Today, I let my eyes wander over to websites I rarely find interesting only to find them interesting, including this “poster” at rare.us:
Which pushed my thoughts on to other mass media outlets and their statistical anomalies, including the Saturday Night Live “Five Timers Club“:
Is there a pattern here worth analysing or simply pointing out and laughing toward?
If George W. Bush’s image can be rehabilitated, then anything is possible, n’est pas?
“At times like this, I am reminded of a scene from an SNL skit.”
“Yeah, boss, which one? The Bassamatic?”
“Nah. But that was a good one, wasn’t it? No, I was thinking more about the Citizen Kane parody, where the owner says, while pointing a gun out the window and shooting six times, ‘Take a headline, Bernstein: “Crazed Sniper Guns Down Six!” We’ll have the innocent men, women and children angle an offer for $10,000 for the madman’s capture!’ That kind of parody.”
“Parade?”
‘No. Parody.”
“Party?”
“No. Parody. Parody, parody, parody. Similar to satire. You know, sarcasm.”
“Ahh…sarcasm. That I understand, boss. Kinda like the way you call me smart when you mean the opposite.”
“Kinda. Anyway, watching the news, I see these talking heads and the puppet strings that jerk their faces around, then I imagine the producers and finally, the owners. Take Fox, for instance. Can’t you see Rupert Murdoch telling his minions, ‘Guys, I need a headline grabber, like this…”
[Video fades to black, cuts to scene from SNL]
Citizen Kane II
Written by: Michael O’Donoghue
Mr. Thompson…..Buck Henry
Nurse…..Laraine Newman
Jed Leland…..Chevy Chase
Charles Foster Kane…..Dan Aykroyd
Mr. Bernstein…..John Belushi
Henri…..Tom Schiller
Delivery Boy…..Garrett Morris
[ black-and-white ]
[open on the dark, moody atmosphere of Mr. Thompson’s room. He lies on his bed reading, as a knock sounds at the door. He rises to answer it, allowing a Nurse to enter the room. ]
Mr. Thompson: Yes? Can I help you?
Nurse: I.. don’t suppose you remember me, but.. I’m the nurse that was with Mr. Kane when he died.
Mr. Thompson: [ momentarily confused ] Mr. Kane?
Nurse: Charles Foster Kane – the big newspaper tycoon.
Mr. Thompson: Of course! You’re the one who told us Mr. Kane’s last word – Rosebud. Huh.. never did find out what it meant.
Nurse: Well.. Rosebud was.. one of his last words.
Mr. Thompson: What do you mean, one of his last words?
Nurse: Well, you mustn’t get angry.. but I just remembered a few more.
<[ theme music crescendos, as the title superimposes on screen: “CITIZEN KANE II” ]
[ Mr. Thompson sits on the edge of his bed, across from the Nurse who sits in a chair ]
Nurse: You see, he was on this all-liquid diet —
Mr. Thompson: Get to the point, woman! What were Charles Foster Kane’s last words?!
Nurse: After he said Rosebud, he coughed a few times, then he muttered: “Henri.” And then he died.
Mr. Thompson: Henri? Henri.. ah! Henri! Of course! A man’s name! Kane’s closest friend, Jed Leland, is still alive in one of those uptown hospitals. Let’s pay him a visit! If anyone knows who thie Henri is, he will!
[ Mr. Thompson and the Nurse rush out of the room, as the music crescendos again and we fade to black ]
[ fade in on the close-up face of an aged, spectacled, moustachioed Jed Leland ]
Jed Leland: [ pondering the clue ] Henri.. hmm.. Henri..
[ pull out to reveal Jed Leland sitting in a wheelchair. He turns to face Mr. Thompson, who sits with his back to the audience and obscured by shadows ]
Jed Leland: You’re absolutely sure you don’t have a good cigar? I’d give anything for a good cigar.
Mr. Thompson: Sorry, Mr. Leland, but what about this Henri?
Jed Leland: Who?
