For the second time in three years, the football gridiron program of the University of Hawai‘i has been exposed as a fraud by a professional sports franchise major university’s team.

Commentators on last night’s (5 December 2009) 51-10 shellacking of Hawai‘i by the University of Wisconsin had fun early on with the walk-on status of the UH quarterback. Who promptly demonstrated why he was a walk-on (leaving aside the matter of “academic transcripts”, which in this world doesn’t matter anyway until one is caught) by ending his team’s first two possessions with interceptions.

(For those of you who don’t follow American college gridiron, a “walk-on” is a student who joins a team without having been invited, and therefore has to pay for his education rather than receiving wages and perks a full scholarship as do the invited players. So – among other things – while his teammates were chowing down at the training table, this young man, who by rule may not partake of the training table’s goodies, was driving around town delivering pizza.)

When it became apparent that the Hawai‘i team defense was going to provide no more of an impediment to the Wisconsin running game than a thin layer of mud on a pavement would to a herd of stampeding elephants, it was obvious that the Aloha State’s gridiron fans were in for a long night. Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba made it a short one.

I am sure that if I were to waste any time with the paid shill that is “the voice of University of Hawai‘i sports”, I would discover that the failings of the UH gridiron squad were all linked to money.

The facilities are lousy. (Tell it to the Psychology Department.)

The recruiting budget is miniscule. (Most university departments have had their budget for graduate student stipends slashed, often by as much as two-thirds of 2008 levels).

Salaries for coaches are noncompetitive. (The current UH head coach makes $1.1 million, merely tenfold what full professors make in most academic departments – but his Wisconsin opposite number makes $1.5 million, in a city where the cost of living is about half that of Honolulu, and coaches in the really big schools make, like, $3.5 million. Not counting endorsement income, support from “boosters”, etc. etc. …)

I reckon it’s time for Hawai‘i to smell the same coffee as Hofstra and Northeastern universities, and close the gridiron program in favor of other pursuits. Like, finding a building to house the Psychology Department.

Of course, any such move would probably close the University of Hawai‘i, or at least the flagship campus at Mânoa. But We the People of the Great Nation State of Hawai‘i are doing that anyway, by slow strangulation. May as well come right out and get it over with.

I mean, the people of the Mânoa Valley never wanted the campus in their backyards anyway. And most of the worst-in-the-nation rush-hour traffic congestion that plagues Honolulu has been tracked to people getting to and leaving UH Mânoa. Close the campus? Problem solved!

Hey. Do this, and the city won’t even need a rail line.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Here’s a peek at a trumpet player well known on this blog.  Of course he wouldn’t post it himself, so I had to do it — but leave the comments for him.

CAVE CANEM (Latin): Beware of the dog. CAVE HOMINEM: Beware of the human.

Seems like only yesterday that our English teachers were telling us exactly what they thought of “news” like this. ‘Man Bites Dog’ stories, they called them, and they were to be beneath our notice. Especially on our assignments, where, if they appeared, they would attract the deadliest Scarlet Letter, the one that would cause the parental units to proclaim the virtues of our remaining in our own rooms after school, for the next week at least.

Our teachers, sadly, foresaw neither the National Enquirer Gospel of Profit, nor the Vista of a World Without Classified Advertising (presented by craigslist). Factors that would transform the MBD from an object of educational disdain into the principal resource of the modern information industry:

ROVERVILLE (API*) Police and Humane Society officials are investigating at this hour a report of aggravated manbite at a home on Setter Avenue.

Authorities were called to the home at around 9 PM yesterday by neighbors complaining of loud noises, including those of a dog or a child in pain. Responding officers found a man, later identified as Mr. Carney V. Russell of Roverville (the owner of the home), and a male golden retriever. The residence showed signs of a struggle, including large hanks of dog hair strewn on the carpet. When both the condition and the name (“Sparerib”) of the dog were ascertained, Mr. Russell was taken into custody, and Sparerib to the Humane Society clinic, where he is reported to be doing well.

Upon hearing of the arrest, Ms. Eva B. Rich of the Roverville chapter of PETA spoke to the media. “We have been aware of Mr. Carney V. Russell’s activities for some time, and we are appalled that it has taken so long for the authorities to act. We expect that Mr. Russell will pay the full penalty for his crimes. Should he not do so, he may expect a visit to teach him respect for life not of his species, with our most potent persuaders including brass knuckles and a year’s supply of tofu bacon. But you didn’t hear that from us.”

