Life can be bright in America

Have I mentioned lately that I think Rita Moreno is the bomb?

And can you believe that this woman is 80? Eighty??? Really?

The eighth wonder of the world, she is. And she's here in America.

3 Chords & the Truth: Moved by the spirit

Sometimes, you just have to go where the spirit moves you.

That was the case on this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth -- the spirit was moving, and we at the Big Show went with the flow. I think you will enjoy the musical results of that.

But as the spirit was -- and is -- moving and I can't stop, I can't stop, I can't stop going with the noncorporeal flow, I'll finish telling you all about this spirit-driven installment of 3 Chords & the Truth . . . in tongues.

I say hey now -- hey now -- iko iko I day. Jockomo feeno ah nah nay . . . jockomo fee nah nay. Mairsey doats and dosey doats and littlelambsydivy, a kiddlely divey too, wouldn't you?

HEY! Theresabathroomontheright. Hey diddle diddle, put your kitty in the middle and we'll mmmmmf ! Mmmmmmf! Nanoo! Nanoo! The Big Show!

Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby.
Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, dooby-do-wah-do-wah-do-wah! Well ya wigga to the lef, ya wigga to da ri! Ya do the ooby-dooby with all of your might!

Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby. Ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, ooby-dooby, dooby-do-wah-do-wah-do-wah coz I'm Henery the aighth, oy am! 3 Chords & the Truth!

Louie Louie, oh no! Me gadda go! Aye-yi-yi-yi, I seh, Louie Louie, oh bay, me gadda go!

IBIDA? Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn! Howsyer mamandem?

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

He's on a mission from Jah

Scott Wheeler, Northland Journal

Working in a stout former bank building with windows closed and air conditioners humming, Orleans County, Vt., sheriff's deputies didn't know what was happening in their parking lot until a neighbor called 911. A man on a big farm tractor, angry about his recent arrest for resisting arrest and marijuana possession, was rolling across their vehicles -- five marked cruisers, one unmarked car and a transport van. By the time they ran outside, the tractor was down the driveway and out onto the road.

With their vehicles crushed, "We had nothing to pursue him with," said Chief Deputy Philip Brooks.

Thursday afternoon's incident ended when city police in Newport, the county seat of the northern Vermont county, caught up with Roger Pion, 34, a short distance away.

No one was injured. At least two deputies had gone inside a few moments before after washing their vehicles, officials said.

"Nobody was hurt. That's the thing everybody's got to cherish," said Sheriff Kirk Martin.

Vermont State Police said in a statement that Pion would face seven counts of felony unlawful mischief, one count of misdemeanor unlawful mischief, one count aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, one count of gross negligent operation, and one count of leaving the scene of an accident.

-- The Associated Press

The cops forgot to add the one count of AWESOME!

I mean . . . ummm . . . in the most unfortunate, deviant sense of the word.

Um hmm. Yeah, that's the ticket.

All . . . and nothing at all

Behold Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, the man who has it all. Except for everything.

He does, however, have an excuse-making, enabling mother who raised her baby boy to be a pluperfect, self-absorbed cad. She seems to be proud of this, blabbing to the Today show that her son's penis only has time for "one-night stands."

If you have the stomach for it, here's part of the story from Fox Sports:

American swimmer Ryan Lochte has become a heartthrob over the past few months, but according to his mother anyone trying to lock him into a relationship will probably be left disappointed.

Lochte's mother Ike told Today that her son focuses so much on his career that he doesn't have time for a girlfriend. She said the following:

"He goes out on one-night stands. He's not able to give fully to a relationship because he's always on the go."

This report comes after an interview in Women's Health when Lochte revealed that the most attractive thing about a woman is keeping a "fit body," and that his celebrity crush is Carmen Electra.

Lochte also claims he mostly sleeps naked, prefers sex with the lights on, and when he sees a woman he wants to meet he makes eye contact and will, "give a wink and come back later because it keeps her thinking."

YOU'D HOPE she's thinking "What an ass!" Or . . . "A social disease is still a social disease, no matter from whom you contract it." But that's probably too much to hope for in this day and age.


WAY TO GO, Mrs. Lochte! You sure know how to raise 'em. Not.

I really can't add much to what Dr. Ruth tweeted today. A mother who's "wingman" for a son as he goes around using women sexually, then casting them aside due to being "always on the go" . . . what the hell can you say about that? Words fail, except to repeat that Ryan Lochte has everything, but ultimately nothing at all.

If Lochte represents the stuff postmodern American "heroes" are made of -- and he does -- our end is nearer than we think. You really don't need Chick-Fil-A's Dan Cathy to tell you stuff like that. We presume upon God's mercy at the risk of incurring His justice.

