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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-04-30, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2015. PAGE 5. “Ah, music,” he said wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here.” – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s StoneQuiz time, my friends. Can you name the three most popular songs in the English language? I’ll make it easy for you. Two of them are “Auld Lang Syne” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. The third song? It’s the one that goes: “Good morning to you Good morning to you Good morning dear children Good morning to you.” Oh, sorry – those were the original lyrics to the song as written by a Kentucky kindergarten teacher name of Patty Smith Hill back in 1893. Along about 1935 some Tin Pan Alley shyster stole the song and changed the words ‘Good morning’ to ‘Happy Birthday’. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. And what a history. The “Happy Birthday” song showed up in a Broadway musical back in 1931. It was used in Western Union’s first singing telegram in 1933. Marilyn Monroe famously crooned it to JFK in Madison Square Garden in 1962. In 1968 the Apollo IX astronauts did it in harmony while orbiting the earth, making “Happy Birthday” the first song to be performed in outer space. For the past century it’s been sung non-professionally in parlours and barrooms, on back porches and in barber shops millions of times wherever English is, er, sung. Not bad for a ditty composed of six notes and six words. The Hill sisters (Patty wrote the words, sister Mildred provided the tune) could never have dreamed that their little tune would go supernova the way it did. Or that it would generate the money it has. The girls didn’t make a dime off the song until a third sister, Jessica, noticed how eerily similar the Broadway “Happy Birthday” song was to the tune her siblings had composed. She went to court on behalf of her sisters and sued. A judge agreed with her argument in 1935, more than four decades after the song was written. The judge’s decision awarded copyright to the Hills. The “Happy Birthday” copyright has changed hands several times since then but it’s still in effect and still generating revenue. So how much is holding copyright to the most popular song in the world worth? According to Forbes magazine, about $2 million. Per year. That’s what the copyright holders earn in licensing revenues per annum. Does that mean every time we sing “Happy Birthday” to somebody we’re breaking the law? No. The only time money is owed is when the song is used commercially – on radio, in a movie, on a ‘singing’ birthday card, etc. As long as it’s just you and the family gathered around the kitchen table serenading Aunt Hettie, you can sing your socks off. And why not? It’s a fine old tune full of good cheer and warm feelings. Just like those two runners-up: “Auld Lang Syne” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. Imagine. The three most popular songs in the world with not a sour note or an unkind thought among them. There may be hope for us yet. Arthur Black Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Have you heard of the newest restaurant/ bar in Dallas, called Tallywackers? If you haven’t, well you may not be in the approximately 50 per cent of the world that it doesn’t cater to. The restaurant is garnering a lot of attention because of the risque nature of its advertisements and expected uniforms because Tallywackers is the all-male staffed version of Hooters. While the restaurant doesn’t deny entrance to men, it’s pretty obvious from its advertising it’s geared towards people who find men attractive. Featuring men in various kinds of underwear that are, at most, boxer-briefs and at least far smaller, the ads are definitely not geared towards me, that’s for sure. Hooters is a restaurant in which an all- female wait staff wears similarly suggestive clothing. Whether (as the comments on the internet suggest) Tallywackers is a restaurant geared towards women or gay men, I can’t help but feel we’re taking a giant step backwards here. Before we get any further in to this, I have a dirty little secret to share. I have never been to a Hooters (that I can remember) and I’ve never been to anything even resembling a strip club. Call me a prude if you want to, but I’ve just never had the inkling to visit the places (despite the fact I’ve been told they usually feature very good food). So that said, I’ll get back to my point. I know that I’ll never be able to change the fact that people look to hire attractive people as wait staff. That’s just the nature of the game when it comes to restaurants unfortunately. I can say, however, that places like Hooters or Tallywackers take it a step too far. That’s usually the way these things go. We have something that isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s also not quite right, then someone decides, “well, if it isn’t wrong, let’s stretch it as far as we can without making it morally reprehensible.” So, before I have to fend myself from attacks of chauvinism, I’ll say that I don’t think either restaurant, or any restaurant that features the wait staff as being more appetizing than most of the food, should be in operation. If I’m going to a restaurant, there are only a few things I look for in a wait staff and revealing clothing and an attractive body are actually not on the list. As long as people are competent, friendly and knowledgeable about the place, I’m happy. Actually, there are more items on that list. A wait staff shouldn’t be “tatted up” to the point that they have little visible un-inked skin left and should always look and smell clean. The latter there is definitely the most important. I can settle for poor service, I can send food back if it’s wrong, but if you look or smell anything less than clean, you shouldn’t be working in a restaurant or, to be honest, any front-line retail or sales position. That, and the fact that I judge restaurants based on the food as much as the service, might be why I’ve