Mr. Qu Fulin, however, a Setter Avenue neighbor of Russell’s and proprietor of Roverville’s Seven Joys restaurant, was more concerned with the state of the dog. “Golden retriever? Terrible choice! Much too bony, and the meat’s too tough. A St. Bernard is much better, especially if you feed well, keep exercise down, and harvest before it’s a year old.”

A number of citizens have been seen in the vicinity of the Setter Avenue address. At least one of these citizens has been identified as a former business associate of Mr. Michael Vick. It is rumored that these persons are seeking a way to use the currently-idle assets of their former business in a legal way, and are seeking advice from Mr. Russell.

Mr. Russell’s arraignment on charges of assault, battery and cruelty to animals (specifically, to Sparerib) is scheduled for 10 AM local time tomorrow in the Roverville Town Hall and Court House.

(* = Amoeba Press International)

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Yes, Latin scholars, that should be “The Amoebae Are Coming …” The title is a direct quote. It’s not my fault.

I suppose I’d better explain.

Yesterday (17 April 2009), somebody found this blog using the search string “amoeba jokes bugs bunny”. I wished to know where else this search would lead, not least to give me a clue as to why anyone would make it. So, I searched on it myself. And wound up reading about the glorious day when amoebae ruled Los Angeles, even making it onto the front page of the paper.

I’d tell you the story verbatim, but if I did:

a. The fellow who tells it, Chuck Blore, is something of a wheel (more on that anon), and seems to pay attention to what’s happening on the Internet;

b. He might think I was running a splog;

c. He’s got lawyers.

So, you’ll have to go here to read the whole thing … and scroll halfway down the page to where it starts.

The short version goes like this. To tell it, you first need to know that Chuck Blore was the program director (= day-to-day operations manager) at radio station KFWB in LA, at a time when it had something like 40% of the market – a phenomenal percentage for a city that had something like 50 stations broadcasting.

Blore was driving into work when he heard his morning drive-time DJ – Bruce Hayes – make one of his patented random remarks.

Oh man, would you look at that? I think there is an amoeba loose in here. Oops, too late. Gone.

Blore stops the car, calls the station. No he wasn’t practicing safe driving. As you’ll soon see, we’re talking prehistory. The man found a pay phone. (We pause briefly while the under-twentysomethings do a websearch on “pay phone”.)

What the heck is an amoeba?

He got his answer (which was pretty close to the correct one), decided that this schtick could be funny, and told Hayes to carry on. Which he did. With messages like:

We’ve just received news on further amoeba sightings. Another amoeba was just seen sliding over the siding on The Pasadena Freeway. Ladies with butterfly nets are chasing him.

Plus:

[Another amoeba report] from The La Brea Tar Pits where the thick black muck is belching up amoebas which are, in turn, belching dinosaur waste.

And the City of the Angels erupted.

Blore went into his office to find KFWB’s phones ringing off the hook. And the police station’s. And the hospital’s. The hospitals got so many calls demanding information on “amoeba protection” that their phone system crashed. One of the calls to KFWB was from the FCC:

Who do you people think you are? Orson Welles?!?

Eventually, the authorities (with help from KFWB, which backed off on its gag) got Los Angelenos calmed down, and life returned to as near a semblance of normal as can be expected from a place nicknamed “La La Land”. But not before a cartoonist with the evening-edition tabloid newspaper, the Herald Express, was moved to draw up a panel showing a panicked citizen up a light pole, worriedly surveying the landscape while a radio in his hand blared:

The amoebas are coming! The amoebas are coming!

A panel that the paper published on its front page. The whole front page.

Now, as I may have mentioned somewhere around here before, I study amoebae and their kin for a living. I can pretty much guarantee you that there were, and are, amoebae in Bruce Hayes’s studio, on the Pasadena Freeway, and probably even in the La Brea Tar Pits. Give me a Petri dish, a cotton swab, and two weeks, and I’ll prove it to you.

