1052 Calling Dr. Brent
You may feel neglected because no exiled prince from Nairobi or Lagos has written to you lately telling you how to collect the millions he wants to give you in return for your banking information.
No worries. There’s been a brief hiatus in this scam while all the exiled princes have moved from Nairobi and Lagos to Hong Kong, earned medical degrees and died leaving you their heirs.
An e-mail pops into the inbox the other day from a guy identifying himself as a representative of a Hong Kong bank. He informs the reader that he has an important and confidential matter to discuss. The recipient returns the e-mail with a single character reply. The character is “?”
Then comes e-mail #2 in which the gentleman from “Hong Kong” apologizes for being unclear the first time and then tells this story:
It seems that a doctor, Mark Brent, died while on a mission of some kind in Africa. (Can’t lose that African connection.) His bank, he says, is about to declare the account dormant because an heir can’t be found. If it does, the funds, US $2.5 million, will have to be turned over to the government of (shudder) China.
So would the e-mail recipient be kind enough to open a secret numbered account into which the money can be deposited. He goes on:
This brings us to the big question; WHY YOU? why would i (sic) choose a total stranger? well i have planned this operation for a while now and the only way to go about it is to use a total stranger to avoid troubles from my bank because they monitor all our activities and the Chinese government has very strict laws against corruption. You may also wonder where i got your email from. I got it from an online directory.
Oh.
Just give me your name, address, phone number, occupation, date of birth, and a photocopy of your valid photo i.d.
Oh.
Ever polite, Mr. Hong Kong banker signs off with
If you feel you can't continue, please notify me so i (sic) can find someone else. I will completely understand.
It’s nice to be understood.
Shrapnel:
--Another Megabus accident, this one with at least one death. Anyone can blow a tire, hit a bridge abutment and crumple one of those high speed tin cans. But bad things seem to follow this outfit.
--On its face, the inmate “Success Bonds” program that rewards reduced recidivism sounds good and seems to be working well in England. But it’s hard to believe that Goldman Sachs would put its own money into something like that without finding a way to profit regardless of the outcome. Still, with the incarceration rate in this country, something has to be done and maybe this is the something.
--A lot of news types have panned “The Newsroom,” HBO’s series set at a TV network. It has elements of extreme fiction, for sure -- but also elements of extreme authenticity. And anything with Sam Waterston in it is worth watching, even though he plays a drunk unconvincingly.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
Friday, August 03, 2012
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
1051 Not in MY Church
1051 Not in MY Church
Let’s get the statistics out of the way first. Crystal Springs, Mississippi is five square miles of nothing that’s about half an hour out of Jackson, which is about 100 square miles of not much.
The Robert Johnson Blues Museum is in Crystal Springs. And Johnson likely would understand what’s going on there today. Today, he would be in the majority... Crystal Springs’ population is mostly black. Not mostly by much. But in a town of about 5,000, anything over 2,500 is “mostly.”
Then, there’s the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs and this is the place where the preacher, in fear of losing his job, refused to marry Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson because they are black. The Wilsons attend this church but aren’t members. The preacher, Stan Weatherford, did conduct the ceremony, but not within the hallowed walls of the FBC.
Pressure from congregants is what he claimed. But not from all of them. There’s a line of members and attendees waiting to apologize. Pressure from congregants could mean anything from “y’all don’ wanna be marryin’ none a those folks in our church,” to that same sentence with the words “or I might have to rethink my annual contribution of 48% of the budget” tacked on.
So a little church in the middle of nowhere performs a racist error for reasons more complicated than race. And the deacons came out with a statement that says in more flowery words “we’ll minister to anyone, regardless...” blah blah blah.
Is that a change of policy? Will the preacher man now be thrown out for NOT marrying the Wilsons?
What’s easily as important as the marriage is that a discussion like this is still going on in 21st Century America, almost 150 years since the issue was supposedly settled and never should have had to been a big deal to begin with.
Keep the Stars and Bars flying, guys. It’s nice to be open about what you stand for.
And to the right thinking, right feeling members of the First Baptist Church: apologies are nice. But find another source of income and send Mr. Big Contributor packing.
Shrapnel:
--Only 12 days to go and the Olympics freak show will be over, less than two little weeks. Then Romney can find somewhere else to put his foot in his mouth. Anyone know who won the gold medal in speed-texting?
--On his foreign tour, Romney insulted the Brits, offered paternalistic praise to Israel while insulting the Palestinians and pandered to laborites in Poland. Three stops in the countries of three staunch US allies. Just think of how that will translate when he addresses our enemies.
--What ultimately will kill the Romney campaign is not the telling of tall tales he’s famous for -- his role at Bain, traditional marriage and the like -- nor his shipping jobs overseas, his ham-handed reverse-diplomacy, nor his arrogant richguy lifestyle. It’s the dog.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© 2012 WJR
Let’s get the statistics out of the way first. Crystal Springs, Mississippi is five square miles of nothing that’s about half an hour out of Jackson, which is about 100 square miles of not much.
