Click to enbiggen

Travel

• The Louisville International Airport has the most amazing Dyson hand dryers in the restrooms. They really do dry off your hands in 10 seconds. Design-wise, Dyson is the Apple of things that blow and suck.

• On both legs of the trip, we sat towards the rear of the airplane, behind the wings. This is a good news/bad news thing. On the plus side, I can look out the window and make sure at least one of the wings is still attached to the plane. On the down side, those wings wobble a disconcerting amount, especially during some turbulence.

• Dulles International Airport is nowhere near Washington DC. Don’t let ‘em tell you different. Watching the cab fare go up and up and up isn’t the most relaxing way to start your vacation.

Downtown DC

• Downtown Washington DC is one of the cleanest, nicest urban areas I’ve ever seen. I don’t know that I saw a spot of trash where it shouldn’t be. Old buildings were classy, not dilapidated. There was only one thing I noticed:

• Washington DC has a huge homeless problem. There was a small park outside of our hotel where in the evening about 10 people slept. This was four blocks away from the White House. We walked to find breakfast on Saturday morning, and in almost every nook and cranny you could fit a person in, there was a person.

• We stayed a block away from the embassies of both Mexico and Uruguay.  I always imagined that embassies had big courtyards that you could run into and request political refuge, if the need struck you. These were like storefronts. They were both next to much bigger, much nicer banks. It was a bit disillusioning.

Click to enbiggen!

Click to enbiggen!

• You can practically stumble across history in the town. We went to the Hard Rock Café one night (several people mentioned that I should try the Ethiopian food in the city, but I gotta be me), and as we were walking out, we noticed that Ford’s Theater (of “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” fame) was right next door. One of Prince’s guitars is less than 100 yards away from one of the great crime scenes in American history, and I don’t mean “Graffiti Bridge.”

The Mall

• While we were walking along the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, we met a woman dipping her toes in. Considering the vast amount of duck poo that coats the Pool’s concrete bank (they never show that in the official photos), it was kinda gross. She asked us how deep we thought the pool was, to which I honestly answered “I don’t know.” I knew immediately that I had just missed an opportunity. Had I answered “Ankle deep, I think,” we all could have found out for sure just how deep it was.

Click to enbiggen!

• Washington must be one of the most photographed places on the planet. Since everywhere you go there’s an amazing site, there are people taking photos everywhere you go. If you’re trying to stay low profile, DC probably isn’t the place for you — you’ll always be in someone’s shot. Eventually, I just gave up and started taking photos of people taking photos. My favorite was of four guys trying to get their photo taken in front of the Washington Monument doing the “YMCA” in mid-air. The guy taking the photo was having problems getting the shot. I didn’t.

The Metro

Click to enbiggen!

• Since we flew in and didn’t rent a car, we depended on our feet and the Metro system to get us around Washington DC. The Metro system is very clean, convenient, fast and easy to use, and wasn’t that expensive. It’s a shame that it’s apparently losing money hand over fist. It did made me rethink my whole opinion on public transportation. Maybe it’s not just for hippies, vagrants and vagrant hippies after all.

The Smithsonian
• Ah, America’s attic. We were able to hit the American History museum and the Air & Space museum. There were a lot of hands-on exhibits, so of course my mind goes right to Swine Flu fears. I remember from my eighth-grade trip that the prop U.S.S. Enterprise was at the Smithsonian, so I wanted to see it. Unfortunately, when we asked someone where it was, he seemed disappointed that we were asking about a fictional ship — and he made sure we knew that it wasn’t real. Glad he cleared that up for us.

• In the Air & Space Museum, I got to touch a sliver of moonrock. Swine Flu be damned, I touched a piece of the Moon. Besides, if I get the flu from a moonrock, don’t I automatically get superpowers?

The Wall

Click to enbiggen!

• The Vietnam Memorial wall was built just after my eighth grade trip. I’ve of course seen it on TV and read about it, but it really is powerful when you get right up to it and see it with your own eyes, and get a feel of just how much 53,000+ really is. A parks department volunteer guide, who was himself a Vietnam Vet (three tours), was stationed at the wall, answering questions. He showed me a spot to take photos where the reflection of the Washington Monument made for a nice shot, and gave me, and others around me, some history and interesting tidbits. Probably the most powerful point of the whole thing was a simple exchange between him and an older man wearing a cap with the Marine symbol on it. “Welcome home, Marine,” he said. The man returned a quick salute with a simple “Thank you.” He then looked at the panel next to me, found a name, and slowly ran his thumb across it. I didn’t take the photo.

