The Arm

Now that the space shut­tle is in the news again, I’ve noticed a dichoto­my between the Cana­di­an and the Amer­i­can report­ing on one par­tic­u­lar item. While the Amer­i­can media have referred to the shut­tle’s artic­u­lat­ed robot arm as “the giant arm” or “the robot arm” or the like, every sin­gle Cana­di­an news­cast­er has called it the “Canadarm”. I’m try­ing to decide who’s got the com­plex here. Is it that the Cana­di­ans have a supe­ri­or­i­ty com­plex (“Nyah nyah nyah, we built a giant space arm and you Amer­i­cans could­n’t, nyah nyah nyah eh”), or are the Amer­i­cans suf­fer­ing from an embar­rass­ing infe­ri­or­i­ty com­plex (“It’s just a giant robot­ic arm, so what if Cana­da makes ’em and we don’t”)? Or am I just read­ing too much into this?

We watched Clone Wars last night. I still think it’s bet­ter than Episode III. For evi­dence, I sub­mit the fact that I’ve seen Clone Wars twice, and Ep. III once. I sus­pect that my pref­er­ence is relat­ed to the fact that (a) Clone Wars is pret­ty much pure action*, start to fin­ish, and (b) the “I love you” plot occu­pies about 10 sec­onds of screen time. Now I have to find Vol. II.

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* And Mace Win­du’s scene, in par­tic­u­lar, must be seen to be believed. Holy carp.