The Robert Johnson Blues Museum is in Crystal Springs. And Johnson likely would understand what’s going on there today. Today, he would be in the majority... Crystal Springs’ population is mostly black. Not mostly by much. But in a town of about 5,000, anything over 2,500 is “mostly.”
Then, there’s the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs and this is the place where the preacher, in fear of losing his job, refused to marry Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson because they are black. The Wilsons attend this church but aren’t members. The preacher, Stan Weatherford, did conduct the ceremony, but not within the hallowed walls of the FBC.
Pressure from congregants is what he claimed. But not from all of them. There’s a line of members and attendees waiting to apologize. Pressure from congregants could mean anything from “y’all don’ wanna be marryin’ none a those folks in our church,” to that same sentence with the words “or I might have to rethink my annual contribution of 48% of the budget” tacked on.
So a little church in the middle of nowhere performs a racist error for reasons more complicated than race. And the deacons came out with a statement that says in more flowery words “we’ll minister to anyone, regardless...” blah blah blah.
Is that a change of policy? Will the preacher man now be thrown out for NOT marrying the Wilsons?
What’s easily as important as the marriage is that a discussion like this is still going on in 21st Century America, almost 150 years since the issue was supposedly settled and never should have had to been a big deal to begin with.
Keep the Stars and Bars flying, guys. It’s nice to be open about what you stand for.
And to the right thinking, right feeling members of the First Baptist Church: apologies are nice. But find another source of income and send Mr. Big Contributor packing.
Shrapnel:
--Only 12 days to go and the Olympics freak show will be over, less than two little weeks. Then Romney can find somewhere else to put his foot in his mouth. Anyone know who won the gold medal in speed-texting?
--On his foreign tour, Romney insulted the Brits, offered paternalistic praise to Israel while insulting the Palestinians and pandered to laborites in Poland. Three stops in the countries of three staunch US allies. Just think of how that will translate when he addresses our enemies.
--What ultimately will kill the Romney campaign is not the telling of tall tales he’s famous for -- his role at Bain, traditional marriage and the like -- nor his shipping jobs overseas, his ham-handed reverse-diplomacy, nor his arrogant richguy lifestyle. It’s the dog.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© 2012 WJR
Monday, July 30, 2012
1050 Cleaning the Bomb Test Site
1050 Cleaning the Bomb Test Site
There’s plenty of serviceable, lightly used shrapnel around, so it’s time to clean up the scraps and leave them neatly collected here.
--The Bloomberg Administration has let a contract to Northrop-Grumman for sugar detectors it will place at the exits of every shop that sells sugary beverages. But it can’t afford to staff all locations. So if you exceed the Maximum Allowable Quantity, MAQ, prison bars will shoot out of the ground to hold you until the arrival of an agent of the Sugar police, which could take awhile, depending on traffic.
--They first considered sugar-sniffing dogs. But that would require an act of the City Council because it would require creating a new training facility. And there’s that staffing issue again.
--Only 14 days to go and the Olympics freak show will be over, two little weeks. Cause for celebration. Anyone know which of NBC’s 23 cable channels is going to carry the tiddlywinks final between Sudan and Monaco?
--On a serious note, it’s been 40 years since the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics. Since then, no progress has been made in relations between the two sides, despite concessions galore from the famously rotating governments of Israel. As Pete Seeger sang “when will they ever learn?”
--Former colleague Bob Shannon of CBS/FM has been taken off the on-air rotation about eight months into a sick leave. Everyone knows Bob and what a huge talent and wonderful person he is. And no one is talking about what ails him, though it’s probably something more serious than an ingrown toenail.
--Welcome to the fray, RocksTV, a British Television outfit that wants to compete here with JTV and Liquidation Channel. It’s something to watch with the sound turned off. The English pitch-birds are a pleasure to see but you can’t understand a word they’re saying.
--If you have a few dozen Facebook friends who post their every location, you have two things. First is an annoyance -- as in who cares where you are. Second is fodder for blackmail in case someone DOES care where they are.
--Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumb trails on Facebook aren’t the greatest annoyance. There are those who have to post 40-thousand photos a year of themselves and from places they believe we should all swooningly care about. Next comes the tonsil cam, or worse, the toilet cam.
--The country’s psychopathic gun nuts are helping population control in two significant ways. First, they’re eliminating people they consider extraneous, some of which may not be. Second, they’re discouraging immigration along with the attending of movies, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, shopping at malls and other overdone activities.
--Happy 107th birthday, aunt Trude Frohman. We will have to celebrate without you again this year. It’s the 15th year we’ve had to do that.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
There’s plenty of serviceable, lightly used shrapnel around, so it’s time to clean up the scraps and leave them neatly collected here.
--The Bloomberg Administration has let a contract to Northrop-Grumman for sugar detectors it will place at the exits of every shop that sells sugary beverages. But it can’t afford to staff all locations. So if you exceed the Maximum Allowable Quantity, MAQ, prison bars will shoot out of the ground to hold you until the arrival of an agent of the Sugar police, which could take awhile, depending on traffic.
