So – in case you missed it – the American White House has decided that the media entity known in these Untied States as “Fox News” is not really news.

Yes …

That “Fox News” is an engine for making money.

Yes …

That media entities shouldn’t try to copy “Fox News” as if it were a legitimate news organization.

Entities like, say, CNN …

Lessee. What did I find when I last visited CNN?

… two soap-opera shootings, half a dozen celebrity reports (two of them obituaries, one for a person, the other for an automobile), a Twitter update, a bull in a china shop supermarket, and (the lead story) a guy who found the Hand of God in his back yard and is selling it on eBay. Yes. Really.

A real, honest-to-true, bona fide news organization, that CNN. Yessireebob.

But what the hell else did you expect?

The American White House acknowledges that Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of “Fox News”, has, quote, a talent for making money. Endquote.

Of what does that talent consist?

Of giving We the People what we are willing to buy.

And what are we willing to buy?

Well, let’s put it this way. If anyone in the “news” actually offered the real news, his viewership would be about the same as Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s blog readership. And he’d be eating peanut butter and jam (not “jelly”, please, there are Britons and Australians in the audience, and Jell-O on bread is just disgusting) sandwiches in his tent. Not a future that would meet with Mr. Murdoch’s expectations as a Captain of Industry.

No. We the People are prepared to shell out major dinero, and keep Mr. Murdoch and his ilk in yachts and caviar, for various “Man Bites Dog” stories. And, most especially, for good, solid, noisy, rabble-rousing opinions. The more loudly and confidently presented, the better. Especially if they confirm the opinions that We Ourselves hold. Spoken loudly and confidently and often enough, they become the truth.

The real truth need not apply.

It’s getting scary out there, people.

  - 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.

With the fate of Wall Street, not to mention the corporate imperium free world, hanging in the balance on this Monday morning (22 September 2008), the last thing I was expecting to hear on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition was an account of the previous night’s Emmy awards.

Not least because I had no clue what they were talking about. Apparently, I wasn’t alone, for, according to the NPR story, the 2008 Emmy awardees collectively have a fan base that’s about the size of the judging panel on American Idol. But I couldn’t have told you who any of these shows or people were if my 401K depended on it.

Yes, we do have a television. It would make an acceptable paperweight if it weren’t for those damfool cords hanging out the back. It’s a tossup which comes around more often, a program viewed on that television, or leap year. Because, as Quilly told the neighbors the other day, I get frustrated, trying to watch anything on that TV. I settle down to enjoy all those wonderful commercials, and, lo and behold, a ballgame breaks out.

Little did I know just how bad things have gotten. For, as the NPR commentators wondered aloud how Emmy-award winning TV shows get to survive without viewers, they entered into the world, not of advertising, nor even that of “product placement”, where disembodied cola cans drift conspicuously, and pointlessly, across viewing screens.

No. The world, it seems, now consists of product integration. Where the advertiser pays to have the company’s product written conspicuously into the story line of whatever show is being sponsored.

Asked by NPR to comment on their story, Robert Weissman of Commercial Alert, one of those so-called “watchdog” groups that appears to have been about as alert on their job of scrutinizing the media as the Securities and Exchange Commission was in keeping tabs on Lehman Brothers, was moved to say, “… it’s not … clear what the distinction is between ads and regular programming.”

Mr. Weissman obviously hasn’t traveled to Honolulu, where half of television programming is already infomercials. With rampant product integration, it will soon all be infomercials. And (happy day), they will all be able to drop the label.

Well, every cloud, they say, has its silver lining. Once upon a time, when men were men and products (more or less) knew their place, there was a British (Welsh, really) rock band called the Kinks, who penned a gay little ditty entitled “Lola”. The first two lines:

Well, I met her in a club down in old SoHo
Where they drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola

The earliest lyrics to this tune, I read, spoke not of “cherry cola” but of “Coca Cola”. Rules against product placement forced the change.

Ray and Dave Davies are still with us, and I can’t help wondering if they’re wondering:

Is it too late to change it back? There’s a whole new LGBT generation to be captured for the Empire of the Red Death …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She came home from work one day, looking rather disgruntled. He, wondering what he’d screwed up this time, asked (somewhat nervously), “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t understand people ’round here”, She lamented. “Some of them don’t have two coins to bless themselves with, but God help you get their attention, never mind their respect, if your blouse or your bag doesn’t have that label on it!”

OK, dear readers, hands up. How many of you expect the next line to be, “And when am I going to get a bag with that label on it?”

Nope. Didn’t happen. Sorry to disappoint you. But if you’ve been here awhile, you should oughta know what a remarkable person She is by now. And just to reinforce the point, there’s the story (and maybe one day She’ll tell it better) of when some of her Las Vegas fifth-graders showed up in class wearing a particularly worrisome set of T-shirts with labels on them.

“What’ve you got those on for?”, She asked.

“Because they’re cool, Ms. A.” was the reply.

“So”, She continued, “you’re telling me that you don’t have any cool of your own, so you had to go out and buy someone else’s?”

Silence.

Well, hey. Think about the last time you walked down a street in these Untied States of America with any number of people on it, or across a school yard or college campus or (shudder) shopping mall. Don’t all those people look like this?

OK, there’s a difference. Today, the advertisements for beer or fashion designers or tractors or whatever are printed on hats and shirts and purses and backpacks instead of on some funny-looking sign.

Make that two differences.

Once upon a time, advertisers paid the guys and gals in the sandwich boards to carry those ridiculous things around.

Today?

We pay the advertisers for the privilege of doing their selling!

Hello?!?

Just to set the record straight. He has no objection to having things with this label or that on it.

Any time those labels are prepared to pay up for the privilege of touting their wares.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.