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.

Trick or terror?

The Washington Post has asked the masters of human fear (writers specializing in horror and suspense) to name their favorite tales of terror.

I’m not someone who goes out of her way to read horror or the like. And I definitely don’t ever watch the stuff. (My sister once had The Haunting, adapted from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House [a pick by one of the writers], on TV late one night. It scared the liver out of me, but made me too afraid to leave the living room and go through the dark house alone to get to my bedroom, so I had to stay until it was over because she wouldn’t go up with me. The toad.)

Okay, I did go to see Alien. But it was on a date and the guy I was with, a writer/producer manqué (this being Hollywood), had been up the night before working on a script and drinking Bordeaux. As the suspense mounted (and Ridley Scott definitely knows his onions on that count), I realized 1)why I don’t like scary movies (I get really wrapped up in the illusion, become one of the characters and they’re too dumb to come in out of the rain, much less stay away from monsters; so I know they're going to get me killed); and 2)that alien was going to jump off the screen straight at me and this fool was too hungover to provide any assistance.

I told him that later and his response was, "You're right."

However, I digress.

With the above disclaimer, let me just say that the scariest story I’ve ever read was “The Beast with Five Fingers”, by W.F. Harvey (never saw the flick). That sucker kept me awake for a week after I finished it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a horror story since.

So, this being Samhain/All Hallows—what’s your pick for the story that scared the daylights out of you?

Net flu

Lest you be one of those scoffing at the idea that the H1N1 (swine) flu pandemic is a crock of codswallop, consider this news: the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report warning that people home sick hitting the electrons could overload our information highway and create the mother of all data traffic jams.

Think 72-car pile-up on I-5 along the Grapevine on the day before Thanksgiving.

According to the GAO, it’s people “sick, working from home” who will log on to the Internet, clogging the networks and bringing things to a halt.

(They don’t seem to factor in the folks who’ll play online poker, watch episodes of Project Runway on Hulu or visit porn sites. My sense is that there’d be a whole lot more of this type of activity than teleconferencing or swapping spreadsheets.)

So what, you say? Well, it seems that overwhelmed networks deny service to things like financial markets, public services and Homeland Security.

Evidently some securities markets have contingency plans in place, but not all. And Homeland Security doesn’t appear to have thought of that scenario, much less devised a plan to deal with it.

Just consider what that’ll do to your access to www.swinefluisahoaxbythetrilateralcommission.com

Hang 'em high

The walls are closing in on war criminals this week, even if they’re still acting as though they’re the victims and not the perps.

Germany’s last court of appeals has tossed out the pathetic plea of John Demjanjuk that the case should be dropped because of health reasons. Oh, and the 89-year-old really never hurt anyone at Sobibór or Majdanek back in the good old days of Nazi rule. He was actually a victim, don’t you know?

Demjanjuk, who was stripped of his US citizenship and deported to Germany for prosecution earlier this year, will start the trial next month in Munich.

Meanwhile, at the Hague, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb architect of genocide of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, has been boycotting his own war crimes trial for the past couple of days. However, presiding judge O-gon Kwon called Karadzic’s bluff Tuesday and ruled that the prosecution can continue with or without the mass-murderer in the dock.

The 64-year-old Karadzic, acting on his own behalf, says he needs WAAY more time to build his defense.

Yeah, because he's guilty, guilty, guilty.

Let me do some gloating that two examples of the worst humanity can vomit up on this earth are being brought to justice—no matter what the time lag between their crimes and their trials. Too many of their ilk have cheated retribution by either dying of old age in their beds, or (like Karadzic’s role model, Slobodan Milosevic) dying of old age in prison awaiting trial. (and Karadzic's trial is expected to last through 2012; that's with an abbreviated case.)

I don’t care how old they are or in what state of health—their crimes should be prosecuted and punished.

Enemies of the people

Interesting report from the NY Times about government snooping on British subjects.

Evidently it’s not enough to have CCTV cameras on every street corner tracking the movements of people out & about. Local governments have the right to run “directed surveillance missions” on their citizens—including tailing, tapping phones & going through all sorts of records—for what I can only characterize as the most trivial rumors of infractions.

(& like the US Patriot Act provisions, they can do it without that pesky impediment of jumping through any sort of legal hoops. Like obtaining a warrant.)

