"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
Built in 1955, it still stands at 7630 South Old State Road 37. The Starlite opened for the 2012 season this past weekend, drawing about 500 cars for a double bill of “The Hunger Games” and “Mission Impossible 4.”
The Loved One and I plan to get out to the Starlite sometime this summer so we can make out in the car.
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PISTOL LOVIN’
I’m trying not to jump on the Trayvon Martin bandwagon at this moment because, as a very, very prominent attorney in these parts reminded me the other day, we don’t know many of the facts yet.
Trayvon Martin And George Zimmerman
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Highly emotionally charged incidents like this one draw the ranters and the ravers out of the deep woods. Like that despicable New Orleans cop who tweeted, “Act like a Thug Die like one!”
Never mind the borderline illiteracy of the man’s wireless ejaculation, this officer of the law is saying if you walk around wearing what he considers to be the uniform of gangsters, you ought to have your life taken.
The cop has been suspended without pay. If I’m the chief of police, I fire his emotionally unqualified ass forthwith.
Anyway, the shooter claims he and Martin had a scuffle. Let’s assume that’s true. Should we be able to pump lead into people whenever we find ourselves in a fight? Especially when we’ve been trailing them in the dark?
See, these are the chickens that come home to roost when you’re a nation in love with guns.
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FRANKFURT LOVIN’
The German city of Frankfurt has a new mayor. Peter Feldmann, a Social Democrat, takes over the fifth largest city in Germany on July 1st.
Feldmann beat the Christian Democrat candidate with 57 percent of the vote.
It’s ironic. I’d just watched the movie “Downfall” (originally “Der Untergang“) the other day. It’s a German production with English subtitles. You can get it on Netflix.
The movie recounts the last 12 days of the Nazi regime and is set primarily in Hitler’s underground bunker. It’s as powerful a piece as you’re likely to see. Much of the story is based on the recollections of Hitler’s stenographer, Traudl Junge.
The actual Junge opens the film by saying, essentially, How should I have known what those guys were doing? I was just a kid.
Junge
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The movie’s coda carries a different tune. I won’t spoil it for you by telegraphing it here.
Anyway, Hitler’s surviving boys always said Yeah, we screwed up but at least we did something about those pesky Jews.
In the movie, Hitler doesn’t allow the possibility that he screwed up but he seems most proud of the fact that he stood tall against the Jews.
Bruno Ganz As Adolf Hitler
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A few people who were forced onto cattle cars and shipped off to concentration camps are still alive to this day. Most of them wore the mandated Star of David.
It’s been only 75 years since the end of the Holocaust. And, yeah, anti-Semitism now and again makes a reappearance in Europe.
Mies, as he’s known familiarly, was perhaps the key figure in 20th Century world architecture. The simplicity of his work was stunning. His famed aphorism, “Less is More,” was the imprimatur for a generation of architects who filled the world’s big cities with box-like, prismatic skyscrapers.
Mies’s 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951)
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Whereas Mies’s boxes were elegant and visually arresting, the slew of copycats who followed him turned his minimalism into a stultifying conformity.
Michael Wolf’s Photo, “tc 81”
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See? Jumping on a bandwagon rarely turns out well.
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LOVIN’ YOU
Here’s another reason I love doing this blog. Minnie Riperton‘s song “Lovin’ You” seemed a perfect wrap up for the series of headlines above. So, in the course of researching Riperton, I discovered Maya Rudolph, ex of Saturday Night Live, is her daughter.
That might be common knowledge but now I know.
Cool, huh? Now, an admission — this song really gets on my nerves.
“Sex is like bridge; if you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.” — Mae West
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THIS JUST IN: ORGASM IS “INTERESTING”
Perhaps the best story I’ve ever read in the Indiana Daily Student appeared Friday. The story, I tell you, makes living in a college town all the more worthwhile.
It’s here, after all, that people actually investigate things like the origin of the universe, the inner workings of the cell, the psychological underpinnings of economics, and — even more intellectually compelling than those topics — the human orgasm.
Debra Herbenick — who, I’ve since learned, is a semi-regular visitor to Soma Coffee — is a research scientist and a director of IU’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. She has released a study indicating that a significant percentage of women who work out at your local gym actually experience orgasm while they’re panting.
Herbenick
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One of the Boys of Soma, Real Estate John, works part-time at the Monroe County YMCA. He usually pulls the Friday night shift. I pointed out the story to him. He read it with great interest. He turned to another Soma Boy who regularly works out at the Y on Friday nights and who also read the piece. Real Estate John said, “I have the perfect candidate.” he mentioned the name of a woman they both were acquainted with.
“Oh yeah!” the other guy said. “No wonder she always has an ecstatic look on her face.”
The woman, the fellows explained, is generally attached to the spinning bike.
That device, according to Herbenick, is one of the exercise machines that lends itself nicely to stimulating certain locales of the female anatomy. “[W]omen,” Herbenick told the IDS, “are moving their genitals in the bike seat.”
Spinning classes are awfully popular with women. Now I may know why. It occurs to me I’ve not met many men who take spinning classes. I wonder if this study will inspire more men to get into that regimen.
