OK, reporters. Let's put on our thinking caps, shall we?
The Fun Superintendent is suing her former employer, Des Moines Public Schools, to prevent it from releasing any more emails she thinks are "purely personal." Which, of course, she illicitly sent and received via her work account, often using school-system computers.
Nancy Sebring may be stupid, but she's also arrogant and ballsy. It must be from . . . never mind.
According to a report Wednesday in the Omaha World-Herald, the incredibly horny (not to mention reckless and foolish) woman who missed being Omaha Public Schools' next superintendent by this much appears to be suing to close the barn door after the brood mare already has made a break for it. After all, the whole thing already has made The Smoking Gun on the Internet, where you can read all the naughty bits the Des Moines Register and the World-Herald censored out.ANYWAY, said the World-Herald's report:
Sebring filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Public Schools in Polk County, Iowa, District Court. She filed the request for an injunction Monday, after The World-Herald and Des Moines Register published selected emails over the weekend. Sebring resigned Saturday from the Omaha superintendent position.
The Des Moines district, responding to public records requests from the newspapers, provided the emails last week with some information redacted, including the identity and email address of Sebring's lover. Both newspapers removed certain sexually-explicit content from the emails before publishing them.
Des Moines officials acknowledged last week that the district's discovery of those emails was the reason Sebring resigned abruptly May 10, despite being under contract through June 30. At the time, Sebring said she needed more time to make the transition to the Omaha job and to help prepare for her daughter's wedding.
(snip)
In her lawsuit, Sebring claims that other individuals have requested or will ask for full, unredacted copies of her Des Moines emails.
The Des Moines district is no longer informing her about new records requests, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit acknowledges that free and open examination of public records is generally in the public interest.
But the suit argues that a small number of the emails were purely personal and their content is of no public interest.
The lawsuit says some of the emails were sent by a private individual who would not have sent those emails “had they known the information would be available for general public examination.”
In the lawsuit, Sebring also alleges that the Des Moines district has refused her repeated requests to delete her emails, which she contends is the district's practice for former employees.
Sebring is asking a judge to find that free and open examination of the emails is not in the public interest because “it would cause substantial and irreparable injury to the persons involved.”
Sebring wants the judge to block the release of personal emails until a judge can rule on her request. She also wants to be notified of any public records requests made to the Des Moines district involving her.
YOU KNOW what this means, right?
Even Sebring doesn't think you can unring a bell -- that a lawsuit will magically erase all those X-rated, Not Safe to Be Sent From Work emails between her and her married lover from The Smoking Gun or newspaper websites . . . or Google's Internet cache. If you want to titilate yourself with the lowlights of the Fun Superintendent and her man friend talking dirty to one another on the public dime, you don't need to file a public-records request with the Des Moines school board.
Nobody's going to put those d*** pictures in a box.
Everybody's going to be reading about Sebring's love affair with a penis, spanking, No. 69, butt licking and her desire for a chair with an attached "suction-cup dildo" for a long, long time.
So, what the hell? With the lawsuit, I mean.
Easy. There's more of this stuff out there . . . or on there, meaning server hard drives (which sounds suspiciously like a line from one of Sebring's oversexed missives).
Note that the Register and the World-Herald were searching for emails having something to do with Omaha. What in the world was she saying that wasn't about Omaha somehow?
Inquiring minds want to know.
IF I were one of the reporters covering this hot mess, I would submit a public-records request for every bit of correspondence to and from Sebring from her then-lover's email addresses. I'd also request all emails to and from Sebring containing a laundry list of words and phrases I cannot mention here.
Just like it should have been obvious that the Naughty Schoolmarm had something to hide when she unfortunately convinced the Omaha reporter to narrow his records request, it likewise ought to be obvious that the woman is at it again, this time trying to "sucker" the Iowa district court.
Because.
There's.
More.
Out.
There.
Or at least there's ample reason to think there might be.
X-rated film at 11.
Eduard Anatolevich Khil is dead.The Russian baritone -- a singing legend of the Soviet era who found renewed fame, this time internationally, in 2010 via YouTube -- succumbed Monday in St. Petersburg after suffering a debilitating stroke in April. He was 77.
The Moscow Times reports:Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences for the performer Monday.
“The death of this outstanding singer, Eduard Khil, is an irreplaceable loss for our culture,” he said in a statement on the White House website. Khil’s songs were “dear to people of different generations, loved not only in our country, but also abroad,” he wrote.