& what sorts of high crimes are they investigating, you ask? Why—such felonious pursuits as failing to recycle, putting trash out too early & letting your dogs bark too loud. Apparently all that’s needed to set the wheels a-spinning is some accusation of wrongdoing. & the data collected on the miscreants doesn’t go away even when they’re not found guilty. It goes into some central repository.

Am I the only fan of the tradition of Anglo-American law creeped out by this?

You have to wonder about the use of public resources for this sort of thing. At the very least, I’d like to hear about surveillance on persons suspected of something more than failing to pick up poop after their dogs. Like bombing the London Tube or torturing & murdering young Yorkshire women over the course of several years.

The story doesn’t say what these activities cost the local governments, or what services they have to cut back on in order to mount them. Whatever it is, it can’t possibly deliver value in terms of a safer society that outweighs the financial & civic confidence in elected leaders.

Sweating spirituality

There’s something about the story of three deaths in a faux-Indian sweat lodge ceremony earlier this month in Sedona that grabs me.

It’s a pity about the three people who lost their lives, of course. But what strikes me is this whole phenomenon of adults so in search of…something that they pay money (in large sums) to any fast-talking self-proclaimed spiritual leader who'll put them through an ordeal that, if mandated by some government, say, or an employer, would spark class-action lawsuits.

I guess what surprises me is that there aren’t more deaths resulting from this sort of thing.

In the “spiritual warrior” experience led by James Arthur Ray, “nationally known New Age guru”, 50 people paid $9,695 for the privilege of spending 36 hours without food or water in the Arizona desert on a vision quest and then three hours in the sweat lodge. (For those unfamiliar with the term “sweat lodge”, think unregulated, smoke-filled sauna.)

I don’t know why this wasn’t seen as a recipe for disaster. Fifty people in a space 24 feet wide and 4.5 feet high. Twenty-one people ended up in local hospitals, with three eventually dying. Despite several participants showing signs of serious trouble, Ray, it seems, blocked the exit.

Yavapai County sheriff investigating the incident as a homicide, but so far no one’s been charged.

Ray, whose company made $9.4M last year from speeches, seminars, retreats, books and videos, says he’s cooperating. It’s gotta bite, after all, if you lose paying customers in such close proximity to your “empowering” events.

Now, here’s my issue. What is it with people who scoff at organized religion as institutional superstition but fall slack-jawed in awe at any caftan-wearing self-proclaimed guru with bad teeth and a worse haircut who promises them spiritual enlightenment if they’ll only [insert ceremony here].

I have a friend who falls into that category. About eight years ago she tried to get me to go on a trip to Sedona run by someone who was supposed to be au fait with all types of spiritual practices. I never told her but the prospect of spending ten days in a mini-van/Comfort Inn with 11 middle-aged white women oohing and ahing about Hopi ceremonies and then engaging in replicas of same just gave me the willies. Their mission, and I am not making this up, was to focus cosmic energy on righting 400 years of wrongs done to the Native Americans.

They were conducted around by some local middle-aged white woman who was supposed to be connected to the local tribes, although there were apparently a couple of instances where the women had to stand at quite a distance because the Hopis weren’t wild about interlopers, no matter how sterling their intent.

When she returned, totally enthused about the experience, my friend showed me her photos of the events. There was one of the women seated in a circle on the ground. It was some sort of prayer circle, meant to concentrate their spiritual powers. She said that the picture was taken just before the heavens opened up and poured rain down on them.

“But that’s okay—it was a cleansing rain.”

Apparently the thought that the gods might be pissed off at the effrontery of 12 middle-aged white women from Virginia thinking that they could erase 400 years of policies in ten days at the Comfort Inn and were expressing their displeasure with the downpour never occurred to them.

So many of these spiritual guides make a very, very good living out of their vision quests and seminars and retreats. Maybe not $9.4M, but comfortable. (And I’m not saying that some don’t indeed have some spiritual gifts that they do share with their followers—maybe without even charging.) But when a New Age guru accepts MasterCard or Discover, how is that different from Jim and Tammi Faye?

BTW, for that vision quest, Ray sent his paying guests out into the October desert for 36 hours with only a sleeping bag. Although he offered to sell them Peruvian ponchos for $250.

I rest my case.

However this investigation turns out, I’d like to think that at least one charlatan has been revealed. But even if he is, his acolytes are sure to stick by him.

Or move on to the next one.