“Phew. I Need A Cigarette.”
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Anyway, Herbenick said her study, which indicated that a shade more than one third of women canvassed have experienced the Big O while working out, “reminds people how interesting orgasm is.”
Can’t argue with that.
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SPIES IN THE CLASSROOM OF LOVE
Most of what I learned early on about sex came from a fellow named Dr. David Reuben.
At the age of 14, mine was the most inquiring of minds. Especially about sex.
The book had somehow found its way into our house. I know I didn’t buy it; if I had, it would have been safely stashed in my room somewhere. Under the bed, next to the old liver sausage sandwich, probably — it’s true, for several months there was a liver sausage sandwich under my bed. I recall having made it late one night and, after bringing it back to my room, had promptly fallen asleep without eating it. It wound up under the bed.
Hey, I was 14 — leaving sandwiches under the bed and devouring all printed material pertaining to sex were defining characteristics of the age.
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I know Dad didn’t bring the book into the house. My sisters had flown the coop ten years before and my brother was away at college so it couldn’t have been them. Process of elimination left Ma as the likely culprit.
Makes sense.
The women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution were in full swing. Now, Ma wasn’t a practicing libber, nor did she sample the pleasures afforded by the newly relaxed attitudes toward sex. She was Ma, after all.
She was, though, eager to be seen as “up on things.” If either Gloria Steinem or Xaviera Hollander, for instance, was to appear on, say, Dick Cavett’s show on a given night, you can bet Ma’d be parked on the sofa, watching. She bought bestsellers like “Love Story,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and, I assume, Dr. Reuben’s book.
Gloria Steinem
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Man, as soon as she finished that thing, I snapped it up and started memorizing it.
Reuben described female topography in terms I’d never heard before. He revealed techniques and practices I could only dream of trying out. My time wouldn’t come for another five or six years, though.
Until then, I considered myself the sexual theoretician of my circle. “It says in David Reuben’s book that a man should…,” I’d begin whenever some sexual topic had arisen.
My pals listened raptly. None of them had the slightest patience to read a book — even one about sex — but they still were curious about the purported expertise Reuben offered.
One day I told Tough Marc about Reuben’s assertion that women know secret methods of masturbation in public. Reuben reported that many women liked to cross their legs and squeeze their inner thigh muscles repeatedly, often bringing themselves to orgasm.
“Oh My God, Is She? Do You Think?”
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Now, Tough Marc was a gearhead and he packed a punch that could have been confused with the blow from a sledgehammer, but he was smarter than the rest of my neighborhood pals. He’d confessed he was almost tempted to forgo his long-lasting embargo on books and buy Reuben’s.
Such a concession made him, among my peers, an intellectual. Still, he was able to resist the urge. Last I heard, Tough Marc owned a car wash on the northwest side of Chicago.
Anyway, Tough Marc was fascinated by the revelation that women had ways to stimulate themselves under the table, as it were.
They’d do this on the bus, in the office, in the movie theater, and even standing in line waiting for the next bank teller. The impartial observer, Reuben revealed, could tell when a woman was hard at work in this manner by the swinging of her leg (if she were sitting) and the dreamy look on her face. Tough Marc and I pledged to monitor the legs and face of every woman we might encounter.
In the summer of 1971 both Tough Marc and I found ourselves in summer school taking a make-up course in algebra.
One of our classmates was a girl named Kathy Masterton. We noticed on the first day of class that Kathy Masterton was a champion leg swinger. You couldn’t walk down her aisle for fear of getting kicked in the shin or knee.
Kathy Masterton, too, often stared off into space, her eyes glazed.
Tough Marc and I looked at each other and nodded. After class on that first day we compared notes.
Leg kicks — check. Dreamy look on her face — yup.
Yeah, we concluded, Kathy Masterton confirmed Dr. Reuben’s assertion.
A couple of days later, Tough Marc said he’d come up with a new name for our leg-swinging classmate. “Kathy Masturbant,” he proclaimed, triumphantly. I congratulated him profusely.
As the summer school semester passed, we became transfixed by Kathy Masturbant. We maintained surveillance of her from the bell that signaled the start of class to the one that ended it. She kept up a rhythm with her swinging leg that can only be described as heroic.
Miss Fritz, the algebra teacher, wrote formulas from one end of the blackboard to another but we took no notice of them. Pythagoras, balanced equations, polynomials — none of them meant anything to us. Our focus was on Kathy Masturbant.
“Huh? What? I Dunno.”
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Kathy noticed us staring at her. I became concerned she might suspect we were on to her. Nevertheless, she kept swinging her leg.
Kathy smiled at me one day and I smiled back. Tough Marc and I conferred about this development immediately after class. It was decided I should chat her up and, if I was lucky, get the inside dope on this leg-swinging business. “Good luck,” Tough Marc said, solemnly.
It’s important to note that we didn’t hatch this plan just to embarrass her. Nor was our aim to somehow get sex from her. We were still too far away from that Holy Grail to consider it a reasonable possibility.