President Vladimir Putin also expressed his condolences to Khil’s wife and son.
Born Sept. 4, 1934, in Smolensk, Khil became famous as a singer in the Soviet Union, performing the songs “Loggers,” “The Moonstone” and “Blue City,” among others.
He also performed “From Where the Motherland Begins,” a song from the 1968 cult spy thriller “The Sword and the Shield,” which regained notoriety recently when Putin said he had sung it when he met the 10 Russian spies expelled from the United States in 2010.
Khil’s popularity faded after the fall of the Soviet Union, but he shot back into the spotlight in 2010 when footage of him performing his wordless 1966 song “I’m Very Glad That I’m Finally Coming Home” appeared on YouTube and immediately went viral.
The song’s joyous “la la la” vocalizations earned Khil the name “Trololo Man” among Western audiences. Several versions of the video have since been posted, with many having received millions of views.
Numerous spoof versions — including one stitched-together video appearing to show Khil unleashing a 10-hour stream of vocal acrobatics and another laid over scenes from “Star Trek”— have also appeared.
The song originally included lyrics about a cowboy riding a mustang in the United States, but the words were deemed anti-Soviet, and it was performed with Khil just humming the melody, he told LifeNews in a 2010 interview.
Khil said he only learned about the newfound popularity of the song after hearing his grandson humming the decades-old tune.
“I asked him, ‘Why [are] you singing it?’” Khil said. “He told me, ‘Grandpa, you’re home drinking tea here, [and] in the meantime, everyone’s singing your song on the Internet.’”
YOU KNOW, the guy was a hell of a singer. I'm glad he got the chance to revel in Act II of his long career before he died. For example, this performance on Russian TV early this year:
REST in peace, Mr. Khil. You earned it.
This right here is just what the missus and I always have needed -- dueling collegiate toasters.In the morning, she can have her inferior, bland Cornhusker toast -- the Big Ten effect, no doubt -- and I can smirk at her as I enjoy my stylish and much more flavorful LSU Tiger toast. All I need is to click on an Amazon button . . . and wait for the parcels to arrive.
YOU WILL NOTE that the LSU toaster is more expensive than the NU toaster. My lovely wife likely will say that's due to kickbacks that have to be paid to somebody in the Gret Stet.
That's because she slept through economics, not to mention many of her other classes at Lincoln.
I attribute the price discrepancy to simple supply and demand.
Geaux Tigers.
On the one hand, there's something warped about doing this to your dearly departed pet.
On the other hand, there's something awesome about something this magnificently warped. What I want the guy to do is attach a small camera to Orville the Stuffed Caticopter, set it to movie mode and record the reactions of people as this dead, flying feline comes straight for them.
But I'm funny that way.
HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.
The Voice of Music, circa 1960.
When in doubt, replace the weak 12AX7 tube in the add-on multiplex adapter, which is much less painful of a procedure than Saturday night's project -- changing all the dial lamps in a 35-year-old Marantz receiver. The music in stereo is a little sweeter now, just as the old Marantz shines like new for the first time in years.
This geek minute has been brought to you by black wingtips and white athletic socks. Additional funding for this program has been provided by pocket protectors . . . pocket protectors, because pens leak.
Picture a world in which you get almost all the way through The Music Man, only to find out that Marian the Librarian has a thing for kinky sex and arouses herself by gazing at magic-lantern pictures of Harold Hill's . . . baton.
So to speak.
Welcome to Omaha; we'll show you around. And then we can then slide on down I-80 to central Iowa to the horndog digital world of a 21st-century schoolmarm -- Des Moines' former- and Omaha's almost-superintendent, Nancy Sebring . . . complete with throughly modern, thorougly naughty "magic lantern" shows.
Who knew what passions which lay beneath the plastic-rim glasses and sensible suits of the plain-Jane, middle-aged educator? And you thought spanking was yesterday's news in the public schools.
Not only that, but who knew what entertaining reading would result from the Des Moines Register's simple public-records request to the local school district for any emails Sebring sent or received mentioning "Omaha"?
Who knew that a professional reporter could be dumber than the ceaseless horde of amateur journo-bloggers who -- we are told -- are no substitute for "real" journalism, as practiced by "real" journalists at "real" newspapers? Don't answer that.
