Battle of the (Military) Bands

Never has there been a bet­ter musi­cal metaphor for the dis­as­ter of the Bush Pres­i­dency than this audio clip from the visit of the Pope Bene­dict XVI to the White House on April 16^th. Thanks to my hero, Tom Allen of the CBC (who will be trag­i­cally let go this fall, much to my agony, but enough about that for the time being), his sharp ears picked up this amaz­ing fiasco of Hail to the Chief:

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Here’s the quote from Tom Allen’s Junk Drawer:

Here’s the musi­cal event Charles Ives waited for his entire life. On April 16, 2008, Pope Bene­dict XVI vis­ited the White House. Two musi­cal groups were there to wel­come him — the Her­ald Trum­pets from the US Army Band, and the President’s Own Marine Band. The Pres­i­dent, not sur­pris­ingly, was there, too. Pro­to­col says that any time the Pres­i­dent of the United States turns up in an offi­cial role, the band has to play “Hail to the Chief.” As you hear from the clip, pro­to­col appar­ently doesn’t say they have to play it in just one key. The story is that one group came to rehearsal and the other didn’t, so they ended up, at the big moment, play­ing the same piece in dif­fer­ent keys. I’ve received, pre­dictably, con­tra­dic­tory reports of which group, the Army or the Marines, fired in the wrong direc­tion, but the result was a direct hit for music fans who like their mil­i­tary bands on the exper­i­men­tal side. It’s fantastic!

I found out this morn­ing that it was because one of the groups was a ‘civil­ian’ group. This was the musi­cal equiv­a­lent of ‘friendly fire’ between Amer­i­can troops and Mil­i­tary contractors.

Woo hoo! Airborne Swine Sighted!

This morn­ing I awoke to some incred­i­ble (and I mean this in the true sense of the word; I can scarcely believe it) news:

Rogers Issues State­ment on the Apple iPhone

TORONTO, April 29 /CNW/ — Ted Rogers, Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc. today issued the fol­low­ing state­ment:
We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

About Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is a diver­si­fied Cana­dian com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media
com­pany. We are engaged in wire­less voice and data com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices
through Wire­less, Canada’s largest wire­less provider and the oper­a­tor of the
country’s only Global Sys­tem for Mobile Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (“GSM”) based net­work.
Through Cable and Tele­com we are one of Canada’s largest providers of cable
tele­vi­sion, cable tele­phony and high-speed Inter­net access, and are also a
full-service, facilities-based telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions alter­na­tive to the
tra­di­tional tele­phone com­pa­nies. Through Media, we are engaged in radio and
tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing, tele­vised shop­ping, mag­a­zines and trade pub­li­ca­tions,
and sports enter­tain­ment. We are pub­licly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange
(TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B), and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI). For
fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the Rogers group of com­pa­nies, please visit
www.rogers.com.

Yes folks, Hell has offi­cially frozen over.

But wait… let’s see: “later this year” could mean any­thing between April 30^th to Decem­ber 31^st. So the longest I’ll have to wait will be 8 months. I guess that’s good news. I have to admit, this did look like an April Fool’s post­ing that is 28 days too late.

At the very least, we’ll see an end to the hand-wringing and cries of Why does Apple hate Canada? on so many of the web sites here.