Presidential Wizardry

Isn't it Cruciatus?

At risk of branding myself an ubergeek...

...you mean "crucio", not "crucius".

"See, it really is a magic wand! I wave it in the air and the band plays 'Hail To The Chief'!"

Of course, it must be painful for anybody in the band. Is the real conductor hidden off camera somewhere? (As was allegedly the case when the totally deaf Beethoven "conducted" the orchestra at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony.)

Blush.
Now I'll never pass the Defence Against the Dark Arts OWL.
Corrected.

It is the Cruciatus spell, and the incantation is Crucio!
But you have to really mean it, or it won't work.

So would "crucius" be the perfect supine form?

Bwah!!!

My wife watched Bush conduct an orchestra some time ago. She remarked, with some surprise, that he was pretty good, right on the beat and so on. She was stating an expert opinion. So it seems that Bush is one of those talented, but unfortunate, individuals who got diverted from their true pathway into a profession for which they had little talent.

That's just begging to have the hat from The Soceror's Apprentice photoshopped into it.

An orchestra would follow the first violin in a case like this; who does a band follow?

You mean the concert master.

We corrected you in error. Surely our slack-mouthed President, too lazy to properly pronounce words such as "nuclear," would likewise mispronounce important spells, eh? :)

First chair, if you like; an ex- who was a violinist always referred to her concertmaster simply as "first" or "the first".

But you led me to the answer, Kea--in a wind band it's the first-chair clarinet.

There is a video of the whole spiel by Bush at the Press Conference Dinner (and may I say, the joke about Cheney masturbating while peeping at Bush was in exceptionally bad taste)

I am not a conductor, but, my impression was that if the band was taking Bush's lead the performance ought to have ended abruptly and prematurely, just guessing from the pattern of hand motion at the end.

While teaching math to teenagers full time (this week, calculating probabilities in Craps; next week: blackjack), I'm taking 3 grad courses at the Charter College of Education.

Last week at the Classroom Management course taught by Dr. Nick Doom (cool name) the subject was how to teach controversial subjects. Before he showed a video, he asked us to write out on a sheet of paper how we would handle these questions from students:

(1) Teacher, have you ever been drunk?
(2) Teacher, why do the Jews control Hollywood?
(3) Teacher, did George W. Bush lie to us about WMD?

Then he showed us the CNN video of the entire Bush segment of the White House Press Corps Association Annual Dinner. When it ended, I called out: "They say that Hitler was also the life of the party!"

That provoked an interesting classroom discussion, in whihc Dr. Doom (a History and Government teacher) explained how funny Lincoln and FDR really were. But I stand by my disgust of Emperor Bush II fiddling while the world burns.