That's a lot of questions floating around in one measly blog post -- one by an amateur idiot, no less, who's no substitute for his betters at The Daily Blab. Not that he particularly cares to be.
But I do have one answer. Hire more horny schoolmarms and let them talk dirty to -- and traffic in Favreian crotch shots with -- the guys they're screwing instead of their husbands, let them do it during office hours and on school computers . . . and you'll get people critically interested in public education again. They won't let Junior withing a country mile of a public school, but the more adventuresome of America's parents might like to make the Fun Teacher's acquaintance.
Not to mention the Fun Superintendent.I MEAN, read this stuff. After I did, I kept thinking of the "nurse" who showed up at Ferris Bueller's house in the movie . . . but school administrator-y:
BUT CAN she take his (censored) home to meet the family? Is his (censored) in love with the Fun Superintendent, too, or is this just another "third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous"?
Mainly, I'm just picturing Nancy Sebring standing at the altar with a giant penis. Is that wrong of me?
I DON'T WANT to imagine how Nancy's Special Friend might attempt to type a reply if he did.
O! Dear. Me.
You get the drift, and you get the staggering, incomprehensible stupidity involved in a) doing this s***, then b) emailing about it incessantly on the job, while c) using your company email account and your company computer, when d) you work for a public entity subject to your state's open-records law.
All entertainment value aside, Omaha is lucky a reporter in Des Moines was paying attention to this stuff and not susceptible to being "suckered," as the Los Angeles Times put it. We dodged a bullet.
Though one might feel compassion (above and beyond the compulsion toward snark) for a reputedly talented educator who now must oh-so-publicly -- not to mention pubicly -- stew in her own hormonal juices, one "fun" fact trumps all: Nancy Sebring is too much of a "Fun Superintendent" for her -- or our -- own good.
Stupid is as reckless does.
It's not easy going around all day, every day with your arms in the air, making every interaction a show tune -- and not only that, but performing the entirety of your life as a never-ending grand finale.
Frankly, if I could put my arms down, I would listen to some Stan Freberg as I drank a cup of Butternut coffee and gazed at the Omaha Moon.
Which, unfortunately, also shines on those hillbillies in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the 
meth-ravaged, trailer-dwelling populace routinely tolerates gnomelike Mexican dwarfs dumping all their Butternut into the Mighty Mo and hanging the empty tins in the city's trees.
Ahamo! AAAAAAAAAAA-haaaaaaaaaaaaa-MOOOWWWW!!!
This week, the Big Show kicks butt in a big way.I know. I'm the guy who does 3 Chords & the Truth every week. What in the world should I think about it? "This week's program sucks, so please don't bother listening"?
Of course not. You have to like what you do, or else you oughtn't do it.
BUT STILL . . . I think this week's show kicks butt. I mean, it came together quite nicely.
Even by 3 Chords & the Truth standards.
So listen, OK? Tell your friends. Tell your enemies, too.
The Big Show is classing up the joint -- only it's class with a beat.
And that's all I have to say about that.
It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
When metaphor presents itself in the Gret Stet uh Loosiana, sometimes it takes a Brooklynite to line it up in the viewfinder and press the shutter release.
In other words, "Oh, frabjous joy! There's a new post on Colleen Kane's Abandoned Baton Rouge blog!"
In fact, Kane -- who more than a year ago moved back to New York after a couple of years in Baton Rouge -- made a special trip back for this post, a follow-up on the decrepit and abandoned Bellemont Motor Hotel, among the more prominent of my hometown's faded glories. You see, nature had slowly been reclaiming the Bellemont for years, but now humans have decided to give the mold, vines and trees a hand with a formal demolition.THIS TIME, she actually got to go inside the ruins. As if shooting through the windows in previous years weren't depressing enough.
When, however, you can get a shot of a convention and visitors bureau brochure holder saying "Baton Rouge. The Flavour of Louisiana" amid the filth, the trash and the ruins . . . well, you gotta do what you gotta do. My homeland, unfortunately, is a lot better at tearing stuff up than it is at building stuff up.
All I wish is that Abandoned Baton Rouge could take the pictures of whole swaths of Baton Rouge that reside in my mind's eye and contrast them with pictures of those same areas today.
That's what I wish.
I've been spending time looking at cool old electronics on eBay rather than send myself into a depressive spiral thinking about -- and blogging about -- the state of the world today.