No, our goal was knowledge. We wanted to know if Dr. Reuben’s leg-swinging theory could be proved. Ours was a scientific quest.
Oh, on second thought, the idea of having sex with Kathy Masturbant must have crossed my mind. I can’t imagine being 15 and certain a girl I knew was masturbating in public and not think it conceivable she might have sex with me.
Then again, Kathy Masturbant was an exceedingly plain-looking girl, which is a nice way of saying she was a gargoyle. In fact, Tough Marc and I cursed our luck that the most likely public masturbator we’d yet found was so homely.
So, we gamely carried out our scientific pursuit.
The next day during class break, I approached Kathy Masturbant in the school parking lot. She was busy lighting one cigarette off another. We exchanged greetings and engaged in a bit of small talk. She seemed easy enough to talk to, although it must be admitted I was scared to ask her about her swinging leg.
“Go On, Man. Talk To Her.”
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I glanced over at Tough Marc, who was eying us from several cars away. He could sense my resolve was fading. He mouthed the words “Ask her!” at me.
I screwed up my courage and spoke up. “So, uh, y’know, I see you’re always, like, swingin’ your leg. Know what I mean?”
“I do?” she said.
“Um, yeah. You do.”
“Oh,” she said.
“So, uh, what’s that all about?”
Kathy shrugged. “I dunno. I’m nervous I guess. What’s the big deal about it?”
“No big deal,” I said. “I’m just interested.”
Oops. Wrong choice of words. Kathy interpreted that to mean I was interested in her.
Which I wasn’t. I still had a teenaged boy’s arrogance that made me think she was not attractive enough for me.
Kathy became giddy. She started telling me all about her family and friends. She suggested we go to see the movie “Patton” someday soon. I let it slip that I was a Cubs fan and she jumped on that, saying we had to go to a game that weekend. Next thing I knew, she’d invited me over for dinner that coming Friday.
“Y’mean, Like A Date?”
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I hadn’t the heart to turn her down. Plus, there was that little part of me that hoped she, the public masturbator, might let me have sex with her.
That Friday I showed up at her family’s apartment at dinner time. She and her mother had laid out a fancy spread. Clearly, my presence made the affair a special occasion.
After we ate, Kathy’s mother said, “You and your boyfriend go in the living room and watch TV. I’ll do the dishes.”
Boyfriend. My hair stood on end (yes, I had hair.)
We watched “The Brady Bunch” (which I loathed), “Nanny and the Professor” (not only bad, but boring), and “The Partridge Family” (now, that was a good show; Susan Dey inhabited every heterosexual boy’s nocturnal fantasies). For her part, Kathy loved “The Brady Bunch” and was in heaven when “Nanny” came on. “The Partridge Family,” she could take or leave.
Unnnhhh….
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Throughout the hour and a half, Kathy’s leg never stopped swinging. At eight-thirty, her Mom came into the living room and said we’d better call it a night. By that time, Kathy had scootched so close to me that I was squeezed into the corner of the sofa.
Kathy put her arm in mine and walked me to the door. I thanked her Mom for the delicious dinner and was about to say goodbye to Kathy when she ushered me onto the front porch and closed the door behind us. She launched into an itinerary that included “Patton” and the Cubs game and four or five other engagements for the two of us over the next couple of weeks. She held my hand as I leaned toward the front steps — swear to god, had she let go, I’d have fallen down the stairs.
Again, I didn’t have the heart to turn her down (nor did I wish to pass up the chance, however negligible, that she’d let me have sex with her.)
Funny thing was, we had a lot of fun over the next couple of weeks. The next Friday night when we walked home from the Tivoli Theater, we took our shoes off because we fancied ourselves sorta-but-not-quite hippies. When we went to the Cubs game, we sat in the very top row of the upper deck and looked out over the city and Lake Michigan and pointed out landmarks to each other. We went to hear Styx at the high school gym and danced until we were soaked in sweat.
C’mon, Go Easy On Me — I Was A Teenager, Okay?
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One day in class, Kathy stopped swinging her leg long enough to inform me that her mother would be out that evening. I should come over, she suggested, so we could listen to her new “Shaft” album.
When I told Tough Marc about this, it was his turn to congratulate me profusely. And again, he said solemnly, “Good luck.”
“Shaft” was a double album — total running time, 68:50. Oh, the things we could do in that time frame!
I was beginning to like Kathy. And, truth be told, she wasn’t that bad looking really, as long as I ignored her horn-rimmed glasses and slight case of acne. Only now am I strong enough to admit she had to ignore the same things on me.
We were laying on the living room floor, kissing deeply, by the time Track 4, Side 1 came on. “Ellie’s Love Theme.” Kathy’d said, “I’ll show you how to French kiss.” I thought I might pass out.
John Shaft
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By the time Side 2 fell onto the turntable, Kathy pushed me away. “Look here, buster,” she said. “We can do this all night long if you want.”
I nodded enthusiastically; unfortunately there was more.
“But I want to tell you something. I’m a virgin and I’m gonna stay that way! Capeesh?”