--They first considered sugar-sniffing dogs. But that would require an act of the City Council because it would require creating a new training facility. And there’s that staffing issue again.
--Only 14 days to go and the Olympics freak show will be over, two little weeks. Cause for celebration. Anyone know which of NBC’s 23 cable channels is going to carry the tiddlywinks final between Sudan and Monaco?
--On a serious note, it’s been 40 years since the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics. Since then, no progress has been made in relations between the two sides, despite concessions galore from the famously rotating governments of Israel. As Pete Seeger sang “when will they ever learn?”
--Former colleague Bob Shannon of CBS/FM has been taken off the on-air rotation about eight months into a sick leave. Everyone knows Bob and what a huge talent and wonderful person he is. And no one is talking about what ails him, though it’s probably something more serious than an ingrown toenail.
--Welcome to the fray, RocksTV, a British Television outfit that wants to compete here with JTV and Liquidation Channel. It’s something to watch with the sound turned off. The English pitch-birds are a pleasure to see but you can’t understand a word they’re saying.
--If you have a few dozen Facebook friends who post their every location, you have two things. First is an annoyance -- as in who cares where you are. Second is fodder for blackmail in case someone DOES care where they are.
--Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumb trails on Facebook aren’t the greatest annoyance. There are those who have to post 40-thousand photos a year of themselves and from places they believe we should all swooningly care about. Next comes the tonsil cam, or worse, the toilet cam.
--The country’s psychopathic gun nuts are helping population control in two significant ways. First, they’re eliminating people they consider extraneous, some of which may not be. Second, they’re discouraging immigration along with the attending of movies, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, shopping at malls and other overdone activities.
--Happy 107th birthday, aunt Trude Frohman. We will have to celebrate without you again this year. It’s the 15th year we’ve had to do that.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
1049 Chicken Fit
1049 Chicken Fit
Hey, let’s all go down to Chick Fill-A and kiss a member of the same sex on the mouth. Probably tastes better than that God awful sandwich, as does air. And don’t plan a Sunday dinner at one of these places.
For those of you preoccupied with trivia like the presidential campaign, health insurance, the economy, voter i.d. laws and the olympics, here’s the story in quick time:
The Chick Fil-A fast food chain (white meat only!) are:
-closed on Sundays
-vocally opposed to same sex unions of any kind
-endorsed by countless big name representatives of the religious right including Billy Graham, Mike Huckabee and the lunatic Rick Santorum.
The cities of Boston and Chicago have declared “don’t come here with that kind stuff,” although to the horror of Rahm Emanuel there’s already one Chick shop within his borders. The mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, wrote to the Chief Chicken saying “There is no room for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it.” Bravo!
The company already has brought its poison to such cities as Rochester, Michigan (As opposed Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic where they prefer medicine over faith healing,) downtown Manhattan (NYU students will eat anything and accept any indoctrination,) and other places you might not expect them. But most of the outlets are in religiously infected areas like South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and the most backward of the northeastern states, Pennsylvania.
They have a right to their opinions, of course. And as Willard Romney reminds us, because corporations are people, they’re free to express them. (Fortune Biscuits with New Testament aphorisms coming?)
Also allowed to express opinion is the company that owns the rights to the Muppets, which has asked Chicken Fit to stop including their toys with kids’ meals. Chick’s response? We have stopped giving away Muppets because they’re too small for little kids who might get their fingers stuck in them. Jim Henson’s heirs see it differently. They have an aversion to bigots and will donate revenue from Chick Fil-A to GLAAD, the gay and lesbian rights group.
So the religious right is planning an eat-in and gay and lesbian groups are planning a kiss-in.
What have we learned from this? First, Billy Graham is too far gone to recognize a rubber chicken dinner with real rubber. The rest of that breed has found yet another way to demonstrate bad taste.
Shrapnel:
--In Alice in Wonderland, they paint the white roses red to satisfy the queen. In drought struck Staten Island, they paint the brown lawns green to satisfy the neighborhood look. This could be the start of something big.
--Seventeen days to go and we’ll be out from under all the olympic stuff. The 2012 Summer Games are the biggest hype in London since Q-E-II’s coronation. But at least that took only one day.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
Hey, let’s all go down to Chick Fill-A and kiss a member of the same sex on the mouth. Probably tastes better than that God awful sandwich, as does air. And don’t plan a Sunday dinner at one of these places.
For those of you preoccupied with trivia like the presidential campaign, health insurance, the economy, voter i.d. laws and the olympics, here’s the story in quick time:
The Chick Fil-A fast food chain (white meat only!) are:
-closed on Sundays
-vocally opposed to same sex unions of any kind
-endorsed by countless big name representatives of the religious right including Billy Graham, Mike Huckabee and the lunatic Rick Santorum.