Mr. Thompson: Henri.
Jed Leland: Henri. Well, I’m afraid I don’t know any — nope.. wait a minute. [ suddenly remembering ] Why, of course. Henri. The little French man. I’ll never forget the first and last time I saw Henri. It was the day Charlie took over the Enquirer. My, what a day it was..
[ flashback dissolve to the Enquirer office, Mr. Bernstein standing alone as Charles Foster Kane and a younger Jed Leland enter ]
Charles Foster Kane: [ chuckling ] Well, Jedediah, here it is! My own newspaper, the New York Enquirer. And I’m going to turn this newspaper into something that this own will want to read. Why, just look at this dribble! [ holds up a newspaper ] “Noted Mitten Manufacturer Retires.”
Mr. Bernstein: Why, it must be a slow day for news, Mr. Kane!
Charles Foster Kane: A slow day for news, Bernstein? I’ll show you a slow day for news!
[ Kane points a gun out the window and fires 6 shots below ]
Charles Foster Kane: Take a headline, Bernstein: “Crazed Sniper Guns Down Six!” We’ll have theinnocent men, women and children angle an offer for $10,000 for the madman’s capture!
Mr. Bernstein: Right away, Mr. Kane! [ rushes out of office ]
Charles Foster Kane: Slow days for news —
[ Delivery Boy enters office ]
Delivery Boy: Did anyone order a roast beef on rye with mustard?
Charles Foster Kane: Yeah, I did. Thanks.
[ Delivery Boy distributes the sandwiches, then exits office ]
Jed Leland: Let’s see here, what am I, chopped liver?
[ Henri the printer rushes in with the new front page reading: “Crazed Sniper Guns Down Six – Woman and Children Among Victims”. Mr. Bernstein appears behind him. ]
Henri: Here’s ze new front page, Mr. Kane!
Charles Foster Kane: Well, you certainly took your time about it, boy. What’s your name?
Henri: Henri, sir.
Charles Foster Kane: Henri, you’re fired! We’re running a scandal sheet here, not a newspaper! [ starts to eat his sandwich ] Mmm.. great sandwich.
Henri: Funny.. I thought it was: “We’re running a newspaper, not a tea party.”
Mr. Bernstein: A tea party?! That doesn’t make sense! how about: “We’re running a newspaper here, not a pet shop!”
Jed Leland: Uh, wait a minute. Obviously, we’re not running a pet shop. That’s no good.
[ Delivery Boy re-enters scene ]
Delivery Boy: Who, uh, gets the tea with no lemon?
Henri: How about, uh.. police office!
Mr. Bernstein: Oh, yeah.. hey! That’s a good idea! “We’re not running a newspaper here –”
[ suddenly, Charles Foster Kane fires 5 more shots out the window ]
Charles Foster Kane: Get out an extra! “Sniper Strikes Again!” Double the reward!
[ everyone but Kane and Leland clear the room ]
Jed Leland: You know, since you took over, you certainly have changed the Enquirer, Charlie.
Charles Foster Kane: Change the Enquirer.. change the newspaper.. I haven’t changed anything, Jedediah. I’ve only changed the front page. What about its heart, its soul, its very being? That’s why I’ve set out this Declaration of Principles. [ posts card on the wall ] 1. Sell millions of newspapers by any means possible. 2. Make that billions of newspapers.
Jed Leland: Can I keep that, Charlie? I have a hunch it could turn out to be pretty important some day.
Charles Foster Kane: [ reflects ] Important someday. Yeah. [ looks out the window ] Jedediah, do you think I can hit that organ grinder down there, from this far away? He looks to be about.. oh.. one-hundred, two-hundred yards. Let’s see if I can get a beat on him. [ fires a shot ] Damn! Bernstein!
[ Mr. Bernstein re-appears ]
Mr. Bernstein: Yes, Mr. Kane!
