"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it —
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
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This is a good day to remember precisely what war is.
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We’re All (Not) Gonna Die!
Well, whaddya know! This holy land is now scot-free of the deadly, dreaded, sure-to-kill-us-all ebola virus. The last remaining ebola patient in America was released, cured, from Bellevue Hospital in New York yesterday.
This is exciting news! Now we can look forward to the next the big thing that’s going to kill us all. I wonder what it’ll be. Let’s see, an asteroid hitting the Earth? Naw, that’s so 2013. E. coli? Uh uh — that’s last year, too. Sharks? Puh-leeaze, that’s way too old school. Ebonics? Nix; most police departments have military weapons and vehicles now so that threat can be neutralized in one bloody swoop.
Pronounce Your TH’s Or We’ll Shoot!
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Wait, I know! Robots.
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Scourges, Real & Imagined
So, those annoying, silly, eventually-embarrassing-to-the-wearer, low-slung drawers may soon be illegal in Forest Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chi.
The mayor of FP, Anthony Calderone, sez he’s tired of seeing young men’s bloomers, acc’d’g to Fox News 32.
Criminals
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The crime fighters of Forest Park’s town council are considering a ban on the wearing of pants so low. At long last, our civilization may be saved from this scourge.
Meanwhile, beginning in January Oklahoma’s James Inhofe will be sworn in as the new chair of the US Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. He’ll be in charge of those who rule on federal laws dealing with the dumping of all categories of shit into our air and water. Oh, and global warming. You know, the thing that Inhofe believes is no scourge at all.
JPMChase’s banksters, acc’d’g to the two, defrauded investors, customers…, hell, the whole world, for that matter, by peddling their garbage mortgage-backed securities. Then that particular Money Mob fleeced the fed. gov’t out of hundreds of billions of USD in bailout dough.
No wonder business schools have been the biggest graduating classes at universities all around this holy land for the last few decades.
If my screeching hasn’t convinced you the Democrat Party is being run by dopes, take it from Ralph Nader.
Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez grilled him on Democracy Now! after the shellacking the Dems suffered earlier this week. Nader said the Dems are set to embark on a plea-copping orgy, blaming everybody and everything but themselves for Tuesday’s massacre.
And, no, this type of thing does not “always happen” as some wags are opining. The GOP slaughter has brought us the most nearly-homogenous, ultra-conservative Congress in more than a hundred years. The Republican victory in the 2014 Mid-Term Elections was indeed historic.
Nader
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Nader — whom many Dems still love to blame for Al Gore’s snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory in 2000 — told Goodman/Gonzalez “the Democrats have got to recognize they have to have a change of leadership.”
Here, here.
When Gonzalez mentioned the barrels of cash dumped into this election by various PACs and political sugar-daddies, Nader reminded him that both the Republicans and the Democrats benefited from such largesse. “The Democrats raised huge amounts of money this time around and in 2012 in their own right, plenty of money to win,” he said.
As I railed on Wed., scads of humans might detest the GOP and what it stands for but the Dems offer voters nothing as an alternative. “[P]eople back home are not given enough reason to vote for the Democrats,” Nader said. “But they’re given plenty of emotional reason to vote for the Republicans because of all the social issues — the school prayer, the reproductive rights, the gun control. The Democrats have dropped the economic issue that won election after election for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. They can no longer defend our country against the most militaristic, corporatist, cruel, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-women, even anti-children programs, the Republican Party. A lot of soul searching is needed….”
Were I the King of the Democratic Party, I’d boot Harry Reid’s, Nancy Pelosi’s, and party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s asses right out the door. And I wouldn’t care if it was open or not.
Despite all the efforts of Indiana University boss Michael McRobbie and his viceroy, Mark Kruzan, to turn Bloomington into a gargantuan megalopolis along the lines of, say, Karachi or Lagos, this burgh still remains, to some little extent, a small town.
