How I learned to stop worrying and love my enormous testicles

Wesley Warren Jr., last year

Fame must be a little like meth.

People will do anything for another hit. Or not do anything, as the case may be.

Take, for example, the poor soul in Las Vegas who now is so hooked on his notoriety that he's turned down the offer of a free million-dollar surgery to right-size the source of that notoriety -- his person-sized testicles.

The man has to go through life wearing enormous hoodies as if they were pants, because that's the only thing into which he can stuff his junk. He also has to go through life peeing on himself because . . . well, he can't find it buried deep within all that.

Then there's all the stuff you can't do when you have a 100-pound scrotum.

So, whatever the risks -- and there are a couple -- you'd think accepting the offer of free surgery to fix what ails you would be a no-brainer. Unless accepting the offer from the Dr. Oz show meant it got exclusive rights to your story.

And what if getting rid of 99 percent of your enormous testicles -- getting to the point where people never mind your bollocks -- meant that people would never mind you, either?

Tosh.0
Get More: Tosh.0 Videos,Daniel Tosh,Web Redemption

Wesley Warren Jr., this month on Tosh.O . . . in the video
I can show. (Skip to 4:45 in the video.) In the other clip,
Warren drops hoodie and shows "it."

Paul Harasim at the Las Vegas Review-Journal has been chronicling the strange, strange case of Wesley Warren Jr., and his large, large balls. Here's the latest:

The late President Lyndon Johnson used to relish doing in-person interviews with reporters while moving his bowels. Wesley Warren Jr., he of the 100-pound scrotum, loved being interviewed last week while sprawled bare-assed across his bed.

Yet Warren, unlike Johnson, swears he was "just being comfortable," that he wasn't deriving a twisted sense of power from watching a journalist try to act like nothing is strange as he is deliberately cast into an awkward situation.

"Write that I have clean butt cheeks," Warren said, laughing in a follow-up phone interview.

Uninspected butt cheeks aside, Warren laughed often as we talked in his small Las Vegas apartment, and he said his scrotum, partially encased in a towel, "grew another three inches."

I WONDER whether he charts its growth with pencil marks on the doorjamb, just like the proud parent of a similarly sized child.

But celebrity -- even the strangest manifestation of it -- is a narcotic, and you got to get that next fix. Ordinary junkies and meth heads do mundane things in the name of getting high, like stealing from family or selling their bodies to strangers.

Fame addicts do other things. Ultimately, they develop a Stockholm syndrome kind of relationship with the genesis of their notoriety, the thing that's holding them hostage.

No debasement is too much, no testicle joke too demeaning if it prolongs the buzz. Even if the world is laughing at you instead of crying with you, the world still is acknowledging that you exist.

Oh, joy.

A "Tosh.0" video also showed a skateboarder appearing to get knocked down when he ran into Warren's scrotum.

"It was fun going to Los Angeles in the big van they sent for me," Warren said, grinning.

The Wesley Warren of today does not act like the somber Wesley Warren I interviewed last fall.

Rather than on the edge of tears, he's seemingly enjoying his celebrity. He reminds you he'll soon appear on The Learning Channel and that Fire Cracker Films of Great Britain signed him to a contract for a documentary.

An indication that Warren's interest in celebrity could interfere with repairing his condition seemed to arise soon after my first story appeared. Producers from "The Dr. Oz Show" called to say Dr. Mehmet Oz had read the piece and would find the best surgeons possible to help Warren at no cost to him.

Yet Warren balked. While fearful he might die on the operating table during the highly complicated surgery, he also said he did not like the fact that Dr. Oz wanted to confine all interviews to his show.

"Howard Stern (the radio shock jock) wants me on his show," he said.

But Warren grows angry if anyone suggests he wants the spotlight more than the corrective knife.

"Who would want to live like this?" he said. "I just don't want to die during the operation."

TOO LATE. Warren died when he answered that first phone call from a Hollywood TV producer.

The Man With the Mammoth Balls, who's filling the late Wesley Warren Jr.'s upside down XXXL hoodie, is going to ride his bollocks as far as they'll carry him. Maybe even to The Howard Stern Show.

Again.

In today's America, it's always better to be The Man With the Mammoth Balls than to be nobody at all.

View from my seat

This is the world, as seen from my seat at the College World Series tonight.

Didya ever wonder what a baseball game looked like through a plastic Diet Pepsi bottle, man? I did. Now I know.


Didya ever notice that kids are interested in pretty much everything except the ballgame?