The cities of Boston and Chicago have declared “don’t come here with that kind stuff,” although to the horror of Rahm Emanuel there’s already one Chick shop within his borders. The mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, wrote to the Chief Chicken saying “There is no room for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it.” Bravo!
The company already has brought its poison to such cities as Rochester, Michigan (As opposed Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic where they prefer medicine over faith healing,) downtown Manhattan (NYU students will eat anything and accept any indoctrination,) and other places you might not expect them. But most of the outlets are in religiously infected areas like South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and the most backward of the northeastern states, Pennsylvania.
They have a right to their opinions, of course. And as Willard Romney reminds us, because corporations are people, they’re free to express them. (Fortune Biscuits with New Testament aphorisms coming?)
Also allowed to express opinion is the company that owns the rights to the Muppets, which has asked Chicken Fit to stop including their toys with kids’ meals. Chick’s response? We have stopped giving away Muppets because they’re too small for little kids who might get their fingers stuck in them. Jim Henson’s heirs see it differently. They have an aversion to bigots and will donate revenue from Chick Fil-A to GLAAD, the gay and lesbian rights group.
So the religious right is planning an eat-in and gay and lesbian groups are planning a kiss-in.
What have we learned from this? First, Billy Graham is too far gone to recognize a rubber chicken dinner with real rubber. The rest of that breed has found yet another way to demonstrate bad taste.
Shrapnel:
--In Alice in Wonderland, they paint the white roses red to satisfy the queen. In drought struck Staten Island, they paint the brown lawns green to satisfy the neighborhood look. This could be the start of something big.
--Seventeen days to go and we’ll be out from under all the olympic stuff. The 2012 Summer Games are the biggest hype in London since Q-E-II’s coronation. But at least that took only one day.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
1048 A Tale of Two Statues, NCAA, Letter to Students
1048 A Tale of Two Statues, The NCAA Tornado and a Letter to Students
(UNIVERSITY PARK, PA) -- The order came down in darkness, probably by telephone, which is the way things are done on the campus of The Pennsylvania State University. Probably a guy came to the door of the head of the grounds department with a dog-eared piece of scrap paper bearing only a scrawled phone number. The number might have been 814 238-75XX. Should one call that number, which is a listed number, he will reach the home of Rodney Allen “Irksome” Erickson, president of that hallowed institution known on these posts as America’s Brain.
And had that call been made as mentioned, the answerer might have said “put up a fence, cover the fence in plastic, block off the street and take down the statue of Joe Paterno,” whose family maintains he did no such thing as orchestrate a cover up of little boy rapist Jerry Sandusky’s merry pranks.
Meantime, in Queens, New York, another statue is coming down, maybe. It is called “Civic Virtue.” Civic -- forgive the use of the first name -- is an immense naked man seen standing on the bodies of a covey of naked women. Its first home in the 1920s was at City Hall in Manhattan. Women hated it. Women’s groups fought it. Mayor LaGuardia said he didn’t like being mooned in marble each day as he walked to work.
They moved the thing to in front of Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, Queens 60, 70 years ago. Civic is still immense and those women must have powerful backs because they’re still holding him up and he hasn’t yet managed to trample them flat.
Now, there is a move afoot to move the hideous stone gavone to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is a beautiful and perfectly maintained place of burial where the dead can look out at the water... 600-thousand graves. A dead population larger than all the living today in Milwaukee.
No grave is big enough for Mr. Virtue and his harem. So they’ll leave all of them above ground.
In contrast, the Paterno statue is a mere seven feet tall. For now, they’re going to let it collect dust in storage. They have a borough hall to put it in front of, too. But it’s on one of the tiny pieces of land the school doesn’t own in the neighborhood and therefore an unlikely eventual landing spot.
Mr. Paterno is from Brooklyn. Mr. Virtue is moving there. Maybe they can share the space. What’s a little ugly garishness in a place people only visit occasionally? (Blog continues below)
Civic Virtue Statue Moons LaGuardia
Joe Paterno Statue: Smaller than Civic or Saddam
Meantime, the NCAA, which is the 102 year old American version of the inbred nose-in-the-air Eurotrash International Olympic Committee, has wreaked havoc by imposing a $60 million fine, postseason ban for four years and five years of probation.
The biggest smite of all (so far) is the grave robbing of all wins from 1998 to 2011... that’s more than 100 wins that everyone knows were wins. And while they will be taken out of the stats books or listed as “vacated,” they won’t just disappear for anyone who cares about such. Paterno is hereby posthumously dethroned as winningest big time coach. The guys who played those games don’t have the luxury of not knowing about it.
The biggest smite in the future has three heads:
1. Loss of football-fueled funding for other sports that are not self-supporting.
2. Loss of enormous football dependent revenue for business and the region.
3. Inability to field a team skilled enough to play at big-ten level along with a completely legal mass exodus of players who now are allowed to transfer -- not that the team for the upcoming season was anything to write home about in the first place.
With no way to punish the actual criminals in this case other than Sandusky, they’ve punished restaurants, hotels, students, the state liquor authority and the guys who have their life savings sunk into houses that are worth less today than they were yesterday.