Obama or Romney. Romney or Obama. If I had a handgun, the barrel probably would be in my mouth right now. Since that wouldn't be such a good thing, I've been looking at (and buying) cool old electronics on eBay instead.
Being, however, that any damn fool can buy or sell on eBay -- or anywhere else, I must add -- sooner or later, you're going to come across a bill of goods worthy of a Washington pol. Or even a Louisiana one.
At the top of this post, I present to you a "VITAGE- MID CENTURY AMBASSADOR TV & AM/FM TUNER. WORKS EXCELENT, RARE FIND ---5IN. TV SCREEN. SET IS PRE 60s."
(Sic), (sic), a thousand times (sic).
IF THAT TV is any older than the late 1970s, I'll eat a vacuum tube. Personally, I'm pretty sure it's no older than the 1980s.
If just looking at the thing isn't clue enough -- How many teeny-tiny television/alarm clock/ AM-FM radio combos running on "D" cells were there in, say, 1958? None, that's how many -- the very modern standardized label is a dead giveaway.
Word to the wise: U.S. addresses didn't include ZIP codes until 1963. Neither did labels of "PRE 60s" television sets.
Oh, by the way. . . .$180.00????????
At 20 percent off???$18 . . . maybe. If it works well.Caveat emptor, y'all. Now more than ever.
It's summer! Summertime is here.
And that's the overriding theme for this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth -- summer and the songs we sing about it.
This Memorial Day weekend being the unofficial start of the season is reason enough to celebrate those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, and that's exactly what we do on the Big Show this week.
Ah, those days of soda and pretzels and beer.OF COURSE, "lazy" is the operative word here. Three paragraphs into this post, I start to rip off Nat King Cole.
OK. That's it.
You have an idea about this summery edition of the Big Show. It's summer. I'm lazy . . . and I'm going to go have a beer.
Call it good.
IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
Getting back to Louisiana . . . did I mention that the whole state is corrupt? Fabulously so. It's the state that's given us, um, colorful politicians like Edwin Edwards and Rep. William "$90,000-in-the-freezer" Jefferson. There was massive malfeasance or ineptitude at the heart of both the Katrina disaster (botched evacuations, levees) and the more recent Deepwater Horizon spill from which the Gulf Coast is still struggling to recover. This is a state that has a higher concentration of chemical and oil plants than anywhere in the world, and a state government that does a poor job regulating it. Even their pro football team turned out to be corrupt, for God's sake.
Why would they possibly need journalists?
You'll likely never notice the moment you were saved from the abyss -- or were cast into it.
For a couple of cities and their daily newspapers, that moment came in 1962. And a half century later, the Omaha World-Herald is still standing, still locally owned and the flagship of a chain of dailies and weeklies across Nebraska and -- now -- across the country.
The other newspaper, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, has not been so fortunate. In 1962, what had been locally owned since its founding in 1837 (cover price, one picayune) became part of Newhouse Newspapers, a division of S.I. Newhouse's Advance Publications. And now the New York-based corporation has decided New Orleans doesn't need a daily newspaper anymore. Or the Alabama cities of Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, either.
Instead, the Picayune, for one, will publish only three times a week -- Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Speculation is that at least 50 people in the newsroom will lose their jobs. That's what it means when spin like this comes down from on high:Amoss acknowledged that for those who rely upon the newspaper as an integral part of their lives, the transition to three days a week would be difficult. But as emphasis in coverage moved online, he vowed that the essential journalism of The Times-Picayune would endure.
"We will continue our 175-year commitment to covering the communities we serve," Amoss said. "We will deliver our journalism in print, through NOLA.com and on our mobile platforms 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and we invite our readers to become a part of the conversation."
Mathews said details of the new digitally focused company are still being worked out, but the transition will be difficult. While many employees will have the opportunity to grow with the new organization, Mathews said, the need to reallocate resources to accelerate the digital growth of NOLA Media Group will result in a reduction in the size of the workforce.
"ESSENTIAL journalism" does not endure when you fire dozens of the people who produce it. And you cannot "reallocate resources" that you have just discarded like yesterday's newspaper.
"Yesterday's newspaper." That pretty much describes The Times-Picayune now.
Instead, what New Orleans will get come autumn is less news on a crappy website. What the city will receive three times a week in print is less news reported by fewer local journalists.