Yep. Game still kid-boring.


Didya ever wonder about those shoes hanging over your head? Like, wouldn't it be bad if that dude just walked through pee, and his shoes are hanging over the ledge above your head?

You gotta think about these things, man!


At least someone's watching Florida State take out UCLA.


Dude! It's great when the people in front of you go home.

And for what it's worth, Mrs. Favog is an atheistic, Bolshevik communiss. She does not stand for the seventh-inning stretch, and she does not sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

No peanuts for you! No Cracker Jack!

The end.

Celebrities: They're not like you and me

New York Daily News

Is it just me, or do we now put people on TV and in the movies -- and in pro sports and on the radio -- who in earlier days more likely would have been put in jail or in insane asylums for the public (and their own) good?

I think it's now pretty safe to say that Alec Baldwin is a taco or two shy of a combination plate, and that the last place he needs to be is on the big screen at your local megaplex . . . or on the smaller one in your family room. I think it's also pretty safe to say that photographers for the New York Daily News may have signed on for a lot of things, but that orderly on the lockdown floor of the Ha Ha Hotel wasn't one of them.

At least on the lockdown floor, orderlies get to put straitjackets on angry folk who prove a danger to themselves and others.

Behold, Alec Baldwin! One of the people driving our popular culture.

That explains a lot, actually.


P.S.: Baldwin had just gotten a marriage license when he went all Muhammad Ali on the photogs. When Mrs. Favog and I obtained ours 29 years ago, I seem to recall being a lot happier than that.

If anything, I would have given the shutterbugs a hug . . . not a right cross to the chin.

If Louisiana were capable of shame . . .

. . . the following "fun" fact would do it.

But it's not.

C'est la vie.

SO, WE'LL just have to let J.R. Ball of the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report be ashamed . . . verklempt . . . mortified on its behalf.

Here's a fact that should make anyone who breathes the contaminated air in this state shudder: Haiti commits a greater percentage of its budget (13%) to higher education than Louisiana (11%).

That's right, the government of a third-world, impoverished nation still struggling to recover from a massive earthquake in 2010 invests more, on a percentage basis, in higher education than the government of Louisiana. That would be the same Louisiana that supposedly is in year five of the eight-year Louisiana miracle.

For those conditioned to respond to such dismal news by saying, “Well, at least we're not Mississippi,” consider that the Magnolia State commits 17.7% of its state budget to higher education, nearly 7 percentage points more than the Bayou State.

So pardon me if my reaction to the just-concluded regular legislative session is a bit more muted than that of those celebrating the “historic” reforms that were approved by Gov. Bobby Jindal and friends. No doubt it was a great session for those demanding reform of K-12 education, but it was another dismal one for higher education. It's gotten so bad that we're forced to celebrate a cut of just $66 million because it could have been as much as $225 million. Yet, remember, higher education must also cut $25 million between now and the end of the month, for a total hit this session of $91 million.

If you are keeping score at home, that's $451 million in budget cuts to higher education since the Jindal administration took office. Moreover, the administration -- thanks to gutless special interest legislators—is now oh-fer-two in its attempts to merge a struggling four-year institution with another university, including one involving Southern University at New Orleans, recently rated as the worst-performing university in America.

FOR YEARS, every time the wife and I head down to Louisiana for a visit, we have commented on the ongoing "Port-au-Princification" of vast swaths of my hometown, Baton Rouge. This refers to how what was nice-to-average now just has become shabby and vaguely Third Worldish.

And now I'll be damned if Louisiana won't even allow me to use ever-so-modest hyperbole to illustrate a bloody point. No, it insists on seeing my dramatic license and raising me a "WHAT THE Fµ¢#???!!!"

Alas, beating your head against the reinforced-concrete wall of the Gret Stet's cultural and political dysfunction is the height of futility. Unfortunately for Ball, someone's got to do it.

Sigh.

3 Chords & the Truth: It's a mess

This week's program is a mess.

I mean, it's all over the place musically. Oh, I know 3 Chords & the Truth always is all over the place musically, but that's just your everyday, standard, all-over-the-place musical eclecticism.

What we're talking here is real chaos. Lucky for me I enjoy chaos. And in the case of this week's Big Show, I'm betting you will, too.

Let me put it this way: When did you have the most fun when you were a kid?

THAT'S RIGHT -- when you were making a mess. This week's show is one of those fun messes. That's really all I have to say about it.