Here’s a question for the NCAA, a question we used to ask back in the ‘hood: Who died and made you God?
So, thanks to Jailbird Sandusky, and -- at least for now -- the late coach Paterno, the fired former president Innocence Spanier, the retired former vice president Sgt. Schultz, the on-leave athletic director Curley. Your actions and inactions are what did this.
Spanier says his father regularly beat him as a kid so how could he not have reported a serial rapist of young boys? Only by not knowing about it. Spanier was by all accounts the king of all micromanagers. The report from Freeh, who is Whiplash Willie with white shoes, says Spanier did know; had to have known.
Thanks also to Governor Tom Corbett, stellar public servant and board of trustees member that he is, who when he was attorney general learned what supposedly was going on and launched a mighty investigation consisting of one lone cop, then did nothing.
And a special thanks to the current president Rodney Irksome Erickson for agreeing not to fight the sanctions. Asked why, he said “our backs were against the wall.” Well, better your back, Rod, than your hands with that old “big kid” Sandusky behind you. But what if the Freeh report is wrong or incomplete?
Since Penn State has money to burn, they’re remodeling the shower area where Sandusky “horsed around,” as he put it, playing games like “tickle monster” and defiling young boys. They don’t need a remodeler, they need and exorcist.
Money to burn? Maybe not for long. The bond rating agency Moody’s is about to drop Penn State from its near top of the heap status on about one billion dollars in debt, which will raise the cost of borrowing which will raise the cost of everything else they buy or sell.
To today’s students and faculty: Your “Great University,” so-called, has let you down in pursuit of fame and fortune, and in your name. And while it deserves your anger and scorn and derision, it does not deserve all of your anger and scorn and derision. Save some of that for your predecessors on campus who made football players into football heros and then into football gods, who placed athletics above academics while loudly claiming they were doing the opposite, and who manufactured personality cults where mere personality admiration at most was appropriate. And then they compounded the felony by knuckling under to some holier-than-thou snoot from Indianapolis who said “off with their wins... their scholarships and their bowl games.”
The student war chant on game days is a group shout: “We are... Penn State.” No you’re not. You’re transients, but as transients you still will bear the burdens heaped on you by what we used to wrongly call the “permanent university,” which isn’t as permanent as it once seemed.
Near his life’s end, Joe Paterno said “this is not a football scandal.” He wasn’t completely right. But he wasn’t completely wrong, either.
This is a scandal of deaf, dumb and blind men or men who chose not to hear, speak or see.
(Note to readers: this is the final full length post on this subject. Other developments -- and there will be plenty -- will be mentioned -- if at all -- only in the Shrapnel section.)
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
I.
(UNIVERSITY PARK, PA) -- The order came down in darkness, probably by telephone, which is the way things are done on the campus of The Pennsylvania State University. Probably a guy came to the door of the head of the grounds department with a dog-eared piece of scrap paper bearing only a scrawled phone number. The number might have been 814 238-75XX. Should one call that number, which is a listed number, he will reach the home of Rodney Allen “Irksome” Erickson, president of that hallowed institution known on these posts as America’s Brain.
And had that call been made as mentioned, the answerer might have said “put up a fence, cover the fence in plastic, block off the street and take down the statue of Joe Paterno,” whose family maintains he did no such thing as orchestrate a cover up of little boy rapist Jerry Sandusky’s merry pranks.
Meantime, in Queens, New York, another statue is coming down, maybe. It is called “Civic Virtue.” Civic -- forgive the use of the first name -- is an immense naked man seen standing on the bodies of a covey of naked women. Its first home in the 1920s was at City Hall in Manhattan. Women hated it. Women’s groups fought it. Mayor LaGuardia said he didn’t like being mooned in marble each day as he walked to work.
They moved the thing to in front of Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, Queens 60, 70 years ago. Civic is still immense and those women must have powerful backs because they’re still holding him up and he hasn’t yet managed to trample them flat.
Now, there is a move afoot to move the hideous stone gavone to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is a beautiful and perfectly maintained place of burial where the dead can look out at the water... 600-thousand graves. A dead population larger than all the living today in Milwaukee.
No grave is big enough for Mr. Virtue and his harem. So they’ll leave all of them above ground.
In contrast, the Paterno statue is a mere seven feet tall. For now, they’re going to let it collect dust in storage. They have a borough hall to put it in front of, too. But it’s on one of the tiny pieces of land the school doesn’t own in the neighborhood and therefore an unlikely eventual landing spot.
Mr. Paterno is from Brooklyn. Mr. Virtue is moving there. Maybe they can share the space. What’s a little ugly garishness in a place people only visit occasionally? (Blog continues below)
Civic Virtue Statue Moons LaGuardia
Joe Paterno Statue: Smaller than Civic or Saddam
II.
Meantime, the NCAA, which is the 102 year old American version of the inbred nose-in-the-air Eurotrash International Olympic Committee, has wreaked havoc by imposing a $60 million fine, postseason ban for four years and five years of probation.
