Adam Lambert's Cat O' Nine Tails and a Continuity Error

Everyone loves a good continuity error, right?  I've found one and it gives me an excuse to post some more about Adam Lambert.

We tape at least some of Idol while we're watching so that if there's anything good we can review.  So we had taped Ring of Fire and replayed it several times between Tuesday, March 17 and Thursday, March 19 when I bought the video from iTunes.  When my editor husband K saw the iTunes version, he immediately noticed that it differed a bit in shot selection from the live show.  That got us interested:  why was it different?  We compared frame by frame and realized that they'd substituted an extreme wide rear shot for a mid-range rear shot in a one spot.  Our hypothesis was that they were obscuring a salacious hip swish. 

It's common knowledge that Idol tapes the dress rehearsal and uses that footage for the wrap-up montage at the end of the show.  In the RoF video, we noted that the midrange camera is nowhere to be seen in the extreme wide shot and it would have been visible within the wide shot had the mid-range camera been where it was during the live show.  (It was circling Adam -- a ring of fire, as it were -- through the whole song.) Therefore, the inserted wide shot was clearly from dress rehearsal.

Over the weekend, I was reading some Adam Lambert fan fiction.  I'm way behind the times so this whole genre of fan fiction was new to me.  Apparently, people take celebrities and write fiction around them.  Adam has inspired a batch of it, including one bawdy series in which he and apparently-straight, married contestant Kris Allen (his roommate at the Idol mansion, for real) revisit Kris' sexual preferences.  It's unfortunate that it's pornographic and not suitable for all readers, because the stories are pretty clever, with scenes written around things that Idol fans would recognize, like the contestants going to the mall to shop for jackets, since this has been the season of everyone-wearing-jackets-all-the-time.  And of course I hate to see homosexuality equated with promiscuity.  Anyway, at one point in the fan-fic story, the writer has Fictional Kris asking Fictional Adam what the fringy thing is that Adam is wearing, and Kris learns (as did I, then) that it's a cat o' nine tails.  (In real life, Adam wore it while performing Black & White and Ring of Fire.)

Armed with this new fact, I updated my hypothesis about the edit to the video of RoF:  it was not to obscure a hip swish, but to make it harder to see that the man is sporting an S&M toy on prime-time family TV.  (Love the man.)  So I went back to the iTunes video to watch for the cat o' nine tails.  You can see it occasionally, but views are fleeting.  You can just see something fringy from the front as his hip swishes send it out to the side, but you can't get a good enough look at it to determine what it is.  And indeed, it's impossible to tell from the extreme wide shot what it is, though the midrange shot gives you a good view, so I believe that solves the mystery of why they made the edit.

But I noticed something else in the iTunes video!  The CoNT is hanging from Adam's left rear side, from a belt loop, for all of the video EXCEPT for that inserted extreme wide shot in which it's hanging from his right rear side.  This tells us that during dress rehearsal he was wearing it on the right side, took it off between dress and live, and then put it on the wrong side for the live show.

And there you go:  a fabulous premise for another story in the fan-fic series about Fictional Adam's debauchery of Fictional Kris:  what exactly was the CoNT doing during the downtime between dress rehearsal and the live show when it wasn't attached to Adam's pants?

Update 7/29/10: I just noticed something about this post that I failed to appreciate when I wrote it. I wrote "It's unfortunate that it's pornographic and not suitable for all readers..." If you're not in my head, you'd think that I meant it was a bad thing that it was pornographic. But what I meant was "Unfortunately, because it's pornographic, I can't post a link or an excerpt of this delightful story here."

In the months after writing this post, I read a LOT of Adam fan fic. Sure, there's some bad fan fic, but for the most part I was blown away by the quality of the writing. There are some seriously talented people out there. Here's a list of "Adam Lambert Fic That Doesn't Suck" compiled by yeats at LiveJournal.com.

Update 9/29/10:  For even more Adam fan fiction, see glambertfiction, also at LiveJournal.com.

Update 9/30/10:  A short list of high-quality Kradam fic at Ink, a fanfic recommendation site.

As long as I'm posting about the Bowie song...

Eno, and Lou Reed period, I can't forget about Iggy Pop.

RE: Under Pressure

Don't forget this, er, homage by Mr. Ice.

You be the judge. Queen’s is here and the other guy’s is here.

Great, now Stephanie has me dancing around my living room.

"Word to your mother." Manilli Vanilli would blush.

Coolest Thing about the Texas Lions Camp?

The pair of eagles that were flying around. They were too high to get a good picture and when they lit, they weren't really in good picture taking positions but I did get a few really good looks while painting.

Scooter, Bowie/Mercury and Lambert

New subtitle inspired by Scooter's Lions' work -- and by Bowie/Queen via Adam Lambert (in a way) who's a fan of both of them and needs to sing a 1982 song on Tuesday. (Did I mention that I'm obsessed?) Under Pressure fills the bill. Or, you idiom-policers, is it "fits the bill"?

For Michael

Begging the question from Mona Charen:

My children have started to become exacting grammarians. David, 15, is driven nearly crazy every time someone misuses the expression “beg the question.” It’s a good thing he is away on a band trip this week and didn’t catch a CNN report on the morning news. A story on the financial situation was phrased like this: “This begs the question: What happened to the TARP money?”

If David had been watching, he would have scowled at the screen and, voice raised, corrected the reporter. “It doesn’t ‘beg’ the question. It presents or suggests or poses the question. To beg the question is to avoid or circumvent it!” David is mostly right. “Beg the question” is widely misused. Michael Quinion of World Wide Words responded to a reader who asked whether it was ever correct to use the meaning David disdains. His answer is comprehensive. “You can easily find examples of the sense you quote, which is used just as though one might say ‘prompt the question’ or ‘forces one to ask’ . . . This meaning of the phrase seems to have grown up because people have turned for a model to other phrases in beg, especially the well-known I beg to differ, where beg is a fossil verb that actually used to mean ‘humbly submit.’ But the way we use beg to differ these days makes beg the question look the same as ‘wish to ask.’ It doesn’t — or at least, it didn’t. . . . The meaning you give is . . . gaining ground, and one or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable — the New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says it is ‘widely accepted in modern standard English.’ I wouldn’t go so far myself."

...

Texas Lions Camp

Off tomorrow for a weekend at the Texas Lions Camp (for physically disabled, hearing/vision impaired, and diabetic children from the State of Texas, regardless of race, religion, or national origin) doing work to get the camp ready for the summer.

These kids get free trips to camp and the testimonials will make you weep.

Remember that even in these hard times we need to pick a group and help ‘til it hurts. I know I’ll be hurting on Monday.

All these worlds are yours except Europa

Geek post of the day.

The Great Red Spot is shrinking according to UC Berkely (per CNN).

Postmodern Brutalism is Shovel Ready

The White House has approved using $116 million in federal stimulus money to pay for a long-delayed federal courthouse for downtown Austin, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett said Tuesday (per the American Statesman).

Little picture and discussion here and bigger picture here. Gah.

Do It Now!

As the last guy on the planet without a cell phone but also as one who is up at 6:00 a.m. checking my news and op-ed sites, I have to agree with Kathleen Parker this morning and wonder how much this technology has been driving our national “do something and do it now” mentality:

The phrase "too much information," a now-cliched talk-to-the-hand deflection, isn't just a gentle whack at someone who tells you more than you want to know about his Cialis experience. It's a toxic asset that exhausts our cognitive resources while making the nonsensical seem significant.

In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

How can CJR possibly track that?