I'm tired, it's the weekend, and I plan on heading to the College World Series. If you can sneak me a beer into TD Ameritrade Park here in Omaha on Sunday afternoon -- thereby giving the fickle finger of fate to the NCAA control freaks . . . aka "those g**damn Nazi bastards," as LSU basketball legend Dale Brown once famously tagged them -- I'll let you do the Big Show and play anything you want.

Except for Tibetan throat singing. You have to draw the line somewhere.

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

40,800 B.K. -- Before Kilroy

We existed.

We were here, where you are now.

We lived. We struggled. We loved. We are no more.

This is my hand. I am -- we were -- human like you.

Do not forget us.

BEHOLD the power of art -- the expression of common humanity -- engaging us, challenging us from some prehistoric terra incognita that modern-day Spain now occupies. It's amazing what one can say with a simple handprint, amazing what a powerful symbol of humanity it is.

Especially when it's at least 40,800 years old -- the oldest cave paintings known to exist. Especially when it's possible, perhaps even likely, the art was created by Neanderthals.

Michelangelo famously depicted God giving Adam life -- giving Adam everything that made him truly human -- with the touch of His finger, reaching out to pour Himself into man . . . through Adam's own finger.

Is it far-fetched to think of those handprints from the mist of prehistory in a similar way? That prehistoric man, perhaps even one of an extinct branch of our own human species, put an outline of his own hand onto a cave wall so that those who came after might press their own hands into his own, and therefore he might live on somehow?

I'd like to think that. I'd like to think we'd look at the wonder of a simple outline of a hand, one that predates the birth of Christ by at least 38,800 years, and realize that even the humblest things -- the simplest child's art, even -- is fraught with meaning. That they connect us in ways that we realize . . . and even more that we don't.

Prehistoric man could not have begun to imagine our world -- the postmodern world of 2012. But there he is, nevertheless, trying to touch us. Impart some of who he was -- that he was -- to us, either his distant descendants or the long-distant kissing cousins he would never know.

I wonder whatever our generation leaves behind for whatever, and whoever, may follow will say as much as a simple handprint. I wonder what Future Man -- if he were to find a 2012 handprint on a wall fragment amid the ruins of some long-buried, long-forgotten North American metropolis -- will think of it.

What might he think of the primitives who left behind such a thing?

Hello in there. Hello.

Adventures in speling

Unless, of course, the incident at the New York hospital somehow involved tequila, salt and lime wedges. . . .

No, probably not.

Jeez, that's one word you'd think everyone in New Orleans knew how to spell.

A message from the It Had to Be Said department

Are we going to have to require people to get a permit -- with mandatory video-safety certification as a prerequisite -- before they can legally purchase or use a cell-phone camera or digital SLR? Probably.

Where's Michael Bloomberg when we really need him?

Ricky Mathews shot Tupac, too

I'm usually not one to post NSFW gangsta rap
videos, but this was too delish to pass up

New Orleans' alternative weekly, Gambit, has been indispensable reading -- especially the past three weeks.

Here's a gem from its Blog of New Orleans today, sticking it to the shameless corporate hacks -- Advance Publications hatchet man (and incoming Nola Media Group publisher) Ricky Mathews, for instance -- presently nosediving the city's venerable daily newspaper straight into the Gulf of Mexico:

At this hour, NOLA.com is fronting a major journalism award it has received for its recent 8-part series "Louisiana INCarcerated," which spotlighted conditions and financial incentives in the state's Byzantine, for-profit prison system:

A team of Times-Picayune reporters was awarded the June "Sidney" award, a monthly journalism prize given out by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, for the newspaper's recent eight-part special report on Louisiana's highest-in-the-world incarceration rate.

The series, "Louisiana Incarcerated," was reported by Cindy Chang, Jan Moller, Jonathan Tilove and John Simerman. It spotlighted how rigid sentencing laws and a strict pardon and parole system conspire to keep the jails full.

Not mentioned in the NOLA.com story: the contributions of photographer Scott Threlkeld, graphics artist Ryan Smith, copy editor Katherine Hart, designer George Berke and managing editors Dan Shea and Peter Kovacs, all of whom were fired from the paper yesterday by the newly formed NOLA Media Group.

Tilove was also fired. Special sections reporter Chang, whose byline appeared over most of the stories, has been offered a job in the general reporting pool.

HEY, if you're shameless enough to do what ownership is doing to The Times-Picayune and its staff, you certainly are shameless enough to exploit, for promotional purposes, the people you just fired or demoted.

Ukfay ouyay, ouyay uckingfay ucksfay.