The biggest smite of all (so far) is the grave robbing of all wins from 1998 to 2011... that’s more than 100 wins that everyone knows were wins. And while they will be taken out of the stats books or listed as “vacated,” they won’t just disappear for anyone who cares about such. Paterno is hereby posthumously dethroned as winningest big time coach. The guys who played those games don’t have the luxury of not knowing about it.
The biggest smite in the future has three heads:
1. Loss of football-fueled funding for other sports that are not self-supporting.
2. Loss of enormous football dependent revenue for business and the region.
3. Inability to field a team skilled enough to play at big-ten level along with a completely legal mass exodus of players who now are allowed to transfer -- not that the team for the upcoming season was anything to write home about in the first place.
With no way to punish the actual criminals in this case other than Sandusky, they’ve punished restaurants, hotels, students, the state liquor authority and the guys who have their life savings sunk into houses that are worth less today than they were yesterday.
Here’s a question for the NCAA, a question we used to ask back in the ‘hood: Who died and made you God?
So, thanks to Jailbird Sandusky, and -- at least for now -- the late coach Paterno, the fired former president Innocence Spanier, the retired former vice president Sgt. Schultz, the on-leave athletic director Curley. Your actions and inactions are what did this.
Spanier says his father regularly beat him as a kid so how could he not have reported a serial rapist of young boys? Only by not knowing about it. Spanier was by all accounts the king of all micromanagers. The report from Freeh, who is Whiplash Willie with white shoes, says Spanier did know; had to have known.
Thanks also to Governor Tom Corbett, stellar public servant and board of trustees member that he is, who when he was attorney general learned what supposedly was going on and launched a mighty investigation consisting of one lone cop, then did nothing.
And a special thanks to the current president Rodney Irksome Erickson for agreeing not to fight the sanctions. Asked why, he said “our backs were against the wall.” Well, better your back, Rod, than your hands with that old “big kid” Sandusky behind you. But what if the Freeh report is wrong or incomplete?
Since Penn State has money to burn, they’re remodeling the shower area where Sandusky “horsed around,” as he put it, playing games like “tickle monster” and defiling young boys. They don’t need a remodeler, they need and exorcist.
Money to burn? Maybe not for long. The bond rating agency Moody’s is about to drop Penn State from its near top of the heap status on about one billion dollars in debt, which will raise the cost of borrowing which will raise the cost of everything else they buy or sell.
III.
To today’s students and faculty: Your “Great University,” so-called, has let you down in pursuit of fame and fortune, and in your name. And while it deserves your anger and scorn and derision, it does not deserve all of your anger and scorn and derision. Save some of that for your predecessors on campus who made football players into football heros and then into football gods, who placed athletics above academics while loudly claiming they were doing the opposite, and who manufactured personality cults where mere personality admiration at most was appropriate. And then they compounded the felony by knuckling under to some holier-than-thou snoot from Indianapolis who said “off with their wins... their scholarships and their bowl games.”
The student war chant on game days is a group shout: “We are... Penn State.” No you’re not. You’re transients, but as transients you still will bear the burdens heaped on you by what we used to wrongly call the “permanent university,” which isn’t as permanent as it once seemed.
Near his life’s end, Joe Paterno said “this is not a football scandal.” He wasn’t completely right. But he wasn’t completely wrong, either.
This is a scandal of deaf, dumb and blind men or men who chose not to hear, speak or see.
(Note to readers: this is the final full length post on this subject. Other developments -- and there will be plenty -- will be mentioned -- if at all -- only in the Shrapnel section.)
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
1047 You Can Get a Man With a Gun and a Baby or Two
1047 You Can Get a Man With a Gun and a Baby or Two
There must be something in the air in Colorado that makes bright young men turn to fantasy and then to murder.
Not since 1999 had this scenic state in general and the greater Denver area in particular seen the kind of kid-provoked carnage as what happened early last Friday morning in Aurora when that fellow with the dark clothing, the body armor, the groin and throat protectors, and the gas mask set off a smoke bomb in a movie house and started shooting people -- using a 40 caliber handgun, an assault rifle and a shotgun. Good thing he was wearing the armor. You never know when one of those infants will pull out a gun and start firing back. It is, after all, the wild west.
“Boom, boom, boom,” exclaimed a woman theater-goer describing what she heard before she managed to duck. She still was cut and burned by flying shards and bullet casings.
The smirking mugshot of James Holmes, PhD candidate in neuroscience shines out at us from TV and computer screens and the daily paper. He looks like a guy who has some neurological short circuits.
Babies, out for a midnight movie with their parents, parents out for a midnight look at Batman with their babies, and others... dead or injured.
And there’s smirky, out in back of the movie house, standing at his little white Hyundai with at least one more weapon inside. You can almost see him blowing the smoke away from the tip of the assault rifle, like they do with the six shooters in old westerns.
