Recently heard another song which was around before I was born. It's from a British comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News, possibly famous for being Rowan Atkinson's first hit (Mr. Bean was his third, while the second being Blackadder).
A video could be found here:
The lyrics and the video at around 1:00 clearly shows how risqué it is – basically it depicts truckers as inconsiderate, rude and sexually predatory beings. But I somehow manage to find two hidden gems in academical aspect.
The chorus features a to-infinitive ("I like to truck") after three uses of gerunds ("I like trucking"). Usually gerunds are for habits while to-infinitive is one time experience, but for this occasion the gerunds mean the act of trucking in general, while the to-infinitive emphasises the personal experience. This can mean the singers like to be on trucks and they also like being in control themselves.
Usual songs have simple forms, even other arch-form music would do little more than ABCBA. This song stands out in that it is a long arc of ABCACBDA, with Pamela Stephenson's stand-out presentation of the chrous in the middle, Rowan Atkinson's solo before and after Stephenson's core respectively; Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones' segment yet on the outside of them, and the all-men chorus at the start and end. A bridge segment ("from behind") was inserted before the final chorus to match the melody.
Another piece of gem found among British audience is that the video features a three-lane road, with the middle one open for vehicles of either direction to overtake if necessary. The joke in the second Atkinson solo is based on this. Now that British roads are either definitely dual or having singled down to two plain lanes, younger people (like me) probably have diffiuclties getting this joke. (A related discussion can be found here)
In the Vietnamese classic history book Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, there's a quote of 14th century historian Lê Văn Hưu's comment on Lữ Gia, the last chancellor of Nam Việt state:
If he found his petition unheeded, he should have given up his place. Otherwise, he should have followed the example of Yi Yin and Huo Guang, to depose King Ai in favour of another son of King Minh, but sparing King Ai's life. Instead, he chose to commit regicide and ultimately led to the downfall of both the Nam Việt state and himself.
There's one error in the comment, though. Huo Guang was quoted as if he existed earlier than Lữ Gia, but in fact Huo's several decades younger. Huo's deposition of Liu He (Marquis of Haihun), which was partly the basis of the quote, was about four decades later than Lữ Gia's assassination of King Ai of Nam Việt.
Among all those usually militaristic North Korean songs, "The General Uses Warp" (장군님 축지법 쓰신다) seems to be the most lampooned on, both because the anime-style music, as well as the reality-warping lyrics. Of course, almost no-one is mentioned by name, so you can theoretically insert anybody as the "Leader" (수령, which actually refers to Kim Il-Sung) or the succeeding "General" (장군, actually refers to Kim Jong-Il).
Still, two of the lampoons, I think, stand out of the others. The first one is actually commercially distributed, and features another lampoon on J.S. Bach, my favourite composer. I will talk about that in a later post.
Today's video is created by a South Korean, using the song to fit it on one of their former leaders, Chun Doo-hwan (전두환). He's the president of South Korea between 1980 and 1988, roughly equal to the period of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. As a general himself, he's known for his continuation of military dictatorship, though probably not as bad as his northern counterpart, whose economy was failing because the USSR was also falling apart.
The film extracted for the video was mostly news montages of President Chun embarking visits to other countries. Surprisingly I found them fitting very well to the music, with the combined effect of suggesting he had completed these visits by warping space-time (even though he'd still utilize planes and limos to reduce shock among the world, as apparently suggested). This seems an even better propaganda video than the original North Korean one, as neither Kim Il-Sung nor Kim Jong-Il appeared personally in the original video.
The video can be seen below:
On a further note, the black-and-white person at about 2:00 was Park Chung-hee (박정희), the famous yet assassinated president, as well as the father of the recently deposed lady president, Park Geun-hye (박근혜). Presumbly the elder Park was included here to fill the role of the Leader (수령).
Yesterday after lunch I had a walk. When passing a Chinese herbal tea shop, I noticed that the box containing juice from dry-fried Cannabis sativa had a layer of pale liquid on top of it. I immediately believed that there were either so few people buying drinks there, or the shopkeeper didn't bother to clean it, that the pale layer rendered the liquid uningestible.
Two things came up in my mind:
Sometimes the competition is so severe that being disadvantaged quickly becomes a vicious circle.
One should be highly aware of their business image, especially those that can make first impression.
