CSotD: Memories Old and New
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Frazz raises the question of tributes and covers and copying, and wouldn't it be nice if you got royalties when someone copied off your paper in school?
Though I don't think it would be all that unusual. I gave a friend a six pack of Bud to add my name to his science fair project senior year.
Our school's science department was pretty much in free fall that year and anyone who passed the physics or chemistry Regents in June did so by dint of hard studying on their own. I never quite figured out what the school administration knew and when they knew it, but anyone walking through the science fair that year had to suspect there was something wrong, because by spring we had gone past simply doing the minimum required and descended into open mockery.
"My" project consisted of a few photos of an unshielded lightbulb and several pages of speculative gibberish on the similarities between the atom and the solar system.
Another project featured a distilling tube, some dirty oil drained from a car and a group of beakers with purported petroleum distillates, including gasoline, clean motor oil and some others at least one of which did not, in fact, come from petroleum. It got a blue ribbon.
By senior year, at least, cheating had become something of a competitive sport. We didn't cheat on the teachers we liked or on the teachers we (however grudgingly) respected, the latter because you'd get caught.
But, for instance, we had a social studies teacher whose method of checking our workbooks was to have us open them on our desk so that he could walk up and down the aisles seeing that the pages were full of writing. After a few months, it became a good thing that he never paused to actually read that writing or all hell might have broken loose, but he never did and a few years later he became an insurance agent, which qualified as a happy ending.
Caulfield's comparison fails in that I don't think any of us cared if someone else cheated. If we kept our answers on a quiz shielded from prying eyes, it wasn't to preserve the artistic integrity of our work or the sanctity of the system but to avoid getting drawn into someone else's punishment.
However, he's got this part right: While Leonard Cohen can license or not license a song for use in a hamburger commercial, he likely doesn't have the power to refuse to allow someone to make a shoddy cover of one of his songs. Or at least he doesn't have the motivation: I suspect he has the wisdom to collect the royalties and not obsess over it.
Royalties make all the difference. A six-pack of Bud can be soothing, and I suspect Cohen has not only access to better beer but enough money from royalties to get more than a six-pack.
A much newer memory was sparked by today's Bizarro, given that I spent 12 hours on the table about three months ago. While my own urologist was, as here, directing things, it went in shifts (I'm told) and (I speculate) that just about anybody who wanted to scrub in had the chance to do so.
I'm assuming he stepped out for a break at some point, though perhaps he is obsessive enough not to. But the feedbag concept is a good one, and, assuming the masks are snug, is safer than letting someone bring a box of Junior Mints into the operating theater.
On the Political Side
Wuerker and Bagley address one of the more curious aspects of the Trump meltdown, which is how the Religious Right can possibly stand by him.
From a philosophical/theological point of view, I prefer Wuerker's vision, which criticizes the type of Christianity that assumes Genesis is literal but that Jesus spoke metaphorically.
Last night, I saw one of Frontline's two-hour programs on the campaign, and one contrast they noted was that Donald Trump grew up going each Sunday to see Norman Vincent Peale preach that success was God's reward for the faithful, while Hillary Clinton's youth minister took the teenagers into Chicago to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
And, if that's Pat Robertson in Wuerker's cartoon, it's almost unfair because the man is not simply conservative but deranged.
Which does not excuse the people who remain in the pews from their own moral obligations. After all, the entire premise of the Protestant Reformation was that people should be able to read and interpret Scripture.
I suspect the truth in this issue is closer to Pat Bagley's vision, that they are trusting and clueless and simply not thinking about things.
Meanwhile, Phil Hands touches on another matter, and he's certainly right that the Trump partisans are intent on equating the Clinton email issue with the problems in their own candidate's camp.
But the media is not innocent and, in this scenario, would likely provide equal-time coverage of both storms.
I'm having flashbacks to White Water at the moment, with the release of the Wikileaks emails, because for months we heard about White Water and, when the details finally emerged, those of us with knowledge of commercial real estate said, "That's it? That's the big scandal?"
So far, I'm getting the same reaction to the Wikileaks "revelations." There is no there there, or, at least, none I've seen yet, but the media, in their urge to be fair, are reporting it as if it mattered.
And as if the Trump loyalists will respect them for it.
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