Recapping
In case you're a new visitor, here are all of my opinions...
1. Republicans and Democrats are both bad.
2. But liberal iconoclasts are the shit.
3. New Orleans is pretty.
4. I like baseball too. It's pretty.
5. If you're a baseball player, you can do steroids as far as I care.
6. Celebrity obituaries are an effective space filler on a blog.
7. Unrelated topics in the same blog post are best separated by a blank line, followed by a line with three dashes, and then another blank line.
8. My listed contributor hasn't contributed in a long time. Control freak probably.
9. Julian Assange is getting screwed.
10. Oscar recap posts were all the shit until about 2008. Now they're not cool at all.
11. The names of books, movies, and TV shows should probably be in italics, instead of in quotes, but it's way too late to change.
13. I despise the number 12.
14. I've got maybe three interesting stories from my actual life.
15. You should be at the Moeller Television Festival right now.
No Easy Days
I love to hear about discord-- and actual democracy-- breaking out during live performances of the Republican and Democratic National Commercials. Occupy members have been marching freely on the streets of Tampa this week-- outside the warm confines of their designated Free Speech Cage, and today, the Ron Paul brigade, with clothespins fastened to their noses,
demonstrated loudly when the Mitt Romney campaign attempted to re-write party rules. It's kind of an important rule that was up for strangling also: Turns out the front running candidate is NOT allowed to discharge delegates they don't want. NOT allowed. I'll be darned.
Don't you protesting nitwits know that the only political theater allowed at these events is the kind orchestrated by campaign media staff? It's called choreography, goddammit!
Here's hoping for-- but not expecting-- more of the same in Charlotte. At least the Republican Party has rebels.
---
Major League Baseball extended its television partnership with ESPN today until 2021. This is good news for MLB owners and the players' union. The National Hockey League found out what happens to coverage of their sport on "The Sports Leader" when their contractual partnership comes to an end. It's great news for the Boston Red Sox. This agreement assures the American League team of being the top story in baseball-- winning season or losing-- for the next decade. I wonder what Bobby Valentine, manager of the 62-67 Red Sox, had to say about all this. See you over at ESPN.com for the answer. And then ESPN Boston. And then Grantland.
Barbara Mack
Barbara Mack, a journalism professor at Iowa State,
died very unexpectedly early this morning. The details are not yet known, but she was only 59 years old, and was only a few days into teaching her final semester before retirement.
Dr. Mack was a remarkable teacher and professional. In my day at least, she taught the class in media law that was required of all students in the journalism program. She had served several years as the general legal counselor for the Des Moines Register during the 1980s before becoming what was really the living embodiment of the journalism school at ISU. She was a thing that I have come to really adore in America-- a passionate, passionate First Amendment advocate. She was also my academic adviser for four years. That's what's called a lucky draw.
Dr. Mack's students know she abhorred poor grammar. If you
peppered your speech with "ums" or "likes", you were quickly reminded that they had no place in formal or professional speech-- or everyday speech, for that matter-- and she evidently despised cell phones in her classroom, although to admit that I didn't know that fact betrays my age. It doesn't surprise me to read it.
An old friend of mine posted a Barbara Mack story on Facebook this afternoon, which I'm going to relay here. I won't mention or link the guy's name because I haven't spoken with him since school. (I sent him a 'friend' request tonight so maybe I'll add it later.)
In 1996, he found himself one credit short of graduation, but one of his two credit classes had been switched back to three credits just after he had finished the course. He was told by one of the professors to write a paper explaining his case, and was given three hours to get it written and submitted. Upon completion, each one of the necessary professors authorized his written request, except for Barbara Mack. She pointed out that he had reversed the words "there" and "their" several times in the text of his paper, and remarked to him her opinion that a journalism student at the level of collegiate graduation should not be making such mistakes. She didn't deny the graduation, but she forced him to take one-on-one classes with her in her office every week-- on a Friday-- for the rest of the year. It would take years before this man's opinion of Dr. Mack would do a 180 towards the positive.
Dr. Mack made an impact on seemingly everybody she encountered. The local attention given to her upon her death might be surprising to anyone that might look only at her resume. While sterling, she chose to be a college professor, which rarely rewards with glamour, and she was an attorney that wasn't the type that becomes celebrated in high profile cases. I'm theorizing that her death is getting such wide attention because of the force of personality that she was among media types, maybe the most intimidating personality I've ever met. She was a big woman physically. Imposing. Not "big" like fat. "Big" like she could punch you unconscious.
But she was also incredibly warm. Her passion and commitment came for the benefit of her students. Tough love like my friend describes, but sweetness too. Before graduation I took a job at WHO Radio in Des Moines, a station in close physical proximity to where she lived with her husband Jim Giles. She was well acquainted with my new boss, told me all she knew, offered her faith in my professional ability, and then I remember her actually drawing a map to her house for me in case I ever needed anything.
The "inspiring teacher" is a cliche, but she was one of my mine. Here's a photo of her with one of her equine friends, probably a Barbara Mack life student whose devotion to her is equal to mine.
Football season approaches
I was in St. Louis early this month, and found myself drinking with a Rams fan. A pleasant sort of fellow. It seems that one Sunday last fall, this guy found himself with a pair of tickets to both a Cardinals home baseball game and a Rams home football game. The games were to be played simultaneously. He parked his car at a metered spot downtown and left the two Rams tickets under the windshield wiper of his car. When he came back to check on them, there were four.