Long Gone, Mostly
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To wit: Yesterday while The Loved One and I enjoyed a spectacular dinner of grilled swordfish (still on sale at Kroger for $7.99 a pound!) at a neighbor’s home, Bloomington chief of police Mike Diekhoff rang the bell and delivered a still-warm plate of berry cobblers made from scratch by his lively bride, Monroe County Circuit Court Judge Mary Ellen Diekhoff. And even though our hosts had promised their own homemade key lime pie, we felt compelled to dig into the cobblers as well after finishing up all our vegetables.
One historian specializing in African American studies presents a fascinating argument that the American Revolution was more a war to preserve slavery than a landmark for liberal governance in human history. Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman last week interviewed Gerald Horne of the University of Houston. Horne posits that the British were close to pushing for abolition in the colonies in the lead up to the Revolution. Reps of the slave colonies became panicky, acc’d’g to Horne’s argument, and thus the decision was made to take up arms against the King.
George III: Abolitionist
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I imagine the landed slaveholders of Virginia, Georgia, et al might have been driven to join the cause of independence because of the Crown and Parliament’s burgeoning anti-slave sentiments, but I doubt one can credit/blame the entire Revolution on the effort to preserve the slave trade.
“More things in politics happen by accident or exhaustion than happen by conspiracy.” — Jeff Greenfield
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BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG SKY
Heads up for another cool sky show tonight.
The annual Leonids meteor shower will peak tonight after midnight. Look toward the constellation Leo when it rises and, if you’re lucky, you’ll catch ten or a dozen shooting stars and hour. The apparent origin point of the shower will be smack dab in the middle of the question mark formed by the lion’s head. That bright star at the base of the question mark is Regulus, known as “the lion’s heart.”
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This should be a terrific year for viewing the shower because this sky is expected to be clear and the moon will be a sliver.
So turn off your TV, bundle up, and watch that sky.
Republican state senators in Georgia held a meeting a month ago to discuss the maddest conspiracy theory yet. Apparently, the GOP legislators believe President Barack Obama is using advanced brainwashing techniques to turn Americans into pliant sheep so that he and the United Nations can take away private property rights, depopulate the suburbs, move everybody into the cities, and otherwise turn this holy land into some kind of dystopia straight out of a cheap science fiction novel.
Svengali
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Again, this is not an Onion article. It’s no joke. I get the feeling I’m going to have to get used to typing that line as time goes by in this, Obama’s second term.
Here’s the dope from the dopes:
The United Nations has an action plan called Agenda 21, created 20 years ago during the Rio global environment conference. It deals with sustainable development, which the sane among us dig, but the psychologically disturbed see as some kind of an Hitlerian/Stalinist plot to enslave us all.
Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntary program that most countries of the world, even these United States, at least pay positive lip service to. The Georgia senators, on the other hand, see things differently.
It’s a “conspiracy to transform America from the land of the free to the land of the collective.” So says a man named Field Searcy, a former Tea Party honcho (that figures) who was booted from the party because he seemed a tad, shall we say, deranged.
If you’re considered deranged among Tea Party-ists, you are deranged indeed.
If This Guy Thinks You’re Nuts….
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Searcy led the meeting which was called by Georgia Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, who bills himself the “taxpayers (sic) best friend,” and was held at the state capitol. So this is no secret cabal getting together under cover of night in some dank basement.
Anyway, Obama’s using a something called the Delphi technique to control the innocents of our nation. It was developed during the Cold War by Project RAND (later known as the RAND Corporation) and it has something to do with making behavior forecasts utilizing the collective thinking of a group as opposed to the wildly divergent thinking done by individuals. How this becomes a nefarious thought control tool is not explained by Searcy et al.
Searcy and his fellow dementos believe municipal, county, and state governments are in on this plot along with the commies, brown people, and Muslims of the UN as well as the chief destroyer of America, Obama himself.
According to political reporter Jim Galloway of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a videographer recorded the first hour of the meeting and then was kicked out of the room. The logical conclusion is that subsequent discussion must have been even more batty than that recounted here.