The Jackholes

• I’m cynical by nature, but I have respect for certain things, like memorials. The Vietnam Memorial. The World War II Memorial. These structures are there to remind us the sacrifice others made to allow future generations their freedoms. So, when you find the name of your state in the World War II Memorial (they’re all there), don’t have your buddies take your picture throwing faux gang signs and making goofy faces. When you’re at the Vietnam Memorial, don’t hug the wall and have your buddy take a picture because the reflection looks cool. You’re not making art; you’re making yourself a jackhole. Cemetery rules apply: If you wouldn’t throw gang signs in a cemetery, don’t throw them there. If you would throw them in a cemetery, get the hell away from me.

The People

• One of the cool things about a city like DC is the people. We heard, we believe, English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hindi, Turkish, and several we didn’t recognize, along with English of different accents.

Things I learned

Click to enbiggen!

• I can spend nearly 24 hours a day for five days with my wife, and still miss her when I had to go to work the next day.

• Objects on a map appear closer than they really are when you have to walk your carcass from one end of the city to the other.

• When you bring a pair of sandals as your only footwear on what is primarily a walking vacation, make sure they won’t rip the skin off your toe or heel. Otherwise, you might have to rock socks and sandals for the bulk of your stay.

• I dress like a tourist no matter where I am, apparently. All I need is a map to complete the look.

The Justification: Ever tried to herd cats? If so, then you know what it’s like to take group shots of 10 kindergarten classes in one day.

The Explanation: Every year, the paper I was working on put together a special section titled “The Class of Present Year +12” (in 2003, it would be “The Class of 2015,” etc.). In it, we’d take pictures of every kindergarten class in the county’s schools (and not just the public schools, my friends; the private schools, too. If you think 5-year-olds in private schools behave better than their peers in the public system, think again). Once we gathered all these images of the precious tots, we’d package it all together, sell advertising to companies that wanted to be part of a “feel good” project, and then make sure everyone’s parents knew that Little Johnny and Janie were going to be in the paper that day, so buy 12 copies!

Win/Win, everyone’s happy, right? Well, not if you’re the one that had to traipse around to all these far-flung schools and try to get 20 or so little germ factories to sit still and look at the same point for five or 10 seconds. Generally, when taking a photo of any group, you take two or three, in case someone blinks. In this case, I’d take four or five, because, invariably, some future jackass that will be your kid’s co-worker at some point would decide this was their big moment and do their best Broadway jazz-hands, usually elbowing their buddy next to them. Chaos ensued.

(By the way, I really don’t have anything against kids, who are, on average, perfectly lovely people. Just want to throw that out there. But I’m sure that even the most doting of parents will, at their most truthful, admit that they wish their kids would, sometimes, just cut the crap. The thing to keep in mind is that these weren’t MY KIDS.)

So, when I’d get back to the newsroom (and I’m using the term “news” pretty loosely right now), I’d take a look at the photos and see that, of the four pictures I had, about 20% of the kids were looking off in the distance, blinking, or otherwise not putting their best face forward. And it wasn’t just me; everyone’s pictures had the same problems.

Then it occurred to me. Out of four shots, all the kids were looking at the camera at some point, just not all at the same time. Since I didn’t move, and since they stayed (pretty much) in the same positions, it would be easy to make a composite shot in Photoshop. The devil on my right shoulder said “do it.” The angel on my left said “Meh, whatever.”

So, in summary, if you had a child in kindergarten sometime during the first half of this decade, at a certain school system, there’s a good chance that I cut off your kid’s head, and depending on how much trouble they were, I wasn’t always gentle. But, hey, YOUR kids were probably looking at the camera and smiling, right? It’s those damn other people’s children who are the troublemakers, so no worries.