Corporate may or may not try to put a little lipstick on that particular pig, but if Advance follows the path it trailblazed in Ann Arbor, Mich., it will end up just cutting the pretense and butchering the pig. Like Ann Arbor, that would leave New Orleans as a no-newspaper town.
With a crappy website.
I WAS born in south Louisiana, grew up there, too -- in Baton Rouge. I grew up reading the State-Times and later worked there for a while.
But when I was in junior high and high school, most days I would hop on my bicycle (or into my old man's '67 Mercury) in the evening, go down to Villa Oaks grocery store and pick up an afternoon State-Times . . . and a New Orleans States-Item . . . and the old gray lady of the bayou morning, The Times-Picayune. From them, I learned about the world.
And from them, I learned what little I know about writing. It was an ink-stained apprenticeship of a fashion.
I had been married for the better part of a decade and had lived in Omaha for three years already when the State-Times died 21 years ago, and it broke my heart. I had always considered it the better (and livelier) of Baton Rouge's newspapers -- for whatever that is worth -- and I know the city is diminished by the loss of its voice, and by the loss of the internecine journalistic free-for-all with its sister publication, the Morning Advocate . . . now just The Advocate.
As I contemplate a struggling, rebuilding New Orleans without the Picayune -- having only a crappy website and whatever the hell the "print edition" is going to be -- I find myself thinking there but for the grace of Peter Kiewit goes Omaha. That's Peter Kiewit's picture above.
In October 1962, as America endured the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis, newspaper titan S.I. Newhouse offered $40.1 million for the World Publishing Co., then-owner of the Omaha World-Herald. The board of directors liked the money, and the deal was almost done.
Kiewit, president of Peter Kiewit Sons', Inc., the family construction business, didn't like anything about what he had read in the Wall Street Journal. The World-Herald deal, as opposed to the Cuba thing.
During an Oct. 12, 1962, layover at the Denver airport, Kiewit learned from a story in the Wall Street Journal that his hometown newspaper was about to be sold to New York publisher Samuel I. Newhouse.
World-Herald directors were willing to sell the paper to prevent the stock, largely held by heirs of founder Gilbert Hitchcock, from being diffused.
Four days later, Kiewit called a friend, banker W. Dale Clark, who also was chairman of the newspaper board, and asked to see the newspaper's balance sheet. Clark told Kiewit that the board had a buyer and was satisfied with the offer.
The newspaper's directors weren't interested in other offers, Clark told Kiewit, who later said he realized Clark felt a moral obligation to Newhouse.
But Kiewit persevered. Unknown to him at the time, Kiewit had a strong ally in his wish to keep The World-Herald in local hands. Martha Hitchcock, widow of founder Gilbert Hitchcock, felt strongly that ownership should remain in Omaha.
Kiewit spent nine days gathering the financial information he wanted. He was impressed with what he found.
Kiewit called Clark again on Oct. 26, saying he had the necessary information.
"Fine," Kiewit later quoted Clark as saying. "You had better come down and see me.''
Two days later, Kiewit and company colleague Homer Scott met World-Herald directors in an all-day Sunday meeting.
Monday night, Kiewit worked out an offer of $40.4 million. Newhouse's bid was $40.1 million.
Tuesday morning, Kiewit was the owner.
HAD KIEWIT hated the idea of his hometown paper being run from a New York office any less, the name of the World-Herald's anniversary website -- 125 Years and Counting -- might sound rather mordantly ironic about now.
Kiewit, who died in 1979, understood what few in business or the public understand today: Newspapers are not just another business. Newspapers are in the business of earning more dollars and cents than they spend, yes . . . but they also are in the business of community. And the business of democracy. And the business of education. And the business of accountability.
When a newspaper -- whether it appears in printed form every day or not -- is diminished, as Advance Publications proposes to diminish the Times-Picayune and its other Southern papers, it's never just the newspaper's light that grows dimmer. There will be vitally important stories in New Orleans that won't get told now.
There will be vital information that New Orleanians won't get, and good decisions won't be made because of that. Corruption will become even easier in the Crescent City, because there will be dozens fewer journalists keeping vigil over the public's funny business.
And a city that loves its traditions will be at a loss over the radical wreckovation of a big one in town.
I guess New Orleans just hasn't suffered enough, what with all the crime, killing, poverty, ignorance, corruption . . . and Katrina.
