Infrastructure

Ceremonial Podium Files For The Credit The Scissors Received; The Ruling Turns On Whether It Was Load-Bearing

The podium points out that every announcement at both ceremonies was made from a podium. The props office asks the one question it cannot afford to answer.

A ceremonial podium petitioned Monday for a share of the credit awarded to the ceremonial scissors, arguing that the ribbon was pre-scored at nine that morning, that the blades closed on air two inches to the left, that a shovel across town moved 1.4 cubic feet of soil, and that all three of those facts were announced to the public by a person standing at a podium.

The office that classifies ceremonial implements accepted the petition for review and then asked the podium the question that has ended every petition it has ever received, which is what the podium did. Precedent here is settled and recent. The shovel was reclassified from Implement, Ceremonial to Equipment in July on the finding that measurable output disqualifies an implement from ceremonial billing, because a ceremony is a statement about a project and a hole is merely the project.

The podium's difficulty was that holding a man up is measurable output. Weight is the most measurable output there is. Counsel for the podium was understood to be preparing a distinction between structural work and dignified work when it instead entered a photographic study into the record.

"We are not arguing that the podium did something small. We are arguing that it did nothing at all, and we can show fourteen minutes of it."

The study covers the full fourteen minutes of remarks at frame intervals. Hands made contact with the surface for a cumulative eleven seconds, all of it lateral, none of it downward. At no point in the ceremony did the podium bear load. It was present, it was lit, and it was structurally unnecessary, which under the office's own July finding is the precise definition of ceremonial.

The ruling granted the credit. The podium issued a statement calling it the most presidential finding ever handed down and noting that it had said as much in August, before the office had the evidence. The ribbon filed a brief in support, its third, and this desk has stopped asking why the ribbon keeps filing briefs.

The shovel applied the same afternoon to be re-tested under the contact standard. The office declined the application on the grounds that dirt, once moved, cannot be un-moved, and that the shovel's file is closed by the soil itself. The confidence index closed the day up on the strength of an implement that was certified to have supported nothing, and this desk records the finding without endorsing it.