I’d never been so relieved in my life. I’d only just learned how to French kiss moments before. Despite reading Dr. David Reuben’s book from cover to cover several times over, I still had no idea what was expected of me had she said tonight’s the night.
Kathy’s Mom came home around 10:30. She looked at us suspiciously. Kathy said, “Mom, we didn’t do anything. We just listened to albums.”
Her Mom looked skeptical. “I don’t want anything going on around here,” she warned.
“Oh no!” I said quickly. “No, no, no, no. Nothing.”
With that I said good night to Kathy and told her Mom how very nice it was to see her again. She nodded but her eyes were narrowed.
Kathy and I lasted about another two weeks, which constituted a committed, long-term relationship at our age. A cosuin had introduced her to a boy who, Kathy told me apologetically, had bedroom eyes. The unspoken question being How could she not start dating him.
I began walking home certain I’d kill myself that night. By the time I’d hit the back door, though, I was over Kathy.
I never did find out if Kathy Masturbant was, well, masturbating when she swung her leg so heroically. In retrospect, I realize I was never cut out to be as accomplished a sex researcher as Debra Herbenick.
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THEME FROM SHAFT
Any song off this double album still makes my legs weak.
You know, it’s easy to be magnanimous with people in need as long as they’re cuddly and harmless.
Professional athletes, for instance, are great at this. They’re forever flitting from one children’s hospital to another, signing autographs, bringing game-worn jerseys, and hugging kids made bald by chemotherapy. And, yeah, the poor kids are thrilled to pieces. They grin and swoon. How can anyone with a beating heart not embrace some unfortunate little one who’s dying of cancer?
But what if the needy person stinks or is obnoxious? Things get a little difficult. Take a guy who’s 52 years old and scraggly-bearded, who hasn’t changed clothes or had a full bath in weeks. How quickly is the shooting guard for the Indiana Pacers going to wrap his arms around that guy?
And don’t get me wrong. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in the Monroe County Public Library and have chosen to move from my table when a homeless dude who smells like hell sits across from me. Or when a half dozen homeless folks set up camp at the table next to mine and loudly argue about who’s a better friend of whom.
Suddenly, I’m not a saint.
Not Easy
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It’s not easy being a saint. The people who run IMU, though, have made the hard choice and we should salute them.
“We are a very public building and invite everyone into our building,” IMU official Thom Simmons tells the IDS.
That’s the good news. The bad news? Just that there are homeless in this very, very wealthy land.
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SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX, TAXES, AND GUNS. AND SEX.
Another h/t to my pal R.E. Paris. She messaged me yesterday, pointing out that the Republican Party in some backwoods South Carolina county is demanding its members sign affidavits that they’ve never had pre-marital sex.
“Would You Be My Wife And S&M Submissive?”
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Wow!
Oh, and that “Your spouse cannot be a person of the same gender…,” and “You cannot now, from the moment you sign this pledge, look at pornography.”
Do we really need any more evidence that the GOP is obsessed?
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ELECTIONEERING
Barack Obama’s White House shocked the bejesus out of Chicago by moving the G-8 Summit from my hometown to Camp David.
The May pow-wow had the potential to be as wrenching an experience as the 1968 Democratic Convention. Obama’s political advisers sure as hell are not going to let their man suffer the same fate the late Hubert Humphrey did.
Law And Order
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Mark it — the Obama brain trust is as politically astute as the gang that Bill Clinton assembled 20 years ago.
That c-note I have riding on the Obama reelection looks like a smarter prop every day.
The Jordanian-born, Palestine-state advocate put a slug in Robert F. Kennedy’s cranium on June 5th, 1968, in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. Kennedy died the next morning.
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Sirhan’s attorneys say, yeah, their boy was on the scene when the gunshots rang out, but he didn’t kill the presidential candidate.
As is the case in all high-profile shootings, conspiracy theories began bouncing off the walls seemingly before Kennedy was even loaded into the ambulance. The most persistent theory has it that a security guard standing behind Kennedy either inadvertently or as part of a plot fired the deadly bullet.
Me? I have little patience for conspiracy theories. Public officials have a hard time filling potholes efficiently and promptly. They usually can’t even agree on what time to break for lunch. So how are they gonna put together an airtight plan to topple the Twin Towers, whack the president, or capture extraterrestrials?
Once in a great while, though, conspiracy wingnuts raise a point that might just pass the sanity muster. For instance, why couldn’t a part-time security guard who was probably trained for all of two and a half hours have accidentally fired his gun in the chaos at in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen?
But Sirhan’s lawyers say the security guard wasn’t the shooter. Someone else was — and their boy was a patsy.
Wrestling With Sirhan
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Here’s where they lose me: Sirhan, they insist, was “hypo-programmed” by conspirators. His role was to serve as the fall guy while the real hit men did their thing.
Oy! You know what? A lot of people are gonna buy into this fever dream. Too many folks in this holy land can’t tell the difference between reality and cheap fiction.