I suppose if certain anti-Obama-ites have their way and do indeed secede from the union, they should call themselves the United States of the Cuckoo’s Nest.
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AUSTERITY, NO
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! writes in Truthdig that the movement against austerity measures is gaining ground all across the globe.
This news makes me feel a bit better after writing the previous story.
Thanks, Amy
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It seems the reelection of Barack Obama and the repudiation of so many Republican candidates a week ago Tuesday is our nation’s little way of rebelling against austerity. Sure, some young people took to the streets for a few months in the Occupy movement of 2011 but, honestly, that had about as much effect as tossing an LSD tab into a big city’s water supply in hopes of turning the populace on.
Most of the American citizenry believe money should remain safely in the hands of the uber-wealthy, no matter what folks say about raising taxes on the rich. Not so elsewhere in the world. We fetishize the plutocracy; the rest of humanity looks upon the Midas class properly, as one would a mobster making you an offer you can’t refuse.
How else would you explain the popularity of Donald Trump?
“Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.” — Jimmy Breslin
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GOD’S PISSED, AS USUAL
You had to know this was coming: Some whacked-out preacher says Big Sandy is God’s way of saying FU to America.
No, he didn’t actually drop the F-bomb. I wish he would have; I would have had more respect for the dumb bastard if he had.
O, Heavenly Father, Please Count To Ten
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I’m not going to link to the story or reveal the preacher’s name. He doesn’t need me to pimp for him. And no one other than his deluded flock has heard of him before this. Now, of course, his name has gone national.
I’ll only say it’s his fervent belief that the god he prays to on his knees each and every night has thrown the gargantuan storm at the Eastern Seaboard because this land is full of lesbians, gays, and other miscreants. Not only that but President Obama is as thick as thieves with the Muslim Brotherhood and together they aim to destroy this holy land.
Which is weird because I thought he’d just finished saying god was in the process of doing that very thing. So, wouldn’t he figure that Obama and the Muslim boys are doing god’s work?
Oh, and somehow Mitt Romney has teed off the creator of the universe big time, too, only I didn’t quite catch how.
Take That, Queers And Arabs!
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You know, this god needs to have a nice glass of wine or go for a massage. He’s constantly suffering from the red ass.
Maybe the prayers of the faithful should go something like, “Chill, Big Guy. It’ll all be cool. Take a breath.”
Funny how things like the Holocaust or Joseph Stalin’s purges or this nation wiping out the Amerinds failed to elicit a peep from the almighty daddy-o but a couple of guys making out makes him insane. I think he’s repressing something.
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REAL REPORTERS
I just subscribed to a muckraking website that was recommended to me by a loyal Book Corner customer. FairWarning describes itself as a purveyor of “news of safety, health, and corporate conduct.” Which means it ought to be in business for at least the rest of this millennium.
Myron Levin: A Reporter, Not A Movie Star
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Here’s a sample of headlines it has run recently:
Oil companies Rarely Punished for North Sea Spills
Senate Report Points to Medtronic’s Manipulation of “Independent” Medical Research
Young Blacks Awash in Alcohol Ads, Study Says
Commentary: A Strange Indifference to Highway Carnage
Libertarian Group Prepares Bogus “Addendum” to Undermine Federal Climate Science Report
Founder Myron Levin founded the site after working as an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times for 20 years. Photos of his staff portray a gang that’s decidedly seriously and flamboyantly non-glamorous. That’s cool by me — of the several billion brain cells I possess I’ve assigned perhaps six to the maniacal grin of Katie Couric and the rest of her colleagues in the corporate media “news” industry.
Please Stop It, Katie
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In any case Levin and company are less polemic than the likes of Democracy Now! and far less precious than NPR. They are pure journalists, and isn’t that refreshing?
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NIGHTMARE, NOW
Here’s today’s CNN online headline:
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Let’s get serious about things now. This is the nightmare we’ve been dreading ever since the two words “climate” and “change” were first put together by scientists.