If you can fake being sincerely annoying. . . .

Oh, thank God.

The people on House Hunters aren't that priggish, superficial and annoying all by themselves. That's just who they play on TV. Just like they're playing at actually looking for a house.

Because the HGTV "reality" series is a great big ol' fake. We heard the news today -- oh, boy!

Er . . . I mean, Yahoo!

The blog Hooked on Houses is giving fans a dose of reality about the HGTV series "House Hunters." According to an interview with a former participant, Bobi Jensen, much of the popular show, which has been on the air since 1999, is faked.

The premise of 'House Hunters' is that viewers follow a buyer as they anxiously decide between three different houses. Jensen says that, in fact, one house has already been purchased--the producers wouldn't even finalize her as a subject until after the closing. "When I watch other episodes of the show now I can usually pick out the house they were getting based on hair-dos alone," says Jensen. Houses are sometimes shot months apart. While the two rejected properties may be on the market, in Jensen's case, "They were just our two friends' houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!"

A former subject of the spin-off "House Hunters International" confirms that one house on the program has already been bought before filming begins. Ted Prosser, who did his real estate search in the Virgin Islands, said in an interview with a St. John blog: "The show is not really a reality show. You have to already own the house that gets picked at the end of the show. But the other houses in [my] show are actually the other houses we considered buying."

Hooked on Houses originally busted the program for using houses already in escrow in 2010, but now they are providing more dirt about other phony details. Jensen says producers tweaked her storyline to make it more TV-friendly. "The producers said they found our (true) story--that we were getting a bigger house and turning our other one into a rental--boring and overdone." Instead they had Jensen emphasize that their old home was too small, something that she claims makes her "cringe" with embarrassment when she watches the episode.

I GUESS at HGTV, if you can fake insufferable, you've got it made. Such is life in this land of bread and circuses.

Hell, no, we ain't all right!

Long before anyone busted the first rhyme, put on the first piece of bling or intentionally tried to walk down the street with his pants moving south and his drawers creeping north, my old man invented rap on the back patio of our house in blue-collar Baton Rouge.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

All it took for the old man to go old school (before it was even the new wave), was a wayward hammer head on his thumb and not the nail. Or a balky lawnmower engine. Or a balky dog.

Oftentimes, it was a balky teenager of my intimate acquaintance.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! Gotdamn sonofabitch, c********* bastard!

Though he little realized it, the old man was a human beatbox in coveralls -- as blue as 2 Live Crew, with a purple thumbnail to boot. If only he'd had his own personal DJ to punctuate his raptastic freestyles with some mad scratching and killer mixes.

Eh . . . he would have told him to "cut that goddamn shit off" right in the middle of a performance.

BUT THIS ISN'T about my old man, though I am my father's son -- which pretty much scares the holy living hell out of my wife. No, this is about the carnage at New Orleans' newspaper, The Times-Picayune.

It wasn't the work of a madman, but it was close. It was the work of a bunch of executives at corporate who left not bodies strewn across the newsroom floor, but instead careers.

By the end of the day Tuesday, 201 employees of the Picayune had been told that come Sept. 30, they would be shit out of luck -- not to mention shit out of a job. Of the 201 people getting the old heave-ho, which I think we're supposed to call "right-sizing" now, 84 came from the newsroom.

Firing 84 out of 173 newsroom employees, if we do the math, comes to 49 percent of the people actually responsible for covering the news that south Louisianians need to read. That's how Advance Publications makes sure that "essential journalism" endures in this star-crossed American city in direst need of it.

That's how cheap men in expensive suits "continue our 175-year commitment to covering the communities we serve."

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

Thus goes the first act of a newspaper company transitioning to the "digital future" -- firing half the people who "cover the communities we serve." Trading a seven-day print schedule for a three-day one. Shifting the lions' share of the "news coverage" to the paper's really, really bad website. Letting the vast majority of the newsroom layoffs fall upon the news and business sections.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

MEANTIME, one might be curious about where this "bold move" into newspapers' digital future will take place.

Nothing notable, just your average midsize city more murderous than "pre-surge" Baghdad that also happens to be Latin American corrupt, Latin American uneducated and absolutely Latin American poor. With a small ruling coterie of Latin American-rich types who got that way either through business or genetics.

Also, the digital strategy is aimed at a city where lots and lots of people have no broadband service -- New Orleans has just a 40- to 60-percent subscription rate for Internet service fast enough to fully access a multimedia website. For the poorest areas of town -- which are mostly all-black -- the subscription rates hover somewhere between zero and 40 percent.