“Those who, in principle, oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence, and famine as permanent features of human life.” — Bertrand Russell
We’re talking cheating on a test or hiring a ringer to write a paper, that sort of thing. Some 366 cases of such enhanced achievement misconduct were adjudicated last year. This year the number of cheaters already is approaching that total, according to the article, even though the spring semester isn’t even half over.
Giraffing
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Using last year’s figure, let’s just assume the actual number of cheaters was three times the official number. That gives us a shade under 1100 future Wall Street icons…, er…, I mean, cheaters. That’s a pretty heartening number, no?
When you consider that some 95,000 aspiring scholars attended classes at the seven Indiana University campuses, you realize that only .0038 percent of students are kinky, to use an old alley cop term for lawbreakers.
“So, Cheating On Your Semester Finals, Eh?”
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Not bad, eh? The pressure on college students to succeed, especially in this Great Recession era, is enormous. When only one in approximately 261 students spits on the academic code, in my hypothetical scenario, I think we can safely say IU crammers by and large are honest souls.
The whole subject reminds me of that great Woody Allen line: “I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”
Balt tries to explain women. Don’t get me wrong, I love Joy to pieces, but now, after reading the essay, I’m more confused than ever about those folks who possess different plumbing than I do.
Then again, perhaps my confusion means I really get it now.
Women are like quantum mechanics. As Richard Feynman reportedly said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.” — Julius Marx
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THE BOYS OF SOMA WAKE UP
Believe it or not, the hairy men who inhabit Soma Coffee occasionally can form full and complete sentences before they’ve even finished their first cups of the life-giving substance.
Videographer Steve Llewellyn told us he lucked into a ducat for the Bourdain/Ripert gabfest last night at the IU Auditorium.
Bourdain
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“I never really knew that much about him but he was hilarious. I had no idea — ‘Some guy’s talking about food, wow’,” Llewellyn says. “He had a lot to say about vegetarians. He said what you ought to do is cook bacon in front of a vegetarian. ‘Bacon is the gateway protein’.”
Tyler Ferguson (a member of the Boys of Soma Women’s Auxiliary) was at the “Good Versus Evil: An Evening with Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert” show as well. “Didja hear when he mentioned Monsanto and people booed? The first person down in front who started the booing? That was me,” she said.
Ripert
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After delivering his report, Llewellyn flipped open the IDS. Computer genius and web developer Boise Tomlin couldn’t help but comment.
Noticing that the news section of the paper carried quite a few column inches of sports-related gibberish, Tomlin opined, “Look at this. This daily newspaper has an entire section dedicated to sports. Half the paper is sports. And yet they still have sports stuff in what should be the news section. That’s ridiculous.”
I’ve been holding my tongue for nearly a week now.
In fact, I bit my tongue so hard on Facebook Sunday that I’m still tasting blood.
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No more.
I was dying to say Sunday that the whole Whitney Houston mourning thing is way over the top, no?
I mean, really, when was the last time any of these people who are so all broken up over her demise actually listened to her music? And if they did listen to her music, didn’t they hear one of the most annoying hit songs ever? That is “I Will Always Love You“?
Honestly, did she not have any other way of conveying emotion in a song other than to up her voice volume to eleven?
All I knew of Whitney Houston was that she sang a lot of boring stuff white people liked and that she had a lot of trouble with substances. Ergo, her untimely death was no surprise to me. How could it have been a surprise to anyone else?
Perhaps it was the timing of her death, coming on the heels of the check-outs of Amy Winehouse and Etta James. People love the idea that things happen in threes (although they don’t — it’s really only our human need to see patterns even when there aren’t any). The Winehouse and James deaths were met with real outpourings of emotion, considering they were, well, true creative artists.
Have you seen this image floating around the interwebs these days?
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So, it’s not that I have anything against Whitney Houston. She was a terrific singer, albeit one I never cared to listen to. But my preferences aren’t the sacred arbiter of what’s art and what’s not.
No, my quibble is with the folks who are trying to elevate her to some kind of weird martyrdom.
That’s all.
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BIG MIKE’S SHELF
We’re trying a little something new down at the Book Corner these days. We’re dedicating a shelf for a week or so to each of our august literary sales drones so they can display their fave tomes.
Well, whaddya know, I’m the first vict…, er, choice. Here are my books for the week (or until somebody feels ambitious enough to put up a new shelf):
Now then. Speaking of the one-of-a-kind Tyler Ferguson, she’s making big plans for the spring.
She’s got this crazy idea that she wants to produce a Bloomington-oriented TV talk show. The host, natch, would be none other than one Tyler Ferguson.
Yup.
It will be modeled after the legendary late-night talk show, “Playboy After Dark,” hosted by Hugh Hefner back in the 1960s.
Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr., Anthony Newley, and your host, Hugh Hefner
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Tyler wants to call her show “Nightcap.”
She plans to tape the pilot in her living room with a live audience comprised of invited friends. The idea, according to the aspiring TV mogul, is the thing’ll be a party and throughout the evening, a lineup of guests will appear. Bloomington, Tyler reasons, is chock full of musicians, authors, poets, singers, comedians, and others. They’ll be interviewed by Tyler in the usual desk-and-couch set-up.