The point of this long, slightly rambly story is that, now that digital photography is everywhere, it’s easy to doctor photos with programs such as Photoshop, and the temptation can sometimes be overwhelming. It’s easy to say “I’d never doctor a photograph that was going to be published,” it’s hard not to bump up the contrast, remove the red-eye, make this part of the photo a little lighter, that part a little darker (just to help the composition, you understand)…. At what point does it go from touch-up work to forged photography?

Simply messing with the lightness and darkness of photographs (called “dodging and burning,”) got Time Magazine in a spot of trouble when they ran a picture of O.J. Simpson’s mug shot after the slow-speed Bronco chase. While Newsweek ran the photo pretty much as is, Time’s version was darker and more sinister. The illustrator responsible said that he wanted to make the image “more artful, more compelling,” by illustrating the shadow that had fallen over a then-loved sports figure (it’s true – O.J. Simpson at one time played football). Enough people saw it as “demonizing the black man” that time did something they had to that point never done – they pulled the cover and replaced it so that the one that hit the newsstands was a much less controversial shot (only subscribers to the “evil” cover, so call now!).

Of course, photo retouching isn’t a new game. Russia was an old pro at it in the 1920’s (pre-Photoshop). Probably the most famous case was that of Leon Trotsky, a friend of Lenin who ran afoul of Stalin’s politics. Suddenly, like a teenage boyfriend who cheated, he was eliminated from the photo albums, and from the public record. When you consider the technology the Soviets  had to work with, it wasn’t a bad job, actually.

Next week, we’ll take a look at modern examples — some funny, some not-so-much — of altered photos being used to tell stories that should never have been told.

TO BE CONTINUED…

<old fart moment> The defining movies of my childhood were the “Star Wars” films, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Superman” (which was amazing on the screen, but doesn’t really hold up as well as some of the others, which isn’t to say I don’t still get the goose bumps during that opening credit sequence), “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” etc. I feel like it was a golden era for a small boy in an oversized seat, something that kids don’t have today. I feel bad that the summers of their childhood will be filled with disposable films like “G.I. Joe,” “Transformers,” and other pieces of cinematic crap “events” that no one will really remember a decade from now. By 2017, no one will really be going to rescreenings of “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.” </old fart moment>

I love movies so much that, with the help of a very understanding wife, we remodeled the basement of the house we bought last year into a big-screen theater with surround-sound and décor that looks it was designed by a 12-year-old boy with a budget. Have I mentioned that I love my wife?

<old fart moment.2>The theater of my youth was Showcase Cinemas on Bardstown Road in Louisville. It was a multi-screen cinema, and sure, you could tell when screens were added later because of the space allotted — more screens means more butts in seats means more money, so theaters got smaller — but it still had some really, really big theaters. Screen one was massive, and screens four and five will always be the theaters that I had the perfect “Star Wars” screening experience. That Cinema is gone now (actually, it’s still there, just rotting away). Modern theaters have fallen prey to the “strip mall” mentality. No personality — just a box to watch a film in, and then get the hell out. </old fart moment.2>

Maybe as screens at home get bigger, the “event” feeling of being at a movie shrinks. This leads to a whole mass of people not knowing — or worse, not caring — how to behave at a theater. And it’s not just kids. Adults are losing the ability to watch a movie in public, and it’s not pretty. It’s not your living room, and no one wants to hear your personal commentary, and being irritated at people in front of me opening their phones (which in a darkened theater, looks like a little flashlight) who just can’t NOT TEXT for TWO FRACKIN’ HOURS ruins the experience a little.

But I digress.

One of the best things about films, as I discovered a bit later as my circle of friends and family grew to the point where being an only child didn’t matter, is discussing films afterwards. Sometimes, after a great film, you can talk about plot, subtext, nuance, history and on and on, with each person bringing something different. For a completely different way of looking at your favorite films, take a quick visit to postmodernbarney.com’s Uncomfortable Plot Summaries. All these are accurate,  from a certain point of view (to quote a certain lying-ass old Jedi Knight):

ALIEN: Ship fails to deliver cargo, crew don’t get bonus.

BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: Deranged pedophile big-business industrialist tortures and mutilates young children.

FRANKENSTEIN: Scientific advancement proves unpopular with general public.

IRON MAN: Alcoholic rich white man with technology fetish goes vigilante.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: American yahoo murders soldiers and desecrates religious artifacts for money.

TWILIGHT: Girl gives up college for stalker.