But I will also prove that no one will be chasing them with a butterfly net. A big amoeba might be as big around as a human hair. Most of them are lots smaller than that. Hardly likely to be the subject of mass panic. (We’ll talk about amoebic dysentery another time, shall we? You might be dining right now …)

So what gives? What was it about that time and place that caused an amoeba joke to turn into Massisteria … um, mass hysteria? (I did not make that up.) Blore takes the fact that it happened for granted, not asking (at least, not in those parts of his book that he’s posted online) how come it happened. But this Amoeba wishes answers. And he thinks he just might have one.

Blore doesn’t actually say when this episode took place, but (I did some digging) it had to have been after Blore instituted his then-novel programming at KFWB in early 1958, and before Bruce Hayes left the station in early 1961.

The years 1958 to 1961 were also the ones in which the actor Steve McQueen appeared as the star of a television program, a Western called Wanted: Dead or Alive.

No, Wanted: Dead or Alive didn’t have any amoebae in it. What it did have was the power to turn the previously little-known McQueen into a household name. A household name whose previous efforts in various B-movies were suddenly profitable. One of those B-movies was making the rounds of the drive-in theatres, to large audiences, at about the time that Bruce Hayes was reporting amoebae popping up all through Los Angeles. A movie that was then, and still is now, the freakiest amoeba movie of all time.

The Blob.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Surely, dear readers, you’ve been following the recent uproar over piracy in the waters off Somalia. Especially, the capture and dramatic rescue of merchant marine Captain Richard Phillips. A rescue that was celebrated with blasts from the horn of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s training vessel.

The Academy is Phillips’s alma mater.

And it is located on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts – where 17 out of every 10 of the tourist attractions has a pirate theme.

Hey. We the People love pirates. Especially those pirates active in the Caribbean during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the so-called Great Age of Piracy from whom most of the romanticized outlaws of fiction have sprung: Long John Silver, Conrad, Hook, Jack Sparrow. Consider the popularity of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies. All those sports teams with pirate-inspired nicknames, particularly “Pirates” (of course) and “Buccaneers”. (Which is not what their earrings cost. At least, I hope, for the sake of their health, it was not.) The rafts of pirate-inspired romance novels.

Alas, writes David Cordingly, the author of Under the Black Flag, the sober historian finds little support for the romance in those novels, even for the most notorious captains such as Sir Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and William Kidd.

From him, I learned what I already suspected. That the lives of real pirates were short on glamor, romance, and time, and long on brutality and violence. That the men and women who sailed under the Jolly Roger were neither noble rebels nor cartoon villains.

They were terrorists. Which is what we’re calling the Somali practitioners of the art.

And they were in it for the money, the legit livelihoods available to them having been taken away, or reduced to starvation wages, by earlier iterations of the current economic downturn.

Which is what the Somali pirates are in it for, the legit livelihoods available to them having been taken away by the collapse of Somali central government and the larger-scale piracy of Somali waters by the fishing fleets and trash haulers of “developed” nations.

What I had not previously known was the organization of the terrorist organization known as a pirate vessel in the Great Age of Piracy. Those vessels were as large and imposing as the pirates could manage to steal, and they crammed as many men on board as possible. They could therefore promise to overwhelm the skeleton crews of most merchant vessels, and fulfill the promise if necessary. It was seldom necessary.

(Somali pirate vessels, in contrast, are small and seemingly insignificant, and their crews are small. Then again, one dude with an AK-47 can make one hell of an impression, and make it a hell of a lot faster, and cheaper, than 100 men with cutlasses.)

Obviously, though, that many men on a boat, the largest of which wouldn’t be considered big enough, today, to carry three software billionaires, is a recipe for trouble unless there’s a strong and effective organization in place. And, contrary to what you might expect, that organization was not based on despotic rule.

Instead, each voyage was conducted under a set of written articles, signed (willy-nilly) by every member of the crew. Each signer was then entitled to vote on all matters relevant to the craft and its maintenance. The crew voted the captain in (and out), the cruise route, the rations, codes of behavior and the punishment for violations, the distribution of plunder, and the compensation due those injured.

In other words, at a time in the history of the world when most governments were headed by absolute monarchs, these ocean-going vessels represented the planet’s most able and active democracies, embodying liberty, equality and brotherhood a century before the American and French revolutions. Democracies of violent men, which existed solely for the sake of plunder, for the unrepentant robbery of the wealth of others.

Did somebody say something about Iraq?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

… iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses.

