Sunday, January 18, 2009
Inauguration Mania!
It turns out there's a lot of inauguration coverage to watch when you're not doing your best to completely block out an entire presidency. I mean, CNN is running a crawl at the bottom of its screen with different color-coded blocks telling you what inauguration events you can see when. Yesterday when I got to the gym they were broadcasting an event where the inauguration train didn't even stop -- just twenty minutes of reporters speculating about when the train would arrive, with the big payoff of footage of Obama waiving from the back porch. When I left, they were showing his speech in Baltimore, which I have to admit was rendered much less inspiring by all the typos on the closed captioning. I decided I would watch it on Youtube later.
Today, of course, is the big inauguration concert, complete with footage of George Lucas awkwardly not singing along with everyone else in the audience on "This Land is Your Land." Seriously, this thing is a treasure trove of awkward. If the spectacle of Shakira singing Stevie Wonder and turning every vowel into some other vowel doesn't do it for you, there's the image of Bono somehow making the civil rights movement all about a white dude from Ireland. Oh, and the sound of Tom Hanks somehow messing up the emphasis on "OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people." Come on, Tom, I got that one when I had to memorize it in sixth grade.
It turns out there's a lot of inauguration coverage to watch when you're not doing your best to completely block out an entire presidency. I mean, CNN is running a crawl at the bottom of its screen with different color-coded blocks telling you what inauguration events you can see when. Yesterday when I got to the gym they were broadcasting an event where the inauguration train didn't even stop -- just twenty minutes of reporters speculating about when the train would arrive, with the big payoff of footage of Obama waiving from the back porch. When I left, they were showing his speech in Baltimore, which I have to admit was rendered much less inspiring by all the typos on the closed captioning. I decided I would watch it on Youtube later.
Today, of course, is the big inauguration concert, complete with footage of George Lucas awkwardly not singing along with everyone else in the audience on "This Land is Your Land." Seriously, this thing is a treasure trove of awkward. If the spectacle of Shakira singing Stevie Wonder and turning every vowel into some other vowel doesn't do it for you, there's the image of Bono somehow making the civil rights movement all about a white dude from Ireland. Oh, and the sound of Tom Hanks somehow messing up the emphasis on "OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people." Come on, Tom, I got that one when I had to memorize it in sixth grade.