And I say this as "presumer" No. 1.

Sigh.

The United States of Acme

This country only starts to make sense if you think of it as a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Things start to fall into place further if you imagine some sort of superpower client state of the Acme Corporation. And you begin to achieve perfect clarity if you view the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in the personages of Wile E. Coyote, Foghorn Leghorn and Daffy Duck.

Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner? Emigrated to Canada in '04.

IN THAT LIGHT, may I present the latest Looney Tunes: Washington episode, "The Postal Service Runs Off a Fiscal Cliff" -- presented with limited commercial interruptions by Acme.

"Acme Corporation . . . if you're askin' for it, we'll let you have it. But good."

Now we switch you -- live and direct -- to CBS News and The Associated Press:

The U.S. Postal Service braced Wednesday for a first-ever default on billions in payments due to the Treasury, adding to widening uncertainty about the mail agency's solvency as first-class letters plummet and Congress deadlocks on ways to stem the red ink.

With cash running perilously low, two legally required payments for future postal retirees' health benefits -- $5.5 billion due Wednesday, and another $5.6 billion due in September -- will be left unpaid, the mail agency said Monday. Postal officials said they also are studying whether they may need to delay other obligations. In the coming months, a $1.5 billion payment is due to the Labor Department for workers compensation, which for now it expects to make, as well as millions in interest payments to the Treasury.

Some members of Congress are seeing Wednesday's default as a cry for help, CBS Radio News correspondent Dan Raviv reports from Washington. The Senate passed a bill in April to spread retiree health payments over a longer period and to allow the Postal Service to save money by canceling Saturday deliveries, but the House of Representatives has not taken any action.

Congress let the Postal Service delay Wednesday's payment for more than half a year.

Financial analysts feel Wednesday's default could be a step toward filing for bankruptcy, Raviv reports.

The defaults won't stir any kind of catastrophe in day-to-day mail service. Post offices will stay open, mail trucks will run, employees will get paid, current retirees will get health benefits.

But a growing chorus of analysts, labor unions and business customers are troubled by continuing losses that point to deeper, longer-term financial damage, as the mail agency finds it increasingly preoccupied with staving off immediate bankruptcy while Congress delays on a postal overhaul bill.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has described a "crisis of confidence" amid the mounting red ink that could lead even once-loyal customers to abandon use of the mail.

MEEP! MEEP!

Splat!

Dry around here. Real dry.

How dry is it around these parts?

Drier than a Baptist wedding reception, that's how dry. In fact, there's never been a drier July in Omaha.

Is it just me, or have there been a lot of fill-in-the-blank-ever meteorological moments lately? What we could use is a little melting ice sheet to water the parched and cracked earth of the Plains and Midwest.

Then again, climate change rarely does you any favors. As we hear from KETV television in Omaha:

For many farmers, this means giving up on the corn crop.

"The corn has basically stopped," farmer John McNamara said.

McNamara said he's been regularly watering his farm in Plattsmouth, but that it doesn't compare to a good rainfall; McNamara has lost 30 to 40 percent of his annual average production.

"You go to one plant, you have nothing. You go to another, you have nothing, this is happening a lot," McNamara said.

SUCKS, this does. Coastal Americans might be about to get a harsh economic lesson in the importance of "flyover country."

Word to the wise: Buy yourself a big freezer and stock up on beef now, when it's cheap because ranchers are having to sell off the herds they no longer can afford to feed because their pastures dried up and turned to dirt. Thus, the market is glutted.

Next year, however. . . .

Thank you, God!

Because the female breast is so unexceptional, tit libber Moira Johnston makes her living as a topless dancer at a topless bar, where cerebral gents pay good money to marvel at her sparkling personality and towering intellect.

And if a patron might get overenthusiastic about her towering intellect and sparkling personality, then grab hold of her unexceptional tatas, it of course would be no big deal. Obviously, that would be just one more way of saying "Atta girl!"

I'm sure that's how Johnston would see it, too. Because there's nothing exceptional -- or sexual -- about a woman's boobs.

But do you think she ever wonders why the most enthusiastic supporters of her tit-liberation movement are 13-year-old males?

Precocious preteen sucks worse than Roseanne

Parents who let an 11-year-old girl call herself a "singer-songwriter" and traipse through the Texas coffeehouse and showcase circuit need to have their heads examined.

Parents who let an 11-year-old white girl with an OK voice run around oversinging oversung Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé songs in public probably need to be horsewhipped.