You wonder why I’m so dismissive of corporate media news? This is the prime case in point. They insist on presenting the faux arguments of climate change deniers in the interest of some weird view of journalistic balance. It’d be like Walter Cronkite interviewing a representative of the Flat Earth Society while the Gemini astronauts circled the globe.
That Curved Surface Is Merely An Illusion, Walter
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IT’S RAINING MEN
In honor of Sandy and dedicated to the loon preacher mentioned above, here are The Weathergirls, AKA Two Tons of Fun, with the biggest gay anthem of all time.
My club pals and I would go to the cavernous boy dance bars after hours back when we were young, trim, and loathe to ever go to sleep. The DJs would boost the bass and volume on this track to the point that I’m surprised the foundations and masonry of nearby structures didn’t crack. The joint would smell of leather, sweat, poppers, and Clinique. And we’d dance ourselves into delirium.
Don’t ask me how we survived it all.
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The only events listings you need in Bloomington.
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Tuesday, October 30th, 2012
VOTE ◗ Two locations for early voting in Monroe County today:
The Curry Building, 214 W. Seventh St.; 8am-6pm
Indiana University Assembly Hall, South Lobby, 1001 E. 17th St.; 10am-6pm
STUDIO TOUR ◗ Brown County, various locations — The Backroads of Brown County Studio Tour, free, self-guided tour of 16 local artists’ & craftspersons’ studios; 10am-5pm, through October
MUSIC ◗ IU Ford-Crawford Hall — Doctoral Recital: Ji Hyun Kim on piano; 5pm
MIXER ◗ Coaches Bar & Grill — Young Professionals of Blooomington, monthly event; 5:30-8:30pm
SCIENCE ◗ Lake Monroe, Paynetown SRA Activity Center — Citizen Scientist Quarterly Meeting, Help collect data to track animal populations and monitor habitats; 6-8pm
MUSIC ◗ Cafe Django — Jazz Jam, Featuring Bloomington’s young artists; 7pm
FILM & DISCUSSION ◗ IUCinema — “The Healthcare Movie,” Followed by discussion led by Rob Stone, MD, Director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan, Kosali Simon, PhD, & Beth Cate, JD; 7-9pm
COMMUNITY MEETING ◗ Monroe County Public Library — After Incarceration: Employment Matters, Presented by Decarcerate Monroe County; 7pm
MUSIC ◗ The Player’s Pub — Blues Jam, Hosted by Bottom Road Blues Band; 8pm
GAMES ◗ The Root Cellar at Farm Bloomington — Team trivia; 8pm
MUSIC ◗ IU Ford-Crawford Hall — Hot Tuesdays: Jazz Combos, Wataru Niimori Group & Chris Knight Group; 8:30pm
“Who’s gonna take me seriously with this on my head?” — Leanza Cornett
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WHO’S THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL?
I never watch the televised presidential debates for the same reason I’ve never cared about the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
Or even any human beauty pageant, for that matter.
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You know, these TV debates became important only because of what happened in the fall of 1960. Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Dem nominee for president that year came into the scheduled series of debates — the first time the events would be televised nationally — as the punk kid trying to elbow his way past the sitting vice president and foreign policy maven Dick Nixon.
The wags figured the debates would be a slaughter, with the wily Nixon taking the brash rich boy out for a spanking.
Things didn’t turn out that way.
JFK won the election because, during that first debate, held at the WBBM-TV studios in Chicago, he appeared cool, calm, sun-tanned and healthy. Whereas Nixon was gaunt and pale, having recently suffered through some health issues.
Not only that, Nixon fidgeted and sweated. Kennedy was charming and composed.
Beauty And The Beast
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Boom — knockout for the challenger. So Kennedy won the beauty pageant and the White House.
Seems a rather silly criterion upon which to base a vote for the leader of the western world, no?
Anyway, don’t cry for Nixon, America, because he capitalized on his dorky, dweeby, homeliness and his loss to the uber-wealthy, elite Kennedy, to vault into the presidency eight years later. Nixon basically told the voting public, Hey, I’m a schlub — just like you.
