I recently saw this “Health Risk Warning Sign” posted in the men’s room at the Irving Convention Center in Texas. It’s required by law to be posted in all restrooms of establishments that serve alcohol, and doubtless it contains good advice for those who might be or become pregnant. But if it’s posted in the men’s rooms shouldn’t it also warn its target audience that they’re in the wrong bathroom?
But can we trust them? Time will tell!
1. It celebrates a racist sport, having originally been written back in 1908 when baseball was still segregated and African-Americans were barred from the major leagues. Baseball’s subsequent integration cannot erase this song’s tainted origins.
2. The song is about a young lady named Katie Casey or Nelly Kelly (depending on the version) who was keen on baseball. It not only relies on gender-role traditionalism for its premise, but is also culturally insensitive toward persons of Irish ancestry.
3. In the song, the protagonist asks her young man to “take me out to the ball game” and “buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,” displaying a totally outdated sexist attitude. Why can’t she take herself out to the ball game and buy her own peanuts and cracker jack? Or she could take a friend, without regard to gender identity.
4. As originally written, the song describes this lady as being “baseball mad—had the fever and had it bad”. This is not only demeaning to those with real mental health problems, but also disrespectful to the millions of people who die of infectious diseases each year.
5. According to the song, Katie (or Nelly) “told the umpire he was wrong, all along, good and strong.” Such disruptive behavior and disrespect for authority should not be condoned, much less celebrated.
6. The words “root, root, root for the home team—if they don’t win it’s a shame,” encourage pure partisanship, perpetuating baseball’s inherent unfairness arising from the home team advantage. If the best team doesn’t win it’s a shame; statistically, in 50% of games that won’t be the home team. In addition, this line overemphasizes the importance of winning, at the expense of the fair play and fun that should be the primary objectives of what is, after all, just a game.
7. The references to peanuts and cracker jack are socially irresponsible: they encourage unhealthy eating habits, while deliberately ignoring the imperialism, environmental impact and human rights abuses associated with peanut farming. Also, the eating of peanuts could prove fatal to nearby spectators with allergies, and the toys formerly included in cracker jack boxes have been a significant contributor to oceanic plastic pollution.
8. The song is the inauthentic product of cultural appropriation; its writers had never attended a major league ball game.
9. The song is now out of copyright. Perpetuating its popularity deprives struggling present-day songwriters of an opportunity to earn royalties.
10. Most troubling of all is the line “I don’t care if I never get back.” Apart from its dangerist implications, this is female submissivism at its worst. The singer is prepared to risk death (and perhaps a worse fate) just in order to watch baseball. Her priorities are clearly in need of adjustment.
I encountered this web page late last night:
Is their website powered by a clockwork engine that needs rewinding every 12 hours?
I suppose it makes sense to take care of two errands at once, but I’m a little perturbed by the idea of a “walk-in” smog check: just what tailpipe emissions do they propose to test?
One minor annoyance about supermarket shopping can be the background music played over the store’s loudspeakers. I have no problem with instrumental tracks (as long as they only play one at a time), but hearing song lyrics can be a real distraction while reading the labels along a shelf. For example, on the day I snapped this sign OUTSIDE the store…
the speakers INSIDE the store were playing that old song by the Archies. You know, the one that goes “Sugar, ah honey honey, you are my candy girl and you got me wanting you, honey, ah sugar sugar…” when what you really want is marmalade (and I don’t mean the kind that went ob-la-di ob-la-da).
Of course if supermarkets REALLY wanted to make life easy for their shoppers, they would alphabetize their products, like video stores did. But I suppose that’s too much to ask. Ah well….
Here’s a 1987 British advertisement for squirt-cream which I recently unearthed from the vault. I can’t help but feel that a W is missing from the very top of the page….
All the recent fuss and confusion over Brexit reminds me of a British newspaper cartoon I saw round about 1971, before Britain entered the “Common Market” (as we called it back then). As I recall, it showed a group of eggs bearing the faces of Europe’s political leaders, perched on the rim of a frying pan. The egg with the face of Edward Heath, Britain’s Prime Minister, was speaking, and the cartoon caption was something like: “Gentlemen, suppose I don’t like being an omelette and want to go back to being an egg again?”
This prophetic cartoon deserves another airing. If only I could find it and see how accurate my recollections are.
Yesterday morning at home I got a call on my cellphone regarding a broken window (not at my house but in another building), after which I exchanged a number of text messages on the subject.
Imagine my surprise when I turned on my computer a few minutes later to visit one of my favorite websites, and up popped an advertisement for an emergency window replacement service. I’m sure this was no coincidence, as I’d never seen this advert before.
How, I wondered, could the Internet suddenly “know” that I was in conversations about a broken window, unless it was somehow spying on my cellphone traffic and linking it to my computer? I think it’s because I have a cellular signal booster that routes my cellphone traffic through my internet connection, and/or because my cellphone connects to the WiFi in my house. Either way, it means that someone, probably my cable/internet provider, is monitoring the traffic going to and from my IP address, looking for keywords and selling the information to advertisers. (They could also be listening in on my phone calls, which, although scarier, seems less likely as it is technically harder.) It would be interesting to devise an experiment to test this hypothesis….
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