And parents old enough to know better who let an 11-year-old girl who isn't do this to the national anthem at a major-league soccer game -- on television, no less -- need killin', to put it in their native Texan.


CONGRATULATIONS, asshats. There's now a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner worse than Roseanne Barr's. It's your daughter's.

You were happy to bask in the reflected glow of your little darling's prepubescent musical specialness. So you put her out there. And put her out there. And put her out there some more, because the fruit of mama's womb turned out to be a singer-songwriter!

I mean, if her website says it, it must be true!

And then you put her out there, before tens of thousands in a stadium and many more than that on TV. What could go wrong with an 11-year-old white girl trying to outdo Whitney Houston's version of a song that to most singers is what invading Afghanistan is to most empires?

Because, by God, people are gonna remember Harper Gruzins from Coppell, Texas!

Well, you got that right. The national anthem done in the style of Tibetan throat singing would have been less memorable . . . and more palatable.

Sadly for you, there's no reflected glory to bathe yourselves in. Worse for Harper, there's no shortage of Texas-size ridicule for a precocious preteen to bear all by her Lone Star self.

Somebody git a rope!


HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.

3 Chords & the Truth: The fundamentals

Listen, people. Rock 'n' roll ain't brain surgery.

If you learn a few fundamentals of the genre, learn its building blocks, you'll be fine. And there aren't too many fundamentals to rock music, even counting a tangential one -- that many fundamentalists are still suspicious of it.

This week, we devote most of 3 Chords & the Truth to the fundamentals of rock 'n' roll. Maybe that should be FUN-damentals, because they certainly are on the Big Show.

Anyway, here are the big ones that I could come up with off the top of my head.

FIRST, you gotta have girls. Without girls to sing about, there probably would be very little music in the world. We'd all be using out iPods to listen to Koran verses or something. No, of all the musical genres out there, rock arguably gets the most mileage out of the fairer sex.

That sounded real bad, didn't it? No, it's not that way at all.

Well, maybe it kinda is.

Be that as it may, rock needs girls to look at, lust after, woo, win, lose and pine over. And on the Big Show this week, we'll be seeing how many kinds of girls we can fit into one set. Of course, the first kind is "bad."

But there are other fundamentals of rock 'n' roll, too.

YOU GOT your love. And you sure got your cars.

And heartbreak. And dancing . . . lots of dancing.

And S-E-X. I just got your attention, didn't I? Now watch me mess with the search engines . . . SEX, sex, S-E-X, sexy, sex, sex, sexual sex.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Party on , Garth, because this is about to be one of the most-listened to episodes of 3 Chords & the Truth, ever. Did I mention seXXX? It's a rock fundamental, you know.

Oh . . . by the way, we have a nice, long vocal-jazz set on this week's program, too. It classes up the joint.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Tweets from the tolerant

This is America, which now means that if you express the "wrong" opinion, the "right" people are justified in doing any damned thing they want to you.

Three words to that, Roseanne: "Eat mor chikin."

With that, we begin another episode of Tweets From the Tolerant, brought to you by the Internet . . . if you have nothing constructive to say, say it here!

* * *

Suck my d*** chick filet- nazi chicken f***ing pricks

-- Roseanne Barr,
flunked sex ed, biology
(via Twitter)

anyone who eats S*** Fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4Christ

-- Roseanne Barr,
humanitarian

off to grab a s*** fil-A sandwich on my way to worshipping Christ, supporting Aipac and war in Iran.

-- Roseanne Barr,
??????????????????

christian liars: i never wished cancer on you at all-jesus will punish u 4 ur deceit-I said processed foods cause cancer.

-- Roseanne Barr,
angry theologian

I lost two brothers to cancer, Roseanne. What a truly heinous thing to say.

-- Jim Henson,
OBVIOUSLY a hater

Retreading my tweet I realize that I used the wrong word-I shouldn't have used the word deserves

I shouldn't have used the word deserves in my tweet and I apologize

-- Roseanne Barr,
got a call from agent

sex, lies and emailgate

Pity Freddie Gray.

The president of the Omaha school board decided to hone her mad JoePa skillz just when everybody -- and by "everybody," I mean the entire world outside State College, Pa. -- decided the late Penn State coach was criminally pathetic.

Consider this: You've just picked a new superintendent for Omaha Public Schools. Suddenly, your new hire abruptly resigns her job in Des Moines, Iowa -- weeks ahead of schedule. She contacts your board attorney. Something about emails. That they would expose an affair. Fairly explicit. A district email account. Public-records request from the Des Moines Register. Embarrassing.

