Magic Statistics

The campaign against pirated movies has been taken to an absurd level in Japan.  Bizarre is the only word to describe the hyperbole of an anti-piracy information ad now being shown in Japanese movie theatres.  Richard Lloyd Parry, Times of London Asia Editor, has seen it in person.  The ad opens with a close-up of a very sad-looking young woman as eerie piano music plays in the background. 

Doomy music is playing. Tears began to roll down her bonny cheeks. And - horror of horrors - they are black!

Help! Gurgle!

One of them ends its journey at the point of her pretty chin. The angle changes, and we view the tear as it falls inexorably into a black pool. But what's that shape coming into focus beneath the dismal waters? Holy symbolism, Batman - it's a skull! Now the pool of black tears has turned into a reel of flickering film. Oh no, the film is on fire! Now there's a skull and crossbones on the screen. Now we're looking in close up into the eyes of the blachrymose [sic] girl. She's saying something. She sounds very serious.

Hmmm. Sounds like an ad against drunk drivers or AIDS or maybe even Stephen Harper.

So, what’s she saying anyway?

(Picture of girl looking sad.)
Girl: "Movies are being stolen."
Girl: "Our enjoyment (of movies) is being stolen."

(Black tear appears on girl's face.)
Girl: "Important things will be destroyed."

Text: I want to protect movies, I want to protect our enjoyment (of movies).

(Tear runs down girl's face, drops into water and skull appears. Fades to image of eroding film.)

Text and voiceover: Pirate movie eradication campaign

(Closeup of girl's eyes)

Text: Don't watch or buy illegal downloads and pirated DVDs.
Girl: I won't watch, I won't buy (pirated movies).

Just a little bit over the top, I think.

Even though anyone found using a camcorder in a Japanese movie theatre is liable to summary expulsion, possible arrest, and who-knows-what-else, an enterprising blogger with a perverse sense of humour filmed the ad on a mobile recorder.  It’s posted here.

I love that cute little heart logo saying “save our movies” at the end of the clip.

An Iraqi man who lost both eyes in a bomb explosion has become the first blind person found guilty of dangerous driving in the UK.  Blindness is not his only physical disability.

A man with no eyes who is partially deaf and suffers from leg tremors became the first blind person to be convicted of dangerous driving yesterday.

Omed Aziz, an Iraqi who lost his eyes in a bomb blast in his home country, said that he had been testing his abilities behind the wheel when he was stopped by traffic police in April.

The police stopped his car after observing it cross the centre line to the wrong side of the road.  At the time Mr Aziz was receiving driving instructions from a friend—but the friend had been banned from driving.

For reasons known only to himself, Mr Aziz decided to contest the charge, so yesterday he had his day in court.

Defence solicitor Timothy Gascoyne invited the bench to acquit his client of dangerous driving.

In his closing submissions, the lawyer told the court: "I don't propose to call my client to give evidence. The question is not whether his driving was dangerous, but whether being blind makes it dangerous."

The news report doesn’t tell us whether Mr Gascoyne managed to say that with a straight face.

Sentencing is scheduled for 11 September but, in the meantime, the passenger will appear on a charge of aiding and/or abetting dangerous driving.

Yesterday must have been dumb drivers’ day in British courts.  In charges arising from unrelated incidents, two men appeared accused of drunk driving of a horse and cart.  One man pleaded guilty, while the other will go to trial next month.

After we’d decided to go to New York last month, one of first locations I put on our list of places to visit was the Brill Building.  For aging baby boomers like me, the Brill Building is the stuff of legend.  It was here that the greatest pop songwriters of the late 1950s and early 1960s worked their magic.  Under the auspices of Aldon Music, founded by Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, a group of amazingly talented writers, composers, and producers came and worked together in the Brill Building.  (Aldon Music’s offices were actually located nearby at 1650 Broadway, but most of the writers worked at the Brill Building.  References to the Brill Building Sound, etc., somewhat misleadingly encompass both addresses.)

The leading songwriters who worked at the Brill Building throughout its hit-making period numbered fourteen, composed of seven teams: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.  Other writers associated with the Brill Building at some point included Phil Spector, Gene Pitney, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, Neil Diamond, and Paul Simon.

The list of enduring popular songs they wrote or co-wrote would fill a book.  A few of the most important and memorable are: “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’”, “Walk On By”, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”, “On Broadway”, “Up on the Roof”, “The Locomotion”, “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy”, “Crying in the Rain”, “Stand By Me”, “Chains”, and “Kicks”.  Here's a link to a four-CD compilation (released in 1993, but now out of print), made up of 74 songs from the Brill Building.

Here’s me in front of the entrance to the Brill Building.  It’s still an office building, and no official recognition is given to the songwriters of forty years ago, so there’s nothing to see inside.  All we could do was take a photo and remember for a moment what used to be.