It seems to me that it's one thing to argue that most poor folks don't subscribe to the paper, but quite another to, for profit's sake, raise the bar higher and higher to even aspire to be an informed citizen. Like this Harvard professor, one wonders exactly when did we cross the line between having a market economy and becoming a market society -- one where everything has a price.

Even those things that oughtn't.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

By the way, the Picayune isn't exactly losing money. It's still plenty profitable -- just not profitable enough for the Newhouse family, owners of Advance Publications.

GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard!

OH . . . and then there's this sad reminder amid the economic and emotional carnage inflicted Tuesday on employees of The Times-Picayune: This is the "new economy," bucko. Loyalty is a one-way street that always runs in management's direction. Channel 8 in New Orleans illustrates this principle vividly for us:

"It's almost like a funeral inside, like a wake," said commercial artist Patricia Gonzalez after she got word she was being let go. She said she has worked at the TP for four decades.

Even though employees knew it was coming, Tuesday's developments still hit some like a brick.

"Next to my father's death, this is second in my life. I feel like I lost my family, somewhat ashamed that I lost my job, or will be losing my job," continued Gonzalez.

Staff writer Danny Monteverde also received bad news about his job.

"It's rough today, and it's sad to see all my co-workers and friends, really, and family go through stuff like this, but I had a good six years, I really did. I wish I had a lot more," he said.

Workers who have been axed are getting severance packages, but some were too distraught to pay attention to the details right away.

"I really haven't checked into the package, but I can't talk," Gonzalez said while choking up.

(snip)

Amoss said laid-off workers can apply for jobs that will be posted.

"When we launch the new company we will have a significant number of journalists, especially newsgathering, reporters, photographers, videographers, graphic artists," he said.

"I'm never going to give up. I will be reapplying for whatever is available, even if it's to cut the grass outside; that's how dedicated I am to the company," Gonzalez stated.

GOTDAMN sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! GOTdamn sonofabitch! Gotdamn bastard! Gotdamn sonofabitch, c********* bastards!

Freestyle THAT, Advance.

Flukes of CWS universe didn't get Big Ten memo

The baseball cards are marked.

The deck is stacked.

The fix is in.

The playing field tilts to the south. Or the South, as the case may be.

So how in the world does anybody expect the Big Ten to have a chance in hell of making the College World Series? Everybody knows Northern schools don't have a chance.

And in this June 2 story in the Omaha World-Herald, league coaches wonder why they shouldn't just take their gloves and . . . play in the summer and fall. Say to hell with the CWS and the whole crooked, Southern-fried, put-up deal that is college baseball:

Nebraska is now playing in a conference convinced that college baseball’s rules and structure prevent the Big Ten from fairly competing for the national spotlight.

The league-wide frustration has grown to the point that the conference’s most seasoned and respected voice, Minnesota’s John Anderson, is suggesting the Big Ten (and other northern schools) secede and form a new league that plays deeper into the summer.

Purdue’s having a milestone year, yet Boilermakers coach Doug Schreiber is still in full support of his own proposal to play a portion of the season in the fall. Most — if not all — league coaches want the NCAA to return to a true regional bracket for postseason play.

Radical? Yes. But the way Big Ten coaches see it, their squads are being forced to swing the bat with one arm, while everyone down south gets to use both.

“The current system that we have, we’ve learned, doesn’t produce the equity that it could,” Anderson said. “Part of the reason, people don’t want to change. The sport’s making money, there’s TV, growth, attendance — which kind of masks the problem.”

The problem is climate, and a mid-February season start date (still too early up north). It’s travel burdens (fiscal and physical). It’s academic concerns (Big Ten squads can miss no more than eight class days). It’s the NCAA tournament selection process and the overvalued RPI. It’s an investment in facilities (the Big Ten’s made recent strides), thus a lack of attendance and interest. It’s oversigning rules that Big Ten schools must abide by that most conferences don’t have; before finalizing annual rosters, the Big Ten allows its teams to commit one extra scholarship to no more than two players.

During multiple World-Herald interviews with several Big Ten coaches over the past month, the league veterans each presented this warning: Play baseball in this conference and you’ll be staring at an impassable uphill trek to the sport’s summit.

WITH THIS in mind -- this laundry list of injustice heaped upon the poor, beleaguered and put-upon Big Ten baseball programs . . . these disrespected Nanooks of the North in spikes -- we welcome to the 2012 College World Series a couple of schools from obviously tropical climes.