Charles Foster Kane: Get out an extra! “Sniper Kills Organ Grinder’s Monkey, Not Even Pets Safe in Weird Murder Spree.”
Mr. Bernstein: Sure thing, Mr. Kane!
[ Kane admires the copy of his newspaper, as he flash-dissolve back to the aged Jed Leland in the hospital ]
Jed Leland: Yeah.. Henri. That’s who Henri was.
Mr. Thompson: He doesn’t really seem important enough, somehow. I mean, why would Kane’s last words be about some printer he fired fifty years before?
Nurse: Oh, wait.. I’m sorry. I just remembered that Mr. Kane said one more thing before he died. He said: “Rosebud”, coughed a few times, muttered: “Henri”, and then he turned to me and whispered: “With Mustard.”
Mr. Thompson: Wait a minute.. let’s put this all together: “Rosebud.. Henri.. With Mustard.” I wonder what it means.
Nurse: Beats me.
Jed Leland: Well, maybe it was a horse he bet — [ Chevy Chase suddenly cracks up ] It could’ve been a horse he bet on!
Mr. Thompson: Yes, that might be amusing if it were.
Nurse: Maybe a woman he knew.
Jed Leland: Might be.
Mr. Thompson: I guess we’ll never know.
[ dissolve to a fiery incinerator. The door is pulled open, and a hand inserts a menu into the flames that read: “Roast Beef On Rye With Mustard” ]
[ fade to black, up on SUPER: “The End” ]
[ dissolve to SUPER: “Introducing The Cast” ]
[ dissolve to “Laraine Newman as the nurse.” ]
Nurse: You see, he was on this all-liquid diet.
[ dissolve to “Chevy Chase as Jed Leland.” ]
Jed Leland: I’d give anything for a good cigar.
[ dissolve to “Buck Henry as Mr. Thompson.” ]
Mr. Thompson: What do you mean, one of his last words?
[ dissolve to “John Belushi as Mr. Bernstein.” ]
Mr. Bernstein: How about: “We’re running a newspaer here, not an ant farm!”
[ dissolve to “Tom Schiller as Henri.” ]
Henri: Here’s ze new front page, Monsieur Kane!
[ dissolve to “Garret Morris as the delivery boy.” ]
Delivery Boy: Who gets the roast beef on rye with mustard?
[ dissolve to “Dan Aykroyd as Charles Foster Kane.” ]
Charles Foster Kane: Mmm.. great sandwich!
[ fade to black ]
“I don’t know boss. It’s awfully complicated.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. But I wouldn’t put it past Murdoch to fund a few fundamentalist groups and keep their leaders on speed dial when he needs to up his viewership and advertising rates. Oh, just forget it. Let’s watch a rerun of ‘The Americans‘ and call it a day.”
Do you know what your neuronal connections look like?
I think I know mine:
How many of us do something against our wishes because it’s our “job”?
How many of us go against the wishes of others because it’s our destiny?
Yesterday evening, my wife and I drove to a food store chain called “Cheeburger Cheeburger” because a day or so before we had listened to “50s on 5,” a satellite radio station dedicated to the popular American rock’n’roll music of the 1950s, which put me in the mood for a ’50s style eatery.
Delayed gratification had us sitting at a two-topper, recently cleaned off by Russell.
Courtney took our food order and Mayra brought us our food.
As we were close to finishing our delicious ground-up cow meat patties on buns and basket of frings (sliced/fried onions/potato), a large group of teenagers entered all cheery, bright-eyed and photo-happy, obviously not having eaten at this particular fine dining establishment before.
Of the group of 27, four young lads sat next to us, one wearing a T-shirt with the words “KEEP CALM I’M THE DOCTOR” emblazoned below the emblem of a old telephone booth, affectionately known as the time machine called the Tardis to fans of an internationally-popular show on the tellie called “Doctor Who.”
The young gentlemen were quite polite, informing my wife, upon her inquiries, that they haled from across the Big Pond in a small burgh called Birmingham (pronounced BIRM’ing-hum as opposed to our local town we call Birmin-HAM’).