FINALLY, let's not even get into the foolhardiness of Advance putting all the Picayune's eggs -- this in the age of foundering Facebook IPOs and a soft online-advertising market -- in a highly uncertain digital basket.
Obviously, there are good ways to make money in the digital universe. There are ways for newspapers to profit online. I just don't trust the Picayune's corporate masters to look for them . . . or to look much beyond the shaky Internet-advertising model.
What could go wrong?
In New Orleans? Pretty much everything. And today, as a newspaper's employees and its city stare into the abyss, it's becoming clear who gets to pay S.I. Newhouse's bill from May 1962 that just came due.
Here in Omaha, I think it would be appropriate if the employees of the Omaha World-Herald -- and the citizens of the city it calls home -- spring for a giant spray of flowers for Peter Kiewit's grave, God bless him.
It all started when Wall Street created an "unlike" button for Facebook. And it may not end well.
At all.
Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg. Punk.However, the valuation of Facebook may be moot. Because tech finance expert, Michael Wolff, presents a different doomsday scenario about Faceook in the MIT Technology Review - one where Facebook literally brings down the internet advertising model.
It all starts with the incredible growth necessary to keep Facebook stock price up, just as Aswath Damodoran assumes it must.
Woolf says that this will destabilize the ad market online, with negative results. He suggests . . .
“In its Herculean efforts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-traffic website feel about the ever-downward movement of the cost of a thousand ad impressions (or CPM) is turning to dread, as some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent decrease in the last quarter, following Facebook’s own attempt to book more revenue.
You see where this is going. As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else.”
It's 1972, and through the miracle of modern technology, you can play tennis . . . on your television set!
Will wonders never cease in Space Age America? Surely, the world of Star Trek cannot be far away.
Someday soon, I'll bet we'll even have "communicators" and computers you can talk to!
Don't bother me.It sounds like my childhood in here.It sounds like heavy metal.
Now, by heavy metal, I do not mean Megadeth. I'm talking a sheet-metal chassis filled with vacuum tubes and wires that connect them to resistors and capacitors and all manner of normal-size things that won't fit on a computer chip.
I'm talking an honest-to-God tube-type, hi-fi tuner . . . circa 1960, when FM was mono, not stereo, but you could buy this little box, see? And when stereo did come to town, this "multiplexer" (below) would set you up.
HI. I'm the Mighty Favog, and I'm a geekaholic. Hi, Favog!
Right now, I'm listening to the new/old Voice of Music tuner. No one will mistake it for state of the art. But the sound it produces could be mistaken for a certain Magnavox console, circa 1962. The one that lived in my childhood home.
It sounds quirky, but really warm. It also gets warm, thanks to the vacuum tubes, which fill the studio with a nostalgic aroma.
The old VM also is unforgiving. It hates rock stations that turn the processing up to 11. It really hates them. I can almost hear it saying, "Back in my day. . . ."
BACK IN its day, FM was for "good music." And like a good tuner of its time, the VM loves classical and jazz, enveloping the orchestration in an affectionate hug, then playfully tousling the music's long hair.
Which is a pun you might "get" if you're as old as I . . . and my Voice of Music tuner.
I had a couple of teachers this stupid, ignorant and hostile when I was in school.And I can't get the IQ points back that those fools cost me.
Some school systems tolerate this kind of willful incompetence and bullying. Those would be bad school systems, best avoided.
The problems with this moronic gasbag of a social-studies teacher at North Rowan High School in North Carolina -- as evidenced by the video -- begin long before she suggests the government of the United States hass veys of dealink vith doss vhat "slander" der Gott-Kaiser Barack Obama. That the woman still is employed (suspended with pay) by the Rowan Salisbury School System more than a week after her "discussion period" is all one needs to know about the Rowan Salisbury School System.
This "teacher" doesn't need firing so much as she needs defenestrating.
No, I didn't learn that word from those crappy teachers I had, just like I suspect no kid in the the presidential-respect commissar's class learned a damn thing about social studies this year.
I have pretty much drifted through my adult life, doing a little of this and some of that, but still not knowing my true vocation.No more. Praise the Lord, I saw the light.
I now know what I was meant to do in life, and I owe this big change in my aimless existence to a couple of big, big dogs by the names of Sadie Sue and Boo Radley.