Ferguson already has her video director set up as well as her very own sidekick. And guess who that sidekick will be. Yep, this guy, Big Mike, president and chief executive officer of the international communications colossus, The Electron Pencil.
My Dream Job: Second Banana
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Tyler banged away on her laptop this morning, taking notes on the show idea. The idea’s been floating around in her fertile cranium for a few weeks now. She expects it to run on You Tube and hopes to be able to secure a timeslot on CATS.
This thing just might be for real. Tyler already has set up one sponsor for the show, a start-up brewery that’ll supply the booze for the party.
Look for a late May/early June release of the pilot.
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A WOMAN’S PLACE
Apparently the ideas of women are pretty much irrelevant to the blowhard who’s running Congressional hearings on contraception, religious myth organizations, and the Obama administration’s new rules on health care coverage.
You know, it wasn’t too long ago that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) was considered just another loon in the GOP’s (POG’s?) stable of putative primates in Congress. Now, he’s chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“No Girls Allowed!”
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And whaddya expect from the Party O’god? Have you caught the video of that human-impersonator on MSNBC last night who said things were so much simpler back in his day: women simply squeezed an aspirin between their knees to avoid getting pregnant.
This unindicted moral felon, a fellow named Foster Friess, doesn’t like the idea of women having sex. He’s a billionaire, so his “thoughts” carry weight in this holy land.
“Y’see, I’m Obscenely Rich And You’re Not.”
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It occurs to me that these god-groupies who are so freaked over contraception really don’t need women. Females are so troublesome, after all. So I have a solution to all their problems. Here’s a partner that won’t file a paternity suit against you or demand birth control pills or even talk back when you just want to roll over and fall asleep the way the creator intended a man to act.
(I’d have posted a picture of the product here but — here’s a shocker — I thought it might be more prudent not to. You’ll just have to click on the link.)
I propose nominating the above-mentioned product as Mrs. Republican USA for the year 2012 — and for all the years thereafter!
“Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.” — Yogi Berra
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SANTORUM, THE LIBERAL
Okay, the Republican presidential primary race has officially turned psychotic.
Apparently, the closeted candidate, Rick Santorum, has passed the mannequin candidate, Mitt Romney, as the frontrunner for the nomination.
That’s scary enough in and of itself. What makes this shift in standings even more petrifying is the Romney camp’s reaction to it. According to political reporter Ben Jacobs in The Daily Beast, the Romney brain trust will now go all out in attacking Santorum and one of the biggest guns in its arsenal will be — oh, my aching head! — Santorum’s liberal voting record in Congress.
Liberal voting record!
Are these people out of their freaking minds?
I mean, I understand that Romney’s trying to prove he can be just as antediluvian as the next Republican but saying the words liberal and Santorum in the same sentence is about as ludicrous as pairing the terms Trump and decent human being.
Romney’s gang can’t be expected to fry Santorum over his twin preoccupations with homosexuals and women who insist that they have the right to enjoy sex. That is, not if he wants to have a prayer of gaining even one vote from a certain GOP base that sits around in its own flatulence from morning till night grumbling about fags and strumpets.
And he really can’t challenge Santorum on his other stances, which include building a wall on the US-Mexican border, privatization of Social Security, denial of climate change, his “drill everywhere” energy policy, his view that there is no right to privacy, and his embrace of “intelligent design.”
No, Romney can’t hit Santorum with those clubs because they are the weapons the Republicans have used successfully to bludgeon the sane among the electorate for a good 35 years now.
So Romney has to concoct a different kind of evil Santorum — and what’s more satanic than a liberal?
Commie
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I don’t know how the Romney boys are going to do it. Perhaps they’ll accuse Santorum of being soft on teenaged masturbation. They may even charge Santorum’s wife with buying a loaf of organic bread once.
I suppose this new strategy may work, though. Just uttering the word liberal in a roomful of Republicans makes them all break out in hives.
It’s been well-documented that many teenaged aspiring ballerinas fall victim to eating disorders.
Women have started to rebel against unrealistic body images imposed on them by fashion mavens, dance teachers, gymnastics coaches, and panting frat boys. But the blowback apparently hasn’t reached all corners of the distaff population as yet.
Still, it heartens me to see women like Adele make it big on world stage.
How dare she try to entertain us when she can’t even hide the fact that she doesn’t try to throw up every spoonful of yogurt she’s ever put in her mouth?
Now, the truth is Adele was a rather chubby young girl and even after she became a star she remained curvy. But of late, she seems to have slimmed down considerably, no doubt thanks to the constant harping of jerk record executives and verminous PR people.
I’ve got a bit of advice for my female friends. Whenever people criticize your form, tell them what I tell people who are idiotic, insulting, and insensitive: “Kiss my fat ass!”
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BABY GOT BACK
Generally, I’d prefer to hear a corrupt judge sentence me to the electric chair than any hip-hop music but this 1992 hit by Sir Mix-A-Lot fits perfectly here.
After this, I promise I’ll never post another rap, hip-hop, or house song again.
“The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you.