They and their pals had enjoyed a good time at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center before being whisked off to the local shopping extravaganza known as the Madison Square Mall.
In like fashion to my wife’s curiosity, satisfying us that they were interested in a future career of engineering when they entered university (one favouring mechanical engineering and the other civil engineering), they pressed us for our favourite fast food joint.
As we hemmed and hawed, they informed us that they had the international fast food chains such as McDonald’s in Great Britain but not ones like Wendy’s.
I told them I believed my favourite place is Steak ‘n Shake, similar to Cheeburger Cheeburger but without the one-pound special, closer in style to my alltime favourite, Pal’s, which was too small for them to know about. My wife believed her favourite is In-N-Out Burgers, which is concentrated on the West Coast.
The young men told us they were still in secondary school and that one of their chaperones, a woman with pink stripes in her hair, was their physics teacher whose specialty is astrophysics.
We wished them well and told them we hoped to meet them on the International Space Station one day, imagining these guys and their friends the future of space exploration and settlement.
After all, the enthusiastic pursuits of our youth often encourage us to expand our horizons.
These young men, some of them wearing what I believe to be the head gear of the Sikh religion, are part of our future, going on into fields of science and engineering along with their colleagues of many races, religions, genders and backgrounds, inventing new ways of observing our universe that we hardly imagine possible today.
I am happy that our ancestors put us on the path for Americans and Brits to meet at a small restaurant tucked into a shopping centre in the south part of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth.
Even as early as 25 years ago, I would not have thought it possible for us to meet like that.
Fifty years ago, not long after I was born, it was practically impossible.
Can you see how much progress we’ve made, how much farther we’ll go in 25 and 50 years from now?
Can you see why I don’t believe in secret societies and never chose to belong to one, even though I know they still exist and contribute in part to my being here today?
Iff my friends in the business can take care of Dr. Drew, I’d appreciate the effort.
Someone please tell me the difference between a woman who is treated as a trapped sexual object and a woman who is expressing her sexual freedom in a sign of feminine independence.
This past weekend I watched a couple of minutes of a stage diva marionette bouncing around with a couple of former coworkers on a platform above a football field in a technical dance routine that was as contrived a show of sexuality as any before or since.
A veritable puppet show.
The woman was praised for her performance but I, being older than the target audience, was not mesmerised.
Perhaps that is the reason I should ignore the carnival barker brouhaha surrounding the whole event and go on to the next issue at hand, especially now that only 13604 days are left.
Phil Silvers (Fischl Silverstein): “What’s television? Burlesque with an antenna — that’s television.”
When I walked into the sunlight to eat a banana as part of my daily ritual to get outside of the house at least once a day, the construction workers next door tended a small bonfire to burn scraps leftover from remodeling, mainly short pieces of wood.
A goldfinch in winter plumage hopped onto the tree limb near me and chirped away, expecting me to scoop up some birdseed and fill the feeder in the backyard.
The blue reflection of the sky domed me in, sunlight warming my pants and then my legs but not enough to take away the chill of freezing air around me.
When did I become this old man whose sympathy neurons were so overdeveloped from years of having to be on my toes, reacting to my father’s whims, his bursts of pent-up anger that seemed to come out of nowhere, that I don’t want to mingle with others because I have a bad habit of reading their movements in an attempt to gauge their thoughts in case they, too, would physically release their passive-aggressive volcano of internalised emotion-based thoughts or attack verbally?
I am a mischievous peacemaker, the devil’s advocate, whose raison d’être was to be constantly on the lookout for information to keep my father at bay, entertaining him while he was with me, paying attention to the conversations around us to steer people away from setting off my father.
I loved my father but to be with him, he who was the product of his parents’ and grandparents’ personality quirks, was to suppress my personality quirks that tended to set him off.
I look at myself and wonder how many of us are like me.
How many of us naturally respond to the behaviours of others just to avoid controversy?
