Here Not There
I’m trying to get back into the habit of pontificating here rather than on social media. I like the forum Facebook provides but, too often, I get annoyed by the blatherings of everyone else. How about BigMikeBook? Now there’s a social medium I can get behind.
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The Clique
Malia Obama wants to go to Harvard.
Malia Obama
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I suppose I know why the kids of presidents and other big-time pols choose to go to the Ivy League schools, especially Harvard and Yale. They want to take advantage of the clubby, exclusive network that fosters the hegemony the 1% exerts over the nation and, for that matter, the world.
But why can’t a few of them elect to go to schools where the daughters and sons of hard-working, modest people go? What’s wrong, for instance, with Oberlin College or the universities of Wisconsin or Southern California?
It’s not as if Malia will walk into a job interview in a few years and the HR drone will write her off because she only has a BA from Washington University of St. Louis.
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Birds Of A Feather
Have you noticed all the sports goons who’ve endorsed America’s Shart, Donald Trump? Here’s one list: Bob Knight, Mike Tyson, Dennis Rodman, Rex Ryan, and Mike Ditka. There are others sure, but you’d hardly recognize their names unless you’re a sports goon yourself. And by sports goon, I mean someone who makes the argument that sports — especially big-time college and professional sports — somehow is the path for participants to become better, finer, more successful human beings. Which is a patently indefensible argument, considering the number of pro athletes who’ve become destitute after their careers are over and who’ve beaten their wives and girlfriends and have suffered only slaps on the wrist for it, among other insults to society.
Ditka, Knight & Tyson
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Anyway, the aforementioned Trumpsters all have a few things in common: They are demonstrably unknowledgeable in anything except their own games and they’re prone to anti-social, often violent outbursts. They also have reputations for “telling it like it is” which is code for being insulting a-holes. Just like the guy they’re endorsing.
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Criminal Stupidity
Those parents who let their 19-month-old kid die of meningitis because they don’t trust “western” medicine and they’re advocates of the idiocy that is naturopathy, have been found guilty in a Canadian court of failure to provide the necessities of life for their son.
The Stephans: Horseradish Homicide
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As their kid was dying of the dread disease over a two and a half week period, David and Collet Stephan treated him with hot pepper, garlic, onion, and horseradish smoothies, among other spice rack “medications.” Unless they suffer from a heretofore unknown psychological syndrome wherein they confused their spawn with a pot of soup, they ought to be imprisoned for a good long time.
Naturopathy advocates, natch, have sworn to high heaven this regressive, magical philosophy of “health” has cured them of any number of maladies. They’re probably right. Naturopathy likely is very effective in treating imagined illnesses.
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Fun With Dirt
Did you know Saturday will be World Naked Gardening Day? I bet not. How will you celebrate?
Watch Those Thorns!
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Fun & Notable May 2 Birthdays
Dr. Spock — Benjamin Spock revolutionized kid-raising with his 1946 book, Baby and Child Care. In the ’60s, he became even more well-known for his anti-war stance and his urging of young men to resist the Vietnam War draft.
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Link Wray — Leather-jacketed rockabilly legend born Frederick Lincoln Wray, Jr. A hard-driving, nimble guitarist, he was one of the inspirations for the punk movement of the ’70s.
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Leslie Gore — Pop chanteuse of the immediate pre-British Invasion era, she later came out as a lesbian.
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Sounds like the “old” mike. MT