Irony and rehearsals

Countering the idea of patriotism = supporting the war (in America) this article from last week's The Onion is just excellent:

It's one thing to question our leaders in the days leading up to a war. But it is another thing entirely to do it during a war. Once the blood of young men starts to spill, it is our duty as citizens not to challenge those responsible for spilling that blood.

[ . . . ]

At this difficult time, President Bush needs my support. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld needs my support. General Tommy Franks needs my support. It is not my function as a citizen in a participatory democracy to question our leaders. And to exercise my constitutional right - nay, duty - to do so would be un-American.

And they say Americans can't do irony... everyone should read The Onion. As a sidenote, a recent poll of citizens in St Louis, SF, found that 22% of the respondents feel they have no right to question the war now. 56% said it's okay to question the war, but only 23% believes it's okay to protest the war; a bunch of statistics which I find shocking. I am astonished at the ease with which some "patriotic Americans" have apparently forgotten about the rather fundamental right to free speech.

As of yesterday afternoon, I am now officially On School Holidays. As such, and since we're in our last year of school (a very strange thought) our year did a Leavers' Assembly yesterday, which was similar to a pantomime[1] and included a song at the end, which was a filk of We Will Rock You ("We will, we will miss you"). This required the rewritten lyrics to be projected via a laptop onto a large screen as a Powerpoint slide so that the rest of the school could sing along; and being known as someone who knows her way around a computer, I was volunteered to take care of this.

We finished off our rehearsal with a run-through of the song, and then someone yelled, "Okay, can we have the music for the next song now?"

Next song? Excuse me?

So I asked her (the organiser) whether she also wanted the rewritten words for the second song (The Time of our Lives, from Dirty Dancing... *shudder* *Eighties shudder*) on the screen in Powerpoint. She seemed to think I'd done it already, and didn't realise that I'd never been given lyrics for the second song. All this while lyrics sheets were being handed round, so I told her I could do it now, quickly - I leapt down to the laptop clutching a lyrics sheet (the time being 11:12, three minutes before the real thing was due to start) clicked New, dragged a text box and started typing. Frantically. But there was nowhere to put the sheet of paper, so I had to stand it up against the screen and could therefore only see half of what I was typing... I had to go by instinct as to whether I'd made any typing errors in the first few words of each line. I was almost halfway down the page when people started filing into the hall for assembly and Julia told me to leave it since I wouldn't be able to finish it, although she let me carry on when I showed her how much I'd typed already.

And when I finished typing it all (on the ultra-flat laptop keyboard, which considerably slowed my typing speed), I saw there was no way it was going to fit on one page as it was (except maybe with 6pt font) so I had to run huge numbers of lines together, squash stanzas together, etc. while frantically trying to finish before the whole school had come in. I didn't even have time to proofread it for tyops, of which I still don't know whether there were any in the end.

And the end-of-termitis has caught up with me - I nearly fell asleep at 4pm yesterday, and today I have difficulty in talking because of a rather sore throat.