And on and on….

Even films that are inaruably classics can afford to have some holes drilled through them. On AMCTV.com’s SciFi Scanner, novelist and columnist John Scalzi offers his Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design. “I’ll come right out and say it,” he writes. “Star Wars has a badly-designed universe.” And he makes good points. For instance:

“Stormtrooper Uniforms
They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view (“I can’t see a thing in this helmet!” — Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don’t just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.”

Movies will be a central feature in the coming months for Internet Siteseeing, because they’ve been such a big part of my life, and well, it’s my blog. What are some of your early movie memories? Share, won’t you?

Customer: Where do I apply for the credit card where I get a free gift?

Employee: Right back there, but you have to be approved to get the gift.

C: (hesitantly) I have to get approved?

E: Yes, ma’am

C: But there is a free gift, right?

There was a lot packed into that simple overheard conversation, but the main thing I took away from it was this: Big Lots has credit cards? Honey, if you can’t afford to pay cash in Big Lots, time to rethink your financial strategy. (What the free gift could have been was a close second, but I digress).

Ah, the credit card. Has the mind of man ever come up with a more dangerous, misused piece of plastic (insert Hollywood cosmetic surgery joke here)? Originally designed to be a quick, convenient loan tied to a certain store — the equivalent of running a tab at the bar — they serve a certain purpose, I suppose. Of course, there are medicinal uses for cocaine, heroin and morphine, too. The one thing that all these items have in common is their potential for abuse.

And, just for the record, I know whereof I speak. My ex-wife and I ran up quite the bill keeping a lifestyle that we couldn’t afford, which continued until we couldn’t afford the payments, either. There’s nothing quite like the joy of paying for a meal three years after you ate it.

It wasn’t easy to make the transition from digging a deeper hole to filling the hole back in, either. The first step was to stop digging, and then to find the resources to reverse the trend. The disgust of paying out money every month for things that were already gone — or for some computer products, already obsolete, which is a double kick to the inseam — was enough to get things turned around.

The collector calls were another impetus to wake the frak up. What a lovely, helpful bunch of people. It’s been years, and I’m not behind to anyone, but to this day, if I don’t recognize the number on the caller ID, I have a hard time picking it up.

One of the proudest days of my life was driving the final stake into the heart of the credit card vampire. I still have the statements showing zero balances on the last two, and the biggest, credit cards I paid off. They are tacked up to the corkboard in my home office to remind me. Not that I really need to be reminded. NEVER again.

Funny thing has happened, though. With the economic downturn that rocked the financial system, along with other factors, credit cards companies seem to have been put on the defensive. In May, the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act was passed, which put some reins on what the companies could legally do with interest rates and late payment charges. While it’s nice now that they don’t have unbridled power, the legislation is no match for personal responsibility.

What the credit card companies may have lost in brute force, however, they make up for in sneakiness. For instance, did you know that there are certain purchases you can make on a credit card that potentially red-flag you for rate increases, even if you’re not behind on your payments? Apparently, paying for traffic tickets, marriage counseling and booze makes you look unstable, while buying, ahem, adult playthings looks like you are practicing escapism. Either way, in the credit card company’s eyes, the probability of stiffing them or being late on your payments goes up. So if you buy a round of drinks at the strip club, don’t use your plastic, even if you’re in danger of losing your g-string tuckin’ cash.

An interesting thing seems to be happening, by the way: Punishing their customers doesn’t seem to be working as well as it has in the past. The total amount of borrowing decreased by $10.3 billion in June, and borrowing on credit cards dropped about $5 billion. Are people paying down their debt and taking out fewer cards? Seems to be.

One of the best resources you’ll find when it’s time to have that long, cold talk with yourself and cut up the cards is Dave Ramsey. Host of “The Dave Ramsey Show,” he offers simple, true advice on how to get out of debt and stay out of debt. Sure the advice is simple, kind of like saying “the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more,” but y’know what? That’s how you lose weight. It’s not magic, but in a world where common sense seems to be a little less common, it’s necessary to hear every now and again.

And, so, how do you avoid paying outrageous credit card interest rates and late payment fees? Don’t use the stupid things. They can jack the rates up 8,000% and increase the late payment fees to loan-shark levels, but if you don’t use ‘em, it just doesn’t matter.