Mein Gott! Mon dieu! What, oh what . . . what should you do?

Well, if you're Freddie Gray and OPS board counsel Elizabeth Eynon-Kokrda, you don't bother to find out what exactly is in those "fairly explicit" emails. You take Nancy Sebring's word for it that the content is "somewhere along the lines of what most seventeen year olds are reading in Cosmo." You don't even check out what most 17-year-olds are actually reading in Cosmopolitan today.

Also, you assume that a woman who's cheating on her husband with a man who's cheating on his wife is being straighter with you than with them. After all, Eynon-Kokrda tells Sebring, “my thought is you have a pretty sympathetic situation.”

Most importantly, you and the lawyer take what Sebring, the naughty superintendent, has told you and make it into "just our little secret."

Even though Sebring has reached out to you and counsel because “I don't want anyone on the OPS board to be surprised by this situation in Des Moines,” you don't inform a single board member because. . . .

Because. . . .

BECAUSE you feel obliged not to after the fun superintendent expressly said she didn't want anyone on the Omaha school board to be surprised by the brewing scandal.

“We had an individual who ... we thought was being very open and honest with us about something that was a very personal issue, a very painful issue for the individual,” Gray told The World-Herald. “We believed that we had a contracted employee who was reaching out and was telling us the truth.”

In a May 24 email to Sebring, Eynon-Kokrda wrote that she did not share Sebring's emails with board members: “I do not forward your emails because I want them arguably protected and/or not known to exist, per se, but I do advise Freddie of our contacts so she is current.”

In that same email, the lawyer wrote that Gray was the only OPS board member who knew of the Des Moines Register's public records request, through which that newspaper eventually obtained the personal emails.

WHO IS working for whom here?

It's rather interesting, in the same sense that his evening at Ford's Theater gave Abraham Lincoln a headache, that Eynon-Kokrda and Gray seem to lose track of where their primary loyalties lie. They protect OPS' wayward new hire to an extent she didn't even ask for, refusing to give the full school board even the slightest heads-up about her naughty-email problem in Des Moines.

They take Sebring's word for everything. In short, they try to keep her viability as OPS' new superintendent totally intact by aiding and abetting an ultimately failed cover up.

When she resigned abruptly from Des Moines in early May, Sebring said publicly that it was because she needed extra time to take care of personal matters, such as moving to Omaha and preparing for her daughter's summer wedding.

The newly released emails show that after resigning from Des Moines, Sebring kept in regular contact with Eynon-Kokrda, who relayed information about those contacts to Gray as all three anxiously waited to see what the Des Moines Register would do with the volatile emails the newspaper had requested from the Des Moines district through a public records request.

The emails Sebring made public last week were sent between May 18 and June 1, the day The World-Herald and the Des Moines Register broke their stories online.

The emails show that Eynon-Kokrda and Gray remained committed to making Sebring the next OPS superintendent if she could survive the uproar of the emails going public or if the emails never went public.

The three of them planned how they would respond publicly should news organizations discover that the emails were the actual cause of her resignation from the Des Moines job and publish stories about them.

(snip)

In a May 24 email to Eynon-Kokrda, Sebring wrote that four of the Des Moines emails were “highly personal and contain fairly explicit content (somewhere along the lines of what most seventeen year olds are reading in Cosmo),” referring to the women's magazine Cosmopolitan.

In the same email, Sebring offered to resign from the OPS job, telling Eynon-Kokrda: “I would rather bow out gracefully before starting my job in OPS, than be caught up in a scandal after I begin the job.”

She asked Eynon-Kokrda whether OPS would fire an employee who had done what she did.

Eynon-Kokrda wrote back that she would not recommend that Sebring submit an immediate offer of resignation, saying that “seems extreme” and “my thought is you have a pretty sympathetic situation.”

Eynon-Kokrda wrote that she knew of no OPS employee ever terminated solely for personal use of email, saying that OPS informs employees that emails are not confidential and that individuals must “use good judgment” but that sending personal emails has never by itself demonstrated sufficient poor judgment as to result in termination.

“The closest I've ever seen is where a principal involved with a subordinate at his school had about 50 texts and emails per day during school hours, over months and months (thousands of emails and texts on school phone) some of which proved he had inappropriately approved sick leave so she could join him on business trips,” Eynon-Kokrda wrote.

She wrote that if the situation “starts to really go south,” she would recommend meeting with the OPS board “to explain and provide them with the opportunity to circle the wagons.”

(snip)

“Freddie will be in about the same place,” Eynon-Kokrda wrote. “If asked for comment, she will say it isn't appropriate for her to discuss your personal life.”