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The electorate bought it and, coupled with the fact that the Democratic Party was in the midst of a five year long suicide attempt, we elected ourselves a paranoid, self-loathing, suspicious, unindicted co-conspirator to be our leader. As a reward, we got Watergate, an unprecedented bombing campaign in Southeast Asia, Pat Buchanan, Karl Rove, and the original Rat Fuckers.
Oh, and a couple of pandas from China for the Washington National Zoo.
But I digress.
In the 1980 presidential candidate debates, Ronald Reagan out-prettied Jimmy Carter, which wasn’t very hard to do. Carter was somber and serious, talking about nuclear weapons and energy and the Middle East. Reagan was the chipper cheerleader.
The nation was ready for a pep rally.
When Carter brought up some controversial decisions Reagan had made as California governor, Reagan good-naturedly scolded him, saying, “There you go again.”
Grumpy & Happy
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The debate would be remembered for those words as well as a line Reagan uttered during his closing comment: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
Reagan routed Carter in the election.
In 2004, John Kerry whaled on President George W. Bush in their first debate. I actually watched that show, although I can’t for the life of me remember why. Anyway, I was astounded to discover that I actually felt sorry for Bush. He looked lost, physically diminished even, as the erudite Kerry tore down his arguments one by one.
All the experts agreed: Kerry had won the debate big time.
Dopey & Doc
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What do you think happened? A large percentage of jes’ plain folks in this holy land felt Kerry was too smart, an egghead. Poor old Georgy Boy was just a guy trying to do his job running the country and some Harvard-educated snob comes along and tries to tell him what to do. Bush’s polling numbers actually improved after what I’d figured was a knockout blow.
Now, my side of the political spectrum is always honking about “issues.” The debates must be about hard facts and real problems and definitive plans, they say.
Yet many folks on the Dem/Left/Progressive team last night commented that Barack Obama wasn’t “aggressive” enough, whatever that means. Should he have slugged Mitt Romney at some point in the night?
I suppose that would send ratings through the roof. Maybe that’s the future of presidential debates. The candidates can go after each other on a remote island. Whomever captures the other wins. That would be something Americans could understand.
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But last night’s debate was a wonk-fest. Obama and Romney argued like seniors on the high school debate team. Which, I figure, is what debate is all about.
But now the Obama side wants glitz and glitter and a he-man show of strength. They want that ultimate zinger, the kind that Ronald Reagan could deliver so well and so easily.
Times and sides change.
For the last few days, wits and pundits have been predicting that Romney would narrow Obama’s lead with his performance in the first debate. How they knew this in advance I can not say (other than to point out that news creatures need to invent new angles when conventional wisdom starts getting ripe.)
Sure enough, the post-game commentary and the pronouncements this morning have Romney coming out ahead last night. He looked like he belonged up there, the consensus goes. As opposed, I guess, to Romney showing up in shorts and a T-shirt. Romney, the experts say, looked presidential.
Maybe Obama should have slugged him.
I bet Obama will slug Romney in the next debate. Metaphorically, of course. Then Obama will see his numbers grow again. The final debate will be a tepid affair, with both guys deking and jabbing, but neither willing to risk going for the big blow so close to the election.
My hundred bucks on Obama still looks safe.
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THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARSENALS
One thing none of the three debates will address is the issue of guns.
That matter’s been settled and put to bed. We have agreed as a nation to allow our citizens to arm themselves to the teeth against…, um, against what I don’t know.
Well not all of us have agreed. Not I, for one. And not Nikki Giovanni, the writer and commentator. Here she is on Democracy Now!, spitting into the wind (click on the image for access to the vid; sorry, I couldn’t embed it):
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SUPERSIZE ME
You’ve been reading about that news anchor in Wisconsin who lambasted an emailer for calling her fat, haven’t you? Or you’ve at least seen the vid on YouTube, right?
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The woman is being praised from all quarters for standing up to what can only be described as bullying in the guise of a faux concern for the health of nation’s youth.