The Brill Building was built in 1930 and is named after the four Brill Brothers who ran a men’s clothing store on the ground floor when it first opened and who bought the building the following year.  Plans to rent space to blue-chip companies were thwarted by competition from the newly constructed Rockefeller Center and Empire State Building, so the entertainment industry moved in.  By the early 1960s, the building rented office space to over one hundred music publishers.

After assembling his team of songwriters at Aldon Music, Don Kirshner’s entrepreneurial vision led him to establish his own record label, Dimension Records, and go beyond writing and arranging songs to producing music on site.  The Brill Building became a one-stop shop for making records.

The beginning of the end was Kirshner’s 1963 decision to sell his music empire to a distant Hollywood entertainment giant, Columbia Pictures-Screen Gems.  The camaraderie between the songwriters and their employers was broken.  Before the end of the '60s, the Brill Building songwriting teams had gone their separate ways.

More information on the Brill Building phenomenon can found on the web at Spectropop and The History of Rock and Roll.  The Brill Building’s official site includes a complete history of the building from its construction to the present day.

Last year, Ken Emerson wrote the definitive history of the Brill Building music makers: Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, reviewed by Spectropop here.

Ted Byfield points out that, in all the media activity around Steve Centenni and Olaf Wiig, the two Fox News journalists forced to convert to Islam, no one thought to ask them a crucial question.

It was awfully decent of the media not to ask that kidnapped Fox News correspondent and his cameraman, forced by terrorists to embrace Islam as the price of being freed, whether or not they had been Christians.
. . .
Their not doing so, however, might not have been out of kindness. More probably, it never occurred to them to ask.

The question is key because secularists regard religion as an subjective matter of speculative opinion—certainly nothing worth dying over—so changing one’s religion is no big deal.  For Christians, however, faithfulness to Jesus Christ is of the essence.

Mr Byfield also rehearses a few elementary facts about martyrdom in the early church, a topic that has arisen elsewhere in connection with this controversy.

Most Christians are aware that in the first 300 years of their history, tens of thousands of us were presented with such ultimatums [deny Christ or die].

They were ordered to burn a pinch of incense to the "god" Caesar.

If they did it, they were instantly released.

If not, they were sent as slaves to the mines, effectively a death sentence. Women and boys were consigned to the brothels. Both men and women were often put to death by public torture.

So many refused and suffered so courageously, they eventually converted the whole empire to Christianity.

In response to the inevitable challenge, “OK, you sanctimonious Canadian, what would you do if you were told to renounce Christ or die?”, Mr Byfield says he doesn’t know what he’d do.

So what would you do, Byfield, in such a circumstance?

How could I know?

But I'd be in no doubt whatever about what I should do.

Same here.

Previous related posts:

• Do words said under duress mean nothing?
• Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam
• Ted Byfield in The Wittenburg Door

A hastily-arranged, surreptitious meeting of two subversive Anglican bloggers took place recently in an East Side Mario’s on the west side of Edmonton.  (So as to throw the opposition off the trail.)  Here’s a photo of the dangerous duo.

On the right is Rev Joseph Walker, Anglican chaplain at the University of Alberta, who runs the consistently insightful and intelligent blog felix hominum.  The fellow on the left is me; I run the marginally relevant and excessively idiosyncratic blog that you’re reading right now.  (Photo taken by the StatWife.)

Since the family and I were going to spend a few days in Edmonton on our way back from The Big Apple, I thought it might be a good opportunity to meet Joe, whose blog I’ve followed for quite some time now.  So, I contacted him by e-mail, and we made the arrangements.

Since it was a get-acquainted meeting, Joe, the StatWife, and I shared the stories of our spiritual journeys over a meal of East Side Mario’s best.  Joe is one of those Christians of whom I am in awe because he is doing so many good things for the Lord.  Not only is he ordained, his is a campus ministry with a significant outreach focus.  He encourages students to participate in Christian life in many ways, both inside and outside traditional church settings.  He mentioned Habitat for Humanity and the sol café.  (A few more are listed in the right sidebar at his blog.)  Not only that, he and his wife have four young children, and he says they’re thinking of adopting another.

And me?  Well, I just warm a pew and snipe incoherently from the sidelines.

As we were preparing to depart following our meal, Joe and I agreed that we would simultaneously post independently written blog items, complete with the same photo, about our time together.  This morning at 10:00 am Edmonton time (9:00 am Whitehorse time) is the appointed posting time.  I can’t wait to see what Joe has written.  Maybe this will start a new trend in the blogosphere: “simultaneous blogging”.

UPDATE: Here is Joe's post.  Next year in Whitehorse!