If pressed, Eynon-Kokrda wrote, Gray would say that while people shouldn't use work email for personal purposes that interfere with job performance, “she is unaware of any allegation that you have anything but a stellar job performance record, and your personal emails and private life don't change that.”

UNTIL THEY did change that. The Register and the World-Herald not only ran their stories about why Nancy Sebring quit Des Moines so quickly, but they ran the worst of the emails, too.

At that point, Gray ended up running away from Sebring like her feet were on fire and her ass was catching. A thoroughly surprised (thanks to Freddie Gray) OPS board ended up accepting Sebring's resignation from a job she'd yet to begin.

The emails were exactly what one would expect from a Cosmo "sex issue," which I presume is just like a regular issue of Cosmo (as read by "most seventeen year olds") only a little more so. Thus, "circling the wagons" wasn't a viable option, as we already had learned low "in love" Nancy Sebring was with her boyfriend's d***.

And the emails got better than that.

UNFORTUNATELY for Gray, the board president's ability to lie convincingly to the press just doesn't get better at all.

On June 1, Gray told the World-Herald "she had heard only 'rumors and innuendo' about why Sebring resigned. During that interview, she said she had not discussed with Des Moines district officials the circumstances of Sebring's resignation and did not know what was contained in the emails.

"I haven't seen them," she said then, "so I have no clue what they are, what they're not."

In a later interview, a World-Herald reporter asked Gray whether Sebring had been in contact with her or Eynon-Kokrda about the personal emails prior to them going public.

“No, why would she be?" Gray had said.

UH . . . lots of reasons?

Unfortunately, some people never learn that when you tell a big one, at least be plausible:

Gray and Eynon-Kokrda told The World-Herald this week that they would have acted differently had they known the actual contents of the emails.

“She never characterized these as graphic, pornographic or in any way sexually embarrassing,” Eynon-Kokrda said. “She portrayed them as not salacious, as chatty, and as emails that would reveal that she had an affair.”

When Sebring wrote to Eynon-Kokrda May 24 describing the explicit emails as something a 17-year-old girl might read in Cosmo, that still didn't cause alarm, Gray and Eynon-Kokrda said this week, because they didn't perceive Cosmo as a raunchy magazine.

TWO PROBLEMS with this one render it a no-percentage assertion -- it requires Omahans to believe either that Gray and Eynon-Kokrda think they're really stupid, or that Gray and Eynon-Kokrda themselves are really stupid. Personally, I go for a third option: Yes, they think we're stupid . . . because they're idiots.

Make that complete idiots.

Here's Gray, back in June:

“For the board, this is about policy violation. It's not about the content,” she told The World-Herald after Sebring resigned. “These are things we tell our staff all the time not to do. It's a big violation to use company equipment and emails.”

BUT NOW Gray defends her secrecy and her inaction regarding Sebring's emails by saying she was misled about how bad they were. That she didn't think Cosmo was "raunchy," so it couldn't be that big a deal.

But if "it's not about the content," as she said last month, who cares? Sebring admitted to doing, in Gray's words, "things we tell our staff all the time not to do." Which, she told the reporter back then, was "a big violation."

And certainly no rationale to help a sister out, which is exactly what she and OPS' legal counsel set out to do. In secret.

The other OPS board members ought to be furious right now. Beyond furious, actually. But the biggest problem the school system faces today is that I'll bet most aren't that upset at all.

After all, if they "circle the wagons," Freddie Gray might be able to survive unscathed as president despite having been caught in more than one big lie. Despite having kept her board, and the board's constituents, completely in the dark about the time bomb ticking away nearby. Despite having proven that her loyalties lie not with her board, or the voters who elected her, but instead with a fatally flawed would-be superintendent whose personal and professional sins finally caught up to her.

If the board circles the wagons well enough, maybe there won't be the unpleasantness of Freddie Gray getting what she so richly deserves -- immediate removal as president, accompanied by the board's demand that she resign her seat.

NO, that would be ugly. Firing the board attorney would be, too.

In that light, I'm sure Gray is banking on her colleagues being "incredibly supportive," just like Eynon-Kokrda was for Sebring, because this whole World-Herald exposé thing is "ridiculous."

After all, "hindsight is 20/20." Yeah, that's the ticket.

This is the end. My only friend, the end.

Knowing the end is coming, knowing why it must be the end . . . the knowing does not lessen the hurt when the end finally arrives.

The Grim Reaper is a giant mechanical shovel. The Grim Reaper would be more poetic if we still called him a steam shovel. The Grim Reaper is just as merciless by any name.