The word is “schadenfreude,” and you have to respect the German culture that came up with a single word that encompasses such as specific feeling. Its definition is “a mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others.” Sure, it’s the basis of moral-driven stories (we all felt it when Darth Vader threw the Emperor down the ventilation shaft; no one I know of stood up and said “BOO! Emperor Palpatine was the duly elected ruler! This is an illegal coup!”), but we see it in our everyday lives, as well. One might say it surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together. Or one might not. Your choice.

Case in point: I was driving my best friend and his family to the airport, and we traveled up I-265 towards the Kennedy Bridge. This is one of the biggest areas in Indiana for writing speeding tickets, and they were out in force that morning. We counted five pull-overs in about a two-mile stretch. They even had cops on motorcycles, so you know they meant business (IHiPs?).

Driving back, I knew to look for it, and was traveling about 60 MPH. The PT Cruiser that blasted by me at 80 MPH, however, did not. He wasn’t 500 yards ahead before he got the signal to pull over and get his day ruined. I chortled all the way back home; it isn’t often that there’s such as perfect setup, and it’s even less often that you know exactly where to look for it. Was it small of me to get pleasure out of the pain of another? Probably. Was it funny? Definitely.

The concept was brilliantly covered in the musical “Avenue Q” with the appropriately titled song “Schadenfreude” (warning: salty language):

GARY: D’ja ever clap when a waitress falls and drops a tray of glasses?

NICKY: Yeah…

GARY: And ain’t it fun to watch figure skaters falling on their asses?

NICKY: Sure!

You get the idea.

Some kind souls are nice enough to post some of their misfortunes online simply to allow others to feel better. One of the best places to find such things is on fmylife.com. F— My Life (fill in the blanks for yourself) offers user submitted examples of why their lives are f—-ed. For example:

“Today, I finally decided to tell my mother, a former Miss North Carolina winner, that I was several weeks pregnant. She immediately burst into tears and hugged me. She kept saying, ‘Thank god, thank god.’ At first I was relieved. Then she said, ‘I thought you were just getting fat.’ FML”

or

“Today, my 250 lb ex-Marine dad announced he was going to start randomly punching me in the crotch, without warning, to ‘improve my reflexes.’ FML”

or

“Today, I missed my flight. Why? My niece thought it would be funny to empty out my suitcase and hide inside. FML”

To select the manner in which you can feel superior, categories include love, money, kids, work, health, intimacy, funny people and miscellaneous. For an extra “kick ‘em when their down” moment, you can vote “I agree, your life sucks” or “You totally deserved it.” Because sometimes their life does indeed suck, and sometimes they do indeed totally deserve it.

Some other sites to brighten your day at the expense of others:

• We all have them, but submitters to awkwardfamilyphotos.com are actually posting their family keepsakes. Let’s just say the 1980’s weren’t very good to some people, and some poses seemed like a much better idea than they turned out to be (I’m looking at you, Awkward Drill Team)

• One of the fun things about our society is that pretty much everyone has a camera in their cell phone, so for the first time in our history, no stupid thing has to go unrecorded. Such photos often wind up on FAIL Blog. It’s choc-full of failures that people have photographed, such as a guy on a bicycle using a wastebasket instead of a helmet, or the sign that reads “Open 8 Days a Week. Closed Sunday.”

• As a graphic designer, I try really, really hard not to end up on Photoshop Disasters, where the site owners state “Clumsy manipulation, senseless comping, lazy cloning and thoughtless retouching are our bread and butter.” Photoshop is like fire: In the right hands it can be one of our best tools; in the wrong hands, you can remove thumbs, screw up lighting, make various body parts whither inappropriately, and do a host of other damage. Some of these mistakes are harder to find than others, but once you see them, you can’t not see them. From mom ‘n pop ads to the cover of Entertainment Weekly, no one is immune to bad digital manipulation. You might think you are, but you’re not.

So, the next time something bad or embarrassing happens to you, remember that it’s not real unless it happens on the Internet. So, by all means, go ahead and post it — sometimes the purpose of our lives is to be a warning to others.

My best friend and I were in our seats, waiting for “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” to start (short review: To get the same effect without forking over nine bucks a head, take your silverware drawer, throw it into a front-loading clothes dryer, set in front and watch it go round and round for 180 minutes or so – popcorn optional, but recommended).

