve reacted to the vaccine, and I’ve started showing symptoms of sore throat and incipient joint aches.

It might be defective serum (wouldn’t be surprised that this shouldn't be any different from everything else in this state), or possibly the fact that in the past couple of weeks—even taking sleep meds—I’ve averaged about five hours of sleep per night, and I’m just plain beat to hell.

The sore throat started coming on this morning—slowly, which makes me hope this won’t be a really terrible bout. (When I start getting The Throat in a matter of minutes I know I’m in for a long, hard slog.) As soon as I got home I took a hit of Nurofen Cold & Flu, a magic tablet found in the UK that works better than anything else I’ve ever found at treating symptoms.

(You can only get it in blister packs of max 24 tabs, so I hoard my stash for times like this. Whenever I go back I go from chemist to chemist buying up packets, because they won’t sell you more than one. Not because, as in the US, you might be running a meth lab, but because you might use them to commit suicide. Let me just say: give me a few days of the flu and death would be a relief.)

I actually got the shot this year because if I was going to get sick I wanted it to be now and not later in the month, when I’m on vacation.

Mission accomplished, damn it.

Working wounded

As a public service I offer this guide to determining if your workplace is dysfunctional.

Well, not sure if it’s an unadulterated public service—might be depressing to diagnose your employer as truly toxic if you can’t do anything about it. Lord knows my own department fits most of these symptoms & more.

For example, this list doesn’t include the guiding principle by which we exist: “strategy” will change course at least monthly, & you’re expected to reconfigure all your work accordingly.

Or: those who succeed are those who can deliver BS with the highest volume & greatest arrogance. No need to even be consistent.

Or: 93% of meetings make you feel as though you fell into Chien Andalou.

Well—here’s hoping your office scores lower than mine.