And the Grim Reaper came for Omaha's old Rosenblatt Stadium today.

I've spent a fair chunk of my adult life, seen amazing things, communed with amazing friends in a place soon to be but a memory. Thanks be to God, steam shovels can't touch the ballpark in my mind.

THE ONE where I was sitting high above the first-base line. 1996. College World Series championship game. Bottom of the ninth. LSU down 8-7 to Miami. Two out. Head in hands. Knee jumping. Praying that Warren Morris just doesn't strike out. That he just gets on base somehow.

"The stretch by Morrison, the pitch. Swung on and hit to right field. That's way back there, way back there . . . HOME RUN! TIGERS WIN! TIGERS WIN! WARREN MORRIS! IT'S A TWO-RUN HOME RUN, AND THE TIGERS ARE THE NATIONAL CHAMPS! I DON'T BELIEVE IT!"

STEAM SHOVEL can't take that away from me.

The last Founding Father

I would be remiss if I failed to point out that George Jefferson was a Founding Father. He also is on the $2 bill.


Not many people will tell you the full story about how momentous the sitcom character's passing is, along with that of his alter ego, Sherman Hemsley. But I just did.

You can thank me later.

Yes, this is an oldie but a goodie. But how could I not revisit it on this sad and notable occasion? Jordan Jefferson: The gift that keeps on giving.

Movin' on up

George Jefferson's movin' on up to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky.

Sherman Hemsley is dead at 74.


I THINK heaven just got a little more entertaining with the long-awaited reunion of Jefferson and Archie Bunker.

Rest in peace, Mr. J.

Wings to almost die for

I regret that I didn't go to work for big, booming, powerful Channel 9 in Baton Rouge.

If I had, boredom would be something I'd never suffer, being that my people down in Louisiana are not a boring people. Whack, yes. Dull, no.

Blessed is the reporter who gets to report this story:

Authorities said a woman drove to a Baton Rouge restaurant after she was shot at another location Thursday night.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said a woman who was shot on Hyacinth Avenue drove to the Buffalo Wild Wings on Bluebonnet Boulevard.

Deputies were notified around 10:30 p.m.

They said the Baton Rouge Police Department is investigating the shooting.

WELL, they are damned good Buffalo wings. This has ad campaign written all over it -- the woman ought to get free wings for life. However long that might be.

Coming up at 5 and 6 on WAFB 9 News.

Well, duh!

Yeah. Um hmm.

It's confession time for Rick Reilly. If confessing the obvious is a confession at all.

Yeah, him and the entire American sports "journalism" establishment. Him and whoever is behind the team "features" aired during game-day broadcasts.

"Forgive us, Father, for we've fed the beast, constructing inspiring "narratives" out of -- if not whole cloth -- at least out of the fertile imaginations of university sports-information directors and PR staffs."

The acclaimed sportswriter came clean on ESPN.com about a week and a half ago, right after the Freeh Report set the record straight about what "doing things the right way" really meant at Penn State.

Whoopie.

What a fool I was.

In 1986, I spent a week in State College, Pa., researching a 10-page Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece on Joe Paterno.

It was supposed to be a secret, but one night the phone in my hotel room rang. It was a Penn State professor, calling out of the blue.

"Are you here to take part in hagiography?" he said.

"What's hagiography?" I asked.

"The study of saints," he said. "You're going to be just like the rest, aren't you? You're going to make Paterno out to be a saint. You don't know him. He'll do anything to win. What you media are doing is dangerous."

Jealous egghead, I figured.

What an idiot I was.

THESE TWO THINGS are clear, and always have been whenever we didn't have our fingers in our ears while screaming "Neener! Neener! Cancelcancelcancel!"

One, we like to hear what we want to hear. Two, the big business of major-college athletics loves lies almost as well as it does money -- lies grease the skids for "narrative" and narrative is what sells a product nowadays. Things can get ugly when reporters don't stick to the official narrative, which almost always causes them to fall back into line.

In other words, "What you media are doing is dangerous."

'Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld!'('These Atrocities: Your Fault!')

Ever been on a plantation tour in the South and heard all about the lost glories of the Old South -- that idyllic life the planter class enjoyed prior to the martial unpleasantness that brought it all to naught?

Were you amazed at how little you hear on some of these tours about the slaves upon whose backs was built this life of privilege and beauty for the few . . . the proud . . . the wealthy and white?