Mr. Holmes, about to drop out of school, informed police that his third floor walkup apartment was booby trapped. So the count of death and injury didn’t rise because when police went a-visiting they brought along stuff that would protect them or disable the bombs and gas canisters.
Here’s an inventory of the White Hyundai arsenal:
--Glock pistol, .40 cal.
--Another Glock pistol, .40 cal.
--Remington shotgun, model 870, 12 gauge.
--Smith & Wesson AR-15 assault rifle, similar in appearance to the long ones in this picture.
\The base model goes for around $730. But with all the bells and whistles it can set you back almost two grand, list.
Holmes bought the weapons from two Denver-area chain stores, Gander Mountain Guns and Bass Pro Shops. Good to have a pro on your side when you’re thinking about doing some baby killing in a movie house. Bass has released a statement saying it has reviewed the paperwork for the sales and everyone in its house followed all the laws. Which says something about the laws.
Holmes also bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition using the internet, which didn’t raise any eyebrows let alone set off alarms anywhere.
Holmes is remembered as being “very smart and a little strange” by one of his classmates quoted by NBC News. Just not smart enough to save us all the trouble of hearing about his tough childhood and his probable drug abuse, his mental state and all the other smokescreens that’ll come up at his trial.
And the imbecile politicians? What ever happened to Obama’s pledge to renew the assault weapons ban? And then there’s Romney who favored gun control as governor of Massachusetts now has (oh, what a surprise) reversed his position?
There are good uses for all those legally acquired things that don’t kill people, it’s just that there are too many of the wrong ones in the hands of people like the guy with the body armor, the groin protector and the “Joker” hairdo at a Batman movie.
(Coming Wednesday 7/25/12: The final full length post in the Penn State scandal, this one about the downing of the Paterno statue and the NCAA penalties. Any added stuff will be in the form of shrapnel, familiar to both movie goers in Aurora and rational evaluators of America’s foremost sort-of state university.)
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
There must be something in the air in Colorado that makes bright young men turn to fantasy and then to murder.
Not since 1999 had this scenic state in general and the greater Denver area in particular seen the kind of kid-provoked carnage as what happened early last Friday morning in Aurora when that fellow with the dark clothing, the body armor, the groin and throat protectors, and the gas mask set off a smoke bomb in a movie house and started shooting people -- using a 40 caliber handgun, an assault rifle and a shotgun. Good thing he was wearing the armor. You never know when one of those infants will pull out a gun and start firing back. It is, after all, the wild west.
“Boom, boom, boom,” exclaimed a woman theater-goer describing what she heard before she managed to duck. She still was cut and burned by flying shards and bullet casings.
The smirking mugshot of James Holmes, PhD candidate in neuroscience shines out at us from TV and computer screens and the daily paper. He looks like a guy who has some neurological short circuits.
Babies, out for a midnight movie with their parents, parents out for a midnight look at Batman with their babies, and others... dead or injured.
And there’s smirky, out in back of the movie house, standing at his little white Hyundai with at least one more weapon inside. You can almost see him blowing the smoke away from the tip of the assault rifle, like they do with the six shooters in old westerns.
Mr. Holmes, about to drop out of school, informed police that his third floor walkup apartment was booby trapped. So the count of death and injury didn’t rise because when police went a-visiting they brought along stuff that would protect them or disable the bombs and gas canisters.
Here’s an inventory of the White Hyundai arsenal:
--Glock pistol, .40 cal.
--Another Glock pistol, .40 cal.
--Remington shotgun, model 870, 12 gauge.
--Smith & Wesson AR-15 assault rifle, similar in appearance to the long ones in this picture.
\The base model goes for around $730. But with all the bells and whistles it can set you back almost two grand, list.
Holmes bought the weapons from two Denver-area chain stores, Gander Mountain Guns and Bass Pro Shops. Good to have a pro on your side when you’re thinking about doing some baby killing in a movie house. Bass has released a statement saying it has reviewed the paperwork for the sales and everyone in its house followed all the laws. Which says something about the laws.
Holmes also bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition using the internet, which didn’t raise any eyebrows let alone set off alarms anywhere.
Holmes is remembered as being “very smart and a little strange” by one of his classmates quoted by NBC News. Just not smart enough to save us all the trouble of hearing about his tough childhood and his probable drug abuse, his mental state and all the other smokescreens that’ll come up at his trial.
And the imbecile politicians? What ever happened to Obama’s pledge to renew the assault weapons ban? And then there’s Romney who favored gun control as governor of Massachusetts now has (oh, what a surprise) reversed his position?
There are good uses for all those legally acquired things that don’t kill people, it’s just that there are too many of the wrong ones in the hands of people like the guy with the body armor, the groin protector and the “Joker” hairdo at a Batman movie.
(Coming Wednesday 7/25/12: The final full length post in the Penn State scandal, this one about the downing of the Paterno statue and the NCAA penalties. Any added stuff will be in the form of shrapnel, familiar to both movie goers in Aurora and rational evaluators of America’s foremost sort-of state university.)