So, a subarctic Omaha greeting goes out to CWS contestants the Seawolves of New York's Stony Brook University and the Golden Flashes of Ohio's Kent State University. (NB: Kent is in the subtropical part of Ohio; Columbus, home of Big Ten member Ohio State, is in the tundra.)

On the other hand, though, maybe it's not the weather.

And maybe it's not a giant NCAA baseball-rigging scandal concocted by a nefarious cartel of Southern universities.

Maybe it's something else, Big Ten. Maybe, just maybe . . . it's you.

The sound and the beauty

Photo: www.audioasylum.com

Leave it to me to be a hi-fi geek staring into the abyss of whole generations now come of age hearing the world as a low-bitrate MP3 through cheap earbuds connected to an iPod.

Yes, my generation had crappy transistor AM radios we listened to with cheap earphones. But we also had stereo systems with killer tuners, wall-shaking amplifiers and loudspeakers the size of a Smart car.

And before I yell at you to get off my lawn -- punk -- I'll just say that back then, FM sounded great, AM sounded really good, and most consumer audio allowed you to hear that. Not only that, some of our "stereos" or "hi-fis" were stunningly beautiful, even. Above is the REL "Precedent" FM tuner, circa 1954 . . . some seven years before my time, I hasten to add.

Some vintage-audio aficionados say the Precedent -- in all its monophonic glory -- was the best FM tuner ever made. I don't have the expertise (or experience of it ) to be able to say. But I do think it might have been the prettiest.

My trusty old Marantz 2226 receiver, though, surely has a place on the prettiest stereo gear list somewhere. I've had it since I was 16, and that's it at left . . . aglow in the dark.

Then again, I am an anachronism. I value the spectacle, and the experience, of hearing good music nearly as much as the music itself. IPods and MP3s have their place today, of course. But for me, they are a utilitarian concession -- not the crème de la crème of a generation rendered tin-eared by a utilitarian age.

For this relic of an age long past, alas, there is nothing left but to offer a futile protest against the times in which I must live -- non serviam. Now find a jazz station somewhere on FM and crank that tube amp up to 11 for me, will you?

3 Chords & the Truth: The music munchies

Dude. Got any Doritos on you, man?

Man, I was listening to me some Vanilla Fudge, and I was getting into the spirit of it all -- You know? -- and now . . . you sure you don't have any Doritos, man? I'm just Jonesing for some salty, crunchy, nacho-flavored goodness.

Well, once again, 3 Chords & the Truth is all over the place musically, only in a thoughtful manner instead of a hook-your-MP3-player-up-to-an-FM-transmitter-and-call-it-radio manner. That's no surprise, but . . . you know where I can get some @#$&%*+! Doritos, man?

DAMN, I like me some Doritos almost as much as I like me some psychedelic music to start off the Big Show. Like . . . where were we, man?

Oh, yeah. Eclectic are we on the program this week and every week. Lots of musical goodness, lots of stuff you haven't heard in a very long time, lots of good music to get turned on to . . . and by.

In other words, 3 Chords & the Truth is kind of a trip. Every week. Only the kind Joe Friday's not gonna bust you over, dude.

You SURE you don't have any Doritos, man?

Well, I'm gonna go find me some. Can I bring you back anything, man? Like, how about some marshmallows and spicy mustard? It's really good s***, man!

I think I may know where a Doritos stash is, man. You listen to this while I look for that, all right? I'll be back in about 90 minutes, man.

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

There's a thin line between love and hate

I think you might call this TV commercial from the Netherlands . . . a Dutch treat. Even though this is the English-language version.


HAT TIP: The Browser.

Dear God. There's more out there.

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.

Toujours fidèle

As this 68th anniversary of D-Day comes to a close, please take some time to watch these On the Road reports from CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman.

William Faulkner once famously -- and truthfully -- wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The past two nights on the CBS Evening News, Hartman has shown us, heartbreakingly, how the Second World War may be over for a Texas widow and a French town, but it is anything but past.

It is a wound as fresh as today. It is an old debt still being repaid by a little town and the grateful Frenchmen who inhabit it.

It also is the story of how government incompetence and the malfeasance of a Texas congressman and his staff prolonged an old woman's heartbreak. And it is the tale of how her grace and forgiveness exposes how inconsequential can be the powers and principalities that possess our nation's capital.


Ne jamais oublier. Never forget.

Oh, no!

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.

It's not consumerism if you need 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.