“And our governments are very much the same.” — Marjane Satrapi
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THE RIGHT CHOICE
WFHB moves glacially when it comes to hiring people. Sheez, it took the board six months to figure out Chad Carrothers was the person for the job of General Manager, even as he was whipping the station into shape operationally and financially as the Acting Boss.
So, the two-month wait to give the News Director position to Alycin Bektesh doesn’t seem so, well, endless.
Bektesh & Pal
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Yep, the former Assistant News Director/Acting News Director now gets to print up permanent business cards and I can’t think of a more deserving soul in the industry.
I wrote the news with Bektesh when she first joined the station as a volunteer a year ago. I thought I was the hottest pepper in the salad until she sat next to me. Alycin was aggressive, confident, knowledgeable, and damned good.
Perhaps most amazing of all was her ability to endure my incessant chatter and ribbing. Not only that, she gave it all back and then some.
Look out Chicago and New York. This chick’ll be nosing around Bloomington only for a precious short time.
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INNER BEAUTY?
Correct me if I’m wrong but is this not the year 2012?
The IDS reports this morning that an Indiana University junior named Brianna McClellan was tabbed Miss IU Saturday night.
The campus pageant is one of the stepping stones to the Miss Indiana and Miss America contests.
Miss America?
Miss America: A Crowning Intellectual And Public Service Achievement
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I mean, there are a lot of dumbass things going on in this holy land — the Republican primary reality show for one — but I had no idea we still had beauty pageants.
Oh, the participants in these things caution us not to call them beauty pageants anymore. Heavens no.
If not, then why can’t I compete in them?
I’ll tell you why: The sight of me in an evening gown would sour the audience on life permanently.
Anyway, last year’s Miss Indiana University, Jaclyn Fenwick, turned over her tiara, sash, bouquet of flowers, riding crop, and velvet handcuffs to Brianna, at which point the new Miss IU held her hand to her cheek in shock, which, if I’m not mistaken, is a gesture mandated by law in such cases.
McClellan, Shocked (photo by Kirsten Clark/IDS)
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Fenwick told the IDS that the Miss America thing is important because it provides scholarships to young women.
McClellan said, “I just want it to be known that it’s not a pageant. It’s not a thing about beauty…. It’s the inner beauty and scholarship.”
McClellan added that it’s really volunteerism and community service that count most in the competition.
I suppose it’s only a coincidence that McClellan and Fenwick and the runners up all possess extraordinary conventional physical attributes.
I’ll believe McClellan’s and Fenwick’s unsolicited protestations the day a 250-pound woman who wears horn-rimmed glasses and who volunteers at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank or Boxcar Books wins the title.
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WE DO FACEBOOK SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO
This feature has been absent in recent weeks mainly because FB-ers have been unimaginative.
They sure made up for lost time last night and this morning.
So let’s see what the social media’s brightest minds are up to — and remember, this is a no spamily, no brattle zone.
◗ Rich Lloyd, professor of complicated stuff at Vanderbilt University, read an op/ed piece in the New York Times that’s relevant to the above discussion on beauty pageants.
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The author of the piece, historian Stephanie Coontz, points out that women today earn nearly 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, leading some observers to wonder if they’ll have a hard time finding husbands.
After all, men don’t make passes at women who wear glasses, right?
Wrong, Coontz says. That’s old hat. Read the piece and find out why.
◗ Radical lawyer Jerry Boyle, whose hands are going to be filled when the G-8 and NATO big boys visit Chicago this spring, found the fabulous quote that appears at the top of this page. It’s from graphic novel author Marjane Satrapi.
I can’t stress enough how cool Satrapi is. Her breakthrough work was the double-volume “Persepolis” saga, detailing her upbringing in Iran in the 1970s and ’80s. She personally witnessed two sets of iron hands — those of both the shah and the ayatollahs’ theocracy — squeeze the life out of that nation.
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Satrapi suspects that the Iranians and Americans have a lot more in common than we’d care to admit.
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.
Generally when The Loved One drives me to Soma on a Saturday morning the most we offer to each other in the realm of conversation are grunts. We understand each other enough to know that human verbal intercourse is not biologically possible before we have our caffeine.
Today is different.
This Penn State thing has been on everybody’s mind this week. Even The Loved One, who doesn’t know a Nittany Lion from the Nattily Attired, has followed the story.
What In The Hell Is A Nittany Lion Anyway?
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And she’s come to a conclusion.
“Here’s what I think,” she began as she negotiated the construction zone at 3rd Street and the Bypass.
My first instinct was to grunt. I reached down deep into my reserves of civility and said, “Yes, my precious angel?”
“Every man, except you and some other men I know, is a child molester,” she said.
I sat up straight. I surely wasn’t going to grunt at this pronouncement.
“Huh?”
“That’s what I believe. There are just too many incidents. It happens far too much. The only thing I can say is that the only man who’s not a child molester is a dead man.”
Wow. Normally I feel somewhat itchy about carrying the XY chromosome, what with fellow males like Rush Limbaugh, Gene Simmons, and the Rev. Fred Phelps running around loose. (Then again, the Double-X set can claim Ann Coulter and Michele Bachmann, so there!) Anyway, I suddenly felt awash in guilt by association.
