Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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On Hockey Pucks and Teddy Bears

Monday, April 23, 2001

From Marietta, Ohio

When did it become a human right to act like a pinhead at every international conference? The protesters in Quebec were fire hosed, beaten, gassed, and pushed around. Did they think that anyone outside of an NPR production studio was taking them seriously?

According to Niko Price's AP report: "Some of the protesters threw bricks, hockey pucks, firebombs - and even teddy bears - at the police."

Hockey pucks and teddy bears? If the next summit is in the Caribbean what are they going to throw, pelotas and pi�atas?

See, here's their mistake. The protesters are protesting in exactly the place and at exactly the time that the security people expect them to be protesting.

Not surprisingly, the security people are lying in wait with plenty of time, bodies, fences, riot gear, fire hoses, and guns.

If the protesters really wanted to make a splash, they should have sent a few hundred protesters to Quebec to shout slogans either in or about English, which would have confused everyone. They should have then sent the main body of protesters somewhere else, like New York or Los Angeles. They would have gotten great television coverage, and there were not nearly the number of police and security forces available to hose them down.

Why do I have to think of everything?

Here's a suggestion to the people who plan these international meetings: Have them during finals week.

Speaking of protests and Los Angeles I watched some of the XFL championship - and probably all-time final - game, which was played in the LA Coliseum.

Welcome to Inside the Directors' Studio: The problem? How to avoid showing that there were maybe 20,000 people in a stadium designed to hold 90,000.

The solution?

A - For crowd shots, the cameras were aimed at small knots of people who had obviously been moved into the front rows (like they do in the movies).
B - For shots of players on the sidelines, the cameras were placed on the ground shooting up at the player so the background was not empty seats, but the sky.
C - On kickoffs, the camera did not follow the flight of the ball, but panned downfield to cover the receivers.
D - Pass plays were no problem. The quarterbacks generally couldn't get enough loft on the ball to cause the cameras to have to show the stands. On those rare occasions that they did, the camera did not tilt up above the first few rows of the stands (see A above) which meant the ball went out of top of the frame.

This is what happens when the network covering the event, owns the event.

A recent Gallup poll indicated 51 percent of British respondents do not like the job George W. Bush is doing as President.

Here's a Mullings Memo to our friends in the UK: Why don't just go ahead and cozy up to France? You know their national slogan: A friend in need is � not going to be French.

Or, why not become best friends with Germany. How has that relationship been working for you over the past 100-or-so years?

Find out what the devil the joke at the end today means, plus what a pelota is, a snappy Caption, and the other stuff on the Secret Decoder Ring.

I was in the Detroit area Saturday night for a friend's wedding and turned on the local news. The anchor said, as the lead-in to a package on the Mayor's race: "Another name put into the hat for Detroit Mayor �" The idiom is: "Another hat was thrown into the ring �"

While we're on the subject of bad writing, the other day I wrote, "The issue at hand was a discussion on how the Administration of President George W. Bush is doing as it nears the geologically accurate, but functionally immaterial 100 day mark on April 30."

A former editor for a great metropolitan newspaper wrote to suggest that "chronologically" would have been a better word choice than "geologically." I agreed, saying I had committed the sin of having fallen in love with the rhythm of the sentence.

My favorite science magazine, Discover, has an article in the current issue which describes an experiment to prove a tenet of Einstein's theory of general relativity dealing with the existence of gravity waves. The experiment is costing $300 million.

What happens if we just stipulate Einstein was correct? And don't say, "Don't make waves, Rich," which would be a cheap and unworthy joke.

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