Ecuador is not a colony of Great Britain. Tonight at 10.
The story of the attempted extradition of Julian Assange has grown larger than just the one about the persecution of lifesaving whistle blowers by the United States and its imperial allies. It's also about the autonomy of nations on the globe that don't control the world's financial markets or military firepower. According to officials in Ecuador, the British government has threatened to invade the Ecuadorean embassy in London in order to arrest Assange. The WikiLeaks founder is receiving political asylum at the embassy in order to be protected from a United States government that issues official legal arguments in support of its right to torture political opponents, and, according to Amnesty International, executes more prisoners annually than all but four other countries on Earth-- China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.
One has to wonder if the British government, the fading colonial power, with its threatened actions to assault the sovereignty of the South American country, has been actively considering the fact that it has embassies of its own in almost every country on Earth. Do you suppose military officials that invaded any of those embassies would be labeled terrorists?
Murdering the mentally disabled
Last week, when the state of Texas executed a retarded man, it did so under a state standard of mental retardation
inspired by the fictional character Lennie Small in John Steinbeck's novel "Of Mice and Men." Steinbeck's son Thomas issued a statement that included this passage, "My father was a highly gifted writer... His work was certainly not meant to be scientific, and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability. I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous, and profoundly tragic."
Marvin Wilson was the man executed. He was a 54-year-old black man who, according to the Atlantic magazine, "could not handle money or navigate a phone book, a man who sucked his thumb and could not always tell the difference between left and right." He had an IQ of 61, which placed him below the one percentile of measured human intelligence. The Supreme Court outlawed executions of the mentally retarded in 2002, but strangely, left open the flexibility of individual states to establish this standard. One would doubt the Lone Star State's ability to formulate such a judgement if one has seen the science textbooks in their public schools.
Marvin Wilson was Governor Rick Perry's 245th legal kill.
Meet Paul Ryan (R- Koch Brothers)
Paul Ryan's alleged fiscal responsibility: Voting for unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the Wall Street bailout, and for Medicare Part D, the taxpayer giveaway to prescription drug companies that prohibits the federal government from negotiating drug prices and was the single cause of 14 congressional aides leaving their jobs for positions in the drug and medical industries. All this while simultaneously voting for the passage, and then re-passage, of the Bush tax cuts. If we had a functioning news media in this country, this topic of the false advertising of Candidate Ryan would be one they could incorporate for discussion.
---
If you've been watching a lot of the Olympics on TV, tell me-- does NBC ever run any promos for "Community," "30 Rock," or "Parks & Rec"? That's what I thought.
---
Quote of the day: Dave Barry, "It turns out that athletes pee in the Olympic swimming pool. Seriously. Swimmer Ryan Lochte revealed this in a radio interview with famous personality Ryan Seacrest, saying, 'I think there’s just something about getting into chlorine water that you just automatically go.' Then Lochte’s teammate Michael Phelps revealed that he sometimes pees in the pool. Then another U.S. team member, Chris Cantwell, revealed that he, too, pees in the Olympic pool. This was especially disturbing, because Chris is a shot-putter. No, that last one was a joke, and I hope Chris does not take offense because he is a silo-sized individual who could crush my skull like a ping-pong ball using only his thumb and forefinger."
Punk prayer
I need a week off. I'm depressed over Sight & Sound's
failure to put a comedy on their 2012 Top 10 films poll.
Back to the nest
I'm spending the weekend with some old friends-- no, I don't mean my old radio buddies Jamie and Kem. They'll be there too, but I was talking about the 1982 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, who are being honored at Busch Stadium Saturday night upon the 30th anniversary of the club's 9th title. The Cardinals picked this Iowa farmboy to be their lifelong fan 30 years ago this summer when he was just seven years old. Ozzie, Whitey, Bruce, "Mex," Obie, Tito, and Brummer-- all among the attendees. A perfect weekend to say thanks. Truly theirs was the gift that would last a lifetime.
Money well spent
The Kansas City Royals are more cunning in their front office than they are on the baseball diamond. Kansas City Sports Radio 810 WHB reports that, of the $17 million the club has collected in tax subsidies over the last 5 years earmarked specifically for stadium repairs and upkeep, only 9% has been spent to that purpose. The rest has gone to such things as employee salaries, security, and-- get this-- towards paying their payroll taxes. Yes, the Kansas City Royals, a team that has managed only one winning season in the last 19, and has managed to finish better than 4th or 5th place in a 5-team division only twice since 1995 (third, both times), has found a way to
use taxpayer money to pay their taxes.
This report is stunning for two reasons: 1) Team officials obviously feel there's not an effective auditing system in place through which this behavior would get noticed-- either that or just that nobody would care, and 2) a radio station broke a news story.
---
Racism is usually to blame when we read these stories about the folly of having these "multi-millionaires" representing the United States on the Olympic Men's Basketball team. Curiously, Chicago Sun-Times columnist
Rick Telander is not questioning multi-millionaire Roger Federer's motivation to win the Gold Medal in Men's Tennis. The U.S. Olympic Committee has the prerogative to replace our professional basketball players with amateur (read: future professional) players. It might even make the games more competitive and interesting. It will just render the results of the games meaningless when the best players in the world are sitting at home.