never felt the need to go into any eatery that features scantily clad or naked women. So, as I said, this is a step backwards. When we talk about equality, about making all people of the same value, we shouldn’t be trying to reach the lowest common denominator. The thought process shouldn’t be to try and make sure that men have to face every single derogatory situation that women do. Equality should be about bringing everyone up, not taking anyone down. We should be shutting down Hooters, not opening up a male version. I’d like to say that’s where my frustration lies – in the fact that either place exists at all. Unfortunately, like most other things, the internet takes a bad situation and makes it worse. I know I’ve tackled gender inequality before, but then it was about men being treated with incredible disrespect by labelling everyone with a ‘Y’ chromosome as being less able to face illness than a woman. Again, this is just showing that many women (and gay men) are not interested in equality but in treating men just as bad as chauvinistic men treat women. Many comments revolve around “eye candy” and “looking at beautiful men” when they eat and, in the end, they are all objectifying the men who are going to work at these restaurants. Equality won’t be achieved by lowering everyone to the bottom rung but by raising everyone up together. As many community leaders in the area say, a rising tide raises all boats. We need to make sure that every person is judged on who they are and not how good they look in revealing clothing. And before anyone thinks to accuse me of just being jealous, even when I was skinny, which, admittedly was many years ago, I still had a problem walking around without a shirt on. Maybe I am a prude, but it really just seems unnatural especially if food is involved. And, just because I know the reasons above may not be enough to convince some people, I have one last ace up my sleeve to convince people to not participate in these kinds of base discussions and restaurants. We all have a mother and a father. Many of us have siblings. Many of us have nieces, nephews, sons, daughters and cousins. All of us are somehow related to someone we care about. Now imagine that any one of those people were the ones being ogled at one of these restaurants. Imagine a daughter or a son being sold as the main attraction. Now stop imagining because every waiter at Tallywackers and every waitress at Hooters is someone’s son or daughter or mother or father and every one of them, whether they realize it or not, deserves to be judged based on their actions and personality, not their assets. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Remember when... While I hate to do this, and so many internal impulses are telling me not to, I feel that I have to talk about the weather. I also have to retread some not so old ground and get into this week what I got into last week. Two sentences that probably don’t result in you being very excited to read my column. Ah well, I’ll do what I can to draw you right back in. In the HBO show The Sopranos, main character Tony Soprano abruptly left the table during a dinner with his friends who were sitting around and reminiscing. He defended his decision to leave, saying that “remember when” is the lowest form of conversation. I know what Tony is saying here, but there is certainly a little more merit to reminiscing than he gives his friends credit for. But then again, Tony could be known to be unreasonable (if you watched the show) so perhaps it’s alright that I disagreed with him. Then again (again), if the show illustrated anything, it was that disagreeing with Tony is usually a bad thing to do – so there’s always that to consider. While I see where Tony is coming from, I think that talking about the weather is likely the lowest form of conversation that I can think of. The weather is obvious (everyone can see and feel it) and very often there is very little you can talk about with someone that is going to be ground-breaking or surprising. (Person A says “Snowing again, eh?” and Person B should respond with, but never does, “Yes, since I am alive and not blind, I know that it snowed. Thanks for nothing.”) However, The Citizen’s recent foray into an attempt at a Photo of the Day photographic journal (which I mentioned in last week’s column) shows us just how much the weather can change from day to day in Huron County. On Thursday and Friday, we posted pictures of snowy landscapes. One came courtesy of Citizen reporter Denny Scott and the other came by way of Walton’s Chris Lee. Both made it look like January in Blyth and Walton, respectively. The next two days, we had two distinctly different pictures. The first, again came from Scott, and the second came from Averly Kikkert of East Wawanosh (serving you coffee with a smile at the Queens Bakery most days). The first picture showed a rabbit and a bird frolicking on lush green grass, while the second detailed a canoe trip in Huron County. As you have imagined, where I’m going with this is how amazing it is to think of how the weather can change from day to day in Huron County. In addition, how neat is it to think that on The Citizen’s website at www.northhuron.on.ca we’ll be able to look back at these pictures and remember exactly what a specific day was like? So, as we find ourselves on the cusp of May, it is frustrating that snow still seems to be a part, albeit a small one, of our daily lives. However, it’s comforting to see that it can turn back to being warm on a dime. So perhaps there’s still hope for us. While Citizen staff are still doing much of the heavy lifting in terms of finding a new picture every day, audience participation is creeping up slowly but surely – and we’re grateful for that for a number of reasons. Let’s hope that our Photo of the Day archive is soon full of lovely and colourful entries that make the grey, wet images of winter (as well as of last week) a thing of the past – at least until they start again later this year. Other Views Tallywackers? We just go for wings Most popular song in the world