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,
the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time
handed out military command, high civil office, legions, everything – now
restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

     - Juvenal, Satire 10.77-81

As I write this, the New England football gridiron Patriots are playing the New York football gridiron Giants in the last regular-season National Football Gridiron League game for both teams. The Patriots, in case you live in Iceland or something, have not yet lost a game, and are trying to complete an undefeated regular season.

I actually sat down to watch the game. Yes I did. I mean, it’s not as if you could miss it if you tried. It’s on three, count ‘em, three separate television networks.

I lasted all of five minutes.

Long enough to see a Patriots wide receiver score a touchdown and get his team penalized fifteen yards for excessive celebration. Which the receiver and his teammates did. Yes, the play broke three league records. Too bad. It’s not exactly a new rule. And supposedly, the rules are the rules.

But not to the commentators. Who ragged endlessly on the referees for “interfering with the game”.

And it’s not as if the penalty was harmless. The Giants scored a touchdown on the ensuing kickoff – made possible in large part by the fifteen yards the kicking team had to give up. Who is at fault? The receiver and his teammates for not abiding by the rules? Or the referees who are charged with enforcing the rules?

Click.

… sporting events are rituals. Specifically, ritualized combat. Rituals that connect us with the other animals on this blue sphere, all the way back (at least) to the cartilaginous fishes of 450 million years ago. Rituals that permit the stronger of two contestants to be identified without exposing both to potentially lethal attacks except when absolutely necessary. Rituals whose rules serve to minimize the risk of mayhem, murder, war.

Trouble is, when the rules of ritualized combat break down, there’s only one thing left.

The real thing.

Like when the Christians got tossed to the lions in the Roman circus. Or gladiators fought to the death.

Ave caesar! Morituri te salutamus!
Hail Caesar! Those about to die salute you!

And Roman gladiators didn’t even get paid like the modern ones. Who make twice as much in a week as the average school teacher makes in a year. Like the one sitting next to me, working on school materials on a Saturday afternoon.

My telling you about a teacher who is working for free might get the attention of a few dozen of you. About the same number who, the stats say, read about the (now) $225 million in deferred repairs to academic buildings at the Central Pacific university that is sending its gridiron team to the Sugar Bowl. Meanwhile, the ESPN webpage dedicated to the Patriots-Giants contest had 7,000 comments. Before the first half ended.

Rollerball, anyone?

   - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

One of the bands OC plays in performed one of their four Christmas Concerts at Honolulu Hale for the City Lights celebration. Here’s a video clip of the band playing and perhaps 1/100th of the huge Christmas display. More photos to follow. Stay tuned for when and where (we have many blogs!).

O’Ceallaigh is playing concert after concert after concert. Tis the season, after all. On Saturday the band I’m forbidden to name performed their Christmas concert in the outdoor gazebo at Mililani Town Center. On Sunday OC played in church, performed with the Oahu Civic Orchestra at Windward Mall and played in a brass ensemble which accompanied the Kapiolani Chorale Choir in performing a Christmas Cantata. Then tonight the Oahu Civic Orchestra played again at a retirement center.

Here are pictures from the Windward Mall performance. Sorry, no video. I just bought the camera and haven’t read that far in the operator’s manual.

No pictures from tonight’s performance because I did not attend. I had planned to spend the weekend making stockings, but all my time was taken by OC’s concerts (although I did sneak away for a bit at Windward Mall and buy my lovely new Canon PowerShot A560 — which so far I like quite muchly)!

In the previous post, dearest Quilly yanked a few of the few remaining feathers from the top of my head because I haven’t written anything here lately.

Yes, I’m busy. And I’m going to get a lot busier. Busy enough to make me wonder whether I will have time to blog at all. Or even do any more of the Fiddler stuff. It’s not like the Fiddler stuff pays the bills. When I was in Berkeley, California a couple of years ago now, I became acquainted with a music store called The Starving Musician. Yep, it’s still there. In fact, there’s three of them. Glad to see somebody in the music business is making a crust. I think. It sure ain’t the musicians.

Or the writers.

As I’m sure everyone in the known universe and Iceland now knows, the professional writers are on strike. The ones in those parts of southern California that didn’t burn down to the ground last month, who are responsible for such lasting contributions to the cultural heritage of the English-speaking peoples as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, American Idol, and Dancing With The Stars.