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
1046 Hippocrates and the Hot Air Balloons
1046 Hippocrates and the Hot Air Balloons
(STATE COLLEGE PA) -- Have you noticed this? The skies lately have more hot air balloons than ever before. They’re fun to watch and probably scary-good fun to ride. Around here, we see one regularly from a real estate company. But there’s also a guy who sells rides to those who want to see the rolling hills here from above -- but slowly enough to make airplane rides impractical.
Hot air is free. Ask this or any other blogger. Of course, when the fire goes out or a hole appears in the skin, the thing crashes, sometimes at a leisurely pace; sometimes like a rock falling out of the sky. And at America’s Greatest Sort-of Public College, the fire is out and the hole is pretty big and getting bigger.
Too bad there’s no Hippocratic oath for institutions of higher education. “First, do no harm” is not in the text of the Hippocratic oath, even though most of us think it is. It’s in the Hippocratic Corpus. What is in the hippocratic oath is the pledge to not play God.
Part of playing God is filling your balloon with hot air and convincing everyone that the thing is floating of its own magical accord.
So, from one hot air balloon to another: Blue and White is a not a good color combination for a floating sham. Make the next one red, white and blue. Or pink. Or black. Or pink AND black.
You want to start the healing process following the little-boy-raped-and-Joe-Paterno-turned-his-back-to-it crisis, start with a Hippocratic oath that includes both doing no harm and not playing God.
And while you’re at it, fly the balloon a little lower. You’ve discovered that it’s a long way down from where you were floating. Get some new pilots and a more able ground crew, one that doesn’t just sit around and stare as the thing falls out of the sky, one which knows the meaning of “controlled descent.”
And as Hippocrates said, the bloom is off the sewer.
Shrapnel:
--Hot air artist Antonin “Tony Ducks” Scalia says he’s not mad at John Roberts for “defecting from the game plan and voting in favor of that Kenyan Muslim socialist’s health insurance tax.” Clarence Thomas isn’t mad either. He said “ ,” which is all he ever says.
--Hot air artist and self- proclaimed non-anti- Semite Ralph Nader has issued a report in which he says advertising doesn’t work and that Madison Avenue is navel gazing when it says it does. To prove his point, he says his stable of underpaid and overworked researchers often is confused with the Oakland Raiders.
--It had to happen. The MTA has declared an expansion of its Open Spaces Program. This is not a plan to turn old bus terminals into parks, it’s a plan to put ads on the front face of the MetroCard.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011
(STATE COLLEGE PA) -- Have you noticed this? The skies lately have more hot air balloons than ever before. They’re fun to watch and probably scary-good fun to ride. Around here, we see one regularly from a real estate company. But there’s also a guy who sells rides to those who want to see the rolling hills here from above -- but slowly enough to make airplane rides impractical.
Hot air is free. Ask this or any other blogger. Of course, when the fire goes out or a hole appears in the skin, the thing crashes, sometimes at a leisurely pace; sometimes like a rock falling out of the sky. And at America’s Greatest Sort-of Public College, the fire is out and the hole is pretty big and getting bigger.
Too bad there’s no Hippocratic oath for institutions of higher education. “First, do no harm” is not in the text of the Hippocratic oath, even though most of us think it is. It’s in the Hippocratic Corpus. What is in the hippocratic oath is the pledge to not play God.
Part of playing God is filling your balloon with hot air and convincing everyone that the thing is floating of its own magical accord.
So, from one hot air balloon to another: Blue and White is a not a good color combination for a floating sham. Make the next one red, white and blue. Or pink. Or black. Or pink AND black.
You want to start the healing process following the little-boy-raped-and-Joe-Paterno-turned-his-back-to-it crisis, start with a Hippocratic oath that includes both doing no harm and not playing God.
And while you’re at it, fly the balloon a little lower. You’ve discovered that it’s a long way down from where you were floating. Get some new pilots and a more able ground crew, one that doesn’t just sit around and stare as the thing falls out of the sky, one which knows the meaning of “controlled descent.”
And as Hippocrates said, the bloom is off the sewer.
Shrapnel:
--Hot air artist Antonin “Tony Ducks” Scalia says he’s not mad at John Roberts for “defecting from the game plan and voting in favor of that Kenyan Muslim socialist’s health insurance tax.” Clarence Thomas isn’t mad either. He said “ ,” which is all he ever says.
--Hot air artist and self- proclaimed non-anti- Semite Ralph Nader has issued a report in which he says advertising doesn’t work and that Madison Avenue is navel gazing when it says it does. To prove his point, he says his stable of underpaid and overworked researchers often is confused with the Oakland Raiders.
--It had to happen. The MTA has declared an expansion of its Open Spaces Program. This is not a plan to turn old bus terminals into parks, it’s a plan to put ads on the front face of the MetroCard.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011
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4759 The Supreme Court
C’mon, guys, we all know what you’re doing. You’re hiding behind nonsense so a black woman is not the next Associate Justice of the U.S....