I want to feel special, thinking I am the one and only me, but I know my set of states of energy is made of the same stuff as everybody else’s, sharing a large portion of subcultural as well as genetic traits with subsets, most especially those nearest me.
I am the two, three, four, x, y, z-dimensional intersection of subsets known and unknown.
My reaction to others is to immediately suppress my personality and figure out which subsets we have in common; then see if I can mentally predict the behaviours of the people around me not only in our conversation but also in events past and future.
The mischievous side of me sees what I’m doing, or what I know someone will do, and tries to stop it with a humourous interlude.
So many people take life too darn seriously when we know we’re all going to die.
I have grown into the old man in the cabin in the woods because I am now my father.
I ended up adopting his nonassertiveness when it comes to handling emotional responses to contradictory information from which I cannot pick or decide to choose a behaviour to exhibit in my repressed personality mode.
The most successful people, children AND adults, have spent many, many hours in training, learning from their mistakes and building upon their lessons.
Success itself is a rutted road, or the belief that one will keep one’s momentum pointed down the path of success, in whatever venture one seeks.
Habits, in other words.
My habits from early childhood were developed in response to my father, a man willing to use a belt or the back of his hand to serve justice immediately, with rarely a delay (my mother used the phrase “wait until your father gets home” sparingly).
When I was younger, I asked myself, “When do I get to be me?,” as if there was another person inside me wanting to get out.
At my workplace over the years, I attended a couple of assertiveness and anger management classes to get a better understanding of who people like me are.
I turned my assertiveness training into developing myself as a lead engineer, supervisor and then manager.
I learned that if I wanted to assert myself and was willing to face the consequences of my actions, no one would stop me because…you can guess where this is going…most of us are responding to others and repressing our personalities for the sake of the common good.
The secret to success is there is no secret to success.
All of us have habits that benefit some more than others, that’s all.
When I was an engineering manager, I wanted to hire an engineer who made more money than me. My boss and the human resources manager told me that the system doesn’t work that way. Either they had to increase my salary above that of the potential new hire or we couldn’t offer her a job unless it was at a lower salary.
Being a good midlevel manager not wanting to rock the boat, I extended a lower salary offer to the engineer and she declined after we couldn’t find any other negotiating points like a shorter workweek and/or flexible workday to make her hourly rate equivalent to what she was already making.
At that point in my career, I realised that I was on the wrong career track or perhaps working for the wrong company.
I never was a socioeconomic hierarchy climber.
I simply had my personal way of reading and reacting to the behaviour of others that made them feel good about themselves in the same way I treated my father, habits established in my formative years and refined as I got older.
I spent my whole life reacting, reacting, reacting and decided that if my only reward for reacting to others was to be given higher salaries and more people to manage, then I needed to stop reacting and become proactive, whatever that meant.
The only way to do that was to remove myself from social situations and place myself here in front of this electronic input device.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
Money buys me stuff but it never bought me prestige, it lifted me out of poverty and gave me enough luxury to satisfy my wants as well as my needs.
As we get older, our tastes change in relation to our age, societal status, family needs and reactions to a world full of overstimulating mass marketing.
At my age, the illusions now propagated by the Internet are as much a part of my life as physical realities.
My needs and wants are largely met by the reflected and beamed light of an LCD panel just as the needs and wants of the previous generation were largely met by the reflected and beamed light of a television tube, interrupted by paper-based books/magazines, breaking the monotony with retail shopping/eating therapy.
What will the next generation spend time doing in their old age after they’ve spent their youth and young adult years saying they aren’t like their parents but becoming them anyway?
How did your formative years train you for the success you’re experiencing right now?
How will your influence upon your children’s formative years feed their success?
How does this translate to subcultures, cultures, the global economy and civilisations over thousands of years?
That’s all for today — time to listen to the wind and see what its “personality” tells me will happen next in our society in some fuzzy way that comes out comically on these blog pages.
treetrunkdings 