We have been foster pet-parenting the old girl and her big little brother for the past couple of months while their real parents' house has been torn asunder and put back together in a radically different order. I think the technical term for this is "remodeling," and the aim of this major surgery -- involving sledgehammers, flooring, cabinetry, lots and lots of drywall, lots and lots of tile, lots and lots of construction workers, stainless-steel appliances and a stained-steel I-beam that now holds up the second story -- has been to create the "Kitchen of the Future."
Which, after all this time, labor and -- yes -- money is starting to look a lot like the woo-doo Kitchen of Today.ANYWAY, I have been reliably informed that big, big dogs and construction workers coming and going is not an optimal combination. So we got the dogs instead of the cool new kitchen.
I know, Molly the (little, little) Dog. It sucks to be you. You will be rewarded with limitless dog treats as you await Mama and me at the Rainbow Bridge when your time on earth is done.
Soooooooo . . . back to my true vocation. These slobbery and hairy weeks at La Casa Favog, as it turns out, have been a time of self-discovery for yours truly. At age 51, to my great surprise, I seem to have an innate talent heretofore unknown to me.
I am a great hair sweeper-upper. An artiste with a broom, as it turns out.
And I just wanted to share this with you. See the top picture? Some of my handiwork from this afternoon. I do this every day, three times a day -- take hairy floors in the living room and kitchen and sweep them clean, creating neat little mountains of fur and then dispatching them out the back door.
I'LL BET the rabbits and squirrels are scared spitless at the overwhelming scent of danger that now wafts over their previously unremarkable universe. Tee hee. Just a little devilish lagniappe that comes with my new career, which I discovered on Monsters.com.
After 5½ years of college and decades of drifting between this dead end and that, I now know I can step right into a fulfilling life as a minimum-wage barber-shop floor sweeper.
It's not everybody who, thanks to a couple of monster dogs and a yappy one, stumbles into a perfect career for the new economy. I am a lucky man.
From 1968 and West German television . . . the Bee Gees no one remembers today -- the psychedelic brothers Gibb.
Here now is the title track from their "Idea" LP. Enjoy.
The thing about the Bee Gees was this: Even if you were young and opinionated in the late 1970s -- a foot soldier in the "Disco Sucks" army, even -- you had to acknowledge just how damned good the brothers were.Because you remembered this song, among others the brothers Gibb -- Robin, Barry and Maurice -- had recorded. You had loved those pop-music classics first heard through a little earphone and eight transistors, classics that lived in the grooves of the soundtrack album of your life. Soon enough, you would realize that the brothers' disco-era incarnation was part of that soundtrack, too.
And you were OK with that. Quality endures, even though the earthly body does not. Not Maurice's. And now, not Robin's.
May he rest in peace, along with all the stilled voices of my youth.
Your mileage may vary, but do you want to know what I think the neatest thing about radio is?
It's when it does something completely unexpected. When it takes well-known things and does something totally off the wall with them.
Good luck finding that on the AM or FM dial today.
That's why 3 Chords & the Truth is here. The Big Show exists to take music, mix it, match it, mess with it and see what happens.
What happens is usually pretty good, if I -- your Mighty Favog and host of the whole thing -- do say so myself.
See, it's kind of like mint. Most everybody likes mint, and around here it will take over your back yard if you let it . . . which I am prone to do, being that I really like fresh mint.I LIKE TO steep some in a pot of English breakfast tea. I like to throw a couple of sprigs in the bottom of a pot of coffee for a minty brew.But did you ever eat the stuff as greens? It's mighty good on a sandwich. Adds a lot of zip and zest to something pretty ordinary -- try it sometime.
3 Chords & the Truth is the musical, Internet version of piling mint on your salami sandwich. Most people probably wouldn't have thought to do that, but it's pretty damned good once you do. And if you ask me, this week's program is a standout example of that.
Once upon a time, American radio was all about putting mint on your sandwich . . . or in your salad. Certainly about steeping some in your pot of tea.
Today, radio is just about dead, and it's places like this -- the Big Show on your podcasting dial -- that are taking ordinary things and aiming for the unusual . . . and extraordinary.
I don't mean to particularly blow my own horn, though. It is what it is; we do what we do. It's just a necessity, given Corporate America's pillaging of an industry and a culture. And it's kind of exciting, actually. I hope you would agree.
NOW IF you will excuse me, I need to eat my sandwich. It's piled high with hard salami and . . . backyard mint.
It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
