Advertising Chicanery

This morning I was listening to Pop Radio, which I will admit that I sometimes do. I could excuse myself and tell you it was to listen for traffic, but I must admit that sometimes I just have an interest in psycho-analyzing the newscasters and what they choose to announce. While I was conducting this 'research' an advertisement came up for a spa that does those essential things such as liposuction, skin lifts, and hair-lasering (note the sarcasm). They proudly announced that in light of the financial crisis no payments would have to be made till October 2009.

Now I ask you- how is anyone's financial crisis going to be lifted if in a year's time they are billed for expenses they couldn't afford and forgot to budget for? Advertisers, as well as many businesses, do not hesitate to capitalize on lending false sympathy to individuals, while trying to deepen their debt.

Whatever happened to advertising as a means to fulfill a need of the public? Whatever happened to businesses who were honest about their products? Whatever happened to the news as a public service? Okay...rant over, perhaps I should lay off the radio.

Deep Delight

Aaron's post below brought to mind two things. The first is a series which I've been watching lately by BBC called Planet Earth. It is perhaps a mix between a nature documentary, a travel show, a poem, and a great work of art. It reflects the vastness of our universe and the wonders of our planet. The most striking aspect, however, is that the simplest scenes give you a deep awe and joy. Whether it be an African Elephant roaming miles to an oasis, the sea cresting on the Antarctica coast, or a antelope escaping, it is a series worth watching.

The second is a poem which I would like to share with you. It is one of my favorites because it describes so aptly this wanderlust or the deep seeded desire to see beauty in unknown places.

Tell Me a Story

by Robert Penn Warren
[ A ]Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.
I did not know what was happening in my heart.
It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.
The sound was passing northward.

[ B ]Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.

Wanderlust

Ever feel the need to just get up and go somewhere? While - alas - stuck in front of your office computer? Well the folks over at GOOD Magazine have solved your dilemma, mapping historical and fictional journeys on a nifty interface with quotes, pictures, and neat little facts. The voyages chronicled include: Magellan's Circumnavigation, Phileas Fogg's 80 day race, Marco Polo's known route, and Charles Lindberg's flight over the Atlantic. It's a great time-killer...

Special thanks to Margaret Perry, whose Ten Thousand Places blog first brought this to my attention.

A Tale of Two Tshirts

The other day I saw a tshirt that read, "I got ninety nine problems but a BABY ain't one!" At the bottom some sex ed program proudly declared its sponsorship of this apparel. My heart sunk. If you consider babies a problem, let me suggest that your issues may run far deeper than the mere mechanics of procreation (or the inhibiting thereof).

But my moral and sartorial spirits were lifted on Sunday when a visiting priest told a story about being at the local park with his parish's youth minister, who pointed out a parish family across the way. It was a fairly young couple, with husband and wife both about thirty years old. With them were five children. The wife and children all wore matching tshirts which read, "No, we're not done. We're just getting started." Awesome!

Not having seen the young family myself, I cannot venture much of a guess, but it would not surprise me if the young parents were far happier people than the wearer of the sex ed tshirt (who did not seem a particularly happy gal). It is a situation almost universally observed at pro- and anti-abortion rallies, where the people who support baby killing just seem like bitter people. The selfishness and loneliness inherent in viewing the lives of others as problems will catch up to you sooner or later.

Just another reason I'm glad I'm Catholic.

Sixteen Military Wives

For you fans of the Decemberists out there, here's one of their videos I came across:



Stephen Colbert described the Decemberists as "hyper-literate prog rock." I once mentioned that in a loud bar and someone thought I had said "hyper-lyric." It could be true; you would be hard pressed to find another musical act with music so full of rich vocabulary, esoteric allusions, dramatic twists and buckets of pathos. (I think pretty much any of their albums could safely be titled "Love and Death.") One of the fun things about their videos is that they do not content themselves with a few shots of the band playing, interspersed with fairly vague and generic scenes which probably have to do with the lyrical content of the song. No, they usually proceed to tell another story, similar to - but often different from - that told in the song. It is almost as though the song is simply the soundtrack for a film short, rather than the film simply being the image side of a music video. In any case, the result is a highly complex assemblage of instruments and vocals, words and images. Like their music generally, the Decemberists' music videos are probably considerably denser than our usual fare, but I think they are quite worth the added digestion.

Do We Have a Canon?

The other day I was conducting a certain thought experiment: What if there were an old-fashioned boarding school - let's call it St. Boniface College - with lots of ancient buildings and esoteric old traditions. And let us assume that among those traditions are readings at the beginning of meal times, somewhat like in monastic refectories. To what sort of readings would I have the boys (and girls too, if this is a coed place) listen?

Some countries have a national epic or a pretty short list of canonical works that express who they are, where they have come from and what they stand for. But do I, an Anglophonic American Catholic Christian, a child of the Western Tradition, have a short list of works that I could share with a rising generation at the beginning of each meal? Well, I've endeavored to produce such a list.

Certain works have been excluded because their genre does not fit the context of the thought experiment. (Aquinas' On Being and Essence, no matter how important it may - or may not - be, is never going to make good reading for communal meals.)


Breakfast:
Sacred Scripture

Lunch:
Homer, The Iliad
--, Odyssey
Virgil, Aeneid
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Polybius, Histories
Livy, From the Founding of the City
Unknown, Beowulf
Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Willibald, Life of St. Boniface
Various, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
William of Tyre, History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Thomas Mallory, Le Morte D'Arthur
Edmund Spender, The Faerie Queene
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Dinner:
William Shakespeare, Tragedies, Comedies and Histories


In the end I decided that Sacred Scripture and the works of Shakespeare were too large and too important to have to share a rotating schedule with anything else, so they each get their own meal. I'm fairly happy with this list, except that there are no American works. Granted, there are a number of works that we can safely say the American Founders read, so I'm not overly concerned about it, but, still, it would be nice to see something from this side of the Pond.

There were several honorable mentions that almost made the list:

Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Tacitus, Histories or Annals
Nennius, History of the Britons
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain

Any thoughts from the readership? Suggestions? Things that didn't make the cut, that should have? Or things that I let in that should have been excluded?

Post script: A little while ago on another blog I wrote a post about things that changed my life: books, music, other works of art. There is some overlap, though I think you'll find the scope is somewhat different. Still, if you find one list interesting, you may be intrigued by the other.

Tired of the 24-Hour News Cycle

I must confess something. I do appreciate the fact that the Internet can bring us obscene amounts of information in just a couple seconds. For example, I can't imagine doing legal research without Internet databases. Looking up every case by hand would be brain-numbing and a waste of time.

The dark side of the information superhighway, though, is that most news stories last only a few hours. To compensate for our short attention span, the news media just flood us with more and more information. I simply cannot keep up with the news media.

That's where the 1783 edition of The Onion comes in handy.

(To view a larger version simply click on the image.)