I’m all for her. Only I would have saved her a lot of breath. Had I been tasked with writing the news script for her response, I would have handed her a sheet with the original email on it, which she’d read, then the instruction for her to look straight into the lens and say, “And you, sir, are an asshole.”
Simplicity is best, don’t you think?
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The only events listings you need in Bloomington.
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Thursday, October 4th, 2012
Brought to you by The Electron Pencil: Bloomington Arts, Culture, Politics, and Hot Air. Daily.
ART ◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Center, outside WFHB Studios — Public participation in creating a ten-foot sculpture called “The Angel,” Rain or shine; 9am-5pm
LECTURE ◗ IU SPEA — NBC News’ Phil Lebeau talks about the auto & aviation industries; 9:30am
STUDIO TOUR ◗ Brown County, various locations — The Backroads of Brown County Studio Tour, free, self-guided tour of 16 local artists’ & craftspersons’ studios; 10am-5pm, through October
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I have to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” — Paul Ryan
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THE ME PARTY
So, Willard opts for one of America’s biggest Ayn Rand groupies.
True Love
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Frankly, I’m glad. Romney’s vice presidential tab provides us with a necessary referendum on where we want to go.
Will the Great United States, Inc. be the land of the mythical rugged individualist? Will the number two man in the nation be a profit-oriented slave to economic theory? Or will we cast our lot for four more years of a man who pays exquisite lip service to hope and change?
Yeah, I’m fabulously unimpressed with the choices I’ll have this November. But I’ve still got my c-note on Barack. And he’s still got my vote.
Wade Page is the canary in America’s racial coalmine. Anderson points out that this holy land already has passed a point of no return.
To wit: just over a year ago, minority births for an entire year in the US exceeded those of whites.
And that train ain’t slowin’ down, babies.
The End Is Near
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Guys like Page, who immerse themselves in thoughts of white and black and brown and oh dear god what’ll happen to us all when the mud races take over, are doing doing what little they can to delay the inevitable.
Those of us who are sane don’t care what color our progeny will be in 50, 100, and 200 years. The Page gang thinks about it constantly.
They think they’re losing the battle but they’re not going down without a fight.
Expect more guys like Wade Page to pop up over the next few years.
Oh, and don’t kid yourself. It’s one of the driving forces behind the monolithic force of the gun lobby.
And I predict this will have absolutely zero effect on the American electorate.
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Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.
“The hell with it. I’m tired of repeating the obvious. I know with dead certainty that I will change nobody’s mind. I will hear conspiracy theories from those who fear the government, I will hear about the need to raise a militia, and I will hear nothing about how 9,484 corpses a year has helped anything.”
“Should this young man — whose nature was apparently so obvious to his mother that, when a ABC News reporter called, she said “You’ve got the right person” — have been able to buy guns, ammunition and explosives? The gun lobby will say yes. And the endless gun control debate will begin again, and the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association will go to work, and the op-ed thinkers will have their usual thoughts, and the right wing will issue alarms, and nothing will change. And there will be another mass murder.”
This ain’t no movie, kids. This is life. Guns are designed to take it.
Workers Tear Down The Paterno Statue At 9:30 This Morning
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Now, maybe the people who run the institution can refocus on something novel: the development of students’ minds.
Joe Paterno made a lot of dough at the school. He signed a three-year contract in 2008 that called for an annual salary of a half million dollars a year. He made piles more — several times that amount per year — from ancillary sources.
The late unindicted co-conspirator was responsible for nothing more than the likes of instructing running backs on which way to turn when linebackers were approaching. It seems to me that particular aspect of the education of young men can be done by any number of “teachers” who’ve studied football (read: “have sat in front of the TV on Saturday and Sunday afternoons”).
Me? I’d spend half a million bucks on five teachers of a different sort, say:
Lynda Barry, creative writing and cartooning — The creator of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek”, “The Good Times Are Killing Me” and other works of reality-based fiction and visual art, Barry has transformed the struggles of an outsider into brilliantly funny and therapeutic entertainment. Think of what a role model she’d be for geeky, self-deprecating teenaged girls.