We got there early for our abuse (mini-review: It was like being in a two-and-a-half hour car wreck, with a Lincoln Park soundtrack, with some Nickelback thrown in), as did everyone else, and noticed that the teen in front of us had, of all things, a book on the Biltmore Estates in North Carolina. My friend had just returned from there, and struck up a conversation with him about it. The kid was articulate and well-versed in the architecture – honestly, it was the last conversation I expected to sit in on waiting for this film to start (micro-review: T:ROTF sucked, big time). We we’re feeling oddly buoyed about the state of the youth of America.

And then it happened. The kid got a message on his cell phone – it was a graphic from a friend of his. The graphic was a 3D swastika rotating in front of a map of the United States of America. His friend, he explained (after seeing the look on our faces), had done time in prison and had to join the Aryan Brotherhood (or somesuch) to survive and not get raped all the time. There was a tone of both “whatareyagonnado?” and what I can only categorize as pride in his voice (because he knew someone “edgy,” I suppose) when he said this. He then showed it to the friends he was with several times.

Never having been to federal prison, I can’t speak to what his friend had to do get by, but as bad as the movie was going to be (final anaylsis: I did not care for it), Nazism wasn’t really necessary. Maybe it’s because my father fought in France and Germany in World War II (D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, concentration camps, the whole deal), or because I’ve cracked open a history book or two in my life, but if someone sent me something like that, I would immediately be looking for a way to delete it, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be showing it to anyone. And maybe it’s a snap judgment, but I also knew everything I cared to about the young man.

It did get me thinking, value judgments aside, however, about the powerful effect symbols can have on us. What is the swastika, really? It’s an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles. That’s it. It dates back to the Neolithic period, and has been used as a religious symbol in several faiths. Because of the baggage it carries in the Western world, however, it will never be a neutral symbol. (As a graphic designer, however, I gotta admit that’s some effective branding. More than 60 years after the fact, it can evoke feelings in people who weren’t even alive at the time of maximum use.)

Certain symbols can convey information, sometimes very clearly (the meaning of red octagonal sign on the street corner is pretty clear, and if you ignore it, the flashing lights on the top of the car behind you offer another lesson in symbolism). When a house near ours put out a Confederate flag after Obama won the primary, it was curious; when they put out two more when he was elected president, I’m pretty sure it was a message. At last count, I believe there are five sets of “stars n’ bars” on the property.

Even the Transformers use symbols, so they can tell an Autobot from a Decepticon. Of course, you can’t see them because they resemble a junkyard in a tornado, but I guess they can tell one from the other, kind of like one cat can tell if another cat is a boy or girl, I guess.

Other messages are less clear, known only to those “in the know.” Hobo code is one of these examples. Developed as a way of sharing information between the homeless in the wake of the Great Depression, the code is still in use today. Hobos could use the symbols when coming up on a new area or town to know where a softhearted person would give them a meal, a less-softhearted person would give them a meal if they had a sob story, where law enforcement was, where mean dogs were, and if a beating awaited them there. Good info to have.

So, in summary, if Confederate Nazi Hobos start to get a foothold in your neighborhood, you now know the signs to look for. And stay away from the Transformers movie. If I’ve helped even one person, it’s been worth it.

“Why,” you may ask? Aren’t they our less-troublesome partner on this continent? Aren’t they, as some say, America’s hat? Why would we attack our own hat? That’s madness.

I have one, 10-letter word that should very nearly make my argument for me: Nickleback.

Canada has finally gone too far. Like the frog in the pan of boiling water that dies because it didn’t notice the increasing temperature, we’ve become acclimated to Canada’s increasing hostilities. First, there was Bryan Adams in the 1980s. Looking back, that was more of a skirmish. An expeditionary force to test our resolve, if you will. The sad news is that we, my friends, were found lacking.

Emboldened by the distinct lack of American troops streaming across the border, the Canadians launched their next attack — Céline Marie Claudette Dion.

Speaking a strange mix of English, French and whatever the language is that they speak in the most boring Ring of Hell (I always get my Rings of Hell mixed up), “Celine” Dion  — as this attack is more popularly known as — shocked and awed us in the 1990s. The battle reached a fever pitch in 1998 when, despite the best we could throw at her, Dion taunted us by declaring that, no matter what we did, her heart, would indeed, go on. And on. And on.