Ever turned on the TV and seen one of those stories about post-Soviet life in Russia, where you always see some raggedy protest by old pensioners with hammer-and-sickle flags and pictures of Lenin and Stalin, lamenting the passing of the dictatorship of the proletariat and all its attendant glories?

Were you amazed at how the gulags and captive nations never quite fit into the narrative of nostalgia for Soviet greatness?

Yeah. Me, too.

THIS REMINDS me of all that. And the warped, warped culture of idolatry and denial surrounding Penn State football and pervading State College, Pa., needs to follow the Old South and the Soviet Union into the ash bin of history.

Cloresa Turner drove to central Pennsylvania from Virginia to see the statue of veteran Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.

When she arrived in State College on Sunday and saw that it was gone from its place outside the university stadium, she clasped her hand over her mouth.

"He's done so much for this university. It's sad," said Turner, of Martinsville, Va. "To wipe it all away is like he meant nothing."

Construction vehicles and police arrived shortly after dawn Sunday, barricading the street and sidewalks near the statue, erecting a chain-link fence and then concealing the 7-foot-tall statue with a blue tarp. Workers used jackhammers to free the statue and a forklift to lower it onto a flat-bed truck that rolled into a stadium garage bay as some of the 100 to 150 students and other onlookers chanted, "We are Penn State."

(snip)

The Paterno family issued a statement saying the statue's removal "does not serve the victims of Jerry Sandusky's horrible crimes or help heal the Penn State community." The family, which has vowed its own investigation, called the report by former FBI director Louis Freeh the "incomplete and unofficial" equivalent of a charging document by a prosecutor and said the only way to help the victims "is to uncover the full truth."

NO, THEY'RE not s****ing you.

It's not an act for the tourists like proud faux Confederates re-enacting Pickett's Charge or drunken Kappa Alphas getting their Ashley Wilkes on in hopes of making some Southern belle swoon like Scarlett. This is the kind of true-believer devotion to Baal that gave us the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws, because Reconstruction wasn't thorough enough and didn't last nearly long enough.

"Look away, look away, look away . . ." JoePa fans.

Some who came out to watch the statue's removal were angry that it had been done with so little notice that many missed it - "It was under cloak of darkness," said Diane Byerly, 63, of Harrisburg - and worried that stiff sanctions from the NCAA would punish the innocent while possibly destroying businesses that rely on the commerce from the tens of thousands who flood State College on game days.

"I think there's ways you can punish the parties involved without affecting all of State College," said Richard Hill, a 1967 graduate from West Chester.

Chris Stathes, 40, a lifelong Penn State football fan who has a daughter at the school and manages two State College breakfast eateries, said shutting down the program would devastate area businesses.

"Football season, that's our moment. From the time we open our doors in the morning until kickoff, there's a line out the door," he said.

Philip Frum, 24, who works on research projects for Penn State, said he hoped the statue would be erected elsewhere, such as at a nearby Penn State sports museum.

"This statue was a symbol of all the good things he's done for the university," Frum said. Any NCAA penalty that shuts down the football program "will be just as bad as taking down the statue," he said.

OH . . . I hope it's much, much worse.

A culture that throws its children into the flaming pyre for the sake of Baal -- also known as "our peculiar institution," "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and big-time college football -- deserves every bit of divine wrath it calls down upon itself. It needs to be obliterated for the sake of the world . . . and for the sake of those under its thrall.

In Germany after World War II, we had a name for a similar effort. "Denazification," we called it.

Today, let the "de-Paternofication" of the Pennsylvania State University begin.


UPDATE: The Philadelphia Daily News just posted this story. Good grief.

Where is the Red Army when you really need it? What's next, tales of Penn State faithful barricaded in their man caves with the little woman, a 9 mm Luger and a couple of cyanide capsules?

My blood runs cold . . .

My memory has just been sold . . .

My hi-fi is the centerfold . . .

Hi-fi is the centerfold.

SOME MEN take pictures of topless women. Others gawk at the pictures the first men took.

One thing is certain, though. The gawkers will never have a shot at the angel with staples somewhere near her waist.

You can take that to the bank. Certain media moguls already have.

NOT ONLY THAT, the angels that some of the no-chance voyeurs already have are bound to be less than thrilled with their obsession with the angels they cannot -- they will not -- have.

Ever.

And consider this -- you never need to Photoshop high-fidelity gear from 1956 after the shoot is done. Reality is good enough.

I know this because I am a geek. An audio geek, which totally trumps "dirty old man" in most societal measures of respectability.

And as a geek, I take artsy-fartsy pictures of my old audio gear when I'm bored late on a Saturday night. Which I then post on my blog, which is a whole 'nother world of geekery right there.