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Rebecca Watson, general science — The founder of Skepchick, she works tirelessly to upgrade the status of brainiac girls and female scientists around the world.
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Tariq Taylor, Humanities, black studies — As a Morehouse Collage grad student, Taylor visited Thailand after having never traveled in his life before. His experiences in that country were documented in the video “The Experience,” which reveals how travel can profoundly affect young black men who’ve been cloistered in racial and economic ghettos their whole lives.
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Amy Goodman, journalism — The boss of Democracy Now!, Goodman digs deeper than just about any reporter alive.
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Harriet Hall, MD, philosophy — The SkepDoc, Hall strips away the masturbatory bullshit that passes for curiosity and inquiry in the New Age and alternative medicine worlds today.
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Wouldn’t you think a hundred G’s a year would be good pay for each of five individuals whose words and guidance might affect literally thousands of students a year? Oh, and none of those students would have to be winners of the gene pool lottery wherein they’d have been born bigger/faster/stronger than 99.9 percent of their peers.
Call me a dreamer.
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WHERE THERE’S SMOKE…
As if anybody needed more proof that Tony Robbins is a con artist:
Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.
The tree, a blue spruce, was donated by a neighbor some 22 years ago. The neighbor was able to look at the tree each morning through his apartment window. He’d nursed the tree through some tough times and considered it his “baby.”
A Typical Blue Spruce
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And yesterday he discovered that some punks — apparently — had sawed the whole damned thing down and hauled it away!
If that isn’t bad enough, city tree boss Lee Huss says it’s not terribly unusual. Huss says some twelve trees a year are stolen.
Man. Have I not awakened from my beauty sleep yet and this is just one of those stupid dreams?
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COFFEE CHATTER
Did you catch the puff piece on Soma Coffee in the weekend IDS?
Chad Carrothers, the big boss at Firehouse Radio, says January Jones resigned as WFHB News Director to, in her words, “spend more time with my family.”
Sheesh. I can’t even make a smart-assed comment about that other than to say any good news hound — and January was a fine news hound — knows that’s what you say when what you really want to say will burn bridges.
Her resignation was, in Chad’s words, “unsolicited and unexpected.”
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The news operation at our town’s community radio station undoubtedly will suffer without her even though Assistant News Director Alycin Bektesh is among the sharpest pencils in the drawer and would be a fab choice as January’s permanent replacement.
I’ll redouble my efforts to get January’s take on the split.
◗ The radical attorney Jerry Boyle, who’s been running around downtown Chicago for a couple of months now trying to keep the town’s Occupy people out of hot water, posts a Venn diagram of the US Government-Goldman Sachs unholy union.
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I’ll have to repro the diagram here. Dig it, and then tell me our elected officials will do their utmost to rein in those cash cowboys.
Man! It’d be like Jack and Bobby Kennedy putting Sam Giancana in charge of the Justice Department.
◗ Delia Chandler of Brighton, UK, reminds us Sunday was the anniversary of the assassination of charismatic Black Panther leader Fred Hampton — in his bedroom — by Chicago cops, the FBI, and members of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office in 1969.
Don’t be confused by the line in the Democracy Now! teaser calling it the 40th anniversary of the rub out. Amy Goodman‘s piece ran in 2009.
◗ Bleeding Heartland Roller Girl Shanda Rude takes her life in her hands by blaspheming Oprah. Or at least pointing out — approvingly — that Bill Maher has soiled the name of the most powerful woman on Earth.
Me? I didn’t worry about watching it — I’m slated for hell already.
◗ Finally, uber-Cub fan Al Yellon, proprietor of the Bleed Cubbie Blue fansite gushes over the long-awaited election of Ron Santo to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
If you’re wondering about my own feelings on Ronnie’s canonization, you need only read my Salon.com piece on his death, almost exactly a year ago.