We eventually reached a settlement (we refused to call it a surrender), where Dion took possession of the American territory of Las Vegas from 2003 to 2007. As of this writing, the area still is being rehabilitated, and hopefully will be fit for repopulation by the spring of 2010.

While we were battling the Dion WMD, though, Canada was already planning it’s next, most devastating attack. While there were, for the most part, ways to avoid Dion if one looked hard enough, our “friends” to the North were developing something in Alberta that would be inescapable. Total annihilation, the likes we haven’t seen since the twin attacks of disco music and CB-lingo in the 1970s.

They first surfaced, for the majority of the American populace, in 2001, with the song “How You Remind Me,” straight, bland, middle of the road rock. It just sits there, music with a beat that you don’t care if your parents here. Then another single was launched. Then another. And another. Many people didn’t realize that all this bland “rock” was the same band, figuring that NO ONE BAND could be plain, insipid and trite. Well, that’s where we underestimated them. Canada had now developed the technology to make music utterly devoid of soul, and they were willing to use it.

Their latest attack — and most devastating, in my opinion — is entitled “If Today Was Your Last Day.” The song is a collection of clichés. Seriously. It’s just one cliché after the other, set to what I think is the same tune all their songs are set to, and then it’s over. Until it starts again — and it will start again.

Let’s consult lyrics.net, and examine the attack in detail. The first verse:

My best friend gave me the best advice
He said each day’s a gift and not a given right
Leave no stone unturned, leave your fears behind
And try to take the path less traveled by
That first step you take is the longest stride

Okay. By my count, that’s five clichés in five lines (and the first line doesn’t count, as it’s setting up what is to come later, by framing the song as a “friend’s” advice. I believe the friend in question is Satan, because that would explain ever so much).

The chorus goes on to preach:

If today was your last day and tomorrow was too late
Could you say goodbye to yesterday?
Would you live each moment like your last?
Leave old pictures in the past?
Donate every dime you had?

I believe there are at least 25 pieces of Hallmark “advice” in this song, and that’s conservative. So, the question is, who is actually buying this crap? The album that spawned this single, “All the Right Reasons” has sold 7,163,130 copies in the US as of June 13, 2009. WHO’S DOING THIS? Are grandparents buying them as graduation or birthday presents and giving them to children who politely force a smile and say “Gee, thanks, Gran,” and then never open it, or try to sell it with the shrink wrap still firmly in place?

We’re not done yet, though. There are ways to survive this:

1.    If you are buying this, STOP IT.
2.    If you receive a Nickleback CD for a present, say from a grandmother who doesn’t know any better, politely refuse and explain why. If this same grandmother buys you another Nickleback CD on another occasion, take it and strike her in the face, repeatedly. Harsh, yes, but this is war, and she’s proven to be a liability during wartime.

Those are individual actions. On the “Nickelback” entry on Wikipedia.org, we learn how to combat Canada’s latest superweapon by banding together:

“In 2004, Nickelback were playing at a heavy metal music festival in Portugal when the crowd started throwing debris at the stage. Front man Chad Kroeger put down his guitar and announced on the microphone, ‘Have we got any Nickelback fans in Portugal?’ As this resulted in only a minimal positive response, he added, ‘Are you sure? Up to you. You guys wanna hear some rock ‘n’ roll or you wanna go home?’ Kroeger then turned around and he was hit by an object in the back of the head. He then said ‘See you,’ before leaving the stage with the finger raised. The recording of the incident was referenced by CTV Television Network, who noted, ‘A YouTube clip shows the band storming off stage in Portugal after being pelted with rocks and water bottles. The video has been viewed almost two million times’.”

So, my friends, we must follow the path of our Portuguese allies — whenever Chad Kroeger is seen, he must be pelted until he and his band scurry back across the border. Then we must seal the border. With any luck, Nickleback will reach critical mass there, instead of here (there HAS to be a greatest “hits” album in the tubes, ready for launch), and we’ll be able to claim what will remain of Canada in 12 to 15 years (the half-life of bad, middle of the road, generic rock and roll).