YOU KNOW what else is great about taking cheesecake shots of old tube hi-fi gear?

For a few bucks at an estate sale or on eBay, the object of your lust can be yours. And your wife will be tolerant about that.

Within reason.


BESIDES, unless the human centerfold of your X-rated desires spent a lot of time at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima, chances are she won't glow in the dark. Because that would just be wrong.

No, vacuum tubes are where it's at. Trust me on that.

3 Chords & the Truth: A mighty hot wind

They say, as we Midwesterners endure a summer of epic proportions, that the last step before you dry up, turn into cinders and blow away is you look like this -- "this" being House Speaker John Boehner.

Oh, crap.

Well, in that case, perhaps the theme of this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth should be "Just a Song Before I Go." At least it's a show on which I could be proud to check out . . . thank you, Timi Yuro!

AND John Prine.

And Red Foley.

And Charley Pride.

And Patti Smith. (Didn't see that one coming, did you?)

And Timmy Thomas.

And OK, Go.

And Sam Beam, a.k.a., Iron & Wine.

And U2.

And Tonio K.

AND IF you'd like to hear future episodes of the Big Show, send water and cooler weather to Omaha, by God, Nebraska. I'm pretty sure my sun-dried, Boehner-burnt remains are gonna need to be rehydrated next week. Really cool music can do only so much, alas.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

What a GREAT idea. Umm hmm.

At Penn State, Joe Paterno and his football program were so big, powerful and unaccountable that a pedophile coach got away with it for years.

No one yelled rat; no one called the authorities. JoePa wanted it that way, in the name of being "humane."

Yes, absolute power corrupts. Absolutely.

So, in the name of preventing future Penn States, the Big Ten is considering making the power of its commissioner even more absolute. Some want to give Jim Delany the power to fire member schools' coaches.

GEE, what could go wrong with that?

The Associated Press tells us how an entire conference full of college muckedy-mucks can't see the irony here . . . or conceive of how such a scheme ever could go horribly wrong. Ever.

In the wake of the scandal at Penn State, the Big Ten Conference is considering a plan to give its commissioner the power to punish schools with financial sanctions, suspensions and even the ability to fire coaches.

An 18-page plan being circulated among Big Ten leadership raises the possibility of giving Commissioner Jim Delany such authority, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Thursday, citing a document it had obtained.

The Big Ten did not respond to requests for comment, but confirmed that the proposal — titled "Standards and Procedures for Safeguarding Institutional Control of Intercollegiate Athletics" — is being discussed.

"It is a working document intended to generate ideas, not draw conclusions," according to an email sent from Big Ten headquarters to people in the league. "One provision in the document addresses 'emergency authority of the commissioner' - it is just one of many ideas."

Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was recently convicted of sexually abusing 10 boys, sometimes on campus. A report commissioned by Penn State said school leaders, including the late coach Joe Paterno, ignored allegations more than a decade ago to avoid bad publicity, allowing Sandusky to prey on other boys for years. Paterno's family said he never participated in an attempt to cover up wrongdoing.

The NCAA and U.S. Education Department are investigating Penn State for potential rules and policy violations; the issue of "institutional control" is believed to be a key part of the NCAA probe, since problems there can lead to athletic penalties. The Chronicle said the Big Ten is still discussing how to handle fallout from the scandal at one of its member schools; currently, its 12-member Council of Presidents and Chancellors must approve any decision to suspend or expel one of the league's schools.

Whether Delany would ever be granted the power to fire coaches or punish schools was unknown. The Big Ten email said the council would have to approve such a sweeping change.

BIG TEN types, particularly the academics among them, fancy themselves and those associated with their institutions to be a cut above. If you're talking wool production, maybe.

Baa.

Penn State's not the only campus where football -- or, alternatively, basketball -- is king. Yet these smarter-than-your-average-Joe eggheads can't imagine how some power-drunk commish might use Coach as a Sword of Damocles, albeit one with a whistle and a bag of balls, to bring obstreperous conference members into line on a Very Important Matter, meaning Whatever the Hell the Commissioner Wants Today.

If your weasely boss at Paper-Pushers, Inc., can trump up a file full of "misdeeds" to get rid of that guy he just can't stand, what do you think someone with the resources and savvy of Delany might be able to cook up?

Hmmm?

What? Don't think such a fine man as Jim Delany would stoop so low?

What? You think he'll be Big Ten commissioner forever? Or that absolute power doesn't corrupt . . . absolutely?

Don't feel bad about your naiveté. That's what we all thought about JoePa.

Fool us once. . . .