If Rush Is A Guy, I Don’t Want To Be One
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“But darling,” I protested, “Methinks you’re hyperbolizing. Yes, we hear about child molestation but that’s because it’s news and news usually is the unusual.”
The Loved One shook her head. “It happens everywhere. And what about the way men look at teenaged girls?”
“Well,” I said, “you have to consider this. Wouldn’t it be natural for men to look at a female just as soon as she reaches sexual maturity? I mean, a fourteen-year-old can be alluring because she’s already grown all the necessary appurtenances. But laws and mores forbid us from acting on those instincts so most men don’t.”
“That’s just what I’m getting at,” she countered. “Women see things differently than men. Women feel that if you’re thinking about it, it’s just as bad as doing it. Take ‘Lolita.’ The men who saw it probably thought, ‘Oh, it’s just a movie.’ But it deeply affected a lot of women who saw it.”
At this moment I thought I’d hit upon the coup de grace. “If what you say is true, ” I said triumphantly, “why do you exclude me and these unnamed other men you know. Aren’t we, then, child molesters, too?”
I waited for The Loved One to relent and say, “Yeah, you’re right. I exaggerated.”
And waited. And waited.
By the time we reached Indiana Avenue, I’d shrunk into a corner of the car seat. If the Prius had an ashtray, I’d have jumped in.
She pulled up in front of Soma, we kissed each other goodbye, and I watched her drive off. My wife. MY love. The woman who posits that I’m a child molester.
Marriage is a fascinating experiment.
Remind me to tell you about the time The Loved One called me gay because I knew all the words to “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” from “South Pacific.”
Yup. Ninety percent of the enlightened, educated, broad-minded populace of Bloomington, Indiana and surrounding environs chose to give the finger to democracy.
Oh, sure, the election was pretty much a joke. After all, Mayor Mark Kruzan and City Clerk Regina Moore ran unopposed. And every single Republican who lives in this blessed county ran in the election (that would be three GOP-ers overall.)
And The Winner, In A Unanimous Decision, Is…
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But there was a semblance of a race for the three at-large seats in the Bloomington Common Council. Chris Sturbaum faced a nominal challenge in the 1st council district as well.
The Me Party-ists won so many of last November’s Congressional contests in large part because voters who actually possess cerebellums stayed home.
Maybe we’re not so smart after all.
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THE SECRET
So far, the Indy Colts are the worst team in the National Football League. Their record stands at 0-6.
It’s a civic embarrassment. The combined record of the Colts and the Indiana Hoosiers would be an execrable 1-15. Yech.
Clearly these are not glorious days for professional and collegiate bone snappers and ligament rippers in the great state o’Indiana.
Sad Sundays
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Something had to be done so the Colts’ Jeff Saturday, a mountain of gristle and muscle who plays center, called a team meeting this week. Apparently, he roared at his mates and then revealed to them the secret to winning which he, a 13-year veteran of the human carnage that is NFL football, has learned.
He spoke about his revelation later in a press conference. “…[I]t needed to be said and I said it,” Saturday explained.
The secret? Saturday told his fellow Colts they must “play better.”
Oh.
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LESS IS MORE
Speaking of sports, who do you think will have the better basketball season — the Pacers or the Hoosiers?
Laid my mitts on a couple of local publications I’d never seen before this week. One is put out by high school aged kids, the other by college students.
“The Antagonist” is a monthly publication of Brad Wilhelm‘s Rhino’s Youth Center. Rhino’s caters to kids from the ages of 13 through 18. The fall issue of “The Antagonist” is devoted to horror, natch.
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You’ll find some fairly fascinating stuff within its semi-glossy pages. James Pfister lists some of the haunted sites in and around Bloomington. The IU Career Center, so the story goes, is ghost-infested because abortions were performed in the place many years ago. Who knew?
A kid named Ricky pens a fairy tale with a moral and the aforementioned Pfister rates local buildings in their efficacy as safe havens in the event of a zombie invasion. The fourth cover features a colored pencil drawing of Puffy the Vampire Bear.
Nice work.
“The Black Sheep” bills itself as “A college newspaper that’s actually about college,” which I suppose is a jab at the IDS for running stories about silly things like local news and world events.
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The tabloid provides a guide to lying to loved ones when the college student returns home for Thanksgiving. There’s plenty of value in that. Hell, I’m 55 and I still fudge things when I report back to the clan for the holidays.
An attached photo also endorses alcohol as a therapeutic bracer against the onslaught of kin. Count me in again. Man, I’ve contemplated dosing myself with morphine when forced to rub shoulders with my blood relations.
On the other hand, “The Black Sheep” descends into over-weening snarkiness at times. Here’s an example. In a piece about IU being an alcohol-free campus, the writer types, “… it is supposed to be dryer than Mother Theresa’s (sic) corpse’s vag.”
So “The Antagonist” is refreshing and creative while “The Black Sheep” is world-weary and shock-jock-y. That can describe the difference between many 14-year-olds and 19-year-olds.