Yeah, them.

You probably know better than I that the writers are in high dudgeon because their employers are increasing using the Internet to peddle their wares. The employers are doing this for several reasons, one of which is that, through a loophole in their previous collective-bargaining contract, writers make no money when their writings are peddled over the Internet.

Hey. Lower costs. Higher profits. The American way. Like how Halliburton can get a “buy” rating on the NYSE without actually having to supply electricity to Baghdad.

Anyway. The writers are trying to get that loophole closed through their negotiators (who are, as of this writing, getting nowhere), and by winning We the People over to their side. Among other things, they’re trying to win We the People over to their side by peddling their wares (where else?) over the Internet. The so-called “speechless” campaign. Which, this amoeba finds, is so smug and self-absorbed that, for those not already part of the Writer’s Guild chorus, it makes a better case for Management than for the scribblers. Not that America’s Got Talent doesn’t already do that.

Here. See for yourself.

Now, Amoeba’s Rule states that any intractable argument is usually over the wrong thing. (Don’t bother googling websearching that. I just made it up.) Like with the recent strikes at General Motors and Chrysler. Seems dumb to argue about how profits are to be divided instead of getting together to figure out how to make enough profits to divide.

In case you were thinking that Media Management types had all the money in the world and were churlishly hiding it from their writers. Think, if you will, about why (for instance) there aren’t any locally-owned or -operated TV or radio stations any more. Each and every one, at least in places I’ve lived, is part of some huge corporate conglomerate. Because the audience is shrinking, and no media outlet can survive without the backing of a Disney or a Time-Warner, which, thanks to economies of scale, can produce more stuff with less money. Including programs. Which have to capture a pretty fair chunk of the market that’s left in order to make a buck. Which means a whole bunch of things like America’s Got Talent. Because that’s what the remaining market will buy.

In case you were thinking that the writers were fat cats crying over milk that wasn’t spilt their way. It opened my eyes last week when I read what the average annual take for a Hollywood screenwriter is. $60,000. Sixty fricking thousand dollars. Before taxes. And health insurance. Which will likely cost double what it costs if you’re, say, a teacher, or one of those UAW assembly-line workers, instead of (as I think is usual) an independent contractor to the studios. Hell, at that rate of pay, I’d almost rather be a teacher. At least teachers don’t have frantic producers calling them for rewrites at three in the morning.

Sure, there will be a few writers who make lots more than sixty K a year. It takes real talent to be able to pander to the tastes of the mass market, what’s left of it, without actually doing hard-core porn. Try it sometime.

Wait a minute. We are trying it. Some two million of us just on our beloved WordPress alone. To say nothing of Blogger, or Typepad, or Youtube, or, well, you name ‘em.

The writers are having a hard time making a dollar at their writing because so many of We the People are willing to do it for free.

Including Your Favorite Amoeba.

Ask yourself. How much of your entertainment time budget is spent blogging, or reading blogs, or otherwise browsing Internet content that is available for free, was put online for free, presumably by people who are able to produce and post that content for free because they’re subsidized by their jobs, or their benefits, or their, well, I won’t presume to guess. If I do, somebody might feel offended. Especially the people who are trying to make their living writing for media programs, or selling the advertising for media programs, or buying/selling stock in media corporations based on their ability to produce programs that will sell to advertisers who will make sure that We the People will watch them.

I’ve written, somewhere in the blogosphere, that the idea of a professional scientist was pretty much unknown before the twentieth century. It’s close to the same way with professional writers, or artists, or musicians. Of course, the electronic media (radio, television, movies, computer networks) that provided such a huge market for writers, artists, and musicians didn’t exist before the twentieth century.

Famous people like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote not for professional musicians, but for amateurs, people who could afford both the time to play and the outlay for their instruments and training. Such writers either had day jobs, or they spent huge amounts of time seeking contracts and patrons. And it didn’t always work. Mozart is recognized, even today, as one of the absolute goliaths of Western music. And he died penniless.

If we are not careful, we could wind up, once again, living out a time where all art is amateur. And scarce. Because fewer and fewer of us, as we all scrabble for life’s diminishing resources, will have the time or cash to invest in writing, or drawing, or making music.

Oh. Did I mention? The only people who could play Mozart’s music, the only ones for whom Mozart could afford to write, were rich noblemen?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.